by Mark Lawson
The tweets from @jesspolondon (dropping the thick from her handle seemed a sensible precaution in this medium) were infrequent but cheery, posting a link to the website of a programme she had worked on or making some insider pointscoring comment about the photography or continuity in a series that was trending.
Sometimes, when a well-known person was ‘found dead’ or revealed a terminal illness, Emma would scroll back through their tweets looking for signs in the tone or topics that they had been depressive or going for tests. Reading through two years of @jesspolondon’s – 73 followers, following 148 – mundane professional and personal comments, she tried to identify the time when, during conversations with friends and detectives, she had identified herself as a victim. But the woman gave away no more than being a moderately self-obsessed user of the new communications.
Emma clicked back to the nights out in the Facebook timeline. It was clear, even to a non-lawyer, that there was ample material here for the favoured rape defence that the complainant was an alcoholic fantasist.
Although the concept of a Sisterhood had largely been a fiction during Emma’s personal and working life, it depressed her that a sex case forces women to hate, blame and shame another. She wondered how the solicitor dealt with that, and would perhaps get to raise the question in the court canteen.
Emma had been asked by her mother and Helen Pimm (the only friend brave enough to do so) whether, if the worst happened, she would be making the daily hand-holding walk across the court concourse, striding by her husband to signal more importantly that she was Standing By him.
And, although the prospect terrified her, she thought she would. She understood the possible impact on jurors of her refusal to do so and also knew that, if she didn’t, then she was telling herself that she was living with a sex criminal. And, even in her bleakest sleepless moments, she could not believe that.
All trace of Jess Pothick had been cleared from her screen and desk when Ned got back from the doctor. They had stopped kissing each other in greeting but were keeping their conversations civil.
‘How was it?’
‘I’ll live. Unfortunately.’
‘Ned!’
‘Joke. He wants to wean me off the zonkers at night but he’s upped the dosage of the happies as a consolation.’
‘Ned, did you ever work with a Jeremy Milligan?’
‘Where? Teaching or TV?’
‘TV. Director or producer, I think.’
‘Not that I remember. But there were so many of them. Why?’
A lie was required and arrived with satisfying rapidity. ‘Oh, he was in some discussion on Radio 4 about history documentaries.’
What if he wanted to search it on iPlayer? But her deception had worked. ‘Yes, well, I don’t want to know what he or they said while I’m having my breakdown.’
‘You’re not having a breakdown.’
Epistle
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Ned (if I may), I have followed your career with some interest, as we are both alumni (though some years apart) of St Barnabus School. In fact, as I have my own media profile, although much lower than yours, I was invited to be the speaker at Speech Day there last year, where my duties included presenting the Marriott Cup for History.
As I appreciate that privacy must be of some importance to you at the moment, I should tell you that I got this e-mail address from our former teacher in common, the redoubtable Mrs Ricks.
I have noted your recently publicised troubles. I am in possession of neither the facts nor the right to make any judgement. However, I can say that, whenever I have met anyone who knew you through either our school or through broadcasting, the comments on you have always been positive. I am also acutely aware, from the direction in which my own profession has taken me, of the impact that such stigmatization, in whatever circumstances, can have on someone.
Might you ever feel it useful to speak to me – whether as a priest or simply a sympathetic listener – I would be happy to arrange to meet.
I appreciate that the fact that someone has been raised and educated as a Catholic does not mean their faith has endured but I offer you my pastoral care at whatever level you may wish to receive it and I will (again, if I may) pray for you.
With best wishes, Father Anthony Glascock, SJ
There Goes the Neighbourhood
When he had to go out – to see Claire or Dr Rafi – Ned left the house as early as possible, hoping to meet no one. But, on the first Thursday of his disgrace, Olliphant, the heart surgeon, was coming out of Number 22. The two men were on nodding terms, which they continued, but the medic now extended to conversation.
‘Er, one never knows whether to say anything. But are you all bearing up?’
Olliphant was looking away shyly but his voice sounded genuinely kind, perhaps from a career of telling people that they might be dying, or people’s relatives that they just had.
‘Well, you can probably imagine.’ Olliphant nodded. ‘I’m sorry about the scrum outside the house. Yes, I did say scrum.’
‘Ha! My dear chap, we know you didn’t invite them. And yours was nothing compared to what went on with our Secretary of State across the way or poor Mr Mercury down the road. Look, Ned, if I may call you … ?’
‘Sure.’
‘One has had many colleagues in malpractice cases. Almost to a man exonerated. Eventually. I’m sure we can’t but if there were anything the Residents’ Committee could do for you …’
‘Just don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’
‘Well, indeed. I’d have thought these properties, even the flats, are worth far north of what the Daily Mail estimated, wouldn’t you? Now take care, won’t you, er, Ned?’
Friday Suicide Call (2)
‘Tom?’
He knew at once the gentle recitativo but withheld the recognition. ‘Yes?’
‘David Wellington. So, how you are getting on?’
‘I assume there must be a relief when I answer. So you have that relief.’
