The Hamilton Case (19 page)

It was not her intention to deceive. There is an old instinct, at work in bordellos and the relations of East and West, to convert the unbearable into the picturesque. It enables a sordid existence to be endured, on one side, and witnessed, on the other, with something like equanimity. A visitor to Lokugama would have seen plaster that peeled like diseased skin, sagging rattan, the mildewy bloom of wood unpolished for decades. A horn at the gate would send Maud scuttling from the verandah, hissing for the bungalow keeper. That same evening she could sit at the dining table, its scratched varnish sticky along her bare arms, and evoke
the intoxicating scent of jasmine
or
the emerald flash of a parrot’s wing
. The prose that thousands before her had applied like antiseptic to the island gushed from her nib. Rats thundered in the rafters.
Did you know
, she found herself writing,
that according to legend this was the Garden of Eden?

In the weeks leading to the monsoon heat stacked up like yellow bricks. By afternoon all life was walled in. The sun was a ripe fruit, oozing toward collapse. Insects vanished, swallowed by the cracked earth. There were no birds.

Prickly heat, an affliction Maud thought she had discarded with the tedium of childhood, returned in angry lumps in the folds of her knees and elbows. Her nails left ribbons of skin in their wake. One morning dhobi itch had stamped its rosettes along the line of a collarbone. Sweat passing over the inflamed skin stung so painfully that she wept. This sweat was a further indignity: it poured down her flanks, broke out on her forehead, gathered in the intimate creases of her flesh. She would wake in the night to find a soaking sheet twisted about her hips.

From one day to the next her body became repellent to her. She became grateful for isolation, certain that she stank. Between breakfast and lunch she had doused a dozen handkerchiefs in eau de cologne and wiped herself down. She squandered a whole vial of orange water, up-ending it in her bath. The monsoon arrived and the weather cooled by three perceptible degrees, and still the clothes she put on when she rose were musky with sweat by eleven.

At last she sent Sirisena into town with a chit for the doctor. When he came, he heard out her symptoms and asked two questions. Then he fingered his tie, with his gaze averted, and named her condition. Maud was dumbfounded: it was so simple and so absolute. Accustomed to regard herself as singular, she was unprepared for this last proof of commonality with her sex.

The oak-framed cheval glass that had occupied a corner of her bedroom when she came to Lokugama as a bride had long since given way to an oblong of pocked mirror. Maud braced herself and let her house-coat fall. Then she took an inventory: twin purses of skin each with its warty stud, a little round loaf, a fistful of graying lichen. Below and above she had not the fortitude to venture.

For a week she craved gin, drunk neat. She had a need of clarity. Night after night, Claudia appeared in her dreams: gliding in and out of doorways in a long pale nightgown rocking a doll-like infant; or curled in her bed, a child herself, with a little silky cushion jammed between her knees.

Maud woke, stippled with sweat. She recognized the dream: its sequences had haunted her in the weeks after Claudia’s death when she had lain in the nursing home with pneumonia. Later, when fever and the delirium it brought had cleared, and pain no longer scoured her lungs, the dream images, too, had faded.

Jaya had been her first visitor. The instant he loomed in the doorway, she asked a question consisting of a single word.

“I don’t know.” He advanced into the antiseptic space between them. “She was afraid there would be something wrong with the baby. But he was perfect. Perfect.” His huge hands sketched a small shape. “One of those little crests of hair . . .” He sank onto a chair, and placed his palms over his face. In this way he avoided her eyes.

It was the only time they spoke of it. There was the disgrace of murder compounded with suicide, best smothered in silence; and then, Maud nurtured an explanation that she didn’t care to voice. Her son-inlaw was careless. She had warned him, in the first months of his marriage. “Ritzy and I had an understanding,” she had said. “But don’t imagine Claudia will put up with it. These girls today want the whole show.” Then she handed him the battered little cardboard rectangle the dhobi had returned with the
mahatheya
’s shirts. The demure face of an old friend’s wife smiled out from its scarring of creases.

