The Impressionist (25 page)

‘Chandra?’ she calls out.

‘Yes, Ambaji?’ replies Robert.

‘Have you finished your chores?’

‘Yes, Ambaji.’

‘Does he want you for anything?’

Reverend Macfarlane grunts. Tell her yes I do. Some new equipment has arrived. I want to try it out.’

‘Yes, he does, Ambaji.’

‘More skulls? Very well. Tell him not to keep you too long.’

Chandra-Robert turns back to the beard and the wall. ‘She says –’

‘I heard,’ mutters the Reverend. ‘Now climb over and help me unpack the things. They have come all the way from
Edinburgh.’
He emphasizes the name of the town, as if to underscore its importance and specialness.

The youth pulls a packing case close to the wall and uses it to climb over, dislodging a loose brick with his foot. The Reverend rolls up his sleeves in anticipation of hard work and leads the way indoors to a low-ceilinged hall fitted out as a church. The furnishings are plain and unornamented, a heavy table and lectern facing rows of backless benches. Stacks of hymn books are crammed on to bookshelves at either side. At the far end a pair of double doors open out on to the street, barred by a heavy wooden beam. City sounds, tonga wheels and bicycle bells and hawkers’ cries, seep in through a two-inch gap beneath them. The place is scrupulously clean but pointedly spartan, its single concession to comfort being a ceiling-mounted fan.

‘You must call my wife by her proper name,’ Macfarlane snaps.

‘I don’t want to hear you using this gobble-gobble she’s adopted.’

‘Yes, sir, Reverend Macfarlane.’

‘She is Mrs Macfarlane. Anything else encourages her. And don’t allow her to call you Chin-whatever it is either. Robert. Elspeth and Robert. Perfectly adequate names.’ Dust motes dance in the light, swirling about them as they pass through the church and climb the narrow flight of stairs to a room which serves the Reverend as both sleeping quarters and laboratory. Robert hovers in the doorway as Macfarlane strides over the creaky floor and throws open the shutters. The street noise jumps closer and the dim room is unveiled in all its meagre glory.

The Reverend Andrew Macfarlane is a man who believes that tidying up is a minor species of prayer, handmaiden to more major forms like spring cleaning and the practice of callisthenics. As a result he lives in a space whose contents are arranged with a kind of right-angled vigour, the hundreds of books placed in exact alphabetical order on well-dusted shelves, the hard cot bed made up with soldierly precision, the battered writing desk free of stray papers and the cupboards containing his more unusual study tools shut tight and bolted. No graven image sullies the white-painted purity of the walls, no frivolous rug or matting besmirches the honest boards of the floor. Personal vanity is imprisoned in a metal travelling trunk of clothes, liberated twice monthly to occupy the small exercise yard of a shaving mirror, a mirror turned face down on the washstand when not in use. Were beard-trimming to take place more frequently than this, sinfulness might be the result. Religious prophylaxis, rather than self-indulgences like convenience or (heaven forfend) actual aesthetic preference, dictates the condition of the Reverend’s wild patriarchal growth. Like the room, nothing about the man is the product of chance or carelessness.

Yet, through a chink, sentiment has seeped into this airless world. The absence of images is not complete. A hinged bazaar-bought brass frame stands on the writing desk, containing two photographs. Robert, who has often been in this room, nevertheless sidles over to look at them, the two young infantry soldiers staring unreadably into the camera. Two different studios. Two different tones of sepia. The dead sons. He finds their faces endlessly fascinating, though nothing particular about their undistinguished shuffling of their parents’ features catches the eye. They are frozen and powerful, the repository of all the backed-up emotion which rules the life of this household. They are, he realizes, the reason Ambaji took him in, and the reason the Reverend allows him to stay.

‘You’re supposed to be assisting me, not standing about daydreaming.’

Macfarlane’s voice brings him back to earth, and he helps to lever open a small packing case and lay the lid carefully to one side. They lift out various pieces of grooved and slatted wood, along with several little leather cases containing sets of callipers, adjustable clamps and heavy brass rules. There is also a folding screen on a metal stand, rather like those Robert has seen used to project cinema pictures, but black.

Macfarlane reaches into his pocket for keys and opens one of a pair of large wooden cupboards. Inside, arranged neatly on shelves, are several rows of human skulls. The Reverend looks at them affectionately.

‘Ah, my little Golgotha. Hello.’

He stoops and drags out a heavy tool chest from the bottom of the cupboard.

