The Impressionist (58 page)

He turns round to find three half-asleep porters watching him blearily. Trying to recover his composure, he tells them to go back to bed, and staggers back to his tent.

The next morning he realizes that while he does not want to continue with the census, he also does not want to go back to camp. Instead, he decides to carry on as if nothing has happened, except that instead of actually going into the farmsteads, he will pass them by, and make up the entries in his notebook. When he first does this, going as far as a few hundred yards from a farmstead, then skirting round it, Idris and the others look at him strangely, but say nothing. After a while they accept it as another routine, no more or less crazy than anything else they have been asked to do. In this way he zigzags across the Fotse countryside, gradually losing his sense of direction altogether.

He does not ask the porters for help. They do not offer it. After a while he begins to see landmarks that he recognizes, and it occurs to him that he might be walking in circles. All the farmsteads look the same, a little knot of conical huts round a central yard; and after the thirtieth or so, they begin to blend into one.

The only way to tell them apart is by the shrines. Each farmstead has one, sometimes in the yard, sometimes out in the fields, where it can take care of the crops. The idols, standing under little thatched shelters, take every form: stone, carved wood, painted and unpainted, a shapeless mound of clay with shells pressed into it for eyes and mouth. Embedded in one is a fragment of blue-glazed tile which must have found its way south across the desert. Another consists of a baton of oxidized metal that turns out to be a flint-lock pistol, its stock eaten away by termites. All are coated in libations – a mess of coloured powder, milk and millet beer offered up to the ancestors. He is standing, considering a bulbous figure with a top-knot on its head, trying to decide if he has seen it before, when he hears the distant crackle of a gramophone and realizes he is only a little way from the camp.

While Jonathan is on tour, Marchant’s obsession with latrines is vindicated. His original model (a simple trench), is soon superseded by a mark two version, and then a mark three. The Mklll is an elaborate affair, with twin wooden thunderboxes (pilot and gunner) enclosed by wood and canvas housings with lockable doors. Though Marchant’s original intention was to enforce a complete separation of toilet facilities, events overtake him. Illness strikes the expedition, and for ten days it is every man for himself.

The illness is characterized by terrible gut-wrenching pain and an alarming sensation of liquefaction, which means that both thunderboxes are in almost constant use. Possession being nine tenths of the law, no occupant is ever keen to vacate for his frantic colleagues. Rattling the door, abuse and even threats become commonplace. The degeneration into savagery is swift, and comes to a head with Gregg blowing the gunner door lock off with his revolver, dragging out a terrified Gittens and then barricading himself inside. Marchant has to coax him out by singing sentimental soldiers’ songs through the wall. Afterwards, by common consent, the housings are removed and the latrines declared a neutral zone. Fotse observers report to the Daou that, curiously enough, even at the height of their affliction, none of the white men think of doing their business in the bushes. The spiritual significance of the boxes is, they suggest, penitential.

The illness subsides, leaving the victims thinner, sallower and consumed with dislike for one another. Marchant and Gregg resume surveying, slowly mapping the region around the escarpment, meshing it in their powerful abstraction of triangles. Edgy and irritable, they discover that while they have been occupied, some Fotse have taken to hovering around at the perimeter of the camp. Most are children, but a few insolent young men sometimes join them, strolling about and listlessly examining things.

One morning a boy scoots out of Marchant’s tent, followed by Marchant himself, dressed only in a towel. The boy has a head-start of several yards, and after a few paces Marchant gives up the chase. ‘Can you believe that?’ he pants to Gittens. The little wog stole my shaving brush!’

After this they keep a careful eye on their equipment, and resume night-time patrols of the perimeter, but despite their caution a series of personal things goes missing. The Professor loses his shoelaces, and Gittens a penknife and a tin of dubbin. Some of the things the Fotse steal have no obvious value. Morgan finds two men sifting through food waste behind the kitchen tent. He catches another boy on his hands and knees near the latrine, carefully collecting up hair and toenail-clippings.

When Jonathan comes back from census-taking he finds the whole team sitting together round the fire. They are listening to Morgan’s scratched record of Welsh hymns, a nagging paranoia overcoming their distaste for each other’s company. Most of the expedition’s guns are with them, propped up against chairs, casually fondled in laps. It is dusk and everyone is furiously smoking, a habit which started as an insect-repellent, but over the days has taken on an atavistic, slightly hysterical intensity. Jonathan is greeted by grunts and nods. Morgan shuffles his chair sideways to make him a place.

They ask him a few questions. (‘Bloody, was it?’, ‘Run into any bother?’) but do not seem interested in the answers, too mired in despondency to care about much outside their own troubles. The conversation, such as it is, concerns the horrors of the climate and the general degeneracy of the Fotse, who are failing to come up to anthropological expectations. To Jonathan their opinions sound as if they are coming from a great distance away; recordings, inscriptions from a place about which he knows something, and to which he once felt connected, but now has trouble recalling, unable to fix it in the turmoil of his memory.

‘This,’ sighs the Professor, ‘is not the Africa I knew. In Fotseland I used to be able to shake off the cares of modern man.’

‘The burdens,’ adds Gittens, ‘of civilized society.’

‘Well, it’s fucked now,’ says Marchant. ‘Fucking hot, full of bloody flies, and as for the wogs, the ones they have here are worse than gyppos.’

The Professor winces. ‘I wish…’ he begins, but trails off. ‘Oh, what’s the point?’

Gittens steps in. ‘I think I see what you mean. Like visiting our own distant past.’

‘You mean, fucking
primitive,’
says Marchant.

‘Pristine,’ corrects Gittens.

