The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  A RIVER OF CHAMPAGNE CORKS

  There is no man on earth who is not emboldened by the death of his father. Saddened, perhaps. When I looked down at the orchids I had placed on Pater’s grave I knew, with piercing certainty, that now there was no one left in the world who would always be glad to see me. At the same time, it was as though a mist lifted and the landscape stood out with the crude confidence of a child’s drawing: a broad road lit by a crayoned sun. Sitting behind Pater’s desk, fingering the objects that had once signified adulthood (a gold-clipped fountain pen; a Florentine leather blotter), it was not my father’s absence I felt but my own presence: a solid form that occupied space in the world, that had weight and quiddity and cast a shadow.

  Pater had died as the sun rose a week after his fiftieth birthday. He was riding in Queen Victoria Park when his heart seized up and he slumped forward on his horse—or rather Uncle Kumar’s horse, because my parents were back in Cinnamon Gardens. Major, a chestnut gelding, continued to canter around the track. An English engineer who attempted to grasp Pater’s reins slipped from his own saddle, caught his foot in a stirrup and broke his leg. His horse came to a halt and began grazing. But round and round the track went Major, a single-minded beast, schooled in routine, impervious to the unfamiliar distribution of weight on his back. Bystanders—there are always bystanders in this country, fellows who appear from nowhere like a rope trick in reverse—bystanders shuddered and stared at the dead man on the tall horse. The phenomenon was surely moospainthu, a bad omen. As such, it was best not to intervene.

  At last a gardener who recognized my father had the wit to send word to the house. Mater and Kumar arrived, accompanied by a groom. Major slowed, trotted across to the servant, lowered his head, whinnied for sugar. Pater slid sideways into Kumar’s arms.

  The Englishman, whom no one had liked to touch, continued to lie moaning on the grass. The next day Mater had a basket of fruit sent to him in hospital. Several rude weeks later, she received a stiff little note of condolences. “Really,” she said, tossing it to me, “anyone would think I’d sent round a sack of durians.”

  Pater had made me his executor and sole heir; the tears that had remained unshed beside his grave prickled my lids as I learned of his confidence in my judgment. The weeks that followed my return were spent in consultation with solicitors and accountants and bankers, and I was vain enough, even surrounded by the wreckage of my inheritance, to be gratified by the deference they paid me. An Oxford degree, the London Bar: they invested me with an authority before which men twice my age bowed their heads.

  All the same, anger rose in me like bile as I discovered the full extent of my father’s profligacy. His desk was jammed with letters of credit, unpaid bills, bounced checks, notices of arrears. Yet the week before he died he had thrown a party for three hundred guests at our place by the sea in Bentota. Kumar assured me you could have strolled across the lagoon on the champagne corks.

  There was also the envelope I found at the back of a drawer. Its contents revealed that Pater had put our old overseer’s son through a mission school and subsequently paid out a sizable bribe to have the fellow employed as a peon in a government department. A bundle of letters scrawled on lined paper in an ill-formed fist thanked my father for his generosity at Christmas, at Sinhalese New Year, on the letter writer’s marriage, the birth of his son, et cetera. Hundreds of rupees squandered on soothing Pater’s conscience over a rightful thrashing administered years before: that was the kind of excess I found difficult to forgive.

  One of the last things Pater had done was to sign over our estates at Lokugama. I managed to save the house itself. But only by selling everything: teak almirahs, ebony headboards, Malay pewter, Irish linen, Japanese erotica, my lead soldiers, Claudia’s dollhouse, our sturdy old rocking horse, Willy’s enameled snuffbox with the view of St. Petersburg on the lid, Granny’s chamberpot handpainted with French roses; everything of value that had survived my father’s depredations. I ransacked steamer trunks, turned out mildewed handbags, rummaged through the pockets of long-discarded suits. I went through my ancestral home like a thief. It was an experience not unmixed with exhilaration.

