The Hamilton Case (8 page)

My voice was gentle, then, as I endeavored to reason with Mater. I pointed out that without the Bentota sale, the estate could not afford to keep up her allowance. I explained that the expense of running a house in Colombo was out of the question. I intended to move to Lokugama, I said, and practice out of chambers in the nearest town. Claudia could keep house for me. Mater would be welcome under my roof, of course; but with only a barrister’s uncertain income to sustain the household, I could offer her no more than board and lodging. If she wanted an independent income and a place of her own in Colombo—and I was certain, knowing my mother, that she would have no desire to bury herself away in Lokugama—the Bentota bungalow would have to be sold. Besides, I added, my sister was still a girl, and a timid little thing at that. It was ludicrous to be thinking of marriage settlements.

Mater had just lit a fresh cigarette. There was a chrome smoker’s stand beside the piano; ignoring it, she placed her cigarette on the gleaming instrument. I watched it burn down, knowing it would leave a furrow in the lid of Iris’s Pleyel. That was Mater all over, utterly heedless of the damage she caused other people. Beside the fading ash, her crimson nails beat time for long seconds. Then, with no more ceremony than if passing on a trivial piece of gossip, she said, “Claudia has accepted an offer of marriage.”

When I could speak, I blurted out the question. “Donald Jayasinghe,” said Mater. Even in the midst of my distress, I noted the sly satisfaction with which she purred those syllables.

Jaya had been home for over a year. I had heard of his First of course—he might as well have taken out a notice in the
Times
—but his alleged brilliance notwithstanding, he had been idle since his return, squandering time and money in the usual way on drink and cars and women. He lived two streets away, in his father’s house in Green Crescent. I had seen him once, at the tennis club, where he had come up to me and offered his condolences. I had answered politely and turned away. And all the while the blackguard had been engaged to my sister.

Piece by jagged piece, I fitted the story together. They had met over mixed doubles at the club, said Mater. “Jaya spoke to your father on the evening before the accident. Afterward, with Ritzy barely in his grave, we decided to say nothing for a while. It didn’t seem right to be announcing a marriage.”

That should have tickled me: Mater constrained by social niceties! But I was in no frame of mind to be amused. It was the casualness of that pronoun:
we
decided. “What about me?” I spluttered. “How could you not have said anything to me?”

“Because I knew you would make a scene,” she said calmly. “You’ve always been so absurdly jealous of Jaya. And I didn’t want you upsetting Claudia. She’s been through quite enough, with the shock of losing her father and whatnot.”

From my sister’s earliest years, Pater had recognized the delicacy of her nerves and singled her out for special indulgences. Knowing her dread of the dark, he would remain by her bedside for hours on his visits to Lokugama; sometimes I woke at midnight to hear his slippers padding past my door. He had the gift, not uncommon among those who have little to do with children, of being able to enter imaginatively into their world. On Claudia’s fifth birthday he had rosy apples hung from every tree in the garden to surprise and delight her. So I had attributed my sister’s jangling tears and hammered silences to grief. Now I recalled her watery eyes scuttling away from mine, the cunning with which she had avoided tête-à-têtes, her convenient fit of weeping, face down on the coverlet, when I cornered her one afternoon in her bedroom. She had conspired with Mater and Jaya to deceive me.

From the
suriya
tree outside the window, a saw-edged cry was hacking through the thick air. My ayah used to say that when a rice stealer died, his soul entered the body of a crow. The irrelevant detail floated around my brain; I batted it away, endeavoring to concentrate on Mater’s news.

“How do you intend to get by without an income?” I inquired, as unpleasantly as possible. “Carry on sponging off Uncle Kumar?”

“Don insists I make my home at Green Crescent after the wedding. You know what a pile the old boy built—there are corridors and staircases by the mile.”

They had arranged everything. I clawed at the back of the nearest chair. Mater, however, had regained her composure. She settled herself on the settee, lit another cigarette. “The suite in the tower will do me very well. As for pocket money . . .” She waved one of those narrow hands that so resembled a snake’s head, setting ash falling and bracelets clinking like coins. “I daresay I’ll scrape by.”

