‘I imagine they know my time is valuable. They may be aware that I’m overwhelmed with work. I’m surprised that they’ve got so much sense. If they had tried to make me attend, I should have been obliged to refuse. And if, as a result, they had seen fit to arrest me, I should have been ready, on a point of principle, to face prison. The suffragettes need not think they have the monopoly of that.’
He was not called upon, and continued to complain.
18
An Unusual Court Case
The court opened at ten, before the lately appointed stipendiary magistrate. Fred, Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn were told to wait in the witnesses’ room. The proceedings were not expected to take long, and Daisy had her things in a bag ready to bicycle to the hospital. She seemed very pale. Her face was still fresh, but she looked blindly, as a statue does, not being given any feelings to show. Gallant Mrs Wrayburn, in crimson Russian boots and a linen tabard, did her best to encourage both of them by suggesting (the room was small and stuffy) that they had all been mistaken for prisoners and would be soon given their skilly and required to sew mailbags.
‘Mrs Wrayburn, I can’t smile,’ said Daisy, ‘and the Lord knows how you can. If you hadn’t done a good action and picked us up off the road, you wouldn’t have to be wasting your time here this morning. Don’t you think about that?’
‘Perhaps a little,’ said Mrs Wrayburn.
The witnesses were not allowed into court until George Turner had been charged. An inspector from the station appeared to conduct the prosecution. ‘Your name is Richard Catcher, you are a detective sergeant,’ he had read out rapidly to his first witness. ‘Did you, on the 4th of April, interview Mr George Turner at Turner’s farm, Guestingley Road, and did you charge him with the two offences, and did he become abusive and show signs of endeavouring to hinder you in the execution of your duty, and did he ask you why you had not found the missing carter, and state that the Cambridgeshire police had less idea how to find anyone than a bitch chasing fleas on her own arse?’ The sergeant had agreed to this.
Fred was sworn in and taken through his evidence. It was the first time he had seen George Turner, who sat there intransigent, his neck shrunken by the east winds inside his hard Sunday collar, his hands on his knees, a blameless, simple man bewildered by the processes of the law. The defence solicitor, who got up to cross-examine, appeared anxious to earn his money. He asked Fred whether he had good eyesight. Fred said that he had. The solicitor looked disconsolate. Had it been pitch dark? No, but dark enough.
‘Mr Fairly,’ said the solicitor, ‘do you consider yourself a scientist and a philosopher?’
The magistrate asked whether this was material to the case. The solicitor said he was questioning the witness’s reliability.
‘I’ve never been a philosopher,’ said Fred. ‘If you mean, as I think you do, that as a scientist, I’m not able to look where I’m going, then I must tell you that you’re mistaken.’
Mrs Wrayburn, after Fred had sat down, was sworn in, and told that she was a housewife. ‘I should be a graduate,’ she said, ‘if the university allowed women to take degrees.’
‘Mrs Wrayburn, you are a housewife,’ the inspector went on. ‘On the night of February the 26th you heard what sounded like a collision outside your house. You put on a waterproof and, going out into the road, discovered two individuals, a man and a woman lying apparently injured. You were not at that time able to identify them. You then went for assistance to the neighbouring farm and found Mr Turner’s son, who conveyed the two victims to your house one at a time on a handcart.’
‘Is Mr Turner’s son in court?’ asked the magistrate. The son had been excused because he had been taken poorly. He had been allowed to put in a sworn statement, in the course of which he stated that he didn’t know who his father had hired to drive the cart or whether it had lights or not. But he reckoned it must have had some or how would the driver have been able to see?
‘You were lucky to have got as much sense as that out of him,’ called out George Turner.
The magistrate told him that he would have the opportunity to speak later. ‘I’ve got plenty to say,’ replied Turner.
