In Pursuit of the English (25 page)

‘Dan,’ said Flo, warningly, giving ingratiating smiles to everyone.

‘I don’t care who hears,’ shouted Dan, over the drone from the Court, through a door left slightly open because of the heat. Someone from inside the Court tiptoed over and shut the door. Every eye followed the squat figure in folds and tags and pleats of grimy black, who frowned at us so portentously that the young Counsel blushed: he, like the rest of us, had forgotten his surroundings. ‘Not so loud, please,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dan automatically.

There was a high titter from the other doorway. The old lady, white-faced and trembling with hatred, glared in at us from among other faces, which were curious or amused or indignant. Our lawyer gave her a puzzled glance and might have asked who she was, but Dan was speaking again. ‘When I left the Navy I had four hundred pounds. Do you know how I got that?’

‘There are certain traditions of the British Navy,’ said Counsel, conveying that he found the word Navy, on Dan’s lips, repulsive.

‘Oh. I know that,’ said Dan, as if delighted to be reminded, sharing them, so to speak, with Counsel, ‘For people with the money there’s nothing like it. I was personal servant once to the Surgeon Commander. His wife was in England. Ah, he knew how to enjoy himself. There was a girl. She fell for my boss. Five months of it, every night, war or no war, being stuck in harbour on account of a torpedo. I used to let her out, three, four in the morning, five shillings a time. Plenty of money there. Dan, she used to say. I know you are my friend. Yes, miss, I used to say. She was a lovely girl. Black hair. Black eyes. Lovely figure.’ Dan let his fingers
curve together on the table, with such appreciation that various eminent legal gentlemen winced and looked away. ‘I used to sit down below and envy him. Then his wife came. She went sniffing about in his pyjamas and all over.’ Dan imitated a cold shrewish drawl: ‘“Really, darling, I cannot
think
what you’ve been doing.” She thought all right. She used to come to me, smiling sweet as cherries in syrup. “Dan, I do hope my husband has been comfortable?” And she’d give me a look to kill.’ Dan, without moving his head, let his eyes move in a cold curious stare from Counsel’s face, to the lawyer’s. ‘But sixpence, that’s all.’ He bared his teeth in a silent, contemptuous laugh. ‘And all the time, my boss was hanging around trying to hear. He’d come in, casual. “Women are curious,” he’d say. “They’re as curious as monkeys.” I’d say: “That’s right, sir. Wear the life out of a man, a curious woman. They go on and go on until you think what’s the use, might as well tell and be done with it.”’ Dan stuck his fist into his left pocket and brought out an imaginary note. His right hand accepted his note with oft-hand gratitude, stuffing it carelessly into the other pocket. ‘ “That’s right,” he’d say. “But it’s worth keeping your mouth shut in the long run.’” Dan heaved out more soundless laughter. ‘In one way and another I did well out of that couple.’

‘Tell them about the nylons,’ shouted Flo. ‘go on, tell them.’ Dan froze. ‘What nylons?’

‘You know, the nylons …’ Flo saw she had made a mistake, and sat smiling pathetically, while Dan glared at her.

Rose whispered to me: ‘Dan brought in nylons all through the war, he wound them round and round his body under the uniform. A smuggler, that’s what he was.’

Dan said hastily, ‘And so that’s how I bought ray house, fair and square, with four hundred pounds I had after the war.’

‘My house. My house!’ came a shrill voice from the door.

‘Who is that?’ asked Counsel sharply.

‘That’s those dirty old beasts, dear,’ said Flo. ‘Them what we’re here for.’

‘Good God,’ said the lawyer. He dropped his voice: ‘How long have they been listening?’ He rose and slammed the door.

‘But I didn’t know you’d mind,’ said Flo. ‘They always listen, dear. That’s what they’re like.’

‘Well. I really don’t know!’ said the Counsel. He looked at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime.

‘So if the Judge could take my war service and the Lascar into account,’ said Dan, remembering why he had begun his confidences.

‘I’m going to lunch,’ said Counsel, and went, deeply offended. The lawyer went with us to lunch, to make sure nothing worse could happen. It was a difficult meal. Dan’s bad temper had focused itself on Jack. ‘Yes,’ he kept saying, belligerently. ‘Yes. And if we lose the case I’ll know who to thank.’

‘Now, now,’ the lawyer said. ‘Now, now. It’s not everyone who can make a good witness.’

