When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Look, let’s not be silly,’ she said, ‘shall we? Why be silly?’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Pop said. ‘I’m off to have my supper.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Supposing I said I thought the whole thing was a ghastly mistake?’

  ‘Supposing you said the stars were potato crisps?’

  ‘All I wanted to say was this.’ Her voice was low and languid in the darkness. ‘If you and I could come to terms I might–’.

  ‘Terms?’

  ‘Well, an arrangement. Just you and me. Strictly entre nous and all that.’ Pop heard the dry rustle of the mackintosh as she suddenly swung away from the car and came closer in the darkness. ‘After all, what quarrel have we?’

  Pop, thinking that so stupid a question didn’t require an answer, started to walk away.

  ‘No quarrel at all. All you’ve got to do is to give me the signal and I think I can persuade Pinkie to call the dogs off.’

  ‘Signal?’ Pop paused, half-way across the-yard. Dogs off? ‘What signal?’

  ‘Come back and I’ll show you.’

  ‘Good night,’ Pop said.

  Again he heard the dry rustle of the mackintosh in the darkness.

  ‘After all, it’s only a question of pride with her. I don’t believe she really wants to go on with it. After all, who does? Nobody really does, do they?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Pop said and a moment later left her standing there, a ruffled bundle alone under the April stars.

  9

  Although the regular Friday Petty Sessions at the Police Court in Fordington opened at half-past ten it was nearly half-past twelve before Pop heard a police constable calling his name.

  By that time he was feeling decidedly peckish and couldn’t help wishing he’d nipped across the road to The Market Arms for a glass of beer and a piece of pork pie or a couple of sandwiches. The court had taken what he thought was a damn long two hours to deal with three straightforward drunks, a speeding motorist, a dustman accused of stealing twenty-three boxes of cigars, and a barrel of a woman, arrayed in a man’s cheese-cutter cap, who had hit her next-door neighbour over the head with a coal bucket.

  ‘Call Sidney Charles Larkin.’

  Pop, who was wearing a natty black-and-white check suit with hacking style jacket and a yellow tie, at once stepped briskly forward, said ‘That’s me!’ and stood in the well of the court facing the magistrates’ plain mahogany dais at the far end.

  That morning five magistrates were sitting and a pretty ripe old lot they looked too, Pop thought. Sir George Bluff-Gore, the chairman, in a dead black suit and plain grey tie, looked more like a dyspeptic pall-bearer than ever and regarded Pop with a cheerless oyster eye. On his left sat a Miss Cathcart, a tall, mannish, peg-like woman wearing pince-nez, a thorn-proof suit of nettle-green and a matching hat with a pheasant’s feather stuck in the side. Miss Cathcart shared a house with a tiny nervous brown sparrow of a companion named Emily, whom she unmercifully bullied night and day, at the same time devoting much of her time to moral welfare.

  On Sir George’s right sat Major Sprague, a maroon-faced comatose bull of a man with staring eyes who appeared to be continually searching for something to ram his head against. A Mrs Puffington, a miniature over-neat lady with a shining mother-of-pearl face, sat tucked under the broad flanks of the bull rather like a new-born calf sheltering from the morning’s stinging wind. The fifth magistrate was a round soapy bubble of pink flesh named Portman Jones, a retired local preacher, bald as an egg, who quavered at the very end of the bench with an air of impending doom, rather like a pirate’s victim quaking at the plank’s end.

  Pop, already damn certain he wasn’t going to get much change out of that crew, presently heard the Clerk of the Court, a tallish man in a charcoal-grey suit, reading out the charge against him.

  ‘Sidney Charles Larkin, you are hereby charged that on the twenty-third day of April of 1959, at Gore Court, you unlawfully and indecently did assault a certain female, namely Phyllis Monica Jerebohm.’

  The clerk then proceeded to point out to Pop that he had the choice either of being tried by a jury or of having the case summarily dealt with, to which Pop replied promptly that he would have it dealt with there and then.

  ‘Very well. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’

  ‘Not guilty o’ course. What do you think?’

  ‘Never mind the of course. Nor what I think. Are you represented in court?’

