A Sentence of Life

by Julian Gloag

  “I can get the M.O. up here in two shakes if you feel a bit funny.”

  “No, I’m okay.” Sorry—I mean alright. Where did that come from?

  “Well, if you say so. He’ll be round this afternoon anyway. Governor’s inspection today, too. After chapel. You’ll be ready for that, won’t you?”

  “The governor’s inspection.” He felt baffled—there was something there at the edge of his mind, almost at his fingertips, but …

  “Every Sunday, remember? Hardly makes it a day of rest, but he’s got to do it. All in prison regs.”

  “I don’t mind.” Or did he? Yesterday he would have known quite clearly, but he could hardly recall yesterday.

  “They don’t mean no harm.” Denver looked at him anxiously. “The gov’s a good bloke. He does try to be human. Look, mate, you’ll feel better when it’s all over. Try an’ eat some of Ben’s breakfast, won’t you?”

  “Will they court-martial me if I don’t?”

  Denver smiled. “That’s better.”

  “I’ll be very quickly convicted.” He smiled back.

  “Now, now, Maddox, you got no call to talk like that. You take it easy today, forget about it.”

  Jordan stared at him. “Oh, that!” he said suddenly. He paused. “I will be convicted though, Denver.”

  “Now you can’t know that—why do you want to think like that?”

  He remembered now what he had to ask. “I want to see the governor.”

  “He’ll be round after chapel, like I said.”

  “No—I mean alone.” To confess—that’s what he’d been reaching for. He was at once impatient.

  “A private interview? Oh yes, that’s easy. He’ll probably be able to give you a few minutes on his rounds.”

  “Before lunch?”

  “Yes, that’s right, before lunch.”

  Jordan quickly lit a cigarette. He offered one to Denver.

  “No thanks. Can’t smoke on duty.” The word seemed to recall him. He tugged at his tunic. “Well, I’ll have a look in later on. Exercise this afternoon, alright? If you want anything, give us a yell.” He went to the door. “Maddox?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Do me a favour, will you, and have a go at them eggs?” He nodded and was gone.

  Eggs! Suddenly he knew he loathed Denver’s anxious kindliness. Food, fresh air, comfort, concern … Irish stew!

  Do me a favour—he had spent his life doing favours. Doing what they said was best for him, following doctor’s orders, wryly taking his medicine for the sake of … of what? A cure? Hardly. To confirm his invalid status, someone who needed looking after, needed protection. Like Uncle John.

  He sat down abruptly on the bed. A finger of ash fell onto his shirt and he brushed it away, leaving a dark smudge.

  Like Uncle John. Good God. He, Jordan, had always accepted their ministrations as though he were a sick man. Always? Not always—his mind spun back to his childhood like a tossed penny. No, not then. Slap, he caught it on the back of his hand and looked.

  When John died. That was when. To the very day—to the first moment of Mr. Prideaux’s silver-jangling hand-in-pocket sympathy. From a functionless object of neglect, he had become a creature of sympathy. Colin, Trevor—even, in her disdainful fashion, Mary. And, most of all, Annie. Willy. June. He had become pitiable even to Georgia. He attracted pity, like venom, from mankind—womankind—and, like venom, it paralyzed him. A slow death.

  But he had accepted it obediently, an obedience only reinforced by humorous protest. He had stretched out his hand, not to take, but for support.

  He had been obedient always to what was wanted for him, not to what he wanted. He hadn’t failed the world—their world, wrinkled with desiccation and pudgy as an old boxing glove. He’d done what it wanted, saluted its face, done his duty by its commands. The perpetual lamb, shorn and sad-eyed.

  He got up and walked quickly up and down the room. He rubbed his face with his hands.

  Like John, he had submitted to sacrifice. Uncle John, the very openness of whose innocence had invited destruction—the long sweet cruelty with which humanity revenges itself for its own failure. And Jordan, too, had been a member of that subtle alliance in which each joins to ridicule and crush such faultless life. How often had he stepped up to the attic, stood at the workshop door, waiting—waiting for what? For some lovely trumpet that shall never call retreat—at the sound of which all, without doubt and at once, will join in the universal jubilance? What had he waited for? What had he wanted?

