His ayah snored on her mat across the doorway. Damp and the urine of polecats had drawn a brown map of Africa on the ceiling. He gouged a lump of dry, gray matter from a nostril. Then he rose and stepped over his ayah, dropping the snot into her open mouth. She shifted and muttered and didn’t wake.
During his illness and convalescence all spices had been omitted from his diet. In the pantry he scooped lime pickle from a dish and licked his fingers. He filled a tumbler from the ceramic water filter. It tasted faintly of dust.
Thus fortified, he returned to the room where the baby had died and went in. It contained only a faint, sweet reek and the corpses of flies. Somewhat disappointed, he wandered out again.
A sofa with elaborately scrolled ends leaned against one wall of the verandah that ran around the courtyard, its broken leg propped up on half a brick. He lay on its sagging rattan, with his feet resting on one of the scrolls. The second toe on his right foot overshot his big toe by half an inch. This was moospainthu. The courtyard was a cauldron of light with a blue enamel lid. He fell asleep and woke screaming.
A rat’s tail lay across his ayah’s shriveled chest. She coiled the plait into a gray knot and speared it with hairpins. All the while she scolded him: her practiced eye had spotted the smear on his chin. “Aiyo,” she whined to Maud, who was lowering herself onto the sofa. “You see how disobedient he is? He steals food that gives him bad dreams. If he falls ill, the hamuduruwo will say it is my fault. But what am I to do?”
Rattan had stamped itself into the boy’s cheek and arm, a trellis of cinnamon flesh. He turned his head and looked at Maud. “I dreamed I was in that room,” he said. “And there was a cushion on the floor. And a thing in a net.”
“What kind of thing?” she asked.
He answered without hesitation. “A hand like mine.”
On Harry’s last day at Lokugama, the household was woken at dawn by a bulletlike downpour that exhausted itself almost at once. Over a fortnight there had been a series of these eccentric starts to the monsoon. Even now the sky was as gray as a bucket but the air remained heavy and close, with no sign of the singing winds that would sweep in when the rain arrived to stay.
But an hour later the trees around the house were bowing until they groaned. The first drops of rain fell like fat fish. Harry’s ayah scuttled between rooms, hiding scissors and knives in cupboards, draping towels over mirrors as lightning splintered the enormous sky.
Soon rain poured straight down as if a tap had been left open overhead. While Sam was still explaining that flooding had rendered the roads impassable, the line went dead.
Maud remained in the hall, clutching the receiver. Why had Leo’s room contained a cushion, rather than a pillow, in Harry’s dream? What did the substitution signify?
She thought of Claudia, and her special cushion—no different from any other—that the little girl insisted on jamming between her knees when she slept. Maud could remember the child’s fierce attachment to the thing, how she had trailed that silky blue package everywhere, dragging it through grass and over earth so that its sheen dulled and its piping frayed. At last it began to disintegrate, and was wrested from her grasp while she stiffened her body, and thrown away while she screamed.
Rain crashed on the roof. Maud’s spine prickled. She turned to see a child approaching fast, his shirt a pale smear in the rain-darkened hall. Harry ran past and out onto the verandah.
There he swung himself up onto the wall and extended first one stick leg and then the other into the downpour. Far from the regimenting forces of pavements and lampposts, wind and water were larger, more elemental things; he needed to express his solidarity with them. Children always side with monsoons, thrilling to the assault on stability. It was an instinct the boy would never quite outgrow.
The coconut trees against the wall swayed and ducked behind each other, and clouds blew through their feathered heads like smoke. Water foamed in the compound and raced down the drive, where puddles boiled with caramel bubbles. Curtains of rain turned the day so dark that lights were required in the house. But switches clicked uselessly; electricity put up only a feeble struggle against the monsoon. To Harry’s delight, the bungalow keeper produced bunches of candles from the pantry. He was allowed to stick them onto saucers. With candles, there was always the hope that someone would get hot wax on his fingers.
