The Sleep of Reason (49 page)

“She tried to be loyal, didn’t she?” he said to me.

I said yes.

The judge explained to Hargrave, who had not been present.

“The Ross girl was loyal to her friend this morning. She tried to take all the blame she could.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Hargrave.

“I don’t believe her,” said the judge.

“I meant, it shows there’s some good in her, after all,” Hargrave insisted, at the same time diffident and firm.

“I don’t believe that she was so much in charge.” The old man was wrapped in his thoughts. Then he looked up, eyes bright, hooded, enquiring.

“Do you know what went through my mind, when I was listening to that young woman in the box? And remember, I’ve been at this business not quite but almost since you two were born. I couldn’t help pitying anyone in her position. You can’t help it. But ought you to pity her? Think of what she’d done. She’d helped get hold of that little boy. I expect they promised him a treat. And they took him out there and tortured him. That was bad enough, but there was something else. He must have been frightened as none of us has ever been frightened. Just remind yourself what it was like your first days at prep school. You were eight years old and you’d got some brutes pestering you and you didn’t see any end to it. Well, that poor child must have gone through that a million times worse. All I hope is that he didn’t realise that they meant to kill him. I don’t know about you, Eliot, but I can’t imagine what he went through. Perhaps it’s a mercy not to have enough imagination. So I ask myself, ought you to pity her?”

“I think you ought,” said Hargrave.

“Do you?”

“I think we shall all need pity, judge,” Hargrave went on with his surprising firmness, “when it comes to the end.”

“Ah, you’re a reformer, you believe in redemption. Are you a reformer, Eliot?”

“Of course he is,” I had never seen Hargrave so assertive. He spoke across to me: “You’re on the side of the poor, you always have been–”

“That’s different,” I replied. “I’m afraid I’m not a reformer in your sense.”

“You don’t believe,” the judge asked Hargrave, “that any human being is beyond hope, do you?”

“Certainly not.”

“You should look at those two. And I tell you, the Ross girl isn’t the worst of them. I’ve got a suspicion that the little one is a fiend out of hell.”

That was startling. Not because no one had said it before: the old man knew no more about them than anyone else, he might not be right. But he hadn’t said it with loathing, more with a kind of resignation. It was that which shook both Hargrave and me, as we gazed at him, forking away at his sole, looking like a saddened eagle.

In time Hargrave recovered himself.

“You’re asking me to believe in evil,” he said.

“Don’t you?”

(Listening to Hargrave, I wasn’t comfortable. Yet he didn’t obtrude his faith: was I imagining a strand of complacency which wasn’t there?)

“No. We’ve all seen horrible happenings in our time, we’ve seen horrible happenings here. But, you know, in the future people are going to do better than we have done. It wouldn’t be easy to go on, would it, if one wasn’t sure of that?”

The judge didn’t wish to argue. Perhaps he too was uncomfortable with faith, or too considerate to disturb it. He may have known that Hargrave had done more practical good than most men, more than Mr Justice Fane and I could have done in several lifetimes.

“I don’t know that I believe in evil,” he contented himself by saying. “But I certainly believe in evil people.”

He cut himself a very large hunk of the local cheese. He had made a heartier lunch than Hargrave and I put together.

“It’ll soon be over now,” he said, like an echo of George Passant earlier that morning and sounding for the first time like a tired and aged man. Then he had a businesslike thought. “Unless Clive Bosanquet makes an even longer speech than usual. Clive is a good chap, but he will insist on not leaving any stone unturned. Within these four walls – if in any doubt he thinks it better to turn them back again. And that does take up a remarkable amount of time, you know.”

With the comfort of habit, he was mapping out the progress of the trial. His own summing up wouldn’t be over-long, he assured us. Nevertheless, he was tired, and it needed all his friendliness and good manners to prevent him from letting the meal end in silence.

