Harald stood up as if someone had beckoned, so that Claudia turned towards the door. Which way, which way. She rose. Motsamai — Hamilton — came gently over to guide them.
— Don’t discuss this with anyone.—
Claudia lifted a strand of hair off her forehead and looped it behind her ear, looking at him. — If you call Dladla to the witness box what is the effect on the judge going to be. How are you to know his attitude to this sort of complication.—
— Oh just like you two and myself, anyone is aware of the kind of set-up there apparently was in that house. Men with men. Nothing special about that, nothing to be ashamed of, condemned, these days — the new Constitution recognizes their right of preference. That is so. That’s the law.—
Sinking.
Sinking down in the lift they were alone. Enclosed together.
What a mess.
In contemplation, as if it had been come upon by chance in somebody else’s life.
Did you mean what you said, what does it matter whose lover it was that was killed?
The cloth of her sleeve and his were touching.
I mean it. Why did he take on a kind of life, a range of emotions he just isn’t equal to. Who did he think he was.
Harald is able to speak it out, to her.
Claudia hugged her shoulders against her neck; about to shame herself with an ugly giggle. Hamilton has the idea we’d be more concerned about the homosexuality than what happened.
Buggery may be criminal to him.
The mirrored box that caught their private images from all angles, a camera identifying them, halted with a shudder and Harald stepped back in an exaggerated gesture of convention for her to precede him.
In the car he released the locking device which secured it against thieves; they buckled their safety belts. That’s what I asked about the judge. I was thinking of the old guard, the good Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church, some of them are surely still on the bench. But a black judge might be much the same, anyway, when it comes to that.
A mess is something before which you don’t know where to begin: what to turn over, pick up first, only to put the fragment down again, perhaps in a place it never belonged. This ‘discovery’ of Hamilton’s could not stun where already the blow of that Friday had made its iron impact; punch-drunk, after that has been survived, everything else is its fall-out. As the sight of Duncan coming between two policemen into the court was, as the first visit to the visitors’ room was. What more could happen after something terrible has happened; what could measure against that fact. At night they talked in soft voices although there was no-one to hear them in the townhouse; expensively built, the walls sound-proof against the curiosity of neighbours. They lay in the dark, no longer in isolation. Sorting together through the mess. You cannot do this on your own.
That’s what Motsamai was fishing for when he came to see me at the surgery.
I don’t think so. He didn’t know, then. It was before he’d seen Dladla.
But he may have got some idea, from all the times he’s been probing Duncan. He has his ways of getting out of people what they don’t know they’re revealing. He says. It’s a boast but there’s some truth in it, it’s like the gift for diagnosis some doctors have and some haven’t.
They could take up where they left off; the weekend; any night. In the living-room Harald wandered, might be going to set the burglar alarm before bed, stood before a picture, found himself at the cupboard where liquor was kept and began to displace the bottles, jostled against each other. He came upon one that had been pushed to the back, only a thumb’s-high level of some spirit was settled at the bottom of it. He poured the colourless stuff into a glass the size of a medicine measure and sniffed at it. The rest — the bottle turned upside down to empty it of the last drop — went into another glass; held up to her, but she shook her head.
He could have experimented at school. In boys’ schools it’s difficult to resist. But I would have thought — certainly we thought! — at a school like his, first sex would be with girls? There were enough girls available … Sex education. Girls would have been on the pill already, then, wouldn’t they?
He came over to her with the glass, and she took it. They drank and grimaced at the potency of a distillation from the frozen North of his ancestry. The only link with it now was the identity of the one who was shot dead on the sofa.
You think it was an experiment. That’s what it was?
Well, he was always attracted to females, wasn’t he? If we can judge by the crushes we saw he had when he was only fifteen or sixteen, the hours on the phone, the necking with little blondes I’d come upon if I walked into his room at the wrong moment.
Claudia felt for the glass of water on the table beside her and washed down the spirit in gulps. ‘Necking’ belonged to the vocabulary of their youth, hers and Harald’s; perhaps it was originally derived from the intertwining foreplay of birds — those mating dances Harald had the patience to teach his son to admire through binoculars.
That’s what we saw. What we were meant to see, but there could have been something else. Perhaps he wanted to have some secret. When you grow up — I remember — part of it is having some area of your life no-one can look into, even to say — to take it over — that’s fine-as-long-as-you’re-happy-my-darling.
But he was madly in love with a woman. This woman. There’s no argument about that. Verster told us enough. A serious commitment. Putting up with her capers on the side, no-one knows what else. He seems to have been besotted with her. Sexually there must have been something very strong between them … even devastating, the way I suppose it can be if … That business with a man, before her. Wasn’t it a matter of being fascinated by the set in that house? Fashion that’s been around for his generation, the idea that homosexuality is the real liberation, to suggest this as superiority beyond the ordinary humdrum. Why did he choose to live with those men? It turns out he didn’t take the cottage because of the girl. Moved in with them on the property because their freedom claims to go beyond all the old trappings between men and women, marriages and divorces and crying babies.
He didn’t suffer any example of divorces and crying babies with us.
Wanted to be one of the boys. Those boys. Emancipated. Superior. Free.
Or he wanted to try everything. Who knows. I have patients like that, drawn to drugs for example. Not really addictive by nature, some physiological or genetic disposition, just daring themselves for experience’ sake. And what a mess, afterwards.
A lassitude, itself some benign drug, held them in their bed and in their movements about the townhouse, a kind of hiatus. They saw themselves, Harald, Claudia, Duncan, listlessly, from afar. She went to her clinic, he went to his Board Room. Duncan was in his prison. Discovery is not an end. Only a new mystery.
When they sat in the visitors’ room they did not have the anguish that he told them nothing, although there was the covenant, he could always have come to them … short of killing; what does what he did with his sex matter, but as they sat before him and the warders there came to them now actual repulsion against him as one who had committed that act: killed. The fleeting resentment they had had in their early confusion refluxed, corrosive of what is known as natural feeling.