The Sleep of Reason

19: A Fair Question

A milky blue sky, a bland and sunny afternoon, very mild for the second week in January. There was a blazing fire in the Residence drawing-room, and I was sitting on the window seat. Neither Vicky nor Arnold Shaw had been in the house when I arrived an hour before, but all the matter-of-fact comforts had been arranged, and, looking out at the bright daylight, I did not want to leave them. In fact, I had an appointment with Eden & Sharples, George’s old firm, at half past three.

My old colleagues who had to live the disciplined official life had taught me, not that I was good at it, to cut off my thoughts. Douglas Osbaldiston went each morning to see the wife he loved, able to move only her lips and eyes: he arrived at the Treasury as immersed in the day’s timetable as when he was happy. At times it was better to think of the timetable. I was to call on my father that night. That would be no tax: I had received a letter from him just after Christmas (he had written to me not more than half-a-dozen times in my whole life) saying that he would like to see me.

I had one more thing to do before I went to the solicitors. As soon as the young women were charged, which happened on the last day of December, I had telephoned George, telling him that I would keep my promise, but that in return I needed to know about his health. It sounded harsh, or even irrelevant: George was angry and then evasive: I insisted. I couldn’t explain, but I had to know what I was taking on, and where I could draw the limits: how much responsibility was he fit for himself?

So, in the hall at the Residence, I did some more telephoning. George had at last given me his doctor’s name. He had also undertaken to tell the doctor that I was authorised to enquire.

Over the telephone I heard a jolly, lubricated, courteous voice. Yes, Passant was a patient of his. Yes, he knew about me, of course, but he didn’t remember Passant mentioning my name. I said (George, whom I shouldn’t see till next day, had either forgotten or been deceitful) that I was a very old friend.

“Well, anyway, I’m glad to talk to you.” The voice was forthcoming, relaxed. “He hasn’t any close relations, has he?”

I said that he had two sisters alive, but, so far as I knew, saw nothing of them.

“He’s not as well as he ought to be, you know.”

I asked what was the matter.

“Physically, he’s a good deal older than his age.”

Was he really ill?

“No, I can’t say that. But I can’t say either that he’s a specially good life.”

Was he in a condition to take serious strain?

That the doctor couldn’t guess. Passant was a happy man. His arteries, though, were hardening: his blood pressure, despite medication, stayed high.

“He’s his own worst enemy, you know.” The voice was kind, that of someone fond of George. “He’s a very self-indulgent chap, isn’t he? We all like a drop to drink, but I fancy that he takes more than most of us. And I’m certain that he eats too much. If you could persuade him to lose a couple of stone, he might live ten years longer. He ought to have a wife to look after him, of course.” It was all compassionate, brotherly, down-to-earth: but this was one patient out of many, he had no idea of George’s secret life. Nevertheless, he went on talking. It was a relief to know that George had someone who thought about him. “He’s a good soul, isn’t he? Do what you can to make him sensible, won’t you?”

It was a relief to the doctor, maybe, that there was someone who thought about George. Yet, an hour later, standing in the outer office at Eden & Sharples, where I had often waited for him, I was asking questions as though this were a routine visit to a solicitor’s. Mr Eden was expecting me? Mr Eden was sorry, the secretary said, he had been called away at short notice. Could I see someone else? Yes, Mr Sharples would be free in a minute. I looked round the office: still frowsty, shelves of books, metal boxes with clients’ names painted in white. Although the practice was going on, I should have guessed that it had diminished, that there must be twenty bigger firms in the town by now.

The present Eden was the nephew of the senior partner whom I had known. Neither of them had been over-energetic; this one (though I wasn’t quite a stranger) was avoiding a distasteful interview that afternoon. Probably George had always inflated the standing of the firm. It must have made, I thought mechanically, a fair living for the two partners, not much more.

The inner door opened, and a big man, taller than I was and much more massive in the shoulders, stood on the threshold. He uttered my name as though it were a question.

“Come you in,” he said.

It was meant to sound cordial. In effect, it sounded like the standard greeting of someone indrawn.

I sat down in an armchair in his office, which had once been Martineau’s. More shelves of law books. Double windows, so that there was no noise from the street beneath.

Sharples took the chair behind his desk. He was in his forties, handsome in a sombre, deep-orbited fashion. He had the forearms of a first-class batsman, and the hair grew thick and dark down to the back of his hands.

“Well—” he addressed me by name again, gazing at me under his eyebrows — “what can we do for you?”

He seemed both formal and awkward.

I said: “I think I mentioned in my letter, anyway I’m fairly sure that Aubrey Eden knows, that I’m a friend of George Passant’s.”

Sharples said: “Mr Passant left our employment some time ago.”

That told me enough of his attitude to George.

“If it weren’t for that connection,” I said, choosing the words, “I shouldn’t have any right to be here at all.”

“We’re very glad to see you. Any time you care to come.”

“You are acting for these two women, Passant’s niece and the other one, aren’t you?”

He looked at me with deep, sad eyes. He detested George, but he was determined to be courteous to me. In his own manner, he was a courteous and not unfriendly man. On the other hand, he was equally determined not to say a word out of place.

After a pause, he replied: “That is not quite accurate.”

“What isn’t quite accurate?”

“We are acting for Miss Ross, that’s true.” That was the minimum he could tell me: it wasn’t a professional secret, it would be on the record by now. “But we’re not acting for Miss Pateman.”

“You mean, you’ve passed that on to another solicitor?”

“You will find that another firm is handling her case.”

“Why is that?”

“You’re familiar with our trade, Sir Lewis.”

In fact, the answer was obvious. There might be a conflict of interest between the two. It was standard procedure to give them different lawyers from the start.

“Can you tell me this,” I said (it was like talking to a wall), “have you briefed counsel yet?”

He paused again, then said: “Yes.”

“Who?”

Once more he was working out that I could get the information elsewhere. At length he produced a name, Ted Benskin. It was a name that I recognised, for during the few years I practised at the Bar, I had been a member of the Midland Circuit, and still, rather as men read about their old school, I watched for news of it. Not that Benskin had been a contemporary of mine. He was one of the crop of young men who had become barristers after the war and who were now making reputations for themselves.

“He took silk not long ago, didn’t he?” I said.

For once Sharples could answer without brooding. In 1960, he said. He then added that Benskin was well-thought of.

I asked: “Have they got a counsel for Miss Pateman (I was falling into Sharples’ formality) yet?”

“I’m afraid I oughtn’t to answer that.”

That seemed like the end of the road. I tried one more slant: had he any idea, assuming that the case went for trial, who would be leading for the Crown? The question was not innocent. If the case was grave enough, or had roused enough horror, then the Attorney-General might elect to appear himself. Sharples was on guard.

“It isn’t very profitable to speculate, I should have thought,” he said. “We’d better cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Against the far wall, visible to both of us, stood an old grandfather clock. It said a quarter to four. I had been shown into the room at 3.35. The interview was over. He seemed more embarrassed than at the start, now that we were both silent: I found it hard to jerk myself away. I turned to the window on my right, watching the traffic pass soundlessly below, where the tramlines used to run, and pointed to the building opposite. I told Sharples that I had worked there as a youth. “Did you, by Jove?” he said with excessive interest and enthusiasm.

When I went out into the street, my timetable had gone all wrong: my next date, the only one that evening before I went to my father’s, was not until six o’clock. There was a stretch of empty time to kill, and I didn’t want a stretch of empty time. Absently (I didn’t expect much from the next meeting, I didn’t know where to find hard news, it was a foggy meaningless suspense, without the edge of personal anxiety) I walked a few hundred yards into Granby Street, in search of a café that I remembered. There was still a café nearby, but neon strips blared across the ceiling, people were queuing up to serve themselves. Close by, a block of offices was going up, the landmarks were disappearing, this street was reaching above the human scale. I went on another few hundred yards and crossed into the market place. There, all seemed familiar. The shops grew brighter as the afternoon darkened: doors pushed open, smells poured out, smells of bacon, cheese, fruit, which didn’t recall anything special to me — perhaps there was too much to recall. For an instant all this gave me a sense of having cares sponged away. Best of all, the old grinding machine was working on, the smell of roast coffee beans flooded out, bringing reassurance and something like joy.

But even there, where we had once entered past the machine and into the café, there was no café left. I walked along the pavement, opposite the market stalls. Alongside me, facing me, women in fur coats, redolent of bourgeois well-being, just as the whole scene was, were bustling along. The cafés of my youth might have vanished, but such women had to go somewhere, after their shopping, for a cup of tea: so I finished up in a multiple store, scented and heated as Harrods, where I found a restaurant full of well-dressed women, most of them middle-aged, myself the only man. There was not a face in the room that I recognised, though once I might have passed some of those faces in the streets.

Over my tea, reading the local evening paper, I was preparing myself for Maxwell. It was one way of pushing away the suspense, any practical thought was better than none. Otherwise, I hadn’t any reason to think he would help me. In the days after Christmas, beating round for any kind of action, I had remembered that he had become the head of the local CID. I had known him, very slightly, when I was pleading one or two criminal cases and he was a young detective-sergeant. Then I had met him again, during the war, after he had been transferred to the special branch. Why he had moved again, back to ordinary police work, I hadn’t any idea. I hadn’t seen him since just after the war; this present job must be the last of his career.

There were bound to be half-a-dozen of his subordinates busy on a case like this. The police weren’t stingy about manpower. It would be detective-inspectors who had done the investigations, not their boss. He might not know much, but he would certainly know something. That was no reason, though, why he should talk to me. I was not a special friend of his. Further, I should have to declare that I had some sort of interest. He was far too shrewd, and also too inquisitive, a man not to discover it. If I had been there out of random or even out of sadistic curiosity, I should have stood a better chance.

I had asked him to meet me at a pub in the market place. There, in the saloon bar, immediately after opening time, I waited. But I didn’t have to wait long. The door swung open, and Maxwell entered with a swirl and a rush of air. He was a man both fat and muscular, very quick on small, strong, high-arched feet. He turned so fast, eyes flashing right and left until he saw me, that the air seemed to spin round him. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “How are you getting on?”

I said, come and have a drink.

We sat in an alcove, tankards on the table in front of us. When he lifted his tankard, wishing me good health, Maxwell’s eyes were sighting me. He had a strange resemblance to my old colleague Gilbert Cooke. Maxwell, too, was smooth-faced and plethoric, so much so that a doctor might have worried, though he was particularly active for a man in his mid-fifties. His great beak nose protruded violently from the smooth large face. His eyes were of the colour that people called cornflower blue, and so wide open that they might have been propped. The resemblance to Gilbert was so strong that it had previously, and had again that night, a curious effect on me: it made me feel that I knew him better than I did. Because I had an affection for Gilbert, I felt a kind of warmth, for which in reality I had no genuine cause, for this man. In upbringing, though, they weren’t at all the same. Gilbert was the son of a general, while Maxwell’s mother had been a charwoman in Battersea. He had himself started as a policeman on the beat, and one could still hear relics, by now subdued, of a south-of-the-river accent.

“Are you getting on all right?” he began — and then didn’t know what to call me. When we had some dealings together in the war, he had come to use my Christian name. Now my style had changed; he was uneasy, and cross with me because he was uneasy. That was the last thing I wanted, to begin the evening. Not for the first time, I cursed these English complications. I told him, as roughly as I could, to drop all that. Underneath his inquisitive good manners, he could be rough himself, as well as proud. He gave a high-pitched laugh, drained his tankard, called me plain Lewis, and whisked off to fetch two more pints, although I was only half-through mine.

He went on with his enquiries about my fortunes. I retaliated by asking about his; all was well, he had just had a grandson. But with Maxwell the questions tended to flow one way.

“What are you here for, anyhow?” his eyes were unblinking and wide.

“That’s almost what I’ve come to ask you.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Your people have been dealing with this murder, haven’t they? I mean, the boy who disappeared.”

He stared at me.

“What’s the point?” he asked.

I thought it better not to hedge. “I happen to know a relative of one of those young women—”

“Do you, by God?”

Across the table his big face was looking at me, open, not expressionless, but with an expression I couldn’t read. His reactions, like his movements, were very quick. He was wondering whether to tell me that he couldn’t speak. Yes or no. I had no idea of the motives either way.

As though there hadn’t been a hesitation, he said: “You’d better come to the office. Too many people here.”

He looked round the bar with his acquisitive glance, the same glance, I guessed, that he had used as a detective in London pubs, picking up gossip, talking to his informers, just as much immersed in the profession of crime as if he were a criminal himself. Nowadays he was too conspicuous a figure to do that magpie collecting job. Yet the habit was ingrained. Leave him here, and he would find someone who would gossip, and information, irrespective of value (perhaps about the domestic habits of commercial travellers), would be docketed away.

“When you’ve finished your beer—” Now that he had made up his mind, he was eager to be off.

Through the familiar market place he walked with short quick steps, faster than I should have chosen. Then up the street where the recognition symbols were disappearing: the pavements were crowded, every third or fourth face seemed to be coloured; I mentioned to Maxwell that when I was a boy it was an oddity to see a dark skin in the town.

“Mostly Pakistanis,” said Maxwell. “Don’t give much trouble.”

Keeping up his skimming steps, he was telling me, as it were simultaneously, that the police headquarters weren’t far off and that the town had less than the nation’s average of crime. On one side of the street were a few shops whose names hadn’t changed: on the other, a building vast by the side of its neighbours, bare and functional. Maxwell jerked his thumb.

“Here we are,” he said, taking my arm and steering me across, as though the traffic didn’t exist.

In the great entrance hall, policemen said Good evening, Superintendent. The lift was painted white, so was the fourth floor corridor. Maxwell opened a door, whisked through a stark office where sat men in plain clothes, opened another door into his own room. After all the austerity, it was like going into a boudoir. The furniture, I imagined, was official issue, though at that, he had a couple of armchairs. There were flowers on his desk and on a long committee table. Flanking the vase on his desk stood two photographs, one of a middle-aged woman and one of a baby.

“That’s the grandson,” said Maxwell. “Have you got any yet?”

“No,” I said.

“They’ll give you more pleasure than your children,” said Maxwell. “I promise you they will.”

We had sat down in the armchairs. He pointed to a cigarette box on the desk, then said, without changing his tone of voice: “I want you to keep out of this.”

I replied (despite his quiet words, the air was charged): “What could I do anyway, Clarence?”

He looked at me with an intent expression, the meaning of which again I couldn’t read.

Suddenly he said: “Who is this relative?”

He was speaking as though we were back in the pub, the past twenty minutes wiped away.

“Cora Ross’ uncle. A man called Passant.”

“We know all about him.”

I was taken aback. “What do you know?”

“It’s been going on a long time. Corrupting the young, I should call it.”

I misunderstood. “Is that why you want me out of the way?”

“Nothing to do with it. We can’t touch Passant and his lot. Nothing for us to get hold of.”

“Then what are you warning me about?”

For once his response wasn’t quick. He seemed to be deliberating, as in the pub. At last he said, “Those two women are as bad as anything I’ve seen.”

“What have they done?”

“You’ll find out what they’ve done. I tell you they are bad. I’ve seen plenty, but I’ve never seen anything worse.”

I had heard him speak pungently before, but not like this. His feeling came out so heavy that I wanted to divert it, to return to the matter-of-fact.

“You can prove it, can you?” I said.

“We’ve brought them in, haven’t we?” At once he was a professional, cautious, repressed, telling me that I ought to know the police didn’t arrest for murder unless they were sure.

“And can you prove it?”

“We can prove enough,” he said in a businesslike fashion, a good policeman at the end of his career, one who had brought so many cases to the courts. “You can trust us on that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I can trust you on that.”

“They’ll go down for life, of course. There’s just one dodge they might pull. And you know that as well as I do.” He stared at me, with meaning and, at last I realised, with suspicion.

He said, in a level, controlled tone: “I’m going to tell you something. I mean every word of it. Those two are as sane as you or me. When we had them in here and found out what they’d done, if I could have got away with it, I’d have put a bullet in the back of both their necks. It would have been the best way out.”

Once more I wanted to get back to something matter-of-fact, or innocent.

“They’ll get life, you said. This isn’t a capital murder, then?”

At this time we were still governed by the 1957 Act, a bizarre compromise under which the death penalty was kept, but only for a narrow range of murders, depending on the choice of weapon and the victim: that is, poisoning was not capital, unless you poisoned a police officer; but murder by shooting was.

“No,” said Maxwell.

“How did they do it?”

“They beat him to death. In the end.”

“You may as well tell me—”

“We don’t know everything. I doubt if we ever shall know.”

I said, once again, tell me.

“We’re pretty sure of this. They played cat-and-mouse with him. He wasn’t a very bright lad. They picked him up at random, they don’t seem to have had a word with him before. They’ve got a hideout in the country, they took him there. They played cat-and-mouse with him for a weekend. Then they beat him to death.”

He wasn’t being lubricous about the horrors, as I had heard other policemen or lawyers round the criminal courts, telling stories of killings which I remembered clinically, as though they had happened to another species: I had to remember them clinically just to remember them at all, and yet I believed that, despite appearances, I was less physically squeamish than Maxwell.

“The worst they can get for that,” he said, “is life. Which doesn’t mean much, they’ll be let out all right, you know that. But it’s the worst they can get, and by God they’re going to get it.”

“The alternative is—”

“The alternative is, a nice comfortable few years in a blasted mental hospital. Diminished responsibility. They’ll try that. What do you think I’ve been talking to you about tonight?”

Yes, he had been suspecting me. He had seen me in action as an official, he could imagine me going round to doctors, talking to them about “diminished responsibility”, which was another feature of the 1957 Act.

“Yes, they’ll try that, Clarence,” I said. “On the strength of what you tell me, any competent lawyer would have to.”

“They don’t want any help,” he said.

“But don’t you think they’ll get it—”

“I told you something else a minute ago. Those two are as sane as you and me.”

“How are you so certain?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“That’s not enough—”

“If you’d seen them and talked to them as I have, you’d be certain too. You’d be as certain as that you’re sitting there.”

He went on: “If anyone pretends they didn’t know what they were doing, then we’ve all gone mad. We might as well give up the whole silly business. Will you listen to me?”

