The Impressionist (37 page)

Ah, the mystic Occident! Land of wool and cabbage and lecherous round-eyed girls! The girls must be quite something if Bridgeman’s reception aboard the
Loch Lomond
is anything to go by. The presence of a ‘spare man, and such a high-grade one (so
very
spare, so
very
manly) has left the losers of last Autumn’s Fishing Fleet, the inglorious ‘Returned Empties’, all in a tizz. Still husbandless after spending the Cold Weather in India, all they can look forward to at Home is a further period of husbandlessness and then some form of compromise. Less tall. Less rich. Less well bred. Bridgeman, despite the fact that he looks very young and his clothes are singularly ill fitting, appears to represent More. One or two of the Empties are quite determined, and he has been forced to wedge a chair under the handle of his cabin door when he goes to sleep at night. Despite this precaution, both Miss Emily Howard and Miss Barbara Hollis believe they have come to an understanding with him, and Miss Amanda Jellicoe, who has seen rather more of life (and Jonathan) than they have, believes that were she to die tomorrow she would do so contentedly. As the spare man watches the luminous wake stretch away into the darkness, Amanda is sitting back down at the table with Mr and Mrs Devereaux, her chaperones, who think she has been lying down in her cabin, instead of grappling with Jonathan under the canvas cover of a lifeboat on the lower deck. Mrs Devereaux is remarking how
well
she looks, and Amanda is hoping that she will not notice the damp patch on her dress or the rich male smell rising up off her body.

Amanda is an exception. Jonathan has been attempting to avoid such encounters, hoping in fact to do nothing to draw attention to himself. He spends as much time as possible in his cabin, and when he goes out on deck buries himself in the most forbidding-looking books he can find in the ship’s library. Rare indeed is the Empty who can find much to say when the answer to her eye-fluttering ‘So-what-are-you-reading?’ is ‘Volume two of Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic.’
Amanda, quicker than the others, covered her ignorance of seventeenth-century history by talking about windmills and her home in Suffolk and inventing a picture-postcard view of it which she simply had to show him after dinner.

If she knew what she represents, Amanda would probably press her case further. To Jonathan she is a first, a revelation, as much of a crossing as that of the black water itself. Her smell, her colours, even the texture of her hair, are all tiny victories to him, and, as he stands at the rail with her scent in his nostrils, each time he lifts his cigarette he feels like an explorer.

However hard he tries, Jonathan is finding even a basic level of inconspicuousness hard to achieve on board ship. His luggage was a disappointment to him, consisting of a trunkful of screw-top bottles of a brown spirituous liquid, and a second much smaller trunkful of dirty clothes. Apart from a tennis racket in a press, a rifle, ammunition and the skull of some kind of deer, this constitutes his entire estate, and, once he had hefted the bottles over the side, the remainder made a pitiful heap on his bunk. The worst of it is that the clothes do not fit. The previous Bridgeman’s waist was bigger. His feet were larger and his arms shorter. For an incarnation who cares particularly about tailoring, this is a torture. There is only so long that one can walk around in a dinner jacket with a cigarette burn on the lapel, and a pair of trousers with the waistband rolled over and frayed cuffs which flap indecorously about one’s ankles.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Luckily Ganesh the junior cabin steward is another of Jonathan Bridgeman’s admirers, and behind closed doors has been encouraged to think that he too is in possession of a certain understanding. Ganesh has been induced to liberate certain items from the wardrobes of some of the better-equipped passengers. A shirt-front here, a pair of braces there. Even more daringly, a system of high-risk temporary loans has been instituted. Thus Merriwether, the young Kerala DO, sometimes misplaces his second-best linen suit, and Dickie Carson notices something dashed familiar about the cut of Bridgeman’s dinner jacket. Yet since Dickie has three of his own, he does not make the connection, and Jonathan is able to appear at least adequately (if not actually
well)
dressed.

Ganesh’s dress-hire service brings with it its own problems, and when, after Aden, he begins to demand payment and physical relief from the tensions of stewarding, Jonathan has to come up with something special. Money is a particular difficulty. He has almost none of it, and though certain Shipboard services are free and a tab can be run for others, bribery is a cash-only operation. He thinks he will find the solution in the regular engine-room poker game, but on his second visit one of the stokers catches him cheating and things turn very ugly indeed. It is all the chief can do to stop the boys throttling the little bastard and dumping the body over the side. As it is, Jonathan’s face is so cut up that he does not appear in public until after Gibraltar, and for the rest of the voyage he has to watch his back when he ventures anywhere off the main passenger deck.

A storm in the Bay of Biscay alleviates the awkwardness of the situation, transforming most passengers into vomiting wrecks too caught up in their own misery to notice Bridgeman’s bruises, or his sudden return to shabbiness. Spirits aboard the
Loch Lomond
only lift again when the white cliffs of Dover come into view. One or two particularly sea-sick passengers actually cheer (despite the fact that the English coastline has been visible for some time), and there is much discussion of the beauties of Home and the first things people will do on landing. Amanda Jellicoe stands beside Jonathan at the rail and asks him, Aren’t you glad to be back. Jonathan says yes, hearing as he says it how unconvincing he sounds.

Squinting over the water at the green-rimmed chalk cliffs, he is struck by something like awe. To the people around him this has meaning. Only now does he realize that though he has studied England obsessively, he has never really believed in it. The place has always retained an abstract quality, like a philosophical hypothesis or a problem in geometry. Imagine a cube, rotating about its axis… Imagine the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads and the white cliffs rising up out of the green-grey water, circled over by gulls. He tries to feel what the others feel, and wonders nervously what he has become.

