“He’ll come back some time.”
“Will he?” she said, without reaction.
Another interval. My tongue wouldn’t work any better – maybe worse – than when I saw her before the trial.
“What’s it like in here?”
Her glance met mine, slid viscously away, pale-eyed in the heavy handsome face. She gave a contemptuous shrug.
“What do you think it’s like?” she said. Then her tone became a violent mutter: “There’s the soap.”
“What?”
“The soap. It’s diabolical. Every morning when I go to wash, it makes me want to throw up.”
I listened to a long, unyielding, gravelly complaint about the soap. It sounded as though she had a sensitive nose. Against my will, I felt a kind of sympathy.
“Why don’t you tell them?”
“They wouldn’t care.”
She gave up complaining, and sank into muteness again. Inventing one or two questions, I got nothing but nods. Calmly she asked: “Will they let me see her?”
“I don’t know.” I did know: but it wasn’t for me to tell her, or at least I rationalised it so.
Another patch of muteness. Again calmly, she said: “What’s the position about letting us out?”
I said, surely her solicitors had told her already. She said yes, and then, with implacable repetitive calm and obstinacy, asked the question once more.
Well, it spun the time out to explain. The sentence, as she knew, I said, was a statutory one: but, as she also knew, it didn’t mean what it said. In some years, no one could tell quite when, the authorities would be reviewing their cases: if there was thought to be no danger, then they might be released.
“How long?”
“In some cases, it’s quite a short time.”
“They won’t do that for us. People will be watching what happens to us.”
That was more realistic than anything I had heard from her before. Raising her voice, she asked: “I want to know, how long do you think they’ll keep us in?”
I thought it was a time to speak straight. “If they’re sure there’s no danger, my guess would be something like ten years.”
“What are you talking about, danger?”
“They’ll need to be sure you won’t do anything of the same kind again.”
She gave a short despising laugh.
“They needn’t worry themselves. We shan’t do anything like that again.”
For an instant I recalled that colleague of Hankins, too clever by half, making bright remarks before the verdict. Then, more sharply, Mrs Pateman talking of her daughter.
“We shan’t do anything like that again,” said Cora.
She added: “Why should we?”
I couldn’t reply. Not through horror (which at that moment, and in fact through that interview, I didn’t feel): through something like loneliness, or even a sense of mystification that led into nothing. It was a relief to ask her commonplace questions – after all, if my guess was right, when she came out she’d still be a young woman, wouldn’t she? Not much over thirty, perhaps? What did she intend to do?
“I haven’t got as far as that,” she said.
But she had. It came out – she wasn’t unwilling to let it – that she had been making plans. The plans were down-to-earth. They would go and live somewhere else, in a large town, perhaps London. They would change their names. They might try to change their appearance, certainly they would dye their hair. They wouldn’t have much difficulty, if the labour market hadn’t altered, in getting jobs. They would have to cover up for not having employment cards, but still they’d manage. In all she said, there was no vestige of a sign that she was thinking of reshaping her life – no more than George ever had, though about that I had once believed otherwise. She had no thought of finding another way to live. I was listening for it, but there was none at all. All she foresaw, or wanted to foresee, was picking up where she had left off.
Throughout she had been using the word ‘we’. It was ‘we’ who were going to find another place to settle in. Was that going to happen in ten years’ time? How would she endure it, if it didn’t happen? It was difficult to have any prevision of what Kitty would be like. She might be imagining a different kind of life. If she were capable of that, when the time came she would throw Cora away as though she didn’t recognise her face.
The hour wore on. I was trying, when she dropped her chin, to catch a glance at my wristwatch below the table.
“I don’t know how to pass the time,” she said. She hadn’t observed me: she was saying it – not as a complaint, but as a matter of fact – about herself. What did she do all day? I couldn’t make out. Sometimes ‘they’ let her listen to the radio.
“It’s all right for her,” she said, once more as a matter of fact, without envy. “She’ll be doing a lot of reading.”
She repeated: “I don’t know how to pass the time. She’ll be learning things.”
