Twenty-Four

‘You stalked her, didn’t you!’ demanded David Bartle, loudly. ‘You sought out Alyce Appleton in the South of France and pursued her until you got her into your bed!’

Totally unaware of any of the detailed evidence that Appleton’s enquiry team might have assembled to incriminate him, Jordan recognized that under cross-examination he had to test every word and innuendo, to avoid stumbling into traps. And never lose his temper. No danger from this first, exaggerated opening. ‘No, I did not.’

‘You knew Alyce Appleton was a married woman?’

Too easy to be caught, Jordan thought. ‘She wore a wedding ring.’

‘And a particularly obvious engagement ring, given to her by her husband.’

‘I did not know from whom she obtained the engagement ring,’ qualified Jordan, believing he saw a safe avoidance. ‘I believe widows – divorcees even – still sometimes continue to wear their rings.’

‘She told you she was married?’

‘Yes.’ He needed to repeat that he and Alyce had parted without any intention to meet again, one of the several points with which Beckwith had concluded his examination, minutes earlier.

‘But not until after you’d seduced her!’

‘Not until after we’d slept together,’ said Jordan, qualifying again.

‘At your persistent urging!’

‘I have already told this court the circumstances in which the affair began.’ Very slightly, although not easing any of his self-imposed safeguards, Jordan began to relax. He didn’t think Bartle was a particularly good interrogator but very positively refused to lapse into any false security.

‘You’re telling the court that Alyce Appleton was prostituting herself up and down the French Riviera?’

Jordan felt the burn of anger but quickly subdued it. ‘I am telling you nothing of the sort and you – and the court – know it!’ He should have stopped after the initial denial! Shit!

‘Before this examination is over I shall know a great deal about everything,’ threatened the lawyer. ‘Did you find Alyce Appleton attractive?’

Jordan hesitated, trying to anticipate the subsequent question. ‘Yes.’

‘Did you fall in love with her?’

Jordan managed to avoid the hesitation. ‘No.’

‘Did you think she might fall in love with you?’

Too obvious, thought Jordan. ‘No.’

‘What would you have done if she had indicated that she was falling in love with you?’

‘It wasn’t that sort of situation.’

‘Answer the question,’ Pullinger ordered, sharply.

‘I would have made it clear that the feeling was not reciprocated.’

‘But gone on sleeping with her?’

‘No,’ insisted Jordan.

‘What would you have done?’ persisted Bartle.

‘Terminated the situation.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘You are no longer married?’

‘I am divorced.’

‘How long were you married?’

‘Four years. I have provided the court with all the legal documents and evidence.’

‘Were there children from the marriage?’

‘No.’

‘Are you the father of any children out of wedlock?’

It was a re-run of his first meeting with Daniel Beckwith, Jordan remembered. Wrong to regard that as a useful rehearsal. Alyce hadn’t known he had been married, he remembered. ‘No.’

‘It is customary for you to vacation every year in the South of France?’

‘Yes.’

‘Always at the Carlton at Cannes?’

‘I move along the coast.’

‘Until you find a woman to pursue?’

Fuck you, thought Jordan, not responding.

‘I asked you a question, Mr Jordan,’ pressed Bartle.

‘I inferred it as a totally fallacious and misleading statement, which, being both untrue and ridiculous, did not require an answer.’ Jordan thought he detected the slightest of facial expressions, a wince maybe, from Beckwith.

‘Indulge me with a comment, Mr Jordan.’

He shouldn’t have opened himself to the mockery, Jordan acknowledged. And the question could be the feared mantrap if they’d discovered previous holiday affairs. ‘I do not tour the Cote d’Azur seeking women to seduce.’

‘How many years have you vacationed in the South of France?’

Jordan genuinely had to pause, to calculate the period. ‘It’s not a figure I’ve ever bothered to record. I would estimate about ten… twelve, possibly.’

‘How many holiday romances have you had during the course of those possible twelve years?’

The trap was gaping open in front of him, feared Jordan. At once came a contradiction: why was it so much of a trap? He could even cover himself if they had discovered some of the other woman, before Alyce. ‘Three, I think.’ He hadn’t spent a single holiday alone.

‘Were any of them married?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did any of them wear wedding rings or engagement rings?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Does it matter to you if the women you pursue are married?’

Surely the lawyer would have pounced by now if he’d found a previous conquest! And so what if he had, Jordan asked himself again. ‘Every liaison in which I have been involved has been consensual. I do not, to use the word you persist wrongly upon using, pursue women.’

