The Impressionist (27 page)

Despite himself Bobby feels uneasy. On one side Mrs Pereira’s fat ham of a hand is pressing down hard and sweaty on his, on the other Mabel’s dry claw is doing the same. Beneath his palms he can feel the rough scarred wood of the table. The medium’s breathing comes hard and ragged in the darkness.

‘Blue Pearl? Blue Pearl? Can you hear me? It is I, Rosita, calling you. Blue Pearl, come to the portal. Rosita wishes communion.’

Bobby peers through the darkness. He can see nothing. Mrs Pereira’s hand is pressing down ever harder, half crushing his. He wants to pull away. The air feels close and foetid, though this is probably just the medium’s overpowering perfume, which is robbing him of breath, lacing his throat and nostrils with cheap musk.

‘Blue Pearl? Blue Pearl? Is that you I hear?’

A series of sharp raps pierces the darkness. Around the table, the sitters shift in their chairs excitedly. Mrs Pereira’s voice takes on a thick gluey quality.

‘Blue Pearl?’

More knocking sounds. Then another, deeper voice.

‘Is it thou, sweet Rosita? Callest thee? Is it thou who callest me out of the light?’

Mrs Pereira makes a low gurgling sound.

‘I have been watching thy circle from up above. My brethren in the realm of light are mightily pleased with thy researches.’

Once again Mrs Pereira’s voice is clear.

‘Thank you, Blue Pearl. Thank you. You do us all a great honour.’

‘I have a message for one among you. The one who harnesses the great machines.’

Mr Arbuthnot calls out excitedly. That’s me! I mean, it is I, Blue Pearl. Arbuthnot, the railway engineer. What do you want to tell me?’

‘I have a message from the one you lost.’

‘Oh God, David? You’ve spoken to David? What does he say?’

‘David is here beside me. He has not yet the power to speak of his own accord. He says to tell you that he is treated with great honour here in the realm of light. He wishes you to know that he is watching over you.’

‘Oh heaven. Thank you. Thank you. And has he seen his mother up there? Is Thomasina with him?’

The twain are united, and they give you their blessings. David is free of all pain now. He was borne aloft out of the icy waters. He hath fought on the waves and is become a hero, now and for ever. He has escaped the cycle of birth and death.’

‘Oh thank you. Thank you.’

Mr Arbuthnot’s voice catches, and Bobby hears muffled sobbing across the other side of the table. This moment of grief is interrupted by a sudden crack. The tabletop starts rolling and bucking like a wild animal. Beside him, Bobby can hear Mrs Pereira inhaling and exhaling hard, as if performing some kind of heavy physical exertion. Weirdly her breathing seems to be coming from somewhere near his knees. Her hand has squirmed into a different position, its heel pressing down painfully on his fingers.

‘Watch out!’ It is Mabel, her voice suddenly loud and excited. ‘Don’t break the circle. My mother is in the grip of some other spirit.’ Around the table the sitters cry out in alarm.

‘Watch over her!’ calls out Mabel. ‘Watch for her!’

The table starts to rise up, until Bobby’s hands are almost in front of his nose. Then with a clatter it falls back to the floor. Mrs Pereira makes more gurgling noises.

‘Be careful!’ shouts Mabel. ‘It is a young spirit who doesn’t know its own power!’

The table stops moving, and for a minute or two the only sound in the parlour is the medium’s laboured breathing. Then, so quiet as to be almost inaudible, there is a tinkle of bells. A tiny girlish voice, broken by phlegmy coughing, comes out of Mrs Pereira’s throat.

‘Tra-la-la! It is I!’

The sitters are silent.

‘Hey-la. What fun, what fun! So glum, so glum, why so glum?’

Mr Shivpuri speaks up, in a tremulous voice. O spirit? Who are you please?’

‘Who am I? Am I? Why I am myself, of course! You silly, silly.’

‘I say again, who are you?’

‘They call me Little Orchid, you silly, and I have been young since the beginning of the world. I like fun! So much fun! Fun for you and fun for me!’

‘Please?’ It is Mademoiselle Garnier’s voice. ‘Is it very pretty there?’

‘Pretty pretty! All is light and happiness. All is joy, tra-la!’