  ‘Course I am,’ Pop said and waved an airy hand to the little public gallery at the back of the court, where Ma was sitting with Mr Charlton, Mariette, Edith Pilchester, the Brigadier, Angela Snow, and the landlord of The Hare and Hounds. If they weren’t representing him nobody was.

  ‘What I mean is this–are you represented by a solicitor?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘Me.’

  ‘Do you mean by that that you are conducting your own defence?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You are quite sure?’

  ‘Sure?’ Pop said. ‘Course I’m sure.’ Moses, for crying out gently.

  ‘Very well.’ As the clerk, with a withering look, turned his back on Pop, a solicitor named Barlow bobbed stiffly up and down again in front of Pop like a small tarred cork and said: ‘I appear for the prosecution.’

  ‘Defendant conducting his own case?’ mumbled Sir George Bluff-Gore.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well. Proceed.’

  A moment later Mr Barlow rose and, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, proceeded:

  ‘The facts in this case are very simple, sir, and are as follows. On the afternoon of April the twenty-third last Mrs Phyllis Monica Jerebohm, who resides with her husband at Gore Court, was walking alone by the lake in the grounds of the mansion. It was a fine warm afternoon and it was her intention to gather primroses. As she walked along the lake she observed the defendant rowing towards her in a boat–’.

  Pop, bored already, found himself going off into a dream. He felt ravenous already and wondered what Ma had for lunch today. At any moment his belly would rattle emptily.

  It actually did rattle, and quite audibly, a minute or two later, so that Mr Barlow, in the act of finishing his recital of the facts, glared sharply at Pop as if accusing him of manufacturing a deliberately insulting noise.

  ‘I will now call Phyllis Monica Jerebohm,’ he said.

  ‘Phyllis Monica Jerebohm!’ called a police constable in the passage outside and in the space of a few seconds Pinkie, clearly unable to see very straight, was up in the witness box, grasping the book in her gloved right hand and already starting to read the words of the oath in rapid, nervously simpering scales.

  ‘Remove your glove, please.’

  More nervous than ever, Pinkie removed her right glove, keeping the other one on.

  Pop, who knew as well as anybody what had happened by the lake, wasn’t worried very much by the questions put by the prosecution to Pinkie, who all the time stood clasping the front of the box with both hands, on one of which she still wore a white glove whole holding its pair in the other.

  The only time he had occasion to feel in the slightest degree apprehensive was when she was asked if, at any time that afternoon, she had been afraid, and she said Yes, she had been afraid. He hadn’t thought of that. She did in fact drop her glove on the floor of the witness box as she answered the question and when she rose again after stooping to pick it up her face was grey.

  ‘Were you in fact more than afraid?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Were your reactions in fact those of any decent, respectable woman face to face, alone, with unexpected and undesirable interference from a molesting interloper?–or, for all you knew, an attacker?’

  Before Mrs Jerebohm could answer Ma’s voice rang out sternly from the back of the court.

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ she said. ‘I beg your parden.’

  ‘Silence!’ called a policeman and at the same time another policeman heaved himself tow
ards the public gallery.

  ‘Silence my foot,’ Ma said.

  ‘Silence in court!’

  ‘Whoever is interrupting from the public gallery will have to be removed,’ Sir George Bluff-Gore said, ‘if this continues.’

  ‘Come and do it,’ Ma said, well under her breath this time, ‘it’ll need three of you and a crane.’

  Sir George, who knew quite well who was interrupting from the gallery but was reluctant to do anything serious about it, simply coughed several times in an important sort of way and said ‘Proceed’, which Pop presently did by rising to put his first question to Pinkie.

  ‘Mrs Jerebohm–’.

  He paused abruptly and rather lengthily. You had to stand back and let the dog see the rabbit–that was how they did it on telly. He knew. He’d seen it scores of times. It kept the witness on the hop.

  ‘Mrs Jerebohm,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you a very simple question. Can you swim?’

  The question startled not only the court but Mrs Jerebohm, who almost dropped her glove a second time, and in the public gallery Ma started choking.

