The Impressionist (16 page)

Meanwhile in their separate butts the Privett-Clampes are having an excellent morning’s sport. The Sultan Jheel is a resting place for all manner of migrating waterfowl, and today precious few of them are destined to escape alive. Pintail Snipe and Bar-Headed Geese fall in numbers, but it is the duck who come off worst. Death comes to Mallard, Teal, Pochard and Shoveller alike, and soon Pran’s boat is piled high with feathered corpses. In the purdah-butt Charlie completely outclasses the two palace women, who find it hard to concentrate as the Amazon beside them shouts at her cringing loader and provides a running commentary on their performance, a string of Hurrahs, Dash its, Bad shows and That’s the ways which leads Zia Begum to wonder why the English send their sons rather than their wives to fight their wars. Elsewhere the Major, always more introverted than his wife, is shooting steadily, phlegmatically, acknowledging his loader’s cries of ‘Good ehshot, sahib!’ with a grunt and a sideways look to Carter of the Hodson’s, to check he has noticed his latest feat of arms. Carter invariably has, but stoically pretends otherwise.

For the Major, the day’s slaughter is a respite, a moment out of a life he finds increasingly baffling. Augustus Privett-Clampe is a man whose existence was once knowable and controllable, a thing to be turned over in the hands and examined from every side. It was a life, he remembers, like the flask at his hip or the gun whose barrel is heating his hand so comfortingly through its protective leather glove. If you were to open his file at the India Office you would see nothing but success written there. Alcohol and sodomy do not feature in the memoranda. So why does the Major have his first whisky at nine? Why does he forsake his loyal wife for the corruptions of a half-caste boy? Why does he brood for hours in his office, thinking (as is the tradition among failed men) of the service revolver in the locked drawer by his side?

Under the scorching sun of the North-West Frontier, such a thing would have seemed impossible. There a young Privett-Clampe, newly arrived in India, newly shouldering the burden of a Queen’s Commission, looked up at the snow-capped peaks of the Pir Panjal mountains and believed that he had arrived in heaven, never more to leave. The garrison town of Abbottabad was a marvellous place for a young officer, especially for a man commissioned in the station’s senior regiment, Prince Albert Victor’s Own
I
st Punjab Cavalry. Peshawar,’Pindi and Simla were in easy reach, and though the town itself was undistinguished, the Officers’ Mess was like a blue and scarlet brotherhood, where strenuous games of High Cockalorum (games which left civilians debagged, eyes blacked, chairs and tables smashed and a fellow’s monthly bill painfully inflated) were not only tolerated but encouraged by the CO.

A Daly’s man (as they were still called, from the Nabob days when they were simply Daly’s Horse) had the run of the place, and once morning parade was over there was nothing to do but take advantage of it. The country around afforded excellent sport, and it was only natural, only right and proper, that Privett-Clampe should become a devotee of pig.

There was, as a 23-year-old Privett-Clampe would remark to anyone who came within range, nothing on earth so fine as the camaraderie of the Abbottabad Tent Club. The CO was known to agree, and decreed that weekends could begin on Thursday, to give the regiment’s numerous pigstickers more time to develop their art. It was his keenest wish that a Daly’s man win the Kadir Cup, and for a while it looked as if young PC might be the chap to do it. Everything about pigsticking agreed with the young officer’s temperament, from the heft of the nine-foot bamboo long-spear to the look of a ‘big un’’s curved tushes mounted above one’s bed in the Cantonment. Nothing, he declared, gave him a greater thrill than the head shikari’s cry of ‘Woh jata hai!’, as a large boar broke cover.

