The Impressionist (41 page)

‘Yes, Aunt Berthilda.’

‘Nana. Your father called me Nana.’

‘Yes. Right. Nana.’

‘Good boy. Now your father wouldn’t have held with the way they treated me. My brother, your grandfather, was a very cruel man. He thought the worst of people. It was my baby! But: that was all over a long time ago, and Mr Cox and I – it’s as Mrs Cox most people know me, though we never made it official – we did well with the boarding house until he died, but the truth is, Jonathan, they shouldn’t have sent me to such a place. They shouldn’t. And you know how hard good boarders are to come by nowadays. Well, here are you turned up from nowhere with all this money left to you by your father and here am I, his favourite relative, not even able to afford to keep the maid on except to come in once a week and do the floors.’ She pauses meaningfully. ‘We’ve only got each other in the world, Jonathan.’

He cannot believe his ears.

‘You want money?’

‘There’s no need to be crude about it. Something to set me up again. When I close my eyes I can see a wonderful little terrace on a cliff-top promenade, and me in front of it, cradling my little cherub in my arms –’

‘I don’t have any money. Mr Spavin has it in trust until I’m twenty-one.’

Aunt Berthilda spits on the path. ‘Samuel Spavin. Always Samuel Spavin. That man is not well disposed towards me, Jonathan. He is a cruel man. So he has your money, does he? How about if you were to have a word with him, if you were to tell him how I’m your auntie and your father loved me – how would that be?’

‘What do you mean he’s not well disposed towards you?’

‘It’s a silly business, Jonathan. They’re all very cruel men.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All I did was squeeze her too tight! There was no reason to send me to such a place!’

Then Jonathan realizes, with a joyous flood of relief, that whatever else she is (and several of the possibilities worry him) she is certainly quite mad. Maybe this is the kind of conclusion that inevitably shows on the face of the concluder. Maybe Aunt Berthilda is merely perceptive. Either way, something about Jonathan suddenly reveals itself to her in an unfavourable light.

Even as she is attacking him he cannot quite stop grinning. She is mad and he is safe! Scratch on, Berthilda! Berthilda, wail away! She screeches at him incoherently, bringing masters and boys running over the lawn as her surprisingly strong fingers pluck at his face and her stiff skirts snag on his uniform, making a sound like wireless static. As two of the rugby masters escort her off the premises, she shouts back insults, choosing, in one of those moments of insight which come with being mad, to scream, ‘He’s no kin to me! He’s not my blood!’

Dr Noble asks Jonathan whether he is all right. Jonathan says he is fine, thank you. Dr Noble says it (meaning Aunt Berthilda) is unfortunate. Jonathan agrees that it is. After that, Dr Noble considers his pastoral duty fulfilled and places Aunt Berthilda into the sack of unmentionable things which English people, like postmen, drag around with them. A week later Jonathan receives a letter from Mr Spavin advising him to have no further contact with Aunt Berthilda, something he has done his part to promote by having her admitted to an asylum on the Gower Peninsula. It was an unfortunate business, he writes. Perhaps we ought not to have sent her to such a place.

This is the English way: linear and progressive, rolling forward on castors of tradition and good manners. Follow hints, and you will glide on indefinitely, blessed by a kind of social perpetual motion. Ignore them and you will crash into the walls.

Paul Gertler’s Cambridge application is rejected.

He and Jonathan crunch along a frosty path by the river, and Gertler tells him at length how much it does not matter and how the old universities are elitist establishments anyway. Jonathan says he is sorry. Gertler describes how it will be after the Revolution, when every working man will have access to education, and the people will be properly provided for by a caring state. They shake cigarettes out of a pack and stand with shoulders hunched up inside their coats and free hands shoved into their pockets, their breath mingling with the fag smoke in fluffy white plumes. Winter is amazing to Jonathan. The silvered surfaces of the leaves and the whiteness blanketing the flat Norfolk fields make it hard to concentrate on Gertler’s utopia. The notebook in his breast pocket contains entries on
Christmas carols
and
ice skating.

‘I have a car,’ says Gertler, apropos of nothing. ‘It’s parked at the Services.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I am. It belongs to my father. I doubt he’s even noticed it has gone.’

‘What’re you going to do?’

‘How does London sound to you?’

