Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

There are his inhibitions to be overcome; his loyalty, the prized confidentiality bestowed upon the messenger by the privilege of friendship with one he admires or who is, perhaps, professionally cleverer than he. What is emerging is an aside: the nature of his relationship with their son. It is difficult not to become impatient.

— So everyone got on well together, all right. There were no real tensions you know of? How serious they would have to be if we are to believe that Duncan, Duncan … ! Never mind the gun, never mind what the man in the garden says he saw! Isn’t there someone else who really did have what he thought was a reason to attack Jespersen? Why Duncan? Anyone you know of?—

Harald’s line of thought scored across hers.

— Where was the girl. Where was she on Friday? Has the affair broken up, were she and Duncan no longer lovers?—

The young man has to adjust himself to communication with a father who does not require the euphemism ‘girl-friend’ as suitable in communication with parents.

— They’re still together. Of course you know — she was there. The day before, Thursday night. We all ate at the house. Carl and David cooked for everyone.—

Was there nothing more to say? To be got from him; he is the messenger, he must not know more than the text he has been entrusted with.

Claudia drops her hands at her sides; the fingers stir. — Please tell us.—

Harald stands up.

The young man looked from one to the other as if for mercy, and then began in the only way he could manage, the dull defused tone of one relating the circumstances of a traffic accident in which no-one was hurt: the matter-of-factness that defends cornered emotion.

— Last year, in June, Carl got her a job at the advertising agency and they began to go to work in her car every day. Or sometimes in his. I don’t know the arrangement. So they’d often have lunch somewhere together, too. But it was all right.—

— What do you mean? — Harald is looking down at him.

— Duncan didn’t mind. Didn’t have anything to worry about.—

— Didn’t mind that his lover was spending all day with another man?—

— Well, Carl and David were lovers. The three of them in the house are gay, Khulu too. Gay men are often very good friends to women, and they’re no threat to women’s lovers, you know that, of course. Carl and Duncan and Natalie are great friends. Special friends, in the group around the house. They were.—

— I see.—

But Harald, conscious that this is the reaction of himself as a heterosexual man, does not see how Duncan could not resent his woman spending her days with another male, no matter what sex was attractive to that male. His monosyllabic response opens the way, to him and to Claudia, for the return of dread, the dread that came with the pronouncement of the first message, that night; that Friday.

— Please tell us.—

It’s a knell that Claudia sounds.

— On Thursday we all stayed quite late up at the house. There were some other people there, a couple of Khulu’s friends as well. When we left, and Khulu’d gone off with his crowd, I walked with Duncan back to the cottage. Natalie had volunteered to help Carl with the washing-up, David had had a few drinks too many and went to bed. But apparently when everything was tidied up in the kitchen, Natalie didn’t go to the cottage. Duncan woke up around two o’clock and saw she wasn’t there with him. He was worried something might have happened to her, crossing the garden in the dark, and he went over to the house. Yes. Carl was making love to her in the living-room. Duncan didn’t arrive at work on Friday morning and he called me at the office. He told me. He said he found them on the sofa — that sofa, you know. What can I say. It wasn’t the first time Natalie had had some sort of thing going on the side with someone else — I know, we all knew, of one, at least. It’s in her nature, but I think she loves him — Duncan. In her way. And he — he’s absolutely faithful to her, completely possessive, other women don’t exist for Duncan. Recriminations and tears — the usual thing — and then she comes back to him. But this time — Carl. A man who doesn’t love women, but goes for Natalie. To put it crudely. Makes Natalie the exception, leaves his lover asleep in the bedroom and makes love to Natalie on that sofa. Duncan was — I can’t describe it, a terrible state. She wouldn’t come back to the cottage, I suppose she was afraid of him. She left. Got in her car and left in the middle of the night, and she didn’t come back on Friday, either. She wasn’t there. When whatever happened, happened. So that is all I know, and I’m not saying Duncan must have done what he’s supposed to have done, I’m not implying anything, I won’t have you thinking that what I’ve told you is conclusive, I wasn’t there, I didn’t see, although I know Duncan well, your son, I don’t know what went on inside him—

They are all three on their feet now, it’s as if again something for which there is no preparation is going to happen, the atmospheric pressure of that house where Duncan enters, the other man alone on that sofa drinking a Bloody Mary, is produced by them, overcomes them, as anxiety can produce an outbreak of sweat on the body. But it cannot be admitted; it has to be transformed into something understandable, that can be dealt with under control. The messenger is about to wheel his steed around and leave: that’s it. He cannot withstand, he has had enough of, their need.

— Don’t go. — Claudia appeals, although he has made no move. So it’s accepted; all that was going to happen was that he was going to walk out on them. She opens her hands in a gesture towards where they were seated, and takes her place.

In order to keep him with them they turn to discussion of practical matters. The possibility of yet another application for bail, once the case comes up for a first hearing; the conditions under which an awaiting-trial prisoner is kept. There is much, he and they know, they could continue to ask and he could tell about that house with the sofa, and the cottage, and the tracing of their son’s life there, but the young man is clearly in conflict between what is, they feel, an obligation to them, and a betrayal of the codes of friendship. The closest way they can come to this area is to ask whether lately Duncan seemed under any particular strain, say, at work (which is not a context of intimacy). Did it show, there? This was as far as Harald could go in approaching any long-term distraught state of mind that might have existed in the cottage.

— Duncan’s a strong person.—

That might satisfy Harald but Claudia jerked her head away from the two men. — You work with him in the same office, d’you mean it’s simply that he conceals his moods, his feelings? Even from you? He called you, talked to you on the phone, on Friday. —

— If we feel like discussing something, we do; if one of us doesn’t want it, we don’t. We let it go.—

— He’s always been a reserved person. It might have been better if he had talked before.—

— Reserved, how can you say that, Harald — he’s always been affectionate and open — you didn’t expect him to discuss his love affairs with you?—

They were talking of their son, Julian Verster’s friend, as if he were dead. To be in prison is to be dead to connection with consciousness outside, to exist there only in the past tense. Appalled silence interrupted them. Harald gave Claudia the look that in familiar signals between them, suggested they should give the young man a drink. She seemed uncomprehending, not to be approached. He fetched glasses and bottles, cans of soda and fruit juice, the usual habit of hospitality. The filled glasses gave them something to do with their hands; if they could not speak they could swallow.