If he could find no one in the mess to listen to him, Privett-Clampe would play out pig exploits in a kind of shadow theatre as he lay under his mosquito net after parade. Fingers became heats of riders, lined up between the flags at the start of a beat. The beaters, swishing through the long grass prodding likely thickets with their poles, dissolved to a whooshing noise made with the mouth. After that it became more physical, fist smacking into open palm as a pig made his first spurt for freedom, then a terrific creaking of the bed-frame as the adrenalized gallop gathered speed, the pig accelerating away for a first uncatchable half-mile with the leading man straining forward in the saddle to see if it was rideable. Too small? A female? Then the disappointment of a horizontally held spear, an exhalation of breath, a sharp pull-up and a return for another beat. But oh! if it was a goer! (And here in the re-enactment nothing but the shout itself would do.) The call of ‘On-on-on!’, and it was time to ride like billy-oh and the bed-frame would take a real bloody pounding and brother officers would sometimes put their heads round the door thinking something else was going on entirely and end up in stitches as PC in the role of the pig began to tire, jinking from left to right, the cunning old devil leading his pursuer into the very worst kind of country, almost-but-not-quite dropping him into ditches and nullahs, on to hidden logs or copses of thorns or tamarisk and oh! at last came the moment but only after the heroic young nimrod had driven his horse to the verge of exhaustion and the other riders were far far behind, only then did the pig turn and charge and it was time to lower the spear and drive it home into the sweet spot just over his shoulder, feeling the sudden shock of his weight jar all up your arm as he ran himself on to your sharp spade-shaped blade and in that passionate instant it was all over, time for a quick glass of the chaiwallah’s cold tea and back behind the line to begin it all again. Nothing like it. Nothing in the world.

Young PC got his tent-club button (for ten ‘first-spears’) in his maiden season at Abbottabad. He never did win the Kadir, narrowly losing out to a fellow from Skinner’s, but his second place was enough to make him the toast of the regiment and win him a permanent place in the CO’s heart. Life was wonderful. A hard schooling had taught him that the only way to be certain of a situation is to keep it clamped tightly between your legs, and, having been on the wrong end of the House Captain’s spear on too many occasions, Privett-Clampe’s joy in pigsticking went deep. The thunderous beating of a horse’s great heart as he rode it hard over the rough, the thrill of knowing that one mistake could lead to a fall or a terrible goring, the delicious conjunction of judder and squeal as ‘Old Crusty’ impaled himself on to nine feet of hardened male bamboo – all of it reminded him that he was a man, that he had the upper hand, and the world and the creatures in it were his to dispose of as he saw fit.

This same sense of mastery was reflected back to Privett-Clampe in the admiring faces of his proud Pathan Sowars as he inspected them at morning parade. They were a marvellous body of men, tall, well made and protective of their honour to a near-pathological degree. Like all Indian Army officers, their young Captain had been trained to distinguish the differing martial characteristics of the races of the Subcontinent. Since the disaster of the Mutiny it was known that the Hindu Brahmin was both wily and untrustworthy, a far inferior soldier to the average Indo-Gangetic Mussulman, who himself was inferior to the war-like Sikh and the Pathan. These were the races with whom the Englishman felt an instinctive sympathy. By recruiting almost exclusively among them, he ensured generations of loyal soldiery who understood their privileged place in the hierarchy of things, and would strive to protect it. These racial differences were clear-cut, and obvious to even the greenest India-hand. When compared to the hair-splitting Calcutta babu or the timid Kashmiri, it was undeniable that the Pathan was a truer breed of man altogether. Of course they treated their women abominably and had an unfortunate predilection for sodomy, but neither of these tendencies ever interfered with army discipline. Privett-Clampe led his Pathans into the mountains on several occasions, burning villages to punish border raids and tracking down bands of horse-thieves. Those were the days long before the mechanized slaughter of trench war, when fighting was conducted with honour and decency. Privett-Clampe (and all those who ever shared a billet or a dinner table or a railway carriage with him) would never forget the day when some of the infantry chaps were exchanging shots across a valley with a party of Waziri tribesmen, and one of the enemy called out that the English were firing too low, and stood up to give them range. There was your Pathan. Not a finer man in the Empire, even when he was the enemy.

Between Pig and Pathan, Privett-Clampe was a man with both his hands and heart full. To the polite inquiries of the CO’s wife about his marriage plans, he would reply bashfully that he had none, suffering her questions with the stoic but mournful air of a wounded man undergoing field surgery. This was his typical response to matters feminine, for he found interaction with women a feat of endurance.

To the invisible college of elderly matchmakers who ran the station’s social life, such a prize as the young nimrod could not be allowed to escape. Tea parties were arranged with the sole purpose of marrying Augustus off, and he was forced to endure frequent and excruciating picnics where young ladies of the ‘fishing fleet’, fresh out from Southampton, would attempt to hook him with parasols and big eyes and well-timed fainting fits. PC would stand them up, dust them off and take them briskly back to their chaperones, disappointingly safe and unmolested.