He was more intense. And yet, I had been misjudging him. Yes, he was inclined to see conspiracies, he thought I might be one of those standing in his way. He was a policeman: he had “brought them in”, he wanted his conviction. But, staring open-eyed at me in the flowery office, he didn’t want only, or even mainly, that. Strangely, he was making an appeal. It was deeper than his professional pride, or even moral outrage. He wanted to feel that I was on his side. He wanted to drag me, with all the force of his great strong body, on to what to him was the side of the flesh, or (to use a rhetorical phrase which he would have cursed away) of life itself.

In a sharp but less passionate tone, he asked: “You don’t believe in hanging, do you?”

“No.”

He gazed at me, unblinking.

“Don’t you think you might be wrong?” he asked.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

He still gazed at me.

“I’ll give you one thing,” he said. “I don’t believe in all the crap about deterrence. It deters some of them from carrying guns, that’s about all. Nothing in the world would have deterred those two.”

“And you go on saying they’re quite sane.”

“By God I do. They just thought they were cleverer than anyone else. They just thought, I expect they still think, they’re superior to anyone else and no one would ever find them out or touch them.”

There was a silence.

“I can’t get away from it,” he said. “There are some people who aren’t fit to live.”

I replied: “We’re not God, to say that.”

“I didn’t know you believed in God.”

“It might be easier if one did,” I said.

Maxwell shook his head. “Either those two aren’t fit to live,” he said, “or else the rest of us aren’t.”

“Why did they do it?” I broke out. “Have you any idea why they did it?”

“I think it was a sort of experiment. They wanted to see what it felt like.”

His lip was thrust out, his face, interrogating, confronted mine. After a moment, he said: “I told you, when we had them in and discovered what they’d done, I’d have put a bullet in them both. What would you do with them? That’s a fair question, isn’t it? What would you do with them?”

I had a phantom memory of another conversation, a loftier one, in which a character more tormented than Maxwell asked a similar question of someone better than me. But I was living in the moment, and I had no answer ready, and gave no answer at all.

20: Two Clocks

AS I looked up from the road outside my father’s house, the winter stars were sharp. I had gone there straight from the police headquarters: looking up at the stars, I had a moment of relief. I was getting ready for the mutual facetiousness which, as a lifetime habit, I expected with my father.

When I got inside his room, though, it wasn’t like that. First, there was something unfamiliar about the room itself which, to begin with, I couldn’t identify. Then his voice was toneless as he said hello, Lewis. He was watching a kettle beginning to boil on the hob. He was ready to make himself a cup of cocoa, he said. Would I have one?

No, I said (the flicker of how I usually addressed him still showing through), I wasn’t much given to cocoa.

“I don’t suppose you are,” said my father.

His spectacles were at their usual angle from forehead to cheek, the white hair flowed over the wings. Through the lenses, his eyes were lugubrious.

“How are you getting on?” he said, not half-heartedly, nothing like so much as half.

“How are you getting on?”

“They’ve given me the sack, Lewis.” Suddenly his eyes looked magnified: tears began to glisten down his face. They were the tears, as abject and shameless as a child’s, of extreme old age. And yet, watching them, I wasn’t shameless myself, but the reverse. I had never seen him cry before. Not in all his misfortunes or his humiliations: not when he went bankrupt, or when my mother died.

I said: Hadn’t he told the people at his choir that I would provide transport? That it was all arranged? In fact, immediately after my last visit and before the operation, I had, through Vicky, made contact with a car hire firm in the town. They were to produce a car and driver any time he asked. I had written to my father, spelling out precisely what he had to do. I had had no answer: but then, that was nothing new.

“I did tell them,” said my father, sniffling, defensive, as though I were angry with him for incompetence, as his wife and sister used to be. “I did tell them, Lewis.”

“Well then?”

“It was no good.”

“They had me on a piece of string,” he added, lachrymose but acceptant.

It turned out, he went on to explain, that they persuaded him not to find his own car. They drove him forth and back every Sunday night until Christmas. Then they told him — one of the older men had to break the news — that it was “getting too much” for him.

“It wouldn’t have done any good, Lewis. Even if you’d driven me yourself. They thought it was time to get rid of me. They thought it was time I went.”

I couldn’t comfort him. Wouldn’t they let him go on somehow, wouldn’t it be something if he just attended the choir, when he felt like it?

“It’s no use. There’s nothing I can do any more.”

He went on: “I told you what they were up to. You can’t say I didn’t tell you, can you?”

For an instant, that pleased him. He said: “I suppose you can’t blame them. They’ve got to think about the future, haven’t they?”

“You’ve got to think about yourself.”

He answered: “I haven’t got anything to think about.”

As I heard that, I was left silent.

“Mind you,” he said, “they made a bit of a fuss of me. They had a party, and they drank my health. Sherry I think it was. You’d have enjoyed that, Lewis, that you would. And what do you think they gave me?”

I shook my head.

“Over there,” he pointed.

The little room had struck strange: but in the dim light, taken up by my father’s wretchedness, I hadn’t noticed the clock in the corner, although it had been ticking, I now realised, heavily away, racket-and-whirr. It was a large old-fashioned grandfather clock, glass-fronted, works open to sight. When I drew my chair nearer, I could see that it was a good specimen of its kind, with gold work on the face and gilt inlays in the woodwork. They had made a handsome, perhaps a lavish, present to the old man.

“Two clocks,” said my father, indicating the familiar one, on the mantelpiece. “That’s what I got.”

“They can’t have known you’d had another one—”

“I’ve only had two presentations in my livelong days,” he said. “Both clocks.”

I couldn’t be sure whether he was ready to clown, or making an effort to. I said, anyway, they had spent a lot of money this time, the gift was well-meant.

“They don’t even tell the same time,” said my father. “You ought to hear them strike, they go off one after the other. When they wake me up in the morning, I think, confound the clocks.”

Not for the first time, I was beating round for something to interest him. Wouldn’t he at least let me send him a television set? No, he said with meek obstinacy, he would never look at it. How did he know till he tried? He did know. Everything else I could think of, record player, books, he met with the same gentle no. Wasn’t there anything at all I could get for him?

“Nothing I can think of, thank you, Lewis,” he said.

Absently, quite remote from me, he seemed to be thinking again about his clocks.

“I don’t know why people should fancy that I always want to know the time. Time doesn’t matter all that much now, does it?”

He went on: “After all, I shouldn’t be surprised, I might go this year.”

He was speaking without inflection, and in fact as though I were not present. He didn’t say much more, apart from offering to put the kettle on again and make some more cocoa, or tea if I preferred it. Whether he was glad to have told me of his demission, I couldn’t guess, but he was calm and affable as we said goodbye.

Outside the house, I remembered the visit with my son Charles the previous spring. When I thought of the old man, I should have been grateful for my son’s company, all of us part of the flow. But then Maxwell’s question drilled back into my mind: that was what I was here for: no, it was better to be alone.

21: “Is it as Easy as That?”

THE following afternoon, there was a light in George Passant’s sitting-room at three o’clock. When I lived in the town, that light had often welcomed me late at night: he had taken lodgings in this dark street of terraced houses — similar to the Patemans’ and less than half-a-mile away — as soon as he got his job in the firm of solicitors, and had kept them ever since. Though I had not visited him there for a good many years, it was my own choice, and a deliberate one, to go that afternoon. I did not want to meet in a pub, and give him an excuse to have a drink and break — restlessly? secretively? — away. At least that would have been my rationalisation. Perhaps I did not want to be reminded of hearty evenings and the grooves of time.

At the front door he greeted me with his robust, cordial, impersonal shout. Although he had kept the same lodgings for so long, I couldn’t help but notice that those lodgings had changed for the worse. There was a violent, attacking smell of curry percolating the whole house, reaching inside his own sitting-room. Once he had been looked after by a landlady. When she died, her heirs had split up the house into tiny apartments: George had no one to cook a meal for him, and in his sixties was more uncomfortable than as a young man. I glanced round his sitting-room, littered with papers, pipes, ashtrays, undusted, newsprint on the floor. Like my father, he was having to “make do” for himself. Unlike my father, he didn’t produce a vestige of order, but seemed to imbue the derelict room with an air of abandon or even of intent.

Over the mantelpiece stood a steel engraving of the Relief of Ladysmith, which had been there getting on for forty years before. Since his parents died, a few of his personal documents had accrued to him and been hung round the walls: his Senior Oxford certificate, the records of his solicitor’s examinations (showing him always in the highest class), a photograph of himself when he first qualified, and a diploma stating that he had been incorporated as a member of the Independent Order of Rechabites. I knew the Rechabites from my own childhood; they were one of the teetotal movements that sprang up in the nineteenth century, just as the upper fringe of the working class tried to become respectable; my own Aunt Milly had held high office in the organisation, just as she had in any teetotal organisation within her reach. Once, long ago, after a night when George and I had been racketing round the town, we had discovered that each of us had “signed the pledge” before the age of ten. I was as hilarious as he was, and as determined to celebrate with another drink. But, in cold history, the pubs were already shut.

As I sat down, on the other side of the fireplace in which glowed one bar of an electric fire, I looked into his face. The skin under his eyes was dark and corrugated: that had been so for long enough. I couldn’t be sure that there was any change in him at all, any visible change, that is, from the night before Christmas Eve. He said, in a loud but formal tone: “Well, how do you think things are going?”

I answered: “Worse than anyone could have imagined.”

His reply was automatic: “Oh, I’m not entirely prepared to accept that.”

“You must.”

“You can’t expect me to assume that whatever your set of informants have been telling you—”

“George,” I said, “there have been times when I’ve let you comfort yourself. I may have been wrong, I don’t know. Anyway, this time I can’t.”

I told him that I had had an interview with the superintendent. George interrupted, protesting about “these policemen”. But as so often his optimism, and the lack of it, seemed to coexist in the same instant. When I said “You must listen to me”, he fell silent, his eyes blank.

I told him, just as clinically as I had remembered killings in Maxwell’s office, what the police believed the two young women had done. His face was frowning and deliquescent with pain. Physically, he had always been easily moved: he could be upset by the thought of suffering trivial by the side of this.

When I finished (I was as curt as I could be) he said: “Do you believe this too?”

“Yes. “

George gazed at me with a helpless expression, the sound of his breathing heavy, and said, as though it was all he could find to say: “It’s very bad.”

There were no words for me either. But I could not let him slip, as I had once seen him in a disaster of his own in that same room, into the extreme lethargy which was more like a catatonic state.

After a time, I said: “There’s almost nothing that anyone can do.”

“I’m leaving it to you,” he said.

“I can’t do anything.”

“You’re not backing out, are you?”

I did not reply at once. I said: “No. For what it’s worth, I’m not.”

For an instant his face shone with one of his old, expansive smiles. Then he asked: “Will you go and see her? My niece, I mean?”

I said, as gently as I could manage: “I think that’s your job, you know.”

He replied: “I’m afraid I’m not up to it any more.”

Looking at him, I knew that I had no option. This might be a surrender of his, he might, if forced, still be capable of an effort. But I was obliged to do what I had come for. She must be in the local jail, I assumed. George nodded. I wasn’t certain whether any but relatives would be allowed to visit her. If it could be arranged, I would go.

George thanked me, but as though he took it for granted. Ever since he collected his first group of young people round him, ever since he was to them — which included me — the son of the morning in this town, he had been used to a kind of leadership. Even now he felt it natural that anyone who had been close to him should do as he asked.

There was something I wanted to find out. As if casually, I said: “How well do you know her?”

George’s voice was more animated than it had been that afternoon. “Oh, about as well as some of the others on the fringe of our crowd. She was rather interesting at one time, but then she began to slip out of things. And of course there were always a lot of lively people coming on—”

“What is she like?”

George responded with an air of distraction, even irritation, speaking of someone far away: “She didn’t join in much. I suppose she used to listen. I thought she took things in.”

“Is that all?”

“I didn’t notice anything special, if that’s what you mean. Of course, some time or other she took up with the Pateman girl. Some of the young men seemed to like the Pateman girl, I never could see why.”

“George,” I was speaking with full urgency by now, “you must have talked to your niece, you must know more about them than this?”

He said, suddenly violent: “I refuse to take any responsibility for either of them. You know what I’ve told them. I told them what I’ve told everyone else, that they ought to make the best of their lives and not worry about all the neutered rubbish round them who’ve denied whatever feeble bit of instinct they might conceivably have been endowed with. Do you think I cared if they lived together? Not that I knew for certain, but if they did they were just acting according to their nature. And that’s more than you can say for the people you’ve chosen to spend your time among. I suppose you’re trying to put the responsibility on to me. If they’d never been told to make the best of their lives, they’d have been just as safe as everyone else, would they? None of this would ever have happened to them? I won’t accept it for a single instant. It’s sheer brutal hypocritical nonsense. If that’s all you’ve got to say, I’m not prepared to be attacked any more.”

As his voice died down, I replied: “I didn’t say it.”

After his outburst, he sank back, exhausted, drained.

I went on: “But there is something I ought to say. It’s quite practical.”

“What’s that?” he said without interest.

“The police know a good deal about your group. For God’s sake be careful.”

“How have you heard this?” His attention had leapt up: his eyes were cautious and veiled.

“Maxwell told me.”

“What did he say?”

“He only talked vaguely about corrupting the young. But they’ve been watching you.”

“What do they call corrupting the young?”

I said: “Never mind that. For God’s sake don’t give them the slightest chance—”

When I was a young man, I had failed him by not being harsh enough. Now, too late, I meant to be explicit. After this case, the police would have no pity. They were well-informed. Either he ought to break up the group once and for all: or else it had to be kept legally safe. No drugs (not that I had heard any rumour of that). No young girls. No homosexuality.

George gave a dismissive nod. “I’ll see about it.”

“Do you mean that?”

Once more he nodded.

“You’ve got to mean it,” I said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve got people into a mess,” he replied.

It was a response that seemed extraordinary: inadequate, detached, as though he were not at all involved or had no need to look into himself. All along, perhaps, even when I first knew him, he had been alienated (though at that time we didn’t use the word) from the mainstream of living: now he had become totally so. I had to believe, against my will, that nothing could have changed him. It wasn’t just chance, or the accidents of class and time. There were plenty who had lived alongside him, who thought they shared his hopes — like my brother Martin or me, when we were in our teens — who, whatever had happened to us, were not alienated at all. But George had gone straight on, driven by passions that he didn’t understand or alternatively were so pre-eminent that he shrugged off any necessity to understand them. I was not sure, though I guessed, how he had been spending his later years. He was a man of sensual passion. Of that there was no doubt, he was more at its mercy than most men. But equally it was sensual passion more locked within himself, or his imagination, than most men’s. He was in search, not really of partners, but of objects which would set his imagination alight. But that solipsistic imagination (as self-bound as mine when I was lying in the hospital dark) was linked — and that may have been the most singular thing about him — to a peculiarly ardent sexual nature. And so he had finally come to desire young girls, one after another, each of them lasting just as long as they didn’t get in his imagination’s way. It had meant risks. Yet he seemed to be stimulated by the risks themselves. There had been his disaster, where I had been a spectator, of years before. That hadn’t stopped him. There had been, though I didn’t learn the details until after his death, warnings and near-catastrophes since. In secret, after each one, he seemed driven, compelled, or delighted to double his bets.

It was a sexual temperament which only a man in other respects abnormally controlled could have coped with. That he wasn’t, and — so it seemed — in his later life didn’t want to be. In the past I had thought that, despite his gusto and capacity for joy, he too had known remorse and hadn’t cared to look back at the sight of what he had once been. I had thought so during the time, long before (it was strange to recall, after my last meeting with her), when Olive and I were friendly, and she, who gave none of us the benefit of the doubt, jeered at me for giving it to George. I had believed that she didn’t understand faith or aspiration, that she looked at men as strange as George through the wrong end of the telescope. That was true: and yet her view of George wasn’t all that wrong, and mine had turned out a sentimentality. Curiously enough, it would have seemed a sentimentality to George himself. To borrow the phrase he had just employed, he had lived “according to his nature”. For him, that was justification enough. He wasn’t one who felt the obligation to reshape his life. Of course he could look back at the sight of what he had once been. If I — because of comradeship or my own moral needs — wished to invest him with the signs of remorse, then that was my misfortune: even if, as I sat with him that afternoon, it meant the ripping away of — what? part of my youth, or experience, or hope?

I still had an answer to get out of him, though part of it had come through what he hadn’t said.

“The legal line, I take it, will be pretty obvious,” I said. “The defence for those two, I mean.”

“I thought you were suggesting that there wasn’t any,” said George, withdrawn again.

“Oh, it’ll all depend on their state of mind, won’t it?”

Intentionally, I said it in a matter-of-fact tone, like one lawyer to another. But George ceased to be lacklustre, he straightened himself, his voice was brisk with action.

“Of course it does!” he cried. “I suppose everyone realises that, you’d better make sure they do.”

I said, it looked as though counsel would have no other choice.

“Of course, they must be mad,” said George.

“You didn’t say so, when I asked you about them, did you?”

I had said that as an aside, and George took no notice. “Of course, they must be mad,” he repeated, with an increase of vigour.

“What makes you think so?”

“That’s the answer,” George shouted.

“Did you ever see any signs in either of them, which make you think so?”

“Damn it, man,” he said, “I’m not a bloody mental doctor.”

“What sort of signs did you see?”

“I tell you, I’m not a mental doctor.”

I asked: “Why do you think they are mad?”

George stared at me, as he used to when he was young, face protesting, defiant, full of hope.

“I’m assuming they’ve done what you say,” he said. “No sane person could have done it. That’s all.”

“Is it as easy as that?”

“Yes,” he cried. “It’s as easy as that. They’re criminal lunatics, that’s what they are. Only lunatics could behave as they did. They’re nothing to do with the rest of us—”

I had to tell him: “The police don’t think so. They think they’re as sane as any of us.”

George cursed the police, and said: “They’re not bloody mental doctors either, are they?”

“I expect,” I said, “that those two are being watched by doctors all the time.”

“Well,” he said, fierce and buoyant, “we’ve got to bring in our own. I can rely on you, can I, that the lawyers get hold of the right people—”

He went on, as though he had realised the truth from the moment I broke the news; the comforting and liberating truth. He was active as I had not seen him for a long time. Happy again, he went on examining me about the defence.

“It stands to reason,” he cried, “they must be as mad as anyone can possibly be.”

