by Mark Lawson
‘No. Well, not now. In the ’70s. What they call …’
‘Historic,’ she completed, fluent in the dark jargon of the days.
‘Yes.’
‘And not … not … Oh, Edmund …’
‘Not children. Absolutely not,’ he returned the service by completing her sentence. ‘She was in her twenties. As was I. At the time.’
So, against all expectation, a conversation so far filled with good news for his mother: her son was neither dying nor a child-abuser. Ned now had to address the question of what he was. Allegedly was.
‘Do you remember Betty Thomas?’ his mother asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, you do. Eliza Thomas, the year below you. There was a younger one, Imogen, as well. She . . ’
‘Which one is she? You just mentioned three different women?’
‘Betty Thomas. She was left by her husband when the children were little and married again, to a teacher, who had children of his own and one of them, who’s a deputy head in Lincolnshire, tried to take the iPhone off a boy who was using it in class. But, because he touched him, the parents cried thing. Instantly suspended. Now he’s banned from teaching for life.’
If you want to reassure me, Ned thought, tell me stories of justice, not injustice.
‘Yes, Mum. But that’s not quite …’
‘What I’m saying, though, is that, these days, if you touch someone on the arm, it’s sexual assault. Girls of my generation, we used to get home from work with our backsides black-andblue from all the pinching. And, at the Christmas party, you could have done with an … an … armoured bra …’
‘Yes, well, that’s more sexual harassment. That isn’t what it is in my case …’
Another silence heavy with the threat of what was wanting to be said.
‘Oh, Edmund …’
‘What I’ve been accused of – and obviously I completely and utterly reject the allegations – is …’
He knew what the next word had to be but, like an actor whose tongue is suddenly stalled by fear, he could not say it. Nor could his mother; her lips made the shape without any sound coming out, in the way that women of her class and generation had found for taboo usages. Mum voiced the excremental expletive as ‘S-H-1-T’, so perhaps would eventually find an equivalent formula: ‘R-8-P-E.’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed.
‘Oh.’ The speed of the blood-rush to her face made him think of an upended egg-timer. ‘How. Are you … well, you can’t be all right but … is Emma being supportive?’
A mother’s first instinct, then, not to suspect her son but to question her daughter-in-law.
‘She knows it’s open season at the moment on …’
He stalled, unable to call himself a celebrity. But she understood and, clearly not having considered this explanation, seized on it: ‘Yes. You’re a sitting thing, someone like you. So, this is some little madam trying to get some money?’
Previously used for loud or show-off conduct on public transport, Mum’s preferred phrase for a misbehaving female now effortlessly stretched to include the malicious invention of claims of sexual assault.
‘I don’t know what reason the person has.’
‘But you know who it is?’
Ned had to wipe his brow with the napkin Jack had given him.
‘Do I … ? The police give you a name.’
‘And you knew her?’
Such situations exploded one question – did you do it? – which wife, lawyer, friend and now parent all carefully avoided asking, for reasons of personal or professional etiquette.
‘Well, I …’ His mental speech preview system deleted came across her. ‘She was someone I … knew. I don’t recognize at all the situation she describes.’
Although an accusation of murder would clearly have been worse, the denials – I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it, what would my motive have been? – were at least clearer-cut; the allegation he faced had shades of interpretation, especially with a mother, where even the matter of whether sex had taken place could not be raised.
‘The fact is, Edmund, that a lot of these things come to nothing.’
‘Yes. But some of them do. And there’s no way of knowing which one you’re in.’
‘At least you’re sure to have absolutely the best lawyers.’
He told her how events might develop from now on, and their possible length, at which she grimaced.
‘And, Mum, I don’t think Tim needs to know yet …’ ‘What? Well, with the time differences, we don’t … and it’s hardly the type of thing you’d say on Scope.’
This time, he did not correct her pronunciation to Skype. ‘I mean, obviously, if it gets into the papers …’
The unhealthy blush again. She hadn’t thought about the humiliation being public.
‘And, if that happens, Mum, when it comes out, you might be rung up or even have papers outside. The price of democracy is that they can get your address from the electoral register. The closest to nothing – literally nothing – that you can say, the better.’
‘Well, Jack would most likely answer the phone or the door.’
Disgraced Historian’s Stepfather Urges Death Penalty.
But he was relieved by how well the conversation had mainly gone, even though most parents, he knew, assumed the best of their children. In documentaries, he had seen mothers holding candles outside Death Row as their serial-killing offspring were strapped to the gurney inside. Some parents, though – in America, especially – never got the chance to disbelieve the charges, getting a text telling them to turn on the TV news, which was reporting that their kid had shot a few dozen fellow students as a prelude to suicide.
Mum said she had to go to check the potatoes, but she went first to the room at the back of the house that they called the Office, where Jack would be savouring the best phrases to denounce council road-flow policy. Ned heard whispered voices and after lunch, at which Jack began but then suddenly aborted a discussion just before he mentioned an arrested children’s entertainer, his stepfather reached for his mother’s hand, held and squeezed it, and said: ‘Edmund. Whatever happens, we’ll support you. You should know that.’
