The Impressionist (48 page)

In this mood he joins the crowd filing into the stadium to watch the Pageant of Empire. The pageant is poorly attended. Small clusters of people dot the stands, and he finds that he has been seated entirely on his own, a vast empty curve of concrete separating him from the nearest other person. In the arena a military band plays a march, then a man in black tie speaks into a microphone, his amplified voice echoing around the huge space. This,’ he says, ‘is a family party of the British Empire – the first family party since the Great War, when the world opened astonished eyes to see that an Empire with a hundred languages and races had but one soul and mind. Welcome!’ There is scattered applause.

The announcer steps down from the podium. Soldiers and Boy Scouts enact the birth of the Empire, pulling Britannia on a large float into the centre of the space. When they have done this, they perform cameos of the Empire’s growth, assisted in each case by real natives of the newly conquered territory. Maori warriors perform a haka, then surrender to Scouts dressed as naval officers. Zulus run on with spears and hide shields, then fall over as they are defeated by Queen Victoria’s glorious cavalry. The cavalry ride circuits round the stadium, firing blanks like performers in a Wild West show.

The pageant moves into its final sequence, a procession representing the Empire of Today. His heart beating wildly, Jonathan spots Star. She is sitting in a box some way in front of him. Beside her lounges a thin dark-haired man, one arm hooked casually behind the back of her seat. Jonathan cannot see their faces. As the imperial subjects parade past, waving up at the stands and carrying signs proclaiming their origins, they pass directly beneath the couple. To Jonathan it appears as if the whole spectacle is directed solely at them, a homage which they can accept or reject as they please. His imagination transforms Star’s unseen face into a single huge eyeball, greedily sucking in light. When the Indian contingent march past he gets up and leaves.

Back at Oxford he is troubled by the memory of the Fotse villagers. He wants to be rid of them, as if just by entering his thoughts they have cemented some link to his life. Why should they drag at him? He still attends Professor Chapel’s lectures, but does so uneasily. As the Professor speaks about taboos or marriage customs, Jonathan looks around the hall, afraid of catching an eye or seeing a smirk on the face of someone who
knows
– who understands that he is called to blackness and savagery by his tainted blood. Star does not visit him, and his only connection to her is through her father. Gradually Chapel is drawing him into the inner circle of his admirers, keen young men who visit his rambling North Oxford house to sit in the garden and argue and drink sherry. Though he participates in these anthropological discussions, he feels he has to compensate for them. It is important to show where his loyalties lie.

Beyond the boundaries of Oxford, Britain is gripped by politics, as the country lives through its first year of socialist government. Jonathan’s friends are horrified by it. MacDonald and his gang are already signing treaties with the Soviets. They are obviously tools of Bolshevism, and it is only a matter of time before they attempt to subvert the whole basis of British democracy. Within months, they will dissolve the army, force industry to grant huge wage increases, purge the Civil Service and dismantle the Empire. It is up to right-thinking Englishmen to stop the rot. Jonathan throws himself into the fray, arguing loudly in the junior common room and attending a noisy public meeting in the Oxford Town Hall. The National Citizens Union festoon the place with flags. A gramophone plays ‘Jerusalem’, drowning out the sound of the stewards fighting with hecklers at the back. Jonathan sings out the words, loud and clear. Surely no one could mistake him for anything but a bona fide Briton.

One morning he hears from the Professor that Star has gone back to Paris. She is thinking of moving there permanently. The news depresses him, and when some of his political acquaintances suggest he travel down to London with them for a rally, he accepts, hoping it will take his mind off her. He crams into a train carriage with a motley collection of students, a wicker hamper of food and a huge Union Jack that someone has borrowed from their college Officer Training Corps. By the time they reach Paddington, the hamper is wrecked and empty champagne bottles are rolling around in the corridor outside their compartment. Some of the party start a medley of boating songs, annoying the ticket collector, who threatens to take their names.

