The Hamilton Case (6 page)
ORIGINALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
C
laudia and I spent a soothing week together: early morning strolls in the park, the occasional concert, an outing to Brighton. My sister had had her hair bobbed and looked absurdly young. My company was all the tonic she needed; after a day or two of skittish agitation, she grew used to the excitement of being alone with me in London and was soon jabbering like a mynah.
I had forgotten my sister’s trick of twisting commonplace sayings into unexpected configurations. The whole family picked up her coinages.
It’s a long worm that has no turning
became an Obeysekere standard.
No point spoiling the soup for a pennyworth of tar. Give a dog enough rope and hang him
. Now, speaking of a lackluster acquaintance, “He’s no oil lamp,” she remarked. I grinned. It was amusing; even astute. At the same time, I was faintly irritated. As a child I had memorized the proverbs that headed the pages of my copybook, committing each one to heart as my pencil traced its lines and loops. I was word perfect. No one noticed. That was the point, in a way: to have the fluency to pass unremarked. Nevertheless it was galling when Claudia’s mistakes drew admiring laughter from our parents. I have always favored the classical world, in which perfection is synonymous with flawless imitation. The ancients understood that there is no art to being original. It’s only a matter of getting everything wrong.
If I indulged now and then in these uncharitable thoughts, it was only because Claudia could be a trying companion. For a start, she badgered me with questions about Jaya. Where did his people live? Would he call on us when he returned home? Had a marriage already been arranged for him? I refused to answer. It was obvious that she was troubled by the nature of Mater’s relations with Jaya, and I judged silence to be the best way of calming the unhealthy frenzy of her suspicions.
One evening, when we had returned from a late stroll around the West End, Claudia grew excited. It was unwise of me to have allowed her a glass of hock with dinner. Prowling around her room, she hurled a foam of garments from drawers and upended hat boxes. The cause of the hullabaloo was the disappearance of a short length of corded blue silk. The thing was fraying, worthless. But it was her
special rope
. She slept with it under her pillow. If she thought I wasn’t looking, she would take it from her pocket and finger it. It was a habit she had retained from her earliest years, when her imagination would pounce on an unsuitable object of one sort or another and dig in its claws. The cord was the same shade of bruise-blue as a cushion she had dragged everywhere as a small girl; it took Pater to pry it from her when it finally grew too filthy to be tolerated.
I hated seeing my sister handle that grubby little cord. A few hours earlier, I had taken advantage of a diversion to abstract the thing from her evening bag and drop it under a chair. Now, when it became obvious to Claudia that she had lost it, she wanted to scour the pavements we had walked that night. The idea was absurd. I was tired and had no intention of trawling the streets pretending to search for that dingy fragment. But she became rebellious, raising her voice and even trying to push past me as I barred the door. I envisioned being summoned to an interview with the hotel manager, who always wore a brown suit and looked at me as if I were something that had turned up in his toothpaste. He would announce himself
entitled to an explanation
. Embarrassment ran its cold feathers down my spine, curled itself between my shoulder blades.
In the end I was obliged to remind Claudia of certain unfortunate facts. There are instabilities that appear in old families like flaws in the finest china. Take our Aunt Sybil, who never married and displayed a keen interest in missionaries. One afternoon she lured a Methodist into a bathroom and locked the door behind her. Then she hurled the key out of the window. They remained there for several hours, until the minister’s hoarse cries succeeded in rousing the servants. Afterward, Sybil was confined to the care of a brother-in-law who thrashed his eleven children every Sunday morning to strengthen their characters. It was not that I threatened Claudia exactly. But at length she grew limp. I stayed with her all night, fearing she might yet blunder downstairs and into the streets, whimpering for her lost treasure. I need not have been anxious. At breakfast she was a model of propriety. The rest of our time together was entirely harmonious.
As for what went on in Norfolk, I hate to think. At a Law Asia dinner some forty years later, I found myself sitting next to a desiccated chief justice from Lahore. He told me he had once met my mother at Brackwell Hall. “A remarkable lady. Tremendously kind to me, yes tremendously.” He fussed a moment with his spectacles. There had been some awkwardness, he recalled, over a crystal rose bowl. “Been in the family since Queen Anne. The maids were picking shards out of the rugs for days.” He smiled at me, the old toad, and I glimpsed the ghost of a boy in his ruined face, and summers that had grown to fullness, leaf by leaf, Mater in a bronze straw hat and Claudia walking down a grassy path that fell away toward water, all vanished now, everything over.