Home Truths
‘Are you sure Ned’s a good idea to take in with you?’
‘He’s my best friend, Hells.’
‘Yes. But he’s not exactly standing on the high moral ground, is he?’
‘He’s the Executive Dean’s darling.’
‘Was. But, anyway, I thought he isn’t allowed to go into the university either, while he’s suspended.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s why the hearing takes place in some afternoon love motel.’
‘Do they have those round here, sweetheart?’
‘Trick question. Very funny. So I’ve heard.’
‘The point is, love, that at least some of the rubbish about you is from women – and you say that HR are mainly female – and so is it really wise to have a rapist in your corner?’
‘No way is Nod a rapist.’
‘Tom, we hope he isn’t; we don’t know yet.’
A Silent Epidemic
As a woman who had acted for defendants in rape trials, Claire was either a credit to her profession or an enemy to her gender, depending on your perspective, and she knew people who held each opinion.
On the first occasion, she had panicked that conniving to make the CPS or the jury distrust a rape victim was treachery to feminism, and felt relieved not to be a barrister, required personally to subject the tearful account to scepticism. During long silent cross-examinations of herself, she had more or less come to accept that a claim was merely an allegation and that the strength of a legal system depended on rigorous examination of all charges. A lawyer who worked on the defence of a serial killer was not suggesting that those who had died were lying but seeking to ensure that the evidence, examination and sentencing were scrupulous and fair.
Even many liberals, though, seemed to suspend thei
r respect for habeas corpus when it came to rape. She had seen and heard it called ‘the worst of all crimes’, a description originally reserved for murder. As a woman, she could almost follow the logic of this view because the victim of rape remained alive with memories that may damage her possibility of love and family but, as a lawyer, she knew that all allegations had to be challenged. The presumptions of a state were not always safe.
She had friends – and, in fact, a sister – who sincerely argued that the best way of increasing convictions – at a time of a ‘silent epidemic’ of sexual assault, with as many as ‘three million unreported rapes annually’ according to some accounts – would be simply to accept what women said had happened. But her legal training made her wonder how claims that were never made could be tallied so exactly and to baulk at the thought of assuming the total sincerity of any plaintiff.
Her profession had introduced her to people who hadn’t murdered anyone but swore they had, from motives of deluded celebrity-seeking or protection of a loved one. She had been utterly convinced of the innocence of a Miss Marple-ish old lady, who was later shown in court to have redirected to herself, with an ingenuity a master fraudster would have envied, legacies her late husband had intended for the children of his first marriage.
If we always knew when someone was telling the truth, there would be no law or, probably, life.
And, in cases of rape, testimony was especially suspect. After hurt denunciations from female friends – and the many cases of famous Tweeters forced to ‘apologize unreservedly’ for advancing much the same case – Claire was now careful never to differentiate between the effects or severity of rape by a knifewielding stranger on the towpath and the man who refuses to take no for an answer after drunken dinner in a flat.
But there was a distinction between such incidents in the possibility of reconstructing to the satisfaction of a jury – through forensic, narrative and character evidence – what had taken place.
And, while it was no longer worth risking the Twitter death threats and severed friendships that came from saying so, she continued to believe that there was a difference between being assaulted while out jogging and a date gone wrong. A man who jumps out from behind a tree and attacks an unknown woman cannot plausibly claim that his intentions were misunderstood, whereas relationship or recreational sex were notoriously subject to disconnecting levels of desire, technique, pleasure and regret.
She suspected that even the most mutually devoted lovers, sent to separate rooms and asked to describe their most recent encounter, would differ significantly in the vocabulary and interpretation that each gave to phases and sensations they had both consentingly enjoyed. So how much more scope was there for warring reports if the encounter was casual, unhappy or, as seemed to be the case among so many of the young now, conducted while blind drunk?
The law was a bad forum for adjudicating what had happened in private between two people. A college boyfriend and her choice of career had combined to give Claire a silent joke. Q: What do the law courts and Danny the Fresher Chemist have in common? A: Neither of them are much use in the bedroom.
Although armoured by such rationales, she still felt unease about asking an intern to search newspaper databases and the web for references to Wilhelmina / Billy Hessendon-Castle under the various iterations of her name, seeking embarrassing or contradictory facts that could be used to scare the CPS into dropping the case or, if not, then to undermine the defendant in court. Ned Marriott had told her that political campaigns called such trawls ‘opposition research’ – she had her own term for them – and they had become a standard legal tactic now that even an upper-class woman approaching her sixtieth birthday maintained Facebook and Friends Reunited pages, a Twitter account and contributed to websites dedicated to her years at school (Cheltenham Ladies’ High) and university (Durham, International Relations).