‘You didn’t know if it would or would not endanger Alyce Appleton’s marriage when you first went to bed with her, although you knew she was married!’

Jordan seized the ineptly presented opportunity. ‘Neither Alyce Appleton nor I regarded our time together in France as anything other than what it was, an adventure that would end with no attachments on either side. We parted, as the court has already heard at the end of my earlier evidence, without any intention of ever meeting again. I did not alienate Alyce Appleton’s affection from her husband. She no longer had the slightest affection for him.’

‘She told you that?’

‘She told me that papers upon which she had been working – signing – the day we met were divorce papers.’

‘Why did she extend her holiday in France for a further week?’ persisted Bartle.

Jordan shrugged and immediately regretted doing so. ‘We didn’t discuss it at any length. I was not returning to England for another week. She had no pressing reason to come back here to America.’

‘Wasn’t it that she was falling in love with you?’

‘Absolutely not. As I’ve told-’

‘But that you told her you didn’t love her?’

‘I repeat, absolutely not,’ denied Jordan.

‘You gave her a ring, did you not?’

‘A what?’ frowned Jordan, incredulous, conscious of Beckwith’s sudden jerk of attention.

‘During your stay in St Tropez didn’t you buy her a ring and put it on the finger upon which Alyce Appleton by then no longer wore her wedding or engagement rings?’ demanded Bartle. ‘And celebrate, as people do upon engagements, by drinking champagne?’

‘ What? ’ exclaimed Jordan, blocked on the same word in his astonishment.

Bartle beckoned the usher, handing the man a sheaf of photographs and itemizing their recipients. To Pullinger the lawyer said, ‘These were taken in St Tropez, your honour. The date clearly shown upon the prints coincides with that during which Alyce Appleton shared a room with Harvey Jordan at the Residence de la Pinade’

Momentarily Jordan stared bewildered at the two photographs he had been handed. One showed him and Alyce walking arm in arm by what he recognized to be the Place des Lices and the other at a table at the Mouscardins restaurant at the edge of the port. He was clearly holding her left hand, putting a ring on her wedding finger. There were half filled champagne glasses on their table, the bottle in its cooler alongside. And then he erupted into laughter. Alyce, at whose courtroom table another set of prints had been delivered, sniggered, leaning sideways to her lawyer. Reid didn’t laugh.

‘Perhaps your client would share the joke with the court, Mr Beckwith?’ said Pullinger, who wasn’t smiling either.

‘There’s an open air market on the Place des Lices in St Tropez on two days of the week, Tuesdays and Saturdays,’ explained Jordan, patiently. ‘It caters for tourists as well as local residents, selling all sorts of things: cheap clothing and a lot of local produce, cheeses and meats. And there are bric-a-brac stalls. From one of them, at a Tuesday market, I bought a plastic ring, in imitation marble. It was a joke between us. Play-acting, the way people do.’

‘Play-acting the way people do when they feel they are falling in love?’ said Bartle.

‘ No! ’ refused Jordan. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Like what, Mr Jordan?’

‘A serious declaration of love: a declaration of anything of the sort you are trying to make it into.’

‘Why didn’t you mention it, in your written statement?’

Hold your temper, Jordan told himself. ‘Because it was so inconsequential: so meaningless. I had totally forgotten the incident: didn’t even remember it when I first saw the photographs.’

‘You claim it was a joke?’

‘It was a joke: a silly, harmless joke.’

‘People laugh at jokes,’ said Bartle. ‘You and Alyce Appleton look very serious at your restaurant table, with your celebratory champagne.’

‘This is a ridiculous attempt to create a situation where no situation existed,’ insisted Jordan.

‘Did Alyce Appleton continue to wear your meaningless plastic joke ring after that day in St Tropez?’

There’d be more photographs, Jordan guessed. ‘She might have done. I don’t remember her doing so. As I have tried to make clear, it was totally inconsequential, something over in a moment and forgotten.’

‘Alyce Appleton doesn’t appear to have forgotten it,’ said Bartle, summoning the usher to distribute another selection of photographs.

The second batch was thicker than the first and Jordan was surprised that his initial reaction at flicking through them was not apprehension at the questioning they were going to prompt but the briefest moment of nostalgia.

‘Do you recognize – remember – these photographs?’

‘Of course I do!’ replied Jordan, unthinkingly.

