The Hamilton Case (25 page)

When the Moor next appeared she asked to see the flat bales of cotton and muslin he kept in the bottom of his dented trunk. Within minutes he had draped the verandah in florid swags, the bales slapping out under his good hand. Maud chose two lengths of flowered chintz, one coral, the other yellow, each stamped along the selvage with its identifying brand, a tiger’s striped head. Out of them she fashioned a trousseau of waistless sacks, supplemented with glittering oddments: a stole worked in silver flowers, a belt with a jeweled buckle.

In the Moor’s opinion, the old lady in the big house was mad. It was not a contemptuous assessment. He was a man in whom religious feeling expressed itself as a wide tolerance; madness, in his view, was not altogether divorced from saintliness. It seemed evident to him that the woman whose crazy weaving through the jungle was remarked on in villages for miles around had been brushed by the same finger as the ash-smeared holy men who wandered the Hindu pilgrim routes wild-eyed with god and self-mortification.

He was a tall man with sharp cheekbones and a quick tongue. In his presence the verandah bloomed into a small civilized stage hung with trumpery. He would haggle ruthlessly over a card bound with rickrack braid or a length of Pettah lace; then offer, at no cost, that rarest commodity, good conversation.

S
am spent the evening at a house set well back from the road in an acre of flowering trees and softly luxuriant ferns. It was an establishment that guaranteed hygiene and discretion. The girl he chose was new. Her breasts were scarcely larger than their violet-brown aureoles, the faintest swelling above her ribs. Flint-jawed, this elf dealt with him unmercifully. At such times he found himself transported. Mrs. Timms imposed her regal features on the face blooming above him and he clawed at the sheet in ecstasy.

Petrol was rationed but there was a rickshaw stand at the junction. His nerve-endings tingled as he walked up a street where branches met overhead. The moon was a silver sprat held in a mesh of leaves. When he lowered his gaze, he saw a patch of white moving ahead of him. He recognized the uniform above the sturdy calves and remembered that a group of Wrens was billeted in a compound at the head of the road. It lay barely two hundred yards away. But at Christmas there had been a minor scandal about a gang of youths who surrounded an English nurse when she was walking back from the cinema one evening. They had asked her to kiss one of them, a prospect she described as
too frightful for words
.

The thock-thock of the girl’s heels masked his quickened steps. “Please excuse me!” he began, reaching for his hat.

She gave a tiny shriek and spun around. “Don’t touch me,” she screamed. “You beastly little nigger.”

He settled his hat back on his head. “My dear young lady,” he said, “please forgive me. I took you for a strumpet but I see now that you are much too ugly.” The terror on her waxy features hardened to fury as he strode past her.

A week later, while he was knotting his tie, he heard the first sentence on the early bulletin and switched off the wireless. He walked down the stairs with care. It seemed a long way.

The breakfast service, rimmed with blue and gold fleur-de-lis, was one of the few tolerable items his wife had inherited from her mother. He ignored the newspaper folded beside his plate, although the headline was plainly visible:
Labor Landslide!
Nevertheless, knowledge persisted like a headache.

Thanks to the war, it had been years since he had tasted decent marmalade. His son knew nothing but the pineapple jam in the middle of the table, runny and oversweet in its faceted glass dish. The English had gone mad. Now it would be only a matter of time before they extricated themselves from the island as if they had never been there. A century and a half swilled down the drain like a discharge not referred to in polite company. And there he would be, high and dry and thousands of fellows like him, craving the amber subtleties of marmalade and obliged to make do with pineapple bally jam.

At the other end of the gleaming rosewood his wife was smearing onion
sambol
on buttered toast. It was a habit he had not been able to break her of. The whiff of Maldive fish depressed him every morning. His son sat between them, head tucked over his plate, eating spoonfuls of neutral boiled egg.

Sam’s gaze alighted on the dalmatian stretched panting in the doorway, where the servant was obliged to step over it as he came and went with dishes. “Poor old Winston,” he said, attempting lightheartedness, for the child’s sake. “I suppose we should take him out and put a bullet between his eyes.”

