The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  Ranil had unexpected talents. He replaced the worn rattan in all the chairs, holding down the long new canes with his toes as he wove them together. Using a mixture of sugar and powdered borax he rid the house of cockroaches, and was capable, when he put his mind to it, of turning out a halfway decent Irish stew. But in the matter of social instinct he was a blank slate. On his first day at Allenby House he presented the Visitors’ Book to the fellow who came to the door with a cobra in a basket. Sam, inspecting the entry that night, saw an unintelligible squiggle, followed by careful block letters: ONE SNAKCHARMER.

  One morning a dog with a large head was lying on the verandah. It was collarless and of uncertain pedigree, but its toffee-colored fur was sleek. At the sight of Sam, it rolled over and presented him with its unguarded belly. Then it righted itself, inched forward and licked his left shoe. It did not appear rabid. Nevertheless it was an unattractive brute. He sent Ranil to make enquiries among the neighbors but they denied all knowledge of the animal.

  The dog arrived the year after the fields across the lane from Allenby House had been torn up by machinery. Bird-bodied men in cages of bamboo scaffolding buried the clawed earth under three pastel cubes of surpassing ugliness. They had been designed by an upstart in dark glasses who passed himself off as an architect and was rumored to have been paid a lakh for his vandalism. A lakh! The houses were owned by three brothers. One made films about a secret agent called Jamis Banda, another worked in advertising, the third ran an agency that transported tourists to coral reefs and wildlife sanctuaries. These occupations struck Sam as flimsy and dubious. A man might be a carpenter or a shopkeeper or a cinnamon peeler, he might be a general or a shipping clerk, there was a lineage and weight to such work, it anchored a man in the world. Modernity found expression not in revolutions or acts of parliament but in a series of small terrible jolts. One airless afternoon you noticed that respectable women were wearing lime green or that the basin from which a crone was hawking velvet tamarinds to passing schoolboys was molded from plastic, and you realized that the world had changed utterly, in ways that far exceeded the sweep of your comprehension.

  Sam suspected one or all of his new neighbors of spying on him through the slits of their sly louver windows. They possessed transistor radios. Their wives wore frosted lipstick and drove Mini-Minors, their unspeakable sons swaggered up the lane with little fingers linked and combs protruding from their hip pockets. The air around them was hard edged, yet nonchalant and bright. In a chain of days hung with small shameful failures of memory, so that Sam would begin a sentence with rock underfoot and find himself, three words later, dropping through rushing air, a line of a poem he had learned as a schoolboy hammered at his brain: They are all gone into the world of light. “The world of light,” he repeated aloud. “The world of light.” It suggested cellophane, and angular chairs fashioned from blond wood. He stepped out each day from dim rooms of solid brick and mortar into a world as in-substantial and alluring as images projected on a screen.

  His neighbors were implicated in the matter of the stray dog, of that he was certain. He slipped a looped cord around the animal’s neck and told Ranil to take it to the Pettah and turn it loose. This was done. But the next day the dog was there again, flattening itself on the verandah. Its tail thumped when Sam appeared. What was he to do? He laid his hand on the springy fur and found a bloated gray tick on its neck. He pried it free and was about to hurl it into a flower bed, when the dog took it very gently from his fingers and ate it. It was not an unintelligent beast, but it loved him abjectly. It lay across the lavatory door and squirmed with joy when he emerged.

  There was a day when, in the very act of stepping over its belly, he became aware that he found its devotion pleasing. The realization was succeeded by a hot humiliation: to be tickled by the good opinion of an animal! He made one or two further attempts to be rid of the dog, even driving it himself to Nugegoda junction and turning it out of the car. A week later it padded up the drive, ears laid back, hip bones more sculpted. Sam looked up the number for the dog catcher in the telephone book but could not bring himself to make the call. The dog pressed its body against his legs. Eventually he named it Watson: for its good nature, and stubborn loyalty. He ignored it, mostly. It ignored everyone else.