‘Of course you do,’ again mocked Bartle, as he looked up to the bench. ‘I would particularly invite your honour to look at the ring upon Alyce Appleton’s finger as I go through the numbered sequence. Here – dated as they all are – is Mrs Appleton boarding a yacht to another sailing excursion, this time to the lies de Porquerolles. And print five shows Mrs Appleton and Mr Jordan at Cagnes. Print six has them at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo and this,’ declared Bartle with the enthusiasm of a conjuror groping into his top hat for the rabbit, ‘is the photograph of Alyce Appleton passing through Nice airport for her return to America…’ Bartle paused, to create his moment. ‘Each of the photographs before you, your honour, very clearly show Alyce Appleton wearing the joke, inconsequential plastic ring so seriously slipped upon her finger by the defendant, the gesture celebrated with champagne.’

And he hadn’t once been aware of it being on Alyce’s finger after that one fun lunch at the Mouscardins restaurant, thought Jordan.

Alyce walked unaided but with her lawyer attentively close at hand to the witness stand, her doctor tensed forward from his chair behind, took the oath in a controlled voice and settled herself demurely in her seat, knees discreetly covered by her mid-calf skirt, hands crossed in her lap. Despite the lack of make-up, there was a tinge of natural colour to her cheeks. In a steady, controlled voice she went through the identifying formalities before looking expectantly to Daniel Beckwith. On her trip to France, she agreed, she had had an affair – the first in which she had engaged after her marriage to Alfred Appleton – with Harvey Jordan. She could not recall a time in her life when she had felt so lost, so abandoned. Having initiated the divorce proceedings after discovering she had a sexual disease and undergone successful treatment, she had tried to distance herself as far away as she could from a husband she despised and for whom she no longer had any feeling other than contempt. When she’d got to France she’d realized it was not the good idea she had imagined it would be. She was lonely, her confidence gone: there’d been days – specifically two, she admitted, under Beckwith’s questioning – when she hadn’t bothered to bathe or even get out of her hotel bed. Harvey Jordan had been kind. At no time had his attitude towards her been that of a predatory seducer. She’d been intrigued by his invitation to what emerged to be the prison in which the man in the iron mask had been held, never for a moment considering the possibility of his making a sexual advance. Which he didn’t. Feeling as she did because of her personal circumstances – the circumstances of being betrayed and abandoned – she had been deeply moved at seeing the cell in which someone had been shut off from the world, as she at that moment felt herself to have been.

‘What happened after you disembarked from the catamaran back in Cannes, to return to the hotel at which you were both staying?’ asked Beckwith.

Looking directly at the man, her voice even and clear, Alyce said, ‘Harvey asked if I wanted to have dinner. I told him no, that I was tired after being at sea all day and that I wanted to go to bed. But not alone.’

‘Had Harvey Jordan made any sort of sexual approach, any sexual advances, prior to your telling him that?’

‘No, none whatsoever.’

‘So the approach came from you, without any encouragement or pressure from him?’

‘Yes. Although when I said it I didn’t think of it – imagine it – as a sexual approach. I’d been too long alone, like the poor man who’d spent his life in jail for an offence that has never been positively known. I just didn’t want to be alone that night.’

‘But that night you and Harvey Jordan made love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you a willing partner to the lovemaking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Harvey Jordan force himself upon you?’

‘Absolutely not! I had only ever known one man, sexually, before Harvey, who was the most gentle, considerate man I could ever have imagined. Sex with my husband had been close to rape. Sex with Harvey was what I’d always imagined love to be, but never known.’

The reactions stirred through the court. From the Appleton table there was anger from the man himself, but a smile of satisfaction from Bartle. Beckwith irritably tapped his finger against his leg.

Quickly Beckwith said, ‘Did you imagine yourself – believe yourself – falling in love with Harvey Jordan?’

‘Of course not! Neither of us, from that night until I left to return here, to this divorce, had any illusions or fantasies about what was happening. We were having an affair, for my part a wonderful affair. But it ended with my flight taking off from Nice.’

‘You did not intend – plan – ever to see him again?’

‘Never.’

‘What was your reaction at learning that Harvey Jordan had been cited as a co- respondent in this divorce? And that a damages claim for criminal conversations had been filed against him?’

‘Great distress. I do not deny the affair in France. But according to my understanding of the damages accusation Harvey Jordan is not in any way responsible for me divorcing my husband. By the time I met Harvey Jordan there was not the slightest affection remaining to alienate me from my husband. There hadn’t been, for a very long time.’