She seemed to be thinking of tomorrow and the next day, not of the stretch of years.
My time, not hers, was nearly up. I said that I should have to go. As though she were imitating the judge after he had sentenced them, she gave me a dismissive nod.
Meanwhile, I had been having another reminder, which, except by disconnecting the telephone, I could not escape. I had told Mr Pateman – in his frenetic state, when his wife led me to him – that he was at liberty to talk to me. He took me at my word. When we had returned to London, on the first evening, the telephone rang. A personal call: would I accept it, and reverse the charges? Mr Pateman’s grinding voice: “I can’t let it go at this.” His daughter was ill. They hadn’t listened to what the doctors said. They were behaving like rats in mazes. Something must be done about his daughter. Something must be done about people in her condition. What about the authorities ‘high up’: when could I get them moving? Patiently that first night, I said that neither I nor any other private citizen could do anything at all: this was a matter of law – “I can’t be expected to be satisfied with that.” When should I be coming to the town again, so that he could explain his ‘point of view’? Not for some time, I had no engagement there: in any case, I said, I knew very well how he felt. No, he had to explain exactly.
The conversation was not conclusive. Three or four times a week the call came through: reverse the charges? The same voice, the same statements, often identically the same words. Rats in mazes. Authorities high up. His point of view. He wasn’t rude, he wasn’t even angry, he just went grinding on. Once he had found words which contented him, he felt no need to change them.
It was no use Margaret answering the telephone, and saying that I was out. He was ready to ring up again at midnight, 1 a.m., or very early the following morning. We thought of refusing to accept the calls: but that we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Whatever his wife had feared, whether it was that he might become clinically deranged, seemed not to be happening to him now. In hectoring me, in grating on with this ritual, he had found an activity which obsessed and satisfied him. He might even have lost contact with what the object of it was. Over the telephone I couldn’t see – and didn’t want to see – his face. I suspected that he was beginning to look as when I had first seen him, the dislocation going, the confidence of
folie de grandeur
flooding back.
Yet each night we became fretted as we waited for the telephone to ring. And, there was no denying it, we found ourselves showing a streak of miserliness, as though we were being infected from the other end of the line. It was ridiculous. Margaret had never counted shillings in her life. We spent more on cigarettes in a week than those reverse charges could possibly amount to. Nevertheless, with the experience of the trial only a few weeks behind us, we scrutinised our telephone bill with indignation, calculating what was the cost of Mr Pateman.
A few days after my visit to the prison, Charles and I were sitting under a weeping willow on the riverbank. It was a fine afternoon, and I had gone down to his school to settle what he should do during the next academic year. Not that there was much to settle, for he had made up his mind months before. He had cleared off all the examinations, and it was time to go. The only issue remaining was not when, but where. He wouldn’t be seventeen for a good many months, and he had to fill in three terms before he went to the university. He was taking the chance to start off on his travels, and it was some of those plans that we had been discussing.
“You might even write a letter occasionally,” I said.
He grinned.
It would have seemed strange in my time, I said, to be going off on one’s own at his age. In fact, among my friends, it would have been not only strange, but unimaginable. Of course, we didn’t have the money–
“Do we really grow up faster, do you think?”
“In some ways, yes, you do.”
I added: “But, for what it’s worth, I wanted to get married before I was twenty.”
“Who to?”
“My first wife.”
“You didn’t marry her for six – or was it seven – years afterwards, did you?”
“No.”
“If it had happened when you were twenty – what would it have been like?”
“It couldn’t have been worse than it turned out.”
Charles gave a grim, saga-like smile, similar to his uncle’s. But I was thinking that, though he knew the facts of my life with extreme accuracy, he didn’t know how torn about I’d been. He wouldn’t have believed that I had gone through that long drawn out and crippling love. He saw me as balanced and calm, a comparatively sensible ageing man. Sometimes I was amused. I permitted myself to say: “You haven’t got the monopoly of temperament in this family, you know.”