  MIXED DOUBLES

  I trust you have understood that I had no choice in these matters. That didn’t spare me a blazing row with Mater. It was kindled by the Bentota property, the deeds to which were in her name as she had inherited it from a great-aunt. I explained that the sale of the house would ease the burden of debt on Pater’s estate; my mother refused to entertain the idea. “Claudia will have Bentota as her dowry,” she said, and directed a jet of smoke at my face. “It’s not as if you’ve left her anything else.”

  As Pater’s heir and executor I was entitled to dispose of his estate as I saw fit. But Mater, with the illogic that women buff to a high polish, had already made it plain that she was piqued by my failure to consult her. “All that money squandered on you at Oxford. Classics and what-not. How many Ancient Greeks do we know? And then you come home and try to pinch the one thing left to your sister.”

  I remained calm and forbearing. To my surprise, Pater’s death had left my mother badly cut up. I had imagined her to feel nothing but an ill-disguised contempt for the husband she had spoken of with habitual impatience and betrayed so brazenly. Yet by all accounts she had made a spectacle of herself that morning in the park, on her knees beside Pater’s body, pulling up fistfuls of grass by the root. When Claudia was a child, I could make her cry by picking up her favorite doll and shaking it until its china eyeballs shifted out of alignment. Almost three months after my father’s death, Mater still had the look of that doll: jarred, out of true.

  It was my first insight into the nature of marriage: a conundrum only two can solve no matter how transparent it appears. And then, too, over time, I have come to realize that as we grow older we experience any death as diminishment—no matter how shallow the acquaintance, how profound the enmity; another flake of self scraped loose by the knife. I remember opening the newspaper and reading the headline about Jaya: there came upon me the sensation of retreating water, and the curved world falling away under my toes.

  My voice was gentle, then, as I endeavored to reason with Mater. I pointed out that without the Bentota sale, the estate could not afford to keep up her allowance. I explained that the expense of running a house in Colombo was out of the question. I intended to move to Lokugama, I said, and practice out of chambers in the nearest town. Claudia could keep house for me. Mater would be welcome under my roof, of course; but with only a barrister’s uncertain income to sustain the household, I could offer her no more than board and lodging. If she wanted an independent income and a place of her own in Colombo—and I was certain, knowing my mother, that she would have no desire to bury herself away in Lokugama—the Bentota bungalow would have to be sold. Besides, I added, my sister was still a girl, and a timid little thing at that. It was ludicrous to be thinking of marriage settlements.

  Mater had just lit a fresh cigarette. There was a chrome smoker’s stand beside the piano; ignoring it, she placed her cigarette on the gleaming instrument. I watched it burn down, knowing it would leave a furrow in the lid of Iris’s Pleyel. That was Mater all over, utterly heedless of the damage she caused other people. Beside the fading ash, her crimson nails beat time for long seconds. Then, with no more ceremony than if passing on a trivial piece of gossip, she said, “Claudia has accepted an offer of marriage.”

  When I could speak, I blurted out the question. “Donald Jayasinghe,” said Mater. Even in the midst of my distress, I noted the sly satisfaction with which she purred those syllables.

  Jaya had been home for over a year. I had heard of his First of course—he might as well have taken out a notice in the Times—but his alleged brilliance notwithstanding, he had been idle since his return, squandering time and money in the usual way on drink and cars and women. He lived two streets away, in his father’s house in Green Crescent. I had seen him once, at the tennis club, where he had c
ome up to me and offered his condolences. I had answered politely and turned away. And all the while the blackguard had been engaged to my sister.

  Piece by jagged piece, I fitted the story together. They had met over mixed doubles at the club, said Mater. “Jaya spoke to your father on the evening before the accident. Afterward, with Ritzy barely in his grave, we decided to say nothing for a while. It didn’t seem right to be announcing a marriage.”

  That should have tickled me: Mater constrained by social niceties! But I was in no frame of mind to be amused. It was the casualness of that pronoun: we decided. “What about me?” I spluttered. “How could you not have said anything to me?”