As he sat, Beckwith leaned close to Jordan and said, ‘Better than I’d hoped.’

Apart from the actual moment of admitting that she had made the first sexual move, Alyce had avoided looking at Jordan. He thought she might have returned to him when her examination switched from Beckwith to Bartle, ready to give a smile of both thanks and encouragement, but she didn’t. She did shift on the witness stand, sitting more positively upright, as if preparing herself for the attack that was to come. But it was with an attitude of defiance – forced defiance maybe – not the lassitude under which she had appeared crushed throughout most of the hearing.

‘You went to France still considering another reconciliation with your husband, didn’t you? That’s why you took the final irrevocable documentation with you instead of signing it here, in America.’

‘I had no intention whatsoever of entering another attempted reconciliation with a husband who had given me venereal disease. The final documents were not signed here in America because they weren’t ready when I went to France. They were sent to me, for signature, while I was there.’

‘In France you fell in love with Harvey Jordan…’ Bartle paused, searching for the quote from his notes. ‘“The most gentle, considerate man I could ever have imagined”.’

‘No.’ Her face was more flushed now, with what Jordan inferred to be anger.

‘You were so much in love with him that you couldn’t wait to get into bed with him, could you? So eager, in fact, that you actually invited him to sleep with you?’

‘After enduring the life to which I was subjected by my whoring husband I welcomed gentility and kindness.’

‘Is that why you were happy to settle with a plastic token of love!’

‘I would…’ started Alyce, but stopped. Instead she said, ‘It wasn’t a love token. As Harvey has already told you, it was a joke, a silly joke that meant nothing.’

‘A silly joke that meant nothing but which you continued to wear throughout your time together in France, even on the plane coming back here for your divorce action that you didn’t finally initiate until you met Harvey Jordan?’

‘I’ve answered your question,’ said Alyce.

‘Not quite,’ argued Bartle. ‘You began answering but changed your mind about what you were going to say. What was that, Mrs Appleton, that you originally intended to say?’

‘I said what I intended to say,’ insisted the woman.

‘Did you set yourself a time limit, to take a lover in France?’

‘My purpose in going to France was to get as far away as I could from a man of whom my contempt and disgust was absolute, not to take a lover.’

‘She’s holding up well,’ Beckwith leaned sideways to whisper to Jordan. ‘He’s trying to run her down like a truck but she’s not letting him.’ Beside his lawyer Jordan was burning with fury, hands tightly gripped together beneath the court table.

‘You do not like love – sex – do you, Mrs Appleton?’ persisted Bartle. ‘From the very moment of your marriage you were reluctant to share your husband’s bed.’

‘It was not until I met Harvey Jordan in France that I learned the joy of sex. What I did not like was rape, which is how I came to regard my sexual encounters with my husband very early on in my marriage.’

‘You loved your husband, though, didn’t you?’

‘I imagined I did, at the very beginning. It did not take me long to realize that was all it was: imagination. Which is why this action against Harvey is so ridiculous. How can a man alienate affection when no affection exists?’

‘You’ve rehearsed your story well, the two of you, haven’t you? Practically the same phrases, the same denials?’

‘There has been no rehearsal, no preparation, between Harvey and myself to defend this preposterous accusation. There didn’t need to be. All we both needed to do was to tell the truth. Which we both have.’ The flush was going from her face; Alyce even appeared to have resettled, more relaxed, in her seat.

‘Where’s the ring you wore throughout your time with Harvey Jordan in France?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’ve no idea of the whereabouts of the love token that was so precious to you?’

‘I have no idea where the joke ring is, no.’

‘Isn’t it somewhere at home, in one of those boxes in which women keep things, trinkets, that they treasure more than diamonds or gold? Things of the greatest sentimental value?’

‘I do not have such a box.’

‘You do remember him buying it and giving it to you in St Tropez, don’t you?’

‘I had forgotten, until I was reminded by your photographs.’

‘But now you do remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he say when he took your hand and slipped it upon the finger from which you had so recently discarded your husband’s wedding ring?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did he say it was a token of his love?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did he ask you to marry him, when you were divorced and free to do so?’

‘I think I would have remembered, if he had. I don’t remember.’

‘Surely he didn’t say something like: “this is a plastic ring I want to put on your wedding finger as a joke!”?’

‘I really don’t remember,’ repeated Alyce. ‘It is you attaching such great importance to the ring. We didn’t.’

‘Except that you wore it all the time you were together.’

