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?—