By the end of the year the Japanese ships and their carrier-based bombers had swiveled to meet the Americans in the Pacific, and the civilians who had fled to the hills were drifting back to Colombo. Sergeants lavished promises and NAAFI chocolates on girls from decent families. To filch a Wren’s beret from her head became every schoolboy’s dearest ambition. Airstrips parted the island’s leafy hair.
No envelope bearing the government crest arrived at Allenby House. Recalling his informant’s eyes, slitted with malice as he warned of balls bowled down a marble pitch and Eurasian nurses smuggled into bedrooms, Sam could not understand how he had ever credited the report. It exemplified the era. Everyone claimed to have the inside information, rumors vied with each other in outlandishness: yellow ladies ringing for chrysanthemum tea at Raffles, white wraiths fitting railway sleepers in the Burmese jungle.
Mountbatten set up his headquarters in the botanical gardens outside Kandy. The Allied counterthrust into the archipelagos and jungles to the east was formulated in the shade of a Javan willow. Wireless bulletins that had once threatened invasion turned into a recital of names Sam associated with adultery, having in his youth been agreeably scandalized by the stories of Somerset Maugham.
On an afternoon in 1943, as he strolled among the weekend crowds on Galle Face Green flanked by his wife and son, Sam saw a man nibbling a pink cloud. Thirty seconds later in the slope of those shoulders he recognized John Shivanathan.
Leela ducked her head as usual when Sam said, “This is my wife,” but she could not help smiling. The sight of a grown man in a tie with sticky lips delighted her. Meanwhile the stranger had her son’s fingers in his own and was leading him across sun-tormented grass to a knot of food vendors. Since Kumar’s death, the menace of contagion had united Harry’s parents in a spasm of precautions. Every vegetable in Allenby House that could not be peeled was washed in three changes of potassium permanganate solution. The reek of ammonia seeped through walls. All-out assaults were conducted on the cockroaches that milder campaigns had failed to eradicate. Leela scoured the child’s hands with coal tar soap on the hour, and twice before meals. Yet here he was, advancing upon his parents with a repository of disease in each fist.
Shivanathan thrust a rosy puff into Sam’s hand, lifted his hat to Leela and was gone.
For a moment Sam was lost. It is difficult to expostulate while grasping a stick of candy floss. Then the past came flying into his mind like a stone. “He’s no oil lamp. That was how Claudia described him. Blighter used to hang around and bore the poor girl for hours.”
Harry said unexpectedly, “No oil painting.” He was at the age when he noticed patterns of words and parroted them.
“Quite right! No oil painting either!” Before he had realized what he was doing, Sam’s mouth was full of sugar. “It’s a miracle how Shiva’s got on. District Judge of Panadura. Advisor to the State Council. Billy Mohideen told me the latest—he’s been inviting fellows to dinner and reading them a lot of bilge he’s written about the ancient rhythms of village life.”
“He seemed kind,” ventured Leela.
“He was there that night at the Downhill. Heard everything Nagel said. But all he could think about was his precious coolies. Couldn’t make the leap to Taylor.” Sam’s teeth met in sweet pink air. “A plod-der,” he announced.
Seedlings thrust upward between stones, there were furry outbreaks of green on rock and leafy tendrils fused to rusting iron. Once, Maud had thought of that opulence as immoderate, a blind vegetable excess that overran every weak thing it encountered. Now she found it pleasing that life renewed itself cell by cell, that it was assertive and tenacious.
In March the flamboyante tree was hung with scarlet panicles. Poinciana. Poinciana something. It was the year of Maud’s lists. At the bottom of one of her trunks she had found a volume swaddled in a paisley shawl: The Ceylon Gardener’s Handbook, the morocco on its spine worn loose and her father’s name on the flyleaf, Cyril Rajaratne, 1878. Cassia fistula, Indian laburnum, known in Sinhalese as ehela. Tamarindus indica, tamarind, siyambala. She quizzed Padma for the Tamil names of roots and herbs that lay about the kitchen and noted down her replies. Ginger translated as inji, garlic as vella-vengam. The fiery tongues of the niyangala creeper ran through the compound, licking trees. Bright pink amaryllis wove rugs for the earth. The beauty of the place waxed insistent. Maud’s lists proliferated and flowered.
