The Hamilton Case (15 page)

That Sunday, the grizzled houseboy relieved Sam of his hat and hymn book and informed him that Green Crescent
nonamahatheya
and Jayasinghe
mahatheya
were in the drawing room. He found Kumar on the settee, a bush shirt buttoned in crooked haste above his striped pajamas, his hand brushing Maud’s knee. Jaya sat on her far side, with his head thrown back so that his furry throat was exposed. A bottle with a silver teaspoon protruding from its neck lay aslant in an ice bucket. Sam had walked in on a dispute about whose breasts champagne glasses were modeled after. Jaya was for Marie Antoinette, while Kumar was groping for a name he couldn’t recall: “Famous tart. Married that short army bugger.” Maud construed this, correctly, as denoting the Empress Josephine.

Afterward, Sam was unable to remember which of the trio informed him that Claudia was expecting a child. The intelligence ricocheted around his brain and lodged itself as a headache behind his left eyebrow. “Where is she?” he asked, conscious of his hands dangling by his thighs.

“Who?” asked Maud, genuinely puzzled. “Oh—Claudia? Don’t be silly, Sam, she’s at home, lying down.”

Kumar, above whose ear a delicate white feather lay curled, was offering him a glass of champagne. The room was crammed, like all the rooms Sam had known, with dark furniture, brass jardinières, silver candlesticks, stuffed birds, tapestry cushions, tasseled lampshades, china shepherdesses, jasper jugs, painted boxes with sliding lids inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He had never coveted objects, but at that moment understood why men do. A collector runs his fingers over each round or angled surface and is comforted by the heft of the world; without which there is only space, curved as a belly, a humming darkness.

W
hen dawn broke on Monday, Taylor was found dead in his cell. He had fashioned a rope in the classic manner, using a torn-up sheet; but had bungled the job and taken a long time to die.

The note he left, subsequently printed in every newspaper in the island, professed his innocence. He admitted that his wife had told him of the incident with Hamilton.
But God forgive me, I didn’t believe her, knowing Angus as I did, and thinking that my wife’s condition must have caused her to misunderstand or exaggerate some harmless, clumsy action on his part. I swear I never harmed him. I believe he was killed for the money, by the coolies. But I fear that it will go ill with me now, for even the one person whose love I prize above all the world’s riches believes me guilty of murder. And so it is best, for the sake of the child, to end it all
.

No one believed a word of it. Why would an innocent man kill himself? It was agreed, however, that Taylor had been precipitate. He would almost certainly have got off. Earnshaw was swift to point out that Yvette Taylor’s evidence was uncorroborated. And one of the jurors told a newspaper reporter that he had been tormented all weekend by the delicate problem of how a sentence of death might be carried out. That a native should hang an Englishman was unthinkable. But could one count on the government, always unreliable over essentials, to go to the expense of bringing in a hangman from Home? That uncertainty alone was enough, said the juror, to ensure that he, for one, would not have returned a Guilty verdict.

Yvette Taylor spent the rest of her confinement in an Anglican convent in the hills. A subscription was got up for her. Sam donated an anonymous five rupees.

Some months later a squat paragraph in a newspaper caught his eye. She had left the island with her baby, a girl. Hamilton’s firm had paid her passage home. The reporter had allowed himself a final flourish:
Far from our shores, may no shadow of the Hamilton case ever mar the untainted brow, the soft dark gaze, of the infant whose sweet innocence stands as the coda to those tragic events
.

Half a rasher congealed on Sam’s plate as he stared at the newsprint, picturing her in a sheltered corner of the deck, the child in her arms, her face a colorless blur turned this way and that, as a worm swivels its blind head. Around her, an ocean swelled and sank unnoticed.

The day after the trial collapsed, Nagel resigned from the force. It was understood and approved as a gesture of principle: he had been treated shamefully. Sam intended to write to him. It would be an affair of half a morning to pull a silken string or two on the poor devil’s behalf. But the new arrangements at chambers claimed all his attention. Before he knew it, weeks had piled up like the gold-lettered cards on the hall table. He was elected president of the Old Edwardians’ Association. His patronage was sought by the Kennel Club, and Christian Ladies Against Socialism.

