The Hamilton Case (17 page)

Paradoxically, joy represented itself to the gardener as repletion: a seer fish curry of which he might eat his fill.

T
here was a room downstairs, opening off the verandah opposite the kitchen, about which the servants began to complain. It started with a stocky, swaybacked girl called Soma. She said that she could no longer clean the room, because while she dusted or swept something watched her. It was the kind of talk that is taken up like a bad habit. Within days there were reports that a light had been seen there late at night. The cookwoman related how she had been woken by a thunderous crash, as of heavy furniture toppling from a height. Other servants complained of a muffled banging; of an odor they identified variously as putrefaction and bitter oranges.

It was Leela who alerted him to what was going on. This was in the first months of their life together, when the silence swirling between them was still only ankle deep and she had no reason to fear it. She would sit back in her chair after their evening meal, her hands folded on her belly, and offer him segments of her day, fresh peeled. He was of the opinion that this talk of haunting was bally nonsense. But he agreed that something had to be done about it. The next day he called the servants together and informed them that he intended to spend the night in the haunted room.

It contained a four-poster bed carved with sailing ships, a cupboard, an assortment of straight-backed chairs with yawning rattan seats or broken legs. He had a mattress carried downstairs, the bed made up. While this was going on, a russet and turquoise hen stepped onto the verandah and over the threshold of the room, wobbling its head.

“You see,” he said to the servants, attempting lightheartedness and mastery at a stroke. “Everyone knows animals shun a haunted room. So here is proof that there is nothing to fear.”

That they would contradict the
hamuduruwo
was unthinkable. But he knew what they were not saying from the way they found absorbing interest in their work.
A hen is only a stupid bird. A snake, that would be something. Even a crow
. It made him want to shout, I’m not the one who has it all wrong! It was his misfortune to live among a literal people. An English education is a prerequisite for distinguishing irony from ignorance or untruth.

He read
The Woman in White
until midnight by the light of a kerosene lamp, that wing of the house not having been wired for electricity. A few hours later, he could not have said what woke him. The lamp had gone out. The smell was very bad and easily identifiable as drains; he had forgotten to shut the door to the bathroom. For a while he lay with his knees squeezed together, silently repeating her name. The room swam in moonlight and shadows. But he could not persuade himself that there was a yellow dress in the folds of the curtain. He was alone with the whine of mosquitoes, having overlooked the precaution of a net.

At last he went into the bathroom and replaced the plug in the wash-basin. Then he managed to get the lamp going again and read until dawn. When he heard the servants moving about, he put on his dressing gown and went outside, calling for tea. The sky was moonstone feathered with gray.

At breakfast Leela looked at him with her small stupid eyes and said a prescient thing: “Perhaps ghosts show themselves only to people who need to see them.” This annoyed him. He picked up his newspaper and ignored her for the rest of the week.

The episode had a curious postscript: his wristwatch had run down at two forty-three, although he was sure he had wound it as usual before placing it under his pillow. Neither he nor the experts he took it to were able to set it ticking again.

At weddings it was customary to set aside a portion of the cake to be eaten at the christening that was expected to take place within a year. Ten months after his marriage, Sam’s wife presented him with a daughter. The baby weighed six pounds and two ounces. For the past eleven days she had lain motionless under her mother’s ribs, a discreet guest choosing to slip away without commotion.

The midwife wrapped the small body in a towel and smuggled it out of the room, while Leela lay back on her pillows, sweaty and elated. She was waiting to hear the child cry. After an interval, she asked the woman who was sponging her face and neck why the baby was so quiet, and was told to shut her eyes and try to sleep. Then she was left alone. The walls in that room were washed a milky green, a color she would detest for the rest of her life.

Sam arrived a few hours later, after the tournament in which he had been placed fourth in the Men’s Singles, and told her what had happened. When she grasped what he was saying and began to whimper, he left the room.

On the evening she came downstairs for the first time, they sat at opposite ends of a rosewood oval and ate mock turtle soup, mutton cutlets with lime pickle, and jaggery pudding. Halfway through the meal he remarked that he was looking forward to an early night. It was his usual signal to her. She understood then, with awful clarity, that the reason he displayed no grief was that he felt none.