Samuel Spavin employs a quintet of long white fingers to trill the fringe of beard beneath his chin. His chair creaks venerably, a delicate ornament in the fugue of age and tradition that is the special music of the firm of Spavin & Muskett. On the wall behind him hangs a portrait of an early-Victorian gentleman with a fierce look and a high starched collar. Visitors often remark on the resemblance between Mr Spavin and the man in the portrait, most assuming that the sitter, who has been depicted beside a table of books and documents, is a Spavin ancestor, some long-dead lawyer whose wisdom and probity form part of the firm’s professional inheritance. In fact, despite a cultivated similarity of manner and aspect, Mr Spavin is unrelated to the painted man. The picture was purchased in a house clearance sale in the early days of his career, to give precisely the impression of long establishment that his clients have subsequently found so comforting.

Today Mr Spavin is looking across his desk and finding himself pleasantly surprised. He would never have thought it possible. True, the boy is a trifle scruffy, but then he is an orphan. Scruffiness, believes Spavin, is a natural attribute of the orphan, one of the accidents that gives orphaned substance its specific pathos. Spavin is an admirer of Dickens, and Jonathan Bridge-man’s appearance accords perfectly with the old boy’s template for such a person. A little old, perhaps. And male. It would certainly be more piquant if he were a she. Being already that most Dickensian of things, a lawyer, Mr Spavin is now about to become Bridgeman’s guardian. A moment like this, when life takes on the formal quality of literary art, is to be savoured. Spavin shakes his head in silent wonder at the depth of his own sensibility. His appreciation of these matters is so keen that he sometimes wonders whether he missed his vocation.

‘There, and there.’

He points out the spaces on the document where Jonathan is to sign, and watches indulgently as the boy writes his name. He is hesitant, forming the characters slowly and purposefully, no doubt as aware as his patron of the special poignancy of the moment.

There, my boy. It is done. Just as your dear departed father would have wished it.’

Bridgeman nods. He is really a rather good-looking fellow, which in itself is a miracle. Spavin casts his mind back to the day when this Bridgeman’s grandfather, also called Jonathan, marched his lump of a son into the office, and announced that he wished to make arrangements to set him up in the tea trade. Even the most charitable of observers, a class among whom Spavin has the honour to count himself, would have found little to commend in Bridgeman junior. An ill-favoured fellow, coarse and loutish, with what might be termed an
Irish
look about him. His drunkenness (at eleven in the morning!) only added to the negative impression. Who would have thought that from the loins of such a brute could spring so fine a figure as this? Spavin cannot remember whether he ever met the poor woman who was this boy’s mother. Probably not, since the marriage took place after the move to Darjeeling. Yet it is clear that she must have been extraordinarily beautiful. As befits a man of poetic sensibility, Spavin believes that character shows itself in physiognomy. One could tell in an instant that the potato-featured dolt who slurred his way through the interview those twenty years ago would never amount to anything. But this one… What a woman the mother must have been!

‘Do you have a photograph of your dear mamma, Jonathan?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. My father didn’t believe in photographs.’

‘Didn’t believe in them? I see. How peculiar.’

‘That’s right. I have none at all. Not one.’

‘That is indeed a shame.’

A shame indeed. As far as he can remember, the grandfather was not the most handsome of men either. How proud he would have been to know that his line was to be continued by such a one as this! A profile like the Apollo Belvedere! The thought of continuity leads Mr Spavin to cast an eye around the legal clutter of his chambers, the bundles of papers, the shelves of morocco-bound books, the whole tangle of sealing wax and red ribbon that is his working life. Yes, he knows about continuity. Every facet of his existence, from the headed notepaper on which he conducts his correspondence to the regular one o’clock light luncheon he takes with Mr Muskett at the chophouse on the corner, attests to his position as a guardian of tradition, a small but honourable conservative force in the life of a great nation.

It is all a considerable relief. When the telegram arrived saying that there had been some kind of trouble at the docks, and could he send a sum of several guineas to procure the release of his charge from custody and allow disembarkation formalities to be completed, he experienced feelings of apprehension. Could the son be as worthless as the father? Nevertheless, in accordance with his obligations, he sent the money, and the boy turned up with a heartbreaking story which instantly dispelled his fears. He had been robbed in a Bombay alleyway by a gang of cut-throats, and though he defended himself gallantly, knocking two of them down before he was overpowered, they took almost all his travelling money. The misunderstanding about the suit stemmed from a simple and overzealous Indian steward, who made a present of it to the destitute boy, neglecting to tell him that it belonged to another passenger, the Mr Carson who lodged the complaint. Spavin’s intervention had cleared the matter up, and Carson accepted an apology.

‘What would you have done without me, eh, boy?’

‘I honestly don’t know, sir.’

In London the streets are paved with gold – electric light reflected on the wet flagstones. Walkers leave fierce trails behind them, flashbulb memories of raincoated arms and spattered striding legs. Piccadilly is criss-crossed by forces as modern and purposeful as factory machinery, and even the pigeons, fat and grey and rat-like though they are, appear to be coursing with something imperial and rare, some pigeon-essence that powers their strut and their pompous inquisitiveness. In London the rain sparkles with stray energies, and the dirty water that runs in the gutters is notable because it is London water, and carries along with it Morse-code oddments, leaflets and sweet-wrappers and cigarette ends that telegraph clues to London life and thinking.