The Sleep of Reason (39 page)

“There is no other explanation for those body wounds than the one you have given?”

“I see no other explanation except systematic torture.”

McQuillin had not raised his voice. The judge, leaning forward, spoke even more softly.

“I think it is better for us, Doctor McQuillin, if you restrict yourself to your scientific findings.”

“I am sorry, my lord,” said McQuillin.

“I understand,” said the judge.

The head injuries – these had been the cause of death? He was killed, said McQuillin, by multiple head injuries, multiple fractures of the skull. There had been seven blows, and possibly more. Any one of several blows would have been sufficient to cause death. One group of five had been delivered by something like a heavy poker or an iron bar. The others, by a solid obtuse weighted surface, such as the anterior wooden portion of an axe handle. Yes, the bleeding would have been copious. “Nothing bleeds so copiously as the scalp,” McQuillin added. “There must also, with such wounds, have been a discharge of brain tissue. And fragments of bone thrown out, though these have not been found. The vault of the skull showed a number of gaps.”

The blows had been delivered from in front (here McQuillin beckoned a policeman, like a lecturer carried away by his subject and needing to illustrate it), or at least the first one had been. The head had been held back by the hair – like this – possibly not by the person delivering the blow. The remainder of the blows could have followed when the body had sunk to a kneeling or recumbent position–

Benskin interrupted. “This doctor in my submission is going beyond the evidence of a medical expert.”

The judge said: “Mr Benskin, I think I agree with you. Doctor, you have told us your conclusions about the cause of death? You are quite certain about them?”

“I am quite certain, my lord.”

“Then I hope we might leave it there, Mr Bosanquet.”

Bosanquet stood, thinking, and said: “I am content.”

Both defence counsel cross-examined. They were sharp and edgy about the doctor’s reconstructions. Neither of them was free from the miasma which had during his evidence settled on the court. It was a miasma which both rotted the nerves and at the same time held them stretched. Glances at the dock were furtive. The doctor had been imagining how the blows had been struck. Creeping glances at the two women. They knew whether he was right.

Head wounds, body wounds – the lawyers were doing their job, they had to bring the descriptions back before us. To some there, those would be nothing but names by now. But not to Wilson, the younger of the silks. He sounded angry: he could not, less so than Benskin, insulate himself: he took it out of the doctor, partly because it was tactically right, but also because he genuinely, and for his own sake, wanted to disbelieve. The head wounds – no one doubted they had been inflicted, no one doubted they were the cause of death. But surely the doctor’s reconstruction was entirely fanciful? In any case, it was not relevant: if it had been relevant, anyone’s reconstruction would have been worth about as much, which was next to nothing at all?

“I have had some experience of these matters,” said McQuillin impassively.

“I repeat, your reconstruction is fanciful. But that is not the point. The death happened, we all know that. I suggest to you, your conclusions about the body wounds are also fanciful?”

“I have recorded my findings. I could give further conclusions about those wounds.”

“They might have been incurred very near the time of death–?”

“I regard it as most unlikely.”

“It is not impossible?”

“In giving scientific evidence, it is often wrong to say something is impossible.”

“That is, your picture of long-sustained wounding – I might remind you that you used an impermissible term for which my lord reproved you – your picture goes right beyond the medical evidence?”

“In my judgment, it is the only one that fits the facts.”

Wilson could not leave it alone. Questions about lacerations, cuts, bloodstains, the whole pathological examination over again.

At last the judge said: “Mr Wilson, I shouldn’t put obstacles in your way if I thought we were getting any further. But I do suggest that the jury has as much information as we can give it. And perhaps this is getting burdensome for us all.”

He said it aseptically. Wilson, face flushed, wiped his forehead, continued with more questions about flesh wounds, and then sat down.