He intercepted the glance Harry shot at his mother, to which she replied with a slight shake of her head. The next moment, to Sam’s horror, he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He was so very tired of being misunderstood.

F
rom the talk that rolled around the circle of drinkers at the
kadai
, Sirisena learned that he belonged to an Aryan race. Tamils were Dravidians, therefore inferior. There was a man, a

mahatheya
, said the boutique keeper, who had spoken of these things at a meeting in the town. Although he was a gentleman, he had worn a sarong and addressed the crowd as equals. He had promised land for everyone, and bellies full of rice. The Sinhalese were the rightful rulers of their country: the day was coming when they would reclaim its sacred space for themselves and rid the island of all usurpers.

As Sirisena’s wheels ploughed homeward, a cloud settled over the moon. He thought of a hen fluffing out her breast over an egg. At such moments old dreams revived, a pearly gleam at the edge of his vision.

He woke to pain that jolted between the base of his skull and his temples. Toddy was cheaper than arrack but produced a more sickening aftermath. He held his head under the tepid flow from the kitchen tap. Padma scraped the flesh from coconuts and ignored him. He stepped into the bright hateful morning and trod on a small bundle of nut-brown feathers lying in the dirt.

When he had finished cleaning the
nonamahatheya
’s bathroom, the floor was hazardous with slopped water. He smoothed the coverlet over her bed but left the sheets rumpled. At mealtimes he slapped dishes down in front of her, curries coated in a glistening scum of oil. She noticed nothing. This maddened him. In the pantry he poured coffee into a luminous, dinted pot, then spat into it. He wanted to hit the old woman until her hair turned dark and matted, and she whimpered in the dust at his feet. He wanted to clasp her knees and beg:
Help me to escape from my life
.

Maud had her own preoccupations. These, increasingly, had to do with the treachery of her body. There were days when stilettos of pain pierced her chest. Sometimes the floor dipped when she rose from her chair. One afternoon she found herself standing under the flamboyante with flies crawling along her arms and no memory of how she came to be there.

Deer would always bend their heads to a leafy cress that grew by the stream. Maud had witnessed the sight a thousand times before she connected it with Thornton’s voice: “A general tonic and purifier of the blood.” Thereafter Padma had instructions to prepare
gotukola
leaves mixed with shredded coconut every day. Maud persuaded herself that the
sambol
heightened her energy, yet knew she had reached that age when she would never again be free of the demands of a failing mechanism. At best, on a good day, it would let her off with a throbbing toe or a tenderness about her gums. Her lungs scratched. A knee locked itself into immobility. “Such mediocrity of design,” she fumed. “Any cabinet carpentered in a village is sturdier.”

She spoke this aloud, unintentionally. Sirisena, feverish for a sign, materialized at once in the doorway. She studied his small unmanageable face. His yearning communicated itself to her, but thinned and diffuse: a distant commotion. The ready self-pity of the old opened its arms to her. It admitted no neediness but its own.

The electricity failed three evenings in succession and they ran out of candles. It was the kind of minor domestic crisis that restored the bungalow keeper’s sense of self-worth. Conscious of quiet mastery, he filled leaf-shaped lamps with coconut oil and arrayed them on the flat-topped verandah wall. Maud sat entranced before a row of clay lamps no bigger than a child’s palm, each cupping a rag wick and a beating golden heart.

No soldier returns from war without a plunder of stories. Men who had been stationed near Lokugama carried home the tale of a woman with eyes like cold yellow gems who wandered the jungles of Ceylon dressed for a ball. In the torn light under the trees she had the aspect of a young girl, barely marriageable; then she turned her head to reveal a grinning crone.

Variants of this narrative surfaced in Solihull and Nairobi. It was embellished on an expedition to the Amazon, footnoted in an ashram in Poona, disputed on a farm near Dubbo. There was a version in which the woman had been reared by leopards and craved human flesh, the gown in which she prowled the jungle having been ripped from her first victim. Alternatively, she was the sad, mad product of an incestuous coupling, hidden away by her family and governed by the delusion that she was a sought-after débutante. Sometimes the figure in the trees was a ghost, the daughter of a Dutch governor, who had fallen in love with a foot soldier. Her father had the man taken deep into the jungle, where he was chained to a tree and left to the wild animals. The girl learned of his fate as she dressed for the garrison ball. Bejeweled, arrayed in laces and silks, she slipped from the fort that night and vanished without trace.

