The Impressionist (29 page)

Elspeth did not join, not yet. It was all too far away, too great a translation from what she knew. Plain whitewashed walls to intricate carvings. Moderation in all things to joyous excess. She concealed herself from Andrew exactly as he concealed himself from her, and while they were held in this stasis, unable to escape each other completely, the Mission withered. Converts drifted back to their old ways or were sucked up by more dynamic slum churches, the Baptists or the American Lutheran pastor who had set up on Grant Road. Then came the war, and the news that both Kenneth and Duncan had volunteered. Andrew was proud. Elspeth only felt angry. Her sons had already been away for most of their lives, and now they were being taken still further from her, little boys with white handkerchiefs lost among the smudged type of the news reports. It was everything she detested. Lives reduced to black and white brevity, bodies she had washed and cradled straitjacketed by infuriatingly abstract accounts of ‘actions’, ‘fronts’ and ‘offensives’.

For a while she and Andrew prayed together; they had long since ceased sharing a bed. It was a gesture. Elspeth spent her evenings with circles of Theosophists and other seekers, meditating on the troops, trying to throw a psychic shield over the ones they loved. She heard terrible things about the war, how the Germans were servants of the Lords of the Dark Face, implacable opponents of truth, how the dead warmonger Bismarck had planted magnetic talismans at his borders to prevent occult resistance to Teutonic domination. As news of casualties filtered through, some of her Theosophist friends became Invisible Helpers, patrolling the far-off front in their astral bodies, shepherding the souls of the dead towards the afterlife. With terrible foreboding, she tried to make contact with Kenneth and Duncan. Just once. Just (she could not form the thought) one last time. But she could not leave her body, could not unground herself from Bombay. Perhaps, she reasoned, she lacked spiritual technique.

The two telegrams came in quick succession. Kenneth at Ypres. Duncan at Loos. Only the thought of reincarnation sustained her. Someone pointed her to Mr Leadbeater’s ‘Lives of Alcyone’, with its list of incarnations, famous lives intertwined across the cosmos from 40,000 years before Christ until the present day. Julius Caesar. Mrs Besant. Lives lived on Mars, in Peru, on the moon. The immensity of it was comforting. This horror was simply the termination of a single visit by her sons. They had met before and would meet again, hundreds of meetings, hundreds of receding figures, waving across time. With the two telegrams in front of her on the parlour table, she found she was not afraid any more and told Andrew what she believed, calmly laying it all out like a carpet unrolled down a flight of steps for a visiting dignitary.

He was appalled. He told her she had been seduced by Satan. They were no longer man and wife. That afternoon he carried hodloads of bricks into the courtyard, stripped to his shirtsleeves and began to build a wall.

When Bobby first arrived, he marvelled at the construction which had such power over his new employers. It was an uneven wall, crumbling and bowed at the centre, yet with the husband’s life on one side and the wife’s on the other, it seemed both absurd and mystically potent. He has come to suspect that even the Reverend could not explain how he had brought it into being. It was a thing which sprang fully formed out of pain.

It was as much to keep himself in as to keep her out. No one understood that. Slamming the bricks down one on top of the other he felt like the very last man. The tide of filth had swallowed even his wife. Even Elspeth.

Oh Lord.

All his failings. All the previous walls. None of them would have been necessary had he not failed so badly and so often. What the rest of the world saw in him he did not know and did not really care. What God saw was all that mattered, and he knew how he must appear to that giant blue eye. A dripping bucket. A leaky bag of skin.

For a while he thought of laying the bricks in a square. Make a tomb. Shut himself in. It did not come to that. Despair is among the things God does not permit. So he built the bricks up to eye-level, moved the last of his things to the attic over the church, and began to watch Elspeth as she lowered herself gradually towards the level of the monkeys.

He could have made it final. Either of them could have done it, by moving away or returning home. He could have forced his will on her by withholding the money that came from her sister. Susan and Petie, made rich by their chain of chemist’s shops. Yet something in both of them resisted it. By living on either side of the wall they made their lives provisional, unfinished. They put off the final moment of failure.

