The Impressionist (36 page)

‘And so, old boy, that’s why I’m here,’ says Jonathan, clapping Bobby heartily on the back. Tomorrow morning I sail for England. This Spavin chappie is to act as my guardian until I’m twenty-one. Frankly I don’t know what to think. Never met the fellow myself. Some kind of friend of my grandfather’s. I mean to say, what if he’s an old tyrant? Bloody inconvenient to have to go begging to him every time I want a few shillings. And to be honest I don’t like the sound of Blighty much. I know you’re not supposed to say that, but I hear it’s damn cold. You’ve been, presumably?’

‘Yes,’ says Bobby. ‘That is, no. Not really. I’ve lived here for the most part.’

‘Hmm,’ nods Bridgeman sagely. Thought you were country-born. One can always tell.’

‘So, you’ve got no relatives at all?’

‘None that I know of, old boy. Last of the line. Anyway, strike or not, there was no chance I was going to spend my last night of freedom cooped up in some hotel room. All my stuff’s already on the boat, and so long as I’m there for the medical tomorrow morning, it doesn’t matter what condition I’m in, does it?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘No it bloody doesn’t! And I don’t mind telling you my balls are like two ripe melons. Tried to get my leg over with a little half-caste nurse on the train, but she wasn’t having any of it. Told me she would pull the emergency handle, frigid bitch. One would have thought she’d be grateful, but there really is no pleasing some of them. Now, what I’m really after is a big girl. You know, one carrying a little extra ballast in front and behind. It’s how I like’em. Nothing worse than a skinny tart, don’t you think?’

As they turn into the maze of back alleys off Falkland Road, Bobby looks around nervously. He is taking a chance bringing this Bridgeman here tonight. For the moment everything seems quiet. A few people watch them go past, Bobby trying to saunter casually, Bridgeman putting one deliberate foot in front of the other. Two cocky English boys out for a stroll.

For big girls the place to go is the Goa House. Maria Francesca is surprised to see them, shooting a nervous glance at Bobby as Bridgeman lumbers up the stairs and through the door. There are no other customers, so the whole household is in the parlour drinking tea and snacking on sticky coconut sweets. A row of smiling chewing faces. Bridgeman claps his hands in glee at the sight of such a buffet of plump disrobed flesh, and immediately drags Tereza, by far the largest in this household of binge-eaters, through the bead curtain into one of the bedrooms. Bobby paces up and down, smoking pensively, half listening to a story of Twinkle’s about a client who always arrives with a mango.

‘Are you mad?’ Maria asks Bobby. ‘Why bring this fellow here tonight? People are out for blood, you know.’

‘Nothing will happen,’ Bobby snaps. ‘I’ll take him home after this. We all need to eat, you know,’ he says, gesturing sarcastically at the ravaged plate of sweets. ‘What is life without risk?’ He likes the sound of this phrase, which he found in one of Mrs Macfarlane’s novels. It has a manly, adventurous ring. Maria snorts derisively.

‘Look at you – you coconut. You can’t leave the English alone, even when it means you might get your throat cut.’

‘Fuck your mother.’

‘I’ve had everybody else. No, I take it back. Not a coconut. You look white on the outside too.’

She says it with a smile, and Bobby lets the insult go. From the bedroom comes a deep melon-squeezing bellow of pleasure, accompanied by Tereza’s professional sounding trills and ornaments. A few minutes later Bridgeman reappears, a beatific look on his face.

‘Drink, old man?’ he asks Bobby, taking a swig from his hip flask. The girls look impressed at this familiar tone. Pretty Bobby, so suave that even the feringhi treat him as one of their own. Bobby sips a little, for form’s sake, feeling the liquid searing the inside of his throat as it goes down. An unpleasant thought occurs to him.

‘This isn’t – is it?’

‘Oh no,’ laughs Bridgeman. ‘Old Malt Tisky? No, there’s been none of that around for years. This is
my
recipe.’