MURDER CONSIDERED AS A FINE ART
O
xford remains with me as a quintessential day: liver and bacon and toast and marmalade, a couple of lectures, a cold collation in my set at noon. Into flannels for tennis, which we played on a meadow reached by taking a ferry across the river. A meadow: I had never understood the word, so familiar from books since childhood, until I encountered that soft, yielding grass, with its embroidery of buttercups and daisies, utterly unlike the coarse blades and knotted weeds that passed for lawn at home. I would lie down between sets, intoxicated by the sweet scent of earth and grass. All around me boys sprawled under a high, blue sky, young gods in an antique glade.
There would be a huge tea in a pavilion, more tennis, then back to college for a bath and dinner. This was followed by an hour or so of talk and pipes in the JCR or billiards at the Union. With Moderations behind me, I felt able to relax the rigorous program of study that I fear had turned me into something of a swot in my first two years. Fisher, my tutor, encouraged a leisurely approach, advising me to do no more than read generally as initial preparation for Schools. This left plenty of leisure for idling in a punt or penning a short story for the college magazine.
The news from home left me in no doubt that I would be obliged to earn my living on my return. Not for me the debonair cultivation of eccentricities while pretending to manage the family estates; for the very good reason that there would be no estates left to manage. The prospect of a career struck me as no bad thing. There were plenty like my father, natural leaders of our countrymen, who dissipated their talents in frivolities because their wealth freed them from the necessity of earning a living. I determined then and there to seek my fortune at the Bar. A noble profession, and ideally suited to one so amply endowed with reason and eloquence. I borrowed a couple of books on criminal law and lost no time in mastering their contents.
My reading soon led me to the famous murder trials of the day. Thereafter, when I went down to London it was not to visit the Tower or the Houses of Parliament but to stroll down Hilldrop Crescent, where little more than a decade earlier Dr. Crippen had made away with Belle Elmore and buried her remains in the coal cellar of number 39. In the seedy little secondhand bookshop that stood at the crossroads, I bought a twopenny pamphlet and gave myself up to its sensationalist account of the initial police bungling of the case, the subsequent pursuit of Crippen across the Atlantic and the cable received over the ship’s wireless that sealed his fate.
From Hilldrop Crescent it was a short walk to 63 Tollington Park, where Frederick Seddon had murdered Eliza Barrow for her money. My research took me also to the chemist’s shop in Crouch Hill where Seddon’s daughter purchased the threepenny packet of arsenic-laced flypapers that had figured so prominently in the prosecution. I bought a packet myself as a memento, while picturing the revolting sickroom described by witnesses: the sluttish bed linen, the chamberpot that required emptying, the sickening clouds of flies whose squalid buzzing filled the room. Because whatever purpose those flypapers had served, it was plainly not the murder of flies.
Although I could not know it at the time, I was living in the heyday of the English murder. What novelist, even one possessing imaginative powers of the highest order, could have invented a scene such as the one that took place in Bismarck Road, Highgate, where Joseph Smith played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on his landlady’s harmonium while his latest bride drowned in the upstairs bath? Only think, if you dare, of that parlor. I see a determinedly respectable room: a brass-potted aspidistra in the bay window, china dogs on the mantelpiece, looped curtains made of a heavy brown material that doesn’t show the dirt. And Smith descending the stairs, flexing his fingers.
Wonderful stuff, don’t you agree? I was most impressed by the cold brilliance with which the great English murderers planned their crimes, the slow maturation of the project in logic and cunning over weeks and months. It was quite the converse of the way things were done at home. There, lack of premeditation was the rule. Murder was frequent—far more frequent than in England—with at least half the number of recorded murderers giving their occupation as
cultivator
. Such men carried knives for agricultural purposes, and fought with them, rather than with their fists, over the most trivial causes: a fence line that was out by an inch, the disputed yield from a single branch of an overhanging breadfruit tree. There was no art to such crimes. The psychology of the murderers was as simple and dull as the alphabet. In many cases the killer made no effort whatsoever to avoid detection and was apprehended at once by the authorities. It struck me as a thoroughly brutish state of affairs.