From the station they take a cab to the East End, the mansion blocks of the Marylebone Road and Regent’s Park melting into the sooty tenements of Islington. Gradually the houses become meaner, the streets narrower, until they find themselves in Whitechapel, the Jewish quarter. Opposite the hospital on the Mile End Road a crowd of several hundred has gathered. Flags frame a makeshift platform, from which a snub-nosed woman in quasi-military uniform is haranguing the audience. She holds up a picture of the Prime Minister, denouncing him as a Pied Piper, a tool of the Semitic-Bolshevist conspiracy. Jonathan’s friends clap and cheer. Jonathan claps and cheers too. He looks at the names painted over the shops behind the platform:
Silver’s Kosher Delicatessen, Bloom’s Bakery
, and imagines the Elders of Zion plotting among the sausages and sacks of flour. An older woman appears, wearing the same uniform as the first. She talks about the need to build up the navy, and resist the emasculating influence of international Jewish finance. She shakes her fist. A face appears at one of the upstairs windows, then quickly vanishes. Fascist Party workers hand out flyers advertising a dinner-dance, and members of a group called the British Workers League sell books from a stall. Around the fringes of the crowd, a few policemen half-heartedly attempt to keep the demonstration from blocking the road. By the time the woman comes to a conclusion, they have disappeared altogether.

A third speaker, an old soldier with a row of campaign medals on his chest, is exhorting the crowd to protect the nation from foreign competition, when a sudden surge of people propels Jonathan towards the platform. There is the sound of shouting, and a bottle arcs down over his head. A full-scale fight has erupted at the back of the crowd, and while some people run to escape it, others are pushing against them, trying to force their way through to join in. One of Jonathan’s friends tugs at his sleeve, terrified. He is clutching his temple, which has been gashed open. For an instant the two of them are the only still point in a seething mêlée. Jostled by Blackshirts carrying sticks and truncheons, they stumble their way towards the platform. The speakers are surrounded by a phalanx of men, some in uniform, some wearing armbands with ‘Defence Force’ written on them. He steers away from them and makes it out of the crowd, turning back to see a red flag waving in the thick of the battle. Another group of attackers is running towards them, young men in caps and shirtsleeves with red scarves tied round their necks.

He bolts down a side street, the frightened Oxford boys running after him. The noise and chaos vanish behind them as suddenly as a window slamming shut. They run until the demonstration is far behind. No one follows them.

An hour later they are drinking pints in the snug of a Blooms-bury pub, telling each other tall stories about the riot and the number of agitators they faced down. Slowly they are rewriting their roles, transforming themselves. By the time they get back to college they will be heroes: staunch longbowmen, hearts of oak. Only Jonathan is silent, transfixed by the memory of what he saw as he ducked down the alley. The man leading the charge was Paul Gertler.

What began on the day of Paul’s expulsion has been completed: the long, slow process of betrayal. He wants to run back and tell him that he did not mean it, that he does not hate him, or want him to die or disappear.
It was a disguise, Paul, it was only a game.
He cannot rid himself of the memory of his friend’s face, the look of horror as he recognized him, the quick sequence of hurt, anger and defiance. Loneliness crushes him like a physical weight.

After the demonstration, Jonathan backs away from politics. It is too confusing. That October, mired in rumours about spies and Moscow gold, the Labour Party loses the General Election. Oxford breathes an institutional sigh of relief. The Conservative landslide has returned God to his heaven, and the cosmic hierarchy is restored. One morning, soon after the start of the new term, Willis props an invitation beside the coffee pot on the breakfast table. Selwyn Tredgold requests the pleasure of Jonathan Bridgeman’s company at a cocktail party and poetry reading at Lady Tredgold’s Mayfair flat. On the back is scrawled something which looks like ‘Do come, darling – A’. Immediately all his resolutions – to forget her, to concentrate on his work – are forgotten.

