The Hamilton Case (23 page)

Later she crept upstairs to the mirror in her bedroom. What she saw caused her to weep: flesh that merited no more than the loathing he regularly expressed on it.

B
etween the furred paper covers of an exercise book, Maud began to keep a diary. It was a custom Thornton had encouraged, reading aloud entries from her own journal: a list of birds observed on an outing, the medicinal properties of nux vomica, scraps of verse copied from a magazine, the progress of an experiment in which cochineal-stained water inched up the stem of a snowy balsam. There was something ridiculous and tiresome about the enterprise; as with so much that emanated from Thornton. Even as a girl Maud sensed that it was absurd to go about the world pen in hand, as if its variety and chaos and appalling detail could be corseted within royal-blue copperplate. It was very English: that mania for description and constraint. At the same time, and this too was typical of Thornton, the project was not without heroism. All dissection requires curiosity and a sturdiness of nerve; even if wholeness is sacrificed in the process.

Now, at the opposite pole of womanhood, as her body embarked on its clumsy accommodation of age, Maud found herself taking up the ritual as lightly as she had once abandoned it. Her diary was, in a way, a tribute to Thornton, a form of atonement. Dashed off, sporadic, it was nevertheless an agent of analysis and order; an intuitive counter to the swirling hyperbole that had infected her letters.

This morning I followed the monkeys. The undergrowth here is relatively sparse. Rough tracks have been hacked out between the trees, and once accustomed to the gloom my eye easily picks out the telltale blazes on trunks and stumps. The flying column of monkeys called a halt every few hundred yards to rest and peer down at my progress. As soon as I drew near, they were off again. Wood pigeon went flying up, also shama, kondayas, blackbirds, a shock of blossom-headed parakeets. Flock is what I meant, but my pen insisted otherwise.

I’ve remembered something from that day, all those years ago, when I shot my first monkey. Not long afterward, Daddy brought down another. It crashed some way off and Carom bounded after it. We followed the tip of his white tail and found the monkey staring skyward. The shaggy fur on its chest lifted, although there was no breeze. Daddy bent down, then motioned me closer to look at what he had found: a huge-eyed baby clinging to its dead mother. It was probably no more than a week old. Carom’s muzzle approached and I saw the tiny thing trembling with renewed force. Daddy pried it free, very gently. It fitted into the palm of his hand. He took his knife from his bag, thrust the point of its blade into the monkey’s occiput and gave it a slight turn.

For years I had quite forgotten that little monkey. Today I can think of nothing else.

A thread of light between the ropy arms of banyans led Maud to a stream, no more than a few feet wide. Where the opposite bank sloped to the water, the earth had been churned and pocked by animals coming down to drink. A faint stirring of the air could be felt there, out of the shelter of the trees. Maud licked a finger and held it up. Then she walked a little way downwind to a patch of bushy scrub, where she settled beneath overhanging leaves, and waited.

Although she was on the alert, eyes straining to pick up density or movement, she didn’t see the mouse deer until it had stepped out of the bushes on the far bank and straightened its back. It was no bigger than a hare, with pencil-thin legs and frail ebony hooves. Among trees, light and shadow would play over its mottled coat in perfect camouflage. She pictured it slipping through the jungle, weightless as leaves.

Thereafter she made her way to the stream every morning, remaining there until the sun rose too high for animals to come down to the water. The mouse deer and its mate rarely failed to appear. For the space of a season they were accompanied by a fawn, an elfin creature. It lowered its head and butted its mother’s flanks. It lay down on the bank, occupying an area no larger than Maud’s hand. Then a babbler flew up in a jitter of leaves and all three deer vanished as if bewitched, not a shiver of grass to betray the direction of their flight.

Sambhur drank at that sluggish stream, high-antlered deer bulky as elks. There were black-naped hares, also squirrels, pretty little
rilawa
monkeys and the ubiquitous wanderoos. Teal circled low, whistling plaintively. Three of the birds waddled down to the water while their sentinel stood motionless, with craned neck, on the spot where it had alighted. A pair of stilts paused in their feeding to preen an ebony wing, or drowsed, poised on one long leg in the mud.

