The Sleep of Reason

29: A Mother’s Remark

ON the third morning, which was a Wednesday, Martin and I returned to our seats in the official box, having lingered about uselessly for George. In the courtroom the chandelier lights were switched on, the clouds pressing towards the windows were dense and purplish, there was a hubbub of wind and rain. Outside it was a dramatic, a faintly apocalyptic, day: but inside the court the proceedings were subdued, voices were quiet, nothing dramatic there.

In fact, police officers were giving routine evidence about the statements made by the two women. Statements which contradicted each other, but that was no news, we had heard it already. We had heard also the elaborations, the different versions, the excuses for past lies, that Kitty had made as the police played on her. None of this was new. It was all delivered flatly, with nothing like the confidence and projection of the medical witness the afternoon before. But it had the curious intimacy that sometimes descended on law courts — an intimacy in which the police, the criminals, the lawyers, the judge, seemed to inhabit a private world of their own, with their own understandings, secrets and even language, shutting out, like an exclusive club, everyone who hadn’t the right of entry.

In the middle of the morning — the gale was blowing itself out, the windows were lighter — Detective Superintendent Maxwell went into the witness box. He was, I knew well enough, a formidable man: but he didn’t look and sound formidable as he stood there, opposite to us, across the court. He looked less bulky, his eyes less probing and hot: he gave his evidence as flatly as the others, unassertively, almost gently.

“Yes, sir, when she was making her fourth statement the defendant Miss Pateman told me that they had picked him up at 5.45 on the Friday night.”

Bosanquet asked, in a similar tone, what she had said. “She said that he was glad to go with them.”

That had been included, in identical words, in Bosanquet’s opening. So had her explanation of the child’s wounds. Leaning confidentially on the box rail, Maxwell said: “She told me, We wanted to teach him to behave. She told me again, We had to teach him to behave.”

He sounded like an uncle talking of a game of parents and children. I hadn’t seen any man conceal his passions more.

The judge put in, also in an unassertive tone: “You went just a little fast for me, Superintendent. Was it — She — told — me — we — had — to — teach — him — to — behave?”

The judge’s pen moved anachronistically over his paper. Then Bosanquet again — When did they begin to ill-treat him? “She never gave me the exact time. All she said was, We started as we meant to go on.”

I was watching Kitty’s face, just then washed clean of lines. Was she out of pain? Her expressions changed like the surface of a pond. She was writing another of her notes.

Maxwell had led her through the Saturday and Sunday hour by hour. “We put him to bed at half past nine on the Saturday, Miss Pateman told me. I asked her, what sort of condition was he in then? She said, We gave him three aspirins and a glass of milk before he went to bed.” You couldn’t elicit how badly he had been hurt by that time, said Bosanquet neutrally. Just as neutrally, Maxwell said, no, she hadn’t made a positive statement. On the Sunday, she did tell him, they had been obliged to be strict. But they had let him look at television at Sunday tea-time. “What sort of condition was he in then, I asked her, but she never replied.”

The defence was raising no objection. There must be an understanding, or they must have a purpose, I thought.

It hadn’t been established, it still wasn’t clear, at what time on the Sunday night he had been killed. It might even have been early on the Monday morning. “I asked her,” Maxwell said, “did you tell him what was going to happen to him. She said he had asked them once, but they didn’t say anything.”

Again, the judge remarked that his pen wasn’t keeping up. Maxwell, constraining himself so tightly, was speaking unnaturally fast. When the judge was satisfied, Maxwell went on: “I think — I should like to have permission to refer to my notes—” studiously, horn-rimmed glasses on his prow-like nose, he read in a small pocket book — “that on that occasion Miss Pateman stated that they hadn’t any knowledge themselves of what did happen to him.”

There was a sudden flurry of confusion. Comparison of statements, Kitty’s fourth and fifth: the judge had mislaid Cora’s second. Bosanquet steered his way through: had Miss Pateman given any account of the actual killing? No, said Maxwell. In one statement she had told him that early on the Sunday evening they had put him on a bus. That contradicted statements, not only by Miss Ross, but by Miss Pateman herself. On another occasion she said that she didn’t know, or seemed to have forgotten, what had happened on the Sunday night.

“Will you clarify that?” said Bosanquet. “She actually said she seemed to have forgotten—?”

“You will find that in her statement number five.” For an instant Maxwell’s eyes flashed.

“What did you say, when you heard that?”

“I said,” Maxwell replied, once more in his most domestic tone, “Now listen, Kitty. I can’t make any promises, but it will save us a lot of worry, you included, if we get this story straight.”

“How did Miss Pateman respond?”

“She said, I will only tell you, I’ve given you the story as far as I remember it. I don’t remember much about anything that Sunday night.”

Bosanquet was passing to Maxwell’s interviews with Cora. The first breakdown: the first admission (it was she who had made it, not Kitty) that they had taken the child out to the cottage that Friday. All quiet and matter-of-fact. Then Benskin was on his feet, jester’s face smiling at Bosanquet. “If my learned friend will permit me. My lord, Mr Wilson and I have agreed that we shall not challenge this evidence for the Crown. Perhaps it would be advisable for us to indicate—”

The judge gave a sapient nod. “Will you please come up, Mr Benskin, Mr Wilson? Mr Recorder?” The barristers moved to the space immediately below the judge’s seat, and there they and the judge and the Clerk of Assize were all whispering in what, to most people in court, seemed a colloguing mystery. In our box, the Deputy Sheriff’s assistant gave us a knowledgeable glance. “About time, too,” he murmured. It was, we assumed, what those on the inside had expected all along: they were changing their plea: it would have been tidier, so he was saying, if they had started clean on the first morning. Meanwhile wigs were nodding below the judge, the old man was half-smiling.

At that moment we heard a loud unmodulated shout. It was Cora, standing in the dock, palms beating on the rail. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with us? What right have you got?” She was jeering at them with fury and contempt; she began to swear, sweeping round at all of us, the oaths coming out unworn, naked, as in one of George’s outbursts. The air was ripped open. Most people in the court hadn’t heard until that moment what anger could sound like. “We’ll answer for ourselves. We don’t want you, you—” again the curse crackled. “Do you think we need to explain ourselves to a set of—?”

Kitty was pulling at her arm, urgently, eyes snapping. The judge spoke to Benskin, and raised his voice, which showed, for the first time, the unevenness of age. “Miss Ross, you are doing yourself no good, you must be quiet.”

“Do you mean to say anything will do us good among you crowd—”

Very quietly, Benskin had moved to the dock. For an instant she stood there, towering over him: then we heard a rasp of command, and there was a nervous relief as she sat down. Whispers from Benskin, low and intense, which none of us could pick up. (“He’s a very tough man,” the official was commenting to Martin.) Shortly he was back in his place, facing the judge. “My lord, I wish to express regret, on behalf of my client,” he said, with professional smoothness, like a man apologising for knocking over a glass of sherry.

“Very well,” said the judge. Then he spoke to the jury: “I have to tell you that you must dismiss this incident from your minds. And I have to tell everyone in court that it must not be mentioned outside, under penalties of which I am sure you are well aware.” He spoke to the jury again, telling them that he now proposed to adjourn the court until the following morning. This was because the defence would then open their case, admitting the facts about the killing, but claiming that the defendants acted with diminished responsibility. “That means, you understand, that they still plead not guilty to murder, but, because of their mental condition, under our present law, are seeking to prove to you that their crime should be regarded as manslaughter.” The judge lingered over this piece of exposition, courteous, paternal, with the savour of an old professor, famous for his lectures, who may soon be delivering the last one. The jury were to realise that the trial would from now on take a different course. The defence would not attempt to disprove the Crown evidence as to the nature of the killing. So that the jury need not worry themselves about certain questions of detail which had already taken up some time, such as precisely when the child was killed. The legal position would, of course, be explained to them carefully by counsel and by himself in his summing up. He realised that this trial was an ordeal for them, and perhaps they would benefit by an afternoon free. “And perhaps,” he turned to the two in the dock, without altering his tone or his kindness, “you also will be able to get a little rest.”

During the morning I had noticed Mrs Pateman in the courtroom, without her husband. I followed her out, and said that if she cared, I could visit her that afternoon. As I spoke to her (she was looking frightened, her eyes darting round like her daughter’s) I noticed that two journalists were watching us. As we knew already, young Charles’ forecasts hadn’t been entirely wrong.

Going back to Martin, I found him among a knot of lawyers in the hall, all simmering with gossip and rumours. Yes, naturally the defence had wanted to make this plea from the beginning. The only resistance had come from the two women. Or really, said someone, with the satisfaction of a born insider, from one of them. It had been the woman Ross who hadn’t co-operated with the psychiatrists. Co-operated about as much as she did in court this morning. The gossip sparked round.

She said that she despised them.

The other one had been willing to play.

But they’d stuck together up to now. If Ross wasn’t agreeable, then Pateman wouldn’t insist.

Tagging on behind the master, as usual.

The previous two nights, their solicitors had been working on them. So had Ted Benskin. Last night they thought that Ross had given way. If they wanted to switch the case, she’d go along.

Did she go along this morning? You saw her hit the ceiling.

Among the buzz, a quiet voice said that he was wondering whether that wasn’t a put-up job. The quiet voice came from a young man, possibly a law student, about the age I had been when I first attended this assize.

He meant, if they were going to prove she wasn’t responsible, she had given them something to go on, hadn’t she?

An older man said, he didn’t believe anyone could act as well as that. She just cracked.

She was horrifying, said another.

If you’d been to many criminal trials, said one of the clerks, you’d be ready to believe anything. She might have been acting, she might not. Everything seemed about as likely or unlikely as anything else.

Ted Benskin will have to put her in the box, won’t he?

A couple of hours later, I was walking along the street, now familiar, now repelling, to the Patemans’ house. The smell of curry. The wind, still high, whistled down an entry. Pencilled cards, names of tenants, beside one front door: pop music from a bedroom.

When I rang the bell, Mrs Pateman was there, as though she had been waiting in the passage.

“It’s very good of you, I’m sure,” she said.

In the little sitting-room, the fire was bright, as I hadn’t seen it when Mr Pateman was there to supervise. Her attempt to welcome me, perhaps? The disinfectant was not so pungent, but the room was still pressingly dark, although through the single window which gave on to the backyard one could see that the sun was coming out. We were alone in the house.

“He’s gone off to work today,” she said. She was answering a question I hadn’t asked: in his absence, she seemed less diminutive. “I told him to. It keeps his mind off it, if he’s got something to do.”

As for her son, I knew already that, from the day Arnold Shaw’s resignation was announced, he had been absenting himself from his new university in order to campaign at his old one. Full restitution for the four dismissed students! Dick Pateman had organised placard-carrying processions (the dismissals were a year old now, and the two bright students were doing well elsewhere). The university gave out the news that, at the summer convocation, the ex-Vice-Chancellor was to receive an honorary degree. More processions by Dick Pateman and his followers. No degree for Shaw! Insult to student body! All this was happening during the police court proceedings against Dick’s sister, and in the weeks before the trial. Could anyone be so fanatical? asked charitable persons such as the Gearys. And they found something like menace in it.

I was trying to explain to Mrs Pateman about the trial. It was all changed now, she understood that, didn’t she? The lawyers were going to admit that the boy had been killed.

“They did it, did they?” She seemed less shrewd than on the evening she took me into the empty front room.

“Never mind what happened. You won’t hear much more about it.”

“They took him there, didn’t they?”

I said, now the whole point was, whatever had happened, they mightn’t have been responsible for what they did.

“They’re going to say,” said Mrs Pateman, flickering-eyed. “that she’s not all there?” With a gesture curiously like a schoolgirl’s, she tapped a forefinger against her temple.

“Something like that.” I told her that they would put it in their own language, it would sound strange.

“She did something, of course she did. And they’re going to say she’s not all there.”

She looked at me with an expression open, confiding, and somehow free from apprehension.

“I can’t take it in,” she said.

Margaret and I had been wrong, or at least half-wrong, when we sat in the station buffet imagining her feelings. So far as I could reach her, she wasn’t covering up or making excuses. But she spoke as though she were shut off from the facts, or as though they hadn’t entered or touched her.

She asked: “What will they do to her?”

I said it depended on which way the trial now went. If this new plea didn’t succeed, she would go to prison (“they’ll say for life, but you understand, it doesn’t mean anything like that”): if the plea did succeed, then it would probably be a mental hospital.

“When will they let her out?”

“They’ll have to be satisfied, you know, that she’s not going to be a danger to anyone else.”

“She won’t be, they needn’t vex themselves about that.”

For an instant I misunderstood her. I thought she was shielding her daughter.

She went on: “I’m not saying anything for her, she’s done whatever she has done. But she’s got her head screwed on, has Kitty. She’ll be careful, she won’t let the police get hold of her again.”

Now that I had understood her, I was astonished. On the instant, that struck me as the strangest thing I had yet heard during the trial.

She glanced at me, her eyes for once meeting mine. She said: “I can’t take it in. I suppose it’s a blessing that I can’t.”

Yes, she was grateful, but she hadn’t been able to pray, she said. She hadn’t been able to pray much for a long time.

“He’s been praying every day,” she told me. He had taken to going to early morning service, and then at home, in their bedroom, he prayed out loud each night. He was praying for help against all their dangers and against all the enemies who were working to do harm to him and his.

From her account (was there, even that afternoon, while she was lost and numbed, a trace of slyness?) it seemed he could still believe that Kitty and himself had been conspired against.

“Sometimes I get frightened about him,” she said.

Not of him, though that must sometimes, perhaps often, have been true. But she was frightened for him. He might hear something in this trial that he couldn’t reject or alter. He might not be able to protect himself. She had been worrying for years, worrying since the children had been young, about how much (it was her own phrase) his mind could stand.

30: Fantasy and Action

THAT evening Martin and I did not talk in private, for we were having supper with the Gearys. I mentioned that George, for the second day running, had not turned up in court. Within minutes Denis was on the telephone to one of his staff, asking him to find out whether Passant was “all right”. It didn’t take half-an-hour before the reply came back. There was nothing the matter with him, Denis called to us from the receiver: he would return to the trial when it wasn’t a “waste of time”. That sounded like a direct quotation. I was glancing at Martin as Denis sat down again, giving out a satisfaction similar in kind to Lord Lufkin’s in his days of glory, demonstrating how smoothly his organisation worked. We picked up the conversation, quite remote from George, all friendly in the bright clean room. Martin was so disciplined that I couldn’t tell where his real thoughts were. It might have been that he had the same difficulty about me.

Next morning, once more in the official box, we were listening to Benskin’s opening. It was short and subdued. Subdued out of his normal style, for he had more taste for drama than the other barristers in the case. But he was deliberately adapting himself to the tone of the trial. He had a reputation for wit, and that he had also to suppress. His expression was stiff, the humour strained out of it, as he faced the jury. “My lord told you yesterday that my learned friend Mr Wilson and I are, on behalf of our clients, asking you to take a new consideration of this crime. I am speaking here in agreement with Mr Wilson, because there is no shade of difference between us, nor, and I want you to remember this, between Miss Ross and Miss Pateman. We do not dispute that this young boy was killed — and everyone in court must want to express the most profound sympathy to his mother and father. We do not dispute that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were the agents of that killing. That having been admitted by us without reserve, you can dismiss from your minds any minor matters of controversy. I have just stated the central, plain and simple fact. But we now wish to prove to you that, while they were agents for this killing, Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not responsible for their actions in the sense that you and I would be, if we performed such actions. My lord will instruct you about the nature of the law in relation to diminished responsibility. But perhaps it will be some assistance to you if I read to you from Clause 2 of the Homicide Act 1957. Persons suffering from diminished responsibility. He shall not be guilty of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility… You will notice that the definition is wide. Abnormality of mind — leading to impairment of mental responsibility. If I may, I would like to say a few words about how that clause applies to these two young women and this case. My lord will I know correct me if he finds I am at fault. When we claim, and we have no doubt that we shall prove it to you, that they perpetrated this killing with diminished responsibility, or impairment of responsibility, we do not intend to state that, either at the time or now, they were or are clinically insane. You have all probably heard of the old McNaghten rules under which a defendant was only free from guilt if at the time of his offence he couldn’t tell right from wrong. We do not state that either, for these two young women. What we do state is something different, about which we all have to think as clearly and with as little emotion as we can. Let me put it this way. If you and I perform a criminal action, or any other action as far as that goes, we can be assumed to do it in a state of complete responsibility. Or, if you like, free choice. If, for instance, I suddenly assault Mr Bosanquet with this heavy inkwell in front of me” (just for an instant that old-Adam-buffoon was leaking out) “you will consider me, and I hope rightly consider me, fully and completely responsible for that action. And that is true of you and me in every action, decision, and choice right through our lives.” (Benskin had taken a first in Greats, but he wasn’t proposing to puzzle the jury with any of the textbook questions.) “That”, Benskin went on, “is the normal condition of normal people. It is true of you and me. It is true of nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of one thousand in the world round us. There are some, however, of whom it is not true. You will know this from your own experience. There are some whom we cannot consider responsible for all their actions. Through some defect of personality, or what the Act calls abnormality of mind, they cannot stop performing actions which may be foolish or may be anti-social or may be hellish. We suggest to you — I am only saying we suggest because we are certain — that that is the case with the two young women in the dock. Their actions have been hellish. I should be the last person to minimise how appalling and unspeakable they are. But we suggest that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not responsible for these actions. Clearly we want the help of eminent experts who will give us their professional judgment about these young women’s personalities and mental condition. I shall begin straight away by calling Dr Adam Cornford.”

Adam Cornford. Qualifications. First classes, research fellowship at Trinity, membership of the Royal College of Physicians, psychiatric training. Few groups had ever had more academic skills than his family and Margaret’s and their Cambridge relatives. Like a number of them, like Margaret herself, he looked abnormally young for his age. He was actually forty-six, within months of Margaret’s age. His hair was fair, he was good-looking in a fashion at the same time boyish, affable and dominating. His voice, as with Austin Davidson, was light and clear.

From the beginning, he spoke unassumingly, without any affectation, but also like a man who hadn’t considered the possibility of being outfaced. Yes, he had been asked to examine Miss Ross. He ought to explain that he hadn’t been able to make as complete a psychiatric examination as he would have wished. At their first meeting, she wouldn’t communicate. We’ll come to that later, said Benskin. She did talk to you at later meetings?

To some extent, said Adam Cornford. Then he went on, stitch-and-thread through the questions, Cornford easy but conscientious, Benskin as clever, trying to smudge the qualifications down. Miss Ross was in intelligence well above the average of the population. She was not in any recognised sense psychotic. She had some marked schizoid tendencies, but not to a psychotic extent. A great many people had schizoid tendencies, including a high proportion of the most able and dutiful citizens. Those tendencies were often correlated with obsessive cleanliness and hand washing, as with Miss Ross. It was important not to be confused (Cornford threw in the aside) by professional jargon: it was useful to psychiatrists, but could mislead others. Schizophrenia was an extreme condition, which Miss Ross was nowhere near, and she was no more likely to be afflicted by it than many young women of her age.

“Nevertheless, Doctor Cornford, you would say her personality is disturbed?”

“Yes, I should say that.”

“You would say that she has a personality defect?”

“I’ve never been entirely happy about the term.”

