by M. M. Kaye
It was a thoroughly undignified one, in the course of which I remember getting tied up with a truly ghastly sequence of yes’s and no’s, when Mike yelled at me that he supposed that my answer was ‘no’ and I yelled back, ‘Yes — I mean no! — I mean yes, it’s no! …’ Oh, dear; youth, youth! What chumps we can make of ourselves.
In the end Mike shouted at me that in that case he was returning to Delhi that very day, and what’s more he was going to marry the first nice-looking girl he met — so there! And having got that off his chest, and forgetting in the heat of the moment that he had a sprained ankle, he stormed out of the bungalow — ruining his exit by a howl of pain as whichever foot it was hit the floor, and thereafter limping furiously away in search of Colonel Henslow, while I shouted after him with equal fury, ‘Good! I’m delighted to hear it! I hope she turns out to be an alcoholic shrew, which is what you deserve!’ — or words to that effect.
I have to admit that I really didn’t believe for a moment that he meant what he said. I thought it was just Mike in a rage, and that like all those other times in Delhi when he had drunk too much and been rude and insufferable, he would be around first thing in the morning, apologizing in dust and ashes and promising never, never, never to behave like that again. And when he and Colonel Henslow actually did leave an hour or two later — I forget what excuse he and the baffled and embarrassed Colonel cooked up to explain their abrupt departure (the necessity of getting to a hospital, I imagine) — I was truly relieved, because I felt that this was a point of no return, and that what I had to decide now was not so much ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but just how many more times (if I made it ‘yes’) I was going to accept the apologies and the promises never, never to offend in this manner again. I had already begun to feel that I had done so far too often. I needed a few Mike-free weeks to straighten things out, and we would do that together when he arrived in Tonk for the Christmas camp and the tiger shoot.
But Mike had meant exactly what he said, and within a week of arriving back in Delhi — where, as far as I can remember, he parted with the Colonel, who had other commitments — and on his own for the first time, he seems to have collected the old gang of scroungemongers again. Once his ankle was out of plaster, they swept him off to another dance at the IDG, where someone introduced him to a prominent member of that year’s Fishing Fleet, one Amber Orr-Wilson, an ex-model — the job had not the star-status that it acquired in the years after the Second World War, but was still considered fairly ‘dashing’. She was not merely ‘the first nice-looking girl’ that Mike met on his return to Delhi, but a spectacular creature with the figure which one would have expected from a model, and she had already caused more than a few ripples in Peshawar.
There had been, for instance, the occasion when, at a dance at the Peshawar Club, she and her partner had been dancing the tango so superlatively that the other dancers had stood back to watch, and let them have the floor. Undeterred, they continued to dance until it dawned on the spectators that either a button or a bit of elastic, or both, had given way and a vital part of Amber’s underwear was gradually descending. Amber herself did not become aware of this until she suddenly discovered that her ankles were caught up in a loop of lace and satin. Stopping, she looked down to see what it was, and then gracefully stepping out of her ‘smalls’, she freed herself from her partner, stooped down, picked them up and, carrying them at arm’s length, sailed across the ballroom floor and handed them, with the maximum publicity, to the scarlet-faced youth who was presumably her host, saying in bell-like tones, ‘George — park my knickers, will you?’ At which there was a roar of laughter and a good many people clapped.
Women’s underwear, in those days, was still considered to be ‘unmentionable’ (heavens! how far we have come!), and most women, myself among them, would have been speechless with embarrassment if caught in the same predicament. I remember being inordinately impressed by that masterly exhibition of savoir-faire. For you have to be a member of my generation — and of the Raj too, which still preserved a code of morals and behaviour that, if no longer Victorian, still hovered on the fringe of Edwardian — to realize what a quantum leap that gesture of Amber’s was in the direction of the distant future. Those of my parents’ generation — Victorians all — were profoundly shocked, while my own laughed our heads off, and rethought a good many of our attitudes.
I imagine that I lost Mike from the moment that Amber first met him and decided that this was the one she wanted. I simply wasn’t in her class; and even without that silly quarrel and the screaming-match that ended it, if she wanted him, I feel sure she would have annexed him without any trouble at all.
