The Sleep of Reason (52 page)

“Would you?” Margaret asked me.

“No.” I was wondering who might have done. Perhaps the Patemans. Were they hopeful now?

It could be, Martin supposed, that one or two jurors were holding out. None of us had any idea, then or later, what happened in that jury room.

We reached the opulent streets, women coming out of shops, cherishing new hair-sets, complexions matt in the clear sunlight. It would take us twenty minutes to walk back, said Martin.

In sight of the Assize Hall, we made out the policemen on the steps. We hurried into the entrance hall: there were a few people round the refreshment table, others scattered about, George still sitting down. He gave us his open, inattentive smile. “Nothing’s happened,” he said.

During the next hours, we couldn’t cheat the time of waiting any more. Except that I had a conversation with a colleague of Edgar Hankins, a bright-eyed, preternaturally youthful-looking man. We had met occasionally at parties, and in the hall he drew me aside. He wanted, he was full of his own invention, to discuss the treatment of criminals sane and not-so-sane. If we assumed that the two young women were sane, which he believed, then he believed equally that they would never do anything of the kind again. In that case they were no danger to society. So what was the justification for keeping them in jail? It was pure superstition, he was saying. I had always found his kind of brightness boring, and that evening, time stretching out, I found it worse than that. When I returned to Margaret and Martin, they asked what we had been talking about, but I shook my head.

At last – and yet it seemed unexpected – we heard that the jury were coming back. When we went into the courtroom, we saw it gaping, nearly empty: the time was nearly eight o’clock: most of the spectators hadn’t been able to see the end. The two women walked up to the dock, Kitty’s eyes darting – with something like a smile – to her family. Cora had brushed her hair, which shone burnished as the court lights came on. The jury trampled across the room, making a clatter; it was as though one had not heard the noise of feet before. As they settled in their box, I saw one of them, a middle-aged woman with thick arms, gaze intently at Cora Ross.

The judge took his place and bowed. Then the old routine, in the Clerk’s rich voice.

“Members of the jury, who will speak as your foreman?”

A grey-haired man said: “I will.”

“Mr Foreman, do you find the prisoner, Cora Helen Passant Ross, guilty or not guilty of murder in this indictment?”

“Guilty.”

The same question, about Kathleen Mavis Pateman.

“Guilty.”

“And those are the verdicts of you all?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Cora Helen Passant Ross, you stand convicted of the felony of murder. Have you anything to say why you should not now be given judgment according to law?”

Cora stood erect, shoulders squared, her expression unmoved. “No,” she said, in a loud voice. Kitty Pateman followed her with a quieter, perfunctory no.

The judge looked at them, and said clearly but without inflection: “The sentence is a statutory one, and it is that you, and each of you, be sentenced to imprisonment for life.”

He did not say anything more. He gave them a nod, polite, almost gentle, dismissing them. They were taken below for the last time.

Neither in the courtroom, talking to the solicitors and to his junior, nor outside in the hall, when the final ritual was over, would Clive Bosanquet accept congratulations: he had too much emotional taste to do so, in a case like this. He looked, however, modestly satisfied: while Jamie Wilson, speaking to no one, rushed ahead of the others to the robing-room, his face surly with self-reproach. Leaning against the refreshment table, Benskin chatted with vivacity to other lawyers and gave us a cheerful wave. Of all the functionaries at the trial, the only one I actually spoke to, as we made our way to the entrance hall, was Superintendent Maxwell. He spun his bulk round, came up to me in soft-footed steps, and said, in a quiet high mutter: “Well, they didn’t get away with it. Now we’ve got to keep the other prisoners off them. I don’t envy anyone the job.”

I didn’t hear many comments, among the relics of the crowd. There was none, absolutely none – and there hadn’t been during the last minutes in court – of the gloating fulfilment which years before I had felt all round me, and in myself, when I heard the death sentence passed. You could call it catharsis, if you liked a prettier name. There was none of that. So far as there was a general mood, it seemed to be almost the opposite, something like anti-climax, let-down, or frustration.

