The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  In the end I was obliged to remind Claudia of certain unfortunate facts. There are instabilities that appear in old families like flaws in the finest china. Take our Aunt Sybil, who never married and displayed a keen interest in missionaries. One afternoon she lured a Methodist into a bathroom and locked the door behind her. Then she hurled the key out of the window. They remained there for several hours, until the minister’s hoarse cries succeeded in rousing the servants. Afterward, Sybil was confined to the care of a brother-in-law who thrashed his eleven children every Sunday morning to strengthen their characters. It was not that I threatened Claudia exactly. But at length she grew limp. I stayed with her all night, fearing she might yet blunder downstairs and into the streets, whimpering for her lost treasure. I need not have been anxious. At breakfast she was a model of propriety. The rest of our time together was entirely harmonious.

  As for what went on in Norfolk, I hate to think. At a Law Asia dinner some forty years later, I found myself sitting next to a desiccated chief justice from Lahore. He told me he had once met my mother at Brackwell Hall. “A remarkable lady. Tremendously kind to me, yes tremendously.” He fussed a moment with his spectacles. There had been some awkwardness, he recalled, over a crystal rose bowl. “Been in the family since Queen Anne. The maids were picking shards out of the rugs for days.” He smiled at me, the old toad, and I glimpsed the ghost of a boy in his ruined face, and summers that had grown to fullness, leaf by leaf, Mater in a bronze straw hat and Claudia walking down a grassy path that fell away toward water, all vanished now, everything over.

  MURDER CONSIDERED AS A FINE ART

  Oxford remains with me as a quintessential day: liver and bacon and toast and marmalade, a couple of lectures, a cold collation in my set at noon. Into flannels for tennis, which we played on a meadow reached by taking a ferry across the river. A meadow: I had never understood the word, so familiar from books since childhood, until I encountered that soft, yielding grass, with its embroidery of buttercups and daisies, utterly unlike the coarse blades and knotted weeds that passed for lawn at home. I would lie down between sets, intoxicated by the sweet scent of earth and grass. All around me boys sprawled under a high, blue sky, young gods in an antique glade.

  There would be a huge tea in a pavilion, more tennis, then back to college for a bath and dinner. This was followed by an hour or so of talk and pipes in the JCR or billiards at the Union. With Moderations behind me, I felt able to relax the rigorous program of study that I fear had turned me into something of a swot in my first two years. Fisher, my tutor, encouraged a leisurely approach, advising me to do no more than read generally as initial preparation for Schools. This left plenty of leisure for idling in a punt or penning a short story for the college magazine.

  The news from home left me in no doubt that I would be obliged to earn my living on my return. Not for me the debonair cultivation of eccentricities while pretending to manage the family estates; for the very good reason that there would be no estates left to manage. The prospect of a career struck me as no bad thing. There were plenty like my father, natural leaders of our countrymen, who dissipated their talents in frivolities because their wealth freed them from the necessity of earning a living. I determined then and there to seek my fortune at the Bar. A noble profession, and ideally suited to one so amply endowed with reason and eloquence. I borrowed a couple of books on criminal law and lost no time in mastering their contents.

  My reading soon led me to the famous murder trials of the day. Thereafter, when I went down to London it was not to visit the Tower or the Houses of Parliament but to stroll down Hilldrop Crescent, where little more than a decade earlier Dr. Crippen had made away with Belle Elmore and buried her remains in the coal cellar of number 39. In the seedy little secondhand bookshop that stood at the crossroads, I bought a twopenny pamphlet and gave myself up to its sensationalist account of the initial police bungling of the case, the subsequent pursuit of Crippen across the Atlantic and the cable received over the ship’s wireless that sealed his fate.

  From Hilldrop Crescent it was a short walk to 63 Tollington Park, where Frederick Seddon had murdered Eliza Barrow for her money. My research took me also to the chemist’s shop in Crouch Hill where Seddon’s daughter purchased the threepenny packet of arsenic-laced flypapers that had figured so prominently in the prosecution. I bought a packet myself as a memento, while picturing the revolting sickroom described by witnesses: the sluttish bed linen, the chamberpot that required emptying, the sickening clouds of flies whose squalid buzzing filled the room. Because whatever purpose those flypapers had served, it was plainly not the murder of flies.

