The Impressionist (51 page)

In port the bored French officials barely inspect their documents, waving them through a high-ceilinged Customs Hall towards the station from which the Paris express is to depart. They find their carriage through a haze of steam, and settle in just as the whistle goes. Soon the rhythm broken by the ferry is resumed, fields unrolling beside the track like great flat carpets. Gittens discourses on the architecture of Notre-Dame, then drops the name of an antiquarian bookseller on the Rue Saint-Jacques. He evidently wishes to show off his knowledge of Paris, a city he has visited ‘many, many times’. Chapel listens with interest. Jonathan, irritated, heads for the buffet car.

He sits down and the waiter takes his order, slipping seamlessly into English as soon as Jonathan opens his mouth to speak. A whisky-soda arrives quickly, but something about the man’s expression is disconcerting. He swirls the ice-cubes round in his glass, listening to the low murmur of conversation. The fields pass by outside the window. He sips whisky. The passengers talk. Occasionally he sneaks glances at the waiter, who is never doing anything unusual. Even so his discomfort grows. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the waiter. Perhaps it is rooted in something deeper, something about the lilt of spoken French or the unfamiliar typeface of the menu card slotted into the holder on his table. By the time they reach Paris, rattling through suburbs of grey-roofed houses, his unease has grown into a heart-pounding paranoia.

Star has not come to the Gare du Nord to meet them. Jonathan is relieved, too preoccupied by dealing with his panic attack
(breathe iiin, breath out…
) to cope with greeting the woman he is going to marry. They take a cab to the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and check into the Hotel Bristol, which, though expensive, is the Professor’s customary base in the city. At reception there is a message saying Star will meet them for breakfast. Leaving Gittens and the Professor admiring the Gobelin tapestries in the entrance hall, Jonathan announces that he feels unwell and will have dinner in his room. He locks the door behind him and throws himself down on the bed.

What he wants is sleep, but it will not come. The room is stuffy. Its ostentatious furniture and richly patterned walls bear down on him oppressively. He splashes his face at the washstand and opens the windows, letting in the sound of traffic from the street below.

A knock. He opens the door to a pair of waiters, who set up a folding table, cover it with a stiff white cloth and lay it for dinner. Once they have gone he sits down to onion soup and a piece of fish with an unfamiliar rich sauce. The food is good, but its very goodness seems to be part of his problem. In desperation he puts on his jacket and heads out into the streets. There he finds bright lights, but no pedestrians. He trudges along the road, heading against a stream of black cars. The Haussmann façades of ministries and company offices are broken by the lighted windows of late-working functionaries, but even this muted kind of life seems to exist at a distance. Cars and buildings seem like carapaces, shields designed to keep him away from human warmth. He drifts, caroming off these impersonal surfaces, meeting no one but a pair of gendarmes, who stare at him so intently that he turns round and goes back to the hotel.

The next morning when he comes down, Star is sitting in the breakfast room. He has spent so long thinking about her that her presence gives him a shock. It is raw, rudely physical, like that of an amputee or someone very famous. Her father sits beside her, absorbed in the morning papers. She offers Jonathan her cheek to kiss. As he expected, she has made herself into a perfect Parisienne, nursing a tiny cup of coffee and smoking a bright green cigarette in a holder. They make stilted small talk, which breaks down altogether when Gittens appears. He pulls up a chair on Star’s other side and immediately starts to chat. Wonderful morning. How lucky you are to live here. Within a few moments he is leaning forward and telling her in a confidential tone that since he last saw her she has ‘grown into a striking young woman’.

‘And when was that?’ Jonathan asks, from between gritted teeth. Gittens adopts a coltish, moustache-twirling manner, like a bad musical hall song-and-dance man. ‘Not for a long time. A couple of years at least.’ The Professor starts talking about an item in
Le Monde
, which forces Gittens to pay attention to him for a while. However, he keeps shooting little smiles at Star. Why, he suggests, don’t they all spend the day sightseeing together? It occurs to him that they could visit the museums. ‘A capital idea.’ says the Professor.

