The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  I was rarely able to see Claudia on her own. So when I ran into Jaya at the club late one afternoon and he told me that Mater was spending the week with friends on their rubber estate at Maharagama, I strove to conceal my delight. Jaya was heading out to Mount Lavinia for a swim, attended by his usual little cluster of toadies. There would be cocktails afterward, leaving the coast clear for hours. I pleaded a sudden headache, abandoned my tennis partner and drove straight over to Green Crescent.

  As the car nosed into the gate, a man stepped out of the way. I paid him no heed: one of the many household servants, I supposed. But he must have taken note of me, for as I pulled away he called, “Mahatheya! Anay, mahatheya.” I braked, and watched him come hurrying up behind me in the awkward half-trot half-shuffle necessitated by his sarong.

  “Well?” I barked, when he drew level with my window. “What do you want?”

  He bent toward me. I had left the engine running, but a minute later I switched off the ignition and climbed out of the car to stand beside him. It was not a tale I wanted to hear while sitting down.

  My informant was Claudia’s tailor. Once a month he spent a day at the house, making up garments according to the designs she sketched for him. That afternoon in the course of the fitting, as he circled her with his mouth full of pins, an accidental disarrangement of her petticoats had afforded him a view of her back: it was scored with tiny slits just starting to scab over.

  The tailor paused. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, although now and then he cast a sly glance toward the house, which was screened from view by a bend in the drive. Big nonamahatheya and Jayasinghe mahatheya were not at home, he said. He hoped he had not done wrong in speaking to me . . . The little nonamahatheya would be angry if she knew, and he was a poor man with seven children. Seven daughters! Seven little catastrophes!

  The conversation had shifted into a familiar groove. My mind raced with its habitual agility. “You’ve done no harm in telling me about this,” I said airily, as my fingers brushed a few coins in my pocket. I must have been agitated, because I slipped the fellow thirty cents—an absurdly generous tip. He stiffened. Primitive people, like animals, react with unease to any deviation from a pattern. Snatching back two coins from his palm, I went on, “But what you saw is of no importance at all. You should forget it at once if you want to return next month. Above all, not a word to anyone here.”

  The tailor touched his hands to his forehead. But as I approached the bend in the drive, I glanced back and saw him still standing there, peering after the car. It crossed my mind that he might yet come in useful as a witness.

  Jaya’s father kept to his own suite in the house, where a small servant-girl, employed for that purpose, rubbed his feet and heard out his reminiscences of hounds he had bred, bearers he had thrashed and illnesses he had outlasted—the good old days, in short. The old boy was, in Claudia’s parlance, as deaf as a doormat. There was scant danger of him overhearing or interrupting us, but I took the precaution of locking the music room door, anyway.

  Claudia shrank away from me, cowering between the piano stool and the lustrous black instrument. I was having none of that. A few terse sentences conveyed what I knew, as I grasped her by the shoulders and swiveled her about.

  In my distress I handled my sister, a slightly built girl, more roughly than I intended. The soft blue housedress she was wearing ripped at the neck. My heart flickered at the sight of a rusty gash showing beneath a shoestring strap: an ugly thing rendered still more repulsive by its proximity to satiny brown skin and ivory lace.

  Running my fingertips down Claudia’s camisole I located the gruesome herringbone of scabs that framed her narrow back. I wanted to weep. I wanted to commit murder. “He did this, didn’t he?” I cried. “Is it the first time? Tell me, tell me at once.”

  At that, Claudia’s head jerked up. “No, Sam, no.”

  She struggled in my embrace. I tightened my grasp. She flailed uselessly for a minute. “Tell me,” I whispered, my mouth against her hair.

  Between sobs, she confessed that the wounds were her own handiwork: she had cut into her flesh with Jaya’s razor, she said. “Stop covering up for him,” I hissed. “I’ll prosecute the blackguard myself. You’ll be rid of him forever. We’ll live together, just the two of us. I’ll look after you.”

  Her weeping grew frenzied. I shushed her with a hand over her mouth, afraid that the servants would hear. But even when her tears had quieted, she insisted that Jaya had nothing to do with it. She slid down and clasped my knees: “I swear it on Daddy’s grave.”

