The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  ‘It shouldn’t. But the law is sort of off-piste here. In most cases, the allegation comes at the end of the investigation. But, in this kind of thing, it’s the start. Look, we’ve got two choices – the long game and the short game. Short means we bombard them with evidence – dates, data, inconsistencies, your character, hers – until that claim has so many holes in it, they can only use it for crazy golf. Long means we just lodge a complete denial of the allegation and sit it out. If – if – they can get it to court, that’s when we shoot her – it – full of holes. Your choice.’

  Ned had once faced the prospect of standing in the witness box – when the spin-off book from the Henry VIII series was accused of plagiarism – but had never envisaged being in the dock, except possibly for his anarchistic attitude to speed cameras.

  ‘Okay. Well, which way are we more likely to win?’

  ‘Here’s the thing …’ The impact of American screenplays on English speech. ‘If we go short, we’re in effect giving them leads, clues they can use to either firm up Tourist Attraction’s story or, in the worst case, to find others. But, when this comes out – and it will come out, whatever they promise, you know that?’ He reluctantly nodded. ‘There’s a risk anyway that others will have a pop.’

  After their earlier exchange, Ned decided not to see the comment as an invitation to confess. ‘So you’re saying it makes no difference what we do?’

  ‘I think, whatever happens, they don’t have enough on you, as it stands. But recently the CPS have been going to court without enough, so that the jury takes the rap if people get off. If that’s where we end up, they’d be trying to convince women jurors that you’re a menace to the gender. So a standard piece of advice would be to get a chick solicitor, but you’ve got that already. I’d also strongly suggest that we go for a lady QC as well. A star one.’

  He began the desperate financial calculations of a tourist who has picked the wrong restaurant. ‘So, what you’re saying is that short is risky but cheap, while long is risky but crippling?’

  Her happy cackle. ‘Bad for business to say this, obviously. But, in the end, it probably comes down to how much you want to go on living in your house. Houses.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to say short.’

  Even on her habitual high heels, she still had to peer up at him. ‘Careful what you say or I’ll have you for discriminatory language.’

  When he laughed, his throat hurt. ‘How, er, soon do you think people are going to start knowing?’

  ‘I think we have to assume more leaks than a bed-sit heater. Of course, there are limits to what they could print. But they don’t apply to the trolls. What I think is that the feds know this isn’t cooked enough yet. If they’d had the courage of their, um, potential convictions, they’d have knocked on your door this morning with a couple of Murdoch’s finest popping flash guns in your face. It’s good news that didn’t happen.’

  Ned breathed out noisily. ‘I’m struggling to adjust to a situation in which that counts as good news.’

  ‘Yeah, well. That’s the world we’re in now.’

  They shook hands and, as Ned walked home to tell his family of his potential ignominy, he was glad, for the first time ever, that his father was dead, and would have been even happier if his mother were as well. He had become a thought-orphan.

  Bad People

  ‘Mummy! I can’t find my PS4 and iPad in the bedroom! Oh, Daddy, you’re back.’

  ‘Yes, Tobes. Sit down. We need to talk to you.’

  ‘And put your phone down on the table as well.’

  Their son’s face crumpled. Emma had not intended to sound so like a detective.

  ‘No, no, you haven’t done anything wrong, muffin.’

  ‘Then why have you taken away my stuff?’

  He assumed they were imposing game-time restrictions, like after his Year 3 report.

  ‘That’s what we’re …’

  ‘And you can go back on your phone in a minute. You just need to concentrate.’

  A liquid glint in his eyes, then a deadpan manner, and perhaps even a line, learned from television: ‘You guys are getting divorced?’

  Grasping Ned’s hand to dramatize their togetherness, Emma said: ‘No. No, of course not …’

  ‘Well, we’re not actually married so we couldn’t even if we wanted to.’

  ‘Ned, stop it!’

  ‘Which we don’t.’

  ‘Toby, you probably know from school that sometimes bad people spread stories about other people.’

  The eyes brimming again, now within a scarlet face. ‘Oscar’s just really annoying sometimes.’

  ‘What? No. This isn’t about school. A bad person has said some things about Daddy that aren’t true.’ Emma paused for Ned to add details but he just nodded. ‘And, for the police to be able to prove that what they said is wrong, they’ve had to take some things away from the house for a while.’

  ‘Can I get new ones?’

  Emma was uncertain whether to be annoyed or relieved that Toby had pursued his own selfish concerns rather than seeking more details.

  ‘Yes. We’ll go shopping,’ she said, feeling Ned flinch, presumably financially, which he confirmed by adding: ‘To get some stuff. Not all of it because the other things will come back …’ A pause while she thought what he now spoke aloud. ‘Eventually.’

  Because

  Each September, since the installation of PowerPoint, Tom, in his introductory lecture, played the clip from the movie of The History Boys in which Deakin complains that history ‘is one fucking thing after another.’ After the laughter of the freshers had died down, Tom would say: ‘You’ll all have days when you feel that. So do I. But he’s wrong. The reason we study this subject is that History is one fucking thing because of another. Our job is to spot the becauses.’

