“This went on for two years. He wouldn’t let me get pregnant, he said, and I didn’t. I would just lay up there in his wife’s bed and work out algebra problems or think about what new thing I was going to buy. But one day, when I got home, Mama was there ahead of me, and she saw me get out of his car. I knew when he was driving off that I was going to get it.
“Mama asked me didn’t I know he was a white man? Didn’t I know he was a married man with two children? Didn’t I have good sense? And do you know what I told her? I told her he loved me. Mama was crying and praying at the same time by then. The neighbors heard both of us screaming and crying, because Mama beat me almost to death with the cord from the electric iron. She just hacked it off the iron, still on the ironing board. She beat me till she couldn’t raise her arm. And then she had one of her fits, just twitching and sweating and trying to claw herself into the floor. This scared me more than the beating. That night she told me something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. She said; ‘On top of everything else, that man’s daddy goes on the TV every night and says folks like us ain’t even human.’ It was his daddy who had stood in the schoolhouse door saying it would be over his dead body before any black children would come into a white school.
“But do you think that stopped me? No. I would look at his daddy on TV ranting and raving about how integration was a communist plot, and I would just think of how different his son Bubba was from his daddy! Do you understand what I’m saying. I thought he loved me. That meant something to me. What did I know about ‘equal rights’? What did I care about ‘integration’? I was sixteen! I wanted somebody to tell me I was pretty, and he was telling me that all the time. I even thought it was brave of him to go with me. History? What did I know about History?
“I began to hate Mama. We argued about Bubba all the time, for months. And I still slipped out to meet him, because Mama had to work. I told him how she beat me, and about how much she despised him – he was really pissed off that any black person could despise him – and about how she had these spells… Well, the day I became seventeen, the day of my seventeenth birthday, I signed papers in his law office, and I had my mother committed to an insane asylum.
“After Mama had been in Carthage Insane Asylum for three months, she managed somehow to get a lawyer. An old slick-headed man who smoked great big black cigars. People laughed at him because he didn’t even have a law office, but he was the only lawyer that would touch the case, because Bubba’s daddy was such a big deal. And we all gathered in the judge’s chambers – because he wasn’t about to let this case get out. Can you imagine, if it had? And Mama’s old lawyer told the judge how Bubba’s daddy had tried to buy him off. And Bubba got up and swore he’d never touched me. And then I got up and said Mama was insane. And do you know what? By that time it was true. Mama was insane. She had no mind left at all. They had given her shock treatments or something… God knows what else they gave her. But she was as vacant as an empty eye socket. She just sat sort of hunched over, and her hair was white.
“And after all this, Bubba wanted us to keep going together. Mama was just an obstacle that he felt he had removed. But I just suddenly – in a way I don’t even pretend to understand – woke up. It was like everything up to then had been some kind of dream. And I told him I wanted to get Mama out. But he wouldn’t do it; he just kept trying to make me go with him. And sometimes – out of habit, I guess – I did. My body did what it was being paid to do. And Mama died. And I killed Bubba.
“How did I get away with killing one of the biggest lawyers in the state? It was easy. He kept a gun in his desk drawer at the office and one night I took it out and shot him. I shot him while he was wearing his thick winter overcoat, so I wouldn’t have to see him bleed. But I don’t think I took the time to wipe off my fingerprints, because, to tell the truth, I couldn’t stand it another minute in that place. No one came after me, and I read in the paper the next day that he’d been killed by burglars. I guess they thought ‘burglars’ had stolen all that money Bubba kept in his safe – but I had it. One of the carrots Bubba always dangled before me was that he was going to send me to college: I didn’t see why he shouldn’t do it.
“The strangest thing was, Bubba’s wife came over to the house and asked me if I’d mind looking after the children while she went to Bubba’s funeral. I did it, of course, because I was afraid she’d suspect something if I didn’t. So on the day he was buried I was in his house, sitting on his wife’s bed with his children, and eating fried chicken his wife, Julie, had cooked.”
Corruption
Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively (b. 1933) is a critically acclaimed British author of fiction for both children and adults. She won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1973, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and also the Man Booker Prize for her 1987 novel, Moon Tiger. Lively was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours list.
The judge and his wife, driving to Aldeburgh for the weekend, carried with them in the back of the car a Wine Society carton filled with pornographic magazines. The judge, closing the hatchback, stared for a moment through the window; he reopened the door and put a copy of The Times on top of the pile, extinguishing the garish covers. He then got into the driving seat and picked up the road atlas.
“The usual route, dear?”
“The usual route, I think. Unless we spot anything enticing on the way.”
“We have plenty of time to be enticed, if we feel so inclined.”
The judge, Richard Braine, was sixty-two; his wife Marjorie, a magistrate, was two years younger. The weekend ahead was their annual and cherished early summer break at the Music Festival; the pornographic magazines were the impounded consignment of an importer currently under trial and formed the contents of the judge’s weekend briefcase, so to speak. “Chores?” his wife had said, and he had replied, “Chores, I’m afraid.”
