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.