The Hamilton Case (33 page)

At last the postman reached the crest of the lane, standing on his pedals, and turned into the main road; no doubt to snicker in a tea boutique at the old codger to whom no one had written in a month.

Sam had forgotten his stick. Hands paddling the air beside his thighs he made his way up the drive, measuring out the distance three paces at a time. His head jerked sideways.
Sanforized. Sanforized.
It beat in his mind like heavy-plumed wings. They could replace sonnets with
sandesha
poems in every classroom if they liked; both were irrelevant. The generations to come would take their bearings from
A Hentley shirt is smart and neat, And keeps you cool in tropic heat
...

As he neared the house, he halted. Its paint, unrenewed in five years, had faded once more to a lemony ochre. It was a color he couldn’t see without thinking of Claudia. Yet that morning it seemed to him that something was amiss. He continued to stare at the house, his neck thrust forward in the collar that had grown too loose. But the sun edged past the roofline and struck him. He lowered his head and shuffled forward into the portico, and Watson’s cold nose came to fit itself into his palm.

At that moment there rose in his mind a picture of the Taylors’ dog, its hindquarters writhing in ecstasy as it greeted Nagel like an old friend. The scene presented itself to him with sparkling clarity: a withered geranium leaf on the snowy gravel, the silvery feathering on the spaniel’s paws. The past shuddered, then reconfigured itself differently. A life might turn on such a reversal.

He dismissed it at once. The slobbering kisses of a dog: what did they prove? Not that he could understand now why he had ever granted the Hamilton case any significance. Why had he set out to disentangle its chain of cause and effect? He had allowed a sideshow to distract him from the drama of his own history. Nagel, the Taylors, Hamilton glass-eyed on the jungle floor: they swirled about him and crumbled to dust. He barely noticed. He caressed his chest, where the ache had intensified. Something lurched in him, a small vital cog or pivot, and he no longer had the strength to ram it into place.

With painful care he brought his left foot up to join the right one on the lowest step. The effort had to be repeated five times. An age later he arrived on the verandah. There he stood stone-still to recover, and thought, But it was Mater, not Claudia, who wore that shade of yellow.

Words he might have spoken, soft declarations of need, shifted in his thoughts like a breeze lifting papers in a room. He pictured a child rising from his bed, he traced his trajectory along the night corridors of Lokugama: a whiff of spiced air, the ghost with his face waiting at the mirrored end of a passage, rust-colored hexagons cool under his feet. He would climb into his mother’s arms and lay his confession before her. His life would change key.

Alternatives glimmered, a different kind of existence opening now and then like a view. A morning when the arrow flight of his son shot him straight to Leela, who gathered the weeping child to her and held him close on her knee. Sam had thought, It is as simple as that! He looked at his wife, her broad, plain face infused with love, and saw how glorious she was. He was visited by a yearning for absolution so physical that his flesh slicked with sweat. Then it passed. He fell back in his chair. The course of his life was as fixed as a mathematical rule.

Now at last he understood that character—compulsion, will, impulse, propensity, aversion—might accrete and solidify around a central mistake. When Claudia had woken him in the sleeping house that afternoon, the first thing he saw when he followed her into the baby’s room was her little satin-stitched pillow. She disliked being parted from it. But there it lay in Leo’s cot, the embroidery loosened and grubby where her finger worked it as she slept.

The two children stood side by side, looking down on the small body. There was a blister of white paint on the wood near Sam’s thumb. He picked at it. “Baby gone?” whispered Claudia. He watched the smile slip off and on her face.

He was eight years old. He made a slow circuit of the cot. He even had the wit to smooth the snarled netting into place. Then the baby’s ayah muttered in her sleep and shifted on her mat. An eternity passed. When the woman’s bubbling breath began to rise and fall again, he led his sister to her bed, and for sixty seconds gazed at her and marveled.

