The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  At the Customs and Excise Ball, with the daughter of a copra millionaire on his arm, he learned that Nagel had emigrated. To Australia, said Sam’s informant; but someone else chipped in, insisting it was Rhodesia. At any rate, a country waiting to be invented. It would suit Nagel well, Sam thought; he was a man cast in the heroic mold.

  Yet he was unable to shake off the sensation that something had slipped from his grasp.

  His longing for Claudia grew urgent. The thought of the creature engorging itself within her, distending the small waist he had been able to circle with his hands, was repellent. He pictured it as an eye: jellied, rotating in darkness. Fearing that its mass had pitched her off balance, he needed assurance that its effect was in fact steadying. But when he dropped in at Green Crescent, fingers crossed for luck, he was confronted by Jaya, and a priest tricked out in yellow like a bally pineapple. His brother-in-law was devoid of all spiritual feeling; of that he was certain. But the needle of Jaya’s ambition had settled on the north of nationalist zeal, and Buddhism was intrinsic to the cause.

  Jaya crushed Sam to his breast, then explained that Claudia was resting and had asked not to be disturbed. “But stay, stay,” he urged, while the monk’s shaven indigo head turned to study the visitor. “We’re holding a pirith ceremony this afternoon.”

  Of pirith Sam knew only that it involved chanting. That was quite enough.

  Everywhere he went, men flattered him to his face and maligned him behind his back. He recognized this for what it was, incontrovertible proof of success. But there were entire days when his life seemed a thing of cardboard and paint, and a gale raged offstage, mocking him with losses.

  He knew it was time he married.

  III

  The jungle moved within the walls.

  Leonard Woolf

  The copra millionaire’s daughter satisfied the criteria on which he would not compromise: she was plain, and the inventory of her dowry exceeded a dozen foolscap pages. What was more, she had been educated in a seminary for young ladies presided over by two sisters from Aberdeen. Her ambitions were contained by drawn-thread work and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which she read every year, returning to Waverley as soon as she had closed Castle Dangerous. It was true that her parents left something to be desired, as in-laws usually do. They spoke Sinhalese at home and the mother wore nothing but saris. To offset these drawbacks, they were elderly, mild and rarely ventured into Colombo, preferring their rambling estate near the 27-mile post at Kaltura.

  He would be marrying into a family that had been Christian for five generations. But the old people’s primitivism expressed itself in their insistence on having his horoscope drawn up by their astrologer, who scrutinized it for information about his health, financial prospects, compatibility with his fiancée’s chart, and so on. These particulars having been deemed satisfactory, further consultations were required to determine an auspicious date for the wedding. Why her parents chose to believe that the girl’s well-being would be determined by the slant of planets rather than by the estates, investments and lakhs of rupees they had settled on her surpassed Sam’s understanding. But he submitted to their requirements as an anthropologist conforms to the practices of the tribe he is studying: with the tolerance that accompanies the certainty of reward.

  Her name was Leela. He called her Lily, if anything. They never met unchaperoned. But on visits to Colombo she stayed with a cousin, a jovial matron with enlightened views on courtship who found excuses to leave the young couple alone in her drawing room from time to time. On one such occasion, wishing to test the girl’s modesty, he placed his hand on her knee. Her distress was acute and unfeigned. He desisted at once, apologizing. Her unremarkable proportions scarcely affected him; he was excited by smallness, with its aura of violation. Still, the articulation of power is its own aphrodisiac. He looked forward to his wedding night with clinical ardor.

  Claudia’s son was born at daybreak on the 14th of January. In the house next door, the Jayasinghes’ Tamil neighbors smiled to hear him cry. They had risen early in honor of the Hindu harvest festival of Thai Pongal, when barefoot pilgrims crowd into temples to offer up rice and vegetables to the god of the sun. Thus joyfulness and ceremony attended the child’s entry into the world.

  His ayah slept at the foot of his cot on a mat woven from coconut fronds. When he was twenty hours old, a noise awoke her. Through the dissolving meshes of sleep, she saw a figure in a long white gown bent over the baby. As she struggled to her feet the apparition straightened. By the time the ayah began screaming, she was the only one alive in the room.

