— 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.