Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  So this was what it was like, the real thing. Never too late to experience it, probably more potent than ever when you were coming up for forty. Her eyes were shining – difficult not to say they were dancing – her hair was blowing all over the place, although there was no wind. Yellow was the word for how her hair looked that day, like in the Yeats poem, not dreamy golden because there was nothing dreamy about her, not now. She tugged me out of the car while I was still whimpering about parking it properly.

  ‘Come on, Moonman’s longing to see you, he’s chopping wood.’

  She whirled me through the house, so I caught only a blur of plain furniture and swirly wallpaper. Moonman was kneeling at a chopping-block in the small patch of rough grass that was all there was in the way of garden before the firs started again, splitting logs into kindling with a small axe, fiercely, not with that easy absence of force I remembered my father had when doing the same thing, but when he turned wiping his brow, he said, ‘Ah Gus nice to see you’ in the gentlest way imaginable.

  ‘How about a cup of tea, lovey?’ he added in the same gentle tone.

  ‘Coming right up, honey,’ she said in a raunchy Southern-waitress drawl.

  She seemed to do the funny voices now, while he spoke in a quiet, serious voice which was almost unnervingly natural, asking me about the drive down and whether it had been an awful bore to bring the doll’s house. They seemed to have exchanged roles. Yet I didn’t feel that their being together had merely led them to imitate one another. Rather it was somehow that their adventure had freed both of them to display a side which had been kept firmly under control before. Helen had never given the slightest sign of wishing to imitate anyone else’s voice or even a stock type of voice. When she reported what someone else had said, she reported in her own plain, serious voice, so much so that the effect could sometimes be comic or shocking as when she had told me what Farid Farhadi had said he wanted to do to her.

  ‘Let’s take the doll’s house out now, otherwise we’ll forget and you’ll drive back to London with it.’

  We eased the doll’s house out of the back of the car. There was a wooden platform by the side of the road, for milk churns or logs, and we lifted it on to the platform, while I fished out the cardboard boxes containing the doll’s-house furniture. Bobs had carefully wrapped each piece in tissue paper, much of it no doubt drenched with tears (my pity for him came and went because of the irritation factor).

  ‘It’s an evil-looking thing, isn’t it?’ Moonman said, staring at his creation through his droopy Lytton-Strachey specs.

  With the fir forest behind it, the doll’s house had an even more brooding, sinister aspect. The ‘BERYL’S HOUSE’ on the front door looked as if it had been scrawled in blood.

  ‘Terrible things have gone on in that house,’ he continued. ‘By the way, did you know they are going to nab Stoyt-Smith? He thought he’d squared them, but the police got a statement from one of the girls.’

  ‘Girls? I thought it was boys he went for.’

  ‘Oh he’ll screw anything that isn’t nailed down. I don’t think even the shrinks have got a word for him. This time he was wearing a white dress with roses on it, in a funfair.’

  ‘A funfair?’

  ‘A place called Fairness. Sort of clapped-out theatre. He was conducting auditions.’

  Moonman gave one of his old cackles followed by his beatific skyward look which seemed to be addressing some higher authority, either to offer congratulations or to share in Moonman’s incredulity at what His creatures could get up to.

  That was the first time I had heard the word Fairness – it was several months before the full furore was to break out – and I listened to the rest of the story with only mild interest as we carried the doll’s house up the narrow stairs.

  Beryl was drawing at a little child’s table and scarcely looked up as we came in to her room. She seemed thinner, more like a schoolgirl than when I had last seen her. She received the doll’s house politely and when prompted said hallo with no great enthusiasm to the person she was instructed to call Uncle Gus. Her manner was so serious in fact that for the first time she reminded me strongly of her mother, or of her mother when I first met her, which now seemed to have happened in another life. Beryl opened up the doll’s house and inspected it silently like a householder checking the inventory in the presence of the departing tenants. When we brought up the cardboard boxes with the furniture, she unpacked them and started putting the things back in the house, again with scarcely a word.

  ‘Doesn’t it look great, Beriberi?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘thank you, you can go away now.’

  Which we did. ‘Well, I suppose we couldn’t expect her not to mind,’ Moonman said as we went downstairs, ‘but it has been more difficult than we expected. I think perhaps she should spend some time with Bobs, but Helen thinks that might make her worse. What do you think?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ I said, adding, ‘He does miss her.’

  ‘You’re a sort of health visitor.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sent to check on us. Not by the council, though. I expect we’ll have that too. But Bobs sent you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t blame him. Well, here we are. House is warm and dry you can tell him, that’s the sort of thing he minds about, and there are no infectious diseases around so far.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You think I wanted this to happen?’

  ‘No I hadn’t –’

  ‘It’s the last thing I wanted.’

