The Hamilton Case (29 page)

Maud felt full of life, its force streaming through her limbs. A tremendous sense of well-being wrapped itself about her. She stumbled into its embrace and slept like a baby.

The bungalow keeper was a man who yawned often and tremendously, cracking his jaw. He was still retying his sarong and blinking sleep from his eyes when he saw the bundle lying on the verandah.

At the other end of the day, long after the burble of conjecture had subsided, and the doctor had finished issuing contradictory orders and driven away, Sirisena remembered the exercise book. It still lay like a broken bird near the door where he had found her. By the dim verandah light, his thumb rifled pages. That he could neither read nor write was one of the sources of his rage. Its lightning crazed through him now. The book cost five cents at any
kadai
; and represented everything that would always elude him.

The moon eased itself out from under a weight of clouds. When the bungalow keeper turned away from the decaying breath of the rubbish heap he saw the house before him, coated in silver light. For an instant it appeared utterly unfamiliar: a place he had visited only in a dream. Then the vision righted itself and he was returned to the world.

T
he last time Sam saw his mother was on a February morning in 1948. The English were leaving, with the haste instinctive to thieves. As he drove out of Colombo he kept the heel of his hand on the horn. The crowd thickened wherever a festive
pandal
arched over the road, its bamboo struts and crosspiece festooned with flowers and strings of colored bulbs.

The sea hissed on his right. The waves were up, whisked into sloppy peaks. Spray blew onto the hood of his car where the road embraced a headland of dark rock. Everything was changing: the sea crept forward and back, maps were altered grain by grain. Even when he turned off the coast road, he was conscious of that twisting vastness at his back. It propelled him forward, inland, toward certainty.

Maud lay propped against pillows. Her eyes were turned to a corner of the ceiling. She had been lying there, silent, the left side of her jaw dragged loose, for eight weeks. The doctor insisted that it was only a minor stroke. Yet life ebbed from her, a steady leaking.

The room was dim, dust-furred. The nurse slumped by the door took advantage, like all her kind. Sam saw, with irritation, that a sticky spoon with a tarnished handle lay on the drawn-thread tray cloth on the bedside table. His wife had stitched that mat, and the matching runner on the chest of drawers. Now both were creased, stained, the tray cloth was rust spotted. The table itself was cluttered with smeared tumblers, and bottles labeled in an apothecary’s italics. But the doctor, who drove out to see Maud every few days, said that she was making no progress. “Lost interest. It happens all the time.”

This doctor, whose name was Dickie Meerwald, had a birthmark on his left cheek, curving around his socket, where the raised skin was mulberry hued. He held his head awkwardly, angling the bad side down toward his shoulder. If not for the stain he would have been an imposing man: sharp-featured, flat-stomached. Sam remembered him from Neddy’s, a new boy in too-long navy-blue shorts standing at an angle to the boundary wall. The jolt when he turned his head: a flipped coin coming down on the side of calamity.

Saucers of water had been placed under the legs of the dining table. At dinner the bungalow keeper said that the ants were bad that year. Sam hadn’t troubled to telephone ahead, so ate unpolished country rice, fried snake beans and coconut
sambol
, like the servants. But the cook-woman had opened a tin and curried some mackerel for him. The fire-works began while the dishes were being carried in. He chewed slowly, to the sound of distant explosions.

The following morning he went in to see Maud and found himself calculating how many years had passed since they had last touched each other. He sat beside the bed with his hands on his knees. There was a sickroom smell of musty sheets and Brand’s Essence of Chicken. His eyes alighted on his mother’s slippers, the indent of her heel and the ball of her foot plainly visible in the worn rubber. He wrenched his gaze away.

His chair creaked when he brought his knees together. Maud’s lids flew open. Her eyes had remained beautiful: leaf-shaped, the unclouded amber of old. For one long radiant moment, he thought she had seen him clearly: not as he appeared, but as he was. “How clever you are,” she would say. She would say, “My marvelous boy.”

