The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  Several Old Edwardians swear that no one who knew Jaya as a boy could have predicted what he would become as a man. They are wrong. Oh yes, yes, the outward show, the aristocrat turned demagogue, hand-made shoes from Bond Street exchanged for thick-soled sandals of local manufacture, single malt replaced by that vile fruit cup at official functions, all that I grant you. But these things were mere props; in essence, Jaya’s politics were wholly consistent with his antics at Neddy’s. His old friends feel betrayed by the social revolution he engineered when he allowed priests and villagers to impose their prejudices on the entire country, and their sense of grievance blinds them to the truth. It is also soothing to subscribe to the notion of a clean break between the two halves of Jaya’s life; in accentuating that discontinuity, we seek to underplay the fact that the man who let us down so shamefully grew from the boy we idolized.

  I use the pronoun rhetorically, you understand: I am proud to say that I, for one, always thought Jaya shone with a very dim wattage. But far too many of our comrades were dazzled. It is unusual for a clever boy to be popular, too. I myself, while of course looked up to by the others, was treated with a certain deferential reserve, which could on occasion turn malicious. (I well remember the incident of the dead bandicoot placed under my coverlet. And even if nothing was proved, I know who was responsible.) But Jaya had the common touch. Consider our choice of games: I got my colors in tennis, where outcomes hinge on individual talent and strategic intelligence, and a certain discernment is asked of the spectator. Jaya, on the other hand, was a cricketer. There is no surer route to popularity in a country where any urchin can parade his expertise in an alley with a plank for a bat and a kerosene tin for a wicket. When Jaya made 133 not out against Queen’s in March 1920, a tide of boys rolled onto the field and chaired him around the ground, paying no heed at all to my prefect’s whistle. Decades later, more than one Old Edwardian would confess to me that it was the memory of that golden afternoon that had prompted him to vote for Jaya. This despite the incontrovertible evidence that as a batsman the blighter possessed little innate talent and the style of an ebullient bear. Viewed analytically it is obvious that his famous victory was only the compound of his indefensible risks at the crease and some spectacularly inept fielding by Queen’s.

  But it was not just cricket that won Jaya his following. He was also a joker, you see, always playing to an audience. His pranks were legendary, chuckled over by everyone from Olympian prefects to the greenest juniors, regularly finding their way into the Glee Club’s endof-term skits.

  There was the time our form had a new Latin master: Neville Willoughby, pink-eared, black-robed, as fresh off the boat as the morning’s catch. When he entered our classroom we rose to our feet and greeted him with our chorused Salve, Magister. Baring his narrow brown teeth in a grimace intended to convey camaraderie, Willoughby asked us to tell him our names, as we were all going to be great chums. Jaya had planned accordingly. When the new master pointed at him and his cronies in turn, each boy called out a Sinhalese obscenity. The spruce young Englishman strolled up and down between the rows of desks carefully repeating Son of a whore! Frog’s arse! in his Oxford drawl, while behind his back boy after boy collapsed in silent mirth.

  It is quite true—I am not the least ashamed to admit it—that I followed Willoughby out of the room at the end of the lesson and informed him of the deception. My conscience dictated it. Was it gentlemanly to mock a newcomer to our land? Was it honorable to take advantage of his ignorance? Of course I was justified in acting as I did. Yet I confess that I quailed when I emerged from the boarding house the next morning to find Jaya, a suspiciously early arrival, lounging in my path. Half a dozen boys had followed me out after breakfast and now crowded close; I felt their breath on my neck and thought of noble Actaeon, torn to pieces by his hounds. It is possible that I whimpered.

  But Jaya only looked at me. “It’s in your blood, isn’t it, Obey?” Even in those days he had a large furry voice like an actor reciting poetry. “Your people were Buddhist under our kings, Catholics under the Portuguese, Reformists under the Dutch, Anglicans under the English. You can’t help yourself, can you? Obey by name, Obey by nature.”