An entry in her diary might consist of a single notation—dung beetle, for instance, the bald syllables entirely inadequate to convey the concentrated purpose that emanated from the insect as it molded a ball of dung twice its own size from a half-dried cow pat, the slow hour spent watching as it inched this treasure backwards to its lair. Grasses, snails, the withering of a shrub, white birds like torn clouds over ripening paddy: once Maud had begun to notice these things, they were always there, waiting for her attention. She came and went from the house with sprays of leaves and samples of berries in a jet-fringed bag; she read of the medicinal properties of plants that flourished casually in the vast green dispensary of the jungle, and learned how to name them in four languages. Knowledge was a discipline in which she found pleasure, even if it was helpless against a power that asserted itself now and then over the years.
When that happened, things slipped out of their elements. A human face might peer at her from the chipped brickwork of a wall. Mosses grew eyes and moved. Tiny fish, vivid as gems, glowed briefly among ferns. Four headless mandarins in funereal kimonos paraded before her, on a log where a row of cormorants had stood with wings stretched wide as they pecked lice from their pinions. Once, in the unambiguous glare of noon, a figure walked less than six feet ahead of her on the road. It was neither male nor female, and its skin was a luminous coppery blue.
These phenomena no longer disturbed Maud. They were integral to the place in a way her presence was not. If whatever sent them had a message for her, it would be revealed in time. She accepted them, and they left her alone.
Between the jungle and the dhobi, her finery gradually fell to pieces. Fragments of georgette rotted into the earth. Birds braided strips of chiffon into their nests. Once she saw a weaverbird with a scrap she recognized in its bill, and recalled the legend that says the weaverbird studs its nest with fireflies to light it up at night. She would have liked to witness this, the gleam of phosphorescence illuminating a twist of muddied lace, the last glory of sea-green foam that had spun to Viennese waltzes.
Every few months a bolanool man called at the house, a Moor with a withered hand and a tin trunk carried on his head. He traveled at an unhurried pace, content to squat for hours over a cup of thrice-sugared tea. Maud’s purchases seldom ran to more than a packet of needles or a ball of Glasgow thread, but the Moor always insisted on unpacking his entire box for her. Like all peddlars he understood magic. Its performance required him to conjure a world stocked with marvels, the residue of every child’s dreams. A flotilla of shallow trays would materialize on the verandah, each packed tight with ribbons and combs and tiny cakes of sandalwood soap. The Moor might slide a thimble painted with poppies into Maud’s hand or a little japanned cylinder crammed with glass-headed pins. Small bright things have their own potency; she would find herself buying a card of round green buttons or a skein of scarlet embroidery silk, objects she had no use for but coveted with a child’s uncomplicated greed.
When the Moor next appeared she asked to see the flat bales of cotton and muslin he kept in the bottom of his dented trunk. Within minutes he had draped the verandah in florid swags, the bales slapping out under his good hand. Maud chose two lengths of flowered chintz, one coral, the other yellow, each stamped along the selvage with its identifying brand, a tiger’s striped head. Out of them she fashioned a trousseau of waistless sacks, supplemented with glittering oddments: a stole worked in silver flowers, a belt with a jeweled buckle.
In the Moor’s opinion, the old lady in the big house was mad. It was not a contemptuous assessment. He was a m
an in whom religious feeling expressed itself as a wide tolerance; madness, in his view, was not altogether divorced from saintliness. It seemed evident to him that the woman whose crazy weaving through the jungle was remarked on in villages for miles around had been brushed by the same finger as the ash-smeared holy men who wandered the Hindu pilgrim routes wild-eyed with god and self-mortification.
He was a tall man with sharp cheekbones and a quick tongue. In his presence the verandah bloomed into a small civilized stage hung with trumpery. He would haggle ruthlessly over a card bound with rickrack braid or a length of Pettah lace; then offer, at no cost, that rarest commodity, good conversation.
