I regret how we parted that day, but I want you to know that I will think about you and your brother Huddie as often as I think about my daughter, Sally. When you become a doctor, Rose, as you will, I know that you will have an extraordinary life and achieve extraordinary things.
Shirley
For some reason I had not thrown it away. In fact, I had taken it out several days later and read it again, not that there was much to be discovered in it from a second reading. I did not often get letters. Maybe it was partly because of the letter that I decided to go and see Joseph giving evidence in court. I was still doing things because I would have something to tell Huddie afterwards. It would be a long time before I stopped doing that.
I needed to leave early, before Lally arrived. I did not want her to ask where I was going. Carla and Joan would be too preoccupied to even know that I had left the house. I got there an hour before it was meant to start just to be on the safe side. There seemed to be quite a lot of people there already. I had never been to a trial so I was not sure what to do. I went inside and asked someone who looked official: he told me that there was a public gallery I could sit in.
When I looked out over the courtroom, I was surprised that it looked so different from what I imagined it to be from reading books: I suppose I thought it might be like the courtroom in Bleak House — cobwebby and dim, with dark wood paneling and cadaverous old barristers. Instead, it was very modern — a light teak floor and bright neon strips along the ceiling and new chairs. It was like a conference room waiting for the delegates to arrive.
Just before it started, there was a movement at the other end of the gallery and I turned. Shirley Isaacs slipped in and sat down. I moved my body to the side and lowered my head. I did not want Shirley to see me. I did not want to talk to Shirley and then get another regretful letter.
There was some dull stuff first, short bursts of witnesses just setting the scene: what time someone had seen Mr. Carter and the defendant walking through the hotel lobby and getting into the lift, what time the police and the ambulance had been called, what state the hotel room had been in. The barristers kept saying, “No further questions.” Everybody seemed rather bored. This obviously was not the main event.
I watched the boy called Gavriel O’Donnell. Although I had read in the papers he was twenty-two, he did not look it — he could have been someone I was at school with. He did not react to anything that was being said. In fact, he never raised his head up from the book he had on his lap, his finger running across the page and his lips moving as if he was a child learning to read. It could hardly be a novel that he was reading: maybe it was the Bible. He was probably trying to make a good impression.
There was a lull and then Joseph Carter was called. In the hospital, I had not been able to tell what Joseph looked like. Now I saw him clearly, and my heart jumped a beat. He was taller and thinner, but he looked exactly like Iz, but an Iz who had had a makeover — a dark suit and tie and neatly cut, thinning hair.
I presumed it was the defense barrister who began asking questions. “Mr. Carter,” he began.
“Yes,” Joseph said.
“Would you say that Mr. O’Donnell was a friend of yours?”
“Yes. In a way.”
“And how long had he been a friend for?”
“About nine months.”
“So a new friend then?”
“Well…”
As Joseph did not seem to be completing the sentence, the barrister went on. “Do you have many friends who are twenty-two, young friends?”
“In my world, in the theater, I meet a lot of people through work — young actors or singers or dancers.”
“I see. And was Mr. O’Donnell a young actor or singer or dancer you met through work?”
There was a pause. “No,” Joseph said. “Not exactly.”
“You’ve had a very impressive career, Mr. Carter.”
Joseph did not say anything.
“Broadway shows, a hit in the West End at the moment.”
“They haven’t all been hits,” Joseph said.
“But it’s a glamorous world, isn’t it — first nights, photographers, stars, autographs?”
“I’m afraid nobody asks the writer for an autograph. It’s not so glamorous if you’re inside that world.”
“I understand that, of course, but I wonder what it must appear like if you’re not inside that world. It could seem very glamorous, couldn’t it?”
The barrister waited.
“Perhaps,” Joseph finally said.
“Particularly for an impressionable and vulnerable young man from a very different world to yours, a devout world, a world of prayer.”
Joseph shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“But you did know that Mr. O’Donnell was a vulnerable young man.”
“It depends what you call vulnerable, I suppose.”
“Wouldn’t you call a young man who made two suicide attempts and was sectioned in a psychiatric hospital vulnerable?”
Joseph looked amazed. “I didn’t know that.” He looked at the boy as if for corroboration, but he did not look up from his book.
“But you knew he had problems.”
“I knew that there were some problems with his family.”
“Could that have been because the lifestyle and the world you introduced him to were so different from his own strongly Christian background?”
“Actually, he wasn’t really interested in my world at all. He had no interest in the theater or seeing plays.”
“Mr. O’Donnell has said that he was your guest on numerous occasions at some of the best restaurants in London. Expensive food, fine wines, that kind of thing.”
“Yes, sometimes he was.”
“Had he been to many of those kinds of restaurants before you met him?”
“No. I don’t suppose so.”
“And on those occasions did you always pay the bill?”
“He had no money.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
Joseph remained silent.
“He must have felt in your debt, that he owed you something.”
