by Tim Parks
Presenting the case to the jury, prosecution counsel brought up the question of the theft’s being repeated early on. His manner was at once tedious and entirely convincing: the theft of the same materials in the same manner had been committed the very evening before this trial. You will want to ask yourselves, of course, he remarked without looking up, whether this was pure coincidence, or whether perhaps it might have been intended to weaken the Crown’s case and . . . Your honour! Young Harper was immediately on his feet. This is the merest speculation!
Daniel accepted the objection, as Cunningham no doubt knew he would. Studying the jury, the judge was depressed to observe how often twelve people could be assembled without even one of them offering a temptation that would allow a now faithful husband to savour repression at work. The only pretty candidate had been excluded in the ballot. How can I know, Hilary had demanded, at the height of the crisis, that you’re not just becoming more and more like your miserable father! Whoever he was, she added viciously. You knew my father perfectly well, Daniel objected. He referred, of course, to the recently deceased Colonel Henry Savage who had spent so much money to send both his sons to Rugby. Colonel Savage always said, both my sons. You were child to the people who brought you up. Certainly as much as brother Frank. The jury tittered on hearing the story of the jacket. Defence counsel, Daniel noticed, was definitely looking smugger than he ought. But this, perhaps, was theatre. Like one’s wife, one’s children, the jury were there to be convinced.
Aren’t we spending too much?
At lunchtime the judge and his wife met briefly at the house to do some measuring. Hilary seemed both worried and delighted. These visits were already a pleasant routine. They wandered through the rooms, climbed an iron ladder upstairs. I wish we’d had three, she said. Here an old piece of furniture from the flat would fit, there another must be purchased. From her place at the piano – she had scratched out a shape on rough floor boards – she would be able to look sideways into the flames of a fire that was to sit in a modern cast iron core, but clad, distinctly Regency, in a delicate stone surround. You look – she gave him the brochure. How was it that they had stopped arguing, Daniel marvelled, turning the pages? The grey stone? he asked. Three children would have been happy here, she said. The crisis they had had did not quite seem to explain it, he felt, this contentment, this lack of tension. Or the marble?
The brochure showed smiling faces staring into flames. Young faces. Combustion and heat distribution (there were graphs and tables) were the most efficient technology could provide. Do you think that Sarah will start playing again, he asked, once we have the new piano? As yet their daughter still refused even to come and see the place. Hilary laughed. They poked their noses out into the rain. That was a terrible exhibition she put on for Max last night. For Max? Daniel was nonplussed. She used to play so well, he said wistfully. A bit mechanically, Hilary said. Should they terrace the front garden where it sloped down quite steeply? The religious thing is just to be provocative, I think, she said.
Then Hilary exclaimed, Oh but for heaven’s sake, I forgot: Christine phoned to say they might be interested in buying the flat. In fact, she was positively gung-ho. What, Martin’s Christine? The Shields? I’m sorry, I should have said at once. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Suddenly, his wife turned and embraced him under their umbrella on a muddy path. As soon as they’ve got the doors on, let’s bring up a rug and make love. All right, Daniel agreed, though sensing this was more the kind of thing one did with a mistress than a wife of twenty years. Still, he felt very happy, looking across the sloping hills in the rain. Some workers were watching from one of the other houses. Very happy, he told himself. The piano had been an excellent move. It was true Sarah’s playing had been mechanical. And it would be too good to be true if they simply sold the Carlton Street flat at once to old friends. Yet at the same time – or rather this was somehow part of that happiness – he had the elusive impression that his life was actually over already, burned out. It was Tom and Sarah who had the kindling in their eyes now. Their middle aged father would just relax on the terraced lawn or on the hearthrug, listening to the ordered progressions of Bach and Mozart.
