The Impressionist (38 page)

Jonathan dodges pedestrians and taxi cabs, hearing the metallic clattering of the rain on his big black umbrella, a sound so unlike the roaring of the Indian monsoon that he can never forget what he has done, how he has come here and made himself giddily, vertiginously new.

London has blue-uniformed policemen and red omnibuses with advertisements on the side. The parks that open out between its tall buildings yield expanses of rich green lawn, and for the first time he understands what the British have tried unsuccessfully to replicate in India. Velvet green. Pulsing with life. The homesickness that India’s brown and patchy open spaces must inspire in these people! Here in their own place, in the fug of their dampness, they finally make sense. In their London you can shake the rainwater from your umbrella and step into a Lyons tearoom where pale girls in black and white uniforms serve cake as heavy and moist as the lawns, accompanied by brown milky tea that is almost the only thing in the city not subtly different to its Indian namesake. They are called ‘nippies’, these girls, and Jonathan wonders if this is due to their sharp, pinched look. It is a type of Englishness entirely new to him. This sort of face, washed out and poor, is not exported to rule the Empire.

Everywhere Jonathan finds the originals of copies he has grown up with, all the absurdities of British India restored to sense by their natural environment. Here dark suits and high collars are the right thing to wear. Here thick black doors lead away from the electric streets into cluttered drawing rooms, with narrow windows to frame squares of cold watery London light. Cocooned in a leather armchair, Jonathan understands for the first time the English word ‘cosy’, the need their climate instils in them to pad their blue-veined bodies with layers of horsehair and mahogany, aspidistras and antimacassars, history, tradition and share certificates. Being British, he decides, is primarily a matter of insulation.

Mr Spavin has rented him an attic room in Bayswater, with his own little window on to a view of roofs and chimneys. It is only a short let, because in September he will go to school to prepare for The University. This is spoken of like firing a pot or varnishing a piece of furniture, a final craftsman-like transformation he must undergo before he is saleable. He will spend a couple of terms in the workshop of Chopham Hall, and be turned out as an Oxford scholar.

After the door of this room closes for the first time, he stands looking at the empty mantelpiece and the neatly blacked grate and the rug and the washstand with the square of speckled mirror hanging above it. Until this moment he has not thought about the contents of his new life. The life itself,
an English life,
was enough. The sight of all these empty things waiting for him to fill them up with himself sends a knife of panic into his chest. He locks the door and slumps down against it. He has grabbed this life; he is an Englishman. But there are more requirements, things that hitherto have escaped his attention. The empty bookcase next to the bed. The dark square on the wallpaper where a picture once hung – where a picture is
supposed
to hang. What picture? What should be there? He does not know, and the answer that would come to other people, to real people
(Whatever picture I like),
surely cannot be right for him. He does not feel he could like something without checking to see if it gave him away. Before he
is,
he is an Englishman, and should have the taste of an Englishman.

Which is?

He thinks long and hard about this. An Englishman would hang up a hunting print or a photograph of the King or a painting of his dead relatives, like the mutton-chopped old man over Mr Spavin’s desk. Having no painting, Jonathan settles for the King, bought from a stall in Berwick Street and slipped into a gilt frame. So, for his first months among the lawns and the rainlit streets, he goes to sleep under the hand-coloured image of George V, resisting the temptation to pray to it, to ask the jutting tinted beard to point him on the path to selfhood.

Until September he has nothing to do. Jonathan is quite happy about this. The idea of Chopham Hall fills him with trepidation; when British people talk about school, they use words that other people use about prisons. Spavin, however, is concerned, and asks young Mr Muskett, his partner’s son, to show him around. In due course, after a polite exchange of notes, a golden-haired youth in tennis whites materializes on the Bayswater doorstep. ‘Hullo,’ he says, peering with visible distaste into the dim recesses of the hall. ‘You must be Bridgeman. I thought we could play a couple of sets.’

Muskett stands in the dim hall, and receives the obeisances of Mrs Lovelock, the landlady. Mrs Lovelock evidently finds him an impressive figure, and fusses round him in a kind of bobbing spiral meant to indicate deference and pleasure. Muskett ignores her, fully occupied in curling his sculpted lower lip at the hall decoration. When he is offered a seat in the front parlour, he declines, saying that if it is all the same to Mrs Lovelock he would rather stand. His lower lip is employed once again when Jonathan reappears, wearing a pair of brown shoes.

‘Don’t you have plimsolls?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘Oh well. I suppose we can buy some on the way.’

A detour via Piccadilly, and then the two of them walk out on to a springy grass court tucked away behind a house on the good side of Regent’s Park. Jonathan’s feet are sheathed in fresh white canvas. The handle of his racket is already drenched in nervous sweat. The game is a disaster. He throws himself after the ball, chasing it left and right, slamming bodily into the net and failing to return a single one of Muskett’s shots. After a while the golden youth surveys the panting figure on the other side and, employing his expressive lip once again, asks whether he would perhaps like to have a break. Jonathan nods mutely.

‘I thought you said you played.’

Jonathan is non-committal.

‘I’m surprised. You colonial fellows are usually so sportif. The healthy Punjab lifestyle and all that.’

Ruefully Jonathan remembers the British-Indian habit of building tennis courts on any available piece of land, even in the hills, where they carve them into the mountainsides like Jains do the images of their saints. It is inconceivable that he would not play. He can think of no satisfactory reason for his failure, so he says that he has hurt his hand, hoping this will be enough to save him. Muskett obviously does not believe him, but politely half masks his disgust and suggests they go and drink lemon barley water on the terrace.

