The Life and Loves of a She Devil (15 page)

The judge took his work seriously. He knew he must stand above and beyond the common man, guarding himself from error, protecting himself from corruption. He knew how rare a man he was, how very few there were prepared to wield the fine rapier-blade of justice within the vulnerable substance of society: how difficult it was to dispose of another man’s life when he personally had done you no particular harm, how peculiar to steal his time away in yearly chunks — twelve months for this, eighteen for that, a dozen years for the other. How disconcerting to be the one to say this is bad, this is worse, for this there’s hell to pay! But there it was. And it was, when it came to it, a vocation. He had been born to it.

The judge’s family had to play their part; it was the penalty exacted by fate for their closeness to so exceptional a man. They had to be careful not to wake him in the night, not to overtire him with their demands or irritate him with chattering. They had to exist — for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty. But they could not be seen (or heard) to exist too much.

Lady Bissop had spent many nights pacing up and down with crying infants in those rooms of the house furthest from the judge’s bedroom, and whispering to them, as they grew older, in the early mornings, so that their childish prattle did not wake him. And why should she not? Did not the future of some wretched miscreant depend upon his mid-morning humour? Five years incarcerated, or fifteen?

Judge Bissop did not want to think that he was cut off from the ebb and flow of normal life. He needed to keep his ear to the ground, to catch tremors of popular discontent, the rumblings of public opinion. He was, after all, the public’s servant; but he must be devious, must look ahead. Deal harshly with a rapist now, and you would forestall the day when the masses demanded the forcible castration of all sex offenders. Deal lightly with a bigamist today, and postpone the tomorrow when all marriage laws were revoked. The people’s voice must be heard, but how to hear it, when the people insist on having their judges out of earshot, sitting on thrones, dressed in wigs, in courts more like theatres than rooms of general consultation?

So the judge read the popular papers whenever he found time, and fell into easy conversation, whenever he could, with those few members of the public who crossed his path — newspaper sellers, waiters, his barber, programme sellers at the opera house, members of his own domestic staff.

His wife had lately hired, through an employment agency in the city, a very tall, ugly woman who went by the name of Polly Patch. Her references were excellent, and she had two certificates in General Education and one in Child Care (Advanced). His wife had taken her on as live-in household help.

The judge did not think she would last long. Lady Bissop hired and fired staff impetuously. One day, being lonely, she would confide her troubles to the maid; the next, feeling better, she would complain that she was being taken advantage of and demand that she leave at once. There was no redress: domestic staff depend upon the whims of those they cosset. The judge hoped that Polly Patch would stay for at least a month or so. He found ugly people interesting. It seemed to him that they were in touch with a reality, a knowledge, which he himself had been denied. His path through the world, he felt, had been too easy, made so by his good looks, his background, his intelligence. He was his parents’ glory, his school’s triumph, his profession’s pride, but where was
he?
He thought that Polly Patch, lumbering through a doorway, engaged in the menial business of child care, might well have the secrets of reality at her square fingertips, and be the one to impart them. Then he would know what was really going on. A man, even a judge, has to have something or someone to measure himself against, if he is to know what sort of person he is. If the judge so much as flicked his fingers at his wife and children they melted into the wallpaper; they disappeared. Hard to make Polly Patch disappear: her surfaces were like sandpaper; the coarse kind, not easily worn smooth.

Miss Patch, to his relief, showed no signs of taking advantage of his wife, and seemed in no danger of being dismissed. If anything, Lady Bissop seemed a little in awe of her. Polly Patch had rather protuberant eyes, which from time to time glittered pinkly — perhaps only because of Lady Bissop’s fondness for rosy lighting — but which nevertheless seemed to invoke respect. She was, the judge estimated, twice his wife’s size, and had twice her intelligence. Her looks, no doubt, mitigated against her in the labour and marriage markets, which was why she was reduced to nannying. Or perhaps, as did so many women, she simply longed for a home, for sofas and beds and fires and doors locked at night against intruders, and a daily ritual of work and leisure, and the soft purr of the washing machine renewing and restoring, and since she could not achieve this for herself — for it has to be done in the lower reaches of society with a man’s money and consent — did the next best thing, and entered someone else’s home as servant.

