The Hamilton Case (3 page)
Dowager ladies began sniffing and asking in ringing tones for the manager. All oblivious, Pater smoked his pipe and chatted away. When Maud’s party approached, he was saying, “You must promise me, as a man of honor, never again to soil your lips with China. Ceylon tea! The flavor, you know, is incomparable. If you could see those hillsides on an April morning!” There and then, Mater decided to marry him.
Beware of what you fall in love with. I have often observed that we are attracted to those characteristics that we ourselves do not possess; so it is not surprising that they quickly lose their fascination. My mother, a shrewd, pragmatic woman, was charmed by this informal, open-handed stranger. Within days she was calling him Ritzy: a nickname that revealed her disdain for detail (she had met him, as you will recall, at the Savoy) as well as her craving for glamour. But as love’s feast was succeeded by familiarity’s reckoning, she would realize she had married a man who liked nothing better than giving things away.
Society is intolerant of this impulse—only think where it might lead—and so it was fortunate, from my father’s point of view, that a ready-made, socially sanctioned outlet was at hand for his weakness. The horses came from Ireland and Arabia, from Cape Town and Calcutta, beautiful, smooth-muscled beasts, nervous as harpstrings. In the hills during the Season, in Colombo all year round, with a gardenia in his buttonhole and his lucky moonstone set in embossed silver on his little finger, Pater proceeded to unburden himself of my inheritance. From time to time he couldn’t help winning. On such occasions he was visibly downcast.
My parents quarreled frightfully. Or rather Pater dodged about the room, while my mother hurled abuse and whatever she could reach at his maddening smile: cushions, fruit, fruitstands, first editions of Tennyson, eighteenth-century candlesticks, a set of ivory figurines, a silver salver, a game of dominoes, a maidenhair fern. She plucked a canary from its cage and launched it on a stream of curses. It flew into a mirror and died. Mater seized the yellow corpse and dropped it into her teacup, then flung the lot at my father’s head.
She was a great smasher, my mother. Crystal was her speciality. My father took pains to ensure that she always had a supply of costly glass-ware at hand. Did she never realize he was making her his accomplice in his grand scheme of beggaring us? Vases, decanters, a wine-red Venetian swan and five little cygnets: they shivered apart and Mater’s yellow eyes glistened. Her lizard tongue slid over her lips. Once, peeping awestruck from behind an armchair while she raged and smashed a Baccarat jug and a dozen ruinously expensive water glasses, I saw her grow still. She strode over to Pater, thrust him back onto the ottoman and straddled him. I thought she was going to murder him, slit his throat with an icy splinter. Squeezing my knees together, I rocked for joy. She would be mine, all mine! Imagine my disappointment when she moaned and he laughed, and next thing they were sitting side by side, the best of friends.
But what I remember most about my parents is that they weren’t there.
I remember the coming of the monsoons, that intoxicating sensation of rules disobeyed as the earth darkened and the wind grew huge and swung around to a different quadrant. I remember the grassy inner courtyard, where I lay on my back through slow afternoons and waited for a disheveled cloud to move across the sky.
Beyond the servants’ quarters, on the far side of the wall that marked the rear boundary of the compound, loomed the jungle. Green birds flew in and out of it. One day I stacked bricks at the foot of the wall and heaved myself level with the parapet overhead. There I gazed into the face of a cobra, who was coiled in a patch of sunlight. I did not repeat the experiment.
My earliest companion was my smooth gray pony, Moonshine. Every morning and evening I would ride him to the trunk road and back, bracketing each day with his comforting presence. There were dogs, too, five or six Great Danes reeking of Lifebuoy soap sprawled about the place like trophies. Pater was fond of the breed; perhaps they reminded him of horses. He used to feed them toast spread with Gentleman’s Relish. They never lived very long: those the snakes didn’t get, the ticks finished off.
Forty years earlier, when a fire had destroyed part of the house, my grandfather himself had drawn up the plans for its reconstruction. The resulting admixture of styles and periods bore eloquent testimony to the triumph of zeal over talent. The courtyards typical of our ancient homesteads were now imprisoned between verandahs tiled in the tiny mustard and rust hexagons of any Civil Service bungalow. Satinwood doors, three inches thick, that had withstood Dutch bullets, opened onto lavatories. A corridor turned an angle and collided with a bricked-up doorway. An ancient fresco on the gateposts, restored by an artist who had toiled on these scenes from the life of the Buddha for three years, jarred with the marble nymphs and shepherd boys Sir Stanley had shipped out from Genoa to lurk about the compound. Fortunately Miss Dawson and her oar intervened at this juncture and my grandfather’s vision of battlements was never translated into stone.
