Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— He tells me they were lovers, but they ‘lived their own lives’—these are his words.—

A day and time were set up to meet the girl at Senior Counsel’s chambers. That morning Claudia telephoned Harald from her surgery to his office. A representative of the government Housing Commission was with him, they were discussing an agreement on terms of low-interest loans that would put up walls and a roof for thousands of poor people; there was a long negotiation about to come to a conclusion, or to risk being deferred yet again.

Harald, I’m not going. There’s no need for us to meet her if the lawyer is handling her. I don’t want to see her. We should leave it to him.

As if he had been shaken and dragged out of bed in the middle of a night; for a moment he did not recognize what he was being recalled to, his comprehension was torn in two. The man from the Commission picked up his papers in order to be seen to be not listening. Harald was possessed by wild irritation, with her, Claudia, her intrusion, her recall to the intrusion in their life that monstrously displaced everything else, his fifty years, eclipsed the sun and shut off the air of all he had learnt, the understandings he believed he had reached in knowledge of human beings and the mores he had tested, the satisfaction in work and the pleasures of accepted emotions, the love between man and woman, between parents and son, the ease of friendship; irritation that swelled and struck out — even at his son, Duncan, who had landed himself in prison. Yes! Clamouring forces were struggling to take over his innards, forces that if let loose outside were the kind that could be violent. He could not speak, not even pronounce oblique dismissive, soothing things to her that nevertheless would relate to a situation the other man in the room was completely remote, removed from, innocent of. He put down the receiver on her mid-sentence.

Natalie-Nastasya. Motsamai said she was already there, had gone to the ladies’ room.

Received by a father’s eyes as she came in she matched the young woman Duncan had brought to the townhouse once or twice. This was she, all right. She was closing the door with a hand curving gracefully behind her, Motsamai smiling acknowledgment of the consideration. So Motsamai, also, felt an attraction she apparently emanated for some — many — men.

The same sloping shoulders of a Modigliani model (and there was a print of a Modigliani nude, unremarked until it came to him now, in the bedroom he had plundered). He was not one to take much notice of women’s clothes, only of the effect they produced, but it seemed she wore the same kind of garments she had worn, legs outlined in something like a dancer’s tights and a loose shirt unbuttoned on a deep V of sun-stippled throat. The hair was somehow different — whatever colour it had been before it was now boot-polish black — but the eyes, the gaze on him, were unavoidably recognizable. Perhaps there was a place in memory, a cheap photo album of Duncan’s girls that existed though never opened. That was the impression of her: yellow-streaked dark eyes (colours of the Tiger’s Eye paperweight on Motsamai’s desk) secretive within extremely thick lashes on both upper and lower lids that tangled at the outer corners. And these outer corners of the eyes turned down slightly, whether by the nature of her facial muscles or by an expression she permanently arranged; the eyes were a statement to be read, depending on who was receiving it: lazily, vulnerably appealing, or calculating, in warning.

When Duncan brought girls — his women — to the townhouse it could not be thought of (really) as bringing them ‘home’, home was left behind where he grew up, was the house they had sold, abandoned as having become a burden no longer necessary. Dropping in for a meal accompanied by a girl did not mean that he was presenting her to his parents as someone to whom he had a serious commitment, but it also did not mean that she was a passing fancy; if those existed, they did not warrant the degree of intimacy implied by being admitted, however casually, to the area of his life he shared, committed to it by the past, with Harald and Claudia. He must have brought her at least because she was on a level of personality that interested him; come to think of it, that was how he, Harald, thought of the criterion on which a son introduced a lover to his parents. How Claudia thought of it — she had referred to the girl as ‘that little bitch who shacked up with Duncan’. How could she have formed that impression in the few times Duncan had brought the girl to the townhouse — oh and the single occasion on which Duncan had bought theatre tickets and the four had seen a play together, an occasion when one listened and looked and didn’t have much of an exchange. Women see things among themselves, about one another, that you have to belong to their sex to attribute, whether these attributions are just or not. Whatever this girl was, there was a judgment on her, by Claudia, as the cause of whatever terrible consequences Duncan’s embroilment in her life had brought about. But how to believe, Claudia, at the same time, both that Duncan could not have performed that act, the final act of all human acts, the irreparable one, the irreversible one, and that this girl, little bitch, was important enough to him for her behaviour to cause him to be suspected of performing that act? The torturing preoccupation when such contemplation seized him was out of place here and now: he had lost attention to what was passing as the three of them, he, the girl, Motsamai, were sitting together in Senior Counsel’s chambers. What had Motsamai just said? Mr Lindgard and his wife are naturally concerned to have your version of what happened that Thursday night.

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.