“But, in the sense we often use it in cases such as this, it applies to her?”

“I think I can say yes.”

“She has in fact an abnormality of mind?”

“Again, in the sense the law uses that expression, I should say yes.”

All of a sudden there was a quiet-toned legal argument. Cornford had been called as a witness to the mental state of Cora Ross: he said that he could do it “in any sort of depth” only if he could discuss her relation with Miss Pateman. By permission of her lawyers, he had been able to conduct professional interviews with Kitty Pateman: who, so Cornford said, had been much more forthcoming than her partner and had given him most of the knowledge he had acquired. Wilson (this had, it was clear, been prearranged) told the judge that he welcomed Dr Cornford giving any results of his examination of Miss Pateman. The judge asked Bosanquet if he wished to raise an objection. For some moments, Bosanquet hesitated: he wasn’t spontaneous, he was hedging on protocol, it was, I thought, his first tactical mistake during the trial.

“I should like to give the defence every opportunity to establish the prisoners’ states of mind, Mr Recorder,” said the judge.

“The position is very tangled, my lord.”

“Do you really have a serious objection?”

“Perhaps I needn’t sustain it against your lordship.” Politely, not quite graciously, Bosanquet gave an acceptant smile.

Cornford had listened, he said, to both of them about their relationship. It was intense. Probably the most important relationship in either of their lives. That was certainly so with Miss Ross. She had said, in a later interview, when she was putting up less resistance, that it was all she lived for.

Benskin: I have to put this question, Doctor Cornford. This was an abnormal relationship?

Cornford, harmoniously: I shouldn’t choose to call it so myself.

Benskin: Why not?

Cornford: I don’t like the word abnormal.

Benskin: Most people know what it means.

Cornford: Most people think they do. But persons in my profession learn to doubt it. If you ask me whether there was a sexual element in the relation of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman, then the answer is, of course, yes. If you ask whether there was any direct sexual expression, then the answer is also yes.

But it was easy to misunderstand some homosexual relations, Cornford said. Persons outside thought the roles were easily defined. Often they were not. In this case Miss Ross appeared to be playing the predominantly masculine role. When that happened, it could throw a weight of guilt upon the other partner: for Miss Pateman was behaving like a woman, without the full satisfactions, without the children, that in her feminine role she was ready to demand. That might be particularly true of her, because in her family the women seemed to be expected to be submissively feminine, more than ordinarily so (was that the total truth? had Cornford had any insight into Mrs Pateman?). Perhaps that was why she had sought a relation with a woman — so as to be feminine, and rebel against males, at one and the same time. But in doing so, she took upon herself more guilt, more a sense of loss and strangeness, than Miss Ross.

For Miss Ross had lived an isolated life, without those intense family pressures. Her father had deserted her mother, her mother had died young. She had been supported by an uncle. In adolescence she had been somewhere near, without being part of, a circle without many constraints. They were committed to a creed of personal freedom. She had made acquaintances there, but not close contacts. Perhaps she was too indrawn a character, or perhaps she was already finding it necessary to make a masculine compensation.

She had, said Cornford, an unusual degree of immaturity. For example, she preserved every scrap of printed matter — programmes of cinema shows they had attended together, even bus tickets — relating to Miss Pateman. That sometimes happened in an intense relation, but he had never seen it carried to this extent. She had drawers full of objects which Miss Pateman had touched, including handkerchiefs and sheets.

In a different fashion, Miss Pateman showed her own, not quite so unusual, signs of immaturity. She kept up a large collection of dolls, and apparently took one or two with her whenever she left home.

Through the questions and answers — Benskin was skilfully feeding him — Cornford, unflustered, equable, drew his psychological profiles. It sounded, to listeners in court not used to this kind of analysis, strangely abstract, a dimension away from the two women’s bodies in the dock. Several times, in the midst of the articulate, lucid replies, I glanced at them. Cora had her head thrown back, almost for the first time in the trial. So far as she was showing emotion, it looked something like pride: but beside her Kitty was frowning, her face crumpled with anger, her eyes sunk and glittering, as in a patient with a wasting disease, when the skin is bronzing and the eyes sinking in.

Benskin Q, Cornford A. The two young women found each other, they responded to complementary needs, they were driven to escape from unsatisfactory environments. Very soon they began to live in a private world. A private world with their own games, rules, fancies. That was very common in many intense relationships. It was part of a good many marriages. It could be a valuable part. The married couple got great exaltation from living in a world made for two. This happened frequently in intense homosexual relationships. Sometimes it gave them unusual depth and strength. But it had dangers, if the relationship was overloaded with guilt. As in the case of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman. When there was a component of bad sex rather than good sex. When the sexual expression was not full or free or sufficient in itself. That needn’t happen in a homosexual relation: far more often than not it didn’t: very occasionally it did. It was rarer, but not unknown, in heterosexual relations also.

Benskin: Can you explain the dangers you are referring to, Doctor?

Cornford: One of them is sometimes called folie à deux. That is, the partners may incite each other to fantasies which neither would have imagined if left to him or herself.

Benskin: And these fantasies may be transferred into action?

Cornford: In extreme cases, there is a danger that that may happen.

We didn’t know, said Cornford, why the gap between fantasy and action — which in most of us is wide and never crossed — should in those extreme cases cease to exist. If we did know that, we should understand more of the impulses behind some criminal actions. If he were going to admit the term personality defect, he might apply it to those impelled to carry such fantasies into action.

Benskin: That would apply to Miss Ross?

Cornford: That would apply equally to Miss Ross and Miss Pateman.

They had certainly made fantasies about having children in their charge. That was not uncommon in relations like theirs, overshadowed by guilt: especially so when one of the partners was a woman deprived, or a mother manquée, like Miss Pateman. There was a strong maternal aspect in her feeling for Miss Ross. In many such relationships, similar fantasies existed. They had played imaginary games of parents and children (that reminded me of the Superintendent’s homely tone). But it was an extreme case of folie à deux that led them to translate that game into a plan–

They had made fantasies about ultimate freedom. They had heard of people who talked about being free from all conventions: they had met people who prided themselves on not obeying any rules. They felt superior because they were breaking the rules themselves: that was not inconsistent with unconscious guilt, in fact it often went hand-in-hand with it. But they excited each other into being freer than anyone round them. They made fantasies about being lords of life and death. They thought of having lives at their mercy. That again was not unknown — particularly in relations with a coloration of what he (Cornford) had previously called “bad sex”. But it was very rare for the impulse to be so uncontrollable as to carry over into action.

Guilty relationships, the more so if the guilt was not conscious, had a built in tendency to lead to further guilt. One had done something which one couldn’t thrust away or live with peacefully or reconcile with one’s nature: with many people in that position, there grew a violent impulse to do something which one could face even less. Guilty relationships pushed both partners further to the extreme. All guilt had a tendency towards escalation.

That might be true, I was thinking: it was certainly true of some that I had known. A few people, dissatisfied with their lives, tried to reshape them. But there were many more like George, who couldn’t take his pleasures innocently, who felt, at least when he was young, attacks of remorse — and yet couldn’t help getting more obsessed with the chase of pleasure, never mind the risks, never mind who got hurt. He knew that those who accused him or mourned over him were right: well, to hell with them, he’d give them twice as much to be right about.

The gap between fantasy and action. Those who jumped it — Benskin got back to business — had some serious — in the terms of the Act — abnormality of mind? There was some fencing about definitions. Cornford, so confident in his own line, was intellectually a conscientious and modest man. He wasn’t prepared to trust himself in semantics or metaphysics, he said.

Benskin: But if we accept from you that personality defect or abnormality of mind is not an exact term, you would tell us that Miss Ross had features of her personality which drove her into living out her fantasies?

Cornford: I should say that.

Benskin: And that really does mean an abnormality of mind, doesn’t it?

Cornford: In the legal sense, I should say yes, without question.

Benskin: Also she couldn’t control that part of her personality?

Cornford: I should say that too.

Benskin: That is, while planning and performing those criminal actions, she had far less responsibility for them than a normal person would have?

Cornford: I’m a little worried about the words “normal person”.

Benskin: Like most of the people you meet, not as patients, doctor, but in everyday life. Compared with them, her responsibility was impaired? Very much impaired?

Cornford: Yes, I can say that.

Wilson asked permission to put the same questions about Miss Pateman. After Cornford had given an identical reply, Benskin finished by saying: “I should like you to give a clinical opinion. How well, in your judgment, would Miss Ross’ mental state respond to treatment?”

For once Cornford hesitated: but he wasn’t hesitating because — although it was true — this was a long-prepared question by the defence.

He said: “I can’t be as certain as I should like.”

“You told us, you found her difficult to examine?”

“Quite unusually.”

“And the first time, she wouldn’t co-operate at all?”

“No. “

“What happened?”

“She told me she had nothing to say.”

“In what terms?”

“Pretty violent ones.”

If one had heard her outburst in court, one could imagine the scene. Cornford’s handsome face was wearing a faint, uncomfortable smile. He was upset as a doctor: he had his share of professional vanity: and perhaps, of physical vanity too.

Later meetings had been easier, but it had been hard throughout to get her to participate.

“What sort of indication is that? About her mental state being treatable?”

“Usually it is a bad sign. When a patient hasn’t enough insight to co-operate, then the prognosis is bad.”

Benskin thanked him and sat down. Wilson did not ask similar questions about Kitty Pateman. Cornford might have said that Kitty Pateman had more insight, and, though the whole tone of his evidence had been in her favour, at least as much as Cora’s, that final word could have done her harm.

Bosanquet must have seen the chance to divide the two. But he didn’t take it. His duty was to get them both. It was more than his duty: it was, as I knew by now, what he believed to be right. Further, as he began to cross-examine Cornford, I gained the impression that beneath the stubborn phlegm Bosanquet was irritated. Cornford had the knack, just as Davidson and the older generation of their families had, of provoking a specific kind of irritation. They were clever, they were privileged, to outsiders it seemed that they had found life too easy: they were too sure of their own enlightenment. Bosanquet hadn’t found life at all easy: despite his name, his family was poor, he had been to a North Country grammar school. He wasn’t sure of his own enlightenment or anyone else’s, after living in the criminal courts for thirty years. His first questions were, as usual, paced out and calm but — I thought my ear was not deceiving me — his voice was just perceptibly less bland.

Bosanquet: Doctor Cornford, you have been telling us about the gap between fantasy and action, haven’t you?

Cornford: Yes, a little.

Bosanquet: We all have fantasies, you were saying, weren’t you, of violent actions. That is, we all have fantasies of putting someone we dislike out of the way?

Cornford: I can’t be certain that we all do. But I should have thought that it was a common experience.

Bosanquet: Granted. But not many actually do put someone they dislike out of the way?

Cornford: Of course not.

Bosanquet: As you were saying, the gap between fantasy and action is not often crossed?

Cornford: Precisely.

Bosanquet: And you suggest, when it is crossed, people are driven by forces out of their control, that is, they are not responsible?

Cornford: That is rather further than I intended to go.

Bosanquet: Or, at any rate, their responsibility is diminished?

Cornford: In many cases, not necessarily all, yes, their responsibility is diminished.

Bosanquet: I don’t think we have heard you make exceptions before. What exceptions would you make?

Cornford: I don’t want to go into the nature of responsibility in general. That’s too wide to be profitable.

Bosanquet: But you are prepared to talk about responsibility in particular cases? Such as the present one?

Cornford: Yes, I am.

Bosanquet: This case is, even to those of us who have had more experience of such crimes than we care to remember, a singularly horrible one of sadistic killing. You will agree with that?

Cornford: I am afraid so.

Bosanquet: And you have stated your opinion that the two women who performed it were acting with diminished responsibility?

Cornford: Yes. I have said that.

Bosanquet: And you would say exactly the same of any similar case of sadistic killing?

Cornford: I can only talk as a psychiatrist of this particular case about which I have been asked to express a professional opinion.

Bosanquet: But you would be likely to give the same opinion in any comparable case? Of killing just for the sake of killing?

Cornford: I can’t answer that question without knowing the psychiatric background of such a case.

Bosanquet: (sternly) I have to ask you as an honest and responsible man. In any such case, where a person or persons had been living in a morbid fantasy world, and then carried out those fantasies in action, you would be likely to say that that was an example of diminished responsibility?

Cornford: (after a pause) I should be likely to say that.

Bosanquet: That is really your professional position?

Cornford: That is going too far. It might, in a good many cases, be my professional position.

Bosanquet: Thank you, Doctor Cornford. I should like to suggest to you that this is a curiously circular position. You are saying that, when people commit certain terrible crimes, they wouldn’t do this unless there was no gap between fantasy and action: and that therefore they ipso facto are acting with diminished responsibility. That is, the very fact of their committing the crimes implies that they are not responsible. Isn’t that what you are saying?

Cornford: It is not so simple.

Bosanquet: Isn’t it precisely as simple? Committing the crime is proof, according to your position, that they are not responsible. How else are we to understand you?

Cornford: I’m not prepared to generalise. In certain cases, where I can explore the psychological background, I may be convinced that committing the crime is, in fact, a sign of lack of responsibility.

Bosanquet: Surely that is making it very easy for everyone? Don’t you see that, if we accept your view, if we accept that people don’t commit crimes when they are responsible, we can dispense with a good deal of our law?

Cornford: It is not for me to talk about the law. I can only talk as a psychiatrist. I can only talk about specific persons whom I have examined.

Bosanquet kept at him, but Cornford was quite unruffled. He was intellectually too sophisticated not to have gone through this argument, and what lay beneath it, in his undergraduate days. But he was in court, he was determined not to leave his home ground. And further, he had no patience with what he regarded as pseudo-problems. Free will, determinism, the tragic condition, all the rest, if there had been any meaning to them we should have found the answers, he thought, long ago. He was as positive-minded as Martin, but in the opposite sense. We should each of us die, but he liked making people better while they were alive. He was a good doctor as well as a psychiatrist: he was benevolent as well as arrogant, and his world was a singularly sunny one.

Through the morning and afternoon (the cross-examination was going on after the lunch break) I kept thinking that, in private, he was more variegated than this. He had a touch, as he remarked in his harmonious clinical manner, of the manic-depressive. In the box, however, he was more uniform and consistent than anyone we had heard, reminding me of one of those theologians who set out with sharp goodwill to reconcile anything with anything else, every fact of life being as natural as every other, everything being overwhelmingly and all-embracingly natural: reminding me also of a military spokesman giving a battle commentary on what might have seemed to be a disaster (and which actually was), explaining it away and encouraging us about the prospects to come.

His profiles of all our lives, I thought, would have sounded just as sensible, a little sunnier than those lives had been to live. One could imagine how he would have described mine, or Margaret’s, or Sheila’s, or Roy Calvert’s. But one couldn’t imagine it all: he had his own insight, lucid, independent. He would have told us things we didn’t recognise or admit in ourselves. He would certainly have been more penetrating, and wiser, about George Passant than I had been. If Sheila had been a patient of his, he would have worked his heart out to reconcile her to her existence. He could not have admitted that to her — and at times to the rest of us, though not to him — it was not tolerable to be reconciled. He would have thought that she was resisting treatment: while she would have gone away, not ready to have her vision blurred, even if it meant living in a nightmare.

When he left the box, it was something like a star going off the stage, to be succeeded by a competent character actor. This was the psychiatrist called on behalf of Kitty Pateman, a dark, worried man whose name was Kahn, not so eminent in his profession, nothing like so articulate. In fact, for the rest of the afternoon, he told very much the same story and gave the same opinion. A clear case of abnormality of mind and substantial impairment of responsibility. He gave, to me at least, a strong impression of self-searching and difficult honesty. He did produce one new piece of evidence. At eighteen, a year or two before she met Cora Ross, Kitty had had, without her parents knowing, an affair with a married man. The details were not clear, but Dr Kahn testified that she had suffered a traumatic shock. In his view this had been one of the causes which had driven her into her relation with Cora Ross.

31: Talk About Freedom

THAT was the evening when Martin and I were due for the party at Archibald Rose’s house. Driving slowly past the thickening hedges, Martin did not want to talk about the trial. Instead, he was asking me, how much had this bit of the county changed since we were boys? Not much, we thought. It was still surprisingly empty. Now and then a harsh red brick village interrupted the flow of fields. It was a warm day, unusually so for April, windless and pacifying: looking out into the sunshine, one felt anthropocentrically that the pastures, rises and hollows, were pacified too.

Unlike the house to which Vicky had driven me the previous summer, this one lay half-hidden, down beside a wood. When we got inside, there were other dissimilarities, or really perhaps only one: there was nothing like so much money about. Children were running round, Rose’s wife, a young woman in her twenties, greeted us, noise beat cheerfully out from what in the nineteenth century might have been used as the morning-room. This had once been a dower house, and was still called that; it hadn’t been much restored: from the morning-room, where the party had already begun, the windows gave on to a rose garden. It was a room which, like the smell of soap in the morning, wiped away angst, or certainly the lawyers seemed to find it so. They were all there, the two defence counsel and their juniors, Clive Bosanquet, the Clerk of Assize, the judge’s clerk, various young men who could have been pupils in chambers. Glancing through the crowd, I didn’t notice any of the solicitors. Plates of cold chicken, duck, tongue, ham, stood on the side table, glasses, bottles of red and white wine. The Roses weren’t as rich as Vicky’s business friends, but they spread themselves on entertaining. Rose’s wife, one child holding on to her hand, was cheerful among all the men. The lawyers were walking about, plates and glasses in hand, munching, drinking, and above all talking. Martin and I might have been inhibited, as we drove out, from talking about the trial: not so these. For a good part of that evening, they were talking of nothing else. During the war and after, Martin had spent plenty of time with high civil servants: he was used to their extremes of discretion: with Rose’s Uncle Hector, for instance, one had to know him, literally for years, before he would volunteer an opinion about a colleague (which, in his case, was then not specially favourable). Martin hadn’t seen lawyers relaxing in private during a trial. Ted Benskin, more than ever glinting with grim mimicry, came up and asked what we thought of Cornford’s evidence. Bosanquet was standing by. Martin, not certain of the atmosphere, feeling his way, gave a non-committal reply.

“We should all like to know,” said Ted Benskin. “I’m damned if I do.”

A young man (I took him to be a pupil of Bosanquet’s, not long down from the university) said: either we are all responsible for our actions, or else no one is.

“I wish,” said Bosanquet, gazing at him like a patient, troubled ox, “I wish I were as certain about anything as you are about everything.”

“But if you were on that jury,” said Archibald Rose, more positive than his leader, “you wouldn’t follow the Cornford man—”

Bosanquet said, not eagerly but with weight: “No. I couldn’t do that.”

“If you were old Jumbo,” said someone, “and summing up, what would you tell them?”

“What will old Jumbo tell them, anyway?”

Someone else said: if we’re not responsible for abominable actions, then we’re not responsible for good ones. If you explain one set away, then you explain the other. It’s the ultimate reduction.

Ted Benskin said: “Anyway, I’ve got to put my woman in the box. I wish I could get out of it, but I can’t. Clive knows that.”

Bosanquet gave a professional smile. If Cora Ross didn’t give evidence for herself, the inference was, it was because she might appear too sane.