  PART TWO

  FINDINGS

  Weaving

  People often congratulated Ned on the fullness and darkness of his hair. On the night of his sixtieth, it had attracted the usual tributes from envious baldies and grey-heads of his generation. Such admirers presumably suspected that the thick black coif was a cosmetic illusion and probably commented in the hope of detecting some guilt in his acceptance of their compliments.

  He could not deny that his expensive reversal of nature was vanity, but argued in his defence a practical motivation. Until very recently, when presenters could claim youth credibility by shaving their heads as a fashion choice, a TV broadcaster who went bald was soon heard on radio. So from the first flash of scalp in the mirror after a shower or swim – and then the paranoid conviction that a silver-locked intruder had been sleeping on his pillow during the day – Ned had taken precautions against his genetic fate.

  For more than twenty years, strands – he had been too squeamish to ask if they were synthetic or, as urban legend said, from the dead or poor – had been woven with his own, then tinted and dyed to match the publicity photograph of Ned at thirty-seven that he had given The Centre as a reference.

  But, if the effort and expense were intended to keep him on television, should he continue them while he was not? A folk instinct that the exiled ceased to care about their hair – like straggly Timon, for whom his brother was named – merged with a feeling that, with money shorter, he should not be spending it on defying time. He suddenly wondered if the documented phenomenon of men in the public eye going grey during crises was due not to stress but to economizing or no longer bothering.

  He searched his in-box for the e-mail from The Centre confirming his July 16 appointment.

  What Minds Do

  Knowing that he had three hours before Helen came home, Tom folded a blanket lengthways and laid it on the floor, in the way that the websites demonstrated. The spot he had chosen was between the twin beds in the spare room. He added a second doubled-up blanket because the carpet seemed to have little effect on the hard coldness of the wooden boards. From what he took to be a combination of psychological and orthopaedic wisdom
s, the booklet advised against lying on a bed, recommending bedding on the floor. Flashbacks of crashing on people’s floors as a student.

  He had bought online a bolster of the type you only saw in boutique hotels these days, and a padded rectangle, like a shrunken bean bag or, with its lavender smell, a scented sanitary towel.

  Tom settled the bolster under his head, sculpted the duvet into a cocoon and, self-mothering, tucked himself in. Balancing the iPhone on his chest, with thoughts of paramedics’ equipment, he fumbled the earphones into position, avoiding the thick crusted scab on the right lobe, a result of shaky shaving.

  There was a single toll of a church bell. Meditation 1: Mindfulness of Body and Breath, said the voice, so soft that Tom had to blindly fumble with the volume control. Finding a position where you’re comfortable: if you’re lying down, allowing your legs to be uncrossed with your feet falling away from each other and your arms slightly away from your body. Allowing your eyes to close, if that feels comfortable.

  It did. Oxymoronically a powerful murmur, the tones were those that English middle-class believers would attribute to the voice of God. Being fully aware of the sensations of breathing, for the completion of the in-breath and the completion of the out-breath. Or, Tom thought, the recording that the UK government had made during the Cold War, spoken by a Shakespearean actor, that would be broadcast in the moments before the Russian nuclear missiles struck.

  Spookily, these soothing tones seemed somehow even to know that Tom had become distracted by thoughts of total conflagration.

  Sooner or later, God / Armageddon said, you’ll probably find that the mind wanders away from the breath: to thinking, planning, remembering. And, if so, don’t worry or blame yourself. That’s just what minds do. Call it back.

  A cartoon image of concentration as a dog. With his wandering consciousness settled, Tom listened to the soothing instructions to focus on each part of his body, from the feet to the head in turn, and focus on the sensations you can feel there. At first most aware of an inner trembling that he ascribed to adrenaline (‘your adrenals are very buzzy,’ an osteopath had once said), he felt himself loosen until the doubled blanket underneath seemed as supportively plump as a lilo.

  Focus now on the sensation of the breath in your abdomen.

  He was woken up by Helen, lifting the silent plugs from his ears. Told what he was doing, she asked why he needed it. Tom told her he was stressed at work because of the threat of redundancies.

  K, I, C, B, M, M, R, R

  Just as new lovers turn to certain poems to express what they are feeling, there were particular books that Ned was driven to revisit or, alerted to the ironies of the storyline by a friend or an article, to read for the first time. Unnervingly, he discovered that some of the most relevant texts were waiting on his shelves, bought years ago but never opened, as if he had somehow known that denunciation would one day come.

  In his workroom, searching the not-quite-alphabetical lines of spines and the random stacks of volumes waiting to be arranged, Ned suddenly had a powerful sense of how he must look in front of the book-case, standing on the polished halfladder that Emma had given him one Christmas. But this was not the ‘depersonalization’ identified on his antidepressant packet as a possible side effect. A favoured piece of background footage (‘B-roll’ or ‘wallpaper’ in broadcasting argot) for news interviews with professionals – sacked cabinet ministers, judges appointed to run public inquiries – showed them peering along the shiny titles in their libraries. The pictures were supposed to be un-distracting, running under commentary, but Ned often found himself ignoring the voice-over, inclining his head sideways to see what the worthy had on their shelves. As one of the final questions on Desert Island Discs acknowledged, reading tastes were revealing. (Ned had chosen G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, his dad’s favourite book.)

