The House Gun Read online

  Slender hands interlaced, fingers with up-turned tips, calmly on her thighs.—I’ve already told you. You can give them that information.—

  She was responding to the lawyer but she was addressed to Duncan’s father; under the wisps of fringe that moved on her brow those eyes gazed out steadily on him. If there were to be a malediction, it would come from her. He dismissed the context swiftly. —We are not interested in your behaviour that night. Only in your other observations. Duncan’s state of mind. Leading up to that night, what has been his mood, lately, you were living with him—what kind of relationship was it?—

  And his bared face before her gaze was saying, between them, what are you, what did you do to him?

  —He was the one who asked that I move in with him. He was the one who decided.—

  —That’s not enough. Why did you move in?—

  —I don’t know. He seemed to be a solution. I’m sure you don’t want to hear my life story.—

  Although she, not the one in a cell, was the accused, here, she said this last charmingly, taking in with it the two men, her interrogators.

  —Only insofar as it will help Mr Motsamai in Duncan’s defence. Don’t you know Duncan is in danger—we’re talking here as if you’re some stranger to him, but you were living with him, sleeping in the same bed, for God’s sake! To be blunt, your life’s your own, yes, but what you did that night couldn’t have come out of the blue, what was in your relationship must have had something to do with it—what you did must have been a consequence of some sort? Were you quarrelling? Was it a crisis, or just another incident, that you’d both accepted, before? Don’t you see this is important?—

  She was listening attentively, meditatively, as to a voice indistinct on another wave-length.

  —Duncan takes on other people. Forces. Can’t leave them alone. He likes to manipulate, he can’t help it. And he’s pretty ugly when you resist, and you’re resisting because what he’s doing, what he’s got to offer, isn’t what you want. And the more he fails, the worse he gets. I think you don’t know what he’s like.—She gave a show of shuddering admiration.

  —But you stayed. You stayed with him until you got into your car and drove off and left him alone that night and didn’t come back.—

  She was still looking him full in the face, her hands still calmly interlaced.

  She closed her eyes a moment. The black lashes pressed on her cheeks.

  —I was free.—

  —So you were afraid of my son.—

  —He was afraid of me.—

  When she had gone Harald sat on in Motsamai’s chambers, looking round the shelves of law books with their paper slips marking relevant pages that might decide—not justice—he was not able to think of justice as he used to—but a way out. The law as a paper-chase whose subsidiary clauses might lead through the forest. Motsamai called on his intercom for coffee, and then without explanation to his client countermanded the order. He came out from behind his desk and went to a brass-handled cupboard. In it were rows of files and an inner compartment where glasses hung by their stems from carved slots, as in an elegant bar. He lifted in either hand a bottle of whisky and one of brandy, questioning? Harald nodded at the brandy. Motsamai poured them each a good tot. It was a small gesture of kindly, silent tact that came unexpectedly from this man. Harald could say to him—So she believes Duncan killed the man he saw fucking her on the sofa.—

  —She knows the sort of woman she is. That is for us to proceed on.—

  Motsamai drew at his tongue to savour the after-taste of the brandy; here is a man who enjoys his mouth, has managed to retain the avidity with which the new-born attacks the first nourishment at the breast.

  —Is it?—

  —Man, she provoked him beyond endurance, drove him beyond reason, not only that night, with her exhibition, but for over a year or so preceding that night. Culminating in it.—

  —That’s not what she says. She says he was the one. He was the one to get, how did she put it, pretty ugly.—

  —Ah, but you said it yourself—she stayed. And did you hear: he was afraid of me. That was her answer when you asked, after all her complaints, her allegations about him, if she was afraid of your son. She stayed, she stayed!—

  Because he was more dreadful than the water, learned Senior Counsel. But that self-judgment of the accused was not for the ears of the lawyers; not yet, if ever. There is a winnowing process in preparing a case, to be learnt by a layman; Harald had some experience in picking up nuances in a very different context, the Board meetings he attended and sometimes chaired. Some facts would be useful to the lawyer, some would be detrimental to the argument he would present—how to proceed?

  Motsamai slid between his majestic maroon-leather upholstered chair and his desk to seat himself again. What he had to say had to be said from there and not from the casual stance of sharing a drink.—Harald, it’s not going to matter whether or not fingerprints can be discovered under the dirt on that gun. My client has instructed me.—

  —Duncan has said so.—

  —He has. Duncan has told me.—

  —He’s told you. And he’s told you to tell us.—

  —Yes. Ah-hêh.—

  That drawn-out sounding from the breast can be, is everything, a recognition, a lament. When he heard the man call him by his first name, for the first time, he knew what was being expressed now in an articulation older and beyond words.

  —So that’s the end of it.—

  —No, that’s not the end of it at all. It’s the beginning of our work.—

  —You and his good friend, his attorney.—

  The whole body tingling, the drug of an unknown emotion injected in this well-appointed chamber of announced damnation which now replaces the meaning of all other dwellings on this earth, in this life.

