I’ve remembered something from that day, all those years ago, when I shot my first monkey. Not long afterward, Daddy brought down another. It crashed some way off and Carom bounded after it. We followed the tip of his white tail and found the monkey staring skyward. The shaggy fur on its chest lifted, although there was no breeze. Daddy bent down, then motioned me closer to look at what he had found: a huge-eyed baby clinging to its dead mother. It was probably no more than a week old. Carom’s muzzle approached and I saw the tiny thing trembling with renewed force. Daddy pried it free, very gently. It fitted into the palm of his hand. He took his knife from his bag, thrust the point of its blade into the monkey’s occiput and gave it a slight turn.
For years I had quite forgotten that little monkey. Today I can think of nothing else.
A thread of light between the ropy arms of banyans led Maud to a stream, no more than a few feet wide. Where the opposite bank sloped to the water, the earth had been churned and pocked by animals coming down to drink. A faint stirring of the air could be felt there, out of the shelter of the trees. Maud licked a finger and held it up. Then she walked a little way downwind to a patch of bushy scrub, where she settled beneath overhanging leaves, and waited.
Although she was on the alert, eyes straining to pick up density or movement, she didn’t see the mouse deer until it had stepped out of the bushes on the far bank and straightened its back. It was no bigger than a hare, with pencil-thin legs and frail ebony hooves. Among trees, light and shadow would play over its mottled coat in perfect camouflage. She pictured it slipping through the jungle, weightless as leaves.
Thereafter she made her way to the stream every morning, remaining there until the sun rose too high for animals to come down to the water. The mouse deer and its mate rarely failed to appear. For the space of a season they were accompanied by a fawn, an elfin creature. It lowered its head and butted its mother’s flanks. It lay down on the bank, occupying an area no larger than Maud’s hand. Then a babbler flew up in a jitter of leaves and all three deer vanished as if bewitched, not a shiver of grass to betray the direction of their flight.
Sambhur drank at that sluggish stream, high-antlered deer bulky as elks. There were black-naped hares, also squirrels, pretty little rilawa monkeys and the ubiquitous wanderoos. Teal circled low, whistling plaintively. Three of the birds waddled down to the water while their sentinel stood motionless, with craned neck, on the spot where it had alighted. A pair of stilts paused in their feeding to preen an ebony wing, or drowsed, poised on one long leg in the mud.
An anteater nosed its way down the bank one morning, back arched high, an apparition from prehistory. Maud chilled at the sight. As a girl she had seen one of these creatures thrust the gelatinous blade of its tongue deep into the passages of an anthill and withdraw it encased in a quivering black scabbard. There is also something repellent about the way an anteater walks, the curved claws of its forefeet pointing backwards, like pavement beggars with broken bones set forever at sickening angles. Yet watching this one now, as it rose on its hind legs, swiveling its head as it sniffed for food, Maud acknowledged the perfection in its clanking design; in the shield-shaped plates of clear gray horn that defended it from jackals and leopards and the cobra’s fangs, row after regular row laid close against the skin, an archetype of imbrication.
Sam could not fail to notice the change in her. She was still grotesque, knees apart as she inhaled smoke, a worm of ash trembling on her ridiculous dress. He considered her with the impartiality of a summing up from the Bench: a bony face above a corded throat, arms shrouded in loose flesh. The familiar, arrogant tilt of her head merely ludicrous now, a shred of defiant scarlet still clinging to the flagpole while crows strip the carcasses below.
Yet in some subtle way she had altered. There was a lightness in her. He could not rid himself of the peculiar idea that she would appear at Allenby House. Her breath settled on the bones at the base of his skull as he made his way down the stairs. He went into his office room and found himself peering over his shoulder, certain he would find her lounging by the door.
At last curiosity triumphed over his distaste for servants’ gossip, and he asked Sirisena how the nonamahatheya spent her time. The bungalow keeper replied that she went for walks. Sam looked out, incredulous, at the vegetation pawing at the walls. Going for a walk: it was an activity he associated with buds fattening in an English hedgerow. Where could one walk here? “In the jungle,” said the bungalow keeper, which only compounded the riddle.
