Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

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.’

The 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.