And so, bundled up in scarves and hats, Gertler’s woollen-gloved hands slipping on the steering wheel, they head off. The car is a pre-war Wolseley, spacious and grand. Gertler has paid the man at the Services a guinea to garage it, and he stands watching them depart, his arms folded, face inscrutable. The headlights illuminate two wobbling discs on the icy surface of the road. Otherwise darkness. It is an eventful ride. Once they slide off the road altogether, gliding sedately round a corner to nestle in a hedge. Somewhere near Colchester it begins to snow. By the time London starts to assemble itself around them, they are cold and tired, letting the low brick houses pass by without comment. Only when the silhouetted buildings get taller and the streetlights brighter do they pick themselves up and ask each other what they are going to do.

Coffee and sandwiches at a stand somewhere in Islington. Then…

THE
WEST
END!

where it doesn’t matter what time it is and they park the car near a pub called the Coach and Horses dive in up to the bar carrying two pints overhead the place is so packed and excuse me excuse me crammed against a pillar can I interest you two gents in no thanks suit yourself same again out on the street people in doorways music coming out of basements shuffling syncopating girls who say smiling why not come home with us we share a flat in Shepherd’s Market but insist on going somewhere to drink a cocktail first the Egyptian Room you can wait can’t you it’s very modern very much the American thing oh and what would you know about the American thing then somehow they are outside a place with no sign only a bell called Mother Taylor’s the girls are gone Paul’s wallet hat and everything else too, the people draining out of the icy streets like blood from a wound.

Gertler is shouting
damn you damn you all!
up at windows in St James’s, which is definitely going to get them arrested unless Jonathan, who has been drinking less fiercely, can persuade him that they need to get to school for breakfast, which means they have to go now.
Come on, Paul
Jonathan has the thought that each minute of delay is storing up bad energy for them, and that later he will look back on this as the moment things started to slip away from his friend. They drift back into Soho, Gertler kicking a rubbish bin which clatters all the way down Beak Street. Then Jonathan forces the keys into his hand and tells him to drive. Which he does.

The journey back to Norfolk is far, far worse than the journey down. Gertler is so drunk that his head keeps nodding down towards the wheel. Every few minutes some crisis – a milk cart, a turning cab – is narrowly avoided. Jonathan is surprised they even make it out of the city.

‘They all bloody hate me,’ Gertler is saying, somewhere in Essex, when they finally run into a tree. Jonathan thinks he may have been unconscious for a few seconds, or a minute, but when he opens his eyes Gertler is still talking, as if nothing has happened. They all – why do you think they do it?’ he asks. The windscreen has shattered, and he has a cut on his forehead, a trickle of blood running down into his left eye. The front bumper of the Wolseley is battered, but somehow the engine is still running and they are more or less unhurt. A few minutes later, apart from the wind blowing through the empty windscreen frame and the dried blood on Gertler’s face, it might as well have been a dream.

When they arrive at Chopham Constable, the man at the Services, dressed in his church clothes, looks at them astonished. Two smashed-up haggard boys. Walking wounded. They leave the car and skirt the crumbling wall of the school grounds, looking for a place to climb up. Sunday morning in the country. Birds at amplified volume like a very high-pitched jazz band. Jonathan is halfway over the wall when he sees a figure watching them from the trees. The cherubic face is unmistakable. Framed by auburn curls, pricked by sly calculating eyes: Waller, the House Tart.

As Gertler lands beside him, grunting and falling to one side, Jonathan points. Waller sees he has been spotted and dives behind a bush. Flicker of running boy between tree trunks. Gertler starts after him, swearing. Aghast, Jonathan watches as he catches the smaller boy and knocks him down. Bad idea. Such a bad idea. Waller is a special protégé of Fender-Greene and Gertler is laying into him, really losing control. Waller wriggles about in earth and leaf-muck, spitting, snarling
I’ll get you I’ll get you,
as Gertler kneels on his chest, punching his face. Jonathan runs up and pulls him away. They watch Waller stumbling towards the school, handkerchief to his bloody nose. Then they turn on one another, each accusing the other of fouling things up. Side by side, not speaking, they trudge through the grounds back to the house.