At lunch-time, they pulled off the main road into a carefully selected lane and found a gate-way in which to park the car. They carried the rug and picnic basket into a nearby field and ate their lunch under the spacious East Anglian sky in a state of almost flamboyant contentment. Both had noted how the satisfactions of life have a tendency to gain intensity with advancing years. “The world gets more beautiful,” Marjorie had once said, “not less so. Fun is even more fun. Music is more musical, if you see what I mean. One hadn’t reckoned with that.” Now, consuming the thoughtfully constructed sandwiches and the coffee from the thermos, they glowed at one another amid the long thick grass that teemed with buttercup and clover; before them, the landscape retreated into blue distances satisfactorily broken here and there by a line of trees, the tower of a church or a rising contour. From time to time they exchanged remarks of pleasure or anticipation: about the surroundings, the weather, the meal they would eat tonight at the little restaurant along the coast road, tomorrow evening’s concert. Richard Braine, who was a man responsive to the moment, took his wife’s hand; they sat in the sun, shirt-sleeved, and agreed conspiratorially and without too much guilt that they were quite glad that the eldest married daughter who sometimes accompanied them on this trip had not this year been able to. The daughter was loved, but would just now have been superfluous.
When they arrived at the small hotel it was early evening. The judge carried their suitcase and the Wine Society carton in and set them down by the reception desk. The proprietor, bearing the carton, showed them to their usual room. As she was unpacking, Marjorie said, “I think you should have left that stuff in the car. Chambermaids, you know…” The judge frowned. “That’s a point.” He tipped the contents of the box into the emptied suitcase and locked it. “I think I’ll have a bath before we go out.”
He lay in the steamy cubicle, a sponge resting upon his stomach. Marjorie, stripped to a pair of pants, came in to wash. “The dear old avocado suite again. One day we must have an avocado bathroom suite at home.” The judge, contemplating the ris
e of his belly, nodded; he was making a resolution about reduction of the flesh, a resolution which he sadly knew would be broken. He was a man who enjoyed food. His wife’s flesh, in the process now of being briskly soaped and scrubbed, was firmer and less copious, as he was fully prepared to concede. He turned his head to watch her and thought for a while in a vague and melancholy way about bodies, about how we inhabit them and are dragged to the grave by them and are conditioned by them. In the course of his professional life he had frequently had occasion to reflect upon the last point: it had seemed to him, observing the faces that passed before him in courtrooms, that confronted him from docks and witness boxes, that not many of us are able to rise above physical appearance. The life of an ugly woman is different from that of a beautiful one; you cannot infer character from appearance, but you can suspect a good deal about the circumstances to which it will have given rise. Abandoning this intetesting but sombre theme, he observed his wife’s breasts and muscular but not unshapely thighs and the folds of skin upon her neck and remembered the first time he had seen her with no clothes on. She turned to look at him. “If you’re jeering at my knickers, they’re a pair of Alison’s I grabbed out of the laundry basket by mistake.” Alison was their youngest, unmarried daughter. “I hadn’t really noticed them,” said the judge politely. “I was thinking about something quite different.” He smiled. “And don’t leer,” said his wife, flicking him with her flannel. “It’s unbecoming in a man of your age.” “It’s a tribute to your charms, my dear,” said the judge. He sat up and began to wash his neck, thinking still about that first time they had both been embarrassed. Embarrassment had been a part of the pleasure, he reflected. How odd, and interesting.
It was still daylight when they drove to the restaurant, a violet summer twilight in which birds sang with jungle stridency. Marjorie, getting out of the car, said, “That veal and mushroom in cream sauce thing for me, I think. A small salad for you, without dressing.”
“No way,” said the judge.
“I admire your command of contemporary speech.” She went ahead into the restaurant, inspecting the room with bright, observant eyes. When they were sitting at the table she whispered, “There’s that same woman we met last year. Remember? The classy type who kept putting you right about Britten.”
The judge, cautiously, turned his head. “So it is. Keep a low profile.”
“Will do, squire,” said Marjorie, applying herself to the menu. “Fifteen all?” she added. “Right?”
“Right,” said her husband.
Their acquaintance, leaving before them, stopped to exchange greetings. The judge, mildly resenting the interruption to his meal, left the work to Marjorie. The woman, turning to go, said, “So nice to see you again. And have a lovely break from juries and things.” She gleamed upon the judge.
He watched her retreating silk-clad back. “Rather a gushing creature. How the hell does she know what I do?”
“Chatting up the hotel people, I don’t doubt. It gives you cachet, you note, your job. Me, on the other hand, she considers a drab little woman. I could see her wondering how I came by you.”
“Shall we enlighten her? Sheer unbridled lust…”
“Talking of which,” said Marjorie, “Just how unprincipled would it be to finish off with some of that cheese-cake?”
Back at the hotel, they climbed into bed in a state of enjoyable repletion. The judge put on his spectacles and reached out for the suitcase. “You’re not going to start going through that stuff now…” said Marjorie. “At least have one whole day off work.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Tomorrow will do. I’ll have that Barbara Pym novel instead.”
