While the controversy billowed about him, Shivanathan had accepted a post abroad; somewhere that didn’t count, like Canada. At this recollection, Sam’s resentment began to ease. He flipped through the book, a cheap local edition, noticing the coarse paper, misspellings and smudged, uneven type. A biographical note informed him that the author was Emeritus Professor of Low at a university in Vancouver. The little rush of glee carried Sam along Galle Road, so that he bore the exhausted afternoon with equanimity. The sloganed, filthy walls, the blue petrol stink and glaring windshields, the house-high advertisements for Bata Shoes: he smiled with gentle forbearance on them all.
At sunset bats rose from the tree at the top of the lane to stencil the sky. Sam opened Shivanathan’s book, savored the pretentious subtitle—Island Epiphanies—and prepared to be entertained. “There will be breasts that resemble mangoes,” he announced to the decanter at his elbow. “Hair lustrous with coconut oil will alternately ripple and cascade. And I very much fear there’ll be a barefoot old woman in spotless white who eats curries with her fingers and performs simple devotions to her gods.”
Two hours of contented skimming proved him right in every particular. He put down the book, awarded himself a third whiskey and went in to dinner.
For years now he had taken his meals at a gate-legged table in his office room. At eight Ranil came in with a fish cutlet, boiled French beans, tinned beetroot, white bread and butter. Afterward there was orange jelly. Everything was indifferently cooked, the beans falling apart, the jelly resilient as rubber; but to care overmuch about food is a sign of weak character. Between courses he opened Shiva’s book at random and read, with deep pleasure, a sentence involving a maiden and delicately cupped hands.
Over the jelly, his amusement turned rancid. Shiva had taken the cuneiform in which the world manifested itself and reduced it to a script suitable for the nursery: H is for Hut. L is for Lotus. His version of reality resembled the simple drawings in flat, bright colors that adorn kindergarten walls: a typical lotus, a typical hut. And those terrible little pictures, drained of all complexity, were hailed by his publishers as authentic glimpses of an island paradise. Here I am, thought Sam, with my orange jelly and my Collected Works of Shakespeare, I’m part of it all too, like it or not, I’m as authentic as any bally mango.
The last story in the book was by far the longest. He saved it until he had swallowed the last spoonful, intending to relish it like a sweet.
He read quickly at first, then slowly, and a pale moth drugged on light drowned in the coffee grown cold in his cup.
When he was halfway down the last page, the night mail dragged past at the bottom of the lane. Minutes later it reached the bend in the track and cried out, a beast that could endure no longer.
He flipped pages until he found the beginning of the story, and read it through once more.
“Death of a Planter” was set in an outstation in the 1930s. It centered on a bored Englishwoman named Cynthia Wilmot, who was married to the superintendent of a rubber plantation. Mrs. Wilmot had been amusing herself with a man called Cameron, her husband’s oldest friend, who managed the adjoining estate. The story opened at the point where she had thrown him over for Vernon Danby, the local magistrate. Consumed by jealous hatred, Cameron threatened to lay the tale of her infidelities before her husband; whereupon the lovers colluded to murder him.
Cameron’s body was found beside an isolated estate road very early one morning. The police looked for the killer among his workers, as Cameron was a notoriously harsh employer. A coolie was arrested and interrogated. But nothing could be proved against the man, despite the best efforts of the police, and eventually he was released. (Here, the flow of the story was interrupted by a page of predictable sentiments about the plight of the estate worker, plucked from his native India to labor on the plantations of the profiteering British. The sole merit of the passage was to stamp Shiva’s blatant pastiche of Maugham with a clumsiness that was wholly original.)
It was then, a few weeks after the crime, that the murderers revealed their genius and the true viciousness of their scheme. Danby befriended an English reporter who was visiting the district and contrived to direct suspicion at Mrs. Wilmot’s husband. The reporter, a Londoner with the high opinion of himself that brands a fool, leapt at the opportunity to play sleuth. Within days, following the trail of insinuation and false evidence artfully laid by Danby, he had “discovered” the identity of the murderer. True to the principles of detective fiction, his investigations “proved” that the crime had been committed by the least likely suspect: Wilmot, the dead man’s best friend.