I didn’t realize that I could stop dithering as to whether I wanted to marry him or not, and that I could now, to quote a future pop-song, ‘colour him gone’, until Tacklow and Mother both received charming letters from him. He thanked Tacklow for laying on the Ganges trip for him, and told both of them what fun it had been and how much he’d enjoyed it, didn’t even mention me in either letter, but ended both by saying that he was afraid he would not be able to come to Tonk for the Christmas camp after all, because he had had a telegram from his mother to say that she would be coming out to Delhi for Christmas, and would be staying with friends who hoped he too would stay with them. He was so sorry … etc., etc., but it couldn’t be helped, and he wished them both a very merry Christmas and New Year. And that was that.
I didn’t see him or hear from him again for several years, though I did hear about him from certain kind friends who took care to keep me au fait with all the gossip about him and Amber. It seems that they swanned around India together, and on a return visit to Peshawar — where he did not look up the Captain and the Bo’sun or any ex-member of the NBN — he managed to break all the rules by smuggling Amber, dressed as a man, up to Razmak, a men-only frontier post which in those days was strictly off limits to all British or European women.
This, when discovered, raised a terrible furore, and the story goes that when the officer in command of the garrison at Razmak was telephoned by some irate brass-hat in Peshawar and asked if it was true that an Englishwoman had actually been smuggled past the sentries into tribal territory and was present in Razmak, he admitted it, and asked, on behalf of the entire Mess, if they could please keep her for a day or two before sending her back. She was a dazzler, was Amber.
Mike very nearly married her. But on the eve of the wedding,* assisted apparently by a collection of his bachelor friends who were giving him an eve-of-wedding party, he got gloriously tight, and treated Amber as he used to treat me when under the influence — as though she was some unattractive stranger who had gatecrashed his party and could therefore be spoken to as rudely as possible. That attractive creature, Amber, was not used to this sort of thing, and the result was a terrific row, in the course of which the lady tore off her engagement ring and threw it in his face, announcing that as far as she was concerned the wedding was off — for good! And stormed out. She (like me!) expected him to turn up the next morning full of apologies and penitence, and when he didn’t she telephoned his flat and got no answer. His mother and his best man and a selection of his friends all insisted that they hadn’t an idea where he was, which could possibly have been true, because Mike, with a good deal of assistance from his resourceful mother, Lady Guernsey, had phoned ex-Able Seaman Tony Weldon NBN,† whom the two of them had prevailed upon to accompany the escapee on an expedition to Canada’s Hudson Bay, all expenses paid and starting at once. They would be responsible for booking all the tickets and for ship and hotel accommodation.
Tony said he jumped at it: ‘Well, who wouldn’t?’ And the two of them disappeared for the next couple of months into Hudson Bay and the enormous, trackless forests of Northern Canada. The wedding was called off, and, naturally, the reception; and by the time the fugitives returned to civilization, if there were any bits of broken hearts lying around, they had all been thrown away with the bathwater. In the event Amber married an Itali
an Marchese, thus becoming a Marchesa and châtelaine of one of those fairy-tale villas on the shores of one of the Italian lakes. But she must have been one of ‘those whom the gods love’, for she died, still young and beautiful, from cancer.
As for me, I continued to think that I still had a choice in the matter of Mike’s hand and heart until I received a long and chatty letter from one of the Delhi debs (who had never been a particular friend of mine) telling me in great detail all I didn’t want to know about Mike’s new girlfriend. She said she ‘thought I ought to know’. (Oh yeah?) Well, I suppose she was right, at that. But I remember glooming around the camp that Christmas, feeling lower than an earthworm and unable to enter into the Christmas spirit.
* In London.
† Who happened to be in London at the time.
Chapter 28
The camp was one of those lavish ones that the princes of Rajputana went in for in a big way. Wooden floors covered with durries — druggets — and strewn with Persian rugs. Proper beds ornamented with brass knobs and curlicues, dressing-tables fitted with cheval-glasses; tin baths; sitting-rooms complete with cretonne-covered sofas and chairs, and elegant writing tables provided with writing paper embossed with the state’s crest in gold. In those days princes liked to do things properly.
