The Sleep of Reason (33 page)

Furtively she closed the door behind us. I sat on one divan, Mrs Pateman on the other, which lay underneath the window: in the black uncovered glass one of the lamps was reflected full and clear. Close to me stood the latest model of a record player. There were other gadgets, well cared-for, stacked neatly on the shelves, a tape recorder, a couple of transistor radios.

Mrs Pateman gave me a wistful, ingratiating smile.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Taken aback, I stammered a reply: “Am I sure of what?”

“Are you sure what’s happened?”

The eyes in the small, wrinkled face were fixed on mine.

I said “No”. She was still gazing at me.

“It’s a good job he doesn’t believe she’s done anything, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it is,” I answered.

“He won’t believe it whatever happens. It’s just as well. He couldn’t face it if he did.”

She said it simply. She was speaking of the husband who dominated her as though he were sensitive, easily broken, the soul whom she had to protect.

“Are you sure yourself?” she asked again, just as simply.

I hesitated.

“I should have to be absolutely sure to tell you that.” It was as near a straight answer as I could give. It seemed to satisfy her. She said: “I can’t bear to think of her in there.”

The words sounded unhysterical, unemotional, almost as though she were referring to a physical distress.

“I can understand that.”

“She’s got such nice ways with her when she tries, Kitty has.”

I mentioned – we were both being matter-of-fact – that I had met her once or twice.

“And she often did good things for people, you know. She was always free with her money, Kitty was.”

She added: “Her father used to tell her off about that. But it went in one ear and out of the other.”

Her face was so mobile, for an instant there was the recollection of a smile.

“I’ve been worrying about her a long time, as far as that goes.”

“Have you?”

“I thought there was something going wrong with her. But I couldn’t find out what it was. It wasn’t just having a good time–”

“Did she talk to you?” I put in.

She shook her head.

“That’s the trouble with children. They’re your own and you want to help them and they won’t let you.”

She went on, without any façade at all: “I don’t know where I went wrong with her. She always kept herself to herself, even when she was a little girl. She had her secrets and she never let on what they were. I didn’t handle her right, of course I didn’t. She was the clever one, you know. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us put together.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself too much,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

I replied in the same tone in which she asked: “Yes, if anything bad happened to my son, I know I should.”

“I can’t bear to think of her in there,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid you’ve got to live with it.”

“How long for?”

“You don’t need me to tell you, do you?”

Her face was twisted, but no tears came. All she asked me was that, if I saw her during the trial, I should tell her any news without her husband knowing. She wouldn’t understand the lawyers, she said, it would be over her head. That was all. Very quietly she opened the door of the room, and then the front door. She whispered a thank you, and then saw me into the street without another word.

THE sky over Hyde Park, as Margaret and I sat together in the afternoons, was free and open, after the Patemans’ parlour. The lights of the London streets were comfortable as we drove out at night. It might have been the only existence that either of us knew. But Margaret was watching me with concern. She saw me go into the study to work each morning: she didn’t need telling that I had never found it harder. She didn’t need telling either that I was making excuses not to dine out or go into company.

One night, she had persuaded me to accept an invitation. At the dinner party, her glance came across to me more than once, seeing me behave in the way she used to envy when she herself was shy. Back in our own flat, she said: “You seemed to enjoy that.”

I said that for a time I did.

“You’ve still got more than your share of high spirits, haven’t you?”

“Other people might think so,” I said. “But they don’t know me as well as you do.”

“I think so too,” she replied. “It’s been lucky for both of us. But–”

She meant, she knew other things. A little later, after we had fallen silent, she said, without any warning: “What’s the worst part for you?”

“The worst part of what?”

“You know all right. The worst part of all this horror.” I met her eyes, brilliant and unevadable. Then I looked away. It was a long time before I could find any words. It was as hard to talk as in the dark period before we married, when we each bore a weight of uncertainty and guilt.

