The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  He asked for and received a camera one Christmas.

  He was allergic to penicillin.

  He had a pen pal in Oslo.

  He had inherited his mother’s weakness for clear, bright colors. His bedroom was scattered with a confetti of cheap objects that had caught his eye on Pettah pavements: two china eggcups manufactured in Japan, one scarlet, the other leaf green; a turquoise tin mug with a crimson rim; a plastic orange.

  He loved eggs scrambled with green chilies, and an American improbably named Elvis.

  He wrote to the manufacturers of Ponds Vanishing Cream to avail himself of their free offer: an autographed photograph of their model, the film star Miss Kamala Devi, Loveliness Personified.

  He had the same shoe size as his father. And like him, he couldn’t hold a tune.

  These were the things Sam knew about his son when the boy left for Oxford in his twentieth year. After eighteen months of cramming, Harry had been offered a place at his father’s college; the question of what he was to read had proved almost as problematic. He had dropped Latin after scraping through his O Levels, and even Sam was obliged to acknowledge that he had no aptitude for the law. Probed about the future, Harry was typically malleable and vague: he could see himself in the Civil Service, he wouldn’t mind tea, he hadn’t altogether ruled out teaching. It was plain that he could not be left to steer his own course. Sam wrote to his old tutor. Fisher, now the Senior Fellow, suggested that the boy read history. It does a young man no lasting harm. Thus it was settled.

  On the evening before Harry sailed, Sam stood him dinner at a hotel by the sea. It was a grand old place: atrocious architecture and beautiful décor. The boy chose a table on the pillared verandah. At the far end of the dining room a quartet was playing “Under the Bridges of Paris.” The music reached them in dashes, interrupted by the breakers from India hurling themselves at the sea wall.

  This was before the ban on all imported goods. Champagne arrived while they were waiting for their baked crab. Harry lit a Gold Flake, fumbling it a little. He was still new to smoking, having taken it up while cramming for his exams. Noting his awkwardness, Sam thought of all the rites the boy had yet to negotiate and with what negligence the world could crush him. He gripped his knife. This circumvented the impulse that would have him clasp his son’s wrist and cry, Don’t leave me.

  He said, “Your grandmother was a great smoker,” the words a blurted link between two needs. But it sounded harsh: accusatory and flat. Harry swiveled his head away.

  A trolley of dishes with silver lids glided past. The scent of cardamom arrived to muddle the sea tang of salt and sewage.

  Harry said, “Did you know that curry comes from a Tamil word? Kari, meaning a sauce.”

  “I say!” He eyed his son. “What an extraordinary thing to know. Where did you pick that up?”

  Harry shrugged. Sam saw that it was, inexplicably, the wrong question. He resented the unreasonableness of this.

  As always, silence was the solder they applied to the cracks between them.

  The quartet played “Blue Skirt Waltz,” followed by “As Time Goes By.”

  Sam said, “Great thing to be a young fellow with Oxford waiting like a book.”

  He said, “A May Ball, you know.”

  He said, “Nosing down the river in a punt. The willows. And those birds, let me think what they’re called. Sedge warblers?”

  Harry looked into his empty glass. He drank like a young man, thirstily. He looked up and said, “Granny told me you were refused a tryout for the tennis teams. And that the stories you wrote for the college magazine were always returned. They didn’t even open the envelope.”

  Sam could see Harry’s lips moving, but knew that these little razor-tipped shafts had been loosed in hell. He wanted to put his arms up before his face. The realization that the boy had carried that information within him all these years, like an illness, was unbearable. Sam had never spoken of these slights. He had forgotten them himself. It was like that game he had played as a child, where a fellow came up noiselessly behind you and drove his knees into the backs of yours and what you felt above all, as you went down, was that you had been a fool.

  There was a weight in his breast pocket, the gold lighter he had had engraved with his son’s initials. He put his hand to his chest.

  Harry said, “Why do you never talk about what they did to you? Why is it always water meadows and the deer at Magdalen?”