On Christmas morning there was a long line of camp servants standing ready to present my parents with the customary festival‘dollies’, flat, rush platters piled with fruit and all kinds of metai — sweetmeats. After Tacklow had distributed largesse, the guns — Tacklow and Bill, Campbell Harris, and the heir, Saadat, together with three or four of his friends and several courtiers — went off to walk up partridge or shoot snipe on a nearby jheel. I didn’t go with them, and spent the afternoon sulking in the company of the lone elephant which had been brought along to act as a stop for the beat that was scheduled for Boxing Day.
The elephant was as bored as I was, and I began to have a fellow-feeling for her as she rocked restlessly to and fro in her pickets, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and inventing various ways of passing the time. I’ve always liked elephants, and I owe this one a debt of gratitude, because I ended up watching her silly games and being amused by them instead of brooding about the end of my love affair with Mike. One of the many ploys that got her — and me — through the long, hot, drowsy hours of that last Christmas Day of the restless twenties was a very simple one, but fascinating to watch. She would pick up a handful of dust from the sandy soil to one side of her and, having placed it carefully on a small pile on the top of her head, swing her trunk down to the opposite side and blow it off, repeating the operation with neatness and elegance, and never once failing to blow off the little pile that she had placed on her head. She had a whole repertoire of these silly games, and when she got bored with one, she would turn and look at me, before producing the next, to make sure that I was paying proper attention to her.
Thanks to that silly young elephant and to the tiger-hunt, I forgot to brood on my personal affairs, and I can’t even remember now on what day the beat was held, only that we had to wait until we received proof that the tiger was in that area. Bait, in the form of some hapless (and very vocal) goat or young buffalo calf, had been staked out at various points in the landscape to which it was hoped to lure the tiger, and only when the local shikari arrived hot-foot with news that the tiger had killed one of these unfortunate creatures on the previous night, was the beat laid on. By which time it was far too late for Bill to take part in it, since he had to leave in time to be present for the New Year’s Day parade in Kohat. The beat consisted of as many men as could be raised in the nearby villages, reinforced by some of the Nawab’s token army, and every man who cared to arm himself with a lathi or ancient shotgun, firecrackers, drums and anything that could make a noise. The country around the camp was true ‘tiger-country’ — which meant that it in no way resembled the jungle as depicted by Hollywood in films such as The Jungle Book and Kim. Here the land was largely open plain, liberally scattered with low, scrub-and-tree-covered hills. And almost everything that grew there was the colour of gold or sun-bleached grass. A tawny country where the thin lines and criss-cross black shadows might have been specially designed as cover for tigers.
Tacklow and the others had been taken on the previous day to see the machans we would occupy for the shoot — half a dozen small wood and string platforms about the size of a child’s bed, fixed high up in the tallest of the sheshum trees, and each capable of holding at least two to three people. Tacklow, for whom the shoot had been laid on, and the head shikari were to occupy the one in the most favoured position, on the level ground of a narrow valley between two steep little hills, with the longer of the two hills at his back. Mother and I, who were ‘onlookers only’, were given the next machan in line. And at the foot of the same hill, at intervals of roughly 100 to 200 yards, were Saadat’s and the best shot among his equerries; then the one that should have been Bill’s, and was now occupied instead by Bets and Campbell Harris, and finally one containing two more of Saadat’s suite.
As soon as news was received that the tiger had killed, a runner went out with the news to the waiting beaters, who had presumably been camping out on the plain well beyond that hilly tract where the machans had been built, while extra beaters and the elephant were hurried out to the spot. We left as soon as we had finished breakfast, and followed in cars (the Land Rover had not been invented in those days), bumping over the open plain and raising clouds of dust in the process, stopping when we came up with the advance guard. This was as far as we could go by car, explained the head shikari, for where the little hills began there was too much thorn-scrub and tall grass, and too many trees to allow for the passage of cars.