  At a party for a retiring assize judge, he was accosted by a sucked chicken bone with a face like a fist: Mrs. Malini Mendis, the country’s only lady advocate. Her grandfather had been a letter writer sitting cross-legged on a pavement in the Pettah; Mrs. Mendis was a graduate of Girton. Sam disliked her, of course. Quite apart from anything else, she was wearing an electric-blue sari. He would have grimaced and passed on, but she thrust a stuffed chili under his nose and said, “Now just the other day, your name came up.”

  Her voice was the sort described as fluting, which meant it could stun an elephant at twenty paces. “Denis de Saram’s birthday party. We were talking about famous trials, that kind of thing. One of Denis’s ancient aunties had a long rigmarole about a murdered planter. Harrison? Hamilton? The case Don Jayasinghe solved. Denis’s auntie said you prosecuted but lost, because the English hushed it all up. I said, Are you telling me Sam Obeysekere used to be anti-British? Because as long as I’ve known him, his veins have run with Bovril.”

  It took her a little while to recover from her own wit. He passed the time in contemplation of her altogether remarkable sideburns.

  Then he said, “You know, I ran into Nanette Raymond last week. I never see that girl without remembering how fondly poor old Bunny used to speak of her.”

  An embolism had killed Bunny Mendis while he toiled above the ravishing Nanette on a heat-clogged afternoon the previous year. Sooner or later, few could resist reminding his widow of these facts. But the Mendis woman’s stretched white smile didn’t falter. Sam was almost moved.

  The idea, iridescent as an archangel’s wing, came to him the next day. Now that he was alone at Allenby House, he had made his bedroom on the ground floor. The dust-sheeted rooms upstairs had the melancholy air of all things that have outlasted their purpose. Still, he climbed the veined stairs from time to time and stood at a window that looked seaward. At daybreak water and sky were a thin, opalescent mist. Once, he saw a fleet of etched black boats dissolve in it. But he preferred the night hours, when the sea detached itself from the land as a different darkness and the windows of the mail train pouring itself along the coast were a border of golden rectangles stamped on sooty velvet.

  That evening the racket of the train’s passing reminded him that Mrs. Mendis’s mother had killed herself by stepping in front of an up-country express. At the time the event had defined her daughter; but now, just a few short years later, he had not thought of it at all in the course of their encounter. Knowledge became smudged with terrifying swiftness, forms faded and merged. At that moment he realized that he had to write about the Hamilton case. Once so widely known and discussed, it was slipping from public memory, glimpsed now and then only in grotesque distortion. He discovered that he was trembling a little from the force of the revelation. Yet the thing appeared to him whole and clear, so that he knew he was not mistaken. A book inviting to hand and eye, calf-bound, printed on linen paper. No desiccated lawyer’s chronicle, but a tale that winged to the heart of things, life skimmed quivering onto the page. He gripped the sill and saw that he would write about himself, that this would give his story its human ballast.

  He looked at the star-crowded sky and thought, There will be no mistaking the facts.

  The moon was thin-edged, irregular as a pearl.

  He thought, and a small wave lifted under his heart, he thought, Harry will understand.

  After breakfast Sam would give Ranil his instructions for the day. Then he attended to correspondence, read the legal journals he still subscribed to, listed his personal expenditure from the previous day in a notebook. After that there were callers to receive. These were invariably obscure young men in search of endorsement of one kind or another. They s
at on the edge of their verandah chairs in heroically snowy shirts, their knees jiggling in that common way, clutching a letter of introduction from men who were themselves of no importance, one of Sam’s old clerks perhaps, or a minor official he had come across outstation and could no longer remember. The young men sought employment at the Transport Board or the Ministry of Agriculture, posts that carried a monthly salary of seventy or eighty chips and were contested by hundreds of their kind. They had identical stories, of ailing mothers to support and younger brothers to put through school. To these narratives Sam no longer listened. But he always scribbled a few lines on the young man’s behalf and watched the sheet of headed notepaper stored away with painful care in a used brown envelope or between the pages of a blue-ruled exercise book. He was flattered by these requests, of course. At the same time he knew that it was useless, that if the fellow had any prospects he would not have been on Sam’s verandah in the first place but importuning a cabinet minister or a senior civil servant or indeed one or other of the pastel trio across the lane.

