The Hamilton Case (24 page)

In the first year of the war, ignoring ridicule, he had acquired a truck with a hundredweight of rust under its hood. Then he unloosed his twelve-year-old nephew on the carcass. The obstinacy and range of this child were remarkable. He crossed his arms over his chest and haggled with thugs. At a workshop on the edge of the town he watched, and wheedled assistance. He flashed a knife at shanty-dwellers scrambling through refuse for the same coveted section of rubber tubing or metal flange, and hoarded screws with half- or three-quarter-inch threads in an oily cocoa tin. His hands were callused and always filthy, his conversation fluent in pistons and connecting rods. At the end of eleven months he summoned his uncle to a ceremony. With his teeth clamped on his lower lip, he jiggled a length of copper wire. They heard an engine turn over.

There came a January when an incantation was in every mouth: Kampar, Batu Pahat, Slim River. The
kadai
keeper probed a troublesome molar with a matchstick and concluded an alliance with an up-country market gardener. He found himself a driver. The rivulet of soldiers pouring into the country swelled to a white cataract, and he called on their quartermaster. His truck coasted down from the hills with the bland vegetables dear to the English, cauliflowers, lettuces, cabbages large as heads. The first baby with russet hair was born in a drain-pipe, twin gray lamps startling in its wizened brown face.

Sam sent Leela and the boy up-country when Singapore fell. Colombo emptied in days, the population interpreting editorials about the brave little island chosen to staunch the flow of tyranny as a coded admission of the nightmare to follow.

Alone at Allenby House, he found that Claudia’s presence had grown vivid. This happened, from time to time: a brief brightening of memory. An arrangement of cushions on a settee molded itself to her form. By the door of the music room, he heard soundless melodies flow from her fingers. In those weeks glazed with public dread, he was aware as never before of time as matter: habitually opaque and dense, a medium through which he advanced only by means of a tremendous exertion, it would give way, without warning, to a fold of drapery, easily disturbed. Through a window in a courtroom he glimpsed his sister in a treed alley in Hyde Park. He sat like a rock in his armchair at the club because she knelt before him in a frilled pinafore, laying out a feast of pyramidal mud cakes and magenta petals on a lawn. Fixed things— cause and effect, the physical laws—seemed fluent. His sense of smell sharpened. A light green scent detached itself from the routine reek of damp and rot, the bass note of the tropics. For a brief interval, a world he had systematically disregarded acquired power over him. He saw the new moon through glass and crossed his fingers to avert misfortune. The sight of two magpies on a telephone wire filled him with unreasonable joy.

Then it ended. A chap with a commission in the Ceylon Light Infantry tipped him the word that Allenby House was on a list of private residences to be requisitioned for British officers. That night Sam rose from his bed and passed through silent rooms, while the sea complained endlessly about the ice at its feet. Now and then his fingertips found their blind way to glass or carved wood. The idea of strangers going casually about the house, opening its doors and yawning in its corridors, filled him with disgust. He lay face down on Harry’s bed, persuading himself it still held the child’s smell. The dalmatian tied up for the night on the back verandah lifted its muzzle and studied him. He entered a downstairs lavatory and tugged vengefully on the porcelain handle of the chain.

The warning screams had scarcely begun when the beggars deploying their sores by the Colombo breakwater on Easter Sunday saw the ship-crowded harbor erupt with blossoms that pulsed rose at the edges. A fish market was hit in the same raid; also a wing of the lunatic asylum. A madman escaped into a universe where giant metal insects flew up from the trees to dance and blaze in the sky.

Kumar’s name was among those that figured on the register of the dead. Ten days earlier he had drunk a glass of sherbert and contracted typhoid. A buffoon’s death, thought Sam. Nevertheless there was now the possibility that the old boy had done the decent thing and returned the Bentota bungalow to him. For twenty-four hours he found himself susceptible to certain objects—a fluted vase, a paperweight, a string of beads around a shopgirl’s throat—and was at a loss to explain why he noticed these things. Then, as he paused in the act of pulling on a sock, he thought
glass
, and
greenness
, and the memory rolled and sparkled before him: a green glass ball caught in a net of foam, beside a woman’s boot, pearl-gray kid splashed with seawater. He reached for the green marvel and heard his mother say, “How clever you are, darling.” It was the sole residue of a day spent at Bentota in the third year of his life.

