The Impressionist (22 page)

‘Come,’ he says, and Pran notices a villager, skinny and dark, salaaming at them from the trees. The man picks up various cases of camera equipment and balances them on his head, beckoning them to follow him into the darkness. The Picturewallah immediately unslings his rifle, carrying it in front of him like a stave. He is wearing a hunting outfit of thick Shetland tweed and a matching tweed turban. Twin cartridge belts are slung bandit-fashion across his chest. Pran sees the set expression on his face and wonders for a chilling moment if the whole seduction plan is a ruse, and he has been taken out here to be killed.

By the light of an oil lantern they pick their way along a dried-up watercourse, made into a closed tunnel by a lacy canopy of creepers. Above them the forest communicates in whoops and trills and buzzes, passing news of the three walkers far ahead into green space. Once something large breaks cover up ahead, a blur crashing heavily into the trees. After half an hour or so, just as the Picturewallah is beginning to wheeze and wipe his sleeve across his forehead, a smell of cooking starts to overlay the forest’s clean pungency and they arrive at another clearing.

Loinclothed men lounge around a fire, scooping rice and sloppy dal into their mouths out of big steel dishes. Their skins are leathery and dark. Tribal men. A pair of their women squat further off, ears, ankles, arms and noses heavy with silver, scouring pans and whispering together. Yellow eyeballs dart round, then settle with impersonal curiosity on the newcomers. The women tug the pallas of their saris over their heads and look away again, focusing meekly on the ground. The Picturewallah starts giving orders, and the men stand up, unhurriedly, to obey.

Behind them are two large mounds, covered in branches. Pran makes his way round the fire, walks towards them, and is greeted by a rich, deep, rasping sound. A roar. With a start he realizes he is face to face with a pair of caged tigers. They look lazily at him, tongues lolling, their liquid eyes seeming barely to register his presence. He turns to the Picturewallah for explanation. All the men are grinning at him, as if he has just been let in on a joke.

‘When the Angrezi come to hunt,’ the Picturewallah laughs, ‘there are some things it is better not to leave to chance.’

One of the tribals dances forward to a cage, sticks his arm through the bars, and actually strokes a broad velvety snout. The tiger brushes against his hand like a cat.

‘You haven’t given them too high a dose?’ asks the Picturewallah. ‘You’ll have to drag them over to the machans.’

‘No, sir. No. They’re awake just enough for the shoot. Anyway, these foreign people will not know the difference.’

‘True enough,’ grunts the Picturewallah, and settles down to wait.

Some distance further into the forest, the main party takes a light supper. Hampers. Wine coolers. Collapsible tables unpacked and spread with white cloths. Prince Firoz strides among the foreign people, more opulently foreign than his guests. He cannot settle. Occasionally he casts a glance at the drunken Major, who is wandering around among the parked cars with a leg of chicken and a hip flask, his upper body making involuntary jerking movements. Is he? – yes, he seems to be talking to himself. Jean-Loup should not find him too much trouble. If the man will not make the right recommendation after that silly business with the pornographic film, then he will have to be persuaded. Birch has brought a mountain of equipment, and right now he should be setting himself up in a suitable vantage point. Everything should be fine. Unless, that is, his accursed brother is telling the truth. Unless, God forbid, he has managed to propel one of his stunted sperm far enough into one of his women to impregnate her. Firoz thinks this impossible. And yet – and yet his sources in the zenana have supplied some alarming reports. Damn. He really wishes he had chosen a different hat. This one has such an
Indian
feel to it. Damn.

The Diwan also has photography on his mind. He does not trust the Picturewallah, who had to be reminded that he would be working in darkness. How will your machine see? Oh, he had not thought of that. Of course if the imbecile had taken a good picture the first time around none of this would be necessary. And the Major seems not to be himself. Ill, perhaps? The Nawab-Sahib has also been behaving strangely. As soon as they alighted from the cars, he sidled up to Lady Braddock and did a very lewd thing. A sort of rubbing. Naturally everyone had manners enough to pretend they had not noticed, but Sir Wyndham appears angry. His good English lady wife should have been able to stop the Nawab fondling her breasts, even if he is her superior in rank.