Wilmot protested his innocence, but was arrested and tried for murder. He stood to gain financially from Cameron’s death, having come into a sizable legacy from his friend. Yet at trial the case for the prosecution was shown to be flimsy, with little direct evidence linking the accused to the crime.
At this crucial juncture Cynthia Wilmot took the witness stand. There, playing her role with consummate artistry, she “broke down” under cross-examination and confessed to her affair with Cameron. She told the court of her fears that Wilmot had discovered what was going on. She also retracted the alibi she had originally provided, now admitting that she had slept so soundly throughout the night of the murder that she could not swear to her husband’s presence at her side. Everyone understood what she did not actually say: that this unnaturally deep sleep had been brought on by the cup of Horlicks served to her at bedtime by the accused and doctored with a draught for his own murderous ends.
The jury returned a Guilty verdict, which was upheld on appeal, and Wilmot went to his death in a prison yard one morning.
His widow, tearful and upright to the last, sailed for New Zealand, where Danby joined her after a judicious interval.
The reporter, whose genius was feted on three continents, turned his account of the murder into a bestselling book, accepted an outrageously high fee from a London broadsheet to write the occasional column celebrating his own brilliance, and lived a long, contented and useless life.
Much later, while a corner of his brain noted with puzzlement that the decanter was almost empty, Sam thought of Shivanathan cultivating his spite over the years until it erupted at last into this grotesque flower. It demonstrated what he had always known: that no one is too untalented to excel at envy.
Yvette Taylor had been capable of anything. Hadn’t he always suspected her of setting that weak fool Taylor on his murderous course? Beyond that, Shiva’s theory was preposterous. To imply that Nagel was guilty of cold-blooded collusion in the deaths of two men was fanciful enough. But to suggest that Sam himself had been instrumental in fulfilling the murderers’ design proved only that a diseased mind is a great maker of fictions.
The high opinion of himself that brands a fool. There would be smiles in Hulftsdorf when that one did the rounds.
From the row of royal-blue bindings, he selected the volume he wanted straight away. The bookcase had a glass door locked with a key, protecting its contents from the monsoon’s rot; but silverfish have in common with thoughts the capacity to ravage as they please. He shook the book gently, dislodging a papery shower of wings from the binding on the spine, noticing that the silver crest and motto on the cover were still bright: Semper Vincit. Inside, entire sections displayed the insects’ tattoos, but the cutting he had placed there forty years earlier remained intact. He carried it over to the lamp and examined the photograph with the tender amazement we reserve for our younger selves. Our Sherlock Holmes: as an embrocation, it was extraordinarily soothing.
With supreme disregard for the British Council’s injunctions he went through Shivanathan’s book with his pen in his hand, circling literals, underlining errors of fact, annotating legal points, calling attention to the grosser stylistic blunders with an exclamation mark in the margin. All the while an old trouble flickered just below the surface of his mind. Something he had noticed but not heeded at the time. It came again, a faint tug
traveling up the taut stretch of years. Any moment he would wind it in. But then it darted away, vanishing into opacity where he couldn’t follow.
When he looked up he saw what he had long ceased hoping for, a fold of yellow skirt in the mess of shadows beyond the bookcase. At once he was released, the core of him unclenching. There would be time yet to set everything right. He rose from his chair in a single painless movement, supple as a boy. She was gone on the instant. But when he opened his eyes the memory of happiness remained, a streak of brightness like the first thread of day unspooling along the horizon.
It was a Saturday. There were no young men waiting on the verandah. Half-past ten found him at his usual post, by the gate. A dull discomfort was coursing the length of the arm that had been cramped under his body when he woke. He stretched and flexed the limb but was unable to dislodge the ache. There was a scuttling among the white-haired mango stones and blackened plantain skins in the ditch; a rat perhaps, or a chameleon. Watson cocked his head, but declined to investigate.