He picked up the case he had set on her bedside table. Made of mahogany and lined with royal-blue silk, it held eight cut-glass bottles with silver-gilded stoppers and mounts, a silver-backed clothes brush and a shaving pot. He had acquired it in a lot, along with a pair of vine-clustered grape scissors and a papier-mâché card tray, at an auction house on Bullers Road, obeying the usual imperative that directed his purchases. It was only after the auctioneer had knocked everything down to him that he spotted the initials twined on the lid of the case.

The past was retrievable; at that moment he was certain of it. Time dissolved, slipped sideways in that room. The girl who was his mother stopped him in his flight. She would not let him pass, but steadied him in her arms. He angled the case and traced its gold lettering with a finger that trembled:
H. W. P. O.
“Look,” he said. “It belonged to Pater.”

Maud gave no sign of having understood or even heard. But when he was at the door she said, her voice clear, “Only eight bottles, Ritzy?” Then her crooked, irresistible smile. “I suppose I smashed the other two.”

That night, in Colombo, the noise jangled him awake. He had dozed off in his office room, feet up on a low table. A Christmas fly, seduced by the lamp at his elbow, was disintegrating in half an inch of brandy. Still cobwebby with sleep he swung his feet down, and pins and needles tattooed prickles along the muscles of his calves. The telephone squatting on his desk like a sooty imp shrieked again, bloated with self-importance.

He knew at once what this midnight summons signified. The operator went off the line and he heard the bungalow keeper’s voice, buzzing with static and the thrill of bad news. It drowned out the sound of the sea. But he knew it was there, a rolling darkness to which he would come.

E
ight years later, in 1956, what was now called the Sinhalese People’s Party won government in a landslide victory at the polls. Sam gave it as his opinion that the elections had been rigged; he knew fellows who knew other fellows who had witnessed the bribery and voter intimidation at first hand. The chaps—decent chaps with
backgrounds
—who had taken over the burden of government from the British woke up to find themselves in opposition, scrambling for scapegoats and explanations.

The new Minister of Culture—Jungle Jaya, as an inspired columnist dubbed him—appeared in every newspaper, massive, genial, wreathed in marigolds and temple flowers. At the club Sam ran into a fellow from Neddy’s who swore that Jaya had slept with the wives of every one of his fellow ministers. This despite the gargantuan paunch, dragging at him like guilt, that rendered the act almost impossible. It was common knowledge in government circles, said Sam’s informant, that the Minister accomplished sexual intercourse only with the aid of a ramp designed to facilitate the copulation of elephants.

At the Queen’s–St. Edward’s match Jaya showed up in a sarong, his silver and blue rosette pinned to a Nehru collar. When he presented the cup to the winning team—Queen’s, with four wickets in hand, as it happened—he remarked that it was only when watching a game of cricket that he could understand why so many intelligent men had believed in the honorable intentions of the British. He seemed not to notice the flushed presence on the same stage of Warden Radford and half a dozen English masters. The boys cheered, as boys do. Jaya clambered into the back of an open truck with the rowdiest of them and drove around Colombo, serenading schoolgirls with caddish songs. It was bally bad form from start to finish.

At Neddy’s Harry had one of those nondescript careers. For a few months at the age of fourteen he displayed an enthusiasm for hockey, which evaporated as soon as his house selected him as a reserve. Once, he was placed third in Geography; the maps he drew were exquisite. His reports typically characterized him as
a pleasant boy.
The lack of interest he inspired in his teachers was manifest.

Sam sometimes thought that this ordinariness was itself a kind of talent, and not unenviable: it freed his son from the knotted anxiety that had attended his own successes at school. Is there any torment in adult life keener than that suffered by a clever child hanging around the noticeboard where the results will be posted? Yet the next moment he would be speared by anger: why couldn’t the boy make an effort, when was contentment with mediocrity not symptomatic of a mediocre mind?

The years lengthened, breathing slowly.

Harry had his tonsils out.

He was left-handed.

He rode his bicycle everywhere.

He went to the pictures, or swimming at Mount Lavinia, with friends from school. They shared a brief craze for cramming themselves into telephone booths, a fad that swept the city and attracted the disfavor of newspaper editors.

He asked for and received a camera one Christmas.

He was allergic to penicillin.

He had a pen pal in Oslo.