That Tuesday afternoon, Claire was working on the bundle for an unfair dismissal case. At a private school in Suffolk, a teacher had repeatedly asked a thirteen-year-old student to stop chewing gum in lessons. When the boy again denied that he was, she had asked him to open his mouth; when he refused, she had pulled his lips apart. Although this action resulted in his proving her right, by spitting sucked pulp onto the desk, the boy’s parents had complained to the school and threatened to go to the police and claim assault unless the staff-member was removed. With writhing reluctance, the Head had opted to avoid the possibility of a prosecution and the loss of future fees from the gum-chewer and his two siblings in the junior feeder. The teacher, unless she cleared her name, would never work in education again. Claire was confident of the impact on the hearing of opposition research showing that the student had been posting defamatory remarks and violent threats against the teacher for two years before the incident.
The direct line on her desk-phone lit up.
‘Ms Ellen?’
‘Yep.’
‘Richard Dent at the Met. I’m calling about Ned Marriott.’
She had an elated instinct that Dent was calling to say that ‘no further action’ would be taken on the Hessendon allegation.
‘Look, we always hate to do this …’ He was delaying the humiliating admission that the case was abandoned. ‘But I have to tell you that we’ve received another complaint.’
Lessons From Royal Gynaecology
In the first days of waiting to be unmasked, Ned searched his name on the web each morning – and sometimes so far before dawn that it was technically still night – to check if anything had broken in the newspaper web editions.
If his respectability remained, the relieved release of adrenaline made sleep impossible and he stayed online. He started with the sites flagged as favourites: Gillingham FC (incurable infection from a Kent childhood) and Liverpool FC; Amazon to check his sales figures but not the reader comments (he was already insecure and depressed enough); UME History and Harvard History.
And then out into the badlands where the policing of taste and fact had no jurisdiction. For an historian, schooled in sources and cautious assertion, it was like being a celibate on a porn-film set.
Citizen historians asserted that President Obama was Kenyan, Muslim, white, gay, female, extra-terrestrial. Some of the claims about Tony Blair were argumentatively sustainable – war criminal, closet Tory – but others – paedophile, transsexual, Liberal Democrat – absurd. Plane crashes and disappearances that had mystified the aviation and investigative industries for years were solved by a sequence of letters in the tail-fin or a line in some movie the captain had apparently watched the night before the flight.
And one site – The Royal Baby Hoax – claimed that all births in the British Royal Family for at least sixty years had involved a network of secret surrogate mothers and sperm donors, created by Royal gynaecologists after their apprehension that the Hanoverian descent was fatally compromised by genes conferring haemophilia, porphyria and insanity, the incidence of which was likely to be increased by the fact that, if a European Royal said to you ‘meet my wife and my cousin’, they were often referring to one person. However, as recent British princes and princesses had sometimes pioneeringly wed a nonrelative, the theory was adjusted to exclude more recent brides (starting with Princess Diana) from ordinary breeding on the grounds that their reproductive tracts had allegedly been ruined by cocaine use or sexual promiscuity, or that their husbands were impotent as a result of suppressed homosexuality.
The main evidence attested by the cyber-detectives was that Charles and Edward were visibly less macho than their ‘father’ the Duke of Edinburgh and that William and Harry, though ‘brothers’, looked different. Confining the Duchess of Cambridge to home or hospital during her ‘pregnancy’ with Prince George – due to a ‘diagnosis’ of hyperemesis gravidarum – was a clever stratagem to avoid her having to wear her prosthetic baby-bump too often at events and so risk exposure by beadyeyed keepers of websites; the citizen journalist warned the public to expect the same subterfuge to be use
d for the ‘second baby’ that the newspapers were expecting Kate soon to be expecting. The fact that Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie were more or less a morphed self-portrait of their parents was, like all contradictions faced by conspiracists, ignored.
Although Ned was a Republican – a fact that the BBC had warned him to keep quiet while promoting his monarchical documentaries (now there was a conspiracy theory) – he could see that, beyond the logistical complications of this plot, there would be a fundamental flaw in removing from a Royal family the one thing that gave it legitimacy: the bloodline.
But, amid these lunatic falsehoods, there was one invention so demented that Ned was tempted to appalled applause. The Surgeon-Gynaecologist to Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Household for the most recent births had been Alan Farthing. He, on assuming the post, had reportedly been informed of the secret IVF and surrogacy programme and, as a man of honour, had threatened to go public. So, fearing the downfall of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor, the security services had arranged for his girlfriend, the broadcaster Jill Dando, to be murdered on her doorstep in West London as a warning that he would be next. (The inconvenient truth that Farthing had joined Royal service nine years after Dando’s killing went typically unmentioned.)
Then, during Kate’s ‘pregnancy’ with Prince George, Buckingham Palace and MI5, alerted that some blokes with body odour sitting at their laptops in bedsits had spotted what was going on, paid Australian DJs to phone the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was being ‘treated’, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles, then murdered a nurse but made it look like suicide. The result was that anyone now typing ‘Kate hoax’ into a search-engine got so many stories about the hospital tragedy that the citizen journalist websites heroically publicizing the Royal gynaecological conspiracy were forced to the unread reaches of the queue.
