The Game

“I imagine you’ll have enough material for half a dozen books, by the time you leave.”

He couldn’t hide a wince, although whether at the idea of leaving or of writing, I couldn’t be certain. “Oh, exotic adventure stories aren’t exactly my bailiwick.” The book of his that I had read comprised two hundred pages of hallucination, internal monologue, and sexual reminiscences on the part of a young man who lay in hospital after having been sent down from Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, and been knocked unconscious by a police baton during a violent march in Trafalgar Square.

“No,” I said, “of course not. But your writing seems to be concerned with people and their struggle for”—I nearly said integrity, but changed it at the last moment—“independence. It occurred to me that the context of an Indian ‘native state’ would give a writer of your calibre considerable scope. The political world in microcosm.”

He stared at me, either because he hadn’t thought of such a topic, or because he hadn’t thought anyone else would. Finally he pulled himself together enough to say, “Microcosm, yes.”

“I mean to say, the maharaja seems a benevolent enough dictator, but still, one has to ask oneself about the people living under him. Take the poor coolies yesterday, one of them was rather badly hurt by a boar, and all because we—”

But Trevor Wilson was not listening. His gaze had gone inward, and he abruptly stood and dropped his table napkin on his plate. He took two steps away before his manners recalled him enough to turn back and say, “Excuse me, Miss, er . . .” Then he was gone, leaving me staring open-mouthed at his retreating back. So much for my idea of picking the brain of the maharaja’s secretary for his master’s inner thoughts.

Faith and Lyn had finished their meal, and paused by my table on their way to the terrace. “More pigs today?” Faith asked, a sparkle in her eye.

I laughed. “I don’t think I could even look at a horse for another couple of days. His Highness is showing me the zoo this morning, but I thought maybe this afternoon I might walk into the city and have a look at the bazaar.”

“Would you like some company?”

“I’d love it. Shall I send word, when I’ve returned from admiring the bison and orangutans?”

“That would be fine.”

“I won’t be joining you,” Lyn said. “I have a date with a novel.”

Not, I noted, with a piece of sculpture. I finished my coffee, glancing through a copy of The Times that was only three days old. A few minutes before nine o’clock, I presented myself to the chuprassi outside my door for guidance to the “toy room.”

We set off as if going to the main block with the durbar hall and ball-room, but continued on to the western wing, mostly hidden from the gardens by large trees. Its shaded arcade was chilly, the marble floor damp enough to require caution in places. The electrical lights that brightened the guest quarters, it appeared, had not extended here, and a faint odour of lamp-oil betrayed the means of illumination.

We travelled for nearly ten minutes around the great inner garden and down the twisting passages before the chuprassi stopped at a door that had been painted a startling blue. He held it open, then closed it behind me; I was alone.

“Hallo?” I said. There was no answer, although the back of my neck prickled, as if I were being watched. The room’s only light came from a shaft of sun through a high window; it shone onto more purdah screens—they seemed to be a feature of the Fort architecture, although this maharaja’s ladies lived in town. By the dim reflected light, I peered around me, trying to make out the room’s contents. That it contained a great deal was immediately clear, but it seemed more the clutter of a storage room than a used living space, and I looked in vain for an electric switch to throw light on the matter.

“Toy room,” the note had said. And hadn’t Nesbit’s brief biography of the family mentioned that the previous ruler, the current maharaja’s grandfather, was an enthusiastic collector of mechanical oddities? With that hint, my eyes began to adjust to the gloom and pick out its contents.

The first figure to come into focus appeared to explain the sensation of being watched: a full-sized suit of armour, parked at the other side of the door. So strong had the feeling been that, half embarrassed, I flipped up the visor to be certain, but there was no face behind it, only cobwebs.

The overall texture to my left proved to be an entire wall of open shelves, laden from floor to the ceiling fifteen feet above with metal wind-up toys of all makes, conditions, and vintages. White-painted Indian cows and German birds in nests, tigers and horse-drawn carriages, clowns and Victorian gentlemen. A lady in the dress of the nineties sat at an elaborately painted tea table, one hand frozen halfway between table and lip—although on closer examination the hand held, not a tea cup, but a cigarette: shocking. Next to this iconoclastic figure, a roughly clad and bearded man awaited a turn of the key to resume his chopping of firewood. And here was one that brought back my childhood with a thump—a tin boy on a pennyfarthing bicycle, identical (if in better condition) to my father’s childhood toy, given to me when I was five. Life in a myriad of forms, all with keys in their backs or on the shelves beside them, all frozen and awaiting the animation of tension on their mainsprings.

When I returned the pennyfarthing boy to his place, I was surprised to feel dust on my fingers, although the air smelt faintly of machine oil. The room was maintained, but not tidied.

My eyes had adjusted sufficiently to trust myself not to bump into something, so I pressed on into the room. Scattered across the floor, looking as if they had been unloaded there rather than arranged, were display cases, some of which contained larger machines such as those in fun fairs near the sea. As I threaded my way across the room I saw at least six fortune-tellers, two of them old gipsy women, the others turbanned swamis, all set to different coinages. In two machines, the customer’s coin seemed to produce nothing more thrilling than a circuit of a train through a painted landscape, with a duck-laced pond here, a mountain tunnel there. No doubt the whistle blew several times during the circuit.

Behind the smaller display cases rose four enormous constructions of mahogany and plate glass, their contents more diorama than mechanism. At first the figures within appeared to be dolls about six inches in height, but on closer examination, underneath their costumes they proved to be specimens of taxidermy art. Most of the creatures were furry, blunt-faced rodents with no tails to speak of and short ears—a variety of guinea pig, perhaps. One case held perhaps thirty of the things, posed on their hind legs and dressed for a formal ball, half of them in white tie, the others wearing silk or velvet, with diamonds on their hairy throats and diminutive champagne glasses clasped in their upraised paws. The second case represented, I assumed, a box at the Ascot races: A dozen of the creatures clutched tiny binoculars and wore elaborate spring hats. The third was a night-club, with dancers on a stage, their furry bodies graced with strips of costume and feathers perkily jutting from their heads. The fourth case held eight infant piglets, of the pale domesticated kind, gathered in a Victorian conservatory around a laden tea table; something about their attitudes made it seem a cruel parody of society at the time—English society, that is.

As elaborate pieces of humour, they were most emphatically not to my taste. I thought it more than a little perverse, in fact, to raise a hundred small creatures just for the purpose of being transformed into facsimile human beings.

Along the back wall of the room a trace of gravel on the floor gave further evidence of the paucity of attentive servants in this place. (And as for their master, I thought, where was the maharaja, anyway? I’d been well after nine o’clock getting here, thanks to the unexpected distance between my rooms and this place.) Farther along, nearly in the corner, I came across the collection’s more, well, esoteric contraptions. The first startled me by appearing to be a man; this, on closer examination, proved to be what he was, a life-sized waxwork Englishman in the uniform of the Crimean War, complete with musket. I supposed he fired it when animated. He had been placed, possibly by accident, as if to stand guard over a cluster of glass-cased boxes, although these had neither gipsies nor swamis, and one glance made me glad I did not have the requisite tokens for putting them in motion. The women had skin that was uniformly pink and pearly, the men ranged from white to a darker shade of English pink, and all of them were comprehensively nude. I shook my head and turned to retrace my steps to the door, and nearly shrieked at the silent and unpainted figure ten feet away.

“Heavens!” I said, my heart pounding. “Your Highness, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“My grandfather’s collection. And I do wish you’d call me Jimmy.”

“They’re . . . extraordinary.”

“Do you want to see them work?”

“Oh no,” I said, more hastily than I had intended.