  Servants stumbling along a corridor toward the commotion at the front of the house met their mistress gliding on bare feet in the opposite direction. They flattened themselves against the wall to let her pass; but as they said later, she appeared not to notice them. A few claimed to have seen that she was concealing something in the folds of her night-dress. They all agreed she was smiling.

  It was Jaya who found her, in the damp weeds among the plantain trees by the back wall, the bottle of Lysol empty beside her. She was not smiling then; and no one who saw her doubted the agony of her end.

  Sam was able to go on living after she chose not to by becoming more himself. This would be his lifelong tribute to her. It affirmed her wisdom in choosing oblivion over monstrosity, the last lucent expression of a mind giving way to darkness.

  He began by seeking out someone to punish. There was the abomination she had married. At Claudia’s funeral, a furtive ceremony boycotted by the Jayasinghe clan, her husband wept as men did not, in that time and place, weep for their wives. Sam watched, stone-eyed, from the opposite side of her grave. In that public grief he saw only the inadequate expiation of private remorse.

  Afterward, when the handful of mourners had converged on Kumar and Iris’s drawing room, Jaya drew him aside. “I found this in her almirah,” he muttered, fumbling in a pocket.

  A letter, Sam thought. She had left a letter. Not for him, but for Jaya. He felt like a man who has missed the last step on a stair.

  Jaya held out a small sooty sphere hung with gold. He moved his hand and two blue eyes flipped open in his palm.

  Sam put out a finger. The thing was smooth and cool to the touch.

  Jaya shuddered. “It’s horrible,” he said. “Like a charm.”

  “It’s a doll’s head,” countered Sam. The turmoil of his emotions did not prevent him noting how fluently his brother-in-law resorted to superstition. Really, the veneer of Jaya’s civilization could be picked off with a thumbnail.

  “But look how it’s been colored black. It has to be a message.” Jaya’s voice had risen. Any moment now it would attract attention, and there would be a scene: probing, exclamations. Sam plunged his hands into his pockets, short-circuiting the impulse to snatch the vile little object from Jaya and crush it underfoot.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “A broken doll. She kept things like that.”

  After a minute Jaya said, “She used to talk about you.”

  Small cold feet trod the length of Sam’s spine.

  “About when you were children.” Jaya’s voice had thickened. “How could you have . . .” But here he produced a handkerchief, flashily monogrammed, into which he made coarse, trumpeting noises.

  Sam closed his eyes. Not because he gave a hoot for his sister’s prattle, but because the slide from the second to the third person is always chilling. Whenever he thought of Claudia, he had pictured her face turned to his. Now he saw himself as a thing trundled across a stage, a little varnished manikin pushed hither and thither for private entertainment.

  A few weeks later Jaya converted to Buddhism. Thirteen months after Claudia had been laid in her grave he announced his engagement to a moon-faced Kandyan virgin, descended from aristocrats who had led a failed rebellion against the British. Sam interpreted these signs, and every subsequent step in his brother-in-law’s career, as proof that Claudia would always have been sacrificed to
mythology and ambition.

  But Jaya, spiraling into history’s orbit, was beyond his reach. Besides, Jaya had only married her. There was the parent who had delivered her up to him.

  Sam was at the passenger terminal to meet her ship.

  With her usual disregard for proper sentiment, Maud had decided to go abroad as her daughter’s stomach swelled. “My last fine careless rapture and whatnot. Do you realize this wretched infant will make me an aachi?” So she had exclaimed, resplendent in green lace, scattering cigarette ash on her guests, at the party Jaya had thrown for her before she left.

  Claudia had been allowed to attend the first hour. Afterward, Sam sat with her as she lay on her bed, her hand jumping in his, while downstairs the gramophone alternated with the piano in grinding out fun. Her hair lay loose on her pillow. He remembered smoothing it behind her small ears; making a feeble joke about the “affluence of incohol.” It was the last time he saw her alive.

