The Hamilton Case (34 page)

My sister and your aunt were in the same year at school. Both outcasts, I think, Anne conscious of her stick and dragging leg, Claudia, who had been educated at home, suffering from her ignorance of the rituals that govern school life. She spent the day at our house now and then. A girl with long eyes. Her upward glance produces a streak of topaz brilliance, snuffed out straight away. Anne used to tease me about her. It was true that in her presence I became more awkward and tongue-tied than usual. Her shyness drew me; it was not a quality I associated with beautiful young girls.

I tried to pump Anne. “What is she like? What do you talk about?” “Everything but you,” said my sister. She had a sardonic vein. “Well, but what exactly?”

But she wouldn’t say. And Claudia left school after a year, when she turned sixteen. My sister kept in touch for a while, but her attention was increasingly on her studies. Claudia dropped out of our orbit, as people do.

I saw her one more time, when I was a proctor practicing up-country. It was the year of the Hamilton case. She was married by then, mistress of a house washed through night and day with a flux of people. In those years Jaya was still sniffing out the form that his convictions would assume and had yet to discover the tonic effect of anti-Tamil rhetoric on a political career. He had helped me with a submission to the Crown about conditions on the tea estates, and I was grateful for his advice. But when I took up his invitation to drop in one evening, I confess I was moved chiefly by the desire to see his wife.

Yet when she entered the room I failed to notice her. Then, beyond a wedge of dark jackets, I saw your father turn his head. I traced his gaze to a Japanese screen in a corner; and found her there, half obscured, in the dimmest recess of the room. I had forgotten how small she was. Her cocktail gown and cigarette holder looked outlandish, frippery filched for a game.

When she looked up to find me three paces away, no glimmer of recollection disturbed that topaz stare. Her glazed smile remained in place. A swirl of platitudes, light as flies, passed between us. I looked away, the bubbles of pleasant anticipation that had effervesced in my veins all day gone flat on the instant, and met your father’s eyes. They were faintly amused.

In my next letter to Anne I recounted this little episode. Her reply is beside me. After some wholly gratuitous observations about masculine vanity, she continues:
I never told you about the time I saw a wreath of blisters on Claudia’s shin. When I pressed her for an explanation, she admitted she had applied a lighted cheroot to her flesh. It was nothing, she said. An “experiment.” Her face, usually so sweet, flickered with cunning as she produced the word, fished up to please me with its scientific ring. Even an ignoramus like you might know that self-inflicted wounds signal low self-esteem? Her idea of her own worth functioned in inverse ratio to the power she accorded others. Her brother, above all. Sam this, Sam that: so she chirped endlessly. I would say she was terrified of him.

I suggest you do not place any store on that last remark. Anne, whose opinion of me was set at affectionate scorn, was a stranger to the more tender fraternal sentiments. And her medical studies having newly led her to the mire of psychoanalysis, it was a time when she was predisposed to find unwholesome depths beneath the most innocent surfaces. I report her comments only as corroboration of the undertow that ran between Claudia and your father. It rubbed me a little raw, that private strand of emotion. It felt exclusive. Contemptuous. I brooded on it for three days, then shook myself like a dog. Absurd to entertain jealousy in that quarter. He was only her brother, after all.

One incident I recall dates from ’40 or ’41. At any rate, the early part of the war. I was District Judge of Galle, and when I heard that Jaya would be addressing a rally some twenty miles away, I offered to put him up for the night. We were allies still, exchanging letters and ideas, gorging ourselves on fried rice and deviled crabs at the Mandarin Inn whenever I was in Colombo. I applauded his break with the brown sahibs in Congress. He encouraged my tentative steps into fiction, arranging a meeting with a friend who edited the little magazine where my first story was published.

I plucked him from the usual throng of sycophants and petitioners, and drove fast along back roads where the jungle streamed past and monkeys fled into the trees. I couldn’t wait to quiz him about the speech his leader had made the previous evening. Its references to the purity of the Sinhalese race had kicked up an almighty stink.

“Did you hear what Congress called him? Our Führer in waiting.” Jaya, overflowing on the narrow seat, hooted with laughter. “I knew it would put the wind up those buggers.”

