Free The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer Page B

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.
    â€”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.—
    â€”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.—

T he 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