The Hamilton Case (16 page)

Their group was trailing its permutations along the wintry Mediterranean coast when Claudia died. The telegram followed Maud from one gilded, chilly hotel to another for over a week, until it caught up with her beside the Bay of Naples on the afternoon of her fifty-first birthday.

Rain was falling when her ship docked in Colombo. The boom of waves crashing against the breakwater was in Sam’s ears when an old woman draped in black put a hand scribbled with violet veins on his arm. He had looked straight past her, scanning the passengers disem-barking under umbrellas. She saw that she had disconcerted him, and smiled her crooked smile. Sooner or later every son sees his mother as a quantity of female flesh. But for the first time in his life, on that bilge-smelling morning, he experienced her presence only as an absence of desire.

She took a cigarette from a silver case. Her porter hung about ostentatiously. “Give the man a whatnot,” she said and began coughing.

He fumbled for a coin. She said, “How stingy you are, Sam.” It was spoken with the disinterest of a naturalist remarking on the behavior of apes. Then she sank to her knees on the shining pavement.

Kumar summoned his doctor, who diagnosed bronchial pneumonia with pleurisy. There was already Iris, who required round-the-clock care; and the doctor, a straight-browed Tamil, waggled the neckless head set like a ball on his shoulders and warned that Maud’s condition was acute. Within an hour she was in a nursing home. Until she was pronounced out of danger, Sam prayed every night and every morning that she would be spared. He wanted her to live a long time.

When she could receive visitors he went to see her. A leather dressing case lay on her coverlet. Her lips and nails had been colored their usual crimson, and she was wearing a bed jacket of tawny quilted satin. But a line had been crossed. She had left for Italy a handsome, middle-aged woman. Now, although her skin was close-grained as linen, her eyes magnificent, these things reminded him of the last yellow roses that had clung to the wall under his window in Oxford: not so much an echo of summer as evidence that the glory was gone.

He asked where she intended to live when she left the nursing home. “Don’t imagine you can go back to Kumar,” he said, forestalling her. “Iris is dying. He’s told me he doesn’t want you there.”

That was not strictly true. But he had surmised it from the old boy’s eloquent silence on the subject of Maud. Besides, the lawyer who had drawn up Iris’s will was an Old Edwardian. Sam knew that after disposing of her jewelry and personal effects among an assortment of nieces, Iris had left the residue of her small estate to Kumar. She had added a line in her own hand, made clumsy with illness, under the clerk’s copperplate:
I beg you to have nothing more to do with her
.

On Maud’s bedside table, a vulgar gold basket held two dozen sprays of orchids, an extravagance of bruised kisses. She reached behind them and slid out a long buff envelope. “The deeds to Bentota. Jaya’s given them back to me. I’ll put the house up for sale and rent a little place in Colombo.”

The ceiling fan creaked round and round. Sam was conscious of the blood being forced around his veins; of everything that repeated itself and was beyond his control.

At last, he said, “You don’t really imagine the Bentota bungalow is worth anything, do you? Selling it will barely cover the bills you’ve run up here.”

Maud said, “You could pay them yourself. Now that you’re marrying money.”

“I’m afraid Lily and I will have considerable expenses of our own.” There was a small waxy stain on the gray coverlet. He picked at this scab. “A young couple just starting out, don’t you know.”

The silence wound itself tighter.

Being Maud, she rallied. A narrow hand wove a nonchalant arc through the air: “Something will come up.”

He leaned across her, to her dressing case. Then, taking hold of her wrist, he folded her fingers around a tortoiseshell handle. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not any longer.”

She hurled the mirror at him as he was leaving. It caught the green-painted rail at the foot of her bed. “Seven years’ bad luck,” he said, and shut the door.

It was Kumar, in the end, who rescued her, taking the Bentota property off her hands at a price well above market value; a generosity that dropped like sourness into his relations with Sam, curdling them forever. The money enabled Maud to hang on in Colombo, where she parked herself on a series of acquaintances, moving on every few months when hints hardened into ultimatums.

Sam waited. His rivals at the Bar liked to say that he bored the defense into submission. When the jibe made its way back to him—as it was bound to do, since friends rarely deny themselves the pleasure of relaying abuse—he smiled. Only a fool distinguishes between outwitting an opponent and outlasting him.