The stand on the postman’s bicycle was broken. He propped it against a telephone pole and fed envelope after envelope into the slits in the gateposts of the pastel houses across the way. Then he looked across at Sam and shook his head. He could just as well have signaled this information as he freewheeled down the lane, but had chosen to keep his victim in suspense. This despite relieving him of five chips at Christmas. Fury knocked at Sam’s breastbone. But he remained planted where he was, gazing up the lane as if absorbed in the red tilt of the earth, the vacant blue sky. He was very well aware that this charade lacked conviction, but was unable to prevent himself from acting it out.
At last the postman reached the crest of the lane, standing on his pedals, and turned into the main road; no doubt to snicker in a tea boutique at the old codger to whom no one had written in a month.
Sam had forgotten his stick. Hands paddling the air beside his thighs he made his way up the drive, measuring out the distance three paces at a time. His head jerked sideways. Sanforized. Sanforized. It beat in his mind like heavy-plumed wings. They could replace sonnets with sandesha poems in every classroom if they liked; both were irrelevant. The generations to come would take their bearings from A Hentley shirt is smart and neat, And keeps you cool in tropic heat ...
As he neared the house, he halted. Its paint, unrenewed in five years, had faded once more to a lemony ochre. It was a color he couldn’t see without thinking of Claudia. Yet that morning it seemed to him that something was amiss. He continued to stare at the house, his neck thrust forward in the collar that had grown too loose. But the sun edged past the roofline and struck him. He lowered his head and shuffled forward into the portico, and Watson’s cold nose came to fit itself into his palm.
At that moment there rose in his mind a picture of the Taylors’ dog, its hindquarters writhing in ecstasy as it greeted Nagel like an old friend. The scene presented itself to him with sparkling clarity: a withered geranium leaf on the snowy gravel, the silvery feathering on the spaniel’s paws. The past shuddered, then reconfigured itself differently. A life might turn on such a reversal.
He dismissed it at once. The slobbering kisses of a dog: what did they prove? Not that he could understand now why he had ever granted the Hamilton case any significance. Why had he set out to disentangle its chain of cause and effect? He had allowed a sideshow to distract him from the drama of his own history. Nagel, the Taylors, Hamilton glass-eyed on the jungle floor: they swirled about him and crumbled to dust. He barely noticed. He caressed his chest, where the ache had intensified. Something lurched in him, a small vital cog or pivot, and he no longer had the strength to ram it into place.
With painful care he brought his left foot up to join the right one on the lowest step. The effort had to be repeated five times. An age later he arrived on the verandah. There he stood stone-still to recover, and thought, But it was Mater, not Claudia, who wore that shade of yellow.
Words he might have spoken, soft declarations of need, shifted in his thoughts like a breeze lifting papers in a room. He pictured a child rising from his bed, he traced his trajectory along the night corridors of Lokugama: a whiff of spiced air, the ghost with his face waiting at the mirrored end of a passage, rust-colored hexagons cool under his feet. He would climb into his mother’s arms and lay his confession before her. His life would change key.
Alternatives glimmered, a different kind of existence opening now and then like a view. A morning when the arrow flight of his son shot him straight to Leela, who gathered the weeping child to her and held him close on her knee. Sam had thought, It is as simple as that! He looked at his wife, her broad, plain face infused with love, and saw how glorious she was. He was visited by a yearning for absolution so physical that his flesh slicked with sweat. Then it passed. He fell back in his chair. The course of his life was as fixed as a mathematical rule.
Now at last he understood that character—compulsion, will, impulse, propensity, aversion—might accrete and solidify around a central mistake. When Claudia had woken him in the sleeping house that afternoon, the first thing he saw when he followed her into the baby’s room was her little satin-stitched pillow. She disliked being parted from it. But there it lay in Leo’s cot, the embroidery loosened and grubby where her finger worked it as she slept.