Jaya had laughed the thing off. Nevertheless, she had jolted him into discretion. But Maud knew that old patterns have a way of asserting themselves. She pictured Claudia, nine months pregnant, opening a book and coming across a photograph. She saw the girl lifting the blotter on Jaya’s desk and reading a letter she found there. There were pockets of pure anguish in her daughter. As a child, she had been shaken by bouts of baffling tears. An array of little fetishes, broken toys and household oddments, small unsightly items no one quite liked to touch, provided her with a queer kind of comfort at such moments. It was easy to imagine her overwhelmed by the discovery of her husband’s faithlessness, swept along on a cold black current of despair. Watching Jaya weep beside a florist’s arrangement of scentless blooms, Maud knew he was ravaged by the same suspicion. It was torment enough, she decided.

Now, thinking of the last terrible minutes of her daughter’s life, she rose from her bed at Lokugama. She hunted out every carafe in the night-shadowed house and dashed them one by one against the tiles of the verandah. The act brought no release. At six in the morning Sirisena found her still sitting there, surrounded by broken glass. He was obliged to step gingerly when he returned with a broom. It was the kind of thing that did not occur to those who went about the world wearing shoes.

The postcard showed the Promenade des Anglais.
Bellissima, We are dying of envy. Here it is foul, the mistral all day and no one simpatico. Next week we sail for New York. Carlo kisses your ravishing hands, and so do I. Your loving Giulia
. Maud propped it against the Bakelite salt cellar while lunching on curried ash plantain. She had it by heart before she realized it carried no forwarding address.

Christmas brought a little loaf of envelopes, bland sentiments, cautious expressions of goodwill, a sheaf of impenetrable free verse from the poet. Sir Alban’s card, robins and a wreath of holly, bore a handwritten addendum to its Compliments of the Season:
Took in a rather delightful Sapphic show yesterday. One of the girls long and brown, like you. Poor old Mulligatawny had to be put down in August. P.S. Charlotte died last spring
. The stockbroker sent two blunt lines asking her not to write.
It causes awkwardness at home
.

These communiqués barely registered with Maud. By then she was covering forty pages a day, epistles she rolled up and slipped into mildewing shoes or tucked behind a cushion and forgot. Her style grew daily wilder, more fabulous. Even a mildly attentive reader would have diagnosed a dislocation. In a country where night arrived with the haste of a curtain lowered on a flop, she insisted on
twilight
. While a monsoonal wind ripped a limb from the mango tree, she could write with no sense of incongruity of
spice-laden breezes
.

In the intervals between letters, she would rise from the dining table to drift in and out of rooms where no one had breathed for years. The absurd topography of the house had always eluded her. There was a step between two corridors that served no purpose except to make her stumble. She spent a morning in search of a room she remembered, a pleasant bay with a fern-filled alcove where Claudia had played the piano. Dust stirred and settled. Thwarted, Maud slammed the door on a mournful little cubicle at the end of a passage. Midstride she halted, retraced her steps. The Lindahl had stood there, under the window that memory had embellished with leaves and curved air.

Cockroaches, glossy as dates, fled from her slippers. She saw no one. Yet a presence walked with her. She stepped aside, to allow it space. It wished her no ill, but she felt the stir of its longing. What are ghosts but things we cannot bear to remember? Sometimes, on entering a room she was certain something had altered, a chair angled differently, a drawer pulled open. In the doorway of a shuttered room, one hand on the jamb, she knew that this scene had already occurred.

M
eals occasioned small spears of anticipation that pierced the cottoned tedium of Leela’s day. Her first dreamy thoughts, on not quite waking, were of improbable dishes, vanilla-scented poppadoms or trifle spiked with fennel. All day Soma went back and forth from the kitchen bearing fried breadfruit chips in a silver epergne or a rose-patterned plate piled with prawn crackers. There were mornings when the
nonamahatheya
devoured four pots of chocolate custard or a platter of fish patties. She ate jack
mallung
heaped on crackers. She kept a jar of pumpkin preserve at hand. In the concentration she brought to bear on flavors and textures, she discovered a kind of steadying. In those years her jaws worked nonstop.

On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday she looked in her mirror and saw how flesh had accrued around her waist. She had thickened at the hips, like a candle. Layers of flesh blunted the line of her nose, the curve of her jaw. As she gazed at herself appalled, there was another face beside her own, a child’s face with tumbled black curls. It vanished in an instant. When the knocking in her chest quieted she set a chair in front of her glass and remained there all day.