  —Is a lawyer obliged to take a brief for someone who has said he is guilty? Already judged himself. What is there to defend.—

  —Of course a lawyer must take such a brief! The individual has the right to be judged according to many factors in relation to his confessed act. Circumstances may affect vitally the weight of circumstantial evidence. The accused may judge himself, but he cannot sentence himself. Only the judge can do that. Only on the verdict of the court. In terms of the kind of sentence likely to be imposed, this is the beginning of the case, man! What we concentrate on is ensuring that the sentence is not going to be a day longer, not a degree more punitive than mitigating factors allow. He’s opened up, Harald—your son’s talking to me now—there’re aspects of the affair to pursue for the defence, that defence still exists!—

  The prison visit to a murderer.

  When he came back from Senior Counsel’s chambers and told her, her face broke out in scarlet patches as if in fierce allergy, it was shocking to look at. A raw indecency before him. He anguishedly wanted her to weep, so that he could hold her.

  They went dully over what the lawyer had said about his brief, his task. The principle of law, innocent until proved guilty, which they held along with all those who are confident they will never transgress further than incur a traffic fine, was overturned. In its dust, bewilderment isolates; each spoke for the self rather than succeeded in reaching out to the other.

  Any other woman surely would have wept, keened over her son, and he could have found some purpose, embracing her, joining her. He offered, of himself: We know less than before. Motsamai didn’t ask him the only thing that matters. To me—us. It’s not why—that’s all Motsamai’s concerned with, that’s the defence. It’s also how. How could he do it. Duncan could bring himself to do it, take a gun and kill. He’s you and me, isn’t he, and we can’t know, can we. Not because he’s not going to tell Motsamai or us or anyone; it’s something that can’t be ‘told’. It has to be in you. In him.

  Claudia went to the kitchen to find food because this must be about the time when they usually ate. He was not domesticated. He followed, out of some sort of courtesy which was all that w
as left for their situation. There was nothing further to say; he had perhaps said too much already. What Claudia had been thinking, framing in her mind in that burrowing silence of the kitchen, came next day when they were walking together down the path to the carport on their way to the prison. One of the stiff spatulate leaves of the Strelitzia caught at her hair and she dodged, breaking their inevitable progress, and he turned to see what was impeding her. A grin swiftly transformed her face and as swiftly shut away. You believed that night that he could do it. Didn’t you? You’d decided. You didn’t need to wait for any confession to a lawyer.

  First there had been the persona of a prisoner on the other side of the table in the prison visiting room, this day there was the persona of a murderer, self-accused, self-defined as such. Duncan. Claudia, his mother, managed the half-hour within the format of her profession that she could summon, a surety no calamity could take from her; the confession of guilt a diagnosis. There was the question of the lawyer yet again. Was the patient absolutely satisfied with the competence of the one in charge of his case, was he sufficiently impressed with Motsamai, now that he had had talks with him? Would he like to have another opinion called in, there were many highly-experienced lawyers, wouldn’t that be worthwhile? The nature of the diagnosis itself, what awesome malignancy it has pronounced, is not under discussion. His father confirms:—I’ve also had a chance to talk to Motsamai. I think he’s a clever man. And he knows you’re going to need a clever man. I think we should leave it to him, if he wants to bring in someone else for consultation. If there’s someone whose particular experience in a certain kind of case he’d want to make use of.—

  Their son—in his new persona, there he is, wearing one of the shirts his father fetched from the cottage, their son who has killed a man—he is not calmly observing them as he did during the previous prison visits when they could represent to him the fantasy their presence posited that he had not done what he did, someone else would be found who had tossed the gun into a fern-bed. He is distrait, restless of hands and eyes. She even asks if he has a fever?—all she knows about, poor loving mother, poor thing.

  What could she prescribe for this kind of fever.

  —Motsamai’s a bit of a pompous old bastard, but he’s all right. I get on with him. So you’ve been with him. You know what there is to know.—

  —No. We don’t know what there is to know. Only your decision. And that he accepts it. Can’t offer an alternative. Duncan.—

  Abruptly Duncan puts out a hand, the hand of a drowning man signalling from his own fathoms, and grasps his father’s across the table. His gaze falters between Harald and Claudia.—I would have understood if you two hadn’t come again, now.—

  The nearest Duncan goes to admitting what he has done to them.

  It is not only the man on the sofa who is his victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in him. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that where the answer—Why? Why?—is to be found? Harald is prompted by the Jesuits, Claudia by Freud.

  There is a need to re-conceive, re-gestate the son.

  There was good sport at his making, that Harald knows. The transformation of self in the first sexual love is something hard to recall in its thrilling freshness—it’s not only the hymen that’s broken, the chrysalis where the wings of emotion and identification with all living creatures are folded, is split for release. Harald was Claudia’s first lover when she was the youngest medical student in her class and he was in a state of indecision whether or not to leave the faculty of engineering for that of economics. Swaggering confidence of being in love gave him courage to disappoint his father and desert a tradition of engineers reaching back to the great-grandfather who emigrated from Norway.