“I don’t think he looked at it like that. I didn’t look at it like that.”
“At these restaurants, Mr. O’Donnell has said, you encouraged him to drink alcohol.”
“I didn’t encourage him.”
“But you drank alcohol together?”
“We were eating: yes, we sometimes had wine.”
“You know that his faith does not allow alcohol?”
“It’s not my faith. I’m not an expert on what you can do and can’t do.”
“Would you say that Mr. O’Donnell is a devout man?”
“No, I don’t think he is particularly devout.”
“Did he observe the important events in the Christian calendar as his faith requires?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Like fasting and abstinence during the period of Lent.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“But he has said that you celebrated the end of Lent together.”
Joseph sighed. “I suppose so. In a way.”
“Would you say he was less devout after he met you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you meet Mr. O’Donnell?”
“In a club,” Joseph finally said.
“Was this a club you frequented often?”
“No. I only went once.”
“And what was the purpose of going to the club?”
“To meet people, I suppose.”
“Men? Women? Was it a mixed establishment?”
“It was mostly men.”
“Was it a crowded marketplace?”
“It was not a marketplace. It was a club.”
“And did you meet many people there?”
“No.”
But you did meet at least one person there. Mr. O’Donnell.”
Joseph looked down. “Yes.”
The atmosphere in the courtroom suddenly seemed charged. I could not believe what Joseph was being asked. Were you even allowed to ask those kind of questions? The barrister was like a magician: he proffered a deck of cards to Joseph over and over again, asking him to choose any one he wanted, but each time, in answering the question, Joseph picked the same card — the one that the barrister had predicted, the one that made everything he said sound terrible.
“Mr. O’Donnell has said that he began to be confused about his sexuality after he met you. You say you are not an expert on his faith, but you presumably know that homosexuality is forbidden by the kind of strongly Christian sect he belongs to.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I don’t know if he was confused or not.”
“Was it a meeting of equals, would you say?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You are a mature man, an experienced man. You’re fifty-eight years old, Mr. Carter. Mr. O’Donnell is twenty-two. He is impressionable. His world is the Christian world. He did not have experience of your world until he met you. Would you say that drugs played an important part in your relationship?”
“We took drugs sometimes, yes.”
“Provided and paid for by you. Like the alcohol.”
“Yes,” Joseph said quietly.
“Would you say that Mr. O’Donnell’s judgment was impaired by the drugs and alcohol you provided for him, that he became more malleable?”
“I don’t know.”
“The night of the twenty-seventh of March: Mr. O’Donnell has said that he hitchhiked to Manchester to see a friend and that he ran into you outside the theater where your play was on.”
“That’s not true. He had specially come up to see the play.”
“Really? Even though, as you said earlier, he had no interest in the theater or seeing plays? Mr. O’Donnell has told the police that you coerced him into coming back to your hotel by telling him that you could provide drugs and alcohol for him.”
“That’s not true.”
“But back at your hotel you did provide drugs and alcohol for him, didn’t you?”
Joseph did not say anything.
“Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. O’Donnell has said that he tried to resist your advances at the hotel.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Joseph said.
“What was it like, Mr. Carter?”
Joseph seemed to be shrinking before my eyes. He put his head in his hands.
“You knew that Mr. O’Donnell had been arrested and charged?”
Joseph nodded.
“And yet two weeks ago you telephoned Mr. O’Donnell. Did you know that he was not allowed to discuss the case?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But didn’t he tell you that on the telephone and yet you asked to continue the conversation?”
Joseph nodded.
“During that conversation did you use the phrase ‘If we get our story straight…’?”
“It wasn’t what it sounds like.”
“But you did use it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And he has testified that you offered him money during that conversation.”
“I was concerned for him.”
“I see.”
Joseph suddenly roused himself, and for the first time he raised his voice a little. “I cared about him.”
“You cared about him? Really? I would say that you were simply exploiting him for your own sordid purposes,” the barrister said contemptuously.
Even if Joseph had wanted to answer the question, he was denied the opportunity. The barrister turned his back on Joseph and said, “I have no further questions.”
Iz had brought us up to distrust lawyers. He had told me about them getting the innocent convicted and the guilty set free. He had told me about trials in which people were arrested because of their political beliefs and were manipulated by lawyers into sneaking on their friends to save themselves, about show trials in Russia where innocent people were put on trial purely to get rid of them.
The stories Iz told about his past were few and far between, but I remembered one that had particularly struck me when I was a child. It was about a trial that Iz had been involved in. I was only five or six. It might have been Iz’s strange idea of a bedtime story: it sounded a bit like a fairy tale in which there was good and evil and bad people doing horrible things to good people. The details and the background were very vague. It was not even clear exactly who was on trial, nor did he really say what the charge was: at one point it seemed to be about someone not being allowed to have different beliefs from someone else but at another point it seemed to be about setting fire to a building. There was someone who manipulated the truth and there was someone else who lied to save their own skin and there was a guilty verdict. It was only at the end of the story that I realized that Iz was the one on trial: when I asked what had happened after the trial, he said. “I was sent a long, long way away.”
