The House Gun Read Online Free PDF Page A

around and leave: that’s it. He cannot withstand, he has had enough of, their need.
    â€”Don’t go.—Claudia appeals, although he has made no move. So it’s accepted; all that was going to happen was that he
was going to walk out on them. She opens her hands in a gesture towards where they were seated, and takes her place.
    In order to keep him with them they turn to discussion of practical matters. The possibility of yet another application for bail, once the case comes up for a first hearing; the conditions under which an awaiting-trial prisoner is kept. There is much, he and they know, they could continue to ask and he could tell about that house with the sofa, and the cottage, and the tracing of their son’s life there, but the young man is clearly in conflict between what is, they feel, an obligation to them, and a betrayal of the codes of friendship. The closest way they can come to this area is to ask whether lately Duncan seemed under any particular strain, say, at work (which is not a context of intimacy). Did it show, there? This was as far as Harald could go in approaching any long-term distraught state of mind that might have existed in the cottage.
    â€”Duncan’s a strong person.—
    That might satisfy Harald but Claudia jerked her head away from the two men.—You work with him in the same office, d’you mean it’s simply that he conceals his moods, his feelings? Even from you? He called you, talked to you on the phone, on Friday. —
    â€”If we feel like discussing something, we do; if one of us doesn’t want it, we don’t. We let it go.—
    â€”He’s always been a reserved person. It might have been better if he had talked before.—
    â€”Reserved, how can you say that, Harald—he’s always been affectionate and open—you didn’t expect him to discuss his love affairs with you?—
    They were talking of their son, Julian Verster’s friend, as if he were dead. To be in prison is to be dead to connection with consciousness outside, to exist there only in the past tense. Appalled silence interrupted them. Harald gave Claudia the look that in familiar signals between them, suggested they should give the
young man a drink. She seemed uncomprehending, not to be approached. He fetched glasses and bottles, cans of soda and fruit juice, the usual habit of hospitality. The filled glasses gave them something to do with their hands; if they could not speak they could swallow.
    â€”I don’t remember ever seeing him drink whisky.—They followed her: to the bottle of whisky, the unused glass, and the bucket of ice beside that sofa.
    Before he left, it was safe to ask whether as a friend (close as he evidently is) Julian Verster can suggest anything in particular that they might take with them on the visit the next day.
    Nothing, of course. Nothing.
    Awake in the night, there is enactment of what might take place. Instead of the landscapes of dreams, darkness forms the prison, steel grilles, keys (maybe now there is electronically controlled security, like the green or red eyes that signal or bar right of entry or egress through bank doors). If they had never been in court before, it is certain that neither had ever been inside a prison. The structure comes from the narrowing perspective of corridors in scenes from television films, the eyes through Judas apertures, with a sound-track of heavy echoes, since of all the sough of ordinary life, the conversation of birds, humans, traffic, only shouts and the cymbal of boots striking concrete floors remain. The wearers of the boots don’t have to be dreamed; they already have been encountered in Court B17; young men with open-air faces who stand by in stolid inattention with the expression of contented preoccupation with their own private lives while crime and punishment are decreed. The cell—but prison visitors won’t see the cells, there will be a visitors’