In the old days Maud had dressed for shoots in sensible twill, and narrow boots hand-turned on a lathe in Burlington Arcade. Later she had switched to trousers, reasoning that they were disreputable, practical and flattered her figure to the point of obscenity. Now her progress through tunnels of restless leaves was marked by scraps of taffeta or organdy spiked on twigs, a scattering of diamanté like starfall. Skirts that had belled over parquet snagged on thorns and were tugged free with little hisses of protest. Hems came undone and trailed behind her, gathering earth and leaves.
Maud went home and hacked away the sticky burrs of love grass with pinking shears. She used a double strand of cotton to sew up the lips of jagged tears. The dhobi clucked his tongue over these crooked white scars, then beat her dresses limp against a rock to rid them of stains.
For Padma, that ruined incarnation passing through the house and compound was yet another sign that the place was cursed. Yet for her and her husband these years, on the whole, brought an interval of grace. Any long marriage is subject to variations of tempo. The eroticism that had first drawn those two together returned in force at this time. There were mornings when they could scarcely credit the bliss they had harbored. It instructed them in the savoring of other, small pleasures. A mynah, fallen from its nest and hand reared, that returned to peck rice from their palms. Ambrosial half-moons cut from a round red cheese, a gift from the hamuduruwo that the nonamahatheya failed to eat at Christmas.
There remained one facet of her marriage that never failed to elicit Leela’s gratitude: every day she witnessed the love that Harry drew from his father. She saw Sam steal up behind the child, scoop him into his arms, whirl him into the air. He helped Harry mount his pony and walked him in circles around the garden or up and down the lane, showing the boy how to hold himself in the saddle, adjusting his grip on the reins. He held his son on his knee and taught Harry his letters out of a book salvaged from his own childhood: A is for Army, That dies for the Queen, It’s the very best Army, That ever was seen.
There was this symptom, most telling of all: he lavished money on his son. When Harry lay in bed with measles a box arrived, larger than the child, covered with foreign stamps and sealed with emerald wax. It contained one hundred and eighty-five hollowcast soldiers, including two rare British Camel Corps as deployed in the relief of Khartoum. Harry arranged battle formations on his coverlet, murmuring with delight.
Yet it was also apparent to Leela, watching with her old uncontroversial skirts swathed about her on the lawn, that love manifested itself in her husband as a craving for perfection. As Sam crouched beside the child to demonstrate once again the turn of a wrist on releasing a ball, she saw that patience might be only a by-product of implacability. At that, a brief spasm of fear clutched her heart.
And the boy always chose his mother, making his preference clear with the casual cruelty of those who have not yet learned to dissimulate. One morning he came crying into the house, having cut open both knees in a fall. His father exclaimed and half rose from his chair; but the child trotted straight past, to his mother. Over the small heaving body, Leela saw her husband’s face.
Maud’s eyes snapped open to the night noises of Lokugama, frogs, creaking blinds, bandicoots in the rafters, the sawing of her own breath. Then a child cried out in the room next door. “Polecats, nonamahatheya,” said the bungalow keeper the next morning. It was true that there had been heavy rain the previous week, enough to have driven polecats indoors to nest in
the roof. But she knew it was not a polecat she had heard.
There were three halved coconut shells, each cradling a paste of boiled rice, condensed milk and strychnine. Sirisena climbed into the roof through a trapdoor on the back verandah while his wife held the ladder steady. Padma was wrapped, as usual, in a blue cotton sari, her eyes fastened on the ground. She said something to her husband, her Tamil seething like bubbles. Maud leaned against a verandah post, smoking. The bungalow keeper clambered down, the muscles of his buttocks moving beneath his sarong. His feet were soled with gray skin half an inch thick. Long bare toes like fingers felt for each rung as he descended.
As soon as Sirisena looked at the nonamahatheya, he knew her thoughts had alighted elsewhere. She was a disappointment to him: her attention was fluid and could not be diverted to flow solely in his direction. The legend of the devil-bird had pricked her into reaction, so he had ventured another tale, this one involving a farmer and his unfaithful wife. Gama katha: stories people told in villages, gathered around a cooking fire at night. He had pictured himself producing them one by one, coins drawn glinting from a purse. But as soon as he began to speak she had gazed at him blankly. A little later he heard her blundering about the house, crooning to herself. Now, while he was still slapping his palms together to rid them of dust, she swerved away. She came to a halt in the doorway of the room next to hers, one hand on the jamb. So she might remain for an hour.
