The Hamilton Case (18 page)

She came to hate the house. It was an arrangement of monumental boxes, each with its own lock and key. She had grown up in an ancient sprawling edifice designed without interior doors; a curtain hung over a doorway provided privacy while allowing the free circulation of air. In Allenby House each room was a cell, into which more prisons had been fitted: cupboards, chests, tallboys, cabinets, chiffoniers, trunks, rifle cases, document boxes, scent bottles, biscuit tins, cheese dishes, spice jars, tea caddies, decanters, a stool with a hinged lid, a glass bell encasing wax flowers, so many tombs where a soul might flail for all eternity. No sooner had she settled to her sewing or bent her gaze over a letter than a compulsion she was powerless to direct brought her to her feet. All day she went in and out of rooms, climbed and descended stairs. a servant looking up from the hall might see her standing there, the mass of her planted solid on the landing yet faintly nebulous along the line of a shoulder or hip in a way that occasioned unease in the onlooker.

In every room the sea mourned with her. Yet she shunned the upstairs windows on the seaward side of the house. Her mind unfolded that view into the flat blue planes of a schoolroom map, and she would recall the fear she had felt on first realizing that nothing but the treachery of water lay between the island on which she stood and a continent of ice. Now and then as she wandered through the house, small things stopped her in her tracks: a fan of red chilies drying in the sun, the gardenias Soma floated in cut-glass bowls. But the sea was like love: a vast, glittering instability.

In those terrible years even Sir Walter failed her. Narrative, an optimistic form, assumes that it is worth turning the page; it is predicated on development and progression. That life might
move on
, a sentiment echoed by well-meaning relatives, struck Leela as monstrous. Sequences of sentences she had had by heart for years now chilled her. She had all the books removed from her room and placed in a trunk, where those brown or faded crimson boards could no longer mock her with the relentless ambition of their contents.

Sam’s affinity for the house intensified in tandem with his wife’s aversion. The symmetry of its design, the harmony of its proportions laid a salve on his soul. He drew its air into his lungs, and his life grew light and sumptuous. Tender with gratitude, he ministered to its needs like a considerate lover anticipating his mistress’s desire. Masons repaired its crumbling brickwork. Electricians rewired the upper floor, cursing their predecessors and the rats that had gnawed through their workmanship with admirable evenhandedness. The cookwoman’s uncle, a doddery individual with a wispy gray topknot who appeared at the back door one day to cadge a cup of tea, revealed himself as a plumber of genius: within the space of a morning he had set water gurgling again in the downstairs cistern and unblocked the pantry tap. A carver from Galle who specialized in
mal lella
was hired to restore the damaged fretwork above doors and windows. The missing roof tiles were replaced. Shutters that had warped tight over a decade of monsoons were eased open, planed to fit once more into window frames. One morning Sam went out into the garden and found an ossuary on the lawn: the remains of birds and small mammals whose carcasses had clogged the guttering for years.

All but the most urgent work took place gradually, over weeks that lengthened into months. He would place his hand, palm open, against wood or plaster, and know where the house desired his attention: here in the chinked creaking of boards, there in the musky stench seeping from a cupboard.

His face became known in the salesrooms of auction houses. He picked up a massive ebony chiffonier for a song. An eight-inch vase glazed in damson pink and gold cost him as much as he pulled in in two months. He bought an astrolabe. He acquired three portraits, in oval frames, of men who had the air of dim aristocrats. He bought eighteenth-century soup ladles, a chest of drawers with beveled edges, two music stands, a bone stamp box, a hideous electric chandelier. Other things, a pair of biscuit-colored Meissen cups painted with flowers and fruit, a nest of straight-legged teak tables, he rejected with barely a glance. It was as if the house spoke through him, so that he turned away from the exquisite silver nutmeg grater the auctioneer had set aside for his inspection because the phrase
a set of ivory-handled fish knives
had floated into his mind. He crossed to a display cabinet, shifted a basket of tiles depicting the activities of cobalt Chinamen and located the knives in a box lined with maroon silk, the whole bordering on the commonplace but urgently necessary to him.