Jonathan feels obliged to rub his wrist occasionally, and Muskett talks about parties and the people who go to the parties and their relationships with the hosts and each other and him. Muskett has money and a motor car, and invitations for the next five weekends to The Country, which is where Everyone goes when not at Parties or on the tennis court. Muskett tells the story of Lady Kynaston’s dance, and of Mr and Mrs Huntington’s dance and the amusing things he said at the dinner the Waller-Waltons gave beforehand. It appears that all these occasions were deathly and most people were at all three, except the ones who had an invitation to the reception at the Swedish Embassy, which Muskett didn’t. He didn’t mind because he expected it would be even more deathly (embassy things always are) and of course afterwards Everyone said that is exactly how it was. Muskett has already done two years at The University, and he has debts that the Old Man will sort out and an understanding with Anne Waller-Walton, and expects that when he goes down he will probably go into The City, which is not, Jonathan gathers, the opposite of The Country but something altogether more technical involving the controlled flow of capital, equity and lunch.

Muskett says he will call again the following week, but does not. Jonathan knows he has failed some sort of test, and realizes he has a lot to learn before he is fit for the kind of circles in which young Mr Muskett moves. In a notebook he jots down his deficiencies:
tennis, dancing, motor car.
Most of his allowance has already been spent on clothes, but he starts to reserve a small sum for lessons. Tennis or dancing? Dancing is cheaper, especially if he travels out to Shepherd’s Bush, where according to a classified advertisement in the
Post
a woman called Madame Parkinson holds a Monday evening class. Madame Parkinson turns out to have bright red hair and a French accent that even Jonathan can tell is fake, but she is a good teacher all the same.
Left one two, right one two, and viz elehgaanz – yes!
Soon he is spending evenings at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where the Brylcreemed band punch out foxtrots through the cigarette smoke, and shingle-haired girls let him tread on their toes, and then take him down by the river where it is dark and quiet.

Gradually he begins to relax into the city, his senses attuning themselves to the different qualities of London space. People have different boundaries from Bombay, different thresholds for invasion and anger. He travels on the underground, and forces himself not to hold his breath, to adopt the same expression of nonchalance as the other passengers hurtling along through the earth in their metal capsule. He sits in the cinema, bathed in white light, thrilling as the organist coaxes gunshots and creaking floorboards out of his futuristic machine. Between the petting couples in the back row, he eats an ice and feels Englishness begin to stick to him, filming his skin like city grime. This is what he wanted. This is enough.

It all ends abruptly when Mrs Lovelock mentions the Palais to Mr Spavin, who calls him into his office and explains that this is not the sort of behaviour he expected from his ward. Jonathan does not know what exactly is the problem, but apologizes profusely, terrified that everything will be taken away. Mr Spavin believes he is becoming unruly, and it would be best if he went up to Chopham Hall forthwith. Discipline is what he needs. Discipline and the rigours of academic life. It would be pointless to delay. He is to take the morning train from Liverpool Street Station.

At the moment of his death, Sir Peregrine Haldane is said to have sat bolt upright in the Great Bed at Chopham Hall, and shouted, ‘Let them be chastised, O Lord! Spare them not!’ Afterwards these last words were variously interpreted. The parish priest of Chopham Constable (a man Sir Perry had always suspected of dangerous and levelling opinions) considered them prophetic of the fate of all rich men, and preached a sermon which dwelt heavily on the fate of the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. An anonymous London pamphleteer claimed that ‘Sir Poxridden Halfmast’ was actually imagining himself back at the scene of one of his legendary five-wench debauches, an opinion which was shared by most of London society, despite the gallant protestations of friends who maintained that Sir Peregrine had meant to say, ‘Let
me
be chastised, O Lord! Spare
me
not!’, but had, in his final agonies, become confused.

Whatever the truth, after the reading of the will, no one could deny that the old man had repented. On hearing its contents, Oliver de Tassle-Lacey, Sir Perry’s nephew and heir, realized he was ruined. Having heavily engaged himself on the expectation of his inheritance, he felt he had no option but to commit suicide, and jumped from a box at the Theatre Royal, impaling himself on a spear carried by an attendant in a production of
Alexander and Poros.
The combination of Sir Peregrine’s appalling reputation and Oliver’s flamboyant death kept the matter of the will in the public eye for several weeks. That the old rake should choose to found a school for ‘the sons of the deserving poor’, instead of passing on his house and land to the next generation, was considered eccentric to the point of folly. Still, some at court thought it touching, and the King even had a description of the foundation read out to him during his morning evacuation.

During the subsequent two and a half centuries Chopham Hall has gone through many changes. The initial bequest was supplemented by various others, and for a period the school was even fashionable enough to attract sons of the lesser aristocracy to its doors. Sadly, by the August afternoon that Jonathan’s train pulls into the sleepy station of Chopham Constable, such days are long gone. Chopham Hall has settled into a middling niche in the great hierarchy of English public schools, some way below the Harrows and Etons and Winchesters, though still far enough up the social ladder for the villagers to doff their caps to the young masters, and sometimes spit at their departing backs.

To Jonathan, Norfolk seems a very long way from London. Rattling over the flat countryside he is reminded of the Punjab, and these memories make him uneasy. When he sees Briggs, the school porter, waiting to meet him, a stiff and bushy-bearded figure in a bowler hat, he is tempted to stay on board and take his chances with King’s Lynn. However, he steels himself, dismounts, makes himself known, and is duly driven through the village in an ancient pony trap.

Conversation is sparse. Briggs makes a single gnomic pronouncement about the weather, which he reckons about fair, considering. Considering
what
exactly, Jonathan does not ask, and Briggs does not see fit to tell him. They reach the school gate in silence.