Wasn’t there some less pompous way to describe what he had tried to do than “clear his father’s name”? Was he very self-righteous standing up here in a white sheet and a halo, admitting to such laudable and dutiful behaviour? No doubt Mr Lytton, who had a nasty look in his elderly eye, would be able to attend to all that.
“In short, Mr Marlowe, when you wrote these verses, were you actuated by any desire other than to force Mr Shorn into court?”
“None.”
“Had you any wish to injure Mr Shorn, either professionally or otherwise?”
“No.”
“Were you actuated by personal malice of any sort towards the plaintiff?”
“None at all.”
So it went on. Half the barristers in the front didn’t seem to be listening. There was an Indian law-student here today in a blue turban. From the witness-box Don was able to see up into the public gallery, the peering faces, the resting elbows, the attentive ears. Not an inch of space upstairs or down. House Full notices. Booking for the new season begins on November 2. The Queueing System will be in operation.… The only gap in the well of the court was between Joanna and Bennie where he had been. Mrs Delaney was two rows behind, almost next to Warner Robinson. And Robert Delaney was here, in the front row of the gallery. He didn’t look as if he’d recently backed many winners.
Eleven forty-five before the examination in chief was over. By then, although the worst was still to come, the weakness had left his knees. There was a pause before Mr Lytton got up. Nobody seemed in a hurry. The judge lifted himself an inch or two to change his position, and stared into the middle distance from under suspicious lids. A couple of barristers whispered together. The judge’s clerk was sharpening a pencil.
Mr Lytton rose, and stood for a moment winding a piece of pink brief tape on and off his fingers.
“Mr Marlowe, can you tell the court exactly when you left home?”
Don stared at him. “ Do you mean as to date?”
“I mean in relation to your own life.”
“Well … from Oxford I went straight into the army, not by choice of course. When I came out I started at the Royal Academy and for about a year I lived at home. Then I went to study in Vienna, and when I came back I didn’t go home but went into digs.”
“Any reason why you didn’t go home?”
“Only that I was studying hard, going to concerts, playing the piano, was in and out at all hours.”
“What did your father feel about it?”
“He thought it was a good thing.”
“So it would be a considerable number of years, six—eight—ten? since you lived with your father?”
“About eight, I suppose.”
“Did you see a lot of him during that time?”
“I’m afraid not a great deal. If one wants to be a musician one unfortunately has to develop a one-track mind.… Then, at about the time he retired, I got married.”
“Not too much of a one-track mind for that?”
“As you remark.”
Mr Lytton kept screwing up his eyes as if dazzled by the witness. But he never really looked at Don; he only spoke in Don’s general direction, his grey, pachydermatous face wearing a weary, dusty expression as if too many years of exposing human frailty had left him without illusions and without hope.
“Now in these eight years since you left home, how frequently would you say you saw your father?”
“Well, I was abroad part of the time. I——”
“Omitting the period when you were abroad did you see him, say, twice a week?”
“Oh, no.”
“Once a week?”
“Before I was married I went home every Sunday evening. Afterwards, and because he was then living in Midhurst, it wasn’t so often as that.”
“Once a year?” suggested Mr Lytton.
“About once a month, I suppose, or a little oftener.”
“So that you consider you have had every opportunity of observing his behaviour during the last eight years?”
“I don’t follow you,” said Don, following very well.
“I am wondering how you could consider yourself so certain that none of these statements about your father was true?”
“One doesn’t need to live with a man every minute of the day to know his character.”
“Every minute of the day is a little different from a few minutes once a month. It is true isn’t it that, although you were naturally indignant at reading these articles, you knew nothing really to contradict them from first-hand knowledge?”
“I think that my first-hand knowledge of my father over a great many years was enough.”
“You mean you had an opinion which, like anybody else’s, could have been right or wrong?”
“That may be how you see it.”
“It’s really a question of how the jury will see it, Mr Marlowe.… Tell me, do you feel you were a dutiful son?”
“How can one answer that?” Don said impatiently. “ I would have liked to see more of him. But that wouldn’t have been a duty because he was always good company.”
“His death came as a shock to you?”
“Naturally. One doesn’t expect it at fifty-two.”
“Perhaps you had promised yourself that in a few years’ time when you were better established you would be able to see more of him again?”
“Yes, I had.”
“Where are these questions leading, Mr Lytton?” asked his Lordship.
“I was about to ask the defendant, my Lord, if he felt something of a conscience about having seen so little of his father, now that he was dead.”
Mr Justice Alston raised his eyelids to Don. “ Well?”
Don said: “No, I don’t. It’s not, I suppose, unnatural to wish one had done more.”
“Well?” said the judge, this time to Mr Lytton.
“You wish you had done more … Mr Marlowe, I am asking you to consider this very carefully. I am asking you if you are sure as to the motive behind your attack on Mr Shorn. Is not your desire to clear your father’s name rather a window dressing, so to speak, sincerely felt of course but largely a surface indignation?”
“Why do you suppose I am incurring all this unpleasantness, then?”
