The Impressionist (35 page)

Finally the Captain stops babbling and jumps down. He makes a brief address to the crowd, telling them to disperse quietly, go back to their homes, let the King-Emperor’s officers do their duty. Then he slaps the lorry’s side and tells the last of his men to get in. As the engine coughs into life, Bobby runs to the tailgate, but no matter how many times he waves or calls her name he cannot make Ambaji look at him. Finally one of the constables gets up and pulls the canvas flap closed. The driver inches forward, leaning on the horn, pushing the front bumper up against the jostling mass of people. The crowd parts reluctantly and the lorry drives away into the darkness.

Bobby finds Reverend Macfarlane standing at the door of the church, staring at a group of youths who are loitering around on the opposite side of the street.

‘Go on! he shouts at them in English. ‘Go away! Godless rabble.’

‘Reverend,’ implores Bobby. ‘Mrs Macfarlane has been arrested.’

‘Yes, I saw. Go on! Get away before I take a tawse to the lot of you!’

‘What shall we do?’

‘Do? Nothing, boy. She is reaping what she has sowed, cleaving to Bolshevists and Satanists. Where have you been? I expected you this afternoon to assist in an experiment.’

One of the youths throws a stone, which clatters against the church door. ‘Imperialist!’ he shouts. ‘Capitalist lackey!’

Reverend Macfarlane strides across the road and the boys scatter, calling more Communist slogans as they run away. The Reverend comes back, red-faced and out of breath, to extract a promise that Bobby will help him with the work in the morning. As soon as he can, Bobby makes an excuse and goes up to his room.

His collage of pictures looks down at him, all the hundreds of magazine faces, stars in the sky. They make him feel earthbound, insect-like.

He is worried about Mrs Macfarlane. She is old. She loves him. Yet as soon as she returns he will be homeless, so maybe it is good they arrested her. Is it bad to think like this? He has a sense of collapse, of scaffolding falling away. Something like this has happened before, but then it was sudden and unforeseen. Now he feels as if he is leaking, all the particulars that go to make up Pretty Bobby draining away to leave behind nothing but an empty vessel. A husk. When he falls asleep, the watercarriers are already moving through the streets, making their early-morning deliveries.

The next day Bombay is shuttered up. Only the European shops in the Fort remain open, their owners posting men at the doors to ward off trouble. The trade unions have called a one-day strike, aimed mainly at shutting down production in the cotton mills. The streets are filled with a roiling crowd of workers. Mrs Macfarlane and her friends have been arrested to prevent them from marching and making speeches, but despite the wave of detentions the city is at a standstill. Bobby spends the morning measuring shin bones with Reverend Macfarlane, listening distractedly as he outlines a plan to quantify relative degrees of moral rectitude in north Indian racial groups by weighing (postmortem) sections of the frontal lobe of the brain. Through the open window comes the sound of engines, troop carriers roaring past to deploy platoons of English Tommies at strategic locations around Bombay.

By lunch-time Falkland Road is a rumour factory, centred on the paan stall. The red-spittled gossipers say some strikers have tried to hold a meeting on the maidan, but it was broken up by a police charge. They say anarchists tried to torch one of Readymoney’s mills, but were shot. Or they were Communists and got away. Motilal Nehru will make a speech. A woman was run over by a military vehicle. The Governor has left the city. The British will use aeroplanes. Hindu fanatics are attacking Muslims in the suburban slums.

People are feverish, tense. When Bobby goes out, he notices an atmosphere of hostility. It is odd, barely tangible, but people who normally greet him are avoiding his glance. His sense of foreboding worsens during the afternoon, as he spots the stone-throwing Communists of the previous night hanging around outside the Mission, looking up at Reverend Macfarlane’s shuttered window.

At dusk a column of smoke is clearly visible, rising up from the slums near the Tata Mills. Falkland Road is unusually full, and something about the ebb and flow of people strikes Bobby as odd. There is no impression of fun or pleasure-seeking. These men are ready, waiting for something. An hour or so after sunset, a ragged march goes past, garlanded satyagrahis punching the air to the sound of drums and wailing trumpets. It leaves behind a restless wake of men and boys, looking for action, a focus, something to bring the strike day to a climax.