Soberly, firmly, he began to talk about the trial. The committal proceedings wouldn’t take long. He wasn’t going to ask me to come. But when it came to the Assizes, George said, he would have to attend himself.

“It won’t be very pleasant, I accept that,” he said.

He asked, with a half-smile: “Can you be there?”

I said, “What use would that be?”

“I should feel better if you were somewhere round, you know,” he said.

22: Out of Prison

IT occurred to me that Maxwell, for reasons of his own, would be in favour of my paying a visit to the jail. So, back at the Residence, I rang him up. Passant wanted me to talk to his niece, I said: he wasn’t in a fit state to do it himself: it wasn’t a job I welcomed, but what was the drill? Maxwell said that he would speak to the governor. If she wouldn’t see me, they couldn’t force her, that was the end of it.

Later in the evening, the telephone rang, and Vicky, who was sitting with me, went into the hall to answer it. In a moment she returned and told me: “It’s for you. Police headquarters.”

I heard Maxwell’s voice, brisk, sounding higher-pitched than when one met him in the flesh. All fixed. I could go to the jail at four o’clock the following afternoon. She hadn’t shown any interest. They had asked if she objected, and she said she didn’t mind whether I went or not.

When I got back to the drawing-room, Vicky enquired: “All right?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

She knew why I was staying in the town, but she hadn’t asked about any of the details. She assumed that I was trying to help old friends. She might have noticed that I was unusually silent. Perhaps not: she had her own concerns, she didn’t think there could be anything wrong with me. In any case, she was not inquisitive.

Instead she was talking in high spirits about her father’s dinner party next day. Her spirits were high because she had heard from Pat (who, I thought, either got fond of her in absence or was keeping her in reserve) that week. She was also pleased because her father, instead of resisting the advice which I relayed from Francis Getliffe, had, contrary to all expectation, taken it. He had actually invited Leonard and his other young academic critics to dinner. It was to be an intimate dinner so that he could put his “cards on the table”, as he had told both of us euphorically, implying that we should have to keep out of the house. Vicky was herself euphoric. She couldn’t help but think of Leonard and her father as clever, silly, squabbling men, and now perhaps they would take the opportunity to stop making idiots of themselves.

Next afternoon, just before four, I was outside the main gate of the jail. Above me the walls stretched up, red brick, castellated, a monument of early nineteenth-century prison architecture — and a familiar landmark to me all through my childhood, for I passed it on the route between home and school. Passed it without emotion, of course: it just stood there, the gates were never open. And yet, even before the inset door did open that afternoon, let me in, closed behind me, I felt the nerves at my elbows tight with angst — the sort of tightness one felt visiting a hospital, perhaps, as though one were never going to escape? No, more shameful than that.

A policeman met me, gave me the governor’s compliments, told me the governor was called away to a meeting but hoped that next time I would have a glass of sherry with him. The policeman led me up flights of stone stairs, right up to the top of the building, along a corridor, white-painted, to a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM.

“Will you wait here, sir?” said the policeman. “We’ll get her along.”

The room was spacious, with a long table: it was dark here, but through the window I could see the russet wall of the prison, and over the wall the bright evening sky.

After a time there were footsteps outside, and two women entered. One was in police uniform: in the twilight she seemed buxom and prettyish. Should she switch on the light? she asked. Yes, it might be better, I replied. Her voice sounded as uneasy as mine.

The exchange of domesticities went on. Should she send for a cup of tea? I hesitated. I heard her ask her companion — though with the room now lit up, I had glanced away — whether she would like a cup of tea. Some sort of affirmation. You can sit down, said the policewoman to her companion. I took the chair on the other side of the table: and then, for the first time, I had to look at her.

“May I give her a cigarette?” I called to the policewoman, who had gone right to the end of the room.

“Yes, sir, that’s allowed.”

I leant over the table, as wide as in a boardroom, and offered a packet. The fingers which took the cigarette were square-tipped, nails short, not painted but neatly varnished. I had not really looked at her before, not in the few minutes in the Patemans’ living-room; her eyes met mine just before I held out a match, and then were half-averted.

Her face was good-looking, in a strong-boned, slightly acromegalic fashion, more like her uncle’s than I had thought, though unlike him she did not have a weight of flesh to hide her jaw. Her hair, side-parted, cut in a thick short bob, was the same full blond. But it was her eyes, quite different from his, from which I could not keep my own away. George’s were a light, almost unpigmented blue, the kind of colour one sees only in Nordic countries: hers were a deep umber brown, so heavily charged that, though they stayed steady while averted from me, they seemed to be swimming in oil.

“What have you come here for?” she asked.

“George asked me to.”

“What for?”

I didn’t answer until two cups of tea had been placed on the table. I sipped mine, weak, metallic-tasting, like Whitehall tea.

I had to submerge or discipline what I felt. Going into the jail, preparing for this visit, I had been nervous. In her presence, I still was. It might have been anxiety. It might have been distaste, or hatred. But it was none of those things. It was something more like fear.

“He wanted me to see if there was anything I could do for you.”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

She had been wearing a half-smile ever since I looked at her. It bore a family resemblance to the expression with which George, at our last meeting and often before that, asked me for a favour, but on her the half-smile gave an air, not of diffidence, but of condescension.

“He asked me to come,” I repeated.

“Did he?”

“He wanted me to see if you needed anything.”

My remarks sounded, in my own ears, as flat as though I were utterly uninterested: and yet I was longing to break out and make her respond. (What have you done? What did you say to each other? When did that child know?)

“I like George,” she said.

“Did you see much of him?”

“I used to. How is he?”

“He’s not too well.”

“He doesn’t look after himself.”

The flat words faded away. Silence. The other questions were making my pulses throb (Who suggested it? Didn’t you ever want to stop? Are you thinking of it now?) as, after a time, I asked, in the stiff mechanical tone I couldn’t alter: “How are they treating you?”

“All right, I suppose.”

“Have you any complaints?”

A pause. Her glance moved, not towards me, but down to her lap.

“This dress they’ve given me is filthy.”

It was a neat blue cotton dress, with a pattern of white flowers and a pocket. I could see nothing wrong with it.

“I’ll mention that,” I said.

Another pause. “Anything else?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t mind seeing a doctor.”

“What’s the matter?”

She wouldn’t reply. Was she being modest? I looked at her body, which, contradicting her face, was heavy, deep-breasted, feminine. (Did you ever feel any pity? Will you admit anything you felt?)

“I’ll tell them.”

Flat silence. Forcing myself, I said: “I used to be a lawyer. I’m not sure if you know that.”

She gave the slightest shake of her head.

“If I can be any help—” (Did you do everything they say? What have you done?)

“We’ve got our lawyers,” she answered, with what sounded like contempt.

“Have you talked to them?”

“They’ve asked me a lot of questions.”

“Are you satisfied?”

“It didn’t get them very far,” she said.

Silence again. I was trying to make another effort, when she said: “Why have we got different lawyers?”

For an instant I thought she was confused between solicitors and barristers, and started to explain; but she shrugged me aside and went on: “Why have Kitty and me got different lawyers?”

“Well, the defence for one of you mightn’t be the same as for the other.”

“They’re trying to split us up, are they?”

“It’s common practice—”

“I thought they were. You can tell them they’re wasting their time.”

She went on, bitter and scornful: “You can go and tell the Patemans so.”

I began, this must have been the solicitors’ decision, but she interrupted: “Yes, those Patemans have always wanted to come between me and Kitty. That’s all they’re good for, the whole crowd of them.”

Her anger was grating. She went on: “You wanted to know if there was anything you could do for me, didn’t you? Well, you can do this. You can tell that crowd they’re wasting their time.”

She went on, nothing was going to split her and Kitty. With bitter suspicion, she said: “I suppose you’ll get out of it, won’t you? You won’t go and tell them so.”

I said, if it was any comfort to her, I would.

“I should like to see their faces when you did.”

Once more, angrily, she said that I should slip out of it. I said without expression that I would tell them.

“I hate the whole crowd of them,” she said.

After that, she seemed either exhausted or more indifferent.

My attempts to question her (the internal questions were dulled by now) became stiffer still. I gave her a cigarette and then another. To eke out the minutes, I kept raising the cup to my lips, saving the last drops of near-cold tea.

At last I heard the policewoman moving at the far end of the room (for some time we had been left alone). “Afraid your time is up, sir.” I heard it with intense relief. I said to Cora that I would come again, if she wanted me.

She didn’t say a word: her half-smile remained. Outside the jail, in the fresh night air, I still felt the same intense relief, mixed with shame and lack of understanding. The great walls, which dominated the road in daytime, were now themselves dominated by the neon lights. I didn’t clearly remember, five minutes afterwards, what it was like inside.

Some time later, when I met Vicky in the town — I was taking her out for dinner in order to leave the Residence free for Arnold Shaw’s private party — she did not so much as ask me what I had been doing. Some young women would have noticed that I was behaving with a kind of bravado, but Vicky took me for granted. Which was soothing, just as it was to see her happy. The small talk of happiness, merely the glow, still undamped, of a letter from Pat. The pleasure of sitting at a restaurant table opposite a man. The pleasure, incidentally, of a very good meal. She had nominated an Italian restaurant which had not existed in my time, and she tucked into hearty Bolognese food with a young and robust appetite. When I lived in the town, we couldn’t have eaten like this, even if we had had the money, but since the war people had learned to eat. Restaurants had sprung up: there was even good English cooking, which I had never tasted as a boy. Other things might go wrong, but food got better.

The pink-shaded lamp made her face look more delicate, as faces look when the light is softening after a sunny day. She was talking more than usual, and more excitedly. Once I wondered if she was wishing — as a good many have wished in the lucky lulls in a love affair — that time could stand still. No, I thought. She was too brave, too positive, not apprehensive enough for that.

We had to spin the evening out. Arnold Shaw’s dinner party had started early, but we were not to arrive back until eleven. “Anyway,” said Vicky, “it’ll be nice to have them stop nattering at each other, won’t it? He ought to have patched it up months ago.” Although I was dawdling over our bottle of wine, I couldn’t do so for another hour and more.

“What shall we do?” I said.

“I know,” said Vicky with decision.

“What?”

“Don’t you worry. Leave it to me.”

After we left the restaurant, she led me down a couple of side streets past a window which was darkened but, as in the wartime blackout, had a strip of light visible along the top edge. On the door, also in dimmed light, was the simple inscription HENRY’S.

“We go in here,” said Vicky.

Inside it was as dark as in a smart New York restaurant. If it hadn’t been so dark, Vicky and I might have looked more incongruous, for her skirt was much too long and my hair much too short. But the young people, lolling about at crowded tables drinking coffee, were too polite or good-natured to notice. They pushed along, made room for us, settled us down. It was not only dark, the noise was deafening: a record player was on full blast, couples were twisting on a few square yards of floor. It was so noisy that some young man, hair down to his shoulders, had to point to a coffee cup to inquire what we wanted.

Soon afterwards the same young man patted Vicky’s knee and jerked his thumb towards the floor. To my surprise, she gave an enthusiastic nod. When she started to dance, she appeared much older than anyone there: she wasn’t dressed for the occasion, she was as out of place as someone arriving in a lounge suit at a function with all the others in white tie and tails. But, again to my surprise, she danced as one who loved it: she had rhythm from the balls of her feet up to her pulled-back hair: she had more animal energy than the boys and girls round her. It was a strange fashion to end that day, watching Vicky enjoy herself.

“Nice,” she said in the taxi going home. It occurred to me that all this was a legacy of Pat’s, and that she might be thinking of him.

It was not, however, quite the end of that day. When we arrived at the Residence, the windows were shining but there were no cars standing in the drive. We seemed to have timed it right, said Vicky efficiently. As we went into the hall, Arnold Shaw came out of the drawing-room to greet us. His colour was high, his melon lips were pursed and smiling. They’ve gone? she asked. He nodded with vigour, and said, expansively, come in and get warm.

In the bright drawing-room, used glasses on the coffee tables, Shaw stood on the hearthrug, braced and grinning.

“You’ve been in prison this afternoon, Lewis, haven’t you?” he said to me. He said it with taunting good nature, eyes bright, as though this was the sort of eccentric hobby I should indulge in, having no connection with serious living.

I said that I had.

“Well, I’m out of prison myself, you’ll be glad to know,” he announced. “And that means that I’m going to give us all a drink.”

At a quick and jaunty trot he left the room. As we waited for him, Vicky was happily flushed but didn’t speak. For me, his one casual question had triggered other thoughts.

He returned balancing a tray on which shone two bottles of champagne and three tulip glasses. While he was twisting off the wire from one bottle, Vicky burst out: “So everything is all right, is it?”

“Everything is all right,” he said.

The cork popped, carefully he filled a glass, watching the head of bubbles simmer down.

“Yes,” he said, “I shall be going at the end of the term.”

“What?” cried Vicky.

“I’m resigning,” he said, filling another glass. “I’ve told them so. Of course they’ll treat it as confidential until I get the letter off tomorrow. I had to explain the protocol—”

“Oh, blast the protocol,” said Vicky. Tears had started to her eyes.

I had been jolted back into the comfortable room, into their company.

“You can’t do it like this, Arnold,” I began.

“You’ll see if I can’t. It’s the right thing to do.”

“You must give yourself a bit of time to think.” I was finding my way back to an old groove, professional concerns, the talk of professional men. “This is an important decision. You’ve got to listen to your friends. You haven’t even slept on it—”

“Quite useless.” He spoke with mystifying triumph. “This is final. Full stop.”

Vicky, cheek turned into her chair, was crying. For once, she was past trying to boss him: she wasn’t often like a child in his presence, but now she was. She couldn’t make an effort to dissuade him. She didn’t seem even to listen as I said: “Hadn’t you better tell us what has happened?”

“It’s simple,” said Arnold Shaw. “They were all very friendly—”

“In that case, this is a curious result.”

“They were all very friendly. No one minded speaking out. So I asked them whether, if I went on as Vice-Chancellor, I had lost their confidence.”

“And they said—”

“They said I had.”

“In so many words?”

“Yes. In so many words.” Arnold refilled his glass, looking at me as though he were master of the situation.

“I must say, it all sounds very improbable,” I told him.

“They were absolutely direct. I respected them for it.”

“You must find respect very easy.”

“I don’t like double-dealing,” said Arnold Shaw.

“But still — why have you got to listen? These are only three or four young men—”

“No good, Lewis.” Shaw’s expression was happy but set. “They’re my best young professors. Leonard is alpha double plus, but the others are pretty good. They’re the people I’ve brought here. They’re going to make this place if anyone can. A Vice-Chancellor who has lost the confidence of the men who are going to make the place hasn’t any business to stay.”

“Look here, there are some other arguments—”

“Absolutely none. It’s as clear as the nose on your face. I go now. And I’m right to go.”

Arnold, like one determined to have a celebration, poured champagne into my glass. He was so exalted that he scarcely seemed to notice that his daughter was still silent, huddled in her chair. At a loss, I drank with him, for an instant thinking that of all well-meant interventions Francis Getliffe’s had been the most disastrous. It was the only advice I could remember Arnold Shaw taking. Without it he would have battered on, unconscious of others’ attitudes, for months or years. Yet, though unlike my old father he had no nose for danger, he took it far more robustly, in fact with elation, when he was rubbed against it. Of course, he was many years the younger man. My father, when his own dismissal came, had nothing else to live for. But still — it was an irony that I didn’t welcome — it was often the unrealistic who absorbed disasters best.

“I remember, Lewis, I told you one night in this house,” Arnold pointed a finger, “I told you I should decide when it was right to go. No one else. It didn’t matter whether any of the others, or any damned representations under heaven, were aiming to get rid of me. If I thought I was doing more good than harm to this place, then I should stay and they would have to drag me out feet first. But I told you, do you remember, that the moment I decided, myself and no one else, that I was doing more harm than good, then I should go, and that would be the end of it. Well, that’s the position. I can’t be anymore good in this job. So I go at the earliest possible time. That’s the proper thing to do.”

He was just as intransigent as when he was resisting any compromise or moderate suggestion in the Court. He was more than intransigent, he felt victorious. He was asserting his will, and that buoyed him up: but more than that, he was behaving according to his own sense of virtue or honour, and it made him both happy and quite immovable. He had scarcely listened to anything I said: and, as for Vicky, perhaps she realised at once when first she heard his news and began to cry, how immovable he was.

At last she had roused herself and, eyes swollen, began to talk about their plans. Yes, they would be moving from the Residence, they would have to find another house. She didn’t say it, but she was becoming protective again. How much would he miss his luxuries, and much more, all the minor bits of pomp and ceremony? Would he be impregnable, when once he knew that he had really lost his place? Vicky said nothing about that, but instead, in a factual and prosaic manner, was calculating how much income they would have.

Arnold insisted on opening the second bottle of champagne, I didn’t want it, but he was so triumphant, in some way so unshielded, that I hadn’t the heart to say no.

23: The Front Room

THE Patemans’ house was not on the telephone, and I sent a note that I should call on them at half past six, at Cora Ross’ request, before I caught my train back to London. That was the day after my visit to the jail. The clear weather had broken, it was raw and drizzling in the street outside, the street lamps shone on the dark front window, curtains left undrawn.

Mrs Pateman let me in. The light in the passage was behind her, and I could not see her face. She said nothing except that my overcoat was wet. I put down my suitcase and went into the parlour, into claustrophobia and the disinfectant smell. There, sitting at the table, plates not cleared away, were both Mr Pateman and his son. Dick nodded, Mr Pateman, head thrown back, gave me a formal good evening. I sat down by the slack fire, no one speaking. Then Mr Pateman said, in a challenging, more than that, attacking tone: “I hope you’re bringing us good news, sir.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

He stared at me.

“I don’t want you to make any mistake from the beginning. I don’t credit a single word that anyone brings up against my daughter.” He was hostile and at the same time his confidence seemed invulnerable. But now I could, though the room was dim, watch Mrs Pateman’s face: it was washed youthful by fear. I said: “I’ve got nothing to say about her.”

“I didn’t expect it,” said Mr Pateman. “Some of us don’t need telling about our children.”

“I’ve only come,” I said, “to give you a message from her friend.”

