The Sleep of Reason (50 page)

Martin said later that her imagination – or else her nervous force – had its effect on him. Despite the beams of sunlight, the courtroom seemed shut in as a greenhouse.

But Bosanquet was not a suggestible man. As with Cora, though this was technically the harder job, he wanted to domesticate her answers. He went through a similar routine about their workaday lives. Once or twice she tried a fugue again, but then gave up. Here she couldn’t sound unbalanced. Mostly her replies were shrewd and practical. Then he asked her about the books she read. Yes, she read a lot. She produced a list of standard authors of the day. “Sometimes I go a bit deeper.” “Who?” “Oh well–” she hesitated, her glance flickered – “people like Camus–”

At that, I should have liked to question her, for I suspected that she was lying again: not this time because of some thought out purpose, but simply because she wanted to impress. She might even be, I thought, a pathological liar like Jack Cotery in his youth.

For once Bosanquet was taken aback. He was a good lawyer, but he wasn’t well up in contemporary literature. He recovered himself: “Well, what do you get out of them?”

Again she hesitated. She answered: “Oh, they go to the limit, don’t they, I like them when they go to the limit.”

I was now sure that she had been bluffing: somehow she had brought out a remark she had half-read. But it gave Bosanquet an opening. He didn’t know about Camus, but he did know that she wanted to show how clever she was.
Hadn’t she enjoyed showing how clever she was – when they were planning to capture the child? Hadn’t she felt cleverer than anyone else, because she was sure that she could get away with it
? She had said a good deal to her counsel about being “different” and “special” – wasn’t that a way of proving it?

She was flustered, the current of words deserted her.

“No. It wasn’t like that. That was my second breakdown, that’s all.”

She spoke as though she was astonished and ashamed. She gave the impression that he had hit on the truth which she was trying, at all costs, to conceal. Yet Bosanquet himself and others of us, knew that wasn’t so. Certainly she had enjoyed feeling clever, set apart, someone above this world – but none of us, looking at her, could conceive that that was all.

And yet, of all the questions put to her in the witness box, these were the ones that upset her most. He picked up a phrase of hers –
she had gone to the limit, hadn’t she? Wasn’t killing a child going to the limit
?
That didn’t upset her: she got back into her evasive stream. Then he said: “After it had all happened. Didn’t you feel cleverer than anyone else, because you thought you had got away with it?”

Again she couldn’t answer. This time she stood as mute as Cora.

“Didn’t you talk it over together? You’d brought off something very special, which no one else could have done, didn’t you tell yourselves that?”

“No. We never said anything about it.”

That, I suspected again, but without being sure, was another lie. It was possible that “going to the limit” had
disappointed
them, grotesque as the thought might be.

Bosanquet left her standing there quietly, not flying off with an excuse which would smear over the picture of the two of them sitting together, congratulating each other on a scheme achieved. At once Wilson set her going again, fugue-fluent, on her breakdowns, first and second, and we listened without taking in the words.

About an hour later – still heavy after the afternoon of Kitty Pateman – I called at the Shaws’ new house. During the weekend I had rung up Vicky, asking if I could see her: I wanted to get it over, after my talk with Martin, as much for my sake (since I still detested breaking bad news) as hers. The house was in a street, or actually a cul-de-sac, which I remembered well from my boyhood and which had altered very little since, except that there used to be tramlines running past the open end. On both sides the houses showed extraordinary flights of pre-1914 fancy; most were semi-detached in various styles that various human minds must have thought pretty: one stood by itself, quite small, but decorated with twisted pinnacles, and led into by a porch consisting mainly of stained glass. In the patch of front garden the only vegetation was an enormous monkey puzzle. When I was a child, I didn’t notice how startling the architecture was: I probably thought it was all rather comfortable and enviable, because the people who lived there – it was only half-a-mile away from our house – were distinctly more prosperous than we were. One of them, I recalled, was a dentist. It looked that afternoon as though the social stratum hadn’t changed much, a good deal below that of the Gearys’ neighbours, considerably above that of the streets round George’s lodgings. The Shaws’ house was one of a pair confronting one at the end, unobtrusive by the side of the art nouveau and suburban baroque, but built at the same time, front rooms looking over a yard of garden down the street, perhaps six rooms in all. When I rang the bell, it was Arnold Shaw who opened the door. After he had greeted me, his first words were: “This is a long way from the Residence.” He wore a taunting smile.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” I replied.