Sure enough, trouble is not long in coming. At lunch-time a fag appears in their study, summoning them to a meeting with Fender-Greene. He receives them in state, a new waistcoat and an ostentatious gold watch demonstrating the seriousness of the occasion. Fortunately, though he has his suspicions, all he can prove is, that they have broken bounds. There is the question of bullying. ‘Somehow typical of you, Gertler. Somehow
unchristian.’
Jonathan is apologetic, Paul cold. Loss of privileges, a caning, and the matter appears to have been resolved. That is, however, all on the surface. Jonathan knows they have hurt one of Fender-Greene’s special little lushers, the boys who do personal things for him, and do them the way he likes them done. And Waller is no ordinary lusher, being the Theda Bara of School House, a poisonous and exotic plant who has already caused the expulsion of two senior boys, and is only tolerated because of the patronage of Fender-Greene and the existence of the Waller Cup for Services to House Drama, recently (and hurriedly) donated by his father.

Waller is a dangerous enemy and, in conjunction with Fender-Greene, cannot be underestimated. Yet though Jonathan tries to make this clear to Gertler, his warnings are ignored. Paul seems to feel he has nothing left to lose. He stops doing schoolwork, refuses to wear a tie and spends the next few days pacing the study talking about the steppes, vodka and the downfall of the plutocracy, jumbling Russia and Communism together until they merge into one thing, a free country of the mind where he can be away from the frost and school and Fender-Greene. He has never been to Russia. He would go tomorrow, if he could. Jonathan listens quietly, and gradually withdraws into himself. At least one of them ought to be on guard.

Fender-Greene’s first move comes a couple of mornings later, as Jonathan shivers in the bathing-house, standing under one of the backbone-building dribbles of cold water that passes for a shower. Thinking himself alone, he is surprised to hear someone at the next showerhead along. He turns to see Waller, materialized out of nowhere, soaping a large erection and pouting at him lasciviously. As Jonathan blinks water out of his eyes, Waller steps closer, reaching out as if to kiss him. Though he is half asleep, Jonathan moves quickly, pushing the other boy aside and grabbing a towel – just in time to see Hoggart burst in, followed by a pair of prefects. The whole thing has obviously been set up, and Hoggart is clearly disappointed to find Bridge-man and Waller on opposite sides of the room. Still, he delivers a lecture on Immorality! Continence! Sin! wagging a finger in Jonathan’s face and blasting him with his rank-smelling breath. There is something wrong with you, Bridgeman, whatever Dr Noble says. Something sick.’

Gertler lasts three more days. That Saturday, a few minutes before lunch, Jonathan bowls into the study to find him ashen-faced, kneeling by his trunk, flanked by two of Fender-Greene’s lieutenants. He is packing his bust of Lenin on top of a jumble of clothes and papers.

‘You should check your stuff, Bridgeman,’ says Porter, the taller of the two prefects, who has a waistcoat and moustache modelled on that of his glorious leader, ‘in case the bloody yid’s made off with it.’

Jonathan looks at Gertler, who shrugs.

‘Go on. Check it, if you like.’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’

Gertler’s eyes are red. It looks as if he has been crying.

‘Your loss,’ butts in Porter. Manning, standing by the window, snorts with laughter.

‘They say I stole a five-pound note from Waller’s pocket book,’ Gertler murmurs.

‘We don’t
say
anything,’ sneers Manning. ‘We found the bloody thing on you. Bloody thief.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘It’s already happened. Briggs is driving me to the station to catch the four o’clock train.’

‘I’ll help you. I’ll go and see Dr Noble.’

Gertler looks infinitely tired. ‘It won’t do any good,’ he says.

Jonathan insists. Full of determination he sets off for Dr Noble’s lodgings, but on the way something happens. He finds himself slowing down, hesitating. Perhaps, he thinks, he is being unwise. Perhaps Gertler relishes being an outsider. He certainly wears his Communism like a badge. His family has money. Surely nothing too bad will happen to him. Jonathan does not want to do anything to draw attention to himself. He should be blending in with the background, not sticking his neck out for no reason. After waiting a suitable time, he heads back and tells Gertler that Dr Noble would not change his mind.

‘Thanks for trying, Johnny,’ says Gertler. ‘I won’t forget it.’ He gives Jonathan his father’s address, and Jonathan promises to write, although he already knows (a knowledge growing like a sick feeling in his stomach) that he will not. They are travelling in opposite directions, he and Paul; one breaking out, the other tunnelling in. At half past three they stand by the pony trap, as Briggs harnesses the fractious old horse.