Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘What’s it going to be like, Mummy? Will it have a toilet?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Beryl. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘It might have an enormous swimming-pool in the kitchen,’ Moonman suggested, ‘or a tree in the bathroom.’

  ‘No-oh,’ squealed Beryl, ‘don’t be silly.’

  Bobs counted to three and then Beryl tore at the wrapping paper, tangling herself in the sticky tape. Finally she staggered away from the doll’s house, now engulfed in the silver paper but leaving the doll’s house standing naked, and naked was somehow the word for it. I had not seen it since its early stages and had expected, I don’t know why, something like St Col’s in warm red brick with complicated gables, but this was a bleak terrace house in a grubby shade of cream with crude green windows and a smeary blue front door which had BERYL’S HOUSE written on it in large red letters, hopelessly out of scale and unevenly painted, so that it looked more like a hastily scrawled mark of the plague. You could take the roof off and peer down into the bedroom and bathroom or unhook the front of the house and look into the sitting-room and kitchen. The four rooms were all sparsely furnished and papered in oppressive floral wallpapers so that internally the effect was not unlike St Col’s.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Beryl squealed.

  ‘I think the place must be haunted,’ Bobs said.

  ‘It’s lovely, lovely,’ Beryl squealed again.

  ‘Wouldn’t care to call after dark.’

  For once, Bobs was right. It did have a sinister quality.

  ‘Don’t be horrid, you’re not my daddy any more. Moonman’s my new daddy.’

  ‘I’m Moonman too.’

  ‘No, you’re not proper Moonman. This is my real daddy.’ Beryl grasped Moonman’s hand and swung herself round behind him so that she disappeared for a moment before peeping round his leg to see how the audience was taking it.

  ‘Sorry, Beriberi, I can’t magic that trick. You’re stuck with old Bobs, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m not, I’m not. I hate old Bobs. You’re my daddy.’

  ‘Stop showing off, Beryl, and say thank you to Moonman.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you, Moonman Daddy.’

  He stood smiling while she swung to and fro clinging to his hand.

  That was the last time I saw the four of them together. A month later, perhaps a little more, Bobs telephoned me and told me that Helen had gone off with Moonman to a cottage somewhere by the sea, taking Beryl of course but this could be sorted out. That was as far as he got before breaking down. When he recovered himself a little, he promised he wouldn’t do anything stupid, not like last time which he took this opportunity to apologise for, but now he had something to live for, he had Beryl and he wasn’t going to let her down.

  It must have been an awful shock, I ventured lamely, not wanting to put the telephone down and also wanting to express my own astonishment.

  ‘Shock, no, why should it be?’ he said with a kind of vagueness which sounded inappropriate.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I had never thought Helen would do anything like that.’

  ‘Going off, you mean?’

  ‘Not the actual going off, but –’

  ‘Oh you mean, having an affair. That’s been going on for months.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I assumed you must have known. In fact, I thought of discussing it with you, but then I thought you might have had a basinful of us lot. In fact, I rather hoped you might have been thinking how sophisticated of Bobs to turn a blind eye. Well, I didn’t really, what I really thought you must be thinking was how pathetic. Then I wondered whether you weren’t having it off with her too, for old times’ sake.’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Don’t take offence. Probably everyone else has, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t. But I didn’t want her to go, I really didn’t.’

  He began crying again.

  Fairness

  ‘WOULD ANYONE IN their right mind have built a holiday resort here,’ Francie Fincher exploded on his first sight of it, but then we found out they built the power station when the resort was already long past its heyday. Now it was dead. We agreed we had never seen a deader place, not even on this desolate coast with its low crumbly cliffs, though it was kind to call them that, when they were only eight or ten feet high, with the coal showing through the sand so that even on the sunniest day they looked dirty. We hadn’t had any sunny days yet. Francie had told me to bring golf clubs but we hadn’t had any time off either.

