Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

A brief preview offered of what eloquence Motsamai was going to produce for his clients, in court.

Harald had to grant it as such with a gesture.

— Claudia spent as much or as little time with him as I did. A doctor also brings preoccupations home and doesn’t even have regular hours. And he was in boarding school … if you think of it, how much time did we have of him. I don’t think she knows anything about Duncan I don’t.—

— Ithink I know better. Sorry! I’m working on Natalie, I’m satisfied with that, and what I am looking for from Duncan’s mother is the other side of the story, what the young man was before that particular young woman got hold of him.—

Harald has learnt that when Motsamai has something to tell that is likely to rouse emotion and dismay he uses the tactic of sudden rapid development of the subject so that there is no warning pause in which apprehension speculates on what might be to come. He does this now without a change of tone or voice level. — I’ve made an application for Duncan to go for psychiatric observation. To tell you the truth, that’s why I didn’t quibble over postponement. Among other reasons … I need time, I need a full psychological report for my submissions. Absolutely essential. I need to know everything there is to know about Duncan. As I’ve told you — from you, from Claudia. And I need to know what neither of you knows and what I’ll never get from him myself. There’ll be a State psychiatrist and one we’ll appoint privately, ourselves. I’ve engaged a first-class chap, your wife will have heard of him. Duncan will go to Sterkfontein — that’s a state mental institution, yes. Ah-hêh. Don’t be alarmed. I know you won’t like the idea. He’ll be there a few weeks — well, four weeks. And it’s better if you don’t visit. Don’t be upset. It’s a routine procedure in a case like this. Your son’s not mad, man! That is certainly not my submission, no! Something different — what propelled the accused to act as he did.—

Duncan Duncan. Again the branding iron descends. — He’s guilty. In his right mind.—

— No no Harald, the plea is ‘not guilty’. That’s the form. While we admit material facts which prove guilt, we submit our argument of momentary loss of capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.—

Your son is not mad.

— Only a few weeks there. And it so happens — it’s advantageous, point of view of timing. The trial. Yes … Ah-hêh. I have my sources.—

The glassy whites of his eyes signal a quick nudging smile, for himself, not directed to the man in trouble. — It’s good to find out what judges will be on the bench during what period. There’s an old precept we lawyers have — well, call it a saying — you must meet the judge in the moral climate he occupies. I want the judge whose moral climate is one I can count on meeting in this exceptional case.—

Your son’s not mad, he said. She, Claudia, understands better. I expected it, she says.

What kind of place is it.

Pretty unpleasant, she says.

That’s all, from her.

At 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.