The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  From the front, Dent spoke for the first time on the journey. ‘Don’t worry. This isn’t kiddies.’

  Don’t worry: although these words were unusually prone to misleading application, they could rarely have been spoken as inappropriately as this.

  We are troubled on every side, Ned thought. Many people, in extreme moments, are surprised by lines from prayers or poems learned in childhood. But a broadcaster, like an actor, also carries around fragments of scripts ineradicably remembered. As if a tape had been activated in his brain, Ned heard himself speaking some verses from, he thought, Corinthians. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.

  He saw himself – though unsure whether from a memory of the recording or of watching it broadcast – crouching beside the Dead Sea, during his Easter Special The Bible – History or Myth?, delivering a link on the canniness of Christianity in turning suffering into a virtue. It was the only one of his programmes that had not been followed by a proud phone call from his mother. He remembered an argument with the producer, who had wanted to use, instead of the bass cadences of the King James, a modern American translation – something like, we are down, but not out; worried, but not depressed – that the viewers were judged more likely to ‘get’.

  Ned repeated the ancient consolations in his head, but they had no calming effect, as they would have done for his mother. He was distressed, he was in despair.

  ‘When we’re there, we’ll get you settled in,’ Walters said, sounding like the courtesy driver for a luxury hotel. ‘But nothing will happen until your brief turns up.’

  Ned smiled, tension in the muscles making his face hurt as he did so, and stared out of the window, trying to remember every woman he had ever – it seemed wrong even to think fucked – known.

  He had once read an interview with an elderly writer who admitted that he spent much of his twilight time remembering sexual pleasures from the past. But, except when away on long filming trips (in the great divide between masturbators, he favoured factual scenes over fantasy ones), he had never expected to be doing it at sixty and still less in an unmarked police car.

  Some men, he supposed, must think, as they are driven to the station, oh, fuck, that kid in Scarborough in 70 something, or understand that a dread at the edge of their dreams for decades – modern western democracies’ version of the dawn knock on the door by the secret police – has finally arrived. But no guilt – only fear – was triggered in Ned.

  Starting with Nicky Harper – 1972, freshers’ week, eighteen, a virgin, as was he, but potentially more reluctant, as a woman of that time, to have sex – he began to play back his mental porn collection.

  The Director of History

  Reminded of waiting for the headmaster’s door to open fifty years before, Tom Pimm tried to guess how much trouble he was in from the tone and expressions of, Eileen-was-it?, his line manager’s personal assistant.

  The e-mail had dropped at 2.30pm the previous afternoon, when he was wondering how early he could reasonably leave to prepare for Ned Marriott’s party; the days when a member of the department could spend months or even years ‘reading at home’ were over. With ‘customers’ now paying for their tuition, ‘absenteeism’ had become a disciplinary matter.

  ‘Tom’, the message began. Although some departmental relics of the letter-writing era employed even electronically a Victorian ‘Dear’, and the younger and looser used ‘Hi’, management traditionally dispensed with any preface, presumably in fear of being accused of over-familiarity or misleading the recipient with a friendly tone.

  Tom,

  Following receipt of the Traill Report, the Director of

  History would like to see you tomorrow (Friday) at 3.45pm

  in his office.

  Elaine Benham,

  executive assistant to Kevan Neades (Director of History – Deputy Executive Dean of Humanities)

  No ‘yours’, neither faithful nor sincere. Like judges nervous of being overturned on appeal, Neades always tried to be as noncommittal as possible in all communications, and his team seemed to follow his example. But Tom’s suddenly charging heart understood, before his mind formulated the thought, that he was unlikely to have been summoned to be asked his opinion of the report’s pagination.