In this way, with time, he felt the loss of Claudia less keenly. It was not that the house replaced his sister but that it came to function like the puckered tissue that grows over a wound, the presence that betrays an original absence. He gave no sign of understanding that his life had been a series of substitutions. He might spend an afternoon gazing from an upstairs window, while the sky turned gray and swollen like a tick and nails of rain were driven into the sea.

A
boyhood devilry with firecrackers had claimed the tip of the Lokugama bungalow keeper’s little finger. Even at the time, in the swirl of shock and pain, Sirisena was not sorry. The missing phalanx conferred distinction.

His ancestors were fishermen. To Buddhists the work was abhorrent since it necessitated taking life. Then a fleet of sallow Portuguese priests arrived, their lines baited with salvation. The despised fisher caste rushed to nibble at this god who loved their kind. The boy saw Catholicism, too, as synonymous with difference. When paper lanterns glowed in the village for Vesak, the fisher huts were holes of briny darkness.

Sirisena’s father drowned. His mother married a brute. The boy turned his back on beatings and the sea. Inland there was a Carmelite convent with a whitewashed chapel, the Counter-Reformation un-scrolling beneath coconut plumes and the ravishing spread of flamboy-ante.

He clutched a chit from a priest. The nuns found him work: digging a well, relieving the night watchman. One morning he looked at a girl in the kitchens. Thereafter she always stirred a spoon of condensed milk into his tea. Marriage to a Tamil: it was yet another sign that he had been singled out for an uncommon destiny.

They had a child, a boy with a large lolling head. In their sister house in the hills the nuns had a special wing for unfortunates. It was sheer charity on their part to take the baby. Yet Padma could not reconcile herself to the loss. She turned sullen. Sirisena saw suddenly how coarse she was. She picked a louse from her scalp and squashed it between her thumbnails.

They were encouraged to make their future elsewhere. The sisters resolved it, like all difficulty, with an adamantine sweetness. A situation was found for the pair, the ease of their duties pointed out. They arrived at Lokugama on an evening when the moon was full and saw the house before them, pearl-pale in the jungle.

Even when daylight revealed rats’ nests, and rafters patched with sky, Sirisena remained joyful. He paced verandahs, studied the dim outlines of the frescoes on the gateposts. He counted the coconut trees. His wife, uprooting yams that had seeded and run wild, paused in her labors. She understood that she had married a fool. Look at him now, delirious because he had the use of a heavy black bicycle. In her dreams a flat-eyed baby mewled. She lay on her mat with aching nipples.

There were no more children. At night the animal breath of the jungle licked their necks. As the years wore on it became difficult to see these things—barrenness, isolation—as marks of favor. There were days when the bungalow keeper knew he was cursed. His wife cooked with
gingelly
oil, in the Tamil fashion. In the thatched booth of a tea boutique at the junction with the trunk road, a tot of illegal toddy eased his nausea.

When the
hamuduruwo
announced that his mother would be living at Lokugama, purpose was restored to Sirisena. Overnight his former air of an energetic bird returned: an alertness to his step, a round bright eye cocked at his surrounds. On the coconut estates that had once belonged to the Obeysekeres, there were villagers who could remember the old days at the house. The bungalow keeper grew avid for their stories. A child employed solely to fold table napkins into lotuses. The head servant who disciplined underlings with tablespoonfuls of castor oil. A Chinese seamstress who filled the house with scarlet crepe paper dragons when the bullock cart bringing pots of poinsettia from up-country overturned on a hairpin bend one Christmas. Sirisena led former servants from room to room, his heart knocking with pleasure as they detailed vanished opulence. A clock as tall as a man that showed the phases of the moon. The fifteen curries served daily at lunch. There was a septuagenarian who evoked a gramophone with a turquoise-glazed horn and a chandelier strung with faceted rainbows as vividly as if these objects were painted on the cataracts that blinded him.

Then the
nonamahatheya
arrived, and was not as Sirisena had envisaged. Nevertheless he looked at her and thought of chrome, he thought of a curtain rising in silvery swags as the lights dimmed and of white ships gliding like queens into a harbor. The bright vague web of yearning within him lashed itself about her presence. He dropped a fistful of pink newborn mice into four inches of water. There were places where everything was new and clean, where no one struggled.