T
ime was his great ally. The day came, as he had known it would, when Maud had sold or pawned everything of value that she owned. That in itself required little prescience. But this was where he displayed insight into the social mechanism: he understood that power always comes down to accountancy. Without wealth, a woman who is no longer young is no longer desirable. It is a principle scored across cultures, etched into the species. He knew it would not fail to search out his mother.

One evening the letter he had known would arrive was waiting in the brass tray on his desk. He noted the second-class stamp; and the envelope, which was the kind that could be bought singly from a
kadai
and caused ink to smudge. It lay on his upturned palm. He thought of all the letters that had surely preceded it, the appeals addressed to everyone she had ever known. They had failed her, of course, the cronies, the lovers, the sycophants, the protégés, all the people she had once preferred to her children, the great, glittering wheel of society rotating and returning her to him.

He had to pull over twice and ask for directions. When at last he found the house, in a laneway off Fife Road, there was no street lighting and he almost stepped into an open drain when he got out of the car. The servant who came to the gate scratching her scalp yawned in his face. On a verandah lit by a bare light bulb with a nimbus of insects, a youth wearing a sarong lolled on a chair with one knee cocked. He eyed Sam with frank curiosity and didn’t have the decency to get to his feet.

Maud received her caller with aplomb, even though he had arrived without notice. She stood, one slim hand resting on the jamb, in a doorway that opened off the verandah. “Isn’t this a convenient spot?” she screeched over the blare of her landlord’s wireless. “I go for a walk every morning, right around the links. Ritzy and I always meant to take up golf. All those marvelously ugly socks and whatnot.”

The reference to his father he interpreted as a brazen attempt at blackmail. He ignored it, and the bright falsity of her tone. Her cramped, airless room told him everything he needed to know. He pulled out one of the straight-backed chairs tucked in under a card table and sat down. Before him spread a drift of papers, bottles of nail varnish, a dirty teacup, a saucer that had served as an ashtray, hairpins, three mauve tissue-paper roses in a plaster vase, little pots of face cream, the usual sluttish disarray he associated with his mother. A bottle of Stephens Ink caught his eye. He pictured her clearing a space at the table before sitting down to compose the letter in which she asked him to
tide her over for a few months
. He wondered how many drafts it had taken to hit on the brittle nonchalance of that phrase; and felt his glance hooked by a wickerwork spiral from the wastepaper basket unraveling in a corner.

Maud drew a bottle and two cloudy tumblers from a varnished almirah. She arranged herself with her spine propped against the buttoned headboard of her bed and fanned her face with a pleated newspaper.

Sipping without enthusiasm at flat soda water, Sam noticed two black-strapped rubber slippers arrayed side by side under the bed. The soles, worn thin, showed the indent of his mother’s heel and the ball of her foot, and he remembered that she walked with her weight rolled over to her instep, so that all her shoes were eventually pulled out of shape. The sight affected him queerly. He turned his head away.

“Heard from Jaya lately?” he enquired to give himself countenance. A five-strong coterie had resigned from the Ceylon National Congress the previous month. In a blaze of oratory and denunciation the quintet had announced the birth of the People’s Party. Its platform was vague yet menacing. A return to village values, the restoration of land to its traditional owners, the dignity of labor. The British affected indifference; a nursery squabble, that was the line. The Communists sulked in public, but Billy Mohideen swore he had evidence of a midnight meeting at Green Crescent.

The president of the new party was a former dux of Queen’s and a graduate of the LSE. But there was a toothiness to his jaw. In photographs he had the air of an aggrieved rodent. It was his handsome right-hand man the newspapers loved. Sam, confronted with grainy images of Jaya addressing a mass rally in a malarial outstation, had sensed the first stirring of something large and with a capacity for rage. At the same time, he couldn’t help filtering the new party’s provocative stance and popular following through the clichés of a schoolboy story: rebellious Fourth Formers taking on the prefects in Congress, egged on by rowdy juniors. In this way he failed to understand the power of the phenomenon he was witnessing.

