Maud woke, stippled with sweat. She recognized the dream: its sequences had haunted her in the weeks after Claudia’s death when she had lain in the nursing home with pneumonia. Later, when fever and the delirium it brought had cleared, and pain no longer scoured her lungs, the dream images, too, had faded.
Jaya had been her first visitor. The instant he loomed in the doorway, she asked a question consisting of a single word.
“I don’t know.” He advanced into the antiseptic space between them. “She was afraid there would be something wrong with the baby. But he was perfect. Perfect.” His huge hands sketched a small shape. “One of those little crests of hair . . .” He sank onto a chair, and placed his palms over his face. In this way he avoided her eyes.
It was the only time they spoke of it. There was the disgrace of murder compounded with suicide, best smothered in silence; and then, Maud nurtured an explanation that she didn’t care to voice. Her son-inlaw was careless. She had warned him, in the first months of his marriage. “Ritzy and I had an understanding,” she had said. “But don’t imagine Claudia will put up with it. These girls today want the whole show.” Then she handed him the battered little cardboard rectangle the dhobi had returned with the mahatheya’s shirts. The demure face of an old friend’s wife smiled out from its scarring of creases.
Jaya had laughed the thing off. Nevertheless, she had jolted him into discretion. But Maud knew that old patterns have a way of asserting themselves. She pictured Claudia, nine months pregnant, opening a book and coming across a photograph. She saw the girl lifting the blotter on Jaya’s desk and reading a letter she found there. There were pockets of pure anguish in her daughter. As a child, she had been shaken by bouts of baffling tears. An array of little fetishes, broken toys and household oddments, small unsightly items no one quite liked to touch, provided her with a queer kind of comfort at such moments. It was easy to imagine her overwhelmed by the discovery of her husband’s faithlessness, swept along on a cold black current of despair. Watching Jaya weep beside a florist’s arrangement of scentless blooms, Maud knew he was ravaged by the same suspicion. It was torment enough, she decided.
Now, thinking of the last terrible minutes of her daughter’s life, she rose from her bed at Lokugama. She hunted out every carafe in the night-shadowed house and dashed them one by one against the tiles of the verandah. The act brought no release. At six in the morning Sirisena found her still sitting there, surrounded by broken glass. He was obliged to step gingerly when he returned with a broom. It was the kind of thing that did not occur to those who went about the world wearing shoes.
The postcard showed the Promenade des Anglais. Bellissima, We are dying of envy. Here it is foul, the mistral all day and no one simpatico. Next week we sail for New York. Carlo kisses your ravishing hands, and so do I. Your loving Giulia. Maud propped it against the Bakelite salt cellar while lunching on curried ash plantain. She had it by heart before she realized it carried no forwarding address.
Christmas brought a little loaf of envelopes, bland sentiments, cautious expressions of goodwill, a sheaf of impenetrable free verse from the poet. Sir Alban’s card, robins and a wreath of holly, bore a handwritten addendum to its Compliments of the Season: Took in a rather delightful Sapphic show yesterday. One of the girls long and brown, like you. Poor old Mulligatawny had to be put down in August. P.S. Charlotte died last spring. The stockbroker sent two blunt lines asking her not to write. It causes awkwardness at home.
These communiqués barely registered with Maud. By then she was covering forty pages a day, epistles she rolled up and slipped into mildewing shoes or tucked behind a cushion and forgot. Her style grew daily wilder, more fabulous. Even a mildly attentive reader would have diagnosed a dislocation. In a country where night arrived with the haste of a curtain lowered on a flop, she insisted on twilight. While a monsoonal wind ripped a limb from the mango tree, she could write with no sense of incongruity of spice-laden breezes.
In the intervals between letters, she would rise from the dining table to drift in and out of rooms where no one had breathed for years. The absurd topography of the house had always eluded her. There was a step between two corridors that served no purpose except to make her stumble. She spent a morning in search of a room she remembered, a pleasant bay with a fern-filled alcove where Claudia had played the piano. Dust stirred and settled. Thwarted, Maud slammed the door on a mournful little cubicle at the end of a passage. Midstride she halted, retraced her steps. The Lindahl had stood there, under the window that memory had embellished with leaves and curved air.