  Only almost a bottle of red wine, speedily downed in relief at completing his tribute to Ned without being struck dumb or punched by the subject of the speech, had allowed him to sleep at all: for two hours until he woke with a dry, sour mouth and lay awake until the unnecessary 6.45am alarm, scripting the most positive possibilities for their conversation. Look, Tom, it’s no big deal, but, with the students going bankrupt to be here, we need to give premium service: a couple of freshers have found your comments on their essays a bit robust. You know the drill these days: here’s an idea that might help you to make your work even better. I’m really sorry to have to do this – you’re one of our best teachers – but these are the times!

  A warning it would be, at worst. Or, if worse, what? Dr Pimm, I’m afraid I have to tell you that a number of the women in the department have raised concerns that some of what you say – jokes, anecdotes, banter though you and I know them to be – may be capable of misinterpretation in the modern workplace. Dial them down a bit, eh, maybe?

  Except that the real Neades didn’t speak in anything like the voice he had in those consoling fantasies. His language was that of the career bureaucrat, calculatedly drained of detail and meaning. The passive – passive-aggressive voice – Offence has been given, steps will be taken – was more in the line of what he might say. And, if Tom asked what those steps might be: There is a range of views.

  It couldn’t be anything actually physically sexual, he thought; turning away from Helen’s warm, sleeping form, as if to emphasize his virtue even within the marital bed. Tom was one of the few university teachers he knew in his generation who had never screwed a student – when there were numerous rumours about Ned Marriott and many others – and so at least that was one bullet he would duck.

  For an hour, he conducted one of the gruelling, looping selfinterviews with which insomniacs ensure the impossibility of sleep. Sometimes the questions were helpful to his cause. Why do you assume you’re the only one? Marriott might have been summoned on a charge of fucking freshers. But when I mentioned the meeting with Special last night, Ned showed no recognition. But he’s a TV presenter, which is virtually an actor. Yeah, yeah, but I know him well enough to be able to tell.

  Elsewhere, the interrogation challenged even his consolations. You say there won’t be sexual accusations, but what if people have lied in their evidence? Well, why would they do that? Are you serious? You’ve worked in that department for thirty years: to call it a nest of vipers is defamatory to snakes. The managers all turned a blind eye to Allison for three decades and are now spinning this fiction they didn’t know anything about him. And everybody thinks they should have the job one rung above theirs, and so conspires against whoever’s got it. They get through gossip like Formula One uses gasoline.

  Then, at 05.50 by the red-eyed clock, in a moment of ecstatic clarity, he understood that Neades had asked to see him as a witness to the conduct of others – he had made some observations to the investigation – and experienced a moment of almost-calm until he began to fret about being pressured to give evidence against Ned and other friends in the department.

  Just before quarter to seven, he switched off the alarm before it sounded, but the cancelling click was enough to halfwake Helen. She drowsily rubbed her feet against the back of his legs, toenails always sharper than she thought.

  ‘You had a restless night,’ she yawn-talked. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah. My friend red wine is now my enemy, apparently.’

  ‘You’re not …’ – another loving rake from the talons – ‘… worried about something?’

  ‘No.’

  Luckily, ‘The Past Roots and Present Consequences of America’s Fe
ar of Communism’ was a lecture he could have delivered in his sleep, a theory almost tested that morning. Tom conducted a seminar on a favourite presidential paradox: Nixon avoiding impeachment but resigning, Clinton being impeached but remaining in office. It worried him that so many of the students seemed to view Nixon as strong and wronged (because of his frozen head in Futurama, he was the president they knew best) and Clinton as weak and sleazy, his treatment of Monica Lewinsky ‘gross’. ‘But isn’t there a case,’ Tom asked, ‘that what Clinton didn’t quite do to Ms Lewinsky, Nixon actually did to Cambodia? And which, we might ask, matters more?’ But he had been too oblique – the joke only working with the word fucked – and they didn’t get it. ‘Monica was a vulnerable young woman and he was President, plus married,’ said Milly Morton-King, sounding, morally if not linguistically, more nineteenth century than nineteen, to much nodding from the other women and silent stillness from the men.