“Would you answer the question directly, please?”
“What is the question?”
“I am asking you if it is not true that the real motivating force for this quarrel derives on your side from a wish to rid yourself of a sense of guilt because you did not do your duty to your father while he was alive.”
Don looked at his fingers but made no reply.
“Well, Mr Marlowe,” said the judge at length, “ what have you to say to that?”
Don said: “ I think it’s just damned nonsense, my Lord.”
There was a titter in the court. Mr Doutelle gave a convulsive movement of disapproval.
His Lordship looked across the court. “It will not assist your case, Mr Marlowe, if you answer the questions in an improper manner.”
“I’m sorry, my Lord. It seemed to me that that one had been put in an improper manner.”
“You may think so but it is a matter for me to decide, not you.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Would you how try to answer the question?”
Don said to Lytton, “In the first place you use the word ‘attack’. My ‘attack’ on Roger Shorn. If I chase a burglar who has stolen my money, am I attacking him? What’s the difference, except that Shorn stole my good name? As for trying to tie it all up in a lot of psychological nonsense, I still think the suggestion, begging your Lordship’s pardon, what I called it in the first place. If I could have got some sort of a public withdrawal of what had been said I should have jumped at it, but that was never offered.”
Mr Justice Alston looked at Aubrey Lytton. “You seem not only to have been answered, Mr Lytton, but to have provoked a speech for the defence.”
Mr Lytton said: “ Please answer the qu
estions, Mr Marlowe, and confine yourself to them.… Now tell me, you say you were not actuated by malice in writing these abusive verses?”
“Not malice, no.”
“What would you have done if Mr Shorn had ignored this attack?”
“I should have written something else.”
“In other words you would have gone on and on and on?”
“I should have gone on and on and on.”
“You intended your writings to be defamatory, yet in your original defence you put forward, among other things, a plea of no libel.”
“I’m afraid that’s a legal point I don’t understand. I want the case to be decided on its broadest aspect.”
“In other words, justification?”
“Yes.”
“You hope to convince the jury that Mr Shorn is a jackal, a wolf, a coward, a skunk, a liar and a louse?”
“Not literally,” said Don.
There was a murmur of laughter.
“You left out the fungus, Mr Lytton,” said his Lordship. There was more laughter. During it Roger sat with legs crossed and an expression as if nothing in the present court concerned him.
Mr Lytton impatiently cleared his throat. “ Now Mr Marlowe, you say you were on the best of terms with your father during his last years?”
“Yes.”
“Would you describe him as a secretive man?”
Don hesitated. “I had always thought of him as very frank.”
“Did you meet his friends?”
“Some of them.”
“Did you ever meet Mrs Delaney?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you about her?”
“Not as far as I can remember.”
“Don’t you think that rather strange for a frank person?”
“I think he wanted to keep his friendship with her a secret from everyone for the time being.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t you think his whole attitude showed that he knew he was getting into dubious company?”
“I have only just met Mrs Delaney; but ‘dubious company’ is the last way I’d think of describing her.”
“Did you ask your father for his reasons when he told you he was going to retire?”
“He told me he wanted to devote his whole time to writing.”
“How did this explanation strike you?”
“I was surprised. Naturally I accepted it.”
“If you were surprised, it’s not unnatural, therefore, is it that other people should have been surprised, and perhaps not have accepted it quite so easily?”
At the time the litigants were snatching a hasty lunch in order to be back in court for two o’clock, Michael was eating his midday snack and reading the report in The Times of yesterday’s hearing.
Not that he had any need for hurry. His greatest enemy was time.
Number 10 Wornington Place was at the end of a row of late Victorian houses in a cul-de-sac backing on to the railway. Michael had a room on the top floor. In the basement were two West Indian families, each family paying £2 10s 0d. a week for their room and a share of the coal-house. The front windows of the basement were boarded up but they had windows at the back and electric light and water. (Sometimes too much water because there was a crack in the drainage in the house and it seeped down an inner wall.) On the ground floor was a white labourer who had a wife and three children for his two rooms but no furniture except some old sofas. They slept on the floor and ate off soap boxes. His wages were ten pounds a week and he paid fifteen shillings a week for the rooms, to the infinite chagrin of the owner, who couldn’t get them out. A room on the first floor was rented by a Welsh harmonica player who earned something in the pubs on a Saturday night and by running errands for the two Central European girls who shared a room on his floor and occasionally, it seemed, customers. It was he who had given Michael all his information.
The other room on the first floor was in the possession of the owner, a Jamaican and his wife and two children. Four years ago he had bought the house for £3,000 on a ten year lease. By sub-letting he had already paid for the house and could now live off it without working and run a smart second hand Chevrolet. On this floor also was the one bathroom-lavatory, which the Central European girls used as a kitchen.
On the top floor in the two rooms at the front were four coloured men. Three of them went out to work and made good money and were the most respectable people in the house. The fourth wouldn’t work and sat at the window all day looking out. He got £2 a week National Assistance and paid 35s. a week rent. The other 5s. he spent on rice, on which he lived.