  Distorted by weeping, smeared with mucus, her angled face was still beautiful. It always had the power to undo me. I squatted beside her and folded her in my arms. By degrees, I managed to comfort her. We rocked back and forth.

  As the knot in my chest loosened, it occurred to me that Claudia’s self-mutilation was a form of protest. “You can’t bear him touching you. That’s it, isn’t it?” I asked, as I stroked her.

  “Oh yes, Sam,” she murmured.

  At the thought of Jaya’s hands crouched like tarantulas on her sweet flesh, I could not repress my own shudder. But what could I do? When I begged her again to leave him, her hysteria revived. She was terrified of what he might do in retaliation, of course. It required all my skill to calm her.

  In the end, the best I could do was to extract a promise that she would not harm herself again. I spoke of our childhood. I reminded her that she could always turn to me. And then—and all these years later it still grieves me to write it—then I went away and abandoned her to him.

  Iris was playing the piano when I got home. I stood listening on the dark verandah, and recognized an old melody that Pater used to strum on his ukulele: Believe me, if all those endearing young charms ...I thought of childhood holidays in the hills before everything went wrong, my head against Mater’s knee and Claudia sleepy-eyed on the rug, the circle of our family as gleaming and unbroken as a wedding band.

  The verandah was lined with square red planters holding leafy clusters of dieffenbachia and caladium. A creeper studded with pale stars wound about a pillar, releasing scented cadenzas into the night. My sister’s face rose before me, her smile pasted into place as we said goodbye. For the heart that has truly lov’d never forgets. I put my fingers in my ears. The moon, flat and white, had on its idiot stare.

  Time passed. Word of Jaya’s growing interest in politics reached me now and then. He had been to India, where he had an audience with the Mahatma. He had joined the Ceylon National Congress. He had addressed an anti-British rally on Empire Day. He was stirring things up on behalf of whichever cause would tolerate his interference: working conditions on tea plantations, standards in village schools.

  But I refused to listen to talk about Jaya. I snatched private moments with Claudia when I could, and assured her that she could rely on my help if she left her husband. I immersed myself in my work. I played tennis four times a week. I blocked my ears.

  THE ELEPHANT’S POINT OF VIEW

  Kumar was one of those chaps given to enthusiasms. Once he had devoted months to the breeding of tropical fish. Later an entire year had been given over to horology. Malodorous jars of fish food still stood forgotten on windowsills, and not one of the clocks in the house kept reliable time. He had recently emerged from an artistic phase, so that you never knew when a bungled sketch or a tube of cadmium yellow might turn up behind a cushion or at the bottom of a lavatory bowl.

  His current ambition was to shoot an elephant. He had a whole repertoire of near misses that he would relate with a disarming blend of despair and drollery. On one memorable expedition, his new gun had jammed not once but three times. On another occasion he had been charged by a cow elephant and fractured both ankles scrambling out of her way.

  “I was born too late, Sam,” he lamented. “Sixty years ago there were elephants running about all over the bally place. A fellow had only to let off a gun. Like this Major Rogers chap—”tapping the collection of Vic
torian hunters’ tales that was his vade mecum at the time—“fourteen hundred elephants. Fourteen hundred. And his friend Skinner is credited with half that number. Two fellows accounting for over two thousand elephants between them. Those were the days, Sam. We poor buggers can only dream.”

  Good old Kumar! The best of chaps but undoubtedly a duffer. His approach to hunting exactly mirrored his attitude to life: wildly enthusiastic, potshots at everything in sight, but no strategy, no disciplined attack. No wonder Mater had broken off their engagement. “Kumar’s like a spaniel,” she once observed with disinterested indulgence. “All snuffle, snuffle, snuffle. It’s sheer luck if he turns up what he’s looking for.”

  Enthusiasm is a shallow but infectious emotion. After yet another evening of listening to Kumar hold forth about elephants, I found myself scanning the shelf of books he had amassed on the subject. Soon I was enthralled. What had begun as an idle notion, no more than shifting light and shade on the edge of my consciousness, took on definition and bulk, crashed through all other thoughts as the weeks passed.