Bosanquet’s re-examination was brief. He remarked that the doctor had been a long time in the box, and asked if, as a result, he wished to modify any of his statements of fact or his conclusions. McQuillin was as impassive as when he first answered to his name. He had given considered opinions, he answered. He did not wish to change in the slightest anything he had said.

It was well after half past four, the court had overrun for the first time in the trial: the judge had watched the clock, but not interrupted.

WHEN at last Martin and I got out into the air, we heard a voice behind us calling. It was Edgar Hankins who, nowadays turning his hand to non-literary journalism, was writing special articles on the trial for a Sunday paper. He came running after us, his face cheerful, rubbery, sweating.

“Let’s all go and have tea and then a drink,” he said.

Before I could reply, Martin said: “No, not now. Lewis and I have something to talk about.”

Hankins dropped back, his face still not having forgotten the smile of invitation. I hadn’t often heard Martin impolite before: his tone had been colder than when I offered to help out financially over his son. As a rule with Hankins, because of their past history, he was specially considerate. He didn’t speak until we were sitting in his car. Then, before he started it, he said: “I couldn’t bear his brand of nonsense tonight.”

He went on: “You know, we could write it for him. Great throbbing pieces about how we’re all guilty. So really no one is guilty. So really everything is as well as could be expected in an admittedly imperfect world.”

Neither of us said much more – Martin’s face was hard and angry, he made another aside about “saccharine rhetoric” – until, a little later, he rejoined me in the bar of his hotel.

It was a bar which we both knew: though, since I had left the town for good when he was a schoolboy, we had never before sat there together. It was still a meeting place for men coming out of their offices on the way home to the prosperous suburbs: the income level had always been higher than in the pubs which George and I most often used. Though the bar had stayed geographically in the same place, it had been transmogrified, like the hotel and most of the town itself. It had become plushier and, in the American style, much darker, lights gleaming surreptitiously behind the sandwich bar. But the people looked much the same, hearty middle-aged men, bald or greying, a good many of them carrying their weight on athletes’ muscles: from some of these Martin, as we sat in a corner alcove, kept getting shouts of greeting. For while I might be recognised from photographs, he had more acquaintances here, they had played games together before the war. Amiable impersonal backchat: how are you getting on, I’m an old man now, I can’t get my arm over any more, you never did get it very high, I shall soon be taking to bowls. Some of them had made money, Martin mentioned, when we weren’t observed. There was a lot of quiet money in this town. There were also one or two casualties in that bar, boyhood friends who were scrabbling for a living, or who had taken to drink. Most of them, though, had come through into this jostling, vigorous, bourgeois life. All round us he could see the well-being, the survival, and sometimes the kindness of the flesh.

Was that any sort of reassurance to him? I was wondering. We had said little to each other: to an extent, we did not need to. I had let slip a remark about the time-switch at Auschwitz, and he had picked it up, just as Margaret would have done, or often young Charles. I didn’t have to explain. I meant – someone had said it before me – that at Auschwitz one could not help being invaded by the relativity of time. The relativity which was at once degrading and ironic. That is, on the same day,
at the same moment
, people had been sitting down to meals or begetting children while, a few hundred yards away, others had been dying in torture. It had been the same with this boy’s death. While he was beginning to suffer fright and worse than fright, the rest of us had, at the same moment, through the switch of time, been living as healthily as those men round us in the bar, talking or making love or maybe being preoccupied with what seemed a serious worry of our own. Martin understood without my saying so. He did not understand (I did not want to explain, perhaps because it reminded me of another death) that I had been, in court, working out the hours of the boy’s suffering. That might have been going on – in all probability it had been going on – during a happy dinner party at our London flat, when Margaret and I were looking forward to the children’s future, making a fuss of Vicky, and being entertained by Martin’s own son.

