Another discovery. Each sensed it in the other, in conspiracy; it must not be revealed to the lawyer who believed he had all their confidences. Revulsion was their crime, committed against their own child and they were in it together. The seals of silences there had been between them were broken; they shut themselves up in the townhouse and talked, they drove out into the veld and tramped with the dog while they added, in step, each to the other’s doubts they had about tendencies observed, and not spoken of at the time, in the child, the adolescent, the adult man. The charm the small boy had used to dominate his friends — all the games had to be his games, chosen and imposed by him, a tendency that doesn’t end there; a lack of physical courage concealed by bragging: the only release in adult life for those who are afraid is to break out just once, at last, in violence? The young adult’s uncertainty about a career: what he wanted to be? What do you want to be? So it was architecture, something on a large scale of ideas (which his doctor mother welcomed as a characteristic inherited from his cultured father, no ordinary businessman), and fortunately he turned out talented as he had been a charmer, cleverer than the colleague in the same firm who was his messenger, Verster. What he wanted to be. A mistake to take that, as it customarily was, as referring only to a career.
Apparently he did not know what he wanted to be.
Claudia understood her accomplice’s observation to be about their son’s sexuality. Even in this strange new form of intimacy that had come to replace the other (revitalized it in a way that shouldn’t be examined), he could not tell her what really was coming back to him: ‘ … the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying.’
The statements that seem to have been emptied of all meaning by endless repetition are the truest. Conventional wisdom is the most demonstrable. Life goes on. It did not stop dead that Friday night; that solution is not on offer. Ever. Neither from Harald’s resource of God in His wisdom — he had to accept that refusal if not as His will, then as man’s lot; nor from Claudia’s rational experience that while some conditions appear terminal, some semblance of life persists. Hamilton said he was satisfied with the preparation of Heads of Argument and that he could come by and bring his clients up-to-date on his way home, why not, no inconvenience to him. So they put out the tray with glasses, the ice, soda, and bottles. Hamilton likes his tot of brandy. A few days before, Claudia, waiting at a traffic light, had unthinkingly beckoned to a prancing man holding up a candelabra of red lilies and bought flowers again, as she had used to on the way home from her surgery. They were under shaded lamplight. Hamilton entered the mise en scene of life going on as he did the equally well-appointed room in his chambers; as if every place were made ready for his presence. Something to drink was welcome; he tested the brandy, clucked his tongue, and got up from the chair he had chosen to serve himself a spurt of soda.
— My news is the date is set. A month from today.—
— It couldn’t be sooner?—
— I know it seems long, but Duncan understands. And the judge is the one I had in mind. So.—
— What does Duncan understand, Hamilton? — Harald was not to be fobbed off with some assurance about delay. — We haven’t much way of finding out from him. But you know that, we’ve gone through it with you over and over. Does he understand you’re relying on getting the girl to show she was the one who drove him to some edge of madness from which he could do what he did? She’ll do this, out of her own mouth. I mean, does he believe it: that she was what it was. That he was possessed — in some way. I don’t see how your use of her can help Duncan if he won’t accept this manoeuvring of the — this — I don’t know what to call it — justification.—
— No no, not of the act; of the state of mind, the state of mind, Harald. This was not something premeditated. It was breaking-point — and she put him there, she did it! There on the sofa with Jespersen! It was her work!—
Motsamai was legs apart wide at the thighs, leaning out towards them in his body’s emphasis, as he did from behind the desk in chambers, the gleam of day’s efforts shone on the obsidian of his face, his blackness was the stamp of authority in the room. — He says he’s guilty. That’s all. I’m going to show why. I’m going to show who else is. How.—
— So he hates her now. Whether or not he’s ready to blame her for himself and what he did. Hates her for what he found. — Claudia looked to Harald.
Motsamai answered them both, but taking his attention inward for a moment. — He doesn’t speak about her. He doesn’t want to think of her, that’s my impression. I don’t succeed, in that direction, with him. So I take it he leaves it to me. He knows I’m going to cross examine her.—
— Hates her now. Or he loves her.—
Claudia’s laconic either/or is irrelevant to Motsamai.
— Of course he knows, too, that I’m calling Khulu Dladla. Ah-hêh. —
— For the adventure with Jespersen.—
— Oh indeed. Indeed I shall, Harald. Jespersen has — he had — his part in the state of mind, didn’t he — ve-rr-y much so. He and the girl. Fatal combination. Isn’t there good reason to believe that not content with throwing over his male lover, he got some kind of extra kick out of sleeping with the woman the ex-lover had taken up? Perhaps there was contempt or some sort of revenge, the lover has deserted the set in the house, so to speak, defecting to the female sex. Preferring women! Who really can follow these bisexual variations. They both were Duncan’s lovers. Maybe each had some grievance against him, you know how such things are, even in ordinary love matters — my God, if you could hear some of the motives I come across in my briefs. Man! There could have been spite against Duncan the shameless pair were prepared to enjoy themselves with. Certainly they couldn’t have thought of a better way to hurt and humiliate and push such a man to the point of self-destruction. A confession of guilt can be a kind of suicide. That’s what I see here, and my task is to save my client from it. That’s why I’m going to cross examine Miss Natalie James and I’m calling Mr Nkululeko Dladla.—
Suicide. But he didn’t turn the gun on himself in the cottage, he threw it away.
Claudia and Harald are returned to that scene.
Suicide. The State may do it for you if you are convicted of murder. Harald speaks for them.
— We’ve never discussed the sentence. If the mitigation plea succeeds. Or if it does not.—
Hamilton Motsamai’s face, the depth of bass in a long register of that intoning of his, the groaning, tender ah-hehheh … mmhê reached out to them in embrace. — I know what you’re thinking. But the penalty hasn’t been exacted for some time, there’s been a moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the old Constitution became inevitable. It’s all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. The first case to be heard there, as a matter of fact, is the charge that it is illegal under the interim Constitution. The Death Penalty. I’m confident the Court will rule that it’s unconstitutional. It will be abolished. Finished and done before we get sentence passed down. Ah-hêh. Only for the time being it’s still on the Statute Book.—
As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people — privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate in retribution — dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social policies where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of that State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster — the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr Lindgard once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely, any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)