The Hamilton Case (7 page)
Mrs. Arthur Timms must have been in her thirties when I made her acquaintance. Part Maori, part Irish, part Scottish, she was a large-boned woman with smooth olive skin and eyes of the clearest grey. She had met and married Timms, an able seaman in the merchant navy, when he was on three days’ shore leave in Dunedin. My bedstead of dainty, if chipped, white iron, like the wreaths of bluebells and pink rosebuds on my wallpaper, hinted that the original occupant of my room had been a young girl. However, the Timmses marriage did not appear to have produced any children; at any rate, I saw no photographs or mementos to suggest the contrary. Mrs. Timms—I never knew her first name—rarely volunteered information about herself and, despite the nature of our relations, I was always too shy to ask questions. There was something dignified and regal about her, a compound of her slow gait, the heavy black hair she always wore pinned up, the dark rings around those pale irises that gave her an air of intense remoteness, even when she was engaged in the most intimate acts.
She, on the other hand, encouraged confidences. Soon I found myself whispering to her what I hardly dared acknowledge to myself. Thereafter she often brought a springy length of rattan to our encounters. As for Timms, he was away on his ship for months at a time. I saw him only once, in the dim hallway, a blue-jowled chap with a shiny raincoat and lips as red as geraniums. When he went away again, his wife had a black eye and violet bruises along her thighs. What I remember most vividly about her is that, unlike the English, she always smelled clean.
There were five other boarders, all of us students from Asia. At first I flattered myself that Mrs. Timms had singled me out for her attention. I was soon disabused of that notion. A month after our first encounter, alerted one evening by a familiar creaking, I crept upstairs to the third-floor landing. After a brief hesitation, I approached a door and applied my eye to the keyhole. A diminutive Burmese was busy with Mrs. Timms, whose dress was rucked up around her hips; he had fastened himself to its dove-grey billows like a small golden ornament. It was fortunate that my moans coincided with his or surely I would not have escaped detection.
After that I listened attentively whenever I heard my landlady’s step; and thus ascertained that she came and went from all our rooms, never staying longer than half an hour or so. She fitted us in: between putting a pie in the oven and serving up supper, between stepping out of her bath and stepping out to the corner-house on a Saturday evening, resplendent in a mauve satin hat.
The service Mrs. Timms did us lonely young men, strangers in a strange land, cannot be overestimated. Oddly enough, we never discussed her among ourselves. For my part, I had the sense of living under an enchantment; to speak of it would have broken the spell. There was also the fact that I felt an instinctive antipathy for the Parsi from Bombay with whom I shared a landing. Sodawallah was always pushing smudged tracts about vegetarianism and Gandhi under my door. I finally put a stop to it by informing him that I would far rather live under what his literature persisted in calling
the imperialist yolk
than put my trust in a fellow who went about in sandals. From then on Sodawallah affected not to see me when we met in the hallway or passed on the stairs. When Mrs. Timms enquired into the cause of our strained relations, I confessed at once. She spanked me soundly with my clothes brush. The roses on my wallpaper blossomed in crimson splendor.
You will think, perhaps, that I relate these details from a vulgar desire to titillate. Not at all. I wish, belatedly, to pay tribute to Mrs. Timms. Until I met her, I had believed that no woman would willingly have congress with me. Ugliness is a terrible affliction. I was painfully conscious of the discrepancy between my unprepossessing appearance and the subtlety of my mind. Oh, those large English girls with their small English smiles! How I yearned for one of them, more discerning than her sisters, to see beyond my appearance to the delicate play of intellect and wit in a mind nurtured on all that was finest in literature and philosophy.
I am not what I seem
, I wanted to cry.
I am no different from your brothers. We have read the same poems
. But those bloodless lips twisted, and the girls looked away. I do not believe this was due to racism. Jaya’s skin was almost as dark as mine, yet mutual friends were always barraging me with reports of his success with the wives and daughters of peers and publicans alike. The difference was that he was tall and broad-shouldered and that women deemed him handsome.