“I think,” I said haltingly at last, “that I’m outraged because I am so close to it. I feel it’s intolerable that this should have happened to me. I believe it’s as selfish as that.”

“That’s natural–”

“I believe it’s as petty as that.” Yet to me that outrage was as sharp as a moral feeling.

“But you’re not being quite honest. And you’re not being quite honest at your own expense.”

“It’s surprising how selfish one is.”

“Particularly,” she said, “when it’s not even true. I don’t believe for a moment that that is the worst of it for you.”

She added: “Is it?”

I was mute, not able to answer her, not able to trust either her insight or my own.

On another topic, however, which came up more than once, it was not that I wasn’t able to answer her, but that I wouldn’t. Just as, during my conversation with Cora Ross, so flat and banal, there had been questions pounding behind my tongue, so there were with Margaret.
What did she do? What did they say to each other? What was it like to do it?
For me in the jail, for Margaret in our drawing-room, those questions boiled up: out of a curiosity which was passionate, insistent, human, and at the same time corrupt. She was no purer than I was, and more ready to ask. I felt – with what seemed like a bizarre but unshakable hypocrisy – that she oughtn’t even to want to know. I didn’t give her, or alternatively muffled, some of the information that I actually possessed. I showed her the reports of the committal proceedings which, although they made a stir in the press, were tame and inexplicit.

Throughout those weeks I took no action which had any bearing on the case. It would have been easy to talk to counsel, but I didn’t choose. I had one of George’s neat impersonal notes, telling me the name of a psychiatrist who was to be called in his niece’s defence. It would have been easier still to talk to this man. He was a distant connection of Margaret’s, her mother having been a cousin of his. They both came from the same set of interbred academic families, and I had met him quite often. He was called Adam Cornford, and he was clever, tolerant, easy-natured, someone we looked forward to seeing. He was also, I told myself, a man of rigid integrity: nothing that I or anyone else said to him would alter his evidence by a word. That was true: but it wasn’t the reason why I shied away from speaking to him and even – as though he were an enemy whose presence I couldn’t bear – avoided going to a wedding at which he might be present.

My mood, I knew, was wearing Margaret down. I told her so, and told her I was sorry. She didn’t deny it. If I could have been more articulate, it would have been easier for her. She accepted – there was no argument, she took it for granted – that I should have to attend the trial. But she thought I oughtn’t to be left alone there, with no one to turn to. Would it be useful if she came herself? She would come for part of the time anyway, if her father didn’t need her. Who else? There weren’t many people, as I grew older, to whom I gave my intimacy. Charles March, perhaps Francis – but they were too far away from the roots of my youth. Without my knowing it at the time, Margaret rang up my brother Martin. He would understand it as the others couldn’t. Her relation with Martin had always been close: they couldn’t have been each other’s choice, and yet there was a tie between them as though it might have been pleasant if they had. She talked to him with that kind of trust. Yes, he was ready to hang about the trial in case I wanted him. But – and again I didn’t know it at the time – she found, as they talked, that he too, underneath his control and irony, seemed unusually affected.

One Sunday, when we had fetched Charles from school to have lunch at home, Margaret mentioned the date of the trial. The assizes would be beginning in April: how long would the trial take? Anyone’s guess, I was saying: probably three or four days, perhaps a week or two, depending on how the defence played it. Margaret told Charles that meant he might not be seeing much of me during the Easter holidays. I said, he could possibly endure that extreme deprivation. Charles gave a preoccupied grin.

After lunch, he and I were alone in the drawing-room. He was looking out of the window: it was a serene milky day in late February, smoky sunshine and mist, the branches on the trees just showing the first vestigial thickening.

Charles turned away and said: “So you’re going to this trial, are you?”

“Yes, I’ve got to.”

“Why have you got to?”

“One of those women is a niece of old George’s, you know.”

“I knew that.” He was sitting on the arm of a chair: his face was clouded. “But you can’t do any good.”

“I can’t desert him now,” I said.