‘That’s right, sweetheart,’ said Flo, trying to shield her son, ‘And he took a day off from work and all to help you.’

‘Work,’ said Dan. ‘Work. It’s not everyone who can work, either.’

‘Jack, why don’t you run along off to the pictures,’ said Rose.

‘But I want to see what happens in Court,’ said Jack.

Rose signalled to him with her eyes that Dan should be avoided: but Jack said: ‘The Court’s for nothing, and I’d have to pay for the pictures.’

‘That’s right,’ said Flo, trying to smile her man into good temper. ‘And so it won’t cost nothing if he stays.’

‘You can say cost,’ said Dan. ‘You can say it, you’re always saying you’re short of money, and I know where it goes.’

‘Now, now,’ said the lawyer. ‘There’s our case to consider. Let’s all keep calm and cool.’

Our case was on first after lunch. We went into the Court with Counsel’s anxious voice in our ears: ‘Do be careful what you say, please, please.’

They put Dan into the witness-box first. As soon as he was asked a question he replied: ‘I served my King and my
Country, sir.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said our Counsel, in a coldly disapproving voice. ‘But! did. All through the war.’ ‘What’s that?’ said the ludge. Counsel, very irritated, said that this man had served in the Navy. ‘So I see from his papers,’ said the Judge, indifferently. Dan’s face darkened. His mouth had already opened in a shout of ‘Justice!’ when Counsel hastily dismissed him, and before they had time to establish even one of the rehearsed points.

Counsel now made a long and efficient statement, from which it appeared the old people were a variety of maniacal criminal. Everyone listened in a matter-of-fact way, like actors at a play. ‘How well he does it,’ the Court officials seemed to be thinking, as they listened to the earnest and accomplished young man practising a sober rhetoric which would one day take him to far more impressive surroundings than these, to argue big cases, important cases, involving large sums of money and large reputations. They were watching him as if he were a promising schoolboy in his last year, overripe to show what he could do in the great world; and when he concluded, elaborately grave, his voice sinking to a well-sustained note of quiet confidence, the Judge nodded, as if to say. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll go far.’ Then he returned to his notes.

In a few moments the opposing Counsel called Dan back again. This was a poor sort of man, who had long ago lost all hope of taking flight away from this dreary and unimportant Court. He was thin, worried-looking, and his voice was edged with a persistent sarcasm. He kept saying: ‘I put it to you …’ at Dan; and with every repetition of the phrase, Dan’s face clenched with uncertainty, tasting each separate word for a hidden trap. He was quite confused, and waiting for a familiar landmark. He did not understand that this Counsel was trying to establish the fact that he was a liar. He had been counting on Dan to deny he locked the bathroom against his clients. After a long preamble, designed to trip Dan up, which luckily he understood not one word of. Counsel arrived at the bathroom and was confounded by the way Dan, finding himself on prepared ground, drew himself up and entered into the part of a
landlord concerned only to protect his tenants from the dirt and disease of the old couple. ‘And there are children in the house, too!’ Dan ended on a note of real sincerity. Thrown off balance, the opposing Counsel dismissed Dan, in order to find a fresh approach.

All this time the old people were sitting by themselves in a corner. The old man was slumped defeatedly against the back of a bench, suffering the continual jogs and jerks of his wife’s indignant elbow so slackly that each time she pushed that sharp bone into his side, his whole body slid a little way along the seat, till he righted himself with a straining pull of his shoulder muscles, pulling at the back of the high polished bench with a trembling hand. They were even older than I had thought, incredibly old, with the trembling fragility which comes to people so near their end that they have to conserve every movement in order that their strength may last through what they have to do. The old woman was trembling. A tiny parchment bag of bones, with a small white violent face on top; that was all she was, this terrible old woman of whom I’d heard so much and not really seen before. As the shameful disclosures about her way of living were made aloud for everyone to bear, she twisted her head about in a grimacing parody of scornful laughter, and cried in small gasps: ‘No, no, a lie,’ until the Judge looked gravely at her over his throne’s edge, and told her to be quiet. She put a handkerchief to her stretched and agonized mouth and remained still, but her trembling made the flowers on her soiled white hat rattle together, with a tiny dry sound; and the persistent dry rattling went on till people turned around to look, but the evidence of such misery in the midst of this official scene made them uncomfortable, and they turned away again.

