A Certain Justice

by P. D. James

  “Seventy-two is not old.” He spoke the words aloud but they fell on the unencumbered air less as a small defiant affirmation than as a thin wail of desperation. Was it really possible that that appalling moment over the road in Court Twelve only three weeks earlier could have robbed him of so much in one moment? The memory of it, the agony of it, was with him almost every waking minute. Now his body became stiff with remembered terror.

  He had been in the middle of his closing arguments in a case which had been more forensically interesting than difficult, a lucrative brief from an international company, and a case concerned as much with establishing a point of law as with any dramatic conflict of interests. In one second, with no warning, language deserted him. The words he next wanted to speak were not there, neither in his mind nor on his tongue. The familiar court in which he had appeared for over forty years became an alien cockpit of terror. He could remember nothing, not the name of the judge or of the parties, not the name of his junior or of opposing counsel. There was a halfminute when it seemed that every breath was stilled, every eye in the court was bent on him with surprise, contempt or curiosity. He managed somehow to finish his sentence and sit down. At least he could still read. The written words still conveyed a meaning. He took up his brief with hands which were shaking so violently that they must have signalled his distress to the whole court. But no one spoke, nothing was said. After a little pause and a glance at him, the opposing counsel got to his feet.

  But it mustn’t happen again. He couldn’t live again through that embarrassment, that panic. He had been to his general practitioner, had spoken in general terms of lapses of short-term memory, of a fear that this could be a symptom of something worse. He had forced himself to speak the dreaded word, Alzheimer’s. The subsequent physical examination revealed nothing abnormal. The doctor spoke reassuringly about overwork, the need to take things more gently, the advisability of a holiday. The connectors of his brain were getting less efficient with age; that was to be expected. He was reminded of the words of Dr. Johnson: “If a young man mislays his hat he says he has mislaid his hat. The old man says, ‘I have lost my hat. I must be getting old.’” He suspected that this anecdote was offered as reassurance to all elderly patients. He had received no reassurance; he had expected none.

  Yes, it was time to retire. He hadn’t intended to commit himself to Drysdale Laud, had regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. He had been precipitate. But he had been wiser than he knew. It was right to give way to a younger man as Head of Chambers. Or a younger woman. Drysdale or Venetia, it hardly mattered to him which of them succeeded him. And how much did he himself want to go on? Even Chambers had changed. It was now less a band of brothers than the convenient, if over crowded, set of rooms in which men and women lived their separate professional lives, sometimes not meeting for weeks. He lamented the old days, when he was first a member and there was less specialization, when colleagues would saunter into each other’s rooms to discuss a brief or the nicer points of law, to seek advice and rehearse arguments. A gentler world. Now the systems men had taken over with their calculators, their technology, their managerial obsession with results. Wouldn’t he be better out of it? But where was he to go? For him there was no world elsewhere, no place except that quadrilateral of narrow streets and courts where the ghost of a small boy, with his romantic dreams, his naïve ambitions, walked through the Middle Temple.

  His grandfather, Matthew Langton, had from his birth intended him to be a lawyer. Despite the name, with its overtones of ecclesiastical eminence, the family had been poor; his great-grandfather had kept a small hardware shop in Sudbury in Suffolk, his great-grandmother had been in service with an aristocratic Suffolk family. They managed, but there was never money to spare. But their only child had been highly intelligent, ambitious and determined to be a lawyer. Scholarships had been won, sacrifices made, the family at the great house where his mother had worked had given their patronage. At the age of twenty-four Matthew Langton had been admitted to the Middle Temple.

  And now memory, like a searchlight, moved with seemingly deliberate intent over the wasteland of Hubert’s life, paused to illumine with shadowless clarity a moment in time which for a second was fixed and motionless and then, as if activated by some click of recollection, moved on again. Himself at the age of ten, walking through Middle Temple Gardens with his grandfather, trying to match his steps to the old man’s longer stride, hearing the roll call of famous names, men who had been members of their ancient society: Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Burke, the American patriot John Dickinson, the Lord Chancellors, the Lord Chief Justices, the writers—John Evelyn, Henry Fielding, William Cowper, De Quincey, Thackeray. He and his grandfather would pause at every building to identify it by the badge assigned to the Templars: the Paschal Lamb carrying the banner of innocence set in a red cross on a white nimbus ground. He remembered his triumph when he discovered it above a door or on a water pipe. He was told the history, the legends. Together they counted the goldfish in the pool in Fountain Court and stood hand in hand under the four-hundred-year-old double hammer-beamed roof of Middle Temple Hall. And here, in those childhood years, he had imbibed the history, the romance, the proud traditions of this ancient society, and had known that one day he would be part of it.