The judge was at first a little suspicious of this new member of his household: the men and women who appeared before him, the criminals, the misfits, the losers, were for the most part unprepossessing; (if they were not, they stood a better chance of being acquitted, juries being what they are). He knew it was a mistake to assume that, because all convicted criminals are ugly, all ugly people are criminals, but the uneasy feeling remained that this was true. Perhaps she was the thin end of some robber wedge, come to case the joint, steal all his worldly possessions? One day he might come home and find the purple carpets, the orange sofas, the appalling silver cutlery in modern design, the surrealist paintings, all gone; stolen by a gang for whom she was the catspaw? He came to doubt it. She had a natural taste: she turned the coverlets of the children’s quilts inside out, making them a browny gold instead of bright tan, so that he did not have to wince when he went into their rooms to kiss them goodnight. (He did this every night, ritually, knowing quite well they only pretended to be asleep. Why should his family be different from the rest of the world, why any less deceitful?) And although to have a natural taste was not a bar to criminal activities it did not predispose towards them. It was, on the contrary, more likely to create a victim — the robbed and not the robber. The judge grew to trust her. He liked the way she scooped up the children, tucking them underarm with ease, carrying them quickly out of earshot if they squabbled or whined.

It was over the matter of the peanut butter that Polly Patch finally won his heart. Henry Bissop allowed no peanut butter in his house, irrationally and irascibly, driven to unreason and fury by the unintelligence of those with whom it was his fate to work and live — by, in fact, the rest of the world. It had lately and unwisely been brought to his notice by a group of social statisticians investigating the causes of crime, that the majority of people who committed them had consumed, in the time around the act, an unusually large amount of peanut butter.

Such spurious statistics incensed him — it was obvious to the judge that the peanut butter involved was consumed in prison while awaiting trial (peanut butter being a staple of prison diet), the point of criminality in the study being determined by conviction for the act, not its committing, a point which had evaded the perpetrators of this particular study. So when defending counsel put forward this and other convenient but ill-considered statistics in an attempt to show their clients in a favourable light, or so that blame would pass from them on to society itself — barristers have the habit of blaming unemployment, or pollution of the mind by lead poisoning, or poor nutrition, or lack of education for their clients’ malfeasance — the judge had only to stare at the barrister hard and say, ‘I never have peanut butter in my house. I don’t want my children growing up criminal’, and their voices would falter and their cases crumble in confusion. It was his joke, but they didn’t find it funny.

The judge lived in a glimmering hope that one day his wife Maureen would resist the domestic peanut butter ruling, for peanut butter was the children’s favourite food, and dispute the offered statistic, and take him to task, but she never did, any more than his barristers. Perhaps it was too much to expect that she should show intelligence where highly trained lawyers could not. Nevertheless, he writhed and moaned in the face of their incomprehension and inflicted upon them, as punishment, a peanut-butterless house.

Lady Bissop, with the years, had become even more pliable, more acquiescent, less argumentative. He felt she was turning back into a child, that she grew down as others grew up. It was his fear that one day soon he would find himself stuffing salt into her mouth as if she were his daughter, not his wife. It was in the attempt to keep his wife a properly functioning adult female, and not someone fast regressing into a pre-puberal girl-child, that he subjected her to extreme sexual practices; or so he later explained himself to Polly Patch. As long as he nipped her nipples with his teeth so that she cried out, her breasts would not disappear. As long as he could tug and twist her pubic hair, it would continue to grow. It was for her own good.

