The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  It occurred to Maud, weeks after she first ventured into the trees, that the jungle where she now walked every day was the first she had entered alone and unarmed. The realization brought her to a halt. She pondered it with the aid of a cigarette taken from the grubby sequined evening bag that swung from her wrist. After a while she decided that to have been granted a different perspective, at her age, was no small thing.

  She plucked a frond from a fern growing by the track. It was a game children played. You placed the leaf on the inside of your arm, on the silky skin below the elbow, then pressed down hard. When you took the frond away, a silvery tattoo remained stamped on your flesh.

  It served as the seal on a vow Maud made to the gods of the place: to live with, instead of against, whatever they demanded of her. She put her head back and cursed her clumsy shoes and attempted a waltz. One hundred and twenty feet overhead, the winking leaves spun with her.

  The dhobi returned her batiste nightdress folded like a moth, the pin-tucks on the yoke exquisitely smoothed. Two nights later when she lifted it from a drawer, Maud discovered the brown hoofprint of an iron scorched into the back of the garment.

  No one guards against trivial losses, which is why they lodge directly in the heart. Maud sat on her bed, the ruined nightdress across her knees, and looked about her. What she saw was an angled space that had sheltered her as a child, a secret place formed by the junction of two walls and a rattan-backed settee draped with a leopard skin. One morning she peered through the rattan and saw her father’s mustache graze a lady’s hand. The kiss was not unusual but the lady was. Ada Thornton, scrubbed, dish-faced, as incongruous in Dr. Rajaratne’s catalog of conquests as a toad in a bed of carnations. At the brush of his lips she flushed a fierce, painful scarlet. Seconds later the air had turned foul. Within days Maud would realize that the stirring of Thornton’s emotions could always be counted on to trigger her flatulence.

  Everything about the new governess was soft, her voice, her round blue eyes, her touch on the piano, most of all her heart. She melted and spread, a toffee left in the sun. When a terrier suspected of rabies had to be shot, Thornton dug the grave herself and folded her good crepe blouse about the body. Four sets of girls had outgrown her like gingham. She gave love, because she could not do otherwise, but suffered no illusion of being loved in return. She knew she was ridiculous. Her hair was the color of a mirror and still she thrilled to the world, its brutality and extravagance.

  From Thornton, who had been in the colony for only thirty months, Maud learned to rub the dogs with kohamba oil as a specific against fleas. The wood of the tree was much prized for bookcases, said Thornton, as silverfish were repelled by its aroma. She picked the yellow flowers of the ranawara bush, dried them in the sun and brewed them into a tea that she drank twice a day. “Cassia auriculata. Excellent for purifying the blood.”

  Dr. Rajaratne, Edinburgh trained, was skeptical. When a villager was carried into his surgery, he sent for Thornton. Six weeks earlier, the man’s arm had been clawed by a bear, the flesh ripped away between shoulder and elbow. A fool had packed the wound with dung. “Miss Thornton, this is what advanced gangrene looks like,” said Dr. Rajaratne. He was a kind man. He had seen Europeans come unstuck. There was the German surveyor who had taken up abode in a cave in the jungle in order to eat berries and practice chanting; he wore a saffron robe and died of malnutrition. Dr. Rajaratne wanted the governess to see ancient wisdom for what it was: superstition and a terrifying ignorance of hygiene.

  But he was mistaken about her. Where knowledge was at stake, it was not romanticism that propelled Thornton but a steely curiosity. She asked questions: what was chunam? how many yards of cloth went into a sarong? what measures was the government taking to combat rinder-pest? That she conducted her enquiries among villagers as well as educated people was disconcerting. It led Dr. Rajaratne to misdiagnose as sentimentality what was in fact an instinct for impartiality. In the purest sense she was the better scientist of the two.

  Thornton insisted on a sisal hat and white cotton gloves, and when Maud was thus attired grasped her hand and led her half a mile to the paddy fields on the edge of their outstation town. They watched women winnowing rice, tossing it into the air from flat baskets. A buffalo with corrugated flanks waited with terrible patience to be led to the threshing floor where beasts trod the grains from the straw.

