The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  What did they talk about in the car? Neither would remember. Maybe they hadn’t spoken at all, each preferring it that way. They were already seated in the room when Motsamai—Hamilton—came in with the animation of a long lunch, like an actor backstage after leaving an appreciative audience.

  —Got caught up!—

  Dumped a raincoat, flung hands apart, a smile that seemed to belong with the last pleasantries and witticisms exchanged at a restaurant door. Wine in him maybe.

  It was as if he had forgotten whatever it was he had called them together for. He calmed while ignoring them, flitting through papers that had arrived on his desk in his absence. And then became really aware of their presence; turned from where he stood and shook Harald’s hand, clasped it doubly, covering the fist, and presented himself before Claudia.—Tea. You’ll have some tea. Or you’d like a fruit juice?—

  The tray had been brought and the obligatory ritual was followed in preparation for—what? ‘The afternoon hours’. A considerable weight of his time to be given to whatever it must be he had to say to them.

  —You’ve seen your son this week, yes? I have the impression he’s standing up well.—

  —Whatever that means.—

  She may not know, but he, Harald, impatient, does: why pretend !—He’s determined to finish the plan he was working on, you’ve arranged that, I gather. I don’t know what the firm will feel about it.—

  —Oh he’s still on the payroll. Man! I should damn well hope so! They’d look fine if they struck him off before he faces a charge that hasn’t been heard. I would not be prepared to let that pass, you can be sure.—

  —If the man himself does not wait to be judged guilty.—

  —Oh come now, Harald, I’ve told you again and again. That’s not the principle. The facts still must be examined by the court, verified. You must bear in mind there are cases where an accused may be taking the rap for someone else—a matter of big money, or even, certainly where a capital offence may be involved, a matter of love, something where one party will do anything to protect the other.—

  —You don’t think there’s any possibility here, do you.—

  Claudia is not asking, she is drily pre-empting any baseless encouragement in herself.

  —I do not. No. I’m reiterating from another aspect what we know our case rests on—circumstances. Circumstances that will be revealed in court. As I’ve already discussed with you. As I’ve been studying in the psychiatrist’s report. As I’ve been following up in the talks I’ve had with people I’ve called in this past week. Verster. David Baker and so on. People from the house and those who frequented the house. What must and what should not be expected from cross examination. If I think it necessary to call this one or that as witnesses.—

  —There is only the man, the gardener. If you can say witness is what he says he saw and didn’t find.—

  Harald contracted his calves against his chair to control irritation with Claudia. The lawyer was working up to whatever it was he was going to tell them, it was signalled in the way he leant back and then brought his body forward over the expanse of desk that held him at professional remove from them, his people in trouble; an intimacy with which, while inspiring their confidence must always leave him with a clear head above theirs. He could have summed it up for them: the definition of a best available Senior Counsel is one who thinks for those who do not know what to think.

  —I’ve had them all in this room, one by one. With the exception of Baker, Jespersen’s lover, they don’t seem to feel anything particularly violent against Duncan, which surprised me, I must admit. Even if they thought they were concealing from me —I have my ways of seeing through the faces people put up. After all, one of them is dead, you could expect them to reject absolutely—never want to look at Duncan again. Ah-hêh …—

  —One of them’s been to visit Duncan. We bumped into him outside.—

  Motsamai tilted his head at Claudia in confirmation; must have sent him there.

  —Ah-hêh. It was necessary for someone to go to him. From the house, the two men who are left of the little set that lived on the property. Kind of family. Whatever in the house might have happened.—

  —He never mentioned Dladla who’d just been with him.—

  —I suppose it was a bit of a shock. But also something to give him courage, you know what I mean. Later. When he could bring himself to think about it, in there. There’s so much time, so many hours when you’re inside … Well. Dladla was with me last week and again yesterday. We’ve talked. Long talks. He’s told me what Duncan hasn’t, and what I didn’t get out of the girl. Miss Natalie James didn’t tell me the particulars of her relationship with Duncan. Dladla says she tried to kill herself after the affair of the birth. I don’t know exactly what she did, pills, walked out into the sea, it was in Durban, he says, but Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him. Depends which way it was, for her. Given my impressions of her, she could punish him for it. That could have been what the display of intercourse on the sofa was about. Oh yes. With a woman like her. A proven unstable character. I’ve said before—I suspect she wanted him to discover her. And now it turns out there’s another reason why she would choose this particular way to get at him.—

  The discourse is slowing down. All three were on some reckless vehicle together and it was braking as it approached a dangerous blind rise over which there would have to be a new surge.