By the time lunch was cleared away, tiles had been wrenched from the roof and the household had run out of buckets. The distinction between inside and outside blurred as rooms filled up with falling rain. Basins, saucepans and an enameled chamberpot were placed wherever someone was bound to trip over them. Furniture hauled into unfamiliar positions out of the way of leaks provided a further hazard. There were groans, and hands clamped to bruised shins.
Leaves turned black and rain fell in ropes. When it stopped, late in the afternoon, steam rose from the drive. In half an hour it would pour again. Meanwhile the sun shone as if clouds were a fanciful notion that would never amount to anything.
All night, sky and leaves dripped. Harry flailed in his bed. His lids snapped open. He had said cushion. But he meant pillow. He realized that now. Pillow. Cushion. But then he wasn’t sure. One or the other lay beneath his cheek. Cushion. Pillow. They melted and merged. They wavered and became sleep.
In the morning, Maud called Harry to her and gave him her snake stone. She told him the legend associated with it, shouting over the din of the rain. A squall of wind carried a pestilential stench into the room. The stone rolled on the child’s palm: a dull little nugget, ochre-tinged.
At lunchtime it was discovered that an act of municipal heroism had restored the supply of electricity. Harry raced in and out of rooms, puffing his cheeks and blowing out candles with great gusty breaths. A horn tooted at the gate. Maud thought, How am I to live, not seeing his face?
She was lying on her coverlet, sleepless in the dark, when her bed began to shake. The door crashed on its hinges, drawers opened and slammed shut. One by one, her fingers were forced back from a bedpost. There was a weight on her chest, so that she fought for air. Coverlet and sheets were ripped from beneath her. Very clearly, above the rage, a thin sobbing went on and on. None of this was as frightening as the sense of a frustrated, furious presence. Its warm breath was in her ear.
When it ended, a minute later, she rose from the disordered bed. “I am a stupid old woman,” said Maud to whatever was listening. Her fingers groped for the switch on the standard lamp, but everything was already clear.
God knows what that old fool of a doctor gave me to knock me out. It settled like fog on my brain, obscuring everything that happened that night.
Hours after I had fallen into bed, I found myself on the back verandah. Every step I took was weighty and effortful, like striding through water. Dr. van Dort had taken Leo away with him, but I had either forgotten or didn’t care. Instinct propelled me toward the roomwhere he had last drawn breath. The door was open. And on the threshold I walked into a child.
That was the vision that sank into my mind and lay buried there all these years. It governed me from that moment, I realize that now. But I had understood everything the wrong way round.
It seemed essential to write it all down, to pull knowledge, at least, from the wreckage of love. Maud saw a garden laid waste by thirst, soft blooms crisped on the stem. Her pen sped as if charmed.
I should have seen what Harry’s dream meant straight away. A cushion that replaced a pillow: that was the crucial detail. It held the key to what happened to Leo.
Rain fell, the noise clamorous on the roof. When she tried to rise from the table, the walls swayed about her. She steadied herself, gripping the back of her chair.
Her diary was in her hand when she passed onto the verandah. She could not have said what she was doing; only that she was intent on reparation. Wind feathered her nightdress and someone called her name. Light flashing from the sky obliterated the courtyard. Trees filled the void, green fists bursting as far as s
he could see, rimmed with restless blue at the horizon. Her father lifted his hat and waved to her from that shore. The girl beside him held out her hands, strung with a ruby-red necklace. A dog with a snow-tipped tail wove in and out of view, and Iris, in strapless satin, was tangoing with a man in striped pajamas.
Other figures drew near, her dead gathering to greet her. A pigeon-toed woman, deep in conversation with Thornton. A jug-eared pirate who blew kisses. He lifted a fold of leopard skin and Maud saw the round-headed baby in his arms.
Rain drummed joyfully on the tiles, and was answered by the pounding at Maud’s temples. The door of Leo’s room gave at her touch. What she saw within, the scene glowing softly as if painted on glass, was a child with his arms folded over his chest. Then he let the pillow fall and ran forward to meet her.