At what time was exhibit one seized? Defence counsel asked. The jury had been shown the fragment of jacket. The morning after the crime, the police officer said. I asked at what time? The policeman consulted his notes. Ten-thirty. And of course the exhibit was immediately taken back to the station? Yes. That was February 12th? Yes. And at what time was the search warrant on the defendant’s house executed? The following morning. February 13th? Yes, we felt . . . At what time, Sergeant? Early. Five-thirty. And you immediately found the jacket? It was hanging in the passage by the door. With the fragment missing? Yes. And no doubt you rushed it straight back to the police station to compare it with exhibit one? We did. Taking Mr Conway back with you for safety’s sake? We felt that given . . .
How wearisome this was! Daniel had his eye on the clock. Surely nothing could save the defendant. The evidence was overwhelming. Defence counsel was dragging it out. And a non-white judge, however sophisticated his accent, merely made it easier, Daniel thought, for an all-white jury to convict. He had told Minnie he would be in his room in chambers late afternoon and already it was four–fifteen. The pretty one lost in the ballot had been Asian. Would she come? Did he want her to? Yes, but only in order to have whatever it was she wanted off his back. No desire, he thought, to repeat the experience. On the contrary, he had never been so eager to get home after work, to play safe. In another couple of minutes he would invite counsel for the defence to come to the point.
At what time, then, would the arrival of exhibit two have been entered in the station’s exhibit log? Daniel cleared his throat: If defence counsel could, er, come to the point, he suggested. There were wry smiles. The police sergeant was clearly telling the truth. The jury was bored. The defendant, constantly muttering under his breath, seemed sensibly to have accepted the inevitable. He had the look of a man let out of prison only in order to see how quickly he might find his way back there. We are eager, Daniel finished, to hear where your questioning is leading, Mr Harper.
Of course, your honour!
It was only then, as the young man turned rather dramatically to the judge’s bench to explain himself, that Daniel appreciated that it was a set up. How stupid of him! After all these years. Defence counsel, a young and eager performer, a man with ambition glowing from his eyes, dripping from his shiny lips, had been begging to be interrupted. Begging. He had been dragging it out in order to be interrupted. The interruption underlines the surprise – every lawyer knows this – as a noise is louder when one is woken by it, when one is shocked out of sleep. By a phone-call perhaps. Daniel had woken the jury with his demand, put them on maximum alert for whatever it was counsel was now about to say. Your honour – the boy even indulged in a flourish of the gown – your honour, I merely wish to demonstrate that the arrival of the fragment of leather jacket, exhibit one, was not entered in the police station log until after the police had seized the jacket itself, exhibit two, entry for exhibit one being made at 10 o’clock on February 13th, almost twenty-four hours after alleged seizure, and entry for exhibit two after again a full twenty-four hours delay, at twelve-thirty on the fourteenth. The truth is that the police already had the jacket in their possession before seizure of the fragment was recorded. This discrepancy with regard to the only – ahm – evidence that the prosecution is offering fits all too well with the defendant’s emphatic claim that facts have been manipulated in order to gain his conviction.
Daniel looked over to the prosecution counsel. For a moment the man had closed his eyes. He raised a hand to his brow and slowly shook his head, then asked: Your honour, given this development, I wonder if you would allow me a fifteen minute adjournment for consultation? Daniel allowed it, knowing full well that on his return the man would announce that the Crown was dropping its case. So that in the event it was only a matter of h
alf an hour before the defendant, more bewildered than ever, would hear the judge directing the jury to acquit, and a question of minutes then before the man would be set free, though neither judge, prosecution nor defence seriously doubted that he had been involved in the crime. Sometimes it is the conclusion the jury comes to that counts and sometimes the chance to reach a conclusion is denied them. When everything seems settled, everything can still be undone. What you thought was evidence, is suddenly irrelevant. It hasn’t been properly recorded, would never hold up on appeal. How could the police have made such a cock-up? It was a minor coup for young Harper to have noticed such a thing. His elderly opponent made a point of going over to compliment him while Daniel, hurrying back to his chambers, was again aware, without even needing to articulate it to himself, of the gap between reality and court theatricals. He shook his head. The CPS people would be furious. So much of life came into the court and so much escaped it, eluded it, or emerged bizarrely packaged in a quantity of money to pay, or years to serve, or years that might be served if you ever got caught doing anything again. It isn’t so much arbitrary, Daniel would tell himself, as disconnected, not on the same plane. In any event, the real damage to a convicted man is not, or not necessarily, the punishment itself, but the way the conviction conditions those all around you, the jury you live your life with day by day. It would be far less damaging, for example, to Daniel, to be sent down for a month on a drunk driving charge, than for it to become generally known how he had met and seduced Minnie.
