The Impressionist (17 page)

The early days of his marriage were the happiest of Privett-Clampe’s life. He felt he was at the zenith of human existence, and could look forward to an unbroken eternity of pigsticking and Pathans with his wife at his side. It was then, naturally enough, that disaster struck. Like the heroes of the Shakespearean tragedies that had bored him so powerfully at school, young PC had a tragic flaw. Unlike them, his was not a particularly dramatic fissure. It lay concealed under the surface, manifesting itself in a certain nonspecific air of gravitas he would adopt when confronted by conversations he found puzzling or irrelevant. His face would cloud for a moment, and then an expression of noble rumination would pierce through it like a shaft of sunlight. This expression had a peculiar quality, in that whatever he said next, even if it were just to shout for another nimbu-pani, would always sound like the very last word on the matter in hand.

So striking was his facial tic that Privett-Clampe gradually earned a reputation as a man of piercing intelligence. Though it was perhaps not entirely deserved, he made little effort to repudiate it. Who would? This is the kind of petty failing that anyone but the most pox-ridden Renaissance dramatist would feel bound to forgive. Yet it was enough to exile him from the Eden of Abbottabad, and mire him in a bog of uncertainty from which he has never freed himself.

The occasion of his fall was a conversation with a certain Mr Wiggs; its cause, a sneeze. Wiggs was an unwelcome guest in the Daly’s mess, because he insisted on talking politics. Like women, politics was the subject of an absolute prohibition. But Wiggs, who had trained as a lawyer, considered that the term comprehended merely party politics, whereas his topic was the evils of nationalist agitation, a staple of clubs and common rooms across India. Technically he was correct. However, by ‘politics’ an officer of the first Punjab Cavalry means ‘anything I find boring’, which described Mr Wiggs’s monologue perfectly. When he demanded that every last rioter, distributor of seditious pamphlets and jumped-up babu be transported to the Andaman Islands for the term of his natural life, though his opinion was considered sound, it was received with stony indifference. All down the long table, fingernails were examined and toothbrush moustaches wrinkled against the bottoms of noses in a uniform expression of froideur. Privett-Clampe, his deep-and-grave look set fair on his face, did not even notice the exposition drawing to an end. He was too absorbed in a daydream about Victoria sponge cake, a hard thing to come by in India.

It was at this moment that he sneezed.

The sneeze brought him to the attention of Mr Wiggs, who was looking around nervously for allies in the sudden chill of the mess. He noticed the young man’s contemplative expression, and formed the opinion that here at least was one fellow who appreciated the subtleties of an argument. Foolish puppet of fate, Privett-Clampe looked up and made eye contact with Wiggs. Thinking he had better make some remark, he said, ‘Yes, rather’, and nodded, feelingly.

This clinched it. To Privett-Clampe’s dismay, Mr Wiggs (who did something deadly at Delhi) collared him when they retired to smoke. He said, in a tone unpleasantly full of darkness and mystery, that Lieutenant Privett-Clampe was a young man whose talents were being wasted. Privett-Clampe, who felt that barely a drop of them was being spilt, still thought better of disagreeing. He simply told the old chap thanks awfully and, as soon as was decent, fled. How was he to know that in the loneliness of his guest room, Mr Wiggs (who despite his social failures was a man of influence) would decide to ‘give him a hand up’? How could he foresee that this intention would be immediately made flesh in a letter that contained a passage describing ‘a young man of acute political judgement, with genuine feeling for the problems of the region’? Who could predict that its recipient, a certain Colonel Brightman, would put the acute youth’s name into a memo which, in time, would pass over the desk of none other than Sir David Handley-Scott? Who would have thought that Sir David would pause briefly over that name, and deciding it was indeed the fellow from the PVH, would mark it with a red pencil?

But it happened. Three months later Privett-Clampe was promoted to Captain and seconded into the Indian Political Service, one of the most sought-after postings in the Empire. To any other man it would have been a time for celebration. PC was aghast.

It was a desk job.

There must have been some mistake. But however hard he complained, however many times he went to the CO or wrote to London or got drunk and cursed Wiggs for an interfering poodlefaking swine, no one would take him seriously. They either thought he was pulling their leg, or put it down to a sudden crisis of confidence.