  A flood of depositions had come in just after we had arrived and there were endless conferences with the police and the lawyers about how the evidence ought to be taken: should we hear the children, or should we confine ourselves to the adults – but then when did children start being adults and might it not be better to hear those whose memories were fresh – which meant some of the youngest – and not rely solely on reheated recollections from those who were now seventeen or eighteen? So it was decreed that Dr Brightwell, the child psychiatrist on the team, should talk privately to the children so as not to frighten them by putting them before another tribunal, and Francie and I would listen to her tapes.

  ‘I think I’ve had enough of this for today,’ Francie whispered to me, ‘let’s go down there. I always believe in walking the course.’

  So Mr Justice Fincher drove me in his old dark-green Jaguar down to Pleasure Beach from the draughty little red-brick schoolhouse built to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. There was an east wind blowing, which rattled the flaps of the ice-cream hut and swished the sodden leaves into the rickety verandah of the Pier Theatre. The theatre wasn’t much more than a large hut. The face of a laughing clown painted on its pediment was only a piece of flimsy hardboard. Beyond the theatre there was a round bandstand with rusty metal pillars, at least we thought it was a bandstand, until Francie pointed to the grimy machinery in the roof and the places where the horses had been bolted on to the pillars.

  ‘Not merry, not going round,’ Francie muttered, ‘that just about sums the place up.’

  Mr Garforth, the trim muscular-looking man who used to manage the theatre and still looked after the place – ‘Call me Mr G,’ he said, ‘everyone does’ – let us in and showed us round. There was not much to see: a minuscule stage with a backdrop left over from the pantomime, a little door at the side of the stage with steps leading down to the auditorium – forty or fifty tip-up chairs all covered in dust.

  ‘The council wants to knock the whole lot down,’ Mr Garforth said gloomily, ‘don’t blame them, but they haven’t got the money to build the leisure centre. Still with all this trouble, they may knock it down anyway.’

  There were a few derelict booths either side of the crumbling asphalt, with doors and windows smashed or covered with graffiti, and then a high chain-link fence supported by concrete posts with floodlights mounted on them at intervals. Beyond, overshadowing the entire funfair, was the power station, its dull grey walls lowering over us so close that I couldn’t even see the gigantic chimney which otherwise was visible for miles.

  Francie Fincher took in every feature with a quick dart of his lean head, his spare body thrusting forward as though he was making a sharp point to a jury. He was at the same time curiously awkward, almost lumpish in his movements. This lack of co-ordination showed up in his riding which was said to be reckless but also graceless. He just flung himself on a horse any old how, as though this carelessness was part of being on holiday from his meticulous courtesy in court and his unrelenting forethought out of it. I’m a bogman from Fermanagh, he would say, that’s why I’m such a grasping sort of bugger. His parents had scraped to send him to some Catholic public school in England – Beaumont? Douai? – and that had knocked the Irish out of his voice. Fifty-eight years old now, he had been famous when he was just a jobbing barrister for never buying a round at the Garrick or the Old Cock, and much loved for his stinginess – but he was always the last to leave the bar, without the drink showing on him, except p
erhaps to exaggerate the precision of his speech. He smiled little and laughed not at all, so that his wit, of which he had a fair amount, was mostly deadpan. This I found offputting on first acquaintance, because I had to listen carefully to gather whether the point he was moving on to was serious or ironic. I suppose that is partly what people mean by lawyers being dry, but it was unnerving because he was at the same time so sympathetic, which you couldn’t help being aware of the moment you met him. He had spent his early years breaking his collar bone once a month out hunting or in some disastrous point-to-point. He was a generation younger than my father and his friends, but he knew their names and had once ridden a horse at Larkhill that Froggie O’Neill had a leg of, a terrible animal. And when he said that he always liked to walk the course, the phrase brought back those stumbles across the damp downland with my father, him plunging in a stick near the rails or on the take-off side of the fence to find the firmest ground, with the wet smell of the laid brushwood fences and the morning mist still hanging in the thorn bushes and the dull gleam of the sun trying to get through.