  Although I could not know it at the time, I was living in the heyday of the English murder. What novelist, even one possessing imaginative powers of the highest order, could have invented a scene such as the one that took place in Bismarck Road, Highgate, where Joseph Smith played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on his landlady’s harmonium while his latest bride drowned in the upstairs bath? Only think, if you dare, of that parlor. I see a determinedly respectable room: a brass-potted aspidistra in the bay window, china dogs on the mantelpiece, looped curtains made of a heavy brown material that doesn’t show the dirt. And Smith descending the stairs, flexing his fingers.

  Wonderful stuff, don’t you agree? I was most impressed by the cold brilliance with which the great English murderers planned their crimes, the slow maturation of the project in logic and cunning over weeks and months. It was quite the converse of the way things were done at home. There, lack of premeditation was the rule. Murder was frequent—far more frequent than in England—with at least half the number of recorded murderers giving their occupation as cultivator. Such men carried knives for agricultural purposes, and fought with them, rather than with their fists, over the most trivial causes: a fence line that was out by an inch, the disputed yield from a single branch of an overhanging breadfruit tree. There was no art to such crimes. The psychology of the murderers was as simple and dull as the alphabet. In many cases the killer made no effort whatsoever to avoid detection and was apprehended at once by the authorities. It struck me as a thoroughly brutish state of affairs.

  From the art of murder it was a short step to murder as art. It was at this time that I discovered the complex pleasures of the detective novel. I was soon immersed in Conan Doyle and E. C. Bentley, and the early works of the sublime Mrs. Christie. I shuddered over “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I thrilled to the adventures of Father Brown. Holmes and Poirot, my favorite fictional detectives, became quite as real to me as anyone I knew. I loved to sharpen my wits on the ingenious puzzles devised by their authors, and may say without vanity that once or twice I succeeded in cracking them before the solution was revealed in the final pages. Modesty compels me to add that my unraveling of the Hamilton case (variously described as masterly and a dazzling piece of detection) probably owed more to a mind steeped in the stratagems of detective fiction than to the genius with which I was credited by so many commentators.

  Here I must ask you to grant me the indulgence of a parenthesis. Only last week I attended a lecture at the British Council on the subject of classic detective fiction. The lecturer, a Dr. Sims, dressed like a poacher and sounded like a barrow boy, but claimed to be a don at the University of Liverpool. When my ear had adjusted to the peculiarities of the fellow’s accent, he was arguing that the popularity of the detective novel springs from its shoring up of conservative values. “By its strict adherence to formal conventions, the whodunnit seeks to bring the socially disruptive act of murder under control,” he brayed. “The murderer is unmasked by a representative of authority, who provides a rational, logical explanation of the crimes. Thus we see that the detective novel raises the specter of a threat to society only to exorcise it. The murderer is removed from our midst, and the reader is reassured by the restoration of order and the perpetuation of the status quo.”

  Have you ever heard such rot? I almost rose from my seat to set the silly ass righ
t there and then. Dr. Sims had missed the point entirely. The true drama of the whodunnit lies not in the clash between murderer and detective, but in the skirmish between author and reader. The fictional murderer is brought to justice, yes. But when an author succeeds in outwitting his reader, there is the “destabilizing of convention” so prized by that nitwit from Liverpool.

  Consider for a moment a classic work like Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Doesn’t the success of Mrs. Christie’s inspired plot hinge on the rules that govern the conduct of policemen? The reader who accepts that convention is outwitted by the author, who dares to flout it. Contrary to Dr. Sims’s argument, the whodunnit is an invitation to social disobedience. It is enthralling precisely to the extent that the principles it sabotages are considered beyond question. Who but a fool would describe this process as shoring up conservative values? The detective novel is nothing short of a literary insurgent.