An anteater nosed its way down the bank one morning, back arched high, an apparition from prehistory. Maud chilled at the sight. As a girl she had seen one of these creatures thrust the gelatinous blade of its tongue deep into the passages of an anthill and withdraw it encased in a quivering black scabbard. There is also something repellent about the way an anteater walks, the curved claws of its forefeet pointing backwards, like pavement beggars with broken bones set forever at sickening angles. Yet watching this one now, as it rose on its hind legs, swiveling its head as it sniffed for food, Maud acknowledged the perfection in its clanking design; in the shield-shaped plates of clear gray horn that defended it from jackals and leopards and the cobra’s fangs, row after regular row laid close against the skin, an archetype of imbrication.

Sam could not fail to notice the change in her. She was still grotesque, knees apart as she inhaled smoke, a worm of ash trembling on her ridiculous dress. He considered her with the impartiality of a summing up from the Bench: a bony face above a corded throat, arms shrouded in loose flesh. The familiar, arrogant tilt of her head merely ludicrous now, a shred of defiant scarlet still clinging to the flagpole while crows strip the carcasses below.

Yet in some subtle way she had altered. There was a lightness in her. He could not rid himself of the peculiar idea that she would appear at Allenby House. Her breath settled on the bones at the base of his skull as he made his way down the stairs. He went into his office room and found himself peering over his shoulder, certain he would find her lounging by the door.

At last curiosity triumphed over his distaste for servants’ gossip, and he asked Sirisena how the
nonamahatheya
spent her time. The bungalow keeper replied that she went for walks. Sam looked out, incredulous, at the vegetation pawing at the walls. Going for a walk: it was an activity he associated with buds fattening in an English hedgerow. Where could one walk here? “In the jungle,” said the bungalow keeper, which only compounded the riddle.

In the old days Maud had dressed for shoots in sensible twill, and narrow boots hand-turned on a lathe in Burlington Arcade. Later she had switched to trousers, reasoning that they were disreputable, practical and flattered her figure to the point of obscenity. Now her progress through tunnels of restless leaves was marked by scraps of taffeta or organdy spiked on twigs, a scattering of diamanté like starfall. Skirts that had belled over parquet snagged on thorns and were tugged free with little hisses of protest. Hems came undone and trailed behind her, gathering earth and leaves.

Maud went home and hacked away the sticky burrs of love grass with pinking shears. She used a double strand of cotton to sew up the lips of jagged tears. The dhobi clucked his tongue over these crooked white scars, then beat her dresses limp against a rock to rid them of stains.

For Padma, that ruined incarnation passing through the house and compound was yet another sign that the place was cursed. Yet for her and her husband these years, on the whole, brought an interval of grace. Any long marriage is subject to variations of tempo. The eroticism that had first drawn those two together returned in force at this time. There were mornings when they could scarcely credit the bliss they had harbored. It instructed them in the savoring of other, small pleasures. A mynah, fallen from its nest and hand reared, that returned to peck rice from their palms. Ambrosial half-moons cut from a round red cheese, a gift from the
hamuduruwo
that the
nonamahatheya
failed to eat at Christmas.

T
here remained one facet of her marriage that never failed to elicit Leela’s gratitude: every day she witnessed the love that Harry drew from his father. She saw Sam steal up behind the child, scoop him into his arms, whirl him into the air. He helped Harry mount his pony and walked him in circles around the garden or up and down the lane, showing the boy how to hold himself in the saddle, adjusting his grip on the reins. He held his son on his knee and taught Harry his letters out of a book salvaged from his own childhood:
A is for Army, That dies for the Queen, It’s the very best Army, That ever was seen
.

There was this symptom, most telling of all: he lavished money on his son. When Harry lay in bed with measles a box arrived, larger than the child, covered with foreign stamps and sealed with emerald wax. It contained one hundred and eighty-five hollowcast soldiers, including two rare British Camel Corps as deployed in the relief of Khartoum. Harry arranged battle formations on his coverlet, murmuring with delight.