‘Please?’ asks Mademoiselle Garnier. ‘Do you have perhaps anyone there from Charleroi?’

Mrs Pereira is suddenly taken by a fit of coughing. Bobby feels her moving around in her chair. Once again there is the sound of distant bell-ringing and the table begins to judder.

‘Please?’ Mademoiselle Gamier sounds desperate. ‘Charleroi? You have seen? Please? You have seen?’

Mademoiselle Gamier is to be disappointed. Little Orchid does not speak again. After more bells and rocking, Blue Pearl’s voice comes back into the parlour.

‘Verily, the spiritual frequencies are busy this night. The golden chain between the two worlds is most strongly manifested. I have two more spirits here, taken in their prime. Young warriors who seek a mother.’

‘Oh Lord,’ whispers Elspeth. ‘Can it be true?’

‘They have not yet the power of speech, for it is hard to keep the ethereal charge flowing.’

There is a banging and clattering at the table.

‘Quick!’ cries Mabel. ‘My mother is at the end of her strength. I don’t know how long she can hold the portal open. Perhaps we can communicate using the spirit code. O spirits, spirits! Answer our questions, we beseech you. Knock once for yes, twice if you don’t know and three times for no. Do you understand?’

A single knock.

‘Is there one in this room with whom you wish to speak?’

A knock.

‘Is your mother here among us?’

A knock.

Elspeth Macfarlane’s voice is choked with emotion. ‘Kenneth? Duncan? Is that you?’

Again, a single knock. Elspeth breaks into uncontrollable floods of tears.

Long before he tore them apart, God brought Andrew Macfarlane and Elspeth Ross together. Elspeth and her sister had been invited by the Johnstone boys on an outing to Melrose Abbey, to take a look at the ruins and, as Petie Johnstone put it, ‘Just to imagine how all the old monks and nuns used to spend their days.’ The girls thought never in a million years, but, in a rare fit of good nature (and because the Johnstones were the chemist’s boys, and had prospects), father had given his permission. However, when the two excited girls opened the curtains on the appointed Saturday morning, the world outside was wet and grey. Low clouds hung heavily over the trees on the hillside, and rainwater was already coursing in rivulets down the cobbled street below their bedroom window. There was nothing for it. The trip was cancelled.

Afterwards Malcolm Johnstone could have kicked himself. He would always put it like that when he told the story. I could have kicked myself right the way from here to the Border. Nevertheless it was his idea to look in on the public lecture at the kirk hall. Better than nothing, he thought. At least it was a chance to sit next to Elspeth for an hour, an hour in which there would surely be sixty minutes’ worth of opportunities to touch her hand, or brush her leg with his, or to scrape his foot inch by inch over the parquet until the side of his shoe was touching the side of hers. He did all of that. On the other side of him, Petie and Susan were doing the same, but with one big difference. When Petie’s searching fingers made accidental-on-purpose contact with Susan’s, they found themselves accidentally touched back. There was hand-holding. There was pressing of calf against calf. What Malcolm could not see directly, he could tell by the colour of Petie’s face. Red as a beetroot, the lucky beggar.

Malcolm, on the other hand, got nowhere. Elspeth ignored him with a resoluteness that was both shocking and hurtful. She sat listening to the bushy-bearded missionary as if he had cast a spell on her. Here was a local man, from Kelso just along the Tweed, who had swapped the pale watery light of Scotland for the scorching sun of India, who though still young had already spent ten years braving the most appalling hardships, walking for months through the Eastern jungles and living among savage tribesmen who worshipped devils and hung the painted skulls of children outside their huts for decoration.

Oblivious to Malcolm’s mute and yearning presence at her side, Elspeth listened to tales of poor benighted people bowing down to idols and trusting themselves to the wiles of native priests, and fell in love. As he told his story, Reverend Macfarlane’s eyes burned with such passion that in a few moments the vague images of Malcolm which had begun to forge themselves into a band in her mind, images which were all mixed up with the tinkle of the Johnstones’ shop doorbell and the smells of cold medications and scented soap, were completely incinerated. To her he was Andrew immediately, even as she sat there in the hall, ignoring Malcolm’s questioning toe and listening to the lecture, even before she had spoken a word to him.

Andrew.