  Claudia’s father was a cardiologist and her childhood games were playing doctor with an old stethoscope; she disappointed no-one, since her mother was a school teacher whose nascent feminism wanted a more ambitious career for her daughter.

  Harald and his girl, Claudia and her boy (that was how their parents thought of them, in the Sixties) were lovers too young to marry but did so when she found herself pregnant. Sport at his making. What was so enthralling about the mating, what was the compulsive attraction of the partner is something that not only changes perspective from the view of what is revealed about one another as each becomes known over years, but also reveals something else, that was there at the time, to be seen, and wasn’t. Claudia, so young, even then satisfied that healing the body fulfilled herself and all possible human obligations—a destiny, if you wanted to use outdated highfalutin terms. Harald, unable to commit himself to any such self-definition, choosing an occupation that interested him for its influence over his own existence, already picking away at meanings of life like layers of old paint. Neither was attracted to join the chanting flower-children of the era. Making love, making love was exclusive and serious—hopeless to understand now what it meant to them then—how could they have at the same time kept aware of the oddness that mismatched them even while their bodies matched in joyous revelation. And they had overcome, too—no, managed—these incompatibilities through the different stages, in marriage, of loving one another as distinct from being in love—incompatibilities which were ignored at the moment of conception: but present. The son was born of them.

  The wriggle of a sperm and its reception by the ovum—what comes together in conception is what parents are, and their two streams of ancestry. But you could go back to Adam and Eve for clues in pursuit of that. Hamilton Motsamai, to whom their son’s life is entrusted—and theirs—can no doubt trace his through a language spoken, through oral legend, song and ceremony lived on the same natal earth. For those whose ancestors went out from their own to conquer, or quit their own because of persecution and poverty, ancestry begins with grandfathers who emigrated. There is an Old Country and a New Country; the heredity of the one who is conceived there begins with the New Country, the mongrel cross-patterns that have come about. The Norwegian grandfather was a Protestant but Harald’s father, Peter, mated with a Catholic whose antecedents were Irish, which is how Harald comes to have a Scandinavian first name but was brought up—his mother’s duty to do so, according to her faith—as a Catholic. Claudia’s parents had been to Scotland only once, on a European holiday, but her father, the doctor whose disciple she was, was named for a Scottish grandfather who emigrated on a forgotten date, and so Claudia’s son has received the genetically coded name Duncan Peter Lindgard.

  A fish-hook in his finger.

  When did certain things enter, work their way in to join the inherited, couldn’t be removed?

  He did more with his father, shared more activities. She supposes that is natural, when the child is male. So there is a particular responsibility on the father. His father had him with him, fishing, and the fish-hook was embedded in the soft pad of his third finger, he was perhaps six years old. Or less. He was brought home to his mother the doctor so that she could gently remove the hook as she had the skill to do, hurting him as little as possible, an early example to him. The human body must not be wilfully damaged.

  As a child he had the perfect balance of a bird on the topmost frond of a tree.

  The image came to Harald from the times he took him birdwatching. She would make excuses not to come, too slow for her, the extended waiting for something to alight, sweeping the empty sky for a cut-out shape to pass across binoculars—the boy importantly looking up the appropriate illustration in the bird manual even when he was still too young to read the text. An image drew close, from time, as the lenses of binoculars do from distance: sunlight fingering the spindly forest (where, what year) and his figure striped with it, like a small animal himsel
f as he moved carefully, not to be a disturbance to any creature in nature; such a respect for life.

  When a dog had to be put down—alone, how could she not re-examine this, she was the one who had to do it because he begged her not to let the task be left to the vet. He was ten or eleven, he wanted his doctor mother to do it because he trusted her not to inflict pain, to ‘put to sleep’ (he was protected from killing by the euphemistic phrase) the pet who, while he was growing taller and stronger, had grown too old to walk. She did it without delay because of his painful, almost adult indecision about taking the old animal’s life; and after, in his subdued face, there was his conscience over their having done so, reproachful of her for having been his accomplice; adults should know how to make creatures live forever, abolish death.

  This sentimental searching back to what he was is something each, Harald and Claudia, is alert to in the other, not because each seeks the weakness of comfort from the other, but because something vulnerable, incriminating to either, might be revealed. Someone must be to blame. If Duncan says he’s guilty. Sometimes, the hint of a search slips out: while they are taking the dog for a walk (they decided to defy the ruling against animals in the townhouse complex, least they could do, for their son) she remarks suddenly on the way the child would express himself, particularly when he was intrigued by what he had just learnt. Paper is trees, rain is the water that comes up from the earth when the sun heats it. So everything is something else. And tears? When I cry?