  He spoke aloud. “What do I want?”

  The rusty machinery of desire shuddered against the encrustation of years of disuse. Love? When had he not moved in a loveless, passionless country? Mary rasping out the thin affection of greetings and farewells. Willy indulgently permitting the invasion of her sex. And Annie—who knew what secret charms abnegation held? Jordan knew. For years he had fondled it.

  No longer. That’s what he wanted. No longer to placate life with submission. No longer to give up. His change of plea was not a placation of the ghosts of the past. Not compensation. But repudiation—repudiation of his years of mortuary service to them.

  There came into his head the doleful chorus of the Armistice Day dirge—“We will remember them.” On the contrary, he would forget them. To hell with them. To hell with …

  He glanced up. The governor stood in the doorway, his retinue behind him.

  “Everything alright, Maddox?” Major Forster cocked his head on one side and his mouth crumpled into a tiny, fluted smile, as much as to say that any complaints would be kindly treated as the product of a harmlessly deranged mind.

  “Yes.”

  “You have something of a reputation as a model prisoner, Maddox. Still doing those puzzles of yours, eh?” He wrinkled his lips. “Bit stuffy in here, isn’t it? Well, I hear you want to have a word with me.”

  “Alone.”

  Major Forster glanced at his watch. “Won’t take long, I suppose? No. Right.” He turned to the deputy governor behind him. “Perhaps you’d carry on in the ward, Wilton.”

  Jordan waited until the others had gone. “I wish,” he said, “to confess to the murder of June Singer.”

  The governor’s head jerked quickly. “Hold on. Let’s be sure I understand, and you understand, what you are saying. You wish to confess to the crime for which you are being tried, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  Major Forster was no longer jolly. But his hasty assumption of gravity suddenly infuriated Jordan. “Well?” he snapped.

  “Yes, quite.” The governor glanced sidelong. “You have, I presume, discussed this with your solicitor?”

  “Yes.”

  The governor paused, and then, briskly, “Well, the correct procedure is for you to make a statement, a written statement, which I shall, of course, at once submit to the proper authorities. The police—”

  “I’ll write it myself.”

  The governor nodded and stepped back. “You know the form. Got pen and paper? Good. Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Date it and sign it. When you’ve finished, let them know. I’ll leave instructions that it is to be brought straight to me. And then … You know that you can simply change your plea to guilty?”

  “I’ll do it this way.”

  “Right. Yes. Get it down in black and white. I’ll leave you to get on with it, Maddox.”

  He heard the governor talking to the orderly at the end of the corridor. Then a door slammed and there was silence. It was as if the prison—all London—had been deserted. A soft, diffuse sunlight shone through the dusty window, waxed, faded, then grew stronger.

  Jordan reached out and turned on the wireless. It hummed for a moment and then, in rising volume: “… band of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, under the direction of Captain G. Cutler, will conclude Sunday Bandstand with their own regimental march: ‘Lutzow’s Wild Hunt’ …

  The swift, jerky tune struck into the cell at top volume. Jordan turned his
face to the window, holding the beat in his mind, remembering every note. Suddenly the music was split by the high blare of silver bugles. Bugles and fanfares, trumpets and drums—beating out the victories of the past: of Blenheim and Dettingen and Minden and Salamanca and Waterloo. John had heard them, lively and pure, until one day they had all marched past and gone away. But his death had restored that triumphant music over the thin crackle of Sibley, where so few demands were made, so few desires fulfilled. Death for the sake of life, like old Mrs. Singer for June. The last unanswerable victory of an old soldier who chose death on the battlefield over the dim, cruel sadness of just fading away.

  And Jordan, having sworn always to remember John, had forgotten him. In that forgetfulness he had himself, as a living being, disappeared. But now he had come to the surface. Now he understood.