‘It must have been such an innocent place,’ says Morgan wistfully. ‘An Eden. And to think that none of it will be here in ten years.’

‘Good riddance,’ says Marchant.

‘It can’t be helped,’ says Gittens. ‘It’s the price we pay for progress.’

The others nod philosophically.

‘I propose,’ says the Professor, ‘that our prime concern should be recording. If we salvage what we can in the way of artefacts –’

Gittens and Morgan nod enthusiastically. ‘The interviews haven’t exactly –’

‘Exactly,’ agrees the Professor bitterly. ‘And they used to be rather talkative.’

Morgan wonders whether they ought not to try again, suggesting it with the air of a man who hopes he will be contradicted.

Gittens, whose pet theories about noble savages have been rather dented in the last few weeks, is in no hurry to talk to any more Fotse at all. He quickly changes the subject. Ten years? That’s not completely certain, is it?’

‘That,’ says the Professor, ‘is what the man from the Governor’s office led me to believe. There are timetables. When the road grid for this district is finished, the plan is to concentrate the Fotse into settlements around the primary junctions. Nothing will happen for five years, but he advised me to take what I could now. I said it was a shame, but he gave me the predictable line – omelettes and breaking eggs and so forth.’

‘What if they don’t want to go?’ asks Jonathan.

‘I expect the authorities are prepared for a certain amount of opposition. Some degree of coercion is often necessary in this sort of case.’

Morgan thinks about this for a moment. ‘It’s in their best interests of course. From an economic point of view, it makes a lot of sense. The yields they get here are terrible. If we show them how to plant properly, and perhaps move them on to some better soil, who knows, perhaps in twenty years they could even be growing cash crops for export. It’s not impossible. If their goats were crossbred with European stock it would increase their weight. They would get more milk –’

‘Do you have to talk about goats?’ sighs Gittens. ‘If I never see another goat in my life, that will not be too soon.’

‘I happen to find goats quite fascinating,’ says Morgan primly.

Jonathan has a question. ‘Don’t you think they’d rather be left alone?’

‘The goats?’scoffs Marchant.

‘The Fotse.’

The men look at him incredulously.

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ says Gittens in a measured tone, ‘but I think it’s typical of your attitude, Bridge-man. I know I’m not alone in my opinion.’

The Professor frowns. ‘In retrospect, I think it was a mistake inviting you to participate in this expedition. You haven’t really pulled your weight. You’re unwilling to work. You haven’t participated. Your main trouble, Bridgeman, is that you lack team spirit.’

‘Team spirit?’

Morgan looks pityingly at him. ‘You’re not exactly a joiner, are you?’

Jonathan looks at them, and hears around the perimeter of the camp the sound of the wind rustling the grass.

‘No,’ he says, ‘maybe you’re right.’

Though it is still early, he makes his excuses and heads off to bed. He spends the night oscillating between two states – a surreal wakefulness in which the silence sings with tension, and something which may or may not be a dream, in which he becomes aware that cables and wires are strung between every object and person in the darkness around him, forming a single interconnected mechanism. Every time he changes position or raises a hand to his face, he also moves other things, a cascade of effects reaching out into the beyond. Sometimes those things act on him, moving his arms, his eyelids. If he could free himself, he might be all right. If, at least, he could discover how the system worked, he might be able to gain some independence from it. He imagines the Fotse as their huts are bulldozed and they are marched towards their new settlements by the side of their new roads. In the small hours, the past is even more confusing than the future. A suppressed thought starts to take form. What if, long ago, he got lost? What if he got lost from himself, and can never get back again?

The next morning he leaves camp, telling Chapel that he wants to carry on with the census straight away. The Professor tells him that he can take only two porters with him, because several of the boys have run off, and they are short-handed. He readily agrees, and sets off upstream along the dried-up river which runs past the Daou’s compound. He does not know where he is headed. He just knows that he cannot stay.

Jonathan follows the course of the river, walking a herder’s path between boulders and stands of tough, spiky grass. Though he passes several farmsteads, he does not stop at them. At the first, he takes out his notebook, but cannot bring himself to write anything in it.

As the sun reaches its zenith, the bed of stones turns towards the escarpment, which towers on for miles to north and south. For the rest of the day the narrow river path runs almost at its foot. Jonathan makes camp in a cleft between two giant boulders, and as the night falls, with the clinical swiftness with which night always falls in Fotseland, the curtain of rock which has loomed over him all day starts to oppress his mind. As he watches Idris cook his supper, he fancies that the change is physical and the cliff is somehow growing bigger. By the time he goes to bed he is not so sure. It is more that the escarpment is concentrating its substance, intensifying itself.

On the second day, walking under the eye of the cliff from morning until night, the feeling is worse, and on the second night he cannot sleep. He hears noises near the edge of the camp, first to one side, then another, and becomes convinced that figures are circling around his tent. Instead of pulling open the flap, or going outside with a revolver, he lies very still under his sweat-soaked blanket, his eyes wide open, his arms at his sides, and thinks,
Let them come.

They do not come, but when he wakes up in the morning the porters have gone. Their blankets are still lying by the embers of the fire. He calls and calls, but there is no sign of them. As he tries to work out what could have happened, the world jumps around a little at the edge of his vision. The flask from which he takes a sip of brackish water is a dead weight, and the light filtering through his sunglasses is unpleasantly bright. Confused, he tries to strike camp, but finds that folding the tent is complicated. He rolls it and tries to push it into its canvas cover, but it will not fit, and the effort exhausts him. He wanders around scattering things over the site, and though he calls for his servants, angrily, fearfully, all he can really think of is how much his head is throbbing. It dawns on him that he is feverish, but it still seems imperative to keep walking, even without someone to follow him.