It was easy to talk to him, as to Martin, on the plane of sarcasm. As we sat there, I mentioned the telephonic activities of Mr Pateman. “You’ve brought it on yourself,” said Charles, operating on the same plane. An acquaintance of his sculled by, and Charles gave an amiable wave – rather like, since he was leaving so soon, Robin Hood gazing on the exploits of the budding archers. When the swell had passed, the river was mirror-calm, the willow leaves meeting their reflections in the water. It was something like an afternoon with C L Dodgson, I said to Charles, and went on to tell him that I had talked to Cora Ross in Holloway.
“Haven’t you packed all that up by now?”
“Not quite.” I added, sometimes it seemed that I never should.
He leaned forward, confronting me.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”
“This is an incident. If it hadn’t been for sheer blind chance, it wouldn’t have been an incident that mattered to you. All along, you’ve given it a significance that it doesn’t possess.” He was speaking lucidly, articulately, but with force and something like antagonism.
“I could have found other incidents, you know. Which would have affected me in the same fashion.”
“That’s because you are looking for them,” said Charles. “Do you remember, that weekend I was at home, you were breathing hellfire and damnation about Auschwitz? I disagreed with you then. You noticed that, did you? And I still disagree with you.”
“Auschwitz happened.”
“Many other things have happened. Remember, Auschwitz happened years before I was born. I’m bound to be interested in what’s happening now–”
“That’s fair enough.”
“Of course there are awful things. Here and now. But I want to find them out for myself.”
“Retracing all our mistakes in the process.”
“That’s
not
fair enough.” He said it politely, but as though he had been thinking it out alone and his mind had hardened. “I don’t think I’m easily taken in. My generation isn’t, you know. We’ve had to learn a fair amount.”
“It’s curious how you talk about ‘your generation’,” I said. “We never did.”
He wasn’t distracted. “Perhaps that’s because we know that we have a difficult job to do. You don’t deny that, do you?”
I said, that would be the last thing I intended.
He was referring to his friends by name. As a group, they were abler, very much abler, than those I had known as a boy. Some of them would take the world as they found it: become academics, conventional politicians, civil servants: that was easy enough, they had no problem there. But one or two, like himself, were not so content. Then what do you do? “We should like to find something useful. Perhaps I ought to lower my sights, but I don’t feel inclined to, until I’ve had a shot. And I don’t think it would be very different, even if I hadn’t got you on my back–”
He threw in that remark quite gently. I said that he could forget me.
He said, still gently but with a flick of sarcasm, that he would do his best to. That was the object of the exercise.
No, not really the object, just the first condition, he corrected himself. He wanted to throw in his weight where it would be useful: and he wanted to be sure it was his weight and no one else’s.
It had the ring of a youth’s ambition, at the same time arrogant and idealistic, mixed up with dreams of happiness. Some of it sounded as though it had been talked out with friends. Most of it, I thought, was solitary. He seemed spontaneous and easy-natured, but he kept his secrets.
He said that he had no more use for “doctrines of individual salvation” than I had. (I wondered where they had picked up that expression?) Any of those doctrines was dangerous, he said: they nearly always meant that, either actively or passively, one wished harm on to the world. Of course, he wanted for himself anything that came. What did he want? He was imagining something, but kept it to himself. He returned to saying that, whatever he found to do, it was going to be hard enough: so he couldn’t afford to carry any excess luggage with him.
“I want everything as open-ended as it can be, isn’t that right?” he said. “I don’t want to set limits yet awhile. Limits about people, I mean. So that’s why I can’t take this trouble of yours as tragically as you do. Do you mind that?”
All I could answer was to shake my head. I was sure by now that he had come to this meeting resolved to make his declaration: once he had got it over, he was in high spirits. Cheerfully he stretched himself, sucking a stem of grass. It was almost time, he said, for us to move off into the town for tea. “Tea’s not much good to you, is it?” he said. “Well, afterwards we’ll go to a hotel and I’ll stand you a Scotch. Just to celebrate the fact that this is the last time you’ll have to come down to this establishment–” he spread out a hand towards the river, the fields, the distant towers across the meadows.