The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  The first time, she had sewn and embroidered dozens of baby shirts in graded sizes. Also bibs and satin-stitched pillow slips, and bath sheets with yellow ducks appliquéd along the borders. One day she opened a chest that had remained padlocked for years and folded back layers of tissue paper. Soma, padding in with her broom, found the nonamahatheya surrounded by scraps of lace and lawn and cotton. Leela held up an exquisite little shirt, white shantung with blue smocking at the yoke and wrists, for the girl to admire. But Soma recoiled. Here was the source of the evil, she declared, in her slow, flat voice, these ghost babies hungry for life and sucking it out of her mistress. Their presence in the house was moospainthu.

  The next day Tissa sent his boy to the kitchen door to say there were two Rodi women at the gate. Buddhists shunned contact with the Rodiya, considering them unclean; yet they made their living by begging and were rarely turned away from a house. They were believed to possess second sight and the evil eye, and it was judged unwise to cross them.

  Usually it fell to Tissa’s boy to deposit food and coins in their trowel-shaped bowls, which he was careful not to touch. That afternoon the nonamahatheya herself came out of the house, carrying boiled rice, curried bitter gourd, salt fish and a rustling parcel done up in brown paper. The Rodi women under the jacaranda watched in silence as the bulky figure crossed the lawn, an ungainly woman rendered clumsier by pregnancy. Approaching those emaciated effigies, with sweat pooling under her breasts, Leela was aware of how much space she occupied in the world.

  In a mud-colored sling across her chest one of the beggars carried a baby with yellow crusts along its eyes. It was to this woman that Leela presented her parcel. At that, the other Rodiya seized her hand, turned it over, ran the ball of her thumb hard across Leela’s palm. “The child will be a boy,” she said. “Healthy, strong. There is nothing to fear.”

  She was turning away from them when the woman with the baby spoke. “The first one will come for you before your son’s milk teeth have fallen.”

  One evening the lights dipped and flickered. Then they went out. That in itself was not unusual; the supply of electricity to Lokugama was at best unreliable. But then a woman screamed from the rear of the house: a drawn-out wail followed by three strangulated notes. Frozen on the verandah, Maud thought, Sirisena has murdered his wife. Now he will come after me.

  After an eternity dull footsteps approached. The bungalow keeper carried a candle stuck to a saucer. Maud looked at his hands, club-thumbed and blunt-edged, and hoped it would be over quickly.

  He said, “Nonamahatheya, dinner is served.”

  Afterward, when he was clearing the table, she asked, “Who was that woman screaming at the back?”

  “That was the devil-bird.”

  At once her mind was brushed with purple and brown feathers, a curved beak waiting for the moment her attention faltered. But Sirisena went on talking. “In our village they say there was a woman whose husband killed her because he suspected the child she was carrying was not his. He buried her body with the child still alive inside her. Now she roams the jungle at night, and from time to time she cries out to warn another woman of violent death.”

  She asked what this bird looked like.

  He shook his head. “No one has ever seen it. But it cries, Magai lamaya ko? Magai lamaya ko?”

  “Where is my child.”

  He said, “These are only stories.”

  A week later he returned from market bringing news of a girl who had been discovered in a jungle grave with her throat cut. The police sergeant had put his boot on the corpse of a chameleon that lay nearby. “That’s the mark of the devil-bird. It always leaves a dead lizard to show that it passed.”

  At times Maud was convinced that the walls pressed about her, a ceiling lower than she recalled, a corridor narrowing at her step. Yet the house was emptier than it had ever been. As a girl, she had passed through its overstuffed rooms and understood at once what she was witnessing: the delusion that, given an adequate weight of chesterfields and candelabra, sufficient swathes of linen and plum-red velvet, domesticity would prevail in that setting. In certain moods she had been apt to see the illogic of Sir Stanley’s architecture as expressing a fundamental dissonance between the bones of order that held the household rigidly upright and the decay at work everywhere under that roof.

  It was a sentiment that had overwhelmed her one evening, in the third year of her marriage, halfway through one of her famous cold buffet suppers: such a waste of endeavor, this pitting of talk and jellied venison against the soft snarl of the jungle. She set down her glass. Twenty yards from the gate, lamplight and braided music and embroidered satin shoes might never have existed.

