The Impressionist (45 page)

Paris features heavily in Astarte’s conversation. Her father is keen for her to be cosmopolitan, a quality neglected in the traditional English system of education. When it comes to cosmopolitanism, Paris is the world centre, and this year she will be spending the entire summer there. She has been before, of course, but not for an entire summer. Paris, Jonathan learns, is a place with élan, ésprit and several other things which have to do with energy and vital force. The key to life is to remain in contact with this force, which is dissipated by contemporary existence. Modern man is degenerate (because of train travel and illustrated papers), and renewing the vital force has taken on a special urgency. Seen in this light, spending the summer in Paris is a particularly worthy thing to do. Astarte calls all this her aesthetic. Jonathan has never met a girl with her own aesthetic before.

Everyone calls her Star. Jonathan calls her Star. She likes to shock, but what shocks him is not the pistachio, or the bangles (from the Fotse people of Africa, a present from her father), but her ideas about European degeneracy. He cannot understand how someone who looks like her could feel that way.

‘But aren’t you – aren’t we a civilizing influence on other races?’

‘Oh silly Johnny, civilization is the problem! It’s stifling us! We’ve forgotten how to feel. We’ve – you know – lost contact with the earth. We should tear it all down and go back to our primitive emotional selves, running naked on the sands of life!’

There turns out to be a place on the Côte d’Azur where one can go to do this. Star has never been to the Côte d’Azur herself, but Edie’s older brother Freddie is living in a peasant’s hut there. Actually it is several huts converted into a villa, but done in a very rustic and primitive style. Edie went down and ran naked last summer with one of Freddie’s friends, and Jonathan has to promise not to tell Edie’s parents, who are very stifling when it comes to primitivism. Jonathan promises, which is easy enough, since he does not know any of the people she is talking about.

Then, as suddenly as she arrived in his day, Star leaves. He is trying to say how sorry he is about the bicycles, when she kisses him on both cheeks, says have a nice summer, and sweeps out of the tearoom, the little bell above the door jangling behind her. He wonders if he did something wrong, but cannot think of anything. She did not seem upset. She seemed happy. He walks back to college, feeling dazed but elated. About halfway he remembers the cricketers, and speeds up, not slowing down until he is in his rooms.

The next day he walks over to Star’s college to leave her a note. When he hands it to the porter, he is told that Miss Chapel has gone down for the long vacation, and is not expected back in Oxford until September. The news brings on a strange crisis. He stands outside the gate feeling stricken and cheated. Star has given him a glimpse of something, and immediately taken it away again. He trudges back to Barabbas and sits forlornly in the garden, watching the college tortoise make a stately progress across the lawn. That night he has a nightmare about the cricketers. They have multiplied a hundredfold, legions of white-flannelled men hunting him down through the streets. The vision is extraordinarily clear, and comes back for several nights afterwards, running in his brain like a horrific cinema reel. It lingers during the day, and he finds himself staying in his rooms, afraid of meeting Fender-Greene in the street. Finally, feeling that the old stone walls are about to crush him, he takes the train to London and spends a weekend awake, flitting between pubs and nightclubs in a haze of alcohol. Though he starts off in the West End, he is pulled steadily east and south, and finishes the evening under a table in an establishment called the Fishy Mitten, located in an alley near the East India Docks. There, at last, he experiences a blessed, dreamless sleep.

A week later his trunk is loaded on to a London train, and a boring summer vac begins. Mr Spavin is concerned about Jonathan’s future plans, and thinks it would be best if he had a taste of the world of work. Working in Paris, a suggestion of Jonathan’s, is dismissed as impractical. His arguments about combating the degeneracy of European man carry no weight. What is the boy to do? He has announced that he no longer wishes to go into the Colonial Service. He does not appear to be suited to the military. The answer is clearly the law. Legal experience is what he needs, and it so happens that the firm of Spavin & Muskett are in need of clerical assistance. What could be more simple?