A fire of rubbish is lit in the street, and people stand around in its orange light. From his window Bobby sees a motor car turn the corner, a white face visible behind the wheel. The car stops dead, hesitates, then turns round to go back the way it came. Gradually more people crowd around the fire. Bobby spots men carrying staves, one a long curved knife. Then a lorry of policemen growls down the street, and the crowd dissipates, leaving the fire behind to burn itself out. The constables hang around for a few minutes, kicking over the embers and peering up at the tall rickety wooden buildings. Then they leave.

Afterwards, things quieten down. Maybe tonight will pass peacefully after all. Bobby is bored sitting at the window. He needs air, space to think, so he pulls on a linen jacket, knots a tie around his neck and goes out for a walk. As soon as he steps outside he feels the difference. People stare at him, and once or twice men try to block his way, until he speaks to them or some other person pulls them back, explaining who he is. It is not good to look English tonight in Bombay.

Bobby’s walk leads him into the Fort. Here he has the streets to himself. The office windows are unlit, the tramlines are silent, and apart from a few beggars and the odd hurrying cyclist he could almost imagine that this is the moment just after the end of the world, Pretty Bobby wandering around on a stage set which all the other players have vacated. He amuses himself by occupying the space in suitably lordly fashion, strolling in the middle of the road and stretching out his arms to become as large as possible. Pretty Bobby, Lord of Endtime Bombay.

Progressing with giant steps through the abandoned city, he arrives at Flora Fountain. A stockade of gas lights illuminates this underwhelming piece of scenery, a little outcrop of soiled statuary jutting out of a tarmac plain. As he walks towards it, he discovers that he is not the only bit player to be left behind. Under the lights, still performing for all they are worth, are two others, an English boy and a cow.

‘God almighty,’ slurs the youth. ‘What does one have to do to be treated civilly in this hole of a city? Rude, that’s what it is. Bloody rude.’

He seems to be talking to the animal. Bobby advances cautiously, until he reaches the edge of the pool of light. The boy sways on his feet, fumbling in his pockets. He locates a hip flask, drinks from it and appears to come to a decision.

‘Right, cow. If you’re not going to play fair, the gloves are coming off. I say to you – just a shot across the bows, you understand –
Horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding.’

The cow looks at him impassively. The boy looks annoyed.

‘Steak, you idiot! Jerky! Stew! I’m not mucking about. I don’t give a fig for your bloody Cow Protection Societies or any of the rest of your Hindustani fan club. I’m bloody going to eat you, you pig of a cow.’

He looks as if he is squaring up to punch the animal on the nose, but spots Bobby. ‘Hallelujah!’ he shouts. ‘Someone with vocal cords. The name’s Bridgeman. This beast is a bloody disgrace. Now, you wouldn’t happen to know where one could purchase a tart around here, would you?’

Bobby nods cautiously. Bridgeman’s face lights up. ‘Ha!’ he shouts, like someone who has just won a particularly difficult point in a game, and slaps the cow’s rump in satisfaction. ‘Take me there, right now. What did you say your name was, old fellow?’

Bobby has not said, and is yet to be convinced he is taking anyone anywhere. This Bridgeman is in a sorry condition. Though he cannot be above twenty, his rough skin is livid with the effects of a day’s drinking, and his clothes bear the remains of more than one meal eaten standing up. Even sober, his face would not inspire much confidence. It has a doughy, half-formed quality, small eyes and a blunt porcine nose swimming over it like dumplings in some sort of fatty soup. Drunk, his entire head seems unpleasantly mobile beneath its fringe of lank brown hair. Jelly-like. Unstable.

He does, however, have money. He proves this by taking it out of his pocket and waving it around. ‘So, old lad,’ he slurs, ‘we are going to have ourselves a time. A grand finale. Right, where’s the bloody bovine gone?’

He is adamant that they should take the cow with them. Even when he realizes it has trotted off, he seems inclined to go looking for it. Eventually he accepts its loss and allows Bobby to walk him in the direction of the red light district, keeping up a flow of conversation that fills Bobby both with wonder (at its volume, dexterity, total unconcern for listener) and with a creeping, unmistakable sense of fate.