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘Are you afraid of water, Mrs Jerebohm? I mean,’ Pop explained, ‘the sort you fall into?’

  Several people at the back of the court started laughing, with the result that a police, constable shouted ‘Silence!’ and still another policeman moved on cautious feet towards the gallery.

  ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘Either you are or you aren’t,’ Pop said blandly. ‘No supposing. In fact I put it to you, Mrs Jerebohm, that you are terrified of water?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say exactly terrified.’

  Pop, smiling in his cool, perky fashion, wondered if Mrs Jerebohm would mind casting her mind back to the afternoon in question? Weren’t almost her first words to him on that day ‘I can’t swim. I am simply terrified of water’?

  ‘They may have been.’

  ‘Mrs Jerebohm, do you feel you are lucky to be alive today?’

  ‘I suppose we all do,’ Pinkie said, her gloved hand clutching hard at the edge of the box. ‘It’s only natural.’

  ‘Never mind about all of us,’ Pop said. ‘Do you?’

  Pinkie, who had already been more than surprised by several of Pop’s questions and couldn’t for the life of her see the point of this one, almost inaudibly murmured ‘Yes’ and then was still more startled to hear Pop say:

  ‘Have you any idea, Mrs Jerebohm, how deep the lake is?’

  Mrs Jerebohm, growing more nervous every moment, confessed that she had no idea at all.

  ‘If I told you it was fifteen feet in places, even twenty,’ Pop said, ‘would it upset you?’

  ‘It possibly would.’

  ‘Give you a bit of a turn like?’

  Pinkie simply stared straight in front of her, in silence. No answer was forthcoming and none was necessary. She was clearly having a bit of a turn already.

  ‘Now, Mrs Jerebohm, do you recall that when I rowed you into the bank that afternoon–that’s where the lake’s fifteen-feet deep by the way–I warned you on no account to move until I got the boat moored?’

  ‘You may have done. I was in a great hurry.’

  ‘To go where?’ Pop said. ‘To the bottom of the drink? Because, strike me, that’s where you would have gone if I hadn’t grabbed hold of you when I did.’

  Pinkie, more pallid than ever, looked suddenly sick.

  ‘I disagree,’ she said, after a moment or so, in a remote voice that she hoped sounded dignified, if not calm. ‘I could well have looked after myself.’

  ‘Not on your nelly!’ Pop said.

  ‘What was that strange expression?’ Sir George Bluff-Gore mumbled. ‘I didn’t catch that.’

  ‘It’s an expression,’ the clerk said, ‘in the current vernacular.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Pop said. He had no intention of being insulted and put so much severity into his voice that the clerk, biting his lip, seemed to recoil visibly.

  ‘Just two more questions,’ Pop said. ‘What did you do after the alleged attack?’

  ‘I screamed.’

  ‘Why,’ Pop said, ‘didn’t you attack me?’

  ‘Because you were holding both my hands.’

  Pop gave the swiftest, perkiest of smiles at the same time only wishing he could telegraph it to Ma and his friends in the gallery.

  ‘So now,’ he said, ‘I’ve got three hands, have I?’ He held up his hands for all the court to see. ‘One to pinch you with and two to hold you with.’ Pinkie’s face had suddenly gone from extreme grey pallor to boiling crimson. ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, eh? Thank you very much, Mrs Jerebohm.’

  After the pale and shaking Pinkie the next witness, Mrs Perigo, looked icy, almost arrogant, by contrast. She was wearing a tailor-made tweed suit in a sort of dull rhubarb shade and a close-fitting hat to match.

  The questions he wished to put to her, Mr Barlow said, were very simple in themselves but, nevertheless, very important. First, did she see the attack? Secondly, was the nature of it as described by Mrs Jerebohm herself? And thirdly was the reaction of Mrs Jerebohm that of a lady in a state of most alarming and acute distress?

  To all three questions Mrs Perigo answered yes, merely adding to the last of her answers that Pinkie was hysterical. This, Pop knew, was the corroborative evidence stuff that Charley had briefed him about and he listened eagerly as the solicitor for the prosecution went on:

  ‘One more question. Did the defendant at any time offer, in your presence, any sort of expression of regret or apology for his action?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None whatever?’