Maud felt full of life, its force streaming through her limbs. A tremendous sense of well-being wrapped itself about her. She stumbled into its embrace and slept like a baby.
The bungalow keeper was a man who yawned often and tremendously, cracking his jaw. He was still retying his sarong and blinking sleep from his eyes when he saw the bundle lying on the verandah.
At the other end of the day, long after the burble of conjecture had subsided, and the doctor had finished issuing contradictory orders and driven away, Sirisena remembered the exercise book. It still lay like a broken bird near the door where he had found her. By the dim verandah light, his thumb rifled pages. That he could neither read nor write was one of the sources of his rage. Its lightning crazed through him now. The book cost five cents at any kadai; and represented everything that would always elude him.
The moon eased itself out from under a weight of clouds. When the bungalow keeper turned away from the decaying breath of the rubbish heap he saw the house before him, coated in silver light. For an instant it appeared utterly unfamiliar: a place he had visited only in a dream. Then the vision righted itself and he was returned to the world.
The last time Sam saw his mother was on a February morning in 1948. The English were leaving, with the haste instinctive to thieves. As he drove out of Colombo he kept the heel of his hand on the horn. The crowd thickened wherever a festive pandal arched over the road, its bamboo struts and crosspiece festooned with flowers and strings of colored bulbs.
The sea hissed on his right. The waves were up, whisked into sloppy peaks. Spray blew onto the hood of his car where the road embraced a headland of dark rock. Everything was changing: the sea crept forward and back, maps were altered grain by grain. Even when he turned off the coast road, he was conscious of that twisting vastness at his back. It propelled him forward, inland, toward certainty.
Maud lay propped against pillows. Her eyes were turned to a corner of the ceiling. She had been lying there, silent, the left side of her jaw dragged loose, for eight weeks. The doctor insisted that it was only a minor stroke. Yet life ebbed from her, a steady leaking.
The room was dim, dust-furred. The nurse slumped by the door took advantage, like all her kind. Sam saw, with irritation, that a sticky spoon with a tarnished handle lay on the drawn-thread tray cloth on the bedside table. His wife had stitched that mat, and the matching runner on the chest of drawers. Now both were creased, stained, the tray cloth was rust spotted. The table itself was cluttered with smeared tumblers, and bottles labeled in an apothecary’s italics. But the doctor, who drove out to see Maud every few days, said that she was making no progress. “Lost interest. It happens all the time.”
This doctor, whose name was Dickie Meerwald, had a birthmark on his left cheek, curving around his socket, where the raised skin was mulberry hued. He held his head awkwardly, angling the bad side down toward his shoulder. If not for the stain he would have been an imposing man: sharp-featured, flat-stomached. Sam remembered him from Neddy’s, a new boy in too-long navy-blue shorts standing at an angle to the boundary wall. The jolt when he turned his head: a flipped coin coming down on the side of calamity.
Saucers of water had been placed under the legs of the dining table. At dinner the bungalow keeper said that the ants were bad that year. Sam hadn’t troubled to telephone ahead, so ate unpolished country rice, fried snake beans and coconut sambol, like the servants. But the cook-woman had opened a tin and curried some mackerel for him. The fire-works began while the dishes were being carried in. He chewed slowly, to the sound of distant explosions.
The following morning he went in to see Maud and found himself calculating how many years had passed since they had last touched each other. He sat beside the bed with his hands on his knees. There was a sickroom smell of musty sheets and Brand’s Essence of Chicken. His eyes alighted on his mother’s slippers, the indent of her heel and the ball of her foot plainly visible in the worn rubber. He wrenched his gaze away.
His chair creaked when he brought his knees together. Maud’s lids flew open. Her eyes had remained beautiful: leaf-shaped, the unclouded amber of old. For one long radiant moment, he thought she had seen him clearly: not as he appeared, but as he was. “How clever you are,” she would say. She would say, “My marvelous boy.”