  Padda boats with thatched roofs slipped along the river. To Maud, the gentle reek that enveloped this part of the town was an unremarkable fact, like the cast in the servant-boy’s eye or the warty skin of a custard apple. It was Thornton, craning over a parapet, who pointed out that the stench rose from the coconut branches and husks rotting in the water until they had decayed sufficiently to be beaten for fiber.

  Among the things Maud knew were her times tables and the 23rd

  Psalm. She knew Arthur’s knights and Alfred’s cakes. Education, in her experience, involved books. That the world around her merited her attention was a novel idea. Conservative as only a seven-year-old can be, she regarded it with mistrust.

  Throughout the years they spent together Thornton would unleash contradictory sentiments in Maud. One evening she saw the governess, believing herself unobserved, retrieve one of the doctor’s shirts from the dirty clothes basket, and sniff at it with her eyes closed. This was at once thrilling and ludicrous. Dr. Rajaratne, cognizant of the poor creature’s suffering, exploited it with aplomb. He suggested, for instance, that she take charge of the surgery accounts. “Dear Miss Thornton, you have such exquisite penmanship,” he sighed, bending so close over the ledger that their shoulders brushed, with the result that the air turned noxious and Thornton sat up long after the household had retired, trying to reconcile columns of unreconcilable figures.

  When the servants went home to their villages for Sinhalese New Year, Thornton cooked and scrubbed and swept the leaves from the drive with an ekel broom. She herself was entitled to half a day off a week and one full day each month, but the notion was theoretical. Every now and then Dr. Rajaratne overlooked the matter of her wages. Yet he always addressed her with kindness and courtesy, and was mindful to ensure that she was out of earshot when he whistled “The Lass with the Delicate Air,” winking at Maud as the child writhed in her chair with laughter.

  Here is a curious anomaly. Humility, unselfishness, devotion are qualities that scarcely affect us. Are they not our due? But a mole studding a cheek, a hat pinned at an unfortunate slant, a weakness for china kittens or prints of dying cottagers, these things grate our nerves raw. A trick Thornton had of peering at objects with her chin just slightly lifted had the ability to enrage Maud. At the bottom of the garden she mimicked the Englishwoman’s stance, and stumped flat-footed in circles glaring at ripening guavas. As an exorcism it was a fiasco. There continued to be moments when the mere sight of Thornton acted on her as the shriek of fingernails on a blackboard.

  It was above all the governess’s infatuation with Dr. Rajaratne that his daughter could not bear. As Maud grew out of childhood, Thornton’s unassuming slavery of the heart worked on her acutely. Like the governess’s flatulence it could be broached only in comic terms, and then never to her face. Compassion struggled in Maud; uselessly, like a puppy in a sack. The changes in her body made her ruthless in all that concerned an eroticism she was ruled by but could not articulate.

  Around this time a Mrs. de Zilva was a frequent caller at the surgery. Scented, parasoled, gorgeously female, she invited Maud to spend the day at her house. The girl returned with a Kandyan silver bangle, an enameled powder compact, a new way to arrange her hair. Some months previously she had come across a book in a case her father had forgotten to lock and learned much from its illustrations. The nature of his relations with her new friend was more or less plain to her. Dr. Rajaratne being the pole of her own fixations, Maud might well have resented Mrs. de Zilva. Instead, she was mesmerized. Charmaine this, Charmaine that. The name was always on her tongue. Simultaneously, her irritat
ion with Thornton grew as unbearable as lace that pricks under the arms. It was a reaction not unmixed with self-protection. Thornton was the crow with stiff wings nailed to a tree. The girl cawed and wheeled away.