  On a planet where men are moved by a superior mechanism it might have been apparent to Sam that belligerence was the coating with which the boy was trying to swallow his nerves. As it was, he managed only to say, “She must have got it all from Jaya. He had cronies at Oxford. Threads of third-hand gossip, spun out of all proportion.” It clattered between them, sounding tinny and worthless, like one of the new coins the government had minted.

  The boy’s face remained ungiving. This time the silence had a different quality, as of a blind alley.

  Harry sailed at midday on the Orion. His father’s old overcoat, freshly brushed, lay across his bunk. It pinched under the arms, but Sam had insisted. “Just to tide you over,” he said again, now. He stooped, caressed one of the hairy sleeves. “Get yourself measured up as soon as you can. Jermyn Street. You have the address?”

  Harry nodded.

  His father picked up the heavy coat. He patted it, scraped at a loose thread that wasn’t there, laid the coat down again with great tenderness. “Mustn’t get stuck with this old fellow.”

  He shook Harry’s hand when the bell sounded. A motor launch was waiting to carry visitors to shore. He stood at the stern, heedless of spray, his gaze on the rail that was receding like hope. That evening, he realized that he had forgotten to wave his handkerchief. His footsteps followed him in and out of echoing rooms, and he could not forgive himself the omission.

  Weeks later his coat arrived in layered brown paper, along with a black-and-white postcard of the Sheldonian. Meadows stony, said the inscription in Harry’s backward sloping hand. The parcel had been opened and inexpertly done up again. It was a wonder the coat hadn’t been pinched. Sam wouldn’t put anything past the light-fingered blighters at the post office. Whenever he sifted through the envelopes waiting for him on his desk and found nothing with an Oxford postmark, he pictured a clerk with oiled hair slitting open an envelope with foreign stamps in case it contained banknotes. With time, the attributes of this individual became very clear to him: the nylon shirt yellowing in the armpits, the stacked aluminum lunch carrier with its film of greasy curry. He had a word to the postmaster general, who promised to look into the matter. Nothing changed, of course. The PMG was not actually a fellow one knew. This was happening more and more, chaps arriving out of nowhere like cracks in a wall.

  History, for all its shortcomings, is supremely impersonal. Sam could see its effect on lives other than his own, patterns he had thought eternal wrenched into new configurations. A fellow’s shoes growing shab-bier as inflation corroded his pension. Silver-haired girls one had danced with wilting in line for a bus under the fierce blue eye of noon. Nevertheless he was unable to shake off the suspicion that a unique malice had singled him out. It was not that misfortune came his way. Rather that his star dimmed; or perhaps it was simply that others brightened. One morning no different from all the others, between the upward and the downward scratch of his pen, he understood that the zenith toward which he labored already lay behind him.

  There was nothing to suggest this in the dark paneling of his chambers, or the twenty-six crimson spines of Principles of Roman–Dutch Law in the French-polished case behind his desk. He had taken silk just before the war. His reputation was secure. His practice flourished; years ago it had reached the stage where it could scarcely do otherwise. Lesser men still fawned on him and courted his patronage. But one post-independence cabinet succeeded the other, and the Bench was never mooted. Yet he was sure he had the finest legal mind in the island. All government appointments were political,
of course; merit didn’t enter into it. His views on the state of the country were widely known and he wasn’t about to sing a different bally tune. Jaya’s old jibe, Obey by name, Obey by nature, crawled once more over the convolutions of his brain. He was never going to give them the satisfaction of seeing him mash stringhoppers between his fingers while coconut gravy dripped down his arm. The fear of appearing foolish if he changes his mind may bind a man to a course of action more securely than any oath. He began giving small formal dinners every year on May 24. Sam Obeysekere’s Empire Day do: word got around. He felt it was a plucky, rather fine gesture: the Collector in the doomed residency running up the standard. At the same time he resented the role. It had been imposed on him. They had thrust him into anachronism.

