The Impressionist (28 page)

‘Her? That’s the Scotch God-botherer’s wife? Poor little thing. He seems so completely insufferable.’

‘I imagine so. Arthur says he simply never shuts up.’

It should not have touched her, but it did. Somehow she had thought everyone saw Andrew as she did. The idea that he might be boring had never crossed her mind. Naturally she did not mention it to him, and, as she lay awake that night, wrapping the memory tightly inside her, she told herself it was a test of faith, a little trial sent by God. All the same, she remembered the words, and something inside her began to stand apart and watch.

Bombay shook her even more. Her image of the Orient was vague in the extreme, a misty vision of palm trees and coconuts and brightly dressed native women. She knew the city would be a terrible place, but in the abstract its awfulness had presented itself as an exciting challenge, to be faced with gritted teeth and a prayer, a trial which would soon evaporate in the face of good Scottish resolve such as her own, to be transmuted into a harmonious Christian East of hard work and smiling brown faces shining with the light of the Lord. The crush of porters at the Apollo Bunder, the hundreds of beggars tugging at her white cotton dress, the furnace heat and the alien smells all hit her like a dirty black hand slapping her face. Following Andrew into the worst of it, where the streets narrowed into stinking alleys, she first thought she would faint – and then did, collapsing in the middle of a crowd. She came round again in the dilapidated courtyard which was to be her home for the next thirty years.

For a long time she existed in a state of suspended animation, trusting herself entirely to Andrew. She followed his lead in every thought and action, mechanically running the household according to his instructions. As far as possible she blocked out the nightmarish place in which she lived, holding it at arm’s length like a soiled rag she was taking out for the laundry. When she felt alive at all, it was inside her imagination, fuelled by battered English books that she saved up to buy second-hand from junk dealers in the Crawford market. She read romances, fairy stories and tales of gothic horror, the more extravagant the better, hiding them from her husband and selling them back to the bookwallahs when she had finished.

When she fell pregnant, Andrew relented and allowed her a servant. The old woman helped with some of the cooking and swept the floor of the makeshift church at whose doors he stood waiting every Sunday, ready to welcome a congregation which had yet to materialize. At night she comforted herself with memories of grey hills and white faces. Thoughts of Malcolm Johnstone and tall glass jars of miniature scented soaps presented themselves often to her mind, bringing with them painful silent tears.

Duncan’s birth was difficult. She almost died in the stifling ward at the women’s hospital, and though Andrew was keen for her to get back to her work at the Mission, she spent two months recuperating, lying in a cot by an upstairs window, weakly nursing her baby and watching the street life unfold below her. Perhaps it was this angelic distance, this sense of floating above the world she watched, that first allowed her to love India. She watched the people go about their business, buying and selling, cooking their food, begging for alms, washing their clothes, squatting to brush their teeth over the gutter, and finally found something more complex in Falkland Road than a mass of unsaved humanity. Day by day she watched more carefully, saw the figures carrying racks of tea glasses, hods of bricks, bales of cotton, papier maché idols and flower-strewn corpses, and started to marvel at how full this world was, how full of things she understood nothing about.

Andrew was overjoyed at her return to health. She threw herself into Mission work with new vigour and attempted, for the first time, to make friends with the people among whom she lived. She now felt she truly loved Andrew for bringing her here, and he responded by taking her with him as he roamed the slums, seeking converts.

‘What is it that I, a man from faraway Scotland, intend to do? Only to raise you up! Only to take your hand and show you the way! Only to ennoble your hearts by inspiring that moral fibre which is the mainstay of the Scottish character! I pledge this to you! I shall live among you as an example of righteousness, and if you come to my church, when you go back out into the world, they will say of you – he is a good man, she is a good woman…’

Sometimes passers-by would stop and listen. More often they would walk past. Because Andrew spoke in English, his message went unheeded by most of the people he was trying to reach. Though Elspeth pointed this out to him, he seemed reluctant to learn the language, let alone preach in it. He explained this by saying that the English language had an innately moral character, that it was in itself a route to God. She asked what he had done among the tribesmen in Assam, and he told her he had learnt some of their tongue, of course, but had concentrated on teaching them his own. English and Christ, Christ and English. Inseparable.

