The House Gun (9 page)

A
t the remove of the telephone, Harald told the Senior Counsel . that Claudia was stressed and wanted to rest over the weekend. Motsamai sounded as if he took no offence, but asked Harald to come to his chambers whenever convenient that afternoon.

For Harald's part, it still was necessary to show no offence was intended—after all, the man had offered his hospitality, if with professional motive.

—Claudia's become unapproachable.—

But Motsamai understood Harald did not know what he was saying, did not know his was an angry plea for help, not a warning to the lawyer that he would have no success with the wife. Motsamai is accustomed to the erratic attitudes of clients—people in trouble—alternating between confidence and distrust, dependency and resentment.

—The very one who's in the same boat with you isn't always the one you can talk to. I don't know why. But there it is, I see it often. Don't worry that she won't get through to you. Don't be disturbed, Harald.—

Ah-hêh,
In the silence there is the resonance of his soothing
half-sigh; sometimes it is like a human purr, sometimes a groan you cannot express for yourself.

And Harald at once felt a new anger; at himself, for having revealed himself. Too late to recall the image that should have remained private between him and his wife, to rebuff the recognition expressed (urbanity speaking clumsily for once) by this third party for whom nothing must be private because it might be useful. There is no privacy for anyone, in what has happened, is happening. Soon the prisoner's utter privacy of isolation will be broken into by doctors. Night-notes at the bedside are discovered by prying eyes.

—I'll have a good chat with her anyway. I'll make a date when you and I are sure you'll be busy somewhere. Maybe I should drop in at her surgery, end of her day.—

—I wish you luck.—

He did not know it was the day the Senior Counsel had arranged to visit her. There was no regular hour for her return in the evenings, emergency calls on the beeper could delay her any time; she came in now lugging a supermarket bag from whose top the spiky headdress of a pineapple stood up. He half-rose to unburden her but she was already passing into the kitchen.

He poured her a gin-and-tonic, relic of those evenings when they used to enjoy sitting oh their terrace, watching the colours of mixed vapour and pollution wash out in the sky and listening to the raucous plaint of shot-silk plumaged ibises perched tottering on the treetops of the landscaped enclave.

D'you want it in there?

She came back into the room with the pineapple in her hand and signalled with a tilt of her head for him to put down the glass on a table. She was preoccupied rather than ignoring him; hesitated, placed the pineapple in space pushed aside for it in a bowl of apples, then took it out again and went slowly back to the kitchen.

One of the displaced apples fell and rolled to the floor; it stopped at his feet.

What was Claudia going to do with the bloody pineapple? Decide they mustn't eat it? Everything they ate, drank, everything they did, the air they breathed, he was deprived of, they took while he did without, they took from him because they indulged themselves with these things while he, their son, Duncan, was about to be shut up among schizophrenics and paranoids. She'll get Motsamai to deliver it to that other kind of prison, maybe they'll allow him to have it. Maybe they'll examine it to see if there's a knife suitable for suicide or a file suitable for escape buried in its flesh; these cheap detective yam tricks of tension are a fact, for us. If it isn't a pineapple it's a salad to be wrapped in plastic, a bunch of grapes, a goat cheese—does she know how irritating these futile attempts to take our kind of life into his are?

May God grant patience with her. Tonight while she lies beside him in her ignorance.

Did you ask Motsamai to come and see me?

Claudia has come back and picked up her drink. She rattles the ice in the glass and her gaze wanders the room.

Why should I? No.

About Duncan.

It was his idea, he wanted it. I couldn't say no on your behalf, could I? It was for you to say whether you'd see him or not. I simply told him you didn't feel like coming to his house at the weekend, I said something polite and plausible.

Why me? What's the difference between that, and talking to us together?

But he's talked to me alone, too, hasn't he? Times when you didn't turn up. And you didn't mention you'd agreed to have him come to the surgery today—I don't know why you didn't, some reason of your own.

She is gazing at Harald with great concentration as if waiting for some move in him to be detected.

I don't understand you, Claudia.

He wants to know everything, Duncan's childhood, his adolescence, everything—from me. As if I produced him by parthenogenesis. Only me.