The two children stood side by side, looking down on the small body. There was a blister of white paint on the wood near Sam’s thumb. He picked at it. “Baby gone?” whispered Claudia. He watched the smile slip off and on her face.
He was eight years old. He made a slow circuit of the cot. He even had the wit to smooth the snarled netting into place. Then the baby’s ayah muttered in her sleep and shifted on her mat. An eternity passed. When the woman’s bubbling breath began to rise and fall again, he led his sister to her bed, and for sixty seconds gazed at her and marveled.
The afternoon and evening passed in a wheezing rush. All through the tumult of discovery, he seemed to be holding his breath. He had only to speak. But his brother was dead. Nothing he might say could set that life chirping again. While across the table there was Claudia. She sat upright on her chair crayoning a doll’s face black. The circle of their family had gaped briefly to admit Leo. Now it had sprung closed again. He walked around the table and stood beside his sister, and pincered her wrist between finger and thumb. He chafed her soft skin back and forth. She neither pulled away nor screamed. In this way he set his mark on her. She looked at him, and her face was vivid with understanding.
His tutor possessed the English genius for sidestepping unpleasantness. Summoning a rotten tooth, he spent the evening barricaded within his room. No one paid any heed to the children left alive. They dined on water biscuits and the ruins of a blancmange. Their father appeared at the door, gazed at them and padded away again in his blue velvet slippers. Hearing those dull steps, Sam remembered the overseer’s son prostrated on the verandah. His father had not sought to punish the boy, just as he himself had not sought the elimination of Leo. Yet it had fallen to them both to restore equilibrium in the disruptive wake of a crime. Exaltation was rolling through him, when a splinter of fear punctured his mood: Claudia’s pillow still lay in their brother’s cot.
Squeezing his knees together, he prayed for time. He rang for a servant, had a bed carried into his room and made up for his sister. But she would not settle, plucking at the overlong banian that served her as a nightdress. At last Sam went out onto the back verandah, to a sofa scattered with cushions. He returned with one of them. She rubbed its silky piping along the side of her finger, stroking it into her dreams.
It was well past midnight when the reek of oil of cloves retreated from the corridor and an amber line no longer showed at the bottom of the Englishman’s door. The boy ran through the house on silent feet. He eased the pillow from the empty cot, a lump of embroidered matter in his arms. Slipping from the room, he collided with his mother.
Hours after he had watched, limp-muscled with longing, as s
he rocked his brother’s inert flesh, Maud was still wearing the yellow traveling costume in which she had arrived at Lokugama. Her hair had worked loose and was bunched around her face. She stood in the doorway, one raised arm on the jamb, and the lamp on the verandah rimmed her sleeve with gold. She looked from his face to the pillow in his arms. He saw revulsion seep into her eyes and fled, a button at her elbow grazing his ear as he passed.
He lay in his bed with a sheet over his face, and shivered in monsoonal heat. His first thought: it was a hideous mistake. His mother had seen everything from the wrong angle. He had been judged guilty of a crime he had not committed. Each blow of his heart protested the unfairness of it. He dreaded and longed for explanation, for her step in the corridor.
Instead, old evils arrived to torment him. He crouched beside Claudia, urging her to tweak a fold in the usurper’s dimpled thigh. He constructed mythologies in which their brother had been stolen and replaced with a devil’s nestling. What she had done, she had done to please him. She had carried out his desire as surely as if he had guided her hand.
By the time dawn came with its diseased light, he had grown reconciled to the distortion of events. He rose and went out into the compound, and hurled the pillow over the wall to rot in the jungle. That his mother thought him hateful was no more than he deserved. For the rest of his days his understanding of justice would be molded to that skewed design. Now, at the bleak end of the arc of his life, frozen on the verandah of Allenby House, he saw with the extraordinary lucidity that was pouring through him like pain that the boy trembling under a sheet was only the first for whom he had found no forgiveness.
The Hamilton Case Page 25