  Ned’s versions of this mime had run under a correspondent saying, for example: ‘The government today appointed the historian and broadcaster Professor Ned Marriott to chair a commission on what British schoolchildren should be taught about their nation’s past.’ He tried – and failed – to avoid visualizing the footage being re-used under a correspondent saying: ‘He enjoyed a glittering career as an author and broadcaster and confidant of politicians. But the prosecution told another story and today the jury of ten women and two men concluded …’

  Neatly where it should have been between Berger and Boyd, the Böll was a Penguin paperback bearing a sticker from the University book shop, the £1.95 price an astonishment now, the decimalization a novelty at the time. An edition of the Kafka, from around the same time, had somehow, probably during a house move, ended up on the wrong side of Stephen King and Milan Kundera, but Ned discovered the book he wanted, took it and shuffled the others into order. The Coetzee, however, was in perfect surname sequence, between three Jonathan Coes and the Collected Lyrics of Leonard Cohen, and the Philip Roths were bookended by a Joseph Roth, which might have pleased him, and a J. K. Rowling, which probably would not.

  The drama bookcase had been pilfered during the period of Dee’s fevered desire to be an actress. He found the Mamet as a Royal Court programme-playscript and a Miller Plays: One, with marginal notes (‘Sexual subtext!’) in his more histrionic daughter’s large, looping purple-inked script, so she must have returned that one, although she seemed to have filched his Ibsen, which he ordered in a Very Good edition from Amazon’s Used and New. Finding the Rattigan, he felt sad.

  He created a file and typed the list of novels and plays, realizing that, a suspended professor, he was compiling a reading list for a course on which he would be both tutor and student. ‘Summer Seminar: The Literature of False Accusation’, he thought. Or: ‘Reputation 101’.

  The Contents of This E-Mail

  To: tkpimm@chatter.co.uk

  From: d.j.wellington@ume.ac.uk

  THE CONTENTS OF THIS E-MAIL ARE HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND INTENDED ONLY FOR THE SPECIFIED RECIPIENT

  Dr Tom Pimm,

  As you are aware, you have been charged with offences under the university codes of Bullying & Harassment (incorporating Insubordination).

  At this stage of the process, I am formally informing you of the charges against you. These include:

  — Sarcastic and undermining comments to colleagues and to customers.

  — Undermining the confidence of customers by persistent negative feedback and under-marking.

  — Offensive and personal remarks to third parties about colleagues and customers.

  — Using sexually explicit and offensive language in teaching situations.

  — Displaying favouritist behaviour to some colleagues and customers, through actions such as divisive social invitations and preferential marking practices.

  — Sighing – or, on other occasions, seeming to stifle a sigh – during departmental meetings, thereby displaying verbal Insubordination towards senior management.

  — Exhibiting dismissive and undermining body language during departmental meetings, thereby displaying visual Insubordination towards senior management.

  — Failure fully to cooperate – including dismissive and undermining spoken language and body language – with the Traill Inquiry into the Culture and Conduct of the Department of History.

  As these are extremely serious charges, you should be aware that, if even one of them is upheld, your contract with the university is likely to be terminated immediately.

  You have chosen to appeal against the charges and I can now inform you that this process will consist of two stages: the Documentation Stage (during which you will be permitted to inspect victim and witness statements and other supporting material) and the Hearing Stage, in which you will be allowed to answer the charges in front of a senior manager from another department.

  In order to protect the anonymity of the victims, you will not be able to call victims or witnesses for cross-examination, nor is there any facility for provision of witnesses (to either incidents or
character) in your own defence. However, as we understand that the process can be daunting, you are invited to bring with you to both the Documentation Stage and the Hearing Stage one supporter, who must not be a qualified lawyer but may be the official of a union or other trade organization. In order to protect the integrity of the process, the identity of this supporter must be stated in advance for approval by UME WH.

  Although the victims will remain anonymous throughout the process – and their identities will be anonymized or redacted in all documentation – you may believe, from circumstantial evidence, that you are able to make an identification. But, if so, you must not attempt any form of contact with a victim or witness or to disseminate names or complaints in any way. Such actions would be treated as an extremely serious breach of contract and could lead to immediate dismissal before the completion of the process, and without the possibility of appeal.

  As you have already been informed, you will, until the completion of the process, be suspended on full pay and with the terms of your contract intact. However, during this period, you must have no contact with any colleagues or customers of UME, including in the latter case (but not restricted to) receiving or returning academic work, taking part in any teaching situations (undergraduate or postgraduate) or granting verbal or written references. You will not – without formal written invitation from the Director of History or a designated representative – enter any premises owned by (or, at that time, occupied by) UME.

  In respect of the latter provision, UME WH, as deputed by the Director of History, formally invites you to attend the following two appointments: