The Hamilton Case

by Michelle de Kretser

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

The place is Ceylon, the time the 1930s. Set amid tea plantations, decay and corruption, this sinuous, subtle, surprising novel is a masterly evocation of time and place, of colonialism and the backwash of empire. It is the story of an embittered Ceylonese lawyer, Sam Obeysekere himself a product of empire - 'obey' by name and by nature - and of a family that once had wealth and influence but starts to crack open when Sam's charismatic father dies leaving gambling debts, an ex-beauty of a wife, an unstable daughter and an inadequate son. But the writing has been on the wall for a generation, ever since another sibling died in his cot- And at the heart of the novel is the Hamilton Case, a 'White Mischief' murder scandal that shakes the upper echelons of the island's society. Sam's involvement in it makes his name but paradoxically ensures that he will never achieve his ambition. A miracle of delicacy and restraint, full of volte faces, and narrated with perfect pitch in a voice that catches both the tragedy and comedy of their situation, this is a gripping, nuanced tale of the end of an era, suffused with 'the unbearable thought that everything might have turned out differently'.

Release date: May 12, 2004

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

A WISE CHILD

A name is the first story that attaches itself to a life. Consider mine: Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere. It tells of geography, history, love and uncertainty. I was born on an island suspended midway on the golden trade route between East and West—a useful bauble, fingered and pocketed by the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn. In 1902, when I was born, Sir Alban Marriott was Governor and he agreed to be my godfather. How could he refuse? He had been in thrall to my mother ever since she sent him the skin of a leopard she had shot, along with a note. I shall call on you between five and six this evening. The skin is for the small blue reception room, which is ideally suited to fornication and whatnot. Her name was Maud and she was a great beauty. Also a first-rate shot. In Scotland she had stalked deer with the Prince of Wales; his performance, she reported, was mediocre. He presented her with a brooch fashioned from an eagle’s talon mounted on silver and onyx. Mater dismissed it as monumentally obvious and palmed it off on her stewardess in lieu of a tip on her voyage home.

My father insisted on calling me Stanley, although my mother hated the name. I have often pondered the significance of Pater’s uncharacteristic resolve. His father, too, was a Stanley, so he might simply have been affirming family tradition. On the other hand, might his assertion of my paternal provenance betray some anxiety about it? My mother had a certain reputation. It was alleged that she once swam in a jungle pool wearing only her bloomers, even though there were gentlemen and snakes present. Half of Colombo society followed the lead of Lady Marriott, who was stout and afflicted with shingles, in cutting her dead. Mater said Stanley was fit only for a peon, so it was just as well my initials spelled Sam. These days there is no one left to remember that I was ever called anything else.

Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere: between the names that define me as my father’s child falls the shadow of an Englishman who didn’t serve a second term as Governor. Shortly after his death eight years ago a package from a firm of London solicitors found its way to my desk. It contained a small murky oil painting of a large and largely unclad female gathering flowers and berries against a backdrop of broken marble columns in a woodland glade. The artist—quite unknown to the works of reference I have consulted—signed himself Tom Baltran. The executor’s letter accompanying the painting explained that the Baltrans and the Marriotts were cousins. Moreover, it continued, the Hon. Thomas was descended on the distaff side from the first Duke of St. Albans, Charles II’s illegitimate son by Nell Gwynne. The artist’s hefty nymph was held, in family lore, to represent the orange seller, but this was purely speculative. Sir Alban, wrote his solicitor, was most anxious for this painting, the gem of his small collection, to pass to you. He retained the warmest memories of his years in Ceylon, and often referred to happy times spent in the company of your mother.

An ambiguous legacy, wouldn’t you say? I keep the painting in a cabinet, along with Sir Alban’s other gift, a silver eggcup presented on the occasion of my christening. Now and then I set these objects before me and study them. An egg, a mistress, a bastard son: their message seems unequivocal. But the testimony of signs is unreliable. Within minutes I have reasoned that an eggcup is a wholly conventional gift on the part of a godparent, and that the Hon. Thomas’s daub points only to the ill-judged sentimentality of a nonagenarian. The argument prevails for a brief interval; then doubt creeps in again. These sessions always end the same way: I cross to my mirror where reassurance waits in the solid evidence of my flesh.

If you wish to ascertain a man’s lineage, read his face not his birth certificate. My skin is as dark as my father’s, our branch of the Obeysekeres being famously black. Like Pater, I am of average height and inclined to portliness in age. We share a high forehead, thick, springing hair, a curved nose and assertive ears. We are not handsome men. But we have presence. Whereas Sir Alban, as he appears in my parents’ photograph album, is tall and hollow-chested, with pointed features and an entirely unconvincing mustache. He clasps his left wrist in his right hand, holding himself together.