  Snooping through the governess’s room, Maud grew furious at the discovery of a broken cuff link with her father’s monogram secreted in a handkerchief case. She hurled the glittering little object through the bars of the window and saw it swallowed by leaves. At lunch she stared at Thornton and complimented her father on his new onyx links. The governess turned scarlet. Wind seeped noiselessly from her. Maud shot meaningful smiles at her father until Thornton intercepted one of them. The tormented thing lowered her head. Her fork clattered on her plate. Maud hated herself. She dug her nails into the back of her wrist and spoke loudly, brightly: “Daddy! Can you please tell Piyadasa not to bring durians home from the market? They stink like anything.” In her room she threw herself face down on her coverlet and wept. How could she have said such a thing? She was vile.

  When she rose, she twisted up her hair and fastened it in place with a tortoiseshell comb. She admired her ears, set so sweetly on her head. Her reflection was dazzling. The swell of her breasts delectable. She was giddy with power. Already men’s eyes slid sideways at her. Thornton was a fool. It was her own fault that people laughed at her. She invited humiliation. I shall never be like that, vowed Maud, stroking the mulberry length of her nipples. If I love a man, he will never know it. He will be my slave. Pictures of what she might command this slave to do flickered across her mind.

  A week after Maud’s thirteenth birthday, a letter came for Thornton. The aunt who had raised her had tripped over her cat and broken a hip. Duty rose plain as a cliff before Ada Thornton. It was essential to climb, and not think about the drop.

  On the day before she sailed she called Maud to her room. The girl found her surrounded by piles of blued, shapeless undergarments. A trunk stood open against one wall. It contained old birthday greetings made by Maud, skeleton leaves glued crookedly to scraps of card; also seven china kittens. It was plain that Thornton did not possess the kind of mind that can pack.

  The parcel she handed Maud rustled like dry wings. Within the folds of brittle, yellowing paper lay a snowy nightdress: old-fashioned, yet exquisite even to the girl’s judgmental eye, each of its three dozen stitched button loops a tiny work of art. Maud stood before Thornton’s looking glass, the nightdress flattened against her body. Her tongue slithered out to caress her upper lip. She was thinking that it would take a long time to undo those buttons; and how a man might be driven wild by the delay.

  “I made it when I was not much older than you are,” said Thornton’s soft burr behind her. “But I never had an occasion to wear it.”

  That evening they drank Thornton’s health in madeira wine. Maud presented the traveler with a coral brooch that had belonged to her mother. All week she had been gently attentive to Thornton, ensuring that the governess’s favorite curries and sambols succeeded each other at mealtimes. For herself, she contemplated the parting with equanimity. Thornton belonged to her childhood. That her adult years would be lived in the new century was thrilling. On a visit to the capital she had witnessed the phenomenon of electricity. It was like being vouchsafed a vision of her future.

  Dr. Rajaratne had retired to his room that night when there was a knock at the door. He gazed dreamy-eyed on Thornton. Her hair hung over her shoulders and she was clad in a dressing gown made of some eminently sensible material. When she released her grip on its folds, it opened on bare flesh. Dr. Rajaratne felt no alarm; the scene was consistent with the chemistry of the opiate in his veins.

  “A vision,” he said, recounting the incident to his apothecary, while Maud leaned against the wall by the open window. “Pukka flashing eyes and floating hair, like the chappie says.”

  The apothecary asked a question, lewd and to the point.

  “My God, no,” Maud heard her father say. There was a faint chink of glass. “But I think I touched something. Flabby. Like a pudding gone cold.”

  The eavesdropper strolled away, stretching her arms to the sun.

  Half a century later, she was the single thread left of their knot. Thornton, her father, the apothecary, all gone. Even the nightdress, which might have outlasted the lot of them. I must have been mad to entrust it to the dhobi, thought Maud. But it was only the most recent mistake. She rose, and began to pace about the room; as if it might yet be possible to return to that place where everything first went wrong, and set out again, differently.

  The child was named Henry, after his paternal grandfather. Leela had known all along that this would be the case but had secretly yearned for Quentin or Nigel, and had spent the last dreamy months of her confinement weaving epic adventures in which the boy fought injustice under a crimson banner and was hailed as a hero in banqueting halls. Then he arrived, furious and urgent, and she forgot everything except that she adored him. An indigo stain spread over the small of his back. That was the way with all newborns, they assured her, adding that the birthmark would vanish after a week. She wept at this intelligence, and pressed her lips to the puckered blue skin. He was perfect. She wanted to eat him.

