The Impressionist (44 page)

Thoughts of the girl block out the Italian wars. The lecture goes in one ear and out of the other. Alliances are made and broken and cities sacked without leaving a trace on a consciousness entirely devoted to blonde hair and white cotton stretching taut and slack, taut and slack. He considers looking for her. There are only a few women’s colleges, and it would not take too long, but the idea brings back bad memories of waiting in the shadows, bowing from behind bushes. He reminds himself that Oxford is a small place, and he is certain to meet her again. Sooner or later.

It happens sooner, on the last night of
Othello.
Every evening for a week, Jonathan has spoken Levine fair and watched him succumb to the green-eyed monster jealousy, before putting out the light of Percy Twigg, a melting, (if broad-shouldered) Desdemona. Though the college authorities denied permission for a real female to take the role, several undergraduettes have managed to sneak into the cast party, giving it a daring, illicit atmosphere. It is held in Levine’s set, decorated Venetian-style for the occasion, a look largely created by draping muslin over his battered furniture and placing large bowls of fruit on the sideboard. Levine himself, in order to maximize his tragic effect, is wandering around in costume, slapping his rapier against people’s thighs and making them spill their drinks. Full of champagne and artistic triumph, he insists on kissing everyone French-style on both cheeks, leaving large black marks behind him. An owlish boy from Balliol is shouting at Jonathan over the un-Venetian gramophone jazz
you do ha ha do it so well the dissembling part of it quite sent a chill down
– when the door opens and she walks in. As she scans the room, for one illogical, exciting moment Jonathan thinks she is looking for him. Then she rushes forward and throws her arms round Levine.

‘Darling!’

‘Darling!’

‘You were –’

‘I know.’

Jonathan disengages himself from the owl and makes his way towards them, intending to force an introduction.

‘But really,’ the girl is saying, in a loud voice,’such savage nobility. So visceral.’

Levine simpers, and plays with the pommel of his sword.

‘Star, you are too kind.’

Jonathan appears at his friend’s shoulder. The girl carries on talking about Levine’s performance. She is wearing a pale green gown, and several unusual carved wooden bangles on her arms, which click together when she gestures. Describing Levine’s ‘generative force’ and his ‘feel for the Negro soul’ she sounds like an abacus, which, to Jonathan, only adds to her charm. Though she is wearing heavy mascara and pistachio eye-shadow, she somehow still manages to look quintessentially English. Beneath a layer of white face-powder, her complexion is pink and healthy. There is nothing washed out about her blonde hair, which pulses with yellow life like a cornfield in September, a rolling, waving field, seen in the warm evening light as the weary harvesters trudge home, their scythes on their backs, whistling, yes, a country air – Jonathan pulls himself out of this mental Wessex and tries to concentrate. Levine, basking in praise, shows no sign of diverting any of it by acknowledging his friend, and finally it becomes apparent that he will have to do the work himself. He sticks out his hand and says hello.

Levine looks annoyed. The girl ticks him off.

‘You’re very rude, Veenie.’

‘Sorry, Star. Jonathan Bridgeman, Astarte Chapel.’

They say how do you do to each other and she smiles encouragingly. Jonathan ventures a question.

‘Astarte?’

She sighs, and turns to Levine. ‘Why do they always do it?

Levine shakes his head. ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’

Jonathan realizes he has done something obscurely wrong.

‘Look, Veenie,’ she says suddenly, ‘got to dash. Flying visit and all – I’m sure the porter will be here in a trice and everyone will end up in frightfully hot water.’

‘Absolutely, Star. You must flee, or Jonathan here will start making attempts on your chastity. He’s an absolute demon.’

‘Is he?’

She arches one eyebrow playfully, kisses Levine goodbye and sweeps out, leaving Jonathan pink-faced, grabbing on to a fading image of pistachio and bootblack smudges on a white cheek.

‘That was unfair, Levine.’

‘Was it? Sorry.’

‘And you never told me you knew anyone like that.’

‘Well, I know lots of people. Anyway, you already landed yourself in it. Out for a duck, I’d say.’

‘What did I do?’

Levine shrugs. ‘She’s very sensitive about her name. Everyone asks. Bores her terribly.’

