by Mark Lawson
So it was only over tea at the Midland Hotel, where they had arranged to wait for the footballing contingent, that there was no subject obviously available to displace the one that hung over them like a doctor’s printout.
‘How do you think Ned’s doing?’ Helen asked.
Emma gave micro-surgical attention to a peppermint teabag. ‘Fine.’
‘You know I’d be surprised if that word really covered it?’
‘Yeah.’ The word emerged as a sigh. ‘You’re sort of always prepared somewhere – aren’t you – for them to lose their jobs or get a terminal illness? And this is a bit like those – as if someone’s taken a hammer to their personality – but also not quite because they’re moping around at home but go on getting paid and they still might get the all clear. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes. And, if they were sacked or sick, you wouldn’t blame them.’
‘Blame? You think Tom and Ned are responsible for what happened?’
‘Well, not Tom. But …’
Appreciating her mistake immediately, Helen had it confirmed by Emma’s snapped comeback: ‘You’re saying that my par—, my husband’ – the term spoken in italics, like a foreign word – ‘is a rapist?’
The expression about elephants in rooms concerned the impossibility of ignoring a topic but this elephant was not only a distraction. It had charged across the carpet.
‘No,’ Helen said with an intonation of contrition. ‘Of course not. It’s just that from what I hear …’
‘Whatever he might have told Tom would have been in confidence.’
‘Yes, yes. It was only very … general. But I guess sometimes people put themselves in situations where …’
An actor who dries on stage is desperate to speak but doesn’t know the words; someone abandoning a conversation knows the line but dare not speak it.
‘Look, Ned’s never going to run for Pope. But then nor, probably, is Tom.’ Despite decades of feminism, there survived a primal instinct to defend her man against another woman, which Helen resisted. ‘There’s stuff I’m fucking furious with Ned about. Like a lot of guys, he could have done with a padlock on his cock sometimes. But he doesn’t deserve this. Because Jimmy Savile ducked the bullet, they’re shooting people at random now. Do you think Tom’s innocent?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Well, there you go.’
‘Look, what I, we, think is, it’s complicated. Tom probably is guilty in the way that they define the crime. But we question the definition. It’s like the water test for witches – you were a witch if you sank but also if you floated. Tom has been accused of saying things to people but also not saying things to people. And, get this, if the victims say he’s guilty, then he is.’
‘I know. Ned said.’
Her brain knew not to say it but was over-ruled by her mouth. ‘Although whatever Tom said to him would have been in confidence.’
Emma’s rapid flush and blink reminded her of besting people at school or in editorial conferences. The consequences were also similar. ‘When you said that Ned brought it on himself …’
‘I don’t think I quite …’
‘I mean, we all love Tom but there’s a side of him that could be seen as a sarcastic bastard …’
However civilized they claimed to be, humans always divided into tribes or sides. ‘Jesus, Emma!’
‘I’m just saying – if you were an eighteen-year-old and away from home …’
‘Eighteen? Some of these people are nearer eighty!’
‘Really. Ned said it was students …’
‘Did he? I can’t imagine why. Well, there might be someone who wanted a first and got a third. But, no, these are faculty. Write your own gags about the ones they may have lost.’
From Emma’s silence, Helen sensed victory, but was proved wrong. ‘I need to ask you something, Helen. I wasn’t going to but, as it seems to be dirty linen day … Ned has this Claire woman … oh, don’t fucking smirk …’
‘I’m not!’
‘His solicitor.’
‘Yes, I know. She’s helping Tom now.’
‘She’s putting together these character references for Ned.’ The match must be long over. Where were the boys? ‘Ned said that you refused to give …’
The hesitation, Helen guessed, resulted from pulling out of, abandoning, the expression give him one. Why did almost every English expression carry sexual innuendo?
‘So. Em, all I thought is that there wasn’t much point in having two Pimms on a list. Anyone looking at it is just going to think: oh, she agrees with her husband, surprise, surprise.’
Scepticism or contempt – or a combination – twisted Emma’s face. ‘It was only writing a paragraph that he doesn’t strike you as a fucking … as a rapist. You don’t think you might be overthinking this?’
A small but raucous chorus from behind interrupted them. A football chant in which she first picked out the clear tenor voice of her husband and the shy soprano of Toby and then made out the words: ‘Who ate all the scones? Who ate all the scones? Who ate all the who ate all the who ate all the scones?’