  Francie was a criminal Silk, not a family lawyer, though he admitted to having sat a couple of times in chambers on custody cases, but he was a family man and devout, dragging a cross-section of his large brood to the Oratory every Sunday, and he seemed to be a popular choice for this job which he said was because being a Papist everyone assumed he must be an expert on devil worship, though he never remembered any of those kind of things back in Ballyturbet, a little bestiality now and then but nothing serious. His assessor, Joan Brightwell, the consultant child shrink from Birmingham, didn’t much care for that line of talk, but Francie was as quick as anything to woo her back by showing an exhaustive knowledge of the material we had already been sent and consulting her opinion every five minutes on the finer points of social work, and in any case she wasn’t without a glint in her sensible eye. I was the secretary to the inquiry, ignorant, sceptical, apprehensive about the whole business, which had been dumped on me so that the new Social Services Inspectorate should be seen to be ‘getting its hands dirty’, in Hilary Puttock’s ill-chosen phrase.

  ‘We really must not rush our fences,’ Francie said. ‘We have to go very carefully and not jump to anything that looks like a pleasing conclusion as soon as it presents itself. We shall no doubt hear a great deal of nonsense, but some of it may be true. Joan, this is all a memo to myself and to our learned secretary, you don’t need telling a word of it, I’m sure.’

  She smiled and took the flattery nicely, like someone accepting a small piece of jewellery.

  ‘I have a problem,’ I said. ‘An old friend of mine will be giving evidence, Helen Moonman, she’s a social worker, Cases J and K. Should I step down or go for a walk or something when she’s here?’

  ‘No, no need at all, she’s not on trial. We can slip the fact into the questioning to forestall any possible embarrassment.’

  ‘I didn’t realise she was mixed up in this when I was asked to –’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  It sounds odd not to have thought that Helen might be mixed up in this business, or not to have found out whether she was, but my appointment had happened in something of a rush and her name had not come up in any of the newspaper reports. Anyway I knew that she and Moonman were living miles away, the other side of the county, because I had been to visit them. It was only when I saw her name on the list of potential witnesses that I discovered that the children referred to as J and K, or rather their parents, had moved over to Helen’s area a year or so after the alleged incidents and had told their stories to her.

  That is a reasonably convincing explanation, at least I hope it is, but it isn’t the whole truth. The reality, part of the reality anyway, is that I had not the slightest wish to get in touch with Helen ever again. Some betrayals shock you for a while, they are even exciting to hear about, give you a creepy thrill spiced with a little tremble of guilt. Then they disappear from view, under the heap of other betrayals. But Helen’s leaving Bobs was different, because after everything I still thought she was different. There had been something about her that made her incapable of deliberately harming another human being. There might be a little collateral damage when she took up with someone new, which was inevitable if she was trying to be helpful to everyone. But then helpfulness has nothing to do with love. In fact, they were opposites, and that was why men ran after Helen in such a puzzled, frantic way (that and the golden hair, of course). They wanted to stop her being helpful, to make her lose control, surrender to passion. And Moonman seemed to have cracked it.

  The side-effect was to change my attitude to Bobs. To see him suddenly bereft of wife and daughter, knocked off his perch, reduced to the ranks, was to become aware of his basic superiority to other characters in the drama, of his eager human softness, his noble nature – noble really was the word. Which didn’t stop him driving me crazy. He would telephone me at strange hours, not tragic three a.m. calls but in the middle of office hours, like eleven forty-five in the morning.

  ‘This maintenance thingy, what do you reckon?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I reckon?’

  ‘Well if I start making out a banker’s order, won’t that be sort of accepting the situation?’

  ‘Don’t then, let her stew. Unless you want to accept the situation. Anyway, Moonman must be coining it.’

  ‘It’s not that. But if I don’t support Beryl, then Helen can accuse me of neglect. She’s missing her dancing lessons,’ he added mournfully.

