The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer Page B

him.
    â€”Do you want me to believe you.—
    â€”Sometimes I do. But I know it’s impossible. Other times I don’t think about it, because whether you’ll accept it or not—
    Something terrible happened. She cannot remind him of the letter he wrote so long ago, and the pledge she—his father?—they made.
    â€”Wouldn’t it be better if you tried to tell me something now instead of Harald and me hearing—things—when you have to answer in court—
    He continues to move his head like that, it’s unbearable to her.
    â€”so I could tell you now, I’m telling you now that it doesn’t matter what it was that happened, whatever you might have done, you can come to us.—
    He gazed at her with deep sorrow changing his face before her, the nose pinched by the grooves that cut into the cheeks on either side, down to the mouth. Better not claim me, my mother.
    He did not need to say it.
    Slowly, cautiously, she took one of his hands again.—Remember, while you’re shut up here. All the time.—
    He did not withdraw the hand.
    â€”You can imagine all the things we want to ask. Harald and I.—She avoided referring to ‘your father’; any reminder of that identity with its authoritarian, judgmental connotations—Harald with his Our Father who art in heaven—could destroy the fragile contact.—Could I say something about the girl?—
    â€”Natalie.—He pronounced the name rather than prompted. As if to say, that’s what stands for her; what has it to do with what she is.
    â€”I didn’t have the impression your affair with her was particularly serious, I mean the few times I saw her with you. And I can tell you I didn’t take to her much. But you probably saw that. Mama being carefully nice when she was really disapproving. Of
course.—The slackening of a slight smile, between them.—I thought the other one, the one before, was more your likely choice to live with. This one. I’d look at her when she wasn’t aware of it and I’d see she had the childlike manner of many promiscuous women. They’re the hunters—what would you call it, the predators who look like the hunted. I see a lot of them in my practice, black and white, they have that same manner. I’m not disapproving of her because of promiscuity, you know. My only objection would be on grounds of what it can do to the bodies I have to deal with. I’ve always supposed you’ve had plenty of experiences of your own. When Harald and I were young there were only diseases you could cure with a few injections. Now there’s the one I can’t cure with anything. At the clinic they bring me babies who’ve begun to die of it from the moment they’re born. But I thought—oh I suppose all middle-class people like Harald and me have that snobby notion—you’d mix with the kind of women who’d be as, well, fastidious as you. Fussy about partners. It wasn’t the promiscuity that put me off, it was the manner, the disguise, the childlike manner. My experience is that there’s something quite different underneath. And I must tell you something else. Harald met her at Motsamai’s chambers, and it showed. It certainly wasn’t childlike.—
    â€”What is it about her you want to know.—
    â€”Whatever you’ll tell me.—
    â€”Natalie had a child—not from me—given at once for adoption and then she tried unsuccessfully to get it back and she had a nervous breakdown. That’s when I met her. She recovered, she was full of—you know—the joys of life, return to life. She moved into the cottage with me. She has energy she can’t contain, she wouldn’t ever try to.—
    â€”You knew that?—
    â€”I suppose so. Knew it and didn’t know it. But if you ask about her you have to ask about me as well.—
    The warder stirred like a sleeping watchdog.