  One day he switched on the wireless halfway through a jingle: Hentley, Hentley, Shirts the dhobi cannot tear . . . He was scarcely aware of listening. But later he discovered the word sanforized embedded in his memory. Sanforized. Sanforized. He batted it away and it returned to the attack. What did it mean? He suspected that everyone else knew. Sanforized. Sanforized. How could he find out, without revealing ignorance? Where was the dictionary to which he could refer?

  On an April morning limp with heat, he stood in his dressing room and found himself shouting. “I’m the detective,” he bellowed at a rack of listless ties. “I’m the coming man.”

  On Harry’s twenty-first birthday, he came into money from his mother’s family. He had been at Oxford for four terms. He wrote to Sam, thanking him for his telegram of congratulations, and the bank draft. A brief paragraph added, as if it were an afterthought, that he had left the university and was living with friends in Yorkshire. There was a view of moors, he wrote. He intended to find work as a gardener, or perhaps in forestry. To set a seed in the earth and see it grow was all he wanted to do.

  Sam took a Quickshaws taxi to the airport. There he crossed the tarmac and boarded his first airplane. A scented china doll with yellow hair piled on her head leaned across him to adjust a buckle. Her cone-shaped breasts were an inch away from his lips. He squeezed his knees together. Over Switzerland the plane ran into turbulence and he moaned as she lurched across the aisle and into his arms. Together they dipped toward the lights of Europe, an orange sodium code that for a long ravishing moment he believed he could crack with her assistance.

  For five days he heard nothing but the ringing in his ears. Against this metallic score, England unfolded as a soundless hallucination. Double-deckers exhibited their scarlet rumps in choked streets. Girls’ bleached faces swayed above their collars like flowers that refuse to open. At Paddington an ancient female with pink-rimmed eyes and a fox stole barred his way, mouthing furious instructions; at last he gathered that he had been taken for a porter. He was outraged and humiliated—among the crowds pushing past there had been more than one smile—yet you could see how it had happened. He had never seen so many brown and black faces in London. Whenever he ventured into the street he encountered women shivering in saris or gaudy robes, a bright plumage of embroidered cloth escaping from the camouflage of dirt-colored raincoats and stretched cardigans. Once, if you had met a creature like that in London you would have known she was a princess. Now there was every chance she would turn out to be a tea plucker. The February sky was an iron cap clamped down as tight as a headache. The exchange rate was a practical joke.

  He was afraid that Harry would not come. But he did, seventeen minutes late. He was wearing a coat with a hood and wooden toggles, quite plainly not from Jermyn Street. His face had filled out. His hair was too long. Father and son shook hands, directed smiles at each other’s shoulders.

  Sam had decided to stand the boy lunch at the Savoy, to demonstrate his goodwill. It was an error. They were shown to a table half obscured by a potted palm, with a view of a wall. The prices were dizzying. Harry said something to their waiter. After a long interval, he was brought a plate of pale leaves and slices of whitish-yellow tomato.

  “What? What?” The din in Sam’s skull had sunk to a drone, but all external noise still reached him thickened with silence. Harry’s lips moved. “Vegetarian?” His son nodded. “Why?” Harry gazed at the cruet, spoke briefly. Sam caught the word life. “Not a Buddhist as well?” Harry shook his head. “Well, that’s a relief,” he shrieked, and saw the boy flinch.

  Sam had promised himself that he would not speak of Oxford over lunch. Words trembled on his lips but he held heroically to his course. They shouted platitudes at each other at intervals. The effort this required was exhausting. Harry enquired about friends from Neddy’s. Sam had no idea what they were up to. He made his way through another gluey forkful of veal à la normande, all the while conscious that every facet of the scene—the atrocious food, the bored waiters, the mingled scents of hothouse gardenias and roasting flesh—was conspiring against him. There stole upon him the same helpless rage he felt when a jury, ignoring legal argument, common sense and directions from the Bench, returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

  At last it was over. Outside, the rain had let up and an east wind was rubbing the day raw. Harry produced a frightful checked muffler that he wound about his throat. He hadn’t shaved. Sam had a sudden, terrifying premonition that he was about to walk away and leave everything unsaid between them forever. “A stroll!” he bellowed and grasped his son’s elbow.

