“And it will be weaker by the time we’ve done with Mrs Stenson,” Toby Bander said cheerfully.
“The second sort of occasion,” Newton said deliberately, “is when counsel’s client is likely to make such an unfavourable impression if he goes into the box that it is better to keep him out of it.”
Grundy smiled broadly. “And I come into that class?”
Silence. Toby Bander said, “You have a hot temper. Eustace Hardy knows how to stick in needles so that they really get under the skin. If you lost your temper under cross-examination it would be a pity.”
“So what do you advise?”
The note of detached irony was so strong that Newton could not trust himself to speak. Toby Bander replied.
“What we would have said before today was that the case against you demanded that you should go into the box and answer it. Now there is the possibility that Mrs Stenson’s perjury and the way Kabanga arranged it may leave such an unpleasant flavour in the jury’s minds, and cause so much doubt, that we can obtain an acquittal anyway.”
“The possibility,” Newton said. “It can’t be put higher than that. If you could guarantee to control yourself in the box—”
Grundy intervened, grinning. “Which of us can guarantee to control himself anywhere?”
Now Newton fairly shouted at his client. “Damn it, man, it’s your skin we’re worrying about.”
“Very good of you. You gentlemen are the experts. What do you advise?”
“It must be your own decision.”
“I see.” Grundy pondered, but only for a moment.
“Let’s toss for it, shall we? Heads I go in the box, tails I don’t.”
And toss for it, to the open fury of Magnus Newton and the secret amusement of Toby Bander, was what they did. A half-crown, produced by Toby Bander from his pocket, was spun by him and dropped to the floor. It came down tails.
So it was that Magnus Newton rose, after Kabanga left the box, and said solemnly that he proposed to call no further witnesses and that the case for the defence was closed. Red-faced, puffing irregularly like a car starting up from cold on a winter morning, he made a vigorous final speech. The half-crown incident had made him so angry that he would have preferred, for once, to find himself upon the prosecution side. It was not in his nature to be half-hearted, however, and he warmed to his words as he went on talking, telling the jury that the prosecution case was such a tissue of quarter-truths, terminological inexactitudes and confessed perjury that, after the most careful consideration, he and his learned junior had decided that it was not necessary for their client to go into the witness box. This, Newton said gravely, was his right and privilege, and it should not be thought that he was afraid to enter the box. Making the best of Grundy’s appearance, he asked, “Do you think he would be afraid of anything?” Grundy scowled at them with obliging ferocity.
Then Newton listed some of the prosecution witnesses, the girl Paget who had been asked to leave one school and who had sworn to things that were almost self-evidently ridiculous, Jellifer the wine and food expert who sampled only too well the subject matter of his talks and articles, Clements who identified a car in a glimpse lasting two or three seconds but could not remember a girl he had seen every day for a fortnight, Leighton the convicted felon, and last and worst of all Mrs Stenson, the model of respectability who had turned out to be a drug addict and peddler. Was there a conspiracy, Newton could not help wondering, was there a conspiracy of some sort on the part of a sinister figure or figures behind Mrs Stenson, to victimise his client? He left the jury with this slightly improbable thought.
Perhaps the most important effect of the decision not to call Grundy was that it disconcerted Eustace Hardy, so far as that model of intelligent legal decorum could be disconcerted. Hardy’s closing speech, like his opening one, was not one of the most notable in his career. There were many things which he would have liked to ask the accused, he said. What were the circumstances in which Sylvia Gresham’s dress had been torn, and his face raked by her nails? It was, however, the accused man’s right, as his learned friend had said, not to enter the witness box, but it did mean that the jury must try to find their answers to these and other questions without the help of the accused man. He referred to Grundy’s “ungovernable temper,” and then proceeded to answer all the rhetorical questions he had asked about the party, about Grundy’s general behaviour, and about his attempted departure for Belgrade without a word to his wife or his partner. He skirted as delicately as possible the unfortunate incident of Mrs Stenson, and suggested that the total volume of evidence was overwhelming…
If Hardy was well below his best, Mr Justice Crumble’s summing up was a model of the judge’s art. A judge may be likened – well, to many things no doubt, but among others he may be likened to an apothecary who, holding those scales above the Old Bailey in his hands, delicately tips them this way and that, dropping in an inch of perjury on this side and an incontrovertible fact on the other, finally balancing them triumphantly with the aid of the necessary precious blobs of judge’s opinion placed unobtrusively on one side or the other. On which side should the balance finally tilt? It was for the jury to say.
But Mr Justice Crumble came back again and again, as it would have been impermissible for Hardy to do, to the fact of Grundy’s absence from the witness box. What of the party incident and of “what the prosecution has called his panic flight” to Belgrade? Well, they must try to explain these as best they could, because the person able to tell them had chosen not to do so. What of this, what of that, what of the other? They must make up their minds without the assistance of the accused man. At the same time, he was careful to add, no obligation rested on the accused to enter the witness box…
When Mr Justice Crumble had finished this balancing act with his ten fat red fingers and his nimble judicial brain, the jury filed out. They were back in a little more than an hour, and those wise in the ways of courts noticed that they abstained from looking at Grundy. The foreman, a neat sort of man with a well-kept toothbrush moustache, rose composedly when asked whether they had reached a verdict, and said that they had.
