If something could be found in the lobes of the brain to explain how all, all these, like himself, could do these things; continue to wound and savage and, final achievement of it all, kill.
A house gun. If it hadn’t been there how could you defend yourself, in this city, against losing your hi-fi equipment, your television set and computer, your watch and rings, against being gagged, raped, knifed. If it hadn’t been there the man on the sofa would not be under the ground of the city.
He was a happy boy. Wasn’t he. Claudia did not have to ask Harald that question. Of course he was. What did they have to recall from what — the lawyer attributed to them — they ‘thought over and done with’. As if there were to be something hidden; from him; from themselves. What did Duncan want of them. What did he need of them.
Have you still got the letter?
One of those box files in the old cupboard we brought when we moved. But there’s only the first page.
Yes, he remembered; they had thought of it, unavoidable, in all their confusion after that Friday night. A terrible thing happened the boy wrote. They had accused each other over who was or was not responsible to tell their son we’re always there for you. Always.
I was thinking it might be something for Hamilton. But I suppose not. It didn’t show any particular shock, the boy seemed to have dealt pretty well with whatever the business of that child hanging himself meant to him. We were the ones who were so disturbed.
That he didn’t write that way doesn’t mean he didn’t feel it. Upset, afraid.
But he couldn’t write it to us. Yes. Why.
Children don’t say things outright. They offer some version for grownups to interpret. I know that from when I’m trying to diagnose a child.
Harald lifted his head and his gaze wandered the room, in denial, seeking. One of them — Claudia, himself, that silly self-justifying argument they’d had — both of them had made the covenant with the boy, There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. But he had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him. He had not told them that he loved a man, or at least desired him, explored that emotion, although he had been taught to give expression to his emotions, nonsense that boys don’t cry. He had not told them that he had brought a girl from the water, lived with her in conflict with her embrace of death. He introduced young women for a drink on the terrace of the townhouse; an hour of talk about public events in the city, holidays, politics maybe, exchange of anecdotes and laughter, of opinions of a book both he and his father had read — and they might or might not see the woman again. This one whom he had taken in apparently permanently they had not seen much more of; he would walk in alone, you are always at home to your own son, and sit down to eat with them. Then there would be an old form of intimacy, a recognition between the three of them, you might call it, they would talk together in that privacy of family matters, their experiences in the different worlds of their work, he would tell his mother it concerned him that she worked such long hours and discuss with his father the possibility that he might hive off from the firm in which he was employed and start his own architectural practice more in accordance with his aesthetic directions. Once Harald had asked, You’re in love with this girl, and he had seemed to welcome the admittance coming from without. — I suppose I am.—
But to say that was to be saying love was difficult; there were difficulties. Harald, Claudia should have read that. But there was freedom, his right to his own privacy: their form of love for him.
The covenant meant nothing.
It had been the most important commitment in their lives. Without it all the people whose old age she eased and the men, women and children whose wounds of many kinds she tended, were nothing, and without it all Harald’s love of God was nothing. And if he could have, no, would have come to them, would they have been able to stop in time, what happened? At what stage in the disorder that was taking over his life could that have been done? What — when — was the point before no return; when the girl was resuscitated — the basic form of ‘saved’—could he have been prevented, protected, from taking on to ‘save’ her in the final sense, in reconciliation to life? While it was obviously the self-destruction that was her dynamo, the very energy itself that attracted him to her?
Or was there a point earlier, predating the girl. They thought — all this often surfaced and was spoken between them — about the homosexual episode. If it was that: an episode. Was that something at which a halt should have been called, was it to be seen, diagnosed, as a beginning of disintegration of a personality — and wasn’t theirs a heterosexual judgment of homosexuality as a ‘disintegration’! If he had told them of that attraction would it have been the right thing to counsel him in a worldly way, suggest that for him it was a matter of the ambience in that house, a fashion, the beguilement of male bonding in a period — his adulthood — and a place where social groupings were in transition. In that house, as the saying goes: no problem, black and white, brothers in bed together.
There could have been that.
But then Harald thought about it alone, at night, and came back to bed to find her awake. Perhaps if we had had a chance, if he could have come to us then — it would have been a mistake to see the Jespersen thing as an episode. Maybe that was the stability for him.
You mean the life in that house. That way.
Yes. Saving the girclass="underline" it was an attempt to make himself something he’s not. Someone like us. I don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself wanting to make love to a man. I don’t know whether I would have been wanting to run away from myself. Coming from our sort of background. Maybe he should have stayed with men. That was really for him. If not Jespersen, there would have been someone else and they might have had a better life together in the cottage than the sordid mess he committed himself to with a woman.
She got up out of their bed.
What’re you doing?