He picked up the case he had set on her bedside table. Made of mahogany and lined with royal-blue silk, it held eight cut-glass bottles with silver-gilded stoppers and mounts, a silver-backed clothes brush and a shaving pot. He had acquired it in a lot, along with a pair of vine-clustered grape scissors and a papier-mâché card tray, at an auction house on Bullers Road, obeying the usual imperative that directed his purchases. It was only after the auctioneer had knocked everything down to him that he spotted the initials twined on the lid of the case.
The past was retrievable; at that moment he was certain of it. Time dissolved, slipped sideways in that room. The girl who was his mother stopped him in his flight. She would not let him pass, but steadied him in her arms. He angled the case and traced its gold lettering with a finger that trembled: H. W. P. O. “Look,” he said. “It belonged to Pater.”
Maud gave no sign of having understood or even heard. But when he was at the door she said, her voice clear, “Only eight bottles, Ritzy?” Then her crooked, irresistible smile. “I suppose I smashed the other two.”
That night, in Colombo, the noise jangled him awake. He had dozed off in his office room, feet up on a low table. A Christmas fly, seduced by the lamp at his elbow, was disintegrating in half an inch of brandy. Still cobwebby with sleep he swung his feet down, and pins and needles tattooed prickles along the muscles of his calves. The telephone squatting on his desk like a sooty imp shrieked again, bloated with self-importance.
He knew at once what this midnight summons signified. The operator went off the line and he heard the bungalow keeper’s voice, buzzing with static and the thrill of bad news. It drowned out the sound of the sea. But he knew it was there, a rolling darkness to which he would come.
Eight years later, in 1956, what was now called the Sinhalese People’s Party won government in a landslide victory at the polls. Sam gave it as his opinion that the elections had been rigged; he knew fellows who knew other fellows who had witnessed the bribery and voter intimidation at first hand. The chaps—decent chaps with backgrounds—who had taken over the burden of government from the British woke up to find themselves in opposition, scrambling for scapegoats and explanations.
The new Minister of Culture—Jungle Jaya, as an inspired columnist dubbed him—appeared in every newspaper, massive, genial, wreathed in marigolds and temple flowers. At the club Sam ran into a fellow from Neddy’s who swore that Jaya had slept with the wives of every one of his fellow ministers. This despite the gargantuan paunch, dragging at him like guilt, that rendered the act almost impossible. It was common knowledge in government circles, said Sam’s informant, that the Minister accomplished sexual intercourse only with the aid of a ramp designed to facilitate the copulation of elephants.
At the Queen’s–St. Edward’s match Jaya showed up in a sarong, his silver and blue rosette pinned to a Nehru collar. When he presented the cup to the winning
team—Queen’s, with four wickets in hand, as it happened—he remarked that it was only when watching a game of cricket that he could understand why so many intelligent men had believed in the honorable intentions of the British. He seemed not to notice the flushed presence on the same stage of Warden Radford and half a dozen English masters. The boys cheered, as boys do. Jaya clambered into the back of an open truck with the rowdiest of them and drove around Colombo, serenading schoolgirls with caddish songs. It was bally bad form from start to finish.
At Neddy’s Harry had one of those nondescript careers. For a few months at the age of fourteen he displayed an enthusiasm for hockey, which evaporated as soon as his house selected him as a reserve. Once, he was placed third in Geography; the maps he drew were exquisite. His reports typically characterized him as a pleasant boy. The lack of interest he inspired in his teachers was manifest.
Sam sometimes thought that this ordinariness was itself a kind of talent, and not unenviable: it freed his son from the knotted anxiety that had attended his own successes at school. Is there any torment in adult life keener than that suffered by a clever child hanging around the noticeboard where the results will be posted? Yet the next moment he would be speared by anger: why couldn’t the boy make an effort, when was contentment with mediocrity not symptomatic of a mediocre mind?
The years lengthened, breathing slowly.
Harry had his tonsils out.
He was left-handed.
He rode his bicycle everywhere.
He went to the pictures, or swimming at Mount Lavinia, with friends from school. They shared a brief craze for cramming themselves into telephone booths, a fad that swept the city and attracted the disfavor of newspaper editors.
The Hamilton Case Page 22