“Mind you,” said Mr Pateman, ignoring me, “I know that certain people want to drag her through the courts.” With confidence, with the brilliance of suspicion, he went on: “I’ve got my own ideas about that.”

I tried to speak gently, in the direction of his wife: “You’ve got to prepare yourselves for the trial, you know.”

“Thank you,” said Mr Pateman, “we are prepared for more than that. My daughter’s room” — he pointed towards the front of the house — “is waiting for her as soon as this trial is over. It’s waiting for her empty, with not a penny coming in.”

How soon would the trial be? Mrs Pateman asked in a timid voice. I explained that they would be sent from the police court to the assizes — that would be two or three months ahead. To my surprise, Mr Pateman accepted this information without protest: perhaps he had discovered it already. Would he accept a different kind of information, if I warned him that his hopes were nothing but fantasy and that he was going to hear the worst? I might have warned him, if we had been alone: in the presence of his wife, certainly frightened, maybe clinging to his hopes, I hadn’t the courage to speak.

“I’ve only come,” I repeated, “to give you a message from Cora Ross.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that woman,” said Mr Pateman.

“It was just this — when it comes to the trial, she wants you to know, they’re going to be loyal to each other.”

“I shouldn’t expect anything else. From my daughter,” said Mr Pateman, with complete opacity, dismissing the news as of no interest, getting back to his own suspicion: “I never liked the look of that woman, she was a bad influence all along. I always had my own ideas about her.”

He stared at me accusingly: “I don’t want to say this, but I’ve got to. I never liked the look of that woman’s uncle. He’s a friend of yours, sir, I’ve been told?”

“That’s true,” I said.

“I don’t want to say this, but he’s been the worst influence of all. Even if he is a friend of yours, he’s a loose liver. There’s bad blood in that family, and it’s a pity my daughter ever came anywhere near them. That’s why certain people want to drag her through this business. They think anyone who goes round with that woman must be as bad as she is. And that woman wouldn’t have turned out as bad if it hadn’t been for her uncle.”

“I don’t agree with that,” said Dick Pateman, who had been sitting with an expression as aggressive as his father’s.

“Some of us,” said Mr Pateman, “have spent a lifetime summing people up.”

“Passant would have been all right,” Dick went on, “if only they’d given him a chance.”

“I can’t agree.”

Dick continued. “They” were to blame, “the whole wretched set-up”, the racket, the establishment, society itself. We should have to break it up, said Dick. Look what they had done to his father. Look at what they were doing to him. His discontent was getting violent (I gathered he was having more trouble with examinations at his new university). Kitty would be happy in a decent society. There was nothing wrong with her. As for Cora Ross, if she’d “done anything”, that was their fault: no one had looked after her, she’d never been properly educated, she’d never been found a place.

I didn’t answer. What did he believe about the crime? Certainly not the naked truth. He was more lucid than his father, and more angry. He seemed to accept that Cora Ross was involved. But his indignation comforted him and at the same time deluded him. It removed some of the apprehension he might have had about his sister. So much so that I had to ask one question: had he talked to her solicitors? No, he said, his father had done that.

All the news in that home, then, had come from Mr Pateman. He and Dick must have sat in the parlour arguing with no more sense of the fatality than they showed tonight. It was intolerable that they should be so untouched. The dark little room, with its single bulb, pressed upon one. We were shut in, they didn’t mind being shut in. Their faces were as bold as when I had first seen them. The disinfectant smell seemed to become stronger, mixed with the sulphuretted smell of the slack fire.

“Yes,” said Mr Pateman, “I’ve done my best with those people” (the solicitors to whom Eden & Sharples had sent Kitty’s case).

He confronted me with glass-bright eyes.

“And thereby hangs a tale”, he announced.

For an instant, I thought he was going to give some of their opinions.

He said: “They’re running up their bills, those people are. I want to know, where is the money coming from?”

It was a question for which I was totally unready. I hadn’t even asked George about the legal costs for his niece. In the midst of shock, I hadn’t given it the vestige of a thought. Yet it was certain that George couldn’t afford to pay himself. His friends in the town were better off than they used to be: perhaps they had already supported him, but I didn’t know.

“It will cost some money,” I said.

“That doesn’t get me very far.”

I said that the whole expenses wouldn’t be less than several hundred pounds.

“You’re not being very helpful, sir.”

I said: “I’m just telling you the facts.”

“Do you think it’s helpful to mention a sum like that to me, after the way I’ve been treated?”

I said (I was recalling that the structure of legal financing had changed since the time I practised) that they were not to worry. Legal aid would be forthcoming. In a case like this, no one had to think about solicitors’ and barristers’ fees.

“Oh no,” said Mr Pateman, “we’ve already been granted legal aid. So has the other one, they tell me.”

“Then what are you worrying about?”

“Charity,” said Mr Pateman with a superior smile. “I don’t like my family receiving charity.”

My patience was snapping. “You can’t have it both ways—”

“I always believe in exploring avenues,” he went on, still invulnerable.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking of.”

“Newspapers. That’s what I’m thinking of.”

Yes, he had heard of newspapers paying for the defence in a murder case, and getting an article out of it afterwards. Wasn’t that true?

“Do you really want that to happen?” I asked.

“It would recoup us all for some of our losses. It would mean my daughter was paying her way.”

He appeared to want, though he didn’t specifically say so, advice about the popular press, or perhaps an introduction. I had no intention of giving either, and got up to leave; once more Dick nodded and Mr Pateman and I exchanged formal good nights. In the passage Mrs Pateman, who had followed me out, plucked at my sleeve.

“Please,” she whispered. “Come in here a minute.”

With quick scurrying steps (such as I had noticed in my glimpses of her daughter) she opened the door of the front room. It looked, as soon as the standard lamp was switched on, bright, frilly, feminine: the lamps gleamed behind painted Italian shades: from the passage one could see straight across the room to a long, low dressing-table, looking-glass shining under the lights. The floor was swept and polished, just as on an afternoon when the young women were returning from their work. And yet I had an instant of holding back before I could cross the threshold, an instant which was nothing but superstitious, as though I were entering a lair.

Furtively she closed the door behind us. I sat on one divan, Mrs Pateman on the other, which lay underneath the window: in the black uncovered glass one of the lamps was reflected full and clear. Close to me stood the latest model of a record player. There were other gadgets, well cared-for, stacked neatly on the shelves, a tape recorder, a couple of transistor radios.

Mrs Pateman gave me a wistful, ingratiating smile.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Taken aback, I stammered a reply: “Am I sure of what?”

“Are you sure what’s happened?”

The eyes in the small, wrinkled face were fixed on mine.

I said “No”. She was still gazing at me.

“It’s a good job he doesn’t believe she’s done anything, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it is,” I answered.

“He won’t believe it whatever happens. It’s just as well. He couldn’t face it if he did.”

She said it simply. She was speaking of the husband who dominated her as though he were sensitive, easily broken, the soul whom she had to protect.

“Are you sure yourself?” she asked again, just as simply.

I hesitated.

“I should have to be absolutely sure to tell you that.” It was as near a straight answer as I could give. It seemed to satisfy her. She said: “I can’t bear to think of her in there.”

The words sounded unhysterical, unemotional, almost as though she were referring to a physical distress.

“I can understand that.”

“She’s got such nice ways with her when she tries, Kitty has.”

I mentioned — we were both being matter-of-fact — that I had met her once or twice.

“And she often did good things for people, you know. She was always free with her money, Kitty was.”

She added: “Her father used to tell her off about that. But it went in one ear and out of the other.”

Her face was so mobile, for an instant there was the recollection of a smile.

“I’ve been worrying about her a long time, as far as that goes.”

“Have you?”

“I thought there was something going wrong with her. But I couldn’t find out what it was. It wasn’t just having a good time—”

“Did she talk to you?” I put in.

She shook her head.

“That’s the trouble with children. They’re your own and you want to help them and they won’t let you.”

She went on, without any façade at all: “I don’t know where I went wrong with her. She always kept herself to herself, even when she was a little girl. She had her secrets and she never let on what they were. I didn’t handle her right, of course I didn’t. She was the clever one, you know. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us put together.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself too much,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

I replied in the same tone in which she asked: “Yes, if anything bad happened to my son, I know I should.”

“I can’t bear to think of her in there,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid you’ve got to live with it.”

“How long for?”

“You don’t need me to tell you, do you?”

Her face was twisted, but no tears came. All she asked me was that, if I saw her during the trial, I should tell her any news without her husband knowing. She wouldn’t understand the lawyers, she said, it would be over her head. That was all. Very quietly she opened the door of the room, and then the front door. She whispered a thank you, and then saw me into the street without another word.

24: Quarrel With a Son

THE sky over Hyde Park, as Margaret and I sat together in the afternoons, was free and open, after the Patemans’ parlour. The lights of the London streets were comfortable as we drove out at night. It might have been the only existence that either of us knew. But Margaret was watching me with concern. She saw me go into the study to work each morning: she didn’t need telling that I had never found it harder. She didn’t need telling either that I was making excuses not to dine out or go into company.

One night, she had persuaded me to accept an invitation. At the dinner party, her glance came across to me more than once, seeing me behave in the way she used to envy when she herself was shy. Back in our own flat, she said: “You seemed to enjoy that.”

I said that for a time I did.

“You’ve still got more than your share of high spirits, haven’t you?”

“Other people might think so,” I said. “But they don’t know me as well as you do.”

“I think so too,” she replied. “It’s been lucky for both of us. But—”

She meant, she knew other things. A little later, after we had fallen silent, she said, without any warning: “What’s the worst part for you?”

“The worst part of what?”

“You know all right. The worst part of all this horror.” I met her eyes, brilliant and unevadable. Then I looked away. It was a long time before I could find any words. It was as hard to talk as in the dark period before we married, when we each bore a weight of uncertainty and guilt.

“I think,” I said haltingly at last, “that I’m outraged because I am so close to it. I feel it’s intolerable that this should have happened to me. I believe it’s as selfish as that.”

“That’s natural—”

“I believe it’s as petty as that.” Yet to me that outrage was as sharp as a moral feeling.

“But you’re not being quite honest. And you’re not being quite honest at your own expense.”

“It’s surprising how selfish one is.”

“Particularly,” she said, “when it’s not even true. I don’t believe for a moment that that is the worst of it for you.”

She added: “Is it?”

I was mute, not able to answer her, not able to trust either her insight or my own.

On another topic, however, which came up more than once, it was not that I wasn’t able to answer her, but that I wouldn’t. Just as, during my conversation with Cora Ross, so flat and banal, there had been questions pounding behind my tongue, so there were with Margaret. What did she do? What did they say to each other? What was it like to do it? For me in the jail, for Margaret in our drawing-room, those questions boiled up: out of a curiosity which was passionate, insistent, human, and at the same time corrupt. She was no purer than I was, and more ready to ask. I felt — with what seemed like a bizarre but unshakable hypocrisy — that she oughtn’t even to want to know. I didn’t give her, or alternatively muffled, some of the information that I actually possessed. I showed her the reports of the committal proceedings which, although they made a stir in the press, were tame and inexplicit.

Throughout those weeks I took no action which had any bearing on the case. It would have been easy to talk to counsel, but I didn’t choose. I had one of George’s neat impersonal notes, telling me the name of a psychiatrist who was to be called in his niece’s defence. It would have been easier still to talk to this man. He was a distant connection of Margaret’s, her mother having been a cousin of his. They both came from the same set of interbred academic families, and I had met him quite often. He was called Adam Cornford, and he was clever, tolerant, easy-natured, someone we looked forward to seeing. He was also, I told myself, a man of rigid integrity: nothing that I or anyone else said to him would alter his evidence by a word. That was true: but it wasn’t the reason why I shied away from speaking to him and even — as though he were an enemy whose presence I couldn’t bear — avoided going to a wedding at which he might be present.

My mood, I knew, was wearing Margaret down. I told her so, and told her I was sorry. She didn’t deny it. If I could have been more articulate, it would have been easier for her. She accepted — there was no argument, she took it for granted — that I should have to attend the trial. But she thought I oughtn’t to be left alone there, with no one to turn to. Would it be useful if she came herself? She would come for part of the time anyway, if her father didn’t need her. Who else? There weren’t many people, as I grew older, to whom I gave my intimacy. Charles March, perhaps Francis — but they were too far away from the roots of my youth. Without my knowing it at the time, Margaret rang up my brother Martin. He would understand it as the others couldn’t. Her relation with Martin had always been close: they couldn’t have been each other’s choice, and yet there was a tie between them as though it might have been pleasant if they had. She talked to him with that kind of trust. Yes, he was ready to hang about the trial in case I wanted him. But — and again I didn’t know it at the time — she found, as they talked, that he too, underneath his control and irony, seemed unusually affected.

One Sunday, when we had fetched Charles from school to have lunch at home, Margaret mentioned the date of the trial. The assizes would be beginning in April: how long would the trial take? Anyone’s guess, I was saying: probably three or four days, perhaps a week or two, depending on how the defence played it. Margaret told Charles that meant he might not be seeing much of me during the Easter holidays. I said, he could possibly endure that extreme deprivation. Charles gave a preoccupied grin.

After lunch, he and I were alone in the drawing-room. He was looking out of the window: it was a serene milky day in late February, smoky sunshine and mist, the branches on the trees just showing the first vestigial thickening.

Charles turned away and said: “So you’re going to this trial, are you?”

“Yes, I’ve got to.”

“Why have you got to?”

“One of those women is a niece of old George’s, you know.”

“I knew that.” He was sitting on the arm of a chair: his face was clouded. “But you can’t do any good.”

“I can’t desert him now,” I said.

“You won’t do any good. You won’t make any difference to him.”

“Perhaps a little,” I said.

“I doubt it,” said Charles. In a hard, minatory tone he went on: “I don’t think you ought to go.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“This trial will have all the press in the world. They’ll be after you.”

“I shall just be there in the court, that’s all—”

“Don’t fool yourself. You’re a conspicuous figure.”

“They might notice I was there,” I said. “Still—”

“This is going to be the horror of horrors. Don’t fool yourself. You ought to have learned by now that you’ll land yourself in trouble. Don’t you realise that someone is going to link you up with the Passants? There’ll be a lot of mud flying round. Some of the mud will stick. On you.”

His expression was so dark that my temper was rising. I tried to seem casual.

“I think you’re exaggerating,” I said. “But even if you weren’t, does it matter all that much?”

“I should have thought you’d had enough of it,” he replied, not with kindness so much as reproach.

“Look here, I’ve known George since I wasn’t much older than you are today. Do you really expect me to leave him absolutely alone now?”

“If you could do any good, no.”

“Whether I can do any good or not—” I was speaking harshly.

“That’s sentimental. You’re taking a stupid risk which won’t do any good to him and will do you some harm. There’s no justification at all.”

“Good God, Carlo,” I cried. “You’re talking like a Chief Whip—”

“I don’t care what I’m talking like. I’m telling you, you’re being sentimental, that’s all.”

“You really think I ought to abandon an old friend just to avoid a bit of slander—”

“That’s not a good piece of translation.”

“Put it any way you like.”

“I’ll accept it your way. And I say — if you can’t be any good to him, the answer is yes.”

I was bitterly angry with him. Was it because he reminded me — too nakedly — of an aspect of myself when young, when I was rapacious and at the same time calculating the odds? Was it also because, with a cowardice of the nerves, I should have liked to agree with him and follow his advice?

“Do you believe,” I said, my temper grinding into my voice, “that you’ll be able to live your own life without taking this kind of risk? My God, if you can be that cold, what sort of life are you going to have?”

Charles had become angry in his turn. His skin, which, different from mine or Margaret’s, didn’t colour in the sun, took on a kind of pastel flush. He said: “I shall take more risks than you ever did.”

“Say that when you’ve done it.”

“I shall take more risks than you did. But I shall know what I’m taking them for.

“As for being cold,” he went on, eyes black with resentment, “I think you’re wrong. I’m not sentimental, if that’s what you mean. I never shall be. I’m not going to waste so much of myself.”

For some time we sat in mutinous silence, each of us hurt, each of us throwing the blame upon the other. Then Margaret entered, the low sunlight streaming on to her face, which unlike ours was tranquil and bright. In an instant, though, she felt the fury in the room. It astonished her, for she had scarcely heard Charles and me exchange a bad-tempered word.

“Whatever’s the matter with you two?” she burst out.

“Carlo’s been telling me that I oughtn’t to go to the trial,” I said, shrugging it off.

“No,” she spoke to Charles, “he’s right to go.” She said it soothingly, but Charles, smothering his pride, began to tease her: why was she always so certain of her moral position? The teasing went on, light and easy. He could talk so easily because of the difference between them. That afternoon he couldn’t have talked to me like that. He didn’t give a glance in my direction. He was responding to her with fondness and detachment. He couldn’t have told, or wanted to know, how he was responding to me: and nor in reverse could I.

25: A Quiet Opening

AS Margaret and I approached the old Assize Hall, there was a smell of moist grass, sweet and taunting. It was the kind of April morning which, when one is happy, is lit up with hope: on the patch of lawn beside the steps, dew sparkled in the wave of sunlight. In front of the Georgian façade, policemen were standing, faces fresh in the clear light. The smell of grass returned, sweet and seminal. Looming behind the building was a Gothic wall, a relic of the historic town: we were half-a-mile away from the shopping streets, and close to the quarter where I had taken Charles for a walk the year before.

The entrance hall was high, bright from the lofty windows, crowded, people hurrying past. There were spectators making their way into the courtroom, policemen in plain clothes, rooted on thick legs, policemen in uniform stationed by the doors. At the far end of the hall barristers, in gowns but not yet wearing their wigs, pushed to and from the robing-room. The hall fell into shade, as the spring wind outside drove clouds across the sun. Then bright again. On the wall panels stood out the arms of the county regiments. Across the far end, near where the barristers appeared and disappeared, a long trestle table carried a couple of tea urns and plates of sandwiches, cakes, and sausage rolls, as though at an old-fashioned church fête.

Margaret was seeing all that for the first time. She had never been inside this place before — in fact, she had never been inside a criminal court. The curious thing was, I seemed to be seeing it for the first time too. And yet, when I was studying law in the town, I had gone into this entrance hall a good many times. Later, when I was practising, I had appeared in several cases at these assizes, using that same robing-room at the far end, walking through to the courtroom in the way of business. Once, in the minor financial case which had involved George Passant: often we had forgotten that, or at least acted, despite the premonitions, as though it had signified nothing.

