The Impressionist (53 page)

Jonathan does not understand what he is saying, but he cannot take his eyes away from the man. One after the other, characters appear. One with a deep baritone voice. Another with a little cap and a hectoring way of talking. Each lasts a few seconds, a minute. Each erases the last. The man becomes these other people so completely that nothing of his own is visible. A coldness starts to rise in Jonathan’s gut, cutting through the vodka. He watches intently, praying that he is wrong, that he has missed something. There is no escaping it. In between each impression, just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all.

The Impressionist

The prow of the liner looms over the port, a stark wedge of black that dwarfs the mud-coloured buildings. Against the ragged line of tin roofs it appears alien, ominous. As it materializes, women make their way towards it, pushing handcarts, carrying basins of bananas and groundnuts and smoked fish wrapped in palm leaves. Stevedores form a chain, passing sacks and boxes into the company warehouses, and the women set down their loads and squat behind them. By the time the white men step from the launch on to the quayside a market has formed, complete with beggars and dogs and a policeman with a stick clearing a path to the Customs House. The white men shuffle and blink in the sunlight, while the market women pretend not to look at them, taking secret satisfaction in the circles of sweat spreading under the armpits of their fresh shirts, the way they look about nervously, afraid to catch anyone’s eye.

Jonathan stares at Africa with uneasy recognition, the visor of his sun helmet taking a black bite out of the scene. All along the quayside, battered cargo vessels are emptying their bellies of canned goods and corrugated-iron siding, and taking on an equal volume in palm oil and bales of cotton and tobacco. They are fed by ant-like lines of men who jog up and down the bucking gang-planks, urged on by foremen with manifests and holstered pistols. In front of one ship a contingent of West Indian troops sit out in the heat, waiting to be told to board. Above them, positioned for enfilading fire, is a whitewashed slave fort, named for Saint James, though it might as well have been George or John; one of the English-sounding saints who would brook no nonsense and give a good account of himself in a fight. From the fort’s crumbling parapet, the muzzle of a modern six-inch siege gun pokes out at the sea. The contents of this vista are new to him, but something in its arrangement is familiar. After years in Europe, he is back in a two-speed world, one part digging in its heels as the other part drives it forward. He knows the logic at work here; the system is etched into his skin.

In the Customs House, the anthropologists wait to have their documents processed while officials check a huge consignment of liquor, the smell of gin from accidentally broken bottles pervading the hot, busy hall. Jonathan stands and distractedly watches the bustle. Objects that England made familiar, ledgers and ink pads and uniforms, have been thrown back into strangeness. Umbrellas shield people from sun instead of rain, the faces of their owners black zeroes over their starched collars.

The Professor walks about, tapping crates with his walking stick and getting in the way of the porters. Morgan, sweat running into his eyes from beneath his new cork helmet, leans over to speak to Gittens.

‘Look at Bridgeman.’

Gittens looks at Bridgeman. He is wandering around the Customs House, dejected and sullen.

‘True, he’s not himself.’

‘I can see that – but it’s been weeks now. Shouldn’t we say something?’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know. Ask him if something is the matter.’

Gittens stares at him witheringly. Morgan holds up his hands, accepting whatever charge – sentimentality, prying, effeminacy – is being levelled at him. During the voyage from Marseilles, Gittens has made him aware that he lacks certain qualities. Tact, for example. Reserve. It appears that the right thing is not to ask Bridgeman if something is the matter.

A hawker manoeuvres in front of them, holding up a basket of little wooden figures. They wave him away and he goes over to pester Bridgeman.

‘Doll, sah?’

Jonathan looks down at the carvings. They are Englishmen, little painted
colons
in white uniforms, with bulbous topis on their heads. Their features stand away from their faces, eyes and mouths and noses sharp and oversized. Their stiff poses give them a formal, hieratic quality.

‘How much?’

The man names a price. Jonathan bargains him down, and after a few minutes two of the little carvings are wrapped up in his bag. The hawker goes on his way and he carries on his work, negotiating with the officials and overseeing the unloading of the expedition equipment.

He walks about mechanically, as he has done for weeks, entirely preoccupied with Star. His internal projectionist runs the scene in the bar over and over again: Sweets sitting down, kissing her. Sitting down. Kissing Star. Sitting, kissing, sitting, kissing; a continuous nauseating loop. He cannot contemplate the confusion of that kiss straight on. Hunched into the front stalls of his mind, knees jammed tremulously up against the red plush of the row in front, he has to squint, wishing he could leave the auditorium, but pinned to his seat by this monstrous confusion of bodies.

On board ship he spent most of the voyage on a deckchair, staring at the Atlantic through his dark glasses. Every day he would sit for hours, watching the contrast between sea and sky, until his consciousness erased it and the world became a shifting grey blur. At night he stood at the rail of the ship and watched the water rushing invitingly under the keel below him.

By the same rail, he watched Professor Chapel take the air in the morning. Imposing and proprietorial, he would stick out his paunch and open his nostrils like gates, a munificent landowner permitting the air to frolic in the rolling parkland of his lungs. When he took off his panama to mop his bald patch, the light caught it with a blinding gleam. When the sea wind tugged at a loose strand of grey hair, it floated like a laurel wreath around his head. Faced with this evidence of election, Jonathan took heart. Here was a wise man, a good man. Jonathan was still his assistant, and together they were on their way to extend the boundaries of anthropological science. What higher purpose could one have?

Yet minus Astarte, anthropology seems less enticing than it did. Without Star, his heading is tenuous, his compass needle shivering and spinning around the dial. He tries to remember what he has read, about how explorers find themselves through solitude. Yet she was the final piece of his puzzle; with her, Jonathan Bridgeman would have been entire.