By now it will be apparent that my pen is not constrained by decorum. I have always set great store by the truth, a virtue not usually prized in my profession. But it was my ability to see accurately and to speak the truth, without concern for convention or fear of reprisal, that made my name in a different sense. The very notoriety of the Hamilton case has seen it shrouded in the fog of rumor, conjecture and misinformation that passes for analysis in the drawing rooms of this country. In these pages I intend to set down the facts of the matter at last.

A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

My grandfather, Sir Stanley Obeysekere, was a mudaliyar, an office that placed a man at the pinnacle of our island’s social system. A mudaliyar was a leader of men, with considerable influence in his ancestral district. By tradition he was a gifted soldier and a skilled diplomat, abilities he placed at the service of his sovereign. With the advent of the Europeans, however, the role of the mudaliyar evolved. The Kandyan kingdom remained unconquered in the hills until 1815, but as the Portuguese, Dutch and finally the British occupied larger and larger areas of the maritime provinces, it was for their administrative talents, above all, that my ancestors came to be valued by the colonial powers. Their education, the respect they commanded among their countrymen and their knowledge of the island’s customs meant they were ideally suited to assist in the colonial administration: as record keepers, as intermediaries and interpreters, as presidents of the courts that dealt with native disputes concerning land, contracts and debts.

The Europeans rewarded loyalty with land: whole villages were given in gift to the mudaliyars, vast tracts of jungle, tax-free estates. Pater’s inheritance included landholdings throughout the southern provinces, four properties in Colombo, six or seven outstation bungalows, a cottage in the hills, a tea plantation and a plumbago mine; as well as Lokugama, our country seat, where my childhood unraveled in splendid isolation.

I have no doubt that my ancestors were vigorous men. One of my lasting regrets is that I never knew my grandfather, who was by all accounts a wise and able administrator. I have by me a copy of the confidential memorandum from Government House recommending his knighthood. It notes that my grandfather possessed a most complete and accurate knowledge of the practice and procedure of the Island and describes him as a man of the highest character, honourable, high principled and unswervingly loyal.

Alas, Sir Stanley met with disaster at the age of thirty-four. He was boating on the lake in Kandy one afternoon when he noticed that a party of English girls, who had ventured out without a boatman in the spirited way of the young, had gotten into difficulty. Before his horrified eyes, one of the girls, who had unwisely risen to her feet, was pitched overboard. Ten years earlier my grandfather had swum the Hellespont, cheered on by a smelly band of very villainous Greeks, as he recorded in his diary. Now he dived at once into the lake and reached the young lady’s side in a few swift strokes.

All would have been well had it not been for the hysterical reaction of Miss Daisy Dawson, one of the ladies left shrieking in the boat. Afterward her father, the Government Agent for the Jaffna Province, offered in extenuation the terror and confusion his daughter felt at the prospect of capsizing (none of the ladies could swim) and her extreme distress at seeing her friend, a sweet girl on the threshold of womanhood, being manhandled by a native. In her understandable terror, confusion and distress, Miss Dawson brought her oar crashing down on my grandfather’s skull. He drowned, of course.

Miss Dawson’s party, including the sweet girl in the water, was rescued by two Scottish engineers, whose presence on the lake was taken as proof that my grandfather had acted courageously but precipitately. Two white men would not have sat by and watched an English girl drown. Sir Stanley would have done better to attract the engineers’ attention with manly shouts. The sentiment in billiard rooms and newspaper editorials was that the Ceylonese, even the ablest among them, were prone to exaggeration.

Pater was a boy of nine when his father drowned. Some said Sir Stanley had been murdered; it came down to one’s point of view. His death served as a pretext for a halfhearted attempt to stir up anti-British sentiment, which floundered at once since the Obeysekere clan failed to support it. In fact my Great-Uncle Willy wrote a strongly worded letter to the Times of Ceylon regretting his brother’s impetuousness, and absolving Miss Dawson, a mere inexperienced girl, of all blame.

It so happened that Willy was involved in litigation at the time. He was the subject of a lawsuit brought by a man called Perera, who was contesting Willy’s title to some twenty acres of forested land near Chilaw. This fellow Perera claimed that the land had belonged to his family for generations, although he could produce no certifiable title of ownership. He alleged that Willy had acquired a spurious title to the property and then sent a band of thugs to seize it by force.