  ‘Beryl? There must be dancing teachers in wherever it is. Do you really think Helen would be in a position to accuse you of neglecting Beryl? It’s not you who’s run off.’

  ‘You don’t understand what it’s like, nobody understands what it’s like till it happens. She’s so angry when she speaks to me, so it’s like it was me who’d done a runner.’

  He looked at me – I was sitting in the guest’s chair in his sanctum at Moonman Travel – and his little squashed face was illuminated with a sad kind of what can only be called wisdom – not a word I ever thought I would use within a hundred miles of him. Perhaps you needed to pack in a lifetime’s practice as a butt in order to learn things like how angry people could be when they themselves were behaving badly.

  ‘And another thing,’ he said, ‘I don’t like the sound of that cottage. Beryl said on the phone she was all shivery and Big Bro doesn’t care about comfort at all. It’s probably filthy damp.’

  ‘What about Helen though?’

  Again he looked at me with this new sad-wisdom face.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed how she doesn’t care about that sort of thing either? She was always forgetting to turn on the heating and change the sheets. Mind on higher things. You didn’t notice any of that?’

  ‘No,’ I said uneasily, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘She’s odd, you know,’ Bobs said. ‘Really quite odd. Not like normal people.’

  ‘I know what odd means,’ I said irritably.

  ‘You probably don’t really. It’s probably only very ordinary people like me who can see when people are a bit peculiar.’

  ‘Well, if you’re so worried, why don’t you go down and see them?’

  ‘She doesn’t want me to. I rang and she said not to come till we’d talked to the lawyers. But I don’t want any of that because I still want her back, Beryl and her, I want them both.’

  He was going to start crying again, so I tried to focus his mind on practical steps, which was a mistake because the first practical step he suggested was that I should go down there and see how the land lay.

  ‘Just call in by accident, say you were passing and wanted to drop off the doll’s house which Beryl has been pining for.’

  ‘I can’t just accidentally be carrying someone else’s doll’s house in the back of my car.’

  ‘All right then, forget the doll’s house. Just drop in.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  �
�Just can’t face it. Anyway, they’d know I was spying for you, because otherwise how would I know the address?’

  ‘Look, it’s not your marriage that’s broken up and it’s not your daughter that you haven’t seen for months and you –’

  ‘All right, what’s the number? I’d prefer to telephone her first.’

  Hard to say what exactly I had expected from her – a certain awkwardness perhaps, even surprise at hearing my voice after so long, then possibly an unenthusiastic invitation or more likely the brush-off. Not a bit of it. She said how lovely it was to hear from me, and how I must come down immediately while the weather was still nice, and how eager Moonman would be to see me, as he was so fond of me and thought of me as one of his oldest friends. None of which sounded like Moonman at all, and not very much like her. As for the doll’s house, she said off her own bat that Beryl was missing it and would I mind very much picking it up from St Col’s – the word Bobs was not mentioned – and was my car big enough, perhaps if I laid it sideways.

  The cottage was in the middle of a huge wired-off plantation of firs which seemed to go on for miles either side of the single-track road. Cottage was the correct name for it in terms of size, but the word suggested thatch and plaster, and so I didn’t stop the first time as I passed the square red-brick modern dwelling sitting in the middle of the firs. But there was a notice in front of it saying FIRS COTTAGE, so I reversed almost into the onrushing figure of Helen who, I saw in the rear view mirror, had her arms outstretched which recalled, in one of those high-speed recollections your mind is sometimes jogged into, our other meetings on the beach at the Ville, at the D.O.’s house, on the picket line at Woden Heath, and how cool and serious she had been, not unfriendly but cool. And now here she was jumping up and kissing me like a puppy and jabbering nineteen to the dozen.

  ‘Isn’t it absolutely hideous? Moonman says it must have been designed for prison warders and somehow got transferred to the Forestry Commission, there are supposed to be red squirrels in the trees but we haven’t seen any, though there is a badger sett up at the end and when there’s a moon you can see them playing.’