At the Customs and Excise Ball, with the daughter of a copra millionaire on his arm, he learned that Nagel had emigrated. To Australia, said Sam’s informant; but someone else chipped in, insisting it was Rhodesia. At any rate, a country waiting to be invented. It would suit Nagel well, Sam thought; he was a man cast in the heroic mold.

Yet he was unable to shake off the sensation that something had slipped from his grasp.

His longing for Claudia grew urgent. The thought of the creature engorging itself within her, distending the small waist he had been able to circle with his hands, was repellent. He pictured it as an eye: jellied, rotating in darkness. Fearing that its mass had pitched her off balance, he needed assurance that its effect was in fact steadying. But when he dropped in at Green Crescent, fingers crossed for luck, he was confronted by Jaya, and a priest tricked out in yellow like a bally pineapple. His brother-in-law was devoid of all spiritual feeling; of that he was certain. But the needle of Jaya’s ambition had settled on the north of nationalist zeal, and Buddhism was intrinsic to the cause.

Jaya crushed Sam to his breast, then explained that Claudia was resting and had asked not to be disturbed. “But stay, stay,” he urged, while the monk’s shaven indigo head turned to study the visitor. “We’re holding a
pirith
ceremony this afternoon.”

Of
pirith
Sam knew only that it involved chanting. That was quite enough.

Everywhere he went, men flattered him to his face and maligned him behind his back. He recognized this for what it was, incontrovertible proof of success. But there were entire days when his life seemed a thing of cardboard and paint, and a gale raged offstage, mocking him with losses.

He knew it was time he married.

III

The jungle moved within the walls.

Leonard Woolf

T
he copra millionaire’s daughter satisfied the criteria on which he would not compromise: she was plain, and the inventory of her dowry exceeded a dozen foolscap pages. What was more, she had been educated in a seminary for young ladies presided over by two sisters from Aberdeen. Her ambitions were contained by drawn-thread work and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which she read every year, returning to
Waverley
as soon as she had closed
Castle Dangerous
. It was true that her parents left something to be desired, as in-laws usually do. They spoke Sinhalese at home and the mother wore nothing but saris. To offset these drawbacks, they were elderly, mild and rarely ventured into Colombo, preferring their rambling estate near the 27-mile post at Kaltura.

He would be marrying into a family that had been Christian for five generations. But the old people’s primitivism expressed itself in their insistence on having his horoscope drawn up by their astrologer, who scrutinized it for information about his health, financial prospects, compatibility with his fiancée’s chart, and so on. These particulars having been deemed satisfactory, further consultations were required to determine an auspicious date for the wedding. Why her parents chose to believe that the girl’s well-being would be determined by the slant of planets rather than by the estates, investments and lakhs of rupees they had settled on her surpassed Sam’s understanding. But he submitted to their requirements as an anthropologist conforms to the practices of the tribe he is studying: with the tolerance that accompanies the certainty of reward.

Her name was Leela. He called her Lily, if anything. They never met unchaperoned. But on visits to Colombo she stayed with a cousin, a jovial matron with enlightened views on courtship who found excuses to leave the young couple alone in her drawing room from time to time. On one such occasion, wishing to test the girl’s modesty, he placed his hand on her knee. Her distress was acute and unfeigned. He desisted at once, apologizing. Her unremarkable proportions scarcely affected him; he was excited by smallness, with its aura of violation. Still, the articulation of power is its own aphrodisiac. He looked forward to his wedding night with clinical ardor.

C
laudia’s son was born at daybreak on the 14
^th
of January. In the house next door, the Jayasinghes’ Tamil neighbors smiled to hear him cry. They had risen early in honor of the Hindu harvest festival of Thai Pongal, when barefoot pilgrims crowd into temples to offer up rice and vegetables to the god of the sun. Thus joyfulness and ceremony attended the child’s entry into the world.

His ayah slept at the foot of his cot on a mat woven from coconut fronds. When he was twenty hours old, a noise awoke her. Through the dissolving meshes of sleep, she saw a figure in a long white gown bent over the baby. As she struggled to her feet the apparition straightened. By the time the ayah began screaming, she was the only one alive in the room.