So begins a morning of explanations. It is as if Gittens has been training for this all his life, has been put on earth for the sole purpose of conducting them around the highlights of the Louvre. He walks from exhibit to exhibit, spouting
Baedeker
prose, his eyes misty with love for the glories of Western civilization. Factual information is interspersed with personal asides, designed to demonstrate that he is not just a scholar but a sensitive soul, a man who in other circumstances might well have been an artist. A Renaissance Madonna is pronounced to have a ‘coruscating beauty’. A depiction of the Passion puts him in contact with his ‘higher self’.

These pieces of critical appreciation are, of course, all directed at Star. She looks flattered. Jonathan suffers. As they walkthrough the galleries, the previous night’s panic rises up again in his chest. He slopes around behind Gittens and Star, feeling the paintings loom over him, an endless parade of kings and heroes posed in attitudes of serene, self-possessed greatness. He begins to understand what has been preying on him since he first crossed into France. He is foreign here. Even as Jonathan, he is foreign here. And beyond this country is another one, and another capital with a gallery and libraries and boulevards of high-roomed buildings. It is vertiginous, terrifying.

Things are sliding badly. The Professor wanders off to look at the Egyptian rooms. Gittens takes Star by the elbow and steers her towards the nudes. Any will do, it seems. He positions her in front of Venuses, harem girls, nymphs pouring out of classical skies like scoopfuls of airborne marshmallows. He spends a long time before a particularly frothy Fragonard, a group of naked river-bathers, all blonde hair and dimpled pink flesh. Pointing out their ‘enchanting pose’ and the painter’s ‘dazzling technique’, he stands close to her ear and starts murmuring something about the unbridled sensuality of art. Jonathan, who needs something to take charge of, decides that this might as well be it.

‘Look, Gittens, I really don’t think this is on.’

‘On?’ asks Gittens. ‘What do you mean, on?’

‘I mean – I don’t think this is the way a gentleman behaves.’

‘Oh Johnny,’ says Star, ‘don’t be so
English.’

English?
English?
He needs to sit down. The room is spinning, a vortex whirling faster and faster with him at the centre…

He wakes up to find his field of vision crowded with heads. Star, Gittens, a uniformed attendant, a man with slick black hair and a waxed moustache. He is lying on the cold marble floor. Someone has loosened his collar. Star is talking rapid French to a person he cannot see. Gittens looks down on him, an expression of genuine concern on his face.

‘You all right, old fellow? You had a bit of a turn.’

Jonathan sits on his bed, propped up against the headboard by a pile of bolsters. Yes, he feels much better thank you. This is mainly due to Star, who has come to see him. She is sprawled on a heavy gilt armchair, blowing cigarette smoke out of the open window. It is not so much her presence (nice though it is) that is reviving him, as the way she is talking about Gittens.

‘God, Johnny, he’s so dull! On and on and on, like a schoolmistress! No wonder you fainted. I was tempted to try it myself. And so convinced that he’s the great connoisseur, with his brushstrokes and breathing on my neck. Quelle horreur!’

‘You know, for a moment I thought –’

‘Oh how could you! He’s not my type at all. Look at you! You’re smiling. You can’t be all that ill. In fact, you seem fine already.’

‘Yes, I am. I don’t know what happened.’

‘Travel, I expect. I hate it too. All the Montparnasse crowd hate it. And the Saint-Germain, though if you’re Cole Porter or the Aga Khan or whoever, you probably always go by air. Look, I’ve told Daddy and Dr Gittens that we absolutely must have this evening together. Dr Gittens looked quite shocked. He started saying he had no idea that you and I were friends, and had he known, and all that sort of thing. I think I actually believe him. Paris takes a lot of people that way when they’re not accustomed to it. They find it overstimulating.’