Such allegations—indeed such practices—were common enough in those days, when everyone who could afford to do so was mad to get his hands on land that could be used for cash crops. One might argue that the land grab had been set off by the government, whose Waste Land Ordinance had declared that all lands not permanently cultivated or in certifiable ownership were the property of the Crown. In this way the British acquired acres of primeval forest that were sold for plantations. The local elite followed suit, clearing land for coffee and tea and rubber and coconut with so much zeal that the government was eventually forced to consider measures for preserving the jungle and slowing down sales of uncultivated land.

Willy and Perera had hired teams of lawyers who had been fighting it out in our tortoiselike courts for years. In fact the case had dragged on for so long that Willy had grown quite fond of his adversary, whom he referred to affectionately as The Blasted P. He regaled his relatives with details about this character: his hair oil, the sturdy umbrella that accompanied him everywhere, his habit of picking his teeth with a long fingernail, his numerous offspring (“I counted at least fifteen. Huge, hairy hulks. And as for his sons . . . !”). When he learned that The Blasted P’s eldest daughter was to be married, Willy sent her a handsome canteen of cutlery. It was returned the next day. Willy slapped his forehead. “Of course! The Blasted P scorns cutlery. Should have sent the girl a set of fingerbowls.”

Whenever the clan gathered at Lokugama, Pater and his cousins would entertain the adults by acting out imaginary episodes from the life of The Blasted P, who had quickly passed into family myth. The Blasted P at Buck House: much hilarity from the spectators as our hero presses betel on the Crown Prince, slurps his tea from a saucer, ogles the behind of a lady-in-waiting, asks a footman when the arrack will be served, all under the unamused eye of Victoria (my Aunt Sybil, much padded with cushions, who at the age of twelve bore an unnerving resemblance to that redoutable monarch).

Willy once took The Blasted P aside and made him a sporting offer: settle the matter once and for all like gentlemen, weapon of his choice, circumvent the bally lawyers. But The Blasted P was a devout Buddhist. “Lectured me on the taking of life and whatnot. Blighter’s bleeding me to death in the courts but that’s different, it seems.”

With the shift in government policy on the sale of forested land, the matter was no longer farcical. Willy’s lawyers expressed pessimism about the final ruling, expected in a few weeks. Then my grandfather died and Willy wrote his letter. The court found in his favor. His jungle acres were cleared for coconuts and in time returned considerable profits. The Blasted P faded from view, although Willy always sent him a card at Christmas. Yet he died a disappointed man, poor Willy, because the OBE he yearned for never materialized. The English have long memories, you see. Their great talent lies in the reconciliation of justice and compromise. A formidable race. I miss them to this day.

RITZY

Would Pater have turned out differently if Sir Stanley’s accident hadn’t deprived him, at a tender age, of a father’s loving sternness? Speculation of that kind is irresistible and pointless. For myself, I believe that sons are born to disappoint their fathers. In that respect, every man fulfills his destiny.

My father was an indulgent, insouciant man. There was something spongy about him, like a fish that has lain too long out of water. This was perhaps the consequence of his moment in history. With the development of the colonial Civil Service, the mudaliyars’ power had eroded, and a preoccupation with status had taken its place. Senior chaps like Pater had little to do but advise the British on the doings and the opinions of the Ceylonese. In this way, they came to wield enormous influence in the twice-yearly distribution of imperial honors among their countrymen. Pater traveled at the center of a retinue eager to laugh at his witticisms and compliment him on his judgment. In private, lists of the coveted honors were drawn up on the backs of dance cards. Resentment at being passed over would be elaborated into an extravagant narrative of insult and vengeance as obsessively detailed as the petit point over which generations of ladies wore out their eyes in drawing rooms.

Pater loved parties, champagne, horses. His generosity was legendary. If he had particularly enjoyed himself at a house party, his hostess might receive three bottles of priceless Tokay Essence or a comb that had last belonged to a Chinese empress. Sentimental songs made him weep. Once, learning of a critically ailing child on the estate at Lokugama, he despatched a carriage to Colombo for his own specialist. The round trip of two hundred miles took the best part of a day, and the child died hours before Sir Humphrey arrived; but that was not the point.

At Lokugama, petitioners thronged at the gate whenever Pater was in residence. In his hearing true friends desisted from admiring this painting, that bibelot, because, “Take it! I bought it for you! Take it!” he would urge, and if they remained adamant in their refusal, he had it sent around to them the next day, anyway.