Buried alive in ledgers, Jonathan’s days pass painfully slowly. As he carries files from one room to another, in his mind he is running naked on the Côte d’Azur. He shudders to think what Star would make of Spavin & Muskett: civilization at its worst. The other juniors are wan shadows who talk about either football or money. With their florid complexions and unvarying routines, the two partners seem devoid of anything resembling a powerful emotion. Jonathan scrutinizes them, hoping to unearth at least one visceral urge: he finds none. Mr Muskett occasionally shouts at the typists, but that seems to be due to rich food and lack of physical exercise, rather than any uprush of Nordic soulfulness. July turns into August. Fat bumble bees knock against the dirty windows, and the law gradually drains him of life, until even his skin seems to be yellowing, turning the colour of land deeds and testaments.

One afternoon, young Muskett floats through the office, dressed, as usual, in tennis clothes. Turning his profile to its best advantage, he rocks on his heels and describes a wonderful motoring holiday. ‘Bombing around Cornwall’ is how he puts it. Bombing around Cornwall in a friend’s Wolseley. He is only passing through London, which is awful in the heat. He doesn’t know how Bridgeman stands it. Luckily he is not going to have to stand it long himself, for tomorrow he is on his way to a house party on the Côte d’Azur. Jonathan’s tortured expression gives him away. Poor Bridgeman, Muskett laughs. Poor inky-fingered Bridgeman, working for Pater all summer. Better luck next time, old chap.

After that, the offices of Spavin & Muskett feel like a living hell. Jonathan walks around in a cloud of jealousy, tormented by visions of Star and Muskett coming to terms with their primitive selves in the second-most-important part of France. One of the typists tries to help him, taking him to the stationery cupboard and pointing out that there is no evidence the two even know each other. Despite her best efforts, he is inconsolable. By the time term starts again he has developed his suspicions into a three-reel orgy, in which the two are lovers, rolling around on a silver strand in the throes of gymnastic, highly financed passion.

When Jonathan goes back up to Oxford, everything has changed – or stayed the same, it is hard to tell. Rudolph Valentino is still on at the George Street Cinema, but in a different film. The ‘beaver’ craze is over and bearded men can walk the streets without fear of ridicule. Someone has set a fashion for wearing jumpers. An enterprising self-publicist has hired a bus to drive round the town centre with his name painted on the side. There are new faces, nervous young men who ask directions to places they are standing in front of, but they look exactly like the old faces they have replaced.

Jonathan listens to stories of walking tours in the Bernese Oberland, and visits to churches in Italy. Someone has been sailing in the Caribbean. Someone else has been to New York. He does not admit he has been working in an office, preferring to hint that he has been caught up in a whirl of mysterious and fashionable London parties. He does not think he sounds convincing. On the third day of term, as he is returning from a bookshop with a manual on mah-jong under his arm, he spots Astarte Chapel, cycling down the high street dressed entirely in pale yellow. He calls after her. She turns round, and waves hesitantly.

‘Star, you’re back!’

‘Of course, chéri. As you see.’

Over the summer she has acquired a very odd accent. Her cloud of hair is gone, chopped down into a severe, geometrical bob. She is marvellously coordinated. Even her shoes are pale yellow.

‘How wonderful. Did you have a good time?’

She sighs and rolls her eyes, as if to show the impossibility of verbally encompassing the joy of the previous three months. The unwelcome image of young Muskett springs to Jonathan’s mind.

‘Did you stay in Paris?’

‘Oui, chéri.’ She laughs musically. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m out of the habit of speaking English. Yes, I did. It was divine.’

‘You didn’t go to the south?’

‘Oh, I did – for a couple of weeks. I stayed with Freddie.’

‘Oh.’Jonathan’s mind renders a quick pastel impression of her in ambulatory seaside nudity, which he instantly smudges out. She looks around impatiently, as if scanning for other people to greet. Then she sighs.