He waited for her call. Or perhaps she would actually come to the court. At six he phoned home and said he wanted to hang on an hour or so to go through the papers for tomorrow’s list. Martin and Christine are here, Hilary said. She was breathless. They want to put down a deposit. Already! On the full asking price? His wife said yes. Without negotiation? That’s what I said. I can’t believe it. Sarah had been offensive again, his wife complained. Gone out slamming the door just because I made a comment about her appearance. Tell them, Daniel said, we’ll get someone to draw up a contract absolutely as soon as possible. In the background he could hear Tom’s rumbustious banging on the piano. ‘Get back Joe!’ We must have asked too little, he laughed. Putting down the phone he felt awed by this extraordinary run of luck. All the anxiety he had foreseen, the problem of making payments on the new house while waiting to see when and at what price their old one would sell for, was gone. Sold, done it!
Somebody’s made an offer for the flat, he mentioned to the departing clerk. Oh that’s wonderful, the girl said. Congratulations. Her voice was sincere. Sweetheart, he thought. Minnie too had been a sweetheart. Smiling to himself, he turned to some sentencing reports.
A social worker was recommending leniency for a man who had broken his son’s wrist. The mother had walked out on the family. An older sibling, one of four, insisted that this particular act of violence was unique, the result of stress and anxiety. Daniel understood the impulse to violence. There had been a number of occasions when he had hit his children too hard. Immediately prior to the incident, the victim (a six-year-old) had deliberately smashed all the kitchen crockery. Those were the details. With a hammer! But Daniel had never come close to taking Tom by the hand and snapping his wrist. He hoped they would be happy in the new house. Hilary too could be violent. She had thrown a knife at him when she had found out about Jane. How had she found out? A vegetable knife. Somebody somewhere must have whispered something. The handle caught him above an ear. How else could she have known? She wouldn’t say. And she had done violence to herself too. Her fingers bled at the nails; she had gouged flesh from above her knees. He had respected this hysteria. He was impressed. He had pointed out that it was years since they had been happy together, packed his bags and left. He had gone to the Cambridge Hotel. But the convicted man had taken a child’s arm and snapped it over the edge of the table. He had been drinking. Did one hear it snap? At least fifty percent of those I’ve defended and prosecuted had been drinking at the time of the alleged crime. It was something one often mentioned in conversation. If Daniel wasn’t lenient, he would deprive the boy of his father. This was the social worker’s concern. And thus of his home. That was true. In cases of this kind one’s discretionary powers were considerable. What the mother had done, on the other hand, walking out on her family, wasn’t even illegal. She was incapable, she had stated, of looking after children in her present situation. As it hadn’t been illegal when Daniel checked in to the Cambridge Hotel. The social worker was of the same opinion. Quite incapable. But ugly, Hilary had said. Ugly. The mother was an alcoholic. The father was doing his best. He only drank occasionally. On the other hand how lenient was lenient? And could a six-year-old be expected to answer a social worker’s questions in his own best interest?