  Before recess the taunt was all over Neddy’s: Obey by name, Obey by nature. Fellows grinned all over their faces when they saw me coming. I could have pointed out that what Jaya had said of the Obeysekeres was equally true of the Jayasinghes—indeed of all our leading families. I could have argued that there is no shame in adaptability and keeping an open mind. But Jaya didn’t operate within the parameters of rational argument. His popularity was founded on the base instincts that schoolboys share, the cheap laugh, the dagger in the spine.

  His most notorious stunt took place in the science laboratory. Chemistry was taught throughout Neddy’s by a hunched and ancient Tamil by the name of Sudaramani. Suds, as we called him, had a temper as explosive as the chemicals with which he surrounded himself. The slightest misdemeanor, even the suspicion of inattention, and Suds would have the culprit by the ear and his cane at the ready. We lived in terror of him. Once, when we were lined up outside his lab, I was seized with a fit of hiccoughs. Suds arrived, shoulders around his ears, hauled me out of line and ordered me to bend over in the doorway. He then invited my classmates to plant a muddy boot in my backside as each boy entered the room, which I regret to say they did with alacrity. Suds himself delivered the final kick, sending me sprawling to the floor, where I remained for the rest of the lesson. I must say it cured my hiccoughs.

  Chemistry lessons with Jaya meant stink bombs, and test tubes that mysteriously slid from benches to smash on the floor whenever Suds was preoccupied with a particularly tricky experiment. Jaya had more thrashings in Chemistry than I had in all my years at Neddy’s; eventually he took to slipping an atlas down the seat of his trousers before entering the lab.

  One morning he was uncommonly provocative, hurling inky litmus pellets around the room and breaking wind loudly. But when Suds came roaring down from his dais, cane twitching, Jaya leapt off his stool and scuttled to a corner, shouting, “Sir, I can’t stand it any longer, sir! Sir, you have destroyed me, sir!”

  He reached up to the shelf above his head, grabbed a jar clearly labeled Hydrochloric Acid, pulled out the stopper and took an almighty swig. Old Suds howled like an injured dog. Clutching his chest, he tottered toward Jaya, who had fallen writhing to the floor. Seconds later, as we boys watched petrified, Suds’s cane swished through the air. Jaya was rolling to safety under a bench, gurgling with laughter. It transpired that he had climbed in through a window the previous day and replaced the contents of the jar with water. Warden Metcalfe himself administered the caning at a special school assembly, after which Jaya was suspended for a fortnight.

  You see the relevance, don’t you? What has Jaya’s entire political career been but a hideous practical joke perpetrated on our country? Calling us the Lion People, telling every Sinhalese lout with a chip on his shoulder that he was the rightful master of the land: what arrant nonsense the man came up with to wangle his victories at the polls.

  Jaya used to boast that he taught his countrymen to be proud; the truth is, he taught us to hate. We’re no longer Ceylonese: we’re Sinhalese, Tamils, Malays, Burghers, Chinks, Moors, Colombo Chettys, and ready to cut each other’s throats at the slightest provocation. How providential that the blackguard drove his car into an embankment before he could send the whole country slamming into a brick wall. Not that he didn’t set us well and truly on our course; and he’ll be splitting his sides among the hellfires when the grand collision comes.

  But I see that Jaya has quite usurped this account of my schooldays, which is not what I intended at all. He was a minor player on the periphery of the happiest times I’ve known. These days, Neddy’s has come down in the world. It might still be the finest school in the country, but it has little in common with the institution that nurtured me. Do you know that they no longer teach Latin? And they’ve begun phasing out
English-medium instruction. Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage? The Tamils will learn their Tamil, the Sinhalese their Sinhala; if they end up unable to understand each other, so much the better for mutual hatred. Divide et impera: wasn’t that one of their charges against the British?

  I am proud to have attended Neddy’s in the days when it turned out gentlemen and scholars. As a boy I often thought what a great pity it was that Ceylon had no empire of her own: we Edwardians would have made such a splendid job of sallying forth and ruling it.