Like all admirable qualities, this liberality was hard on those in its vicinity. I learned to keep prized possessions hidden away after Pater spotted my beloved lead soldiers on the verandah, scooped up the Duke of Wellington and pressed him into the grubby hands of our cookwoman’s grandson. I flew at the brat and kicked his ringwormed shins, for which I earned myself a thrashing. That night I cried myself to sleep. Not for the sake of my backside—my father’s strokes were so light and glancing that in his hands a cane was an instrument of love—but for the injustice I had suffered.

It was Pater’s iconic largesse that had first brought him to my mother’s attention. Mater, her cousin Iris, and Iris’s parents were taking tea at the Savoy on the girls’ first visit to London, when Great-Uncle Bertie adjusted his monocle: “Isn’t that young Obeysekere over there by the window? But who on earth is that frightful fellow with him?”

The frightful fellow turned out to be an out-of-work coachman who had stopped my father in the Strand and asked for money, saying he was hungry. Pater invited him to tea. Dumbstruck waiters fetched apricot jam, lemon curd, cheese tartlets, asparagus rolls, shortbread fingers, coffee éclairs, tongue sandwiches, ginger biscuits, coconut meringues, shrimp paste, a raspberry sponge, a chocolate blancmange, plum cake, seed cake and a trembling mandarin orange jelly. After all, Pater was known to tip royally. The coachman rose splendidly to the occasion, filling his stomach and his pockets at the same time. Mater swore she saw him snaffle the sugar tongs, wedged between two currant buns.

Dowager ladies began sniffing and asking in ringing tones for the manager. All oblivious, Pater smoked his pipe and chatted away. When Maud’s party approached, he was saying, “You must promise me, as a man of honor, never again to soil your lips with China. Ceylon tea! The flavor, you know, is incomparable. If you could see those hillsides on an April morning!” There and then, Mater decided to marry him.

Beware of what you fall in love with. I have often observed that we are attracted to those characteristics that we ourselves do not possess; so it is not surprising that they quickly lose their fascination. My mother, a shrewd, pragmatic woman, was charmed by this informal, open-handed stranger. Within days she was calling him Ritzy: a nickname that revealed her disdain for detail (she had met him, as you will recall, at the Savoy) as well as her craving for glamour. But as love’s feast was succeeded by familiarity’s reckoning, she would realize she had married a man who liked nothing better than giving things away.

Society is intolerant of this impulse—only think where it might lead—and so it was fortunate, from my father’s point of view, that a ready-made, socially sanctioned outlet was at hand for his weakness. The horses came from Ireland and Arabia, from Cape Town and Calcutta, beautiful, smooth-muscled beasts, nervous as harpstrings. In the hills during the Season, in Colombo all year round, with a gardenia in his buttonhole and his lucky moonstone set in embossed silver on his little finger, Pater proceeded to unburden himself of my inheritance. From time to time he couldn’t help winning. On such occasions he was visibly downcast.

My parents quarreled frightfully. Or rather Pater dodged about the room, while my mother hurled abuse and whatever she could reach at his maddening smile: cushions, fruit, fruitstands, first editions of Tennyson, eighteenth-century candlesticks, a set of ivory figurines, a silver salver, a game of dominoes, a maidenhair fern. She plucked a canary from its cage and launched it on a stream of curses. It flew into a mirror and died. Mater seized the yellow corpse and dropped it into her teacup, then flung the lot at my father’s head.

She was a great smasher, my mother. Crystal was her speciality. My father took pains to ensure that she always had a supply of costly glassware at hand. Did she never realize he was making her his accomplice in his grand scheme of beggaring us? Vases, decanters, a wine-red Venetian swan and five little cygnets: they shivered apart and Mater’s yellow eyes glistened. Her lizard tongue slid over her lips. Once, peeping awestruck from behind an armchair while she raged and smashed a Baccarat jug and a dozen ruinously expensive water glasses, I saw her grow still. She strode over to Pater, thrust him back onto the ottoman and straddled him. I thought she was going to murder him, slit his throat with an icy splinter. Squeezing my knees together, I rocked for joy. She would be mine, all mine! Imagine my disappointment when she moaned and he laughed, and next thing they were sitting side by side, the best of friends.

But what I remember most about my parents is that they weren’t there.

LOKUGAMA

I remember the coming of the monsoons, that intoxicating sensation of rules disobeyed as the earth darkened and the wind grew huge and swung around to a different quadrant. I remember the grassy inner courtyard, where I lay on my back through slow afternoons and waited for a disheveled cloud to move across the sky.