“Yes, but . . .” I glanced sideways. He had his elbow propped on the window and his face showed only the most serene good cheer. “Did he run it past you?” I asked.

He laughed again. “I wrote every word of it.”

“But it’s preposterous,” I blurted. “It’s so . . . so third rate.”

“Not the cadences,” he replied. “They’re first rate.” A flattened coin of light rolled along the dash, skimming from the gold-rimmed dial on his wrist. He began to sing: “On the road to Mandalay, Where the flying fishes play, And the dawn comes up like
thun-der
. . .” He broke off. “Isn’t it
rousing
.” He sang the last line again. “Third-rate sentiments. First-rate cadences. You see?”

By then we had turned onto the trunk road. I was about to argue when my attention was caught by a shard of brightness under the trees that crowded close to the road in those days. As I said, we were traveling fast. I had barely registered the apparition when we had left it well behind.

“My God!” said Jaya, twisting to peer in the direction we had come. “Did you see . . . ?”

“Yes.”

He slumped back in his seat. “That was Maud Obeysekere,” he announced.

“My God!” A jade-hatted vision shimmered through my mind. I tried to fit it to the ruin I had glimpsed. “Are you sure?”

“The Obeysekeres have a place near here.”

“But did you see . . . ?”

“Yes.”

She had been wearing a dress that rippled and shone, a cascade of light. Sequins, perhaps, or silver beading. There was something unsettling about the sight. A sense of dislocation. Even today, the discrepancy between that gown and its setting troubles me. It suggested the perversion of some fundamental law. You will forgive me for saying it suggested insanity.

“She was a grand old girl.” Jaya’s voice was flat.

“Should we go back?”

He was silent for a minute. “Better not,” he said at last.

Jaya never spoke of his first marriage. It was assumed that the Obeysekere connection was an embarrassment. His second wife, whose family tree was an impeccable record of Buddhist piety and opposition to colonial rule, was so much more congruent with the public man. And then, of course, there was the shame of your aunt Claudia’s death. The story given out by the Jayasinghes was that her child had lived only a few hours, whereupon grief had driven his mother to take her own life. But there were rumors, as there always are in such cases. Unofficial narratives of a complicit doctor and bribes paid to an ayah to hush up a greater scandal. No wonder Jaya kept off the subject. But I always thought his silence was also a form of self-rebuke. He had failed with Claudia, you see, and he was not a man accustomed to failure.

We drove without speaking for some miles. The vine-shrouded banyans thinned, and coconut trees took their place. A curve in the road brought us out onto the coast. The sea was blue and infinitely creased, a sheet of silk pulled over the life that rolled and muttered below.

Jaya said, “Did you ever go there? To Obey’s family place?”

I shook my head. “They were living in Colombo when I knew them.”

If I had probed then, he would have spoken freely about Claudia. I am sure of it. He was expecting my questions; hoping for them, even. But I was in no mood to be beguiled by private romances. The rhetoric reported in my newspaper that morning had enraged me; but anger is a lively emotion. Now I felt only a dull despair. Nationalism, for me, was a sentiment as large as light. I was just beginning to understand that it could be reduced to something as petty and merciless as the glint of ambition.

Beside me, Jaya stirred. I sensed him calculating whether or not to go on.

“There was another brother,” he said at last. “Died when he was a baby. It was Claudia who found him.” From the corner of my eye, I saw him studying me. “Can you imagine it? She was three years old. She got up from an afternoon nap and went to look at the baby. He was just lying there in his cot. She told me she’d never heard the word
dead
. But she knew it described him.”

The VOC shield carved above the massive entrance to the fort had come into sight when he next spoke. “I could never rid her of the idea that she was somehow to blame. It was Obey who had put that notion into her head, of course.”

Ever since I read your letter I have been pondering how to answer you about the Hamilton case. You are quite correct in surmising that “Death of a Planter” is a transposition of its elements. But when you ask if it is true that your father’s investigation brought about the death of an innocent man, all I can tell you is that I used to think so. It was a hypothesis that drew on the flimsiest data. The way two people didn’t look at each other. And this detail: the newspaper report of Mrs. Taylor’s departure from the island mentions her infant’s
soft dark gaze
. I read that clipping thirty times over as many years before I realized why it had hooked my attention. Both Taylor and his wife had eyes of the palest blue. You will remember Mendel’s law on that point: two light-eyed people cannot have a dark-eyed child.

