The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

man who doesn’t even have a watch, can’t say what time all this was. If you can’t prove your innocence, you are guilty, isn’t that what Duncan’s come to.
    Why doesn’t he speak.
    Well, that’s the only positive thing the man said, so far as I’m concerned. We have to try and get him to confide in the lawyer even if he won’t in you or me. And don’t ask me why he won’t.
    She and he.
    But what are they to do, if in his dire need, he does not need them? He, Harald, has to keep his eyes on the road, away from her, because they suddenly are deluged with tears, as if a sphincter has been pressured to bursting point. These drives. These drives back from disaster.

H arald was in the cottage. He had gone first to the room at the end of the garden where the plumber’s assistant and part-time gardener lived. A padlock on a stable door; the property was old, the man occupied what once must have housed a horse.
    Harald had avoided the house, expecting to send the man to fetch the cottage key for him, although there was a car in the driveway, indicating someone was at home. When he knocked, a half-recognized face appeared at a window, and Khulu Dladla came to the door. He had met Dladla a few times—Duncan now and then had his parents over for drinks in the garden, they didn’t expect him to bother with providing a meal, and usually one or other of the friends on the property would join them. Harald had the key from Khulu; the heavy young man thumped off barefoot to fetch it; the word-processor at which he was interrupted shone an acid green eye on that living-room; that sofa. Harald was left standing alone with it. The young man’s feelings as he handed over the key to the cottage drew his features into the kind of painful frowning of one who is tightening a screw.
    â€”I can come with you, if you want.—

    No, Harald was touched by the awkward kindness that suddenly brought him together with this man but there should be no witness to the implications of Duncan’s absence from the cottage.
    Harald was in the room where Duncan slept. And the girl. There was a pot of face-cream among the cigarette packs on the left bedside table. He turned away respectfully from the appearance of the room, took shirts and underpants and socks from a wallcupboard while ignoring anything else, none of his business, stacked there.
    Don’t bring anything I was reading.
    The books weighing a rickety bamboo table to the right of the bed; but he went over, he picked them up, read the titles familiar or unfamiliar to him, with an awareness of being watched by the empty room itself. The table had a lower shelf from which architectural journals and newspapers were sprawled to the floor. To him they had the look of having been dropped there, that day, when the occupant of the bed lay listening to battering on his door. He knelt on one knee and straightened them into place but the shelf sagged and they spilled again, and mixed up with them was a notebook of the cheap kind schoolchildren use. He balanced it on top of the pile—what for? So that Duncan would be able to put his hand on it when he came back to sleep in that bed? As if the delusion existed that he was about to do so.
    He took up the notebook and opened it. He felt settle on the nape of his neck the meanness of what he was doing as he turned the pages, the betrayal of what the father had taught the son, you respect people’s privacy, you don’t read other people’s letters, you don’t read any personal matter that isn’t meant for your eyes. It was all ordinary, harmless—date when the car was last serviced, calculations of money amounts for some purpose or other, an address scored across, note of the back number of some architectural digest, not a diary but a jotter for preoccupations come to mind at odd hours. Then scrawled on the last page to have been used there was a passage copied from