  —Well. Dladla, yesterday. Yes. We were talking. In English and also, yesterday, in our language, when there are difficult things to say it’s better to use the words that are closest.—

  Motsamai struck the flat of his palm at his chest.

  —He told me many things. I thought I had it all straight from my sessions with Duncan—but this man told me. He told me something else. I don’t think you know. You would have said, you’d know I’d need to know, that’s so.—

  He is looking at the two of them with the patronizing compassion of an adult who suspects a child of maybe not being entirely open to him. His head is lowered but the gloss of his eyes under fold-raised forehead glistens at them.

  They knew nothing. Nothing. That was it, that was so! It was an accusation, not from the lawyer, but from each to the other, Harald, Claudia, another killing, a common life speared through, flung down: you, a father who knew nothing about your son, let him share a gun like a six-pack of beers; you, a mother who knew nothing about your son, let him fire it.

  But Hamilton, their Hamilton Motsamai, had no part in this fierce flash of animus between them, although, diagnostician-priest-confessor that he was, he might have sensed it, brought from the Other Side his particular kind of mother-tongue prescience.

  —Khulu knows something else.—He is racing the three of them down the steep descent now, can’t stop. Don’t speak: —Natalie was not the only lover on the sofa. Khulu says Duncan and Carl Jespersen were lovers at one time. Jespersen broke up the affair, not Duncan. Khulu says Duncan took it badly. He didn’t move away, out of the cottage, although the other one—Jespersen had stayed there with him—went back to live in the house. But he was hurt, Khulu says he saw it. Depressed. Even if he wanted to show he wasn’t any less free than the others—‘for us, people can change partners, no big deal, still friends’ that’s how the fellow puts it—Duncan somehow underneath didn’t have the same facility, the same attitude. And then it so happened that he went to the coast and found the girl to save. Saved himself. Khulu suggests. He doesn’t know if Duncan had met her before, he thinks he might have, somewhere, when she was still with the other man, the father of the child she had. So he came back in love with a woman and brought her into the set-up. Nobody minded, no prejudices, he was free to do as he liked, and everything’s fine, Miss Natalie James fits in very well. There is the heterosexual couple in the garden cottage and the gay trio in the house. David Baker and Carl Jespersen are lovers, Jespersen’s fling with Dun
can is a thing of the past, for Duncan just as these episodes are for the others. And then, and then … Jespersen is the one who makes love to the woman. Duncan’s woman. A wife, I call it, living there like any ordinary couple in that cottage. Oh we’re told there were other little adventures she had. But this is Carl Jespersen. First he rejects the man and then he makes love to the man’s own woman. He’s there to be found on top of her—I’m sorry Claudia—right there on the sofa in the room where they’re all such good friends!—

  Motsamai is hearing applause, excitement moves his shoulders under the padding of his jacket which keeps them so elegantly squared. In an earlier generation, on what the law decreed as his Side, he would have had no recourse for this spirit but the pulpit. He had commanded them completely so that they could not have interrupted him; now he expects something outspoken from them. But all there is in this chamber, a familiar of the many emotions of people in trouble, is his rhetoric; and his clients’ estrangement, neither wishing to admit any reaction to the other.

  At last, it was Harald who spoke. Words are stones dropped one by one.

  —Does it make any difference whose lover he shot.—

  In their absolute attention that magnified every detail of his demeanour, both saw Motsamai’s muscles relax beneath the jacket and the encirclement of his shirt collar and tie-knot.