He led the way into the front room. Vicky jumped up and kissed me, knowing that I had come for a purpose, looking at me as though trying to placate me. Meanwhile her father, oblivious, was pouring me a drink.

“I needn’t ask you what you like,” he said in his hectoring hospitable tone. There was an array of bottles on the sideboard. However much Arnold had reduced his standard of living, it hadn’t affected the liquor.

I gazed round the room, about the same size as our old front room at home. The furniture, though, was some that I recognised from the Residence.

“It’s big enough for me,” said Arnold Shaw defiantly.

I said, of course.

“Anything else would be too big.”

With the enthusiasm of an estate agent, he insisted on describing what he had done to the house. There had been three bedrooms: he had turned one of them into a study for himself. “That’s all I need,” said Arnold Shaw. They ate in the kitchen. No entertaining. “No point in it,” he said. “People don’t want to come when you’ve got out of things.”

He hadn’t mentioned the trial: to me, at that moment, it was lost in another dimension. Not noticing Vicky, half-forgetting why I was visiting them, I felt eased, back in the curiosities of every day. It was a relief to be wondering how Arnold was really accepting what his resignation meant, now that he was living it. He was protesting too much, he was putting on a show of liberation. I nearly said, all decisions are taken in a mood which will not last: he would have known the reference. And yet, the odd thing was, although he probably put on this show for his own benefit each day of his life, he was also, and quite genuinely, liberated. Or perhaps even triumphant. I had seen several people, including my brother Martin, give up their places, some of them, in the world’s eyes, places much higher than Arnold Shaw’s. Without exception, they went through times when they cursed themselves, longing for it all back, panoplies and trappings, moral dilemmas, enmities and all: but, again without exception, provided they had made the renunciation out of their own free will, underneath they were content. Free will. For one instant, listening to Arnold, I was taken back to that other dimension. Free will. Arnold had, or thought he had, given up his job of his own free will. He felt one up on fate. It was a similar superiority to that which some men felt, like Austin Davidson, in contemplating suicide: or alternatively in bringing off a feat which no one else could do. Just for once, in the compulsions of this life, one didn’t accept one’s destiny and decided for oneself.

It didn’t sound as exalted as that, with Arnold Shaw grumbling about his pension and discussing the economics of authorship. The university had treated him correctly but not handsomely (that is, they hadn’t found him a part-time job): he was hoping to earn some money by his books. His chief work would be appearing in the autumn, he had the proofs in his study now: it was the history of the chemical departments in German universities, 1814–1860. It was the last word on the subject, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt it. That was the beginning of organised university research as we know it, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt that either. It ought to be compulsory reading for all university administrators everywhere: how many would it sell? Ten thousand? That I had to doubt a little, and he gave me an angry glare.

Forgiving me, he filled my glass again. Then he said, aggressively, jauntily: “Well, I’d better get back to those proofs. This won’t buy aunty a new frock.”

As he shut the door and I was still amused by that singular phrase, Vicky had come to the chair beside me.

“Have you got any news?”

She was looking with clear, troubled, hopeful eyes straight into mine.

“I’m afraid I have.”

Her face, which had during the past year begun to show the first lines, became clean-washed, like a child’s.

“Have you seen him?”

I shook my head.

“Oh well.” Her expression was sharp, impatient again, hope flooding. “How do you know?”

“I’m afraid I do know.”

“He hasn’t told you anything himself?”

“I shouldn’t come and say anything to you, should I, unless I was sure?”

“What are you trying to say, anyway?” Her tone was rough with hate – not for him, for me.

“I think you’ve got to put him out of your mind. For good and all.”

No use, she said. She had flushed, but this was not like the night when her father broke the news of his resignation, she was nowhere near tears. She was full of energy, and with the detective work of jealousy, easy to recognise if one had ever nagged away at it, wanted to track down what my sources of information were. Had I seen him at all? Not for months, I said. Had I been talking to his friends? Did I know them? Young men and young women? The only one of his friends that I knew at all, I said, was my stepson Maurice. He had been home for the vacation, but he hadn’t said a word about Pat.

She couldn’t accept even now, not in her flesh and bone, that he had deceived her. When she loved, she couldn’t help but trust. Even when she didn’t love, she found it easier to trust than distrust, in spite of her sensible head. She trusted me that afternoon (even while she was giving me the sacramental treatment of a bearer of bad news) but it was only with her head that she was believing me.

I asked her when she had last heard from him. She had written to him a good many times since Christmas, she said. She didn’t tell me, she let me infer, that she hadn’t heard from him.

“I can’t do any more,” she said. “I don’t think I can write again.”

That didn’t seem like pride, more like a resolve. We had all been through it, I told her. It was very hard, but the only way was not to write, not to be in any kind of contact, not even to hear the name.

“No,” she said. “I’ve got to know what’s happening to him.”

“It’s a mistake.”

She said: “I still feel he might need me.”

That was the last refuge. She was obstinate as her father: she had no more sense of danger – and she had her own tenderness.

Crossly, for I was handling it badly, I said: “Look here, I really think you ought to give a second thought to Leonard Getliffe.”

I was handling it badly, and that was the most insensitive thing I had done. Nothing I could have said would have made much difference: all the tact in the world, and you can’t soften another’s disasters. But still, I was handling it specially badly, perhaps because I had come to her from the extremes of death and horror, and, by the side of what I had been listening to, I couldn’t, however much I tried, get adjusted to the seriousness of love. Some kinds of vicarious suffering diminished others: unhappy love affairs – in absolute honesty, did one ever sympathise with total seriousness unless one was inside them? – seemed one of the more bearable of sufferings. So that I was, against my will, less patient than I wanted to be. Having met Leonard Getliffe at the Gearys’ for a few minutes the week before, which made me think perfunctorily of Vicky, I had merely wished – with about as much sympathy as Lord Lufkin would have felt – that they would get on with it. And now Leonard’s name had found itself on my tongue.

She gave a cold smile.

“No,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure you underestimate him.”

“Of course I don’t. He’s a great success–”

“I don’t mean in that way. I’m pretty sure you underestimate him as a man.”

She gazed at me in disbelief.

“Once you set him free, I bet you he’d make a damned good husband.”

“Not for me,” she said.

She added: “It’s no use thinking about him. There’s no future in it.”

She had blushed, as I had seen her do before when Leonard was mentioned. She still could not understand how she had inspired that kind of passion. Once more she used that bit of old-fashioned slang: there was no future in it. She was utterly astonished at being the one who was loved, not the one doing the loving. She was not only astonished, she was disturbed and curiously angry with Leonard because it was a position she couldn’t fit.

Then, as I became more impatient, she tried to prove to me that, of the two, it might be Pat who needed her the more.

AT the close of Kitty Pateman’s evidence, the judge had announced that, on the following morning, the court would begin half-an-hour early, at ten o’clock, in the hope of finishing the case that day. When the morning came, and we sat there knowing that the verdict was not far away – the two women back in the dock, Kitty not scribbling any more, the triptych of Patemans in front of us – the proceedings were low-keyed and the three final speeches by counsel were all over by noon. It wasn’t that they were hurrying, but all they could do, in effect, was repeat the medical arguments for and against. The evidence for mental abnormality wasn’t disputed, said Benskin. What had been disputed was how much this abnormality impaired their responsibility: as he had put it to the Crown witness, Dr Gough, it was a matter of degree: and yet surely, after all the evidence, the impairment wasn’t in doubt? Could anyone, said Jamie Wilson, having heard Kitty Pateman’s history and
having seen and listened to her in the witness box
(that was the boldest stroke that either he or Benskin made), believe that she was capable of a free choice? That her state of mind allowed her to control what she had done? All that her doctors said showed that this was incredible, and all that she said herself made it more incredible still.