Andrew had lain for three weeks in a savage’s hut, praying to God to deliver him from the fevered hallucinations of malaria. Andrew had seen the Assamese tribeswomen shamelessly parading their nakedness, and called upon them to cover themselves. Andrew had healed their sick and made a mortal enemy of their witchdoctor, who collected snake venom and shook his bone rattle, trying to cast a curse on the powerful white devil who was so destroying his prestige. With his own hands Andrew had cut down jungle trees and raised high the beams of the Mission Church, bringing the Word of God for the first time in history to this forsaken corner of the Empire. Andrew told of all this with wonderful humility, saying that it was his duty, the measure of his Christian faith, the least that could be expected of someone who had the good fortune to have been born in the knowledge of God’s grace. When he finished speaking and asked everyone to join him in a short hymn, Elspeth sang so loudly and enthusiastically that people in the row in front turned round to look. Afterwards Malcolm hung around gloomily at the back of the hall as she stood beside the lectern, shifting from foot to foot, asking the speaker a hundred questions and, finally, inquiring whether he might not perhaps care to take tea at her father’s house. By the time Petie and Susan were married the following spring, Andrew and Elspeth Macfarlane had already taken ship for India.

At first the joys outweighed the disappointments. The stern clarity of Andrew’s faith made the world seem certain and secure. Elspeth felt armoured by his firm rules, protected by his pronouncements that such a thing was sinful and such another thing the only possible course for a Christian. She loved his coarse sunburnt skin, his fierce patriarchal features, even the way his sleeping body was drenched in sweat when the old fever made one of its occasional reappearances. In the privacy of the marriage bed her eighteen-year-old body knew revelations, as her husband took his rights with an abandon that, had she not been reassured it was lawful, would have seemed to her the very definition of carnal sin.

Elspeth’s trust in Andrew was complete, so she swallowed her disappointment at hearing, in their little room at Mrs Butler’s Travellers’ Boarding House at St Pancras, that they would not be going to Assam. Some dispute with the Mission Society meant that Andrew was no longer the minister of the church in the jungle. Also, as he gently explained, his work there was done. The job of keeping savage minds fixed on the Lord belonged to another man. His calling was taking him in a different direction. Looking out over the soot-blackened roofs of King’s Cross, the London skyline hazed with green-tinged fog, Andrew painted a picture of another city, darker still. Amidst the teeming slums of Bombay were souls crying out for the word of God, souls who had nothing but three million Hindu idols, every single one diabolic in origin, to satisfy their spiritual cravings. On his lecture tour Andrew had raised enough money to start a mission in the very heart of the slums, where the degradation and depravity was at its worst. He asked her to think of it, the honour of bringing true Christianity to a city where fire-worshipping sects exposed their dead for the birds to pick clean, and Jesuit priests, almost as idolatrous as the Hindus themselves, went among the poor and needy spreading distorted versions of His Word. He knew the road they were about to travel was hard, but he would never have dreamt of asking Elspeth to join him on the journey had he not believed implicitly in her fortitude. She bowed her head and told him she would follow wherever he led.

Her first taste of disillusionment came a few weeks later, as she was walking on the deck of the Peninsular & Oriental steamer, squinting out at the bright glare of the Red Sea. The rubber soles of her deck shoes squeaked with each pace she took past the first-class passengers, who reclined on folding chairs, attended by solicitous young stewards in starched white uniforms. When she had first climbed up the gangplank and was handed the passenger list, she thrilled at the thought that she would be mingling with such exalted, interesting people: Civil Servants, Indian Army officers, all the aristocracy of the Raj. However, it was rapidly made clear to her, through silences, seating plans and acid politeness, that a missionary’s wife was not the honoured rank she had been led to believe. Her second-class cabin on the starboard side of the ship, the inferior side which caught the full force of the sun, marked her as unfit to eat with, or even talk to, the Heaven-born or the business nabobs, who appeared in their tails each night at dinner to take possession of the ballroom, spinning their shimmering wives and daughters around in their richly tailored arms. Now, as she passed a gaggle of elderly memsahibs surveying some of the young folk playing deck quoits, she heard one cut-glass English voice remark to another, insolently loud, not caring if she heard, There. That: one.’