The Impressionist (39 page)

First impressions are pleasant. The grounds are ample, a line of rugby and cricket pitches stretching off towards the Brand, the little stream which marks the eastern limit of the park. The Elizabethan manor house has altered little since Sir Perry’s day, though generations of headmasters have added amenities like the new boarding houses, and the gymnasium-and-chapel. Housed together in a single Victorian gothic building, this architectural curiosity stems from one educationalist’s theory about the close relationship between worship and physical exertion, which he put into practice with the help of a progressive staff and a subscription fund. The chapel tower, a round structure with a slight curve and an oddly bulbous tip, is all that remains of Sir Perry’s folly, built at the height of the old man’s hellfire days. Disguised by buttresses and topped by a cross, it is nevertheless still known by the villagers as the Big’un, and the legend persists that it is an anatomically correct rendering of Sir Perry’s favourite appendage, executed in an attempt to win the favours of the Duchess of Devonshire.

As Briggs hefts his trunk off the back of the pony trap, Jonathan walks into the oak-panelled entrance hall and for the first time smells the combination of carbolic soap, mud and boiled cabbage that is the unique aroma of the English boarding school. Since there are three weeks before term starts, everything is deathly quiet. The gold-leafed names on the scholarship roll and the plaster busts of past headmasters look down on a scene of weird calm, like sentries during a cease-fire. Jonathan peers into a glass case of sports trophies, until Briggs coughs loudly in his ear, suggesting that they might as well think about climbing up, considering. He follows the old servant upstairs, past rows of closed doors and through the cavernous, scarred space of the junior prep room. Finally they reach a wing once occupied by the Haldane family guest rooms, and now by the sixth-form studies of School House.

A door. Another empty room, waiting for him to fill it up.

He is given time to settle himself in, and told that the headmaster expects him for tea in the glasshouses in an hour. Having delivered this information, Briggs hovers in the doorway until Jonathan presses a coin into his hand, whereupon he shuffles off down the hall.

*

Rising up behind the main hall, the glasshouses appear like a miniature crystal palace, glittering in the sunshine. Mesmerized, Jonathan is approaching them across the back lawn, when a voice bellows out, stopping him dead in his tracks.

‘Boy! BOY!’

He wheels round to find a red-faced man leaning out of an upstairs window.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

‘Going –’

‘What?’

‘Going –’

‘WHAT? I hardly think you should be
going
anywhere over the
grass!
Regard! What you have wrought!’

Jonathan looks down, and sees that his shoes have left a trail of little bruises on the sleek green-striped surface.

‘Lawn!’ shouts the man. ‘Parents, masters and senior domestic staff only! Exceptions! Prefects on Sundays! All upper-form boys on Founders Day between two and four in the afternoon! Now get off!’

Gingerly Jonathan steps on to a gravel path. The window is slammed shut. He thinks for a moment, takes out his pocket book and writes:
further demonstration of the significance of lawns.
Englishness seeps a little deeper into his skin.

Finding the glasshouses is one thing. Finding a way in is another. The structure appears to be divided into three sections, each one crammed with foliage. Certain areas are screened from the light by canvas blinds. Others are so misted up that it is impossible to see inside. A complex system of pipes passes over the gravel, pumping out heat. Finally Jonathan spots a yellow-hatted figure moving about inside. Following the perimeter, he discovers a door, and is transported back to rainy-season India, the air as heavy and thick as flannel.

Dr Noble, Headmaster and orchidist, is discovered in the act of hybridization. He has a lush red Dendrobium by the petals, and is stroking a pollen-coated toothpick over its sex organs, coaxing it like a recalcitrant chorus girl. His wide-brimmed yellow panama is pushed back on his head, revealing a bony scalp and a single lock of grey hair. Transmitting frowns down a long sculptural nose, he appears not to notice Jonathan’s arrival, concentrating absolutely on his task. Only when the pollen transfer is complete does he straighten up from his workbench. He stretches, then surveys his new pupil with a post-coital smile.

‘Bridgeman,’ he intones. ‘Fresh from the tropics.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Lately arrived from Asia, like my new box of Paphiopedilums.’ He indicates a wooden crate at his feet, and together they stare into it. Jonathan sees an unpromising mess of dirt and tubers. Whatever Dr Noble sees must excite him, because he lets out a low moan.

‘Gorgeous,’ he murmurs.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Follow me to the Alpine House, where I trust we shall discover that Mrs Dodd has laid out tea.’

They make their way through the mass of greenery. Orchids are everywhere, lined up in long planters, hanging from baskets, curling over logs and artful contraptions of bark and wire. They take every imaginable form and colour, large waxy flowers with trailing roots, tiny stars, spikes, fans, columns and rosettes, flowers in the shape of pouches and flowers with little pointed tails. They reach frilly lips up from beds of moss, and hover overhead, trailing clusters of aerial roots which catch at Jonathan’s face and hair. The Doctor appears more their leader than their gardener, controlling his hordes by force of will.

