The Impressionist (32 page)

‘Where did you say your family were from?’

It is the aunt, teacup poised between saucer and chin. He has not thought about this part of the story, and answers without thinking.

‘London.’

‘Oh really, which part?’

‘The – the east of the city.’

‘The East End? You surprise me. Whereabouts?’

‘Where?’

‘Yes, where?’

Bobby has heard of the East End. It is the opposite of the West End. But East End place names are beyond him.

‘Brighton’ he says uneasily. It is obviously the wrong answer. The two women look at him quizzically.

‘I thought you said London,’ says the niece, with that flirtatious relish for tripping up young men that nice English girls are taught at boarding school.

‘I did?’

‘You did.’

‘Well – my ancestors came from there. I was brought up in India, for the most part.’

‘But – you said you only came out to take up your present position with the Survey.’

Bobby could easily have said that. He doesn’t remember.

‘Oh, you must have misunderstood. I have been here a long time. Look, it has been lovely meeting you but I – I forgot that I have an appointment at three. I really must be going.’

He knows he is behaving oddly, but he cannot help it. His unease communicates itself to the aunt. Warning bells ring visibly in her head. Scanning the garden, she appears to be looking around for someone official. Bobby stands up. Her face clouds with a sudden intense suspicion.

‘Virginia? Did I leave my handbag here? I’m sure I had my blue bag with me.’

‘I think you took it upstairs, Aunt Dorothy.’

Aunt Dorothy looks sharply at Bobby. He looks wanly back at her. She notes the strain in his face, and takes it as an indication of guilt.

‘Mr Watkins. Have
you
seen my bag?’

‘Absolutely not. And now, if you’ll permit –’

‘Waiter? Waiter?’

Aunt Dorothy is convinced she has sniffed out a plot. She glares fiercely at Bobby. Already two or three hotel staff are converging on the table. Though he has done nothing wrong, Bobby does not think he could brazen out an explanation. He scrapes his chair back over the flagstones, and flees.

‘Stop, thief!’ calls out Aunt Dorothy in a bell-like tone.

Bobby heads rapidly for the main entrance. Luckily, no one in the lobby is of a vigilante cast of mind, and he reaches the street without being stopped. The only casualty is his Curzon topi, which falls off as he makes his escape. He runs through the afternoon heat and is soon comfortably lost in the maze of tenements. Later, holed up with Gul at Madame Noor’s, he decides the hat is no great loss. Real English people don’t seem to wear them, unless they are attending some sort of official function. A few days later he goes out and buys a plain pigsticking topi to replace it. A far less imposing item of headgear. Discretion, he is beginning to realize, is the key.

Luckily for Bobby, incidents like that of Virginia and Aunt Dorothy are few and far between. Once a middle-aged tax inspector, country-born, leans towards him and says, ‘You’re an Indian, aren’t you?’ but most of the time Bobby is free to reinvent himself, slipping into a new gora identity like one of Shahid Khan’s jackets. His pretences are flimsy at first, and he soon learns that looks and accent are not enough. There is, for example, the question of smell. Like everyone, Bobby has always wondered about the grim English war against cookery, their inexplicable liking for tasteless slabs of meat, unspiced vegetables and sweetened concoctions of flour and fat. A conversation with a naval rating reveals a side-effect of a diet devoid of garlic and onions. Bobby is pretending to be a man of influence, heir to an Edinburgh import-export business. The sailor snorts with laughter and tells him frankly that, money or no money, he stinks like a wog. Unless you sort yourself out, lad, you’ll die a bleeding bachelor. Bobby is too intrigued to be offended. What do wogs smell like? Is there a typical English smell? The question fascinates him. He starts to avoid garlic (at least before going out), and tries, surreptitiously, to inhale the scents of the people he accosts at the docks. It is not enough. One day, in desperation, he pays a servant at Watson’s Hotel a couple of annas to let him sniff the piles of dhobi. The man thinks he is a pervert, but is prepared to take his money anyway. Face buried in burra mem’s smalls and burra sahib’s dirty shirts, he finally puts a name to it. Rancid butter. With perhaps a hint of raw beef. The underlying whiff of Empire.

One can choose to avoid introspection. If Bobby makes himself invisible to others, shape-shifting, changing names and keeping his motives hidden, he does so no less to himself. Secrecy hints at depth, and this is what people fantasize about when they see him. The prostitutes and Theosophical ladies, the Cook’s tourists and the layabouts at the paan shop, are all prisoners of the conviction that, if they stared hard enough, they could unearth what lies beneath the beautiful mask of Bobby’s face. It is a kind of addiction. It makes him tantalizing, precious. Yet this aura would not be there if Bobby knew why he does what he does. It is cowardice, of course, but he tells himself he does not want to understand. Better, he thinks, to live an unexamined life. Otherwise you run the risk of not living at all.

So Bobby is a creature of surface. Tissue paper held up to the sun. He hints at transparency, as if on the other side, on the inside, there is something to be discovered. Maybe there is, maybe not. Maybe instead of imagining depth, all the people who do not quite know him should accept that Bobby’s skin is not a boundary between things but the thing itself, a screen on which certain effects take place. Ephemeral curiosities. Tricks of the light.

Stitch a personality together. Calico arms. Wooden head. A hat and a set of overheard opinions. How perfectly impossible it is to grow a good lawn in India. The positive moral effect of team sports. The unspeakable vileness of Mr Gandhi, and the lack of hygiene of just about everything. Lay them out one by one, like playing patience. It does not matter if you believe them. Belief is nothing but a trivial sensation in the stomach. Nevertheless, as Bobby builds and inhabits his puppets he grasps that there is something marvellous about English people. Their lives are structured like pieces of engineering, railway engines or steamers unpacked and bolted together at the heads of new rivers. Each one is rigid and assured, built according to blueprints of class and membership that are almost noble in their invariance, their stern inflexibility. Noble, at least, in the manner that a suspension bridge or a viaduct is noble. English lives, conquering and functional. Industrial lives.

