Arthur & George

by Julian Barnes

  They knew him innocent? And then despair bore him down further. They knew him innocent, but how could they stop turning over in their heads what they had seen and heard over the last four days? What if their belief in him began to falter? When they said they knew him innocent, what did that really mean? To know him innocent, they must either have sat up all night and observed him sleep, or else been on watch in the Colliery field when some lunatic farm-hand arrived with an evil instrument in his pocket. Only thus could they truly know. So what they did was believe, truly believe. And what if, over time, some words of Mr. Disturnal, some assertion of Dr. Butter, or some private long-held doubt about George, began to undermine their faith in him?

  And this would be another thing he would have done to them. He would have sent them on a dismal journey of self-questioning. Today: we know George and we know him innocent. But perhaps in three months: we think we know George and we believe him innocent. And then in a year: we realize we did not know George, yet we still think him innocent. Who could blame anyone for this declension?

  It was not just he who had been sentenced; his family had been too. If he was guilty, then some would conclude that his parents must have perjured themselves. So when the Vicar preached the difference between right and wrong, would his congregation think him either a hypocrite or a dupe? When his mother visited the downtrodden, might they not tell her she would be better off saving her sympathy for her criminal son in his distant gaol? This was another thing he had done: he had sentenced his own parents. Was there no end to these tormented imaginings, to this pitiless moral vortex? He waited for a further descent, a washing-away, a drowning; but then he thought again of Maud. He sat on his hard stool behind iron bars, while somewhere in that gloom Constable Dubbs whistled tunelessly to himself, and he thought of Maud. She was his source of hope, she would keep him from falling. He believed in Maud; he knew she would not falter, because he had seen the look she gave him in court. It was a look that did not need interpretation, that could not be corroded by time or malice; it was a look of love and trust and certainty.

  When the crowds outside the courtroom had dispersed, George was taken back to Stafford Gaol. Here he encountered another realignment of his world. Having been in prison since his arrest, George had naturally come to regard himself as a prisoner. But in fact he had been lodged in the best hospital cell; he received newspapers every morning, food from his family, and was allowed to write business letters. Unreflectingly, he had assumed his circumstances to be temporary, attendant, briefly purgatorial.

  Now he was truly a prisoner, and to prove it they took his clothes away. In itself this was ironic, since for weeks he had regretted and resented his inappropriate summer suit and otiose straw hat. Had the suit made him look less serious in court, and thus harmed his cause? He could not tell. In any case, suit and hat were taken away, and exchanged for the heavy weight and felty roughness of prison attire. The jacket overhung his shoulders, the trousers bagged at knee and ankle; he did not care. They also gave him a waistcoat, a forage cap, and a pair of wife-kickers.

  “You’ll find it a bit of a shock,” said the warder, bundling up the summer suit. “But most get used to it. Even people like yourself, if you don’t take offence.”

  George nodded. He observed, gratefully, that the officer had spoken to him in just the same tone, and with just as much civility, as he had done over the previous eight weeks. This came as a surprise. He had somehow expected to be spat upon and reviled on his return to the gaol, an innocent man now publicly labelled guilty. But perhaps the terrifying change was only in his own mind. The officers’ manner remained the same for a simple and dispiriting reason: from the start they had presumed him guilty, and the jury’s decision had merely confirmed that presumption.

  The next morning, as a favour, he was brought a newspaper, so that he might see, one final time, his life turned into headlines, his story no longer divergent but now consolidated into legal fact, his character no longer of his own authorship but delineated by others.

  SEVEN YEARS PENAL SERVITUDE.

  WYRLEY CATTLE-KILLER SENTENCED.

  PRISONER UNMOVED

  Dully, yet automatically, George looked over the rest of the page. The story of Miss Hickman the lady doctor appeared also to have reached its end, subsiding into silence and mystery. George noted that Buffalo Bill, after a London season and a provincial tour lasting 294 days, had concluded his programme at Burton-on-Trent before returning to the United States. And as important to the Gazette as the sentencing of the Wyrley “cattle-killer” was the story right next to it:

  YORKSHIRE RAILWAY SMASH

  Two trains wrecked in a tunnel

  One killed, 23 injured

  BIRMINGHAM MAN’S THRILLING EXPERIENCE

  He was held at Stafford for another twelve days, during which time his parents were allowed daily visits. He found this more painful than if he had been hustled into a van and driven to the most distant part of the kingdom. In this long farewelling each of them behaved as if George’s current predicament was some bureaucratic error soon to be remedied by an appeal to the appropriate official. The Vicar had received many letters of support and was already talking enthusiastically of a public campaign. To George this zeal seemed to border on hysteria, and its origins to lie in guilt. George did not feel his situation to be temporary, and his father’s plans did not bring him any comfort. They seemed more an expression of religious belief than anything else.