There were those who claimed that the woman in the jungle appeared only to soldiers who would die in combat. Others, that the vision guaranteed safe passage through the war. She glided on six inches of air, she crept on all fours, she walked abroad on moonless nights, or at that hour when the last star still glimmers palely above the horizon. There were always these constants, however: a violence from which everything sprang, the fabulous incongruity of her clothes.

W
hen the pain first manifested itself Leela thought it was temporary, brought on by the green mango
achacharu
she loved and ate by the dishful. She dosed herself with

Kruschen salts and waited for it to pass.

Later she knew it would not. She said nothing. She wanted her son to remember an afternoon of light and water they had spent together by a lake up-country. She had held him on her lap and pointed out the colors of a kingfisher: the back a deep lilac, rich blue wings edged with ultramarine, a snow-white belly, red feet and a carmine bill. If she complained now, what would he retain of her? A handful of brutally accurate photographs; the memory of hushed voices, a woman lying like a grub inside the milky-green cocoon of a sickroom.

There came a day when she stopped eating, unnoticed by all except Soma, who noticed everything; still she kept finding her way downstairs to her chair on the verandah. There were hours when her needle was a weight she could barely lift, as in a dream. But a border of gros point lotuses flowered beneath her fingers. It surrounded a parade of caparisoned elephants, drummers, dancers and a crimson-petaled sun. She made, in those last weeks, a set of six chair backs, thousands of stitches. But she left the sixth unfinished because a shadow fell across her knees and she looked up to see her daughter step forward to claim her.

With his canteen of filtered water thudding against his white shirt, Harry ran all the way down the lane to show his mother what the morning had brought: a tooth threaded with blood, the hole in his smile.

Filing away the papers that concerned his wife’s death, Sam came across the certificate of their marriage. It was the date that made him pause. Fifteen years; and already she was blurring like fine print, he couldn’t recall with certainty how tall she was, or the particular gracelessness with which she held her body.

One memory, however, remained with him to the end of his days. It was a Friday afternoon before the war. He had allowed a junior advocate to stand him lunch at the Jersey Hotel in the Fort and told him a good one over the deviled prawns:
Old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get the postman a letter. When she got there the cupboard was bare—so they did it without. Which was better
. One of the eccentricities of the Jersey in those years was that instead of measuring out a peg, the bottle was brought to the table. At the end of the meal the waiter used his thumb to gauge how much had been drunk, and that was what went on the chit.

When Sam emerged into the street that afternoon, leaving his companion to settle the bill, a tramcar was rattling past. The
suriya
trees had dropped yellow blossoms on the pavements. In the violet shade of a line of rickshaws a child sat on his heels, puffing on a
beedi
.

Sam turned into Chatham Street and saw a shapeless female standing in front of Hidaramani’s window. He looked again and recognized his wife, peering through the glass at a bolt of flame-colored cloth. Bright colors attracted her. He had put the kibosh on that sort of thing from the start; he didn’t want to have to turn up to public functions with a bally parrot on his arm. Even now she was obediently clad in a dull blue garment drained of all light, as dreary as a wet morning. For a moment he considered taking her into the shop and inviting her to choose herself an extravagant length of cerise or scarlet. Not to have made up into a frock but to keep locked in her almirah, a furtive pleasure gleaming in that musky dimness. From time to time she would open the door and run her finger along its lustrous folds. But as he was about to greet her she turned and saw him, and the impulse faded. It had been such a long time since they had surprised each other.

H
e had three names, Henry Stanley Edward, and a fourth, Harry, but his mother always said
putha
, naming the relationship that bound him to her. In the park a few days after she vanished, he heard, “
Putha!
Where are you hiding,
putha
?” He let go of his ayah’s hand and ran toward the voice. On the far side of a bed of flaming crotons he cannoned into an imposter in a pink sari. The lesson had to be administered three or four times before he understood that an act of his, committed in ignorance, had driven his mother away forever.