“It’s worse for Jamie here,” said Benskin. He pointed to Wilson, who was standing a little apart, looking handsome, hard, distracted. After a while, simply because he looked so miserable, I went into a corner and spoke to him alone. None of them was unaffected: but he was more affected than any. At a first glance in court, I had thought him insensitive. It was one of those impressions like that which Margaret often produced, which were the opposite of the truth.

“Yes, of course I’ve got to call her,” he was telling me. “And I’m afraid she’ll destroy anything the psychiatrists say.”

“You’ve met her, haven’t you?” he went on. “I’m afraid she’ll seem perfectly lucid. Mind you, I think some of these people are dead wrong,” he nodded towards the middle of the room. “I accept one hundred per cent what Adam Cornford said. Don’t you?”

“You’ve talked to her yourself?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, set-faced. “When I’m defending people, I always insist on getting to know them personally.”

He added: “It’s not pleasant to be tried for anything. Whoever you are and whatever you have done.”

Back among the central crowd, I let Ted Benskin refill my glass, while Martin was listening to some of the tougher lawyers. Freedom. Ultimate freedom. They had picked up the phrase from Adam Cornford. They didn’t know, as Martin and I did, how once it had been a slogan in George’s underground. But they knew that the two women had used it to excite each other. (I could remember a passage from George’s diary. “The high meridian of freedom is on us now. In our nucleus of free people, anyway — and sometimes I think in the world.” That was written in 1930, and I had read it two years later. I hadn’t imagined, any more than he had, what was to come.)

“It’s done a lot of harm, propaganda about freedom,” said someone.

“Freedom my arse,” said the Clerk of Assize with simpler eloquence.

“Keep your heads, now,” said Ted Benskin. “I tell you, my children are happier than we ever were. And I think they’re better for it.”

“We need a bit of order, though,” said Bosanquet.

“You’re getting old, Clive.”

“Order is important.” Bosanquet was as unbudgeable as in court. “This country is getting dirtier and sillier under our eyes.”

“Happiness isn’t everything,” said someone. “Perhaps it isn’t the first thing.”

“I tell you,” said Benskin, “if ever there was a time to keep our heads, this is. By and large, there’s been more gain than loss.”

Other lawyers rounded on him. How could anyone spend his life in the criminal courts, and believe that? Benskin replied that he did spend his life in the criminal courts: that he proposed to go on doing so, and give them all a great deal of trouble: and that he still believed it.

There were a number of strong personalities round us, clashing like snooker balls: Benskin was ready to go on clashing all night. As he stood there, shorter than the rest of us, with his urchin grin, one of the clerks began to speak of ‘topping’ (he was using the criminals’ slang for hanging). The 1957 Act was a nonsense. You couldn’t have categories of murder. Why was the murder in this case non-capital, whereas if they had shot the child—?

Mrs Rose, who by this time had put her family to bed, said with a firm young woman’s confidence that she was in favour of capital punishment. Good for you, shouted one of the lawyers. So far as I could tell, there was a majority in support — certainly not Wilson, not a couple of the pupils. Benskin hadn’t given an opinion. It was Bosanquet who spoke.

“No,” he said, as steady as ever. “I’ve always been against it. And I still am.”

Some rough comments flew about, until, in a patch of quietness, a voice said without inflection: “Even in a case like this?”

“Yes,” said Bosanquet. “In a case like this.”

Tempers were getting higher — Benskin, who seemed to have a passion for buttling second only to Arnold Shaw’s, was uncorking another bottle — when Archibald Rose mentioned that day’s appointments to the bench. It might have been a host’s tact: he had been disagreeing with his leader: anyway, whether it was a relief or a let-down, it worked. Two new appointments to the High Court. One was (I hadn’t noticed it in The Times that morning) an old acquaintance of mine called Dawson-Hill. Bosanquet, who might reasonably have expected the job himself, was judicious. Benskin, who mightn’t, being years too young, wasn’t. “We don’t want playboys up there,” he said. “He’s just got there because he’s grand, that’s all—”

“But why is he all that grand?” I asked. I was genuinely puzzled. It was one of those English mysteries. Everyone agreed that Dawson-Hill was grand or smart or a social asset, whatever you liked to call it. But it was difficult to see why. His origins were similar to Rose’s or Wilson’s in this room, perhaps a shade better off: nothing like so lofty as those of Mr Justice Fane, and no one thought him excessively smart.

“That bloody school,” said Benskin, meaning Eton.

“He went to our college,” said Martin. “And that’s about as grand as the University Arms.”

“He must have made a mistake that time,” said Benskin with a matey grin. “Anyway, you can’t deny it, any of you, no dinner party in London is complete without our dear D-H.”

As he drove down the path, away from the party, Martin remarked: “To say that was a popular appointment would be mildly overstating the case, wouldn’t it?”

Gazing over the wheel into the headlight zone, he wore a pulled down smile. The backchat about Dawson-Hill had softened the evening for him. He was a man whose emotional memory was long, sometimes obsessive, at least as much as mine. Often he found it harder for his mood to change. For the past three days he hadn’t been able to shrug off what he had been listening to. It had lightened him to be in the company of men who could. Driving on, he was asking me about them, half amused, half-envious. They were less hard-baked than he expected, most of them, weren’t they? Yes, I said, criminal lawyers seemed to have become more imaginative since my time. But the jobs mattered, Martin was smiling, they were pretty good at getting back out of the cold? Archibald Rose had been talking to him seriously about when he should take silk. They were pretty good at getting back on to the snakes-and-ladders, weren’t they? Of course they were, I said. I nearly added — but didn’t, since I was feeling protective towards my brother, as though we were much younger — that I had heard him written off as a worldly man.

Through the dark countryside, odd lights from the wayside cottages, I was thinking, he must know it all. Political memory lasted about a fortnight. Legal memory lasted about a day after a trial. You had to forget in order to get along. It made men more enduring: it also made them more brutal, or at least more callous. One couldn’t remember one’s own pain (I had already forgotten, most of the time, about my eye), let alone anyone else’s. In order to live with suffering, to keep it in the here-and-now in one’s own nerves, one had to do as the contemplatives did, meditating night and day upon the Passion: or behave like a Jewish acquaintance of Martin’s and mine, who, before he made a speech about the concentration camps, strained his imagination, sent up his blood pressure, terrified himself, in confronting what, in his own flesh, it would be truly like.

When the car stopped in front of the Gearys’ house, Martin got out with me. It was bright moonlight, still very warm. Martin said: “It’s a pleasant night. Do you want to go to bed just yet?” We made our way through the kitchen, out into the garden. Upstairs a light flashed on in the Gearys’ bedroom, and Denis yelled down, Who’s there? I shouted back that it was us. Good, Denis replied: should he come and give us a drink? No, we had had enough. Good night then, said Denis thankfully. Lock up behind you and don’t get cold.

We sat on a wooden seat at the end of the garden. On the lawn in front of us, there were tree shadows thrown by the moon. It reminded me of gardens in our childhood, when, though the suburb was poor, there was plenty of greenery about. It reminded me of Aunt Milly’s garden, and I said: “After all, it’s the twentieth century.”

For a moment, Martin was lost, and then he gave a recognising smile. It had been a phrase of hers which obliterated all threats, laughed off the prospect of war (I could hear her using it in July 1914, when I was eight years old), and incidentally promised the triumph of all her favourite causes, such as worldwide teetotalism. She had used it indomitably till she died.

After all, it was the twentieth century. We had heard others, who had found their hopes blighted and who had reneged on them, call it (as Austin Davidson did, and most of his friends) this dreadful century. Neither Martin nor I was going to know what our children would call it, when they were the age we had reached now.

Martin lit a cigar. The smell was strong in the still air. After a time he said: “There was a lot of talk about freedom.”

“You mean, among the lawyers? Tonight?”

“Not only there.”

Not able to stop himself, he had returned to the two women. Ultimate freedom. The limitless talks. More than most people, certainly more than any of the lawyers or spectators at the trial, Martin and I could recreate those talks. For we had heard them, taken part in them. “What is to tie me down, except myself? It is for me to will what I shall accept. Why should I obey conventions which I didn’t make?” It was true that, when we had heard them, those declarations were full of hope. George’s great cries had nothing Nietzschean about them. They were innocent when they proclaimed that there was a fundamental “I” which could do anything in its freedom. When you started there, though, Martin said, in an even, sensible tone, you could go further. Wasn’t that what the man Cornford was getting at with his “escalation”?

“Do you believe,” asked Martin, “that — if it hadn’t been for all the hothouse air we used to know about — those two mightn’t have it?”

He spoke without emotion, rationally. The question was pointed for us both. We were gazing out to the moonlit lawn, like passengers on the boat deck gazing out to sea. Without looking at him, I spoke, just as carefully. It was impossible to prove. Was there ever any single cause of any action, particularly of actions such as this? Yes, they must have been affected by the atmosphere round them, yes, they were more likely to go to the extreme in their sexual tastes. Perhaps it made it easier for them to share their fantasies. But between those fantasies, and what they had done, there was still the unimaginable gap. Of course there were influences in the air. But only people like them, predisposed to commit sadistic horrors anyway, would have been played on to the lethal end. If they had not had these influences, there would have been others.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But I think that wherever they’d been, they’d have done something horrible.”

“Are you letting everyone off?” he said.

“I was telling you, I don’t know the answer, and nor does anyone else.”

“I grant you that,” said Martin.

We were not arguing, our voices were very quiet. He said — in a quite different society, more rigid, more controlled, was there a chance that they would never have killed? He answered his own question. Maybe there might be less of these sexual crimes. Perhaps such a society could reduce the likelihood. “But, if you’re right,” he said, “no one could answer for those two.”

He had turned to me, speaking quite gently. He thought that I might be making excuses for us all: yet they were excuses he wanted to accept. He also knew that I was as uncertain as he was.

All of a sudden, his cigar tip glowing in the shadow, he gave a curious smile. In an instant, when he spoke again, I realised that he had been thinking of a different society. “I have seen the future. And it works.” That had been Steffens’ phrase, nearly fifty years before. When Martin repeated it, there was in his tone the experience of all that had happened since. He went on, in the same tone, not harsh, not even cynical: “I have seen freedom. And it rots.”

In some moods, he might have said it with intention. But not that night; it was one thought out of many, often contradicting each other, that he couldn’t keep out of his own mind and could suspect in mine. In fact, he took the edge off his last words almost at once. Anyway, he was saying, unabrasively, as though he too had had his memory shortened, as though he were just content with the calm night, there was something in what Ted Benskin had said, wasn’t there? Authority might have disappeared, there wasn’t much order about, but our children, like Ted’s, seemed happy. Not that there had been much paternal authority in our family; Martin was smiling about our father. “Whereas,” he said, “young Charles has to put up with you.”

Martin knew Charles very well, in his independence, his secret ambitions, and his pride. They were unusually intimate for uncle and nephew. In some aspects, their temperaments were more like each other than either was like mine.

Martin leaned back, giving out an air of bodily comfort: we seemed to have regressed to a peaceful family night.

“By the by,” he said, “I meant to have a word with you about my boy” — (he never liked calling Pat by his name of protest).

This wasn’t altogether casual, I knew as I said yes. He had been holding it back all week.

“You told me once, it must have been getting on for a year ago, about that nice girl. Vicky,” Martin went on.

“What about her?”

“I think someone ought to make her realise that it’s all off.”

“Are you sure?”

“I shouldn’t be saying this,” said Martin, “unless I really was sure.”

“It’s for him to do it,” I said, both angry and sad. I wanted to say (the old phrase came back, for which we hadn’t found a modern version) that it would break her heart.

“He’s genuinely tried, I really am sure of that too. I don’t often defend him, you know that.” Martin, who did not as a rule deceive himself, spoke as though he believed that was the truth. “But he has genuinely tried. She’s been hanging on long after there’s been nothing there. It’s the old story, how tenacious women can be, once they’re in love.”

“It’s absolutely over for him? He won’t go back and play her up again?”

“I guarantee he won’t.”

“He’s not above leaving a thread he likes to twitch. When he’s got nothing better to do.”

“Not this time,” said Martin.

“Why are you so sure?”

“I’m afraid that he’s made up his mind. Or someone else has made up his mind for him.”

Martin was speaking with kindness of Vicky, more than kindness, the sympathy of one who was fond of women and who might have felt his eyes brighten at the sight of this one. But he was also speaking with obscure satisfaction, as though he had news which he couldn’t yet share but which, when he forgot everything else, gave him well-being, and, as he sat there beside me in the garden, something like animal content.

32: Quality of a Leader

BACK in court the following morning, we were listening to more psychiatrists, as though this were the normal run of our existence and the family conversation in a garden as unmemorable as a dream. These were the psychiatrists called by the prosecution, and we knew in advance that there would be only two. That was planned as the total evidence in rebuttal, and they were as careful and moderate as the defence doctors, without even the occasional wave of Adam Cornford’s panache. In the result, though, through the moderate words, they were each saying an absolute no.

Obviously by prearrangement — as I whispered to Martin, sitting at my side in the box — neither Benskin nor Wilson pressed the prison psychiatrist far. Bosanquet had questioned him about his knowledge of the prisoners: yes, he had had them under observation since they were first arrested. He was a man near to retiring age, who had spent his whole career in the prison service: he had seen more criminals, psychotics, psychopaths, than anyone who had come into court, and yet he still spoke with an air of gentle surprise. Miss Ross and Miss Pateman had shown no detectable signs of mental disorder. Some slight abnormality, perhaps, nothing more. Medically, their encephalograms were normal. He had conducted prolonged interviews with Miss Pateman: Miss Ross had, under examination, not usually been willing to discuss her own history. So far as he could judge, they were intelligent. Miss Pateman had asked for supplies of books from the prison library. Their behaviour was not much different, or not different at all, from other prisoners held on serious charges. Miss Pateman exhibited certain anxiety symptoms, including chronic sleeplessness, and her health had caused some concern. Miss Ross had a tic of obsessive hand washing, but this she admitted was not new or caused by her being in prison. Neither had at any time been willing to speak of the killing. Occasionally Miss Ross went in for something like talking to herself, monologues about what appeared to be imaginary scenes, in which she and Miss Pateman figured alone.

“None of this has made you consider that they are not responsible for their actions?”

“No.”

“From all your observations, you would not consider that they acted in a state of diminished responsibility?”

“No. I’m afraid I can’t give them that.”

“After your long experience, you are positive in your opinion?”

“I am.”

It was while Benskin, in his first questions, was asking the doctor to say what he meant by a “slight abnormality of mind”, that Martin, plucking my sleeve, pointed to the body of the court. Since the morning before, when the medical evidence had begun, the attendance had fallen off, as in a London theatre on a Monday night: the gallery was almost empty that morning, and the lower ranges only half-full: but there (he had not been present at the beginning of the session, he must have entered during the Crown examination) sat George. His great head stood out leonine; he was staring at the witness box with glaucous eyes.

I scribbled on the top of a deposition sheet We shall have to sit with him this afternoon. As Martin read that, he nodded, his brow furrowed, all the previous night’s relaxation gone.

Benskin was asking, weren’t those opinions subjective, wasn’t it difficult or impossible even for an expert to be absolutely certain about some mental conditions? Could anyone in the world be certain about some mental conditions? Weren’t there features of the doctor’s observations, given in his examination-in-chief, which might be regarded as pointers to deep abnormality—? Just for an instant, Benskin (who often suffered from the reverse of l’esprit de l’escalier, who thought of the bright remark, made it, and then wished he hadn’t) was tempted away from his own strategy. He began to ask when “our expert” had last been in touch with professional trends? Had he read—? Benskin shook himself. The jury wouldn’t like it, this was an elderly modest man, the sooner he was out of the box the better. The tactic was to reserve the attack for the heavyweight witness. Disciplining himself, anxious at having to waive a marginal chance, Wilson kept to the same line. He asked a few questions about Miss Pateman’s state of health, her record of psychosomatic illness, and then let the doctor go.

The heavyweight witness was a Home Office consultant, brought in as a counterpoise to Adam Cornford. When Bosanquet asked “Is your name Matthew Gough?”, that meant nothing to almost everyone in court, and yet, before he answered the question at all, during the instant while he was clambering up to the box, he had been recognised, as no one else had been recognised in the whole trial. The fact was, he appeared often on television, under the anonymous label of psychiatrist, giving his views — articulately, but with as little fuss as Cornford in court — on crime, delinquency, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, race relations, censorship and the phenomena relating to Unidentified Flying Objects. On the television screen he gave the impression of very strong masculinity. In the witness box this impression became more prepotent still. He was dark-haired, vulture-faced, with a nose that dominated his chin. Despite his peculiar kind of anonymous fame, which brought him some envy, his professional reputation was high. He wasn’t such an academic flyer as Adam Cornford, but his practice — in a country which didn’t support many private psychiatrists — was at least as large. He was said to have had a powerful and humane influence upon the Home Office criminologists. I had heard also that he was — this came as a surprise in his profession — a deeply religious man.

In the box, his manner was kind, not assertive, but with a flow of feeling underneath. He had, he answered, spent a good many hours with each of the two women. He had found Miss Ross — in this he was odd-man-out from the other doctors — as communicative as Miss Pateman, sometimes more completely so. It was true that occasionally she put up total “resistance”: but his judgment was that this was deliberate, and could be broken when she wanted. Not that he blamed her, that was one of her protective shields, such as we all had. To the puzzlement of many, he differed flatly from the others in his attitude to Cora Ross; he seemed to find her more interesting, or at least more explicable, than Kitty. Miss Ross’ father had left her mother when she was an infant; not much was known about him, Miss Ross’ memory of him was minimal and her mother was dead: there was some suggestion that he had been (and possibly still was, for no one knew whether he was alive) mentally unstable. He had been an obsessive gambler, but that might have been the least of it. Miss Ross had been left alone in her childhood more than most of us: it had been an unusually lonely bringing up. Perhaps that had conduced both to her immaturity (about which he agreed with Cornford) and to the sadistic fantasies, which she had certainly been possessed by since an early age: but that was common to many of us, so common that the absence was probably more “abnormal” than the presence.

Without emphasis Bosanquet led Matthew Gough over the descriptions Cornford had given. It was a good examination, designed to show that Gough was as unprejudiced as the other men. Yes, Miss Ross had lived on the fringe of a free-living group. If she had been less timid or inhibited, that might have “liberated” her. Actually it had driven her further into herself. It was hurtful to live in a Venusberg without taking part oneself.

As for her relation with Kitty, he had some doubts about Cornford’s analysis. He wouldn’t dismiss it altogether: but “guilt” used in that fashion was a technical term. He wasn’t easy about this concept of the escalation of guilt. Many homosexual or perverse relations were quite free of it. “Bad sex”, in Cornford’s sense, was very common: it did not often lead to minor violence, let alone to sadistic killing; it was very dangerous, and unjustified, to try to define a simple causation.

Bosanquet: You would not accept then, Dr Gough, that this relation in any way diminished their responsibility?

Gough: No.

Bosanquet: Or that any other feature of their personal history did so?

Gough: No.

On Kitty Pateman, he said one puzzling thing (which I half-missed, since just at that time the judge’s clerk entered our box, giving me his lordship’s compliments, and asking if I would care to lunch with him on the coming Monday). He was speaking about her environment: while Cora had grown up solitary, Kitty had lived her whole childhood and youth in a close family life — as intense, I was thinking, as the fug in that stifling sitting-room. That was a good environment, said Gough. Stable, settled, affectionate. This must have been his own interpretation of Kitty’s account — or had she misled him? Gough was disposed to believe devotedly in family life, I was thinking. It was then that he surprised me. But even in a stable family, he said, there could be wounds — which only the person wounded might know. Was he being massively fair-minded, or had he picked up a clue?