  ‘None whatever. He merely laughed.’

  ‘He merely laughed, you say. Thank you.’

  This, Pop knew, was the tricky part of the business and when he finally rose to question Mrs Perigo he stared her straight in the face and opened with a question like a bullet, not bothering to pause for emphasis, as he had done with Pinkie.

  ‘You are Corinne Lancaster Perigo?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Nothing could have been more haughty than the word naturally and at the back of the court Ma felt her blood starting to boil.

  ‘Absolutely certain?’

  ‘Of course I’m absolutely certain!’

  When the fury of the words had died down a bit, Pop went on:

  ‘You say you saw the alleged attack?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Can you tell the court from what distance?’

  ‘Several yards.’

  ‘Can you tell the court how many yards is several?’

  ‘Oh! three or four. Half a dozen.’

  Pop, pulling himself erect, wagged his finger at Mrs Perigo with accusing severity.

  ‘I suggest to you, Madam,’ he said, ‘that if you had a neck as long as a giraffe’s and a fifty-foot extension ladder and a three-inch telescope you couldn’t have seen pussy from where you were.’

  ‘Indeed I could. And did.’

  Ma, in a fury of her own now, could bear it no longer.

  ‘Wheel her out!’ she called.

  ‘Remove that person from the court at once.’

  ‘All right,’ Ma said. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m going. I’ll be over at The Market Hotel, Sid. I’ll see if they’ve got some decent steaks for lunch. I forgot to ring the butcher.’

  ‘Good egg!’ Pop said. ‘See if they’ve got some smoked salmon too.’

  ‘Right!’

  While Ma was being removed from the court, as large as ever but more dignified, the clerk rose stiffly to ask with great acidity if Pop had quite finished with his personal catering arrangements? If so, could the court proceed?

  ‘No more questions,’ Pop said.

  Mrs Perigo, haughtier and colder than ever, withdrew from the witness box, sweeping across the well of the court on a positive breeze of perfume, leaving the solicitor for the pros
ecution to rise and say: ‘That is the case for the prosecution.’

  ‘Do you wish to call any more witnesses, Larkin?’ the clerk said.

  ‘I do,’ Pop said. ‘Uncle Perce.’

  ‘What was that?’ Sir George Bluff-Gore said. ‘Uncle who?’

  ‘Call Percival Jethro Larkin!’

  Quick as a fox, Uncle Perce nipped into court and was already half way through a toothless recitation of the oath before the book had actually been handed up to him.

  ‘Morning, Sid. Cold for the time o’ the year.’

  ‘The witness will refrain from making observations,’ the clerk said. ‘Either about the inclemency of the weather or any other matter.’

  ‘Yessir. Sharp ’un this morning, though.’

  ‘Quiet!’

  Uncle Perce was instantly and obediently quiet, though not for long.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be anybody else, would I?’ he said in answer to Pop’s question as to whether he was in fact Percival Jethro Larkin?

  ‘And do you at the present time live at The Three Swans hotel at Wealdhurst?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Where you are employed as handyman and boots?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘The witness will answer the questions either in the negative or the affirmative,’ the clerk said. ‘And not by observation.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Pop, before addressing Uncle Perce, again made one of those timely and dramatic pauses he had so often seen enacted, and with such effect, on television.

  ‘I want you to glance round the court. Take your time. Have a good long look.’

  ‘Yessir. Sid, I mean.’

  Uncle Perce took an all-embracing, owl-like stare round the court, at the same time picking one of his few good teeth with a finger-nail.

  ‘Do you see in court,’ Pop said, ‘anyone known to you as Mrs Perigo?’

  ‘No, that I don’t.’

  ‘Quite sure?’

  ‘Sure as I like a nip o’ rum on a cold morning.’

  ‘Take a good look at the lady in the dark red costume who sits over there.’

  ‘Her with the red bag on her head?’

  That was the one, Pop said. Did he know her as Mrs Perigo? No, Uncle Perce said, he’d be blowed if he did.