The Impressionist (54 page)

This is the first the others have heard of it. Gittens raises an eyebrow.

‘What sort of survey?’

‘I have no idea. I imagine they will be able to enlighten you.’

‘I thought,’ says Morgan, ‘that strictly Fotseland isn’t ours to survey.’

‘Don’t be obtuse,’ snaps Gittens. ‘Of course it’s ours. We just don’t administer it directly. We rule through the local emirs, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make a map of the place.’

‘I thought there was some question of the French –’

‘Politics, politics,’ sighs Chapel. ‘Look, they’re just coming with us to take a look at things. See how the land lies. Politics has nothing to do with it.’

‘Very good, Professor,’ says Gittens admiringly. ‘How the land lies. Very good.’

The matter seems to be closed, and everyone disperses to change for dinner. At sunset they assemble on the veranda, to listen to the faint crash of waves and wait hungrily for the steward, an ancient man with tribal scars on his cheeks, to finish laying the table. As the light fails, the sound of laughter and yelling comes from inside the club. Famous appears, chased by a wiry European with a ginger moustache, brandishing a tennis racket. ‘Famous, are you?’ he shouts, whacking the African with the racket. ‘What for, eh? What for?’

‘Please,’ says Famous, edging away from him. ‘Please?’

‘Don’t understand, sambo?’ laughs the man. ‘I said’ – thwack! – ‘how’ – thwack! – ‘did you’ – thwack! – ‘get so famous?’

The sight of Famous being hit on the bottom with the racket is received with amusement. He hops comically up and down, pleading incoherently. Club members come out to see what the fuss is about and Jonathan finds himself part of a ring of savagely grinning men ranged around the bewildered servant. He steps aside, allowing Famous to make his escape.

‘Evening all,’ says the ginger man, with a London accent that brings a momentary grimace to the Professor’s face. ‘You must be the others. Godforsaken spot, isn’t it?’ He puts out a hand. ‘Marchant. George Marchant.’

Introductions are made. Gittens is encouraging the Professor to roll out his ‘how the land lies’ joke when another figure appears on the veranda. Everyone turns round. It is not only his height, although he has to stoop to come through the doorway. There is something else, something which kills the conversation.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ says the man. His voice is flat and uninflected.

Marchant holds out his hands wide, a ringmaster’s gesture. ‘May I introduce Captain Gregg.’

‘Not Captain any more, Marchant. Just Mister.’

Gregg shakes hands. All eyes are momentarily drawn to his cheek. Just below the bone is a knot of scar tissue, centred on a deep fingertip-sized pit. There is something obscene and fascinating about the little crater. An anus, a star. The man is otherwise unremarkable-looking, but the thing on his cheek gives his face a disturbing movement, as if the other features are about to be sucked into it, and at any moment the whole substantial head might slide away. Gittens, who spent the war at his desk in Oxford, puts on a comradely air.

‘Where did you serve?’ he asks.

‘France. Field Artillery.’

As Gregg steps into the light of the oil lamp Jonathan sees his eyes: calculating, range-finding eyes, used to calibrating their hands and mouth precisely, according to the fall of shot.

At dinner the talk is of maps. Like the anthropologists, Gregg and Marchant have recently arrived in the country. They have come, they say, from Persia, where they were part of a survey team working around the Caspian Sea. What kind of survey, asks Gittens. Much the same as this, says Marchant. Making maps of places where there are none.

During the meal, Gregg hardly speaks. Marchant, on the other hand, never stops. Prompted by Gittens, he keeps up a stream of chatter, about wet heat and dry heat and lions and football and the King and the inconveniences of Persia, which, he has no doubt, will not equal half of what is waiting for them in Fotseland. Latrines, he says darkly. It is all more or less a question of latrines. Once or twice Gregg interrupts him, to correct a fact or damp down some of his more boastful comments.

‘Obviously,’ sighs Gittens at one point, ‘a map of an unmapped place is a useful thing. But I’m still in some doubt about the nature of your work. Why Fotseland?’