‘We’ll put the Lamprey Grid together first. You hold and I’ll tighten the screws.’

As he presses down on the slats of wood, Robert looks up at the dead people. The dead people look down at him. However hard he tries he cannot get used to the Reverend’s collection. The idea of them all packed in there fills him with horror. Men and women who once walked around and ate supper and played music and had arguments, all reduced to scientific specimens. The first time he saw them, he almost screamed. ‘Base superstition’, Macfarlane called it, musingly rapping Robert’s head with his knuckles. ‘Quite natural in a mind such as yours.’ Robert pulled away. The gesture chilled him. He felt as if, in the Reverend’s eyes, his own walking eating arguing existence was provisional, that the boundary which separated him and the cupboard of specimens was easily crossed. Now, under the hollow gaze of the skulls, he helps Macfarlane string silk threads through the wooden frame, creating a chequered grid which they mount on a stand before the black screen.

‘There it is,’ says Macfarlane, full of satisfaction. ‘Now at last I can make proper photographic studies. You, young man, shall have the honour of being my first subject.’

Robert squirms uncomfortably. He has assisted the Reverend before, and though the work is neither arduous nor painful, it always makes him uneasy. Several times they have performed an experiment which Macfarlane refers to as ‘following in the footsteps of the great Morton’, upending the skulls and filling them full of fine lead shot. The shot is packed tight and then carefully poured back out into calibrated glass beakers. In this way they have found that the Naga tribal woman’s skull holds less than the Bihari farmer’s. The Gujarati Kayastha holds more than the Bihari. The Tibetan herder holds more than the Kayastha or the Bihari or the Naga or the Orissan fisherman. All these discoveries are held by the Reverend to confirm the great Morton’s greatness, though the large size of the Tibetan’s skull appears to irritate him. Through all of it Robert’s help has never seemed strictly necessary. His main role is to listen to the Reverend expound his theories, derived from the vast library of books on anthropological subjects he has acquired during his thirty years as a missionary.

It turns out that through the incontrovertible methodology of science, craniometry has revealed the foundation of British imperial domination of the world. The scale of cranial capacities which Reverend Macfarlane has confirmed for a selection of the subject races of India can, he explains, be extended to show how differences in brain size correspond exactly to degree of civilization and capacity for rational thought throughout the world. At the bottom, atavistic creatures like the South Javan and the Hottentot demonstrate capacities (as well as facial and maxillary structures) little different to those of the higher apes. The Indostanic group, to which most of the Reverend’s dead people once belonged, falls somewhere in the upper middle of this global league. At the top is the European, whose capacious Ioo-cubic-inch capacity gives him room for brain development far in excess of such benighted fellows as the 9I-inched Peruvian or the savage 86-inched Tasman. Hence, Empire. Of course the Reverend acknowledges that simple capacity measurement is crude and old-fashioned, but he has had to wait until now to get his hands on the tools which will take his inquiries to the next level.

He stands Robert side-on in front of the grid, fixing his neck and back with rigid steel clamps and extending one arm, similarly immobilized, out in front of him. Then, mounting a camera on a tripod some distance away, he takes a series of photographs. The boy seems to have a distaste for having his picture taken, and Macfarlane has to shout at him to stop him wrinkling up his face. Finally he settles down. Through the viewfinder his marble-white skin almost glows against the black calico background. To the Reverend his fine nose and thin, sharp lips appear strangely pure. For a mongrel, incredibly pure. Really almost too pure. Almost European.

‘Quite, quite remarkable,’ he mutters. ‘Really, Robert, your taint of blood hardly shows at all.’

Robert is unscrewed and placed on a chair, as the Reverend employs his new measuring devices on the various parameters of his head. Facial angle is fixed at ninety-three degrees, the nose found to be leptorrhine and eyes mesosemic, with a certain upturning at the corners which is announced to be a tell-tale indication of Asiatic origin. The jaw is pleasingly orthognathic, a contrast to the jutting prognathous jaw of the Negro skull illustrated in Nott and Gliddon’s
Indigenous Races of the Earth.
This interesting volume is given to Robert to flick through while the Reverend jots down his results. He looks at the pictures of noble Greek statuary and twisted soot-black nigger faces, and feels, as he often does, a peculiar relief at his resemblance to one and not the other.