A signal is given and the party heaves itself on to elephants to travel the last few miles to the hunting ground. The mounting goes more or less smoothly, apart from some antics involving the Swedish dancer, who wishes to be lifted by her animal’s trunk. Eventually they move off, a single file of beasts swaying hip-deep in the high meadow grass. The atmosphere of plotting, of fierce concealments and scratch calculation, spills over the elephants’ grey hide like a static field, a nervous aura of itchy trigger fingers, weird brain chemistry and paranoid virtualities which makes the animals edgy and skittish. The mahouts dig their heels behind large and sensitive ears, murmuring to their little pearls to step boldly, not to worry, not to fear.

The grass turns to forest and the party dismounts, walking a short way to the site the Nawab’s Royal Huntsman has decreed most likely to attract a tiger. The Huntsman himself, an ancient retainer with a moustache that extends in extravagant curls on either side of his face, leads the way. A dry nullah runs beneath a slight ridge, a single cut-off bend still filled with reasonably fresh water. Around this area, in a ragged semicircle, wooden machans have been mounted in the trees. The platforms are large and sturdy, spreading amply over lower branches, furnished with stools and bedding. ‘No one,’ cries the Nawab, in his first intelligible speech for some hours, ‘need suffer as a guest of the Lord of Fatehpur!’ He receives a smattering of applause.

‘Quite the place for a tiger, this,’ Vesey remarks to the Diwan, with the knowledgeable smirk of a man who has shot a big cat or two in his time. The Diwan agrees politely. He cannot, alas, summon up much enthusiasm for the hunting aspect of the evening, mainly because he already knows what is due to happen. At around two hours after midnight Sir Wyndham will bag a large male, which will miraculously turn out to measure two inches more from nose to tail than the tiger his predecessor shot three years ago. If things go exactly to plan, one of the other English visitors will take the second. This degree of predestination might disappoint some of the guests. However, their hosts take the view that politics demands certain sacrifices from sportsmanship. Sir Wyndham must, above all, associate Fatehpur with success. Even if this were not the overriding consideration, some lack of spontaneity would be inevitable: the last genuine wild tiger was shot here in 1898 and in recent years the royal family has imported its animals from Assam, where they have a surplus.

Three spindly legged calves are tethered at strategic positions around the waterhole. The huntsmen make long knife-cuts across their backs, deep enough to draw blood. The calves scrabble at the earth and low in fear, as if aware their scent is now wafting enticingly through the forest. A complex ballet takes place as the Royal Huntsman assigns the party its places. The confusion is partly caused by his moustache, which muffles his already eccentric pronunciation of names, and partly by a reluctance on the part of some of the hunters to go where they have been told. Mrs Privett-Clampe and Lady Braddock, for example, seem unaccountably reluctant to spend a night up a tree with one another. Sir Wyndham is swiftly ushered into the best spot, accompanied by both the Nawab and Prince Firoz. Privett-Clampe, who has great difficulty even seeing his tree, let alone ascending the rope ladder to his machan, is eventually helped up by Vesey and De Souza, the latter casting longing looks at his lady-friends, who have been placed out of harm’s way at one end of the row. By the time the hunters are in position and the ropes have been pulled up, darkness has fallen. They settle down to wait.

Pran sleeps. He is woken by the Picturewallah, who looks as if he has just woken up himself. His voice is thick and phlegmy, and he appears agitated.

‘Hurry up!’ he whispers. ‘We’re late.’

The campfire is a pile of embers. The men have gone, the tigers with them. The Picturewallah gathers up his things and the two of them trot through the trees, thorns and creepers catching their clothing, tugging at their ankles like beggar children. Pran does not understand the urgency, does not understand anything about this blind stumble except that it seems to knit together everything about his life into one act, a pelting through clammy resistant darkness. The thought makes him laugh, and he runs along panting and giggling, light-headed, hysterically careless.

Tiger hunting requires two main qualities: silence and patience. If a change of wind direction carries the hunter’s scent to his prey, any but the hungriest man-eater will stay away. Likewise, the slightest noise can ruin things. Loud giggling, for example, or the popping of champagne corks. Charlie Privett-Clampe, quite pleased with the hint of moonlight illuminating the nullah, and the clear line of sight she has to the tethered bait, does not want her chances ruined by the commotion coming from the end tree. What are they doing up there, holding a cocktail party? She hisses a sshhh!, much as one might at the theatre, but when it has no effect on the festivities, she goes back to glowering over her rifle barrel, propping herself in a comfortable position and trying as far as possible to ignore Minty, who is coquettishly brushing her hair.