That's nonsense. That's not so. You know the reason he has to question us both, everything we remember, everything we know —our own son, who else could know it! So that he can show what awful pressures ended up in him doing what he did. Against his nature, his background. What our son says he did. But Motsamai does have some sort of patronizing attitude towards women, so you …

I didn't find him patronizing.

Then what is it?

As a little boy, was he happy at school, at home, was he ever aggressive, did he confide in me. Of course he was happy! What else could he be, loved as he was. The question could only be asked by someone whose kids get beaten.

She is searching among her own words. He tries to find the right ones for her.

He has the idea that women, somewhere in the background, are more accessible than men, children turn to the mother—it obviously comes from the way things are in his own house. I'll bet he's an authority to be reckoned with, there. It's their style.

She has come upon something.

Did the child have a religious upbringing. Did he go to church.

Harald smiled. So what did you say.

That you were Catholic and took him with you but so far as I know he stopped when he was old enough to decide for himself. I didn't try to influence him one way or the other.

Well, that's something we won't go into now.

And does he believe in good and evil. Does he believe in God.

Does he?

You know that kind of question wouldn't come up between Duncan and me.

Harald raises his hands stiffly and places the tent of palms from nostrils down lips to chin; his regular breath is warm un the tips of his fingers.

Neither knows whether the man, Duncan, believes in a supreme being by whom he will be judged, finally, above the judgment of the court.

The barrier of hands is discarded.

Perhaps Motsamai's playing us off one against the other. Has to. So what the one (Harald swiftly censored himself from saying ‘who doesn't want to remember')—what the one doesn't remember he may get from the other. That's all.

The townhouse is a court, a place where there are only accusers and accused. She leans back in her chair, arms spread-eagled on the rests, preparing, baring herself.

What have I done to Duncan that you didn't do?

O
f course what the lawyer's getting at—what he wants is to be able to convince the judge that the self-confessed murderer is one to whom, because of a devout Catholic background, his own crime is abhorrent. The confession itself is certainly a strong point; he confesses his sin, through the highest secular law of the land, to the law of God. He throws himself on God's mercy. Jesus Christ died for all others, to kill another is to act in aberration against the Christian ethic in which the boy was brought up, and which is within him still.

And perhaps if she—seated across the room, outside walking the dog, hanging up her clothes before bed, lying beside him with her beeper handy (to hell with them)—if she could have gone beyond the intelligence of the microscope and the pathologist's finding to intelligence (in its real sense, of true knowledge) that there is much that exists but cannot be known, proved in a testtube or by comparison with placebo results—if she had not been stunted in this dimension of being, the boy might have been the man who at twenty-seven could not possibly bring himself to kill, to have become someone more terrible than the water. ‘Didn't try
to influence him one way or the other.' But wasn't that statement her very position? Its power. Mother managed perfectly well to be a loving mother, to do good and care for others by healing the sick. She could look after herself. She quite evidently needed no-one to be accountable to for control of any of the temptations every child and adolescent knows about, to lie, to cheat, to use aggression to get what you want. ‘They turn to the mother.' Then what he found there was a self-sufficiency of the material kind—and that includes the doctoring, expert preoccupation with the flesh—which if it was enough for her wasn't enough for him. If that's what he did settle for when he stopped coming to church.

Stopped; oh but that doesn't necessarily mean he stopped believing, lost God. That's something this father does not know any more than does his mother. Even though, while he himself finds communion not only with God but with the unknown people around him in the cathedral in the wrong end of the city, a communion with life which guards him against the possibility of harming anyone, any one of them, no matter what they may be, he knows that there are men and women who remain close to God without partaking of the ritual before a priest. Her son may still believe, in spite of her; my son.

