The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  Watson was whining in the depths of the hall. When Sam raised his eyes he saw a woman at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the newel. He heard a commotion that he took for the sea; but then he realized that the floor of the verandah had lifted. In thickening light he was pitched forward on a flow of white marble tiles with black diamonds at each corner. Her arms flew wide and love burst against his ribs, and he went joyfully into the dark.

  IV

  He knows everything between Varanasi and Rameswaram.

  Tamil saying

  Harry Obeysekere, Esq.

  Allenby House

  Allenby Lane

  Colombo 3

  Ceylon

  28 February 1971

  Dear Harry,

  I remember it well. You must have been how old—three? four? Your eyes stretched wide when I handed you that stick of pink sugar. But you wouldn’t let yourself taste it until you had trotted back to your mother with her share. She had a gentle face.

  You ask about your father. There’s not a lot I can tell you. We were friends briefly, a lifetime ago. It grieves me to hear that he sat up with one of my books on the night before he died. He would surely have disliked what he read.

  One Saturday when we were cycling back to school after a swim at Mount Lavinia, he called over his shoulder, “Look at that, will you. That’s magnificent.” I slowed and turned my head. The wall was faded and embroidered with mildew, but had once been painted kingfisher blue. By the doorstep someone had set three kerosene tins, rust laced, planted with golden cannas. We were both boarders at Neddy’s that year.

  The manuscript you enclosed is remarkable. Here and there it terrifies. In cahoots with some ne’er-do-wells. A cold collation in my set. He had the gift of perfect mimicry, you see. It won him every prize on the classics side. If you would put your hand on the key to him, study that ventriloquism. I find it unbearably sad.

  Jaya argued that it kept us captive, locked in the structures of an alien way of thought. But what else did we have? Jaya’s solution was the vernacular. As theory, it was sound. Nevertheless, we went on reaching for English. How could it have been otherwise? We had ingested the language. It streamed through our lungs, fired our synapses. It turned to waste in our bowels. It fed muscle and bone. In this context the word alien is not unproblematic.

  You see, we were a generation that spoke always in quotation. Even Jaya’s oratory derived from the civilization it denounced. Because at some point quotation had become our native mode. There was no original. No beneath, before, beyond. It was a question of rote thinking. Of the stock response and the preordained concept. I catch myself at it still, rolling out ready-made phrases like any well-drilled schoolboy. Not un-problematic. Did you hear it, there? It works insidiously. In the placement of an adverb. The choice of a cadence. Only in my case the pastiche is gross. I never had your father’s ear.

  He was one of those sincere, aggrieved people. He would go up to a fellow and harangue him in detail about the flaws in his game; and then bound over to him the next day, beaming, racquet in hand. Nine times out of ten he was turned down, and not always politely; and each time the rebuff caught him unprepared. You could see it pained him. A thinning of the mouth. It was a devastating lesson in how a man might see every detail with perfect clarity and yet misread the shape of the whole.

  The first thing one noticed about your father was that plume of hair. It was a trial to him. In a burst of disclosure he told me he thought it conveyed an impression of coarseness. He spent five minutes each morning plastering it flat with a comb dipped in water.

  He was avuncular with me, well disposed but essentially remote. We were not close. There was the difference in age, all-important in the stratified society of school. Besides, there was something in him that precluded intimacy. I diagnosed it as ambition, recognizing the symptoms in myself. The virus was endemic at Neddy’s. Now I think that fear went to compound the hard little nugget at his core. What other people thought of him mattered acutely. He feared judgment. Like all imposters, he feared exposure. You are familiar perhaps with the pathology of psychosis? The tragedy of the psychotic is that he lives in terror of a breakdown which has in fact already occurred. So it was with your father. He strove to perfect a performance that had never deceived his audience.

  There was an evening when he looked up from his book and asked how one pronounces Marylebone. I suggested he enquire of one of the masters. A bleak despair crept over his features. “Then they would know,” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m not one of them,” he blurted.

  I came down with pneumonia after two terms and was a day boy when I returned. Thereafter I knew him only in flashes. He nods at me on a landing, sea and sky two bands of different blue beyond his shoulder. He gives me five hundred lines for having my hands in my pockets. As a prefect he was, of course, a disciplinarian. It was wholly in character. The dread of being judged articulated as a need to punish.

  Of his relations with his family I can tell you very little. He never spoke of home. Well, none of us did. It was not exactly encouraged. Neddy’s constituted our world, sufficient unto itself. But I knew, vaguely, that his people were grand. And rather fast. There was a whiff of scandal. Bills that went unpaid. He was among those regularly summoned to the bursar’s office, which always meant trouble over fees. From those interviews he would return stone-eyed.

  I remember a sports meet when a lady in a jade-colored hat turned every head. She was your grandmother. I didn’t know which I coveted more, the silver flask she produced when tea was served or the diamanté-collared Great Dane at her side. It strolled up to Warden Metcalfe’s prize begonias and urinated on them in front of the entire school. My mother bristled beside me. “All show and humbug,” she hissed.

  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 h
e 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.