Marchant gives him a significant look. ‘They say they want a map, so we go and make one for them.’

‘Scientific curiosity, Dr Gittens,’ says Gregg. ‘Could one have any higher purpose?’

‘Absolutely not,’ says Morgan. ‘Isn’t that right, Professor?’

Everyone turns to the head of the table, but Chapel does not reply, having fallen asleep. He is lolling forward, his heavy jowls flowing down on either side of his high stiff collar. His face is that of a man who (at last!) no longer has to associate anything with anything, and feels immensely relieved about it.

Another week is spent haggling with merchants and flattering the Governor at his dinner table. In quiet moments, Jonathan gingerly starts to work through his file. The task is daunting. There are three pages simply listing the records he has to produce, one set of documents for a district chief, another for village headmen, a third for the council of village elders, different coloured receipts for various areas, different shapes of chit for men and women… All his preparations for Africa, from his studies in the university library to his conversations with Professor Chapel (and further back, through history lessons, head-measuring, poetry-reciting… ), have shown him the same edifying picture: a lone adventurer, heroically inscribing the English character on a blank land. Instead he is to be some kind of tax inspector. Something seems to have gone wrong.

There is also the question of the Africans themselves. Serving his food, making his bed or driving him around the port, they refuse to remain mere possessors of beliefs or participants in social organizations. Instead they seem irreducibly, disquietingly physical. These abstractions breathe, eat, talk and laugh – laughter that he can kill by walking into a room. Of course, it is what he has strived for; this instant effect is what it means to be the master. So why does he have trouble looking his servants in the eye? Why does he wish he could tell these faces, suddenly grave and inscrutable,
It’s all right, I’m only pretending. Carry on, laugh if you like…

On the morning the expedition is ready to depart, he wakes early and picks his way over a litter of coconut shells and driftwood to the beach. Fishermen are propelling long pirogues into the surf, forcing their paddles down into the water, dragging them back with fluid, determined movements. Slowly the boats clear the line of breakers and escape the fiercest pull of the tide. Only when they have reached the limits of vision do they pay out their nets into the water. The wind carries back little shards of sound, disassembled fragments of their work song. He sits on the sand where the beach rakes sharply downwards and spends an hour watching thumb-sized crabs scavenge the margin between land and sea. The beach stretches for miles. The crabs are operating on its entire length, a ribbon of tiny metropolitan bustle bisecting the stillness. There is something comforting about their little liminal world, something he does not want to leave. When he finally gets back to the club, Famous is calling for him in the yard and the anthropologists are standing around impatiently on the veranda.

Their steamer is waiting for them, wallowing at a riverside mooring a couple of miles up from the coast. It is an uninspiring sight: a square flat-bottomed hull with a flimsy roof over the top that was once painted white, but years of service have turned it more or less entirely rust-red. A single large paddle-wheel squats at the rear, its blades patched in several places. Forward, a pair of narrow funnels rise from the boiler, jutting through the roof behind the wheelhouse, which is a kind of knocked-together shed accessible by a ladder. A barely legible sign on its side proclaims this the good ship
Nelly.

Almost all the deck space is taken up with crates and chop boxes, and the expedition members have to string their hammocks where they can. Jonathan ends up next to the engine. The crew, a silent captain and a trio of grimy deck hands, watch their passengers with somnolent disinterest, the stoker occasionally throwing a shovelful of coal into the boiler and tapping the glass of his gauges.

Several club members have come to see them off, and as the
Nelly
turns its head upriver there are shouts of encouragement and urgent warning gestures made at Jonathan, who has taken off his hat. He waves back, pretending not to understand. He is saluted by Famous, whose own head is adorned with a bulbous pith helmet.

As the sea recedes behind them, the
Nelly
steers through a wide delta, picking its way between shoals and rocks. Gradually the river narrows until it is a single channel, flowing sluggishly between densely forested banks. From time to time they pass villages where excited children paddle out towards them on pirogues, or turn somersaults off the jetty.