‘I can see I’m going to have to be on my mettle for these. A lot of people who have these forced breaks of routine …’
‘Well, that’s one way of putting it.’
‘A lot of people undergoing this, what they find most difficult is the loss of structure. So are you able to get some reading and writing and so on done at home?’
‘I’ve been doing a lot of reading.’
‘Well, that’s one good thing, Tom. I always think, if I could have a long painless illness with a guaranteed recovery, I’d have a big stack of books by the bed.’
‘Well, maybe you should arrange to be secretly investigated by Dr Traill.’
‘Ha. I can understand why you’d say that. Tell me what you’ve been reading, Tom?’
‘Actually, I’ve been enjoying a lot of Kafka. Especially The Trial.’
‘Ah. I know of it. I’ve read the cockroach one. But …’
‘This one is about a man who is told one day that he’s on trial for unspecified crimes in a process that seems to have secret rules.’
Though attempting non-judgemental listening, Wellington judged that he should change the subject. ‘Tell you what, Tom. One of my dreams in retirement is to read the whole of Shakespeare.’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve been getting through a lot of old Shaky. Especially Othello.’
The gaps before Wellington’s answers were becoming longer. ‘Right. Well, unless I’m missing something, that one should take your mind off things.’
‘Not really. “I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial.”’
‘Tom, I think I missed some of that. There was a lot of noise in the corridor.’
Tom repeated the line with an even heavier stress on lost and reputation, briefly the actor he had dreamed until university of being.
‘What I’m wondering, Tom, is whether you might require a greater l
evel of professional support than I can give you.’
TBOTS – Ch 1, Dr 1
Born a Paduan aristocrat, he lived as a monk – probably the most celebrated and almost certainly the maddest apart from Rasputin – and died as a heretic, hanged and incinerated in Florence in May 1498, the burning of his corpse possibly a cruel allusion to the notorious Falò delle vanità – bonfire of the vanities – that he had carried out – no, stoked was better, Ned thought – had stoked in the city the previous year. That great blaze contained paintings, writings and items (such as cosmetics) that Girolamo Savonarola considered religiously or politically incorrect.
Ned reversed the adverbs, using religiously as a buffer between politically and incorrect to disguise slightly the contemporary rhetorical reference, the most consistent complaint of critics being his fondness for comparisons between history and news stories. Although, of all his projects, this was probably not the one for such objectors.
Whereas other religious preachers had been most concerned with cleansing the souls of the people, Savonarola wanted to sterilize their tongues, eyes and minds. He sought to bring thought and discourse in line with sensitivities that he personally identified and protected. Among his main targets were university teachers and the preachers, pamphleteers and prophets who were the entertainers and media of fifteenth-century Italy
The research had revealed the compelling detail, which he would carefully footnote to Professor Donald Weinstein, that Renaissance preachers would be dropped from a certain church or a period of the liturgical calendar (Easter, Christmas) if their congregations dwindled during a series of sermons. It was a metaphor too tempting for this historian.
university teachers, preachers and pamphleteers and the preachers, who, like television presenters today, could lose the best slots in the pulpit if their ratings with the congregation went down during a series of talks. And that is not the only contemporary resonance of the false prophet who ended up as cinders on Florentine cobbles. Girolamo Savonarola’s mission was above all a war on what could be said and seen in a society. In this respect, though a figure from the Renaissance period, he can be considered a guiding spirit of our own times.
Ned saw himself delivering this speech – repeatedly because of different camera positions and revving scooters – on location on a hot day in Florence, an attractive young woman runner dabbing his scalp with perfumed wipes between takes. No, a male gay runner.
Home Truths (3)
‘I don’t want to sound flippant, but to be accused of rape once may be accounted etc…’
‘That’s unfair, Hells. It’s self-perpetuating. After one allegation, there’s more likely to be another. It’s called clustering …’
‘Maybe, sweet, but mightn’t the women in HR – and they usually are women, from what I’ve seen – see it as a sort of v-sign? Like walking into your drink-driving trial on the arms of Jim Beam and Dom Perignon …’
‘If someone tells a lie about you, it doesn’t become the truth because someone else tells it as well.’
‘Oooh, mmmm, well, pattern of behaviour?’
‘No. Pattern of allegation is what it is …’
‘And, anyway, Tom, in this case, it’s not a lie being repeated, it would have to be two people making separate things up. I really think you should consider taking someone else …’
‘Hells, do you believe I’m innocent?’
‘Silly, you know I do.’
‘Well, I think Nod is.’
‘Tom, yours is some corporate brainstorm. Ned’s is … is …’
‘Okay, suppose I were accused of rape, would you believe in me?’
‘Gosh, well … what a grim what-if … well, of course, I would … you’re just not that kind of man.’
‘And you think he is?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying, Tom.’
Stranger Danger
In the Guardian, Ned read about a survey in which people were asked what they would do if they saw a weeping child standing alone on a street. Three-quarters said that they would walk on because of the risk of being falsely accused of abuse.