  She knew six years of happiness. Harry had a tortoise, two puppies, a pony, a tank of rainbow fish. The house was a tree, putting out fresh leaves, charged with birds; if it had motives of its own they were entirely benign. Children caroled from the swing on the lawn, or took flight along corridors like a shower of arrows. Her son swerved past her on the stairs. For a whole week he ran everywhere, arms outstretched, making a humming noise that threatened to drive the household mad.

  The women who brought their children to play with Harry fell into conversation with his mother. To the usual noises of the house was added the ching of bangles sliding along arms. An only child in a household ruled by the gods of duty and abstinence, Leela had been a serious, self-conscious girl. Now, for a brief, delicious interval, she yielded to frivolity. There were shopping expeditions to the Fort. A morning was spent reviewing the merits of L’Heure Bleue and Chanel No 5. Samples of poplin or crepe de chine, fanning out with pinked edges from their cardboard backing, made their way from hand to hand. A length of rose moiré silk was draped about a torso, while Leela stood with her head angled, then stepped forward to pull the soft folds into a more artful arrangement. Her flair for design earned her a mild envy. The patterns she cut from newspaper brought compliments and outbursts of squabbling.

  She was unused to admiration. It fizzed in her through afternoons tinted the pale gold of champagne. Meanwhile her husband continued to live his life as if she played no part in it. This had been the state of affairs between them for so long that she had ceased to expect anything else. But now a little tendril of vanity uncurled within her. She submitted to the exquisite torture of eyebrow plucking. A tortoiseshell shoehorn crammed her feet, which were broad and somewhat splayed, into crocodile-skin shoes strapped roguishly across the instep. She exchanged her lifeless garments for shaped bodices with lace inserts, and skirts that molded themselves around her hips. Toweling herself dry after her bath, she escaped into a timid dream in which a petal-soft mouth fluttered the length of her thigh.

  Sam, who had long been blind to her, was transfixed one evening by the pigeon-toed apparition descending the stairs on a cloud of French musk, a visor of powder clamped over its face. “My God!” he said. “Have you seen yourself lately?” His wife froze, clung to the newel with a rose-tipped brown paw.

  Later she crept upstairs to the mirror in her bedroom. What she saw caused her to weep: flesh that merited no more than the loathing he regularly expressed on it.

  Between the furred paper covers of an exercise book, Maud began to keep a diary. It was a custom Thornton had encouraged, reading aloud entries from her own journal: a list of birds observed on an outing, the medicinal properties of nux vomica, scraps of verse copied from a magazine, the progress of an experiment in which cochineal-stained water inched up the stem of
a snowy balsam. There was something ridiculous and tiresome about the enterprise; as with so much that emanated from Thornton. Even as a girl Maud sensed that it was absurd to go about the world pen in hand, as if its variety and chaos and appalling detail could be corseted within royal-blue copperplate. It was very English: that mania for description and constraint. At the same time, and this too was typical of Thornton, the project was not without heroism. All dissection requires curiosity and a sturdiness of nerve; even if wholeness is sacrificed in the process.

  Now, at the opposite pole of womanhood, as her body embarked on its clumsy accommodation of age, Maud found herself taking up the ritual as lightly as she had once abandoned it. Her diary was, in a way, a tribute to Thornton, a form of atonement. Dashed off, sporadic, it was nevertheless an agent of analysis and order; an intuitive counter to the swirling hyperbole that had infected her letters.

  This morning I followed the monkeys. The undergrowth here is relatively sparse. Rough tracks have been hacked out between the trees, and once accustomed to the gloom my eye easily picks out the telltale blazes on trunks and stumps. The flying column of monkeys called a halt every few hundred yards to rest and peer down at my progress. As soon as I drew near, they were off again. Wood pigeon went flying up, also shama, kondayas, blackbirds, a shock of blossom-headed parakeets. Flock is what I meant, but my pen insisted otherwise.