The Hamilton Case (28 page)

One of the spry barbets that flew about the garden developed an interest in Harry. It would follow him around the compound, alighting on a branch or a wall to regard him with fondness. He led his men in a daredevil charge on the golden battlements of an abandoned anthill, and the bird fluttered its wings to cheer their victory. He thought it tracked him on his walks with Maud but could not be sure. The jungle was full of those small green parrots and the
kukra-kukra-kukra
of their insistent call.

When the temperature was less than ninety-six degrees, shadows showed violet. In the middle of the day they turned blue. If he stood on the verandah in the afternoon and sniffed, he could smell the heat. “Always going in the sun without a hat,” scolded his ayah. “You will become black like a dirty Tamil person.”

He stepped along packed red earth beside Maud. In his mind he skirted his grandmother with caution, as if she were a piece of furniture against which he might scrape his shin. The old woman stood fresh-peeled cinnamon quills in jars, drenching the air with scent. She went about the house in bare feet, like a servant. She picked up a drumstick from her plate and sucked flesh from bone with wet noises. Her arms and legs were meshed in silvery scales of drying skin. She said
stomach
instead of
tummy
. She cut cigarettes in half to make them last longer. Her nails were unpolished and the color of horn.

These were confusing signs. He had absorbed, at a very early age, the distinction between a
woman
and a
lady.
In his grandmother’s presence these terms slid toward that disturbing category of words he could not at once fasten to a thing:
teapot
and
kettle
caused the same queasiness to stir in him, or
orange
and
yellow
, ideas that slipped in his mind like a soapy plate gliding through Soma’s fingers on its way to disaster. He had not intended to, but found himself gripping his grandmother’s knotted hand.

The child’s presence in the house released an unquietness. It was not altogether hostile. A row of mud cakes decorated with crimson petals pulled from a Barberton daisy was set out on a step for Harry one morning. A white pebble winked between each crumbling cake.

At that hour of the evening when the sky turns inky blue and children are driven in from their games, he heard a soft voice call from the crotons, “Ready!”

The monsoon rolled in the distance, like thunder. Sweat glued Harry’s shirt to his skin. He was walking along the back verandah, past the room next to his grandmother’s, when he found himself breathing icy air. His ayah had told him that a baby had died within those walls. His head grew hot with fright.

A boy at school by the name of Rex Ebert had an uncle who had served in Burma. Wounded in action, he had a leg that unscrewed and an artificial eye. Harry had seen him, straight-spined and stiff-gaited, at a cricket match, where he had given off no more than the usual adult charge of menace. Yet Rex swore that at night his uncle took himself apart entirely, so that nothing was left in his room. It was information Harry would have given a great deal to unknow.

If he found himself alone he ran, from the dining table to his bedroom, between verandah and pantry. As he fled he kept his head lowered and would not glance to left or right. He sniffed all morning rather than fetch the handkerchief that waited at the far end of shadow-filled corridors. The lavatory was an ordeal in a class of its own, a dank chamber where he crouched on a mahogany seat with his chin tucked on his chest. To look up was to risk facing whatever might be standing in the doorway. He learned to move his bowels every third day, forging a lifelong link between anxiety and constipation.

Clouds of white butterflies with pale green underwings streamed into the compound one morning, signaling that the monsoon was on its way. The day was as still as a pond but tiny fingers of air stroked Harry’s scalp and set it tingling.

A clinging odor was remarked on by everyone in the house. The smell came and went at unpredictable intervals and was predominantly sweet, as if a bottle of scent had been left unstoppered in a room. Yet in a moment it could turn foul. The stretching of nerves, characteristic of the season, was thus exacerbated. A dish of fried sprats sprang from the bungalow keeper’s hand. Harry’s ayah sliced open her heel on a shard of bottle glass.

A formal arrangement of squares was found chalked on the verandah one morning. Hopscotch was a girl’s game. Harry would have scorned it at home. Here he scoured garden beds for a smooth, flat stone. His
butta
landed in the first, second and third squares. The boy aimed at the fourth until his arm ached. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered, whenever he remembered. At each attempt the stone fell on a line, or outside the chalked squares.