  At his feet Watson growled softly in his throat. He was jealous of all visitors, and would rise and place his body sideways between Sam and whoever came into the room. Sometimes all that was required was Sam’s signature, as a justice of the peace, on a statutory declaration. Sometimes it was an old peon who had fallen on hard times. Once it was a loafer with a shifty, rolling gaze, who claimed to be Tissa’s eldest son and tried to touch Sam for a loan. He stank of toddy and was wearing trousers. Bally cheek from beginning to end. But mostly it was the young men. These he was incapable of turning away. Each was a version of Harry, who might even at that moment be standing in front of an ineffectual codger in shirt sleeves who represented everything he understood as success.

  Between a quarter- and half-past ten he would leave the house, ignoring the young men, who rose to their feet when he emerged from his office room. He walked down the drive, accompanied by Watson. At the gate the dog always raised his hind leg against the left-hand post. Then he would scratch lustily at the earth, scraping up grass and sending small stones flying. Sam would stand at the gate, looking up the lane, hands clasped on his stick. The face of the lion on the seaward side had blurred. Watson, an indolent beast, panted in the striped shade of the jacaranda.

  During the monsoon the dog stood under dripping leaves, his gaze doleful. If the schools had awarded a rain holiday, two brats in plastic raincoats would emerge from a pastel house and hurry to the head of the lane, where they launched a flotilla of newspaper boats in the ditch. They had to run to keep pace with the downward rush, righting boats that capsized, poking sticks at those that floundered to urge them on. Their toes curled in the red mud. Sam looked on from the shelter of curved ebony petals. His own newspapers were bundled, tied with string and sold for wrapping at the rate of one cent a pound to the man who came to the kitchen door four times a year with a pair of scales and iron weights. The children’s paper boats fetched up sodden against gratings, or were swept irretrievably under culverts. There was a certain frisson to be derived from the spectacle of this waste.

  The post brought brick-high stacks for the houses across the lane. Sam himself was an assiduous letter writer, keeping up with colleagues who had retired to outstations, pursuing cronies who had emigrated to New South Wales. He had always had a prodigious memory for dates. He remembered the birthdays of third cousins and anniversaries overlooked by those whose acts they commemorated. Despite the cost of postage, he was particularly attentive to correspondents who lived abroad. The blue edge of an aerogram protruding from the postman’s fist signaled a small explosion of hope. Sam would find his mouth full of saliva. The years passed, and his haul thinned. Yet even when there were six or seven letters it took only a moment to ascertain that there was nothing from Harry.

  He would make his way back up the drive, sucking in his cheeks, then releasing them. The house waited for him, stuffed with useless objects: toast racks, clocks, chests of folded linen, plump putti nestled in the gilded molding of a frame.

  At Christmas and in the week leading up to his birthday anticipation flickered constantly in him, as a frayed wire exposes the jumping current within. He was beset by tiny acute pains that shifted their source as soon as he had tracked them to eyeball or wrist. When he thought of his son he saw a window streaked with rain that he could not wipe clean. Once—a bad December—he sat for over an hour behind his desk. He still had the address in Yorkshire. Christmas flies, drawn to the lamp, left a litter of taffeta wings on his blotter. But when he placed his hands on the arms of his chair and levered himself upright, ligaments creaking defiance, the sheet of ivory paper in front of him remained unblemished. He was owed an apology. It was up to the boy to make the first move. A son stands to his father in the same relation as beasts to man. This was one of the granite foundations on which he had built his life. It was not a question of refusing to go forward; rather that he had arrived at a limit. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He thought, People used to wave a hanky to say goodbye. But he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen it.

  After dinner, and long into the night, he sat at his desk, working on the memoir that would set out the events of the Hamilton case. At first, as he polished his style and buffed his epigrams, he knew only intense pleasure. It was inherent to the task: where is the man who does not enjoy talking about himself? And then, every writer knows the elation of beginnings. Greater than these delights, however, was the satisfaction of puncturing the sanctimonious bubble with which Jaya had contrived to surround himself during his life, and which a hundred bleating eulogies and fawning Sunday features enshrined as truth after his death. Sam would call history to testify against mythology. A just verdict! His pen raced toward the sweet prospect. Now and then, in its haste, his nib caught in the paper. His pages were punctured with tiny holes, a scattering of gunshot.