Yet it was also apparent to Leela, watching with her old uncontroversial skirts swathed about her on the lawn, that love manifested itself in her husband as a craving for perfection. As Sam crouched beside the child to demonstrate once again the turn of a wrist on releasing a ball, she saw that patience might be only a by-product of implacability. At that, a brief spasm of fear clutched her heart.

And the boy always chose his mother, making his preference clear with the casual cruelty of those who have not yet learned to dissimulate. One morning he came crying into the house, having cut open both knees in a fall. His father exclaimed and half rose from his chair; but the child trotted straight past, to his mother. Over the small heaving body, Leela saw her husband’s face.

M
aud’s eyes snapped open to the night noises of Lokugama, frogs, creaking blinds, bandicoots in the rafters, the sawing of her own breath. Then a child cried out in the room next door. “Polecats,
nonamahatheya
,” said the bungalow keeper the next morning. It was true that there had been heavy rain the previous week, enough to have driven polecats indoors to nest in the roof. But she knew it was not a polecat she had heard.

There were three halved coconut shells, each cradling a paste of boiled rice, condensed milk and strychnine. Sirisena climbed into the roof through a trapdoor on the back verandah while his wife held the ladder steady. Padma was wrapped, as usual, in a blue cotton sari, her eyes fastened on the ground. She said something to her husband, her Tamil seething like bubbles. Maud leaned against a verandah post, smoking. The bungalow keeper clambered down, the muscles of his buttocks moving beneath his sarong. His feet were soled with gray skin half an inch thick. Long bare toes like fingers felt for each rung as he descended.

As soon as Sirisena looked at the
nonamahatheya
, he knew her thoughts had alighted elsewhere. She was a disappointment to him: her attention was fluid and could not be diverted to flow solely in his direction. The legend of the devil-bird had pricked her into reaction, so he had ventured another tale, this one involving a farmer and his unfaithful wife.
Gama katha
: stories people told in villages, gathered around a cooking fire at night. He had pictured himself producing them one by one, coins drawn glinting from a purse. But as soon as he began to speak she had gazed at him blankly. A little later he heard her blundering about the house, crooning to herself. Now, while he was still slapping his palms together to rid them of dust, she swerved away. She came to a halt in the doorway of the room next to hers, one hand on the jamb. So she might remain for an hour.

The child cried again the following night.

Maud knew there was nothing in that room, only a small filthy pillow in which mice had once nested and the spoor of her slippers on the dusty floorboards.

Toward dawn, a tap gushed in the courtyard. But there was no tap there.

The morning was cloud-flanneled, and a section of guttering swung loose from a corner of the verandah. Perhaps that was what she had heard, rain cascading from the broken gutter. That was the genius of the place at work again, concocting undecidability.

A few weeks later, she returned to the room where Leo had died and found that the pillow had vanished. She knew she had seen it lying near the skirting board under the window. If she closed her eyes she could summon a corner of striped ticking, smell the musty dampness of kapok.

She asked the bungalow keeper if he had thrown the thing away. He denied all knowledge of it, swore he hadn’t entered the room in years. It proved nothing. A servant would never admit to having removed a household object, however dilapidated, without permission. It could be construed as theft.

T
he thatched
kadai
at the Lokugama turnoff where Maud bought her cigarettes had metamorphosed into a concrete shop, with a hinged door painted the green of sugar almonds and a poster distributed by the Dig for Victory campaign. The boutique keeper now spent his days slouched in a carved armchair, surrounded by lesser men. His shop hummed with the expectant murmur of rendezvous and transaction. Villagers stood entranced before pyramids of tinned luncheon meat and crackers. Enameled basins overflowed with graded rosy or brown growths, since rice was rationed and everyone was condemned to a diet of yams.

Every hour the khaki blur of jeeps appeared and faded on the trunk road. The boutique keeper wore his striped sarong low on his waist to accommodate his soft round belly. It was one of the marks of his new ease, like the walnut-cased wireless on its shelf behind the counter and the mirror etched with swans that doubled his mistress’s humiliations. None of these things afforded him the twist of joy that came with the sight of white men, stripped to the waist, laboring like coolies at clearing a path through the jungle.