In the tone, firm and yet diffident, in which he always used to issue his invitations, George said to the three of us: “I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour.” Before any of us replied, my sleeve was being gently tugged and Mrs Pateman was saying, very timidly: “I wonder if you could have a word with him, sir. It might settle him down. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, I’m sure.”

She was quite tearless. In fact, she didn’t mention her daughter, only her husband, who was standing at the side of the hall, gesticulating as he harangued Dick Pateman. As she led me towards them, she asked me if I would “humour him a bit”. She said that she didn’t know how he would get over it.

When he saw me, his gaze was fixed and angry. He seemed possessed by anger, as though that were the only feeling left.

“I can’t have this,” he said.

I said that I was sorry for them.

“I can’t let it go at this,” he said.

I attempted to soothe him. Couldn’t they all go and try to sleep, and then talk to the solicitors tomorrow?

That made him more angry. His eyes stood out, his fists clenched as though he were going to hit me.

“They’re no good to us.”

“Well then–”

“I want someone who’ll take care of people who are ill. My daughter’s ill, and I insist on having something done about it.”

“That’s what we want,” said Dick Pateman.

I said, she would certainly be under medical supervision–

“I’m not going to be put off by that. I want the best people to take care of her and make her better.”

Again I tried to soothe him.

“No,” he shouted into my face. “I can’t leave it like this. I shall have to talk to you about how I can get things done–”

He was threatening me, he was threatening everyone. And yet he was crying out for help. The curious thing was, I was more affected by his appeal than by his wife’s. She had known a good many sorrows: this was another, but she could bear it. Whatever else came to her, she would go on enduring, and nothing would break her. But she didn’t believe that was true of her husband and her son. Standing with him, listening to their threats (for Dick joined in), I thought she could be right. To be in their company was intolerable: in many ways they were hateful: and yet they were helpless when there was nothing they could do. Their only response to sorrow, the chill of sorrow, was to fly out into violence. Violence without aim. Shouts, scowls, threats. What could they do? They were impotent. When they were impotent, they were nothing at all.

I told Mr Pateman that I had no knowledge of the prison service or of prison doctors but that, if he ever wanted to talk to me, he was welcome to. He didn’t thank me, but became quieter. Any bit of action was better than none. Getting a promise out of me, however pointless, showed that he was still effective, and was a comfort to him.

“I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour,” George had said, before Mrs Pateman took me away. When I rejoined the three of them, they were waiting to walk out to Martin’s car. As we drove across the town, up past the station, all of us in silence, I was thinking again, yes, that was how George used to invite us – when he was asking us, not to a pub, but to his “place”, as though it were a baronial hall. Actually, it consisted of the sitting-room and bedroom in which he had lived for nearly forty years. How he managed it, I had never known. George had clung on, with no one to look after him. Not that he needed much.

In the sharp spring night, transistor radios were blaring and people lolled about the pavement, when we drew up outside the door. Inside his sitting-room, as he switched on the light, the newspapers and huddle sprang to the eye, and one’s nostrils tingled with the dust.

“Now,” he said, as, panting, he cleared litter from the old sofa to make a place for Margaret. There were only two chairs. Martin put me in one of them, and himself sat on the sofa end. “Now,” said George. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Margaret glanced at me, looking for a signal. She was tired, after the long, nerve-ridden day. She would have liked a drink. But, though she knew George well, she had really no idea about his style of life. Even in her student days, she hadn’t seen a room like this. No, she said, he wasn’t to bother. If she had asked for a drink, I thought, she would probably have been unlucky. For George, who drank more than anyone round him, had – at least in my experience, in the time I knew him best – scarcely ever drunk at home.

“I can easily make some tea,” said George.

“Never mind,” said Martin. “We’ve drunk enough tea for one day.”

George looked at the three of us, as if to make sure that the formalities had been properly observed. That gave him pleasure, even now, as it had always done. Then he took the vacant chair at the side of the fireplace, pulled down his waistcoat, and said: “Well. I thought you ought to be the first to hear.”