  THE DREAMING SPIRES

  This morning the sight of a grizzled face in the mirror so startled me that for a moment I feared an intruder had slipped into my room. Yet I am all too conscious that I have grown old. I, who once prided myself on coming to the point, on the succinct phraseology of my addresses to the jury, have become a man who rambles. In my youth I had no patience with the conversational detours of the elderly: how long it took them to reach their destination, I would think, searching for shortcuts to bypass their meandering. I couldn’t understand why, when so little time remained to them, they would squander it in this way. Now I see that it was not a matter of being wasteful, but of hefting each moment, acknowledging its due weight. Tempus fugit; so old men cling to it as it passes, and its wings beat a fraction slower overhead.

  Nevertheless I must press on if I am to arrive at the events that spurred my pen. The first lesson the Bar taught me was that narrative is chiefly a matter of selection. What one leaves out is quite as important as what one chooses to disclose—indeed more so. I must endeavor to keep the precept in mind as I compose this account.

  And so I shall not allow Oxford to detain me long. I spent four years there, reading Greats. Warden Metcalfe had advised against this course of study, warning that students who didn’t have an English public school preparation usually fared badly. But when he saw that my mind was made up he offered me every encouragement, tutoring me himself in Ancient Greek and extra Latin. His words came back to me on my first night in Hall, as the scholars stalked disdainfully past my table. The long dark rustle of their gowns left me pincered between envy and resolution. I knew very well that to be their equal I should have to prove myself their superior. Thus I applied myself with diligence to my books, and eventually took a very decent Second in Honor Mods.

  Mater and Claudia were visiting England that year and came up to see me. They were pleased that I had done well, but their congratulations were perfunctory. Women are rarely impressed by intellectual achievement. My father would have appreciated my success more keenly but he had remained behind in Colombo. Mater had refused to cover his passage—she had sold Granny’s star sapphires to raise the money—and he had no means of paying for himself.

  Over tea in my set my mother recited a litany of complaints. The arrangement with Kumar and Iris had come unstuck, and now my parents were renting a poky little house with only three bedrooms in Havelock Town. The few parcels of land that hadn’t been sold were mortgaged to the hilt. Our dwindling revenues were being sunk into my education. Pater had sneaked off to Lokugama one weekend, packed up the contents of the cabinets in both drawing rooms and sold the lot to a flat-faced Malay. Mater had been obliged to pawn a gold chain to pay for Claudia’s piano lessons. They could no longer afford a motorcar. Even the Great Danes hadn’t been replaced when the latest litter succumbed to tick fever.

  Meanwhile Claudia picked at her sleeve and her teacup rattled in her saucer. She had grown into an attractive young woman with a slim yet rounded figure and our mother’s long golden eyes. Yet she avoided one’s gaze and her fingernails were hideous: raw, bitten down to the quick. It was plain that the dear girl was quite overcome with emotion at being reunited with me at last.

  After tea I proposed a stroll around the colleges. It was a flawless afternoon, all restless leaves and the river slow and green, stonework like sculpted honey. We had paused in Tom Quad so that I could discourse on its history when I was interrupted by a shout—and to my dismay there was Jaya, shambling toward us in the sunlight. Really, the fellow bore an astonishing resemblance to an ape; one looked around in vain for his keeper.

  He stood before us and stroked his mustache, examining my mother with an auctioneer’s frank interest. She, wretched woman, narrowed her eyes still further and her nostrils quivered like a deer’s. He claimed he was over from Cambridge to visit friends, but that didn’t prevent him attaching himself to us for what was left of the day. With my mother on his right arm, he strolled the pavements as if he owned them, laughing in that coarse way with his head thrown back, or bending close to Mater and snuffling in her ear. I followed, rigid with rage. Beside me, Claudia gnawed at her fingers and screamed when a bicycle bell sounded at her shoulder.