  After twelve days George was transferred to Lewes. Here he received a new uniform of coarse biscuit-coloured linen. There were two broad vertical stripes up the front and back, and thick, clumsily printed arrows. They gave him ill-fitting knickerbockers, black stockings and boots. A prison officer explained that he was a star man, and therefore would begin his sentence with three months’ separate—it might be longer, it wouldn’t be shorter. Separate meant solitary confinement. That was what all star men began with. George misunderstood at first: he thought he was being called a star man because his case had attracted notoriety; perhaps the perpetrators of especially heinous crimes were deliberately kept apart from other prisoners, who might vent their anger on a horse-mutilator. But no: a star man was simply the term for a first offender. If you come back, he was told, you will be classed as an intermediary; and if your returns are frequent, as an ordinary or a professional. George said he had no intention of coming back.

  He was taken before the Governor, an old military man who surprised him by staring at the name before him and asking politely how it was to be pronounced.

  “Aydlji, sir.”

  “Ay-dl-ji,” repeated the Governor. “Not that you’ll be much except a number here.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Church of England, it says.”

  “Yes. My father is a Vicar.”

  “Indeed. Your mother . . .” The Governor did not seem to know how to ask the question.

  “My mother is Scottish.”

  “Ah.”

  “My father is a Parsee by birth.”

  “Now I’m with you. I was in Bombay in the Eighties. Fine city. You know it well, Ay-dl-ji?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never left England, sir. Though I have been to Wales.”

  “Wales,” said the Governor musingly. “You’re one up on me then. Solicitor, it says.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ve rather a slump in solicitors at the moment.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Solicitors—we’ve a slump in ’em at the moment. Normally we have one or two. One year we had more than half a dozen, I recall. But we got rid of our last solicitor a few months ago. Not that you’d have been able to talk to him much. You’ll find the rules here are strict, and fully enforced, Mr. Ay-dl-ji.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Still, we’ve got a couple of stockbrokers with us, and a banker as well. I tell people, if you want to see a true cross-section of society, you should visit Lewes Prison.” He was accustomed to saying th
is, and paused for the usual effect. “Not that we have any members of the aristocracy, I hasten to add. Or”—with a glance at George’s file—“any Church of England ministers at present. Though we have had the occasional one. Indecency, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now I’m not going to ask exactly what you did, or why you did it, or whether you did it, or whether any petition you might forward to the Home Secretary stands more chance than a mouse with a mongoose, because in my experience all that’s a waste of time. You’re in prison. Serve your sentence, obey the rules, and you won’t get into any further trouble.”

  “As a lawyer, I am used to rules.”

  George meant this neutrally, but the Governor looked up as if it might have been a piece of insolence. Eventually, he settled for saying, “Quite.”

  There were indeed a large number of rules. George found the prison officers to be decent fellows, yet bound hand and foot by red tape. There was no talking to other prisoners. There was no crossing of legs or folding of arms in chapel. There was a bath once a fortnight, and a search of the prisoner’s self and belongings whenever the necessity arose.

  On the second day, a warder came into George’s cell and asked if he had a bed-rug.

  George thought this an unnecessary question. It was perfectly plain that he had a multi-coloured and reasonably heavy bed-rug, which the officer could not miss.

  “Yes, I do, thank you very much.”

  “What do you mean, thank you very much?” asked the warder with more than a touch of belligerance.

  George remembered his police interrogations. Perhaps his tone had been too forward. “I mean, I do,” he said.

  “Then it must be destroyed.”

  Now he was completely lost. This was a rule which had not been explained to him. He was careful with his reply, and especially with its tone.

  “I do apologize, but I have not been here long. Why should you wish to destroy my bed-rug, which is both a comfort and, I imagine, in the harsher months, a necessity?”

  The warder looked at him and slowly began to laugh. He laughed so much that a colleague ducked into the cell to see if he was all right.

  “Not bed-rug, number 247, bed-bug.”

  George half-smiled in return, uncertain if prisoners were allowed to do so under prison regulations. Perhaps only if granted permission. At any rate, the story passed into prison lore, and followed him down the succeeding months. That Hindoo lived such a sheltered life he didn’t even know what a bed-bug was.

  He discovered other discomforts instead. There were no proper conveniences, and a lack of privacy when it was most required. Soap was of a very poor quality. There was also an idiotic regulation that all shaving and barbering had to be done in the open air, which resulted in many prisoners—George included—catching colds.

  He quickly became accustomed to the altered rhythm of his life. 5:45 rise. 6:15 doors unlocked, slops collected, bedclothes hung up to air. 6:30 tools served round, then work. 7:30 breakfast. 8:15 fold up bedding. 8:35 chapel. 9:05 return. 9:20 go to exercise. 10:30 return. Governor’s rounds and other bureaucracy. 12 dinner. 1:30 dinner tins collected, then work. 5:30 supper, then tools collected and put outside for the next day. 8 bed.

  Life was harsher and colder and more lonely than he had ever known it; but he was helped by this rigid structure to the day. He had always lived to a strict timetable; also with a heavy workload, whether as schoolboy or solicitor. There had been very few holidays in his life—that outing to Aberystwyth with Maud was a rare exception—and fewer luxuries, except those of the mind and spirit.