  —Ah, I’m glad you take it like that. Harald, Claudia. (He summoned and commanded each, formally.) That’s how it should be. I’m impressed. That’s what we need if I am to proceed in my client’s interest, effectively, no nonsense. I have difficult decisions ahead. Because it does make a difference! It could make a crucial difference! This factor. The prosecutor—he’ll have no purpose in calling any of the friends: as witness to what? The State’s case rests on the confession. That’s sufficient. It’s the Defence’s decision whether or not to put Dladla on the witness stand. Dladla’s not going to be questioned about this aspect unless the Defence decides to bring it up. What matters is my and my colleagues’ decision. That’s the way to look at what you’ve just heard. That’s all that matters. You are wise; believe me. Oh you are wise.—

  Harald stood up as if someone had beckoned, so that Claudia turned towards the door. Which way, which way. She rose. Motsamai—Hamilton—came gently over to guide them.

  —Don’t discuss this with anyone.—

  Claudia lifted a strand of hair off her forehead and looped it behind her ear, looking at him.—If you call Dladla to the witness box what is the effect on the judge going to be. How are you to know his attitude to this sort of complication.—

  —Oh just like you two and myself, anyone is aware of the kind of set-up there apparently was in that house. Men with men. Nothing special about that, nothing to be ashamed of, condemned, these days—the new Constitution recognizes their right of preference. That is so. That’s the law.—

  Sinking.

  Sinking down in the lift they were alone. Enclosed together.

  What a mess.

  In contemplation, as if it had been come upon by chance in somebody else’s life.

  Did you mean what you said, what does it matter whose lover it was that was killed?

  The cloth of her sleeve and his were touching.

  I mean it. Why did he take on a kind of life, a range of emotions he just isn’t equal to. Who did he think he was.

  Harald is able to speak it out, to her.

  Claudia hugged her shoulders against her neck; about to shame herself with an ugly giggle. Hamilton has the idea we’d be more concerned about the homosexuality than what happened.

  Buggery may be criminal to him.

  The mirrored box that caught their private images from all angles, a camera identifying them, halted with a shudder and Harald stepped back in an exaggerated gesture of convention for her to precede him.

  In the car he released the locking device which secured it against thieves; they buckled their safety belts. That’s what I asked about the judge. I was thinking of the old guard, the good Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church, some of them are surely still on the bench. But a black judge might be much the same, anyway, when it comes to that.

  A mess is something before which you don’t know where to begin: what to turn over, pick up first, only to put the fragment down again, perhaps in a place it never belonged. This ‘discovery’ of Hamilton’s could not stun where already the blow of that Friday had made its iron impact; punch-drunk, after that has been survived, everything else is its fall-out. As the sight of Duncan coming between two policemen into the court was, as the first visit to the visitors’ room was. What more could happen after something terrible has happened; what could measure against that fact. At night they talked in soft voices although there was no-one to hear them in the townhouse; expensively built, the walls sound-proof against the curiosity of neighbours. They lay in the dark, no longer in isolation. Sorting together through the mess. You cannot do this on your own.

  That’s what Motsamai was fishing for when he came to see me at the surgery.

  I don’t think so. He didn’t know, then. It was before he’d seen Dladla.

  But he may have got some idea, from all the times he’s been probing Duncan. He has his ways of getting out of people what they don’t know they’re revealing. He says. It’s a boast but there’s some truth in it, it’s like the gift for diagnosis some doctors have and some haven’t.

  They could take up where they left off; the weekend; any night. In the living-room Harald wandered, might be going to set the burglar alarm before bed, stood before a picture, found himself at the cupboard where liquor was kept and began to displace the bottles, jostled against each other. He came upon one that had been pushed to the back, only a thumb’s-high level of some spirit was settled at the bottom of it. He poured the colourless stuff into a glass the size of a medicine measure and sniffed at it. The rest —the bottle turned upside down to empty it of the last drop—went into another glass; held up to her, but she shook her head.