  An elephant presents such a vast target that shooting one would appear to pose no great difficulty. But that is far from the case. The colossal beast is so strong that unless it is killed with the first shot, it will almost certainly get away. Hence the preferred method of a bullet in the brain.

  And there the difficulty lies. An elephant has a massive skull in order to afford a surface sufficient for the attachment of the powerful muscles of the trunk and jaws. However, its brain is very small. It is also situated far back in the skull and surrounded by such a huge, irregular mass of bone and flesh that its exact location, in a living animal, is hard to determine. Most other land quadrupeds possess a thin, solid cranium wall, easily shattered by a blow or a bullet. But an elephant’s skull, although of considerable thickness, is made up of long, narrow sections perpendicular to its surface, irregularly shaped, pocked like honeycomb. A shot might pass through these airy cells only two inches from the brain with no effect other than to make the animal run farther and faster than it would otherwise do.

  Kumar and I would sit up until all hours, poring over diagrams that showed cross sections and angled views. One evening, just short of mid-night, a shadow fell across the crimson Turkey rug and I looked up to see Iris. The library was strewn with diagrams, maps, the breathing bodies of dogs. “A Number 8 gun,” Kumar was saying. “Nine pounds, twelve ounces.”

  Iris came closer. Mater’s people were typically long-limbed and light-skinned, but in Iris the stock ran anomalous. She was a little round guava of a woman, thick-waisted and blunt-nosed, her coarse complexion disfigured forever by acne. Two years younger than Mater, she looked a decade older. The contrast when they were girls must have been cruel; and Iris’s defining trait was that infinite capacity for self-effacement that a woman no one looks at learns when very young.

  She stood there now in a shapeless blue housecoat, her hair, which she wore bundled up in a knot during the day, plaited into a gray rope as thick as my wrist. The tremor was not yet very pronounced. Nevertheless the cup she was carrying quivered on its saucer.

  “You shouldn’t keep Sam up late,” she said to Kumar. “He works so hard.”

  “We’ll be through in two ticks, Aunt Iris,” I assured her. “We’re just deciding which kind of gun is best. Tricky business, you know. Expert opinion is divided.”

  “Double muzzle-loading,” said Kumar firmly. “Smooth- bore.”

  Iris peered at the litter of catalogs surrounding us. Then she said, “It probably comes down to the same thing, child. From the elephant’s point of view.”

  She padded away to the faint clatter of bone on bone. Kumar and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Women so often leave one with nothing to say.

  UNDER THE STARS

  We camped in a grove of palu trees, near the confluence of two clear brown streams. Kumar, who knew the area of old, had seen to all the arrangements. We had set out at dawn and reached a village of scattered huts early in the afternoon. The bearers and trackers hired by Kumar were waiting there for us. We followed them along jungle paths shrill with the calls of monkeys and birds and the screams of the tree beetle, until we reached our camp site two hours later.

  It was an idyllic spot. The shamas that had piped us on our way were still calling from the trees as we drank smoky tea and watched our cook busy himself with the hunk of venison that would form the basis of our supper. The other servants settled on their haunches at a respectful distance from our camp stools, chatting quietly over their betel. Soon the irresistible aroma of roasting meat would creep into our nostrils and the shamas would fall silent one by one while the nightjar cleared its throat. God was in his heaven. All was wrong with the world.

  Kumar had waited until the previous evening. Then, when I went into the library, wound up and ticking with the pleasure of inspecting our equipment for the last time, he wandered over to the window, shuffled his feet and told me that Jaya would be joining us.

  “For dinner, you mean?” I asked, horribly jolted. But from the way the old boy avoided my eye and fiddled with a crimson tassel, I knew where the conversation was headed.

  He tried to pass it off lightly, as one of those spur-of-the-moment things. He had been shopping for tick gaiters in the Fort when he bumped into my brother-in-law and told him of our plans for the weekend. Jaya had been so enthusiastic that Kumar felt it was the sporting thing to invite him along. “No harm done,” he concluded with brittle cheer, looking at last into my face. What he saw there led him to turn away in haste, rubbing the bridge of his nose, always a sign that his emotions were perturbed.