Just at the point when the matchmaking cabal were about to turn nasty and brand him unsound, Augustus met Charlotte Lane. If not love at first sight, it was at least admiration. He first noticed her taking a tricky ditch as a guest of the Peshawar Vale Hounds. The PVH hunted jackal over some of the best country in India. Privett-Clampe was a valued member and universally reckoned to look very fine indeed in his scarlet coat with its pale blue collar. The thing that struck him about the girl was how well she took the jump. As the horse stretched out for the far bank, she leant forward over its neck, easing smoothly back into her seat as it landed. He could not help but think it finely done, and told her as much in the club that evening.

Born under the sign of the horse, their courtship was charmed from the start. To the hunt they added polo, paper-chasing and tent-pegging as reasons to meet each other, always doing so as if by accident and then standing around with their hands in their pockets, rocking backwards and forwards on the soles of their booted feet. Neither of them was much on dancing, though Privett-Clampe was delighted to find that the young lady shot as splendidly as she rode. When he saw her bring down a black buck with a .275 at a hundred and fifty yards he decided he must be in love. She was tall and rangy, with big hands and a shock of blonde hair which was usually shoved up under a ‘Bombay Bowler’ topi. PC appreciated all of this in much the same way as he did a good gait or a well-turned fetlock in a polo pony. What Charlotte looked like under her clothes never really occurred to him, and it took a lot of coaching from ‘Stage-Door’ Johnny Balcombe before he understood how and where and when to try to kiss her.

It was a bad business, the first kiss. Gus prepared more or less as he did for any close-quarters engagement, and beforehand was just as tense. He had chosen for his ground the swing-chair on the rear veranda of the Abbottabad Club, which gave a commanding view over a suitably romantic mountain vista, and afforded at least two lines of retreat in the shape of the garden and the billiard room. He made the assault by night, during the latter stages of a leaving ‘do’ for a civilian polo chum who was changing station. Despite the advantage of surprise, and a weakened enemy in the shape of a Charlotte who had been plied with several glasses of slightly stiffened fruit cup, he was entirely routed. After softening up her position with some Stage-Door-taught phrases about the beauties of the wild and the fragrance of the evening, he imagined he had made his intentions sufficiently clear and embarked on a frontal assault of such vigour and poor direction that his forehead slammed hard into the bridge of her nose. Fruit cup splashed on to new dress, followed by several drops of blood. Both of them were mortified. Gus immediately withdrew his forces, but Charlotte, who had been sent to India by her mother to do exactly this sort of thing, was not going to give up so easily. She clung to Gus’s neck and pulled him back downwards, and although there was a deal of smoke and many alarums and excursions, by the end of the action the two sides had come to an understanding. A week later they announced their engagement and were duly married in the English church at Peshawar three months after that.

The wedding night was as disastrous as the first kiss had portended. After several bruising falls before the walls of the citadel, Gus attempted to force a breach and was finally and definitively unseated by a furious Charlotte, who thought the whole thing an outrage and a frank imposition. The newly-weds forgave each other, neither being the grudge-holding type, and fell to playing Old Maid on the bed. Things progressed slightly over the following weeks, but they never thought it a priority, and by the time they took a long leave in Kashmir the following year they were living as chastely as brother and sister.

Time and again, the last form imprinted on fading duck eyes is the glittering lung of the Sultan Jheel, the black dots of the shooting butts ranged across it in a bowed line. The birds spiral downwards in a flutter of blood and feathers, splashing into the water for Pran to scoop up. The killing seems endless. When his arms are slick with blood and there is no more space in the shikara, he sinks down exhausted, his head resting against a warm cushion of duck corpses. Yasmin does the same, the pole trailing in the water beside him. Overhead the slaughter continues, an irregular crackle of gunshots echoing off the surface of the lake.

The boat drifts and gradually they find themselves close to the butt where the British officers are shooting. Sharper eyes than theirs, the eyes, perhaps, of the spirits the peasants sometimes see flittering through the reeds of the lake, might be able to make out the avid expression on Major Privett-Clampe’s face. It is mirrored on other faces, Charlotte Privett-Clampe’s most closely, a tightness about the mouth and a brightness in the eyes that seems to intensify at the moment of pulling the trigger. Discharging one gun and taking the next from his loader, the Nawab displays it as a cruel curl of the lip. Even Firoz’s girls, more used to the kind of kicks to be found on dancefloors, in nightclub bathrooms or the darker reaches of house-party gardens, find themselves oddly moved by the pounding recoil against their shoulders, the heft of the hot barrels in their hands. No one feels it more than the Major, for whom this discharge has to substitute for all others, his sole relief from the urges he finds welling up so powerfully and problematically inside.