He lay in his room, working up to the test of courage he had devised. There was no breeze but he heard the jungle creaking. He thought of a story he liked about pirates and flying fish. For a moment he was the boy on the bowsprit, with white birds following.

His ayah snored on her mat across the doorway. Damp and the urine of polecats had drawn a brown map of Africa on the ceiling. He gouged a lump of dry, gray matter from a nostril. Then he rose and stepped over his ayah, dropping the snot into her open mouth. She shifted and muttered and didn’t wake.

During his illness and convalescence all spices had been omitted from his diet. In the pantry he scooped lime pickle from a dish and licked his fingers. He filled a tumbler from the ceramic water filter. It tasted faintly of dust.

Thus fortified, he returned to the room where the baby had died and went in. It contained only a faint, sweet reek and the corpses of flies. Somewhat disappointed, he wandered out again.

A sofa with elaborately scrolled ends leaned against one wall of the verandah that ran around the courtyard, its broken leg propped up on half a brick. He lay on its sagging rattan, with his feet resting on one of the scrolls. The second toe on his right foot overshot his big toe by half an inch. This was
moospainthu
. The courtyard was a cauldron of light with a blue enamel lid. He fell asleep and woke screaming.

A rat’s tail lay across his ayah’s shriveled chest. She coiled the plait into a gray knot and speared it with hairpins. All the while she scolded him: her practiced eye had spotted the smear on his chin. “
Aiyo
,” she whined to Maud, who was lowering herself onto the sofa. “You see how disobedient he is? He steals food that gives him bad dreams. If he falls ill, the
hamuduruwo
will say it is my fault. But what am I to do?”

Rattan had stamped itself into the boy’s cheek and arm, a trellis of cinnamon flesh. He turned his head and looked at Maud. “I dreamed I was in that room,” he said. “And there was a cushion on the floor. And a thing in a net.”

“What kind of thing?” she asked.

He answered without hesitation. “A hand like mine.”

O
n Harry’s last day at Lokugama, the household was woken at dawn by a bulletlike downpour that exhausted itself almost at once. Over a fortnight there had been a series of these eccentric starts to the monsoon. Even now the sky was as gray as a bucket but the air remained heavy and close, with no sign of the singing winds that would sweep in when the rain arrived to stay.

But an hour later the trees around the house were bowing until they groaned. The first drops of rain fell like fat fish. Harry’s ayah scuttled between rooms, hiding scissors and knives in cupboards, draping towels over mirrors as lightning splintered the enormous sky.

Soon rain poured straight down as if a tap had been left open overhead. While Sam was still explaining that flooding had rendered the roads impassable, the line went dead.

Maud remained in the hall, clutching the receiver. Why had Leo’s room contained a cushion, rather than a pillow, in Harry’s dream? What did the substitution signify?

She thought of Claudia, and her special cushion—no different from any other—that the little girl insisted on jamming between her knees when she slept. Maud could remember the child’s fierce attachment to the thing, how she had trailed that silky blue package everywhere, dragging it through grass and over earth so that its sheen dulled and its piping frayed. At last it began to disintegrate, and was wrested from her grasp while she stiffened her body, and thrown away while she screamed.

Rain crashed on the roof. Maud’s spine prickled. She turned to see a child approaching fast, his shirt a pale smear in the rain-darkened hall. Harry ran past and out onto the verandah.

There he swung himself up onto the wall and extended first one stick leg and then the other into the downpour. Far from the regimenting forces of pavements and lampposts, wind and water were larger, more elemental things; he needed to express his solidarity with them. Children always side with monsoons, thrilling to the assault on stability. It was an instinct the boy would never quite outgrow.

The coconut trees against the wall swayed and ducked behind each other, and clouds blew through their feathered heads like smoke. Water foamed in the compound and raced down the drive, where puddles boiled with caramel bubbles. Curtains of rain turned the day so dark that lights were required in the house. But switches clicked uselessly; electricity put up only a feeble struggle against the monsoon. To Harry’s delight, the bungalow keeper produced bunches of candles from the pantry. He was allowed to stick them onto saucers. With candles, there was always the hope that someone would get hot wax on his fingers.