Bobby is not reassured. Bridgeman, however, is in the best of moods. Barely noticing that he is the only one drinking, he polishes off the rest of his flask and asks Maria, with a rakishly appraising glance, whether she has some kind of discount rate for special clients. Though his voice is so slurred that she has trouble understanding, she finally discerns that he wants to ‘go again’, this time with her. Another bedroom interlude ensues, punctuated by Maria’s unique yelling. She really plays to the gallery, pulling off some spectacular pitch-shifting moans which go down particularly well in the parlour. Arré, says Tereza, she sounds like a factory siren. After a while there is silence. Not bothering to dress, Maria comes out to tell Bobby his friend has passed out.

‘He can’t stay here,’ she says, rolling her eyes and waggling a scornful little finger at Tereza. Tereza makes the same gesture back, and all the girls fall about laughing. Bobby sends one of them out for some water.

An hour later, he and Bridgeman are on the road again. Bobby is half carrying him, a beefy post-coital arm lying across his shoulders, heavy and damp as a forest log. The thing,’ Bridgeman is telling him ‘about old Blighty is that it’s different from here.’ The street is deserted, but he feels uneasy. The air has a charred smell, and stumbling out of the Goa House they stepped over a single shoe, forlorn in the middle of the roadway. Now that the majority of this drunken idiot’s rupees have been transferred to his own pocket, Bobby wants to get shot of him. As soon as they are somewhere near the big hotels, he will let him go.

Not to be.

Bridgeman is wondering whether the mountains in Blighty are like the mountains here, and guessing that they couldn’t hold a candle, when one of the shadows ahead of them splits up and filters into several smaller shadows, each carrying a stick or a bottle or a knife. Bobby goes cold. Seven, eight men? Even from a distance they reek of smoke and toddy. The leader has a rag wrapped round his head and an iron bar in his hand. There is a smear of blood across his cheek, as if he has already been fighting tonight. As he steps into the light, Bobby sees his eyes are bloodshot with bhang.

‘Sisterfucking feringhis,’ he spits.

Self-interest is deep-rooted in most people, and in Bobby deeper than most. The decision to drop the semi-conscious Bridgeman is made, more or less, in the time it takes for the relevant synaptic messages to travel from brain to legs.

He runs.

And behind him hears yells, thuds, sickening sounds.

So he runs faster.

After a while he realizes they have not come after him, and stops. He hugs his knees, his breath coming in huge ragged gasps. When he has recovered, he starts to feel guilty. He should have stayed with Bridgeman. He should have buckled his swash and flourished a rapier and fought them off. All eight of them? Swearing, he takes off his tie and folds his jacket under one arm. Then he gingerly starts walking back the way he came.

The men have gone. He makes sure of that first. Bridgeman has been dragged into an alley, between the high walls of a tenement and a builder’s yard. He is lying on his back, his arms limp and formal at his sides. He looks peaceful, from a distance. Still.

Bobby waits and watches for several minutes. Yes, they have gone. It is safe to approach.

Bridgeman looks no better dead than he did alive. The left-hand plane of his face is a single huge contusion, black and swollen. His jaw has a lopsided look, one side caved in by a blow. The grubby shirt, once decorated with food stains, now glistens a uniform blood-red. Bobby examines him with a kind of detached pity. The alcoholic boy who was to go to England. One last night of fun. An odd touch: through all of it he somehow managed to hold on to his hip flask. Bobby bends down and prises it out of the dead hand. Turning it over, he traces the initials JPB, engraved on the side, and this makes him feel guilty again, for a moment.

Bridgeman’s empty wallet is lying near by. Bobby is about to leave, nervous about being found next to a corpse, but something makes him stop. By his foot is a little leather document folder. Inside is his steamer ticket to England, a passport in the name of ‘Jonathan Pelchat Bridgeman’ and a blank sheet of notepaper with an engraved heading: ‘Spavin & Muskett: Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths’, of the Gray’s Inn Road, London.

He looks at the photograph on the passport. A dark-haired young man stares out at the camera, his face so washed out it is almost blank. Not much of a likeness.

It could be anybody.

He puts the documents in his pocket and starts to walk back to the Mission. The idea is already fully formed before he has reached the end of the street. He knows what he is going to do.