‘So, chéri, are you coming?’

‘Coming where?’

‘To my father’s lecture. He’s talking about his Africans.’

Of course Jonathan is coming. He walks beside her as she wheels her bike along the pavement. They talk about Professor Chapel’s work with the Fotse, who live in a remote and inaccessible part of West Africa.

‘They must be wonderfully primitive.’

‘Yes, it’s a shame, the poor dears. Most of them don’t even wear clothes, unless they’re going out. Just a lot of beads and these rather lovely bangles.’ She waves her arms, which make the clicking sound he loves so well.

‘But – I thought you were in favour of primitivism.’

‘You are a strange boy! The Fotse are savages! I mean, they’ve never even seen a bath. Daddy has to take a collapsible one whenever he visits them. Of course, they treat him like a great chief. It’s very impressive, apparently…’

The topic of Professor Chapel’s high Fotse social status lasts them until they reach the lecture hall. The Professor is obviously a popular speaker, for the place is packed with serious young anthropologists, jostling each other, squatting in the aisles and perching on the windowsills. Star’s entrance is spectacular, unleashing a flurry of greetings and jealous looks directed at Jonathan. He sits down beside her in the front row, in a chair vacated by a ruefully grinning young don, and for a moment feels life is paying him back for his summer of Spavin & Muskett. As settles himself, crossing one leg over the other and straightening the seams of his trousers, he sneaks glances at Star. Her eyes are outlined in heavy Tutankhamun black, and she looks even more aesthetic than he remembered, somehow more sophisticated and knowing. He tries not to think about anywhere in France south of the Midi.

Jonathan is engaged in a painful reverie about the Cap d’Antibes when the door swings open and Professor Chapel strides through the audience to the front of the hall. Star waves and mouths, ‘Hello, Daddy,’ The Professor is an impressive ox-like man, not tall but heavy, a full chest and belly swelling beneath his rumpled tweed suit. The head on top is a large slab, the features on it solid and defined. He greets his daughter with a paternal smile, and squints fiercely at Jonathan, trying to place him. Then he shuffles around, hunting in his briefcase for his notes and, finding them at last with a loud ‘Aha!, takes out a comb, drags a few white-blond hairs over his balding head, drums his fingers on the lectern, and begins.

The social customs of the Fotse, he explains, are both complex and opaque. They herd goats in a dry and mountainous region, and because their lands are located away from traditional trade routes they have largely been left alone by the wider world. They remain, he states with an air of satisfaction, almost pristine. The Fotse live apart from one another in homesteads consisting of conical huts, each main living space surrounded by smaller granaries and storerooms. The clusters of pointed roofs give their dwellings the appearance of mud and thatch Loire chateaux. The Professor has made three tours to the Fotse country, and each time has found these forms very pleasing. Around a Fotse habitation is invariably found an area of cultivated millet, a much larger area of pasturage and a fortified compound into which the goats, the main source of Fotse wealth, are herded at night.

Fotse descent is traced matrilineally, inheritances passing to a young warrior through his mother’s brothers. Depending on a kinsman’s membership of one of the four men’s societies (which play a murky but important role in Fotse culture), land or goats may also be passed between men who are not blood relations. On occasion inheritances may also come through the father’s younger sister, though it is not yet known under what circumstances this takes place, and it is possible that the information was an example of Fotse humour, at the expense of the field-worker who gathered it.

The Professor is at pains to emphasize that his account is a simplification. Despite extensive study, Fotse inheritance practices remain almost impossible to untangle. The problem lies in the concept of ‘Fo’, which is crucial to any understanding of the Fotse world-picture. Indeed the very word ‘Fotse’ is a conjunction of ‘Fo’ and ‘Tse’, ‘the people who speak / make / do Fo’. Though the Fotse also use the word ‘Fo’ to name their language, it commonly refers to a process of bartering and negotiation which takes place after a death.