In the specific case of Miss Pateman, it seemed that she might have had an excessive attachment to her father. But he, Gough, could not regard that as a cause of her later actions. That was over-simplifying. Her relation with Miss Ross, her part in the crime — no one could identify the origins.

Bosanquet: You discussed the crime with her, doctor?

Gough: With each of them. On several occasions.

Bosanquet: Were they willing to describe it?

Gough: Up to a point.

Bosanquet: Will you elaborate that, please?

Gough: They were prepared to describe in detail, almost hour by hour, how they planned to kidnap the boy. They told me about what happened at the cottage and how they brutalised him. But they wouldn’t go beyond the Sunday afternoon. Miss Pateman said they had finished punishing him by then. Neither of them at any time gave any account of how they killed him.

Bosanquet: Were they at this stage still pretending that they hadn’t done so?

Gough: I think not.

Bosanquet: Why wouldn’t they speak of what they did to him after the Sunday afternoon, then?

Gough: They each said, several times, that they had forgotten.

Bosanquet: That is, they were concealing it?

Gough: Again I think not. I believe it was genuine amnesia.

Bosanquet: You really mean, they had forgotten killing that child?

Gough: It is quite common for someone to forget the act of killing.

In his last question Bosanquet had, quite untypically, inflected his voice. For once he was at a loss. We realised that he was getting an answer he didn’t expect, and one that the defence might return to (Benskin was muttering to his junior). In an instant, Bosanquet had recovered himself: with steady precision he brought out his roll-call of final questions, and the doctor’s replies fell heavily into the hush.

“It has been suggested by some of your colleagues,” said Bosanquet, “that a sadistic killing of this kind couldn’t be performed by persons in a state of unimpaired responsibility. You know about that opinion?”

“Yes. I know it very well.”

“How do you regard it?”

“I respect it,” said Gough. “But I cannot accept it.”

“This kind of planned cruelty and killing is no proof of impaired responsibility, you say? I should like you to make that clear.”

“In my judgment, it is no proof at all.”

“People can perpetrate such a crime in a state of normal responsibility?”

“I believe so. I wish that I could believe otherwise.”

He added those last words almost in an aside, dropping his voice. Very few people in court heard him, or noticed the sudden lapse from his manner of authority. Later we were remarking about what had moved him: did he simply feel that, if to be cruel one had to be deranged, there would be that much less evil in the world? And he found that thought consoling, but had to shove it away?

“And that was true of the actions of Miss Pateman and Miss Ross?”

“I believe so.”

“You are certain?”

“Within the limits of my professional knowledge, I am certain.”

“You would not agree that either of them had a real abnormality of mind?”

“We must be careful here. In each of them there is a degree of abnormality. But not enough, in the terms of the Act, to impair substantially their mental responsibility.”

“Their responsibility was not impaired? Not substantially impaired?”

“No.”

“That is true of neither of them?”

“Of neither of them.”

That was the last answer before the lunchtime break. Hurrying out of court in order to catch up with George, we saw him walking away, not looking back. When I called out, it was some time before he heard or stopped. He didn’t greet us, but as we drew near him, stared at us with a gentle, absent-minded, indifferent smile. He gave the impression that he had not noticed we had been present in the court. Instead of insisting on showing us a place to eat, as he had done with Margaret and me on the first morning, he scarcely seemed to know where he was going. He was quite docile, and when Martin suggested having a sandwich in a snack bar George answered like a good child, yes, that would be nice.

As the three of us sat on backless chairs at the counter, George in the middle, he did not speak much. When he replied to a question, he did not turn his face, so that I could see only his profile. Trying to stir him, I mentioned that, the previous day, the defence doctors had given strong evidence, precisely contrary to what he had just heard.

“Yes, thank you,” said George. “I rather assumed that.”

He was just as polite when he replied to Martin, who made some conversation on his other side. I brought out the name of Bosanquet, hoping to hear George curse again. He said: “He’s leading for the prosecution, isn’t he?”

After that, he sat, elbows on the counter, munching. One could not tell whether he was daydreaming or lost in his own thoughts: or sitting there, dead blank.

When we led him back into the courtroom, Martin and I exchanged a glance. It was a glance of relief. There was a larger crowd than in the morning, but still the lower tiers of seats were not full, and we sat, George once more between us, three rows back from the solicitors, gazing straight up into the witness box. Then, the judge settled, the court quiet, Gough took his place. At once Benskin was on his feet, neat and small, wearing a polite, subdued smile.

“I put it to you, doctor,” he began, “we agree, do we not, that Miss Ross suffers from a defective personality?”

“To an extent, yes.”

“You agree that she has a defect of personality, but as a matter of degree you don’t think that it brings her within the terms of the Act?”

“I certainly don’t consider that she comes within the terms of the Act.”

“But it is a matter of degree?”

“In the last resort, yes.”

“I suggest, doctor,” Benskin said, “that any opinion in this matter of degree, about defect of personality or of responsibility — in the sense we are discussing them in this case — any opinion is in the long run subjective?”

“I am not certain what you mean.”

“I think you should be. I mean, that of a number of persons as highly qualified as yourself; some might agree with your opinion — and a proportion, possibly a high proportion, certainly wouldn’t. Isn’t that true?”

“I have said several times,” said Gough, showing no flicker of irritation nor of being drawn, “that I can speak only within the limits of my professional judgment.”

“And many others, as highly qualified as yourself, would give a different professional judgment?”

“That would be for them to say.”

“You would grant that neither you nor anyone else really has any criterion to go on?”

“I agree that we have no exact scientific criterion. These matters wouldn’t cost us so much pain if we had.”

“That is, your expert opinion is just one opinion among many? You can’t claim any more for it than that?”

“I am giving my own professional judgment.”

“I put it to you, doctor,” said Benskin, flicking his gown round him as though it were a cape, “that your judgment shows a certain predisposition. That is, you are more unwilling than many of your colleagues to accept that people can suffer from diminished responsibility?”

“I do not know that you are entitled to say that. I repeat, I have given my professional judgment. I am responsible for that, and for no one else’s.”

“But cannot a professional judgment betray a certain predisposition, doctor? Or prejudice, as we might say in less lofty circles?”

The judge tapped his pen on the desk. “I think you would do better to avoid words which might suggest that you are imputing motives, Mr Benskin. You are asking Dr Gough about his general attitude or predisposition, and that is permissible.”

“I am obliged to your lordship.” Benskin gave a sharp smile. “Then I put it to you, doctor, that you have betrayed a certain predisposition? That you never considered it probable that Miss Ross — or Miss Pateman — were not fully responsible? And you ignored important signs which point the other way?”

“Will you be more specific?”

“Oh yes. I was intending to. You said in evidence that Miss Ross, and Miss Pateman also, had actually forgotten the act of killing. You said, I think these were your words, that it was genuine amnesia. To most of us that would appear to indicate — very sharply — an abnormal state of mind. Impaired responsibility maybe. But not to you, doctor?”

Gough said, in a tone not argumentative but sad: “I couldn’t regard it so.”

“Why not?”

“I think I also said, this condition is surprisingly common.”

“Surprisingly common?”

“That is, among people who have done a killing, it is common for them to have forgotten the act.”

“Does that signify nothing about them?”

Gough said: “It is specially common among people who have killed a child. In my experience, I have not once known any case when they could recall the act.”

Benskin had gone too far to draw back. Quietly he said: “Might not that suggest then a special state of mind, or lack of responsibility, in such cases?”

Gough answered: “I am afraid not. Not in all such cases. In my experience, that would not be true.”

Benskin was pertinacious. He knew he had lost a point, and was covering it up. He was cleverer than the doctor, quicker witted though not as rooted in his own convictions. I thought later, there were not many better counsel for this type of defence.

Hadn’t Doctor Gough glossed over, or explained away, all the other indications of abnormal personality? Their fantasy life: the gap between fantasy and action: Benskin was using Cornford’s analysis, jabbing the rival case straight at Gough, trying to make him deny it or get involved in psychiatrists’ disputes. Fairly soon Benskin won a point back. Gough hadn’t become rattled, he seemed to be a man singularly free from self-regard: but he wasn’t so good as Benskin, or as Cornford would have been, in seeing a chess move ahead. In replying to a question about their fantasy fugues, Gough let drop the observation: “But of course they are both intelligent.”

Benskin did not let an instant pass. His eyes flashed at his junior, and he said: “Ah, now we have it, perhaps. You are predisposed (there was a stress on the word) to believe that persons of adequate intelligence are automatically responsible for their actions?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That is, defects of personality don’t really matter, abnormalities of mind don’t really matter, if people have a reasonable IQ?”

“I repeat, I did not say that.”

“Doctor, it was the implication of your remark.”

“In that case, I shall have to withdraw it.”

“I shall have to ask my lord to make a note of what you actually said. And this gets us in a little deeper, Doctor Gough. I suggested, and you didn’t like the suggestion, that you were predisposed to think that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were fully responsible — perhaps because they were intelligent? No, never mind that. I am now asking you, what sort of persons, in what sort of circumstances, would you ever admit not to be fully responsible? Are there any?”

“I have examined some. And given testimony on their behalf.”

“And what they were like? Were they imbecile?”

“One or two were,” said Gough without hedging. “By no means all.”

“And the rest. They were grossly and obviously inferior mentally to the rest of us, were they?”

“Some were. Not all.”

“You will see the force of my questions, doctor. I am not misrepresenting your position — or predisposition — am I? You are extremely reluctant to admit that persons can be afflicted with a lack of responsibility. And can commit criminal actions in that state. You are reluctant to admit that, aren’t you?”

“I have given my testimony in favour of some unfortunate people.”

“When they are so pitiable that it doesn’t need a doctor to tell us so, isn’t that so? But you won’t give any weight, as your colleagues do, to a history like Miss Ross’ and Miss Pateman’s — which isn’t as obvious but is, I suggest to you, doctor, precisely as tragic?”

As he delivered that question, Benskin sat down with a shrug, so as to cut off Gough’s reply.

Emotions in the court, provoked and stimulated by Benskin, had risen higher. Mrs Pateman, who was sitting in the row in front, gave me a flickering, frightened glance, so like her daughter’s. Whispers were audible all round us, and I could see two of the jury muttering together. As soon as Wilson took his turn to cross-examine, the restlessness became more uncomfortable still: but it seemed to be directed against him, as though the women in the dock had — in the fatigued irritable afternoon — been forgotten. To most spectators, Wilson sounded histrionic, hectoring and false. When he demanded with an angry frown, a vein swelling in his forehead, whether the doctor had deliberately refrained from mentioning Miss Pateman’s adolescent breakdown, it rang out like a brassy, put-on performance. The truth was, he was sincere, too sincere. Benskin had enjoyed the dialectic and been in control of himself throughout: but Wilson wasn’t, he had become involved, in a fashion that actors would have recognised as living the part. Which almost invariably, by one of the perverse paradoxes, gave an effect of sublime artificiality upon the stage: as it did that day in court. Wilson was totally engaged with Kitty. He felt for her and with her. He believed that she had not had a chance, that all her life she had been fated. So he couldn’t repress his anger with Matthew Gough, and almost no one perceived that the anger was real. He even rebuked Gough, Gough of all people, for being flippant. It sounded the most stilted and bogus of rebukes: yet Wilson meant it.

Kitty, who had given up her obsessive note-making since the psychiatric evidence began, listened — often sucking in her lips as though she were thirsty — to her counsel’s angry voice. I wondered if she realised that he was struggling desperately for her. I wondered if she was cool enough to speculate on what influence he was having. For myself; I guessed — but my judgment was unstable, I kept foreseeing different ends — that he was doing her neither harm nor good.

That was what I told George as the three of us sat at tea, in the same scented, women-shoppers’ café as I had visited in January, the day that I first heard the physical facts of the case. The central heating was still on, though it must have been 70o outside: the hot perfumed air pressed on us, as George asked me: “Well. What about it?”

I said, things were back where they were. Bosanquet had wasted almost no time at all in re-examining Matthew Gough: he had merely to repeat his opinion. Diminished responsibility? No. Gough, contradicting Cornford, spoke as scrupulously as Cornford himself had spoken the day before.

Now all the evidence was in — except what the two said when they went into the box themselves.

“That won’t make much difference,” I said.

“Whatever she says, it can’t do her any good,” George replied. He lifted his eyes and gazed straight at me.

“What are her chances, then?”

After a moment, I answered: “Things might go either way.”

George shook his head.

“No. That’s too optimistic. You’re going in for wishful thinking now.”

I felt — and it was true of Martin also — nothing but astonishment, astonishment with an edge to it, almost sinister, certainly creepy. We had heard George hopeful all his life, often hopeful beyond the limits of reason: now on that afternoon, the trial coming to its close, we heard him reproaching me.

There was another surprise. His manner — one could have said, his mind and body — had totally changed since lunchtime, only three hours before. Then he had been lolling about in a state of hebetude, getting on for catatonic, as helplessly passive as a good many people become in extreme strain. Now he was talking like an active man. In the hot room the sweat was pouring down his cheeks, his breathing was heavy, beneath his eyes the rims were red: but still he had brought out reserves of fire and energy, which no one could have thought existed, seeing him not only that morning but for months past, or even years.

“You’re being too optimistic,” he said, with something like scorn mixed up with authority. “I can’t afford to be.”

“George,” said Martin, “there’s nothing you can do.”

“Nonsense,” said George, with an angry shout. “The world isn’t coming to an end. Other people have got to go on living. Some of them I’ve been responsible for. I don’t know whether I’m any further use. But I’ve got to go on living. What in God’s name is the point of telling me that there’s nothing I can do?”

Martin said, he meant that there was nothing George could do for his niece.

Still angry, George interrupted him: “If they send her to a hospital, then I suppose there’s a finite possibility that they’ll cure her, and I shall have to be on hand. That’s obvious to either of you, I should have thought. But as I’ve told you—” he was speaking to me as though I were a young protégé again — “that’s the optimistic plan. It’s over-optimistic, and that’s being charitable to you. If they send her to jail—”

I said: “I agree, that may happen.”

“Of course it may happen,” he said harshly. “Well, in that case, I don’t expect to be alive when she comes out.”

Was he recognising his state of health? If so, it was the first time I had heard it.

“So I’m afraid that I should have to regard her as dispensable, so far as I am concerned. She won’t be out while I’m alive. There are other people I shall have to think about. And what I ought to do myself. That means a second plan.”

Neither Martin nor I could tell whether this was make-believe. He was talking with the decision, buoyed up by the thought of action, such as he used in his days of vigour. He was also talking like the leader which — in his own bizarre and self-destructive fashion — he had always been. When he said that Cora was “dispensable” (just as when he did not so much as mention Kitty Pateman’s name, since she was no concern of his), he was showing — paradoxically, so it seemed — a flash, perhaps a final one, like the green flash at sunset, of the quality which made people so loyal to him. For a leader of his kind needed gusto, and he had had far more than most men: needed generosity of spirit, and no one that I knew had lavished himself more: needed a touch of paranoia, to make his followers feel protective: needed something else. And the something else, when I was young, I should have called ruthlessness. That was glossing it over. It was really more like an inner chill. By this time, I had seen a number of men whom others without thought, as it were by instinct, looked upon as leaders. Some in prominent places: one or two, like George, in obscurity and the underground. Of these leaders, a few, not all, attracted loyalty, sometimes fanatical loyalty, as George did: and they were alike in only one thing, that they all possessed this inner chill. It was the others, who were warm inside, more plastic and more involved, who got deserted or betrayed.

33: Revenant

ON the Saturday morning in our drawing-room, Margaret was asking me about my father. A beam of sunlight edged through the window behind me, irradiated half a picture on the far wall, a patch of fluorescent blue. It was all easy and peacemaking. Yet it felt unfamiliar, that I wasn’t catching the bus down to the Assize Hall.

I had returned very late the night before, and we hadn’t talked much. Yes, I told her now, Martin and I had been to visit the old man (actually, we had gone straight from that tea-time with George). He had complained vaguely that he wasn’t “quite A1”: but, when we asked what was the matter, he either put us off or didn’t know, saying that “they” were looking after him nicely. “They” appeared to consist of the doctor and a district visitor who came in twice a week. My father spoke of her with enthusiasm. “She goes round all the old people who haven’t got anyone to look after them,” he said, expressing mild incredulity at the social services. We had told him that it was his own fault that he hadn’t someone to look after him, it was his own mule-like obstinacy. But he scented danger, with an old man’s cunning he suspected that we were plotting to drag him away. He wouldn’t budge. “I should curl up my toes if anyone shifted me,” he said. His morale seemed to be high. Incidentally, he had with fair consistency called Martin and me by each other’s names: but he had done that in our childhood, he was no more senile now than when I last saw him.

Margaret gave a faint smile, preoccupied as to whether we ought to leave him there, how far had we the right to interfere.

Just then Charles, still on holiday, entered in a new dressing gown, smelling of shaving soap. Over the last year he had suddenly become careful of his appearance. He said hallo, looking at me with scrutinising eyes. He didn’t remind me of his warning, but I hadn’t any doubt that he had searched the papers each day. And his forecasts had proved not so far from the truth. There had been references to my presence at the trial, some just news, a few malicious. An enterprising journalist had done some research on my connection with George Passant. He had even latched on to Gough’s casual comment the day before. “Venusberg trial — Lewis Eliot again with boyhood friends.”

Not waiting for Charles to be tactful, I asked if he had noticed that.

He nodded.

“Well?” he said.

“One gets a bit tired of it. But still—”

Margaret gave a curse. I didn’t tell him, but he certainly knew that it was true for me, that no one I had known, including the hardest political operators, ever quite got used to it. Instead I said (using reflectiveness to deny the here-and-now, the little sting), that this kind of comment, the mass media’s treatment of private lives, had become far more reckless in my own lifetime.

Charles was not much impressed. This was the climate which he had grown up in and took for granted.

“Have you done any good?” he asked.

I thought of George at tea the day before.

“Very little,” I said. “Probably none at all.”

Charles broke into a broad smile. “Anyway, we’ve got to give you credit for honesty, haven’t we?” He teased me, with the repetitive family gibes. Margaret was laughing, relieved that we hadn’t reverted to our quarrel. Why did I insist on getting into trouble? Even when I wasn’t needed? Fair comment, I said, thinking of George again.

I hadn’t seen Charles at all the night before, and he hadn’t had a chance to enquire about the trial itself. At last he did so. What was it really like?

I looked at them both. I repeated what I had said to Margaret, just before going to sleep.

“It’s unspeakable.” Then I added: “No, that’s foolish, we’ve been speaking about it all the week. But not been able to imagine it.”

I didn’t want to talk to him as I had done to Martin: perhaps I should have been freer, if it hadn’t been for the sexual heaviness that hung over it all. True, there wasn’t much, in verbal terms, that I could tell Charles: he had listened for years to people whose language wasn’t restrained, and I was sure the same was true with him and his friends. But together we didn’t talk like that. There was a reticence, a father-and-son reticence, on his side as well as mine, when it came to the brute facts, above all the brute facts of this case.