  Now, as she trailed her own footprints in and out of rooms, Maud thought how greatly the house had improved since Sam had stripped it. A tension had seeped from its shell, dissipating through yawning boards and cracked panes. She lingered in an echoing chamber that bats had colonized one year; although it had been scraped clean of excrement, the smell was still bad. Yet the sullen resentment that used to sour the breath of the place was gone.

  She flipped a little nipple and shadows rolled into corners. But electricity in that house cast a weak, grayish light. It suggested something haggard waiting just beyond its reach.

  The bird with the dragging, purple wings no longer tormented her. Instead, footsteps sounded along the verandah, a dry pattering as of grains spilling from a sack. Maud thought of the child she had glimpsed with his arms folded to his chest. She told herself he was a creature concocted by her brain, a thing of addled chemistry. Nevertheless she lay awake at night, listening. Something was sobbing on the other side of the wall. Years before, when she herself was still a girl, one of her children had died in that room. Her lips framed a soundless question: Magai lamaya ko? Magai lamaya ko?

  In the weeks following Leo’s death Maud had willed herself not to think of him. It was not, after all, so difficult. He had spent only two hundred days in the world. She slept fourteen hours a night, having swallowed the powders prescribed for her. Later, when she allowed herself to remember him—on the anniversary of his birth, or death—she found that the baby was no longer himself but a cluster of sensations associated with him: sadness, a vague odor of cloves, the crimson and ivory upholstery of the Panhard his father had bought soon after he was born. Now, precise images of Leo’s flesh flowed through her mind: a kinked toe on his left foot, the downy sphere of his skull. His clean pink yawn. “Little lion,” she said, and blew onto his scalp. “Little beast.” He batted the air above his chest.

  Maud was not a woman who thrilled to babies. She handed her newborns over to an ayah, and took off for a week’s shooting as soon as she could. But Leo had exercised power over her. She found excuses to keep him in Colombo: he was mildly jaundiced at birth, there was the to-do of his christening, then Claudia went down with measles and to install the baby at Lokugama with the other children was to risk infection. It was not that her days orbited around the infant. The Kaiser’s second cousin visited the island a month after Leo was born, and Ritzy gave him a magnificent hunt in the hills near Hatton. It was the event of the year. Leo was left in Colombo for the nine days of its duration. No one thought anything of it: it was an era when children were in plentiful supply, and therefore accorded neither influence nor status. On the last evening in camp Maud hacked off an aide’s curls with her hunting knife, after which he was ducked in a jungle pool for a breach of form. People would talk about it for years. She was dazzling that night and she never once thought of Leo. Even after she had returned to Colombo, whole days might pass when she saw the baby for five minutes or not at all. Nevertheless an invisible cord ran between them. Now and then each tweaked it, testing.

  She could remember her surprise when Ritzy suggested spending a few days at Lokugama. Her husband loved the place, yet usually shunned it. “Because you can’t lose money fast enough there,” Maud would say, the charge teasing at first but growing vinegary over
time. He admitted it straight away: one of the infuriating things about Ritzy was that their rows were wholly one-sided.

  He was a charming, jug- eared man. He adored Maud. She had been married to him for six weeks before it dawned on her that he adored everyone: his lardy cousin Sybil who sang hymns at birthday parties, the one-eyed gram seller who squatted by a culvert in Sea Street behind her basins of deviled pulses. The impartiality of his affection was maddening. Maud flaunted conquests, dangling her desirability before his eyes. It was useless; he knew nothing of jealousy. He kept a florist in a flat in Bambalapitiya, a liaison that pre-dated his marriage. Well-wishers hastened to apprise his nineteen-year-old bride of the arrangement. Maud opened the Obeysekere Bible to the family chronicle recorded at the back and dragged a heavy black line through the details of her marriage. A hideous mistake, she wrote above it.

  “But what can I do, old thing?” said Ritzy. “Jilt poor Nesta?” He swore it had been years since the florist and he did anything but play cards with her wheelchair-bound mother. “Rummy with Mummy. What’s the harm?”

  In the end Maud believed him. The only lies he told involved horse-flesh. “Ritzy doesn’t keep his flowery little friend for plucking and whatnot,” she declared to confidantes. “She’s just another way he can waste money.” The setup in Bambalapitiya persisted until the day an Afghan moneylender’s ultimatum obliged Ritzy to choose between Nesta Buultjens and a quarter share in an Irish colt, after which nothing more was ever heard of her.

  That was something else Maud understood in time: her husband’s pliancy was threaded with steel. He endowed a lying-in hospital for women who gave birth on the Lokugama estates, and paid a benefit to the families of workers who fell ill; yet one of the laborers, a man of low caste, found himself sacked on the spot for not removing his shirt on entering his employer’s compound. Ritzy’s voice quavered as he recounted the tale, but that he might have acted otherwise never occurred to him.

  Lokugama drew and focused his inflexibility. He could not imagine, for instance, that his children might live with their parents in Colombo. “Lokugama is where we come from. Sam and Claudia belong there.” It suited Maud well enough. There was a relentlessness to small children. Their needs glided with frightening rapidity into demands; she experienced their wants like so many sticky little hands dragging at her skirts. All the same, the implacability of her husband’s ruling exasperated her. It was years before she realized the significance Lokugama held for him, and then it was a thing intuited. The British had entered the country’s bloodstream like a malady which proves so resistant that the host organism adapts itself to accommodate it. Ritzy, who openly declared that he found nationalists a bore, felt no dissatisfaction with colonial rule. But in a part of the island where Europeans had held power for over three hundred years, Lokugama was still a symbol of his people’s enduring worth; it represented a different order, thought Maud, an older, organic world.

  Like all mythic sites it was of course best not frequented. Nevertheless, when Leo was six months old, it was Ritzy who proposed a visit to Lokugama. It was time the children got to know their brother, he said. But Leo’s ayah, informed of the excursion, played the merry devil at the idea of getting into a car, imploring the hamuduruwo and nonamahatheya on her knees. So she was packed off on the early train, with the baby.

  Afterward Maud would remember how they had dawdled that day. They rose late. Then Sybil arrived and settled herself on a leather ottoman with her ankles crossed. Over the next hour she told them about a journey she had made to China, where she had been crucified for her faith. “But I didn’t mind. They ravished me first, you see. Most interesting.” Ritzy sat beside her, refreshing her ginger beer and ignoring his wife’s frowns. Then the Panhard refused to start. When they finally did get away, they were held up at a level crossing where the barrier was down because a bullock had been knifed in a brawl between two carters twenty yards down the track. At the Lokugama turnoff they decided to detour into the town for cocktails at the Oriental. The sun had set when they finally turned into the driveway, half a bottle of champagne wedged between Maud’s shoes. They were met by the blaze of too many lamps and the silhouette of a buggy crouching before the verandah.

  Old Dr. van Dort was waiting at the top of the steps. He came forward and folded her hand in his cold fingers. “Now you must be a brave girl.” The baby had been found dead in his cot, he said. Maud wondered briefly why a man of his age had taken it into his head to play the fool. He was clinging to her hand with such force that her rings bit into her flesh. Then Leo’s ayah ran out onto the verandah with her hair streaming and threw herself at the hamuduruwo’s feet.

  A lifetime later Maud prowled the corridors of Lokugama repeating the doctor’s words: “You must try not to distress yourself, the poor little chap just fell asleep and didn’t wake up.” She tried singing it. She essayed different keys, experimented with ragtime and blues. She reeled past the courtyard in a flurry of tulle, pushed open the door of the room next to hers. “Don’t distress yourself now, girl,” she bawled. “Poor lil’ man just done fell fast a-sleeeep.”

  Before Dr. van Dort left he had dosed her on brandy mixed with something that tasted funny. Leo’s round head lay on the sleeve of her new yellow traveling costume. She counted five silk-covered buttons running up from her wrist, while the moon dangled over the trees like a broken fingernail. A rasping noise went on and on. She heard it plainly. It was the sound of her breath when they pried him away from her; but that was one of the things she failed to understand.

  Very early each morning, before the sun sprang over the horizon spoiling for a fight, it became Maud’s habit to walk the four miles that led from the house to the junction with the trunk road. On one side of the Lokugama road, the jungle reached deep into the hinterland. Along the other lay the old Obeysekere estates, now divided between three absentee landlords. The coconut plantations spread almost to the crossroads, where a few thatched huts and a tea boutique squatted beside a paddy field. She bought her cigarettes at the boutique and lit the first one from the smoldering rope that dangled beside the entrance. Sitting on a culvert with her knees apart, she exhaled blue smoke roses. Five exquisite minutes passed.

