The House Gun

PART ONE

Something terrible happened.

They are watching it on the screen with their after-dinner cof fee cups beside them. It is Bosnia or Somalia or the earthquake shaking a Japanese island between apocalyptic teeth like a dog; whatever were the disasters of that time. When the intercom buzzes each looks to the other with a friendly reluctance; you go, your turn. It’s part of the covenant of living together. They made the decision to give up the house and move into this townhouse complex with grounds maintained and security-monitored entrance only recently and they are not yet accustomed, or rather are inclined momentarily to forget that it’s not the barking of Robbie and the old-fangled ring of the front door bell that summons them, now. No pets allowed in the complex, but luckily there was the solution that theirs could go to their son who has a garden cottage.

He, she — twitch of a smile, he got himself up with languor directed at her and went to lift the nearest receiver. Who, she half-heard him say, half-listening to the commentary following the images, Who. It could be someone wanting to convert to some religious sect, or the delivery of a summons for a parking offence, casual workers did this, moon-lighting. He said something else she didn’t catch but she heard the purr of the electronic release button.

What he said then was, Do you know who a Julian-somebody might be? Friend of Duncan?

He, she — they didn’t, either of them. Nothing unusual about that, Duncan, twenty-seven years old, had his own circle just as his parents had theirs, and these intersected only occasionally where interests, inculcated in him as a child by his parents, met.

What does he want?

Just said to speak to us.

Both at the same instant were touched by a live voltage of alarm. What is there to fear, defined in the known context of a twenty-seven-year-old in this city — a car crash, a street mugging, a violent break-in at the cottage. Both stood at the door, confronting these, confronting the footsteps they heard approaching their private paved path beneath the crossed swords of Strelitzia leaves, the signal of the second buzzer, and this young man, come from? for? Duncan. He stared at the floor as he came in, so they couldn’t read him. He sat down without a word.

He, she — whose turn.

There’s been an accident?

She’s a doctor, she sees what the ambulances bring in to Intensive Care. If something’s broken she can gauge whether it ever can be put together again.

This Julian draws in his lips over his teeth and clamps his mouth, a moment.

A kind of … Not Duncan, no no! Someone’s been shot. He’s arrested. Duncan.

They both stand up.

For God’s sake — what are you talking about — what is all this — how arrested, arrested for what—

The messenger is attacked, he becomes almost sullen, unable to bear what he has to tell. The obscene word comes ashamedly from him. Murder.

Everything has come to a stop. What can be understood is a car crash, a street mugging, a violent break-in.

He/she. He strides over and switches off the television. And expels a violent breath. So long as nobody moved, nobody uttered, the word and the act within the word could not enter here. Now with the touch of a switch and the gush of a breath a new calendar is opened. The old Gregorian cannot register this day. It does not exist in that means of measure.

This Julian now tells them that a magistrate was called ‘after hours’ (he gives the detail with the weight of its urgent gravity) to lay a charge at the police station and bail was refused. That is the practical purpose of his visit: Duncan says, Duncan says, Duncan’s message is that there’s no point in their coming, there’s no point in trying for bail, he will appear in court on Monday morning. He has his own lawyer.

He/she. She has marked the date on patients’ prescriptions a dozen times since morning but she turns to find a question that will bring some kind of answer to that word pronounced by the messenger. She cries out.

What day is it today?

Friday.

It was on a Friday.

It is probable that neither of the Lindgards had ever been in a court before. During the forty-eight hours of the weekend of waiting they had gone over every explanation possible in the absence of being able to talk to him, their son, himself. Because of the preposterousness of the charge they felt they had to respect his instruction that they not visit him; this must indicate that the whole business was ridiculous, that’s it, horribly ridiculous, his own ridiculous affair, soon to be resolved, better not given the confirmation of being taken in alarm by mother and father arriving at a prison accompanied by their lawyer, states of high emotion etc. That was the way they brought themselves to read his injunction; a mixture between consideration for them — no need to be mixed up in the business — and the independence of the young he had been granted and asserted in mutual understanding since he was an adolescent.

But dread attends the unknown. Dread was a drug that came to them both not out of something administered from her pharmacopoeia; they calmly walked without anything to say to one another along the corridors of the courts, Harald standing back for his wife Claudia with the politeness of a stranger as they found the right door, entered and shuffled awkwardly sideways to be seated on the benches.

The very smell of the place was that of a foreign country to which they were deported. The odour of polished wooden barriers and waxed floor. The windows above head height, sloping down searchlights. The uniforms occupied by men with the impersonality of cult members, all interchangeable. The presence of a few figures seated somewhere near, the kind who stare from park benches or lie face-down in public gardens. The mind dashes from what confronts it, as a bird that has flown into a confined space does, there must be an opening. Harald collided against the awareness of school, too far back to be consciously remembered; institutional smell and hard wood under his buttocks. Even the name of a master was blundered into; nothing from the past could be more remote than this present. In a flick of attention he saw Claudia rouse from her immobility to disconnect the beeper that kept her in touch with her surgery. She felt the distraction and turned her head to read his oblique glance: nothing. She gave the stiff smile with which one greets somebody one isn’t sure one knows.

He comes up from the well of a stairway between two policemen. Duncan. Can it be? He has to be recognized in a persona that doesn’t belong to him, as they know him, have always known him — and who could identify him better? He is wearing black jeans and a black cotton T-shirt. The kind of clothes he customarily wears, but the neat collar of a white shirt is turned down outside the neck of the T-shirt. They both notice this, it’s an unspoken focus of attention between them; this is the detail, token submission to the conventions expected by a court, that makes the connection of reality between the one they knew, him, and this other, flanked by policemen.

A blast of heat came over Harald, confusion like anxiety or anger, but neither. Some reaction that never before has had occasion to be called up.

Duncan, yes. He looked at them, acknowledging himself. Claudia smiled at him with lifted head, for everyone to see. And he inclined his head to her. But he did not look at his parents directly again during the proceedings that followed, except as his controlled, almost musing glance swept over them as it went round the public gallery across the two young black men with their legs sprawled relaxedly before them, the old white man sitting forward with his head in his hands, and the family group, probably wandered in bewildered to pass the time before a case that concerned them came up, who were whispering among themselves of their own affairs.

The magistrate made his stage entrance, all fidgeted to their feet, sank again. He was tall or short, bald or not — doesn’t matter, there was the hitch of shoulders under the voluminous gown and, his hunch lowered over papers presented to him, he made a few brief comments in the tone of questions addressed to the tables in the well of the court where the backs of what presumably were the prosecutor and defence lawyer presented themselves to the gallery. Under the ladders of light tilted down, policemen on errands came in and out conferring in hoarse whispers, the rote of proceedings concluded. Duncan Peter Lindgard was committed for trial on a charge of murder. A second application for bail was refused.

Over. But beginning. The parents approached the barrier between the gallery and the well of the court and were nor prevented from contact with the son. Each embraced him while he kept his head turned from their faces.

Do you need anything?

It’s just not on, the young lawyer was saying, I’m serving notice to contest the refusal, right now, Duncan. I won’t let the prosecutor get away with it. Don’t worry.

This last said to her, the doctor, in exactly the tone of reassurance she herself would use with patients of whose prognosis she herself was not sure.

The son had an air of impatience, the shifting gaze of one who wished the well-meaning to leave; an urgent need of some preoccupation, business with himself. They could read it to mean confidence; of his innocence — of course; or it could be a cover for dread, akin to the dread they had felt, concealing his dread out of pride, not wanting to be associated with theirs. He was now officially an accused, on record as such. The accused has a status of dread that is his own, hasn’t he!

Nothing?

I’ll see to everything Duncan needs — the lawyer squeezed his client’s shoulder as he swung a briefcase and was off.

If there was nothing, then …

Nothing. Nothing they could ask, not what is it all about, what is it you did, you are supposed to have done?

His father took courage: Is he really a competent lawyer? We could get someone else. Anyone.

A good friend.

I’ll get in touch with him later, find out what happened when he saw the prosecutor.

The son will know that his father means money, he’ll be ready to supply surety for the contingency that it is impossible to believe has arisen between them, money for bail.

He turns away — the prisoner, that’s what he is now — in anticipation of the policemen’s move to order him to, he doesn’t want them to touch him, he has his own volition, and his mother’s clasp just catches the ends of his fingers as he goes.

They see him led down the stairwell to whatever is there beneath the court. As they make to leave Court B17 they become aware that the other friend, the messenger Julian, has been standing just behind them to assure Duncan of his presence but not wanting to intrude upon those with the closest claims. They greet him and walk out together with him but do not speak. He feels guilty about his mission, that night, and hurries ahead.

As the couple emerge into the foyer of the courts, vast and lofty cathedral echoing with the susurration of its different kind of supplicants gathered there, Claudia suddenly breaks away, disappearing towards the sign indicating toilets. Harald waits for her among these people patient in trouble, no choice to be otherwise, for them, he is one of them, the wives, husbands, fathers, lovers, children of forgers, thieves and murderers. He looks at his watch. The whole process has taken exactly one hour and seven minutes.

She returns and they quit the place.

Let’s have a coffee somewhere.

Oh … there are patients at the surgery, expecting me.

Let them wait.

She did not have time to get to the lavatory and vomited in the washroom basin. There was no warning; trooping out with all those other people in trouble, part of the anxious and stunned gait, she suddenly felt the clenching of her insides and knew what was going to come. She did not tell him, when she rejoined him, and he must have assumed she had gone to the place for the usual purpose. Medically, there was an explanation for such an attack coming on without nausea. Extreme tension could trigger the seizure of muscles. ‘Vomited her heart out’: that was the expression some of her patients used when describing the symptom. She had always received it, drily, as dramatically inaccurate.

Let them wait.

What he was saying was to hell with them, the patients, how can their pains and aches and pregnancies compare with this? Everything came to a stop, that night; everything has come to a stop. In the coffee bar an androgynous waiter with long curly hair tied back and tennis-ball biceps hummed his pleasure along with piped music. In the mortuary there was lying the body of a man. They ordered a filter coffee (Harald) and a cappuccino (Claudia). The man who was shot in the head, found dead. Why should it be unexpected that it was a man? Was not that a kind of admittance, already, credence that it could have been done at all? To assume the body would represent a woman, the most common form of the act, crime passionnel from the sensational pages of the Sunday papers, was to accept the possibility that it was committed, entered at all into a life’s context. His. The random violence of night streets they had expected to read in the stranger’s face of the messenger, this was the hazard that belongs there, along with the given etemals, the risks of illness, failure of ambition, loss of love. These are what those responsible for an existence recognize they expose it to. To kill a woman out of jealous passion; for it to come to mind — shamefully, in acceptance of newspaper banality — was to allow even that the very nature of such acts could breach the prescribed limits of that life’s context.

We’re not much the wiser.

She didn’t answer. Her eyebrows lifted as she reached for the packets of sugar. Her hand was trembling slightly, privately, from the recent violent convulsion of her body. If he noticed he did not remark upon it.

They now understood what they had expected from him: outrage at the preposterous — thing — accusation, laid upon him. Against his presence there between two policemen before a magistrate. They had expected to have him burst forth at the sight of them — that was what they were ready for, to tell them — what? Whatever he could, within the restriction of that room with the policemen hovering and the clerks scratching papers together and the gallery hangers-on dawdling past. That his being there was crazy, they must get him out immediately, importune officials, protest — what? Tell them. Tell them. Some explanation. How could it be thought that this situation was possible.

A good friend.

The lawyer a good friend. And that was all. His back as he went down the stairs, a policeman on either side. Now, while Harald stretched a leg so that he could reach coins in his pocket, he was in a confine they had never seen, a cell. The body of a man was in a mortuary. Harald left a tip for the young man who was humming. The petty rituals of living are a daze of continuity over what has come to a stop.

I’ll insist on getting to the bottom of it this afternoon.

They were walking to their car through the continuum of the city, separated and brought side by side again by the narrowing and widening of the pavements in relation to other people going about their lives, the vendors’ spread stock of small pyramids of vegetables, chewing gum, sunglasses and second-hand clothes, the gas burners on which sausages like curls of human gut were frying.

In the afternoon she couldn’t let them wait. It was the day come round for her weekly stint at a clinic. Doctors like herself, in private practice, were expected to meet the need in areas of the city and the once genteel white suburbs of the old time where in recent years there was an influx, a great rise in and variety of the population. She had regularly fulfilled this obligation; now conscientiousness goaded her, over what had come to a stop; she went to her clinic instead of accompanying Harald to the lawyer. Perhaps this also was to keep herself to the conviction that what had happened could not be? It was not a day to examine motives; just follow the sequence set out in an appointments register. She put on her white coat (she is a functionary, as the magistrate is hunched in his gown) and entered the institutional domain familiar to her, the steaming sterilizer with its battery of precise instruments for every task, the dancing show of efficiency of the young District Nurse with her doll’s white starched crown pinned atop her dreadlocks. Some of the patients did not have words, in English, to express what they felt disordered within them. The nurse translated when necessary, relaying the doctor’s questions, switching easily from one mother tongue to another she shared with these patients, and relaying their answers.

The procession of flesh was laid before the doctor. It was her medium in which she worked, the abundant black thighs reluctantly parted in modesty (the nurse chaffed the women, Mama, doctor’s a woman just like you), the white hairy paps of old men under auscultation. The babies’ tender bellies slid under her palms; tears of terrible reproach bulged from their eyes when she had to thrust the needle into the soft padding of their upper arms, where muscle had not yet developed. She did it as she performed any necessary procedure, with all her skill to avoid pain.

Isn’t that the purpose?

There is plenty of pain that arises from within; this woman with a tumour growing in her neck, plain to feel it under experienced fingers, and then the usual weekly procession of pensioners hobbled by arthritis.

But the pain that comes from without — the violation of the flesh, a child is burned by an overturned pot of boiling water, or a knife is thrust. A bullet. This piercing of the flesh, the force, ram of a bullet deep into it, steel alloy that breaks bone as if shattering a teacup — she is not a surgeon but in this violent city she has watched those nuggets delved for and prised out on operating tables, they retain the streamline shape of velocity itself, there is no element in the human body that can withstand, even dent, a bullet — those who survive recall the pain differently but all accounts agree: an assault. The pain that is the product of the body itself; its malfunction is part of the self: somewhere, a mystery medical science cannot explain, the self is responsible. But this — the bullet: the pure assault of pain.

The purpose of a doctor’s life is to defend the body against the violence of pain. She stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause it. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life.

This body whose interior she is exploring with a plastic-gloved hand like a diviner’s instinctively led to a hidden water-source, has a foetus, three months of life inside it.

I’m telling you true. I was never so sick with the others. Every morning, sick as a dog.

Vomit your heart out.

D’you think that means it’s a boy, doctor? The patient has the mock coyness women often affect towards a doctor, the consulting room is their stage with a rare chance for a little performance. Ag, my husband’d be over the moon. But I tell him, if we don’t come through with it right this time, I don’t know about you, I’m giving up.

The doctor obliges by laughing with her.

We could do a simple test if you want to know the sex.

Oh no, it’s God’s will.

Next come a succession of the usual heart ailments and bronchial infections. Life staggers along powered by worn bellows of old people’s lungs and softly pulses visibly between the ribs of a skinny small boy. Some who turn up this week as every week have eyes narrowed by the gross fatty tissue of their faces and others continue to present the skin infections characteristic of malnutrition. They eat too much or they have too little to eat. It’s comparatively easy to prescribe for the first because they have the remedy in themselves. For the second, what is prescribed is denied them by circumstances outside their control. Green vegetables and fresh fruit — they are too poor for the luxury of these remedies, what they have come to the clinic for is a bottle of medicine. The doctor knows this but she has ready a supply of diet sheets which propose meals made with various pulses as some sort of substitute for what they should be able to eat. She hands a sheet encouragingly to the woman who has brought her two grandchildren to the doctor. Their scarred grey-filmed legs are bare but despite the heat they watch the doctor from under thick woollen caps that cover the sores on their heads and come down right to the eyebrows. The woman doesn’t need the nurse to interpret, she can read the sheet and studies it slowly at arm’s length in the manner of ageing people becoming far-sighted. She folds it carefully. Her time is up. She shepherds the children to the door. She thanks the doctor. I don’t know what I can get. Maybe I can try buy some these things. The father, he’s still in jail. My son.

Charge sheet. Indictment. Harald kept himself at a remove of cold attention in order to separate what was evidence against interpretation of that evidence. Circumstantial: that day, that night, Friday, 19th January, 1996, a man was found dead in a house he shared with two other men. David Baker and Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla came home at 7.15 p.m. and found the body of their friend Carl Jespersen in the living-room. He had a bullet wound in the head. He was lying half-on, half-off the sofa, as if (interpretation) he had been taken by surprise when shot and had tried to rise. He was wearing thonged sandals, one of which was twisted, hanging off his foot, and beneath a towelling dressing-gown he was naked. There were glasses on an African drum beside the sofa. One held the dregs of what appeared to have been a mixture known as a Bloody Mary — an empty tin of tomato juice and a bottle of vodka were on top of the television set. The other glasses were apparently unused; there was an unopened bottle of whisky and a bucket of half-melted ice on a tray on the floor beside the drum. (Evidence combined with interpretation.) There was no unusual disorder in the room; this is a casual bachelor household. (Interpretation.) The room was in darkness except for the pin-point light of the CD player that had come to the end of a disc and not been switched off. The front door was locked but glass doors which led from the living-room to the garden were open, as they generally would be in summer, even after dark.

The garden is one in which a cottage is sited. The cottage is occupied by Duncan Lindgard, a mutual friend of the dead man and the two men who discovered him, and they ran to him after they had discovered Jespersen’s body. Lindgard’s dog was asleep outside the cottage and apparently there was no-one at home. The police came about twenty minutes later. A man, a plumber’s assistant, Petrus Ntuli, who occupied an outhouse on the property in exchange for work in the garden, was questioned and said that he had seen Lindgard come out on the verandah of the house and drop something as he crossed the garden to the cottage. Ntuli thought he would retrieve whatever it was, for Lindgard, but could not find anything. He called out to Lindgard but Lindgard had already entered the cottage. Ntuli did not have a watch. He could not say what time this was, but the sun was down. The police searched the garden and found a gun in a clump of fern. Baker and Dladla immediately identified it as the gun kept in the house as mutual protection against burglars; neither could recall in which of their three names it was licensed. The police proceeded to the cottage. There was no response to knocking on the door, but Ntuli insisted that Lindgard was inside. The police then effected entry by forcing the kitchen door and found that Lindgard was in the bedroom. He seemed dazed. He said he had been asleep. Asked whether he knew his friend Carl Jespersen had been attacked, he went white in the face (interpretation) and demanded, Is he dead?

He then protested about the police invasion of his cottage and insisted that he be allowed to make several telephone calls, one of which was to his lawyer. The lawyer evidently advised him not to resist arrest and met him at the police station where fingerprint tests were inconclusive because the clump of fern had been watered recently and the fingerprints on the gun were largely obliterated by mud.

This is not a detective story.

Harald has to believe that the mode of events that genre represents is actuality.