I had been bored in every cranny of the vast, ill-assorted house he had created. The table in the dining room could seat thirty-two; morose with boredom, I once lay under its ebony expanse throughout a nine-course luncheon, rousing myself now and then to inspect the ankles of a cabinet minister’s daughter. Boredom inspired me to gouge our family tree into a calamander sideboard and take a single huge bite from every biscuit and cake in the pantry. Spiteful with tedium, I tortured frogs and birds in oleander thickets, only to weary of their suffering no sooner than it had begun.
At last, desperate for distraction, I would make a tour of all the cabinets in the house, studying the fabulous flotsam of Empire: scarlet-lacquered boxes, ivory-stemmed opium pipes, pewter card trays, an ostrich egg mounted on a filigree stand, even a jade-green tika from New Zealand. Scattered through this priceless collection was a democratic assortment of leather camels from Aden and seashell ashtrays from Brighton. No distinction was made between the relative worth of these articles. A Georgian tankard might hold a gaudy paper fan emblazoned with cherry-blossom in Birmingham, or a seventeenth-century Persian wall tile painted with ruby pomegranates. All served equally to link our old house, dozing in the jungle, with the great electric world of merchants and machinery. I was the center that drew and held them all—or so I imagined, and would grow lightheaded with pride. Years later in London, as I strolled through the perfumed abundance of Mr Selfridge’s emporium, I was visited by the same delightful sensation. Such profusion, such variety! A cornucopia of disparate items, lace-trimmed handkerchiefs and rattan parrot cages, collected
en bloc
from every outpost of the globe. My gaze alone lent meaning to its surreal topography, rescuing it from chaos.
If I close my eyes I can still conjure the liniment smell of the medicine chest that stood in Mater’s bedroom at Lokugama. It was painted white and locked with a small brass key. My mental taxonomy pairs this faintly sinister cupboard with an angled cabinet that occupied a corner of Pater’s study. Objects that had been in our family for generations were heaped on its shelves in disarray. Ornamental daggers dulled by time, palm-leaf scrolls bearing royal signatures, statuettes of the Buddha, tooled betel boxes, gold-inlaid areca nut cutters, perforated chank shells, a jumble of tortoiseshell and silver hair combs: they all gave off a disagreeable odor of dust and neglect.
We had at least a dozen indoor servants and a regiment of gardeners and grooms. I remember the commotion when a servant-girl threw herself down the kitchen well; for a week, all the household water had to be drawn from the estate wells and brought to the big house in a cart, a welcome bump in the monotonous graph of our routine.
From time to time, out of nowhere, the kitchen courtyard would be full of squawking and feathers. An orchestra from the nearest town would show up in a bullock cart. At least, their instruments arrived in the cart; the musicians trudged along beside it. Tuning up was invariably accompanied by complaints about bunions. Later my parents would arrive from Colombo, sweeping in with presents and anywhere from three to thirty friends. I would rush to Mater and grasp her about the knees. Sometimes, not knowing how else to express my longing, I sank my teeth into the folds of her skirt and worried the material. She patted my head. Her tea-brown hands were diamond-shaped and scented with Russian tobacco. A cat’s-eye bracelet winked at her wrist.
Pater always bought champagne by the twelve dozen. The parties lasted until dawn. After everyone had gone away again, I used to line up the empty bottles along the verandah and shoot them with my air rifle. That’s what comes to mind when I think of my childhood: a boy in short trousers and long socks, the listless, bright, empty afternoon, birds flying up from leaves at the first explosion.
O
nce a week, with a servant in attendance, our buggy cart carried me into the nearest town, several miles distant, for my elocution class. The cart was drawn by a black ox with silver bells around its neck. A few years ago, as a pert little BOAC stewardess strapped me into my seat on a flight to England, I thought of that ox, with its lustrous eyes and hay breath. From buggies to airplanes in the span of a man’s life. Is there a phenomenon more emblematic of our century’s accelerating trajectory?
My teacher, Miss Vanderstraaten, seemed wholly ancient to me, so she was probably about forty. She lived with her mother in a dark house devoid of oxygen set within the blackened walls of the Dutch fort. Her academy was run from an antimacassared back parlor, where the starched children of local notables were delivered to her to be drilled in enunciation. Its furnishings included an occasional table crowded with photographs in heavy frames, and a row of monogrammed Delft plates on a shelf.