I was not a virgin when Mrs. Timms made herself available to me. In Oxford I had frequented ladies of easy virtue. Although “frequented” is hardly accurate: a timid visit now and then when need drove and my allowance permitted. But I had thought that the real price I would always pay for a woman’s caresses would be the revulsion I saw in her eyes—until that autumn day when Mrs. Timms proved otherwise.
I wrote to her after I returned home but received no reply. Once, she had asked me to read out a circular—a trivial matter concerning missionary work in the Far East—saying, by way of explanation, that she had mislaid her reading glasses. It occurred to me at the time that I had never seen her wearing spectacles, but I attributed this to the natural vanity of a woman with beautiful eyes. Now, thinking the matter over, I wonder if she might have been illiterate. Or perhaps it was simply that like most of her sex she preferred to live in the present, and saw no point in lingering over an episode that had reached its conclusion.
Five or six years later, Dartington-Clay’s Christmas card brought the news that Mrs. Timms had tripped on the steps to the coal cellar and broken her neck. He added that one of his pupils, a Tamil from Penang who had been lodging at 6B, had made
rather an ass
of himself at the funeral.
O
n the day I was called to the Bar, I returned to Feathers Lane to find an orange envelope waiting for me on the hall table. The telegram informed me that my father was dead.
Typically, Mater gave no details. A last-minute cancellation provided me with a berth on a ship sailing in four days. A starboard cabin, unfortunately. Port out, starboard home: only in my case home meant traveling east, not west. After Port Said, where the stewards changed into their whites, I simmered slowly on the wrong side of the ship. At night I would linger on deck as long as possible, hoping for a shred of breeze off the water. But a trio of Australians who came aboard in Aden took possession of the piano every evening after dinner and I fled from their music as if from contagion. “Black Mammie, Black Mammie”: sung at the top of a woman’s voice, it pursued me into my dreams. She had hips as broad as her continent, that fair maid of Perth, and her eyes were the vacant blue of the ocean.
Pater had been dead a month when the
Alberta
entered Colombo harbor. I saw a forest of steamer funnels, and the low white buildings like sun-dried droppings that the English left wherever they paused. But well before they came into view, from the moment I first glimpsed a fuzzy green ribbon unrolling along the horizon, my heart had swollen in its cage. My own, my native land. After London it looked small and shabby, a relative last encountered on a distant afternoon and now discovered standing cap in hand at your door. It announced itself as a scent made up of tar, damp, rot and water that has stood for days in vases. My mouth filled with saliva. I had promised myself a feast of crab claws that night; or stringhoppers and chicken curry; or deviled prawns or biriani or egghoppers, but in any case all the fried
brinjal
I could eat. Settling my hat more firmly on my head, I turned away from the rail; a boy no longer.
T
here is no man on earth who is not emboldened by the death of his father. Saddened, perhaps. When I looked down at the orchids I had placed on Pater’s grave I knew, with piercing certainty, that now there was no one left in the world who would always be glad to see me. At the same time, it was as though a mist lifted and the landscape stood out with the crude confidence of a child’s drawing: a broad road lit by a crayoned sun. Sitting behind Pater’s desk, fingering the objects that had once signified adulthood (a gold-clipped fountain pen; a Florentine leather blotter), it was not my father’s absence I felt but my own presence: a solid form that occupied space in the world, that had weight and quiddity and cast a shadow.
Pater had died as the sun rose a week after his fiftieth birthday. He was riding in Queen Victoria Park when his heart seized up and he slumped forward on his horse—or rather Uncle Kumar’s horse, because my parents were back in Cinnamon Gardens. Major, a chestnut gelding, continued to canter around the track. An English engineer who attempted to grasp Pater’s reins slipped from his own saddle, caught his foot in a stirrup and broke his leg. His horse came to a halt and began grazing. But round and round the track went Major, a single-minded beast, schooled in routine, impervious to the unfamiliar distribution of weight on his back. Bystanders—there are always bystanders in this country, fellows who appear from nowhere like a rope trick in reverse—bystanders shuddered and stared at the dead man on the tall horse. The phenomenon was surely
moospainthu
, a bad omen. As such, it was best not to intervene.