  The kadai owner rested his elbows on the plank that served him as a counter. Maud was wearing a dress that reached to her ankles, grass-green georgette bedraggled around the hem, and her rubber slippers. The spectacle of her degradation gave focus to a delirium he improvised upon a cross-eyed Malay girl on the last Thursday of each month. When the old woman walked away he spat very accurately, a scarlet betel jet that arced to earth an inch short of that green skirt.

  One morning, on her way back to the house, Maud halted beside a track that cut through an apron of scrub and vanished into the jungle. The sun had only just burst above the trees but ferocity was already shimmering along the rutted dirt ahead. She looked away, toward the shade. It was one of those merciful intervals when the jungle cacophony had muted to a seashell murmur. She crossed the scrub and walked a little way into the trees, hearing the thwap of her slippers. Her narrow eyes turned this way and that. The jungle hummed with small flies that settled at once on her arms. Vines put out green claws to rake her hair. But the monumental canopy was not as dense as it appeared from the road. Leaf shadows lay along her path, and in between them, leaves of light.

  Her father, a bony, vivid man with a taste for women and morphine, had drowned in the rip off Trincomalee on Maud’s sixteenth birthday. Dr. Rajaratne’s wife had imagined that she was avenging herself on him by succumbing to puerperal fever three days after their child was born. Her death was in fact a relief to her husband, who was as ill suited to discretion as to the infliction of pain. He had wanted a son but was accustomed to disappointment. He taught Maud to bowl and shoot, how to dock a pointer’s tail, the correct way to skin a leopard.

  She was twelve when she claimed her first trophy, a gray wanderoo. As soon as she swung the slim Maynard rifle skyward the silence exploded
with guttural shrieks, wah-wah-wah, and the troop, some ten or twelve monkeys, was off through the treetops. But she was lucky. A large male convulsed, clutched at the surrounding branches, then fell ninety feet through space with outstretched limbs. It thudded to earth almost at the girl’s feet. She had thought every bone in the big body would be broken but on examining the corpse detected only a snapped femur. Her bullet had ripped through the flesh of its left shoulder. It was quite dead.

  Hunting expeditions, in Maud’s experience, were tremendous affairs, orchestrated with the obsessive precision of campaigns. Cooks, porters, trackers, trappers, game bearers and dog handlers set out days in advance. When the hunting party arrived in camp, a makeshift compound awaited them: sleeping and cooking huts, a storehouse, latrines, shelters for the dogs and the servants.

  After she married it had fallen to Maud to compile the foolscap lists of provisions required for a shoot, checking the stores on the morning the advance party was due to leave, a satisfying line drawn through each item with a red crayon. Now, wandering through the jungle at Lokugama, she chanted those lists aloud from memory. Three bags of flour, twelve pounds of sugar, two pounds of tea and three of coffee, tins of jam, butter, ham, sardines, mackerel, meat paste and crackers, table salt, chilies, curry stuffs, coconuts, limes, fifteen gunnysacks of rice, two sacks of orange lentils, ten pounds of potatoes, two tins of dripping, three jars of Crosse & Blackwell pickles, a dozen slabs of chocolate, a dozen tins of Ideal milk, a flask of brandy, eighteen bottles of whiskey, two dozen of arrack (for the servants), sundry bundles of tobacco (ditto). The trackers and bearers had to provide their own food, bought with money advanced for the purpose; about this it was necessary to be firm. “Lanterns, matches, candles, kerosene oil, a soiled-linen bag, a coconut scraper,” sang Maud. “Saucepans, frying pans, ladles, knives, a knife board, cutlery, plates, mugs, camp stools, ropes, nails, an axe, soap, towels, bedding, butter, muslin netting, citronella oil, quinine, potassium permanganate, aspirin, Burnol, bandages, a tin cutter, Ritzy’s blasted ukulele.” Four pounds of coarse salt and four of alum for preserving skins. A spare toothbrush. Half a dozen bottles of brown rum for a never-neglected, last-night ritual under the stars. The fine calibration of these provisions was a matter of pride with her. She had been known to breakfast on curried sardines and woodapple jam on the morning they struck camp, determined that no surplus would mar the elegance of her calculations.