Every time Fred saw Daisy he was taken off guard and, although it seemed to him he never forgot anything about her, he was overwhelmed by all that, after all, he had not remembered quite correctly. The evidence, so far, had only taken twenty minutes or so. Twenty minutes or so ago, then, he had been sitting with her in the witnesses’ waiting-room. He had noticed then that she was pale, but now he saw that he hadn’t given proper attention to the kind of pallor, something more like a white tea-rose, where the colour is below the surface and can only just be guessed at. While Fred (totally oblivious of Mach’s principle that the element of wonder never lies in the phenomenon, but always in the person observing) raved on to himself like this, Daisy was sworn in.
‘Mr Fairly has said earlier on in evidence that you were riding either side by side with, or just behind, another bicyclist,’ the inspector began, ‘a man, who would naturally have been a witness to the accident. You must, of course, have seen this man, and there is a possibility that you know him. Now, Miss Saunders, could you tell the court his name, or give us any other information about him?’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ said Daisy.
‘You don’t know who he was?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You are a friend or an acquaintance of this man?’
‘No.’
‘But you were bicycling with him?’
‘I was cycling behind him.’
The magistrate said he would like to clarify the point. He, too, had noticed Daisy’s pallor, but attributed it to menstrual trouble. Since he very much disliked having anyone fainting in court, he tried to rally her a little.
‘The police, you know, Miss Saunders, have not been successful in tracing this man. Have you any idea where he might be found?’
‘If I don’t know who he is, how can I know where he’s gone?’ Daisy cried.
‘That doesn’t follow, Miss Saunders.’
‘The defendant is entitled to testify on his own behalf,’ said the magistrate.
‘I’ve plenty to say,’ George Turner repeated, ‘but my lawyer here tells me there’s no case to answer.’
‘Is that your submission?’
‘Yes, that’s my submission, according to the laws of the land.’
‘I don’t need instruction about the laws of the land,’ said the magistrate. ‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘What I am telling you is that you can’t hold me responsible for someone you can’t lay hands on, and none of us can’t remember what his surname is. Why, there’s a professor walking about Cambridge at the moment saying that this man, the one who was driving the cart, I mean, that he’s lying dead and buried under the Guestingley Road.’
As George Turner made this last remark in a tone which suggested he was telling a joke, his solicitor allowed himself a smile. Turner sat down, folding his arms. The inspector got to his feet and reminded the magistrate that the police now had some additional evidence. The magistrate and his clerk bent towards each other and murmured in harmony.
‘You want to put in a written statement?’
‘I can call the witness in person, your worship. He got here ten minutes ago.’
A constable was sent to the waiting room and Kelly walked into the court. He was wearing a fawn waistcoat, like a tipster’s, and looked ill and savage. As he gazed about him, knowing and experienced, there was for the first time in the court a physical sensation, like hot breath close to the cheek, of guilt and danger.
Kelly gave his occupation as a newspaper editor and journalist. The magistrate, who was becoming short-tempered, said that surely one implied the other. Kelly did not reply. He stared straight in front of him, licking his lips as though thirsty. Asked where he was on the evening of February the 26th, he replied that he was coming out of Cambridge, cycling in the direction of Guestingley.�
�Did he in fact reach Guestingley? No, he didn’t. He’d only just about missed being hit by a horse and cart and he had had to swerve clean across to the right of the road.
The magistrate said: ‘I want to know if you can describe or identify the driver of the cart.’
‘Yes, I can. When he saw what he had done he jumped off the driver’s seat and ran off towards the farmhouse. I saw him in the light of my headlamp.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘I don’t need to do that. He’s here.’ He jerked his head towards Turner. ‘He was driving the cart.’
Turner bellowed and was escorted bellowing out of the court, but could be heard from the corridor outside with the constable calmly arguing restraint, and then less calmly.
‘I shall dismiss this case until the summons is amended,’ said the magistrate. ‘Please tell them to make a great deal less noise outside the court, and if necessary to take the defendant into detention. Meanwhile I shall take one or two additional points. Mr Kelly, what exactly did you do after the accident?’