  He set them for a fortnight’s time ‘Did Teddy Kennedy or Jack Kennedy achieve most in American politics?’, adding: ‘And, by the way, don’t follow the mistake of a previous student in thinking that one of those Kennedys was called Nigel’ – and then tried to eat at his desk a tuna sandwich that he threw away after chewing out a half-moon from one crust.

  ‘Tom Pimm. For the Director,’ he announced himself at 3.40pm.

  He was mumbling slightly, worried that his breath was still boozy from the birthday party.

  The Director’s assistant didn’t look up.

  ‘If you wait over there.’ Her voice was as blank as her message had been. ‘He’ll pop out.’

  Tom suppressed a smile at the hideous unbidden image of Special exposing himself. Eileen-was-it? – early thirties, extremely pregnant – had a working area that was partly private, with a right-angled partition bracketed to the front of her boss’s office but one wall missing, as in a stage-set. Opposite this gap was a red sofa and a low table that, until the most recent round of spending cuts, would have held the week’s editions of the THES and other educational publications.

  His first flashback was to school, trying to guess the severity of the misdemeanour from the manner of the secretary, but with no more success now than then. The second memory was from February, waiting on a shabby banquette to be called for his evidence to the Traill Inquiry.

  Remove Belts and Shoes

  An unexpected effect of the high level of terrorist threat to the western world had been to make the process of arrest feel less alien to novices in a police station’s custody suite.

  Ned rattled his coins and keys into a plastic bowl, was pat-searched by a man with body odour and halitosis, pressed his index finger and thumb onto an under-lit glass rectangle and aligned his shoes with foot-prints on the floor (too small for his size 14s) until he faced a camera lens that flashed at him. This check-in procedure at least, he thought, was no worse than you would endure to fly to Florence for the weekend. The only departure from terminal protocol was the collection of cheek cells with a swab-bud and that, according to some articles, would be introduced at airports soon.

  But this consoling comparison soon collapsed. Here, shoes, belts and phones were not returned. And he felt more shivery, dizzy and arrhythmic than at Stansted because his destination, after being printed and pictured, was not the Euro-Traveller Lounge.

  Escorting him to the cell, one of the custody officers asked: ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’

  If the notorious penalty of celebrity was harassment, the drawback of being slightly known was half-recognition. In a restaurant once, Ned, after being stared at by the occupants of another table, felt flattered by the apparent rise in his status as a TV face. When one of the party strode over, red-faced and Merlot-lipped, Ned was bracing himself for the gracious granting of an autograph when the man asked him if he could settle a bet that was driving them mad: had he once sat next to them on an Easy Jet flight to Faro? When he answered, ‘I don’t think so,’ the man replied menacingly: ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said again to the policeman.

  ‘Okey-doke. Just something a bit familiar somehow.’

  Ned doubted that the cop-shop escort fitted the demographics for his channels, although some of the series had also been screened or repeated on digital history networks, which drew a broader audience because they showed so many programmes about Nazis. And, in this instance, there was the additional risk he had not been clocked as an historian but mistaken for an habitual offender. He imagined the humiliation of the potential exchange: ‘Well, you might have seen Suez – Britain’s Vietnam?’ / ‘Yer what? Listen, you didn’t do a ten-year for that Heathrow blag?’

  The cell was about the size of the downstairs loo in Winslow, although the lavatory contained in this cramped rectangle was a stainless-steel cone with no seat. Ned guessed that this was to prevent it being used as a weapon of resistance or (as a sort of hanging harness) against yourself. He feared that he would soon need to puke into the already ominously-stained bowl. There appeared to be no loo roll either. Was that an attempt at degradation or because the tissue might be twisted into a noose? The pressure in his bowels was more fierce than his worst experience of live broadcasting nerves and, in this squalid lack of privacy, he was equally determined to ignore the command.

  Being imprisoned for the first time was like an initial sight of New York: a series of moments known from movies. The hollow knock on the steel door and the viewing panel clattering back were expected, almost welcome. A hand extending from an institutional blue cuff passed through a cardboard beaker with steam rising from it.