  He must have been aged eight, perhaps even younger, when his grandfather first showed him the Temple Church. They had walked together between the thirteenth-century effigies of the knights, and he had learned their names by heart as if they were friends: William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, and his sons William and Gilbert. William the Marshall had been adviser to King John before Magna Carta. Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, with his cylindrical helmet. Hubert would recite the names in his high childish voice, pleasing his grandfather by this act of memory and, greatly daring, laying small hands on the cold stone as if these flat impassive faces held some secret to which he was heir. The church had outlived them and their turbulent lives as it would outlive him. It would survive the ceaseless battering of the millennium against its walls as it had survived that night of 10 May 1941, when the flames had roared with the tongues of an advancing army, the chapel had become a furnace, the marble pillars had cracked and the roof had exploded in a burst of fire to fall in blazing shards over the effigies. Then it had seemed that seven hundred years of history were falling in flames. But the pillars had been replaced, the effigies repaired, new stalls were ranked in collegiate order where once there had been Victorian woodwork, and Lord Glentanar had given his splendid Harrison organ to replace the one destroyed.

  Now in his own old age, Hubert suspected that his grandfather had tried to discipline his passionate pride in the career he had achieved, his veneration for the ancient society of which he was part, and that only with the child had he felt free to express emotions, of the strength of which he was half ashamed. He had told his stories with little embellishment, but as the fervid imagination of adolescence had replaced the simple acceptance of childhood, Hubert had clothed history with romance. He had felt his jacket brushed by the gorgeous robes of Henry III and his nobles as they processed into the Round Church on Ascension Day in 1240 for the consecration of the magnificent new choir; had heard the weakening moans as a condemned knight starved to death in the five-foot-long Penitential Chamber. The eight-year-old had found the story more interesting than horrific.

  “What had he done, Grandfather?”

  “Broken one of the rules of the Order. Disobeyed the Master.”

  “Are people put in the cell today?” He had stared at the two window slits, imagining that he could see desperate eyes peering down.

  “Not today. The Templars Order was dissolved in 1312.”

  “But what about the lawyers?”

  “I’m happy to say that the Lord Chancellor is satisfied with less draconian measures.”

  Hubert smiled, remembering, sitting still and silent as if he, too, were carved in stone. The organ music had ceased, he
couldn’t remember when any more than he could remember how long he had been sitting there. What had happened to those years? Where had they gone, the decades since he had walked between the stone knights with his grandfather, had sat with him Sunday after Sunday for matins? The simplicity and ordered beauty of the service, the splendour of the music had seemed to him to represent the profession into which he had been born. He still attended every Sunday. It was as much a part of his routine as buying the same two Sunday newspapers at the same stall on his way home, the luncheon taken from the fridge and heated up in obedience to Erik’s written instructions, the short afternoon walk through the park, then the hour of sleep and the evening of television. The practice of his religion, which, it seemed to him now, had never been more than a formal affirmation of a received set of values, was now little more than a pointless exercise designed to give shape to the week. The wonder, the mystery, the sense of history—all had gone. Time, which took so much away, had taken that as it was taking his strength and even his mind. But not, please God, his mind. Anything but that. He felt himself praying with Lear: “O! let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad!”

  And then there came into his mind a more accepting, more submissive prayer. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling. For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

  6

  It was four o’clock on Tuesday, 8 October, when Venetia hitched her gown more firmly on her shoulders, shuffled her papers together and left a court in the Old Bailey for what was to be the last time. The 1972 extension with its rows of leather-covered benches was empty. The air held the expectant calm of a normally busy concourse now cleansed of discordant humanity and settling into its evening peace.

  The trial had made few demands on her, but she felt unexpectedly weary and wanted nothing more than to get to the lady barristers’ robing-room and to put aside her working clothes for yet another day. She hadn’t expected this case to come on at the Bailey. The trial of Brian Cartwright on the charge of grievous bodily harm had originally been scheduled for Winchester Crown Court but had been transferred to London because of local prejudice against the defendant. He had been more chagrined than gratified by the change, complaining bitterly throughout the two weeks’ trial of the inconvenience of the venue and the time lost in travelling from his factory to London. She had won and, for him, all inconveniences were forgotten. Volatile and indiscreet in victory, he had no intention of hurrying away. But for Venetia, anxious to see the last of him, it had been an unsatisfactory case, ill-prepared by the prosecution, presided over by a judge who she suspected disliked her—and who had made his disapproval of the majority verdict only too apparent—and made tedious by a prosecuting counsel who could never believe that a jury could take in any fact that hadn’t been explained to them three times.

  And now Brian Cartwright was at her shoulder and scurrying beside her down the corridor with the bumbling persistence of an over-affectionate dog, euphoric with a victory which even with his optimism he had hardly dared to expect. Above the crisply laundered collar, the carefully knotted old school tie, the large pores of his strong red face oozed sweat as greasy as ointment.

  “Well, we did for those buggers! Good work, Miss Aldridge. I did all right in the box, didn’t I?”

  He, the most arrogant of men, was suddenly like a child avid for her approval.

  “You managed to answer questions without betraying your strong dislike of the anti–blood-sports lobby, yes. We won because there was no clear evidence that it was your whip which blinded young Mills, and because Michael Tewley was seen as an unreliable witness.”

  “Unreliable he bloody well was! And Mills was only blinded in one eye. I’m sorry for the lad, of course I am. But these people are keen enough to attack others and then scream when they get hurt themselves. Tewley hates my guts. There was animus, you said so yourself, and the jury agreed. Animus. Those letters to the press. The telephone calls. You proved that he was out to get me. You tied him up properly, and I liked that last bit, when you were making the speech for the defence. ‘If my client has such an ungovernable temper, such a reputation for unprovoked violence, you may find it surprising, members of the jury, that at the age of fifty-five he has never had a criminal conviction.’”