  “Because I knew you would make a scene,” she said calmly. “You’ve always been so absurdly jealous of Jaya. And I didn’t want you upsetting Claudia. She’s been through quite enough, with the shock of losing her father and whatnot.”

  From my sister’s earliest years, Pater had recognized the delicacy of her nerves and singled her out for special indulgences. Knowing her dread of the dark, he would remain by her bedside for hours on his visits to Lokugama; sometimes I woke at midnight to hear his slippers padding past my door. He had the gift, not uncommon among those who have little to do with children, of being able to enter imaginatively into their world. On Claudia’s fifth birthday he had rosy apples hung from every tree in the garden to surprise and delight her. So I had attributed my sister’s jangling tears and hammered silences to grief. Now I recalled her watery eyes scuttling away from mine, the cunning with which she had avoided tête-à-têtes, her convenient fit of weeping, face down on the coverlet, when I cornered her one afternoon in her bedroom. She had conspired with Mater and Jaya to deceive me.

  From the suriya tree outside the window, a saw-edged cry was hacking through the thick air. My ayah used to say that when a rice stealer died, his soul entered the body of a crow. The irrelevant detail floated around my brain; I batted it away, endeavoring to concentrate on Mater’s news.

  “How do you intend to get by without an income?” I inquired, as unpleasantly as possible. “Carry on sponging off Uncle Kumar?”

  “Don insists I make my home at Green Crescent after the wedding. You know what a pile the old boy built—there are corridors and staircases by the mile.”

  They had arranged everything. I clawed at the back of the nearest chair. Mater, however, had regained her composure. She settled herself on the settee, lit another cigarette. “The suite in the tower will do me very well. As for pocket money . . .” She waved one of those narrow hands that so resembled a snake’s head, setting ash falling and bracelets clinking like coins. “I daresay I’ll scrape by.”

  In that instant I saw everything, the sickening pictures garlanded in wavering blue smoke as if conjured from an evil Aladdin’s lamp. Mater and Jaya. Claudia, poor child, could have no inkling of what they were about. Perhaps Jaya’s widowed father— the old boy —was in on it too. Mixed doubles, screamed the crow in the suriya tree, mixed doubles!

  Mater’s voice followed me out of the room. “I’m sure you would be welcome too, Sam.”

  The next day or the day after, I contrived to get Claudia alone on the croquet lawn, out of earshot of the house. I had it all planned, the sentences arrayed with parade-ground precision, the arguments—veiled but unmistakable—rehearsed like troops. Then I looked into my sister’s face, those long eyes, so like Mater’s, yet so different in their defenseless transparence, and knew I could no more utter my thoughts than bring my heel down on a nestling and grind till I reduced its softness to a bloody mash of bone and feathers. Instead—and I am ashamed to confess this, but I have set out to tell the truth—I sat on a garden roller and cried like a child.

  After a while Claudia came and sat at my feet. She put out a little hand and stroked one of my conker-brown brogues with a tentative finger. “It’s all right,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  When at length I had mastered myself, I clasped her by the wrist and led her to the house. She preceded me into the hall. There was a grass stain on her skirt, its dampness visible even on the dark frock she wore in mourning.

  THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O’ER EDEN

  Six months later I found myself walking up the aisle at St. Luke’s, Claudia quivering on my arm. An Englishman called Canning had recently been appointed vicar. At a christening held the previous week, he had dropped the baby; an alert godmother sprang forward just in time to prevent the eggshell skull from cracking open on the marble basin of the font. Now the silly ass contrived to drop the ring. The slim platinum band rolled a few inches, came up against the bridegroom’s monumental foot, fell flat with a tiny clattering. You could see everyone thinking it was an omen.

  Less than a year had elapsed since Pater’s death so the reception was a muted affair, just two hundred or so guests. My brother-in-law danced first with his wife and then with her mother. Did anyone else notice his paw straying below Mater’s waist? Probably not; he leashed it in promptly like a wayward puppy. An occasional whim would lead my mother to abandon European dress, and that night she was decked out in a crimson Manipuri sari, with a royal-blue blouse that left a scandalous quantity of midriff on display. Even the Reverend Canning was unable to keep his eyes from drifting toward that expanse of taut brown flesh, like fish trailing a lure.