In all those visits, I seemed to have noticed very little. Was it that I had been blinkered by my own will? When I had been a “hungry boxer”, to use Charles’ phrase, there were scenes I had wanted to rush through, like one passing in a train.

That morning, just as Margaret was looking round, so was I. One or two acquaintances said good morning, knowing me by sight. I was more familiar to them than they to me. It reminded me that my presence wasn’t unobserved. So it did when a young man came up, telling me that he worked in the Deputy Sheriff’s office. The Deputy Sheriff would be pleased to find places for us, in his own box, near to the bench. I glanced at Margaret. We were waiting for George Passant: we should have to sit in the public court beside him. I thanked the young man and explained that we should have other people with us. Margaret said, surprising me, that if her husband was on his own later in the trial, he would certainly take advantage of the offer.

It was about twenty past ten. Through the door of the entrance hall George Passant trod slowly in. He was wearing an old bowler hat, as he used to do on formal occasions, though there had not been many in his life: underneath the bowler, his hair bushed wildly out. Before he saw us, his face looked seedy and drawn. But, at the sight of Margaret he took off his hat, and broke into a smile — almost of pleasure, of astonished pleasure. He gave a loud greeting, asked how we were, asked after Charles’ health. It might have been a meeting on one of his visits to London, running into us by a lucky chance, somewhere between our flat and the Marble Arch.

I went to one of the doors leading into the courtroom. A policeman told me it was quite full down below but that perhaps there was still room in the gallery. We climbed up the stairs, and there, at the extreme wing, found seats which looked down into the packed and susurrating court. Packed, that is, except for a gaping space in the dock and for the empty bench.

From the gallery, we looked down at the line, not far away, of the backs of barristers’ wigs. Behind them the solicitors, Sharples massive among them, were sitting, one of them leaning over to talk to his counsel. The courtroom was small and handsome, dome-roofed, the 1820s at their neatest. It struck lighter than in my time: that I did, all of a sudden, notice. Turning round, I saw that a vertical strip of window, floor to ceiling, had been unblocked. The whole court might have been a miniature Georgian theatre in a county town, except that light was streaming in from the back of the auditorium.

Without noise (only those used to the courts had heard the order, put them up) a policewoman had appeared in the dock, coming up from the underground passage. It happened so unobtrusively that Cora Ross’ head also came up before people were looking. A catch of breath. Then Kitty Pateman was sitting beside her, another policewoman following behind.

The courtroom was quiet. Heads were pushed forward, trying to get a glimpse of them. It wasn’t a natural silence. Something — not dread, more like hypnosis — was keeping us all still.

Cora Ross sat straight-backed in the dock. She was wearing a chocolate dress with white sleeves. That, together with her thick bobbed hair, made her look severe, like some pictures of Joan of Arc. Her face was turned towards Kitty, with a steady undeviating glance. Kitty’s glance, on the other hand, was all over the place. To say she didn’t look at Cora wasn’t true. She looked at everyone, her eyes darting round lizard-quick. She must have seen her parents, whom I had identified just below. She showed no recognition, but her expression was so mobile that it was impossible to read. She seemed prettier than I remembered, in her small-featured peaky fashion: the skin of her neck and forehead, though, appeared stretched, ready to show the etchings of strain. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse of some silky material. She rested her elbows on the front of the dock but shifted about as though she could not find a comfortable position; from above, I could see that one of her legs was entwined with the other.

The silence didn’t last long. From the side door, a couple of barristers hurried in, took their seats, muttered something matey, desultory, to their colleagues, one of them wearing an apologetic smile.

The courtroom clock, high up at the back of the gallery, had turned half past ten. Margaret touched my hand. She didn’t know how casual the timekeeping of a court could be: but she did know that I was irked by unpunctuality, more so when I was anxious, more so still that morning. We had to wait another five minutes before we heard the ritual cry. As we were all rustling to our feet, the assize procession entered, close by the box where Margaret and I had been invited to sit. The old judge limped to his place of state: he was old, but as he faced us, in his red robe and black waistband, he had the presence of a strong and active man. With an amiable, Punch-like smile he made a becking bow to the court in front, to the jury on his left.

He had been a high court judge for many years. The last of the gentlemen judges, so legal acquaintances of mine used to call him. He lived like a country squire, but he was still doing his duty on the assize round — a red judge, my mother would have said with awe — at the age of getting on for eighty. Just as through a chance resemblance I felt I knew Detective-Superintendent Maxwell better than I did, so I felt with this man, Mr Justice Fane, whom I had actually met only once, at an Inn guest night. For he reminded me of a man of letters who had done me a good turn: the nutcracker face with the survival of handsomeness, the vigorous flesh, the half-hooded eyes, tolerant, worldly, self-indulgent, a little sad. He didn’t pretend to be a great lawyer, so my informants said. But he had tried more criminal cases than anyone on the bench, and no one had been more compassionate.

In a full, effortless voice, the Clerk of Assize, just below the judge’s place, was speaking to the prisoners: “Are you Cora Helen Passant Ross?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Katharine Mavis Pateman?”

“Yes.”

“Both of you are charged together in an indictment for murder. It is alleged that you, Ross, and you, Pateman, on a day unknown between September 20, 1963, and October 9, 1963, murdered Eric Antony Mawby. Ross, are you guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” said Cora Ross in a hard, unmodulated tone.

I had heard that indictment a fair number of times (Kitty Pateman was pleading not guilty, her voice twittering and birdlike): when I was a pupil in chambers in London, with nothing to do, I had attended several murder cases. But there was a difference that morning. In the courtroom — although all of us knew the shadow of horror behind those charges — the air was less oppressive. There was none of the pall upon the nerves, at the same time shameful and thrilling, which in those earlier murder trials I had sensed all round me and not been able to deny within myself. For there was no chance of these two being sent to their own deaths. That was the chance which had, at least in part, in earlier days enticed us to the courts. Yes, young lawyers like myself had gone there to pick up something about the trade: yes, there was the drama: but we had also gone there as men might go, lurking, ashamed of themselves, into a pornographic bookshop. In the mephitic air, the sentence of death would be coming nearer.

That morning, the air was not so dense. There was one specific sensation less. In fact, as the jury were being sworn, I thought that there had been an attempt, despite the excitement in the press, to damp down other sensations. As I had learned some time before, the Attorney-General was not taking charge of the prosecution himself. It had fallen to the leader of the Midland Circuit, and when, just after eleven, he began his opening speech, he was as quiet and factual as if he were proposing an amendment to the Rent Act. The judge had spoken just as quietly a moment before, in telling the jury what the timetable would be: 10.30–1.0, then 2.30–4.30. “We shall not sit longer, because of medical advice in relation to Miss Pateman, you understand.”

We had heard no mention of that, and later discovered that she had nothing worse than an attack of rheumatism. The judge was being elaborately considerate: just as, when he called her Miss, he seemed to be rebuking the old custom of the courts, which the Clerk had had to follow, of charging prisoners by their bare surnames.

Bosanquet began: “My Lord and Members of the Jury, on September 20, last year, 1963, a child disappeared. His name was Eric Mawby. He was eight years of age. He was an only child, and he lived with his parents at 37 Willowbrook Road, which is part of the housing estate in — (he mentioned one of the outer suburbs). You will hear that he told his mother that he was going to play in the recreation ground about half-a-mile away from their house. You will also hear that, on most summer and autumn evenings, at about half past five o’clock, he went to the same recreation ground for an hour or so’s play. He was always expected back before seven o’clock, and had never failed to do so until the evening of September 20, which was a Friday.”

To a foreigner, this lead in could have sounded like English understatement. But a foreigner might not have known the transformation in English rhetoric, both in parliament and in the law courts, since about the middle of the thirties, when Bosanquet was starting to practise. He was using the tone of speech which was becoming common form. He had actually joined this circuit not long after I gave it up and went to an academic job. He had already been referred to in court as “Mr Recorder”, which had made Margaret give me a puzzled glance: he worked, besides having his solid practice, as Recorder, which meant in effect judge of a lower court, in a city close by. As he stood a couple of yards away from the dock on his right hand, he was looking at the jury with an expression unmoved and unassuming. Distorted by the wig, as some faces are, his appeared preternaturally foreshortened, round and Pickwickian.

The quiet unaccented voice went on: “He did not return by seven o’clock that evening. His parents became anxious, as any of us with children would be. They made inquiries of their neighbours and their neighbours’ children. At nine o’clock they got in touch with the police. At once there was set in motion the most thorough of searches, of which you will hear more. I think you will agree that the police forces at all levels deserve many congratulations for their devotion and efficiency in this case. There was no news of Eric for over a fortnight, although many thousands of reports had been investigated and already certain lines of investigation were in train. But Eric had not been found, and there was no direct news of him. When the news did come, it was the worst possible. His body had been discovered through a very remarkable piece of fortune, if I may use the word in happenings such as these. It was the only piece of fortune that the police had throughout their massive investigations. There is, I think, no reason to doubt that, without this accident, they would shortly have discovered the burying place. However, something else happened. Very early in the morning of October 9, a pack of hounds belonging to the—” — he gave the name of a local hunt — “were out cubbing in a wood or covert to which the nearest village is Snaseby, though that is some distance away. The wood is known locally as Markers Copse.”

Like most people, perhaps everyone, in the court, I had heard of the bizarre incident which he was — without a trace of acceleration — coming to. During the police court proceedings, it had been carried, more than any single feature of the case, all over the press. He was telling us nothing new. But up till now I hadn’t read or heard the name of the exact spot. Now I did hear it, and it meant something to me. The place was a few miles out of Market Harborough, where, as a boy, I used to stay with my Uncle Will. On these holiday visits I went walking over the countryside and sometimes followed the hunt on foot (which my uncle approved of, considering it in some obscure fashion good for his estate agency). I knew Markers Copse well enough. There had been, and presumably still was, an abandoned church down in the next fold of the gentle, rolling country: a church with an overgrown graveyard, relic of a village long deserted. Below the church ran a stream, in which a friend and I often went to fish. It had been pretty country, lonely, oddly rural: sometimes I, who was used to townscapes, had liked to imagine that I was back in the eighteenth century.

“In Markers Copse, then, in the very early morning of October 9, Mr Coe, the huntsman, took his hounds. In a short time he found that two of them had got loose from the pack. They were well-trained hounds and he was naturally irritated. He had to go some distance through the copse to find them. They were smelling, apparently without any reason, at a patch of earth between two of the trees. Mr Coe couldn’t understand their behaviour. It took him considerable effort, and a good deal of discipline, to draw them away. Later that same day, when his work was done, Mr Coe was still puzzled by their behaviour. He is an extremely experienced huntsman and knows his hounds. He will tell you that he felt silly, but he had to make sure whether there was any explanation or not. So he went back that evening to Markers Copse with a neighbour and a couple of spades. He could remember the precise location where the hounds had been smelling. He and his neighbour started to dig. It didn’t take them long to find the body of Eric Mawby — although the grave was fairly deep and had been carefully prepared.”

Bosanquet’s expression hadn’t changed, nor had his stress. Conversationally he informed the jury: “You will hear medical evidence that the child had been dead since approximately the time that he disappeared. You will also hear, however, that he did not die on that first night and probably not for forty-eight hours afterwards. The pathological experts will tell you that he had received mortal injuries, through his skull having been battered in, though with what precise implement or implements it is impossible to say. The pathological experts will also tell you that there were signs of lacerations and other wounds on his body, not connected with the mortal blows, which may have been inflicted many hours before death.

“That is something of what happened to Eric, though I am afraid that I shall have to tell you more later. I now come to the connection between him and the defendants in the dock.”

He made the slightest of gestures to his right, but continued to gaze steadily at the jury.

“So far as is known, Eric had not spoken to either of them before the evening of September 20. He may never have seen them before. There is evidence, however, that they had seen him. These two young women share a room in the house of Miss Pateman’s parents. They have also, for two years past, rented a cottage in the country, where they have been accustomed to go at weekends. You will hear more, I am afraid, of Rose Cottage. It is near Melton Mowbray, and some considerable distance from Markers Copse. It has, however, become not uncommon, as you will hear, for their acquaintances, or members of a circle to which they belong, to rent cottages similar to theirs at convenient distances from the town, and they are known to have visited one in the Market Harborough direction, in fact in Snaseby.”

That was a reference, which some besides me must have picked up, to George Passant’s group. Bosanquet left it there, and went on: “It may sound as though Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were living a luxurious life. I might remind you that they were each drawing good salaries, Miss Pateman as a secretary, Miss Ross as a trained clerical worker. They had left school with their O-levels, Miss Pateman with seven and Miss Ross with four, and in the normal run of things they were regarded as valuable employees whose security wasn’t in doubt. For two years past they had been able to run a car, a Morris saloon. As it happens, that car had its own part, a negative but finally a significant part, in the story of Eric’s disappearance.”

Patiently, meticulously, he described the police investigations. They had interviewed some thousands of people who might have seen Eric on the evening of September 20. There had been several hundred reports from others who thought they had (or, though he didn’t say it, couldn’t resist either exhibiting themselves or taking the sadistic bait). Witnesses, sound and level-headed, were almost certain that they had seen Eric walking off with a pair of men or a single boy. Others believed they had noticed him catching a bus. Several had caught sight of him in various makes of car. These stories took weeks to sift, and all turned out to be false.

The careful words tapped gently into the court. The minute hand was getting round to twelve. The judge leaned forward and asked: “Is all this quite necessary, Mr Recorder?”

“There is a great deal of complexity, my lord.”

“But do we need all of it?”

“I’m inclined to think it may be as well.”

The voices were courteous, silky, and just perceptibly tense. There might be some past history between the two men: or was the judge simply impatient? He knew, of course, everything the lawyers knew. No one on either side believed there could be any challenge to the facts. He had presumably expected that there would be a short opening speech, after which the defence, instead of trying to disprove the facts, pleaded diminished responsibility at once. Bosanquet stood there, amiable, obstinate. This was his case: he wasn’t going to be hurried or budged. It might be that he had a double motive. I thought, and later had it confirmed, that he must have heard that the defence were still uncertain about their plea: though at that time I didn’t guess the reason. And also he could be insuring against the medical evidence, once diminished responsibility was brought in: by being so rational himself, he was underlining how calculated the crime had been, just as he had, as though by accident, reminded everyone that the two women were of more than average intelligence.

Without altering his pace, he persevered. Many reports of persons who thought themselves eye-witnesses had been analysed and discarded. But two, which had been received in the third week of the investigation, had something in common. In both, the witnesses thought they had seen a child sitting between two people in the front seat of a car, with a woman driving. One of these sightings had taken place not far from the recreation ground. The child, as Mrs Ramsden would testify, appeared to be smiling and waving, the other adult’s arm round his neck and shoulders. Was the other adult a man or a woman? That Mrs Ramsden hadn’t been sure of, since the face was obscured by dark glasses. The second sighting had been a mile away from Rose Cottage. Mr Berry, who was working in his garden, had seen a car travelling very fast: he had noticed a child on the front seat but could not be positive about the other occupants. He had several times before observed Miss Ross and Miss Pateman driving to Rose Cottage: but he did not bring these occasions to mind, and this was not the car he had seen previously. It was in fact a brown Austin, and the number plate was not noticed at either sighting, or else was obscured.

“Those were the first indications which brought the defendants within the scope of the enquiry. I have to remind you that the police had many leads which seemed far more positive and more worth pursuing. But the police routine could not overlook even the most unpromising of suggestions. And so, as a matter of routine, Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were interviewed for the first time on October 6, that is, three days before Eric’s body was found. They were, as you will hear, both calm and co-operative. They expressed themselves as horrified by the disappearance and anxious to help. They denied any knowledge of the boy, but were very willing to account for their movements in the weekend of September 20–22. Their car had, as it happened, needed repairing, and they had left it in their usual garage. So they had gone out to Rose Cottage by bus and spent their usual quiet weekend. On the Saturday morning Miss Ross had done a little shopping in the village. They had returned to the Patemans’ house by the last bus on the Sunday night.

“All this sounded quite natural. As a matter of routine the police checked one or two details of their account. Miss Ross was remembered as shopping in the village as usual on the Saturday morning. No one had noticed anything unusual, outside their ordinary weekend habits. In the same way, an enquiry was made at their garage, the Wyvern Garage in Whitehorse Street, and their car had duly been left there for repair during the weekend, as they had stated. But here Detective-Constable Hallam, whom you will hear in evidence, asked some further questions. He wanted to know what had been wrong with the car. The answers did not satisfy him. The garage proprietor, Mr Norman, had been slightly puzzled himself. There had been a small jamming in the gear change, but only of the kind which experienced car owners like the defendants could put right in a few minutes themselves. This was simply a straw in the wind, but Detective-Constable Hallam was not satisfied.”

The enquiries went on, Bosanquet leaving nothing out. The car was conspicuous, it was well known in the neighbourhood. It occurred to the detective-constable to discover whether it had ever been noticed on the other side of the town, in the vicinity of Eric Mawby’s house. He had found witnesses who had seen such a car patrolling, not one evening but three or four evenings consecutively, the route between Eric’s house and the recreation ground.

“This was still a straw in the wind,” said Bosanquet, with no emphasis at all. “But Detective-Constable Hallam’s superiors thought it justified a visit to the Patemans’ house, at a time when Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were present. We have now come to December last, when, of course, Eric’s body had already been discovered. At this second interview Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not as co-operative as at the first. They refused to discuss the repairs to the car, and after a while refused to answer further questions.”

Silence. The hallucinations of fact. Cora had her gaze still turned on Kitty, who had begun, in a frenetic fashion, to scribble notes and push them forward to her solicitor. She was writing as assiduously as the judge himself.

“There followed a third interview, this time at Rose Cottage,” Bosanquet said. “During the questioning of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman, which was being conducted by Detective-Inspector Morley, other officers were searching the cottage and the garden. For some time this search revealed nothing. The cottage was swept and garnished. But in due course one of the officers, Detective-Sergeant Cross, discovered a small metal object pushed into the corner of a shelf. He recognised it as an angle joint which might have come from a Meccano set. He asked them to explain why it was there. At that point Miss Pateman said or screamed something across to her companion — something like, though no one can be definite about the exact words, ‘You blasted fool’.