Beyond the servants’ quarters, on the far side of the wall that marked the rear boundary of the compound, loomed the jungle. Green birds flew in and out of it. One day I stacked bricks at the foot of the wall and heaved myself level with the parapet overhead. There I gazed into the face of a cobra, who was coiled in a patch of sunlight. I did not repeat the experiment.

My earliest companion was my smooth gray pony, Moonshine. Every morning and evening I would ride him to the trunk road and back, bracketing each day with his comforting presence. There were dogs, too, five or six Great Danes reeking of Lifebuoy soap sprawled about the place like trophies. Pater was fond of the breed; perhaps they reminded him of horses. He used to feed them toast spread with Gentleman’s Relish. They never lived very long: those the snakes didn’t get, the ticks finished off.

Forty years earlier, when a fire had destroyed part of the house, my grandfather himself had drawn up the plans for its reconstruction. The resulting admixture of styles and periods bore eloquent testimony to the triumph of zeal over talent. The courtyards typical of our ancient homesteads were now imprisoned between verandahs tiled in the tiny mustard and rust hexagons of any Civil Service bungalow. Satinwood doors, three inches thick, that had withstood Dutch bullets, opened onto lavatories. A corridor turned an angle and collided with a bricked-up doorway. An ancient fresco on the gateposts, restored by an artist who had toiled on these scenes from the life of the Buddha for three years, jarred with the marble nymphs and shepherd boys Sir Stanley had shipped out from Genoa to lurk about the compound. Fortunately Miss Dawson and her oar intervened at this juncture and my grandfather’s vision of battlements was never translated into stone.

I had been bored in every cranny of the vast, ill-assorted house he had created. The table in the dining room could seat thirty-two; morose with boredom, I once lay under its ebony expanse throughout a nine-course luncheon, rousing myself now and then to inspect the ankles of a cabinet minister’s daughter. Boredom inspired me to gouge our family tree into a calamander sideboard and take a single huge bite from every biscuit and cake in the pantry. Spiteful with tedium, I tortured frogs and birds in oleander thickets, only to weary of their suffering no sooner than it had begun.

At last, desperate for distraction, I would make a tour of all the cabinets in the house, studying the fabulous flotsam of Empire: scarlet- lacquered boxes, ivory-stemmed opium pipes, pewter card trays, an ostrich egg mounted on a filigree stand, even a jade-green tika from New Zealand. Scattered through this priceless collection was a democratic assortment of leather camels from Aden and seashell ashtrays from Brighton. No distinction was made between the relative worth of these articles. A Georgian tankard might hold a gaudy paper fan emblazoned with cherry-blossom in Birmingham, or a seventeenth- century Persian wall tile painted with ruby pomegranates. All served equally to link our old house, dozing in the jungle, with the great electric world of merchants and machinery. I was the center that drew and held them all—or so I imagined, and would grow lightheaded with pride. Years later in London, as I strolled through the perfumed abundance of Mr Selfridge’s emporium, I was visited by the same delightful sensation. Such profusion, such variety! A cornucopia of disparate items, lace-trimmed handkerchiefs and rattan parrot cages, collected en bloc from every outpost of the globe. My gaze alone lent meaning to its surreal topography, rescuing it from chaos.

If I close my eyes I can still conjure the liniment smell of the medicine chest that stood in Mater’s bedroom at Lokugama. It was painted white and locked with a small brass key. My mental taxonomy pairs this faintly sinister cupboard with an angled cabinet that occupied a corner of Pater’s study. Objects that had been in our family for generations were heaped on its shelves in disarray. Ornamental daggers dulled by time, palm-leaf scrolls bearing royal signatures, statuettes of the Buddha, tooled betel boxes, gold-inlaid areca nut cutters, perforated chank shells, a jumble of tortoiseshell and silver hair combs: they all gave off a disagreeable odor of dust and neglect.

We had at least a dozen indoor servants and a regiment of gardeners and grooms. I remember the commotion when a servant-girl threw herself down the kitchen well; for a week, all the household water had to be drawn from the estate wells and brought to the big house in a cart, a welcome bump in the monotonous graph of our routine.

From time to time, out of nowhere, the kitchen courtyard would be full of squawking and feathers. An orchestra from the nearest town would show up in a bullock cart. At least, their instruments arrived in the cart; the musicians trudged along beside it. Tuning up was invariably accompanied by complaints about bunions. Later my parents would arrive from Colombo, sweeping in with presents and anywhere from three to thirty friends. I would r. . .