Saadat had been anxious that one of us should make use of the Tonk elephant as a sort of moving machan, and urged me to ride on it. But I had not spent a couple of afternoons in that creature’s company without coming to the conclusion that she was still too young, and far too imaginative, to be trusted with a tiger beat. I therefore refused the offer as politely as I could, to the obvious relief of the mahout (its handler), who showed no enthusiasm for taking his ponderous charge into the fray, and withdrew her, thankfully, behind the cars and the small group of drivers, onlookers and gawpers who seem to materialize out of thin air anywhere one stops in India, even in the middle of what had seemed to be an unpopulated desert.
We started off on foot and in single file along a narrow beaten track that had been made by those who had built the machans only a day or two earlier, while the head shikari talked in an undertone, explaining where the beaters were and the signal that would tell them that the guns had taken up position and they could begin to move forward. The tiger, he said, was a particularly splendid specimen, and a good many of the minor princes whose states touched the borders of Tonk had tried and failed to shoot it. It was also possible, he added carelessly, that its mate might be in that area, since there had been reports of a tigress which had been preying on the herds of the villagers not far from Pirawa, some months ago. Tacklow inquired where the tiger had taken the kill, and the shikari, like the young Mark Twain, was happy to be able to answer promptly: he said he didn’t know. Well, we were all to know within a minute.
The direction in which we were going took us in a half circle about a clump of pampas grass, and turning to the right, we came in sight of the tall sheshum tree in which the first of the machans had been built. Tacklow and the shikari came to a sudden halt, and so did I, a mere pace behind them. For of all places to choose, the tiger had carried his kill to the patch of open ground that had been thoughtfully beaten flat for him by the feet of the men who had built those elaborate machans. What’s more, he had brought his entire family with him, so that they could share the weekend joint.
Fortunately, they had finished eating. Which was lucky for us, because if we had arrived in the middle of their lunch things might not have turned out so well. As it was, the entire family was taking its
ease after stuffing itself with food. They were all there, father, mother and two three-parts grown cubs, lounging in the thin shadows of the sheshum tree and lazily licking the blood from their paws. They had seen us in the same moment that we saw them. But only the father of the family moved. He stood up and stared at us over the top of a low thorn-bush, and I saw for myself, for the first and thank heaven the last time, a tiger make use of those two whiter-than-white patches above his eyes. He dropped his head, so that the two patches, topped by a jet-black bar, looked exactly like a second pair of eyes: enormous eyes that glared at you with far more effect than the staring yellow ones below. Mother, behind me, said in a whisper, ‘What’s the matter? What are you stopping for?’ and the shikari hissed, ‘Chup’ (be quiet!) and gestured forcibly with his left hand, urging us to go back — slowly — slowly! We obeyed, for by that time even those who could not see what we were retreating from realized why we must move as carefully as though we were playing a deadly game of Grandmother’s Steps. Both the shikari and Tacklow brought their rifles up, inch by inch, into the firing position, and when they eased off the safety catches the double click sounded terrifyingly loud in that petrified silence and drew an ominous growl from the tiger. And then at last we were round a spur of the hillside, and out of sight, and the shikari said, ‘Bargo!’ — (run). And did we bargo!
The whole terrifying incident couldn’t have taken more than two or three minutes. But it felt like hours. No. Not hours: it felt as though everything had stopped and that a clock that had always been ticking away somewhere wasn’t ticking any more. I can’t describe it better than that. Nor can I at this distance make an accurate guess at how near or how far we were to the tigers, because my long sight has always been much better than my short sight — which for many years now has been almost useless. But if I had to make a statement, and stick to it, I would say the distance between the tigers — the tiger, rather, because once I looked at him I never looked away — and myself, was not more than ten paces. I could even have counted his whiskers! He was that close! And I have often wondered if a maddening recurring nightmare that centred upon a tiger, and which afflicted me for close on twelve years after my father’s death, could be traced back to those few minutes of total terror in which I had time to notice every single detail of the Pirawa tiger’s face, including the way in which his lips twitched back from his teeth in something that was not so much a snarl as irritation at being interrupted at an inconvenient moment.