  And now he knew what he wanted. He wanted to—had to—tear it all down, as John had torn down the fig tree. He would assert what he had forgotten—or perhaps had never known—existed. Assert it over against them, for they, certainly, did not know of its existence.

  As he sat down at the table amidst the breakfast dishes and took pen and paper, he thought, If you—all of you—are not guilty, then I am guilty.

  43

  He wrote his signature out in full at the bottom of the page.

  The writing of the confession had been filled with the accurate intensity of poetry. He had ascended to an unassailable upland, and his fingers still trembled with the excitement of the climb.

  The Governor—Urgent, he wrote on the envelope.

  He looked up with a smile as Denver came in. “Just time,” he said, folding the paper.

  “You’re wanted in the solicitors’ room. Your Mr. Bartlett. Feeling better, are you?”

  “I am.” He thrust the paper into the envelope and stood up. “Give this to the governor for me, will you?”

  Denver held out his hand.

  Jordan paused. He’d promised Tom he’d see Bartlett first. Very well then, he would wait—he could certainly afford that magnanimity. “On second thoughts, I’ll give it to you later.”

  Denver’s hand fell. “Okay. Ready? Don’t you want to comb your hair?”

  “To hell with my hair.”

  Denver grinned. “You look like a bleeding fuzzy-wuzzy. So long as you feel chipper. Come on.”

  He was surprised to find Bartlett in a tweed suit and a bright-green tie.

  The barrister smiled faintly. “Excuse the informality. Sunday, you know. God rests but lawyers don’t.”

  They shook hands.

  “Short’s told me the news. I have some news for you, too,” Bartlett said as they sat down.

  Jordan took the letter out of his pocket and gave it to Bartlett.

  “ ‘The Governor,’ ” Bartlett read. “Um—am I to read it?”

  “You are.”

  The barrister opened the flap and unfolded the two sheets of cheap prison paper. He read it very quickly. When he’d finished he said, “Who knows of this?”

  “The governor.”

  “The contents of this? All of it?”

  “No. I told him I was going to confess, that’s all. He suggested making a written statement.”

  “Sensible fellow.” Bartlett slipped the sheets back into the envelope. “Then you are, I take it, instructing me to alter your plea to one of guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a lawyer, I distrust confessions.”

  Jordan smiled. “And as a human being?”

  “You know the old story—true—of the barrister who addressed the jury with the words: ‘I will cast aside the role of advocate, and speak as a man,’ to be immediately rebuked by the judge with, ‘You will do nothing of the kind’?”

  Jordan shook his head. Bartlett, he thought, had put on the aspect of humanity with his Sunday suit. It was as incongruous as the brightgreen tie.

  “I remember when I was a small boy,” Bartlett went on, “being had up by the master for lying over some trivial incident. It so happened that I had not lied, but it was only my word against his. Clearly I was to be beaten, but this particular man had a positive mania that a boy ‘make a clean breast of it.’ So I had this perplexing choice: to tell the truth and be convicted a liar; or to lie, and be declared honest. As neither course would obviate punishment, there was naturally a strong motive for lying.”

  “That must be fairly common. What did you do?”

  Bartlett smiled. “That’s not really the point of the story. But I’ll tell you. I set him a little test. I requested him to give me double the number of strokes he had intended if, and only if, he believed what I was telling him to be the truth. I then told him the truth—I had not lied.”

  “A Solomon.” Jordan looked indulgently at the barrister. “And what happened?”

  “He dismissed me without punishment. And thereafter he avoided me as much as possible. But to get back to the point I was making. Confessions are unsatisfactory evidence at best, because one seldom knows the circumstances surrounding them. And I don’t mean the physical circumstances. A confession may have a compelling motive quite outside that of the actual crime. By its very nature, a confession cannot be regarded as absolutely hard evidence, even when superficially quite convincing—” he tapped the envelope on the table—“as this is.”

  “But isn’t that what trials are for, to determine the truth of the matter?”

