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accompanied by a girl did not mean that he was presenting her to his parents as someone to whom he had a serious commitment, but it also did not mean that she was a passing fancy; if those existed, they did not warrant the degree of intimacy implied by being admitted, however casually, to the area of his life he shared, committed to it by the past, with Harald and Claudia. He must have brought her at least because she was on a level of personality that interested him; come to think of it, that was how he, Harald, thought of the criterion on which a son introduced a lover to his parents. How Claudia thought of it—she had referred to the girl as ‘that little bitch who shacked up with Duncan’. How could she have formed that impression in the few times Duncan had brought the girl to the townhouse—oh and the single occasion on which Duncan had bought theatre tickets and the four had seen a play together, an occasion when one listened and looked and didn’t have much of an exchange. Women see things among themselves, about one another, that you have to belong to their sex to attribute, whether these attributions are just or not. Whatever this girl was, there was a judgment on her, by Claudia, as the cause of whatever terrible consequences Duncan’s embroilment in her life had brought about. But how to believe, Claudia, at the same time, both that Duncan could not have performed that act, the final act of all human acts, the irreparable
one, the irreversible one, and that this girl, little bitch, was important enough to him for her behaviour to cause him to be suspected of performing that act? The torturing preoccupation when such contemplation seized him was out of place here and now: he had lost attention to what was passing as the three of them, he, the girl, Motsamai, were sitting together in Senior Counsel’s chambers. What had Motsamai just said? Mr Lindgard and his wife are naturally concerned to have your version of what happened that Thursday night.
    Slender hands interlaced, fingers with up-turned tips, calmly on her thighs.—I’ve already told you. You can give them that information.—
    She was responding to the lawyer but she was addressed to Duncan’s father; under the wisps of fringe that moved on her brow those eyes gazed out steadily on him. If there were to be a malediction, it would come from her. He dismissed the context swiftly. —We are not interested in your behaviour that night. Only in your other observations. Duncan’s state of mind. Leading up to that night, what has been his mood, lately, you were living with him—what kind of relationship was it?—
    And his bared face before her gaze was saying, between them, what are you, what did you do to him?
    â€”He was the one who asked that I move in with him. He was the one who decided.—
    â€”That’s not enough. Why did you move in?—
    â€”I don’t know. He seemed to be a solution. I’m sure you don’t want to hear my life story.—
    Although she, not the one in a cell, was the accused, here, she said this last charmingly, taking in with it the two men, her interrogators.
    â€”Only insofar as it will help Mr Motsamai in Duncan’s defence. Don’t you know Duncan is in danger—we’re talking here as if you’re some stranger to him, but you were living with him, sleeping in the same bed, for God’s sake! To be blunt, your life’s your own, yes, but what you did that night couldn’t have come
out of the blue, what was in your relationship must have had something to do with it—what you did must have been a consequence of some sort? Were you quarrelling? Was it a crisis, or just another incident, that you’d both accepted, before? Don’t you see this is important?—
    She was listening attentively, meditatively, as to a voice indistinct on another wave-length.
    â€”Duncan takes on other people. Forces. Can’t leave them