By the time lunch was cleared away, tiles had been wrenched from the roof and the household had run out of buckets. The distinction between inside and outside blurred as rooms filled up with falling rain. Basins, saucepans and an enameled chamberpot were placed wherever someone was bound to trip over them. Furniture hauled into unfamiliar positions out of the way of leaks provided a further hazard. There were groans, and hands clamped to bruised shins.

Leaves turned black and rain fell in ropes. When it stopped, late in the afternoon, steam rose from the drive. In half an hour it would pour again. Meanwhile the sun shone as if clouds were a fanciful notion that would never amount to anything.

All night, sky and leaves dripped. Harry flailed in his bed. His lids snapped open. He had said cushion. But he meant pillow. He realized that now.
Pillow. Cushion.
But then he wasn’t sure. One or the other lay beneath his cheek.
Cushion. Pillow.
They melted and merged. They wavered and became sleep.

In the morning, Maud called Harry to her and gave him her snake stone. She told him the legend associated with it, shouting over the din of the rain. A squall of wind carried a pestilential stench into the room. The stone rolled on the child’s palm: a dull little nugget, ochre-tinged.

At lunchtime it was discovered that an act of municipal heroism had restored the supply of electricity. Harry raced in and out of rooms, puffing his cheeks and blowing out candles with great gusty breaths. A horn tooted at the gate. Maud thought, How am I to live, not seeing his face?

S
he was lying on her coverlet, sleepless in the dark, when her bed began to shake. The door crashed on its hinges, drawers opened and slammed shut. One by one, her fingers were forced back from a bedpost. There was a weight on her chest, so that she fought for air. Coverlet and sheets were ripped from beneath her. Very clearly, above the rage, a thin sobbing went on and on. None of this was as frightening as the sense of a frustrated, furious presence. Its warm breath was in her ear.

When it ended, a minute later, she rose from the disordered bed. “I am a stupid old woman,” said Maud to whatever was listening. Her fingers groped for the switch on the standard lamp, but everything was already clear.

God knows what that old fool of a doctor gave me to knock me out. It settled like fog on my brain, obscuring everything that happened that night.

Hours after I had fallen into bed, I found myself on the back verandah. Every step I took was weighty and effortful, like striding through water. Dr. van Dort had taken Leo away with him, but I had either forgotten or didn’t care. Instinct propelled me toward the room
where he had last drawn breath. The door was open. And on the threshold I walked into a child.

That was the vision that sank into my mind and lay buried there all these years. It governed me from that moment, I realize that now. But I had understood everything the wrong way round.

It seemed essential to write it all down, to pull knowledge, at least, from the wreckage of love. Maud saw a garden laid waste by thirst, soft blooms crisped on the stem. Her pen sped as if charmed.

I should have seen what Harry’s dream meant straight away. A cushion that replaced a pillow: that was the crucial detail. It held the key to what happened to Leo.

Rain fell, the noise clamorous on the roof. When she tried to rise from the table, the walls swayed about her. She steadied herself, gripping the back of her chair.

Her diary was in her hand when she passed onto the verandah. She could not have said what she was doing; only that she was intent on reparation. Wind feathered her nightdress and someone called her name. Light flashing from the sky obliterated the courtyard. Trees filled the void, green fists bursting as far as she could see, rimmed with restless blue at the horizon. Her father lifted his hat and waved to her from that shore. The girl beside him held out her hands, strung with a ruby-red necklace. A dog with a snow-tipped tail wove in and out of view, and Iris, in strapless satin, was tangoing with a man in striped pajamas.

Other figures drew near, her dead gathering to greet her. A pigeon-toed woman, deep in conversation with Thornton. A jug-eared pirate who blew kisses. He lifted a fold of leopard skin and Maud saw the round-headed baby in his arms.

Rain drummed joyfully on the tiles, and was answered by the pounding at Maud’s temples. The door of Leo’s room gave at her touch. What she saw within, the scene glowing softly as if painted on glass, was a child with his arms folded over his chest. Then he let the pillow fall and ran forward to meet her.