And then again that other special intelligence: of the lawyer, the best Senior Counsel you can get. He knows what he wants, what will serve. It could be that he'll want to present
two
moral influences; religious faith from the father, secular humanism from the mother. The two sets of moral precepts the whole world relies on—what else is there—to keep at bay our instinct to violence, to plant bombs, to set ablaze, to force the will of one against the other in all the kinds of rape, not only of the vagina and the anus, but of the mind and emotions, to take up a gun and shoot a friend, the housemate, in the head. What a strong argument for the Defence a dramaturge like Motsamai could make of that: the force of perversion and evil the woman Natalie must have been to bring this accused to fling aside into a clump of fern the sound principles with which he was imbued: one, the sacred injunction, Thou Shalt
Not Kill, two, the secular code, human life is the highest value to be respected.

A visit before he goes from one destination to another he's made for himself; prison to madhouse.

The meek trudge along the corridors where some black prisoner is always on his knees polishing, polishing, the place where all the dirt and corruption of life is quarantined must be kept obsessively clean. If only there were to be disinfectants to wash away the pain, of victims and their criminals, held here. What is Claudia thinking : that he couldn't have done it? Does she still hang on to that. Much use. Much good it will do any of us.

In a house, in an executive director's office, in a surgery, each day nothing is ever the same as at the last entry. A flower in a vase has dropped petals. The waste baskets have been emptied of yesterday, an ashtray displaced. A delivery of pathologists' reports has been made.

The visiting room and the table and two chairs and the watching walls are always exactly the same. Two warders, one on either side of the accused, now, are the same nobodies; only Duncan is the element out of place, doesn't belong here. Duncan is Duncan, his face, the timbre of his voice, the very angle of his ears—the visitors' attention sets about him a nimbus, the existence of his presence elsewhere, as it surely must be if there is any continuity in being alive, in the places in the city that know him, in the townhouse, come for Sunday lunch; in that cottage. They bring with them
himself
; having never experienced prison before, they do not know that this is what a prisoner receives from visitors.

He is all right, yes; they are all right, yes. His mother lightly strokes her hand down the side of her cheek to convey appreciation of his beard, which has grown out wiry ginger-bright rather like the filaments of light-bulbs. The preamble is over.

No mention is made of the place to which he has been committed by Motsamai to be observed and assessed for his capacity
to know what he learned from them, to distinguish right from wrong. They talk obliquely round it.

—The lawyer's been to see me at the surgery. Quite an interrogation. Asking me all about what you were like, as a child and growing up.—

—Yes.—

Harald made as if to speak. The distraction was ignored by mother and son.

—Duncan, do you think I've had any particular influence on you? Anything I did?—

—My mother; of course. But you both had an influence on my life, how could it be otherwise. It's not a question. Everything you've done for me. And why you did it. What do you want me to say? You've loved me. You know all that. I know all that.—

This kind of statement would never be made anywhere else but in this dislocated anteroom of their lives.

He looks at them both waiting, each for accusation or judgment from him.

—The letter.—

That's all he has said. But it is as if with the sureness of his architectural draughtsmanship he has drawn lines confining the three of them in a triangle.

—So you do still remember when your father and I came to see you at the school after what happened that time.—

—But you'd first written a letter. I might even still have it somewhere.—

—D'you remember who signed it?—

—Dad … it's so long ago.—

—But you remembered about it.—

He was suddenly gentle with his mother.—You repeated what was there—you've forgotten—when you came the other day.—

—The lawyer—he asked whether you believe in God.—Claudia brings it out.

But he smiles (it is always disturbingly extraordinary when he
smiles in this place, an indiscretion before the two lay figures of warders), and so she can smile with him.

—Yes. Nothing's irrelevant to Motsamai. He's a very thorough man.—

—I had the feeling he was fishing for something. Expected to find, with me. Well, you've been an adult a long time.—

It was to his father he said as usual, his form of farewell this time as any other, that he was running out of books.—I'll need them, in that place.—

—Apparently we're asked not to visit you although as a doctor they can't really prevent me. Remember that. If anything—anything at all—something goes wrong, insist on your right to call us.—

—Have you ever read Thomas Mann? I'll bring you ‘The Magic Mountain'.—

In the car, Harald speaks.

He didn't answer you.

About what?

But he knows she knows.

Faith. God.