The plants in the Alpine House are grouped around little tableaux of rocks, and the temperature is a good twenty degrees colder than the tropical zone next door. Dr Noble pours tea and explains the school philosophy, which is essentially that boys should work hard, play hard, and under no circumstances enter the portals of the Blue Badger or Edith’s Café, the fleshpots of Chopham Constable. Jonathan’s guardian has, he mentions, indicated a certain gravitational tendency towards fleshpots. He has been assured that Chopham Hall will effect a cure. Business dispensed with, he returns to orchids, describing his plan to cross certain difficult species of Cattleya. The result to be presented to Kew. The hybrid to be called C.
haldaniensis,
or perhaps C.
emiline,
after a girl he knew at Oxford. Mention of the university brings him back to the topic of Jonathan’s education, and he switches to Greek, uttering a long peroration in that language, then pausing expectantly. He appears to want an answer. When Jonathan confesses that he does not understand, he is told that this is extremely serious, and the process is repeated in Latin. Together they manage a stilted conversation about the war-like character of the Germanii east of the Rhine, before Dr Noble loses interest and starts to talk about the huge number of plants he lost in the recent drought. The toll on the tropical epiphytes was particularly heavy. As he describes the losses, Jonathan thinks for a moment that he is going to break into tears, but he collects himself, pours more tea and announces that he believes Jonathan would do best in the history sixth.

‘That is what you shall put in for at the university. Classics is not for you. I realize this may be a disappointment, since in your journey along life’s winding path you may encounter fellows who believe an affinity with the Ancients is the mark of a gentleman. However, you must bear their barbs with fortitude and trust me when I tell you that it is for the best. Though the bees in our gardens transfer pollen indiscriminately from flower to flower, still we do not find crosses between dahlia and delphinium, or between geranium and gentian. Why? Because their essential natures are different. Just as it is with flowers, so it is with boys. Each boy has his essential nature, and yours, Mr Bridgeman, is historical. Surely, as observers of creation, we must look upon these boundaries as a good thing? Were there none, the flowers would lose their identities in a hybrid swarm, and nature would be in a desperate mess.’

Jonathan thinks about this for a moment.

‘History will be fine, sir.’

‘That’s the spirit. Now you may go and unpack your things.’

Jonathan spends the three weeks before the start of term reading in the library and assisting Dr Noble in the glasshouses. He sands and paints rotten wood, and learns to mist the tropicals with water at sunrise and sunset. Noble seems to have taken a liking to his new pupil. Or, if not exactly a liking, at least an interest in. Jonathan will laugh or make a gesture and find the Doctor intently watching him. Analysing. Tracing him back through the generations to the pure botanical forms from which he originated.

One afternoon Jonathan helps the Headmaster bed microscopic seeds in layers of watery jelly, packing them into stoppered flasks and talking to them as he does it, his lisping tone totally unlike the clipped voice he uses to human beings. These potential orchids are empresses, queens of the night; they are houris and goddesses and once, startlingly, ‘black-breasted Madonnas of the jungle’. Noble seems unaware that the boy can hear him laying bare this interior life, so full of sensuality.

At night Jonathan walks around the grounds, smoking contraband cigarettes and wrapping the holiday silence tightly around himself. Chopham Hall feels clenched, expectant. On the first day of term it explodes into life.

Dawn breaks with Briggs coughing his way on to the front porch. There is an hour of quiet, then an ominous rumble in the distance. Like invading motorized cavalry, a convoy of parental cars sweeps into the drive, disgorging stern fathers, tearful fox-furred mothers, their sons, chauffeurs, maids and dogs into a mêlée of cricket bats and parcels. The fathers bundle the mothers back into the cars and drive away. Then things begin in earnest. Trunks are bumped up and down stairs. Small boys are kicked and whipped from dormitory to bath to chapel to breakfast to form room to assembly, while larger ones, the kickers and whippers, are sent five miles over the fields, or taught to drill with wooden rifles, or lined up against one another and made to ruck and maul. The chaos is regimented by masters, capped and gowned like ragged black crows, and by prefects, waistcoated sadists alive to the slightest sign of insubordination. Jonathan soon learns that the prefects are the true masters of this universe, and that he, as a new sixth-former, is a suspicious anomaly in it.

School House, to which Jonathan has the honour of belonging, is captained by one Fender-Greene, a straw-haired thug with a wispy moustache and a garish green silk tie, symbols of his privileged rank. Calling Jonathan into his study, he administers a crushing handshake and makes a short speech, to the effect that he does not know what sort of a life Jonathan has led hitherto, but he is now part of something larger than himself, and will be expected to act in accordance with the principles of the house. Then he takes a breath and screams ‘Boooooy-up!’ through the open door, which produces a panting eleven-year-old fag, carrying tea. As the little boy rattles cups and saucers, Fender-Greene leers at him proprietorially.

‘He’s a lovely little lusher, ain’t he? Does boots too, and a super omelette.’

After tea, Fender-Greene escorts Jonathan in front of the assembled house, where he is introduced, applauded and sung to:

‘Striving we for glory

Striving all for fame

Giving of our utmost

In the School House name’

Then Fender-Greene and his prefects turn their attentions to hazing the new ticks, leaving him free to slip upstairs.

In his study he finds a dark-haired young man picking out a tune on a sort of misshapen guitar. The unused side of the room has miraculously filled up with books and pictures, along with a number of unusual objects, such as a typewriter and a little bronze bust of a man with a pointed beard. The boy stops playing, stands and holds out his hand.

‘Hello. I’m Gertler, and you might as well know straight off, I’m a Jew.’

‘Bridgeman. How do you do.’

‘You don’t have to like it, but there it is,’ he says, picking up his guitar again.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘That will make it easier.’

Gertler returns to his practice, constantly repeating the same figure, slapping the body of the instrument in irritation when his fingers refuse to follow instructions.

‘So what are you?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘C of E, I suppose.’

Jonathan makes no answer. ‘Who’s that?’ he asks, pointing to the bronze head.

Gertler smiles. ‘Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I’m a Communist too. You can ask to switch studies, if you like. They’ll probably let you, and I certainly don’t care. Fender-Greene already wants me out. Old Hoggart only keeps me in the House because my father’s rich.’