It is not only the goodtimers in the far tree who are having trouble keeping still. Several people in the party are sharing a rather unpleasant experience, an experience which began when they accepted one of those queer-tasting lemonade drinks that were being handed round at departure. That queer taste has been hanging around at the backs of throats, developing into something distinct and metallic, accompanied by a gradual increase in what can only be termed ‘gastric awareness’. Stomachs (organs which are usually only intermittently present to their owners) have been changing state, becoming mobile, active, uneasy. Vesey is suffering badly, his innards acquiring a treacherous and marshy feel which, once up in the machan, immediately develops into a sensation of full-scale bubbling swamp. No amount of clenching or mind-over-matter exercises will alter the inevitable. It is only a matter of time.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he says to Privett-Clampe, ‘but I’ll have to get down for a moment.’

Prince Firoz is feeling something similar, but is determined not to leave his brother alone with Sir Wyndham. Conversation has been slight, but the risk that in his absence Murad might bring up the matter of the succession is too great to take. Still, a crisis is imminent, and Firoz is unused to physical discomfort. He digs deep, searching for some nub of perseverance not worn away by years of pleasure-seeking. Alas, his resources are meagre, and neither surreptitious wind-breaking nor sips of water seem to help. He pulls his knees up to his chest and tries to think of polo, light aircraft and other strong, manly things.

Activity in the undergrowth grows by the minute. Hunters, mostly those associated with Prince Firoz’s faction, are answering urgent calls of nature. Other hunters are twitchily training their rifles on these sudden movements, surprised to find the jungle so full of life. Squatting in a spiky bush directly in Sir Wyndham’s line of fire, Imelda works out how many hours she is away from the nearest flush toilet, and begins to cry. Sir Wyndham, who in thirty-five years of foreign service has never seen a woman in the act of excretion, watches her through his sights with mingled horror and fascination. Minty must do that. God. There is movement behind him. The Nawab has thrown down the rope ladder, and is descending.

‘Not you too?’ asks Sir Wyndham. The Nawab does not respond. Almost as soon as he has gone, Prince Firoz, who has been rolled up into a kind of foetal ball, unwinds with a strangled exhalation, and scrambles after him, leaving behind a nasty whiff. Sir Wyndham is left quite alone.

Also alone is Major Privett-Clampe. Vesey and De Souza have vanished, leaving him wrapped in velvety, crawling blackness. The Major finds his world has been hollowed out as if by maggots, leaving him suspended in space, a plump and florid web-bound fly. That is how the criss-cross branches look to him. A spider’s web. The horrors multiply in the corners of his eyes, and he cannot stare them all down at once. Only staring, hard concentrated staring, works to resolve the jerks and writhings of this awful place into a conventional arrangement of objects in space. The darkness makes it worse. There are dangers all around. Rustlings. Particularly from a tree some way behind him. Something is up there, watching. The Major takes a firm grip on his rifle and thinks of the Four Hundred and the Valley of Death. If it comes to that, he will not shirk. He will ride forward.

‘Do you absolutely
have
to hum?’ Charlie hisses at Minty. She has had enough.

‘Yes, I think I do, rather.’

‘Well, even if you don’t want to bag a tiger, I think you might show some consideration for those of us who do.’

Minty sighs, an extended and dramatic chest-deflation intended to indicate equal measures of pity and boredom.

‘Oh, you are being tiresome. No wonder Augustus drinks so much. You know, I rather think I shall go for a walk.’

Charlie cannot believe her ears. ‘A walk? We’re in the middle of the jungle.’

‘Yes, precisely. Such a romantic spot. I think it will be delightful.’

And with that she throws down the rope ladder, and descends. Charlie tracks her through the sights of her rifle, wrestling with a set of very un-English impulses. Around and below her, the hunt unravels, all sense of purpose lost. She feels herself the last repository of order in this place, a tiny island in a sea of chaos, a lone rock battered by black waves and topped by a ragged Union Jack.