“Do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty, or not guilty?”
Fingering the little moustache he replied, “Not guilty.”
It would be too much, far too much, to say that there was a sensation in court. Magnus Newton smiled a fat jolly kind of smile as Toby Bander patted him on the back and Trapsell shook hands with him. Hardy congratulated him also, his thin features paler than ever, his voice almost extinguished by the cold in which he was now visibly enfolded. Mr Justice Crumble stroked his rotting nose, entwined his over-ripe fingers, and said that the prisoner was discharged. Grundy, whose expression had not changed when the verdict was given, stepped out of the dock and came face to face with Magnus Newton. He did not thank his counsel, nor did he offer to shake hands. “Congratulations,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“That coin came down on the right side.”
As Newton said to Toby Bander afterwards, the man was the most insufferable boor he had ever met. No word of thanks for sweating your guts out, nothing about the care with which every possibility had been pursued, every crack in the prosecution armour prised open, nothing but that atrocious joke. But when Grundy had gone to pass through the usual form of discharge Newton was able to put him out of mind, and to savour again the taste of triumph, that taste which never varies yet is endlessly fresh upon the tongue.
Now people in Court were busy gathering up papers, putting into order a case which was finished and could be tied up with pink ribbon and placed into its appropriate pigeon hole. It was finished for all of them and passed quickly out of their minds, for Newton who was defending in a couple of days’ time two men accused of a bank robbery, for Hardy who got down to work on the details of a complicated security case, for Mr Justice Crumble who brought his ageing body and alert mind again to the Old Bailey on the following day, when he attended to
a case of alleged rape. For them what was done was done. They had no second thoughts and no regrets.
Marion had not come to Court on this last day because she felt, as she wrote to her husband, that she might break down or do something foolish. Dick Weldon had told her that he would be there and would telephone her as soon as a verdict was reached, but Dick was trapped unexpectedly by a client who had come down from Newcastle and insisted on talking to him. He did not reach the Old Bailey until half an hour after the verdict had been reached. He learned what had happened from an usher, and then went to look for Sol, but was told that he had passed out of the jurisdiction of the Court, and had presumably left its precincts. He telephoned Marion in the expectation that Sol would have rung her already, but she had heard nothing.
What should have been an evening of celebration became increasingly muted through the absence of its subject. The champagne cocktails Dick made tasted sour on Marion’s palate, the irrepressible energy that spilled out of Caroline made her feel for some reason uneasy, every word said by Gloria and Cyprian rasped her nerves. She knew that this was wrong, that Dick and Caroline had both been wonderful, and that only last night (could it really be no longer ago?) Cyprian had made the suggestion about checking with the airline that had helped to dispose of Mrs Stenson’s story. But it was no use, she felt that she must be in her own home, to await Sol’s arrival or a telephone call from him. It was logical enough to say that if Sol rang his own home and got no answer he would obviously try the Weldons’, but still she felt she had to go and wait for him.
“I’ll come with you,” Caroline said at once.
“No, really. I’d rather be alone.”
“But I don’t like to think of you, sitting there waiting on your own. Let’s go round together.”
“Now, darling,” Dick said. “Do you think Sol will want to find an old matron like you sitting there when he’s expecting to see his wife?”
“I ought to have been in Court today, then this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Marion, my dear, it’s I who ought to have been there.” Dick was earnest. “I’m very sorry I wasn’t.”
They watched her go, her elegant legs put one before another with the abstracted accuracy of a sleepwalker’s. All of them, even Gloria and Cyprian, felt an obscure disappointment, as though they had been rather disgracefully let down. They ate the salmon that Caroline had bought and cooked, but it did not really taste as it should have done. Dick expressed the feelings of the whole family accurately when he said, “I must say, Sol is a very odd cuss.”
In the empty house the telephone did not ring. Marion wandered from one room to another, touching Sol’s jackets in the cupboard, taking down a frying pan in the kitchen, putting salt, pepper, butter and eggs ready to make an omelette, switching the television on and quickly off again, looking out through the drawn curtains in the living-room and then letting them drop. She arranged a trayful of drinks, whisky, gin, pernod, but the very idea of taking a drink sickened her. Aloud she said, “My heart is full of love,” wondered if the phrase was true, and decided that it was. Her legs were already smooth, but she went to the bathroom and shaved them carefully. Then she returned to the bedroom, took off her coat and skirt and put on a cocktail dress. She put on three times her usual modest ration of lipstick and used mascara liberally round her eyes. The process brought some relief to her feelings, but inevitably the relief was only temporary. She spoke aloud again in the empty room, saying, “I want sex.”