‘It is a very strange name.’

‘Mmm. Her father’s fault. Professor in the anthropology department. Quite mad. The name’s the least of it.’

‘But what does it mean?’

‘Astarte? Oh, something ancient and anthropological. Why don’t you look it up?’

Astarte:
Semitic deity. Phoenician goddess of love and fertility. Related to the Babylonian
Ishtar
and the Greek
Aphrodite.
One of a group of ancient mother goddesses notably including
Cybele, Demeter
and
Ceres (
q.v.
).
In some forms of the cult, a male deity, her lover, is also worshipped. The sacrificial death and resurrection of this masculine partner is taken to symbolize the regenerative cycle of the earth.

The encyclopedia closes with a thud, and Jonathan replaces it on the library shelf. Just in time for examinations, the sun has come out. The long rows of desks are all occupied, final-year students sweating uncomfortably through their revision. Magnanimously, the librarian has permitted the windows to be opened, and from outside float tantalizing fragments of conversation, each untroubled burst of laughter bringing new pain to the faces of the prisoners inside. Jonathan is relieved that he is free to walk down the stone steps and out into the open air. As he stands in the library quadrangle, clinking his change in his pockets and wondering how to spend the afternoon, a gang of undergraduates runs past him, heading in the direction of the Sheldonian Theatre. On a whim he follows them, and finds himself at the back of a laughing, jostling crowd.

A rag. A lecture has just finished in the Sheldonian, and the attendees have come out to find that someone has carefully picked out all the female students’ bicycles and tied wire around the frames, giving each a crude masculine crossbar. The crowd has gathered to watch the spectacle of a dozen embarrassed women trying to untangle the mess and leave as quickly as possible. They whistle and catcall, cheering as one woman gives in and rides off ‘as a man’. ‘Go on lads!’ shout a gaggle of boys in blazers and cricket whites, clinging to each other with the prankish jollity of it all. Jonathan smiles – and, as he does so, realizes that one of the victims is Astarte Chapel. She is kneeling by her bicycle (
the
bicycle), wrestling with it, her face a mask of impotent fury. As if prompted by fate, she looks up and, seeing Jonathan’s smirk, gives him a look which suggests that she would be more than happy to kill him and plough his body into the soil to ensure the continuation of the seasons.

Quickly, he tries to marshal his face into a pattern of disapproval, but ends up with an odd twisted rictus, like a snakebite victim whose muscles are in spasm. With hand gestures he tries to show his dissociation from what is happening, making pushing motions to indicate his total rejection of everyone and everything involved in bicycle tampering. With a sinking feeling he realizes he must look deranged, and pushes through the crowd to help her.

‘I suppose you think you’re terribly amusing,’ she spits.

‘Honestly,’ he splutters, ‘I had nothing – I mean it’s awful g – terrible. Really. It wasn’t me –’

‘Oh,’ she sneers. ‘I suppose they made you.’

‘But Astarte–’

She is not interested in his explanations. Giving the wire a last tug, she swings a haughty leg over the saddle and wobbles off down the road. Her dress is rucked up over her thighs, and Jonathan watches her depart, his chest a battlefield of mixed emotions. He knows that this spells the end, that she will never forgive him and all his hopes are dashed, but it only makes the sight of her angrily pedalling rear all the more affecting, as if she is receding down Broad Street into another world, lost and for ever out of reach.

Transfixed by these high-flown feelings, he does not notice that a copy of
Les Fleurs du mal
(borrowed from Levine) has fallen out of his jacket pocket.

‘What in hell’s name do we have here?’

He turns round to find that his bad day is about to get worse. Behind him, at the head of the phalanx of cricketers, is Gerald Fender-Greene. In his hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger like a very smelly rag, is his book.

‘Hello FG,’ he says warily.

‘Foreign muck,’ pronounces Fender-Greene. The other cricketers peer to see what he has found.

‘Baudelaire,’ reads one. There is a pause as the information is processed. Then, the verdict: ‘Shirtlifter.’

The gathering takes on a very serious tone. Though Athletes do not take much notice of books, especially the subversive and morally undermining kind favoured by Aesthetes, the name of Baudelaire is infamous enough to have made an impression. Jonathan starts to wish he had chosen another prop for this afternoon’s Aesthetic tea.