  ‘Tea?’ asked the voice of the guy who had known him.

  ‘Oh, that’s so kind. Thank-you very much.’

  A conversation in a Cheltenham tea-shop.

  When Ned took the drink, the policeman stooped to the window. ‘How you feeling? You can see a doctor if you …?’

  Even standing and crossing the tiny space to take the cup had left him feeling faint – he couldn’t remember if he had taken his statins at the flat – but Ned said: ‘No. I think I’m fine.’

  Not since football matches in the ’70s had he sipped a drink that smelled so strongly of piss and tasted as he assumed that urine would. He had managed half an inch of the liquid without being sick when there was another bang on the door and the warder-waiter spoke through the pulled-back portal: ‘Ms’ – the feminist prefix elongated like a mosquito’s whine – ‘Ellen is here to see you.’

  In the past, Claire had handled his divorce, various contractual disputes with broadcasters and the plagiarism case. She strode through the jail door with an air of brisk but casual purpose that could only have been professional bravado but served to relax and relieve Ned, who stood and shook hands – it had never seemed appropriate to kiss her, and still less so now – with his solicitor. The custody officer backed out of the doorway but kept a line of sight and entry. Ned’s historian’s eye for patterns noted the recurrence of half-open doors in his descent through the justice system.

  Positioning her back against the gap, Claire handed across a small wrap of paper, dazzlingly white against her hands. He began to unravel it to find out what was inside but found that the gift was simply several sheets of Andrex. Claire inclined her head slightly towards the steel latrine and winked. Watching the door, Ned slipped the paper into his pocket.

  Gesturing for them to sit on the edge of the hard bench bed, Claire said: ‘So. I could spin you with the ratio of arrests to charges but you’d still think you’d be in the exceptions. They say you’ve declined a medical assessment?’

  ‘Yeah. There was a moment I thought I was going to die on the spot. But I just have to get through this now.’

  ‘Ned, how much have they told you?’

  ‘A charge of sexual assault.’

  ‘Charge? Singular?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s good, I mean, better than, isn’t it … ?’

  ‘Let’s see what they think they’ve got.’

  ‘I have
– I suppose all clients do – an urge to tell you that I didn’t do anything. But …’

  ‘No. You probably know the drill from telly, like most people now. Two of them will ask you questions in a room with a tape running. You don’t have to give any answers at all but, if you don’t, that could be an issue were there ever to be a trial. I’ll be there and you can take my advice. Now, I warn you, I’ve done a fair few of these and there’s a sort of working assumption that it’s fishy if you can’t actually remember what you had for breakfast on a given Thursday in 1969. So, in as much as you can, be ready for Mastermind: Specialist subject – yourself. Now, if you’re okay for the moment, I said I’d ring Emma when I’d seen you.’

  It was one of those speeches that certain professionals – doctors, teachers, lawyers – needed to have in their repertoire, delivered with a calming confidence that made you want to applaud like a theatre-goer. He felt an impulse to hug Claire but had already come to the conclusion that he might never touch a woman again.

  Deposition

  Tom had reluctantly volunteered to meet the Inquiry, on the grounds that, in the snake pit of History, he couldn’t be sure what others might be saying about him. He had Googled Dr Traill in advance, but found only links to joint-authored research papers and one foggy photograph from the schedule of a Belgrade symposium in 2002, showing someone who looked no closer than a younger sister to the serious, soft-voiced fortyish woman, with fluff-cut grey hair, who, when she stood to shake Tom’s hand, proved to be a willowy six-footer, triggering his small-man neuroses by looming over him.

  ‘Dr Pimm, I’m Andrea Traill,’ she greeted him, then angled her freed hand towards an Asian woman who, rising to be introduced, proved reassuringly small.

  ‘Jani Goswani,’ she said, although he had to glance at the printed card in front of her to compute the names. ‘Senior Leader, WH.’

  ‘WH?’ queried Tom, who had missed this addition to the campus acronyms.