Cockroaches, glossy as dates, fled from her slippers. She saw no one. Yet a presence walked with her. She stepped aside, to allow it space. It wished her no ill, but she felt the stir of its longing. What are ghosts but things we cannot bear to remember? Sometimes, on entering a room she was certain something had altered, a chair angled differently, a drawer pulled open. In the doorway of a shuttered room, one hand on the jamb, she knew that this scene had already occurred.
Meals occasioned small spears of anticipation that pierced the cottoned tedium of Leela’s day. Her first dreamy thoughts, on not quite waking, were of improbable dishes, vanilla-scented poppadoms or trifle spiked with fennel. All day Soma went back and forth from the kitchen bearing fried breadfruit chips in a silver epergne or a rose-patterned plate piled with prawn crackers. There were mornings when the nonamahatheya devoured four pots of chocolate custard or a platter of fish patties. She ate jack mallung heaped on crackers. She kept a jar of pumpkin preserve at hand. In the concentration she brought to bear on flavors and textures, she discovered a kind of steadying. In those years her jaws worked nonstop.
On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday she looked in her mirror and saw how flesh had accrued around her waist. She had thickened at the hips, like a candle. Layers of flesh blunted the line of her nose, the curve of her jaw. As she gazed at herself appalled, there was another face beside her own, a child’s face with tumbled black curls. It vanished in an instant. When the knocking in her chest quieted she set a chair in front of her glass and remained there all day.
The incident marked a turning point. Independently of her volition, the grinding mechanism of survival intervened. One day she woke up and the armor welded around her chest had vanished. It no longer hurt to breathe.
Her days gravitated toward the angle of a side verandah, screened with waist-high trellis. On this ambiguous site neither inside nor outside the house, she created a bower. It contained a rattan-seat planter’s chair piled with kapok cushions, a velvet footstool, her porcupine-quill workbox and a palm-leaf fan edged with tortoiseshell. Pots grouped by her chair held mother-in-law’s tongue and philodendron. Maidenhair spilt from coir-lined hanging baskets. Sam, coming upon her there one morning as she sat with folded hands in watery green light, thought of a slug clamped moistly to its leaf, and shuddered, and went away without a word.
Months passed. Leela nibbled iced biscuits from a tin and watched a monsoon demonstrate its architecture of rain. Gray-green growths that crumbled to the touch appeared in the interstices of the trelliswork. Garments arrayed on a clotheshorse remained clammy for a week. Sliding into her shoe, her toes encountered a webbed dampness: spores that had burst into vegetable being in the interval of an hour.
She woke from a doze one afternoon and sensed the scrutiny of small bright eyes. She tracked them to a frieze of geckos with translucent veined stomachs on the side of a pillar. Her stillness attracted birds, chameleons, the little squirrels whose striped backs showed where they had been stroked by a god’s fingers. A pale stucco mansion took shape on a cornice, the wasps ignoring her as they flew in and out of their nest. A tailor bird took hold of two leaves at the extremity of a slender twig and sewed them together at their edges, using a thread made of vegetable fiber and its bill for a needle. For days it flew back and forth from the shoeflower tree that grew by the verandah, tiny feathers and scraps of cottony down protruding from its beak. These the bird
pushed between the two leaves it had stitched together, while its perch swayed under its feet. It had chosen the thinnest twig in order to protect its young from snakes and other predators. Leela watched the leaf nest quiver and spin with each breeze, and envied the bird inside, rocking in soft darkness, with small hearts beating beneath her wing.
In the early years of Maud’s marriage the house at Lokugama had not been connected to the municipal water supply. She could remember an era when a servant staggered between the kitchen well and her bathroom, a bucket at either end of the pole slung across his shoulders. Later, in the grip of one of his ruinous schemes, Henry called in a Manchester firm to do the plumbing. In Maud’s bathroom a dado of bottle-green tiles stretched around the walls beneath a band of stylized pink tulips. The thick copper piping, now dripping verdigris, still functioned to capacity, filling the massive bath in one hundred and twelve seconds.