Bobby is drifting towards something. It happens in imperceptible stages, a continuum rather than a leap, but if there is such a thing as the crossing of a line, it takes place on the night he meets Philips, the Singapore planter. Destiny electroplates the meeting, for Philips accosts Bobby, rather than the other way around, asking him for a light as he walks along Marine Drive. Bobby pulls out his new petrol lighter, and the man cups his hands over the flame. A little conversation accretes to the surface of the encounter, conversation of the nice-night-tonight variety, and for a while they stand and smoke, watching the running lights of the dhows on Back Bay. Philips introduces himself, and Bobby does the same. Bobby Flanagan, of Johnson & Leverhulme, Calcutta trading house. Philips is on his way home, first time in ten years, and to be honest, no offence intended, he doesn’t think much of Bombay. Not a patch on Singapore. Far more life over there, and by Jove a fellow needs a little life. However, by a stroke of luck he did meet some chaps who invited him to play in the billiards tournament tonight. Bobby must know it. The one at the Majestic. Only trouble is he needs to find a partner. Awfully irregular, but would Bobby consider…?

Philips has a disturbingly smooth face, round as a football, and his hair is slicked to one side by some kind of dressing that makes it shine in the moonlight like a gramophone record. He smokes in a stiff clubman’s attitude, one hand behind his back as if he is about to perform a recitation. Shellac man. Bobby is not convinced, but something about the conjunction of glittering surfaces, the water, the pale road, Philips’s absurd shiny hair, forces him to nod. They take a gharri, and head in the direction of the Majestic.

Bobby has often hung around the door of the Majestic Hotel. It is, by convention, a place where Indians are usually not welcome except as servants. When it comes to billiards, this informal rule is strictly applied. Heading through the lobby into the games room, Bobby is greeted by a sea of pink faces, half-drunk men in their shirtsleeves, chalking cues and downing chota-pegs at a great rate. Englishmen relaxing, venting all the frustrations and anxieties of India in alcoholic competition. He realizes with a shock that there will be no getting away from this until it is through.

Philips finds the men who invited him, and, amidst much shaking of hands and standing of drinks, ‘Philips and Flanagan’ is chalked on a board with the rest of the entrants. It is lucky for Bobby that the principles of the game of billiards are relatively easy to grasp, and that the standard of play at the weekly Majestic tournaments is notoriously low. Soon he is moving around the green baize table, listening to the Englishmen laughing and swapping stories of deals made, natives outwitted, game brought down and time still to serve. Bobby makes a difficult shot and Philips claps him on the back, his big hand casually sliding down to brush against his buttocks. Bobby turns round to find a sly grin on his partner’s face.

‘Glad I met you, young fellow.’

Bobby nods silently and hands him the cue.

They win the first-round match, and Bobby slips out on to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. He is elated, tense with the suppressed energy of the successful spy. The confidence of the billiard players has rubbed off on him, and he accosts a passing waiter, tersely ordering a gin and tonic and taking a white man’s pleasure in the brown man’s deep salaam. Taking the drink when it comes, he clenches a hand behind his back in unconscious imitation of Philips. The waiter disappears and Bobby is left to swirl the ice-cubes around his glass, their tiny bright clink like the sound of money. Suddenly he hears a woman’s laughter piercing the basso of male conversation from the billiard room. A couple have walked out on to one of the neighbouring balconies. The man is making some remark and the woman’s head is thrown back in amusement, one long white arm caressing the back of her partner’s neck. They appear intimate without being close. Bobby has the impression that they do not really know each other. The woman is beautiful. Her dark hair is cut daringly short and her clinging gown makes her body a theatre of pale yellow silk and bare skin, glowing lasciviously in the spill of electric light. She screws a cigarette into a holder and Bobby finds he is forgetting to breathe, so intense is her presence. The man is many years older, dull and solid next to his companion. How can he cope? How can he be immune to the operatic near-nakedness of this woman? For a moment Bobby catches his eye, and the man inclines his head, as if acknowledging his stunned homage.

‘I say.’

It is Philips, a shiny messenger to take Bobby back in for their second-round match. At the sound of his voice, the woman turns round and for a moment Bobby looks her in the eye. She returns his glance blankly, her face insolently gorgeous, not a flicker of reaction, even of appraisal. Pretty Bobby is not used to such indifference. In a deliberate gesture, she turns back to her escort and leads him inside.

In round two Flanagan and Philips are soundly beaten. It is mostly Flanagan’s fault, his play embarrassingly erratic compared to his assured first-round performance. Philips is drunk and indulgent, calling out bad luck and never mind, steadying himself on one of the bearers as if the man were a pillar or a wall. Soon Flanagan makes an attempt to leave, but his partner hurries after him, drunkenly crushing him against a wall on the Majestic’s main stairs, oblivious to the appalled glances of the men and women passing by on their way to bed. The encounter soon turns ugly, and when Flanagan hurriedly leaves the building, brushing away the doorman’s offer of a cab, the lapel of his jacket is torn. Yet during the course of the evening something else has knitted together. Pretty Bobby knows what he wants to be.

The woman at the hotel preys on Bobby’s mind. Her self-possession and her indifference. Her long white back and oval face. He wonders about her age, and decides she is probably very little older than him. What would it mean to stand on a balcony with her? What would it mean to look out over the smoking chimneys of the Mill districts and feel the presence of so many tens of thousands of people who would never climb up so far?