  Over coffee and biscuits I attempted to put my argument to Dr. Sims, but he paid no more heed to me than to the dandruff lying in dunes on the shoulders of his corduroy jacket. His tiny eyes leapt about the room like flies. As soon as I paused, he muttered an excuse and headed for the urn, where busty Miss Amita de Silva, the assistant librarian, was arrayed in a fetching scarlet sari and tight black blouse. That is at once the strength and the weakness of the English mind: always more interested in practical outcomes than abstract speculation. Not that Dr. Sims got very far with Miss de Silva. She is a Marxist-Leninist, I believe, with a stern outlook and a fine disdain for Europeans. Other than Marx or Lenin, of course. At any rate, she contrived within minutes to spill a cup of steaming coffee into our lecturer’s lap. He yelled blue murder.

  THE QUALITY OF MERCY

  In time I exchanged Oxford for London, where I would be eating my dinners at Gray’s Inn. Thanks to Fisher, I was reading for the Bar with Douglas Dartington-Clay, the most sought-after pupil-master in England; the two men were related by marriage. Dartington-Clay recommended lodgings off High Holborn; the rooms were cheap and clean, he said, and conveniently situated. All of which was true, but my master was either ignorant of or chose not to mention the overwhelming attraction of 6B Feathers Lane. I became aware of it one icy November afternoon, when my landlady entered my room unannounced and crossed to the table where I sat huddled over my papers. Somewhat taken aback, I was rising to greet her when she placed her hand on my shoulder, indicating with downward pressure that I should remain seated. Then she bent over, unbuttoned my fly and knelt in front of me.

  Mrs. Arthur Timms must have been in her thirties when I made her acquaintance. Part Maori, part Irish, part Scottish, she was a large-boned woman with smooth olive skin and eyes of the clearest grey. She had met and married Timms, an able seaman in the merchant navy, when he was on three days’ shore leave in Dunedin. My bedstead of dainty, if chipped, white iron, like the wreaths of bluebells and pink rosebuds on my wallpaper, hinted that the original occupant of my room had been a young girl. However, the Timmses marriage did not appear to have produced any children; at any rate, I saw no photographs or mementos to suggest the contrary. Mrs. Timms—I never knew her first name—rarely volunteered information about herself and, despite the nature of our relations, I was always too shy to ask questions. There was something dignified and regal about her, a compound of her slow gait, the heavy black hair she always wore pinned up, the dark rings around those pale irises that gave her an air of intense remoteness, even when she was engaged in the most intimate acts.

  She, on the other hand, encouraged confidences. Soon I found myself whispering to her what I hardly dared acknowledge to myself. Thereafter she often brought a springy length of rattan to our encounters. As for Timms, he was away on his ship for months at a time. I saw him only once, in the dim hallway, a blue-jowled chap with a shiny raincoat and lips as red as geraniums. When he went away again, his wife had a black eye and violet bruises along her thighs. What I remember most vividly about her is that, unlike the English, she always smelled clean.

  There were five other boarders, all of us students from Asia. At first I flattered myself that Mrs. Timms had singled me out for her attention. I was soon disabused of that notion. A month after our first encounter, alerted one evening by a familiar creaking, I crept upstairs to the third-floor landing. After a brief hesitation, I approached a door and applied my eye to the keyhole. A diminutive Burmese was busy with Mrs. Timms, whose dress was rucked up around her hips; he had fastened himself to its dove-grey billows like a small golden ornament. It was fortunate that my moans coincided with his or surely I would not have escaped detection.

  After that I listened attentively whenever I heard my landlady’s step; and thus ascertained that she came and went from all our rooms, never staying longer than half an hour or so. She fitted us in: between putting a pie in the oven and serving up supper, between stepping out of her bath and stepping out to the corner-house on a Saturday evening, resplendent in a mauve satin hat.

  The service Mrs. Timms did us lonely young men, strangers in a strange land, cannot be overestimated. Oddly enough, we never discussed her among ourselves. For my part, I had the sense of living under an enchantment; to speak of it would have broken the spell. There was also the fact that I felt an instinctive antipathy for the Parsi from Bombay with whom I shared a landing. Sodawallah was always pushing smudged tracts about vegetarianism and Gandhi under my door. I finally put a stop to it by informing him that I would far rather live under what his literature persisted in calling the imperialist yolk than put my trust in a fellow who went about in sandals. From then on Sodawallah affected not to see me when we met in the hallway or passed on the stairs. When Mrs. Timms enquired into the cause of our strained relations, I confessed at once. She spanked me soundly with my clothes brush. The roses on my wallpaper blossomed in crimson splendor.