  He didn’t say any more, and the awkwardness was swallowed up in the clatter of tea-things in the living-room. Helen began talking about the job she had just landed, with the social work team in the local overspill town, which was already a fearful dump although it was only about twenty years old, and how difficult it was not to start blaming the families for their environment, rather than the other way round. There were a couple of families who had just moved in, you simply wouldn’t believe their carry-on. But it was time to summon Beryl for fish fingers and jaffa cakes, and so then we talked about old times, how we had both been nannies at the seaside in France and then together again digging up emeralds in Africa. Beryl responded adequately to these topics pointing out that boys couldn’t be nannies and asking if we had got any emeralds to keep, but her heart was not in it. She took part in the talk with the mechanical politeness of a dinner guest who wishes she hadn’t come.

  Her face was so sad I didn’t want to look at her, while Helen was describing the past we had shared, and my eye happened to fall upon Moonman instead, who by contrast was intensely interested and seemed suffused by some emotion which, hesitantly at first and then more surely, I identified to my surprise as jealousy. It would have been a relief to dispel any such feeling by saying that there had never been anything between us (with one strange fleeting exception, which was best forgotten), but I couldn’t see how. Perhaps in other circumstances Beryl might have fed me the opportunity by asking if we had ever been boyfriend and girlfriend, but this was one subject which her grim little face proclaimed was utterly forbidden, and so I said nothing and counted the minutes till I could leave.

  That was the last time I saw Helen before the Fairness Inquiry which must have started a year later, more like two years in fact, because first there was the removal of the children into care under Place of Safety Orders, then there was the press hullabaloo, and the release of the children, and then the inquiry, which wasn’t nearly such a big affair as some of the others, just as Francie Fincher was really not the cream of high court judges.

  Francie kept the headteacher’s room at the back for himself to store his papers in and for a place to have a quiet smoke when it was raining and we could not go out and walk round the tarmac playground behind the school. The larger schoolroom we used for public hearings and the smaller was the interview room, although Joan Brightwell usually went to the children’s own homes to talk to the children or the
council homes for the ones still in care. During that first week we sat mostly in the little interview room listening to crackly tapes several hours a day before Francie broke for a cigarette. Sometimes I sat and chatted with him while he smoked, sometimes I went for a walk along the seashore, once or twice with Joan who couldn’t bear the smell of tobacco but was otherwise amiable. She collected jet jewellery which you could buy from a couple of shops in Fairness and fretted about her Jack Russell which didn’t like being boarded out with her sister.

  ‘Mr G took us down to the Clown Theatre to show our dance.’

  ‘You mean the Pier Theatre?’

  ‘Yes, only we call it the Clown theatre, because it’s got a clown on the front. He said a very important person wanted to see us dance. And when we got in there, there was the Mister like in the photo.’

  ‘You mean Mr Stoyt-Smith?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him, only he was wearing a costume, like Mum wears.’

  ‘A dress you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, a dress, it was white, with roses on it. And he told us to dance round him in a ring and then he made a white circle on the floor with a long stick and then he pulled out his willy and told K to show him her fanny and then he made us sing a song which he said was a magic song.’

  There was more, much more of this, the notorious ‘White Dress’ tape, which had started the whole business off. Patricia the stenographer spent most of the day transcribing it, tapping away in Francie’s room. It was at the transcript stage that the letters were substituted for the real names of the children, which made the interviews even weirder to read, as though they were part of some highbrow Kafka narrative. Nobody was quite sure how news of the White Dress tape had leaked out. Francie thought that it must have been one of the police officers connected with the interview who was sceptical about what J was saying and had been outvoted at the case conference which had decreed that J, the little girl being interviewed, should be taken into care, along with her sister who had also made allegations of sexual abuse at the theatre, though, unlike J, she had described neither the white dress nor the ritual.

  At least we did not have to see the children face to face. Francie was right about that. We would have scared them stiff, and in my case vice versa. Seeing the parents was bad enough. They were defiant, of course, but also furtive in a way that made me ashamed to be badgering them. Few of them had the gumption to dress smartly to make a good impression. One or two wore the shiny shell-suits that were just coming in then, the fathers often hadn’t shaved. You wouldn’t in a million years mistake one of them for one of the social workers, though the social workers were defiant and furtive too. After all, they were just as much on trial as the parents, Joan Brightwell said. Not just as much, Francie corrected, the social workers are unlikely to go to jail, whatever we may say about them.

  But the tapes were the worst. They were horrible, those hours in the dusty schoolroom, listening to the jerky, painfully slow dialogues, with their restless background hum that made the pauses – which were frequent – weigh all the heavier. Occasionally a policewoman’s reassuring voice gave the time and place of the interview and the names of those present. But then a child’s voice began speaking, sometimes in a zombie drone, now and then quickening into an eager rushing speech which sometimes went off into a noise somewhere between a gulp and a giggle. And we were carried into a world which was just as sinister and frightening as the newspapers said, but was also somehow null, affectless, beyond everything.

  ‘It’s mesmerising isn’t it?’ said Francie, looking a good deal less mesmerised than the rest of us, Patricia, the duty sergeant, myself, even Joan. ‘But except for the allegations against P, who is after all the father of three of the other girls, there’s no corroboration. The medical evidence is inconclusive, and I think we had better accept that it’s likely to stay inconclusive, isn’t that right, Joan?’