  With her flawless instinct for the disreputable, Maud had hooked up with Jaya’s Venetians. Italians! Treacly eyes, a religion that was eight parts nonsense and two parts sentiment. The countess had worn tails to Maud’s party and kissed her full on the mouth on arrival. The couple had an Abyssinian in their retinue, a long-limbed man with a shaven head who neither spoke nor smiled. Rumor had it that he serviced both husband and wife with unflickering indifference.

  Their group was trailing its permutations along the wintry Mediterranean coast when Claudia died. The telegram followed Maud from one gilded, chilly hotel to another for over a week, until it caught up with her beside the Bay of Naples on the afternoon of her fifty-first birthday.

  Rain was falling when her ship docked in Colombo. The boom of waves crashing against the breakwater was in Sam’s ears when an old woman draped in black put a hand scribbled with violet veins on his arm. He had looked straight past her, scanning the passengers disem-barking under umbrellas. She saw that she had disconcerted him, and smiled her crooked smile. Sooner or later every son sees his mother as a quantity of female flesh. But for the first time in his life, on that bilge-smelling morning, he experienced her presence only as an absence of desire.

  She took a cigarette from a silver case. Her porter hung about ostentatiously. “Give the man a whatnot,” she said and began coughing.

  He fumbled for a coin. She said, “How stingy you are, Sam.” It was spoken with the disinterest of a naturalist remarking on the behavior of apes. Then she sank to her knees on the shining pavement.

  Kumar summoned his doctor, who diagnosed bronchial pneumonia with pleurisy. There was already Iris, who required round-the-clock care; and the doctor, a straight-browed Tamil, waggled the neckless head set like a ball on his shoulders and warned that Maud’s condition was acute. Within an hour she was in a nursing home. Until she was pronounced out of danger, Sam prayed every night and every morning that she would be spared. He wanted her to live a long time.

  When she could receive visitors he went to see her. A leather dressing case lay on her coverlet. Her lips and nails had been colored their usual crimson, and she was wearing a bed jacket of tawny quilted satin. But a line had been crossed. She had left for Italy a handsome, middle-aged woman. Now, although her skin was close-grained as linen, her eyes magnificent, these things reminded him of the last yellow roses that had clung to the wall under his window in Oxford: not so much an echo of summer as evidence that the glory was gone.

  He asked where she intended to live when she left the nursing home. “Don’t imagine you can go back to Kumar,” he said, forestalling her. “Iris is dying. He’s told me he doesn’t want you there.”

  That was not strictly true. But he had surmised it from the old boy’s eloquent silence on the subject of Maud. Besides, the lawyer who had drawn up Iris’s will was an Old Edwardian. Sam knew that after disposing of her jewelry and personal effects among an assortment of nieces, Iris had left the residue of her small estate to Kumar. She had added a line in her own hand, made clumsy with illness, under the clerk’s copperplate: I beg you to have nothing more to do with her.

  On Maud’s bedside table, a vulgar gold basket held two dozen sprays of orchids, an extravagance of bruised kisses. She reached behind them and slid out a long buff envelope. “The deeds to Bentota. Jaya’s given them back to me. I’ll put the house up for sale and rent a little place in Colombo.”

  The ceiling fan creaked round and round. Sam was conscious of the blood being forced around his veins; of everything that repeated itself and was beyond his control.

  At last, he said, “You don’t really imagine the Bentota bungalow is worth anything, do you? Selling it will barely cover the bills you’ve run up here.”

  Maud said, “You could pay them yourself. Now that you’re marrying money.”

  “I’m afraid Lily and I will have considerable expenses of our own.” There was a small waxy stain on the gray coverlet. He picked at this scab. “A young couple just starting out, don’t you know.”

  The silence wound itself tighter.

  Being Maud, she rallied. A narrow hand wove a nonchalant arc through the air: “Something will come up.”

  He leaned across her, to her dressing case. Then, taking hold of her wrist, he folded her fingers around a tortoiseshell handle. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not any longer.”

  She hurled the mirror at him as he was leaving. It caught the green-painted rail at the foot of her bed. “Seven years’ bad luck,” he said, and shut the door.