It was pretty clear, wasn't it. If ‘nothing is irrelevant' to Motsamai, this—question, whatever—is something irrelevant to Duncan, doesn't exist in his life.

That's how you want to understand his dodging what you suddenly sprang on him out of the blue. The most intimate question. You put him in your dock.

But Harald, also, has not answered what she put to him, elsewhere. That must mean he does believe she is more responsible than he for what has happened to Duncan, what Duncan has become. She follows the thought aloud: What Duncan has become —whatever that is, neither of us wants to admit what it might be. I mean, how could anyone, how can we be expected—

He, great reader, corrects her imprecision with his superior vocabulary.

Too naive in our security.

Claudia resists the impulse to say thank you very much; self-disparagement is damaging to health, let him indulge in it on his own.

All their lives they must have believed—defined—morality as the master of passions. The controller. Whether this unconscious acceptance came from the teachings of God's word or from a principle of self-imposed restraint in rationalists. And it can continue unquestioned in any way until something happens at the extreme of transgression, rebellion: the catastrophe that lies at the crashed limit of all morality, the unspeakable passion that takes life. The tests of morality they've known—each has known of the other—are ludicrous: whether Harald should allow his accountant to attribute so-called entertainment expenses to income tax relief, whether the doctor should supply a letter certifying absence from work due to illness when the patient had succumbed only to a filched holiday. But what is trivial at one, harmless, end of the scale—where does it stop. No need to think about that, all their lives, either of them, because the mastery has never needed to be tested any further. My God (his God) no! Where do the taboos really begin? Where did their son follow on from their limits beyond anything they could ever have envisaged him—their own—following. Oh they feel they own him now, as if he were again the small child they were forming by precept and example: by what they themselves were. Parents. Since they were once in this adult conspiracy together, neither can get away with absolving him- or herself of their son's extension of their limits, any more than they can grant absolution from the self-accusations that preoccupy each. Separately, they have lost all interest in and concentration on their activities and are shackled together, each solitary, in the inescapable proximity that chafes them. Incongruous invasions dart each
in the midst of conversations with other people which concern, naturally, the normal world they move about in without right. Targeted, they carry these strikes home to the townhouse, and out of the silence, against the touch of cutlery on plates or the voice of the newscaster mouthing from the TV screen, statements without context burst forth.

You've got a good holding in tobacco shares, haven't you? You know people who've died of lung cancer. You have No Smoking signs all over your offices. But the dividends are fine.

There is a context; they're in it. He would never have believed she could be a spiteful woman. He prepares himself, although he is not sure of the exact issue, it must belong somewhere to the only subject they have.

He laughs. Dull-weary. We're eating chicken and you bought it. I suppose it's one raised in cruel conditions. Caged.

The last word hits home. What concern is there for chickens while you talk to your son within the walls of a prison.

I'm asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.

It's the ultimate, isn't it. Is that what you mean.

No I don't.

Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal—

Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don't think I do. I just believe in damage; don't damage. That's what he was taught, that's what he knows—knew. So now—is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.

Of course it's not. I've said: it's the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.

Before God. She pushes him to it.

Before God and man.

I thought for believers there is the way out by confession, repentance, forgiveness from Up There.

Not for me.

Oh why? She won't let him off.

Because there is no recompense for the one whose life is taken.
Nothing can come to him. It's only the one who killed that receives grace.

In this world. What about the next. Harald, you don't accept your faith.

Not on this issue, no.

So you sin with doubt. Is that only now? Her gaze is explicit.

No, always. You don't know because it's never been possible to talk to you about such things.

Sorry about that, all I could do was respect your need for that kind of belief. I couldn't take up something I'm convinced does't exist. Anyway—you've allowed yourself the same latitude I have between what does and what doesn't count. Even with your God behind you.

Oh leave me alone. I'm a killer because you see people die of lung cancer.

At what point does what's let pass become serious. Harald? If God allows you to condone so much in yourself how do you decide someone won't take the example that you don't have to follow the rules because the people who've taught you to don't do so themselves. Of course they know when to stop. Because nothing in their lives goes any further. They're safe. Making money out of cigarettes, that's not much of a sin for a good Christian.