From the art of murder it was a short step to murder as art. It was at this time that I discovered the complex pleasures of the detective novel. I was soon immersed in Conan Doyle and E. C. Bentley, and the early works of the sublime Mrs. Christie. I shuddered over “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I thrilled to the adventures of Father Brown. Holmes and Poirot, my favorite fictional detectives, became quite as real to me as anyone I knew. I loved to sharpen my wits on the ingenious puzzles devised by their authors, and may say without vanity that once or twice I succeeded in cracking them before the solution was revealed in the final pages. Modesty compels me to add that my unraveling of the Hamilton case (variously described as
masterly
and
a dazzling piece of detection
) probably owed more to a mind steeped in the stratagems of detective fiction than to the genius with which I was credited by so many commentators.
Here I must ask you to grant me the indulgence of a parenthesis. Only last week I attended a lecture at the British Council on the subject of classic detective fiction. The lecturer, a Dr. Sims, dressed like a poacher and sounded like a barrow boy, but claimed to be a don at the University of Liverpool. When my ear had adjusted to the peculiarities of the fellow’s accent, he was arguing that the popularity of the detective novel springs from its shoring up of conservative values. “By its strict adherence to formal conventions, the whodunnit seeks to bring the socially disruptive act of murder under control,” he brayed. “The murderer is unmasked by a representative of authority, who provides a rational, logical explanation of the crimes. Thus we see that the detective novel raises the specter of a threat to society only to exorcise it. The murderer is removed from our midst, and the reader is reassured by the restoration of order and the perpetuation of the status quo.”
Have you ever heard such rot? I almost rose from my seat to set the silly ass right there and then. Dr. Sims had missed the point entirely. The true drama of the whodunnit lies not in the clash between murderer and detective, but in the skirmish between author and reader. The fictional murderer is brought to justice, yes. But when an author succeeds in outwitting his reader,
there
is the “destabilizing of convention” so prized by that nitwit from Liverpool.
Consider for a moment a classic work like
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
. Doesn’t the success of Mrs. Christie’s inspired plot hinge on the rules that govern the conduct of policemen? The reader who accepts that convention is outwitted by the author, who dares to flout it. Contrary to Dr. Sims’s argument, the whodunnit is an invitation to social disobedience. It is enthralling precisely to the extent that the principles it sabotages are considered beyond question. Who but a fool would describe this process as
shoring up conservative values
? The detective novel is nothing short of a literary insurgent.
Over coffee and biscuits I attempted to put my argument to Dr. Sims, but he paid no more heed to me than to the dandruff lying in dunes on the shoulders of his corduroy jacket. His tiny eyes leapt about the room like flies. As soon as I paused, he muttered an excuse and headed for the urn, where busty Miss Amita de Silva, the assistant librarian, was arrayed in a fetching scarlet sari and tight black blouse. That is at once the strength and the weakness of the English mind: always more interested in practical outcomes than abstract speculation. Not that Dr. Sims got very far with Miss de Silva. She is a Marxist-Leninist, I believe, with a stern outlook and a fine disdain for Europeans. Other than Marx or Lenin, of course. At any rate, she contrived within minutes to spill a cup of steaming coffee into our lecturer’s lap. He yelled blue murder.
I
n time I exchanged Oxford for London, where I would be eating my dinners at Gray’s Inn. Thanks to Fisher, I was reading for the Bar with Douglas Dartington-Clay, the most sought-after pupil-master in England; the two men were related by marriage. Dartington-Clay recommended lodgings off High Holborn; the rooms were cheap and clean, he said, and conveniently situated. All of which was true, but my master was either ignorant of or chose not to mention the overwhelming attraction of 6B Feathers Lane. I became aware of it one icy November afternoon, when my landlady entered my room unannounced and crossed to the table where I sat huddled over my papers. Somewhat taken aback, I was rising to greet her when she placed her hand on my shoulder, indicating with downward pressure that I should remain seated. Then she bent over, unbuttoned my fly and knelt in front of me.