So I said, it had been appalling to listen to. Like an aeroplane journey that was going wrong: stretches of tedium, then the moments when one didn’t want to believe one’s ears. I couldn’t get it out of my experience, I told him.

“I haven’t had as much of it as you have,” said Margaret. “But that’s true—” she turned to Charles.

Once more, as with Martin, I was remembering Auschwitz. To these two, I did not need to say much more than the name.

A couple of summers before, when the three of us had been travelling in Eastern Europe, I had left Margaret and Charles in Krakow, and had driven off to the camp with an Australian acquaintance. We had walked through the museum, the neat streets, the cells, in silence. It was a scorching August day, under the wide cloudless Central European sky. At last we came to the end, and were walking back to the car. My acquaintance, who hadn’t spoken for long enough, said: “It’s a bastard, being a human being.”

Often this last week, I’d felt like that, I said to Charles. I was certain that his Uncle Martin had as well.

Charles was silent, regarding me with an expression that was grave, detached and unfamiliar.

After a few moments, I went on: “Did you know,” I said, “that there was a medieval heresy which believed that this is hell? That is, what we’re living in, here and now. Well, they may have had a point.”

Charles gazed at me with the same expression. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. Then in a hurry, as though anxious not to argue, trying to climb back upon the plane of banter, he asked me, why was it that unbelievers always knew more about theological doctrine than anyone else? However had I acquired that singular fact? He was being articulate, sharp-witted, smiling, determined not to become serious himself again, nor to let me be so.

After tea the following afternoon, when I was in one of the back rooms, Charles called out that there was someone for me on the telephone.

Who was it? He wouldn’t say. Soft voice, Charles added — slight accent, North Country perhaps.

I went into the hall, picked up the receiver, asked who was there, and heard: “This is Jack.”

“Jack who?”

“The one you’ve known longest.”

“Sorry,” I said, unwilling to play guessing games.

“It’s Jack Cotery,” came the voice, soft, reproachful. “Are you free, Lewis? I do want to see you.”

I was extremely busy, I said. All that night. I shouldn’t be at home the following day.

“It is important, it really is. I shan’t take half-an-hour.” Jack’s tone was unputoffable, wheedling, unashamed, just as it used to be.

“I don’t know when.”

“Only half-an-hour. I promise.”

I repeated, I was busy all that night.

“You’re alone now, aren’t you? I’ll just come and go.”

He had hung up before I could reply. When I rejoined Charles, he asked who had been speaking. A figure from the past, I said. A fairly disreputable figure. What did he want? “I assume,” I said, “that he’s trying to borrow money.” Why hadn’t I stopped him? Charles enquired, when he discovered that Jack Cotery was coming round. Irritably I shook my head, and went off to assemble a tray of drinks, reminded of how — with pleasure — I had done the same for George, that evening the previous December.

As soon as I heard the doorbell ring, I went and opened the door myself.

“Hello, Lewis,” breathed Jack Cotery confidentially.

I had seen him last about ten years before. He was my own age to the month: we had been in the same form at school. But he was more time-ravaged than anyone I knew. As a young man his black hair was glossy, his eyes were lustrous, he had a strong pillar of a neck: he had only to walk along the street to get appraising glances from women, to the envy of the rest of us. Now the hair was gone, the face not so much old as unrecognisably lined, still a clown’s face but as though the clown hadn’t put his make-up on. Even his carriage, which used to have the ease of someone who lived on good terms with his muscles, had lost its spring. But his glance was still humorous, giving the impression that he was making fun of me — and of himself.

I led the way into the study, put him in the chair where George had sat when he first broke the news.

“Will you have a drink?” I said.

“Now, Lewis.” He spoke with reproach. “You ought to know that I never was a drinking man.”

In fact, that had been true. “I’m a teetotaller nowadays, actually,” said Jack, as though it were a private joke. “Also a vegetarian. It’s rather interesting.”

“Is it?” I said. I turned to the whisky bottle. “Well, do you mind if I do?”

“So long as you take care of yourself.”

Sitting at the desk, glass in front of me, I looked across at his big wide-open eyes.

“Shall we get down to business?” I said. “There isn’t much time, I’m afraid—”

“Why are you so anxious to get rid of me, Lewis?”

“I am pretty tied up—”

“No, but you are anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you?”

He was laughing, without either rancour or shame. I couldn’t keep back some sort of a smile.

“Anyway,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you?”

“That isn’t the right question, Lewis.” Once more, he seemed both earnest and secretly amused.

“What do you mean?”

“The right question is this: Is there anything I can do for you?”

Once I had had some practice in learning when he was being sincere or putting on an act: although, often, he could be doing both at once, taking in himself as well as me. It was a long while since I had met anyone so labile, and I was at a loss.

“I’ve been following this horrible case, you see,” Jack went on. “I’m very sorry you are mixed up in that.”

“As a spectator.”

“No, Lewis, not quite that. Remember, I knew you a long time ago. I understand why you had to go—”

“Do you?”

“I think I do. Trust your old friend.” He put a finger to the side of his nose, in a gesture reminiscent of Azik Schiff talking of millions or of Jack himself, in old days, thinking how to make a quick pound. “You weren’t able to forget how George used to shout at us at midnight outside the jail. And we used to walk down the middle of the tramlines, later on at night, when the streets were empty, dreaming about a wonderful future. So when the future came, and it turned out to be this, you thought you had to stand by George. You weren’t going to let him sit there alone, were you?”

“That’s rather too simple,” I said. Also too sentimental, I was thinking: had he always made life sound softer than it was?

“You see, Lewis, you’re a kind man.” That was more sentimental. I wanted to stop him, but he went on: “I’ve heard people say all kinds of things about you. Often they hate you, don’t they? But they don’t realise how kind you are. Or perhaps they do, and it makes them hate you more.”

“I wish I could believe you,” I said. “But I don’t. I strongly suspect that, if I’d never existed, no one would have been a penny the worse.”

“Nonsense, man. I’m an absolute failure, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I do. I’m no use, if you put me up against the people you live among now. But I can see some things that they wouldn’t see if they lived to be a thousand. Perhaps because I’ve been a failure. I can see one or two things about you. I tell you this. You’ve lived a more Christian life than most of the Christians I know.”

It was my turn to say nonsense, more honestly than he had done. It was an astonishing statement, ludicrous in its own right, and also because Jack, when I knew him, took about as much account of Christianity as he did of Hamiltonian algebra.

“Oddly enough,” he said, “that’s what I came to tell you. Just that.”

It was possible — I was still suspicious, but of course I wanted to believe — that he was not pretending and had come for nothing else. A little later I discovered that he had made a special journey from Manchester — “on the chance of catching you”. It would have been more sensible, I said, to have rung up or written. “You know,” said Jack, “I always did like a bit of surprise.”

Perhaps it had been nothing but an impulse. But he had come to hearten me. Once or twice, when we were young men, he had taken time off from his chicanery or amours, to try to find me a love affair which would make me happier. The tone was the same, he liked bringing me comfort. That afternoon, I might have wished that the comfort was harder and nearer the truth — but none of us gets enough of it, we are grateful for it, whatever its quality, when it comes.

In his soft and modulated voice, Jack was talking, sadly, not nostalgically, about our early days. “No, Lewis, we all did each other harm, I’m sure we did. I was a bad influence on George, I know I was. And he wasn’t any good for me. Of course, you didn’t see the worst of it. But you suffered from it too, clearly you did.”

He said, eyes wide open, as when he was playing some obscure trick: “You know, I began to realise something, not so long ago. I thought — look here, I shouldn’t like to die, after the life I’ve lived.”

After a moment, I mentioned that, the summer before, I had met his first wife, Olive. He said: “Would you believe it, I’ve almost forgotten her.”

I knew that he had married again, and asked about it.

“No,” said Jack. “I extricated myself; some time ago.”

Just for an instant, his remorseful expression had broken, and he gave a smile that I had often seen — shameless, impudent, defiant. Or it might have been an imitation of that smile.

“Have you got anyone now?”

“I’ve given all that up.”

“How long for?”

“Absolutely and completely,” said Jack. “For good and all. You see, I’ve taken to a different sort of life.”

He explained that nowadays he spent much of his spare time in church. He explained it with the enthusiasm that once he used to spend on reducing all human aspirations down to the sexual act — and with the same humorous twitch, as though there was someone behind his shoulder laughing at him. How genuine was he? Sometimes one could indulge one’s suspiciousness too much. Would there be another twist, was this the end? Of that I couldn’t guess, I didn’t believe anyone would know the answers, until he was dead.

“Let’s be honest,” said Jack. “I didn’t just come to tell you you’d lived a Christian life. There’s something else—”

Right at the beginning, I had been counting on a double purpose. Now it came, and the laugh was against me.

“I think you ought to be a Christian — in faith as well as works. I really do.”

He asked, had he overrun his time? Could he have a few more minutes? I hadn’t expected that afternoon to end with Jack expending all his emotion trying to convert me. The old arguments flicked back and forth. The old theological questions. Then Jack said, you’d find it a strength, Lewis. You’d find it made this hideous business easier to take. Strangely, that was what I had said myself to Superintendent Maxwell. But now, as I replied to Jack, I did not believe it. Faith did not mean that one acquiesced so quietly, did it? Surely it was deeper than that? Believers had to confront these extremist questions: nothing I had read of them suggested that they were any more reconciled. I should have respected them less if they had been.

At last Jack went away. I offered to introduce him to my wife and son, but he reminded me, with a not quite saintly grin, how pressed I was for time.

When I joined Charles in the drawing-room, he said: “Well, how much did he want to borrow?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “the subject didn’t crop up.”

34: Reflections of an Old Man

GOING back to the trial by an early train, I stood outside the Assize Hall, not certain whether the others would arrive. Then Martin’s car drew up: he said good morning as he had done for days past, as though we had been pulled back and couldn’t be anywhere else. I had seen politicians meet in the Yard like that during a time of crisis, glad that there was someone else who couldn’t escape, making a kind of secret enclave for themselves. It was a beautiful morning. Close by, the church clock struck the quarter. A few minutes later, as we were getting ready to go into court, we saw George walking towards us, walking very slowly in the hazy sunshine.

As he came up the slope, he said: “Anyway, it won’t be long now.”

I replied: “Not very long.”

“It ought to be over by tomorrow night.” George seemed to be entirely preoccupied by the timetable. When I mentioned that, later in the morning, I should have to leave them and sit in the official box, since I was lunching with the judge, he said: “Oh, are you?” He wouldn’t have been less interested if I had said that I was lunching with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He went on ticking off the last stages of the trial — “I don’t see,” he said, “how they can keep it going beyond tomorrow.”

In the courtroom, more crammed that morning than during the psychiatrists’ evidence, Cora Ross went into the box. She stood there, hair shining, shoulders high and square, as she faced Benskin. She had taken on an expression which had something of the nature both of a frown and a superior smile: her eyes did not meet her counsel’s but (as I recalled from the conversation in prison) were cast sidelong, this time in the direction of Kitty. It was clear from the beginning that Benskin had one of the most difficult of jobs. He didn’t want her to appear too balanced or articulate: on the other hand, the jury mustn’t have any suspicion that she had been rehearsed in seeming abnormal or was herself deliberately putting it on. There had already been whispers that her outburst in court the previous week was a clever piece of acting. And, of course, he was loaded with an intrinsic difficulty. Even if he had been trying to prove that she was mad, not irresponsible, how did sensible laymen expect mad persons to answer or behave? Had they ever seen anyone within hours of a psychotic suicide? Looking, talking, seeming, perhaps feeling, more like themselves than they would ever have believed?

Benskin was much too shrewd not to have worked this out. In fact, he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to talk much. Not that he need have been so cautious, for she was responding as little, as deadeningly, as she had done to me. She sounded as though she were utterly remote, or perhaps more exactly as though there was nothing going on within her mind. Light, practised, neutral questions — not friendly, not indulgent, for Benskin had chosen his tone — made no change in her expression: each was answered by the one word, no.

He had begun straight away upon the killing. Did she now remember any more about it? No. Had she anything to say about it? No. Could she describe the events of the Sunday evening? No.

“You don’t deny, Miss Ross, that you were associated with the killing?”

“What’s the use?”

But she still had nothing to say of how it happened? No. Or when? No. She had no memory of it? No. Had she ever had blocks of memory before? She didn’t know. Did she remember meeting Miss Pateman for the first time? Yes. When? At the — café, in a crowd. (I didn’t glance at George: it was one of his favourite rendezvous.) Did she remember setting up house with Miss Pateman? Yes. When? November 17, 1961. The answer came out fast, mechanically. But she had no memory of the boy’s death? No.

“I have to press you, Miss Ross. Has it quite vanished?”

Cora gave something like a smile, stormy, contemptuous. Her reply wasn’t immediate.

“No,” she said.

“You mean, you have some recollection?”

“Something happened.”

“Can you say anything more definite?”

“No.”

He went on; when she said “something happened”, what did that mean? She returned to saying no. It might have been, so people thought afterwards, that she had given away more than she intended: or, as Matthew Gough believed, that there was only a vague sense of tumult, of whirling noise, remaining to her, something like the last conscious memory of a drunken night.

But she didn’t deny, Benskin asked, that there had been planning to get the boy out to the cottage? No. The planning had taken place, she hadn’t forgotten it? No. Then what had she to say about that?

“When you set out to do something, you do it.”

“Someone must have thought about it for quite a time beforehand?”

She answered, head thrown back: “I thought about it.”

“Can you tell us how you discussed it with Miss Pateman?”

“No.”

When he repeated some versions of this question, she merely answered No. Here, I at least was sure that this was a willed response: she could have told it all if she chose.

“Well. What state of mind were you in, can you tell us that?”

“No.”

“Come, Miss Ross, you must realise that you have done terrible things. Do you realise that?”

She stared to one side of him, face fixed, like the figurehead on an old sailing ship.

“If you had heard of anyone else doing such things, you would have thought they were atrocious beyond words. Isn’t that so?”

Again she stared past him.

“So can’t you tell us anything about your state of mind, say the fortnight before?”

“No.”

“You said, a moment ago, you set out to do something. Meaning those atrocious things. Why did you set out—”

She said: “I suppose you get carried away.”

Benskin said: “Miss Ross, we really want to understand. Can’t you give us an idea what you were thinking about, when you were making those plans?”

“I thought about the plans.”

“But there must have been more you were thinking about?”

“That’s as may be.”

“Can’t you give us an idea?”

“No.”

Benskin said: “Miss Ross, aren’t you sorry for what you’ve done?”

Cora Ross replied, not looking directly at Kitty: “I’m sorry that I dragged her into it.”

Suddenly, as though on impulse, Benskin nodded, sat down, examination over. Some lawyers thought later that he ought to have persevered: to me, sitting in the silent, baffled courtroom, his judgment seemed good. On his feet, Bosanquet asked his first question in a voice as always quiet, but not so punctiliously unemotional: “Miss Ross, you have just told my learned friend that you are sorry to have involved Miss Pateman. Is that all you are sorry for?”

“I’m sorry I dragged her in.”

“You know perfectly well that you have done what have just been called atrocious things. Aren’t you sorry for that?”

No answer.

“You mustn’t pretend, Miss Ross. You must have some remorse. Are you pretending not to understand?”

“You can think what you like.”

Bosanquet was, of course, meeting precisely the opposite difficulty to her own counsel’s. If he drew dead responses like that last one, or any response which seemed outside human sympathy, then he might, paradoxically, be helping her. Momentarily he had himself been shocked. With professional self-control, he started again, quite calmly.

(Remorse. I was distracted into thinking of genuine remorse. Whenever I had met it, in myself or anyone else, there had always been an element of fear. Fear perhaps of one’s own judgment of what one had done: often, far more often, of the judgment of others. I wondered if this woman was one of those, and they existed, who were incapable of fear.)

Carefully, on his new tack, Bosanquet was setting out to domesticate her life. She had lived with her mother until she died? Yes. She had had a normal childhood? She had gone to school like everyone else? She had never been under medical inspection? She had not been in any sort of trouble? She had done satisfactory work at school, she had been good at games? No one treated her as different from anyone else?

“In fact,” said Bosanquet, “no one had any reason to consider that you were?”

“I was.” For once she had raised her voice.

Bosanquet passed over that answer, repeating that no one treated her differently—?

“I’ll answer for myself.” It was an angry shout, like the tirade to the court the week before, mysterious-sounding. She might have been giving out a message — or just stating how, to her own self; she was unique.

With a smooth and placid transition, Bosanquet moved on to her ménage with Miss Pateman. They were living very comfortably when they pooled their resources, weren’t they? Their incomes added together came to something like £1,600, didn’t they? They paid Miss Pateman’s father, £200 for their room? It was an eminently practicable and well-thought out arrangement, their joint establishment, wasn’t it?

It was at this stage that I made my way out of court and round to the official box, so that I missed a set of questions and answers. From the court record, when I read it later, Bosanquet was making it clear that their domestic planning was far-sighted and full of common sense. There were exchanges about insurance policies and savings. Altogether they had been more competent than most young married couples, and as much anticipating that their relation would last for ever.

When I slipped into my place in the box, Bosanquet had just finished asking: “So you managed to live a pleasant leisurely life, didn’t you?”

“We did our jobs.”

“But you had plenty of leisure outside office hours?”

“I suppose so.”

“What did you do with your leisure?”

“The usual things.”

“Did you read much?”

“She was the reading one.”

As Bosanquet tried to discover what Cora Ross read, the answer seemed to be nothing. Certainly no books, scarcely a newspaper. Music she listened to, for hours on end: all kinds of music, apparently, pop, jazz, classical. Television, often the whole evening through. Films of any kind, but more often on television in their room (they had another set at Rose Cottage) than by going to a cinema. Yes, sometimes they went to a cinema: no special kind of film, they went to see stars that they “liked” — a word which had a sexual aura round it.

Music, the screen. She had been drenched and saturated with sound. No printed words at all: or as little as one could manage with, in a literate society. In an earlier age, would she have wanted to learn from books?

“You had everything sensibly organised, Miss Ross,” said Bosanquet in his level tone. “Then you thought you might do a little sensible organisation about — something else?”

“No.”

“Think a moment. What you did to this boy, beginning with the kidnapping, that required a good deal of organisation?”

“No.”

“It required just as much careful thinking as the way you planned your household accounts?”

“No.”

“We know already how you sensibly allocated your combined income. A certain proportion to the drinks bill—”

“She didn’t drink.”

“No, you were a careful household. But you gave exactly the same sort of attention when you decided to make away with a harmless child?”

Sensible, careful, organised: Bosanquet was reiterating the words, letting no one forget how competent they were. It made an extraordinary picture, just because it was so commonplace: the two of them coming back to their room, Cora allowing herself a couple of evening drinks (a bottle of whisky lasted them a fortnight). It made too extraordinary a picture, for there were many in court, uneasy, disturbed, feeling that their life together, even well before the crime, couldn’t have been quite like that. Yet at times it might or must have been.

“You did a great deal of careful planning — when you decided it was a good idea to make away with a harmless child?”

“No.”

“Of course you did. You have told your own counsel so. We have all heard how you picked on that child weeks beforehand. You organised the whole operation just as thoughtfully as you did your household, isn’t that so?”

“No.”

“Do you deny that you planned it?”