This is the sequence of actions by which a charge of murder is arrived. When he recounts to Claudia what he heard from the lawyer she moves her head from side to side at each stage of detail and does not interrupt. He has the impression she is hearing him out; yet when he has finished, she says nothing. He sees, from her silence, he has said nothing; brought back nothing that would explain. Duncan came out of that man’s house and dropped something in the garden on his way back to his cottage. A gun was found. Duncan said he was asleep and did not hear either his friends or the police when they knocked at the door. None of this tells anything more, gives any more explanation than there was in the confrontation across the barrier in court. His brief embrace with head turned away. His reply to any need: nothing. Harald sees, informed by Claudia’s presence, that what he has related, to himself and her, is indeed a crude whodunnit.

Bail application by the good friend cocksure lawyer had been again refused.

But why? Why? All she can call to mind is some unquestioned accepted reasoning that one who is likely to commit another crime cannot be let loose on the mere security of money. Duncan, a danger to society! For god’s sake, why?

The prosecutor’s got wind of some idea that he might disappear — leave.

The country?

Now they are in the category of those who buy themselves out of retribution because they can afford to put up bail and then estreat. He did not know whether she understood this implication of refusal, for their son and themselves.

Where does the idea come from?

The girl’s been called for questioning, apparently she said he’s been threatening to take up a position he’s been offered with a practice in Singapore. I don’t know — to get away from her, it sounds like. Something she let slip, maybe intentionally. Who can fathom what was going on between them.

If Claudia is dissatisfied with what little Harald has learned in explanation, could she have been more successful? Well, let her try, then.

An awaiting-trial prisoner has the right to visits. Her turn: I’d like to talk to that Julian whatever-his-name, before we go.

Harald knows that both have an irrational revulsion against contact with the young man: don’t kill the messenger, the threat is the message.

Claudia is not the only woman with a son in prison. Since this afternoon she has understood that. She is no longer the one who doles out comfort or its placebos for others’ disasters, herself safe, untouchable, in another class. And it’s not the just laws that have brought about this form of equality; something quite other. There’s no sentimentality in this, either, which is why she will not speak of it to anyone, not even to the one who is the father of a son in prison; it might be misinterpreted.

She telephoned the lawyer to obtain the number of the messenger who had presented himself at the townhouse security gate and entered at the hour of after-dinner coffee. She was adamant, Harald could hear as she reached the messenger, that he should come back that evening. Not tomorrow. Now.

This time when he opened the door to the messenger, Harald offered his hand to him: Julian Verster. Claudia had noted down the name.

How did they seem to him? The occasion had no precedent to go by; a social occasion, an inquisition, an appeal — what kind of hospitality is this, what signifying arrangements are appropriate, as the provision of tea or drinks set out, the placing of ashtrays and arrangement of a comfortable chair signify the nature of other occasions. Everything in its customary place in the room; that in itself inappropriate, even bizarre.

Their attitude towards him had changed, overcome by need. They saw in this young man the possibility of some answers, they might read even in his appearance something of the context in which what had happened could happen. Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself. Bulky running shoes with intricate embellishments, high tongues and thick soles, that cabinet ministers as well as clerks and students wear now, and Harald himself, at leisure, wears; pitted skin on the cheeks, the tribal marks of adolescent acne, wide-spaced dog’s-brown eyes darkened by heavy eyebrows authoritatively contradicting the uncertainties of a mouth that moves, shaping and reshaping itself before he speaks. A face that suggests a personality subservient and loyal: an ideal component of a coterie. In business, Harald is accustomed to being observant of such things when meeting prospective associates.

— I’m sorry to have interrupted your plans for the evening, like this, but when you came that night we were all … I don’t know … we couldn’t say much. It was difficult to take in anything. As Duncan’s friend, you must have felt something the same — it must have been hard for you to have to come to us. We know that.—

The young man acknowledges with an understanding downturn of the lips that this is, in turn, her way of extending a hand to him.

— I felt awful — that I did it so badly — I couldn’t think of any other way. Awful. And he’d asked me, he left it to me.—

They sat in a close group now. Claudia was turned to him, sharing the sofa, and Harald drew up a chair, to speak.

— Why didn’t he call us himself.—

But it was a judgment rather than a question.

— Oh Harald … that’s obvious.—

— He was terribly shocked, you can’t imagine.—

— That was at the police station?—

— No, the house, he reached me on my cell phone and I just turned round in the middle of the road, where I was … he was still with the police at the house, the cottage.—

Claudia’s knees and hands matched, tight together, hands on knees. — You went to the house.—

— Yes. I saw. I couldn’t believe it.—

To them, what was seen is the man in the mortuary (Claudia knows the post-mortem procedure; the body may be kept for days before the process is performed). But — there in his face — to this Julian Verster what was seen was his friend, as Duncan is his friend. This realization makes it possible to begin to say what it is they want of him. Out of some instinctive agreement, neither has any right above the other, they question him alternately; they’ve found a formula, at least some structure they have put together for themselves in the absence of any precedent.

— Could you give us an idea of how, at all, Duncan could have been mixed up in this, how his — what shall I say? — his position as some sort of tenant, his relationship to the men in the house — these friends — could have led to the circumstantial evidence there seems to be against him? I was at the lawyer’s today. You belong to that group of friends, don’t you? We don’t know any of them, really—

Claudia turned to Harald, but with eyes distantly lowered for the interjection. — Except the girl, his girl-friend, he’s brought her with him once or twice, here. But apparently she wasn’t there on Friday. She’s not been mentioned.—

— Could you tell us something about the friendship, they all more or less share the property, they must have got on well with one another, to decide to do that, live in such close proximity — what could lead to Duncan being accused of such a horror? You must understand we’ve lived, my wife and I, parents and son, as three independent adults, we’re close but we don’t expect to be privy to everything in his life. Different relationships. We have ours with him, he has his with others. It’s been fine. But when something like this falls on your head — we understand what this — respect, I suppose, for one another, can mean. Just that we don’t know anything we need to know. Who was this man? What did Duncan have to do with him? You must know! We can’t go to see Duncan tomorrow and ask him, can we? In a prison visitors’ room? Warders there, who else—

— We’ve all been friends quite a long time, well certainly Dave, he studied architecture along with Duncan, and so did I–I’m with Duncan in the same firm. But I didn’t join them when they took the house and the cottage together. Khulu’s a journalist, I think Duncan got to know him first, when Khulu wanted to move into town from Tembisa. Carl, Carl Jespersen — (it is difficult to speak of, or hear spoken of, in the tone of ordinary information, a man lying in a mortuary) Jespersen came I think about two years ago with a Danish — or maybe it was Norwegian — film crew and somehow he didn’t go back. He works — was working with an advertising agency. The three of them took the main house and Duncan took the cottage. But they more or less run the whole place together. I mean, I’m often there, it’s pretty much open house, some good times.—

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.

— I don’t remember ever seeing him drink whisky. — They followed her: to the bottle of whisky, the unused glass, and the bucket of ice beside that sofa.

Before he left, it was safe to ask whether as a friend (close as he evidently is) Julian Verster can suggest anything in particular that they might take with them on the visit the next day.

Nothing, of course. Nothing.

Awake in the night, there is enactment of what might take place. Instead of the landscapes of dreams, darkness forms the prison, steel grilles, keys (maybe now there is electronically controlled security, like the green or red eyes that signal or bar right of entry or egress through bank doors). If they had never been in court before, it is certain that neither had ever been inside a prison. The structure comes from the narrowing perspective of corridors in scenes from television films, the eyes through Judas apertures, with a sound-track of heavy echoes, since of all the sough of ordinary life, the conversation of birds, humans, traffic, only shouts and the cymbal of boots striking concrete floors remain. The wearers of the boots don’t have to be dreamed; they already have been encountered in Court B17; young men with open-air faces who stand by in stolid inattention with the expression of contented preoccupation with their own private lives while crime and punishment are decreed. The cell — but prison visitors won’t see the cells, there will be a visitors’ room, the cells will be like whatever it is to which the prisoner went down under the well of the court: unknown. There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark.

You can’t sleep, either.

Beside her, he doesn’t answer. But she hears from his breathing — it does not have the familiar rhythm — that Harald is not asleep. In the dark, his attention is too concentrated to respond. That is all. He, too, has an inviolable privacy: he is praying. Harald is what is known as a great reader, which means a searcher after something that is ambitiously called the truth; both conditional concepts he would be the first, amusedly, to concede. He has tried, over years, through different formulations he has come upon, to explain prayer to her in a way that would be understandable to someone without religious faith, and the nearest he has come to this was to offer Simone Weil’s definition of prayer as a heightened form of intelligent concentration. When she questioned the proviso ‘intelligent’—what else could concentration be? — he satisfied her uncertainty by pointing out that there exists the possibility of a bug-eyed concentration on something trivial, which does not imply intelligence in the religious and philosophical sense. Prayer as a form of intelligent concentration is secularized in a way Claudia has had to accept. She has done this by separating the intelligent concentration from to whom or what it is addressed; then it is not a communication with a supposedly existing God, but a heightened means of communicating with one’s own resources in solution of guidance through fears, failures and sorrows.

Harald is praying. His prayer enters the enactment of what will take place tomorrow. She lies in the dark beside him. What is he praying for? Is he praying that their son did not do what he is accused of? If Harald needs to pray for this, does that mean he believes what he cannot say, that his son killed a man?

They got up earlier than they would do routinely on a working day. There was time to fill before the opening hours of admittance. They passed pages of the newspaper back and forth between them, reading the continuation of crises whose earlier episodes they had been watching when the messenger came. For him, the photograph of a child clinging to the body of its dead mother and the report of a night of mortar fire sending nameless people randomly to the shelter of broken walls and collapsing cellars was suddenly part of his own life no longer outside but within the parameters of disaster. The news was his news. For her, these events were removed, even farther than they had been by distance, further than they had been in relevance to her life, by the message that had interrupted them: private disaster means to drop out of the rest of the world.

He went and hung about in the small garden allotted, walled and maintained, within the landscaping of the townhouse complex; the intricately paved path under the Strelitzias was covered in a few steps, back and forth. Nowhere to go. Where he stood, the angle of the sun struck into flame orange and blue wings of blooms perched like birds. She was in the kitchen, occupying herself with something. When it was time, she appeared with a plastic bowl covered with tinfoil which she placed on the floor of the passenger seat. While he drove she steadied the bowl between her sandalled feet.

I suppose they’ll allow this.

He rocked his head uncertainly. Awaiting trial, maybe.

It’s just a salad and some cheese.

Of course. Women, only women, have this sort of resource. They think of how to ameliorate. He was subliminally aware of tenderness and scorn, not for her so much as for them all, poor things; to be envious of.

At that place, the prison, to which they were inescapably headed, they were received with the kind of courtesy that is learnt in public relations training of a new police force intended to obliterate the tradition of the racist and brutal authority of the past. Anyway, the officer in charge is an Afrikaner, himself a middle-aged man with all that implies of adult children, parental burdens, family sentiments etc. he would assume in common with a white couple. Go ahead, he indicates the bowl of food. — But not to worry, he’s getting a good diet, everything. And you can take his washing and so on, nê.—

Prison is a normal place. That is what they don’t know; the officer has a computer and several kinds of telephones, regular and cellular, in his bureau and there is a basket of flowering indoor plants with its bunch of plastic ribbons that has no doubt marked an anniversary or other celebration. The echoing corridors from the night’s darkness are there but these are ways they will not go down; they are led by the strong buttocks of a young black policeman to a nearby room. It is right that there is nothing to characterize that room; if there is, they don’t see it. It’s the space, closed off from all that is recognizable in life, where they sit on two chairs facing a table on the other side of which is their son. Duncan. It’s Duncan come from the echoing corridors, come from the cell, come from what he contemplates, in himself, there. His spread hands hit the table as they enter, as if striking chords on a piano and he’s smiling in a warning, there is to be no emotionalism. Signals fly like bats about the room. Don’t ask me. We only want to know what to do. I need to see you. If you don’t tell us. I don’t want to see you. Whatever: have to know. You can’t know. At least how did it. You don’t have to get mixed up. You can’t keep us out. Don’t ask for what you won’t be able to take. Come. I want to see you. Don’t come.

Even here — this place that surely cannot exist for these three — there has to be a premise on which spoken communication can take place. The bats must be fought back to the dark from which they come, the cell, the wakeful night. There can be only one premise, one set by the parents: he did not do it. He is, in the vocabulary of the law, innocent, even though they are prepared to believe, they now must know, he is not innocent in the sense of the context of the awful event, the kind of milieu in which it could take place. For it to have come about implies that they have to rearrange life in that house and cottage of young friends as they had pictured it, rearrange the furniture of human relations there, Duncan among compatible friends, just a stretch of pleasant garden away, living with a girl in what might or might not become a permanent liaison.

Duncan is not innocent, but he cannot be guilty. The crucial matter, then, is the lawyer; again there must be the best lawyer. That decision they are not prepared to leave to him, they will be adamant about this, mother and father.

The lawyer, the good friend, they met in Court B17 has briefed a top Senior Counsel, someone, he says, in the class of Bizos and Chaskalson — Hamilton Motsamai.

That is all their son says, he does not give reassurance; only the assurance that he will be defended by what they wanted, the most capable individual available. He does not tell them; he does not tell that he will be safe because he is not guilty of the death of the man on the sofa. This has become a delicate matter that cannot be brought up, as if it were some prying question into a son’s sex life. And indeed — about the girl, of course the subject of the girl can’t be mentioned, although surely she may be needed to give valuable evidence of some sort, she must know she was not worth killing for, that kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed. A gun in the mud. Someone else throws it there. A gardener thinks Duncan has dropped something, perhaps it was a cigarette butt discarded, and the police come upon a gun. What they bum to ask their son is: does he know why the man was killed? But that, too, is not possible, for different reasons: the warder, the policeman, is there as the three chairs and table are, but one must remember that the warder hears although his face is composed in the sulky distance of incomprehension: what the answer might be could be used in damaging evidence, the nature of some circle — how could they know — in which the son moves. Once grouped around an act of violence, anything and everything becomes suspicious.

At least, as a doctor, she has something to say.

— How much exercise are you getting? Do you manage to sleep all right?—

Either to satisfy them or in defiance, he makes light of this concern. — Well, it’s not the five-star accommodation I’d recommend. — He laughs. This room is not used to laughter; it comes back at them from the walls as a cry. — There’s some sort of yard I walk around twice a day. Oh — about the dog. I suppose Khulu or someone is feeding him, but—

— Because I can speak to the medical officer and prescribe a mild sleeping pill. And better exercise facilities.—

— No. Don’t. It’s not necessary. What about the dog?—

This is something for his father; these parents are appealing for tasks.

— I’ll find a solution; I’ll fetch him. And books?—

— Philip has brought me a few and I can buy newspapers. But you could get some of mine. From the cottage — and clothes.—

— What about a key?—

— Khulu.—

Time must be nearly up, this produces a new height of awkwardness in the awareness of each of the three: the dread of his going back down the corridors of concrete and steel and their driving away to leave him abandoned there; and the shameful impatience to have the visit come to an end.

The warder signals. The parents don’t know whether to linger or quickly leave; what the protocol is for this kind of parting, what makes it endurable. They embrace him and his father feels a hand press three times on his shoulder-blade. As their son is led away, there’s an aside, delaying for a moment the warder who accompanies him. — Don’t bring anything I was in the middle of reading.—

What he must think of us!

Think of us?

Well, what did we say to him? So cold, matter-of-fact.

He glanced aside from the road ahead and saw her hands in her lap, the thumbnail of one twisting beneath the short fingernails of the other.

What could be said?

The warder standing there. We’ll have to see if we can’t meet him alone with the lawyer, lawyers have privileges of consulting privately with the person they represent.

That’s not it.

The capsule in which they were contained moving between the irreconcilables, prison and life, was suddenly filled with their voices let loose. The fact is, we don’t know what it is we ought to be discussing.

We don’t know what his entanglement is in this whole terrible — thing — he doesn’t give any sign. He says he’s going to have a first-class advocate but we don’t have any idea of what he’s going to give him; what line of defence the advocate’s going to be able to follow, what he’s going to prove, when he pleads.

What about the advocate.

They had heard it at once, in the shock of the name; the choice of a black man. She’s not one of those doctors who touch black skin indiscriminately along with white, in their work, but retain liberal prejudices against the intellectual capacities of blacks. Yet she is questioning, and he is; in the muck in which they are stewing now, where murder is done, old prejudices still writhe to the surface. Looking at the appointment of someone called Motsamai that way, he can find an answer within its context.

Could be an advantage. If there’s one of the black judges on the bench.

His voice is dry: that he should be thinking like this. Ashamed. And why should such a calculation come to mind — a black judge inclined to think better of an accused because he has chosen a black advocate — when we are not talking here of a criminal, a murderer, appearing before him. Where does such a thought come from, for God’s sake!

But do you know anything about him? Maybe he’s just another good friend.

We can make some enquiries. I’ll talk to someone at the top, I’ve met him a few times, he’ll understand although it’s not usual to expect one advocate to pass an opinion on another, I suppose.

Damn what’s usual. I’m trying to think. What else should we be doing, Harald? Just sat there — chatting. Chatting. You might at least have assured him we’ll pay for the lawyers, anything. How do we know whether fees didn’t come into the choice? These senior counsel cost a fortune a day. If he thinks he’ll have to find the money himself, it might affect everything.

He knows it’s not a question of money. He knows he can depend on us. Not the time or the place to make some kind of magnanimous announcement.

I just thought you’d say … his father … oh all right, not about money, something—

All you could think of was to prescribe a sleeping pill.

I know. Well at least it was some sort of message that if he wasn’t being well treated I’d have pull with whoever the medical officer is. But something—

You tell me what we should have said to him.

She hit her thighs with her fists.

That we believe him.

When he says what? He has said nothing. We know nothing. I read the record of circumstantial evidence. The man is dead. A gun in the mud. What does that mean?

While he is speaking she is hammering across his words. That we believe in him! That we believe in him! That there’s no possibility, ever, in this world, that we would not! That’s what wasn’t there, wasn’t said—

He was checked in obedience to a traffic light. His hand went down to shift the gear to neutral and she moved slightly to avoid contact with the hand. He waited, with the red light, then spoke.

Believe?

You know.

There was no response.

That we believe he could never do such a thing and we’re right about that.

He was carried along with the traffic as if the car drove itself. His head was stirring, almost weaving, in some unshareable conflict, intolerable reluctance.

Claudia — he knew he should qualify the formal use of her name with some intimacy, but the old epithets, the darlings and dearests were out of place in what had to be stated, hard. Begin again.

We don’t even know if he accepts that we believe in him.

Accept? Why should he not? What’s accepting got to do with it!

He cannot allow it to become real to them both by pronouncing it, the father’s voice enunciating it to the mother, but it is there, secreted in the car between them as he arrives at the security gates of the townhouse complex: Because he knows he did what was done. That is why nothing was said in that half-hour in the prison visiting room; the premise we were there on does not exist. That is what our son was conveying to us. That is what there is to believe.

He presses the electronic gadget which lets them into their home but provides no refuge.

The Board of his company has its own prominent firm of legal advisers, one of whom sits on the Board. Harald approaches him for his opinion on all legal matters.

In ordinary circumstances. But he can do now what he would not find proper in ordinary circumstances. He can use the slight acquaintance at, public dinners to importune one of the prestigious figures in the legal profession for a confidential opinion of the capability, reputation and status of the advocate Motsamai. He has no compunction in being presumptuous. Such conventions of his life — what do they matter.

Of course the man knows, everyone knows, the story has been a gift to the Sunday papers. But what is he thinking as he listens to the reiteration of facts, my son is accused of murder, there’s been a decision to place the case in the hands of Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai. My wife and I do not know this person, we have no personal feelings for or against him, we are concerned only with whether he is the best possible professional to act for our son.

Is he interpreting, beneath one of the familiar silences of lawyers, translating the private language of what is not being said: this Senior Counsel is black. Is that it?

But for the moment the question should not be addressed between them; first, to protect the speaker from remarks inimical to the ethics of the profession, there must come a disclaimer: —There would be a number of ‘best possible’ defence counsel. You understand. I would not place one above the other. But Motsamai is known as eminently capable. And experienced. In his four years back in the country he’s appeared successfully in a number of challenging cases. Political, yes — but also of other natures. He has the kind of aggressive spirit — controlled, mind you, by strong intelligence — that puts him on a high level of competence in cross examination. Very clever — some would say exceptional.—

Harald does not need a general opinion, which may be given in the caution of all fairness; he must know what this man himself really thinks. There is no time, no space between cell walls for the dangerous reservations of ‘all fairness’.—And you? What would you say?—

It must be impossible to be confronted by Harald Lindgard at this time and not to be shocked — and shock is always within a breath’s distance of fear — by what it is that could happen to a man like him; like oneself. The last time they met they were standing around drinks in hand discussing with the Deputy Minister of Finance the pros and cons of lifting foreign exchange controls! Although the man did not know Lindgard more intimately than this, he had to put aside professionalism as if he doffed the black robe he wore in court. — Look, I don’t sprinkle exaggerated epithets around, but I can tell you the fellow’s remarkable. You don’t know anything about his background? I can’t remember exactly what part of the country he grew up in, usual thing, a poor lad from uneducated parents, and he managed to get into Fort Hare for his law degree in the late Sixties. Then he was involved in Youth Group political activity, detained. When he was released he fled to England and somehow — scholarships — continued law studies there. Before he came back in’90, he’d been accepted at Gray’s Inn and appeared for the defence at the Old Bailey. So there could hardly be any difficulties raised against his getting admitted to the Bar, here. Frankly — you can well imagine, after years when blacks were discounted as brains in the legal profession, now there’s considerable eagerness to show credit given where credit is due — in fact, Motsamai is providential … a star was needed and he appeared in our constellation … He’s what the popular press would term much sought-after. Fortunately this isn’t just an affirmative action display. No no.—

That may be the concluding statement to be carried away; but Harald senses a weight that keeps him from making to leave.

— You’ve had doubts about your son’s defence being conducted by a black man.—

There it is. Laid out before them, Harald and his distinguished mentor. But it is presented as what might be expected, a simple regression, belched up from the shared dinners of the past.

— We don’t have to attribute that doubt to racial prejudice, because it is a fact, incontrovertible fact, that due to racial prejudice in the old regimes, black lawyers have had far less experience than white lawyers, and experience is what counts. They’ve had fewer chances to prove themselves; it’s their disadvantage, and you would not be showing racial prejudice in seeing that disadvantage as yours, if entrusting defence to most of them. If you were to say to me, now, that you still would prefer to have a white counsel — that’s a different matter. I should have no comment. You are the one who has the grave burden. I can simply say: with Motsamai you are in good hands. If there’s anything else I can do—

Harald feels as he sometimes does when he walks out into the street, the world, after taking communion; a meditative quiet, some sort of certainty, at least, before he takes up to what it must be applied.

It was possible in these early days to get through them with attention fixed ahead in very short span on some action. There was the appointment to meet the Senior Counsel who had been briefed, Hamilton Motsamai.

They came independently to Advocates’ Chambers, she from her surgery, he excusing himself from a board meeting of the insurance company where he was a director. They greeted each other absently; only when they were seated side by side across from the broad and deep expanse of the advocate’s grand desk did they become the couple, the mother and father, the ominous bond. Motsamai was like his chambers, well-appointed. There was immense self-confidence in his combining the signs of success in a prestigious profession — the intercom instruction to his secretary to hold calls, the group photographs with distinguished Gray’s Inn colleagues in London, the library of law books with slips of paper standing up from their pages, marking frequent reference, the presentation plaque on the tray of desk-top accoutrements — with the wisp of beard just under the point of his chin that asserted a specific traditional African style, another order of dignity and distinction. His staccato and fluent English was strongly accented, he retained the drawn-out rounded vowels of African languages and established the right of the reverberating bass murmurs customary to their discourse, in dismissal of those other wordless conjunctions, the urns and ahs of white speakers. A new form of national sophistication. In his elegant grey suit, here is a man who has mastered everything, all contradictions that were imposed upon him by the past. Turning over papers (apparently his notes taken on the brief he has accepted) he glances up now and then at the man and woman before him, the whites of his eyes (he even removes his glasses for a moment, dangles them) strikingly clearcut in his small mahogany face as the glass eyes set in ancient statues. His is a face made by disciplines of the mind, the features drawn closed by concentration, even the mouth, hovering slightly as he responds inwardly to his text, has somewhat tightened its generosity. They study him; whatever is there is what they are dependent on as neither has ever before been dependent on anyone.

His intermittent attention to them was a kind of rehearsal of how to approach what he has to tell them. He had been briefed — in the lay sense, as well — about these clients by the good friend Philip, so knew they were not nobodies — one of the directors of a large insurance firm with a pragmatically enlightened policy towards blacks, and the wife, evidently, a doctor. Educated people to whom he could speak plainly so that they would understand his position: that is, the limitation of his possibilities in undertaking the brief.

— I have talked to your son. Of course I’ll be seeing him again, many times. Ah-hêh … He is not an easy young man to understand. But I am sure you know that.—

The father was about to speak but the mother preceded him. — No. We’ve always had a good relationship.—

— What you’re saying is now — he’s not easy to understand now? Is that it?—

The advocate was nodding, tapping extended fingertips in a little tattoo of agreement with the father. — Exactly, that is so. But it’s only the beginning. There is often — always — difficulty when an individual is in trouble, is in shock. You know (to her) it’s like when someone comes to you after an accident, in trauma, just like that.—

— To be told your friend’s dead and to be accused of it. Yes.—

The advocate knows the accused’s mother is accusing him: of being too measured. He’s accustomed to this kind of reaction, fear turned to resentment. In her case no doubt exacerbated by the fact that she is accustomed, as he has reminded her, to being the professional adviser instead of the victim. He looks away, flicking aside the shred of irrelevancy.

— Unfortunately. Unfortunately — I have to tell you, when he (a wide gesture) when he opens up, when he begins to co-operate with me — at this moment in time he’s somewhat hostile, you know — that is when he and I will have to tackle what there is to face. — He paused, to gauge if they were ready. — I have to tell you that the evidence is overwhelming. Conclusive. With just the exception of the weapon, the question of the dirt, you know, the mud — the fingerprints. But the final report still has to come in, and there are tests that might be able to find matching traces. He’s left-handed, that’s so? If traces should he found and they match, that will be very serious for us. Very, very. You understand? It would wrap up the prosecution’s case. We have to proceed on the assumption that this is going to happen. His hostility is not a good sign. In our experience, it means there is something — everything — to hide. The person doesn’t want to co-operate with the lawyer because he doesn’t believe the lawyer can do anything for him.—

— He’s guilty.—

Counsel received the father’s interjection with the approval of an instructor for a pupil.

— The person believes or knows he’s guilty, that’s right.—

This man with his glib use of the grandiloquent nonsense ‘this moment in time’ when he means now, and his generalized evasions; Harald does not accept the impersonal version of his words: ‘the person’ is his son. — He’s guilty. Duncan. That’s what you’re saying, Mr Motsamai.—

— Wait a moment, sir. That’s not at all what I am considering. It is for the court to decide whether or not an accused is guilty, not his lawyers, not even his parents. What I am asking you to understand is that I — we — the attorney and I — have to prepare our argument for such a contingency. In the light of this, all the circumstances — from childhood, even, the background, the temperament, the character and so on, of the young man, are vitally important. Any detail may be of use to us; that’s why, if you can — just calmly — get through the hostility that he shows to me, I mean — I’m sure it doesn’t apply with you — if you can influence him to tell his lawyers everything he knows about himself, his friends, the lot — that is essential. He must understand that there is nothing he cannot tell us.—

— Hostility — I don’t know whether you could say he has no hostility towards us. What it is that he shows … But how can his father or I approach him in our usual, the old way if anything went wrong, when we see him in that room with a warder hearing everything that might be told. He didn’t even say how crazy it was. For him to be there. No protest. He only made some kind of joke, almost, about where he’s shut away. We sat there as if our tongues were cut out. There was no possibility he’d say what happened. I can’t see how we could do what you ask while we see him under those circumstances.—

I fully appreciate, I fully understand, the advocate repeated in different formulations, developing what lawyers call their arguments. Ah-hêh. But it was not possible for them to talk to their son in complete privacy; that was the regulation. No possible harm could result, however, from them indicating to him, openly, in the presence of warders, that they were convinced, in his best interests at this moment in time, that he should trust his lawyers absolutely, that he tell his lawyers everything there was to tell. The glassmarble glance flashing again, as if it should hardly he necessary to pronounce the obvious — The warder would be most unlikely to comprehend anything you talk about, anyway. Most of those chaps are still a hangover from the old days. Sheltered employment for retarded sons of the Boere. — He tosses an indiscretion he knows won’t go amiss with these people. — Our government finds you can’t change the prison system overnight — or many nights. Ah-hêh.—

During these early days they seem to repeat an inescapable ritual of departure from the same kind of compulsory encounter which leaves each waiting for the other to speak. And each is wary of the kind of interpretation that may be revealed by the other; that would set the encounter up or down on some scale of use, of hope, for them. So long as the silence lasts, this time, they do not have to face in one another what the advocate, Senior Counsel Motsamai, has said has to be faced. It is best to break the silence obliquely, as near to gently, within devastation, as you can get.

What d’you think of him?

She drops her chin towards her breasts a moment; lifts her head to speak under the still-falling avalanche of the meeting. Full of himself. Somehow arrogant. We’re in a mess that he wearily is expected to get us out of. I don’t know.

Probably what looks like arrogance is the kind of decisive presence that’s impressive in court. Judges themselves are reputed to have that kind of presence. I didn’t like him much, either. But that’s irrelevant, he’s not there to ingratiate himself with us — I respect that, he’s there to do his job.

And he’s decided what that is.

That’s what he’s briefed for, isn’t he. His expertise.

And he’s decided that Duncan killed. I can’t, can’t even hear myself say it. I can’t say to myself, Duncan killed, Duncan perfosmed a pathological act. Duncan is not a psychopath, I know enough about pathological states, grant me that, to say so. And I’m not bringing us into it, I’m not basing my disbelief on any proud idea that this can’t be because he’s our son, this isn’t what a son of ours would do. It’s Duncan, not our son, I’m talking about. There must be some explanation of how this ‘circumstantial evidence’ came about. The man doesn’t know, but he’s preparing what? — his defence, on the premise that this ‘circumstantial evidence’ means that Duncan killed. Duncan killed because that little bitch who shacked up with him, who wasn’t too particular who attracted her fancy, and he’d tolerated this before, had a tumble on a sofa with one of the other friends. I’m sure she wasn’t the first girl in Duncan’s life, don’t you remember the others — Alyse or whatever-her-name-was, happened to be a medical student who came to assist me, for the experience, two years ago — she was the favourite for a while.

Why doesn’t Duncan speak.

I can’t tell you, can I? I don’t know. Perhaps because the lawyers keep battering him with ‘circumstantial evidence’ so that he can’t have any faith that the truth will count, you can’t win against circumstantial evidence, a gardener sees you crossing the grass and later the police pick up a gun. A man who doesn’t even have a watch, can’t say what time all this was. If you can’t prove your innocence, you are guilty, isn’t that what Duncan’s come to.

Why doesn’t he speak.

Well, that’s the only positive thing the man said, so far as I’m concerned. We have to try and get him to confide in the lawyer even if he won’t in you or me. And don’t ask me why he won’t.

She and he.

But what are they to do, if in his dire need, he does not need them? He, Harald, has to keep his eyes on the road, away from her, because they suddenly are deluged with tears, as if a sphincter has been pressured to bursting point. These drives. These drives back from disaster.

Harald was in the cottage. He had gone first to the room at the end of the garden where the plumber’s assistant and part-time gardener lived. A padlock on a stable door; the property was old, the man occupied what once must have housed a horse.

Harald had avoided the house, expecting to send the man to fetch the cottage key for him, although there was a car in the driveway, indicating someone was at home. When he knocked, a half-recognized face appeared at a window, and Khulu Dladla came to the door. He had met Dladla a few times — Duncan now and then had his parents over for drinks in the garden, they didn’t expect him to bother with providing a meal, and usually one or other of the friends on the property would join them. Harald had the key from Khulu; the heavy young man thumped off barefoot to fetch it; the word-processor at which he was interrupted shone an acid green eye on that living-room; that sofa. Harald was left standing alone with it. The young man’s feelings as he handed over the key to the cottage drew his features into the kind of painful frowning of one who is tightening a screw.

— I can come with you, if you want.—

No, Harald was touched by the awkward kindness that suddenly brought him together with this man but there should be no witness to the implications of Duncan’s absence from the cottage.

Harald was in the room where Duncan slept. And the girl. There was a pot of face-cream among the cigarette packs on the left bedside table. He turned away respectfully from the appearance of the room, took shirts and underpants and socks from a wallcupboard while ignoring anything else, none of his business, stacked there.

Don’t bring anything I was reading.

The books weighing a rickety bamboo table to the right of the bed; but he went over, he picked them up, read the titles familiar or unfamiliar to him, with an awareness of being watched by the empty room itself. The table had a lower shelf from which architectural journals and newspapers were sprawled to the floor. To him they had the look of having been dropped there, that day, when the occupant of the bed lay listening to battering on his door. He knelt on one knee and straightened them into place but the shelf sagged and they spilled again, and mixed up with them was a notebook of the cheap kind schoolchildren use. He balanced it on top of the pile — what for? So that Duncan would be able to put his hand on it when he came back to sleep in that bed? As if the delusion existed that he was about to do so.

He took up the notebook and opened it. He felt settle on the nape of his neck the meanness of what he was doing as he turned the pages, the betrayal of what the father had taught the son, you respect people’s privacy, you don’t read other people’s letters, you don’t read any personal matter that isn’t meant for your eyes. It was all ordinary, harmless — date when the car was last serviced, calculations of money amounts for some purpose or other, an address scored across, note of the back number of some architectural digest, not a diary but a jotter for preoccupations come to mind at odd hours. Then scrawled on the last page to have been used there was a passage copied from somewhere — Harald’s love of reading had been passed on when the boy was still a child. Harald recognized with the first few words, Dostoevsky, yes, Rogozhin speaking of Nastasya Filippovna. ‘She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not had me; that’s the truth. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water.’

During the period of awaiting trial there are no proceedings in a criminal case with which the papers may feed sensations to the public. When the first reports of the Lindgard son accused of killing a man were published, there was a tacit hush formed around the arrival of the member of the Board of Directors at his office. Newspapers were turned face-down on the headlines or removed from where his eyes and those of others might meet above them. The chairman did not know whether, in the privacy of the Board Room, there should be a formal expression of sympathy and concern for the colleague held in high regard, and his wife, in their time of trouble — that was the phrasing he would have used — or whether it was more tactful and helpful to evade any official attention, the sort of thing that would be remembered although not recorded in the minutes, a kind of conviction-once-removed, going on record against Lindgard, the biological father, at least, of a crime. It was decided to make no statement from the Board. Individual members found appropriate moments when they condoled with him briefly, to limit embarrassment on both sides. The general attitude to be adopted was to show him that of course, the whole thing was preposterous, some ghastly mistake. He thanked them, without concurring; they took this to mean simply that he did not want to talk about the ghastly mistake. Most of them had sons and daughters of their own for whom such an act would be equally impossible.

The period was dealt with on the only model within Lindgard’s and his colleagues’ experience: a remission in an illness about whose prognosis it is best not to enquire. In the men’s room one day a colleague with whom he had been a junior together and who had more concern for frankness of human feeling than about maintaining some convention of his dignity, spoke while peeing. As if it were a double relief — When there’s ever anything I can do — I’ve no idea what that might be — don’t hesitate for a moment, or for any reason. It must be hell. I never know whether to talk about it or not, Harald; how you’d feel. Whatever kind of frame-up it is — it must be agonizing to deal with, knowing it just couldn’t be, it’s out of the question.—

Lindgard had washed his hands. He was pulling the roller towel fastidiously to serve himself with a dry length. Now he spoke in this tiled enclave devoted to humble body functions.

— It isn’t out of the question.—

His colleague righted himself, stood in shock. It hadn’t been said. There are some things it’s not fair to have been told, the speaker will regret the telling the moment it has been done. He went quickly to the door and then turned and came back, put the flat of his hand on Lindgard’s shoulder-blade exactly where the son had made his gesture of communication when he met his father and mother for the first time in the visitors’ room.

Few of the doctor’s patients connected her with one of the cases of violence they might have read about. There were so many; in a region of the country where the political ambition of a leader had led to killings that had become vendettas, fomented by him, a daily tally of deaths was routine as a weather report; elsewhere, taxi drivers shot one another in rivalry over who would choose to ride with them, quarrels in discotheques were settled by the final curse-word of guns. State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way.

She did not work within a group, colleagues who would have to form an attitude to what set her apart among them. There was only Queen, the pert beauty preoccupied with her own authority as sister-in-charge at the clinic, and in the private surgery, Mrs February — whose ancestors had been dubbed with the name of the month in which they had been bought in the slave market — sat at her receptionist’s desk with the mournful eyes of a traditional dignified guise of trouble borne, in lieu of the doctor herself taking this on. It was a delicate expression of empathy that needed no passage of clumsy words. At the clinic and in her surgery hours, the doctor was within an unchanged enclosure of her life, a safe place; people who are surrounded by encroaching danger may be precariously protected for a time in areas declared as such by those outside threat, some agency of mercy. However she had difficulty in retaining the personal interest in patients’ lives which she had always held as essential to the practice of healing. The first identification with another whose son is imprisoned soon disappears in the crowd of those who are in misfortune; once truly jostled, become one among them, there has to be a sense that if I had to listen to your trouble you would have to listen to mine.

She packed up with a food parcel the clothes Harald had brought home, re-folding them.

Why didn’t you bring pyjamas?

Young men don’t wear them, don’t you remember? There weren’t any. Don’t you remember, from when he still lived at home?

How would I know what he slept in?

Didn’t you see him walking around in shorts, underpants, in the summer often coming to breakfast like that?

Of course, and didn’t she put away the clothes that came our of the wash, arrange their order in cupboards for the men in the family, the dutiful wife and mother expected, as well, of the doctor.

I didn’t occupy my time entirely with underpants.

Seems to me there must be a lot of things. Much that we didn’t remember. Don’t remember.

I wish you’d say what you mean. It’s difficult enough … to talk, to know what we’re saying. I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to catch me out, get me to explain, because I’m his mother, I ought to know, I should know why.

And I’m his father! I ought to know!

They stayed up late as they could in order to shorten the intervening night before the visit to the prison. At random he put a cassette of a Woody Allen film into the video player. When the lugubrious face appeared, Claudia remarked that the cassette was Duncan’s, lent to them and not returned. Perhaps it was an attempt, pathetic or ironic, to assert that she remembered something, a loose end, between them and their son. They heard each other laugh at parts of the film; and then it was over, the light on the screen drew in upon itself, vanished into the succubus of darkness. In bed, they lay in that darkness. Harald put his arm over her back, round her waist, but did not take her breast in his hand; it, too, lay there, open. Harald and Claudia had not made love since the night the messenger came. It was not possible for them. It might have been good, it might have helped — after all, they had been able to laugh — but there was witness, from a prison cell, closing her body, making him impotent.

He thought under cover of darkness he might tell her what he had read on the last page of the notebook. Under cover of darkness: the place to understand, for them to understand what Dostoevsky revealed of their son, and to their son, of himself. Claudia read medical journals, she probably had never read Dostoevsky, he did not reproach her for it, in his mind; she healed while he could ensure—‘insure’—as a compensation for pain and disaster, only money, but how to expect her to be able to interpret a passage from the depths of a mind with whose workings she was totally unfamiliar.

In the darkness he could disguise the reference that was within him, as a mood of practicality, necessity; the sole action open to them was to find the next thing to do.

We’ve the right to expect her to come to us. We have to see the girl.

Harald kept the key Khulu had given him and returned to the cottage and took, in the silence of the deserted bedroom, the notebook. Read again the passage of text that his son had found — what? — so devastating, a judgment unable to escape; or was it such a confirmation of ego, of power, that he could make of it his text, flaunt it, live by it. Act on it.

Harald went again through the pages. There were a few lines he had missed the first time, among banal jottings; another quotation but nothing he could put a name to. It was scribbled in overlapping large script, the kind of result of something remembered and written by feel, in the dark, half-awake. ‘I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.’ There was a dash, the initial ‘N’. A piece of adolescent self-dramatization probably divided into the broken lines of blank verse in the original, and hardly in a class to be appreciated along with Dostoevsky. He took the notebook to his office and locked it in a drawer of his desk; it was confidential, between him and his son as the two lovers of literature in the family, in their knowledge that the terrible genius of literature can give licence. His son did not know of this confidentiality. He did not know that his father had sneaked into his adult privacy and stolen his cryptic quotes with the intention of deciphering him.

Hamilton Motsamai was already in contact with the girl — of course. He stretched behind his desk and turned a gleaming yawn into a smile, in tolerance of the ignorance of lay people of how lawyers have to think ahead of them. — We don’t know this lady. You met her a few times? She has not put herself in a very good light, in view of her behaviour that night. There will be a certain reluctance I anticipate … ah-hêh … (he paddled the air with spread hands) to bring her little performance on the sofa out in court, that we’re aware of. So I’m not disturbed at all that the Deputy Attorney General has put her on the list for prosecution witness. That means I can cross examine her. You follow? — I couldn’t do that if I were to call her as a defence witness. But I’ve also made a request to the prosecutor which hasn’t been refused. He’s allowing me access — I can have her. Permission to bring her here to talk. Seems for the moment he’s undecided whether he’s going to use her or not, but I’m sure he will, in the end. He will. So he’ll recall permission after I’ve seen her, but that’s okay, that’s fine. To cover her own hanky-panky she may try some damaging character allegations about Duncan that would be useful to the prosecution. But I expect to have all I’ll need from her for when I get her on the witness stand. A lot depends on her attitude to your son. Is she still attached to him? Or is there some bad feeling, resentment towards him, so she’ll try to make herself look blameless — never mind the sofa — in any provocation that led him to this act. What about her character. All we have is her name, Natalie James, she has worked at an institute for market research, she’s been a hostess on a cruise ship to the Greek islands, she was at one time secretary to a university professor somewhere, and now she describes herself as ‘free lance’, I don’t know in what. What field. She also writes poems. I have informed her you want to see her. She says she will only meet you here, with me. Not at your place.—

Claudia keeps herself turned away while Motsamai speaks, it’s as if she would shut her eyes to concentrate best on what he is saying.

— Have you talked to Duncan about her?—

— 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.

— But you stayed. You stayed with him until you got into your car and drove off and left him alone that night and didn’t come back.—

She was still looking him full in the face, her hands still calmly interlaced.

She closed her eyes a moment. The black lashes pressed on her cheeks.

— I was free.—

— So you were afraid of my son.—

— He was afraid of me.—

When she had gone Harald sat on in Motsamai’s chambers, looking round the shelves of law books with their paper slips marking relevant pages that might decide — not justice — he was not able to think of justice as he used to — but a way out. The law as a paper-chase whose subsidiary clauses might lead through the forest. Motsamai called on his intercom for coffee, and then without explanation to his client countermanded the order. He came out from behind his desk and went to a brass-handled cupboard. In it were rows of files and an inner compartment where glasses hung by their stems from carved slots, as in an elegant bar. He lifted in either hand a bottle of whisky and one of brandy, questioning? Harald nodded at the brandy. Motsamai poured them each a good tot. It was a small gesture of kindly, silent tact that came unexpectedly from this man. Harald could say to him — So she believes Duncan killed the man he saw fucking her on the sofa.—

— She knows the sort of woman she is. That is for us to proceed on.—

Motsamai drew at his tongue to savour the after-taste of the brandy; here is a man who enjoys his mouth, has managed to retain the avidity with which the new-born attacks the first nourishment at the breast.

— Is it?—

— Man, she provoked him beyond endurance, drove him beyond reason, not only that night, with her exhibition, but for over a year or so preceding that night. Culminating in it.—

— That’s not what she says. She says he was the one. He was the one to get, how did she put it, pretty ugly.—

— Ah, but you said it yourself — she stayed. And did you hear: he was afraid of me. That was her answer when you asked, after all her complaints, her allegations about him, if she was afraid of your son. She stayed, she stayed!—

Because he was more dreadful than the water, learned Senior Counsel. But that self-judgment of the accused was not for the ears of the lawyers; not yet, if ever. There is a winnowing process in preparing a case, to be learnt by a layman; Harald had some experience in picking up nuances in a very different context, the Board meetings he attended and sometimes chaired. Some facts would be useful to the lawyer, some would be detrimental to the argument he would present — how to proceed?

Motsamai slid between his majestic maroon-leather upholstered chair and his desk to seat himself again. What he had to say had to be said from there and not from the casual stance of sharing a drink. — Harald, it’s not going to matter whether or not fingerprints can be discovered under the dirt on that gun. My client has instructed me.—

— Duncan has said so.—

— He has. Duncan has told me.—

— He’s told you. And he’s told you to tell us.—

— Yes. Ah-hêh.—

That drawn-out sounding from the breast can be, is everything, a recognition, a lament. When he heard the man call him by his first name, for the first time, he knew what was being expressed now in an articulation older and beyond words.

— So that’s the end of it.—

— No, that’s not the end of it at all. It’s the beginning of our work.—

— You and his good friend, his attorney.—

The whole body tingling, the drug of an unknown emotion injected in this well-appointed chamber of announced damnation which now replaces the meaning of all other dwellings on this earth, in this life.

— Is a lawyer obliged to take a brief for someone who has said he is guilty? Already judged himself. What is there to defend.—

— Of course a lawyer must take such a brief! The individual has the right to be judged according to many factors in relation to his confessed act. Circumstances may affect vitally the weight of circumstantial evidence. The accused may judge himself, but he cannot sentence himself. Only the judge can do that. Only on the verdict of the court. In terms of the kind of sentence likely to be imposed, this is the beginning of the case, man! What we concentrate on is ensuring that the sentence is not going to be a day longer, not a degree more punitive than mitigating factors allow. He’s opened up, Harald — your son’s talking to me now — there’re aspects of the affair to pursue for the defence, that defence still exists!—

The prison visit to a murderer.

When he came back from Senior Counsel’s chambers and told her, her face broke out in scarlet patches as if in fierce allergy, it was shocking to look at. A raw indecency before him. He anguishedly wanted her to weep, so that he could hold her.

They went dully over what the lawyer had said about his brief, his task. The principle of law, innocent until proved guilty, which they held along with all those who are confident they will never transgress further than incur a traffic fine, was overturned. In its dust, bewilderment isolates; each spoke for the self rather than succeeded in reaching out to the other.

Any other woman surely would have wept, keened over her son, and he could have found some purpose, embracing her, joining her. He offered, of himself: We know less than before. Motsamai didn’t ask him the only thing that matters. To me — us. It’s not why — that’s all Motsamai’s concerned with, that’s the defence. It’s also how. How could he do it. Duncan could bring himself to do it, take a gun and kill. He’s you and me, isn’t he, and we can’t know, can we. Not because he’s not going to tell Motsamai or us or anyone; it’s something that can’t be ‘told’. It has to be in you. In him.

Claudia went to the kitchen to find food because this must be about the time when they usually ate. He was not domesticated. He followed, out of some sort of courtesy which was all that was left for their situation. There was nothing further to say; he had perhaps said too much already. What Claudia had been thinking, framing in her mind in that burrowing silence of the kitchen, came next day when they were walking together down the path to the carport on their way to the prison. One of the stiff spatulate leaves of the Strelitzia caught at her hair and she dodged, breaking their inevitable progress, and he turned to see what was impeding her. A grin swiftly transformed her face and as swiftly shut away. You believed that night that he could do it. Didn’t you? You’d decided. You didn’t need to wait for any confession to a lawyer.

First there had been the persona of a prisoner on the other side of the table in the prison visiting room, this day there was the persona of a murderer, self-accused, self-defined as such. Duncan. Claudia, his mother, managed the half-hour within the format of her profession that she could summon, a surety no calamity could take from her; the confession of guilt a diagnosis. There was the question of the lawyer yet again. Was the patient absolutely satisfied with the competence of the one in charge of his case, was he sufficiently impressed with Motsamai, now that he had had talks with him? Would he like to have another opinion called in, there were many highly-experienced lawyers, wouldn’t that be worthwhile? The nature of the diagnosis itself, what awesome malignancy it has pronounced, is not under discussion. His father confirms — I’ve also had a chance to talk to Motsamai. I think he’s a clever man. And he knows you’re going to need a clever man. I think we should leave it to him, if he wants to bring in someone else for consultation. If there’s someone whose particular experience in a certain kind of case he’d want to make use of.—

Their son — in his new persona, there he is, wearing one of the shirts his father fetched from the cottage, their son who has killed a man — he is not calmly observing them as he did during the previous prison visits when they could represent to him the fantasy their presence posited that he had not done what he did, someone else would be found who had tossed the gun into a fern-bed. He is distrait, restless of hands and eyes. She even asks if he has a fever? — all she knows about, poor loving mother, poor thing.

What could she prescribe for this kind of fever.

— Motsamai’s a bit of a pompous old bastard, but he’s all right. I get on with him. So you’ve been with him. You know what there is to know.—

— No. We don’t know what there is to know. Only your decision. And that he accepts it. Can’t offer an alternative. Duncan.—

Abruptly Duncan puts out a hand, the hand of a drowning man signalling from his own fathoms, and grasps his father’s across the table. His gaze falters between Harald and Claudia. — I would have understood if you two hadn’t come again, now.—

The nearest Duncan goes to admitting what he has done to them.

It is not only the man on the sofa who is his victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in him. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that where the answer — Why? Why? — is to be found? Harald is prompted by the Jesuits, Claudia by Freud.

There is a need to re-conceive, re-gestate the son.

There was good sport at his making, that Harald knows. The transformation of self in the first sexual love is something hard to recall in its thrilling freshness — it’s not only the hymen that’s broken, the chrysalis where the wings of emotion and identification with all living creatures are folded, is split for release. Harald was Claudia’s first lover when she was the youngest medical student in her class and he was in a state of indecision whether or not to leave the faculty of engineering for that of economics. Swaggering confidence of being in love gave him courage to disappoint his father and desert a tradition of engineers reaching back to the great-grandfather who emigrated from Norway.

Claudia’s father was a cardiologist and her childhood games were playing doctor with an old stethoscope; she disappointed no-one, since her mother was a school teacher whose nascent feminism wanted a more ambitious career for her daughter.

Harald and his girl, Claudia and her boy (that was how their parents thought of them, in the Sixties) were lovers too young to marry but did so when she found herself pregnant. Sport at his making. What was so enthralling about the mating, what was the compulsive attraction of the partner is something that not only changes perspective from the view of what is revealed about one another as each becomes known over years, but also reveals something else, that was there at the time, to be seen, and wasn’t. Claudia, so young, even then satisfied that healing the body fulfilled herself and all possible human obligations — a destiny, if you wanted to use outdated highfalutin terms. Harald, unable to commit himself to any such self-definition, choosing an occupation that interested him for its influence over his own existence, already picking away at meanings of life like layers of old paint. Neither was attracted to join the chanting flower-children of the era. Making love, making love was exclusive and serious — hopeless to understand now what it meant to them then — how could they have at the same time kept aware of the oddness that mismatched them even while their bodies matched in joyous revelation. And they had overcome, too — no, managed — these incompatibilities through the different stages, in marriage, of loving one another as distinct from being in love — incompatibilities which were ignored at the moment of conception: but present. The son was born of them.

The wriggle of a sperm and its reception by the ovum — what comes together in conception is what parents are, and their two streams of ancestry. But you could go back to Adam and Eve for clues in pursuit of that. Hamilton Motsamai, to whom their son’s life is entrusted — and theirs — can no doubt trace his through a language spoken, through oral legend, song and ceremony lived on the same natal earth. For those whose ancestors went out from their own to conquer, or quit their own because of persecution and poverty, ancestry begins with grandfathers who emigrated. There is an Old Country and a New Country; the heredity of the one who is conceived there begins with the New Country, the mongrel cross-patterns that have come about. The Norwegian grandfather was a Protestant but Harald’s father, Peter, mated with a Catholic whose antecedents were Irish, which is how Harald comes to have a Scandinavian first name but was brought up — his mother’s duty to do so, according to her faith — as a Catholic. Claudia’s parents had been to Scotland only once, on a European holiday, but her father, the doctor whose disciple she was, was named for a Scottish grandfather who emigrated on a forgotten date, and so Claudia’s son has received the genetically coded name Duncan Peter Lindgard.

A fish-hook in his finger.

When did certain things enter, work their way in to join the inherited, couldn’t be removed?

He did more with his father, shared more activities. She supposes that is natural, when the child is male. So there is a particular responsibility on the father. His father had him with him, fishing, and the fish-hook was embedded in the soft pad of his third finger, he was perhaps six years old. Or less. He was brought home to his mother the doctor so that she could gently remove the hook as she had the skill to do, hurting him as little as possible, an early example to him. The human body must not be wilfully damaged.

As a child he had the perfect balance of a bird on the topmost frond of a tree.

The image came to Harald from the times he took him birdwatching. She would make excuses not to come, too slow for her, the extended waiting for something to alight, sweeping the empty sky for a cut-out shape to pass across binoculars — the boy importantly looking up the appropriate illustration in the bird manual even when he was still too young to read the text. An image drew close, from time, as the lenses of binoculars do from distance: sunlight fingering the spindly forest (where, what year) and his figure striped with it, like a small animal himself as he moved carefully, not to be a disturbance to any creature in nature; such a respect for life.

When a dog had to be put down — alone, how could she not re-examine this, she was the one who had to do it because he begged her not to let the task be left to the vet. He was ten or eleven, he wanted his doctor mother to do it because he trusted her not to inflict pain, to ‘put to sleep’ (he was protected from killing by the euphemistic phrase) the pet who, while he was growing taller and stronger, had grown too old to walk. She did it without delay because of his painful, almost adult indecision about taking the old animal’s life; and after, in his subdued face, there was his conscience over their having done so, reproachful of her for having been his accomplice; adults should know how to make creatures live forever, abolish death.

This sentimental searching back to what he was is something each, Harald and Claudia, is alert to in the other, not because each seeks the weakness of comfort from the other, but because something vulnerable, incriminating to either, might be revealed. Someone must be to blame. If Duncan says he’s guilty. Sometimes, the hint of a search slips out: while they are taking the dog for a walk (they decided to defy the ruling against animals in the townhouse complex, least they could do, for their son) she remarks suddenly on the way the child would express himself, particularly when he was intrigued by what he had just learnt. Paper is trees, rain is the water that comes up from the earth when the sun heats it. So everything is something else. And tears? When I cry?

I don’t remember he ever had much reason to cry. A happy kid. Never what you’d call punished.

She saw him when his face went into the scarlet paroxysm, white round the mouth, of childhood.

Because that was always left to me.

So you caused the tears.

To answer back was to engage. She let the dog on his leash tug her forward. Both parents were concerned with the preservation of life. Even he, in a manner, assuring that people (at a profit, yes; but she also was paid for most of her services, wasn’t she) would be compensated for misfortunes that befell them, and, lately, providing money for the homeless to house themselves. The army — the army. That was where the life-ethic the son had absorbed from his parents was reversed. When he did his army service he was taught to kill; whether disguised as parade ground drill, field manoeuvres, ballistics courses (the calibre of the gun found in the bed of fern has been established), what was being given was licence to cause death. That there are circumstances in which this is justified by the law of both man and God — though God’s supposed sanction might not have worked its way in, for Duncan, because although Harald had made him a reader, had he succeeded in making him a believer?

War, the right to take life: a truism.

If Harald brings it up, he also tramps it out of relevance under their feet.

Did he really see action? We know he didn’t, we thanked God he didn’t.

You said to him the army was going to be a brutalizing experience.

All right. The alternative we could have taken? You didn’t want us to send him away, did you? Out of the country. A brutalizing experience, a moral mess: but millions have resolved it. He only fired at targets.

He told us they were in the shape of human beings.

Something terrible happened.

Dear Mum and Dad,

A terrible thing happened. It was on Saturday, we were playing football, 2nd team, the one I’m in. A kid from junior school went into the gym to fetch something and suddenly there was screaming, we even heard it on the field. He saw someone hanging from the beam where the punch bag is. It was Robertse in Form 5. He was hanging by the neck. Old McLeod and the other masters went in but we were kept away. But we saw them bring out something carried in a blanket. There was an ambulance and the police. But we were told we must stay in our cubicles or the common room.

The second page of the letter is lost, although she must have kept the letter as something whose validity was meant to outlast schooldays, boyhood. It was among documentation of the protection parents provide for a child, the commitments they assume, for him. Boosters for polio inoculation, record of orthodontic treatment, anti-tetanus and hepatitis inoculations as precautions taken when he went on some school camping trip in Zimbabwe. This letter came back to her, now, she went to look for it among these other bits of paper which, perhaps, there was really no reason to keep.

When Claudia and Harald received that letter they had been strangely disturbed; she saw, now, that this was the forgotten other time, first time, they were invaded by a happening that had no place in their kind of life, the kind of life they believed they had ensured for their son. (A liberal education — whose liberalism did not extend to admitting blacks, like Motsamai, they realized now.) What could it be that led a schoolboy, a companion of their own son, protected in the same environment, the same carefully limited experience, the same selective civilized mores — they would not have confided Duncan to any school that practised corporal punishment — what could it be that brought a boy to put a rope round his neck? The contemplation was horror — once removed, that’s all. The unease they felt came from revealed knowledge that there are dangers, inherent, there in the young; dangers within existence itself. There is no segregation from them. And no-one can know, for another, even your own child, what these destructives, these primal despairs and drives are. Harald and Claudia — they could have been the boy’s parents, they were their clones, paying the same school fees, approving the enlightened educational philosophy of the worldly teaching staff, choosing a coeducational school so that a male child without sisters should mingle naturally with the other sex. What came to them was fear — fear that there could be threats to their son about which they could not know, could do nothing. They wrote to him — she wrote? — or they went to see him. She heard herself saying to Harald, I want you to tell Duncan, whatever happens to him, whatever he has done, no matter what, he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. We’re always there for you. Always. And so they could feel Duncan was safe. They had made him so.

D’you remember that time with the Robertse boy, what you told Duncan.

I remember you telling him, we got permission to take him out to lunch. We were in a garden restaurant somewhere — there was nowhere else to go. Didn’t seem the right place. Anyway.

No, no, we’d gone over the whole thing, decided we must say something to him he wouldn’t forget, and you were the one.

Why should it have been me? It came from his mother, that would be the obvious way.

Because you’re the man and he was the boy. Perhaps the idea that you would have — I don’t know — some kind of shared male experience, something likely to happen, I wouldn’t have.

What did it matter who uttered the pledge to the boy; it was made by both. It was the document produced when he said in the prison visiting room, I would have understood if you two hadn’t come back again.

When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?

Harald’s dependence on books became exactly that, in the pathological sense: the substance of writers’ imaginative explanations of human mystery made it possible for him, reading late into the night, to get up in the morning and present himself to the Board Room. He turned to old books, re-read them; the mise en scène of their time would remove him from the present in which his son was awaiting trial for murder. But like his son, he came upon his own passages, to be omnipresent in him if not to be copied out alongside the others in the notebook locked up in his office. “‘ … 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, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

‘Deepest desire?’

‘Deepest desire.’

‘It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together — as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, the one acting, the other suffering him — share a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other.’”

Thomas Mann’s Naphta spoke to Harald in the silences that accompanied him everywhere: the accusatory silences, protectively hostile, between him and his wife; the silences he occupied even while he drew attention to anomalies in decisions being considered at business meetings or discussed the effect of new fiscal policies on the financing of mortgage bonds; susurration in the mind like a singing in the ears. The off-hand manner of the girl, at the lawyer’s chambers, when Motsamai said, You were afraid of him; and then — almost a boast — He was afraid of me. Afraid of each other? — in what is fearful, surely there is always one who menaces and one who fears. How can menace be equalled? In deadlock; and that is exactly what it will be, deadly; so if it had been Natalie/ Nastasya his son had killed there would have been an answer: they belong to each other. The reverse side of the conception of sexual love that romantically defines it as the blissful state of union, to which that good old-style marriage ceremony gives God’s blessing as one flesh. But he didn’t harm her; it was the man who lay, shot in the head, on the sofa, and it was known to the friends, to the lawyer, apparently to everyone, that he was not the first or the only other man she’d lain back on a sofa for, any one of them could have served as victim of the lover with whom she belonged in the intimacy of menace. There were times when Harald had the impulse to seek out the girl again, but Motsamai, who knew where to find her, discouraged this.

— I can’t afford to get her back up in any way, y’know what I mean, Harald, she feels that you and your wife blame her—

— How could we blame her. He did what he did.—

— Because you must blame someone. Your son in trouble. It’s human nature, nê? Because I must blame someone! His Counsel must prove circumstances that are causal, that will spread the guilt so that the burden of it rests on others who will never be arraigned.—

In the surf of silence that is with him, here in the familiar room where innocence and guilt are annotated by paper slips in tomes — this chamber and the prison visitors’ room are extensions of his townhouse now — Harald knows: us. On us. Harald and Claudia, who made him: the birds and the bees, don’t steal another’s toy, never read other people’s letters, thou shalt not kill.

— I have a very special kind of approach to her. Oh yes. Ah-hêh. — Motsamai’s lips struggle with something like amusement and self-approbation. — With women, you know; they’re very shrewd. And she, she turns on the charm — like a tap! — when she feels she’s being cornered. I have to coax her, without her realizing it, to condemn herself while she thinks she’s telling me about him. You have to know how to deal with such women. One moment they’re poor little victims, the next they’re showing off how they can dominate anyone and any situation. The weaker sex, they give us lawyers a lot of trouble. I can tell you.—

Harald’s distaste for the assumption that he will share, as an aside casually confidential among males, a patronizing generalization about women, is something he has to dismiss. It doesn’t matter, now, what this man thinks about anything except the case he says he is defending. Prejudices seem unimportant. Duncan was taught not to be prejudiced against blacks, Jews, Indians, Afrikaners, believers, non-believers, all the easy sins that presented themselves in the country of his birth.

— What did she tell you.—

— Don’t take this too seriously — from her. She says he is a spoilt brat. Her words. A spoilt brat. She also uses big words, nê: ‘over-protected’, so that he’s not used to any opposition, anything that threatens his will, the way he thinks things ought to go. The rules are his rules — I questioned this, I suggested that the kind of set-up these young people have has no rules except perhaps the most basic ones, you know, who has the right to take the beer out of the fridge — and of course they had the black man Petrus Ntuli to do the dirty work for them. No, she says, his rules were made for himself, it didn’t mean they were the kind of conventional rules someone like me, a lawyer, would think of. Then what were they? Well, they were about who went with whom, and so on. Sex, I gather; but also friendship, she insisted, the set living on that property seem to have complicated friendships, what you’d call loyalties. He ‘went along’ with the way everyone lived on the property, he thought this coincided with his ideas, his rules, if you prefer, but at the same time he was the ‘spoilt brat’ who couldn’t tolerate it when this style — which he’d taken on for his own, mind you — came into conflict with the other rules he’d freed himself from. From the older generation. Yours. She says these were still there in him although he believed they were not. She said something: he’s in prison now, but he was never free. And of course she means she’s free.—

— That doesn’t say much of what happened between them. From what you tell me, you’d think she had nothing to do with the couple there on the sofa.—

— You’re right. You’re right! She somehow distances herself, that is so. Ah-hêh. And she seems to have, well, no feeling for the man who died as a consequence of her act with him that night. She doesn’t show any particular signs of sorrow … for this terrible thing. Which of course is very good, excellent for my case. When I cross examine her. She could have been the one to die. Why not? She doesn’t even consider it. Why not? It takes two, nê? To get going … Yet she shows no remorse that she was at least half the cause of the man’s death, if we grant that he was well aware that he was busy with his friend’s girl. It’s difficult to understand her detachment. As if she’s sure it wouldn’t have been her. I’m aware there are things I won’t get out of her, perhaps — not even with my means.—

And he has a flashed laugh in appreciation of that skill, at once returning to the seriousness the face of the father, fixed on him, may trust.

To recount what passed at a meeting like this with the lawyer means that Harald, who is informing her, and Claudia, who is the listener, both must first tell themselves again, as they must many times, every day, that Duncan has killed someone. Accept that. The man lay in the mortuary, there was a post-mortem which confirmed death by a bullet in the head, and he has now been buried at a funeral arranged by the friends with whom he shared the house; his body was not flown back to Norway, the man Duncan killed is still here, under Duncan’s home ground.

Harald found Claudia talking on the telephone, making contrivedly interested enquiries and comments about someone else’s life; one of the kind friends who make a point of calling regularly to show that the Lindgards are still within society although something terrible has happened to place them out of bounds. She stares at him while she continues to talk and smile as if the friend could see her, not aware of what she is saying; she wants something he does not have, to give. The incongruity between the smile and the stare is anguish he has to harden himself to observe. He goes to the kitchen and watches the water overflowing the glass in his hand as a measure of time. When he comes back she is on the small terrace, waiting for him.

How far has he got?

What is the point of her aggression; as if he, along with the lawyer, were responsible for the lawyer’s request for postponement of the trial so that evidence may be prepared.

We talked mostly about the girl. He finds her a complex character. She hasn’t a good word to say for Duncan — he’s a ‘spoilt brat’—but Motsamai seems to think there’s an advantage in that. It’s difficult for us to follow this kind of legalistic reasoning. He thinks he’s getting her to condemn herself out of her own mouth — something like that.

Condemn herself — she’s not on trial! He wants to show you how clever he is. And were you satisfied that’s all? All he’s doing!

It’s just that he sees her as a key prosecution witness. We have to trust his judgment, he quoted a stack of precedents for the kind of case he’s preparing. You and I know nothing about such things. We haven’t exactly had experience, have we, we could read about them in the newspapers or ignore they ever happened … He agrees with you, anyway, if not in so many words. She’s a bitch. The more he inveigles her to reveal herself the better his ‘extenuating circumstances’ can be cited. He says she’s entirely cold about the man who died, no conscience, not even the sense that she might have been the one in his place. So sure of herself, she wouldn’t be harmed whatever she did. God knows why.

Because Duncan was in love with her.

At what she has just said Harald feels a rising disgust, distress that he cannot suppress.

So you believe in that kind of love, she fucks with another man, so her lover kills him! Proof of love. I thought you had a better opinion of your own sex, you’re responsible for your actions, as we men are. You call that love. Where did he get that love from!

I’m trying to understand, Harald. Haven’t you been in love.

What a bloody stupid question. You ask that. I was in love with you. I thought I would have died for you, though I suppose that was a safe illusion of youth, knowing I was unlikely to need to. But to imagine I would have killed anyone. Even myself. No. Love is life, it’s the procreative, can’t kill. If it does, it’s not love. It’s beyond me, beyond me to imagine what he felt for that woman.

Then maybe he hates her. Punished her by doing away with the man she wanted. If you kill her you spare her suffering.

We’re not talking about some euthanasia debate among doctors. As if he doesn’t know that if she loses one man she’ll find another.

We were in love, you were in love with me, rather crazily, you say — what if you’d ever found me the way he found her?

Claudia. How do I know. I can’t feel again as I would have felt, then. I would have walked away from you, we wouldn’t have been here, there would have been no Duncan — that’s what I say now. Oh but maybe I’d have claimed you back and fucked you myself, how do I know what I would have done, in love. Spoilt brat or not, that kind of love doesn’t come from me. I wouldn’t have taken anybody’s life.

You can say that because we know now that you have to live on through any disaster.

Could you have done it? There are women who say they’ve killed ‘for love’—what a question to you, who spend your life keeping people alive. What an insult, to ask.

But it was more like a jeer.

There are also women who when they have something to say that never should be said, raise their voices, fling out the words, and there are other women who are drop-voiced as if communicating with themselves and are overheard on such occasions. Claudia’s one of them.

I understand now I’ve never been in love like that — crazily, as you say. Never.

Stop the clocks, lock the doors, but every summer night there is repeated the afterglow they used to come out to enjoy as it raised the sky with light from the bonfire of the day. Another day; awaiting. They still come out. Awaiting trial. They pass the newspaper between them as people do who are not on speaking terms but recognize one another’s presence. They are here, there is no remedy. When there were the usual disappointments and setbacks in their lives — small, small, dwindled to the trivial — they would come home and burrow into each other in bed. He drinks his nightly alcohol ration while the birds (Black-faced Weavers, common to the region) make conversation like foreigners in a bar.

Spoilt brat.

She looked up, at the quotation.

Oh that’s passing the buck from adult responsibility for what you do. The toilet-training syndrome. I would never have tolerated a child of mine as spoiled.

‘Spoilt’. Over-indulged. Chocolate and toys. But there’s another meaning to the word; to spoil something is to damage it for good. Like that burn in your carpet.

You know everything — you’ve read everything, do people commit crimes out of self-hatred? Is it true? Isn’t that another explanation people give? Why should he hate himself? What had he done to make him able to do what he did.

He passed her another section of the paper and returned to the pages he had. To think — thinking — of things to which were given only a moment’s skimming attention, before: an intelligent person reads selectively, no real interest in following the sex adventures of pop stars or the lurid crimes that must have been performed by the deranged. But now — here was that woman who strapped her two small children into their safety seats in her car and got out and let it run off a wharf into the water, drowning them.

Other people! Other people! These awful things happen to other people.

It doesn’t matter whose thoughts these were, Harald’s or Claudia’s; they were in the evening air on the terrace, they were in the rooms of the townhouse like the clinging odour of cigarette smoke in curtains and upholstery.

He was aware that he and she were thinking of these things in terms of happening to the perpetrator, not the victim: as if the motive, the will, came from without. But it came from within. ‘The man is what he wished to be, he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

Claudia went alone to the prison. Harald was a delegate to a conference of bankers and insurance brokers called by the Minister of Economic Development; he could not continue to subordinate everything in his engagement book to the susurration in his mind: without the outward performance of normal occupations life could not be even materially sustained. Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, the stranger to whom he was coupled in the processes of the law, would cost six thousand rands a day for appearance in court, and half as much for time spent working on the case in his chambers.

Claudia found herself considering what she should wear; as if, without Harald, there would be a concentration on her presence in which her clothes would reveal an attitude — to her son — her attitude. In winter she wore trousers, shirt and pullover under the white coat of her working day, in summer a cotton skirt and whatever went with it was in the shops each year, she liked to be in contemporary fashion while her profession was old as human history. The healer does not have to be dowdy; the ancients, like sangomas and shamans of the present, wore beads and feathers. If she went to the prison in her work clothes this would, in a sense, be fancy dress; she would not be consulting at her rooms that morning. If she put on the kind of outfit she wore when she attended some medical conference (as Harald wore a dark suit for his) or went to a restaurant with Harald at the invitation of one of his colleagues, it would seem undue respect granted to the authority of the grim place that held her son. If she wore the jeans of her weekend leisure (a euphemism, a doctor’s beeper could recall her to her patients at any time of day or night) this might look like a thoughtless reminder that out there, outside the walls and lookouts with armed guards, people were walking on grass under trees, the Strelitzias were perched in bloom over the townhouse terrace where his parents sat in summer, the man Petrus Ntuli was watering the bed of fern. She dressed, finally without awareness of it, to please him. To be the kind of mother he would want; neither expressive of the judgmental conventions of a parental generation nor attempting to project into his own, to reach him by trying to look young — she knew that she sometimes took unwise advantage of the fact that she did look younger than forty-seven to choose clothes that were meant for younger women. What she wore should confirm: whatever happens, whatever you do, you can always come to me.

Duncan did not remark on Harald’s absence; it was as if he expected her. She was the one to bring up the circumstance of his father’s obligation to respond to an invitation from a government ministry. He sends his love. It was the line scribbled as an afterthought at the end of a letter, even if the supposed message had never been requested to be conveyed.

He said he’d heard something about the conference, on the radio. This tenuous connection somehow bewildered her, as if what he was claiming was a faint voice from the earth being received by someone strapped in a space craft. She could not picture how someone would sit — no there would be no chair in a cell — lie on a mattress on the floor and listen to the living going on. Outside.

She had not noticed, on previous prison visits, that Duncan raised and lowered his eyelids, slowly, while others — she and Harald — spoke to him. It was not blinking, exactly. It was a patient, distant, stoically fanning movement. He hears us out. She was observing him much more intently and clearly this time than she had done before. When Harald was there, she and Harald had between them sensors invisibly extended, like the raised hairs on certain creatures that pick up the impulses of others towards them, which distracted from perception of their son. Each was tense to what the other’s reactions to him were; there was static interference with the reception coming from the son.

Harald was not there; after a number of visits, it was as Motsamai had said, the warder was no more than the presence of the scarred and scored wood of the table. On it, she was suddenly able to take both Duncan’s hands in hers. She had always admired his hands, so unlike her own with their prominent knuckles and leached skin of doctors and washerwomen; when he was a small child she would spread his fingers and his long thumbs and display them to Harald, look he’s got your hands (and laugh cockily) I made sure he didn’t get my own, didn’t I. She turned them palm-up, now, in that gesture, but he pulled them away and made fists on the table, throwing his head back.

Claudia was appalled. That he should have thought the gesture was a reminder of what he had done with those hands. Here, to him, in this place, you could not explain to him, this was one of those female reminiscences, sentimental, indulgent, that adult progeny rightly find an unwelcome fetter and a bore. It was a moment to get up and run from a room. But this wasn’t that kind of room. Walk out, you can’t walk in again. Can’t come back until the next appointed visiting day. This is not home, where misunderstandings used to be explained away.

The irreparable made her reckless.

— You’ve told him you’re guilty. The lawyer. I can’t believe you.—

— I know you can’t. — He moves his head from side to side, side to side, it’s measuring the four walls, he’s enclosing himself in the walls of the prisoners’ visiting room. She has never seen the cell where he is kept but he has its dimensions about him.

— Do you want me to believe you.—

— Sometimes I do. But I know it’s impossible. Other times I don’t think about it, because whether you’ll accept it or not—

Something terrible happened. She cannot remind him of the letter he wrote so long ago, and the pledge she — his father? — they made.

— Wouldn’t it be better if you tried to tell me something now instead of Harald and me hearing — things — when you have to answer in court—

He continues to move his head like that, it’s unbearable to her.

— so I could tell you now, I’m telling you now that it doesn’t matter what it was that happened, whatever you might have done, you can come to us.—

He gazed at her with deep sorrow changing his face before her, the nose pinched by the grooves that cut into the cheeks on either side, down to the mouth. Better not claim me, my mother.

He did not need to say it.

Slowly, cautiously, she took one of his hands again. — Remember, while you’re shut up here. All the time.—

He did not withdraw the hand.

— You can imagine all the things we want to ask. Harald and I. — She avoided referring to ‘your father’; any reminder of that identity with its authoritarian, judgmental connotations — Harald with his Our Father who art in heaven — could destroy the fragile contact. — Could I say something about the girl?—

— Natalie. — He pronounced the name rather than prompted. As if to say, that’s what stands for her; what has it to do with what she is.

— I didn’t have the impression your affair with her was particularly serious, I mean the few times I saw her with you. And I can tell you I didn’t take to her much. But you probably saw that. Mama being carefully nice when she was really disapproving. Of course. — The slackening of a slight smile, between them. — I thought the other one, the one before, was more your likely choice to live with. This one. I’d look at her when she wasn’t aware of it and I’d see she had the childlike manner of many promiscuous women. They’re the hunters — what would you call it, the predators who look like the hunted. I see a lot of them in my practice, black and white, they have that same manner. I’m not disapproving of her because of promiscuity, you know. My only objection would be on grounds of what it can do to the bodies I have to deal with. I’ve always supposed you’ve had plenty of experiences of your own. When Harald and I were young there were only diseases you could cure with a few injections. Now there’s the one I can’t cure with anything. At the clinic they bring me babies who’ve begun to die of it from the moment they’re born. But I thought — oh I suppose all middle-class people like Harald and me have that snobby notion — you’d mix with the kind of women who’d be as, well, fastidious as you. Fussy about partners. It wasn’t the promiscuity that put me off, it was the manner, the disguise, the childlike manner. My experience is that there’s something quite different underneath. And I must tell you something else. Harald met her at Motsamai’s chambers, and it showed. It certainly wasn’t childlike.—

— What is it about her you want to know.—

— Whatever you’ll tell me.—

— Natalie had a child — not from me — given at once for adoption and then she tried unsuccessfully to get it back and she had a nervous breakdown. That’s when I met her. She recovered, she was full of — you know — the joys of life, return to life. She moved into the cottage with me. She has energy she can’t contain, she wouldn’t ever try to.—

— You knew that?—

— I suppose so. Knew it and didn’t know it. But if you ask about her you have to ask about me as well.—

The warder stirred like a sleeping watchdog. Agitated, she lifted her hand away to look at her watch. Was there time, was there ever time, for this; years had gone by separating the two beings they were, blood counts for nothing.

