The Impressionist (30 page)

The European has crossed with every known race of humanity in the course of his conquest of the world. This miscegenation has resulted in an inextricable mass of mixed peoples, perfectly comparable with our street-dogs and roof cats

Fucking. Make the shape of the word with your red mouth. Lower lip flicking off the teeth, breathy vowel guttering in a strangled click of the throat. Fuck. Fucking.

Examining the angle and direction of the Negress’s vagina and the corresponding angle and structure of the male genital organs, one can clearly see

Fucking. The whore who, as he walked past one morning, lifted up her pink skirt to show her
periodic erethism of the sexual centres

The missionary walking among the harlots. The valley of mouths. Fearing no evil.

the labia are much flattened and thinned, approaching in type that offered by the female anthropoid ape

Fucking.

The missionary toils over a splayed girl. Nails dig hard into brown skin. English words. Gibber gibber glub-glub. Screaming. He makes a fist. All the years. Hit hard. Harder. Somewhere else his forbidden white wife. Oh Lord God.

Men came and pulled him off. Brown men who smelled of sweat and garlic and punched his stomach and cut his face and dragged him outside and threw him on to a rubbish heap. Half naked, his bare feet pressing into shit and rotting orange peel, he stumbled around looking for his trousers. The missionary, watched by a little knot of street children.

He told Elspeth it was an argument with Hindu thugs. He could tell she did not believe him. It was around that time he began to take seriously the ideas of the polygenists.

Maybe, he decided, there had been other families apart from that of Adam and Eve. The sacred author of Genesis had no reason to be concerned with those creatures, and so they had existed down the years, undescribed and unmemorialized. Today’s lower races showed such distinct and separate characteristics that one could hardly help concluding they were actually a separate species, descendants of these less human men. All this made crossing doubly unnatural, no better than bestiality. How he had fallen! At least most authorities agreed that the products tended towards sterility. He imagined his huge-headed yellow daughter, breeding a litter in the muck of the jungles, his own features distorting step by step until the line petered out into a last hideous stillbirth.

Meanwhile Elspeth was drifting away from him. She ceased asking his permission for things, and spoke to the monkey people in rapid syllables which he could not follow. She would not touch him, but would dandle monkey-children on her knee. It was like watching one’s wife debasing herself with a dog or a horse. Afterwards he realized that the outbreak of war had saved him from doing something terrible. All sorts of ideas were stewing in his head, Old Testament images of blood and revenge. The Kaiser wiped them out, or rather redirected them, the
Illustrated News
caricature of the bloodthirsty monster in a spiked helmet doing the work the people of Bombay had never managed, rendering the forces of darkness single and visible. He began to hate the Germans with an overwhelming passion. For a while they became the sole topic of his streetcorner sermons. People gathered to watch him rage over the evils of the Hun, goggling at this whirl of spittle and balled fists perched on a tea chest in the market. He was even prepared to overlook his wife’s occult activities, especially since for the first time in years the two of them knelt together to pray.

Despite his eagerness for war he assumed sacrifices would be asked of him. Sacrifice was, after all, what he craved. Perhaps it was a lack of imagination, but even though Kenneth and Duncan were in France he never thought God would demand them. Abraham placed Isaac on the altar but the Lord stayed his hand. Andrew was never granted the favour of such a personal test, and nothing stayed the German machine gunners. The telegrams left him too stricken to be angry. When Elspeth told him she no longer believed in his God at all, and laid out her fairytale of reincarnation and silvery spirits, part of him wanted to reach out and clasp her to him. If only the boys could come back. If only something could bridge the chasm that had opened between him and the world.

Instead he built the wall. One brick slapped down on top of the other, sealing in the last shreds of his virtue, a sparrow in an experimenter’s glass bell, fluttering as the sustaining air is pumped out. He felt he had no other choice. The wall gave the Macfarlanes a kind of equilibrium, allowing Elspeth room to try to reconnect with her sons in the astral plane, and Andrew to brood on God and guilt and Reason. He gradually conceived a project large enough to occupy him for the rest of his time on earth, the search for a physiological basis for spirituality. Surely, he reasoned, the white man’s unique capacity for faith must stem from some quality of mind or body. Comparative anatomy would hold the key. He began research in earnest.

When the boy arrived, Andrew was existing somewhere near madness, floundering in statistics and calibrations. He heard a noise in the courtyard and came down from his laboratory to peer over the wall as Elspeth showed the dirty khaki-clad urchin her half of the Mission. Later he noticed she had put him to work around the house. He was instantly suspicious, and when he discovered that despite his fair skin and noble looks the child had a taint of blood, he felt that all his worst suspicions had been confirmed. Elspeth was moving further down the ladder. She would be robbed and cheated. He wrote a letter detailing his objections and wedged it under her door. She showed no sign of having received or read it. The boy stayed.

Andrew spied on him over the wall, watching him go about his household tasks. It was as if a ghost had come to haunt him. To have to live so close to the thing he feared most: white yet not white, a diffraction both of his dead sons and his monstrous daughter. One day the lad was out in the yard, mending a broken chair. Elspeth came out and stood behind him, watching him work, a peculiar half-smile on her face. Almost unconsciously she put out a hand and ran it through his hair. The boy looked up and smiled at her. Andrew’s chest constricted. That afternoon he called out to the boy and gruffly ordered him to sweep his side of the courtyard.

Soon he was teaching Robert to write and speak proper English, and giving him the rudiments of culture. It was done in an experimental spirit. What effect had the child’s mongrel heritage (about which he was understandably reluctant to speak) on his intellectual and moral capacities? As he taught, he studied his pupil. The boy was amazingly quick and eager, almost
desperate,
to learn. To his surprise, Andrew found himself dispensing praise as well as admonishment. And of course the boy did the job of a messenger, a celestial intermediary between his world and that of his wife.