“Neither of the defendants produced any explanation about the presence of this Meccano unit. They said it had nothing to do with them. After a further interval officers searching the garden found, buried in the bushes, the box of what appeared to be a new Number One Meccano Set, containing most of its components, and carrying on the lid a tab from the Midland Educational Company. At this stage the defendants were separated, cautioned, and brought back to police headquarters for further enquiries.”

Bosanquet glanced at his wristwatch. As though under suggestion, others of us did the same. It was ten minutes to one.

“By this time, since the officers had spent some hours at Rose Cottage, it was Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless the manager of the Midland Educational Company was immediately contacted, and search, of course, continued at the cottage. The bill for the purchase of a Number One Meccano Set was traced, bearing the date of September 18 last year, that is, two days before Eric’s disappearance. The shop assistant who had made this transaction was visited at her home. She was able to remember the purchaser as someone answering to the description of Miss Ross.

“Meanwhile Miss Ross was being examined alone by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell. He will tell you that she was still denying knowledge of the Meccano set, although in a parallel examination Miss Pateman was providing explanations, such as, that it was a long-forgotten present which had never been delivered. The detective-superintendent was given the information from the Midland Educational Company. He told Miss Ross and asked her to account for it. Then she said: ‘Yes, we took him out to the cottage that Friday night. We borrowed a car to do it.’”

In a tone indistinguishable from that in which he quoted her, he spoke to the judge: “I’m inclined to think, my lord, this might be a convenient time to break off.”

“As you like, Mr Bosanquet.”

The politeness, the bowing judge, the ritual, Cora’s blonde head disappearing underground. When I had followed George and Margaret downstairs, the entrance hall was full, people were pushing towards the refreshment table. Outside, in the spring air, cameras clicked. Some were press cameras, but the journalists had not emerged yet, and I led the other two away, trying to hurry George’s invalid pace. I heard some whispers and thought I could pick one out as “that’s her uncle”.

We walked, Margaret in the middle, George’s heavy slow step with feet out-turned delaying us. Neither Margaret nor I could find anything to say. Instead, George spoke: “It’s nasty,” he said.

His words, like all the words spoken that morning, could not have been more matter-of-fact.

“It’s nasty, of course,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry, George,” said Margaret.

He smiled at her, a diffident, gentle smile.

“Still,” he went on, “wait till you hear the answer.”

Margaret couldn’t reply, nor could I. Was he whistling up his old unextinguishable optimism, or was he just pretending? Wait till you hear the answer. I had heard politicians growl that identical phrase across the floor of the Commons, after the bitterest attack from the other side.

“I must say,” said George, “I thought that—” — he brought out his curse as though the word had just been invented or as though the carnal reality were in front of his eyes — “was unnecessarily offensive.”

Now he wasn’t pretending. He was speaking out of the hates of a lifetime. I didn’t answer. This was no time to argue, though in fact I thought the exact opposite. I thought also that Bosanquet, in his own fashion, was a master of his job.

“Well,” said George, “where are we going to eat?”

Margaret and I looked at each other, hesitating. We didn’t want much, she said. George, with a kind of boisterous kindness, said that we must eat something. He knew of a good place.

It turned out to be a pub which sometimes we used to visit (he showed no sign of remembering that) at the end of a night’s crawl. Nowadays it served hot lunches: and there, in a small and steaming room upstairs, George, giving out an air of old-fashioned gallantry, placed Margaret in a chair and insisted that she eat some steak-and-kidney pie. His pleasure was extreme, pathetic, when she was ready to join him in drinking a double whisky.

He was fond of her, because she never blamed him. He had told her a good deal about his life, and found that she casually accepted it. “I hope that’s really all right for you,” he said, looking at her plate of meat and pastry, like a proud, considerate, but slightly anxious host.

It was not we who were trying to support him, but the reverse. He might be behaving so out of a residue of robustness greater than most men’s — or out of indifference or a lack of affect. All we knew was that he was behaving like a brave man. He even told a long complicated funny story, so quirky that it didn’t seem unfitting that day.

He did ask me — in an aside — whether Bosanquet (whom he never referred to by name, but always by the Anglo-Saxon curse, as though it were a kind of title) was going to “drag in” any of the crowd. George hadn’t missed the single oblique reference. I said that it seemed unlikely. Perhaps the people who lent the car might be mentioned — were they connections of George’s?

George shook his head, his expression for an instant lost and suffering, and said that he didn’t know. “I don’t want anyone else to get into a mess,” he muttered, repeating the words that had chilled me the day before Christmas Eve.

He turned his attention to Margaret again, trying to think of another treat for her, before we returned to the Assize Hall. Again the crowded entrance, the barristers in the courtroom seen from above, the ascent of those two into the dock. A little delay, only three minutes this time. The ritual bowing. Bosanquet on his feet, beginning: “My lord, and members of the jury, we now turn for a moment to certain statements of Miss Pateman—”

26: Teaching a Child to Behave

MISS Pateman made a number of statements to police officers during the period when Miss Ross was being examined by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell,” said Bosanquet in a level tone, without a flick of sarcasm. “On the following day Detective-Superintendent Maxwell decided to take her out once more to Rose Cottage and question her himself. By this time, of course, the search in and round the cottage had been intensified. Traces of blood, small traces, had been found in the bedroom. This blood, as you will hear from experts of the Forensic Laboratory, did not belong to the blood groups of either Miss Ross or Miss Pateman. It did, however, belong to the blood group of Eric Mawby. In the garden were found the remains of a nylon blouse not completely burnt, a blouse which witnesses recognised as having been worn by Miss Ross. On this were detectable some stains of the same blood group.

“In due course, as Detective-Superintendent Maxwell interrogated her—” (How long had they been alone together? When was she told that Cora had broken down?) — “Miss Pateman withdrew her denials that the child had never been inside the cottage. She now told what appeared to be a coherent and self-consistent account of those events. She and Miss Ross had for some time past wanted to have a child alone, by themselves, to be in control of. She gave a reason for this desire. They wanted to teach it to behave.”

For the first time in the long and even speech, Bosanquet laid a stress, it sounded like an involuntary stress, upon the words. In an instant he had controlled himself. “They had accordingly, so it appears, picked out a boy at random. For some time they had driven round the city, in places where they were not familiar, looking for a suitable subject. It was the misfortune of Eric Mawby and his parents that they settled on him. They decided on the weekend of September 20. They bought the Meccano set two days before in order to give him something to do. They picked him up on the Friday evening without difficulty. According to Miss Pateman’s account, Eric was pleased to go with them.” Bosanquet paused. “That we cannot, of course, deny or establish. We also cannot establish at what stage exactly they began to ill-treat him. Possibly early on the Saturday. You will hear expert evidence about the many wounds on his body. He suffered them, according to expert judgment, many hours before death. These body wounds were healing when he was finally beaten to death by at least seven blows on the head, probably with something like a poker or a metal bar and also with a wooden implement.

“About the wounds on the body, Miss Pateman said that they had — what she called ‘punished’ him. They wanted to teach him to behave.

“I should say that neither she nor Miss Ross have ever admitted that they actually killed him. They have each given accounts of what happened to Eric on the Sunday night. The accounts are different. One is, that he was put on a bus to take him back to the town. The other, which is Miss Ross’, is that they drove him back themselves in the borrowed car, and dropped him at the corner of the road leading to his parents’ house. Needless to say, neither of these stories deserves a moment’s thought. That same night, and early the following morning, that same car was seen, as will be sworn by two witnesses, very close to Markers Copse. Further, when the car was ultimately examined — I must tell you that its real owners had no conceivable connection with this crime — there was evidence of blood, blood of Eric’s group, on the floor of the back seat.”

He turned to the judge, and remarked: “I think I need go no further at present, my lord. It would be my duty, if there were any conceivable doubt about the facts of this case, to make the position clear to members of the jury. But there is no doubt. We know most of what happened to Eric Mawby from the Friday evening until the time that he was buried. I haven’t any wish to add to the intolerable facts you are obliged to listen to. You can imagine for yourselves the suffering of this child. There is no doubt about the way he was killed, nor about who killed him. All I need say is that this has been proved to be a deliberate, calculated, premeditated crime. That is enough.”

During the last few minutes of Bosanquet’s speech, I had flinched — and this was true of Margaret and everyone round me — from looking at the two women in the dock, although, keeping my gaze on Bosanquet, I could not help noticing with peripheral vision the fingers of Kitty obsessively scribbling her notes.

A witness was being sworn, a man in his twenties, soft-faced, soft-voiced. It turned out that, with the indifferent businesslike bathos of the legal process, he was being examined about the loan of his car.

The box was on the judge’s right hand, a couple of yards away from where Bosanquet had been standing: so that prosecutor, dock, witness, were all exposed to the same light. The young man’s fair hair shone against the panelling.

“Your name is Laurence Tompkin? You are a schoolteacher employed by the local education authority? You know both the defendants?”

Yes, said the young man in a gentle, ingratiating manner, as of one who was trying to win affection, but he knew Miss Ross better than Miss Pateman. Do you remember either of them saying they might want to borrow your car? Yes, he remembered that, it was Miss Ross. When was that? In the early summer, last year. In the summer, not September? No, much earlier, more like June. What did she say? She just said they might want to borrow it some time, she wanted to be sure that it was available. Then, some time later she did borrow it? Yes. For a weekend in September? Yes. Can you tell us the date? The weekend beginning September 20. Was the car returned? Yes. When? The following Monday. Did you notice anything odd about it? There seemed to be a lot of mud on the number plate, although it had been a sunny weekend. You didn’t examine the floor of the car, down below the back seat? No, he didn’t think of doing so.

Benskin, Cora’s counsel, got up to speak for the first time that day. He was a small man, with a long nose and a labile merry mouth: his voice was unexpectedly sonorous. He was asking a few questions for appearance’s sake. He had, of course, understood Bosanquet’s tactics, that is, to demonstrate the long-laid planning before the boy’s death. As for the defence’s own tactics, a good many of us were puzzled. They seemed to be in a state of indecision or suspense.

It would be perfectly reasonable to ask a friend, said Benskin, whether he could lend a car? Perfectly reasonable to ask, as a kind of insurance, if one was having any trouble with one’s own? Even if the trouble didn’t become serious for weeks? As for the return of the car, if Miss Ross and Miss Pateman drove it back to the town late on the Sunday night, they couldn’t conveniently have returned it, could they? It was perfectly reasonable to park it outside their own house, and return it next day?

Having registered his appearance, Benskin sat down, with a grim half-smile to his junior. Kitty Pateman’s counsel did not get up at all.

The young man left the box. He was one of George’s group: he had not been asked how he could afford a car, or whether he shared it with anyone, or whether he also shared a cottage, or at what kind of parties he and Cora Ross had met. No one had a reason, so it appeared, to disturb that underground. This had been the guess that I made to George. I glanced at him, heavy-faced, mouth a little open: perhaps, even after the prosecutor’s ending, not so many minutes before, he felt — as we all do in extreme calamities, when a minor selfish worry is taken away — some sort of relief.

Another witness, this time the manager of the garage where the women’s own car had been left for repairs. When had it been deposited? September 19. What was supposed to be wrong?

At this the judge, shifting himself from one haunch to the other as he spoke, became restive.

“Surely we are going into very great detail, aren’t we, Mr Recorder?”

“With your permission, my lord, I wish to establish the whole build up before the child was abducted.”

“I suggest we are all ready to take a certain amount for granted.”

“This is a complicated structure, my lord.” Bosanquet spoke mildly, but he didn’t budge. “I require my pieces of bricks-and-mortar.”

“Spare us anything you don’t require,” said the judge, with a nod which was resigned but courteous.

The garage manager’s mystification: she (Cora Ross) could have put it right in ten minutes. She was a first-class mechanic herself.

Next witness, Detective-Constable Hallam. He was raw-boned, quite young, and as he stood in the box his head was bent down towards his hands. His pertinacity about the car. “I was not satisfied,” he said, for once raising his head. His manner was stern but guilty-seeming, he hesitated over answering matter-of-fact questions. Gradually Bosanquet’s junior, young Archibald Rose, dug the story out of him. How he hadn’t been satisfied. How at the garage he thought something was strange. How he made enquiries all along the half-mile between Eric’s home and the recreation ground, asking if a green Morris had ever been seen. When had the car first patrolled that route? (That couldn’t be answered, but it might have been as much as a month before September 20.)

The young constable, who had been a halting, unhappy witness, was given a special word of approval. Without him, it might have taken much longer to look in the direction of Rose Cottage.

Statements from persons who had noticed a green Morris, read in a strong voice by the Clerk of Assize. “I saw this car when I was getting home from work, but did not take its number…”

A detective-sergeant in the box, the first search of the cottage. The piece of Meccano. Exhibit. A plain-clothes policeman, standing by the clerk, with a stiff robot-like movement held up his hand. From where I sat, just a glint of metal. Then he exposed it on his palm. The gesture was as mechanical as the plaything. An ordinary object, prosaic and innocent: yet it did not seem quite real, or else had its own aura. An object like Davidson’s capsule.

“Was this the piece of Meccano you discovered in Rose Cottage…?”

“It was.”

Another detective-sergeant (the cottage and garden had been crowded with them). The Meccano box. Exhibited. The plain-clothes policeman went through his drill.

“Was this the box you discovered in the garden of Rose Cottage…?”

“It was.”

The shop assistant at the Midland Educational Company. The bill for a Number One Meccano Set.

“Is this bill dated September 18?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember selling this set?”

“Yes, I do.”

“To whom did you sell it?”

“To the one sitting there—” She glanced at Cora and away again.

“That was on Wednesday, September 18?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bosanquet asked her to make sure of the date. “I’m sorry to press this, my lord, but you will see what I am establishing—” The judge turned to the jury. “Bricks-and-mortar,” he said. He sounded affable and half-sardonic: but he was being fair to Bosanquet, underlining that this was evidence of intent. Following him, Benskin tried to shake the identification, but the girl was both gentle and strong-willed, and he got nowhere.

Witnesses, names, occupations, addresses, came, went, were forgotten, a random slice of the town. One stood out, a Mrs Ramsden, who testified about seeing a boy being driven in the car. She was plump, with a sharp nose poking out of the flesh: as a girl she must have had a cheerful, impertinent prettiness. As soon as she gave evidence, she gave the impression (much more so than any of the policemen) of being a natural witness. She was one of those people, and there were very few, who seemed to be abnormally observant and at the same time scrupulous. Yes, she had seen a brown Austin driving out of the city on the evening of September 20. What time? She could be fairly exact: she was hurrying home for a television programme: about 5.45. Where was this? Not far from the recreation ground? A few hundred yards away. What did she notice? A small boy sitting between two people in the front seat. She didn’t know Eric: from the photographs, it could have been him, it looked very like him, she couldn’t be more positive than that. A woman was driving the car. The other person in the front seat? Might have been a man or woman. Fair-haired, wearing dark glasses. What was the boy doing? He seemed to be waving. He might have been struggling? He might have been, but she didn’t think of it at the time. She thought that he was laughing. The person with dark glasses had an arm round him? Yes, round his neck. Like this? Bosanquet beckoned one of the plain-clothes policemen, who, sheepish and red-faced, had his neck encircled by counsel’s arm. There was a titter, tight and guilty, the first that afternoon. Both defence counsel cross-examined. Kitty’s, a young silk called Wilson, his actor’s face hard, masculine, frowning, was trying to demonstrate that the boy had gone willingly. Benskin, that the kidnapping might have taken place much later. To most people in the court, none of this could matter, it only dragged out the strain. All those who were used to courts of law would have known by now, though, that they were struggling with their instructions, though I for one couldn’t be certain what any of them were hoping for.

When Mrs Ramsden had left, the judge coughed, and said in an amiably testy fashion: “I see the clock has stopped.” Heads turned to the back of the court. “I make it,” said the judge, “very nearly half past four. I don’t want to go much beyond the half-hour, Mr Bosanquet. I hope you can be brief with the next witness. After all, no one challenges the fact that the boy was taken by car to Rose Cottage. That is so, Mr Benskin, Mr Wilson?”

For the first time, Bosanquet conceded the point. He left the witness — who swore to sighting the car near Rose Cottage on the Friday evening — to his junior, and within minutes the judge was bowing himself out of court.

It had been difficult to feel, since the end of Bosanquet’s speech, how much people in the courtroom had been anaesthetised by the sheer mechanics of the trial. We soon knew. As we walked with George through the entrance hall, there was an air of hostility which, like a blast of freezing wind, tightened the skin. Then came, not loud, but menacing and sustained, the sound of hissing. George threw his head erect, jamming his hat further back so that his forehead was exposed. The hisses went on. They were not directed at him as a person (at the time I didn’t think of it: all I wanted was to lead him through the angry crowd). He wasn’t well enough known in the town for that. But he was connected with those two, and this was enough.

We got him into the street. There were no taxis anywhere near, and we had to walk half-a-mile, people following us, women shouting at him, before we found one. On the way to the station, where Margaret had to catch a train back to London, none of us spoke. When we came in sight of the station building, the red brick glared like a discord in the spring sunshine.

While I paid off the taxi, George stood mute by Margaret’s side. Then he said: “Well, I’d better leave you now.”

No, we each told him, he must wait and see her off.

“I’d better leave you now,” George repeated.

We looked into his face. It was wild, his eyes gazing past us: and yet, how was it different from lunchtime, what did his expression mean?

“I don’t want you to, you know,” said Margaret.

“I think I’d better. I’ve got some things to do.”

Without even glancing at each other, we thought we couldn’t press him any further. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” he said to me. “Of course,” I replied. He said to Margaret: “It was very nice of you to come,” and kissed her.

When we were alone in the booking hall — the smell of damp wood and train smoke so familiar to me, but that evening bringing back neither homesickness nor meaning — Margaret said: “That must be the worst of it over, mustn’t it?”

Her eyes were sharp with pain. All I could say was that I didn’t know.

Down in the refreshment room, gazing at me across the marble table, she was saying that she was glad I was staying with the Gearys. That had happened because Vicky and her father had by this time left the Residence. Margaret had spent the previous night with me at the Gearys’ house; she had liked them and trusted them more than she did usually at first sight. She wasn’t being entirely protective; she would have welcomed their good nature for herself as well as for me; she had been appalled by that day in the court. Before she went through it, she had imagined what it would be like. She had believed that she would be stronger than I was. Now she didn’t want (and this was true of the reporters and police officers, more used to the horrors of fact than the rest of us) to be alone.

We were sitting there fidgeting with the glasses on the table, as we might have been in a love affair that was going wrong, articulateness deserting us, pauses between the words.

She said: “Could we have taken it?”

After a gap, I said: “I’ve told you, sometimes I am afraid that one can take anything.”

“I wasn’t thinking only of the little boy.”

I nodded.

“I was thinking of the parents. If it had been ours—”

I didn’t need to reply.

In time, she went on: “And I was thinking of the parents of the others. The ones who did it. If they had been ours—”

Slowly I said: “Perhaps there, life’s a bit more merciful. Somehow one might cover it up or make excuses—”

“Do you really believe that?”

When the London train drew in, she clung to me on the platform until the whistle shrilled.

The Gearys’ house was right on the outskirts of the town, in a district which had been open fields when I was a boy. Small gardens lay in front of the neat semi-detached pairs on both sides of the road: junior managers lived there, as well as modest professional men like Denis Geary. He and his wife were waiting for me in their sitting-room, bright, well-kept, reproductions of Vermeer and Van Gogh on the walls, on the mantelpiece photographs of their children, groups of the family on holidays abroad.

A copy of the local evening paper under the bookshelf. Headlines about the trial. As he stood up, handsome, grizzled, Denis pointed to it.

“Now,” he said, “you’ve got to forget all about it.”

He was years younger than I was. But he was talking benevolently, as though I were a junior teacher on his staff, coming to him with some domestic trouble.

I said that it wasn’t so easy.

“Lewis, you’ve got to forget about it.” He went on, it might have happened anywhere, it had absolutely nothing to do with the normal run of things, we just had to wipe it out of our minds.

I wasn’t used to being spoken to paternally. Not many men had ever tried to father me. But Denis was one of this world’s fathers, and I didn’t resent it.

“He’s right, you know,” said Alison Geary.

“I promise you,” said Denis, “that we’ll look after anything practical when it’s all over. We’ll look after old George as far as we can.”

Yes, they would visit the Patemans and the two young women, wherever they were sent. It was all in the line of duty. They had visited criminals before now, they took it as naturally as talking to me.

Denis said: “Now forget it and have a drink.”

They had observed, at those dinners at the Shaws’, that I enjoyed drinking. They had laid in more liquor than would be expected in a headmaster’s house and more, I couldn’t help thinking, than they could comfortably afford. But I wasn’t saving their pockets when I told them that, in times of trouble, I drank very little. It was true. They were so kind that I was confiding in them.

“I think I can understand that,” said Denis. He said it with fellow-feeling, as though he had gone through dark nights. Just for an instant, I wondered if he were more complex than he seemed. Heartily he came back: “Still, you must have a little.”

They set to work to distract me both then and through dinner, which, as on the night before, was a delectable English meal. The Vice-Chancellorship — Denis guessed that I might still be made interested in jobs. They hadn’t yet found a successor to Arnold Shaw. They had offered the post to Walter Luke, but he had turned it down. Why? Denis replied, straight-faced: “He said that he didn’t want to become a stuffed shirt.” I couldn’t resist a grin: that sounded like the authentic Walter. Someone asked him if there were other reasons. Denis said, still straight-faced: “He said he couldn’t improve on the one he had already given.”

Comprehensive education — they were both campaigning for it, it meant that our old school, Denis’ and mine, would cease to be a grammar school. “But it’s the only answer,” said Alison eagerly. “It really is.” She was as devoted a radical as her husband; she brought out all the arguments of the day. The lives we were wasting: we three had been lucky in our education, though we hadn’t thought so, we had been lucky, compared with the neighbours round us. This was the only answer. It was also good politics; the public wanted it, whatever the Tories said, and that was nothing against it; but the point was, it was right.

Although she had been talking to distract me, she was committed. Her bright sepia eyes were shining: it was easy to imagine her, quick-stepping, full-bodied, tapping at the voters’ doors.

She couldn’t raise an argument. She spoke about their children. The daughter had been married that winter. Did they like the man? He’s a very good chap, said Denis, we think they’re very happy. Where were they living? He was a schoolteacher in the town, said Alison.

“Well, you did the same,” said Denis, with an uxorious grin.

“He’s an extremely nice man,” said Alison. “He’ll make her a good husband.” Then, as though she couldn’t help it, her face changed. It began to wear an expression I had not seen in her before — was it wistful or shamefaced?

“But I always used to think she’d do something different, after all.”

“She’s going to be happy,” Denis told her, like one repeating himself.

“Yes. She’s a pretty girl,” Alison turned to me, “though I am her mother.”

From the photographs, that I could believe.

“She’s got a lot of imagination too. She always used to be reaching after something wonderful. I used to think that she’d finish up by marrying — well, someone like André Malraux.”

It seemed a curious dream: even though Alison, determined to be practical, explained that she meant, naturally, a younger version of M. Malraux. The Gearys’ marriage was one of the happier ones: but what Alison dreamed for her daughter, she must, of course, once have dreamed for herself.

They didn’t stop working to snag my interest until, very early, I went up to my room. Through the open window came faint scents of the spring. Clouds rushed across the sky, unveiling stars. At the bottom of the garden there were no houses in sight, only a range of trees. The moon, rising above one level branch, was just turning from silver to gold. In some moods that sight would be a comfort or a cheat, telling one that there was an existence more desirable than ours.

I might have remembered, though I didn’t, someone who refused to take false comfort. We did not exist outside out of time. Those were only words which drugged us, which made us blind to our condition. He said to me, on just such a night as this, that he hated the stars.

I stayed at the window, looking out at the night sky.

27: An Impermissible Term

THE next morning, I arrived early in the entrance hall. Through a side door I could see the courtroom, already nearly full. There was not such a queue outside as on the first day. Lawyers hustled by, swinging their briefcases, on the way to robe. Then, as I stood about, George Passant, also early, joined me. After his loud greeting, which hadn’t varied in all the years, his first remark was: “I’ve been thinking, I don’t think I shall fag to come in today.”

I was so surprised that I hardly noticed the old-fashioned slang.

“You won’t?”

“I don’t see any point in it today.”

His manner was bold, defiant, diffident, like a young man’s. As I looked at him, I didn’t understand. Other people in the hall were looking at him, but there was no demonstration. One might have thought he was frightened of another crowd like that of the night before, but I knew that wasn’t true. His courage was absolute, as it had always been. He was saying that tomorrow or next day, they might be getting somewhere. Then I believed I had it. He had been working out the progress of the trial. This morning or afternoon, which he wanted to escape, the medical evidence would come into court. That, though he couldn’t tell me and was brazening it out, he wasn’t able to endure.

“I think that I shall stay,” I said.

“Well then,” said George with relief, “I’ll see you later on.”

After I had watched him leave, I asked a policeman to take a message to the Deputy Sheriff enquiring whether he could still find me a place. Before the answer came back, I saw, and this was another surprise, for at that time I hadn’t been told of the telephoning between him and Margaret, my brother Martin. He wasn’t smiling, but he said: “I thought you mightn’t mind a bit of company.”

I recognised the clerk from the morning before, polite and welcoming. Yes, of course there were two seats. Yes, of course the Deputy Sheriff would be delighted to invite Dr Eliot. The clerk led us down a corridor behind the court, narrow and white-painted, past the judge’s room, out to the official box.

From there our line of sight was only just above the level of the lawyers’ wigs. We had to look up to see the crowd in the rake of the court, heads lit up by the long windows behind them. The row of barristers, the next row of solicitors — suddenly they reminded me of ministers on the front bench in the Commons, their PPS’s whispering to them: I might have been watching them, as I had done often enough from the civil servants’ box, but the angle was different, for it was like being on the wrong side of the Speaker’s chair.

Somehow we were in an enclosure with the professionals, part of the machine. An official sitting beside us gave us piles of typescript, records of the police court hearing, depositions.

The two women came up into the dock, their faces, beyond the lawyers, on a level with ours. Cora stared straight at me, without a sign of recognition. As she turned quarter-face to her left, listening to Kitty, she seemed like a painting I had once seen in the Uffizi, with a visage stormy, troubled, handsome (later I was puzzled to discover that the painting was, of all things, Lorenzo di Credi’s Venus). Martin, who had not seen either of them before, sat forward, tense. Kitty was saying something, eyes sharp and flickering. At the end she gave a quick, surreptitious, involuntary smile. Her skin appeared to have darkened, not become paler, through imprisonment, and now she looked older than her partner.

Through the door just beside our box, the procession entered. As he finished his bow to the jury, beaming, affable, the judge gave me an appraising glance.

The first part of the morning was routine: so much routine that there was a sense of let-down in the court, but Bosanquet was as undeterred as a batsman playing himself in for his second hundred. Questions from the judge: placid answers from Bosanquet, this was a matter of “filling in some pieces”. So there was evidence leading to the weekend of September 20–22. Identification of Cora in the village. A good deal of car and transport evidence. Proof that the story of a bus back to the town, late on the Sunday night, was a fabrication. Sighting of the car near Markers Copse on the same Sunday night. Sighting of the car, close to the cottage, early the following morning. Examination of the car (this was the first appearance of the forensic scientists). Blood on the floor, close to the back seat. Category of blood.

Martin, like Margaret, had not attended a criminal trial before. He wasn’t prepared for the patches of doldrums, the pauses for the judge to catch up with his longhand, the flatness of facts, or even the sheer numbers of the witnesses who came and went, names, addresses, occupations, units in the lonely crowd, just as we to them were units too. (How many people did one know? Intimately? A hundred, if one was lucky. Slightly? Perhaps ten thousand, if one had lived a busy life.) The witnesses came and went: so had the students before the university court the year before, most of us expecting never to see them again. There, but only by chance, I had been wrong: it hadn’t been my last sight of the Patemans. So that, as I looked back, that ridiculous set-piece appeal not only loomed stiffer and more formal than this present trial, but also took on a significance, a kind of predictive ominousness, that it hadn’t in the slightest degree possessed when I was sitting through it.

Already half past twelve. The court stirred. The prosecution was coming to the discovery of the body. Archibald Rose began to examine Mr Coe, the huntsman. The evidence was, of course, a matter of form, since no one could contest it: but it took some effort to drag it out. Mr Coe didn’t appear at all like the romantic picture of an open-air worker: his face was pallid, his hair jet black, his cheeks sunken. In addition, he was one of those witnesses who, when told to speak up, find it — just as my least favourite student had done — as impossible as a tone-deaf person asked to sing a tune. Archibald Rose had a fine resonant performer’s voice: in a cheerful reproving tone he kept saying — “You’re not to speak to me, you must speak to my lord and the jury.” Mr Coe looked lugubriously across to the jury box, raised his volume for a sentence, and then let his chin descend into his chest. My place was within touching distance of the jury, and though I had sharp ears I was missing one word in two. The judge broke in: he was a hunting man, and, though Coe didn’t become more audible, he nodded his head once or twice less sombrely, as though sensible men were talking about sensible things. It was a famous pack, the judge was saying, one of the best packs in the shires, wasn’t it? The judge had never seen or heard of hounds behaving as those two had done that morning, had Mr Coe? If they hadn’t been so cussed, would Mr Coe have thought of returning to the spot?

Coe gave a happy smile when told that he could leave the box, so happy that others smiled in response.

Exhibit. Policeman holding up a small plastic bag, testifying that within were the clothes found on the body. There was also a polythene wrapper, which, for some reason not explained, had been used to cover the boy’s head. The bag was opened: not many had attention to spare for the sight of bits of clothing; all round, as though there never had been any other and as though it would last for ever, was the charnel smell.

“Please remove that,” said the judge. “And we will wait a moment before the next witness.”

The next witness had to be taken care of, for it was Eric Mawby’s mother. She should have given evidence the previous afternoon, but — so the Deputy Sheriff’s assistant, sitting at his desk in our box, told us as we waited, the smell still in our throats — she had not been well enough to attend. However, when she did step into the box, she was erect, and her voice was firm. She was a tall woman, with a high-nosed, proud, imperious face. As the judge asked after her health and told her she would not be questioned for long, she replied like one who enjoyed having attention paid to her.

Yes, Eric always went to play in the summer and autumn before his father came home for his tea (tea in that home must have meant a substantial meal). He always went to the recreation ground, which was a good safe place. Yes, he was always expected back by a quarter to seven. Yes, he was a good obedient boy, he’d never been more than a few minutes late. But that Friday night when he didn’t return— Enquiries. The police.

Bosanquet was asking her as few questions as he could manage: but he had to say: “On October 9, did the police tell you that a boy’s body had been found?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Did they ask you to identify the body?”

“They did.”

“It was your son’s body, Mrs Mawby?”

“It was Eric.” Her head was thrown back, her tone was not so much piteous, or even angry, as commanding.

“And the clothes — they were his clothes?”

“Yes, they were his things.”

Bosanquet thanked her, and finished. Defence counsel shook their heads. The judge thanked her, congratulated her on her courage, and gave her his sympathy. “Thank you, my lord,” she said, taking pity from no one, proud to act as though she were used to courts.

On the way out down the corridor — the court rose after her evidence — Martin was saying that our mother would have behaved something like that. As soon as we reached the entrance hall, Archibald Rose, the junior prosecution counsel, approached us, looking boyish now that he had taken off his wig. “Hallo, I was watching out for you.” He introduced himself; he was the nephew of my old chief Hector Rose. He said that Clive Bosanquet and he wondered if we would like to lunch with them.

In Rose’s car we drove into the centre of the town, talking about acquaintances. All four of us had been drilled in the compact English professional world, where, if you didn’t know someone, you at least knew someone else who did.

Sitting in the restaurant, the lawyers studied the menu. They had been working hard, they were hungry. Bosanquet allowed himself one drink. Close to, his expression was sadder and more authoritative than it seemed in court.

“What do you think of all this?” he said across the table, meaning the case.

I shook my head.

“If you’d stayed at the bar, you’d have done this sort of job, you know.”

“Do you all get used to it?” asked Martin with hard sympathy.

“Do you imagine anyone ever gets quite used to something like this?” Bosanquet was as direct as we were. Despite his comfortable senatorial frame, there was not much padding about him. Young Rose, whose spirits were less heavy, tried to talk of another case. Bosanquet spooned away at a plate of soup.

He looked up.

“I’ve had about enough of it,” he said.

He went on: “I’m afraid I’ve got to bring it all out. I warn you, this afternoon isn’t going to be pleasant.”

A week before, he told us, he had thought that they could “smother some of the horrors”. They weren’t good for anyone to hear. But — he had to go on.

“Look here,” I interrupted, “I’ve been puzzled all along. What are the other side expecting?”

At that, Bosanquet and Rose glanced at each other, and Bosanquet suddenly got away from his revulsion and began to talk like a man at his ease. This was professional, this was clean. Neither of them could understand it. Something had gone wrong. The case was proved to the last inch. The defence counsel knew it, of course. Their only line was to make the best deal they could about the women’s mental states (“We shall go for them there, anyway,” said Archibald Rose). Ted Benskin was a first-rate lawyer. Bosanquet was certain that was how he wanted to plead. But something had gone wrong.

“I shan’t be surprised if they don’t cut their losses any moment now.” (That is, accept the prosecution’s case and make their plea.) “I tell you, no one will be better pleased than me. As it is, I’ve got to plod on through all this filth.”

He gave a sweet, irritated smile.

“And old Jumbo doesn’t make it any easier. I wish he wouldn’t try to run my case for me.”

“Old Jumbo” was Mr Justice Fane. This too was professional, this was clean — in a different compartment from blood, cruelty, the smell of death. Just as Mansel was intent upon his professional problems while I, in a different compartment, was speculating about going blind. Bosanquet was happier now. Everyone loved old Jumbo, he was saying. He had been kind to Bosanquet himself all through his career. But there was no doubt about it, he hadn’t much of a lawyer’s sympathy with a well-built case.

Bosanquet was assessing the old judge like a man who, in the nearish future, might become a judge himself. It would be a good end to his career: and, unlike Mr Justice Fane, he had no private means. As with a writer or an actor, he wasn’t secure from illness or old age. The barrister’s life had altered since my time, they told me. How much had I made in my first year? Under a hundred pounds. Nowadays one would make a decent income, getting on for two thousand. Rose said that he had done so himself. But he appeared to have some money — which surprised me, for his uncle had none, and his father was a suffragan bishop. Anyway, Rose had acquired a house in the country when he joined the circuit. He was inviting us all there, including the defence lawyers, in a couple of nights’ time.

Martin, lacking my nostalgic interest in legal careers, put in a question. He said, getting back to a preoccupation of his own: “Have you any idea which of those two was the prime mover?”

Bosanquet said, once more clouded: “No, we don’t know.”

“I suppose it might have been the butch,” said Rose.

“We don’t know,” said Bosanquet. He said it in a subdued tone, but with authority. “There are plenty of things about this case that we don’t know.” He addressed Martin, who might not have realised how much information police and lawyers possessed, but couldn’t prove or use: “But we do know two things. They had planned this, or something like this, literally for months beforehand. And they were going to kill, right from the beginning. That was the real point all along.”

Martin nodded.

“It’s ten past two,” said Bosanquet, without changing his tone. “We ought to be going.” He added, as old Herbert Getliffe used to say before going into court, like a captain calling to his team in the dressing-room: “All aboard.”

The afternoon began quietly. In the dock Kitty was sitting, pen in hand, but for the moment not writing. The first witness, examined by Rose, was an experimental officer from one of the Midland forensic laboratories, an unassertive friendly man, his manner similar to those of the meteorologists who predicted the weather before the television news. Yes, he had examined samples of blood after Eric Mawby’s body was discovered. These came from another laboratory (“We shall have a deposition to establish,” said Archibald Rose, more emphatic than his senior, “that these samples were taken from relics of dried blood still remaining on his head wounds and also on his clothes.”) It had been possible to determine the blood group. The blood group was the same as that already given in evidence for specimens of blood found on the floor and walls of Rose Cottage.