The child cried again the following night.
Maud knew there was nothing in that room, only a small filthy pillow in which mice had once nested and the spoor of her slippers on the dusty floorboards.
Toward dawn, a tap gushed in the courtyard. But there was no tap there.
The morning was cloud-flanneled, and a section of guttering swung loose from a corner of the verandah. Perhaps that was what she had heard, rain cascading from the broken gutter. That was the genius of the place at work again, concocting undecidability.
A few weeks later, she returned to the room where Leo had died and found that the pillow had vanished. She knew she had seen it lying near the skirting board under the window. If she closed her eyes she could summon a corner of striped ticking, smell the musty dampness of kapok.
She asked the bungalow keeper if he had thrown the thing away. He denied all knowledge of it, swore he hadn’t entered the room in years. It proved nothing. A servant would never admit to having removed a household object, however dilapidated, without permission. It could be construed as theft.
The thatched kadai at the Lokugama turnoff where Maud bought her cigarettes had metamorphosed into a concrete shop, with a hinged door painted the green of sugar almonds and a poster distributed by the Dig for Victory campaign. The boutique keeper now spent his days slouched in a carved armchair, surrounded by lesser men. His shop hummed with the expectant murmur of rendezvous and transaction. Villagers stood entranced before pyramids of tinned luncheon meat and crackers. Enameled basins overflowed with graded rosy or brown growths, since rice was rationed and everyone was condemned to a diet of yams.
Every hour the khaki blur of jeeps appeared and faded on the trunk road. The boutique keeper wore his striped sarong low on his waist to accommodate his soft round belly. It was one of the marks of his new ease, like the walnut-cased wireless on its shelf behind the counter and the mirror etched with swans that doubled his mistress’s humiliations. None of these things afforded him the twist of joy that came with the sight of white men, stripped to the waist, laboring like coolies at clearing a path through the jungle.
In the first year of the war, ignoring ridicule, he had acquired a truck with a hundredweight of rust under its hood. Then he unloosed his twelve-year-old nephew on the carcass. The obstinacy and range of this child were remarkable. He crossed his arms over his chest and haggled with thugs. At a workshop on the edge of the town he watched, and wheedled assistance. He flashed a knife at shanty-dwellers scrambling through refuse for the same coveted section of rubber tubing or metal flange, and hoarded screws with half- or three-quarter-inch threads in an oily cocoa tin. His hands were callused and always filthy, his conversation fluent in pistons and connecting rods. At the end of eleven months he summoned his uncle to a ceremony. With his teeth clamped on his lower lip, he jiggled a length of copper wire. They heard an engine turn over.
There came a January when an incantation was in every mouth: Kampar, Batu Pahat, Slim River. The kadai keeper probed a troublesome molar with a matchstick and concluded an alliance with an up-country market gardener. He found himself a driver. The rivulet of soldiers pouring into the country swelled to a white cataract, and he called on their quartermaster. His truck coasted down from the hills with the bland vegetables dear to the English, cauliflowers, lettuces, cabbages large as heads. The first baby with russet hair was born in a drain-pipe, twin gray lamps startling in its wizened brown face.
Sam sent Leela and the boy up-country when Singapore fell. Colombo emptied in days, the population interpreting editorials about the brave little island chosen to staunch the flow of tyranny as a coded admission of the nightmare to follow.