Before they have reached the end of Esplanade Road, Bobby has found out most of what there is to know about Jonathan Bridgeman, from his premature birth on the floor of a dak bungalow in Bihar to the reasons for his intense intoxication in Bombay nearly eighteen years later. He is, it turns out, within a month of being the same age as Bobby, and is a second-generation drunkard. Son of a dipsomaniac tea planter and his similarly inclined wife, he spent his early life up in the hills near Darjeeling, helping his father knock together a series of makeshift stills under the gaze of the mighty Himalaya.

After mother Bridgeman fell off the veranda and broke her neck (an event which took place when Jonathan was still small), her grieving husband vowed never to send his son to school in England, indeed never to let the Only Thing He Had Left out of his sight. Thus by the age of ten Jonathan knew how to ride, shoot and mix an excellent gin and tonic, but was unable to read or write. This did not bother his father. Literacy was, to his way of thinking, the root cause of his wife’s demise, she having slipped on a copy of
Blackwood’s
magazine which had been carelessly discarded on the front steps.

In those moments when he was capable of directed behaviour, Bridgeman senior’s energies were entirely devoted to a project to distil a new type of spirit from tea leaves. When perfected, this elixir was to replace Scotch whisky in the affections of the British populace, and so make its creator wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Unfortunately, either due to faults in the production process or to the innate unsuitability of tea for the purpose, most batches of ‘Bridgeman’s Old Malt Tisky’ tended to induce seizures and temporary blindness, and its creator eventually decided to amend the recipe to include rice.

Much given to bouts of depression, during which he would take melancholic potshots at his estate workers with a small-bore hunting rifle, Mr Bridgeman eventually realized that even rice would not rescue his dream from ruin. The disappointment made him more than usually morose, but following negotiations with the District Officer (backed up by a platoon of Gurkha infantry), he finally freed his hostages and allowed himself to be committed to the care of the Little Sisters of Violent Contrition, who ran a discreet institution in Calcutta. Little Jonathan was put into a nearby boarding school, with the instruction that he should visit his ailing parent once a month.

In the first few years, Bradshaw’s Calcutta Boys’ Academy beat the rudiments of an education into young Bridgeman, teaching him to eat with his mouth closed, grapple meaningfully with Roman numerals and the alphabet, and keep silent throughout even the longer morning chapel services. Everyone expected him to return to the hills and engage in some rugged pastime, perhaps of a military nature, which would take him to a remote spot where his unpolished manners and already flourishing alcoholism would cause least upset. They reckoned without the miraculous healing powers of the Little Sisters, and their head psychiatrist, Mother Agnes.

Agnes, a burly Slovenian nun with a face like a polished walnut and the temper of a pack-camel, had no truck with mad people. Taking her cue from the traditional customs of her tough mountain village, she employed a regime of cold baths, incarceration and religious invective that produced startling results in her patients. It was said (erroneously) that she literally scared them into sanity. In fact, when sudden temperature changes and a colourful lecture on the torments of hell were insufficient to effect a cure, her technique of last resort was the wrestling pit. Stripping off and oiling herself down, she would take her more recalcitrant charges round to the back of the convent, and there give them a thorough drubbing, moving systematically through the sequences of throws, grapples and locks that had once so effectively protected her chastity against the predations of local shepherds, maddened by lonely months in the high pastures.

It was in this way that Jonathan’s father was returned to sanity. After he cried mercy and promised never to drink again, he made a spectacular recovery. No one had ever expected him to be released, but shortly after his son’s fifteenth birthday he arrived at the school gates, properly dressed and sober, to announce that he wished Jonathan to continue his education, and eventually to go to England to study at one of the great universities. He was truly a changed man. The masters shook him by the hand, raised eyebrows at the large silver crucifix he wore round his neck (fanatical adherence to the Church of Rome being a side-effect of the Mother Agnes cure) and privately considered his hopes for his son laughable. However, Jonathan did his best, mastering various multisyllabic words and acquiring a veneer of wit and culture that impressed even his harshest critics at Bradshaw’s Academy.

Sadly, years of Tisky-tasting had taken their toll on Mr Bridgeman’s health, and a year after his release from the care of the Sisters he died. At the reading of the will it was discovered that he had bequeathed half his estate to Mother Agnes and the rest (a surprising amount) to his son, to be administered by the Bridgeman family solicitor in London, one Mr Spavin.