To Elspeth, it did not seem a very satisfactory method. Something else about it nagged her as well. She had thought Andrew was the open one in the marriage, the one really living in the India she tried to push away. Now she began to see a different figure, arrogant and closed. Because of the strength of its religious traditions, missionaries had always had a hard task in India. It was not like Africa, where, she had heard, they would prostrate themselves in the hundreds after a single sermon. Yet Andrew seemed to have so very little success. When Elspeth fell pregnant again, after almost three years in the country, the Independent Scottish Mission among the Heathen had only two converts, both untouchable men who did odd jobs around the compound in return for food, and on Sunday often had to be dragged out of the paan shop on the corner to attend service.

Andrew decided it was too great a risk for her to give birth in Bombay again, but they did not have enough money to travel back home together. It was arranged for her and little Duncan to stay with the Gavins, an ex-missionary couple in Edinburgh. Kenneth would enter the world there. As she waved goodbye to Andrew from the deck of a Liverpool-bound B & I steamer she felt a surge of excitement. She was going home! She tried hard to keep the image of her husband before her, but too often on board ship it drifted away, obliterated by a sighting of a school of dolphins or the tangled plot of the Marie Corelli novel on her lap.

Scotland was wonderful and alien. On the ship she had worried that she would love the place too much to leave again, but when she arrived she realized to her amazement that part of her had taken root in the Bombay slums. Coming home felt like revisiting herself as a child, both emotional and slightly embarrassing. The first meal of roast beef and potatoes made her cry, and when Susan and Petie came to meet her, she hugged them so hard that Petie asked if she really wanted to crush the life out of them so soon in her visit. Father was too ill to travel. A week later she sat by his side in the old front parlour and cried again, holding his hand while he stared confusedly out of the window, asking her for the third time if she was not Mrs Ferguson come to bring his supper.

The Gavins had known Andrew in Assam, and they spoke of him in a way that sometimes troubled her. How is his resolve, asked Mrs Gavin. There must be terrible temptations in such a place. Elspeth replied that she had never known so firm a resolve, and Mr Gavin spluttered into his tea. Several times Mr Gavin mentioned Andrew’s decision to work among fallen women, as if it were somehow a questionable thing. But he has Elspeth, Mrs Gavin admonished him. She is his strength.

Kenneth’s birth was nearly as hard as Duncan’s, and the Infirmary doctor told the new mother that she would be putting her life at risk by going through such an ordeal again. Abstinence, he said. It may be hard on your husband, but he is a man of the cloth, and he loves you. I’m sure he will understand. They gave her a letter explaining the precariousness of her health. The doctor looked over the rim of his spectacles as he pushed it across the desk. Perhaps this will help to persuade him, he said.

Arriving back in India with her two sons, she realized that all the alignments had changed. Before she left she had revolved tightly around Andrew, caught in him like a moon in the pull of a large gaseous planet. As soon as she smelt Bombay from the deck of the liner, the faint note of woodsmoke travelling across the surface of the sea, she knew this was no longer true. India was part of her personal orbit.

Elspeth’s new gravity changed the Mission beyond recognition. Ignoring Andrew’s complaints, she engaged a munshi to teach her the language and began to tour the slums and brothels, discovering for herself the place where she lived. She spread the word that anyone needing medical attention should come to her husband, and that after the Sunday church service English lessons would be held. Within a few months the ISMH was a hive of activity, and several new young converts had been made.

Her success both elated and shocked her. Why had it been so easy to accomplish? It showed her a new Andrew, a lost Andrew, purposeless beneath his veneer of conviction. The watchful part of her grew, a distance reinforced by the physical gap announced in the doctor’s letter. Her husband’s face as he read it, purple with suppressed rage. There was nothing to say. At night she could feel him beside her, tense with resentment. She would try to comfort him and he would push her stroking hands away. Worse than nothing, he muttered. Worse than before you came.

He made her feel as if it were her fault, as if she had done it on purpose. He did not understand that it was a loss for her too. This was how they had always connected with each other. They had used their bodies to guarantee the rest of it; when he was angry, when she had doubts. So she too was in mourning, though the watching part of her also held its breath, secretly relieved not to have to give itself now her faith in her husband was ebbing away. Sometimes she could not stand it and called him to her, but it always ended badly, with fumbling, tightness, apologies. Being together became worse than being alone.