  He could have experimented at school. In boys’ schools it’s difficult to resist. But I would have thought—certainly we thought!—at a school like his, first sex would be with girls? There were enough girls available … Sex education. Girls would have been on the pill already, then, wouldn’t they?

  He came over to her with the glass, and she took it. They drank and grimaced at the potency of a distillation from the frozen North of his ancestry. The only link with it now was the identity of the one who was shot dead on the sofa.

  You think it was an experiment. That’s what it was?

  Well, he was always attracted to females, wasn’t he? If we can judge by the crushes we saw he had when he was only fifteen or sixteen, the hours on the phone, the necking with little blondes I’d come upon if I walked into his room at the wrong moment.

  Claudia felt for the glass of water on the table beside her and washed down the spirit in gulps. ‘Necking’ belonged to the vocabulary of their youth, hers and Harald’s; perhaps it was originally derived from the intertwining foreplay of birds—those mating dances Harald had the patience to teach his son to admire through binoculars.

  That’s what we saw. What we were meant to see, but there could have been something else. Perhaps he wanted to have some secret. When you grow up—I remember—part of it is having some area of your life no-one can look into, even to say—to take it over—that’s fine-as-long-as-you’re-happy-my-darling.

  But he was madly in love with a woman. This woman. There’s no argument about that. Verster told us enough. A serious commitment. Putting up with her capers on the side, no-one knows what else. He seems to have been besotted with her. Sexually there must have been something very strong between them … even devastating, the way I suppose it can be if … That business with a man, before her. Wasn’t it a matter of being fascinated by the set in that house? Fashion that’s been around for his generation, the idea that homosexuality is the real liberation, to suggest this as superiority beyond the ordinary humdrum
. Why did he choose to live with those men? It turns out he didn’t take the cottage because of the girl. Moved in with them on the property because their freedom claims to go beyond all the old trappings between men and women, marriages and divorces and crying babies.

  He didn’t suffer any example of divorces and crying babies with us.

  Wanted to be one of the boys. Those boys. Emancipated. Superior. Free.

  Or he wanted to try everything. Who knows. I have patients like that, drawn to drugs for example. Not really addictive by nature, some physiological or genetic disposition, just daring themselves for experience’ sake. And what a mess, afterwards.

  A lassitude, itself some benign drug, held them in their bed and in their movements about the townhouse, a kind of hiatus. They saw themselves, Harald, Claudia, Duncan, listlessly, from afar. She went to her clinic, he went to his Board Room. Duncan was in his prison. Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery.

  When they sat in the visitors’ room they did not have the anguish that he told them nothing, although there was the covenant, he could always have come to them … short of killing; what does what he did with his sex matter, but as they sat before him and the warders there came to them now actual repulsion against him as one who had committed that act: killed. The fleeting resentment they had had in their early confusion refluxed, corrosive of what is known as natural feeling.

  Another discovery. Each sensed it in the other, in conspiracy; it must not be revealed to the lawyer who believed he had all their confidences. Revulsion was their crime, committed against their own child and they were in it together. The seals of silences there had been between them were broken; they shut themselves up in the townhouse and talked, they drove out into the veld and tramped with the dog while they added, in step, each to the other’s doubts they had about tendencies observed, and not spoken of at the time, in the child, the adolescent, the adult man. The charm the small boy had used to dominate his friends—all the games had to be his games, chosen and imposed by him, a tendency that doesn’t end there; a lack of physical courage concealed by bragging: the only release in adult life for those who are afraid is to break out just once, at last, in violence? The young adult’s uncertainty about a career: what he wanted to be? What do you want to be? So it was architecture, something on a large scale of ideas (which his doctor mother welcomed as a characteristic inherited from his cultured father, no ordinary businessman), and fortunately he turned out talented as he had been a charmer, cleverer than the colleague in the same firm who was his messenger, Verster. What he wanted to be. A mistake to take that, as it customarily was, as referring only to a career.