The House Gun (11 page)

S
inking.

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.

Apparently he did not know what he wanted to be.

Claudia understood her accomplice's observation to be about their son's sexuality. Even in this strange new form of intimacy that had come to replace the other (revitalized it in a way that shouldn't be examined), he could not tell her what really was coming back to him: ‘ … the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying.'

T
he statements that seem to have been emptied of all meaning by endless repetition are the truest. Conventional wisdom is the most demonstrable. Life goes on. It did not stop dead that Friday night; that solution is not on offer. Ever. Neither from Harald's resource of God in His wisdom—he had to accept that refusal if not as His will, then as man's lot; nor from Claudia's rational experience that while some conditions appear terminal, some semblance of life persists. Hamilton said he was satisfied with the preparation of Heads of Argument and that he could come by and bring his clients up-to-date on his way home, why not, no inconvenience to him. So they put out the tray with glasses, the ice, soda, and bottles. Hamilton likes his tot of brandy. A few days before, Claudia, waiting at a traffic light, had unthinkingly beckoned to a prancing man holding up a candelabra of red lilies and bought flowers again, as she had used to on the way home from her surgery. They were under shaded lamplight. Hamilton entered the
mise en scene
of life going on as he did the equally well-appointed room in his chambers; as if every place were made ready for his presence. Something to drink was welcome; he tested the
brandy, clucked his tongue, and got up from the chair he had chosen to serve himself a spurt of soda.

—My news is the date is set. A month from today.—

—It couldn't be sooner?—

—I know it seems long, but Duncan understands. And the judge is the one I had in mind. So.—

—What does Duncan understand, Hamilton?—Harald was not to be fobbed off with some assurance about delay.—We haven't much way of finding out from him. But you know that, we've gone through it with you over and over. Does he understand you're relying on getting the girl to show she was the one who drove him to some edge of madness from which he could do what he did?
She'll
do this, out of her own mouth. I mean, does he believe it: that
she
was what it was. That he was possessed—in some way. I don't see how your use of her can help Duncan if he won't accept this manoeuvring of the—this—I don't know what to call it—justification.—

—No no, not of the act; of the state of mind, the state of mind, Harald. This was not something premeditated. It was breaking-point—and she put him there, she did it! There on the sofa with Jespersen! It was her work!—

Motsamai was legs apart wide at the thighs, leaning out towards them in his body's emphasis, as he did from behind the desk in chambers, the gleam of day's efforts shone on the obsidian of his face, his blackness was the stamp of authority in the room.—He says he's guilty. That's all. I'm going to show why. I'm going to show who else is. How.—

—So he hates her now. Whether or not he's ready to blame her for himself and what he did. Hates her for what he found.—Claudia looked to Harald.

Motsamai answered them both, but taking his attention inward for a moment.—He doesn't speak about her. He doesn't want to think of her, that's my impression. I don't succeed, in that direction, with him. So I take it he leaves it to me. He knows I'm going to cross examine her.—

—Hates her now. Or he loves her.—

Claudia's laconic either/or is irrelevant to Motsamai.

—Of course he knows, too, that I'm calling Khulu Dladla. Ah-hêh. —

—For the adventure with Jespersen.—

—Oh indeed. Indeed I shall, Harald. Jespersen has—he had—his part in the state of mind, didn't he—ve-rr-y much so. He and the girl. Fatal combination. Isn't there good reason to believe that not content with throwing over his male lover, he got some kind of extra kick out of sleeping with the woman the ex-lover had taken up? Perhaps there was contempt or some sort of revenge, the lover has deserted the set in the house, so to speak, defecting to the female sex. Preferring women! Who really can follow these bisexual variations. They both were Duncan's lovers. Maybe each had some grievance against him, you know how such things are, even in ordinary love matters—my God, if you could hear some of the motives I come across in my briefs. Man! There could have been spite against Duncan the shameless pair were prepared to enjoy themselves with. Certainly they couldn't have thought of a better way to hurt and humiliate and push such a man to the point of self-destruction. A confession of guilt can be a kind of suicide. That's what I see here, and my task is to save my client from it. That's why I'm going to cross examine Miss Natalie James and I'm calling Mr Nkululeko Dladla.—

Suicide. But he didn't turn the gun on himself in the cottage, he threw it away.

Claudia and Harald are returned to that scene.

Suicide. The State may do it for you if you are convicted of murder. Harald speaks for them.

—We've never discussed the sentence. If the mitigation plea succeeds. Or if it does not.—

Hamilton Motsamai's face, the depth of bass in a long register of that intoning of his, the groaning, tender ah-hehheh … mmhê reached out to them in embrace.—I know what you're thinking. But the penalty hasn't been exacted for some time, there's been a
moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the old Constitution became inevitable. It's all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. The first case to be heard there, as a matter of fact, is the charge that it is illegal under the interim Constitution. The Death Penalty. I'm confident the Court will rule that it's unconstitutional. It will be abolished. Finished and done before we get sentence passed down. Ah-hêh. Only for the time being it's still on the Statute Book.—