Servants stumbling along a corridor toward the commotion at the front of the house met their mistress gliding on bare feet in the opposite direction. They flattened themselves against the wall to let her pass; but as they said later, she appeared not to notice them. A few claimed to have seen that she was concealing something in the folds of her night-dress. They all agreed she was smiling.

It was Jaya who found her, in the damp weeds among the plantain trees by the back wall, the bottle of Lysol empty beside her. She was not smiling then; and no one who saw her doubted the agony of her end.

Sam was able to go on living after she chose not to by becoming more himself. This would be his lifelong tribute to her. It affirmed her wisdom in choosing oblivion over monstrosity, the last lucent expression of a mind giving way to darkness.

He began by seeking out someone to punish. There was the abomination she had married. At Claudia’s funeral, a furtive ceremony boycotted by the Jayasinghe clan, her husband wept as men did not, in that time and place, weep for their wives. Sam watched, stone-eyed, from the opposite side of her grave. In that public grief he saw only the inadequate expiation of private remorse.

Afterward, when the handful of mourners had converged on Kumar and Iris’s drawing room, Jaya drew him aside. “I found this in her almirah,” he muttered, fumbling in a pocket.

A letter, Sam thought. She had left a letter. Not for him, but for Jaya. He felt like a man who has missed the last step on a stair.

Jaya held out a small sooty sphere hung with gold. He moved his hand and two blue eyes flipped open in his palm.

Sam put out a finger. The thing was smooth and cool to the touch.

Jaya shuddered. “It’s horrible,” he said. “Like a charm.”

“It’s a doll’s head,” countered Sam. The turmoil of his emotions did not prevent him noting how fluently his brother-in-law resorted to superstition. Really, the veneer of Jaya’s civilization could be picked off with a thumbnail.

“But look how it’s been colored black. It has to be a message.” Jaya’s voice had risen. Any moment now it would attract attention, and there would be a scene: probing, exclamations. Sam plunged his hands into his pockets, short-circuiting the impulse to snatch the vile little object from Jaya and crush it underfoot.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “A broken doll. She kept things like that.”

After a minute Jaya said, “She used to talk about you.”

Small cold feet trod the length of Sam’s spine.

“About when you were children.” Jaya’s voice had thickened. “How could you have . . .” But here he produced a handkerchief, flashily monogrammed, into which he made coarse, trumpeting noises.

Sam closed his eyes. Not because he gave a hoot for his sister’s prattle, but because the slide from the second to the third person is always chilling. Whenever he thought of Claudia, he had pictured her face turned to his. Now he saw himself as a thing trundled across a stage, a little varnished manikin pushed hither and thither for private entertainment.

A few weeks later Jaya converted to Buddhism. Thirteen months after Claudia had been laid in her grave he announced his engagement to a moon-faced Kandyan virgin, descended from aristocrats who had led a failed rebellion against the British. Sam interpreted these signs, and every subsequent step in his brother-in-law’s career, as proof that Claudia would always have been sacrificed to mythology and ambition.

But Jaya, spiraling into history’s orbit, was beyond his reach. Besides, Jaya had only married her. There was the parent who had delivered her up to him.

Sam was at the passenger terminal to meet her ship.

With her usual disregard for proper sentiment, Maud had decided to go abroad as her daughter’s stomach swelled. “My last fine careless rapture and whatnot. Do you realize this wretched infant will make me an
aachi
?” So she had exclaimed, resplendent in green lace, scattering cigarette ash on her guests, at the party Jaya had thrown for her before she left.

Claudia had been allowed to attend the first hour. Afterward, Sam sat with her as she lay on her bed, her hand jumping in his, while downstairs the gramophone alternated with the piano in grinding out fun. Her hair lay loose on her pillow. He remembered smoothing it behind her small ears; making a feeble joke about the “affluence of incohol.” It was the last time he saw her alive.

With her flawless instinct for the disreputable, Maud had hooked up with Jaya’s Venetians. Italians! Treacly eyes, a religion that was eight parts nonsense and two parts sentiment. The countess had worn tails to Maud’s party and kissed her full on the mouth on arrival. The couple had an Abyssinian in their retinue, a long-limbed man with a shaven head who neither spoke nor smiled. Rumor had it that he serviced both husband and wife with unflickering indifference.