She raised her head. “I thought about one or two things.”

“You planned it step by step?”

No answer.

“Every inch along the way?”

With a kind of scorn or irritation, she said: “It wasn’t like that.”

“You planned it very lucidly, Miss Ross. It’s not for me to find an answer to why you did so. Were you getting bored with everything else in your life together?”

“No.” Her face was convulsed.

“Were you ready for anything with a new thrill?”

“No.”

“Well then. What put this abominable idea into your head?”

For some instants it seemed that she was not going to answer. Then, as though she were wilfully getting back into the groove, or as though it were an answer prepared beforehand, she repeated what she had said to Benskin: “You get carried away.”

Bosanquet, looking up at her, said again that it was not for him to find an answer. He returned to the planning, extricating each logistic point, sounding as temperate as though it were a military analysis. By this time — perhaps it was a delayed reaction — Cora had lost her temper. Her monosyllables were shouted, her expression changed from being wild and riven to something like smooth with hate. Then she sank back into sullenness, but her fury was still smouldering. When he finished with her, her eyes for once followed him: she stared down upon him, face pallid, minatory, deadened.

Benskin half-rose, then thought better of it, and left that impression of her, standing there.

There was not time to begin Kitty’s examination before lunch. After the judge’s procession had departed, I went out, and found his clerk waiting for me. A car was ready to drive me to the judge’s lodgings, in the old County Rooms in the middle of the town: he would be following at once with another guest.

In fact, as I walked into his dining-room, white-panelled, perhaps later than Georgian, but light and lively on the eye, the judge was hallooing cheerfully behind me. “We caught you up, you see,” said Mr Justice Fane.

Do you two know each other? he was saying. Yes, we did, for his other guest was Frederick Hargrave, whom I kept meeting on the University Court. For an instant I was surprised to see him there, he looked so quiet, unassuming, insignificant beside the judge’s bulk: I had to recall that Hargrave (whose grandfather and father had lived in the town like simple Quaker businessmen) was a deputy lieutenant of the county and not unused to entertaining circuit judges.

Still wearing his red gown — he had taken off only his wig — Mr Justice Fane stood between us, as tall as I was, weighing two or three stone more, very heavily boned and muscled, offering us drinks. No, that’s no use to you, he corrected himself; speaking to Hargrave: his manners were just as cordial and attentive out of court as in. So Hargrave was equipped with ginger beer, while the judge helped me to a whisky and himself to a substantial gin and tonic.

“It’s very good of you both to have luncheon with me today,” he said. “I don’t like being lonely here, you know.”

As we stood up, there was some talk of common acquaintances: but the judge, like the barristers at Rose’s house, couldn’t keep from living in the trial.

“You haven’t listened to much of it, have you?” he said to Hargrave, who replied that he had attended one afternoon.

“It can’t have been a pleasant experience for you, Eliot,” said the judge.

“Terrible,” said Hargrave in a gentle tone.

“I think it’s as terrible as anything I’ve seen,” the judge added. In a moment, he went on, his Punch-like nose drawn down: “I don’t know what you think. All this talk of responsibility. We are responsible for our actions, aren’t we? I’m just deciding whether to have another gin and tonic. Eliot, if you give me five pounds on condition that I don’t have one, I’m perfectly capable of deciding against. That’s my responsibility, isn’t it? As you don’t show any inclination to make the offer, then I shall, with equal responsibility, decide to have another one. And I shall bring it to the table, because it’s time we started to eat.”

That was a Johnsonian method of dealing with metaphysics, I thought as we sat down, one on each side of the massive old man. The long table stretched away from us, polished wood shining in the airy elegant room.

The judge told us he had ordered a light meal, soup, fish, cheese. He and I were to split a bottle of white burgundy. He was brooding, he was drawn back — as obsessively magnetised as any of us, despite his professional lifetime — to the morning in the court.

“She tried to be loyal, didn’t she?” he said to me.

I said yes.

The judge explained to Hargrave, who had not been present.

“The Ross girl was loyal to her friend this morning. She tried to take all the blame she could.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Hargrave.

“I don’t believe her,” said the judge.

“I meant, it shows there’s some good in her, after all,” Hargrave insisted, at the same time diffident and firm.

“I don’t believe that she was so much in charge.” The old man was wrapped in his thoughts. Then he looked up, eyes bright, hooded, enquiring.

“Do you know what went through my mind, when I was listening to that young woman in the box? And remember, I’ve been at this business not quite but almost since you two were born. I couldn’t help pitying anyone in her position. You can’t help it. But ought you to pity her? Think of what she’d done. She’d helped get hold of that little boy. I expect they promised him a treat. And they took him out there and tortured him. That was bad enough, but there was something else. He must have been frightened as none of us has ever been frightened. Just remind yourself what it was like your first days at prep school. You were eight years old and you’d got some brutes pestering you and you didn’t see any end to it. Well, that poor child must have gone through that a million times worse. All I hope is that he didn’t realise that they meant to kill him. I don’t know about you, Eliot, but I can’t imagine what he went through. Perhaps it’s a mercy not to have enough imagination. So I ask myself, ought you to pity her?”

“I think you ought,” said Hargrave.

“Do you?”

“I think we shall all need pity, judge,” Hargrave went on with his surprising firmness, “when it comes to the end.”

“Ah, you’re a reformer, you believe in redemption. Are you a reformer, Eliot?”

“Of course he is,” I had never seen Hargrave so assertive. He spoke across to me: “You’re on the side of the poor, you always have been—”

“That’s different,” I replied. “I’m afraid I’m not a reformer in your sense.”

“You don’t believe,” the judge asked Hargrave, “that any human being is beyond hope, do you?”

“Certainly not.”

“You should look at those two. And I tell you, the Ross girl isn’t the worst of them. I’ve got a suspicion that the little one is a fiend out of hell.”

That was startling. Not because no one had said it before: the old man knew no more about them than anyone else, he might not be right. But he hadn’t said it with loathing, more with a kind of resignation. It was that which shook both Hargrave and me, as we gazed at him, forking away at his sole, looking like a saddened eagle.

In time Hargrave recovered himself.

“You’re asking me to believe in evil,” he said.

“Don’t you?”

(Listening to Hargrave, I wasn’t comfortable. Yet he didn’t obtrude his faith: was I imagining a strand of complacency which wasn’t there?)

“No. We’ve all seen horrible happenings in our time, we’ve seen horrible happenings here. But, you know, in the future people are going to do better than we have done. It wouldn’t be easy to go on, would it, if one wasn’t sure of that?”

The judge didn’t wish to argue. Perhaps he too was uncomfortable with faith, or too considerate to disturb it. He may have known that Hargrave had done more practical good than most men, more than Mr Justice Fane and I could have done in several lifetimes.

“I don’t know that I believe in evil,” he contented himself by saying. “But I certainly believe in evil people.”

He cut himself a very large hunk of the local cheese. He had made a heartier lunch than Hargrave and I put together.

“It’ll soon be over now,” he said, like an echo of George Passant earlier that morning and sounding for the first time like a tired and aged man. Then he had a businesslike thought. “Unless Clive Bosanquet makes an even longer speech than usual. Clive is a good chap, but he will insist on not leaving any stone unturned. Within these four walls — if in any doubt he thinks it better to turn them back again. And that does take up a remarkable amount of time, you know.”

With the comfort of habit, he was mapping out the progress of the trial. His own summing up wouldn’t be over-long, he assured us. Nevertheless, he was tired, and it needed all his friendliness and good manners to prevent him from letting the meal end in silence.

35: The Limit

THAT afternoon, with Kitty Pateman in the witness box, was for me both the most mystifying and most oppressive of the trial. The courtroom was as packed as it had been on the first two days: the three of us were sitting in the body of the court, with the Pateman family (Mr Pateman had reappeared that afternoon, and Dick attended for the first time) a few yards away, both men rigidly upright, the back of Mr Pateman’s head running straight down into his collar. Mrs Pateman turned once, caught my eye, and gave what, strain playing one of its tricks, looked exactly like a furtive but excited smile. A beam of sunlight began to fall directly on to people’s faces on the far side of the upper rows; as they fidgeted and tried to shut out the light, nerves were getting sharper, for I was not the only one who felt an inexplicable intensity all through the afternoon.

No one in that court but me had heard the judge’s remark about Kitty Pateman. As I sat listening to her, several times it came back to me, but it did nothing but add to the disquiet. For a strange thing was, that as the hours passed and Kitty talked, I couldn’t get any nearer forming an opinion about whether that remark had truth in it or not.

There were other strange things. Much of the time I, along with other observers, was certain that she was acting, and Jamie Wilson, without realising it, was helping her to act. His examination didn’t sound, and didn’t stay in the memory, like the ordinary questions-and-answers of a trial. It was much more like a conversation in which she was playing the major part, and a part which was quick-tongued, elaborate and bizarre.

Glance flitting to the jury box, the judge, once to her family, she described what she called her “first breakdown”, words hurrying out. Sometimes she could recall it all, sometimes she couldn’t: she had told the psychiatrists, but not everything, because she got flustered, and she didn’t like to mention that she had heard voices. Yes, voices when she was eighteen, that she thought someone was managing to produce in her radio set, tormenting her. Or perhaps taking charge of her, she didn’t know at the time, she was frightened, she thought she might be going “round the bend” or else something special was happening to her. She heard the voices over a period of months: sometimes they came just like a telephone message. They told her all sorts of things. They were advising her against her father. He was her enemy. He was keeping her at home, he was planning to keep her at home until her brother had grown up: he wanted her to be a prisoner. They told her to trust “this man” (the man whom Dr Kahn had mentioned). She had thought that he was meant to be her escape. But he wasn’t, it had been a disaster. The voices told her that he was her enemy, like her father. She was intended for something different, no one was going to imprison her. But then they stopped speaking to her, and she hadn’t heard them for years.

The light voice fluted on: I was too intent to get any sense of how others were responding, even Martin — though later I heard a good many opinions, some mutually contradictory, about this part of her evidence. For myself, I had no doubt, on the spot or later, that most of it was a lie. At least the story of her voices was a lie. She was clever enough to have picked up accounts of people’s psychotic states: of how some had precisely that kind of aural hallucination, certain that they were spoken to (in earlier times they would have heard the messages in the air, nowadays they emanated from machines) over the wires. She might even have known such a person, for they weren’t uncommon. But I didn’t believe that it had happened to her. She was mimicking the wrong kind of breakdown. If she were ever going to become deranged — or ever had been — it would be in a different fashion.

But that wasn’t all, it was merely clinical, and only made her seem more ambiguous and shifting than before. For when people lied as she was lying, they usually couldn’t help showing some stratum of the truth. She invented stories of what those voices told her about her father: they said something — though nothing like all — of what she felt for him herself. In the voices, which perhaps as she invented them seemed both romantic and sinister, and flattered her imagination, you could smell something much more down-to-earth, the antiseptic smell of the Pateman house. And you could hear something not so down-to-earth, but which emerged from that same house, and was seething in her imagination — “something special” was happening to her, she was “intended for something different”.

People afterwards said they hadn’t often seen a face change so much. At times she looked young and pretty, at others middle-aged. In the box, which gave her height, she had lost her air of hiding away, and no one thought her insignificant. She made an impression which separated her from the lookers-on, and yet didn’t repel them, almost as though she touched a nerve of unreality. Certainly it was an impression that Clive Bosanquet, as soon as he began to cross-examine, wanted to dispel.

In his level tone, he asked: “Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kill a child?”

She looked at him, eyes steadying, and replied without a pause: “I don’t think I thought anything like that. No, that would give the wrong idea. You see, no one does anything cut-and-dried, you understand—”

Bosanquet was determined to stop her going off on another conversational flight.

“Miss Pateman, there is no doubt that you planned, methodically and over a period of weeks or months, to kill a child. Apparently it needn’t have been Eric Mawby, you picked on him at random. I am asking you, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

“Well, kidnapping is one thing that we might have talked about—”

“I asked, Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

“I was saying, we might have talked about catching hold of one for a little while, you know, we talked about all sorts of things, you know how it is, anyone can make a suggestion—”

“When did this happen?”

“It might have happened at any time, I couldn’t tell you exactly.”

“It might not have happened at any time, Miss Pateman. When did it happen?”

The judge was regarding her, and spoke as considerately as ever in the trial. “You must try to tell us, if you can.”

“Well, if I had to put a date to it, I suppose it would be about the time when I had this second breakdown.”

Her counsel had let her introduce “this second breakdown” and then gone no further, as though he and she assumed, and the court also, that she had been living in a haze. But Bosanquet — for once less imperturbable — was having to struggle to clear the haze away. What was this second breakdown? She realised that it had not been adduced in the medical evidence? She had not at any time during this period considered consulting a doctor? She had been working effectively at her job, and living her life as usual in the room at home and out at the cottage?

“You don’t know about breakdowns unless you’re the one having them, no one could know, not even—” and then she added, with a curious primness — “Miss Ross.”

“You were entirely capable of doing everything you usually do?”

“No one who’s not had a breakdown can understand how you can go on, just like a machine you know—”

“You were entirely capable of making very careful detailed plans, everything thought out in advance, to abduct this child and kill him?”

“But that’s just what I was saying, you can go on, and you don’t know what’s happening—”

“You didn’t know what was happening when you brutalised this child? And killed him? A child, Miss Pateman, who if you were a year or two older might have been your own?”

“No, he wasn’t, that’s got nothing to do with it, it didn’t matter who he was.”

That reply, like many that she had made, might have been either fluent or incoherent, it was difficult to know which. Just as it was difficult to know whether Bosanquet’s thrust of rhetoric, so different from his usual method that it must have been worked out, had touched her. Were the psychiatrists right, how much was she deprived, how much had she wanted to live as other women? How much did those dolls of hers signify? As she lied and weaved her answers in and out, most of us were as undecided as when we heard her first word. Bosanquet brought up the remark — to many the most hideous they had listened to in court — “we wanted to teach him to behave”. What did that mean? Wasn’t that the beginning of the plan? Who said it first?

“Oh, it was just a way of explaining afterwards, I don’t think anyone actually said it. I’m sure I didn’t, that’s not the way you speak to each other, is it, even if you aren’t living through a breakdown.”

“You found the idea so attractive that you planned everything methodically to abduct the child and then go on to ill-treat him and murder him?”

“No, that’s not the way things go, you know how it is, you say lots of things that you don’t mean, ever, we used to say, wouldn’t it be nice if one could do things, but we didn’t mean it.”

Her answers were shifting and shimmering like one translucent film drawn across another: underneath them there were marks when a fragment of their day-to-day life appeared, and then was obfuscated again. The two of them in that front room at the Patemans’: yes, someone had said “it would be nice if we could do things”: it might have seemed like an ordinary sexual come on, voice thick, eyes staring! Who had spoken first? Did that matter? In the witness box, Kitty Pateman was not making the attempt to shield Cora as Cora had done her. She was just intent on seeming crazed. It still had the elaboration, almost the compulsion, of a piece of acting, yet sometimes one felt that, through pretending to be crazed, she had hypnotised herself into being so. Had she — or both of them — pretended like that before? In retrospect, when our minds were cooler, one thing struck most of us. She had far more imagination than Cora. But imagination of a kind which one sometimes meets in the sexual life, at the same time vatic and obscene. She might have, and almost certainly had, prophesied to herself a wonderful life through sex, more wonderful than sex could ever give her: and simultaneously she would never leave a sexual thought alone.

Martin said later that her imagination — or else her nervous force — had its effect on him. Despite the beams of sunlight, the courtroom seemed shut in as a greenhouse.

But Bosanquet was not a suggestible man. As with Cora, though this was technically the harder job, he wanted to domesticate her answers. He went through a similar routine about their workaday lives. Once or twice she tried a fugue again, but then gave up. Here she couldn’t sound unbalanced. Mostly her replies were shrewd and practical. Then he asked her about the books she read. Yes, she read a lot. She produced a list of standard authors of the day. “Sometimes I go a bit deeper.” “Who?” “Oh well—” she hesitated, her glance flickered — “people like Camus—”

At that, I should have liked to question her, for I suspected that she was lying again: not this time because of some thought out purpose, but simply because she wanted to impress. She might even be, I thought, a pathological liar like Jack Cotery in his youth.

For once Bosanquet was taken aback. He was a good lawyer, but he wasn’t well up in contemporary literature. He recovered himself: “Well, what do you get out of them?”

Again she hesitated. She answered: “Oh, they go to the limit, don’t they, I like them when they go to the limit.”

I was now sure that she had been bluffing: somehow she had brought out a remark she had half-read. But it gave Bosanquet an opening. He didn’t know about Camus, but he did know that she wanted to show how clever she was. Hadn’t she enjoyed showing how clever she was — when they were planning to capture the child? Hadn’t she felt cleverer than anyone else, because she was sure that she could get away with it? She had said a good deal to her counsel about being “different” and “special” — wasn’t that a way of proving it?

She was flustered, the current of words deserted her.

“No. It wasn’t like that. That was my second breakdown, that’s all.”

She spoke as though she was astonished and ashamed. She gave the impression that he had hit on the truth which she was trying, at all costs, to conceal. Yet Bosanquet himself and others of us, knew that wasn’t so. Certainly she had enjoyed feeling clever, set apart, someone above this world — but none of us, looking at her, could conceive that that was all.

And yet, of all the questions put to her in the witness box, these were the ones that upset her most. He picked up a phrase of hers — she had gone to the limit, hadn’t she? Wasn’t killing a child going to the limit? That didn’t upset her: she got back into her evasive stream. Then he said: “After it had all happened. Didn’t you feel cleverer than anyone else, because you thought you had got away with it?”

Again she couldn’t answer. This time she stood as mute as Cora.

“Didn’t you talk it over together? You’d brought off something very special, which no one else could have done, didn’t you tell yourselves that?”

“No. We never said anything about it.”

That, I suspected again, but without being sure, was another lie. It was possible that “going to the limit” had disappointed them, grotesque as the thought might be.

Bosanquet left her standing there quietly, not flying off with an excuse which would smear over the picture of the two of them sitting together, congratulating each other on a scheme achieved. At once Wilson set her going again, fugue-fluent, on her breakdowns, first and second, and we listened without taking in the words.

About an hour later — still heavy after the afternoon of Kitty Pateman — I called at the Shaws’ new house. During the weekend I had rung up Vicky, asking if I could see her: I wanted to get it over, after my talk with Martin, as much for my sake (since I still detested breaking bad news) as hers. The house was in a street, or actually a cul-de-sac, which I remembered well from my boyhood and which had altered very little since, except that there used to be tramlines running past the open end. On both sides the houses showed extraordinary flights of pre-1914 fancy; most were semi-detached in various styles that various human minds must have thought pretty: one stood by itself, quite small, but decorated with twisted pinnacles, and led into by a porch consisting mainly of stained glass. In the patch of front garden the only vegetation was an enormous monkey puzzle. When I was a child, I didn’t notice how startling the architecture was: I probably thought it was all rather comfortable and enviable, because the people who lived there — it was only half-a-mile away from our house — were distinctly more prosperous than we were. One of them, I recalled, was a dentist. It looked that afternoon as though the social stratum hadn’t changed much, a good deal below that of the Gearys’ neighbours, considerably above that of the streets round George’s lodgings. The Shaws’ house was one of a pair confronting one at the end, unobtrusive by the side of the art nouveau and suburban baroque, but built at the same time, front rooms looking over a yard of garden down the street, perhaps six rooms in all. When I rang the bell, it was Arnold Shaw who opened the door. After he had greeted me, his first words were: “This is a long way from the Residence.” He wore a taunting smile.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” I replied.