The afternoon and evening passed in a wheezing rush. All through the tumult of discovery, he seemed to be holding his breath. He had only to speak. But his brother was dead. Nothing he might say could set that life chirping again. While across the table there was Claudia. She sat upright on her chair crayoning a doll’s face black. The circle of their family had gaped briefly to admit Leo. Now it had sprung closed again. He walked around the table and stood beside his sister, and pincered her wrist between finger and thumb. He chafed her soft skin back and forth. She neither pulled away nor screamed. In this way he set his mark on her. She looked at him, and her face was vivid with understanding.

His tutor possessed the English genius for sidestepping unpleasantness. Summoning a rotten tooth, he spent the evening barricaded within his room. No one paid any heed to the children left alive. They dined on water biscuits and the ruins of a blancmange. Their father appeared at the door, gazed at them and padded away again in his blue velvet slippers. Hearing those dull steps, Sam remembered the overseer’s son prostrated on the verandah. His father had not sought to punish the boy, just as he himself had not sought the elimination of Leo. Yet it had fallen to them both to restore equilibrium in the disruptive wake of a crime. Exaltation was rolling through him, when a splinter of fear punctured his mood: Claudia’s pillow still lay in their brother’s cot.

Squeezing his knees together, he prayed for time. He rang for a servant, had a bed carried into his room and made up for his sister. But she would not settle, plucking at the overlong
banian
that served her as a nightdress. At last Sam went out onto the back verandah, to a sofa scattered with cushions. He returned with one of them. She rubbed its silky piping along the side of her finger, stroking it into her dreams.

It was well past midnight when the reek of oil of cloves retreated from the corridor and an amber line no longer showed at the bottom of the Englishman’s door. The boy ran through the house on silent feet. He eased the pillow from the empty cot, a lump of embroidered matter in his arms. Slipping from the room, he collided with his mother.

Hours after he had watched, limp-muscled with longing, as she rocked his brother’s inert flesh, Maud was still wearing the yellow traveling costume in which she had arrived at Lokugama. Her hair had worked loose and was bunched around her face. She stood in the doorway, one raised arm on the jamb, and the lamp on the verandah rimmed her sleeve with gold. She looked from his face to the pillow in his arms. He saw revulsion seep into her eyes and fled, a button at her elbow grazing his ear as he passed.

He lay in his bed with a sheet over his face, and shivered in monsoonal heat. His first thought: it was a hideous mistake. His mother had seen everything from the wrong angle. He had been judged guilty of a crime he had not committed. Each blow of his heart protested the unfairness of it. He dreaded and longed for explanation, for her step in the corridor.

Instead, old evils arrived to torment him. He crouched beside Claudia, urging her to tweak a fold in the usurper’s dimpled thigh. He constructed mythologies in which their brother had been stolen and replaced with a devil’s nestling. What she had done, she had done to please him. She had carried out his desire as surely as if he had guided her hand.

By the time dawn came with its diseased light, he had grown reconciled to the distortion of events. He rose and went out into the compound, and hurled the pillow over the wall to rot in the jungle. That his mother thought him hateful was no more than he deserved. For the rest of his days his understanding of justice would be molded to that skewed design. Now, at the bleak end of the arc of his life, frozen on the verandah of Allenby House, he saw with the extraordinary lucidity that was pouring through him like pain that the boy trembling under a sheet was only the first for whom he had found no forgiveness.

Watson was whining in the depths of the hall. When Sam raised his eyes he saw a woman at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the newel. He heard a commotion that he took for the sea; but then he realized that the floor of the verandah had lifted. In thickening light he was pitched forward on a flow of white marble tiles with black diamonds at each corner. Her arms flew wide and love burst against his ribs, and he went joyfully into the dark.

IV

He knows everything between Varanasi and Rameswaram.

Tamil saying

Harry Obeysekere, Esq.

Allenby House

Allenby Lane

Colombo 3

Ceylon

28 February 1971

Dear Harry,

I remember it well. You must have been how old—three? four? Your eyes stretched wide when I handed you that stick of pink sugar. But you wouldn’t let yourself taste it until you had trotted back to your mother with her share. She had a gentle face.

You ask about your father. There’s not a lot I can tell you. We were friends briefly, a lifetime ago. It grieves me to hear that he sat up with one of my books on the night before he died. He would surely have disliked what he read.