  Mater informed me, in a brief letter I received a few days later, that Jaya had invited us all to Brackwell Hall, Sir Geoffrey Alderton’s place in Norfolk, for a week. Sir Geoffrey, you’ll remember, claimed to be a Communist, and liked to collect exotic guests whom he could pin out like so many specimens for the instruction of his neighbors. How utterly typical of Jaya not only to have wangled his way into Brackwell Hall, reputed to be one of the country’s finest examples of Georgian domestic architecture, but to extend invitations to all and sundry like the lord of the bally manor. I was determined to put the kibosh on that little show. Two hours before we were due to set out for Norfolk, I turned up at the hotel in Bayswater where Mater and Claudia were staying and announced that I had no intention of leaving it. I ordered Claudia to remain in London with me, as I did not believe our father would approve of her being on intimate terms with Reds. She wept, as she always did when overstimulated. Mater raged like a leopard but I would not be swayed. It was scarcely proper for her to turn up unaccompanied at Brackwell Hall; some things are simply not done, even by Communists. And yet, you know, as the hour of the train’s departure drew near, she stabbed a pearl-headed pin through her hat and swept out of the door, swearing like a fishwife in primrose linen.

  ORIGINALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Claudia and I spent a soothing week together: early morning strolls in the park, the occasional concert, an outing to Brighton. My sister had had her hair bobbed and looked absurdly young. My company was all the tonic she needed; after a day or two of skittish agitation, she grew used to the excitement of being alone with me in London and was soon jabbering like a mynah.

  I had forgotten my sister’s trick of twisting commonplace sayings into unexpected configurations. The whole family picked up her coinages. It’s a long worm that has no turning became an Obeysekere standard. No point spoiling the soup for a pennyworth of tar. Give a dog enough rope and hang him. Now, speaking of a lackluster acquaintance, “He’s no oil lamp,” she remarked. I grinned. It was amusing; even astute. At the same time, I was faintly irritated. As a child I had memorized the proverbs that headed the pages of my copybook, committing each one to heart as my pencil traced its lines and loops. I was word perfect. No one noticed. That was the point, in a way: to have the fluency to pass unremarked. Nevertheless it was galling when Claudia’s mistakes drew admiring laughter from our parents. I have always favored the classical world, in which perfection is synonymous with flawless imitation. The ancients understood that there is no art to being original. It’s only a matter of getting everything wrong.

  If I indulged now and then in these uncharitable thoughts, it was only because Claudia could be a trying companion. For a start, she badgered me with questions about Jaya. Where did his people live? Would he call on us when he returned home? Had a marriage already been arranged for him? I refused to answer. It was obvious that she was troubled by the nature of Mater’s relations with Jaya, and I judged silence to be the best way of calming the unhealthy frenzy of her suspicions.

  One evening, when we had returned from a late stroll around the West End, Claudia grew excited. It was unwise of me to have allowed her a glass of hock with dinner. Prowling around her room, she hurled a
foam of garments from drawers and upended hat boxes. The cause of the hullabaloo was the disappearance of a short length of corded blue silk. The thing was fraying, worthless. But it was her special rope. She slept with it under her pillow. If she thought I wasn’t looking, she would take it from her pocket and finger it. It was a habit she had retained from her earliest years, when her imagination would pounce on an unsuitable object of one sort or another and dig in its claws. The cord was the same shade of bruise-blue as a cushion she had dragged everywhere as a small girl; it took Pater to pry it from her when it finally grew too filthy to be tolerated.

  I hated seeing my sister handle that grubby little cord. A few hours earlier, I had taken advantage of a diversion to abstract the thing from her evening bag and drop it under a chair. Now, when it became obvious to Claudia that she had lost it, she wanted to scour the pavements we had walked that night. The idea was absurd. I was tired and had no intention of trawling the streets pretending to search for that dingy fragment. But she became rebellious, raising her voice and even trying to push past me as I barred the door. I envisioned being summoned to an interview with the hotel manager, who always wore a brown suit and looked at me as if I were something that had turned up in his toothpaste. He would announce himself entitled to an explanation. Embarrassment ran its cold feathers down my spine, curled itself between my shoulder blades.