He said, “What do you suppose is the position of a former mother-in-law in the village scheme of things? Perhaps you could apply to have a little hut of your own in the back garden at Green Crescent.”

“It’s not as if you can’t afford to rent a place for me,” said Maud. “How much did that girl pay you to marry her?”

But he knew he had the upper hand. “There is always a home for you,” he said. “At Lokugama.”

His chair must have been riddled with bed bugs. All night he tore at the backs of his thighs, exultant when he recalled her face.

There were two suitcases and a steamer trunk on the back seat of his car and a second trunk in the back. “Things,” said Maud, vaguely and grandly, in answer to his irritated question. “Frocks and whatnot.”

She was of a generation that believed in carriage. She sat upright, her gaze fixed straight ahead. As they were passing under the living arch thrown across the road by the bo tree at Kaltura, she lit another cigarette. “When I think of all those years you cadged off Kumar and Iris. One minute it was how you couldn’t afford to tip the servants at Christmas, the next you were boasting how you’d fleeced some poor devil in court.”

The sea came into view: translucent green close in, solid blue farther out, everywhere flecked with light. “How many rooms do you have in that hideous yellow house of yours?” asked Maud, not turning her head.

He had always been rather proud of the dash with which he drove. Now the car surged forward, nosing between a bullock cart and a colonnade of coconut trees. When he had completed the maneuver he said, “There’s my wife to consider. And in time, our children. You’re not an influence I would wish to expose them to.” He had rehearsed these phrases and was pleased to have the occasion to deliver them.

The journey to Lokugama took three hours. Side by side, they sat in silence. His eyes kept returning to the trunk that filled up the rearview mirror. Frocks! It was plain she had failed to grasp what her life was to be like.

She spent thirteen years there. It sounded like a sentence. But he was punctilious in his solicitude, motoring down for a weekend every month. On these visits he settled the servants’ wages, went over the market chits and folded three notes into a stiff blue envelope that he propped on the tallboy in his mother’s bedroom.

To his wife, and everyone else who enquired, he said that Maud had decided it was time she lived quietly, away from Colombo. “You know how it is with old folk,” he observed, over tea in the pavilion at the Queen’s–St. Edward’s cricket match. “They reach that time of life when they want to take stock.” He brandished an asparagus roll. “
Cultiver son jardin
and whatnot.” In those first months he was helpless before an urge to imitate his mother—a verbal tic, a characteristic gesture in which the fingers of one hand were flung outward. Wanting her gone, he found himself compelled to conjure her presence.

At a party to mark a silver wedding anniversary, he parried questions with a light laugh. “You know Mater.” The telltale flip of his hand. “She’s always been a
gamarala
at heart.”

On the whole this picture of rural quietism was unconvincing. Catching the whiff of scandal, one or two of Maud’s more persistent acquaintances motored down to Lokugama to dig out the true state of affairs. But the gates were kept padlocked and the bungalow keeper had orders to turn visitors away, saying that the
nonamahatheya
had been un-well and was resting. This gave rise to the story that Maud Obeysekere, notorious as a bad hat, had contracted something unmentionable and was being kept out of sight by her son.

For a while this rumor could be observed perching here and there like a crow. Then it flapped away. People stopped asking after his mother. She was an old woman, easily forgotten.

F
or the girl he had married, time was a stony plain stretching in every direction. Anniversaries were marked by the packages of matted blood that slid from between her legs at intervals. These objects were borne away from her in covered bedpans; occasionally she flushed one down the lavatory herself. She could not have said what they were exactly. But they were not children. They had no faces.

That first time the midwife, a kind woman who suffered from varicose veins, told her that the baby was a girl, her skull covered in soft black curls. In Leela’s dreams this child was not dead, but beat uselessly with tiny bloody fists on the rocks and earth piled over her. Sometimes, even at yellow midday, she would hear a faint, terrible scrabbling that died away as soon as she lifted her head. Once, entering the dining room, she became convinced that something was trapped in the sideboard. She flung its doors wide. Damask tablecloths, silver trays, Delft platters: they taunted her with the mute indifference of things.