At last a gardener who recognized my father had the wit to send word to the house. Mater and Kumar arrived, accompanied by a groom. Major slowed, trotted across to the servant, lowered his head, whinnied for sugar. Pater slid sideways into Kumar’s arms.
The Englishman, whom no one had liked to touch, continued to lie moaning on the grass. The next day Mater had a basket of fruit sent to him in hospital. Several rude weeks later, she received a stiff little note of condolences. “Really,” she said, tossing it to me, “anyone would think I’d sent round a sack of durians.”
Pater had made me his executor and sole heir; the tears that had remained unshed beside his grave prickled my lids as I learned of his confidence in my judgment. The weeks that followed my return were spent in consultation with solicitors and accountants and bankers, and I was vain enough, even surrounded by the wreckage of my inheritance, to be gratified by the deference they paid me. An Oxford degree, the London Bar: they invested me with an authority before which men twice my age bowed their heads.
All the same, anger rose in me like bile as I discovered the full extent of my father’s profligacy. His desk was jammed with letters of credit, unpaid bills, bounced checks, notices of arrears. Yet the week before he died he had thrown a party for three hundred guests at our place by the sea in Bentota. Kumar assured me you could have strolled across the lagoon on the champagne corks.
There was also the envelope I found at the back of a drawer. Its contents revealed that Pater had put our old overseer’s son through a mission school and subsequently paid out a sizable bribe to have the fellow employed as a peon in a government department. A bundle of letters scrawled on lined paper in an ill-formed fist thanked my father for his generosity at Christmas, at Sinhalese New Year, on the letter writer’s marriage, the birth of his son, et cetera. Hundreds of rupees squandered on soothing Pater’s conscience over a rightful thrashing administered years before: that was the kind of excess I found difficult to forgive.
One of the last things Pater had done was to sign over our estates at Lokugama. I managed to save the house itself. But only by selling everything: teak almirahs, ebony headboards, Malay pewter, Irish linen, Japanese erotica, my lead soldiers, Claudia’s dollhouse, our sturdy old rocking horse, Willy’s enameled snuffbox with the view of St. Petersburg on the lid, Granny’s chamberpot handpainted with French roses; everything of value that had survived my father’s depredations. I ransacked steamer trunks, turned out mildewed handbags, rummaged through the pockets of long-discarded suits. I went through my ancestral home like a thief. It was an experience not unmixed with exhilaration.
I
trust you have understood that I had no choice in these matters. That didn’t spare me a blazing row with Mater. It was kindled by the Bentota property, the deeds to which were in her name as she had inherited it from a great-aunt. I explained that the sale of the house would ease the burden of debt on Pater’s estate; my mother refused to entertain the idea. “Claudia will have Bentota as her dowry,” she said, and directed a jet of smoke at my face. “It’s not as if you’ve left her anything else.”
As Pater’s heir and executor I was entitled to dispose of his estate as I saw fit. But Mater, with the illogic that women buff to a high polish, had already made it plain that she was piqued by my failure to consult her. “All that money squandered on you at Oxford. Classics and what-not. How many Ancient Greeks do we know? And then you come home and try to pinch the one thing left to your sister.”
I remained calm and forbearing. To my surprise, Pater’s death had left my mother badly cut up. I had imagined her to feel nothing but an ill-disguised contempt for the husband she had spoken of with habitual impatience and betrayed so brazenly. Yet by all accounts she had made a spectacle of herself that morning in the park, on her knees beside Pater’s body, pulling up fistfuls of grass by the root. When Claudia was a child, I could make her cry by picking up her favorite doll and shaking it until its china eyeballs shifted out of alignment. Almost three months after my father’s death, Mater still had the look of that doll: jarred, out of true.
It was my first insight into the nature of marriage: a conundrum only two can solve no matter how transparent it appears. And then, too, over time, I have come to realize that as we grow older we experience any death as diminishment—no matter how shallow the acquaintance, how profound the enmity; another flake of self scraped loose by the knife. I remember opening the newspaper and reading the headline about Jaya: there came upon me the sensation of retreating water, and the curved world falling away under my toes.