The incident marked a turning point. Independently of her volition, the grinding mechanism of survival intervened. One day she woke up and the armor welded around her chest had vanished. It no longer hurt to breathe.

Her days gravitated toward the angle of a side verandah, screened with waist-high trellis. On this ambiguous site neither inside nor outside the house, she created a bower. It contained a rattan-seat planter’s chair piled with kapok cushions, a velvet footstool, her porcupine-quill workbox and a palm-leaf fan edged with tortoiseshell. Pots grouped by her chair held mother-in-law’s tongue and philodendron. Maidenhair spilt from coir-lined hanging baskets. Sam, coming upon her there one morning as she sat with folded hands in watery green light, thought of a slug clamped moistly to its leaf, and shuddered, and went away without a word.

Months passed. Leela nibbled iced biscuits from a tin and watched a monsoon demonstrate its architecture of rain. Gray-green growths that crumbled to the touch appeared in the interstices of the trelliswork. Garments arrayed on a clotheshorse remained clammy for a week. Sliding into her shoe, her toes encountered a webbed dampness: spores that had burst into vegetable being in the interval of an hour.

She woke from a doze one afternoon and sensed the scrutiny of small bright eyes. She tracked them to a frieze of geckos with translucent veined stomachs on the side of a pillar. Her stillness attracted birds, chameleons, the little squirrels whose striped backs showed where they had been stroked by a god’s fingers. A pale stucco mansion took shape on a cornice, the wasps ignoring her as they flew in and out of their nest. A tailor bird took hold of two leaves at the extremity of a slender twig and sewed them together at their edges, using a thread made of vegetable fiber and its bill for a needle. For days it flew back and forth from the shoeflower tree that grew by the verandah, tiny feathers and scraps of cottony down protruding from its beak. These the bird pushed between the two leaves it had stitched together, while its perch swayed under its feet. It had chosen the thinnest twig in order to protect its young from snakes and other predators. Leela watched the leaf nest quiver and spin with each breeze, and envied the bird inside, rocking in soft darkness, with small hearts beating beneath her wing.

I
n the early years of Maud’s marriage the house at Lokugama had not been connected to the municipal water supply. She could remember an era when a servant staggered between the kitchen well and her bathroom, a bucket at either end of the pole slung across his shoulders. Later, in the grip of one of his ruinous schemes, Henry called in a Manchester firm to do the plumbing. In Maud’s bathroom a dado of bottle-green tiles stretched around the walls beneath a band of stylized pink tulips. The thick copper piping, now dripping verdigris, still functioned to capacity, filling the massive bath in one hundred and twelve seconds.

Twice a day she would mount the shallow teak steps beside the tub and lower herself, inch by voluptuous inch, into the water. There was a whiff of mud, not unpleasant, about Lokugama water; sometimes it contained a leaf, once a tiny transparent snail. But in less than ten minutes it was a clammy chemise that adhered to her skin. The taps affixed to the tub were beautiful, brass and green-glazed majolica, each topped with a smiling dolphin. Maud fell into the habit of addressing them, cursing the tepid bathwater and her own greed, for she had smoked the last Players in her morning ration of twelve well before that hour.

Soon she was talking to everything, the earthenware goblet with a beaded lace cover in which boiled water was stored, a brown asparagus fern crisped in a blue luster bowl. There came an evening when she began one of her screeds, conjured
a silvery downpour
halfway down the sixth page and in midsentence abandoned the enterprise forever.

Her voice flowed out to occupy the space that the letters had filled. It went on and on. She sang “Lead, kindly Light” and rugby choruses of elaborate obscenity. She conducted baroque conversations with herself, scrolls and whorls of defense and recrimination. When she fell silent her ears filled with an awful clamor, a muttering that crescendoed to screeches and fell away as keening. Maud identified it as the racket of a million microscopic jaws, the scraping of antennae, the whirr of wings, the striving of worms, the march of long, golden millipedes, all the life she had called silence and disregarded. There were nights when jackals howled as they swept past on their hunt, their screams ceasing abruptly at the highest pitch of ferocity. Their noise was terrible, their silence worse. Yet the other was more ghastly still. She lay under her mosquito net chanting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to drown out its claims.