A
fortnight before he married, Sam fell in love.

In matters of the heart his instincts were neurotic but not self-destructive. Where he had loved, he had suffered. The lesson was not lost on him. It led him to discover an outlet for tenderness unshadowed by the menace of rejection.

The house stood by the sea, at the end of one of the lanes that protruded from Galle Road like the teeth of a dirt-caked comb. There were still fields there in those years, emerald parcels of
kurrakkan
and
keera
, and low, thatched huts set among thickets of plantain. Across the lane, the lichen-embossed wall and ironwork gates of Allenby House suggested an opposing army.

From the moment he first saw the place Sam wanted to possess it: the mild lions lounging on the gateposts, the cobalt rectangles of Bohemian glass in the window on the landing, the pedimented portico, the verandah floored in white marble squares with black diamonds at each corner. It had stood empty for close to a decade. Halfway through the previous century Allenby, the third son of a third son, had arrived in the colony with four shillings and a change of twill trousers. He got into coffee and amassed such a fortune that his deerhound fed from a golden dish. But the leaf blight came in 1869, and Allenby shot the dog and hanged himself. The house changed hands a dozen times. It had last been owned by a Danish bandmaster, who had modernized the plumbing. His wax-faced wife burned with increasing boldness for her Tamil tailor. One evening, with guests for dinner and the best silver, she left the room with a murmured excuse. Minutes later, they heard her scream. She was found clinging to the newel, with a tape measure twisted about her neck. In between there had been minor catastrophes, a stonemason crippled in a fall, a baby born with a flipper at its shoulder in lieu of an arm.

Sam put his hand on a brocade curtain in the dining room and came across a bat, bulging like a tumor in the tarnished folds. Mildew had papered an entire wall. In every room the sea could be heard, sighing in its bed. From an upstairs window he looked down at coconut trees slanted like pins and a row of clumsy black stitches. Beyond the railway line waves lowered their woolly heads and butted the shore.

A watchman dressed in a filthy
banian
and sarong trailed Sam through high-ceilinged rooms full of aqueous light, spelling out a catalog of deterrents. These were a judicious blend of the domestic and the gothic: blocked drains, a cloudy shape on the stairs, rotten floorboards, a room into which the mongrel bitch nursing its mastitis on the verandah would not venture. Children with matted hair and mucus-ringed nostrils crept out like cockroaches from their squalid quarters beyond the kitchen to gape at the visitor. The superstitions that had lowered the price of the house to the point where it cost little more than the value of the acres in which it stood left Sam unmoved. In a bathroom where a broad-leafed sapling was growing out of a skirting board he closed his eyes, summoning his sister’s ghost. She had left him nothing: no sign, no token of their understanding. Remorse at his lack of vigilance crashed about his heart with the obduracy of breakers.

The exterior of the house, once faced with dark yellow stucco, had weathered to ochre and lemon. Claudia had owned a dress that color. He could recall its faint sheen in a dim corridor; a fabric-covered button grazed his ear. Among garden beds turned rank and wild, the watchman droned in his wake. Sam sprang up the steps two at a time and entered the house once more, half believing she would be waiting at the foot of the stairs. He would take her hand and lead her out into the gold day. Fish would leap and sing in the sea.

Wide-eyed and rigid on her bridal bed, his wife could not understand, then or ever, why he was the one who wept as he went about his onslaught. In all the years to come she would endure their encounters with the aid of the mantra that a merciful instinct devised for her on that first night.
Flora. Augusta. Rowena. Amy. Flora. Augusta. Rowena. Amy
. He laid his wet face against her shoulder and ripped her open again, and Sir Walter’s heroines sustained her in the dark.

A
t his wedding reception Sam had stipulated that his mother’s glass was not to be refilled between toasts. Maud countered this with the simple tactic of following a waiter out to the hotel kitchen and returning with a bottle in each hand. Then she went around the room informing everyone, from his gaping in-laws to the band leader, that he had married the girl for her money. “Look at her— face like the backside of a bus, poor child.” She waltzed cheek-to-cheek with men Sam’s age, while their wives displayed an overwhelming interest in the contents of their beaded handbags. He watched, flint-masked, from the bridal table.