All through his childhood the cool green buoy had remained on a shelf in his room, but he could not recall having seen it after he went to Neddy’s. It had sunk irretrievably under the flow of time along with everything else that had been damaged or lost or discarded. His chest tightened with longing for the old house at Bentota, for a clean wide selvage that bore no resemblance to the paltry beaches of the capital. He pictured a blue ocean tottering about his son, and yellow grains tracked onto a red-polished floor.

But it transpired that Kumar had left everything to a Miss Hope Galhena. She was twenty years old and a student at the Muttukrishna Polytechnic. Learning to type had been Kumar’s last whim. Four machines of different make were discovered in his office room, along with a sheaf of misspelled observations about a quick brown fox and Miss Galhena’s charms. In encouraging a cousin with expectations to contest the will, Sam found a measure of consolation.

It was an era that had the force of a bad dream and collapsed as swiftly. In the Bay of Bengal a hundred ships were sunk in a week, but enemy air reconnaissance, working without radar, failed to detect the Eastern Fleet as it lurked among the Maldivian atolls. Like the Easter dogfights, this might have been viewed objectively as no more than a minor impediment to Japanese hallucinations. But war, like dreaming, abounds in disproportion. Generals who had held it a small matter to overrun a continent now faltered at the conquest of an island.

Regiments from the Middle East and Africa were diverted to the colony to train for jungle combat, the Japanese having administered lessons in strategy with a vividness unavailable to Sandhurst. The muscled necks of British servicemen displayed their sunburn like so many defiant little flags; they signaled stiffened resistance and a return to order. With Malaya and the Dutch colonies lost, fortunes were made in rubber, the trees slaughter-tapped to maximize yield. It was a situation conducive to trade and theft, speculation and profit; on these activities the root of Empire had always fattened.

By the end of the year the Japanese ships and their carrier-based bombers had swiveled to meet the Americans in the Pacific, and the civilians who had fled to the hills were drifting back to Colombo. Sergeants lavished promises and NAAFI chocolates on girls from decent families. To filch a Wren’s beret from her head became every schoolboy’s dearest ambition. Airstrips parted the island’s leafy hair.

No envelope bearing the government crest arrived at Allenby House. Recalling his informant’s eyes, slitted with malice as he warned of balls bowled down a marble pitch and Eurasian nurses smuggled into bedrooms, Sam could not understand how he had ever credited the report. It exemplified the era. Everyone claimed to have the inside information, rumors vied with each other in outlandishness: yellow ladies ringing for chrysanthemum tea at Raffles, white wraiths fitting railway sleepers in the Burmese jungle.

Mountbatten set up his headquarters in the botanical gardens outside Kandy. The Allied counterthrust into the archipelagos and jungles to the east was formulated in the shade of a Javan willow. Wireless bulletins that had once threatened invasion turned into a recital of names Sam associated with adultery, having in his youth been agreeably scandalized by the stories of Somerset Maugham.

On an afternoon in 1943, as he strolled among the weekend crowds on Galle Face Green flanked by his wife and son, Sam saw a man nibbling a pink cloud. Thirty seconds later in the slope of those shoulders he recognized John Shivanathan.

Leela ducked her head as usual when Sam said, “This is my wife,” but she could not help smiling. The sight of a grown man in a tie with sticky lips delighted her. Meanwhile the stranger had her son’s fingers in his own and was leading him across sun-tormented grass to a knot of food vendors. Since Kumar’s death, the menace of contagion had united Harry’s parents in a spasm of precautions. Every vegetable in Allenby House that could not be peeled was washed in three changes of potassium permanganate solution. The reek of ammonia seeped through walls. All-out assaults were conducted on the cockroaches that milder campaigns had failed to eradicate. Leela scoured the child’s hands with coal tar soap on the hour, and twice before meals. Yet here he was, advancing upon his parents with a repository of disease in each fist.

Shivanathan thrust a rosy puff into Sam’s hand, lifted his hat to Leela and was gone.

For a moment Sam was lost. It is difficult to expostulate while grasping a stick of candy floss. Then the past came flying into his mind like a stone. “
He’s no oil lamp
. That was how Claudia described him. Blighter used to hang around and bore the poor girl for hours.”

Harry said unexpectedly, “No oil painting.” He was at the age when he noticed patterns of words and parroted them.