“You won’t do any good. You won’t make any difference to him.”

“Perhaps a little,” I said.

“I doubt it,” said Charles. In a hard, minatory tone he went on: “I don’t think you ought to go.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“This trial will have all the press in the world. They’ll be after you.”

“I shall just be there in the court, that’s all–”

“Don’t fool yourself. You’re a conspicuous figure.”

“They might notice I was there,” I said. “Still–”

“This is going to be the horror of horrors. Don’t fool yourself. You ought to have learned by now that you’ll land yourself in trouble. Don’t you realise that someone is going to link you up with the Passants? There’ll be a lot of mud flying round. Some of the mud will stick. On you.”

His expression was so dark that my temper was rising. I tried to seem casual.

“I think you’re exaggerating,” I said. “But even if you weren’t, does it matter all that much?”

“I should have thought you’d had enough of it,” he replied, not with kindness so much as reproach.

“Look here, I’ve known George since I wasn’t much older than you are today. Do you really expect me to leave him absolutely alone
now
?”

“If you could do any good, no.”

“Whether I can do any good or not–” I was speaking harshly.

“That’s sentimental. You’re taking a stupid risk which won’t do any good to him and will do you some harm. There’s no justification at all.”

“Good God, Carlo,” I cried. “You’re talking like a Chief Whip–”

“I don’t care what I’m talking like. I’m telling you, you’re being sentimental, that’s all.”

“You really think I ought to abandon an old friend just to avoid a bit of slander–”

“That’s not a good piece of translation.”

“Put it any way you like.”

“I’ll accept it your way. And I say – if you can’t be any good to him, the answer is yes.”

I was bitterly angry with him. Was it because he reminded me – too nakedly – of an aspect of myself when young, when I was rapacious and at the same time calculating the odds? Was it also because, with a cowardice of the nerves, I should have liked to agree with him and follow his advice?

“Do you believe,” I said, my temper grinding into my voice, “that you’ll be able to live your own life without taking this kind of risk? My God, if you can be that cold, what sort of life are you going to have?”

Charles had become angry in his turn. His skin, which, different from mine or Margaret’s, didn’t colour in the sun, took on a kind of pastel flush. He said: “I shall take more risks than you ever did.”

“Say that when you’ve done it.”

“I shall take more risks than you did. But I shall know what I’m taking them for.

“As for being cold,” he went on, eyes black with resentment, “I think you’re wrong. I’m not sentimental, if that’s what you mean. I never shall be. I’m not going to waste so much of myself.”

For some time we sat in mutinous silence, each of us hurt, each of us throwing the blame upon the other. Then Margaret entered, the low sunlight streaming on to her face, which unlike ours was tranquil and bright. In an instant, though, she felt the fury in the room. It astonished her, for she had scarcely heard Charles and me exchange a bad-tempered word.

“Whatever’s the matter with you two?” she burst out.

“Carlo’s been telling me that I oughtn’t to go to the trial,” I said, shrugging it off.

“No,” she spoke to Charles, “he’s right to go.” She said it soothingly, but Charles, smothering his pride, began to tease her: why was she always so certain of her moral position? The teasing went on, light and easy. He could talk so easily because of the difference between them. That afternoon he couldn’t have talked to me like that. He didn’t give a glance in my direction. He was responding to her with fondness and detachment. He couldn’t have told, or wanted to know, how he was responding to me: and nor in reverse could I.

AS Margaret and I approached the old Assize Hall, there was a smell of moist grass, sweet and taunting. It was the kind of April morning which, when one is happy, is lit up with hope: on the patch of lawn beside the steps, dew sparkled in the wave of sunlight. In front of the Georgian façade, policemen were standing, faces fresh in the clear light. The smell of grass returned, sweet and seminal. Looming behind the building was a Gothic wall, a relic of the historic town: we were half-a-mile away from the shopping streets, and close to the quarter where I had taken Charles for a walk the year before.