Like most of the Reverend’s books,
The Indigenous Races of the Earth
is very old, its once-fine pigskin binding cracked and mildewed by many years of exposure to the monsoon. With his fingers Robert traces the bumps and bubbles on its cover, not displeased at the turn the afternoon has taken. At least the arrival of the Lamprey Grid and the gauges means that the Reverend’s obsession with measuring the body might be channelled away from the dead to the living. In the past it has meant some unpleasant errands to St George’s Hospital, walks back through the busy streets with square brown-paper parcels that made him feel like a ghoul or a murderer.

As Robert is thinking about death, Macfarlane is making a note of the ‘unusual luminous leucochroicity of the subject’s skin’, and wondering whether perhaps the very fineness of the features, their uncanny quality, places them under the heading of one of the great Lombroso’s criminal types. The tendency to crime of the mulatto has, after all, been well documented in the Americas, and Robert’s peculiar disguised form of hybridity might conceal all manner of antisocial tendencies. His excessive care for his personal appearance and his enjoyment of tobacco certainly point in that direction, while an examination of the nose and ears reveals a certain hawk-like aquilinity in the former and a pointed tubercle in the latter (more pronounced on the left than on the right) that the Italian anthropometrist identifies as features of the born criminal. For a moment he wonders if it would be wise to dismiss the boy, who, after all, turned up at the Mission completely out of the blue. On the other hand he has lived there for well over a year without incident. And he is a bright boy. Even brighter perhaps than Duncan at that age. Certainly brighter than Kenneth.

As soon as this disloyal thought rears its head, Macfarlane quashes it. Better not to think at all than to think that. He resolves to do nothing. Let the boy stay, even if he is a hyphenate.

‘All right. No time for lessons today. You’re free to leave. Tomorrow I shall test you on the
Aeneid,
Book Five, and on your knowledge of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. If you speak to my wife, you must remind her that I forbid her absolutely to associate with that Pereira woman. I have an idea that she intends to do so this evening. I’m counting on you to stop her. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir, Reverend Macfarlane.’

Robert bounds down the stairs, two at a time. Quickly he hops over the wall, and into a doorway on the other side of the courtyard. Inside a little parlour, decorated with framed prints and vases of flowers, he finds Elspeth Macfarlane chopping vegetables with Shobha the sweeper-woman. They look up as he barges in.

‘Are you going out, Chandra?’ asks Elspeth.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Well, don’t be long. I shall want you to escort me to Mrs Pereira’s at eight.’

‘The Reverend said –’

‘Yes, I’m sure he did. How was your skull?’

‘Very good, Amba – I mean, Mrs Mac – I mean, very good. I am almost English.’

She looks up sharply.

‘I mean Scottish.’

‘I think you should be content to be an Indian, which is more or less what you are. It is a fine thing. I am reliably told that in all your past births you have been an Indian, apart from once when you were Egyptian, and once born on the planet Mercury. Now, make sure you are back to take me at eight.’

‘Yes, Ambaji.’

Chandra-Robert disappears up to his room, a little garret almost entirely papered with portraits from illustrated magazines. American film actresses, politicians, soldiers, jockeys, famous writers and artists, cabaret artistes, society ladies and cricketers mingle with religious pictures, Ganpati, Vivekananda, Saint Francis Xavier, the Buddha, Shiva Nataraj. There are tinted postcards of British views arranged around the washstand. Hyde Park Corner, Lake Windermere, ‘afternoon in the New Forest’, Balmoral from the air. Somewhere buried in the middle of the faces is a group photograph cut out of a periodical called
The Harvest
depicting a missionary tea on Hampstead Heath. Mr and Mrs Macfarlane are just visible among the halftone figures, standing at the back with cups and saucers in their hands.

For a few minutes, he lies back on his bed with his arms folded behind his head and stares at his constellation. He has a game in which he half closes his eyes, or opens and shuts them rapidly, smearing or flickering the faces together, making them into new ones, more fantastic, more interesting. He begins to play, but remembers that he should go right now if he is to make a little money and be back in time for eight o’clock. So he jumps up and stands in front of the square of mirror hanging from the back of his door, and carefully runs a comb through his thick hair. Then he scoops a little dab of wax on to his fingers, rakes them through his hair and combs again, turning his head so the light catches the hint of copper in the shiny blackness. He kicks off his sandals, slips on a pair of Argyll socks and takes a pair of black Oxford brogues from under the bed. They are heavy well-made shoes of a type rarely seen on Indian feet, and very rarely indeed on those of the menial classes. He considers a collar and tie, but decides he has no time, and rushes back downstairs and out of the door, followed by the disapproving stares of the women in the parlour.