On the appointed evening, Jonathan arrives at the address on the invitation, and is shown by a butler into a chromium-plated hallway lined with big-game-hunting trophies. Horns, tusks, antlers and entire mounted heads protrude from the shiny walls. A gorilla snarls at him over the doorway to the reception room, which is packed with people. He hands his coat to the servant, and steps into air that is grey with cigarette smoke. Through the haze the animal prints and carved idols of Star’s game-lodge decor are dimly visible, like set dressings in a horror film. All the guests are painfully elegant, and many faces are familiar from newsreels and the gossip pages of weekly illustrated papers. The only person he knows personally is Levine, who is sandwiched between a stuffed baby giraffe and an arrangement of dwarf palms, attempting to persuade a famous producer to stage his play. For a while Jonathan hovers at the edge of their conversation. ‘Light comedy is the defining mode of our times. What I’ve written is a sort of jeu d’esprit, set in a ladies’ deportment academy. There are two sets of twins… ‘The producer looks impressed. Sensing success, Levine carries on, acknowledging Jonathan with a brief wave.

Suddenly Star comes shooting over, almost knocking over a waiter carrying a tray of empty highball glasses. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she hisses.’ It’s absolutely deathly here. Selwyn is going to read his elegy, and he’s invited a lot of critics and editors and people. Or is it a eulogy? Anyway, he’s dying to meet you and you have to come with me. Where’s your drink?’

Jonathan has no drink, so he is given a cocktail, something new and American with a lot of gin in it. Without asking him anything about himself or offering any information about how she has passed the last six months, she propels him towards Selwyn, who is leaning on a large ebony fetish talking to a group of eminent literati. At their approach, Selwyn assumes a sour expression. He does not look as if he is dying to meet Jonathan. Star introduces them, and Selwyn says a clipped how do you do, softly brushing Jonathan’s fingers with his.

‘It is important,’ he growls, turning back to a hook-nosed woman wearing a mountainous silk turban,’ to lose hope. Unless we do that, we are denying the basic conditions under which we live. We are people of the aftermath. What could hope be to us?’ There are murmurs of assent, and he expands on his theme, describing the need for a new kind of man, a new kind of society and a new kind of art, offering himself and his poetry as a ‘sort of prototype’ for these things. While he speaks, Jonathan has a first chance to examine his rival. Selwyn is short and dark, almost feral looking. As he talks, his thin hands describe sleepy patterns in the air. He makes up for his unappealing features by an air of total confidence. He radiates assurance into the room, toasting his audience in it like muffins. It seems self-evident that he is a great writer.

Star is paying very little attention to Selwyn’s speech, sipping her drink and scanning the party distractedly. To Jonathan she looks more beautiful than ever. Her face is powdered, her lips have been rouged into a tiny cupid’s bow, and her backless tiger-print gown clashes startlingly with her English-rose looks. The effect is arousing, like a virgin being menaced by wild beasts. After a while she pulls him away from the literary conversation and finally asks him what he has been doing, ‘stuck in stuffy old Oxford’. Selwyn does not appear to register they have gone, and Jonathan realizes he said nothing to Star, barely even looking at her as they stood with him. With a rush of encouragement he launches into a string of stories about his college friends. He concentrates on anything amusing or glamorous, copying her habit of using only first names and trying hard to avoid topics which might bore her. It works for a while, but his names do not seem to carry the same weight as hers. She is soon fiddling with her necklace and looking wistfully at her empty glass.

An imposing woman makes her way to the centre of the room and rings a small silver handbell. Lady Tredgold calls her guests to attention, and announces that the main event of the evening is about to commence. Her son will now read from his forthcoming
Crepuscle of a Continent.
Selwyn steps up on a carved wooden footstool. He spends a moment theatrically polishing a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and fitting them on to his face. Then he takes a notebook from his jacket pocket, clears his throat and starts to declaim in a sonorous, nasal voice:

‘Eheu!

Eheu!

The image of Mars

Floats o’er

The face

Of the gibbous moon

Armoured, cruel