Sam spent the evening at a house set well back from the road in an acre of flowering trees and softly luxuriant ferns. It was an establishment that guaranteed hygiene and discretion. The girl he chose was new. Her breasts were scarcely larger than their violet-brown aureoles, the faintest swelling above her ribs. Flint-jawed, this elf dealt with him unmercifully. At such times he found himself transported. Mrs. Timms imposed her regal features on the face blooming above him and he clawed at the sheet in ecstasy.
Petrol was rationed but there was a rickshaw stand at the junction. His nerve-endings tingled as he walked up a street where branches met overhead. The moon was a silver sprat held in a mesh of leaves. When he lowered his gaze, he saw a patch of white moving ahead of him. He recognized the uniform above the sturdy calves and remembered that a group of Wrens was billeted in a compound at the head of the road. It lay barely two hundred yards away. But at Christmas there had been a minor scandal about a gang of youths who surrounded an English nurse when she was walking back from the cinema one evening. They had asked her to kiss one of them, a prospect she described as too frightful for words.
The thock-thock of the girl’s heels masked his quickened steps. “Please excuse me!” he began, reaching for his hat.
She gave a tiny shriek and spun around. “Don’t touch me,” she screamed. “You beastly little nigger.”
He settled his hat back on his head. “My dear young lady,” he said, “please forgive me. I took you for a strumpet but I see now that you are much too ugly.” The terror on her waxy features hardened to fury as he strode past her.
A week later, while he was knotting his tie, he heard the first sentence on the early bulletin and switched off the wireless. He walked down the stairs with care. It seemed a long way.
The breakfast service, rimmed with blue and gold fleur-de-lis, was one of the few tolerable items his wife had inherited from her mother. He ignored the newspaper folded beside his plate, although the headline was plainly visible: Labor Landslide! Nevertheless, knowledge persisted like a headache.
Thanks to the war, it had been years since he had tasted decent marmalade. His son knew nothing but the pineapple jam in the middle of the table, runny and oversweet in its faceted glass dish. The English had gone mad. Now it would be only a matter of time before they extricated themselves from the island as if they had never been there. A century and a half swilled down the drain like a discharge not referred to in polite company. And there he would be, high and dry and thousands of fellows like him, craving the amber subtleties of marmalade and obliged to make do with pineapple bally jam.
At the other end of the gleaming rosewood his wife was smearing onion sambol on buttered toast. It was a habit he had not been able to break her of. The whiff of Maldive fish depressed him every morning. His son sat between them, head tucked over his plate, eating spoonfuls of neutral boiled egg.
Sam’s gaze alighted on the dalmatian stretched panting in the doorway, where the servant was obliged to step over it as he came and went with dishes. “Poor old Winston,” he said, attempting lightheartedness, for the child’s sake. “I suppose we should take him out and put a bullet between his eyes.”
He intercepted the glance Harry shot at his mother, to which she replied with a slight shake of her head. The next moment, to Sam’s horror, he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He was so very tired of being misunderstood.
From the talk that rolled around the circle of drinkers at the kadai, Sirisena learned that he belonged to an Aryan race. Tamils were Dravidians, therefore inferior. There was a man, a
mahatheya, said the boutique keeper, who had spoken of these things at a meeting in the town. Although he was a gentleman, he had worn a sarong and addressed the crowd as equals. He had promised land for everyone, and bellies full of rice. The Sinhalese were the rightful rulers of their country: the day was coming when they would reclaim its sacred space for themselves and rid the island of all usurpers.
As Sirisena’s wheels ploughed homeward, a cloud settled over the moon. He thought of a hen fluffing out her breast over an egg. At such moments old dreams revived, a pearly gleam at the edge of his vision.
He woke to pain that jolted between the base of his skull and his temples. Toddy was cheaper than arrack but produced a more sickening aftermath. He held his head under the tepid flow from the kitchen tap. Padma scraped the flesh from coconuts and ignored him. He stepped into the bright hateful morning and trod on a small bundle of nut-brown feathers lying in the dirt.