‘I turned back to Cambridge and went to Pett’s Hotel. I had a room booked there for the night for Daisy Saunders and myself. I knew she would have to come back there eventually. She hadn’t any money and her cycle was smashed.’
‘Are you referring to Miss Saunders, who is at present in court as a witness?’
‘Yes, Daisy Saunders. I got gypped, though. She didn’t turn up until the following morning.’
‘Why did you not report the accident immediately, in case help was needed?’
‘I wanted to keep out of it. I didn’t want it to get about we were going to a hotel together. I didn’t want to cock it all up for her.’
Kelly was speaking so quietly and flatly that the magistrate and his clerk were both leaning forward, their usual reproach to the indistinct. The magistrate repeated:
‘You did not wish to cock it all up for Miss Saunders. I take it that you mean you did not wish to embarrass her. What has made you decide to come forward now? Please speak plainly.’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Kelly. Then he shouted: ‘Jesus’ eyes, now I do want to cock it all up for her.’
19
Kelly Laid to Rest
Mr Turner’s solicitor retrieved him, and he was bound over, pending further enquiries. Kelly was detained by the police, who required him to make a signed deposition. All the others were free to go. Daisy took her bag and departed for Dr Sage’s hospital. She had not looked even once at Kelly, although his eyes had been fixed on her. Neither had she spoken to Fred.
Fred went and sat for three hours in a small café in front of the magistrate’s court. He ordered a cup of tea and two biscuits for five pence and thought of nothing.—Oh, but that’s impossible.—It’s not possible to think of nothing. Certainly it was unprofessional of Fred, who was paid by the university to use his mind, and unwise of him as a lover, but there it was, he was occupied with bitter sensations, giving way to stupefaction, then to emptiness.
The café was really only the front room of a small house. A coal fire smoked in a dispirited grate—not coal exactly, but brickettes made of coal dust and tea-leaves. There were three tables only. The manageress came through a bead curtain and asked if she should light the gas. Unless Fred wanted to read, she would keep it low. Fred recognised the note, universal as the voice of the sea, of worry about money.
‘I don’t want to read,’ he said. ‘Really, I don’t need the gas at all.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to look as though I wasn’t open. In fact, I was going to ask if you’d sit by the window, to give some atmosphere, you see, if anyone’s passing.’
Fred went and sat by the window. She moved his cup and plate after him. ‘Your tea’s cold now, I’m afraid. I would have drawn your attention to it before, only I was afraid you were thinking.’
‘Do you get a lot of thinkers in here?’ he asked.
‘We don’t get a lot of anyone. You’d think it would be a good place, opposite the court and the police station. Perhaps, though, if they see you talking—it would be better, really, if you could smile a bit. I could tell my father to come in here and sit with you at your table, only he doesn’t have very good hearing.’
Fred tried to smile.
‘Didn’t you fancy your biscuits?’ she asked.
‘Look,’ said Fred, ‘if the police keep someone in there to ask him questions and so on, then when they let him out, surely he’d cross the road and come in here?’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ said the manageress’s father, rattling and tottering in through the bead curtain, not seeming at all deaf. ‘He wouldn’t come over here. If they’re detained by the police they all get away as quick as possible.’
‘I’m waiting for someone to come out. That’s what I’m sitting here for,’ said Fred.
‘Will you be ordering something further, then?’ asked the manageress.
‘Yes, yes, the same again.’
‘You wouldn’t prefer something on toast?’
‘Yes, the same again, but on toast.’
‘You’ll want some for your friend?’
‘I don’t want anything for him. He’s not my friend. I’m not really the sort of person you hoped for, I’m afraid.’
‘I’d looked for young people,’ she said doubtfully.
‘I’m twenty-five, nearly twenty-six,’ he said. She looked more doubtful still.
‘But your friend might want something on toast?’
‘I don’t want to order anything for him. I don’t even want to speak to him.’
‘You’ve waited three hours for him. I should have thought it was worth while speaking to him.’