It was six-thirty and still the girl hadn’t phoned. It doesn’t matter. The only important thing was that she stop phoning him at home. That the past remain past and buried. Pushing the seat back from his desk, Daniel remembered again his odd feeling up at the new house at lunchtime that there was something inexplicable about this new happiness of theirs. Was it really just the crisis and its resolution? The dramas of a year before seemed impossibly distant now. He knew as a fact that he must be the child of those events, but often it was as though they had happened to someone else; not to his wife and himself, music teacher and judge, but to some other person, to this man, for example, this car mechanic, who had immediately taken his son to hospital but refused to admit his responsibility to the doctors, confessing only when interviewed by the police. Even after that confession the boy had sworn blind that the fracture was a result of his falling out of the kitchen window. The alcoholic wife confirmed that her husband had hit her on three or four occasions, though never seriously. It was quite beyond her to look after children. What did never seriously mean? The father had never expected, the social worker’s report insisted, that he would have to look after his children on his own. He would benefit from a period of rehabilitation. My dad, Minnie had said when she told him she was switching phones. My dad!
Daniel put down the case papers. The oddity, in the end though, he reflected, had been that the thing that ought most to have hurt him, most to have confirmed his decision to leave her, had been precisely what made him look at Hilary afresh, allowed him to rediscover a forgotten tenderness. It came to him that he had seen that tenderness once in Tom’s eyes when he, Daniel, in his fury over some game they were playing, had punched their bedroom door and his fist had splintered the thin ply. Tom’s eyes had been full of sad love, of admiration, of reappraisal. But it wasn’t the business of the knife that drew him back to Hilary. It was when she had brought up the whole story of her ex, of Robert. She had resurrected that old story in defiance, in order to destroy their marriage once and for all. They were standing in the foyer of the Cambridge Hotel. She had loved only Robert, she said. Almost sneering. He was the love of my life. She was glad their marriage was over, she shouted. The only one. Glad! It’s been a farce, she said. After Robert killed himself, she no longer cared. That is the truth, if you have to know. She would never get over that, she told him. I married you entirely on the rebound, she said coldly, primly, in the foyer of the hotel. She stressed the word entirely. Hilary is capable of great feats of primness, Daniel remembered. Later, he had spent hours, days, anaesthetised before the TV, waiting for something to happen, something that was supposed to come from within himself, some decision. Martin had looked after him. They spent the evenings playing snooker together. You must look after your mum, he told his daughter Sarah one evening at the school gate. He and Hilary were agreed that the children needn’t be told about Jane. I never cared, Hilary told him determinedly in the hotel foyer, about you, or anyone but Robert. I married you more to spite my parents, she said, than anything else. To spite myself, she said. She tried to laugh in his face. I knew you could never be the man Robert was. He was full of sensibilities you can’t even imagine, she said. He was a genius. You can’t even i
magine. She burst into tears. The only thing you had was you weren’t white. Even weeping she was prim. You’ll never know, she said, how much that killed my Dad.
Waiting for Minnie, reading these papers about the family circumstances of a car mechanic who had pleaded guilty to breaking his son’s wrist – both radius and ulna had gone – Daniel reflected on that crucial meeting in the foyer of the Cambridge Hotel. It had taken place amid a back and forth of guests pretending, as they must, not to listen. She had meant to live an exciting life, Hilary insisted, she was spitting the words at this point, with a musician, a rebel, someone with real charisma, a real man. But when Robert killed himself she lost all hope. She would never understand why he’d done it. Why had they never discussed this? Love hadn’t helped him. My love didn’t help. We two have never talked about anything important, she shouted. Love is pointless. When she saw his body in the garage, she had known she would never love again. I knew I would never love anyone. Then she had just fallen back on him, on Daniel, and on the dull conventional life he had given her. You were a fallback, she shouted. Understand? I’ll never love anyone. The life you’ve given me has been dullness itself. A miserable fallback! She hissed the words. How can someone weep and still be prim? Violently prim, he thought. You fall over yourself to be conventional, she insisted, there was contempt in her voice, because you think it’s the only way a black can succeed. I’m not actually black, he reminded her. Why did he always say that? Well, you’re certainly not white! she yelled. In the foyer of the hotel. She almost spat, as if their marriage were something she could cough up in contempt. I never loved you, she shouted. She could vomit away her marriage. I am retching up our marriage and spitting it out. That was what she was saying.