THAT afternoon, with Kitty Pateman in the witness box, was for me both the most mystifying and most oppressive of the trial. The courtroom was as packed as it had been on the first two days: the three of us were sitting in the body of the court, with the Pateman family (Mr Pateman had reappeared that afternoon, and Dick attended for the first time) a few yards away, both men rigidly upright, the back of Mr Pateman’s head running straight down into his collar. Mrs Pateman turned once, caught my eye, and gave what, strain playing one of its tricks, looked exactly like a furtive but excited smile. A beam of sunlight began to fall directly on to people’s faces on the far side of the upper rows; as they fidgeted and tried to shut out the light, nerves were getting sharper, for I was not the only one who felt an inexplicable intensity all through the afternoon.

No one in that court but me had heard the judge’s remark about Kitty Pateman. As I sat listening to her, several times it came back to me, but it did nothing but add to the disquiet. For a strange thing was, that as the hours passed and Kitty talked, I couldn’t get any nearer forming an opinion about whether that remark had truth in it or not.

There were other strange things. Much of the time I, along with other observers, was certain that she was acting, and Jamie Wilson, without realising it, was helping her to act. His examination didn’t sound, and didn’t stay in the memory, like the ordinary questions-and-answers of a trial. It was much more like a conversation in which she was playing the major part, and a part which was quick-tongued, elaborate and bizarre.

Glance flitting to the jury box, the judge, once to her family, she described what she called her “first breakdown”, words hurrying out. Sometimes she could recall it all, sometimes she couldn’t: she had told the psychiatrists, but not everything, because she got flustered, and she didn’t like to mention that she had heard voices. Yes, voices when she was eighteen, that she thought someone was managing to produce in her radio set, tormenting her. Or perhaps taking charge of her, she didn’t know at the time, she was frightened, she thought she might be going “round the bend” or else something special was happening to her. She heard the voices over a period of months: sometimes they came just like a telephone message. They told her all sorts of things. They were advising her against her father. He was her enemy. He was keeping her at home, he was planning to keep her at home until her brother had grown up: he wanted her to be a prisoner. They told her to trust “this man” (the man whom Dr Kahn had mentioned). She had thought that he was meant to be her escape. But he wasn’t, it had been a disaster. The voices told her that he was her enemy, like her father. She was intended for something different, no one was going to imprison her. But then they stopped speaking to her, and she hadn’t heard them for years.

The light voice fluted on: I was too intent to get any sense of how others were responding, even Martin – though later I heard a good many opinions, some mutually contradictory, about this part of her evidence. For myself, I had no doubt, on the spot or later, that most of it was a lie. At least the story of her voices was a lie. She was clever enough to have picked up accounts of people’s psychotic states: of how some had precisely that kind of aural hallucination, certain that they were spoken to (in earlier times they would have heard the messages in the air, nowadays they emanated from machines) over the wires. She might even have known such a person, for they weren’t uncommon. But I didn’t believe that it had happened to her. She was mimicking the wrong kind of breakdown. If she were ever going to become deranged – or ever had been – it would be in a different fashion.

But that wasn’t all, it was merely clinical, and only made her seem more ambiguous and shifting than before. For when people lied as she was lying, they usually couldn’t help showing some stratum of the truth. She invented stories of what those voices told her about her father: they said something – though nothing like all – of what she felt for him herself. In the voices, which perhaps as she invented them seemed both romantic and sinister, and flattered her imagination, you could smell something much more down-to-earth, the antiseptic smell of the Pateman house. And you could hear something not so down-to-earth, but which emerged from that same house, and was seething in her imagination – “something special” was happening to her, she was “intended for something different”.

People afterwards said they hadn’t often seen a face change so much. At times she looked young and pretty, at others middle-aged. In the box, which gave her height, she had lost her air of hiding away, and no one thought her insignificant. She made an impression which separated her from the lookers-on, and yet didn’t repel them, almost as though she touched a nerve of unreality. Certainly it was an impression that Clive Bosanquet, as soon as he began to cross-examine, wanted to dispel.

In his level tone, he asked: “Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kill a child?”