‘I want to hit him.’
Fred realised now what it was that he had not been thinking about. The old father laughed extravagantly, steadying himself by holding onto the back of a chair. Fortunately Fred had a reasonable amount of money on him, having hoped to take out Daisy and, if necessary, Mrs Wrayburn, to luncheon. While paying for his various orders he saw Kelly coming down the steps of the police-station and felt a peculiar shock of disbelief that comes when the long awaited arrives. Kelly had his hat pulled forward instead of on the back of his head and his jacket collar turned up. It must be raining a little. When he reached the pavement he turned right and began to walk with his usual strut, which seemed to Fred to be that of a man who felt he had unlimited access to women, so that a young girl, picked up by chance and taken for the night to a cheap hotel, would be as nothing. His jacket would matter more to him, being less easy to replace.
There was nothing to discuss. Fred sprinted across the road behind a motorcycle and in front of a dray, caught up with Kelly, grasped him by the coat collar, and spun him round. This left them both in an unmanageable position, with Fred’s arm round the back of his neck, locked in an embrace.
‘You’re the schoolteacher,’ said Kelly. He turned his head as far as he could and spat in Fred’s face. ‘Shock off, schoolteacher.’ Fred changed grip and hit him hard just below the ear. It was not a fair blow, but justice is sometimes what you can afford. Kelly did not behave at all as Fred expected. He stood for a moment as though doubtful whether to fall to the left or the right and then collapsed deliberately and totally as though only his jacket had been holding him together. He fell in front of a shop, a repairing tailor’s, and lay there unmoving.
‘Do you need a hand, Fairly?’ It was Skippey, quite unexpected at this end of Cambridge. ‘There’s a man, you know, lying on the pavement quite close to you.’ Passers-by, not wishing to be involved, made a detour to avoid them.
‘Yes, I knocked him over.’
‘Do you regret it?’
‘No, I don’t regret it.’
‘But I think he can’t stay here, Fairly.’ Skippey picked up Kelly’s feet, in their worn sharply pointed boots. ‘Where to?’
‘Honestly, Skippey, I don’t know.’
‘Something will suggest itself as we go.’
Skippey wal
ked in front with his back towards Kelly, holding him under the knees. In this way they successfully crossed Parker’s Piece. He talked quietly but incessantly over his shoulder to Fred, who followed, supporting Kelly’s head and shoulders, and looking after his hat.
‘Fairly, this whole incident is not characteristic of you.’
‘I’ll tell you who he is. I’ll tell you what he tried to do.’
‘Later, later. I’m glad to have come across you, as a matter of fact, because I should like to discuss a problem I’ve run into.’
They continued to thread their way down St Andrew’s Street between people on other business.
‘I’m working,’ Skippey continued, ‘as you know, on the Michelson-Morley experiments. I think the whole series could be repeated still more accurately. Minute changes of length, of course, entailing very fine measurements, which I can hardly be expected to undertake entirely by myself if I’m to perform my other duties satisfactorily. Yet I’m getting no response at all from my repeated requests for an assistant.’
They negotiated a corner, where Kelly’s hat fell, and was retrieved by a schoolboy. The rain was still falling gently.
‘It’s not that there are no funds available, there is always money to spare in a great university. Extensions, medical schools, they’re building in all directions. They all want libraries put up, even the parasitologists, yes, Fairly, even the economists. Yes! And gold seems to rain on them from the skies. Yet I’m not satisfied that my application has ever been read, much less considered.’
‘Perhaps they don’t feel much more needs doing on Michelson-Morley.’
‘Ah, Fairly! But I’m not satisfied that they offered anything like a complete proof.’
‘I don’t see that a complete proof is possible,’ said Fred. He couldn’t believe that Kelly could remain unconscious for this length of time, unless he was very seriously hurt, and he didn’t believe that either. His colour was better now than it had been in court. Perhaps, like a baby, he simply liked being carried about.
The Gate of Angels Page 13