Martin did not know that. But he knew something else, when I mentioned Auschwitz. For he and I and others of our age had seen the films of the concentration camps just after the troops had entered and when the horror came before our eyes like a primal, an original, an Adamic fact. Yes, with what we possessed of decency and political sense we had made our plans, so that, if people like us had any part in action at all, this couldn’t happen again: and we had gone on spending, though men like Rubin told us that we were wasting our time, a good deal of our lives in action. And yet, while we watched those films, we had, as well as being appalled, felt a shameful and disgusting pleasure. It was almost without emotion, it was titillating, trivial and (just as when Margaret asked me questions in our drawing-room) seepingly corrupt. We were fascinated (the sensation was as affectless as that) because men could do these things to other men.

The wretched truth was, it had been the same in the courtroom that afternoon. Not only in us, but in everyone round us. But it was enough to know it for ourselves.

So, when I spoke, as though casually, of Auschwitz, Martin did not ask any questions. He nodded (raising one hand to a greeting from the other side of the bar), and looked at me with a glance which was grim but comradely.

In time he said: “What people feel doesn’t matter very much. It’s what they do, we’ve got to think about.”

It sounded bleak, like so much that he said as he grew older. Yet, as we sat there, old acquaintances pushing by him, he was as much at the mercy of his thoughts as I was, maybe more so. We were different men, though we had our links of sympathy. What we had learned from our lives, we had learned in different fashions: we had often been allies, but then events had driven us together: perhaps now, in our fifties, we were closer than we had ever been. But Martin, whom most people thought the harder and more self-sufficient of the two, had once had the more brilliant and the more innocent hopes. I had started off in this town in the first blaze of George’s enlightenment. Let the winds of life blow through you. Live by the flow of your instincts. Salvation through freedom. Like any young man, I had got drunk on those great cries. It wasn’t through any virtue of mine, but simply because of my temperament and my first obsessive love affair, that I couldn’t quite live up to them. But there was another side to it. George, like many radicals of his time, believed, passionately believed, in the perfectibility of man. That I could never do, from the time that I first met him, in my teens. Without possessing a religious faith, I nevertheless – perhaps because I wasn’t good myself – couldn’t help believing in something like original sin.

With Martin, it had gone the other way. He had in his youth, though he had never been such an intimate of George’s and nothing like so fond of him, accepted the whole doctrine. He really did have the splendid dreams. Rip off the chains, and he and everyone else would break through to a better life. He enjoyed himself more as a young man than I had done. He had gone through the existence where ideals and sex and energy are all mixed up – perhaps, even now, when people thought him sardonic and restrictive, there were times when he thought of that existence with some sort of regret. It hadn’t lasted. He was clear-sighted, he couldn’t deny his own experience. His vision of life turned jet black. Yet not completely, not so completely as he spoke or thought. It was what people did that mattered, he had just said, as he had often said before: if that was true, then what he did sometimes betrayed him. After all, it had been he – alone of all of us – who had broken his career, just when he had the power and prizes in his clutch. Conscience? Moral impulse? People wondered. They might have accepted that of Francis Getliffe, not of Martin. But it was he who had done it. Just as it was he who, under the carapace of his pessimism, pretending to himself that he expected nothing, invested so much hope in his son, was wide open to danger through another’s life.

The bar was noisy, but neither of us wanted to leave. The place had been familiar, part of commonplace evenings, to each of us – though it had taken something not commonplace but unimaginable to seat us there together. Martin’s acquaintances downed their liquor. Most of them were middle-aged, not thinking about their age, carried along, like us, by the desire to persist. They looked carefree. For all we could tell, some of them were also at the mercy of their thoughts. One, whom I knew slightly, had reminded me of a photograph in a newspaper that morning: of Margaret and me walking with George Passant, a straggle of women demonstrating behind. Did I know “that crowd”, did I know those two women? The questions had been edged. Martin had answered for me, guarded and official, Passant had been a friend of ours when we were young men. Otherwise the rest of them said their good evenings, wanted to know whether we were staying long, offered us drinks. Someone enquired, why don’t you come back and live here, not a bad place, you know, we could do with you.