By the time Dan had been dismissed for the second time, the Judge was in a bad temper. Details of emptied slop bowls, dirty lavatories, filth thrown downstairs, it was an offence to have to listen to them.

At first sight, Flo was a welcome change in the witness-box; a starched black Britannia, the embodiment of wrathful virtue. But as soon as she began to answer questions, it was
a different matter, for the blood of her Italian grandmother responded at once to the drama of the situation; and our Counsel, with the expression of a man hurrying over the last few yards to safety, kept cutting her short, for fear of what might emerge.

Then the other Counsel took over. As he stood there in his dull black, the knobbly wig kept slipping backwards, exposing a large sweating expanse of red scalp, and he glanced continually at the notes in his hand, like a dull pupil in class. It was not that he had a bad case, in fact I think both our Counsel and lawyer expected him to win it; but he looked as if he hadn’t had a good one for years, and had forgotten the habit of confidence. And his manner was even more ponderously sarcastic than with Dan. With each supercilious phrase, Flo got more upset; she was already off balance because our own Counsel had shown no friendly emotion; and this man’s display of thin and peevish hostility caused her voice to rise and her gestures to enlarge.

‘Surely,’ grated Counsel, ‘no reasonable person would put
pepper on
tulips?’

Flo shrugged. ‘That’s what I keep saying all the time, dear.’

‘You say …’ and Counsel consulted his notes, for the effectiveness of the gesture, ‘that she had a dish of pepper. Now what do you mean by that?’ Flo stared at him. ‘A
dish
of pepper,’ he creaked; and stood smiling with prepared amusement.

‘Well, if you don’t know what I mean I can’t help you.’ Flo held an imaginary pepper-pot over the edge of the witness-box, and shook it hard.

‘You mean a pepper-pot perhaps?’ smiled the Counsel.

‘I don’t mind what you call it, dear, it’s all the same to me.’

‘Mrs Bolt,’ said the Judge severely, ‘you really must not call Learned Counsel dear.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Proceed.’

After a pause Counsel said: ‘You will admit that pepper is very expensive.’

Flo raised her hands. ‘God knows,’ she exclaimed, ‘the way prices are going up it’s a wonder we are alive to tell the tale.’

‘I asked you if pepper was not very expensive.’

Flo stared again. ‘That’s what I said.’

‘Just exactly how much does pepper cost?’

‘I don’t rightly know, because I’m still using the pepper my friend from Edgware gave me when she had the blitz on her shop.’

‘Mrs Bolt,’ drawled the Judge, peering over the edge of his table like an irritated tortoise, ‘do please answer the questions put to you.’

Flo blushed at the injustice of it. ‘But I did answer. He said, how much does pepper cost, and I said I don’t know because…’

The Judge said reprovingly to Counsel: ‘I really do think the price of pepper is irrelevant to the point at issue.’

‘I was trying to establish a point, my lord.’

‘I think I can see the point you were trying to establish.’

At this evidence of the Judge’s short temper, our Counsel visibly brightened; but Flo was still miserable. ‘I was only trying to tell him because he …’

‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,’ said the Judge.

After a long pause. Counsel pulled himself together for another onslaught. ‘What time of the year was this?’ he demanded cunningly.

‘Time of year? Tulip time.’

‘You don’t know the exact month?’

‘The time tulips bloom,’ said Flo, with irritation. ‘Spring. Don’t you know the time tulips flower?’

‘And when you saw pepper on the tulips, what did you do?’

‘Well, dear. I went out to have a look at it.’

‘Mrs Bolt, will you kindly not refer to Counsel as dear, I’ve told you already.’

‘Ah, my lord, it slipped out, and I’m sorry, sir.’

‘How do you know it was pepper?’

‘How did I know? It was red, like pepper.’

‘Red?
Red
pepper?’

‘Paprika,’ said Flo, patient but exasperated.

‘Oh!’ He consulted his notes, ‘I took you to mean white pepper.’

The Judge said: ‘I really do feel that the colour of the pepper was immaterial.’

‘My lord, is it likely that two old people on the old age pension should use red pepper. A rather exotic commodity, I should say.’

‘Y e e e e s,’ mumured the Judge.

‘Mrs Bolt, is it likely that your tenants should use expensive red pepper?’

‘Why not? The old witch crawled downstairs and stole it from me, you don’t catch her buying anything she can nip out of my cupboard if I forget to lock it.’

‘Mrs Bolt,’ said the Judge. ‘I see nothing about theft in your statement.’