Read Online The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page A

he is saying.
    â€”Have you talked to Duncan about her?—
    â€”He tells me they were lovers, but they ‘lived their own lives’—these are his words.—
    A day and time were set up to meet the girl at Senior Counsel’s chambers. That morning Claudia telephoned Harald from her surgery to his office. A representative of the government Housing Commission was with him, they were discussing an agreement on terms of low-interest loans that would put up walls and a roof for thousands of poor people; there was a long negotiation about to come to a conclusion, or to risk being deferred yet again.
    Harald, I’m not going. There’s no need for us to meet her if the lawyer is handling her. I don’t want to see her. We should leave it to him.
    As if he had been shaken and dragged out of bed in the middle of a night; for a moment he did not recognize what he was being recalled to, his comprehension was torn in two. The man from the Commission picked up his papers in order to be seen to be not listening. Harald was possessed by wild irritation, with her, Claudia, her intrusion, her recall to the intrusion in their life that monstrously
displaced everything else, his fifty years, eclipsed the sun and shut off the air of all he had learnt, the understandings he believed he had reached in knowledge of human beings and the mores he had tested, the satisfaction in work and the pleasures of accepted emotions, the love between man and woman, between parents and son, the ease of friendship; irritation that swelled and struck out—even at his son, Duncan, who had landed himself in prison. Yes! Clamouring forces were struggling to take over his innards, forces that if let loose outside were the kind that could be violent. He could not speak, not even pronounce oblique dismissive, soothing things to her that nevertheless would relate to a situation the other man in the room was completely remote, removed from, innocent of. He put down the receiver on her mid-sentence.
    Natalie-Nastasya. Motsamai said she was already there, had gone to the ladies’ room.
    Received by a father’s eyes as she came in she matched the young woman Duncan had brought to the townhouse once or twice. This was she, all right. She was closing the door with a hand curving gracefully behind her, Motsamai smiling acknowledgment of the consideration. So Motsamai, also, felt an attraction she apparently emanated for some—many—men.
    The same sloping shoulders of a Modigliani model (and there was a print of a Modigliani nude, unremarked until it came to him now, in the bedroom he had plundered). He was not one to take much notice of women’s clothes, only of the effect they produced, but it seemed she wore the same kind of garments she had worn, legs outlined in something like a dancer’s tights and a loose shirt unbuttoned on a deep V of sun-stippled throat. The hair was somehow different—whatever colour it had been before it was now boot-polish black—but the eyes, the gaze on him, were unavoidably recognizable. Perhaps there was a place in memory, a cheap photo album of Duncan’s girls that existed though never opened.
That was the impression of her: yellow-streaked dark eyes (colours of the Tiger’s Eye paperweight on Motsamai’s desk) secretive within extremely thick lashes on both upper and lower lids that tangled at the outer corners. And these outer corners of the eyes turned down slightly, whether by the nature of her facial muscles or by an expression she permanently arranged; the eyes were a statement to be read, depending on who was receiving it: lazily, vulnerably appealing, or calculating, in warning.
    When Duncan brought girls—his women—to the townhouse it could not be thought of (really) as bringing them ‘home’, home was left behind where he grew up, was the house they had sold, abandoned as having become a burden no longer necessary. Dropping in for a meal