Another of the penalties of judgehood, or so he explained it to Polly, was the sadistic energies it stimulated in the judiciary. That same shivering pang of pain and pleasure mixed, which the description of a violent death or a nasty accident sends darting through the loins of the hearer, darts and lingers in the loins of those who are entitled, indeed required, to inflict pain, to pass sentence. Normally, because the judiciary is so very old and enfeebled, the pang, which contains in it the necessity of sexual release, passes all but unnoticed. But Judge Bissop was vigorous and sexually active, and Lady Bissop, as a wife, was at the mercy of the demands of her husband’s profession. As a doctor’s wife has to answer the phone, as a sailor’s wife has to put up with his absences, so a judge’s wife has to put up with his cruelty.

The judge, in her interests as well as his own, would save up a month’s sentencing and do it all in a week, at the end of which Lady Bishop would be too bruised and bleeding to come down to breakfast but would at least have the next three weeks to recover. He was not unreasonable. She had wanted the status and money that went with being a judge’s wife, and must now take the rough with the smooth.

The judge confided all this and more in Polly Patch. He had come to trust her after the way she had dealt with the matter of the peanut butter. They’d sat in the purple lounge by the gas flicker-fire after the children were in bed and Lady Bissop gone to soak in a long hot bath.

‘You may have wondered why I allow no peanut butter in this house!’ the judge had said, eventually. ‘The reason is because most people convicted of violent crimes have recently eaten so much of it.’

Polly Patch thought for a while. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it’s because most people who appear in court charged with violent crimes have been in custody for some weeks, months, even years — so overcrowded are our prisons these days — and peanut butter is no doubt a staple of prison diet, being cheap and rich in protein. Peanut butter is neither here nor there, when considering the crime; or the character of the criminal. Your children can eat it safely!’

The judge had grasped her large hand warmly; he felt it was safe to trust her with his confidences. She paid attention to the content of what was said, not the status of the speaker. That was rare. He valued her. If he had not already married Maureen he thought he might well have chosen Polly Patch. How pleasant it would be, he thought, to have someone close who was not in awe of him. They were the same height, too, which he liked. He had a tendency, he knew, to bully those smaller than he, and so many were, particularly women. The judge was able to discuss his cases with her, and found the burden of his sentencing much lighter, and much less sexually stimulating, and his treatment of Lady Bissop therefore less extreme, which relieved the judge of anxiety, but made him melancholy — a more passive and pleasant version of the emotions of unease, driving a man not to action but to contemplation.

‘Swings and roundabouts,’ he’d say, sadly. ‘The sum of human misery is always the same — it is the judge’s job to shift it a little, where it most fairly lies. But gain fairness here and you lose it there! My wife just happens to be the one who loses. Fairness is a see-saw, and I am at its fulcrum. Impartiality sits at one end, Lady Bissop at the other, and doesn’t she keep coming down with a bump!’

He talked about a wife who’d murdered her husband by slow poison over a period of three years. But then the husband had been slowly murdering the wife by his cruelty over a longer period — some six or seven years. She’d started to use the poison the day her cancer was diagnosed. The cancer went into remission the day he died. What did Polly Patch think?

Polly Patch’s eyes glittered and she said death came to everyone in the end. It was the manner of living that was important.

‘If she’d change her plea to insanity at least I could just send her to a secure mental hospital,’ the judge said, but Polly Patch did not think this a good idea. They discussed whether the murderess should receive seven years imprisonment, five years or three. Odd numbers seem preferable to even, when it comes to murder. Premeditation weighed against her; provocation for her. The law must be seen to exact some punishment, or the country would be littered with dead husbands; but not too severe a punishment, or dead wives would become more of a problem than they were already.

They settled for three years, with some clear hints of sympathy in the judge’s remarks, so she was more likely to receive an early probation.

‘Sentencing is like marking essays,’ said Polly Patch. ‘B minus, C plus plus, D plus minus, and so forth.’

‘Quite so,’ said the judge, ‘but it’s much more exciting.’

Early in her employment Polly Patch asked for time off to go to the dentist, and every time she went she came back with a tooth either totally missing or ground down to the bone.