In that instant I saw everything, the sickening pictures garlanded in wavering blue smoke as if conjured from an evil Aladdin’s lamp. Mater and Jaya. Claudia, poor child, could have no inkling of what they were about. Perhaps Jaya’s widowed father—
the old boy
—was in on it too. Mixed doubles, screamed the crow in the
suriya
tree, mixed doubles!

Mater’s voice followed me out of the room. “I’m sure you would be welcome too, Sam.”

The next day or the day after, I contrived to get Claudia alone on the croquet lawn, out of earshot of the house. I had it all planned, the sentences arrayed with parade-ground precision, the arguments—veiled but unmistakable—rehearsed like troops. Then I looked into my sister’s face, those long eyes, so like Mater’s, yet so different in their defenseless transparence, and knew I could no more utter my thoughts than bring my heel down on a nestling and grind till I reduced its softness to a bloody mash of bone and feathers. Instead—and I am ashamed to confess this, but I have set out to tell the truth—I sat on a garden roller and cried like a child.

After a while Claudia came and sat at my feet. She put out a little hand and stroked one of my conker-brown brogues with a tentative finger. “It’s all right,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

When at length I had mastered myself, I clasped her by the wrist and led her to the house. She preceded me into the hall. There was a grass stain on her skirt, its dampness visible even on the dark frock she wore in mourning.

THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O’ER EDEN

S
ix months later I found myself walking up the aisle at St. Luke’s, Claudia quivering on my arm. An Englishman called Canning had recently been appointed vicar. At a christening held the previous week, he had dropped the baby; an alert godmother sprang forward just in time to prevent the eggshell skull from cracking open on the marble basin of the font. Now the silly ass contrived to drop the ring. The slim platinum band rolled a few inches, came up against the bridegroom’s monumental foot, fell flat with a tiny clattering. You could see everyone thinking it was an omen.

Less than a year had elapsed since Pater’s death so the reception was a muted affair, just two hundred or so guests. My brother-in-law danced first with his wife and then with her mother. Did anyone else notice his paw straying below Mater’s waist? Probably not; he leashed it in promptly like a wayward puppy. An occasional whim would lead my mother to abandon European dress, and that night she was decked out in a crimson Manipuri sari, with a royal-blue blouse that left a scandalous quantity of midriff on display. Even the Reverend Canning was unable to keep his eyes from drifting toward that expanse of taut brown flesh, like fish trailing a lure.

I glanced at Claudia, enthroned beside a Jayasinghe crone who was informing the room in an imperious shriek that she had broken her ear trumpet when she threw it at her dhobi. My sister had on the strained expression she habitually wore in company, like someone determined to follow a conversation in a foreign language. As for me, I played my part in exemplary fashion, smiling and chatting away. I even suffered Jaya to mangle me against his chest at the end of the evening. He almost crushed my collar bone.

I rose very early the next day and went out into the dewy garden with Kumar’s rifle. I got that crow with my first shot. When I came down to breakfast I looked out of the window and saw the gardener’s boy nailing it to the
suriya
tree. Two centuries earlier the Dutch had planted hundreds of those trees, all up and down the coast. As they built their forts and counted their gold they must have gazed at those tulip-shaped, greenish-yellow flowers and wondered if they could bear it any longer: the scent of cinnamon, the approximations.

A DISTURBING EPISODE

F
reed from the duty of providing for Mater and Claudia, I decided there was nothing to be gained from moving to Lokugama. As soon as word got around that I intended to remain in Colombo, Pater’s old friend Aloysius Drieberg offered me a place in his Hulftsdorp chambers. There I soon acquired a reputation for brilliance. The soundness of my arguments impressed the Bench; the fluency and wit of my delivery delighted juries. I seldom lost a case. My fees rose correspondingly.

Rents in the capital were exorbitant. Colombo landlords treat their tenants in much the same spirit as a cookwoman handles coconuts: split them open, scrape them out, throw away the shells. Fortunately I was spared these trials: Kumar and Iris insisted I stay on and make my home with them, and there was no withstanding their resolve. Iris, who had never enjoyed good health, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease around this time. I hope that my presence in their house brought a measure of cheer into the lives of those two simple souls, whose relations with my parents were far from uncomplicated, yet who throughout those years showed me nothing but kindness.