At last, he took her in his arms and she swayed with him over the parquet. Her head lay twisted on his shoulder. They glided past a mirrored pilaster and he marveled that a tender word from this rouged carcass could once have been his most avid desire. Yet even as he steered her into the center of the floor, he was claimed by a vision in which she was restored to youth and radiance, and he climbed into her bed and was gathered to her breast. Leela, encased in baleen and satin cut on the bias, glimpsed his face at that moment and misread, as she was bound to, the rapture inscribed there.

L
eaves mocked gravity, rising into the air. There they resolved themselves into a billow of jade butterflies. He had hired six men from the docks and turned them loose in the grounds of Allenby House. For two days they crept about with machetes and knives, impervious to the jeering of crows. When they had finished he possessed a lawn, plumbago hedges, brick-edged canna beds, clumps of scarlet and mustard croton, disciplined arabesques of stephanotis and thunbergia. He went out to inspect their work and was particularly pleased with the discovery of a
bulath
vine, woven around the trunk of a
lovi
tree. Its cordate leaves could be sold to the betel women who used them to wrap the small fragrant parcels of areca-nut parings and lime that constituted their trade. The double row of coconut trees against the seaside wall represented a far more lucrative source of revenue; but he had that instinct for the acquisition of wealth that is as appreciative of a coin on a pavement as of the deeds to a diamond mine.

As a married man with a household of his own, he was incurring expenses inconceivable in his bachelor days. When he inspected the monthly accounts he required Leela to keep, his fingernail left a trail of faintly shiny grooves where it had scored the column of figures in consternation.
One dozen coconut-shell spoons: Rs
0.20. Why did they need a dozen? “Because otherwise they are two cents each,” replied his wife. He grunted, and moved on to the cost of kerosene. What Leela didn’t say was that the cookwoman had asked her for more spoons in order to avoid the contamination of vegetable dishes by utensils that had come into contact with meat.

In the early months of their marriage, Sam would send his peon out to the Pettah now and then to check on the prices his wife had listed for a pound of sugar or a bar of Sunlight soap. He suffered a twinge of disappointment on uncovering her systematic honesty.

Now he called together the six men who had restored order to his garden and put this question to them: “What is gardening?”

The rich were like the sun, disease, the pull of currents: which is to say, arbitrary and potent. Each man feared, instantly, that this riddle would be the means that deprived him of his day’s wages. They stared dull-eyed at the
hamuduruwo
’s shoes.

At last, one of the men took half a step forward. His legs were two black twigs, the circumference of each knee identical to that of the ankle.

Sam said again, raising his voice, “What is gardening?” “
Hamudurawanai
, it is preventing things from growing.”

This man, whose name was Tissa, remained in Sam’s employment for thirty-four years. On Christmas morning when the
hamuduruwo
and
nonamahatheya
returned from church, the gardener would be waiting on the back verandah, accompanied by his wife and a row of children arranged like a stair, one new step every year. Each child received a coin, a soft drink, a paper cone of homemade toffees from the
nonamahatheya
’s hand.

But their father’s inclinations lay in a direction quite other than his gradated progeny would imply. The extent of the grounds necessitated employing a gardener’s boy, and Tissa was allowed to handpick his assistant from the families that overflowed like sewage in the tenements. It was in the hollow chests and uncallused flesh of these children that the gardener found pleasure. A new recruit soon learned to stay quite still for the minute or two the act required at the start of each day in the dank outhouse where rats crawled over gardening forks, and cockroaches cracked underfoot. Tissa was tender with these boys, spoiling them with
beedis
and other small gifts: a sesame sweet, a marble enclosing a twist of flame.

When a boy’s voice broke, Tissa returned him to the streets. About this he was implacable, although at such partings he often wept and the boy with him.

He was a wonderful gardener. In a place where palings burst overnight into leaf and no talent was required to bring forth life from the earth, Tissa’s genius lay in conjuring absence. He was the artist who reveals objects by painting the emptiness that surrounds them, the composer whose music shapes itself around silence.