  It was Kumar, in the end, who rescued her, taking the Bentota property off her hands at a price well above market value; a generosity that dropped like sourness into his relations with Sam, curdling them forever. The money enabled Maud to hang on in Colombo, where she parked herself on a series of acquaintances, moving on every few months when hints hardened into ultimatums.

  Sam waited. His rivals at the Bar liked to say that he bored the defense into submission. When the jibe made its way back to him—as it was bound to do, since friends rarely deny themselves the pleasure of relaying abuse—he smiled. Only a fool distinguishes between outwitting an opponent and outlasting him.

  A fortnight before he married, Sam fell in love.

  In matters of the heart his instincts were neurotic but not self-destructive. Where he had loved, he had suffered. The lesson was not lost on him. It led him to discover an outlet for tenderness unshadowed by the menace of rejection.

  The house stood by the sea, at the end of one of the lanes that protruded from Galle Road like the teeth of a dirt-caked comb. There were still fields there in those years, emerald parcels of kurrakkan and keera, and low, thatched huts set among thickets of plantain. Across the lane, the lichen-embossed wall and ironwork gates of Allenby House suggested an opposing army.

  From the moment he first saw the place Sam wanted to possess it: the mild lions lounging on the gateposts, the cobalt rectangles of Bohemian glass in the window on the landing, the pedimented portico, the verandah floored in white marble squares with black diamonds at each corner. It had stood empty for close to a decade. Halfway through the previous century Allenby, the third son of a third son, had arrived in the colony with four shillings and a change of twill trousers. He got into coffee and amassed such a fortune that his deerhound fed from a golden dish. But the leaf blight came in 1869, and Allenby shot the dog and hanged himself. The house changed hands a dozen times. It had last been owned by a Danish bandmaster, who had modernized the plumbing. His wax-faced wife burned with increasing boldness for her Tamil tailor. One evening, with guests for dinner and the best silver, she left the room with a murmured excuse. Minutes later, they heard her scream. She was found clinging to the newel, with a tape measure twisted about her neck. In between there had been minor catastrophes, a stonemason crippled in a fall, a baby born with a flipper at its shoulder in lieu of an arm.

  Sam put his hand on a brocade curtain in the dining room and came across a bat, bulging like a tumor in the tarnished folds. Mildew had papered an entire wall.
In every room the sea could be heard, sighing in its bed. From an upstairs window he looked down at coconut trees slanted like pins and a row of clumsy black stitches. Beyond the railway line waves lowered their woolly heads and butted the shore.

  A watchman dressed in a filthy banian and sarong trailed Sam through high-ceilinged rooms full of aqueous light, spelling out a catalog of deterrents. These were a judicious blend of the domestic and the gothic: blocked drains, a cloudy shape on the stairs, rotten floorboards, a room into which the mongrel bitch nursing its mastitis on the verandah would not venture. Children with matted hair and mucus-ringed nostrils crept out like cockroaches from their squalid quarters beyond the kitchen to gape at the visitor. The superstitions that had lowered the price of the house to the point where it cost little more than the value of the acres in which it stood left Sam unmoved. In a bathroom where a broad-leafed sapling was growing out of a skirting board he closed his eyes, summoning his sister’s ghost. She had left him nothing: no sign, no token of their understanding. Remorse at his lack of vigilance crashed about his heart with the obduracy of breakers.

  The exterior of the house, once faced with dark yellow stucco, had weathered to ochre and lemon. Claudia had owned a dress that color. He could recall its faint sheen in a dim corridor; a fabric-covered button grazed his ear. Among garden beds turned rank and wild, the watchman droned in his wake. Sam sprang up the steps two at a time and entered the house once more, half believing she would be waiting at the foot of the stairs. He would take her hand and lead her out into the gold day. Fish would leap and sing in the sea.

  Wide-eyed and rigid on her bridal bed, his wife could not understand, then or ever, why he was the one who wept as he went about his onslaught. In all the years to come she would endure their encounters with the aid of the mantra that a merciful instinct devised for her on that first night. Flora. Augusta. Rowena. Amy. Flora. Augusta. Rowena. Amy. He laid his wet face against her shoulder and ripped her open again, and Sir Walter’s heroines sustained her in the dark.