  I glanced at Claudia, enthroned beside a Jayasinghe crone who was informing the room in an imperious shriek that she had broken her ear trumpet when she threw it at her dhobi. My sister had on the strained expression she habitually wore in company, like someone determined to follow a conversation in a foreign language. As for me, I played my part in exemplary fashion, smiling and chatting away. I even suffered Jaya to mangle me against his chest at the end of the evening. He almost crushed my collar bone.

  I rose very early the next day and went out into the dewy garden with Kumar’s rifle. I got that crow with my first shot. When I came down to breakfast I looked out of the window and saw the gardener’s boy nailing it to the suriya tree. Two centuries earlier the Dutch had planted hundreds of those trees, all up and down the coast. As they built their forts and counted their gold they must have gazed at those tulip-shaped, greenish-yellow flowers and wondered if they could bear it any longer: the scent of cinnamon, the approximations.

  A DISTURBING EPISODE

  Freed from the duty of providing for Mater and Claudia, I decided there was nothing to be gained from moving to Lokugama. As soon as word got around that I intended to remain in Colombo, Pater’s old friend Aloysius Drieberg offered me a place in his Hulftsdorp chambers. There I soon acquired a reputation for brilliance. The soundness of my arguments impressed the Bench; the fluency and wit of my delivery delighted juries. I seldom lost a case. My fees rose correspondingly.

  Rents in the capital were exorbitant. Colombo landlords treat their tenants in much the same spirit as a cookwoman handles coconuts: split them open, scrape them out, throw away the shells. Fortunately I was spared these trials: Kumar and Iris insisted I stay on and make my home with them, and there was no withstanding their resolve. Iris, who had never enjoyed good health, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease around this time. I hope that my presence in their house brought a measure of cheer into the lives of those two simple souls, whose relations with my parents were far from uncomplicated, yet who throughout those years showed me nothing but kindness.

  For a while I tried to find a tenant for Lokugama, but the isolation of the house proved a disincentive, and so it continued to stand empty and grew more bedraggled with each passing month. The first signs of shabbiness had appeared even before I left for Oxford, and continued apace in the last years of my father’s life, when no one in the family was spending more than a few days on the estate and there was no money to spare on repairs deemed nonessential. But in latitudes where rot is the status quo, preservation is a war that must be waged hourly, skirmish by skirmish; inaction is synonymous with defeat. An assault by termites on one of the back-verandah p
osts proceeded unchecked. In the time it took to replace a row of missing tiles a monsoon had torn three more from the roof; and the rats had grown so bold that they would stroll across a room in daylight.

  On my return I had sacked all the servants Pater had quite unnecessarily continued to employ. With so little to occupy them, they had fallen into idleness and insolence—our head servant even having the temerity to protest that my father had promised them all pensions in their old age. Out they all went with no further ado. I brought in a man and his wife to look after the place, and went down now and then to keep them up to the mark and arrange for a little work on the house. On one of these visits, the bungalow keeper told me that Claudia and Jaya had dropped by on a motoring trip and stayed for a cup of tea.

  With the ménage in Green Crescent I had as little to do as possible. The newlyweds had spent an extended honeymoon on the Continent. After they returned, I pleaded the demands of my flourishing practice to excuse myself from family gatherings. On those occasions when I could not decently absent myself, I found consolation in quiet talk with Claudia. Jaya seemed attentive enough to her, but then attentiveness to women was a reflex with him. And I had only limited opportunities for observing them together, because in those days the ladies gossiped over soft drinks in one room, while the gentlemen discoursed over their whiskey and tobacco in another. I cannot understand why some of our more forward misses have lately begun to protest this arrangement, when it is so plainly advantageous to both sides: the less contact, the greater the mutual allure.