  “The things star men miss the most,” said the Chaplain, on the first of his weekly visits, “is the beer. Well, not just the star men. Intermediaries and ordinaries too.”

  “Fortunately, I do not drink.”

  “And the second thing is the cigarettes.”

  “Again, I am lucky in that regard.”

  “And the third is the newspapers.”

  George nodded. “That has been a severe deprivation already, I admit. I have been in the habit of reading three papers a day.”

  “If there was anything I could do to help . . .” said the Chaplain. “But the rules . . .”

  “It is perhaps better to do entirely without something than hope from time to time that you might receive it.”

  “I wish others had your attitude. I’ve seen men go crazy for a cigarette or a drink. And some of them miss their girls terribly. Some of them miss their clothes, some of them miss things they never even knew they were fond of, like the smell outside the back door on a summer’s night. Everyone misses something.”

  “I am not being complacent,” replied George. “I am just able to think practically in the matter of newspapers. In other respects I am like everyone else, I am sure.”

  “And what do you miss most?”

  “Oh,” replied George, “I miss my life.”

  The Chaplain seemed to imagine that George, as the son of a clergyman, would draw his principal comfort and consolation from the practise of his religion. George did not disabuse him, and he attended chapel more willingly than most; but he knelt and sang and prayed in the same spirit as he put out his slops and folded his bedding and worked, as something to help get him through the day. Most of the prisoners went to work in the sheds, where they made mats and baskets; a star man doing three months’ separate had to work in his own cell. George was given a board and bundles of heavy yarn. He was shown how to plait the yarn, using the board as a pattern. He produced, slowly and with great effort, oblongs of thick plaited material to a determined size. When he had finished six, they were taken away. Then he started another batch, and another.

  After a couple of weeks, he asked a prison officer what the purpose of these shapes might be.

  “Oh, you should know, 247, you should know.”

  George tried to think where he might have come across such material before. When it was clear he was at a loss, the warder picked up two of the completed oblongs, and pressed them together. Then he held them beneath George’s chin. When this gained no response, he put them beneath his own chin and started opening and closing his mouth in a wet and noisy fashion.

  George was baffled by this charade. “I am afraid not.”

  “Oh, come on. You can get it.” The warder made noisier and noiser chomping sounds.

  “I cannot guess.”

  “Horses’ nose-bags, 247, horses’ nose-bags. Must be congenial, seeing as you’re a man familiar with about horses.”

  George felt a sudden numbness. So he knew; they all knew; they talked and joked about it. “Am I the only person making these?”

  The warder grinned. “Don’t count yourself so special, 247. You’re doing the plaiting, you and half a dozen others. Some do the sewing together. Some make the ropes for tying round the horse’s head. Some put them all together. And some pack them up for sending off.”

  No, he wasn’t special. That was his consolation. He was just a prisoner among prisoners, working as they worked, someone whose crime was no more alarming than that of many others, someone who could choose to be well-behaved or badly behaved, but had no choice about his fundamental status. Even being a solicitor here was not unusual, as the Governor had pointed out. He decided to be as normal as it was possible to be, given the circumstances.

  When told that he would serve six months’ separate rather than just three, George did not complain, or even ask the reason. The truth was, he thought that what newspapers and books referred to as “the horrors of solitary confinement” were grossly exaggerated. He would rather have too little company than too much of the wrong sort. He was still permitted to exchange words with the warders, the Chaplain, and the Governor on his rounds, even if he did have to wait for them to speak first. He could use his voice in chapel, singing the hymns and joining in the responses. And during exercise, permission was usually given to talk; though finding common ground with the fellow walking beside you was not always st
raightforward.

  There was, furthermore, a capital library at Lewes, and the librarian called twice a week to take away books he had finished with and replenish his shelf. He was allowed to borrow one work of an educational nature and one “library” book per week. By “library” book he was to understand anything from a popular novel to a volume of the classics. George set himself to read all the great works of English literature, and the histories of significant nations. He was naturally permitted a Bible in his cell; though he found increasingly that after four hours struggling with board and yarn each afternoon, it was not the cadences of Holy Writ that he yearned for, but the next chapter of Sir Walter Scott. At times, shut in his cell, reading a novel, safe from the rest of the world, his brightly coloured bed-rug catching the corner of his eye, George felt a sense of order that was almost edging towards contentment.

  He learned from his father’s letters that there had been a public outcry at his verdict. Mr. Voules had taken up his case in Truth, and a petition was being raised by Mr. R. D. Yelverton, late Chief Justice of the Bahamas, now of Pump Court in the Temple. Signatures were being gathered, and already many solicitors in Birmingham, Dudley and Wolverhampton had given their support. George was touched to discover that the signatories included Greenway and Stentson; they had always been decent dogs, those two. Witnesses were being interviewed, and testimonials to George’s character gathered from schoolmasters, professional colleagues, and members of his family. Mr. Yelverton had even been in receipt of a letter from Sir George Lewis, the greatest criminal lawyer of the day, expressing his considered opinion that George’s conviction was fatally flawed.