— You told him you’re guilty.—

— Could you bring me more books. Ask Harald. You don’t have to wait for next week, you can deliver them to the Commissioner’s office.—

But he embraced her, across the table, she took with her on her cheek the graze of what must have been several days’ beard; shut away there he was doing what she knew men did to change their picture of themselves, growing the hair on their faces. There would be no mirror in a prison, shards of glass are a weapon, but he could put up his hand and feel the image.

Driving herself back to the townhouse she was tormented by what she had failed to ask him. The loss of an opportunity alone with him that might not come again; a connection that broke, but that had come briefly, irresistibly into being, no doubt about it. Did he — did he not—think of consequences? How could he not know he would be where he was?

Perhaps he meant to kill himself, after what he had done. No-one had thought of that. He lay on his bed in the cottage and waited for them to come for him. Only resistance was to sleep, or appear to be asleep and not hear them when they hammered on the door. Didn’t he think about what would happen to him? To her. To Harald.

Awaiting trial. Now there’s been a postponement.

When Harald tells his secretary he will not be in that afternoon everyone in the company knows this must be the day of visiting hours at the prison. If his absence has to be remarked among his peers — apologies from absentees are read out in the routine formalities of a board meeting — there are solemn faces as if a moment’s silence is being respectfully observed; secretaries at their computers and clerks at their files exchange among themselves the country’s lingua franca of sympathy: Shame. The utterance has exactly the opposite of its dictionary meaning, nobody knows how this came about. And in this particular circumstance the reversal is curiously marked: no-one is casting opprobrium at Mr Lindgard for his son’s criminal act; what they are expressing is a mixture of pity and a whine against the injustice that such things should be allowed to happen to a nice high-up gentleman like him.

Harald arid Claudia had close friends, before. Although these are eager to be of use, of support, they cannot be. Harald and Claudia know they have little in common with them now. There is her patient endurance of the telephone calls; without discussion, both avoid invitations, which are more than kindly meant: these few close friends, shocked and genuinely concerned by what has happened, feel left out of the responsibility of human vulnerability, the instinct to gather against it huddling together in some sort of mutually constructed shelter, the cellar of the other kind of war, from the bombshells of existence.

The only person with whom they have something in common is Senior Counsel Motsamai; Hamilton. Without bothering to ask permission from them, he had established first-name terms. The fact that he himself was prepared to address Harald by first name was licence granted. He has the authority. Present within it, he has complete authority over everything in the enclosure of their situation. Motsamai, the stranger from the Other Side of the divided past. They are in his pink-palmed black hands.

The Lindgards were not racist, if racist means having revulsion against skin of a different colour, believing or wanting to believe that anyone who is not your own colour or religion or nationality is intellectually and morally inferior. Claudia surely had her proof that flesh, blood and suffering are the same, under any skin. Harald surely had his proof in his faith that all humans are God’s creatures, in Christ’s image, none above the other. Yet neither had joined movements, protested, marched in open display, spoken out in defence of these convictions. They thought of themselves as simply not that kind of person; as if it were a matter of immutable determination, such as one’s blood group, and not failed courage. He did not risk his position in the corporate establishment. Claudia worked at clinics to staunch the wounds racism gashed; she did not risk her own skin by contact, outside the intimate professional one, with the black men and women she treated, neither by offering asylum when she had deduced they were activists on the run from the police, nor by acting as the kind of conduit between revolutionaries her to-and-fro in communities would have made possible. What these people called the struggle — she recognized its necessity, their courage, when she read reports of their actions, in the newspapers; kept away from them outside clinic and surgery hours. Stuck to her own struggle, with disease, and the damage other people caused: yet other people, who tear-gassed and set dogs upon blacks, evicted them from their homes to live in shacks from which old men and women were brought to her dying of pneumonia and children were brought to her dwarfed by malnutrition. She had kept clear of those others, too.

Harald left her asleep on Sunday mornings and went to the cathedral to take Communion. It was down at the east end of the city where the business district ravelled out into blind-front clubs where drugs were peddled, and stale-smelling hotels rented rooms by the hour. In the congregation there was no-one who would recognize him with sympathetic smiles of greeting he would have to meet at the suburban church in the parish of the townhouse. He was alone with his God. It was none of Claudia’s business. It was nobody’s fault but his own that he had not seen, when they married, that she could never change, was ignorant, a congenital illiterate in this dimension of life where they might have been together now in unforeseen catastrophe. The nameless congregation was of all gradations of colour and feature. Paper-white old ladies from pensioners’ rooms and adolescent girls with mussel-shell eyes and cheeks smoothly brown as acorns, thin black men lost in charity hand-me-downs, women in heavy-breasted church black, young men of the streets with Afro-heads like medieval representations of the sun. Phoebus framed in tangled aureoles of hair and beard. He took his turn behind a man the age of his son who breathed the odour of last night’s drinking and scratched at a felted scalp. He took the wine-moistened Host as did this man blessed in Creation with what not long ago had been an affliction, under the law’s malediction of a mixture of both skins, the suffering of black, and the apostasy of white.

Harald’s religion surely protected him from the sin of discrimination. True, he had never done anything to challenge it in others; not until the law had changed society to make this safe and legal for him. All the years he was, as the convenient phrase goes in praise of private enterprise, ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, he had accepted without questioning that black people could not be granted housing bonds; they could not afford to meet payments. A bad risk. That was the fact. The government of the rime should house them: so he voted against that government, who did not do their duty. That was the extent of his responsibility. Now the new laws were addressing many of the factors that had made poverty black people’s condition as the colour of their skin had been their condition. He was one of those who did not initiate but could respond; he was prominent among members of the insurance and bond industry working with banks who were under a similar obligation to take the risk of putting a roof over the heads of people whose only collateral was need. It gave him some satisfaction to think that he was able to be constructive in improving the lives of his fellow men, even if he had failed to follow Christ’s teaching in destruction of the temples of their suffering. He served on a commission comprised of representatives of the new government and of the finance industry. The members were blacks and whites, of course; the bad risk was shared now. At least, if nothing else brought them together, they were on comfortable terms in business philosophy.

It is very different with Motsamai. Hamilton. Servants used to be known to their employers only by first names, everyone knows now it was intrinsically derogatory. This use of a black man’s first name is a sign not of equality, that’s not enough — it’s a sign of his acceptance of you, white man, of his allowing you unintimidated access to his power. In this relationship the comfortable terms, quite accustomed now, of taken-for-granted equality once the appropriate vocabulary and the same references are understood, draws back from an apparition that must have been waiting in the past. In those hands, now. Hamilton. All that exists, in the silences between Harald and Claudia, is the fact of the life of their son. Every other circumstance of existence is mechanical (except for Harald’s prayers; the sceptic resentment Claudia feels when she senses he’s praying). Because of the old conditioning, phantom coming up from somewhere again, there is awareness that the position that was entrenched from the earliest days of their being is reversed: one of those kept-apart strangers from the Other Side has come across and they are dependent on him. The black man will act, speak for them. They have become those who cannot speak, act, for themselves.

The relationship between the lawyer and his clients is not a business relationship of any kind Harald has known although the best available Senior Counsel is highly paid for his services. Claudia should understand it better; it must be more like that of patient and doctor when disablement threatens. But she was dismayed by the lawyer’s suggestion that she and Harald come to his house — for a quiet talk, Harald told her he had said.

What Hamilton had said to him was confidential. — I don’t think Dr Lindgard — Claudia — and I have really hit it off together, yet. I don’t feel she has confidence — you know — in what we lawyers are doing. Ah-hêh. Yes. I want her to get to know me not here, this room reminds her of what is happening to Duncan, this place with the nasty smell of a court about it — isn’t that so? Nê? I want to talk to her in a relaxed way, get her to tell me the kind of thing women know about their kids that we don’t, my friend … I see it with my own youngsters. They’ll run to their mother. We men bring our work home with us in our heads even if we don’t bring it in our briefcases, we don’t seem so sympathetic, you follow. Any childhood traumas are useful to me in this kind of defence where there isn’t the object of proving innocence of a crime — no option for that — but of proving why the defendant was pushed beyond endurance. Yes. To an act contrary to his nature. Ah-hêh. Anything. Anything the mother remembers that would support, say, a deeply affectionate, loyal nature in the defendant. Anything that will show the extent of the damage done to him by the woman Natalie. How she betrayed these attributes he has and wilfully destroyed the natural controls of his behaviour — think of that scene on the sofa! Not even to go into a bedroom, man! She knew anyone could walk in and see what she was up to there, she knew — I believe it — he might come back to look for her, and what he’d find!—

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.

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?

Of 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.

Claudia is not looking at him as she speaks. Her head is turned away. If it were to control tears it would break the tension which is both hostile and exciting, his heart gushes like a geyser at his breast, against her. She does not offer tears; she asserts the severance of not seeing him. What has happened has brought into the order of the townhouse what it wasn’t built to contain; she’s right, there — their life together was not equipped to sustain itself so far, to this edge. People have ambition that their sons should go further; theirs has made of this a horror.

She said once, What did I do to him that you didn’t do? He wanted to say now in his controlled voice that he could use with the force of a shout, And what is it I didn’t do for him that you didn’t do? Why me? Because I’m the man. That sudden resort to the female tactic. Putting on the sheep’s clothing of weakness when it suits you. I’m the man and so I’m responsible, I buy shares whose profits you spend, money that kills, I made him a murderer, a dead chicken and a man with a bullet through the head, it’s all on the road to hell.

Hostility had sucked all communication into its vacuum. If he’d opened his mouth, God knows what would have come out.

So Harald is able to believe his son did it and that he must be punished. No confession (already made), repentance in exchange for forgiveness possible. So much for the compassion of Harald’s God and of his Only Son who was conceived not of penetration and sperm (because that’s human and dirty) but who took on himself all human sin to cleanse all others who sin. So much for the religious faith that the father had lived by in moral superiority, going off to pray and confess (what?) every week, and every Sunday taking the small boy with him to give him the guidance for his life, the brotherly love and compassion decreed from on high while the mother turned over in bed and went back to sleep. She carried about within her the wretched apostasy of the father as she had carried the foetus he had implanted when she was nineteen.

The great eye of the sun bleared under a cataract of cloud: the diffused glare confused the planes of the face so that for a few moments Harald and Claudia were not sure which black face this was. They were in the parking ground among police vans, he locked the car with the touch on the electronic device, out of habit, they were turned to the fortress. There was recognition acknowledging them, in the face; they and the man approached each other across the space between arrival and the entrance doors that always seemed so long to cover. Khulu. What was it again: Dladla. From the property where the cottage was. From the house, the sofa. He was leaving after a visit to Duncan. Duncan was back in a cell from the madhouse. They were going to Duncan. A strange suffusion of warmth accompanied their coincidence. Harald had not seen the man since waiting in the house stared at by that other eye, the computer, Claudia probably had not seen him at all since some invitation to the house given by their son in a time before what happened. She found no purpose, nothing to be learnt in going to be confronted by the place, it could only be like being forced to look at a grave where after a post-mortem duly performed a man had been stowed out of mind. The victim disappears, the perpetrator remains. It could only rouse revulsion at what the room had witnessed, and she couldn’t risk this revulsion against the one who said he had performed the act.

Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla. He, too, brought to the prison what was missing, Duncan himself, somewhere existing outside. Any grim redolence of the house he had about him was evaporated in the glare on prison gravel; they felt some sort of gratitude. They had no-one else; only Hamilton.

A curved tooth of some captured feline set in gold tangled with an ornate Ethiopian cross on the broad breast in the opening of a shirt left unbuttoned. A gleam of cuff-links and a red-stone ring — these elaborations along with the other, anti-materialist convention of frayed jeans and sneakers — he was normality, a variety of contemporary ordinariness made surprising, simple freedom appearing in the sterility of this space before blind walls, like a daisy pushing up through stones.

— No, man, he’s okay. I think so. I really do. I would have come before but, like, I didn’t know how he’d feel. To see me, and so on. He’s all right.—

This was one of the two friends who had found their friend with his sandal hanging from the thong on his foot, killed by a bullet from a gun that belonged casually to all who used the house, shared brotherly as the cigarette packs lying about and the drinks in the kitchen. He was one of two friends who ran to the cottage to tell their other friend something terrible had happened.

And suddenly, as they stood so close together in shelter before the prison he’d left and they were about to enter, his face very near them struggled with a changing tension of muscles and his eyes, appalled by what was overcoming him, grew large, brimming. He drew tears through his nose with the unashamed snort of a child.

Claudia put a hand on his arm.

But a man must not be patronized or humiliated by the hiatus of another man’s silence: Harald himself had been blinded in this way, once, driving back from the prison at the beginning of awaiting trial. — I’m sure he was glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Thank you.—

Duncan’s manner stopped their mouths against any concern about how the ordeal under scrutiny among the schizophrenics and demented had passed. And he did not acknowledge to them that there had been a visitor before them. He had ready a list of things he wanted attended to and time was on his heels, they must know as well as he did, by now, how soon the warders would shift from one heavy foot to another: back to the cell. There was a distanced practicality in his delivery. As if the probing of doctors had shaken him out of some stunned condition, in there, that place where the human mind in all the frightening distortions of its complexity is exposed. They were to get in touch with Julian Verster (they would know how to do that? If not at home, then at the firm, the architects’ office) and get him to remove what was still on his, Duncan’s, drawing board. Plans. The work he was in the middle of. — I can do it here. They can’t stop me. Motsamai’s arranged it. And tell Julian to bring everything I need, everything, down to the last pen. Motsamai’s arranged for a table.—

Harald noted dictated payments that had to be made: overdue. Time must have been destroyed with everything else in Duncan’s life, and now the sense of what had passed, stopped dead at the moment of the act, had to be reckoned with. Insurance for the car. And it ought to be put up on blocks. To protect the tyres. The battery disconnected. Unless she would like to use it — for a moment the son was aware of her, remembered as if it were to be taken seriously his mother’s jaunty enjoyment when she once tried out driving the second-hand Italian sports car; a vehicle for the transport of a young man’s past life.

— The policy should be in a drawer. The bedroom. A file with other things.—

Harald has no need to make a note of this, he has been there before, looking into what was not for his eyes.

There were letters for posting. These were allowed by the prison authorities to be handed over, awaiting trial there are still some personal rights left, and Harald put the envelopes under the flap of his jacket pocket without looking at them. His son watched the letters stowed, as if à ship were disappearing over his horizon; no horizon within prison walls. And he knows these two will look to see to whom he’s writing letters, once they’re away from this place. And they’ll want to know, desperately want to know what’s inside, what someone like him has to say to these names they recognize or don’t recognize. (Everyone wants to know what’s inside him, everyone.) They’ll want to know because what he’s thinking is what he’ll write and what he’s thinking in the cell is what he is, the mystery he is for them, my poor mother and father.

They promised a twelve-year-old boy that whatever he did, anything, whatever he was, anything, they would always be there for him. And here they are, sitting facing him in the prison visitors’ room.

Plan.

The plan their son is going ahead to draw in a prison cell — office block, hotel, hospital — what is it — predicates something that will come about. Ahead. Belief. Steel and cement and glass, in this form; yet an assumption of a future.

Messengers.

The Senior Counsel’s secretary faxed the message and Harald Lindgard’s secretary brought the missive to his desk. She entered softly in consideration and laid it before him just as she would a letter for signature but of course she knew what such messages concerned. Mr Motsamai had set aside ‘the afternoon hours’ for them, three-thirty onwards. As usual, the attendant at chambers’ underground garage would reserve space for their car if Mr Lindgard’s secretary called to give the registration number. Whatever portent messengers bear they have no responsibility, cannot help; all she could do was call the attendant with the necessary information which, of course, she memorized as part of her job.

Harald picked up Claudia at the surgery. Although the message had come at short notice — he heard her receptionist, Mrs February’s question, what should she do about patients’ appointments, when would the doctor expect to be back, answered with a gesture of dismissal. From Claudia, this time: to hell with them. But he saw it detachedly as the deterioration of her personality, since without the ethics of her doctoring she had no support.

What did they talk about in the car? Neither would remember. Maybe they hadn’t spoken at all, each preferring it that way. They were already seated in the room when Motsamai — Hamilton — came in with the animation of a long lunch, like an actor backstage after leaving an appreciative audience.

— Got caught up!—

Dumped a raincoat, flung hands apart, a smile that seemed to belong with the last pleasantries and witticisms exchanged at a restaurant door. Wine in him maybe.

It was as if he had forgotten whatever it was he had called them together for. He calmed while ignoring them, flitting through papers that had arrived on his desk in his absence. And then became really aware of their presence; turned from where he stood and shook Harald’s hand, clasped it doubly, covering the fist, and presented himself before Claudia. — Tea. You’ll have some tea. Or you’d like a fruit juice?—

The tray had been brought and the obligatory ritual was followed in preparation for — what? ‘The afternoon hours’. A considerable weight of his time to be given to whatever it must be he had to say to them.

— You’ve seen your son this week, yes? I have the impression he’s standing up well.—

— Whatever that means.—

She may not know, but he, Harald, impatient, does: why pretend! — He’s determined to finish the plan he was working on, you’ve arranged that, I gather. I don’t know what the firm will feel about it.—

— Oh he’s still on the payroll. Man! I should damn well hope so! They’d look fine if they struck him off before he faces a charge that hasn’t been heard. I would not be prepared to let that pass, you can be sure.—

— If the man himself does not wait to be judged guilty.—

— Oh come now, Harald, I’ve told you again and again. That’s not the principle. The facts still must be examined by the court, verified. You must bear in mind there are cases where an accused may be taking the rap for someone else — a matter of big money, or even, certainly where a capital offence may be involved, a matter of love, something where one party will do anything to protect the other.—

— You don’t think there’s any possibility here, do you.—

Claudia is not asking, she is drily pre-empting any baseless encouragement in herself.

— I do not. No. I’m reiterating from another aspect what we know our case rests on — circumstances. Circumstances that will be revealed in court. As I’ve already discussed with you. As I’ve been studying in the psychiatrist’s report. As I’ve been following up in the talks I’ve had with people I’ve called in this past week. Verster. David Baker and so on. People from the house and those who frequented the house. What must and what should not be expected from cross examination. If I think it necessary to call this one or that as witnesses.—

— There is only the man, the gardener. If you can say witness is what he says he saw and didn’t find.—

Harald contracted his calves against his chair to control irritation with Claudia. The lawyer was working up to whatever it was he was going to tell them, it was signalled in the way he leant back and then brought his body forward over the expanse of desk that held him at professional remove from them, his people in trouble; an intimacy with which, while inspiring their confidence must always leave him with a clear head above theirs. He could have summed it up for them: the definition of a best available Senior Counsel is one who thinks for those who do not know what to think.