He had inherited his mother’s weakness for clear, bright colors. His bedroom was scattered with a confetti of cheap objects that had caught his eye on Pettah pavements: two china eggcups manufactured in Japan, one scarlet, the other leaf green; a turquoise tin mug with a crimson rim; a plastic orange.

He loved eggs scrambled with green chilies, and an American improbably named Elvis.

He wrote to the manufacturers of Ponds Vanishing Cream to avail himself of their free offer: an autographed photograph of their model, the film star Miss Kamala Devi,
Loveliness Personified.

He had the same shoe size as his father. And like him, he couldn’t hold a tune.

These were the things Sam knew about his son when the boy left for Oxford in his twentieth year. After eighteen months of cramming, Harry had been offered a place at his father’s college; the question of what he was to read had proved almost as problematic. He had dropped Latin after scraping through his O Levels, and even Sam was obliged to acknowledge that he had no aptitude for the law. Probed about the future, Harry was typically malleable and vague: he could see himself in the Civil Service, he wouldn’t mind tea, he hadn’t altogether ruled out teaching. It was plain that he could not be left to steer his own course. Sam wrote to his old tutor. Fisher, now the Senior Fellow, suggested that the boy read history.
It does a young man no lasting harm.
Thus it was settled.

On the evening before Harry sailed, Sam stood him dinner at a hotel by the sea. It was a grand old place: atrocious architecture and beautiful décor. The boy chose a table on the pillared verandah. At the far end of the dining room a quartet was playing “Under the Bridges of Paris.” The music reached them in dashes, interrupted by the breakers from India hurling themselves at the sea wall.

This was before the ban on all imported goods. Champagne arrived while they were waiting for their baked crab. Harry lit a Gold Flake, fumbling it a little. He was still new to smoking, having taken it up while cramming for his exams. Noting his awkwardness, Sam thought of all the rites the boy had yet to negotiate and with what negligence the world could crush him. He gripped his knife. This circumvented the impulse that would have him clasp his son’s wrist and cry, Don’t leave me.

He said, “Your grandmother was a great smoker,” the words a blurted link between two needs. But it sounded harsh: accusatory and flat. Harry swiveled his head away.

A trolley of dishes with silver lids glided past. The scent of cardamom arrived to muddle the sea tang of salt and sewage.

Harry said, “Did you know that curry comes from a Tamil word?
Kari
, meaning a sauce.”

“I say!” He eyed his son. “What an extraordinary thing to know. Where did you pick that up?”

Harry shrugged. Sam saw that it was, inexplicably, the wrong question. He resented the unreasonableness of this.

As always, silence was the solder they applied to the cracks between them.

The quartet played “Blue Skirt Waltz,” followed by “As Time Goes By.”

Sam said, “Great thing to be a young fellow with Oxford waiting like a book.”

He said, “A May Ball, you know.”

He said, “Nosing down the river in a punt. The willows. And those birds, let me think what they’re called. Sedge warblers?”

Harry looked into his empty glass. He drank like a young man, thirstily. He looked up and said, “Granny told me you were refused a tryout for the tennis teams. And that the stories you wrote for the college magazine were always returned. They didn’t even open the envelope.”

Sam could see Harry’s lips moving, but knew that these little razor-tipped shafts had been loosed in hell. He wanted to put his arms up before his face. The realization that the boy had carried that information within him all these years, like an illness, was unbearable. Sam had never spoken of these slights. He had forgotten them himself. It was like that game he had played as a child, where a fellow came up noiselessly behind you and drove his knees into the backs of yours and what you felt above all, as you went down, was that you had been a fool.

There was a weight in his breast pocket, the gold lighter he had had engraved with his son’s initials. He put his hand to his chest.

Harry said, “Why do you never talk about what they did to you? Why is it always water meadows and the deer at Magdalen?”

On a planet where men are moved by a superior mechanism it might have been apparent to Sam that belligerence was the coating with which the boy was trying to swallow his nerves. As it was, he managed only to say, “She must have got it all from Jaya. He had cronies at Oxford. Threads of third-hand gossip, spun out of all proportion.” It clattered between them, sounding tinny and worthless, like one of the new coins the government had minted.