He can smell kerosene on the air. Bridgeman, the actual physical Jonathan Bridgeman, is already fading. Someone known for a few hours only. Emptied and reinhabited. He grins. How easy it is to slough off one life and take up another! Easy when there is nothing to anchor you. He marvels at the existence of people who can know themselves by kneeling down and picking up a handful of soil. Man was created out of dust, says the Reverend. But if men and women are made of dust, then he is not one of them. If they feel a pulse through their bare feet and call it home, if they look out on a familiar landscape and see themselves reflected back, he is not one of them. Man out of earth, says the Reverend. Earth out of man, say the Vedas, like the sun and the moon and all other creation, born out of the body of the Primal Man. But he feels he has nothing of the earth in him at all. When he moves across it, his feet do not touch the surface. So he must have come from somewhere else, some other element.

As he turns the corner on to Falkland Road, he hears a sound like heavy rain falling through trees.

The street is full of people, jostling and shouting. Over all their earth-coloured faces something casts a livid orange glow. He is so wrapped up in his transformation that he is in the midst of the crowd before he knows what it is.

The Mission is on fire.

Flames lick over its wooden frontage like fingers on the strings of an instrument. They make a crackling sound, a low awful roar that momentarily bursts open into a rush, a crashing. The speech of giants. He tries to force his way forward, suddenly horrified at the loss of this place, of his room with its collage of half-tone faces, the cupboard of clothes, the familiarity of the walk downstairs to the parlour. The Mission sign has almost been consumed, only a few words still legible:
Dare we let them die in darkness when we have the light of.
At the front of the crowd someone is waving a home-made red flag. A kerosene stink catches in his nose and mouth. What will Mrs Macfarlane say? After all her work, her love? And the Reverend?

As if in response to his question, the shutters of the garret above the church are suddenly flung open. The crowd seethes and pushes, those at the front trying to back up to protect themselves from the scorching heat, while those further back press them forward. He elbows forward, feeling his face,
Bobby’s
face, baked dry by a searing wind. Fists punching the air. Chanting. Burn! Burn! Bright faces, bared teeth, howling red mouths. On to the balcony stumbles the Reverend himself, like a vision of damnation. His face and clothes are covered in soot, his hair and beard standing away from his head in a haze of smoking grey. His eyes are wild, and he shouts something down at the mob, inaudible over the sound of the flames. Seeing him, the crowd draws back, and some people try to run. The chanting falters, and stops. Cradled in his arms is a pile of skulls. For an instant the scene is suspended in time and ever afterwards Bobby will remember it like that, still and silent as a photograph. Then, with a sickening tearing sound, the balcony collapses inwards, and, like a pile of rags, the Reverend disappears into the flames.

Bobby pushes back through the crowd, fighting to break free. There is nothing here for him any more, nothing to make him stay. He feels the earth moving swift and frictionless beneath his feet.

Jonathan Bridgeman

Jonathan Bridgeman stands at the stern rail of the
SS Loch Lomond
and watches its wake, which looks like a line of whitewash painted on the black water. Though he is crossing the black water, the kala pani, he feels no ill effects, no draining away of caste or merit. Close under the rail the churned-up white actually appears a pale phosphorescent green, the colour of ghosts or radium cure-alls. The night air is warm, and beneath the scrubbed decking turbines are turning giant propellers to make billions of light-emitting algae glitter expensively, just for him, as if to prove that the water can also be the very opposite of black, if it chooses. Bridgeman smiles and hooks the collar of his jacket up over his head, to shield himself as he lights a cigarette.

So the black funnels will carry on pumping out coal-smoke to blot out the stars, and couples will carry on strolling upon the buff-coloured deck, and the ship will carry Jonathan Bridgeman into the mouth of the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal and ease him out into the Mediterranean, so called because it is the centre of the world and around its shores civilization was born in a conjunction of war and law and democratic institutions and the disciplined observation of nature. Leaving the Mediterranean, the black and buff coloured ship will round Cape Finisterre,
finisterra,
the end of the earth, for beyond that, beyond the earth altogether, lies England.