It was a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequence: children were more at risk from paedophiles because adults who weren’t paedophiles were so afraid of being taken as child-abusers.
The Documentation Stage
Before they got out of the car, each of them swallowed an upper. ‘Anti-snap!’ said Tom. Almost every parking space was empty, although a flickering squiggle below the name sign boasted: NO VACANCIES. This type of motel, double-glazed against the rumble of traffic from a motorway junction, was aimed at sales reps, who would leave early and arrive late. As he had done many times since his fall, Ned played out in his mind a counterlife of being known to nobody except those close to him and in which a disaster would go largely unremarked.
A Golf and an Audi, each with child seats in the back, were parked alongside each other in the L-bend of tarmac that couldn’t be seen from the road.
Tom nudged Ned and pointed towards the vehicles. ‘Somewhere in the county, there’s a husband and a wife wondering why their other halves aren’t answering the mobile.’
Ned laughed but felt a malevolent desire for the couple to be caught, which shook him, although, for his friend’s consumption, he said: ‘At least if we happen to bump into them in the corridor, they’re unlikely to tell their friends about it.’
‘Yeah. And, if the paps snap us going in for the afternoon and draw the wrong conclusion, we can sue the buttocks off them and pay our legal fees.’
Mirror tiles on the walls of the lobby must originally have been intended to make the space look bigger but now maximized the shabby decoration. Beside the reception desk, a stand-up glossy billboard showing a family of four with lotterywin grins as they held knives and forks above plates of bacon and eggs, the yolks blindingly yellow. The receptionist, face kissingly close to a computer screen, didn’t look up even when they scuffed their feet noisily on dark green carpet tiles deeply grooved by vacuuming. Tom shuffled a pile of leaflets for a performance by a Coldplay tribute band at the local theatre.
The employee completed his task and acknowledged them. ‘Checking in? What names?’
He looked twentyish, residual spots on a face topped by a burst of ginger hair that resembled a cartoonist’s drawing of a roaring fire. He might be a student at the university, Ned guessed, in which case the discreet location would be useless.
‘No, er, I think Meeting Room 1 is booked for us,’ Tom said.
‘Got you. Your colleague’s already there. Lift or stairs to the basement and end of the corridor.’
Prints of a hunting scene and a fishing trip – school, no kindergarten, of Constable – hung on the walls of a windowless room almost filled by a varnished table. A man with steelrimmed spectacles and a neatly trimmed grey beard – professionguessers on a train would have taken him for a science teacher – stood as Ned and Tom came in.
‘Good afternoon. Stephen Cooper, Workplace Harmony. This – as I hope has been explained to you – is the documentation stage of your process.’ From his crisp handshake onwards, Cooper radiated the incurious neutrality that Tom remembered from urinary-genital clinics. Their corporate warder gave no flicker of recognizing Ned from the news or campus gossip, although he surely did. ‘You have two hours to examine the material and may make written notes but must not take any photographs or other visual record.’
As if in an examination room, a notepad, pencil and closed folder were placed in front of two chairs at the far end of the table. A student, though, would panic at the size of the test being set: the paperwork was as thick as the telephone directory of a major metropolis.
‘Christ,’ Tom whispered to Ned as they sat down. ‘They had less on Adolf Eichmann.’
At the other end of the room, their carer was reading one of C. J. Sansom’s Tudor thrillers. Was this coincidence or, if Tom were a lecturer in Spanish, would Cooper have filled the time with Don Quixote?
/>
‘Excuse me?’ said Ned. ‘We can talk to each other presumably?’
The referee of harmony in the workplace bookmarked the novel with his palm and looked up. ‘Of course. And I’m not involved in your process so you don’t have to worry about overhearing.’
Their anxiety and catastrophizing only partially controlled by medication, Tom and Ned tried to discuss with their eyes whether Cooper’s promise was a double bluff.
Printed on the sky-blue cardboard covers were the words: Strictly Confidential – The Traill Report into the Conduct and Culture of the UME History Directorate, May 2014. Each of their copies had a numeral – Tom’s 3, Ned’s 4 – printed in the top right-hand corner, indicating a tight control of distribution that Tom knew would be of little use if it ever suited the university to leak the contents.
Flashed back with appalling clarity to his Finals, Tom watched a drop of sweat hit the cover and form a ragged island. He felt Ned’s hand on his and turned to see his friend motioning that they should go together. Butch and Sundance, they synchronized their opening of the document.
Still aping an examinee, Tom flicked through the pages to summarize the contents. More than two thirds of the material consisted of print-outs of e-mails sent or received by Tom through the college intranet system, from as long ago as September 1996 to as recently as the previous Easter. In common with most writers and academics, he had fantasized about his correspondence one day being published, but had imagined his exchanges with Ned appearing in a handsome hardback from the Harvard University Press rather than in a print-out with the subheadings Personal Remarks About Staff and Abuse of The UME Intranet System. After thirty years of teaching Nixon, he had become him.