Another experimental officer. Blood found on a piece of clothing, a woman’s nylon blouse not completely burnt, in the garden of Rose Cottage. Identical blood group.

Deposition about taking samples of blood from K M Pateman, C H P Ross. Another witness, from another laboratory, tested these samples (at this stage, the scientific tests seemed mysteriously ramified). Neither belonged to the same group as that of the other specimens.

All muted, abstract as a chart of last year’s trade returns, except for Rose’s ringing voice.

A new witness mounted into the box, and Bosanquet stood up himself. Laurence McQuillin. Home Office pathologist. His arms were folded, he was short, sturdy, unvivacious as a Buddha. He was practised at giving evidence, and he also enjoyed exposition: so that, though he was extremely positive, people did not react against him, but wanted to listen. Bosanquet must have examined him before, and carefully let him give an answer about the problems presented by a body buried for three weeks. “In some matters,” said McQuillin, “there is an area of doubt. I shall indicate to my lord and the jury where the conclusions have to be tentative.”

“But you have reached some definite conclusions?”

“I have.”

One definite conclusion was that the boy’s body showed two types of injury. The first type was wounds which could not have caused death and which had, with reasonable certainty, been inflicted some considerable time before death. These wounds included lacerations on the back, buttocks, and thighs. The exact number could not be decided. Well over twenty. There were also cuts on the breast and groin. A number of burns on the upper arms and shoulders. Not less than ten. Marks on the ankles and wrists.

“What were these wounds inflicted with?”

“There must have been different instruments. The lacerations on the back and buttocks could have been caused by a stick. If so, it must have been used with severe force.”

“And the others?”

“The cuts would have needed a sharp instrument. A knife could have been used. Or scissors.”

“The burns?”

“I cannot be certain. They are quite small in area. Perhaps a lighted cigarette end, but that is only a speculation.”

The marks on the ankles and wrists were minor. They were consistent with the child’s arms and legs having been tied, but that also was a speculation.

“None of these injuries had any connection with the victim’s death?”

“None at all.”

McQuillin added to his answer: they would have caused extreme pain, but a healthy child, or a healthy adult for that matter, would have recovered physically in a comparatively short time.

“How do you reach your conclusion that they were incurred a considerable period before death?”

There were two reasons, McQuillin said. One was simple and didn’t require technical explanation. Blood, in considerable quantity, had been found on the outside of the boy’s clothes. This had come from the head wounds. Almost none had seeped through to the inside of his shirt and shorts. On the other hand, some of the body wounds, not all, but many of the lacerations as well as the cuts, had resulted in the effusion of blood. There was no trace of this blood on the inside of his clothes. He had been killed when he was fully dressed. Thus he must have received the body wounds some time before: possibly, and in fact probably, over a period of hours: presumably while he was naked.

The second reason was technical — McQuillin described the physiology of flesh wounds, and their rate of healing. If the body had been discovered sooner, he could have been precise about the relative time of the head and body wounds. As it was, all indications pointed in the same direction, that there were hours between them.

“There is no other explanation for those body wounds than the one you have given?”

“I see no other explanation except systematic torture.”

McQuillin had not raised his voice. The judge, leaning forward, spoke even more softly.

“I think it is better for us, Doctor McQuillin, if you restrict yourself to your scientific findings.”

“I am sorry, my lord,” said McQuillin.

“I understand,” said the judge.

The head injuries — these had been the cause of death? He was killed, said McQuillin, by multiple head injuries, multiple fractures of the skull. There had been seven blows, and possibly more. Any one of several blows would have been sufficient to cause death. One group of five had been delivered by something like a heavy poker or an iron bar. The others, by a solid obtuse weighted surface, such as the anterior wooden portion of an axe handle. Yes, the bleeding would have been copious. “Nothing bleeds so copiously as the scalp,” McQuillin added. “There must also, with such wounds, have been a discharge of brain tissue. And fragments of bone thrown out, though these have not been found. The vault of the skull showed a number of gaps.”

The blows had been delivered from in front (here McQuillin beckoned a policeman, like a lecturer carried away by his subject and needing to illustrate it), or at least the first one had been. The head had been held back by the hair — like this — possibly not by the person delivering the blow. The remainder of the blows could have followed when the body had sunk to a kneeling or recumbent position–

Benskin interrupted. “This doctor in my submission is going beyond the evidence of a medical expert.”

The judge said: “Mr Benskin, I think I agree with you. Doctor, you have told us your conclusions about the cause of death? You are quite certain about them?”

“I am quite certain, my lord.”

“Then I hope we might leave it there, Mr Bosanquet.”

Bosanquet stood, thinking, and said: “I am content.”

Both defence counsel cross-examined. They were sharp and edgy about the doctor’s reconstructions. Neither of them was free from the miasma which had during his evidence settled on the court. It was a miasma which both rotted the nerves and at the same time held them stretched. Glances at the dock were furtive. The doctor had been imagining how the blows had been struck. Creeping glances at the two women. They knew whether he was right.

Head wounds, body wounds — the lawyers were doing their job, they had to bring the descriptions back before us. To some there, those would be nothing but names by now. But not to Wilson, the younger of the silks. He sounded angry: he could not, less so than Benskin, insulate himself: he took it out of the doctor, partly because it was tactically right, but also because he genuinely, and for his own sake, wanted to disbelieve. The head wounds — no one doubted they had been inflicted, no one doubted they were the cause of death. But surely the doctor’s reconstruction was entirely fanciful? In any case, it was not relevant: if it had been relevant, anyone’s reconstruction would have been worth about as much, which was next to nothing at all?

“I have had some experience of these matters,” said McQuillin impassively.

“I repeat, your reconstruction is fanciful. But that is not the point. The death happened, we all know that. I suggest to you, your conclusions about the body wounds are also fanciful?”

“I have recorded my findings. I could give further conclusions about those wounds.”

“They might have been incurred very near the time of death—?”

“I regard it as most unlikely.”

“It is not impossible?”

“In giving scientific evidence, it is often wrong to say something is impossible.”

“That is, your picture of long-sustained wounding — I might remind you that you used an impermissible term for which my lord reproved you — your picture goes right beyond the medical evidence?”

“In my judgment, it is the only one that fits the facts.”

Wilson could not leave it alone. Questions about lacerations, cuts, bloodstains, the whole pathological examination over again.

At last the judge said: “Mr Wilson, I shouldn’t put obstacles in your way if I thought we were getting any further. But I do suggest that the jury has as much information as we can give it. And perhaps this is getting burdensome for us all.”

He said it aseptically. Wilson, face flushed, wiped his forehead, continued with more questions about flesh wounds, and then sat down.

Bosanquet’s re-examination was brief. He remarked that the doctor had been a long time in the box, and asked if, as a result, he wished to modify any of his statements of fact or his conclusions. McQuillin was as impassive as when he first answered to his name. He had given considered opinions, he answered. He did not wish to change in the slightest anything he had said.

It was well after half past four, the court had overrun for the first time in the trial: the judge had watched the clock, but not interrupted.

28: Another Question

WHEN at last Martin and I got out into the air, we heard a voice behind us calling. It was Edgar Hankins who, nowadays turning his hand to non-literary journalism, was writing special articles on the trial for a Sunday paper. He came running after us, his face cheerful, rubbery, sweating.

“Let’s all go and have tea and then a drink,” he said.

Before I could reply, Martin said: “No, not now. Lewis and I have something to talk about.”

Hankins dropped back, his face still not having forgotten the smile of invitation. I hadn’t often heard Martin impolite before: his tone had been colder than when I offered to help out financially over his son. As a rule with Hankins, because of their past history, he was specially considerate. He didn’t speak until we were sitting in his car. Then, before he started it, he said: “I couldn’t bear his brand of nonsense tonight.”

He went on: “You know, we could write it for him. Great throbbing pieces about how we’re all guilty. So really no one is guilty. So really everything is as well as could be expected in an admittedly imperfect world.”

Neither of us said much more — Martin’s face was hard and angry, he made another aside about “saccharine rhetoric” — until, a little later, he rejoined me in the bar of his hotel.

It was a bar which we both knew: though, since I had left the town for good when he was a schoolboy, we had never before sat there together. It was still a meeting place for men coming out of their offices on the way home to the prosperous suburbs: the income level had always been higher than in the pubs which George and I most often used. Though the bar had stayed geographically in the same place, it had been transmogrified, like the hotel and most of the town itself. It had become plushier and, in the American style, much darker, lights gleaming surreptitiously behind the sandwich bar. But the people looked much the same, hearty middle-aged men, bald or greying, a good many of them carrying their weight on athletes’ muscles: from some of these Martin, as we sat in a corner alcove, kept getting shouts of greeting. For while I might be recognised from photographs, he had more acquaintances here, they had played games together before the war. Amiable impersonal backchat: how are you getting on, I’m an old man now, I can’t get my arm over any more, you never did get it very high, I shall soon be taking to bowls. Some of them had made money, Martin mentioned, when we weren’t observed. There was a lot of quiet money in this town. There were also one or two casualties in that bar, boyhood friends who were scrabbling for a living, or who had taken to drink. Most of them, though, had come through into this jostling, vigorous, bourgeois life. All round us he could see the well-being, the survival, and sometimes the kindness of the flesh.

Was that any sort of reassurance to him? I was wondering. We had said little to each other: to an extent, we did not need to. I had let slip a remark about the time-switch at Auschwitz, and he had picked it up, just as Margaret would have done, or often young Charles. I didn’t have to explain. I meant — someone had said it before me — that at Auschwitz one could not help being invaded by the relativity of time. The relativity which was at once degrading and ironic. That is, on the same day, at the same moment, people had been sitting down to meals or begetting children while, a few hundred yards away, others had been dying in torture. It had been the same with this boy’s death. While he was beginning to suffer fright and worse than fright, the rest of us had, at the same moment, through the switch of time, been living as healthily as those men round us in the bar, talking or making love or maybe being preoccupied with what seemed a serious worry of our own. Martin understood without my saying so. He did not understand (I did not want to explain, perhaps because it reminded me of another death) that I had been, in court, working out the hours of the boy’s suffering. That might have been going on — in all probability it had been going on — during a happy dinner party at our London flat, when Margaret and I were looking forward to the children’s future, making a fuss of Vicky, and being entertained by Martin’s own son.

Martin did not know that. But he knew something else, when I mentioned Auschwitz. For he and I and others of our age had seen the films of the concentration camps just after the troops had entered and when the horror came before our eyes like a primal, an original, an Adamic fact. Yes, with what we possessed of decency and political sense we had made our plans, so that, if people like us had any part in action at all, this couldn’t happen again: and we had gone on spending, though men like Rubin told us that we were wasting our time, a good deal of our lives in action. And yet, while we watched those films, we had, as well as being appalled, felt a shameful and disgusting pleasure. It was almost without emotion, it was titillating, trivial and (just as when Margaret asked me questions in our drawing-room) seepingly corrupt. We were fascinated (the sensation was as affectless as that) because men could do these things to other men.

The wretched truth was, it had been the same in the courtroom that afternoon. Not only in us, but in everyone round us. But it was enough to know it for ourselves.

So, when I spoke, as though casually, of Auschwitz, Martin did not ask any questions. He nodded (raising one hand to a greeting from the other side of the bar), and looked at me with a glance which was grim but comradely.

In time he said: “What people feel doesn’t matter very much. It’s what they do, we’ve got to think about.”

It sounded bleak, like so much that he said as he grew older. Yet, as we sat there, old acquaintances pushing by him, he was as much at the mercy of his thoughts as I was, maybe more so. We were different men, though we had our links of sympathy. What we had learned from our lives, we had learned in different fashions: we had often been allies, but then events had driven us together: perhaps now, in our fifties, we were closer than we had ever been. But Martin, whom most people thought the harder and more self-sufficient of the two, had once had the more brilliant and the more innocent hopes. I had started off in this town in the first blaze of George’s enlightenment. Let the winds of life blow through you. Live by the flow of your instincts. Salvation through freedom. Like any young man, I had got drunk on those great cries. It wasn’t through any virtue of mine, but simply because of my temperament and my first obsessive love affair, that I couldn’t quite live up to them. But there was another side to it. George, like many radicals of his time, believed, passionately believed, in the perfectibility of man. That I could never do, from the time that I first met him, in my teens. Without possessing a religious faith, I nevertheless — perhaps because I wasn’t good myself — couldn’t help believing in something like original sin.

With Martin, it had gone the other way. He had in his youth, though he had never been such an intimate of George’s and nothing like so fond of him, accepted the whole doctrine. He really did have the splendid dreams. Rip off the chains, and he and everyone else would break through to a better life. He enjoyed himself more as a young man than I had done. He had gone through the existence where ideals and sex and energy are all mixed up — perhaps, even now, when people thought him sardonic and restrictive, there were times when he thought of that existence with some sort of regret. It hadn’t lasted. He was clear-sighted, he couldn’t deny his own experience. His vision of life turned jet black. Yet not completely, not so completely as he spoke or thought. It was what people did that mattered, he had just said, as he had often said before: if that was true, then what he did sometimes betrayed him. After all, it had been he — alone of all of us — who had broken his career, just when he had the power and prizes in his clutch. Conscience? Moral impulse? People wondered. They might have accepted that of Francis Getliffe, not of Martin. But it was he who had done it. Just as it was he who, under the carapace of his pessimism, pretending to himself that he expected nothing, invested so much hope in his son, was wide open to danger through another’s life.

The bar was noisy, but neither of us wanted to leave. The place had been familiar, part of commonplace evenings, to each of us — though it had taken something not commonplace but unimaginable to seat us there together. Martin’s acquaintances downed their liquor. Most of them were middle-aged, not thinking about their age, carried along, like us, by the desire to persist. They looked carefree. For all we could tell, some of them were also at the mercy of their thoughts. One, whom I knew slightly, had reminded me of a photograph in a newspaper that morning: of Margaret and me walking with George Passant, a straggle of women demonstrating behind. Did I know “that crowd”, did I know those two women? The questions had been edged. Martin had answered for me, guarded and official, Passant had been a friend of ours when we were young men. Otherwise the rest of them said their good evenings, wanted to know whether we were staying long, offered us drinks. Someone enquired, why don’t you come back and live here, not a bad place, you know, we could do with you.

Martin said: “If you hadn’t had your connections here, just by chance — would this have meant much to you?”

He was talking of what we had listened to that afternoon.

“Should you have thought about it much?” he went on.

“Should we?” I replied. For Martin, in his unexpressive manner, was using the second person when he meant the first.

“I can’t be sure.”

“Could we have shrugged it off? Some people can, you know.”

I told him about the Gearys, who weren’t opaque, who longed, more than most of us, to create a desirable life. Yes, they could dismiss it: they could still look after both the innocent and guilty: but it seemed to them only an accident, a freak, utterly irrelevant to the desirable life they longed for or to the way they tried to build it.

“That’s too easy,” said Martin.

I said, most of our wisest friends would see it as the Gearys did.

“I should have thought,” said Martin, “we’d had enough of the liberal illusions.”

“Those I’m thinking of aren’t specially illusioned men.”

“Anyone is illusioned who doesn’t get ready for the worst. If there’s ever to be any kind of radical world which it’s possible to live in, it’s got to be built on minimum illusions. If we start by getting ready for the worst, then perhaps we stand a finite chance.”

Though to many it seemed a contradiction in his nature, Martin had remained a committed radical. In terms of action, we had usually been at one.

Someone sent over tankards of beer, smiling at us. With public faces, Martin and I smiled back.

“Tell me,” said Martin, “those two aren’t mad, are they?”

“I’m not certain we know what madness means.”

“Are you evading it?”

“Do you think I should choose to, now?”

I went on: “Do you think I should? All I can tell you is, no one round them thinks they’re mad.”

He said: “They look — like everyone else.”

I replied: “I’m certain of one thing. In most ways, they feel like everyone else. The girl Kitty is in pain. She can’t get comfortable, she’s just as harassed as any other woman with sciatica having to sit under people’s eyes. I’m certain they wake up in the morning often feeling good. Then they remember what they’ve got to go through all day.” It had been like that, I said, when I had the trouble with my eye. The moments of waking: all was fine: and then I saw the black veil. I said that in the existential moments tonight, as they ate their supper and sat in their cells, they must be feeling like the rest of us.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Martin.

“The horror is,” I said, “that they are human.”

The dialogue was going by stops and jerks: soon it fell into doldrums, like an imitation of the doldrums of the trial. We dropped into chit-chat, not even the ordinary family exchange. Neither of us mentioned — and this was very rare — our children. Martin spoke (although I knew nothing of botany and cared less) about a plant he had identified on Wicken Fen. Sometimes we were interrupted, the bar was only beginning to empty. Still we didn’t want to leave. Somehow we seemed protected there. We fetched sandwiches, so as not to have to depart for dinner.

In the middle of the chit-chat, Martin made another start.

“Human beings are dangerous wild animals,” he said. “More dangerous than any other animals on earth.”

I didn’t disagree. But I added that perhaps there were some vestigial possibilities of grace. “You have to give us the benefit of the doubt. We need that, the lot of us, to get along.”

“I think you’ve given us all far too much benefit of the doubt,” said my brother.

Maybe. And yet I believed that in the end I was more suspicious than he was.

Later, as we still sat, talking about someone who had just left the bar, Martin suddenly interrupted: “What do you hope will happen to those two?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what verdict are you hoping for?”

I had explained the legal situation, and how I couldn’t understand why diminished responsibility hadn’t been brought in before now. Otherwise they might as well have pleaded guilty of murder and have done with it. He had already asked about diminished responsibility: what were the chances that the defence could win?

“Do you hope they win?” Martin pressed me.

I hesitated for a long time.

“I just don’t know,” I said.

It would be easier, of course, for their families, I went on, it would be easier for George, it would save some pain.

“It would be easier for everyone,” said Martin. He asked, in a hard and searching tone: “And you still don’t know?”

“Do you?” I replied.

It was his turn to hesitate. At last he shook his head.

By this time there were, beside ourselves, only a couple of men left in the room. It had become cavernous and quiet: now the aquarium light obtruded from behind the counter. Soon, said the barman, there would be another crowd, the after-dinner crowd, coming in. In that case, Martin said, he felt inclined to stay, he didn’t specially want to move yet awhile. Neither of us suggested going out, so that we could be alone, the two of us together.