The Sleep of Reason (41 page)

During the morning I had noticed Mrs Pateman in the courtroom, without her husband. I followed her out, and said that if she cared, I could visit her that afternoon. As I spoke to her (she was looking frightened, her eyes darting round like her daughter’s) I noticed that two journalists were watching us. As we knew already, young Charles’ forecasts hadn’t been entirely wrong.

Going back to Martin, I found him among a knot of lawyers in the hall, all simmering with gossip and rumours. Yes, naturally the defence had wanted to make this plea from the beginning. The only resistance had come from the two women. Or really, said someone, with the satisfaction of a born insider, from one of them. It had been the woman Ross who hadn’t co-operated with the psychiatrists. Co-operated about as much as she did in court this morning. The gossip sparked round.

She said that she despised them.

The other one had been willing to play.

But they’d stuck together up to now. If Ross wasn’t agreeable, then Pateman wouldn’t insist.

Tagging on behind the master, as usual.

The previous two nights, their solicitors had been working on them. So had Ted Benskin. Last night they thought that Ross had given way. If they wanted to switch the case, she’d go along.

Did she go along this morning? You saw her hit the ceiling.

Among the buzz, a quiet voice said that he was wondering whether that wasn’t a put-up job. The quiet voice came from a young man, possibly a law student, about the age I had been when I first attended this assize.

He meant, if they were going to prove she wasn’t responsible, she had given them something to go on, hadn’t she?

An older man said, he didn’t believe anyone could act as well as that. She just cracked.

She was horrifying, said another.

If you’d been to many criminal trials, said one of the clerks, you’d be ready to believe anything. She might have been acting, she might not. Everything seemed about as likely or unlikely as anything else.

Ted Benskin will have to put her in the box, won’t he?

A couple of hours later, I was walking along the street, now familiar, now repelling, to the Patemans’ house. The smell of curry. The wind, still high, whistled down an entry. Pencilled cards, names of tenants, beside one front door: pop music from a bedroom.

When I rang the bell, Mrs Pateman was there, as though she had been waiting in the passage.

“It’s very good of you, I’m sure,” she said.

In the little sitting-room, the fire was bright, as I hadn’t seen it when Mr Pateman was there to supervise. Her attempt to welcome me, perhaps? The disinfectant was not so pungent, but the room was still pressingly dark, although through the single window which gave on to the backyard one could see that the sun was coming out. We were alone in the house.

“He’s gone off to work today,” she said. She was answering a question I hadn’t asked: in his absence, she seemed less diminutive. “I told him to. It keeps his mind off it, if he’s got something to do.”

As for her son, I knew already that, from the day Arnold Shaw’s resignation was announced, he had been absenting himself from his new university in order to campaign at his old one. Full restitution for the four dismissed students! Dick Pateman had organised placard-carrying processions (the dismissals were a year old now, and the two bright students were doing well elsewhere). The university gave out the news that, at the summer convocation, the ex-Vice-Chancellor was to receive an honorary degree. More processions by Dick Pateman and his followers. No degree for Shaw! Insult to student body! All this was happening during the police court proceedings against Dick’s sister, and in the weeks before the trial. Could anyone be so fanatical? asked charitable persons such as the Gearys. And they found something like menace in it.

I was trying to explain to Mrs Pateman about the trial. It was all changed now, she understood that, didn’t she? The lawyers were going to admit that the boy had been killed.

“They did it, did they?” She seemed less shrewd than on the evening she took me into the empty front room.

“Never mind what happened. You won’t hear much more about it.”

“They took him there, didn’t they?”

I said, now the whole point was, whatever had happened, they mightn’t have been responsible for what they did.

“They’re going to say,” said Mrs Pateman, flickering-eyed. “that she’s not all there?” With a gesture curiously like a schoolgirl’s, she tapped a forefinger against her temple.

“Something like that.” I told her that they would put it in their own language, it would sound strange.

“She did something, of course she did. And they’re going to say she’s not all there.”

She looked at me with an expression open, confiding, and somehow free from apprehension.

“I can’t take it in,” she said.

Margaret and I had been wrong, or at least half-wrong, when we sat in the station buffet imagining her feelings. So far as I could reach her, she wasn’t covering up or making excuses. But she spoke as though she were shut off from the facts, or as though they hadn’t entered or touched her.

She asked: “What will they do to her?”

I said it depended on which way the trial now went. If this new plea didn’t succeed, she would go to prison (“they’ll say for life, but you understand, it doesn’t mean anything like that”): if the plea did succeed, then it would probably be a mental hospital.

“When will they let her out?”

“They’ll have to be satisfied, you know, that she’s not going to be a danger to anyone else.”

“She won’t be, they needn’t vex themselves about that.”

For an instant I misunderstood her. I thought she was shielding her daughter.

She went on: “I’m not saying anything for her, she’s done whatever she has done. But she’s got her head screwed on, has Kitty. She’ll be careful, she won’t let the police get hold of her again.”

Now that I had understood her, I was astonished. On the instant, that struck me as the strangest thing I had yet heard during the trial.

She glanced at me, her eyes for once meeting mine. She said: “I can’t take it in. I suppose it’s a blessing that I can’t.”

Yes, she was grateful, but she hadn’t been able to pray, she said. She hadn’t been able to pray much for a long time.

“He’s been praying every day,” she told me. He had taken to going to early morning service, and then at home, in their bedroom, he prayed out loud each night. He was praying for help against all their dangers and against all the enemies who were working to do harm to him and his.

From her account (was there, even that afternoon, while she was lost and numbed, a trace of slyness?) it seemed he could still believe that Kitty and himself had been conspired against.

“Sometimes I get frightened about him,” she said.