He led the way into the front room. Vicky jumped up and kissed me, knowing that I had come for a purpose, looking at me as though trying to placate me. Meanwhile her father, oblivious, was pouring me a drink.

“I needn’t ask you what you like,” he said in his hectoring hospitable tone. There was an array of bottles on the sideboard. However much Arnold had reduced his standard of living, it hadn’t affected the liquor.

I gazed round the room, about the same size as our old front room at home. The furniture, though, was some that I recognised from the Residence.

“It’s big enough for me,” said Arnold Shaw defiantly.

I said, of course.

“Anything else would be too big.”

With the enthusiasm of an estate agent, he insisted on describing what he had done to the house. There had been three bedrooms: he had turned one of them into a study for himself. “That’s all I need,” said Arnold Shaw. They ate in the kitchen. No entertaining. “No point in it,” he said. “People don’t want to come when you’ve got out of things.”

He hadn’t mentioned the trial: to me, at that moment, it was lost in another dimension. Not noticing Vicky, half-forgetting why I was visiting them, I felt eased, back in the curiosities of every day. It was a relief to be wondering how Arnold was really accepting what his resignation meant, now that he was living it. He was protesting too much, he was putting on a show of liberation. I nearly said, all decisions are taken in a mood which will not last: he would have known the reference. And yet, the odd thing was, although he probably put on this show for his own benefit each day of his life, he was also, and quite genuinely, liberated. Or perhaps even triumphant. I had seen several people, including my brother Martin, give up their places, some of them, in the world’s eyes, places much higher than Arnold Shaw’s. Without exception, they went through times when they cursed themselves, longing for it all back, panoplies and trappings, moral dilemmas, enmities and all: but, again without exception, provided they had made the renunciation out of their own free will, underneath they were content. Free will. For one instant, listening to Arnold, I was taken back to that other dimension. Free will. Arnold had, or thought he had, given up his job of his own free will. He felt one up on fate. It was a similar superiority to that which some men felt, like Austin Davidson, in contemplating suicide: or alternatively in bringing off a feat which no one else could do. Just for once, in the compulsions of this life, one didn’t accept one’s destiny and decided for oneself.

It didn’t sound as exalted as that, with Arnold Shaw grumbling about his pension and discussing the economics of authorship. The university had treated him correctly but not handsomely (that is, they hadn’t found him a part-time job): he was hoping to earn some money by his books. His chief work would be appearing in the autumn, he had the proofs in his study now: it was the history of the chemical departments in German universities, 1814–1860. It was the last word on the subject, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt it. That was the beginning of organised university research as we know it, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt that either. It ought to be compulsory reading for all university administrators everywhere: how many would it sell? Ten thousand? That I had to doubt a little, and he gave me an angry glare.

Forgiving me, he filled my glass again. Then he said, aggressively, jauntily: “Well, I’d better get back to those proofs. This won’t buy aunty a new frock.”

As he shut the door and I was still amused by that singular phrase, Vicky had come to the chair beside me.

“Have you got any news?”

She was looking with clear, troubled, hopeful eyes straight into mine.

“I’m afraid I have.”

Her face, which had during the past year begun to show the first lines, became clean-washed, like a child’s.

“Have you seen him?”

I shook my head.

“Oh well.” Her expression was sharp, impatient again, hope flooding. “How do you know?”

“I’m afraid I do know.”

“He hasn’t told you anything himself?”

“I shouldn’t come and say anything to you, should I, unless I was sure?”

“What are you trying to say, anyway?” Her tone was rough with hate — not for him, for me.

“I think you’ve got to put him out of your mind. For good and all.”

No use, she said. She had flushed, but this was not like the night when her father broke the news of his resignation, she was nowhere near tears. She was full of energy, and with the detective work of jealousy, easy to recognise if one had ever nagged away at it, wanted to track down what my sources of information were. Had I seen him at all? Not for months, I said. Had I been talking to his friends? Did I know them? Young men and young women? The only one of his friends that I knew at all, I said, was my stepson Maurice. He had been home for the vacation, but he hadn’t said a word about Pat.

She couldn’t accept even now, not in her flesh and bone, that he had deceived her. When she loved, she couldn’t help but trust. Even when she didn’t love, she found it easier to trust than distrust, in spite of her sensible head. She trusted me that afternoon (even while she was giving me the sacramental treatment of a bearer of bad news) but it was only with her head that she was believing me.

I asked her when she had last heard from him. She had written to him a good many times since Christmas, she said. She didn’t tell me, she let me infer, that she hadn’t heard from him.

“I can’t do any more,” she said. “I don’t think I can write again.”

That didn’t seem like pride, more like a resolve. We had all been through it, I told her. It was very hard, but the only way was not to write, not to be in any kind of contact, not even to hear the name.

“No,” she said. “I’ve got to know what’s happening to him.”

“It’s a mistake.”

She said: “I still feel he might need me.”

That was the last refuge. She was obstinate as her father: she had no more sense of danger — and she had her own tenderness.

Crossly, for I was handling it badly, I said: “Look here, I really think you ought to give a second thought to Leonard Getliffe.”

I was handling it badly, and that was the most insensitive thing I had done. Nothing I could have said would have made much difference: all the tact in the world, and you can’t soften another’s disasters. But still, I was handling it specially badly, perhaps because I had come to her from the extremes of death and horror, and, by the side of what I had been listening to, I couldn’t, however much I tried, get adjusted to the seriousness of love. Some kinds of vicarious suffering diminished others: unhappy love affairs — in absolute honesty, did one ever sympathise with total seriousness unless one was inside them? — seemed one of the more bearable of sufferings. So that I was, against my will, less patient than I wanted to be. Having met Leonard Getliffe at the Gearys’ for a few minutes the week before, which made me think perfunctorily of Vicky, I had merely wished — with about as much sympathy as Lord Lufkin would have felt — that they would get on with it. And now Leonard’s name had found itself on my tongue.

She gave a cold smile.

“No,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure you underestimate him.”

“Of course I don’t. He’s a great success—”

“I don’t mean in that way. I’m pretty sure you underestimate him as a man.”

She gazed at me in disbelief.

“Once you set him free, I bet you he’d make a damned good husband.”

“Not for me,” she said.

She added: “It’s no use thinking about him. There’s no future in it.”

She had blushed, as I had seen her do before when Leonard was mentioned. She still could not understand how she had inspired that kind of passion. Once more she used that bit of old-fashioned slang: there was no future in it. She was utterly astonished at being the one who was loved, not the one doing the loving. She was not only astonished, she was disturbed and curiously angry with Leonard because it was a position she couldn’t fit.

Then, as I became more impatient, she tried to prove to me that, of the two, it might be Pat who needed her the more.

36: Let-Down or Frustration

AT the close of Kitty Pateman’s evidence, the judge had announced that, on the following morning, the court would begin half-an-hour early, at ten o’clock, in the hope of finishing the case that day. When the morning came, and we sat there knowing that the verdict was not far away — the two women back in the dock, Kitty not scribbling any more, the triptych of Patemans in front of us — the proceedings were low-keyed and the three final speeches by counsel were all over by noon. It wasn’t that they were hurrying, but all they could do, in effect, was repeat the medical arguments for and against. The evidence for mental abnormality wasn’t disputed, said Benskin. What had been disputed was how much this abnormality impaired their responsibility: as he had put it to the Crown witness, Dr Gough, it was a matter of degree: and yet surely, after all the evidence, the impairment wasn’t in doubt? Could anyone, said Jamie Wilson, having heard Kitty Pateman’s history and having seen and listened to her in the witness box (that was the boldest stroke that either he or Benskin made), believe that she was capable of a free choice? That her state of mind allowed her to control what she had done? All that her doctors said showed that this was incredible, and all that she said herself made it more incredible still.

Clive Bosanquet spoke for longer than the other two, but for less than an hour. More than ever, he was meticulously correct. Prosecuting for the Crown, he said, he had the duty to bring home to the jury the attention that they ought to pay to the prisoners’ plea: there had not been many cases where such a plea had been thoroughly argued: no one, certainly not the Crown, wished to dismiss that plea if these women were mentally irresponsible. But — and then he examined point by point what Cornford had said, how Matthew Gough had rebutted it, and what “responsibility” had to mean. The unassertive voice went on, not with passion, but with attrition. At one stage he said that it would be possible, or at least theoretically possible, for the jury to admit the plea for one of the women and reject it for the other: but neither defence counsel had wished to argue this, and the prosecution did not admit it: the two were inseparably combined, and what applied to one, as all the technical evidence demonstrated, would apply to the other: it had to be all or nothing. That was all. With a gesture, he got on with the attrition.

All through those speeches, I couldn’t listen as I usually did. It was not till I read them later that I appreciated what had actually been said. Odd phrases stuck out, tapped away at circuits in the mind that I couldn’t break. Free choice. Who had a free choice? Did any of us? We felt certain that we did. We had to live as if we did. It was an experiential category of our psychic existence. That had been said by a great though remarkably verbose man. It sounded portentous: it meant no more than the old judge declaring robustly that he could decide — it was in his power and no one else’s — whether to take a second gin and tonic. It meant no more: it also meant no less. We had to believe that we could choose. Life was ridiculous unless we believed that. Otherwise there was no dignity left — or even no meaning. And yet — we felt certain we could choose, were we just throwing out our chests against the indifferent dark? We had to act as if it were true. As if. Als/ob. That was an old answer. Perhaps it was the best we could find.

Morality. Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn’t cheapen it by words. That was why the only people I knew — they were very few — who had any insight into the moral life, talked about it almost not at all.

On the stroke of twelve, the judge started to sum up. Suddenly I was listening with acute attention, absent-mindedness swept clean away. I watched the old, healthy, avian face as he turned, with his courteous nod, towards the jury box: I was listening, knowing already what his opinion was.

“Members of the jury, it is now my duty to sum this case up for you.” All through the trial his voice had shown, except in one rebuke, none of the cracks or thinning of age, and as he talked to the jurors, so easily and unself-consciously, it was still unforced and clear: but his accent one had ceased to hear except in old men. It belonged to the Eton of 1900, not cockney-clipped like the upper-class English two generations later, but much fuller, as though he had time to use his tongue and lips. “This, I think, is the seventh day on which you have listened with the utmost patience to the evidence and the speeches. And, at the end of it all, the issue in this case comes down to the point of a pin. It is agreed by everyone, I think, that these two young women have some degree of mental abnormality: is it enough to impair substantially — I have to remind you of that word — their mental responsibility? Are Miss Ross and Miss Pateman not responsible for the deeds, I need not tell you they are terrible deeds, that they have committed? Or, to make the point sharper still, are they not fully responsible, so that we have to make special allowance for them and accept their plea? Which is, you will remember, one of diminished responsibility. Either you will accept that, and bring in a verdict accordingly: which means, you understand, that they will be treated like mental patients who have perpetrated the crime of manslaughter. Or else you will decide that they were responsible for what they have done, and find them guilty of murder. In which case it will be necessary for me to pass the statutory sentence.”

Almost from the start of the summing up, Cora had been yawning. It looked like insolence: I believed that it was her first sign of nerves. The judge went on: “I do not for one instant pretend that that decision is easy for you. As learned counsel have carefully explained to you, this whole conception of diminished responsibility is relatively new to our law. And you have also been told that it has no really sharp and precise definition in medical or scientific terms. You have actually heard doctors of great distinction, mental doctors or psychiatrists, whatever we like to call them, taking absolutely contrary positions about the degree of responsibility of these two young women. Dr Cornford and Dr Kahn have told us — and I am sure that no one here would doubt their absolute professional integrity — they have told us that these women were less than fully responsible, so much less as not really to be answerable for their actions, when they killed the child. On the other hand, Dr Gough and Dr Shuttleworth, again with integrity that no one can doubt, have given their judgment, which is that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were as responsible as any of us, when we perform any deed for good and ill. No, perhaps I have gone a little further than those doctors did. But they were quite positive that these young women’s responsibility was not substantially impaired.

“Members of the jury, this is not going to be easy for you. I shall try shortly to give you what little help I can. But I have no more knowledge of these young women’s minds than you have. I shall try to remind you what the doctors said, and what Miss Ross and Miss Pateman said themselves. You have listened to it all, and so have I. And it is for you, and you alone, to make the decision.

“But, right at the beginning, I have to tell you two things. I have just said that it is for you, and you alone, to make the decision. I have to repeat it, so that you will never forget it during your deliberations. This issue must not be decided by doctors. I should tell you that, and tell you it time and again, even if the doctors’ opinions were not divided. It is not in the nature of our law to have judgment by professional experts. We listen to them with gratitude and respect, but in the end it is you who are the judges. In such a case as this, it would, in my view, be specially wrong for the issue to be decided by doctors. For I am convinced that none of these eminent men would consider stating that they had reached any final certainties about the human mind. Perhaps those certainties never will be reached. Sometimes, for the sake of our common humanity, I find myself hoping that they won’t. At any rate, no one can be certain now. It is for you to reach a decision as to whether these young women — as my learned friend Mr Benskin put it very clearly — are or are not responsible for these criminal actions, in the sense that you are yourselves for what you do. It is your decision. You will have to be guided by your experience of life, your knowledge of human nature, and I must say, by something we sometimes undervalue, by your common sense.

“Now one other thing, before I try to draw your minds back to the evidence. You have had to listen to the story of an abominable crime. When one thinks of the treatment of that young boy before he died, and then of his death, one finds it hard — and here I am speaking for myself, as an ageing man — one finds it hard to cling to one’s faith in a merciful God.

“But now I have to ask you to do something which you may think impossible. You must do your best, however. I want you to put the nature and details of this crime out of your consideration. You are concerned only with whether these women are, or are not, fully responsible. It would be the same question, and the same problem, if they had committed some quite minor offence, such as stealing half-a-dozen pairs of stockings or a suitcase. It would be the same problem. I ask you to approach the decision in that spirit. I know that it will be difficult. I am asking you to banish the natural revulsion and horror that you must have felt. Forget all those thoughts. Think only of whether these young women were responsible for what they have done.”

One would have to be something like clairvoyant, I was thinking, to listen to him now — and then guess right about how he spoke in private. And yet he was as relaxed, speaking to the jury, as when he spoke to Hargrave and me in his dining-room. It was the habit of a lifetime to be calm and magisterial, to let nothing of himself slip out. Except perhaps a distaste for all the theorists who didn’t live in his own solid world. As he went on, underneath the fairness, underneath the amiable manners, he once or twice inflected his voice, just towards the edge of sarcasm, when he discussed the psychiatrists’ “explanations”. Or did I imagine the inverted commas? He was not a speculative man: in secret, he hadn’t much use for intellectual persons. But that had been so all through his career. It was nothing new that day, it didn’t affect his judgment, it would have been hard to tell whether he was trying to lead the jury at all.

That was Margaret’s impression, as we sat at lunch, the four of us. She had travelled up during the morning, in order to be with us at the end, and had heard nearly all the summing up, which the judge had still to finish.

“He’s not pushing them one way or the other, is he?”

George gazed at her.

“Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s necessary,” he said. He wasn’t speaking bitterly: or apathetically: not with much emotion, just as a matter of fact, like one who took the result for granted. He was not looking drawn. The rest of us were showing signs of suspense, but not George. He gave out an air of resolve or even of obscure determination. It was he who took the initiative, telling us it was time to return. “Last sitting,” he said in a loud, vigorous, exhorting cry.

In the courtroom, full but not as jam-tight as on the first day, smelling in the warm afternoon of women’s scent, sweat, the odour of anxiety, the judge turned again to the jury box, with a smile that was social, not quite easy or authoritative.

“Members of the jury, thanks to the exertions of the lady who has been taking the shorthand notes, I have been supplied with a transcript of what I said to you this morning, and I see that I have made three very stupid little mistakes.” They were, in fact, small mistakes which most of us had either not noticed or discounted as slips of speech, such as transposing the doctors’ names: but the judge was flustered, irritated with himself and those he was talking to. Perhaps he had the streak of vanity that one met in men who had not competed much and who weren’t used to being at a disadvantage: perhaps he didn’t like being reminded that he had reached one of the stages in old age when he could still trust his judgment, but not his memory. At any rate, he wanted to shorten his summing up, he was distrustful of quoting names, he had to make an effort to assert himself. “Let us get our feet on the ground. We are dealing with reality, and this is certain—” He went on with an adjuration that, I fancied, he might have used before. “You have been dealing with an avalanche of words. This is nobody’s fault, of course. It is the only way that it could be done. But you are not dealing with things of imagination. You are dealing with actual lives, actual things that really happened.” Then he was in command again. He told them that he agreed totally with Bosanquet, and by implication with the other counsel: there was no ground for discriminating between the two. He repeated, slowly and masterfully, that it must be the jury’s decision, and not the doctors’. They must detach themselves from their hatred of the crime, and consider as wisely as they could what substantial impairment (he reiterated the words three times) of responsibility meant and what responsibility those two young women bore. At that, he gave his benevolent paternal beck to the jury. “It is in your hands now,” he said.

The judge’s procession left: the heads of the two women dipped out of sight. It was about ten to three. Slowly, in jerks and spasms, the courtroom emptied. As soon as we got outside into the hall, Margaret lit a cigarette, as in an interval at the theatre. In the rush, we all found ourselves near the refreshment table, where I brushed against Archibald Rose, wig in hand, eating a sausage roll.

“Now we shan’t be long,” he whispered to me, in a casual detached tone. None of the others had heard that remark: but each of us, certainly George, was behaving as though Rose was right, as though the jury would be returning soon. We talked very little. It was a good many minutes before George said: “Well, I suggest we might as well have a cup of tea.” We lingered over it, so weak and milky, like the tea I had tasted in the jail. The hall was less crowded, people were edging away. We drank more cups of tea. All of a sudden the delay seized hold of me. I didn’t know about the others, but later Margaret and Martin told me it was the same for them.

At half past four I said: “Let’s go for a stroll.” George said that he wouldn’t bother, found a chair in the now half-deserted hall, sat down and lit a pipe. The others were glad to escape into the free air. Neither of them dissenting, we went away from the Assize Hall, not just round the block, but on into the centre of the town, getting on for a mile away. Margaret knew what I was doing: so probably did Martin. I was trying to cheat the time of waiting — so as to get back when it was all over. We had lived through times of waiting before this. I might have recalled that other time with George in this same court: but curiously, so it seemed to me in retrospect, I didn’t. Maybe my memory blocked it off. Instead, it was much more like times that each of us had been through: meaningless suspense: bad air trips, making oneself read thirty pages before looking at one’s watch: Martin knowing that his son was driving, not told when he might arrive.

“What does all this mean?” Martin said, without any explanation, after we had walked a few hundred yards.

“It must mean that the jury are arguing,” I replied.

“I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. He had taken it for granted that the defence didn’t stand a chance.

“Would you?” Margaret asked me.

“No.” I was wondering who might have done. Perhaps the Patemans. Were they hopeful now?