‘Look at your own photographs,’ invited Alyce. ‘You’ll see in most of them that I wore the sun hat and sandals I bought there. It was very hot. That was all I thought them to be, a hat and a pair of sandals.’

There was an isolated snigger from Dr Harding, from behind the rail.

‘I can see that you did, Mrs Appleton,’ agreed Battle, resuming his seat. ‘But as you’ve just told the court, you bought the hat and sandals yourself. Harvey Jordan bought the ring for you and you didn’t wear that most of the time. You wore it all the time.’

Beckwith waited until Alyce got back to her table to sit beside her lawyer before rising, and as he did so the judge said, I trust this will not be a lengthy concluding submission?’

‘I see no reason for it occupying very much more of your honour’s time, because I believe the evidence you have heard speaks for itself,’ responded Beckwith. ‘This was no instant love match, the stuff of fiction and movies. This was a brief, adult affair between two people, one a single, unattached man on vacation, the other a lonely woman about to divorce a husband for whom affection, if it had ever existed, had long ago died. Mr Bartle has attempted, with very obvious desperation, to make much of the giving of a ring as proof of his client’s claim against Harvey Jordan. Both Harvey Jordan and Alyce Appleton have described the ring episode as a silly joke, which was all it was. I submit to you, your honour, that Mr Bartle’s efforts to make it appear otherwise is an even sillier joke and an indication of his desperation, although far less sinister than the efforts to which the other side appeared prepared to go with the medical evidence of chlamydia. About which I will say nothing further, knowing as I do that your honour has reserved judgement upon it. What I do invite you to find upon the evidence is that under Section 1-52(5) of the North Carolina statute is that Harvey William Jordan is not guilty of alienation of affections, nor of criminal conversations, and dismiss him from the proceedings.’

Judge Hubert Pullinger had listened to the submission slumped back in his chair, not appearing to make any notes. He remained that way for several moments before coming forward over his notation ledger, his throat rumbling, as it had earlier, to clear it before making a pronouncement. ‘You have, Mr Beckwith, forcibly made a submission of some substance – some passion even – which I would be ill treating with a snap ruling, without the benefit of proper reflection: a snap decision which might, even, provide you with ground for an appeal. I choose to remind you of the legal application open to me on charges of alienation of affection and criminal conversation, between which there is an important division. The date of separation of the parties is important to prove alienation of affections and I have yet to hear sworn evidence to prove the depositions that have already been provided to the court. Essential to that is the malicious conduct of your client, Harvey Jordan, in contributing or causing such loss. The parties to the marriage must still be together in order to prove this claim. I have yet to hear further about that, although there is every indication that by the time Mrs Appleton met and engaged in admitted adultery with Harvey Jordan the contesting parties were not together.

‘The action of criminal conversation, however, is more complex. It is a lawsuit sounding in tort – an injustice to the person – based upon sexual intercourse between the defendant, your client, and the plaintiff’s spouse, Mrs Appleton. Further to define the law, a criminal conversation is a strict liability tort, because the only thing the plaintiff, Alfred Appleton, has to establish is an act of sexual intercourse, the existence of a valid marriage between the plaintiff and the adulterous spouse, and the bringing of a lawsuit within the applicable statute of limitations. It is not a defence that the defendant did not know his sexual partner was married, which indeed, Mr Beckwith, you did not advance. Nor is it a defence that the adulterous partner consented to the sex, which again you have not advanced. Nor is it open to you to plead that a separation already existed, that the marriage was unhappy or that the defendant’s sex with the spouse did not otherwise affect the plaintiff’s marriage. Most important among other caveats, which I will not at this stage explore further, is that the plaintiff had also been unfaithful…’

There was the familiar pause, for further throat clearing. Beckwith, expressionless, was sitting tensed forward, leaving the judgement to be recorded by the court stenographer. Bartle was doing the same but there was already a satisfied smile settling on his face. On that of Alfred Appleton, too.

‘None of which diminishes the submission that you have made before me today. It is my function to interpret and administer the law, as it has been proscribed. Even before the full and proper beginning of this action, matters arose which greatly disturb me and upon which I have yet to adjudicate. I do not believe that I would be properly administering the law, which is my duty, if I found for your submission and dismissed your client from this matter. As I have, in the matter of the medical evidence, I intend to reserve my judgement, pending the full hearing.’

‘Fuck it!’ Jordan heard his lawyer say. It was what Jordan thought, too.

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