Twice a day she would mount the shallow teak steps beside the tub and lower herself, inch by voluptuous inch, into the water. There was a whiff of mud, not unpleasant, about Lokugama water; sometimes it contained a leaf, once a tiny transparent snail. But in less than ten minutes it was a clammy chemise that adhered to her skin. The taps affixed to the tub were beautiful, brass and green-glazed majolica, each topped with a smiling dolphin. Maud fell into the habit of addressing them, cursing the tepid bathwater and her own greed, for she had smoked the last Players in her morning ration of twelve well before that hour.
Soon she was talking to everything, the earthenware goblet with a beaded lace cover in which boiled water was stored, a brown asparagus fern crisped in a blue luster bowl. There came an evening when she began one of her screeds, conjured a silvery downpour halfway down the sixth page and in midsentence abandoned the enterprise forever.
Her voice flowed out to occupy the space that the letters had filled. It went on and on. She sang “Lead, kindly Light” and rugby choruses of elaborate obscenity. She conducted baroque conversations with herself, scrolls and whorls of defense and recrimination. When she fell silent her ears filled with an awful clamor, a muttering that crescendoed to screeches and fell away as keening. Maud identified it as the racket of a million microscopic jaws, the scraping of antennae, the whirr of wings, the striving of worms, the march of long, golden millipedes, all the life she had called silence and disregarded. There were nights when jackals howled as they swept past on their hunt, their screams ceasing abruptly at the highest pitch of ferocity. Their noise was terrible, their silence worse. Yet the other was more ghastly still. She lay under her mosquito net chanting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to drown out its claims.
At the far end of the house, Padma, with her husband deep inside her, heard the pitch and fall of that recital. The servants’ room was pungent with coconut oil. On a tea chest draped with a length of eau-de-Nil satin that had once been a pajama leg, a lamp glowed before an eight-inch plaster statue of the Virgin: a wedding gift from the nuns. At some point on their tossing voyage from Liverpool six hundred shoddily stowed madonnas had suffered fractured halos and chipped hands. When the crate was levered open in Colombo a shrewd bishop converted pecuniary disappointment into the conviction that deserving orphans the island over would see only the gorgeousness of gold paint, the horizon-blue sweep of that mantle.
The pair laboring in the room knew they were envied. They ate rice twice a day, they had a tiled roof over their heads, the work of caring for an old woman and a dilapidated house could not be described as arduous. Yet long after the shadows rearing on the wall beside her had quieted, Padma lay sleepless. This was the compass of it, rotting in the jungle with those cracked tones invading her skull. She knew the place was moospainthu. It blighted her cooking. Curries emerged from that kitchen as bland as milk, or so fiery they drew tears. Sauces refused to thicken. A jungle fowl simmered for two hours ended as bone wound with glutinous string. Liquids evaporated or boiled over as soon as she glanced away. Even dishes that seemed faultless when eaten returned to the back of the throat as a putrid tang.
Her husband scoffed at her talk of enchantment. He passed freely through the house, untroubled by its humors. There were seasons when Padma saw milky molecules coalesce on a verandah or gather in a doorway. The contrast between light and shade was more violently marked at these times. Forms sharpened, a table or pillar taking on an etched distinctiveness, the world waxing resolute in the face of an encroachment. Sirisena noticed nothing. Padma kept to the kitchen, where a stew ruined inexplicably. She crossed herself. In the enclosure where chickens pecked she scraped charred flesh from the pot, her nostrils flaring against the crusty stench.
There was a snake coiled on Maud’s pillow. She shouted and sprang away, but when Sirisena came running in it was only her housecoat, a careless twist of chiffon. The lid of a tureen became a mirror that reflected everything except her face. She reached for a cake of gardenia soap and found it fringed with fish hooks. There was also a bird, feathered brown and dusty purple, perched on a brass curtain rod or stepping along the back of a chair; or, horribly, gazing up at her, a prickle of claws along her instep.