‘So, well be seeing the cannibals soon,’ says Marchant, grinning at Jonathan.

‘Actually, the Fotse are farmers,’ says Morgan.

‘They told you that, did they? They’re pulling your leg. I bet behind our backs they’ll be cooking up their grannies in the pot.’

‘No, really… ‘says Morgan, then trails off, seeing that he has missed a joke. Marchant rolls his eyes heavenwards.

The sun rises and falls several times to the sound of this sort of conversation. Marchant tries to start a game of cards, but comes up against Morgan’s Nonconformist conscience. The Professor snoozes in a candy-striped deckchair, a piece of equipment whose status he has continually checked and fussed over since Dover. Gregg, who seems unhappy unless he has a distance to stare at, climbs up to the wheelhouse and sits in front of it. He leans his back against the wooden planks and smokes cigarette after cigarette, cupping them inside his closed hand like a sentry on night watch.

‘Doesn’t say much, does he?’ remarks Gittens on the fifth day, jutting his chin at the roof and, by implication, at Gregg. Marchant leans confidentially close.

‘Half the time he doesn’t hear you. Blew his eardrums out in the war. At Beaumont-Hamel we once had to fire those eight-inchers for thirty-six hours straight. None of us could hear a bloody thing for a week afterwards, and he stayed like it. Since then he says everything comes to him through a kind of whistling.’ Here he adopts an especially significant expression. ‘Like the sound of an incoming shell.’

Gittens looks uncomfortable. That’s rum.’

‘Too right it is. Drives him mad.’

‘So, you were with him in France?’

‘I was his CSM.’

‘And you’re still together.’

‘Well,’ says Marchant, allowing his pause to stretch almost to breaking point, ‘after you’ve seen certain things, and done certain things, the only people you can really talk to are – you know…’

‘Really? That is, yes. Absolutely. Yes.’ Gittens contemplates for a moment. ‘What kind of things?’

‘You know. War. Personally I found it hard, but the Major – let’s just say he was in his element.’

‘Really.’
Gittens, alarmed, glances nervously at the roof, as if at any minute Gregg might come crashing through it.

At first the river is busy, dozens of steamers like theirs ploughing up and down, bulging with goods, or people, one with a Maxim gun mounted on the roof carrying glum khaki-clad soldiers. They halt at trading posts, clusters of huts built round warehouses and company stores, once at a native town, where narrow streets of houses wind round a mud-brick mosque. Gradually the river traffic thins and the journey becomes monotonous, one bend looking just like the next, the fringe of green trees constant on either shore.

Weed clogs the wheel. The
Nelly
grounds on a bank, and the crew have to lever it off with long wooden poles. For a week or more Jonathan lies in his hammock, listening to the irregular roar of the engine and trying to find out something, anything, about what he thinks and feels. He is utterly unavailable to himself, his motivation for even the simplest thing fleeing before his introspection like a dream figure down a corridor. Not knowing what to do, he does nothing, like the others. Slowly the parade of days falls out of step. Time starts to organize itself in more elusive patterns. Things repeat. Sounds project him forward, or shuffle him back.

Minutes or hours? The Professor sleeps. Gregg smokes. There are no surprises, except from the land. Jonathan is waiting to be swallowed by towering forest trees, to feel he is approaching the primeval heart of a little-known continent: this is what happens when you go up an African river. Yet instead of closing in, the country opens up, the skies widening and the foliage on the banks thinning to tracts of low acacia scrub. Along the banks the settlements are fewer. The European trading posts space themselves further apart and the native villages get smaller, meaner looking. The one positive thing about the tedium of life on the boat is the sense of travelling in a straight line, of sedate movement from a beginning towards some guaranteed end. Little by little this ebbs away, the line of water unfolding another dimension, that of the truly unfamiliar, the unforeseen.