The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser Page B

signs that the Fernando case was drawing to a close. Whereupon, for no reason I could see (other than the prospect of being deprived of ongoing drama), Marcus got the jitters about his advocate and dumped him on the spot. Then he put through a call to my chambers and pleaded with me to take on his brief.
    At first I demurred. The Fernando saga was something of a laughing stock among the legal fraternity and I feared my involvement would appear infra dig, at best. On the other hand, the case I should have been prosecuting had come to an early conclusion when the chief witness for the defense came over to the Crown, and it so happened that I had nothing else to do.
    Marcus, sensing my hesitation, mentioned an outrageously high fee. I said I couldn’t possibly consider less than twice that sum. He agreed at once. His wife was a cinnamon heiress and the old boy was rolling in it. I told him to put his solicitors in touch with me and set about clearing my desk.

UP-COUNTRY
    M arch nights in the hill station of Nuwara Eliya were bracing. In my room at the Windsor, a fire crackled in the grate, and on my morning constitutional around the golf course I sported the tweed overcoat I had last worn in London.
    With its rose bushes and frosts and half-timbered cottages, the township offered a very passable simulacrum of an English village. My eyes stung with woodsmoke as I strolled its streets on my first evening, and there came into my mind the memory of young men in long scarves crowding around a bonfire while I looked on from the shadows. I left the European quarter and went down into the bazaar, where a fellow with his head swathed in a gunnysack against the cold was doing a roaring trade in piping hot
mas paans
. But neither the spiced fragrance issuing from his stall nor the fiery beef curry on my tongue could dispel the images conjured by the smoke: shaggy chrysanthemum faces peering out of a foggy college garden, crisp fortunes that gardeners raked up with casual disdain.
    As a boy I had loved the hill country. Every April, when society fled the worst of the pre-monsoon heat, Claudia and I joined our parents for a holiday at our place in Nuwara Eliya. The annual exodus broke the tedium of our routine at Lokugama and was the occasion of much excited anticipation. Our ayah hunted out warm vests and woolens in camphored trunks, while I reminded Claudia of treats in store: toasted marshmallows around the fire, rugging up for morning rides beside the lake on our ponies. Best of all, a week on our tea estate, some thirty miles out of Nuwara Eliya, where our bungalow looked out on near green hills and far blue ones, and we went for walks and picked wild-flowers like children in a storybook.
    In those days, when the motor car was a rarity, we traveled upcountry by train. Like all children, I inhabited a world of potent symbols. The iron span of the bridge over the Kelani River was one of them. As soon as we had steamed across its girdered expanse I would insist on donning my jersey. No matter that our engine had not even begun its assault on the improbable gradients that lay ahead and that it would be hours before the sweetness of cool hill air penetrated our compartment. I sweltered happily in wool, waiting for Claudia, the crybaby, to burst into tears when the first stretch of tunnel cutting into the mountains engulfed us in darkness. Everything happened this way, always. It was very satisfying.
    The itch of wool against my skin, the moist green ferns that sprang from rocky crevices as the track wound skyward, Claudia vomiting on the hairpin bends while I leaned out and waved to the third-class passengers in their bulging compartments at the front of the train: each discrete element contributed its part to my happiness. But I believe the deeper source of my pleasure was the certainty that on these holidays we would all be together, as a family. The up-country season, with its endless rounds of parties and dances, drew Mater as Lokugama