Free The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser

another flake of self scraped loose by the knife. I remember opening the newspaper and reading the headline about Jaya: there came upon me the sensation of retreating water, and the curved world falling away under my toes.
    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,