The Impressionist (49 page)

Let us

The magnetic men

Forge our Steel

Anew

Eheu!’

An air of seriousness settles over the party. Several of the younger men adopt agonized postures of concentration, shading their eyes and grinding their knuckles into their temples. As he gets into his stride, Selwyn’s voice rises, quivering with suppressed emotion.

‘Let us too

The electrical ones

Les beaux, les dynamistes

Chide

Deride

Those smug-faced

Traditionalists

The critics

Let them cry

Eheu!’

At the daring mention of the critics, Selwyn pauses and sweeps the room with his eyes. Star looks unimpressed. ‘He always puts them in.’ she whispers to Jonathan. ‘He says they like to know he’s thinking of them.’ As Selwyn continues chiding and deriding various groups of people, she begins to fidget. ‘You know,’ she says loudly, ‘his eyesight is perfectly fine. Those glasses are just for effect.’ Several people turn round. Jonathan notices that she is slurring her words. Selwyn carries on describing the condition of the anti-poetic classes of society, who are not fit ‘
To lick the boots / of tomorrow’s sons / radium bright
/
and new’
and she sighs loudly, hoping from one foot to the other. Finally she pushes out of the room, returning with a full bottle of champagne and a waiter hurrying after her trying to open it. As Selwyn declaims the final stanza:
‘Though in this European twilight/ we smash our lyres / Eheu!’
she fires the cork, which smacks into the wall by his head. He ducks and loses his footing on the stool, tumbling back against his mother. Lady Tredgold fixes Star with a murderous look, her cheeks and forehead cycling serially and distinctly through every shade of high emotion from puce to magenta.

‘Oh dear.’ says Star.

The room is completely silent. Some Georgian poets, who were trying to storm out in protest at Selwyn’s use of vers libre, come back to see why no one noticed them. Someone starts to applaud, then stops again, cowed by Lady Tredgold’s expression. Star hands Jonathan the champagne bottle, and puts her hands behind her back.

‘Jonathan.’ she says reprovingly, ‘you shouldn’t give me those things to open. They go off without warning.’

Lady Tredgold shifts her basilisk gaze from Star to Jonathan. Then to Star again. She is not to be diverted so easily. Divining that her ruse has not worked, Star grabs the champagne back. Then she grabs her coat, grabs Jonathan and heads for the door. Were Jonathan a little less confused, they could have made a clean getaway, but he is not sure why they are leaving, and Selwyn appears on the front doorstep while they are still trying to hail a taxi. Star throws her shoe at him.

‘Go away.’ she shouts.

Selwyn takes a few steps towards her. He looks furious. ‘Why in God’s name did you do that? I can’t believe it. Did you see there were people actually walking out? That was my moment. I was going to have my very own succès de scandale and you went and upstaged me. Now all anyone’s talking about is you – you – you – bitch!’

Jonathan steps forward. ‘Don’t you talk to her like that.’

‘I’ll talk to her how I like.’

‘I demand an apology.’

‘Well, I shan’t give you one.’

Jonathan sneaks a glance at Star. She is taking no notice of either of them. She is standing in the road and waving her remaining shoe at passing cars. When he turns back, he finds Selwyn sneering at him.

‘You’ll be disappointed, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With her.’

‘Shut up, Selwyn,’ shouts Star. A taxi pulls over to the kerb. ‘You’re such a pig,’ she says, and gets in. Jonathan makes to follow.

‘Go on,’ Selwyn calls after him. ‘Run after her. She’ll make lots of promises, but she won’t actually let you touch her.’

‘How dare you!’ says Star, and gets out of the cab again.

‘Don’t you talk to her like that,’ repeats Jonathan.

‘She won’t do it with you, Bridgeman. She’s frigid. She won’t even let you feel her up.’

‘Pig!’ shouts Star.

‘So bloody old-fashioned. Not even a hand on her –’

‘Pig!’

‘Bitch!’

‘Pig!’

It takes the appearance of another figure on the doorstep to break things up.

‘Selwyn Arthur Tredgold, come inside this instant!’

The shame of arguing in the street like a member of the labouring classes has turned Lady Tredgold’s face a shade of violet that edges some way beyond the visible spectrum. She is monumental, terrifying. Selwyn’s shoulders droop.

‘Yes, Mother.’

Seizing the moment, Star and Jonathan dive into the cab, yelling at the driver to move on as fast as possible. Once they are safely underway, they start laughing with relief. Star kisses him on the cheek.

‘Really, Jonathan, I can’t take you anywhere.’

His heart flies up through the roof.

After that he sees Star almost every day. She comes to stay with her father in Oxford, saying she has got tired of London. According to Levine, London has also got a little weary of her. The ‘Tredgold affair’ is only the latest in a series of similar incidents. London art people do not really like bohemianism except to read about, and then only if practised by foreigners. ‘You know, Johnny,’ Levine tells him, ‘I don’t think she’s the girl for you. She’s rather fast. Look what she did to poor Tredders. He’s a shadow now, a hopeless shadow. Wracked with longing and entirely unable to work. You’re a solid man. Why don’ t you find yourself a decent sort, someone who rides and can partner you at bridge? Forget about Astarte Chapel. I admit she’s rather something, but she’ll end up with some foreign chap. You mark my words.’ Jonathan tells Levine to mind his own business. They part on bad terms.