When the formalities are completed, he pockets the forms, now inked with the illegible stamps of a row of officials, and passes through the hall to find the others. They are waiting with a tall barefooted young black man, dressed in white shorts, a fez and a high-collared white housecoat.

‘This is Famous,’ says the Professor.

‘Famous,’ affirms the man, smiling. ‘Big boy of IRC. Below me three small boy. I come take you there.’

You could say that the Imperial River Club had seen better days, but that would involve deciding when those days were. A bungalow standing at the centre of a baked earth compound, it boasts a driveway marked by a border of whitewashed rocks, a flagpole flying a sun-bleached Union Jack and a pair of miniature cannon mounted on either side of the front porch, their rusting muzzles pointing at the town. Built on what counts as high ground here on the river delta, it is set half a mile or so from the beach, far enough away from the dock to dull the market noise, but not far enough to escape the sewer smell which wafts in through the windows on days when the wind is not blowing off the sea. The stink partly accounts for the desolate aura of the place; that and the fact that the committee has never got round to planting any trees to shade it, so that the heat is stifling, and on days when the wind does blow, it whips fine sand across the floors, silting up the corners and depositing a gritty scum on the surface of the members’ drinks.

The members themselves are a dour bunch, who treat newcomers with an unattractive mixture of jealousy and scorn. The scorn is the universal kind visited on first-tour men by old hands across the Empire. The jealousy is a local product. Its precise objects vary: the newcomer’s constitution not yet worn down by the heat, or his gut, unpopulated by restive African bacteria. Perhaps it is his looks, or his wife, or simply his ability to take pleasure in life on the coast, the pleasure-taking faculty being particularly atrophied among the members of the Imperial River Club. Whatever its trigger, the jealousy is always there, along with a promise of future pleasure in its removal – after all, the newcomer will one day be an old hand too, and as raddled and bitter as everyone else. This
schadenfreude
is accentuated on funeral-days, of which there are two or three a month. When someone succumbs (they never die on this coast, they
succumb,
which involves a measure of culpability and moral failing, of letting things get on top of you), the members sit around and drink more than usual, itemizing the signs and portents which foretold this latest piece of bad news, and the things the deceased could have done to stay alive. If only he had taken more quinine, or better care, or fewer native girls, or simply switched to lime and soda after the third round…

The anthropologists, being boffins, come in for particular criticism. But it is mostly conducted in private, and they are able to settle in to their rooms without too much discomfort. There is much arranging to do. With the expedition equipment stored in a warehouse at the docks, several permits have to be gained, and various government departments liaised with. Soon after arriving they are visited by a political officer, a man calling himself Smith who arrives in a staff car, and introduces himself by showing Jonathan a pass embossed with the seals and signatures of an unnecessarily large number of important people.
The bearer,
says the pass,
is entitled to be in any place and wearing any uniform he chooses. All persons subject to military law are required to give him any assistance he needs.

‘In a way that doesn’t apply to you,’ says Smith, ‘but in a way it does.’

Smith closets himself with the Professor for a while, then comes out and places a file on the smoking-room table.

‘All yours, apparently,’ he says to Jonathan. ‘Have fun in Fotseland. Toodlepip.’

The Professor comes out wearing a grave expression. Jonathan looks up from his examination of a shelf of mildewed thrillers, Gittens and Morgan from their game of billiards. ‘It seems,’ says the Professor, ‘that things have moved on somewhat since I was last in the country. The government has had considerably more contact with the Fotse.’

‘Contact?’ says Gittens. Both he and Morgan look crestfallen. Contact is one of their bugbears. If people will persist in communicating with natives, how is one expected to study them in their natural state?

‘I thought,’ says Morgan with his usual ruminative slowness, ‘that they were relatively pristine.’

‘I think they still are,’ says the Professor. ‘Relatively. However, the Northern administration feels the time is right for a proper census, prior to the institution of a hut tax. Apparently some steps have already been taken in that direction, but they want us to carry it on.’

Gittens looks outraged. That’s not our job, surely.’

‘That’s as may be, but their position is that the patriotic purpose of ethnographic study is to collect information that will allow us to govern more effectively. Hard to argue with, when it’s put like that. Apparently finances are tight, or they lack manpower, or something of that kind. So whether or not we like it, they are making it a condition of our permit to travel in Fotseland. Anyway, Gittens, you won’t have to worry about it. The census will be Bridgeman’s task.’

‘Mine?’ says Jonathan.

Oh,’ says Gittens. ‘That’s all right, then.’

‘So, Bridgeman. All the paperwork is there, apparently. They have a system. Different coloured slips of paper, or something. All you have to do is fill in the forms.’ Seeing Jonathan’s appalled expression, he slaps him on the back. ‘At least,’ he says, looking down at the gin and tonic warming up in his hand, ‘there is ice. There is always ice at the IRC.’

Jonathan looks mournfully at the file. Gittens tries to cheer him up. ‘I knew there was something rum about that fellow,’ he says. ‘Did you notice, he was got up as a Belgian naval officer?’

The Professor leans back in one of the creaky cane chairs in the common room. ‘By the way,’ he adds, ‘I have invited the other members of our party to dine with us this evening. I believe they should be arriving soon.’

‘Other members, Professor?’

‘Yes,’ says Chapel, fishing an insect out of his glass. ‘Two chaps from the Royal Geographical Society. They’re coming with us to do some mapping. Another condition of our permit. The government wants a proper survey of the Fotseland region.’