For some years all this was buried beneath the bustling new life of the Mission. There was always a queue of people waiting for Andrew’s rough doctoring, which consisted mostly of dispensing lectures about personal hygiene. The Falkland Road women began to use the school as a sort of occasional crèche for their children, and the Mission gradually found a niche in the ecology of the road. Elspeth would smile at the gaudy mothers, and they would smile at her, each trying to hide their mutual fascination. Elspeth also noticed how Andrew looked at them. Agonized glances. Forced disapproval. She began to wonder what game he was playing, what kind of test he had set himself.

He seemed to draw violence towards him. Once he almost caused a riot, haranguing a Muslim procession as it passed by the Mission gate. Another time a young English policeman put his head round the door of Elspeth’s parlour. Sorry to intrude, but they had her husband in custody. A, ahem,
fracas
with a Catholic clergyman. As he escorted Elspeth to the kotwal, he could barely hide his amusement. It was always the same. Andrew against the world. Him right and everyone else wrong.

The boys grew up. It came time first for Duncan and then Kenneth to be sent back to Scotland to school. After her little boys faded to handkerchief-waving dots on the horizon, Elspeth had nothing left to distract her from her husband. The truth was, she had fallen in love. Not with another man, but with another way of thinking, which was worse. Gradually the visits to the munshi had been supplemented by a deeper research. Trips to the museum and to historical ruins soon led to lectures, bouts of night-time reading. She made Indian friends, and went to dinner at their houses, feeling wild pleasure at sitting close to the floor and eating with her hands. She went to the beach to watch the Ganpati Festival, jostled by worshippers as the huge idols of Ganesha were dipped into the sea. She peered into the sanctuaries of temples, trying to make out the greasy ghee-smeared forms of the gods in the darkness. One year during Holi, Andrew came out into the courtyard and confronted his grinning wife, her drenched, clinging clothes splotched with dye. You’re becoming one of them, he shouted. They are dragging you down into the mire.

For her it was all to do with magic. The new world she had found was infused with secrets. Her instincts had always drawn her towards the fantastic, and now she realized this was opposed completely to everything Andrew thought – and was. His certainty, once so attractive, now appeared childishly presumptuous. How did he dare? How could he set up his foolscap and balsawood purity against the infinite mysteries of the universe?

As their little constellation flew apart, Andrew, impelled by opposing forces, started talking of science and rational religion and the superiority of the European mind to that of the Asiatic. When there was enough money for them to come out for the holidays, the boys found their parents civil to each other, more or less. Once the family had parted again, its members marginally less strange to each other than before, life in the ISMH returned to a state of guarded hostility. The Mission began to suffer. Elspeth’s centre had moved outside it, and she saw no reason to encourage others into a faith she herself was leaving. When she first put it as bluntly as that, forming the words in her head as she bicycled down a busy street, she had a sense of furiously peddling guilt, an exhilarating fresh sweat of betrayal that broke out under her arms, between her breasts, the residue of the missionary wife soaking out in rivers through her pores.

Imagine a secret doctrine. Imagine ancient wisdom. The ideas were not her own. Nor were they pure Hinduism. Elspeth had been introduced to other seekers, people who believed as she did, in wonder, in the mystic synthesis of things. She attended lectures where she sat as rapt as she had in the kirk hall years before, except that now she listened to stories of the Great White Brotherhood of Himalayan masters, the Lord of the World, the Buddha, Mahachohan, Manu, Maitreya. The speaker, an enthusiastic Englishman dressed in a plain white kurta-pyjama, told of the key held by adepts, attained only after long esoteric training and fierce spiritual discipline, the key that confers immortality and a chance to join the illustrious ranks of Cagliostro, Abraham, Lao Tzu, Mesmer and Plato. The names themselves were dizzying. Hilarion the Greek. Beautiful Serapis and blue-eyed Koot Hoomi. Boehme and Solomon. Confucius and the Syrian Jesus. It seemed that throughout history men and women had strived for a richer understanding of the world, for a fleeting grasp of the dizzying recess of meanings and hierarchies that lay beneath the surface of life. In the modern age, East and West were coming together in Theosophy, a scientific spirituality which sought the only true wisdom, the knowledge of the occult laws which govern the universe.