He was addressing me more than the others, but not personally, rather as a matter of etiquette, because he had known me longest.

He said: “I’m going away.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I shan’t put a foot inside this damned town again.” He stared past me. “It’s quite useless to argue,” he went on, though in fact none of us was arguing. “I made my plans as soon as I saw that business of hers” (he meant Cora, but couldn’t, or didn’t, refer to her by name) “could only come to one end. Incidentally, I thought that you were all deceiving yourselves about that. I never believed that any jury in the country would do anything different.”

He said: “It’s horrible, I don’t require anyone to tell me it’s horrible, but there’s no use wasting time over that. I’ve had to think about my own position. I’ve got plenty of enemies in this wretched town. I’m perfectly prepared to admit that, according to ordinary standards, I deserve some of the things they want to bring up against me. But I’ve got enemies because I wouldn’t accept their frightful mingy existence and wouldn’t let other people accept it either. And all these sunkets want is to make the place too hot to hold me.” This didn’t have the machine-like clank of paranoia, which one often heard in him. “Well, now the sunkets have something to use against me. They can breathe down my neck until I die. It doesn’t matter to them that she hasn’t spoken to me for a couple of years. They can smear everything I do. They can control every step I take. By God, it would be like having me in a cage for crowds to stare at.”

Martin caught my eye. Neither of us could deny it.

George said: “That’s not the worst of it. If it were just myself, I think I might conceivably stay here and take my medicine. But there is the whole crowd. Everyone who has ever come near to me. You heard what they did to young — in the witness box. They’ll all be under inspection as long as I am here. Their lives won’t be worth living. When I go away, it won’t be long before it all calms down again. They’ll be all right, as soon as people have forgotten about me.”

Again, neither Martin nor I could say that he was wrong. It was Margaret who said: “That’s very generous, George. But are you sure you’re really well enough?”

“Well enough for what?”

“Well enough to uproot yourself like that.”

George gave her a shifty, defiant smile, and said: “Oh, if I’m not up to the mark, I shall get in touch with some of you.”

Had he thought of where he might be going?
Of course
, what did she take him for? For the first time that night, George broke into laughter, loud laughter. For days past – perhaps when he had been absent from the court, and perhaps, I now suspected, for a longer period than that – he had been making logistic plans, like the administrator he might have been. It would take him no time at all to “clear up his effects”. He didn’t propose to stay in England. He had never travelled much: as a matter of fact, apart from a weekend in Paris and a few days in Ostend, he had not, in sixty-four years, travelled at all. Yet, it was one of his schematic hobbies, he knew the geography, railways, timetables of Europe far better than the rest of us.

“Well, now I’ve got a bloody good chance to look round,” he cried.

He intended to start in Scandinavia, for which he had a hankering, because he had once met a Swede who looked remarkably like himself.

“I’m sorry to nag,” said Margaret. “But, before you go, do ask your doctor. You know, you’re not very good at taking care of yourself, are you?”

“I shall be all right.”

“Or let us find you a doctor in London, won’t you?”

“You’re not to worry about me.”

He answered her with childlike impenetrable obstinacy: nothing was going to stop him now.

Margaret, used to her father and the sight of illness, thought it was kinder to say no more. Then Martin and I, almost at the same instant, mentioned money. Up till then, the grudges, bad luck, resentments of a lifetime had been submerged: all of a sudden, they broke through.
Of course
he was bound to be short of money. After that ineffable firm (Eden & Sharples, and George’s curses crashed into the room) had fobbed him off with his miserable pension. Seven hundred and fifty a year; that was all he received for a life’s work. When he had saved them from their own contemptible incompetence. If it hadn’t been for him, they would have been extinct long ago! Seven hundred and fifty a year. In exactly one year’s time, he added, with savage, mirthless hilarity, he would get his old age pension. Then he would have nearly a thousand a year. The glorious reward for all his efforts in this mortal life!