— I’ve had them all in this room, one by one. With the exception of Baker, Jespersen’s lover, they don’t seem to feel anything particularly violent against Duncan, which surprised me, I must admit. Even if they thought they were concealing from me — I have my ways of seeing through the faces people put up. After all, one of them is dead, you could expect them to reject absolutely — never want to look at Duncan again. Ah-hêh …—

— One of them’s been to visit Duncan. We bumped into him outside.—

Motsamai tilted his head at Claudia in confirmation; must have sent him there.

— Ah-hêh. It was necessary for someone to go to him. From the house, the two men who are left of the little set that lived on the property. Kind of family. Whatever in the house might have happened.—

— He never mentioned Dladla who’d just been with him.—

— I suppose it was a bit of a shock. But also something to give him courage, you know what I mean. Later. When he could bring himself to think about it, in there. There’s so much time, so many hours when you’re inside … Well. Dladla was with me last week and again yesterday. We’ve talked. Long talks. He’s told me what Duncan hasn’t, and what I didn’t get out of the girl. Miss Natalie James didn’t tell me the particulars of her relationship with Duncan. Dladla says she tried to kill herself after the affair of the birth. I don’t know exactly what she did, pills, walked out into the sea, it was in Durban, he says, but Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him. Depends which way it was, for her. Given my impressions of her, she could punish him for it. That could have been what the display of intercourse on the sofa was about. Oh yes. With a woman like her. A proven unstable character. I’ve said before — I suspect she wanted him to discover her. And now it turns out there’s another reason why she would choose this particular way to get at him.—

The discourse is slowing down. All three were on some reckless vehicle together and it was braking as it approached a dangerous blind rise over which there would have to be a new surge.

— Well. Dladla, yesterday. Yes. We were talking. In English and also, yesterday, in our language, when there are difficult things to say it’s better to use the words that are closest.—

Motsamai struck the flat of his palm at his chest.

— He told me many things. I thought I had it all straight from my sessions with Duncan — but this man told me. He told me something else. I don’t think you know. You would have said, you’d know I’d need to know, that’s so.—

He is looking at the two of them with the patronizing compassion of an adult who suspects a child of maybe not being entirely open to him. His head is lowered but the gloss of his eyes under fold-raised forehead glistens at them.

They knew nothing. Nothing. That was it, that was so! It was an accusation, not from the lawyer, but from each to the other, Harald, Claudia, another killing, a common life speared through, flung down: you, a father who knew nothing about your son, let him share a gun like a six-pack of beers; you, a mother who knew nothing about your son, let him fire it.

But Hamilton, their Hamilton Motsamai, had no part in this fierce flash of animus between them, although, diagnostician-priest-confessor that he was, he might have sensed it, brought from the Other Side his particular kind of mother-tongue prescience.

— Khulu knows something else. — He is racing the three of them down the steep descent now, can’t stop. Don’t speak: —Natalie was not the only lover on the sofa. Khulu says Duncan and Carl Jespersen were lovers at one time. Jespersen broke up the affair, not Duncan. Khulu says Duncan took it badly. He didn’t move away, out of the cottage, although the other one — Jespersen had stayed there with him — went back to live in the house. But he was hurt, Khulu says he saw it. Depressed. Even if he wanted to show he wasn’t any less free than the others—‘for us, people can change partners, no big deal, still friends’ that’s how the fellow puts it — Duncan somehow underneath didn’t have the same facility, the same attitude. And then it so happened that he went to the coast and found the girl to save. Saved himself. Khulu suggests. He doesn’t know if Duncan had met her before, he thinks he might have, somewhere, when she was still with the other man, the father of the child she had. So he came back in love with a woman and brought her into the set-up. Nobody minded, no prejudices, he was free to do as he liked, and everything’s fine, Miss Natalie James fits in very well. There is the heterosexual couple in the garden cottage and the gay trio in the house. David Baker and Carl Jespersen are lovers, Jespersen’s fling with Duncan is a thing of the past, for Duncan just as these episodes are for the others. And then, and then … Jespersen is the one who makes love to the woman. Duncan’s woman. A wife, I call it, living there like any ordinary couple in that cottage. Oh we’re told there were other little adventures she had. But this is Carl Jespersen. First he rejects the man and then he makes love to the man’s own woman. He’s there to be found on top of her — I’m sorry Claudia — right there on the sofa in the room where they’re all such good friends!—

Motsamai is hearing applause, excitement moves his shoulders under the padding of his jacket which keeps them so elegantly squared. In an earlier generation, on what the law decreed as his Side, he would have had no recourse for this spirit but the pulpit. He had commanded them completely so that they could not have interrupted him; now he expects something outspoken from them. But all there is in this chamber, a familiar of the many emotions of people in trouble, is his rhetoric; and his clients’ estrangement, neither wishing to admit any reaction to the other.

At last, it was Harald who spoke. Words are stones dropped one by one.

— Does it make any difference whose lover he shot.—

In their absolute attention that magnified every detail of his demeanour, both saw Motsamai’s muscles relax beneath the jacket and the encirclement of his shirt collar and tie-knot.

— Ah, I’m glad you take it like that. Harald, Claudia. (He summoned and commanded each, formally.) That’s how it should be. I’m impressed. That’s what we need if I am to proceed in my client’s interest, effectively, no nonsense. I have difficult decisions ahead. Because it does make a difference! It could make a crucial difference! This factor. The prosecutor — he’ll have no purpose in calling any of the friends: as witness to what? The State’s case rests on the confession. That’s sufficient. It’s the Defence’s decision whether or not to put Dladla on the witness stand. Dladla’s not going to be questioned about this aspect unless the Defence decides to bring it up. What matters is my and my colleagues’ decision. That’s the way to look at what you’ve just heard. That’s all that matters. You are wise; believe me. Oh you are wise.—

Harald stood up as if someone had beckoned, so that Claudia turned towards the door. Which way, which way. She rose. Motsamai — Hamilton — came gently over to guide them.

— Don’t discuss this with anyone.—

Claudia lifted a strand of hair off her forehead and looped it behind her ear, looking at him. — If you call Dladla to the witness box what is the effect on the judge going to be. How are you to know his attitude to this sort of complication.—

— Oh just like you two and myself, anyone is aware of the kind of set-up there apparently was in that house. Men with men. Nothing special about that, nothing to be ashamed of, condemned, these days — the new Constitution recognizes their right of preference. That is so. That’s the law.—

Sinking.

Sinking down in the lift they were alone. Enclosed together.

What a mess.

In contemplation, as if it had been come upon by chance in somebody else’s life.

Did you mean what you said, what does it matter whose lover it was that was killed?

The cloth of her sleeve and his were touching.

I mean it. Why did he take on a kind of life, a range of emotions he just isn’t equal to. Who did he think he was.

Harald is able to speak it out, to her.

Claudia hugged her shoulders against her neck; about to shame herself with an ugly giggle. Hamilton has the idea we’d be more concerned about the homosexuality than what happened.

Buggery may be criminal to him.

The mirrored box that caught their private images from all angles, a camera identifying them, halted with a shudder and Harald stepped back in an exaggerated gesture of convention for her to precede him.

In the car he released the locking device which secured it against thieves; they buckled their safety belts. That’s what I asked about the judge. I was thinking of the old guard, the good Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church, some of them are surely still on the bench. But a black judge might be much the same, anyway, when it comes to that.

A mess is something before which you don’t know where to begin: what to turn over, pick up first, only to put the fragment down again, perhaps in a place it never belonged. This ‘discovery’ of Hamilton’s could not stun where already the blow of that Friday had made its iron impact; punch-drunk, after that has been survived, everything else is its fall-out. As the sight of Duncan coming between two policemen into the court was, as the first visit to the visitors’ room was. What more could happen after something terrible has happened; what could measure against that fact. At night they talked in soft voices although there was no-one to hear them in the townhouse; expensively built, the walls sound-proof against the curiosity of neighbours. They lay in the dark, no longer in isolation. Sorting together through the mess. You cannot do this on your own.

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.

— My news is the date is set. A month from today.—

— It couldn’t be sooner?—

— I know it seems long, but Duncan understands. And the judge is the one I had in mind. So.—

— What does Duncan understand, Hamilton? — Harald was not to be fobbed off with some assurance about delay. — We haven’t much way of finding out from him. But you know that, we’ve gone through it with you over and over. Does he understand you’re relying on getting the girl to show she was the one who drove him to some edge of madness from which he could do what he did? She’ll do this, out of her own mouth. I mean, does he believe it: that she was what it was. That he was possessed — in some way. I don’t see how your use of her can help Duncan if he won’t accept this manoeuvring of the — this — I don’t know what to call it — justification.—

— No no, not of the act; of the state of mind, the state of mind, Harald. This was not something premeditated. It was breaking-point — and she put him there, she did it! There on the sofa with Jespersen! It was her work!—

Motsamai was legs apart wide at the thighs, leaning out towards them in his body’s emphasis, as he did from behind the desk in chambers, the gleam of day’s efforts shone on the obsidian of his face, his blackness was the stamp of authority in the room. — He says he’s guilty. That’s all. I’m going to show why. I’m going to show who else is. How.—

— So he hates her now. Whether or not he’s ready to blame her for himself and what he did. Hates her for what he found. — Claudia looked to Harald.

Motsamai answered them both, but taking his attention inward for a moment. — He doesn’t speak about her. He doesn’t want to think of her, that’s my impression. I don’t succeed, in that direction, with him. So I take it he leaves it to me. He knows I’m going to cross examine her.—

— Hates her now. Or he loves her.—

Claudia’s laconic either/or is irrelevant to Motsamai.

— Of course he knows, too, that I’m calling Khulu Dladla. Ah-hêh. —

— For the adventure with Jespersen.—

— Oh indeed. Indeed I shall, Harald. Jespersen has — he had — his part in the state of mind, didn’t he — ve-rr-y much so. He and the girl. Fatal combination. Isn’t there good reason to believe that not content with throwing over his male lover, he got some kind of extra kick out of sleeping with the woman the ex-lover had taken up? Perhaps there was contempt or some sort of revenge, the lover has deserted the set in the house, so to speak, defecting to the female sex. Preferring women! Who really can follow these bisexual variations. They both were Duncan’s lovers. Maybe each had some grievance against him, you know how such things are, even in ordinary love matters — my God, if you could hear some of the motives I come across in my briefs. Man! There could have been spite against Duncan the shameless pair were prepared to enjoy themselves with. Certainly they couldn’t have thought of a better way to hurt and humiliate and push such a man to the point of self-destruction. A confession of guilt can be a kind of suicide. That’s what I see here, and my task is to save my client from it. That’s why I’m going to cross examine Miss Natalie James and I’m calling Mr Nkululeko Dladla.—

Suicide. But he didn’t turn the gun on himself in the cottage, he threw it away.

Claudia and Harald are returned to that scene.

Suicide. The State may do it for you if you are convicted of murder. Harald speaks for them.

— We’ve never discussed the sentence. If the mitigation plea succeeds. Or if it does not.—

Hamilton Motsamai’s face, the depth of bass in a long register of that intoning of his, the groaning, tender ah-hehheh … mmhê reached out to them in embrace. — I know what you’re thinking. But the penalty hasn’t been exacted for some time, there’s been a moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the old Constitution became inevitable. It’s all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. The first case to be heard there, as a matter of fact, is the charge that it is illegal under the interim Constitution. The Death Penalty. I’m confident the Court will rule that it’s unconstitutional. It will be abolished. Finished and done before we get sentence passed down. Ah-hêh. Only for the time being it’s still on the Statute Book.—

As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people — privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate in retribution — dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social policies where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of that State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster — the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr Lindgard once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely, any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still had seemed to have nothing to do with them, with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror — they had been unable to think further, only abstractedly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors’ room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who, in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation to God’s forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.’ The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts’ foyer, of being one among the fathers of thieves and murderers was now confirmed. The instinct to go and worship in the cathedral among people from the streets, which had seemed a way of avoiding the sympathy of his suburban peers, had been the taking of his rightful place with those most bowed to misfortune. The truth of all this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety — that other form of segregation — could change their status. In its way, that status was definitive as the forced removals of the old regime; no chance of remaining where they had been, surviving in themselves as they were. Even money; that could buy for them only the best lawyer available. It could buy Motsamai. Motsamai’s extenuating circumstances stood between them — Duncan, Harald, Claudia — and the decision of another court, a court whose decision would not be made on any circumstances in mitigation of the act of an individual, but on the collective morality of a nation which is the substance of a constitution — the right of an individual to life, even if that individual has taken another’s life, and whether the State has the right itself to become a murderer, taking its victim’s life by the neck, hanged in the early morning in Pretoria.

Death Penalty.

Motsamai is confident it will be abolished. ‘Finished and done’ (polylingual as he is, what was on his tongue and translated for their language preference was probably the more expressive Afrikaans-English slang, finished and klaar). But while the man killed on that sofa is under the ground, under the foundation of the townhouse and the prison, and Duncan is in a cell, it is on the Statute Book, it is the law’s right, the State’s right: to kill.

Just as it was the abstract larger question of a civilized nation’s morality that was all that engaged Harald and Claudia when there was no question it could ever have any application to them and theirs, so this night the larger question had no place in the blinding immediacy: Duncan in a cell, awaiting the sentence to be passed down. They were two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence. The embrace of his confidence — wasn’t it the expression of the man, rather than the lawyer, compassion that was on the Other Side, inner side, of his patronizing command, that shell of ego he had had to burnish to get where he was, granted as the best available for this case, among a choice of white Senior Counsel.

Neither could stop thinking about the repulsion they had felt, no escaping it, at the sight of, the situation of Duncan between two warders, this last time in the visitors’ room, that place stripped bare of anything but confrontation. Prison, it was all confrontation, all — perpetrator and jailer, perpetrator turned victim of jailer, son become betrayer of the love parents had given him, parents become betrayers of the covenant made with him. The distaste they had felt suddenly that time, no, these last few times, before him in the visitors’ room. It was revulsion that had brought them together. Revulsion against their child, their son, their man — no matter what he has done — who was brought into being by an old, first passion of mating. The sorrow that it was the shameful degeneracy, sickness of this conspiracy of rejection that had revitalized the marriage brought a collapse into grief. He lay with his arms around her, her back and the length of her legs against him, their feet touching like hands, what she used to like to call the stowed fork-and-spoon position, and they were dumb. Impossible to say it: sentenced to death. It was a long time, lying like that. At last she felt that he had fallen asleep, his hand on her body twitched in submerged distress, like the legs of the dog when it dreamt it was fleeing. Harald doesn’t pray any more. Suddenly this came to her; and was terrible. She wept, careful not to wake him, her mouth open in a gasp, tears running into it.

Plan.

Duncan has a table, a T-square, an adjustable set-square, a scale rule, a circle template in the prison cell and while he is awaiting trial and sentence a month from now he draws a plan. Does he understand he may be going to die? Is this defiance — a plan, a future — because he understands that? Or is it that he has some crazed idea, inexpressible hope in despair, that he will walk out of that place back into his life. He will be free of what he has told, although he has told them, he killed a man. Time will reel backwards with the skitter of one of those tapes he and the girl must have played in bed at night — they were on the bamboo table with the journals and the notebook — and partying that Thursday will end no differently than it must have done many times.

A dead man, as Harald has said, is not present to receive grace; a dead man has no plan.

Everything is changed. So it is not incongruous to Harald that this old building commanding one of the ridges that drop away North from the highveld city, red-faced as the imperialist fathers who had it constructed with wide-flanked entrance and wood-valanced verandahs, has changed character. It is the old Fever Hospital facade he’s looking along as he approaches but it is no longer a place of isolation for those who might spread disease down there among the population; it is the seat of the Constitutional Court. It will house the antithesis of the confusion and disorientation of the fevered mind: it is to be the venue of the furthest extension of measured justice that exists anywhere, a court where any citizen may bring any law that affects him or her to be tested against individual rights as entrenched in the new Constitution. The Constitutional Court, the Last judgment, will be the final arbiter of human conduct down in the city, in the entire country. Its justice will be based on the morality of the State itself, land and shelter, freedom of expression, of movement, of labour — no doubt these will be the issues of some applications to the Court, but they are only components of the ultimate to which this kind of court is avowed as no other tribunal can be: the right to life. The right to life: it’s engraved on the founding document of the State, it is the declared national ethos; there, in the Constitution.

Health not sickness, life not death is the venue.

The first application the Court will hear, convened for the first time, is that of two men in the cells in Pretoria awaiting execution. They exist under the moratorium. They do not know when or if the moratorium will end; the Death Penalty is still on the Statute Book. Neither has committed a capital crime for any cause larger than himself, a means to a political objective; each is what is known as a common criminal and he has been convicted of murder by due process in a court of law. He is not contesting his guilt. He is contesting the right of the State to murder him, in turn. The submission will be that the Death Penalty is in contravention of the Constitution. The right to life.

Harald has read this much in the newspapers. He comes, as if to a clandestine rendez-vous, to the old Fever Hospital. It is an assignation for him; he goes quickly up the steps, in the foyer does not know which carpeted area to follow, the place must have been totally refurbished, it has governmental status of elegance, not a whiff of disinfectant left, a bank of lifts before the inlaid floor’s jigsaw of coloured stone, the potted palms. The atmosphere is less like the approach to Court B17 than the preparation for business seminars he attends in the conference centres of chain hotels. Men and women, minor functionaries, cross and recross with the unseeing eyes cultivated by waiters who do not want to be summoned. But a member of boards has a presence that is like a garment that can’t be discarded although he himself feels that it hangs on him hollowly; a young woman recognizes it and consents to turn her attention to indicate the correct level and hall.

There is fuss and self-important to-and-fro in the destination he had found and where he is obviously early. He’s shunted from one unfamiliar place to another these days: this is a well-appointed submarine, low ceiling lit over an elliptical dais where empty official chairs are ranged high-backed either side of an imposing presiding one. Behind the dais, stage curtains apparently disguise a private entrance. Facing all this is a well of polished panelling and tables with recording devices for scribes, and cordoned-off by a token wooden barrier (standard furnishings, he has learnt, of premises of the law) are rows of seats for the public who have come to hear final justice being done; or for other reasons, like himself.