Alone at Allenby House, he found that Claudia’s presence had grown vivid. This happened, from time to time: a brief brightening of memory. An arrangement of cushions on a settee molded itself to her form. By the door of the music room, he heard soundless melodies flow from her fingers. In those weeks glazed with public dread, he was aware as never before of time as matter: habitually opaque and dense, a medium through which he advanced only by means of a tremendous exertion, it would give way, without warning, to a fold of drapery, easily disturbed. Through a window in a courtroom he glimpsed his sister in a treed alley in Hyde Park. He sat like a rock in his armchair at the club because she knelt before him in a frilled pinafore, laying out a feast of pyramidal mud cakes and magenta petals on a lawn. Fixed things— cause and effect, the physical laws—seemed fluent. His sense of smell sharpened. A light green scent detached itself from the routine reek of damp and rot, the bass note of the tropics. For a brief interval, a world he had systematically disregarded acquired power over him. He saw the new moon through glass and crossed his fingers to avert misfortune. The sight of two magpies on a telephone wire filled him with unreasonable joy.
Then it ended. A chap with a commission in the Ceylon Light Infantry tipped him the word that Allenby House was on a list of private residences to be requisitioned for British officers. That night Sam rose from his bed and passed through silent rooms, while the sea complained endlessly about the ice at its feet. Now and then his fingertips found their blind way to glass or carved wood. The idea of strangers going casually about the house, opening its doors and yawning in its corridors, filled him with disgust. He lay face down on Harry’s bed, persuading himself it still held the child’s smell. The dalmatian tied up for the night on the back verandah lifted its muzzle and studied him. He entered a downstairs lavatory and tugged vengefully on the porcelain handle of the chain.
The warning screams had scarcely begun when the beggars deploying their sores by the Colombo breakwater on Easter Sunday saw the ship-crowded harbor erupt with blossoms that pulsed rose at the edges. A fish market was hit in the same raid; also a wing of the lunatic asylum. A madman escaped into a universe where giant metal insects flew up from the trees to dance and blaze in the sky.
Kumar’s name was among those that figured on the register of the dead. Ten days earlier he had drunk a glass of sherbert and contracted typhoid. A buffoon’s death, thought Sam. Nevertheless there was now the possibility that the old boy had done the decent thing and returned the Bentota bungalow to him. For twenty-four hours he found himself susceptible to certain objects—a fluted vase, a paperweight, a string of beads around a shopgirl’s throat—and was at a loss to explain why he noticed these things. Then, as he paused in the act of pulling on a sock, he thought glass, and greenness, and the memory rolled and sparkled before him: a green glass ball caught in a net of foam, beside a woman’s boot, pearl-gray kid splashed
with seawater. He reached for the green marvel and heard his mother say, “How clever you are, darling.” It was the sole residue of a day spent at Bentota in the third year of his life.
All through his childhood the cool green buoy had remained on a shelf in his room, but he could not recall having seen it after he went to Neddy’s. It had sunk irretrievably under the flow of time along with everything else that had been damaged or lost or discarded. His chest tightened with longing for the old house at Bentota, for a clean wide selvage that bore no resemblance to the paltry beaches of the capital. He pictured a blue ocean tottering about his son, and yellow grains tracked onto a red-polished floor.
But it transpired that Kumar had left everything to a Miss Hope Galhena. She was twenty years old and a student at the Muttukrishna Polytechnic. Learning to type had been Kumar’s last whim. Four machines of different make were discovered in his office room, along with a sheaf of misspelled observations about a quick brown fox and Miss Galhena’s charms. In encouraging a cousin with expectations to contest the will, Sam found a measure of consolation.
It was an era that had the force of a bad dream and collapsed as swiftly. In the Bay of Bengal a hundred ships were sunk in a week, but enemy air reconnaissance, working without radar, failed to detect the Eastern Fleet as it lurked among the Maldivian atolls. Like the Easter dogfights, this might have been viewed objectively as no more than a minor impediment to Japanese hallucinations. But war, like dreaming, abounds in disproportion. Generals who had held it a small matter to overrun a continent now faltered at the conquest of an island.
Regiments from the Middle East and Africa were diverted to the colony to train for jungle combat, the Japanese having administered lessons in strategy with a vividness unavailable to Sandhurst. The muscled necks of British servicemen displayed their sunburn like so many defiant little flags; they signaled stiffened resistance and a return to order. With Malaya and the Dutch colonies lost, fortunes were made in rubber, the trees slaughter-tapped to maximize yield. It was a situation conducive to trade and theft, speculation and profit; on these activities the root of Empire had always fattened.
The Hamilton Case Page 18