  “That’s too simplistic a view. The law can only deal with facts, and sometimes not very well with those. We’re always trying to exclude the nebulous and concentrate on the tangible. Our courts don’t care for nebulosity—witness the law’s archaic attitude to psychiatry. The law is always trying to be specific. It tries to be precise in matters where precision is not always possible. This limitation, largely embodied in the rules of evidence, this narrowness, one might say, is the source of great potency. There could never be any judgement if one was to attempt to include everything relevant—because patently there is a vast area of experience and motive and attitude which is, in a very positive sense, relevant, and yet cannot be admitted as evidence, cannot be proved, disproved: facts, feelings, conditionings.

  “And it is from this large, clouded area that confessions often spring. I hope I’ll live to see the day when all voluntary confessions are automatically excluded. To my mind they are only evidence that a man may be persuaded, or persuade himself, of practically anything.”

  From his upland, Jordan looked down on the barrister. “I think what you mean is that you do not believe what I have written.”

  “No no,” a trifle impatient. “What I am saying is that I am not competent to judge of its veracity.”

  “You don’t want to commit yourself, do you?”

  “Lawyers give opinions and take instructions and accept briefs. It’s no part of their business to make commitments. Which is perhaps why we’re often thought to be cold fish.”

  “Bartlett, I’ve told Short he can wash his hands of this case if he wants to. You can too.”

  “I’d rather not wash my hands of your case. You can instruct me to do so, but perhaps you won’t want to when you’ve heard what I have to say.”

  “Tangible or nebulous?”

  “Let’s say flimsy. Yet potentially very significant. Your Miss Lawley came to see me on Friday.”

  “Miss Lawley?”

  “Yes. She had an interesting story to tell. Some months ago—in January, she thinks—she had cause to see a letter, or part of a letter, written to June Singer. She cannot recollect the exact wording, but it was something to this effect: ‘You are ruining my life’—that particular phrase Miss Lawley is certain of. Then, ‘You know we truly belong together. I will forgive you all if only you come back to me.’ It was signed, ‘Your Bernie Boy.’ That, too, Miss Lawley is positive about. It quite struck her, as indeed it might.”

  “Miss Lawley said all this?” Jordan was puzzled.

  “Yes. I think the reason she didn’t come forward before this was b
ecause she thought she had done something despicable in reading someone else’s correspondence.”

  “The Law in its true colours at last.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Law. We call her the Law—she’s renowned for iron rectitude.”

  “Umm. A fortunate chink in the armour.”

  Jordan stood up. He felt the need of movement. He walked across the solicitors’ room and back again, halting at the table. “She could have made it up, you know.”

  “The thought occurred to me. She’d have a strong motive, wouldn’t she? And yet …”

  “She has always disliked me.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not too easy to say.” He hesitated; he was unwilling to go into it. It was dead and done with. “I believe she felt I was an intruder. And …”

  “Yes?”

  He had never quite seen it this way before. “She was always afraid, I think, that I was going to disrupt the established way of doing things. But it was more than that. This is oddly ambivalent. She also, in some secret way, despised me for not disrupting things. It was as if she was comparing me to … to some ideal figure, and finding that I always fell short. Colin Sutlif’s father and my grandfather founded the firm, you know. Colin went into it, but my father didn’t take much interest. He was a sleeping partner. And yet that’s an absurd description. Because he’d have bursts, so I’m told, of frenzied activity. Try to turn the whole place upside down. It never came to anything. I suppose Clara Lawley might just have known my father in his heyday—she’d certainly have heard about him. I have a peculiar feeling that she would have admired him very much. I can’t tell you why. But if she did … well, then there would be every reason why she wouldn’t care for me.”

  “Because you were not frenziedly active?”

  “What?” He’d not been fully aware of the barrister’s presence. Suddenly he smiled. “More or less. I’m a relatively dull man.”

  Bartlett stood up so that they faced one another across the table. “But a plausible one, Maddox. I have been counting on that.”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll make a good impression on the jury. One has to be objective about this sort of thing. You’re plausible without being smart alec. Juries don’t like smart alecs.”