Not of him, though that must sometimes, perhaps often, have been true. But she was frightened for him. He might hear something in this trial that he couldn’t reject or alter. He might not be able to protect himself. She had been worrying for years, worrying since the children had been young, about how much (it was her own phrase) his mind could stand.

THAT evening Martin and I did not talk in private, for we were having supper with the Gearys. I mentioned that George, for the second day running, had not turned up in court. Within minutes Denis was on the telephone to one of his staff, asking him to find out whether Passant was “all right”. It didn’t take half-an-hour before the reply came back. There was nothing the matter with him, Denis called to us from the receiver: he would return to the trial when it wasn’t a “waste of time”. That sounded like a direct quotation. I was glancing at Martin as Denis sat down again, giving out a satisfaction similar in kind to Lord Lufkin’s in his days of glory, demonstrating how smoothly his organisation worked. We picked up the conversation, quite remote from George, all friendly in the bright clean room. Martin was so disciplined that I couldn’t tell where his real thoughts were. It might have been that he had the same difficulty about me.

Next morning, once more in the official box, we were listening to Benskin’s opening. It was short and subdued. Subdued out of his normal style, for he had more taste for drama than the other barristers in the case. But he was deliberately adapting himself to the tone of the trial. He had a reputation for wit, and that he had also to suppress. His expression was stiff, the humour strained out of it, as he faced the jury. “My lord told you yesterday that my learned friend Mr Wilson and I are, on behalf of our clients, asking you to take a new consideration of this crime. I am speaking here in agreement with Mr Wilson, because there is no shade of difference between us, nor, and I want you to remember this, between Miss Ross and Miss Pateman. We do not dispute that this young boy was killed – and everyone in court must want to express the most profound sympathy to his mother and father. We do not dispute that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were the agents of that killing. That having been admitted by us without reserve, you can dismiss from your minds any minor matters of controversy. I have just stated the central, plain and simple fact. But we now wish to prove to you that, while they were agents for this killing, Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not responsible for their actions in the sense that you and I would be, if we performed such actions. My lord will instruct you about the nature of the law in relation to diminished responsibility. But perhaps it will be some assistance to you if I read to you from Clause 2 of the Homicide Act 1957.
Persons suffering from diminished responsibility
. He shall not be guilty of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility… You will notice that the definition is wide. Abnormality of mind – leading to impairment of mental responsibility. If I may, I would like to say a few words about how that clause applies to these two young women and this case. My lord will I know correct me if he finds I am at fault. When we claim, and we have no doubt that we shall prove it to you, that they perpetrated this killing with diminished responsibility, or impairment of responsibility, we do not intend to state that, either at the time or now, they were or are clinically insane. You have all probably heard of the old McNaghten rules under which a defendant was only free from guilt if at the time of his offence he couldn’t tell right from wrong. We do not state that either, for these two young women. What we do state is something different, about which we all have to think as clearly and with as little emotion as we can. Let me put it this way. If you and I perform a criminal action, or any other action as far as that goes, we can be assumed to do it in a state of complete responsibility. Or, if you like, free choice. If, for instance, I suddenly assault Mr Bosanquet with this heavy inkwell in front of me” (just for an instant that old-Adam-buffoon was leaking out) “you will consider me, and I hope rightly consider me, fully and completely responsible for that action. And that is true of you and me in every action, decision, and choice right through our lives.” (Benskin had taken a first in Greats, but he wasn’t proposing to puzzle the jury with any of the textbook questions.) “That”, Benskin went on, “is the normal condition of normal people. It is true of you and me. It is true of nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of one thousand in the world round us. There are some, however, of whom it is not true. You will know this from your own experience. There are some whom we cannot consider responsible for all their actions. Through some defect of personality, or what the Act calls abnormality of mind, they cannot stop performing actions which may be foolish or may be anti-social or may be hellish. We suggest to you – I am only saying we suggest because we are certain – that that is the case with the two young women in the dock. Their actions have been hellish. I should be the last person to minimise how appalling and unspeakable they are. But we suggest that Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not responsible for these actions. Clearly we want the help of eminent experts who will give us their professional judgment about these young women’s personalities and mental condition. I shall begin straight away by calling Dr Adam Cornford.”

Adam Cornford. Qualifications. First classes, research fellowship at Trinity, membership of the Royal College of Physicians, psychiatric training. Few groups had ever had more academic skills than his family and Margaret’s and their Cambridge relatives. Like a number of them, like Margaret herself, he looked abnormally young for his age. He was actually forty-six, within months of Margaret’s age. His hair was fair, he was good-looking in a fashion at the same time boyish, affable and dominating. His voice, as with Austin Davidson, was light and clear.

From the beginning, he spoke unassumingly, without any affectation, but also like a man who hadn’t considered the possibility of being outfaced. Yes, he had been asked to examine Miss Ross. He ought to explain that he hadn’t been able to make as complete a psychiatric examination as he would have wished. At their first meeting, she wouldn’t communicate. We’ll come to that later, said Benskin. She did talk to you at later meetings?

To some extent, said Adam Cornford. Then he went on, stitch-and-thread through the questions, Cornford easy but conscientious, Benskin as clever, trying to smudge the qualifications down. Miss Ross was in intelligence well above the average of the population. She was not in any recognised sense psychotic. She had some marked schizoid tendencies, but not to a psychotic extent. A great many people had schizoid tendencies, including a high proportion of the most able and dutiful citizens. Those tendencies were often correlated with obsessive cleanliness and hand washing, as with Miss Ross. It was important not to be confused (Cornford threw in the aside) by professional jargon: it was useful to psychiatrists, but could mislead others. Schizophrenia was an extreme condition, which Miss Ross was nowhere near, and she was no more likely to be afflicted by it than many young women of her age.