As far as Jonathan is concerned, Star is exactly the girl for him. Now it seems that for the first time she feels the same way. He helps her run errands on Cornmarket, and is rewarded by the envious glances of other young men as they pass by. Standing in the queue for the George Street Cinema, she lets him hold her hand. Sitting at the back of the stalls, they kiss. On his birthday, she gives him a pair of enamelled cufflinks in the shape of little Negro jazz musicians, a saxophonist and a trumpeter.

It is a significant birthday. He is twenty-one. He has come of age. Mr Spavin makes a last attempt to persuade him into the law, but is finally forced to admit that the battle is lost. In a sober meeting in his chambers he delivers a homily about prudence, foresight and the good prospects of shares in a certain Canadian logging company. Then he releases to Jonathan the capital of his inheritance, a sum of several hundred pounds. As they shake hands, Jonathan avoids his eyes, feeling suddenly guilty about the other Bridgeman, dead and anonymous in Bombay.

The guilt soon passes. By the time he gets back to Oxford it has vanished completely, and he holds a celebratory dinner in a private room at the Randolph Hotel, at which Astarte is the guest of honour. Surrounded by admiring undergraduates, she sparkles as if the birthday belongs to her. Afterwards Jonathan drunkenly escorts her home, and on the way diverts her into some convenient shadows. At first she resists his kisses, and after a while, panting and blushing, she takes his hand away. There is, however, a stretch of time in between which would make Selwyn Tredgold extremely jealous.

That term Jonathan is a conquering hero, the world laid out before him like a white cloth. He sees his future stretching away into the distance, an infinite golden thread. During long afternoons when he should be revising for his finals, time and space embroider a depiction of admiring faces, interestingly designed interiors and Astarte Chapel, proud yet somehow submissive at his side. He is sleeping better too. When he is invited to spend Christmas with the Chapels, he takes it as a sign.

In the village church he mouths the words of carols, the sweet taste of the Professor’s best port on his lips.
We-e three kings…
Candles and stained glass and outside a crisp Cotswold Christmas Eve. There are three more days of paradise ahead, the snow lying round about deep and crisp and even, the rolling hills faint in the darkness behind the hundredth generation of English men and women to shake hands with their vicar.
O! Star of wonder…
walking with him along the lane, breath pluming, her hand hot in his through its damp mitten. After the Professor has fallen asleep by the fire, the two of them push open the chill dark of the boathouse and light a brazier, dragging wicker chairs close together and listening to the gurgling of the river outside the door. Coats are pulled open, buttons undone, layers of wool and cotton mined for warm flesh. Her hand worms into his trousers and he tugs her petticoat up round her waist, indiscriminately kissing her jaw, her throat, her ear. Soon she is rubbing hard against him, clenching his thigh with hers, moaning and wriggling. ‘Yes,’ she sobs, as the tips of Jonathan’s fingers slip inside her, ‘yes, you big buck – do it to me – make jelly roll with me, baby!’ His face is buried in her breasts, and he can hear nothing but the pounding of the blood in his ears. ‘Mmm?’ he pants, not really understanding. Her rhythm falters. ‘Nothing. Don’t stop. Just – just a song.’ She groans. ‘Please don’t stop.’ He carries on, glancing up at her face, which flickers red and gold in the low light. Her eyes are screwed shut. Disconcertingly shut. As if she is not with him, and is imagining – but he has no time to pursue this line of thought because suddenly the shut eyes open wide and she goes completely rigid in his arms. ‘Oh God.’ she says, ‘that’s my father.’ And so it is, calling their names down the garden, his voice getting rapidly closer.

They launch themselves into action. A few seconds later, fully clothed, they have made it halfway to the house. Their faces are studies in angelic innocence. The Professor appears to notice nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Ah there you are, Astarte. What on earth were you doing in the boathouse? I’m afraid I shall have to borrow Mr Bridgeman from you. There are things we have to discuss.’

‘I thought you were asleep, Daddy.’

‘So I was. But now it is time for business. Come on, my boy.’

Jonathan is led unwillingly into the study. The Professor paces up and down, wearing a harrowed expression. Even a nap is hard to achieve these days. Recently things have been bad again, the world filling up with analogies, chains of resemblance and signification which make it impossible to do the simplest thing without becoming distracted. Trying to sit down at his desk sends him tumbling into a vortex of associations, forcing him to perform a series of semi-involuntary rituals. Jonathan watches, bemused, as he spins the old wooden globe in the corner, muttering something under his breath. He takes a bound volume of
Punch
off the shelf, reads three political jokes out loud, pokes the fire, makes an embarrassed attempt to touch his toes, spins the globe counter-clockwise and then hurriedly, almost guiltily, flops down in his chair. After another minute or two of rearranging the objects on the desk into rows and then putting them back in their original places, he looks up and presses his fingers to his temples.

‘Now, where was I?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

He frowns. ‘Your fly is open.’

Bright red, Jonathan buttons himself up.

Chapel’s frown deepens. ‘I’ve been thinking, Bridgeman. I find you a most intelligent and perceptive young man.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You are also close to us. I mean, not only to myself, but to my daughter.’

Jonathan’s heart starts to pound. Is this about his intentions towards Star?

‘I feel you understand my work, and that you would make a congenial companion –’