There was nothing for it. At the age of twenty-nine, Captain Privett-Clampe entered a world of paperwork and plots in Simla, helping with the fiendishly complex business of negotiating relationships between the Crown and the hundreds of native states. In the IPS, only two things counted – protocol and cunning. Failure to stab the correct person in the back at the correct time, and to do so whilst meticulously observing all the canons of precedence and tradition, could have dire consequences. One slip, a single word out of place, and one could have an ‘incident’ on one’s hands. It was bewildering, and even though there was still polo, pig and the PVH, Privett-Clampe found that his work followed him around like a pariah dog, stubbornly howling even in the midst of the most delightful chase or hard-fought chukka. Within a year the first lines were etched on his face, and a regular pattern of whiskies had started to emerge.

To make things worse, the combination of tedium and secrecy in his new work distanced Privett-Clampe from his wife. Charlotte was a straightforward woman, and found it very hard to understand what Gus
did
with all the papers he glumly hawked back to their bungalow every night. Her questions filled him with despair. How was he to tell her he spent his days in fear, checking first one and then another of the hastily scribbled lists he stuffed into the pockets of his uniform?

Charlotte chose to make the best of things, and threw herself into the ordained business of the Burra Memsahib, terrorizing the servants and double-checking the cook’s account book. The mali had to try harder to make the delicate English flowers grow in the hot weather. The dirzi had to copy the master’s suit exactly to the stitch, and use less material than he would have needed to cover the back of a child.

The years progressed on a gentle downward slope. Despite Privett-Clampe’s lack of aptitude for his job, and despite the reputation of the IPS as a service where only the most talented could shine, in truth it was still a bureaucracy, where his undoubted punctuality and the impressive piles of paper he kept on either side of his desk were enough to keep his career on track. Had he realized, he would probably have taken care to turn up late and put his feet up whenever his superior passed in the corridor. Sadly he did not, and his record remained exemplary.

Eventually he was posted as a junior to one of the larger Rajput states. To the dismay of the Paramount Power, the Maharaja had a taste for the sexually bizarre, and a series of rape claims had been brought against him. Privett-Clampe immediately found himself embroiled in the details of the Maharaja’s private life, in which Argentinian tango dancers, Borzoi dogs and a certain regimental harness-maker in Jaipur all featured. Gus was shocked. The further he delved, the worse it got. English women. English breeds of dog. He had to keep a French dictionary at his elbow just to decipher the reports. When he found out it was his job not to give the fellow a sound thrashing but actually to smooth things over, he had a fit of despair and embarked on a mammoth drinking binge.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Charlotte and he had ceased exchanging all but the most basic pleasantries. The case of whisky was fine, brought over directly from Glen-somewhere-or-other by a chum. The sheer volume of work had left him little time for pig that year. And so, his head full of
cuissade
and
frottage
and
soixante-neuf,
he found his way into a native brothel. There the perceptive madam, seeing he had no genuine interest in her girls, left him in a room with a boy.

The next day, filled with disgust, he applied for a transfer back to the cavalry. The transfer was denied. A strenuous programme of tennis and early-morning rides did nothing to alleviate a creeping sense of doom. Try as he might to bury them, lewd thoughts, oddly mixed with pig and schooldays, kept surfacing in his head. The only thing that kept it at bay was drink, but one night he drank too much and found himself back at the brothel. A cycle was set in motion. The final blow came when a bad polo fall left him with a broken leg. The leg set badly, and felt permanently stiff. Returning to the cavalry was now entirely out of the question. Privett-Clampe realized, with a kind of blank horror, that he was now thirty-nine years old and would spend the rest of his life behind a desk.

Charlotte noticed her husband’s boozing, and was genuinely upset that the old boy did not find riding as easy as he had. However, she certainly did not feel she could actually
talk
to him about it. She had her own life, running the household and organizing a charitable venture dedicated to retired cavalry horses, saving them from the glue-factory and putting them to pasture on some land near Rawalpindi. PC thought this pointlessly sentimental. Their roles became as fixed as the cook’s Thursday night meal of ‘lamb cutlash’ and ‘pudding with cushter’.