On Elspeth’s side people came and went. Andrew watched them furtively, peering from upstairs windows or standing on tiptoe behind the wall. They were always in groups, these Theos ophists. They seemed to need to band together. Though the same faces appeared again and again, they did so under different banners. The Daughters of India, the Order of the Rising Sun, the Preparation League of Healers, the Prayer League, the Brotherhood of Arts. So much hocus-pocus. So much confusion. Men and women, Indians and Europeans, promiscuously mingled together. He did not see how Elspeth could stand it.

He never had the capacity for vagueness. He was not proud of this. It was a sign he was weak and faltering in his faith. All his life he had known that were he to give way only once, he would be lost. The baroque mysteries unfolding on the other side of the courtyard were the devil’s work, of that he was sure, but he had always eschewed even more innocent forms of imprecision. Lack of limit. Blending. Multiplicity. To him these were just other names for Doubt.

When he fell, he fell hard.

A light flickers in a hut on an Assamese hillside, slivers of oily yellow escaping between loosely lashed staves of bamboo. A young Andrew paces up and down inside, the print of his naked body left behind in dirty sweat on the sheets of his cot. He drinks water from the covered jug on the table. He kneels to pray. His hands brush himself, bitten nails scraping his mosquito-bitten chest. Each touch sears his skin. The tropical climate is doing its evil work, dissolving Europe in heat and moisture, turning this man of God into a sensuous thing, a streaming naked body fronted by a bobbing, straining cock. He rolls on the floor, groans. He is twenty-four years old. On other nights like this he has given in, hands working guiltily until it is over. Tonight there is a noise outside his door, and he realizes he is being watched. He clutches an old shirt around his waist and opens it, comes face to face with Sarah, one of the Mission girls. Tiny cat-faced child-woman, both hands pressed over her mouth to stifle her giggles. She has removed her cotton print dress, the Mission clothes he and the Gavins have such trouble getting them to wear. She is squatting there, a twist of rushes round her waist, heavy brass rings piercing her distended earlobes. Otherwise naked. His eyes stray down to the little studs of her breasts, her rush-fringed vulva. It is too much. He circles her upper arm with his hand and brings her inside.

It happened once, twice, a third time. No more. By then he was revolted at himself. It was over. He vowed it. But a few months later little Sarah was to be seen waddling round the compound, hands smoothing the faded rose-print stretched over her belly. He avoided her. The Gavins knew she was not married, but they put it down to some failing on her part, yet another event in the tribe which had taken place outside or beneath the limits of European understanding. Perhaps she has a husband, guessed Mr Gavin one day. Some fellow who is not a convert. He had not noticed how the other Mission girls looked at young Macfarlane. He had no idea what his assistant heard as he lay awake at night, whispering prayers into the humid darkness. The scratching at his door like the clawing of small animals. Sarah, and not just Sarah. All wanting favours. Wanting to be the woman of the young white priest.

A little girl was born, and Sarah held her up to her father as he strode past; he did not dare to meet her eye. It was a pale creature. He thought the Gavins could hardly fail to notice. They said nothing. The child was always there, playing in the dirt, clapping its chubby hands. Accusing him.

He had seen villages near to the big tea plantations where whole families of half-breed children lined up to watch the missionaries ride past. Boys and girls of various sizes holding hands in front of their huts, each one bearing the tell-tale crook nose or jug ears of the Plantation Manager, or the Engineer, or the District Medical Officer. A shocking conversation with a man in the mildewed smoking room of an upcountry club. Helps while away the long evenings, what? Bugger all else to do.

But not for him. He was supposed to be better than that.

He resolved to try harder. He threw himself into work, conceived a project for building a proper hospital at the Mission. Four solid brick walls with full facilities, large enough to serve the whole district. He was winning. His thoughts had found a channel. Then Mr Gavin came to visit him one night and found the girls at the door, three of them curled like puppies on the veranda while inside Macfarlane innocently wrote funding requests to the authorities in Darjeeling. Why were they there? What kind of degenerate harem was he running? Eventually his protégé’s face persuaded him that things were not as bad as he had thought, but the damage was done.