For Maud, each day discharged an identical freight of loneliness, monotony and long, voracious mosquitoes. Hardest to bear was the heat. When she lay in bed, the air was so heavy she felt its weight upon her. Her skin grew damp beneath its touch.

The house was dwarfed by its backdrop of trees, so that it appeared to crouch low on its haunches. In fact it had ceilings eighteen feet high, designed for coolness. Its walls were inset with lattice, its verandahs screened with rattan blinds that could be lowered against the sun and sprayed with water. These were stratagems that presupposed currents of air, since an island race is fated to take its bearings from the sea. But the breeze that ruffled the coast was strangled by leafy ropes as soon as it ventured into the hinterland. The air was not air at all, thought Maud, felled on the verandah at ten in the morning, but a woven yellow haze. Spiders and green-veined orchids lived suspended in its honeyed weft.

She began to unpack a trunk and reached a layer of photographs in pokerwork frames. Ritzy failing to look sinister with a cutlass between his teeth. Herself at the same costume party, a slave-girl whose gauzy attire displayed tantalizing traceries of flesh. Claudia unsmiling on her wedding day, Sam authoritative in a morning suit. Was it chance, wondered Maud, that preserved her children in images so much more formal than their parents? She picked up the photograph of Sam and studied his face. Why didn’t she hate him? Wouldn’t loathing be more natural than the massive indifference he triggered in her? He was her first born, the only child left to her, and a door within her slammed shut in his presence.

It had been the state of affairs between them for as long as she could remember. Once, coming away from a prize-giving at Neddy’s, her husband had said, “I say, old thing, you should try harder with Sam.” “Should I?” said Maud, as startled by the fact of the reproach as by the point it delivered. “Yes.” After a minute, “Do you think he minds?” she had asked. “I should say so.” Maud whistled—a vulgar habit she was cultivating. She had tried to concentrate on her son, to see him whole. It was useless. In her mind, she was always inspecting him from a height. The air between them was at once clear and impenetrable. Diamond-bright, diamond-hard: it characterized her manner with the boy. Among a set that valued astringency in human relations, her style passed as good form.

In those first months at Lokugama her dreams were of landscapes where the boundary between earth and water was blurred. She began each day charged with the promise of mutability. At night she walked beside waves or was carried on slow river currents to a boat that lifted and fell and leaned to meet her. How could she not long for deliverance?

Yet a terrible jauntiness informed the notes she soon began composing. These were directed to friends who lived abroad: the Venetians, an Argentine industrialist, a stockbroker from Surrey, a Basque poet, a cluster of faded English civil servants. Within weeks she was writing compulsively, five or six bright, cloying letters a day. Colorful detail was her forte. She described
a troop of monkeys with sorrowful faces, speeding
through the treetops
. She called up
manes of saffron-hued lantana
. Pride dictated that loneliness and despair, the companions on whom she closed her eyes every night, could never be cited. Instead, a blocked and stinking lavatory became
our preposterous plumbing
.

By the end of the third month it was plain her allowance wouldn’t run to the postage. She borrowed two rupees from the bungalow keeper and went on writing.
I wish you could see this marvelous old place. My father-in-law had latticed ducts set in the floor to blow air up the skirts of dancing ladies
. Or:
I have been gorging myself on rambutans. Such fruit! Spiked scarlet globes the size of a hen’s egg, split open with a thumbnail to yield segments of delectable white flesh
.

All routine offers consolation. The truism extends also to cliché, to the comfort found in worn patterns of words. If Maud wrote of bougainvillea it was unfailingly
rampant
. The jungle
teemed with life
. The scent of temple flowers
flooded the evening air
. Language was a net, ready knotted, in which to capture the formless insistence of the world around her: to hold it still and render it legible.

Rain fell. When it stopped, thousands of wings filled the house. The insects flew into Maud’s nostrils and beat in her ears. They drowned in a sauceboat. They seethed on her plate, shedding wings. They clotted every surface with their corpses. Half an hour later she seized a pen and wrote:
Never imagine that it is dull here. A continuous wave of squirrels, bats, hens, lizards, frogs, ants, wasps, beetles and crickets washes through this house. This morning brought the novel diversion of a swarm of winged termites
.