‘And,’ says Fender-Greene, as if pronouncing a death sentence, ‘you were sucking up.’

‘Sucking up?’

‘To that – girl.’ He says it with all the venom that a manly man, a man whose thighs will always be snugly encased in trousers, can feel for a person around whose bare legs air freely circulates. There is a pause, and suddenly a dozen eyes are fastened on the narrow leather belt which holds Jonathan’s own lower garments to his unworthy, poetry-reading, sexually dubious body. The same thought occurs to batsman and bowler alike: if a chap will insist on being effeminate, with his Frenchie books and pretty girlfriends, by what right does he wear such flannel symbols of manhood? There is an imbalance. It must be rectified.

‘Debag him!’

Does the shout go up first, or does Jonathan anticipate it? Either way, he makes a sprint start worthy of an athletic blue, tearing off down Broad Street before the first eleven even realize he is gone. They come after him, yelling incoherently, waving bats and pads over their heads like regimental colours. Passers-by duck out of their way, recognizing a war party when they see one. Jonathan heads down the Turl, weaving between startled shoppers, and elbowing a decrepit classics don into a tailor’s doorway. The old fellow picks himself up, cursing eloquently in demotic Latin, only to be sent flying by the horde of cricketers, his satchel of unseen translations and bicycle clips exploding messily over the cobbles. Soon two University Bulldogs, ex-army men with bowler hats and evil tempers, are in hot pursuit of the miscreants, puffing red-faced behind them. They are followed by a number of tag-along undergraduates, keen to see blood. Jonathan crosses the high street without breaking stride, narrowly dodging a cab and a milk cart. He snatches a glance behind, and sees that the cricketers, who train hard for just this sort of occasion, are steadily gaining ground. Pink and yelling, they look like a gang of large psychotic babies, the terrifying simplicity of their will-to-debag erasing everything else from their faces. Jonathan realizes they are going to catch him. He is about to endure the ultimate humiliation. He does not stand a chance.

But fate, who is chronically indecisive today, flips things round again. Ahead, like a mirage, her bicycle divested of wire with the help of a passing clergyman, is Astarte Chapel.

‘Come on, Johnny-boy! Hop on!’

He cannot believe it, but if his life has taught him one thing, it is that belief is optional. He straddles her back wheel and a moment later is accelerating away from his pursuers, arms round the object of his desire, transported down the high street in a glorious, heavenly backie.

Later, when he is wiser to the ways of Miss Astarte Chapel, he will begin to detect a pattern in the day’s events. Outwardly the combination of vitriol and charity defies explanation. Is she angry? Forgiving? Indifferent? These are hard questions to answer – and this difficulty is perhaps the point, at least as far as Astarte herself is concerned. She believes in keeping boys guessing. Relations with her are composed of a series of dyads, positive and negative held together by a strong bond, as if one attracts the other through some yet-to-be-analysed physical force. If she lets you hold her hand, two hours later she will slap your face. If she swears never to talk to you again, she is guaranteed to arrive on your doorstep the next afternoon, dressed for a picnic. Thus, after Jonathan laughed at her, she naturally made up her mind to rescue him, and to allow him to take her to tea.

Like any well-brought-up English girl, Astarte has been taught to rate qualities like asset liquidity and breeding over mere attractiveness. Still, Jonathan’s looks are pleasing to her. Also his aestheticism, for Astarte is that quasi-mythical thing, dreamt of by every sleepless undergraduate painter and poet – the artistic beauty. Jonathan discovers this over tea, a ritual in which, like much else about her life, Astarte manages to be both strenuously bohemian and utterly English. She must have the table with the view. She does not take milk. She says in a loud voice that she would much rather be in Paris, drinking a tisane. Then she puts a scone daintily in her mouth, and says, ‘Scrumptious,’ looking like a little girl in a Pears soap advertisement. She and Jonathan talk about important things, or rather she talks and Jonathan watches her lips move. For most of an hour he rests his chin on his hands and agrees wordlessly with whatever she says, trying not to drift off into violin-section fantasies inspired by her eyes, or hair, or the crumbs caught at the corner of her mouth.