The judge, waking early the next morning, lay thinking about the current trial. He thought, in fact, not about obscenity or pornography but about the profit motive. He did not, he realised, understand the profit motive; he did not understand it in the same way in which he did not understand what induced people to be cruel. He had never coveted the possessions of others or wished himself richer than he was. He held no stocks or shares; Marjorie, once, had been left a small capital sum by an aunt; neither he nor she had ever been able to take the slightest interest in the financial health of her investments. Indeed, both had now forgotten what exactly the money was in. All this, he realised, was the position of a man with a substantial earned income; were he not paid what he was he might well feel otherwise. But he had not, in fact, felt very much otherwise as an impecunious young barrister. And importers of pornography tend, he understood, to be in an upper income bracket. No – the obstacle, the barrier requiring that leap of the imagination, was this extra dimension of need in some men that sought to turn money into yet more money, that required wealth for wealth’s sake, the spawning of figures. The judge himself enjoyed growing vegetables; he considered, now, the satisfaction he got from harvesting a good crop of french beans and tried to translate this into a manifestation of the profit motive. The analogy did not quite seem to work.
The profit motive in itself, of course, is innocuous enough. Indeed, without it societies would founder. This was not the point that was bothering the judge; he was interested in those gulfs of inclination that divide person from person. As a young man he had wondered if this restriction makes us incapable of passing judgement on our fellows, but had come to realise at last that it does not. He remembered being involved in an impassioned argument about apartheid with another law student, an Afrikaner; “You cannot make pronouncements on our policies,” the man had said, “when you have never been to our country. You cannot understand the situation.” Richard Braine had known, with the accuracy of a physical response, that the man was wrong. Not misguided; simply wrong. A murderer is doing wrong, whatever the circumstances that drive him to his crime.
The profit motive is not wrong; the circumstances of its application may well be. The judge – with a certain irritation – found himself recalling the features of the importer of pornography: a nondescript, bespectacled man memorable only for a pair of rather bushy eyebrows and a habit of pulling an ear-lobe when under cross-examination. He pushed the fellow from his mind, determinedly, and got out of bed. Outside the window, strands of neatly corrugated cloud coasted in a milky-blue sky; it looked as though it would be a nice day.
The Braines spent the morning at Minsmere bird sanctuary; in the afternoon they went for a walk. The evening found them, scoured by fresh air and slightly somnolent, listening to Mozart, Bartok and Mendelssohn. The judge, who had never played an instrument and regarded himself as relatively unmusical, nevertheless responded to music with considerable intensity. It aroused him in various ways; in such different ways, indeed, that, being a thorough and methodical man, he often felt bemused, caught up by the onward rush of events before he had time to sort them out. Stop, he wanted to say to the surging orchestra, just let me have a think about that bit… But already he would have been swept onwards, into other moods, other themes, other passions. Marjorie, who played the piano in an unspectacular but competent way, had often suggested that the problem might be solved at least in part if he learned to read music.
She was no doubt right, he thought, wrestling now with a tortuous passage. When I retire; just the thing for a man reduced to inactivity. The judge did not look forward to retirement. But a few moments of inattention had been fatal – now the music had got away from him entirely, as though he had turned over two pages of a book. Frowning, he concentrated on the conductor.
Standing at the bar in the interval, he found himself beside their acquaintance from the restaurant, also waiting to order a drink. Gallantry or even basic good manners required that he intervene. “Oh,” she said. “How terribly sweet of you. A gin and tonic would be gorgeous.” With resignation, he led her back to where Marjorie awaited him.
“Your husband was so sweet and insistent – I’m all on my own this evening, my sister had a splitting headache and decided not to come.” She was a tall woman in her early fifties, too youthfully packa
ged in a flounced skirt and high-heeled boots, her manner towards the judge both sycophantic and faintly roguish. “I was reading about you in The Times last month, some case about people had up for embezzling, of course I didn’t understand most of it, all terribly technical, but I said to Laura, I know him, we had such a lovely talk about Britten at the Festival.”
“Ah,” said the judge, studying his programme: the Tippett next.
“I’m Moira Lukes, by the way – if you’re anything like me names just evaporate, but of course I remembered yours from seeing it in the paper!” She turned to Marjorie, “Aren’t you loving the concert?”; patronage discreetly flowed, the patronage of a woman with a sexual history towards one who probably had none, of a lavishly clad woman towards a dowdy one. The judge’s antennae slightly quivered, though he was not himself sure why. Marjorie blandly agreed that the concert was superb. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to make a dash to the loo while there’s time.”
The judge and Moira Lukes, left alone, made private adjustments so each other’s company: the judge cleared his throat and commented on the architecture of the concert hall: Moira moved a fraction closer to him and altered the pitch of her voice, probably without being aware that she did either. “You must lead such a fascinating life,” she said. “I mean, you must come across such extraordinary people. Dickensian types. I don’t think I’ve ever set eyes on a criminal.”
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 104