  She began moving away, but he was at her shoulder. Venetia thought she could smell his triumph.

  “I don’t think we need re-fight the case, Mr. Cartwright.”

  “You didn’t say that I’d never before appeared in a court of law, though, did you?”

  “That would have been a lie. Counsel don’t lie to the court.”

  “But they can be economical with the truth, can’t they? Not guilty, then, this time and not guilty the last time. Lucky for me. It wouldn’t have been a good thing to come before the court with form. I don’t suppose the jury noticed the actual words you used.” He laughed. “Or didn’t use.”

  She thought, but did not say: The judge did. So did prosecuting counsel.

  As if he had read her mind, he went on: “They couldn’t say anything, though, could they? I was found not guilty.” He lowered his voice and glanced round at the almost empty hall. He paused. “You remember what I told you about the last time, how I got off?”

  “I remember, Mr. Cartwright.”

  “I haven’t told another soul but I thought you’d like to know. Knowledge is power.”

  “Some knowledge is dangerous. I hope in your own interest that you’ll keep this particular knowledge to yourself. You’ll get my fee-note in due course. I don’t need additional payment in the form of private information.”

  But the piggy bloodshot eyes were sharp. He was a fool about some things but not about everything. He said: “You’re interested, though. Thought you might be. After all, Costello’s in your Chambers. And don’t worry. I’ve kept it to myself for four years. I’m not a blabbermouth. You don’t get to build up a successful business if you don’t know when to keep your mouth shut. Hardly the sort of thing I’d sell to the Sunday tabloids, is it? Not that they’d ever get proof. I paid well the last time and I don’t mind paying well for this. I said to the lady wife, ‘I’m getting the best criminal lawyer in London. I’ll pay what it takes. Never economize on necessities. We’ll see these bastards off.’ Urban vermin, that’s what they are. They haven’t got the guts to ride a seaside donkey. I’d like to put them up on a hunter. They don’t know anything about the countryside. They don’t care about animals. What they hate is seeing people enjoy themselves. Malice and envy, that’s what it’s about.” He added, with a tone of surprised triumph, as if the words were inspired: “They don’t love foxes, they hate humans.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that argument before, Mr. Cartwright.”

  He seemed now to be pressing himself against her. She could almost smell the disagreeable warmth of his body through the tweed. “The rest of the hunt won’t be too pleased with the verdict. Some of them want me out. They wouldn’t have minded seeing that saboteur win. They didn’t exactly leap into the box as witnesses for the defence, did they? Well, if they want to hunt across my land they’d better get used to seeing me in a pink coat.”

  How predictable he was, she thought, the stereotype of the hard-riding, hard-drinking, womanizing, would-be country gentleman. Wasn’t it Henry James who had said, “Never believe that you know the last thing about any human heart”? But he was a novelist. It was his job to find complexities, anomalies, unsuspected subtleties in all human nature. To Venetia, as she grew into middle age, it seemed that the men and women she defended, the colleagues she worked with became more, not less, predictable. Only rarely now was she surprised by an action totally out of character. It was as if the instrument, the key, the melody were settled in the early years of life, and however ingenious and varied the subsequent cadenzas, the theme remained unalterably the same.<
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  Yet Brian Cartwright had his virtues. He was a successful manufacturer of parts for agricultural machinery. You didn’t build up a business from nothing if you were a fool. He provided jobs. He was said to be a generous, open-handed employer. What hidden talents and enthusiasms, she wondered, might lie under that carefully tailored tweed jacket? He had at least had the sense to dress soberly for his appearance in the witness box; she had feared that he might appear in overbold checks and breeches. Had he perhaps a passion for lieder? For growing orchids? For baroque architecture? Unlikely. And what in God’s name did the lady wife see in him? Was it significant that she hadn’t been in court?

  Venetia had reached the door of the lady barristers’ robing-room. At last she would be free of him. Turning, she risked once more the vise-like grip of his hand, then watched him go. She hoped never to see him again, but that was what she felt about the defendant in every successful case.

  A court attendant had come up. He said: “There’s quite a crowd of anti-hunt saboteurs outside. They’re not happy with the verdict. It might be wise to leave by the other door.”

  “Are the police there?”

  “There’s a couple of officers. I think they’re more noisy than violent—the crowd, I mean.”

  “Thank you, Barraclough. I’ll leave as I usually leave.”

  It was then, passing along the concourse to the main staircase, that she saw them. Octavia and Ashe. They were standing together beside the statue of Charles II, looking fixedly down the wide hall towards her. Even from this distance she could see that they were together, that this was no chance meeting but a deliberate encounter, a time and place they had chosen. There was a stillness about them, unusual in her daughter but known and recognized in Ashe. For a second, no more, her steps faltered, and then she walked steadily towards them. As she came within speaking distance she saw Octavia move her hand towards Ashe’s and then, as he made no response, as quietly withdraw it, but her daughter’s eyes did not fall.