Free The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

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.
    â€”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.
    â€”I was free.—
    â€”So you were afraid of my son.—
    â€”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.—
    â€”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.
    â€”Is it?—
    â€”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.—
    â€”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.—
    â€”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.—
    â€”Duncan has said so.—
    â€”He has. Duncan has told me.—
    â€”He’s told you. And he’s told you to tell us.—
    â€”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.
    â€”So that’s the end of it.—
    â€”No, that’s not the end of it at all. It’s the beginning of our work.—
    â€”You and his