  You will think, perhaps, that I relate these details from a vulgar desire to titillate. Not at all. I wish, belatedly, to pay tribute to Mrs. Timms. Until I met her, I had believed that no woman would willingly have congress with me. Ugliness is a terrible affliction. I was painfully conscious of the discrepancy between my unprepossessing appearance and the subtlety of my mind. Oh, those large English girls with their small English smiles! How I yearned for one of them, more discerning than her sisters, to see beyond my appearance to the delicate play of intellect and wit in a mind nurtured on all that was finest in literature and philosophy. I am not what I seem, I wanted to cry. I am no different from your brothers. We have read the same poems. But those bloodless lips twisted, and the girls looked away. I do not believe this was due to racism. Jaya’s skin was almost as dark as mine, yet mutual friends were always barraging me with reports of his success with the wives and daughters of peers and publicans alike. The difference was that he was tall and broad-shouldered and that women deemed him handsome.

  I was not a virgin when Mrs. Timms made herself available to me. In Oxford I had frequented ladies of easy virtue. Although “frequented” is hardly accurate: a timid visit now and then when need drove and my allowance permitted. But I had thought that the real price I would always pay for a woman’s caresses would be the revulsion I saw in her eyes—until that autumn day when Mrs. Timms proved otherwise.

  I wrote to her after I returned home but received no reply. Once, she had asked me to read out a circular—a trivial matter concerning missionary work in the Far East—saying, by way of explanation, that she had mislaid her reading glasses. It occurred to me at the time that I had never seen her wearing spectacles, but I attributed this to the natural vanity of a woman with beautiful eyes. Now, thinking the matter over, I wonder if she might have been illiterate. Or perhaps it was simply that like most of her sex she preferred to live in the present, and saw no point in lingering over an episode that had reached its conclusion.

  Five or six years later, Dartington-Clay’s Christmas card brought the news that Mrs. Timms had tripped on the steps to the coal cellar and broken her neck. He added that one of his pupils, a
Tamil from Penang who had been lodging at 6B, had made rather an ass of himself at the funeral.

  POSH

  On the day I was called to the Bar, I returned to Feathers Lane to find an orange envelope waiting for me on the hall table. The telegram informed me that my father was dead.

  Typically, Mater gave no details. A last-minute cancellation provided me with a berth on a ship sailing in four days. A starboard cabin, unfortunately. Port out, starboard home: only in my case home meant traveling east, not west. After Port Said, where the stewards changed into their whites, I simmered slowly on the wrong side of the ship. At night I would linger on deck as long as possible, hoping for a shred of breeze off the water. But a trio of Australians who came aboard in Aden took possession of the piano every evening after dinner and I fled from their music as if from contagion. “Black Mammie, Black Mammie”: sung at the top of a woman’s voice, it pursued me into my dreams. She had hips as broad as her continent, that fair maid of Perth, and her eyes were the vacant blue of the ocean.

  Pater had been dead a month when the Alberta entered Colombo harbor. I saw a forest of steamer funnels, and the low white buildings like sun-dried droppings that the English left wherever they paused. But well before they came into view, from the moment I first glimpsed a fuzzy green ribbon unrolling along the horizon, my heart had swollen in its cage. My own, my native land. After London it looked small and shabby, a relative last encountered on a distant afternoon and now discovered standing cap in hand at your door. It announced itself as a scent made up of tar, damp, rot and water that has stood for days in vases. My mouth filled with saliva. I had promised myself a feast of crab claws that night; or stringhoppers and chicken curry; or deviled prawns or biriani or egghoppers, but in any case all the fried brinjal I could eat. Settling my hat more firmly on my head, I turned away from the rail; a boy no longer.