One Saturday when we were cycling back to school after a swim at Mount Lavinia, he called over his shoulder, “Look at that, will you. That’s magnificent.” I slowed and turned my head. The wall was faded and embroidered with mildew, but had once been painted kingfisher blue. By the doorstep someone had set three kerosene tins, rust laced, planted with golden cannas. We were both boarders at Neddy’s that year.

The manuscript you enclosed is remarkable. Here and there it terrifies.
In cahoots with some ne’er-do-wells. A cold collation in my set.
He had the gift of perfect mimicry, you see. It won him every prize on the classics side. If you would put your hand on the key to him, study that ventriloquism. I find it unbearably sad.

Jaya argued that it kept us captive, locked in the structures of an alien way of thought. But what else did we have? Jaya’s solution was the vernacular. As theory, it was sound. Nevertheless, we went on reaching for English. How could it have been otherwise? We had ingested the language. It streamed through our lungs, fired our synapses. It turned to waste in our bowels. It fed muscle and bone. In this context the word
alien
is not unproblematic.

You see, we were a generation that spoke always in quotation. Even Jaya’s oratory derived from the civilization it denounced. Because at some point quotation had become our native mode. There was no original. No beneath, before, beyond. It was a question of rote thinking. Of the stock response and the preordained concept. I catch myself at it still, rolling out ready-made phrases like any well-drilled schoolboy.
Not un-problematic.
Did you hear it, there? It works insidiously. In the placement of an adverb. The choice of a cadence. Only in my case the pastiche is gross. I never had your father’s ear.

He was one of those sincere, aggrieved people. He would go up to a fellow and harangue him in detail about the flaws in his game; and then bound over to him the next day, beaming, racquet in hand. Nine times out of ten he was turned down, and not always politely; and each time the rebuff caught him unprepared. You could see it pained him. A thinning of the mouth. It was a devastating lesson in how a man might see every detail with perfect clarity and yet misread the shape of the whole.

The first thing one noticed about your father was that plume of hair. It was a trial to him. In a burst of disclosure he told me he thought it conveyed an impression of coarseness. He spent five minutes each morning plastering it flat with a comb dipped in water.

He was avuncular with me, well disposed but essentially remote. We were not close. There was the difference in age, all-important in the stratified society of school. Besides, there was something in him that precluded intimacy. I diagnosed it as ambition, recognizing the symptoms in myself. The virus was endemic at Neddy’s. Now I think that fear went to compound the hard little nugget at his core. What other people thought of him mattered acutely. He feared judgment. Like all imposters, he feared exposure. You are familiar perhaps with the pathology of psychosis? The tragedy of the psychotic is that he lives in terror of a breakdown which has in fact already occurred. So it was with your father. He strove to perfect a performance that had never deceived his audience.

There was an evening when he looked up from his book and asked how one pronounces Marylebone. I suggested he enquire of one of the masters. A bleak despair crept over his features. “Then they would know,” he said.

“Know what?”

“That I’m not one of them,” he blurted.

I came down with pneumonia after two terms and was a day boy when I returned. Thereafter I knew him only in flashes. He nods at me on a landing, sea and sky two bands of different blue beyond his shoulder. He gives me five hundred lines for having my hands in my pockets. As a prefect he was, of course, a disciplinarian. It was wholly in character. The dread of being judged articulated as a need to punish.

Of his relations with his family I can tell you very little. He never spoke of home. Well, none of us did. It was not exactly encouraged. Neddy’s constituted our world, sufficient unto itself. But I knew, vaguely, that his people were grand. And rather fast. There was a whiff of scandal. Bills that went unpaid. He was among those regularly summoned to the bursar’s office, which always meant trouble over fees. From those interviews he would return stone-eyed.

I remember a sports meet when a lady in a jade-colored hat turned every head. She was your grandmother. I didn’t know which I coveted more, the silver flask she produced when tea was served or the diamanté-collared Great Dane at her side. It strolled up to Warden Metcalfe’s prize begonias and urinated on them in front of the entire school. My mother bristled beside me. “All show and humbug,” she hissed.