The outbreak of the war raised a glimmer of hope in both their hearts. Surely with the Home Country in such dire need, the Captain could escape his desk? Yet in response to Privett-Clampe’s letter offering his services in the European theatre of operations, London promoted him and posted him to Fatehpur. He tore the memo up and wrote again asking for Palestine, which he thought (being halfway) might be a compromise. But the confirmation came, with orders to present himself at his new station forthwith.

So for Major Privett-Clampe, Fatehpur is the end of the world. In this backwater his staff consists of a floating group of ICS-trained juniors like Flowers. With their ‘heaven-born’ arrogance and their habit of speaking to each other in sentences which consist entirely of Latin tags, they make him feel even more desolate than he did already. He can barely think of them as human – in their pressed shirt-fronts and neat frock coats they look more like a flock of wading birds. When nursing his morning hangover, just the sight of one of them perching in his doorway with a file makes his trigger finger itch. For their part the juniors make no secret of the fact that they consider themselves
(si parva liceret componere magnis)
far more competent than the Old Walrus, and note
(pro pudor!)
the unmistakable signs of
delirium tremens
as he struggles to light his pipe in the morning conference.

Pickled in domestic whisky, the Walrus has also given up struggling against his sexual tendencies. He plumbed new depths by allowing Flowers, a man whom he detests as the worst kind of desk-bound pansy, to introduce him to the beautiful boy he thinks of as Clive. Clive has aroused so many conflicting emotions in his breast that he barely knows where to begin. There is no doubt about it. The Major feels
romantically
towards him. There is, he tells himself, nothing exploitative about his desire. One of the few things which stuck in his head about the Greeks was their admirable tradition of man–boy love. His sodden toilings appear to him in an improving light. Now he knows for certain that a degree of white blood courses through the young man’s veins, this sense of being a mentor, a guide through the perils and pitfalls of life, is getting stronger.

Clive’s unwillingness to talk poses a problem. The Major would feel better about things if the boy did not give such an impression of being there under sufferance. He imagines trips to the mountains. He could even teach the lad to shoot! Yet despite his suspicions that most of his IPS juniors and just about all the palace nobles are at it too, there is a need for secrecy. As the weeks progress, the Major’s guilt takes hold more strongly. The whisky-dampened suspicion that he might be doing something wrong looms ever larger in his mind.

Gradually, as the weather grows hotter, Privett-Clampe makes Clive do less turning round and more reading out loud. To his surprise, after a nearly text-free lifetime, the Major finds himself turning willingly to the written word. Naturally he has no truck with the kind of tedious high-flown nonsense (Tolstoy indeed! Sheer Bolshevism!) favoured by the IPS chaps.
Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities
is more to the Major’s taste. A good rhyme will also do the trick, anything with a clear metre and stirring sentiment. He often has Clive recite
Gunga Din
or
The Charge of the Light Brigade,
while he does something pedagogical in his trousers.

Eventually, in the way of things, Privett-Clampe’s noble fiction starts to coincide with reality, and even the trouser-fiddling stops. Clive’s accent improves and the Major contents himself with mistily watching his protégé as he stands up straight and declaims.

‘Oh yes,’ murmurs the Major. ‘Ring it out. That’s the way.’

The whirr of a projector. White light spills on to a screen, silhouetting a dozen fashionably empty heads. Slicked, marcelled, shingled and pomaded, Prince Firoz and his special friends are slumped on red plush chairs in a darkened ballroom, limp flesh pendants to their rigidly set hair. The remains of some activity lie underfoot: sporting or sexual, or conceivably some fashionable Riviera combination of both. Whatever it was, it is over now, and servants are picking up camisoles and fencing foils and arranging the room for one of Firoz’s notorious cinema shows. Liveried retainers have coaxed the opiated chorus girls and satiated shipping heirs from a tangle on the floor, wiped them down and propped them up in front of the screen. In position, despite a few skewed double-windsors and misaligned bandeaux, they appear startingly, intimidatingly attractive. This ability to look perfect even when under the influence of the strongest intoxicants Firoz’s money can buy is their shared skill, the talent which has marked them out from the merely modish herd and brought them here to Fatehpur. Tonight they are excelling themselves, because tonight Firoz has promised a very special show.