Free The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser Page B

Jayasinghe crone who was informing the room in an imperious shriek that she had broken her ear trumpet when she threw it at her dhobi. My sister had on the strained expression she habitually wore in company, like someone determined to follow a conversation in a foreign language. As for me, I played my part in exemplary fashion, smiling and chatting away. I even suffered Jaya to mangle me against his chest at the end of the evening. He almost crushed my collar bone.
    I rose very early the next day and went out into the dewy garden with Kumar’s rifle. I got that crow with my first shot. When I came down to breakfast I looked out of the window and saw the gardener’s boy nailing it to the
suriya
tree. Two centuries earlier the Dutch had planted hundreds of those trees, all up and down the coast. As they built their forts and counted their gold they must have gazed at those tulip-shaped, greenish-yellow flowers and wondered if they could bear it any longer: the scent of cinnamon, the approximations.

A DISTURBING EPISODE
    F reed from the duty of providing for Mater and Claudia, I decided there was nothing to be gained from moving to Lokugama. As soon as word got around that I intended to remain in Colombo, Pater’s old friend Aloysius Drieberg offered me a place in his Hulftsdorp chambers. There I soon acquired a reputation for brilliance. The soundness of my arguments impressed the Bench; the fluency and wit of my delivery delighted juries. I seldom lost a case. My fees rose correspondingly.
    Rents in the capital were exorbitant. Colombo landlords treat their tenants in much the same spirit as a cookwoman handles coconuts: split them open, scrape them out, throw away the shells. Fortunately I was spared these trials: Kumar and Iris insisted I stay on and make my home with them, and there was no withstanding their resolve. Iris, who had never enjoyed good health, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease around this time. I hope that my presence in their house brought a measure of cheer into the lives of those two simple souls, whose relations with my parents were far from uncomplicated, yet who throughout those years showed me nothing but kindness.
    For a while I tried to find a tenant for Lokugama, but the isolation of the house proved a disincentive, and so it continued to stand empty and grew more bedraggled with each passing month. The first signs of shabbiness had appeared even before I left for Oxford, and continued apace in the last years of my father’s life, when no one in the family was spending more than a few days on the estate and there was no money to spare on repairs deemed nonessential. But in latitudes where rot is the status quo, preservation is a war that must be waged hourly, skirmish by skirmish; inaction is synonymous with defeat. An assault by termites on one of the back-verandah posts proceeded unchecked. In the time it took to replace a row of missing tiles a monsoon had torn three more from the roof; and the rats had grown so bold that they would stroll across a room in daylight.
    On my return I had sacked all the servants Pater had quite unnecessarily continued to employ. With so little to occupy them, they had fallen into idleness and insolence—our head servant even having the temerity to protest that my father had promised them all pensions in their old age. Out they all went with no further ado. I brought in a man and his wife to look after the place, and went down now and then to keep them up to the mark and arrange for a little work on the house. On one of these visits, the bungalow keeper told me that Claudia and Jaya had dropped by on a motoring trip and stayed for a cup of tea.
    With the ménage in Green Crescent I had as little to do as possible. The newlyweds had spent an extended honeymoon on the Continent. After they returned, I pleaded the demands of my flourishing practice to excuse myself from family gatherings. On those occasions when I could not decently absent myself, I found