The seats are empty but he is asked to move from the one he has chosen neither too near nor too far from the front because someone is dealing out ‘Reserved’ cards along that row. The pillars that hold up the ceiling are to be avoided; he hesitates before making a second choice, and now it’s as if he is in some sort of theatre and must be able to follow the performance unhindered. A functionary brings water carafes to the curve of table before the official chairs; a tested microphone gargles and shrieks; the functionaries give one another chummy orders in a mixture of English and Afrikaans … the mind wanders … so at this level of the civil service (and of warders who stand at either side of the prisoner in the visitors’ room) it is still the preserve of these white men and women, the once chosen people, old men wheezing out their days as janitors, the younger men and women belonging to the last generation whose employment by the State when they left school was a sinecure of whiteness. Back and forth they hasten, in front and behind Harald; the young women all seem to be wearing a uniform by tacit consent, some type of outfit varied according to fancy and enhancement of sexual attraction. Black-and-white, like the court-room figures in the reproductions of Daumier lithographs he and Claudia picked up along the bookstalls in Paris one year, they should give them to Hamilton, the right addition to the ikons of legal prestige in that room with its own shiny expanse — the desk — and the resuscitating cabinet from which brandy is dinspensed with kindness at the right moment to a man drowning in what he has had revealed to him. Harald recalls himself; looking at his watch. And people are beginning to arrive and take up seats around him.

He does not know any of them, except to recognize one or two expressions from newspaper photographs or television debates — this is an audience come on principle, people who belong to human rights organizations or are politically involved in positions for or against issues such as the one about to be opened. He and his wife have never belonged in the public expression of private opinions, which he supposes is the transformation of opinions into convictions: here he is, among these men and women now. On his right there is suddenly the scent of lilies, a perfumed woman arranges herself with a polite glance of acknowledgment of a neighbour who is surely an ally of some kind, else why would he be present? She has long red hair of whose striking abundance she is aware, and keeps lifting it back from her nape with graceful gesture as she searches through a portfolio on her lap. On his other side a black man sits for a few minutes, alternately gazing down at crossed arms and lifting his head to look right and left, and when he gets up an elderly white man takes the seat and overflows it with girth and bulky clothing. Whether he is poor or whether the outsize jeans worn colourless over his knees and bulges, and the workman’s checked shirt and scuffed leather waistcoat are the expression of a disregard for material things is something Harald, outside the milieu in which such a code of dress is significant, cannot know. He shifts a little, anyway, not to embarrass the man. This is how minutes pass; not to think, not to think why he, Harald, is here. He is intensely aware of the extraordinary presence he is, in his reason, unbeknown to all these people, for being among them.

He is alone as he never has been alone in his life.

And now they begin to file to the official chairs up there behind the shining arena, smiling and chattering softly to one another as they look for their allotted places — men and women who are to be the judges. Not all are judges in the sense of having been appointed to the bench in the ordinary courts, but all have the title for the purpose of this Court. It is impossible — because of the past, and even more because of the changes of the present — not to see them first as an impression of their colours. A black woman with the high cheek-bones and determined mouth of one of her race who has succeeded against odds, a black man with the heavy-set head in thick shoulders of traditional dignity turned academic (only he — Hamilton — has ceased to appear on the inner retina, of the mind, as black; dependency on him has taken his persona out of perception by colour). There is a brisk white woman with a homely Irish name who could be one of the feminist business executives who begin to appear on boards; a pale Indian with level eyes and sardonic curve to the lips associated with a critical mind. An old white judge from the bench emanates distinction, a patient face that has heard everything there is to be told by people in trouble; another who looks boyish, enquiring raised eyebrows as he rearranges his microphone and carafe, but he must be middle-aged, Harald’s contemporary (but Harald has no contemporaries now). Others take their seats without capturing attention, except for one, a swarthy man (Italian or Jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm. They all wear green robes with black sashes and red-and-black bands on the sleeves — a sort of judo outfit with frilly white bib, which must have been designed to distinguish this court from any other. From the divide in the curtains the Judge President himself appears last, and he only is a connection with a past life, someone whom Harald has met or rather been present with on the eclectic guest list of a foreign consulate’s reception. He is a man with one of those rare faces — easy to forget they exist — which present no projection of ego to impose upon others, upon the world. He seems to be handsome, but perhaps he is not; it is the calm without solemnity that harmonizes his features into that impression. He looks directly out at the public in acknowledgment that he is one of them. He does not smile but his eyes behind their panes have that expression, and further, a compassion — but perhaps it’s the distancing of the thick glasses that gives Harald the idea that this is there, and touches him.

In one way, this is a strangely abstract hearing. Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu — these are the names of the murderers — are not present. They are in the death cells. The application has been made jointly by lawyers representing them, and associations called Lawyers For Human Rights, the Society For The Abolition Of The Death Penalty, and even the Government itself; a government challenging the laws of the country — a paradox arising out of the hangover of statutes from the old regime.

Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu — who are they? It doesn’t matter to this tribunal, who they are, what they did, killers of four human beings; they are a test case for the most important moral tenet in human, existence.

That ancient edict. Thou shalt not kill.

There is only one individual present in the concentration under the low ceiling for whom the proceedings are not on this higher plane of abstract justice. Yet the eloquence of the arguments sometimes draws Harald onto the higher plane, the atmosphere is that of a lively debate, with the abolitionists’ lawyers basing their contention on sections of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which they quote (in the aura of lilies the young woman at his right scribbles down what he side-glances to read: Section 9 guarantees the right to life Section 10 protection of human dignity Section 11 outlaws cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment). The abolitionist Counsel’s back, which is all that can be seen of him from the fifth row as he addresses the judges, sways with conviction as he gives his interpretation of Section 9: the first principle is the right not to be killed by the State. The retentionists’ Counsel interprets the same section as the State’s obligation to protect life by retaining the Death Penalty as the measure effective against violent crime that takes life. A letter from a member of the public is emotionally quoted: ‘the only way to cleanse our land is capital punishment’. The judges interrupt, cross question wittily, and expound their own views; the case for retention of the Death Penalty seems to come up against the unanswerable when the judge who has lost an arm and an eye by an agent of the previous regime’s attempt to murder him does not support an arm for an arm, an eye for an eye; does not express any wish to see the man hanged. Only the Judge President contains himself, reflectively, with perfect attention to all that is said, and sums up argument when this becomes too discursive. There is some clause in Section 33 which does allow for the limitation of constitutional rights — a questioning of the Last Judgment (she is scribbling again: only to the extent that it is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on freedom and equality). The abolitionists’ Counsel cuts through the discretionary clauses discourse and argues that even if there is a ‘majoritarian’ position in favour of retaining the Death Penalty this does not mean it necessarily is the right position: the Court is sharply reminded that the question faced by the Court is whether the Death Penalty is constitutional, not whether it is justified by popular demand.

The Court has risen for the lunch recess. Once the Judge President has slipped through the curtains an informality breaks out. Groups gather and block the way between the rows of public seats. One of the judges comes from wherever it is they are in retreat to take some document from a messenger, he smiles and lifts a hand to friends but when they make for him shakes his head and disappears: it is not proper for the judges to discuss the case with anyone. The scent of lilies sidles past along the row with a hasty apology, already mouthing across Harald to someone waiting for her, What a blood-thirsty bunch … People are asking whether there’s anywhere in the building where one could get a cup of coffee, a handsome woman with an imperious head of white-streaked hair opens her picnic bag of mineral water and fruit for her companions and is amusedly rude to the official who tells her it is forbidden to eat or drink in court.

All this forms around Harald and eddies away.

They’ve gone in search of satisfying needs — toilets, food, drink — as at any intermission. Sitting on alone among emptied rows he is no longer disregarded; he is the focus of the shining arena, the vacated half-circle of official chairs up there identified now with the characteristics of the men and women to whom they were allotted. He gets up, walks down the stairs instead of taking the lift, goes out into the unreality of sunlight and the contrapuntal voices of black men working on a hole where some installation, water or electricity, is exposed for repair. Sun and main d’oeuvre — that is, has been the climate of the city, the human temporal taken along as eternal with the eternal. They will be here forever digging and singing. For a few moments dazzled by the sun, easy to have the illusion, nothing has changed. Those names, Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu, two black criminals, are in the cells; the young architect is in his firm’s offices somewhere down there in the living city, drawing plans.

The Death Penalty is a subject for dinner table discussion for those, the others, who will drift back into the Court as Harald will. Their concern, whether they want the State to murder or want to outlaw the State as a murderer, is objective, assumed by either side as a responsibility and a duty owed to society. Nothing personal. The Death Penalty is an issue; it will be decided in this Court, reversed under another constitution in some future time, under some other government, God knows, God only knows how man has twisted and interpreted, reinterpreted, his Word, thou shalt not kill. For these men and women strolling back to the building from the coffee bars they have found down in the streets, their concern is the issue, a dispassionate value above his; he knows, and the God he has been responsible to all his life knows this. Like him, like Claudia and him, it is unthinkable that the issue would ever enter the lives of these men and women — who is there among them or theirs who would be so uncivilized as to kill as a solution to anger, pain, jealousy, despair? The retentionists fear death at the hands of others; the abolitionists abhor the right to repeat the crime by killing the killer; neither conceive they themselves could commit murder.

The only people with whom he would have common cause would be the parents of whoever Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu might be, those to whom what is the subject of leamed argument is not an issue but at home with them, forced entry there by sons who murdered four people, and by the son who put a bullet into the head of the man on the sofa. It was unlikely these parents would be among the crowd in court, almost certainly they are poor and illiterate, afraid to think of exposing themselves to authority in a process incomprehensible any other way than as whether or not a son was going to be hanged one daybreak in Pretoria.

He stood a while after everyone else had re-entered the building. The flash of sunlight on the metal of cars signalled activity unceasing in the city, its chorus was muted into murmurs of what was always left half-unsaid down there; it was reaching him in waves of impulse.

Death is the penalty of life. Fifty. He is fifty; easy to recall the figure, but at this moment in this place he is experiencing what that means, his age. In twenty years the life-span will be reached. He accepts that in obedience to his faith, although many contrive with drugs and implants, Claudia’s domain, an extension. A long time ahead, for him. Fifty, but he still wakes with an erection every morning, alive. Fifty. That the penalty could be paid at twenty-seven — that is what is being laid bare for him, argument by argument, in the guise of an issue. He goes back to the Court to hear what nobody else hears.

Judgment was reserved at the end of the second day of the hearing. With a razor blade Harald cut reports of the proceedings out of the newspapers and added these to his own account, for Claudia. He did not need to confess his assignation; since Hamilton’s carefully off-hand admittance of what was still on the Statute Book both accepted that each was seized in preoccupation with means of dealing with this in his and her own mind; the conspiracy buried its shame, transformed to another end: how to do everything, anything, employ any means to evade for Duncan any possibility of what was still on the Statute Book. Inform themselves. A newspaper published selected surveys of the activities of and views expressed by the judges in the past; inferring that they came to the Constitutional Court already decided in favour of the abolition of the Death Penalty; the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Speculation based on personal background and hearsay which, of course, was most likely the source of Hamilton’s wager disguised as reassurance. But Harald had heard passionate testimony quoting the petition for restoration of the Death Penalty whose number of signatories was growing even while the Court sat; read every day of the robberies, rapes, hijacks — murders — that would bring more and more names to such petitions — imprisonment doesn’t deter, life sentences are always commuted, ‘good behaviour’ in prison releases criminals to kill again: only a life for a life is protection, is justice. He told Claudia of this. Fell silent. Suddenly:

Where do people with infectious diseases go now?

Very slowly, she smiled, for him. Most of those epidemics don’t exist any more. So no more Fever Hospital. People are inoculated as children. What we have to worry about medically is only communicated intimately, as you know; so it wouldn’t be right to isolate the carriers from ordinary contacts, moving about among us. Yet that’s another thing people fear.

There is a labyrinth of violence not counter to the city but a form of communication within the city itself. They no longer were unaware of it, behind security gates. It claimed them. There is a terrible defiance to be drawn upon in the fact that, no matter how desperately you struggle to reject this, Duncan is contained in that labyrinth along with the men who robbed and knifed a man and flung his body from a sixth-floor window — today’s news; tomorrow, as yesterday, there will be someone else, one who has strangled his wife or incinerated a family asleep inside a hut. Violence; a reading of its varying density could be taken if a device like that which measures air pollution were to register this daily. The context into which their own context, Duncan, Harald, Claudia fits, it’s natural. It is in the closed air of a living-room at three a.m. with dry breath of wool from a carpet, the whiff of coffee dregs and the creak of wood under atmospheric pressures. The difference between Harald and Claudia as what they used to be, watching the sunset, and what they are now is that they are within the labyrinth through intimate contact with a carrier of a nature other than the ones Claudia cited. Harald, once again, comes upon his text. It is there one night when he has quietly left the bed not to disturb her, taking up a book he has read before but doesn’t remember. ‘ … the transition from any value system to a new one must pass through that zero-point of atomic dissolution, must take its way through a generation destitute of any connection with either the old or the new system, a generation whose very detachment, whose almost insane indifference to the suffering of others, whose state of denudation of values proves an ethical and so an historical justification for the ruthless rejection, in times of revolution, of all that is humane … And perhaps it must be so, since only such a generation is able to endure the sight of the Absolute and the rising glare of freedom, the light that flares out over the deepest darkness, and only over the deepest darkness …’

Without rejection of all that is humane, in the times only just become the past a human being could not have endured the inhumanity of the old regime’s assault upon body and mind, its beatings and interrogations, maimings and assassinations, or his own need to plant bombs in the cities and kill in guerrilla ambushes. Is that what this text is saying to Harald? What happens, afterwards, to this rejection of all that is human that has been learnt through so much pain, so lacerating and passionate a desperation, a deliberate cultivation of cruel unfeeling, whether to endure blows inflicted upon oneself, or to inflict them on others? Is that what is living on beyond its time, blindly roving; not only the hut burnings and assassinations of atavistic political rivalry in one part of the country, but also the hijackers who take life as well as the keys of the vehicle, the taxi drivers who kill rivals for the patronage of fares, and gives licence to a young man to pick up a gun that’s to hand and shoot in the head a lover (lover of a lover, in God’s name, who can say) — a young man who was not even subject to the fearsome necessities of that revolution, neither suffering blows inflicted upon himself, nor inflicting suffering upon others, as with the connivance of his parents he never was thrust further into conflict than the training camps where his target was a dummy. Violence desecrates freedom, that’s what the text is saying. That is what the country is doing to itself; he knows himself as part of it, not as a claim that what his white son has done can be excused in a collective phenomenon, an aberration passed on by those in whom it mutated out of suffering, but because violence is the common hell of all who are associated with it.

Get him off.

The crude expression from the jargon of the criminal fraternity was the apt one for the determination they were committed to now. Some way, hook or by crook — yes, the old metaphor openly accepted, expected deviousness. Since Harald read out to Claudia the judgments reported in court cases they never would have glanced at, before, having had no taste for vicarious sensations, they were aware of how interstices of the law, abstruse interpretations of the word of the law saved accused who in all other respects were unmistakably guilty. Got them off.

Where Claudia had gone reluctantly in summons to Counsel’s chambers, she and Harald together now badgered Hamilton Motsamai for his time. What they wanted from him was wiliness, a special kind of shrewd ability a lay individual could not have and that people whose generalized prejudices they used to find distasteful attributed to lawyers who belonged to certain races. Jewish or Indian lawyers, those were the ones. Would a black lawyer have the same secret resources? Was it a sharpened edge that could be acquired in legal practice and training? Or was it in the making of a racial stereotype brought about originally by the necessity of those certain races to find ways of defeating laws that discriminated against them? In which case, why shouldn’t Hamilton have developed every natural instinct of life-saving wiliness and shrewdness, who better? Why should he be presumed to have forgone it forever in exchange for the lofty professional rectitude of an Aryan member of the Bar who had never lived on the Other Side? Was it there in his chambers, slyly, under the gaze of the framed photographs of his presence among distinguished Gray’s Inn colleagues in London? Harald thought it was; the whole approach to the girl, the prying into her motivation in the relationship with their son, was to him an indication. But Claudia, in conflict with the trust she had come to place in the man, wondered whether one of the others, spoken of by people whose admiration was also denigration, would not be the right advocate for any means, any means whatever, that could be found to defend their son. A Jew, an Indian. Though she did not say so, her husband understood; many compromises with stereotype attitudes easily rejected in their old safe life were coming about now that the other values of that time had been broken with. Once there has been killing, what else matters? Only what might save another. The townhouse ethics of doctor, board member, are trivial.

Hamilton responded with zest to the new attitude he sensed in them. As if he had been coaxing it all along, ah-hêh, ah-hêh, nice decent white couple from their unworld. He did not see, or pretended not to see, that they thought they were making some challenging disguised demand for him to do something, anything unethical (as they saw it) in defence of their son. The ignorance of educated people, white and black, of the conventions of the law was endlessly surprising, probably she would have the same thing to say about people and the practice of medicine. They still did not understand the scope to be claimed by a leading Counsel in defence tactics. How else could one take on representation of a self-confessed murderer?

— Couldn’t you use what’s the man’s name — Julian — the one who told us, the one Duncan called right away, that night? I have the feeling he dislikes the girl, he’s been present at scenes she made that shocked him, when she behaved — Idon’t know — wildly, provocative towards Duncan in the way you’ve said will be important. —

— My Heads of Argument, yes. — He encourages Claudia.

— Things you can get out of him. Although he strikes me as being reluctant to talk because he’s got some idea of the confidentiality of friendship and all that. Loyalty to what went on in that house, maybe he’s afraid of others reproaching him …—

— Oh you are right. I’ve been working on him. Withdrawn fellow. But the point is, what you say about the house, those who frequent it or live there — true, he likes to have found favour with them, but he’s really attached to Duncan, Duncan’s the one who matters to him. But I doubt if he’s worth calling as a witness.—

Harald keeps in pursuit of the other, Khulu. — Isn’t he more impressive? If I were a judge I’d give more weight to what he might be prepared to say. And he actually is a member of that household, he’s not someone who happens to work with Duncan, a colleague from outside, a friend who wasn’t always around to observe what went on. Whereas Khulu.—

— And Khulu is gay. Ah-heh. He knows the kind of morals, whatever you like to call it, what’s done and not done, in the way they arrange their lives, settle things between them.—

I mean

Could it

Not that

Ah-hêh

I mean

Just a moment

But if

Let me explain

They become animated, it’s both a consultation and a contest. Blessedly for his clients in trouble, Duncan has become an issue, not there, present among them in his prison cell as he usually is when the parents are in chambers.

The plumber’s assistant-cum-gardener: is he worth calling?

— With what purpose? The State can have him! — Motsamai is suddenly very attractive when he laughs, some persona he keeps for other occasions breaks out of protocol, whether it comes from his place, distinguished by the African cut of his beard-wisp, in a coterie of ancient aristocracy, or whether it is his mastery of the other, the legal fraternity’s bonhomie in chambers’ dining-room.

The vulgar street term isn’t used here: get him off. But it is mutually understood in its limitations. What his clients are asking, they and their Counsel know cannot set Duncan free; free of what he says he has done, free of what contains him as he was once in his mother’s womb, unseen. Punished he must be, whether by the will of his father’s God or the man-made laws his mother lives by. The term can serve only as the means, all and every means, to set him out of reach of what is still on the Statute Book. His life for a life.

— And I’m going to need more from you two. You realize that. Ah-hêh … much more. In that area (a spread of the raised hand in the air) we haven’t talked enough. Not nearly enough. What was he like, growing up. Really like. Any problems you might have seen then. What might have affected his reactions later, conflicts and so forth. Some of the things you’ve forgotten, you think over and done with.—

It was as if blinds rattled up from the accord in that room, shadowless clarity fell upon them.

There never were any.

He was a happy boy.

But this was not spoken.