When he had finished cleaning the nonamahatheya’s bathroom, the floor was hazardous with slopped water. He smoothed the coverlet over her bed but left the sheets rumpled. At mealtimes he slapped dishes down in front of her, curries coated in a glistening scum of oil. She noticed nothing. This maddened him. In the pantry he poured coffee into a luminous, dinted pot, then spat into it. He wanted to hit the old woman until her hair turned dark and matted, and she whimpered in the dust at his feet. He wanted to clasp her knees and beg: Help me to escape from my life.
Maud had her own preoccupations. These, increasingly, had to do with the treachery of her body. There were days when stilettos of pain pierced her chest. Sometimes the floor dipped when she rose from her chair. One afternoon she found herself standing under the flamboyante with flies crawling along her arms and no memory of how she came to be there.
Deer would always bend their heads to a leafy cress that grew by the stream. Maud had witnessed the sight a thousand times before she connected it with Thornton’s voice: “A general tonic and purifier of the blood.” Thereafter Padma had instructions to prepare gotukola leaves mixed with shredded coconut every day. Maud persuaded herself that the sambol heightened her energy, yet knew she had reached that age when she would never again be free of the demands of a failing mechanism. At best, on a good day, it would let her off with a throbbing toe or a tenderness about her gums. Her lungs scratched. A knee locked itself into immobility. “Such mediocrity of design,” she fumed. “Any cabinet carpentered in a village is sturdier.”
She spoke this aloud, unintentionally. Sirisena, feverish for a sign, materialized at once in the doorway. She studied his small unmanageable face. His yearning communicated itself to her, but thinned and diffuse: a distant commotion. The ready self-pity of the old opened its arms to her. It admitted no neediness but its own.
The electricity failed three evenings in succession and they ran out of candles. It was the kind of minor domestic crisis that restored the bungalow keeper’s sense of self-worth. Conscious of quiet mastery, he filled leaf-shaped lamps with coconut oil and arrayed them on the flat-topped verandah wall. Maud sat entranced before a row of clay lamps no bigger than a child’s palm, each cupping a rag wick and a beating golden heart.
No soldier returns from war without a plunder of stories. Men who had been stationed near Lokugama carried home the tale of a woman with eyes like cold yellow gems who wandered the jungles of Ceylon dressed for a ball. In the torn light under the trees she had the aspect of a young girl, barely marriageable; then she turned her head to reveal a grinning crone.
Variants of this narrative surfaced in Solihull and Nairobi. It was embellished on an expedition to the Amazon, footnoted in an ashram in Poona, disputed on a farm near Dubbo. There was a version in which the woman had been reared by leopards and craved human flesh, t
he gown in which she prowled the jungle having been ripped from her first victim. Alternatively, she was the sad, mad product of an incestuous coupling, hidden away by her family and governed by the delusion that she was a sought-after débutante. Sometimes the figure in the trees was a ghost, the daughter of a Dutch governor, who had fallen in love with a foot soldier. Her father had the man taken deep into the jungle, where he was chained to a tree and left to the wild animals. The girl learned of his fate as she dressed for the garrison ball. Bejeweled, arrayed in laces and silks, she slipped from the fort that night and vanished without trace.
There were those who claimed that the woman in the jungle appeared only to soldiers who would die in combat. Others, that the vision guaranteed safe passage through the war. She glided on six inches of air, she crept on all fours, she walked abroad on moonless nights, or at that hour when the last star still glimmers palely above the horizon. There were always these constants, however: a violence from which everything sprang, the fabulous incongruity of her clothes.
When the pain first manifested itself Leela thought it was temporary, brought on by the green mango achacharu she loved and ate by the dishful. She dosed herself with
Kruschen salts and waited for it to pass.
Later she knew it would not. She said nothing. She wanted her son to remember an afternoon of light and water they had spent together by a lake up-country. She had held him on her lap and pointed out the colors of a kingfisher: the back a deep lilac, rich blue wings edged with ultramarine, a snow-white belly, red feet and a carmine bill. If she complained now, what would he retain of her? A handful of brutally accurate photographs; the memory of hushed voices, a woman lying like a grub inside the milky-green cocoon of a sickroom.
The Hamilton Case Page 19