“Quite right! No oil painting either!” Before he had realized what he was doing, Sam’s mouth was full of sugar. “It’s a miracle how Shiva’s got on. District Judge of Panadura. Advisor to the State Council. Billy Mohideen told me the latest—he’s been inviting fellows to dinner and reading them a lot of bilge he’s written about the ancient rhythms of village life.”

“He seemed kind,” ventured Leela.

“He was there that night at the Downhill. Heard everything Nagel said. But all he could think about was his precious coolies. Couldn’t make the leap to Taylor.” Sam’s teeth met in sweet pink air. “A plod-der,” he announced.

S
eedlings thrust upward between stones, there were furry outbreaks of green on rock and leafy tendrils fused to rusting iron. Once, Maud had thought of that opulence as immoderate, a blind vegetable excess that overran every weak thing it encountered. Now she found it pleasing that life renewed itself cell by cell, that it was assertive and tenacious.

In March the flamboyante tree was hung with scarlet panicles.
Poinciana. Poinciana
something. It was the year of Maud’s lists. At the bottom of one of her trunks she had found a volume swaddled in a paisley shawl:
The Ceylon Gardener’s Handbook
, the morocco on its spine worn loose and her father’s name on the flyleaf, Cyril Rajaratne, 1878.
Cassia fistula
, Indian laburnum, known in Sinhalese as
ehela. Tamarindus indica
, tamarind,
siyambala
. She quizzed Padma for the Tamil names of roots and herbs that lay about the kitchen and noted down her replies. Ginger translated as
inji
, garlic as
vella-vengam
. The fiery tongues of the
niyangala
creeper ran through the compound, licking trees. Bright pink amaryllis wove rugs for the earth. The beauty of the place waxed insistent. Maud’s lists proliferated and flowered.

An entry in her diary might consist of a single notation—
dung beetle
, for instance, the bald syllables entirely inadequate to convey the concentrated purpose that emanated from the insect as it molded a ball of dung twice its own size from a half-dried cow pat, the slow hour spent watching as it inched this treasure backwards to its lair. Grasses, snails, the withering of a shrub, white birds like torn clouds over ripening paddy: once Maud had begun to notice these things, they were always there, waiting for her attention. She came and went from the house with sprays of leaves and samples of berries in a jet-fringed bag; she read of the medicinal properties of plants that flourished casually in the vast green dispensary of the jungle, and learned how to name them in four languages. Knowledge was a discipline in which she found pleasure, even if it was helpless against a power that asserted itself now and then over the years.

When that happened, things slipped out of their elements. A human face might peer at her from the chipped brickwork of a wall. Mosses grew eyes and moved. Tiny fish, vivid as gems, glowed briefly among ferns. Four headless mandarins in funereal kimonos paraded before her, on a log where a row of cormorants had stood with wings stretched wide as they pecked lice from their pinions. Once, in the unambiguous glare of noon, a figure walked less than six feet ahead of her on the road. It was neither male nor female, and its skin was a luminous coppery blue.

These phenomena no longer disturbed Maud. They were integral to the place in a way her presence was not. If whatever sent them had a message for her, it would be revealed in time. She accepted them, and they left her alone.

Between the jungle and the dhobi, her finery gradually fell to pieces. Fragments of georgette rotted into the earth. Birds braided strips of chiffon into their nests. Once she saw a weaverbird with a scrap she recognized in its bill, and recalled the legend that says the weaverbird studs its nest with fireflies to light it up at night. She would have liked to witness this, the gleam of phosphorescence illuminating a twist of muddied lace, the last glory of sea-green foam that had spun to Viennese waltzes.

Every few months a
bolanool
man called at the house, a Moor with a withered hand and a tin trunk carried on his head. He traveled at an unhurried pace, content to squat for hours over a cup of thrice-sugared tea. Maud’s purchases seldom ran to more than a packet of needles or a ball of Glasgow thread, but the Moor always insisted on unpacking his entire box for her. Like all peddlars he understood magic. Its performance required him to conjure a world stocked with marvels, the residue of every child’s dreams. A flotilla of shallow trays would materialize on the verandah, each packed tight with ribbons and combs and tiny cakes of sandalwood soap. The Moor might slide a thimble painted with poppies into Maud’s hand or a little japanned cylinder crammed with glass-headed pins. Small bright things have their own potency; she would find herself buying a card of round green buttons or a skein of scarlet embroidery silk, objects she had no use for but coveted with a child’s uncomplicated greed.