Michael’s room looked out at the back over the great railway tracks to the west. A last-minute liberality had inspired the builder of the houses to give longer windows and window-boxes to these upper rooms, so it was possible to get a good deal of air. The window of the next house was only a few feet away and he often heard the woman first thing in the morning and could have reached the clothes she hung out to dry.
Fresh air was a thing he needed, because the whole house stank of a dank musty odour he had never smelt before. At first he thought it was the drains; but when night fell and he lay down on the iron bed to sleep he found out. He killed half a dozen bugs before falling asleep, and woke badly bitten to spend the hours until dawn starting up every time a little hard plop told him one had fallen from the ceiling on to the bed.
In the morning they were all gone, except those he had killed staining the sheet and the wall, but he began a search of the room and presently prised away a piece of the skirting board, where they clustered in a mass like a brown varnished plank.
That was how he came so quickly to know the Welshman. Rhys good-humouredly lent a hand, telling Michael that anyway he was wasting his time; but Michael gave him a couple of pounds and sent him out for D.D.T. and a hammer and a chisel and some nails. Then he took off all the skirting boards and sprayed and dusted behind them. The landlord, a big shiny man in a check suit, came up to complain, but Michael said he was improving the property.
Between times Michael sat by the window and watched the trains. They were his only escape from himself. Accelerating off on their long journeys, they hammered out every time they went past that if, when his leg was quite better, he could jump one a bit further down the line he would be two or three hundred miles from London by daybreak. It was the thing to do, after he had seen Bennie.
But he couldn’t go without seeing her first. He had to know how she felt, whether she was still able to care something for him. If she did, then anything was possible, even to giving himself up.
Over and over in his mind went the bitter regrets. It was of his own choice that he had gone on. He had run into all this by little more than a week. If only Roger had seen him before the robbery and told him what he had to tell him.…
He bought three papers every day, and every day he searched them for news of Peter Waldo; but he had missed the day after the arrest was made, and probably his case hadn’t yet come up.
The wound was healed and he no longer wore a bandage, but he still found it painful to put full weight on the leg, so that he still limped, and sometimes the muscles would have a spasm of cramp. Always in the morning it was hard to get them moving.
When he had finished reading through the account of the libel action for the second time Michael let the paper drop and rolled up his empty fish and chip papers into a ball. He finished his bottle of beer and stood up. Four hours of daylight yet, with nothing to do but read through the papers and magazines strewn about the bed or on the table. Then darkness and an hour or two out. After that a climb up the stairs to this barren room and two hours to kill before bed.
As he recovered his health the old restlessness came back, but with a stronger sense of drive and direction. He must get out of here and he must begin again—really from the start. He wanted that. Would the police, knowing of the connection, be watching Bennie’s flat? He couldn’t bear not
to know what she thought. He couldn’t bear to wait to know. Sometimes he banged his head on the pillow in the night to stop his thoughts going on.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Don was conscious that his own appearance in the box had not been the finished performance that Roger’s had been. Nerves had made him stumble and hesitate too often. But the battle was now about to be joined in earnest. The witness who followed him was a tall thin young man of about thirty.
“You are Mr Taylor Hutton, barrister-at-law, of 44 King’s Bench Walk?”
The witness said he was.
“Were you at the Borough Sessions at Cheltenham on the 1st October, 1956?.… Did you appear for the defence, in a case brought by the Crown against a Mr Salem Levitski, before Sir John Marlowe, sitting as Recorder of Cheltenham?.… Will you tell the court what happened?”
“I appeared for Levitski who was charged with obtaining money by false pretences. He was accused of having defrauded a bank. You—er—wish me to go into details?”
“Briefly, if you can.”
“Levitski had a number of businesses standing in the name of various nominees; and by juggling with cheques drawn on his nominees’ banking accounts he was able to finance a series of speculative deals, without having much capital behind him. With this sort of system, if one is ingenious enough, large sums of credit can be built up and manipulated on a modest outlay. Then, if a particular gamble in commodities comes off, the gambler has made money and no one has lost any?”
“I hope you are not recommending it, Mr Hutton,” said the judge.
“No, my Lord. But in this particular case, on July 12, when the whole edifice was about to collapse, Levitski presented further cheques, themselves worthless, drawn on one of these accounts, and managed to obtain cash for them. Then he quickly paid all the proceeds—together with considerable monies of his own—into another nominee’s account, so that earlier cheques which were in course of collection by the bank and which otherwise would have been valueless were met in full. He was charged—mistakenly I still think—only in respect of his transactions of July 12, and when the prosecution closed its case I submitted that no case had been made out, because the bank was actually much better off after this final transaction—indeed that there could be no intent to defraud on this occasion as the intention was to benefit the bank. It was never disputed that the bank was not injured by the defendant’s actions of July 12. I had not had an opportunity of looking closely at the authorities beforehand, but the point seemed a good one to me; and I argued it on general principles.”
The Tumbled House Page 33