Miss Vanderstraaten was the first Dutch Burgher I knew. The European purity of her race was her great pride, and she guarded it with the zeal that brands all lost causes. One day I arrived a little early for my lesson, and so encountered a Mrs. de Jong and her beefy daughter, Phyllis, in the hall. Phyllis and I eyed each other with mutual distaste, while her mother, one of those women who sticks, exchanged a protracted farewell with Miss Vanderstraaten.
As soon as the door closed behind the de Jongs, my teacher’s sugared tones altered. “The cheek of that woman,” she hissed. “Black as the ace of spades and always passing herself off as one of us. As if everyone doesn’t know she was one of the railway Rosarios before she married.” My mystification must have been apparent, because she added impatiently, “A Portuguese Burgher. A lot of
very common
Sinhalese took Portuguese names when they converted.”
“Pater says there’s not a Ceylonese without mongrel blood in his veins,” I replied, gratified that I could keep up my end of the conversation. “He says we’ve all got at least one skeleton in the family closet—a Tamil, a Moor, a Swiss mercenary, someone we’d rather keep quiet about.”
“That might well be true of
your
people,” said Miss Vanderstraaten, enunciating with great clarity. Her eyes flicked over me from head to toe. “Although you look
extremely Sinhalese
to me.”
Whenever I tripped up in my recitations, Miss Vanderstraaten’s wooden ferule thudded down on my knuckles. Mosquitoes congregated in the dim space under the table where I swung my legs. “How now brown cow,” I intoned until the itching grew wild and I had to break off to tear at my shins, while the ruler crashed about my shoulders for fidgeting.
Miss Vanderstraaten often left the room in the middle of a lesson. I assumed this was for reasons to do with her bed-ridden mother, whose voice quavered down the stairs from time to time. Now I am not so sure. My teacher’s habitual odor of lavender water and camphor was subtly different when she returned. In Oxford I was once at a party where a bottle of gin slipped from a girl’s fingers. The sweetish whiff of those fumes transported me instantly across the years. I found myself once again in that cramped parlor, I could see the swing of Miss Vanderstraaten’s coral beads, feel the nubbly texture of her plum-colored tablecloth beneath my elbows as I leaned over my book of exercises.
One day when my teacher had gone to the solace of her flask, I crossed the room to study her photographs. I picked up a studio portrait of a raven-haired goddess on the arm of a stout European gentleman at least twenty years her senior, posed against a painted backdrop of snowy mountain peaks. Peering at the photograph, I had just realized with a jolt that the beauty was my teacher—the mole fastened like a tick under her left eye was unmistakable—when the ruler caught me hard across my arm. Miss Vanderstraaten snatched the photograph from me and clasped it to her pintucked bosom. She brought her face down so close that I could see the grains of powder caught in the downy hair at the corners of her upper lip: “Don’t you ever,
ever
touch my belongings with your
black hands
.”
Behind Miss Vanderstraaten’s house lay a harbor that had seen the fleets of Phoenician merchants; beyond it, the Indian Ocean rolled without interruption to the southern ice. But that spacious blue view was invisible from the parlor, where the blind was always pulled down behind elaborate lace curtains.
My formal education in those years was dispensed by a series of tutors, Englishmen whom the years have blurred into a single pinkish young man with an archetypal chin. The product of a minor public school, he instructs me in Ancient Civilizations (which is to say Egyptian, Greek and Roman) and is tormented by prickly heat. We study Geography with the aid of a globe supported by ormolu caryatids. In Arithmetic he allows that fractions are dashed confusing. He hears out my Latin declensions slapping at mosquitoes; he scratches his bites, which grow red and inflamed. He takes tea on the verandah, staring out at the vegetation that crawls about the house looking for a way in; the milk has turned, again. If he’s a good sort, he plays the piano and teaches me a bawdy song; we belt out the chorus together. Once a month he goes into town, where he tries to work up an interest in the magistrate’s sister, a lady with buck teeth who conducts séances. After a while he packs up the blank notebooks he intended to fill with piquant detail for his
Travels in the East
. A card at Christmas informs us that he has settled into his post of assistant housemaster at his old school. A wistful postscript adds that in England tea simply doesn’t taste the same.