I realized that what had happened in Iz’s story was happening to Joseph now — there was a lawyer who was manipulating the truth and there was someone who was obviously lying. The difference was that Joseph was not the one on trial but he was going to be found guilty anyway.
What surprised me was that I found myself on Joseph’s side from the start. He could have just been an accomplished liar, but I knew he was not. I believed in him, and I initially dismissed the thought that it could be just because he was my brother — there was no logic to that. Then I realized that I would have been on Huddie’s side whatever terrible thing he had done. I would always have believed in him.
At the end, when the barrister had said he had no further questions, Joseph lowered his head. He had been reduced to nothing and I could not bear it. When the recess was called, I got out of the public gallery as fast as I could. As I went through the door, I heard my name being called: it was Shirley, of course. I kept going as fast as I could. I didn’t want to see her, but mostly I never wanted to see a courtroom again. I did not think Iz was right about everything, but now I knew he had been right about this, right to be frightened of lawyers and trials.
Joseph
THE DAY AFTER the trial ended, the newspapers stopped being delivered to the house. When it was time for the news on television, there was a program Shirley wanted to watch on the other channel.
Finally, Joseph said to her, “Shirley, I am a grown-up. You don’t have to protect me from what people are saying.”
“Oh, it’ll blow over,” she said dismissively. “People have short memories.”
“I don’t have a short memory. Why should other people?”
“It’ll only upset you, Joseph. Why put yourself through it? Don’t think about it.”
“You can’t just refuse to think about the things that are painful,” he said crossly.
“Oh, Joseph — you’ve had a horrible time. You’re not yourself.”
He gave a grim laugh. “I still am. That’s the problem.”
What he said to Shirley about painful thoughts was not really true: of course you could refuse to think about them. He had spent most of his life doing that: not thinking about the theaters emptying after one of his and Alan’s flops; not thinking about the frightening things he had wanted, the things he had found with Gav; and his father — that was what he mostly tried not to think about.
How often did people think about their parents? For what percentage of the fifty minutes on their therapist’s couch did they talk about them? But most people had something to say or think when they talked or thought about their parents: the day their father forgot to pick them up from school, say, or the painful divorce after their mother’s affair or any of the other small or large betrayals parents inevitably inflicted on their children.
There was a place where most people stored these things, a big, untidy cupboard that needed cleaning from time to time. Joseph’s cupboard was as spacious as anyone else’s bu
t there was nothing much to put in it. You needed a lot of painful memories about your parents to fill it up and he only really had one: the meeting of twenty minutes or so when he met his father for the first and last time more than forty years ago.
He supposed that people might change their interpretation of painful events as they got older, become more generous: the father did not pick the child up from school that day because he was suicidally depressed; the mother’s affair happened because she was trapped in an abusive marriage. Your parents were sad, flawed people, but it was just possible that they had done the best they could. Joseph found it hard to come up with some late-flowering reinterpretation of the meeting with his father in the coffee bar in Soho. His father was a sad, flawed person, but he had not done the best he could.
It was time to face things: he went up to the study on the top floor where he and Alan used to work, switched on the computer and googled “Joseph Carter + Gavriel O’Donnell.” There were more references than he would have thought, but then it was a perfect story for the more prurient newspapers: “I Gave My Attacker Drugs,” “Devout Christian Seduced by the High Life,” “Champagne Lifestyle of Left-wing Activist’s Son.”
The unnamed colleagues and friends who had expressed shock at the “brutal attack” on Joseph before the trial, who had lauded his “extraordinary talent,” who had said that he was “one of the best-loved people in the London theater world” were now saying something different: it was “well-known in theatrical circles” that Joseph “allegedly dabbled in recreational drugs.” He had been warned about the dangers of his “promiscuous lifestyle.” It was alleged that he had sometimes been seen with “young boys.” If only he had had a promiscuous lifestyle, he thought, life might have been more fun. And there hadn’t been any boys, young or not. Just Gav.
They had picked the worst possible photographs of him coming out of the courtroom. Gav, on the other hand, looked wide-eyed and innocent. Sometimes he was shown in photographs as a schoolboy: neat hair, tie, blazer, a happy, gap-toothed grin. Somewhere, Joseph thought, there must be an instantly accessible database containing photographs of murderers, terrorists, rapists and high-school shooters looking angelic in their school uniforms.
What seemed to get less coverage was what had happened at the trial after Joseph’s appearance in court. Although the prosecuting barrister had pulled some of Gav’s evidence to pieces, cast doubt on his depiction as the devout innocent who had unwittingly been exploited, some of the papers seemed more interested in discussing the “mitigating circumstances” that had made Gav’s sentence shorter than it might otherwise have been. That’s me, Joseph thought, I am the mitigating circumstance.
The Songs Page 23