She leaves Jonathan to get dressed. As he is tying his tie, Gittens puts his head round the door and asks after his health. They have a short conversation, by the end of which Jonathan is convinced he has misread Gittens entirely. He is really very decent. Whistling, he brushes his jacket and carefully slips the engagement ring into an inside pocket. The little square box makes a lump against his chest, so he transfers it to the left-hand side pocket. Perfect. He feels calm and refreshed, ready for anything.

Star is waiting in the lobby, dressed in a shimmering grey evening gown. Her Fotse bangles are on her arms. Her hair frames her face with the precision of an advertising illustration. She says, ‘Tonight, Johnny-boy, you and I are going to have a marvellous time.’ and it sounds like a manufacturer’s guarantee. A cab takes them past a line of busy pavement cafés up the hill towards Montmartre. Paris is suddenly full: cigarette-sellers; men on bicycles; elegant women carrying little dogs; citizens of all kinds hurrying along, spilling out of the ornate Métro gates like newly saved Christian souls. This city seems unrelated to the grid of empty streets he walked through last night. It is brimming, boiling with life.

Star tells the driver to drop them off on a corner and leads the way down an alley to a doorway hung with red paper lanterns. They step through a bead curtain into a murky low-ceilinged room. Behind a counter, pigtailed men in high-necked white jackets are chopping vegetables and swirling them about in iron skillets. There is a great deal of steam and a great deal of noise. Tables are crammed together in the gloom. This is the first Chinese restaurant Jonathan has ever been in, and he does not like the look of it one bit.

‘Are we really eating here?’ he asks. It does not seem like an ideal spot for a romantic dinner.

‘Absolutely. And we’re both having the chop suey. Isn’t this wonderful?’

Jonathan is not so sure. The little room is packed and smoky. Compared to the rest of the clientele, he and Star are wildly overdressed. They are served big blue and white bowls of food which he finds hard to get into his mouth without spattering sauce down his shirt-front. A wizened Chinese man at the next table keeps winking and flashing him the thumbs-up sign. Star, however, seems to be in her element. She eats with her elbows out, grinning at him between mouthfuls. He grins back, fingering the ring box in his pocket. Maybe? No. Best to wait until later.

‘Now,’ says Star as they swish back through the curtain into the street, ‘time for some real fun.’ They hail another cab and head up the Rue Pigalle into a zone of low crumbling houses, almost all of which seem to contain a bar or a cabaret. A smell of petrol hangs in the air, and the road is crammed with partygoers. Drunks stumble out into the road and gaudily dressed prostitutes stand around in clusters, their dinner-jacketed pimps sitting in their cars, smoking and preening. The place is shifting, flashy. Unconsciously, Jonathan starts to sink into a younger version of himself, straightening his tie, trying to decipher the chaotic comings and goings. Dotted among the white faces are a disproportionate number of black ones, wailing buskers from some Latin country, pairs of well-dressed Negroes cutting through the crowds like they own the pavement. Jonathan shakes himself, tries to snap out of his moment of regression. He has raised himself above this. The ring in his pocket is about to put the seal on it. So why has Star brought him to such a mongrel place? The black men, with their canes and silk shirts, seem like a bad omen.

The cab drops them outside a little bar called Le Grand Due. Above the door is a triangular illuminated sign, with the word
BRICKTOP
! picked out in red.

‘I’m very proud of the Duke.’ says Star. ‘Hardly anyone knows about it yet. And Brick is such a darling.’

A uniformed doorman salutes them as they go inside. The place is small, only a dozen or so tables arranged around a room, with a bar to one side. In the centre of the space a tall red-haired woman is singing, backed by a drummer and a pianist. Most of the tables are full, but a waiter shows them to a free one, tucked into a corner. Jonathan looks round uneasily. Everyone in Le Grand Due – singer, musicians, staff and customers – is black.

‘Umm –
Star,’
he whispers urgently, ‘this seems to be a Negro place.’

‘Yes, it is darling. You Oxford boys are so observant. Hullo, Brick? Brick dear?’

She starts waving at the singer, who blows her a kiss back.