For a while I tried to find a tenant for Lokugama, but the isolation of the house proved a disincentive, and so it continued to stand empty and grew more bedraggled with each passing month. The first signs of shabbiness had appeared even before I left for Oxford, and continued apace in the last years of my father’s life, when no one in the family was spending more than a few days on the estate and there was no money to spare on repairs deemed nonessential. But in latitudes where rot is the status quo, preservation is a war that must be waged hourly, skirmish by skirmish; inaction is synonymous with defeat. An assault by termites on one of the back-verandah posts proceeded unchecked. In the time it took to replace a row of missing tiles a monsoon had torn three more from the roof; and the rats had grown so bold that they would stroll across a room in daylight.

On my return I had sacked all the servants Pater had quite unnecessarily continued to employ. With so little to occupy them, they had fallen into idleness and insolence—our head servant even having the temerity to protest that my father had promised them all pensions in their old age. Out they all went with no further ado. I brought in a man and his wife to look after the place, and went down now and then to keep them up to the mark and arrange for a little work on the house. On one of these visits, the bungalow keeper told me that Claudia and Jaya had dropped by on a motoring trip and stayed for a cup of tea.

With the ménage in Green Crescent I had as little to do as possible. The newlyweds had spent an extended honeymoon on the Continent. After they returned, I pleaded the demands of my flourishing practice to excuse myself from family gatherings. On those occasions when I could not decently absent myself, I found consolation in quiet talk with Claudia. Jaya seemed attentive enough to her, but then attentiveness to women was a reflex with him. And I had only limited opportunities for observing them together, because in those days the ladies gossiped over soft drinks in one room, while the gentlemen discoursed over their whiskey and tobacco in another. I cannot understand why some of our more forward misses have lately begun to protest this arrangement, when it is so plainly advantageous to both sides: the less contact, the greater the mutual allure.

I was rarely able to see Claudia on her own. So when I ran into Jaya at the club late one afternoon and he told me that Mater was spending the week with friends on their rubber estate at Maharagama, I strove to conceal my delight. Jaya was heading out to Mount Lavinia for a swim, attended by his usual little cluster of toadies. There would be cocktails afterward, leaving the coast clear for hours. I pleaded a sudden headache, abandoned my tennis partner and drove straight over to Green Crescent.

As the car nosed into the gate, a man stepped out of the way. I paid him no heed: one of the many household servants, I supposed. But he must have taken note of me, for as I pulled away he called, “
Mahatheya! Anay, mahatheya
.” I braked, and watched him come hurrying up behind me in the awkward half-trot half-shuffle necessitated by his sarong.

“Well?” I barked, when he drew level with my window. “What do you want?”

He bent toward me. I had left the engine running, but a minute later I switched off the ignition and climbed out of the car to stand beside him. It was not a tale I wanted to hear while sitting down.

My informant was Claudia’s tailor. Once a month he spent a day at the house, making up garments according to the designs she sketched for him. That afternoon in the course of the fitting, as he circled her with his mouth full of pins, an accidental disarrangement of her petticoats had afforded him a view of her back: it was scored with tiny slits just starting to scab over.

The tailor paused. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, although now and then he cast a sly glance toward the house, which was screened from view by a bend in the drive. Big
nonamahatheya
and Jayasinghe
mahatheya
were not at home, he said. He hoped he had not done wrong in speaking to me . . . The little
nonamahatheya
would be angry if she knew, and he was a poor man with seven children. Seven daughters! Seven little catastrophes!

The conversation had shifted into a familiar groove. My mind raced with its habitual agility. “You’ve done no harm in telling me about this,” I said airily, as my fingers brushed a few coins in my pocket. I must have been agitated, because I slipped the fellow thirty cents—an absurdly generous tip. He stiffened. Primitive people, like animals, react with unease to any deviation from a pattern. Snatching back two coins from his palm, I went on, “But what you saw is of no importance at all. You should forget it at once if you want to return next month. Above all, not a word to anyone here.”