One day, the inevitable conversation as they rode for supplies, monsoon water sluicing off their broad-brimmed hats, deep green jungle smell high in their nostrils. This is a hard country for a single man. Perhaps it is not the place God has ordained for you. Go back, Andrew. Find yourself a wife. We will of course support you completely, but I have to tell you the Mission Society may not be able to find you another place here in the hills.

He had fallen. Yet he would not give in. He went back Home and tried to gain support for his own mission. Duly his perseverance was rewarded. In his mercy God brought him a wife, and out of gratitude he decided to test himself, to strive as hard as possible to prove worthy of God’s gift. A plan unfolded. He would walk among the harlots, make his home in the most depraved place he knew. Thus, by resisting temptation, he would prove his strength and redeem himself in the eyes of the Lord. It was the same impulse that leads other men to lift heavy weights or volunteer for dangerous duties in wartime. He consulted no one, so no one was there to ask him if this was indeed fortitude, or merely a desire to pick, like scabs, over his weaknesses.

Elspeth arrived, fumbling questions to him at the front of the draughty kirk hall. Donations were made for a Bombay mission. The two seemed part of one thing: an end to his worthlessness. He concentrated on this spiritual goal and the world shaped itself around it. The marriage was celebrated, and two second-class tickets purchased on the P & O. Only back in India, with his hysterical young wife stowed inside a dilapidated tenement on Falkland Road, did he stop to think, to draw breath and look properly at the challenge he had taken on.

In truth he was lost. He did not know what to do. It had been like that many times in Assam. He wanted a force to push against, hard work to help him learn about himself. Instead he was frictionless, a flailing skater nudged by the city across its own impenetrable surface. The problem was people. He needed them to do a job, which was to form a mass, a single object for his spiritual striving. Instead they remained stubbornly unassimilated. The unsaved men and women of Bombay watched him preach or did not watch, chewed betel, wandered off, passed comments, and with every sign of amusement or indifference they seemed to flaunt their individuality. How could they? This was teeming Asia, where the individual counted for nothing. He screamed at startled rickshaw drivers in the street, and felt it a shadow of God’s own anger. The whole thing was an affront, made more galling because these people were so servile to other forces: to money, to false religion and the lead weight of their traditions, to the other white men who ruled them. He wondered if he lacked some vital quality these other men possessed, some organ of whiteness and command.

Maybe he was the kind of debased white man who diluted his precious blood.

Everything became knotted together. Duty. The Mission’s failure to get a foothold. Semen. Giggling native women. He wanted to know the exact shape of his sin, and found it in scientific books. Andrew Macfarlane of the Leucodermi, cymotrichous of hair and mesocephalic of head, had coupled with Sarah of the Xanthodermi, exotically leiotrichous but woefully brachy cephalic. Their daughter was a collapse. A blur.

Compared to the parent of the higher race, the children are a deteriorated product. The mixture, if general and continued through generations, will infallibly entail a lower grade of power in the descent. The net balance of the two accounts will show a loss when compared with the result of unions among the higher race alone.

What had he brought into the world? He could not remember what the child looked like. Gradually her face was obliterated by those of his two young sons, born whole and unsullied by their father’s previous failure. They were his pride, yet sometimes the price seemed too high. The denial of his wife’s body was a torture. Though he had the doctor’s letter, something in Elspeth’s manner told him that she would have held herself back even without it. Falkland Road became a place with many pitfalls.

These are the signs of racial inferiority: simplicity and early union of the cranial sutures. Wide nasal aperture, with synostosis of the nasal bones. Prominence of the jaws. Recession of the chin. Early appearance, size and permanence of ‘wisdom’ teeth

These are the parts of women. High foreheads. Eyes rimmed with kohl. Breasts fastened into tight coloured blouses. Bare stomachs. Red sucking mouths, open, waiting.

A flat and retreating forehead is also a ‘low’ feature, but a somewhat bulbous forehead, such as is characteristic of Negroes, does not necessarily imply high intellectual ability

His young wife flourished. Her energy seemed boundless. She was a pulsing living thing, and she was denied him. By rights she was his. It was impossible. Impossible. His jealousy became like a living creature.