An angel.

The cold weather follows the rains. Hot follows cold. During the year after the visit to Mrs Pereira and the arrival of Reverend Macfarlane’s scientific equipment, Bobby’s body hardens and his face acquires a lean cast. The Falkland Road women still call out as he walks past, but the tone of their voices has changed. There is something hungry in the dirty jokes, something wishful and appraising. He has grown out of his old clothes and bought more. Clothes please him. He enjoys the feel of a clean shirt, the glint of a collar stud. The act of choosing a tie from the selection hanging inside his wardrobe door has a ritual quality to it. Spots or stripes. Who to be today.

Though he still lives at the Mission, everyone knows that Bobby’s position as the Macfarlanes’ servant is only nominal. Those two are more than half in love with him, say the gossips. Well, they’re not alone there. I wouldn’t mind. Nor I. What I could teach him if I had the chance.

Bobby has been busy. His Bombay business interests have been considerably extended. He is not rich. Who is in this place? But he is perhaps even better than rich: he is connected. He still runs errands for the houses, but smaller boys are sent out for paan and bottles now. Bobby works on commission, brokering deals and procuring hard-to-find services for those with a discreet manner and an open wallet. Whether your tastes run to the florid curves of Madame Noor’s Baghdad Jewesses
(Habibi! Habibi!
), the threadbare geisha at the Japan House, or those specialized and painful activities that only the Blue Butterfly is properly equipped to provide, Bobby will be able to point you in the right direction.

Rumour has it that he is not above a little freelance work himself. Heaven knows the offers are there. However, he lets on that he is not interested, and people accept that, more or less.

No one can find anything out about Bobby’s background. Nothing so unusual in that. You would not dream of asking Shyam Sen why he can’t go back to Calcutta, or quizzing China Tony about his mangled fingers. Some things are private. But Bobby has a quality which is different from secretiveness. When he is talking to you, he seems to fall in with the rhythm of your voice. He will stand how you stand, making remarks that seem somehow tailored to your sense of humour. For all his swagger and beauty and flamboyance, there is something in Bobby which craves invisibility.

Bobby’s capacity for mimicry helps in his work. He can reduce British Other Ranks to fits by imitating regional accents. Oroight there, mate? Och ye dinnae wanna worrit yersel’. Now then, sirs, if you please to follow me I know a very good place… Bobby deals in stereotypes, sharply drawn. Sometimes he hangs around near the doorways of expensive places, paying the doormen to let him stay. He has short one-sided conversations. ‘How are you today, sir?’ ‘Good evening, can I be of service?’ There often does seem to be something he could arrange. Especially late at night outside Green’s or Watson’s, or at the Byculla Club on race day.

Bobby is a ghost, haunting thresholds, pools of electric light. He hovers at the limit of perception, materializing in his collar and tie like someone only semi-real, ethereal enough to trust with your secrets, safe in the knowledge that he would melt in direct sunlight. Bobby has never been inside the places he watches. He just catches the people who fall out of them. However, he knows one of the waiters at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, and once stands for a whole evening watching a ball. Flaming torches are set on the lawn, and strings of bulbs illuminate a floor of wooden boards around which the members dance each other’s wives and girlfriends, a whirl of white backs and arms watched intently by twenty pairs of Indian eyes.

Sometimes by day Bobby is a student. Under Reverend Macfarlane’s beady eye he recites Key Dates. The Battle of Hastings. Magna Carta. Glorious Revolution and War of Jenkins’s Ear. His Latin grammar is excellent. In return for his tuition he brings the Reverend photographic subjects. The routine is always the same. Tell them I won’t pay, he says, but he will, though only if the subject is from a caste or class he has not covered, and they will pose undraped.

Bobby wonders what Macfarlane thinks. What does he choose to believe about his pupil’s street friends? Or his clothes, or his manners, or his eagerness to learn the Reverend’s lessons? When Macfarlane looks at him, it is not with love, exactly. There is a challenge. An appraisal.

Actually Macfarlane is most surprised by the way Bobby studies his scientific books. One day he sneaks a look at a notebook to find, alongside lists of second declension nouns and the battles of the English Civil War, the sequence
Eskimo, Paiaearctiais or Ugrian, Sinicus, Northern Amerind, Turki, Paroean or Southern Mongoloid, Polynesian, Neo-Amerind, Tehuelche, Northwest Amerind…
And so on. All the racial subgroups, as listed by Haddon. There are other things. Charts. Tables of distributions and frequencies. His fascination with classification seems almost as intense as Macfarlane’s own.

No extraneous word is spoken in the classroom. The two of them communicate in raw data, streams of facts, typologies. Though he feels he ought to be flattered, Macfarlane finds it peculiar. He has a disciple, but there is something almost too avid about his concentration. Something aggressive. He has an instinct to cover himself. It is like having the marrow surreptitiously drained from his bones.

As they turn over information in Macfarlane’s attic room, both find it sinister. Perhaps, thinks Bobby, it is a kind of staring game. Who will blink first? He does not understand why he persists, what is the source of the weird fascination he finds in his lessons with Macfarlane. He feels closest to an answer when watching the Reverend at work on a photographic study. How his clawed hands arrange the model, clamping a body rigid in front of his grid. How they take measurements. The width of a pelvis. The angle of a breast. Dimensions calibrated, then noted down in a ledger. As Macfarlane peers into the camera, his hunched old-man’s body is merely a massive grizzled vehicle for an eye. A single line of force, drawn through the aperture like a wire. There is always strain in his face as he surfaces. Once a girl starts teasing him. Touching herself and striking poses. He stands away from the camera and stares. He seems appalled, unable to think. Finally Bobby bustles her out of the room, afraid Macfarlane is about to do something appalling.