  ‘In these three cases certainly; not in cases where there are unmistakable internal tears or bruising.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about those. Gus?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing any of the girls says which actually contradicts any of the others. Some just add more details.’

  ‘But that’s just the trouble. The details J adds are precisely the most colourful ones, Stoyt-Smith in his white dress with the roses, the sort of details a child couldn’t possibly forget.’

  ‘Even if that child were scared out of its wits?’

  ‘J doesn’t sound scared out of her wits exactly. She sounds disturbed, and from her behaviour at school and in talking to the social worker there is reason to think she is disturbed.’

  ‘The literature on satanic abuse suggests wide variations in the rituals,’ Joan put in.

  ‘But Joan, even if J is telling the truth, is this really a ritual?’ Francie said. ‘Or is it just a trick to get the girls to do what he wants?’

  ‘Is there a difference?’ Joan retorted, nettled by his putdown.

  ‘The fact that social workers all over the country apply for a Place of Safety Order the moment they hear this kind of story doesn’t mean it’s true or that there’s a nationwide outbreak of satanic abuse. I’m surprised that you should believe it all so unquestioningly. After all, it’s me who’s supposed to be the poor credulous Papist.’

  ‘I certainly didn’t say I believed it all. I was only pointing out that there are a large number of comparable reports on the file. The fact that the children come out with memories that are not identical might be – I only say might be – evidence that there is something in them.’

  ‘Or might not.’

  ‘Or might not. I’m no more credulous than you are.’

  ‘No, of course you aren’t, my dear. Listening to this stuff the whole day makes us all edgy. Look, I must go up to London to see Stoyt-Smith, I’m not going to give the hacks the satisfaction of dragging him down here. He’s the only thing keeping them here anyway. As soon as it’s merely a case of poor kids complaining of being buggered in an amusement arcade, they’ll buzz off. I’ll be back in time for your Mrs Moonman on Thursday.’

  So we suspended the inquiry for a couple of days – judge called away on another case – and I mooched around Fairness, picking up a bag of fish and chips from the only place open and taking it down to a sheltered nook in the crumbly low bank above the beach. As I sat looking out at the dark broth of the North Sea, it came to me that after nearly three weeks of the inquiry I hadn’t a clue. The unnerving tapes, the social workers all convinced that the nation was being swamped by an unprecedented wave of sexual or satanic abuse or both, my own natural scepticism, not to mention prudery – how could people want to do such things? – there was no sign of anything that would give a decisive nudge in any direction, just an endless swamp of squalor and uncertainty.

  Francie must have got up at dawn to arrive in time for a nine-thirty start, almost deadheating in the car-park with Helen who hopped out of her little Peugeot 205, looking brisk with a slim brown briefcase under her arm.

  ‘Good of you to come all this way, Mrs Moonman, I’m Francie Fincher and this is Dr Joan Brightwell, Sergeant Thursby of the regional Child Protection Unit and Mr Cotton, our learned secretary, whom I gather needs no introduction to you and I hope will look after you if we get too rough with you.’

  She took this in the intended spirit and gave me a confident little smile or hallo Gus, perhaps both. Curiously, although she was one of the more junior people to be interviewed, her presence gave me a certain confidence that this dismal tangle could somehow be disentangled in the end.

  Francie took her in his usual painstaking way through her training as a social worker and her experience in this particular field (part of his brief was to make recommendations on these matters). She had got her CQSW six years ago, had been on a course on child protection, had attended a residential conference on ritual abuse set up by an American organisation.

  ‘Rather a brief experience for a person burdened with your present responsibilities, wouldn’t
you say?’

  ‘I think my qualifications are about average for the post.’

  ‘Like a lot of your colleagues, you seem to have come to social work relatively late in life.’

  ‘Is that such a bad thing, to have some outside experience?’

  ‘You don’t think you’ve suddenly developed an urge to set the world to rights because your own life hasn’t turned out so well?’

  ‘I’m separated from my husband, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘That seems to be a common misfortune in your line of work.’

  ‘I’m not sure I see the relevance.’

  ‘You may be more inclined to take a dark view of human behaviour, especially if I may say so, of male behaviour. You might be inclined to imagine or exaggerate wrong-doing where there is insufficient evidence for it.’

  ‘Perhaps if you asked me some questions which were more closely relevant to the case, you might find out whether your presumption is true.’

  ‘Very well. What did you think of the conference on ritual abuse?’

  ‘I wasn’t impressed. I thought they were exaggerating the dangers.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘They had their own agenda, a religious agenda.’

  ‘And you think that’s a bad agenda to have?’

  ‘Since you ask me, yes. But that’s just my personal opinion. Professionally, I don’t think you should have any agenda, you should look at the evidence.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Francie said. I thought at first he was taking against her, but almost immediately I saw that he wasn’t and that in fact he liked the way she spoke up for herself. ‘So what do you think of the evidence that you have gathered yourself? We have the transcript of your interview with J after her release from care, you don’t mind me using this alphabet soup, do you, we’ve got used to it here.’