  With glacial calm I checked over our guns and ammunition, took a last look at the cross sections, read once more through the recommendations of experts I already had by heart. Across the room Kumar pleaded silently for forgiveness. He had damp brown eyes like the sludge at the bottom of a coffee cup. Chaps like that are incurable sentimentalists; absolutely fatal on a jury. I ignored him for the rest of the evening, repulsing his feeble attempts at conversation and declining to join him in a lime blossom, a cocktail made from gin and lime juice shaken with crushed ice that was our standard pre-dinner tipple.

  Poor Kumar. It was wrong of me to punish him. Even as I ate my Scotch eggs, tasting only ashes, I could see that he was not really to blame. Given Jaya’s unshakeable conviction that he was a boon to any gathering, it would have been almost impossible to prevent him from encumbering us with his presence. But no amount of reasoning could dispel the cold fury in the pit of my brain. The jungle was infested with monkeys. Why saddle ourselves with another?

  Jaya was uncharacteristically subdued when we called for him at Green Crescent the next morning. He mumbled something about having had one too many at the club the night before and sat slumped in the front seat for the entire journey, stirring himself now and then only to address a remark to the driver. You don’t for a moment believe that rot about Jaya renouncing alcohol to comply with Buddhist doctrine, do you? Booze had played such havoc with his liver that his doctors left him no choice in the matter.

  On arriving at our camp site, we cooled off with a refreshing dip in the stream. Regrettably this had a restorative effect on Jaya. He had begun the day clad in trousers and a bush shirt, but now draped a checked sarong around his fleshy nether regions and sat bare-chested in the fading light, like any village lout. Drops of water glistened on his matted torso and quivered in the black fur along his arms. One longed to enquire if he had had an accident with a bottle of hair restorer.

  When I remarked on the beauty of our surroundings, he snorted. “A grove, a glade—why use words designed for an English forest? They have nothing to do with this jungle of ours.”

  “And what would you say instead?” I enquired in the silky tones I had perfected in cross-examination.

  But Jaya was ever adept at sidestepping inconvenient questions. “The British occupy our imagination as well as our country,” he intoned, drawing on his f
oul-smelling pipe.

  I recognized the prelude to a sermon. “English is our inheritance too,” I interrupted. “Why shouldn’t we mold it to our needs? Grove and palu in the same sentence—isn’t that distinctively Ceylonese?”

  Through rolling smoke, Jaya winked at me like a gargoyle. “Obey by name, Obey by nature,” he hooted. “I say, Kumar—I don’t suppose you’ve heard about the time when . . .”

  Things got worse. No sooner had I launched into the rather amusing story of a match I had won in straight sets, than Jaya got up and strolled away. His manners had plainly been tailored to match his costume. He thrust himself into the circle of servants sitting by the water, and soon their noisy hilarity was drowning out my voice.

  When I could bear it no longer I picked up my rifle, called for one of the trackers and set out before the light deserted us altogether. Within a quarter of an hour I had a brace of the small green pigeon whose bubbling calls had greeted us on arrival. I returned to camp to find that Kumar had joined the raucous group beside the stream. Even the cook had deserted his fire. Not a head turned in my direction. I stood there unnoticed, holding my handful of soft bodies in the dark.

  S HOOTING AN ELEPHANT

  To bring down an elephant requires a stout heart and steady nerves. One must walk boldly up to the animal and fire from twenty paces or less. Men survive the claws of leopards and bears, but the hunter who comes within range of an elephant’s legs or trunk never lives to boast of his exploit.

  These things were in my mind the next morning as I shook a scorpion from my boot. I had often seen elephants in the wild, the gray arch of a back looming above the bushes, or a scattered herd feeding on a hillside. I had watched, from a distance, and contented myself with plover and pigeon, deer and monkey. But now that other death, elephant-shaped, was waiting in the shadow of the trees.