Does that constitute proof? No court would accept an arabesque issuing from a reporter’s overwrought pen as evidence. Even if the remark could be verified as fact, it would scarcely pin Nagel to the murder. The father of Yvette Taylor’s child might have been someone else entirely—why not? Hamilton himself leaps at once to mind. Perhaps the only lie Mrs. Taylor told in the witness box was that he did not succeed in raping her. Perhaps she was to be pitied. Such a bloodless little thing. You would swear she was transparent. But the depths were smoky. She was like a crystal. A man might hold her in his hand. He might turn her this way and that, and read what he wished in her.

When I wrote “Death of a Planter” I suppressed those doubts. The case against Nagel and Mrs. Taylor was not implausible, and the novel delight of prosecution revealed itself to me like a whore disrobing. I relished the finesse, the complex pleasure of the thing. By the time I laid down my pen I had quite persuaded myself that the pair in the dock were guilty. Then last month you wrote to me. Since then all my old uncertainties have revived; only strengthened now, more vigorous.

You see, I share your father’s fascination with detective fiction. I was perusing his defense of it with no little enjoyment, when a name made me pause. The next moment recognition brought me upright in my chair. Twenty-five years have passed since I read
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
. I have never owned a copy of the book. Yet I saw that I had—quite unconsciously—plucked out the crucial elements of Mrs. Christie’s plot and grafted them onto the Hamilton case. A policeman who commits murder. A dark-eyed child with light-eyed parents. I had believed, preening myself, that my theory about Nagel and Mrs. Taylor sprang from shrewd observation and deductive logic. Now I saw that I had fallen for an old enchantment. I had mistaken the world for a book.

Your father would have understood. He knew the force of narrative patterning. It threw him Taylor: a weak man, Hamilton’s best friend, the least likely suspect. His guilt had been elaborated in the pages of a hundred detective novels. Perhaps he did murder Hamilton. Who knows? What is beyond all reasonable doubt is that he fitted the plot.

And then there was his wife. Has it ever struck you that detective fiction teaches suspicious reading?
Take no one at his word. Nothing is as it seems.
Those are its iron principles, the legacy it bequeaths its addicts. You will notice the resemblance to psychoanalysis; I annoy my sister by claiming that it was Poe, not Freud, who founded her discipline.

Your father was a sophisticated reader, fluent in the conventions. That Yvette Taylor constructed herself as a victim was in itself cause for suspicion. He looked for the latent confession beneath the occluding surface. That business of the lavender coatee. The small hand resting like a badge of virtue on her swollen belly. She had overdone the symbolism, like any Sunday scribbler. In the signs of innocence he recognized guilt. As I said, he was a sophisticated reader.

All Hulftsdorf knew your father’s opinion of Mrs. Taylor. I, for one, shared it. Keep in mind her costume, and the way she went to pieces in the witness box. It suggested greasepaint. It looked stage-managed. So when I came to write about the Hamilton case, it was with an untroubled conscience that I winched her viciousness a notch tighter. You could call it the curse of belatedness. Murder, like love, offers only a handful of variants. The story has always already been told; it feeds on ever more ingenious twists. To accuse Mrs. Taylor of doing no more than orchestrating the murder of Hamilton now reeked of old hat. So I described an adul-tress who had arranged the deaths of two men and made a fool of a third. Understand that I was certain I had discovered the truth. It never crossed my mind that the Yvette Taylor I had conjured might have been determined from start to finish by narrative necessity.

Naturally none of this precludes the possibility of her guilt. Sometimes the endless shifting of figure and ground drives me to despair. I long, like you, for the consolation of certainty. But murder, like all art, generates interpretation and resists explanation. Why do you suppose that your father, having set out to establish the facts of the Hamilton case, found himself unable to do so? Have you never noticed how testimony falters under interrogation?