  They walked in the park with bent heads past sodden earth and drowned green lawns. There was no one about. Boughs dripped noiselessly. Dark birds blew about the sky like debris.

  At a place where hooves had churned the footpath into milky tea, Sam halted. “No real damage done. Saw Fisher yesterday. They’ll have you back.”

  Harry began to say something.

  “Have to speak up!”

  “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Finish your degree. Then we’ll see.”

  Harry shook his head.

  “The money won’t last forever. How will you get by then?”

  Again, the boy shook his head. He said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be all right! Don’t worry!” Then, unexpectedly, Harry smiled. His face, released from watchfulness, was vivid with charm. “Here we are,” he roared, “at the heart of the Empire, shouting at each other across two feet of mud.”

  Sam slapped him, open-palmed.

  Harry took half a step backwards. He placed his hand against his cheek. He said, every word distinct, “I’ve always hated you.” Then he walked away.

  Life is bearable only if it can be understood as a set of narrative strategies. In the endless struggle to explain our destinies we search for cause and effect, for recurrent patterns of climax and dénouement; we need beginnings, villains, we seek the hidden correlation between a rainy afternoon remembered from childhood and a letter that doesn’t arrive forty years later.

  It was routine among Sam’s acquaintances, as they stiffened into age, to date the decline of the island from the departure of the British. After that everything followed with the inevitability of history: new stamps, hula hoops, ration books, flocked nylon, rising prices, a falling currency, Coca-Cola, cabinet ministers in sarongs, ladies in trouser suits, failed coups, successful assassinations, race riots and a national anthem no one knew the words to. A generation was left marooned on verandahs, eking out its grievances like whiskey and sodas. Land reforms! The Twist!

  After Sam retired he became a familiar figure in Colpetty, stepping straight-backed through the streets every morning with a malacca cane. He wore a straw boater and a sand-colored suit, and noted evidence that standards had deteriorated. A brass tap on a stand pipe at the junction of two streets that hadn’t worked for months. Drains painted with velvet slime. The insolence of rickshaw coolies. Three dead rats arrayed on a potholed pavement. Yellow phlegm gobbed in a doorway. A constable on point duty who wiped his nose on the back of a smeared cotton glove. Dust-streaked double-deckers, pensioned from London, fixed in the traffic and coughi
ng up exhaust like old men with terminal illnesses. The tide of filth that mounted the pavements, crept over walls, plastered the façade of every public building. He would return to breakfast well satisfied: it was no more than the fools deserved.

  Tissa had gone, claimed by a cancer that gnawed through his pancreas in four weeks. He was succeeded by a series of anonymous laborers, hired for two or three days a week. Such men knew nothing about gardening. They treated their days at Allenby House as a respite from the spine-cracking labor that waited for them on building sites or the docks, and were usually to be found scratching at the vegetable beds near the kitchen, hoping for a cup of tea. Patches of mange appeared on the lawn. No longer renewed every six months, the earth in the flower-pots along the verandah turned gray, and the plants they held withered. An arbor collapsed under the weight of clumping jasmine. Seeds grew skyward where they fell. Shrubs rose and put out woody arms and choked each other. Wild blue pools of morning glory advanced by stealth. Throughout the garden there were fresh new leaves and silky shoots, the ancient, anonymous green life that thrived on neglect.

  Whenever its disorder impinged too far on his consciousness Sam would sack the man he had hired, then replace him with another of the same kind. It was a ritual, satisfying and meaningless. It appeased his sense that something had to be done, but saved him the expense of a full-time gardener. The government was up to its systematic rookery. The price of a chundi of rice! The cost of butter! Devising ingenious household economies was one of the pleasures of Sam’s retirement. Visitors were served drinks in thimble-sized glasses. He had the bulbs removed from half the lamps in the house and tolerated nothing brighter than forty watts in the rest. His servants were allowed meat or fish no more than twice a week. Then he gave notice to the lot of them and employed a cook servant-boy, a round-chinned youth named Ranil from a village near Lokugama.