Hamilton responded with zest to the new attitude he sensed in them. As if he had been coaxing it all along, ah-hêh, ah-hêh, nice decent white couple from their unworld. He did not see, or pretended not to see, that they thought they were making some challenging disguised demand for him to do something, anything unethical (as they saw it) in defence of their son. The ignorance of educated people, white and black, of the conventions of the law was endlessly surprising, probably she would have the same thing to say about people and the practice of medicine. They still did not understand the scope to be claimed by a leading Counsel in defence tactics. How else could one take on representation of a self-confessed murderer?
— Couldn’t you use what’s the man’s name — Julian — the one who told us, the one Duncan called right away, that night? I have the feeling he dislikes the girl, he’s been present at scenes she made that shocked him, when she behaved — Idon’t know — wildly, provocative towards Duncan in the way you’ve said will be important. —
— My Heads of Argument, yes. — He encourages Claudia.
— Things you can get out of him. Although he strikes me as being reluctant to talk because he’s got some idea of the confidentiality of friendship and all that. Loyalty to what went on in that house, maybe he’s afraid of others reproaching him …—
— Oh you are right. I’ve been working on him. Withdrawn fellow. But the point is, what you say about the house, those who frequent it or live there — true, he likes to have found favour with them, but he’s really attached to Duncan, Duncan’s the one who matters to him. But I doubt if he’s worth calling as a witness.—
Harald keeps in pursuit of the other, Khulu. — Isn’t he more impressive? If I were a judge I’d give more weight to what he might be prepared to say. And he actually is a member of that household, he’s not someone who happens to work with Duncan, a colleague from outside, a friend who wasn’t always around to observe what went on. Whereas Khulu.—
— And Khulu is gay. Ah-heh. He knows the kind of morals, whatever you like to call it, what’s done and not done, in the way they arrange their lives, settle things between them.—
I mean
Could it
Not that
Ah-hêh
I mean
Just a moment
But if
Let me explain
They become animated, it’s both a consultation and a contest. Blessedly for his clients in trouble, Duncan has become an issue, not there, present among them in his prison cell as he usually is when the parents are in chambers.
The plumber’s assistant-cum-gardener: is he worth calling?
— With what purpose? The State can have him! — Motsamai is suddenly very attractive when he laughs, some persona he keeps for other occasions breaks out of protocol, whether it comes from his place, distinguished by the African cut of his beard-wisp, in a coterie of ancient aristocracy, or whether it is his mastery of the other, the legal fraternity’s bonhomie in chambers’ dining-room.
The vulgar street term isn’t used here: get him off. But it is mutually understood in its limitations. What his clients are asking, they and their Counsel know cannot set Duncan free; free of what he says he has done, free of what contains him as he was once in his mother’s womb, unseen. Punished he must be, whether by the will of his father’s God or the man-made laws his mother lives by. The term can serve only as the means, all and every means, to set him out of reach of what is still on the Statute Book. His life for a life.
— And I’m going to need more from you two. You realize that. Ah-hêh … much more. In that area (a spread of the raised hand in the air) we haven’t talked enough. Not nearly enough. What was he like, growing up. Really like. Any problems you might have seen then. What might have affected his reactions later, conflicts and so forth. Some of the things you’ve forgotten, you think over and done with.—
It was as if blinds rattled up from the accord in that room, shadowless clarity fell upon them.
There never were any.
He was a happy boy.
But this was not spoken.
PART TWO
Why is Duncan not in the story? He is a vortex from which, flung away, around, are alclass="underline" Harald, Claudia, Motsamai, Khulu, the girl, and the dead man.
His act has made him a vacuum; a vacuum is the antithesis of life. If they cannot understand how he could do what he did, neither does he. Except the girl; she might, she would. She was prepared to kill; herself. That’s the nearest you could get to the act upon another. The act itself, not the meaning. He does not remember the act itself; the lawyer believes him or wants to, needs to believe him, but the prosecutor, the judge and the assessors, whoever it is who will be told this will not believe him. He did not, in the words of the lawyer’s question, ‘premeditate’ what he did. It was enacted so quickly, a climax that is over, the unbearable emotion out of grasp, gone. He can follow the sight of the gun lying there, but that is the night before, some idiot was talking of buying one and had asked to be shown how to use the thing. The house gun. It was always somewhere about, no use having it for protection if when the time came no-one would remember where it was safely stashed away. He can see it put down, forgotten, on the table among the bottles and glasses, the night before. And when they — Jespersen, Natalie, the two of them — washed the dishes, cleared up, made love on the sofa, they left it there. The time came. They left it there for him.
He doesn’t see it when he follows how he found them. Exactly how he found them is clear in every detail. They’re both dressed (that’s the way she likes it), only their genitals offered each to the other, her skirt bunched out of the way and his backside still half-covered by his pants as he’s busy inside her. They egg each other on with the sounds that are, he can’t stop himself hearing, familiar to him from both of them, and at the very moment they realize someone has come upon them they are seized by what they can’t stop, it’s happening in front of him, it seems to him that’s what it’s always like, if you could see yourself, a contortion, an epileptic fit. He fled from it. He thought he heard her laughing and crying. He sat in the dark in the cottage waiting for her to feel her way in and say, That’s all there is to it, so! But this time it’s not all there is to it.
How many nights in their terrible hours after their good hours, middle of the night had she stood over him shaking her head of flying hair, a Fury (oh yes, put me on a pillar or something in your Greek classical post-post-modern whateveritis architecture) laughing and crying — they’re the same to her — and bending to him as if he were deaf: ‘You faggot! Why don’t you go back to one of your boys! Go on, go over to the house if I don’t suit you, you want to make me over, Mr Godalmighty.’ She, to whom everything was permissible, would not hesitate to abuse him for what she actually regarded as of no account. In confidence in the freedom of experience, of emotions, she professed and practised, he had done what he never should have — told her of the incident, no, be honest, it was more than that: the time with Jespersen. Given her a weapon to whirl above his head, hold at his throat, and when she saw in him the reaction she wanted, whip away as a big joke.