It could be, Martin supposed, that one or two jurors were holding out. None of us had any idea, then or later, what happened in that jury room.

We reached the opulent streets, women coming out of shops, cherishing new hair-sets, complexions matt in the clear sunlight. It would take us twenty minutes to walk back, said Martin.

In sight of the Assize Hall, we made out the policemen on the steps. We hurried into the entrance hall: there were a few people round the refreshment table, others scattered about, George still sitting down. He gave us his open, inattentive smile. “Nothing’s happened,” he said.

During the next hours, we couldn’t cheat the time of waiting any more. Except that I had a conversation with a colleague of Edgar Hankins, a bright-eyed, preternaturally youthful-looking man. We had met occasionally at parties, and in the hall he drew me aside. He wanted, he was full of his own invention, to discuss the treatment of criminals sane and not-so-sane. If we assumed that the two young women were sane, which he believed, then he believed equally that they would never do anything of the kind again. In that case they were no danger to society. So what was the justification for keeping them in jail? It was pure superstition, he was saying. I had always found his kind of brightness boring, and that evening, time stretching out, I found it worse than that. When I returned to Margaret and Martin, they asked what we had been talking about, but I shook my head.

At last — and yet it seemed unexpected — we heard that the jury were coming back. When we went into the courtroom, we saw it gaping, nearly empty: the time was nearly eight o’clock: most of the spectators hadn’t been able to see the end. The two women walked up to the dock, Kitty’s eyes darting — with something like a smile — to her family. Cora had brushed her hair, which shone burnished as the court lights came on. The jury trampled across the room, making a clatter; it was as though one had not heard the noise of feet before. As they settled in their box, I saw one of them, a middle-aged woman with thick arms, gaze intently at Cora Ross.

The judge took his place and bowed. Then the old routine, in the Clerk’s rich voice.

“Members of the jury, who will speak as your foreman?”

A grey-haired man said: “I will.”

“Mr Foreman, do you find the prisoner, Cora Helen Passant Ross, guilty or not guilty of murder in this indictment?”

“Guilty.”

The same question, about Kathleen Mavis Pateman.

“Guilty.”

“And those are the verdicts of you all?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Cora Helen Passant Ross, you stand convicted of the felony of murder. Have you anything to say why you should not now be given judgment according to law?”

Cora stood erect, shoulders squared, her expression unmoved. “No,” she said, in a loud voice. Kitty Pateman followed her with a quieter, perfunctory no.

The judge looked at them, and said clearly but without inflection: “The sentence is a statutory one, and it is that you, and each of you, be sentenced to imprisonment for life.”

He did not say anything more. He gave them a nod, polite, almost gentle, dismissing them. They were taken below for the last time.

Neither in the courtroom, talking to the solicitors and to his junior, nor outside in the hall, when the final ritual was over, would Clive Bosanquet accept congratulations: he had too much emotional taste to do so, in a case like this. He looked, however, modestly satisfied: while Jamie Wilson, speaking to no one, rushed ahead of the others to the robing-room, his face surly with self-reproach. Leaning against the refreshment table, Benskin chatted with vivacity to other lawyers and gave us a cheerful wave. Of all the functionaries at the trial, the only one I actually spoke to, as we made our way to the entrance hall, was Superintendent Maxwell. He spun his bulk round, came up to me in soft-footed steps, and said, in a quiet high mutter: “Well, they didn’t get away with it. Now we’ve got to keep the other prisoners off them. I don’t envy anyone the job.”

I didn’t hear many comments, among the relics of the crowd. There was none, absolutely none — and there hadn’t been during the last minutes in court — of the gloating fulfilment which years before I had felt all round me, and in myself, when I heard the death sentence passed. You could call it catharsis, if you liked a prettier name. There was none of that. So far as there was a general mood, it seemed to be almost the opposite, something like anti-climax, let-down, or frustration.

In the tone, firm and yet diffident, in which he always used to issue his invitations, George said to the three of us: “I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour.” Before any of us replied, my sleeve was being gently tugged and Mrs Pateman was saying, very timidly: “I wonder if you could have a word with him, sir. It might settle him down. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, I’m sure.”

She was quite tearless. In fact, she didn’t mention her daughter, only her husband, who was standing at the side of the hall, gesticulating as he harangued Dick Pateman. As she led me towards them, she asked me if I would “humour him a bit”. She said that she didn’t know how he would get over it.

When he saw me, his gaze was fixed and angry. He seemed possessed by anger, as though that were the only feeling left.

“I can’t have this,” he said.

I said that I was sorry for them.

“I can’t let it go at this,” he said.

I attempted to soothe him. Couldn’t they all go and try to sleep, and then talk to the solicitors tomorrow?

That made him more angry. His eyes stood out, his fists clenched as though he were going to hit me.

“They’re no good to us.”

“Well then—”

“I want someone who’ll take care of people who are ill. My daughter’s ill, and I insist on having something done about it.”

“That’s what we want,” said Dick Pateman.

I said, she would certainly be under medical supervision–

“I’m not going to be put off by that. I want the best people to take care of her and make her better.”

Again I tried to soothe him.

“No,” he shouted into my face. “I can’t leave it like this. I shall have to talk to you about how I can get things done—”

He was threatening me, he was threatening everyone. And yet he was crying out for help. The curious thing was, I was more affected by his appeal than by his wife’s. She had known a good many sorrows: this was another, but she could bear it. Whatever else came to her, she would go on enduring, and nothing would break her. But she didn’t believe that was true of her husband and her son. Standing with him, listening to their threats (for Dick joined in), I thought she could be right. To be in their company was intolerable: in many ways they were hateful: and yet they were helpless when there was nothing they could do. Their only response to sorrow, the chill of sorrow, was to fly out into violence. Violence without aim. Shouts, scowls, threats. What could they do? They were impotent. When they were impotent, they were nothing at all.

I told Mr Pateman that I had no knowledge of the prison service or of prison doctors but that, if he ever wanted to talk to me, he was welcome to. He didn’t thank me, but became quieter. Any bit of action was better than none. Getting a promise out of me, however pointless, showed that he was still effective, and was a comfort to him.

37: Forgetting

“I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour,” George had said, before Mrs Pateman took me away. When I rejoined the three of them, they were waiting to walk out to Martin’s car. As we drove across the town, up past the station, all of us in silence, I was thinking again, yes, that was how George used to invite us — when he was asking us, not to a pub, but to his “place”, as though it were a baronial hall. Actually, it consisted of the sitting-room and bedroom in which he had lived for nearly forty years. How he managed it, I had never known. George had clung on, with no one to look after him. Not that he needed much.

In the sharp spring night, transistor radios were blaring and people lolled about the pavement, when we drew up outside the door. Inside his sitting-room, as he switched on the light, the newspapers and huddle sprang to the eye, and one’s nostrils tingled with the dust.

“Now,” he said, as, panting, he cleared litter from the old sofa to make a place for Margaret. There were only two chairs. Martin put me in one of them, and himself sat on the sofa end. “Now,” said George. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Margaret glanced at me, looking for a signal. She was tired, after the long, nerve-ridden day. She would have liked a drink. But, though she knew George well, she had really no idea about his style of life. Even in her student days, she hadn’t seen a room like this. No, she said, he wasn’t to bother. If she had asked for a drink, I thought, she would probably have been unlucky. For George, who drank more than anyone round him, had — at least in my experience, in the time I knew him best — scarcely ever drunk at home.

“I can easily make some tea,” said George.

“Never mind,” said Martin. “We’ve drunk enough tea for one day.”

George looked at the three of us, as if to make sure that the formalities had been properly observed. That gave him pleasure, even now, as it had always done. Then he took the vacant chair at the side of the fireplace, pulled down his waistcoat, and said: “Well. I thought you ought to be the first to hear.”

He was addressing me more than the others, but not personally, rather as a matter of etiquette, because he had known me longest.

He said: “I’m going away.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I shan’t put a foot inside this damned town again.” He stared past me. “It’s quite useless to argue,” he went on, though in fact none of us was arguing. “I made my plans as soon as I saw that business of hers” (he meant Cora, but couldn’t, or didn’t, refer to her by name) “could only come to one end. Incidentally, I thought that you were all deceiving yourselves about that. I never believed that any jury in the country would do anything different.”

He said: “It’s horrible, I don’t require anyone to tell me it’s horrible, but there’s no use wasting time over that. I’ve had to think about my own position. I’ve got plenty of enemies in this wretched town. I’m perfectly prepared to admit that, according to ordinary standards, I deserve some of the things they want to bring up against me. But I’ve got enemies because I wouldn’t accept their frightful mingy existence and wouldn’t let other people accept it either. And all these sunkets want is to make the place too hot to hold me.” This didn’t have the machine-like clank of paranoia, which one often heard in him. “Well, now the sunkets have something to use against me. They can breathe down my neck until I die. It doesn’t matter to them that she hasn’t spoken to me for a couple of years. They can smear everything I do. They can control every step I take. By God, it would be like having me in a cage for crowds to stare at.”

Martin caught my eye. Neither of us could deny it.

George said: “That’s not the worst of it. If it were just myself, I think I might conceivably stay here and take my medicine. But there is the whole crowd. Everyone who has ever come near to me. You heard what they did to young — in the witness box. They’ll all be under inspection as long as I am here. Their lives won’t be worth living. When I go away, it won’t be long before it all calms down again. They’ll be all right, as soon as people have forgotten about me.”

Again, neither Martin nor I could say that he was wrong. It was Margaret who said: “That’s very generous, George. But are you sure you’re really well enough?”

“Well enough for what?”

“Well enough to uproot yourself like that.”

George gave her a shifty, defiant smile, and said: “Oh, if I’m not up to the mark, I shall get in touch with some of you.”

Had he thought of where he might be going? Of course, what did she take him for? For the first time that night, George broke into laughter, loud laughter. For days past — perhaps when he had been absent from the court, and perhaps, I now suspected, for a longer period than that — he had been making logistic plans, like the administrator he might have been. It would take him no time at all to “clear up his effects”. He didn’t propose to stay in England. He had never travelled much: as a matter of fact, apart from a weekend in Paris and a few days in Ostend, he had not, in sixty-four years, travelled at all. Yet, it was one of his schematic hobbies, he knew the geography, railways, timetables of Europe far better than the rest of us.

“Well, now I’ve got a bloody good chance to look round,” he cried.

He intended to start in Scandinavia, for which he had a hankering, because he had once met a Swede who looked remarkably like himself.

“I’m sorry to nag,” said Margaret. “But, before you go, do ask your doctor. You know, you’re not very good at taking care of yourself, are you?”

“I shall be all right.”

“Or let us find you a doctor in London, won’t you?”

“You’re not to worry about me.”

He answered her with childlike impenetrable obstinacy: nothing was going to stop him now.

Margaret, used to her father and the sight of illness, thought it was kinder to say no more. Then Martin and I, almost at the same instant, mentioned money. Up till then, the grudges, bad luck, resentments of a lifetime had been submerged: all of a sudden, they broke through. Of course he was bound to be short of money. After that ineffable firm (Eden & Sharples, and George’s curses crashed into the room) had fobbed him off with his miserable pension. Seven hundred and fifty a year; that was all he received for a life’s work. When he had saved them from their own contemptible incompetence. If it hadn’t been for him, they would have been extinct long ago! Seven hundred and fifty a year. In exactly one year’s time, he added, with savage, mirthless hilarity, he would get his old age pension. Then he would have nearly a thousand a year. The glorious reward for all his efforts in this mortal life!

Anyone from outside might have thought that George was morbidly preoccupied with money, miserly in the fashion of Mr Pateman. That was dead wrong. No one had minded about it less, or given it away more lavishly. In that storm of protest, it wasn’t money that was making him cry out.

But he had his streak of practicality, and I had to answer on those terms.

“Are you going to be able to cope?” I said.

“Can’t you work it out for yourselves?”

“You must let us help.”

“No. It’s rather too late to impose upon my friends.”

He had spoken with stiff pride. Then, to soften the snub, he gave his curiously sweet and hesitating smile.

Martin half-began a financial question, and let it drop. There was a silence.

“Well,” said George.

None of us spoke.

“Well,” said George again, like one of the students before the Court, as though he were seeing us off at a railway station. Martin and I, used to his habits in days past, realised that he was anxious for us to go. Perhaps he had someone else to see that night. As we stood up, George said, amiably but with relief: “It was very good of you all to come round.”

Margaret kissed him. Martin and I (it wasn’t our usual way, we might have been saying good night in a foreign country) shook him by the hand.

When Martin stopped the car in front of the Gearys’ house, the drawing-room lights, curtains undrawn, shone out into the front garden: there were other luminous rectangles in the houseproud road. Denis Geary met us at the door.

“Here you are! It’s not so late, after all.”

I had rung up from the Assize Hall to say that they weren’t to wait supper for us, we couldn’t tell when we should be home. Alison Geary was hurrying us into the bright warm room, saying that we couldn’t have eaten much. Margaret replied that she was past eating, but, at her ease as she wasn’t at George’s, added that she was pining for a drink. “It’s ready for you,” said Denis, pointing to the sideboard. They had been preparing for us all the evening. Martin, who was ravenous, tucked into a plateful of cold beef: we sat, not at the table, but in easy chairs round the room; outside the French windows, stars sparkled in the cold clear sky. “That’s better,” said Denis to Margaret, who was now starting on some bread and cheese. “You all looked a bit peaked when you came in. We’d been expecting that,” said Alison. Margaret smiled at them, and gave a grateful-sounding sigh.

We hadn’t been sitting there for long before we told the Gearys about George’s decision. Is he really going? Alison wanted to know. Yes, we said, we were certain that he meant it. Margaret added that he wasn’t fit to go off alone, his physical state was worse than any of us imagined. Denis looked at her; “I’ll see if I can check on that,” he said.

“I don’t think he’ll thank you for it,” I told him.

“I tried,” Margaret said.

George was going, we said to Denis. He didn’t intend to listen to anything that got in his way. I thought — but Margaret believed he could be deceiving himself — that he knew he wasn’t a good life.

“So we can’t stop him, you think?” said Denis, frowning, chafing to be practical. Then he added gently, having seen, more continuously than we had, the whole course of George’s existence: “Perhaps it’s all for the best.”

Soon afterwards he said: “Anyway this town isn’t going to be quite the same without him.”

He said it without any expression on his elder statesman’s face. It might have been a platitude. None of us was feeling genial, no one smiled. But Denis, though he was a very kind man, was not without a touch of irony.

He refilled our glasses. He looked across at his wife, as though they were colloguing. Then, in exactly the same tone, firm and sympathetic, in which he had greeted me on the first night of the trial, he spoke to the three of us: “Now then. You’ve got to put all this behind you.”

For an instant, no one answered.

“All of it,” Denis went on. “The whole hideous business you’ve been listening to. You’ve got to forget it. You’ve got to forget it.”

Very quietly, speaking to an old friend whom he respected, Martin said: “I absolutely disagree.”

All of a sudden, in the bright comfortable room, we were back in the argument — no, it wasn’t an argument, it was at once too much at random and too convergent for that, we agreed more than we disagreed, the dialectic existed only below the words — which I had been having with Margaret for a long time past and with Martin on those nights together during the trial.

It was wrong to forget. We had forgotten too much. This was the beginning of illusions. Most of all (this was Martin, speaking straight to Denis Geary) of the liberal illusions.

False hope was no good. False hope, that you hold on to by forgetting things.

The only hope worth having was built on everything you knew, the facts you didn’t like as well as the facts you did. That was a difficult hope. For the social condition, it was the only hope that would give us all a chance. For oneself–

Was anyone tough enough to look at himself, as he really was, without sentimentality or mercy, all the time?

For an instant I thought, though I didn’t report it, of something that had happened to me during the trial. When Kitty Pateman was being cross-examined, when we all might have expected to forget our own egos, I found myself shutting my eyes, flooded with shame. It was entirely trivial. I had suddenly remembered — I had no idea what trigger set it off — an incident when I was about eighteen. My aunt Milly had just been making a teetotal pronouncement, her picture was in the local paper, and I was talking to some friends. One of them suspected that she was a connection of mine: I swore blind that I had never seen her in my life.

It wasn’t the memory itself that rocked me, now that it returned in the Gearys’ sitting-room. Who hasn’t stood stock-still in the street, blinking away some petty shame which has just jabbed back to mind? No, what shook one was the sheer perseverance and invading power of one’s self-regard. Whenever we made attempts to loose ourselves, that confined us. And yet, in brutal terms, it also saved us to survive.

Reason. Why had so much of our time reneged on it? Wasn’t that our characteristic folly, treachery or crime?

Reason was very weak as compared with instinct. Instinct was closer to the aboriginal sea out of which we had all climbed. Reason was a precarious structure. But, if we didn’t use it to understand instinct, then there was no health in us at all.

Margaret said, she had been brought up among people who believed it was easy to be civilised and rational. She had hated it. It made life too hygienic and too thin. But still, she had come to think even that was better than glorifying unreason.

Put reason to sleep, and all the stronger forces were let loose. We had seen that happen in our own lifetimes. In the world: and close to us. We knew, we couldn’t get out of knowing, that it meant a chance of hell.

Glorifying unreason. Wanting to let the instinctual forces loose. Martin said — anyone who did that, either hadn’t much of those forces within himself, or else wanted to use others’ for his own purpose. And that was true of private leaders like George as much as public ones.

(Were others thinking, as I did, of those two women? Was it true of one of them?)

Midnight had passed. Margaret and Alison were trying to look after each other. Margaret knew that the Gearys were not, like the rest of us, buoyed up by the energy of strain. We were feeling tireless, as one does in the crisis of a love affair, ready to walk all night. The Gearys had had nothing to make them tireless: Margaret said it was time to go to bed. But Alison had a sense that we were getting a curious kind of nepenthe, even when we were speaking as harshly as we could. We weren’t being considerate: at times we should have said that we didn’t mind reawakening our own distress or anyone else’s: and yet, it seemed that we were producing the opposite effect. It was like being made hypocrites by accident. Whatever we said, however hard our voices sounded, just by being together we were creating an island of peace.

No, said Alison, he (Denis) didn’t have to go to school tomorrow. She would make us a pot of tea. To herself, she thought it was good for us to go on sitting there.

We shied off tea, which had been offered to us enough that day. Then Denis ordered us to have another drink. Martin refused, saying he had to drive his car back to Cambridge before the morning. Margaret settled down in her chair, wakeful, but all of us quiet by now.

Denis said: “We can only do little things, can’t we? But we must go on doing them. At any rate, I must. There’s no option. I shall have to go on doing the things that come to hand.”

Martin nodded. They spoke about old acquaintances, whom they had known when they were in the same form together. Denis broke off: “Look here, I’m the Martha of this party. Much more than she is.” He put his hand over his wife’s. “There’s a certain amount of debris to be cleared up. You’d better remind me what I ought to do.” A call on George before he left — he was ticking off: “those Patemans”: inquiries about the prisons. That all?

Then, leaning forward, he surprised us — it came out without any lead at all — by asking what was the name of that old man, who, living in riches, said he felt like a beggar holding out his hand for another day of life. Was that going to happen to us all? When did it begin to happen? He was in his early fifties, but, half-smiling, he wanted an answer. I was the oldest there, but I shook my head.

“I’ve got an uncomfortable idea,” said Denis, “that some day it is going to happen to me.”