At the far end of an empty verandah, a child slid into view. His arms were folded over an object he clutched to his chest but his face was in shadow. She took half a step forward and he wasn’t there. But what set her heart knocking was the certainty, sudden as a blow, that something essential had eluded her.
The place itself eroded the distinction between perception and hallucination. It hung a devil mask in a flamboyante tree, a bold gray langur monkey whose mocking face presided over the drive. It impaled a turquoise rag on a twig and then, when Maud reached for it, bewitched by that brilliance, slipped a rotting wing into her fingers. Nothing was as it seemed. Nothing stayed the same. Flowers staged brief, violent dramas, blazing and dropping within the day. A cloud burst and sticks exploded into tender green leaves. A scratch on the bungalow keeper’s heel blossomed overnight, unfolding petals of yellow pus. Maud turned her head away from a bloated pi dog that lay stinking by the roadside, held fast in a trembling mesh of red ants; an hour later it had been picked clean of all corruption.
The alchemy of change, hostile to all patterning, worked with dizzying swiftness. The carter who carried away the nightsoil from the servants’ lavatory was always accompanied by his daughter, a capering four-year-old in a filthy pink skirt. One morning the little girl was not there. Her father wept by the kitchen door, relating how the child, usually as robust as a coconut, had complained of a stiff neck the previous afternoon and was dead by nightfall. For the first time in Maud’s life there was nothing to distract her from these mutations. They induced nausea, like lines of print held too close to the eye. It was a matter of perspective. Trying to adjust itself, her mind swung a little loose on its hinges.
Looking back on those months, she would picture them marbled with lunacy. She continued to observe the rituals that keep a life from fraying, but observed them oddly, a bath lit with candles at midnight, a table set under the mango tree at four in the afternoon. Ordinary things, some ugly, entranced her. She might turn a spoon in her hands for hours, as if to discover its function or marvel at its perfection. She studied the small jeweled flies that settled on the slice of papaw before her and made no motion to disturb their feeding. For two or three days at a stretch her mind would be inhabited by a detailed eroticism, bright lewd images succeeding each other swiftly like postcards thumbed to excite desire: the bungalow keeper naked and priapic before her, her cousin Iris stroking a faceless girl who knelt between her thighs.
It was an interval of heightened, almost painful sensations. Objects she had handled unthinkingly—a towel, a nail file—turned velvety and repulsive to the touch. Colors flared more forcefully, and translated themselves into flavors, the blue-black of a crow experienced as a thick plummy sweetness, the scarlet of canna rising in her nose like mustard. The place would not be reduced to background. It cast nets of leaves about her. It caressed her arms with its warm yellow tongue
.
Madness seemed as inviting as cool sheets. She spent an afternoon crouching in her almirah, among the discarded skins of her evening gowns. After a while the conviction came to her that this finery should not be left to rot in the dark. The next morning she trod the length of the verandah in bare feet and midnight-blue lace. Sam found her glittery-eyed in a carapace of bronze beading, her greasy playing cards fanned out before her. He caught a whiff of spice. She turned her head and he saw that she had inserted a clove in each earlobe in lieu of a jewel.
He had opened his mouth to inform her that she had stepped over a boundary, when she rose from her chair. Even barefoot she was taller by half a head. He tightened his lips, carried his bouquet of chits to his room, slipped the car into gear while the sky was still dim the next morning.
When the doctor confirmed what Leela already knew, she registered only the dull anticipation that her condition now aroused in her. But this time she began each day vomiting into a blue-rimmed enamel basin. It went on for hour after hour. There was a respite in the afternoon, when she trembled with exhaustion on her bed, a hummock of feeble flesh with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne across her temples. Shark cooked in a white curry that contains fenugreek seeds encourages the flow of a woman’s milk, so she forced herself to swallow a few spoonfuls with rice each day. Nivithi sambol too was prepared daily, as spinach develops a baby’s brain. Then Soma was holding the nonamahatheya’s head over the basin again. Four months later when the vomiting ended, the child had still not dislodged itself.
There was a prickling sensation, like pins and needles, running along Leela’s arms. She realized it was hope, exercising itself with the caution of a limb grown numb from disuse.
The Hamilton Case Page 15