She looked at him, eyes steadying, and replied without a pause: “I don’t think I thought anything like that. No, that would give the wrong idea. You see, no one does anything cut-and-dried, you understand–”

Bosanquet was determined to stop her going off on another conversational flight.

“Miss Pateman, there is no doubt that you planned, methodically and over a period of weeks or months, to kill a child. Apparently it needn’t have been Eric Mawby, you picked on him at random. I am asking you, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

“Well, kidnapping is one thing that we might have talked about–”

“I asked, Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

“I was saying, we might have talked about catching hold of one for a little while, you know, we talked about all sorts of things, you know how it is, anyone can make a suggestion–”

“When did this happen?”

“It might have happened at any time, I couldn’t tell you exactly.”

“It might not have happened at any time, Miss Pateman. When did it happen?”

The judge was regarding her, and spoke as considerately as ever in the trial. “You must try to tell us, if you can.”

“Well, if I had to put a date to it, I suppose it would be about the time when I had this second breakdown.”

Her counsel had let her introduce “this second breakdown” and then gone no further, as though he and she assumed, and the court also, that she had been living in a haze. But Bosanquet – for once less imperturbable – was having to struggle to clear the haze away. What was this second breakdown? She realised that it had not been adduced in the medical evidence? She had not at any time during this period considered consulting a doctor? She had been working effectively at her job, and living her life as usual in the room at home and out at the cottage?

“You don’t know about breakdowns unless you’re the one having them, no one could know, not even–” and then she added, with a curious primness – “Miss Ross.”

“You were entirely capable of doing everything you usually do?”

“No one who’s not had a breakdown can understand how you can go on, just like a machine you know–”

“You were entirely capable of making very careful detailed plans, everything thought out in advance, to abduct this child and kill him?”

“But that’s just what I was saying, you can go on, and you don’t know what’s happening–”

“You didn’t know what was happening when you brutalised this child? And killed him? A child, Miss Pateman, who if you were a year or two older might have been your own?”

“No, he wasn’t, that’s got nothing to do with it, it didn’t matter who he was.”

That reply, like many that she had made, might have been either fluent or incoherent, it was difficult to know which. Just as it was difficult to know whether Bosanquet’s thrust of rhetoric, so different from his usual method that it must have been worked out, had touched her. Were the psychiatrists right, how much was she deprived, how much had she wanted to live as other women? How much did those dolls of hers signify? As she lied and weaved her answers in and out, most of us were as undecided as when we heard her first word. Bosanquet brought up the remark – to many the most hideous they had listened to in court – “we wanted to teach him to behave”. What did that mean? Wasn’t that the beginning of the plan?
Who said it first
?

“Oh, it was just a way of explaining afterwards, I don’t think anyone actually said it. I’m sure I didn’t, that’s not the way you speak to each other, is it, even if you aren’t living through a breakdown.”

“You found the idea so attractive that you planned everything methodically to abduct the child and then go on to ill-treat him and murder him?”

“No, that’s not the way things go, you know how it is, you say lots of things that you don’t mean, ever, we used to say, wouldn’t it be nice if one could do things, but we didn’t mean it.”

Her answers were shifting and shimmering like one translucent film drawn across another: underneath them there were marks when a fragment of their day-to-day life appeared, and then was obfuscated again. The two of them in that front room at the Patemans’: yes, someone had said “it would be nice if we could do things”: it might have seemed like an ordinary sexual come on, voice thick, eyes staring! Who had spoken first? Did that matter? In the witness box, Kitty Pateman was not making the attempt to shield Cora as Cora had done her. She was just intent on seeming crazed. It still had the elaboration, almost the compulsion, of a piece of acting, yet sometimes one felt that, through pretending to be crazed, she had hypnotised herself into being so. Had she – or both of them – pretended like that before? In retrospect, when our minds were cooler, one thing struck most of us. She had far more imagination than Cora. But imagination of a kind which one sometimes meets in the sexual life, at the same time vatic and obscene. She might have, and almost certainly had, prophesied to herself a wonderful life through sex, more wonderful than sex could ever give her: and simultaneously she would never leave a sexual thought alone.