  Later he would think that this had been his mistake, to allow himself to be seduced on his journey to the heart of the Hamilton case. He had dawdled. He had followed the temptation of meandering tracks and found himself doubting the way forward. Impossible now to recover the élan of his start. Two nights and a day might pass and he would have written only a single sentence. He retraced his steps; cast this or that phrase differently. He made a fair copy of the manuscript. The Hamilton case beckoned. He was there, at the edge of the thicket. And still he hesitated, and looked over his shoulder and was pursued by a bewilderment that advanced on him like time.

  He might be proposing a toast at a Bar Association dinner, or negotiating a flight of stairs while pain streamed to his knees from his spine, his mind fixed on the task at hand, when he would be nudged by an un-ease he found difficult to classify. Then the ill-defined impression that he had missed something—a vital clue was the formulation that came unbidden to him—would keep him company for days, a smudge at the edge of his vision. If he jerked his head around quickly enough he might spot it.

  This tic, very pronounced at times, was remarked upon by everyone who knew him. In the market, Ranil sat on a sack of lentils and gave it as his opinion that the hamuduruwo was beset by ghosts. The remark was a testimony to his insight.

  On a rain-shrouded night in 1963, Jaya’s car had skidded on a bend near Kadugannawa Pass. He died with a steering wheel embedded in his chest. Sam recalled the black border around his newspaper; the photograph of the crumpled hood. At the time, he had exulted at the supreme justice of it: Jaya crashing into a rocky embankment, like the country he had guided into disaster with such reckless disregard for the rules. The telephone was ringing before he had reached the end of the first column: a chap he knew from Neddy’s, inviting him to a discreet celebration in Cinnamon Gardens that evening. By the time he returned to the table, his toast had grown cold. He rattled the handbell. Ranil came in, after a delay. Sam was about to tick the blighter off; then he saw that the boy was crying.

  Now, during the sleepless hours he spent hunched in a chair, cross-
examining the past like an unreliable witness, he was haunted by the possibility that he had chosen unwisely. By daylight he knew this to be absurd. But at night the sound of the sea reached him more distinctly. Its repetitions, which were never wholly identical, hinted at infinite subtleties of interpretation. He was unable to articulate why he should find this disturbing. There was only the unbearable thought that everything might have been different.

  Beneath the baleful murmur of ceiling fans, the British Council library offered the Times, the Spectator, Punch. In this way entire afternoons were rendered tolerable. Each day was a campaign conducted in hostile territory where meticulous discipline was required to keep moving forward, outflanking tedium. He still played tennis every Wednesday and Saturday; and turned up, vervain scented, at AGMs, where he could be counted on to dispute obscure points of order. Other men, his contemporaries, succeeded in overcoming boredom only to be assaulted by despair. Then there were only two courses open to them, death or emigration. He outmaneuvered loneliness by failing to recognize it, a devastating strategy.

  One day, as he was leaving the library, his attention snagged on the rosewood stand of Recent Acquisitions. The book was called Serendipity; but it was the name below that had drawn his eye. His first thought: When was inadequacy ever a bar to ambition? Nevertheless, as he picked up the volume there was a needle of jealousy in his heart— Shivanathan, the author of a collection of stories!

  At the Loans desk, he tapped the crudely tinted illustration on the cover. “I know this fellow.”

  The librarian, rifling through his box of index cards, nodded without raising his eyes.

  “Oh yes—we were at Neddy’s together. One of those plodders. Worked his way up, worked his way up. But they passed him over for the Supreme Court.”

  Even the silly asses at the Ministry got it right from time to time. Like everyone in the legal fraternity, Sam knew that Shivanathan had come under an official cloud. Details were sketchy, but Billy Mohideen had insisted the blighter was suspected of taking bribes. Nothing could be proved, said Mohideen, but the Supreme Court was out of the question. It so happened, however, that the vacancy arose shortly after the riots in ’58, when everything was reflected in the distorting mirror of race. The cry went up that Shiva had been overlooked because he was a Tamil.