She was painfully aware of the urgent need of her body. The apparatus of her life in this room, bits of china picked up cheaply, a collection of books about wild flowers, in which she had been passionately interested as a child, the curtains chosen with so much care at Heal’s, what did they mean, what did they add up to in a life? She unlocked a drawer in her desk and took out a small photograph album in which were recorded scenes of her childhood, dogs and holidays, dead aunts and uncles. Looking at them she wept and made the mascara run. She cleaned herself up, put on fresh mascara, and poured a large whisky. The time was almost nine o’clock.
Just after eleven she was sitting, half-asleep and half-drunk, beside the picture window. She had opened the curtains to look for Sol so that he saw her at several yards’ distance, framed with the light behind her, as he walked along the gravel road and opened the gate. He saw and was seen by Felicity Facey, who had been watching her neighbour’s house all the evening. When she told her husband, who had moved on from Sir Herbert Read to Sir Kenneth Clark, he grunted and advised her not to make a fool of herself again. The Faceys too had found themselves unpopular in The Dell in the general reversion of feeling that had taken place during the trial.
When Grundy opened the living-room door it seemed to Marion for a few moments that she had been transported back to the night of the Weldons’ party, for down one of his cheeks could be seen again the scratches that had been visible when he descended the stairs. Then she saw that these were not scratches but livid weals, and that they were upon the wrong cheek. The greeting she had imagined, in which she melted unquestioningly into his arms, was forgotten. She rose. “Sol,” she said, as though uncertain of his identity. “Sol?”
He stood there, filling the doorway, looking at her.
“Where have you been, Sol? I’ve been waiting. So long.” She heard with dismay a note of querulous complaint enter her voice.
“Seeing those bastards.” He had been drinking, although he was not drunk, no more drunk than she.
“Seeing – who? What happened to your face?”
“What do you think?” He came cautiously into the room, stepping as though there might be a trapdoor beneath the carpet. “First went to see MY partner, my loving partner who tried to shop me.”
“Theo?”
“Who else? Beat him up. His girl was there.”
“But Sol, Theo only did what he had to do, he only—”
“Broke two of his teeth.” He looked at his knuckles, and she saw that they too were scarred and bloody. “Little dummy, he’ll have to get some dummy teeth. But I did a better job on the other.”
“What other?”
“Took her away from me, the scheming little bastard. Doped her up to the eyes, I shouldn’t wonder. Then tried to frame me.”
“Sol,” she cried out. “Sol.”
“He’s out on bail, you know that. He’ll wish he wasn’t, now. Two of his boys caught me, but I think I broke his jaw first.” He began to laugh, then stopped.
Desperately she tried to preserve something at least of the dream with which she had begun the evening. She came towards him, entered the circle of his arms – or would have entered, if those arms had not been hanging, like great atrophied fins, by his sides. “Sol, I don’t want to hear any more, I don’t want to know, we can make a new start. We must make a new start.”
“A new start.”
“I want—” She could not say the word sex, it seemed wrong. “I want love. Make love to me, Sol.”
“Too late.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Too late, I tell you. You do what you’ve got to do, you see what I mean.”
“No, I don’t see what you mean. Tell me.”
“With her it was always, it was all, she was sex, you see what I mean.”
“Her,” she cried out, horrified. “Her?”
He sat down now, heavily, and talked, not looking at her, not coherently, yet with a total meaning in his words that she was unable to avoid.
“From the beginning it was like a revelation, you see what I mean. It was reality. All my life, I felt as if all my life had been wasted, not wasted exactly, but meaningless. Instant sensation, you see what I mean, that was what it was, and through it you get the whole meaning of life.”
She tried to extract from this jumble something of what, for her, made sense. “It was true then, what they said.”
“Who said?”
“Jack – Jack Jellifer, Peter Clements, that man – Leighton.”
He might not have heard her. “It was reality, you see what I mean, nothing else existed. That’s not right, though, no, you live in two worlds, but only one of them is real. And you don’t – you don’t control either of the worlds, they do things to you, not the other way round, you see.”
“You strangled her because she was going to marry Kabanga, that’s right, isn’t it?”
“To destroy a world. I only did what I had to do.”
“Oh, talk sense,” she said, more angry than frightened, determined to know the truth. “They were all telling the truth, even that wretched little Jennifer.”
“The truth,” he said, and seemed to meditate on the words. “Jennifer saw us.”
Gropingly she said, “But I don’t see – why didn’t you give yourself up?”
Before she had finished he was shaking his head.
“You live in two worlds and in both of them you have to behave as if they were real, you see? You play the game, you don’t give anything away. But shall I tell you something terrible? When one world has gone it’s impossible to live in the other.” For a moment the eyes that looked now straight into hers seemed to clear, and she thought she saw in them an intense suffering. Then they were again opaque, milky, like the eyes of a sufferer from glaucoma. He took something out of his pocket. “I got this from Kabanga, he tried to shoot me with it.”
The End Of Solomon Grundy Page 21