‘Oh, hello, darling,’ she said to Tom, who kissed the top of her head. Emma pulled Toby into a hug, leaving Ned alone as the recipient of no affection.
‘Did they win?’ Emma asked.
‘One–one. But, Mummy, we’re boy … boy …’
‘Boycotting,’ Tom prompted.
‘Yes, we’re that word SpecSavers. Because they were spon … spon …’
‘Sponsoring,’ Tom said.
‘The ref!’
There was dutiful laughter, more for the performer than the joke-writer, then a silence in which Tom made his Sherlock Holmes face. ‘Oh, dear! I get the impression there’ve been some crunching tackles and red cards here.’
Date
When Claire said, ‘I’ve just had a call from Dent at Millpond,’ Ned could tell from her voice that the charges hadn’t been dropped and that, worse, he was probably being summoned to hear another accusation.
‘Bit of an odd one,’ his lawyer said. ‘They’ve come back with a date from the first complainant. And it’s very precise. Between 10.15pm and midnight on Monday September 20th, 1976. Can you have a think and let me know if it sets off an alert in your mind or your diaries?’
A Letter to My Family and Friends
If you have had to open this envelope, then it will only be in circumstances that I could never – until this year – have imagined subjecting you to.
You will rightly be angry that I came to see this as the only option and will consider it selfish. You will say – as I have said of others in similar situations – that there must have been some alternative, that many people have come through worse and restored their lives to something like they were before; or, failing that, had a duty to avoid adding more damaged lives to their own.
All I can say is that it came to feel as if there were no alternative. In the past months, it has seemed to me as if a completely demonized, fictionalized version of myself had stolen and overcome my identity.
This false alter ego – which I had done nothing consciously to create but could also do nothing to destroy – overshadowed every conversation and every action. It felt that even people sympathetic or helpful to me were offering congratulations on not being like ‘him’ – or having ceased to be like ‘him’ – when it was my contention – and, I hope, of those who knew me best – that this monster had never existed. In public, I felt like a ghost – someone who was not expected to appear and who terrified and unsettled people by doing so – but a ghost who was required to go on living and to make a living.
Was. To have your name and reputation ruined in this way is like receiving an incurable diagnosis. Shame and disgrace – even if unfairly imposed – are almost always a fatal disease, except to a few who are inoculated against the effects by levels of wealth or self-belief that I have never – and can now never – attain. One way or another, the shock and ignominy would have kil
led me anyway and so I have chosen a sort of Switzerland.
I can see that a butcher, for example, might recover from such charges because the accusations contain no implications for their cutting of meat. But my work involves the assertion of facts and the assessment of reputations and therefore rests on credibility and integrity. Anyone who puts my name into a search engine forever will find words that will corrupt their judgement of me. In the world we have made, even the innocent or exonerated cannot completely clear their name.
I beg my wife, children, friends, doctor and lawyer not to torment themselves with the thought that there is anything they could have done to prevent this happening. None of you have let me down. I, however inadvertently and unknowingly, have let you and myself down in somehow provoking this persecution.
Please understand that you could not have shown me more love. But love is no protection against the impulse to destructive judgement that seems to have seized the world.
I have left with my solicitor under separate cover a list of those who must under no circumstances be admitted to my funeral or to any memorial service that might follow, even if, from guilt or dull institutional duty, they should attempt to. However, having experienced the damage to wellbeing and reputation that can come from our culture of naming, blaming and shaming, it is also my wish that no other person involved in these events should be held responsible, either privately or publicly, for this outcome. Nobody else should be hounded to what I have done. By which – to avoid confusion – I mean only what I have done to cause this envelope to be opened.
I feel sorry to some degree to those who, for whatever reason, came to – or chose to – see me as the reason for reverses in their lives and careers. But I feel most sorry to those I loved – and whom I hope loved me – that I have been forced to a conclusion that was previously unthinkable. But, once your name has been taken, there is nothing left.
Confession
Even many Catholics didn’t understand that confession doesn’t have to take place in a dark box with the priest wearing a stole round his neck and a grille between him and the penitent.
Tony had once given the Sacrament of Reconciliation (as it was then called) to a commuter who had collapsed on a railway platform. He had gone to the man’s aid as a citizen trained in first aid, rather than as a priest, but, as he loosened the starched collar and fat tie-knot, the dulled eyes had seen the line of white at his helper’s neck and checked in a wheezing whisper if he was a Catholic cleric. The condition of discretion was difficult to fulfil in these circumstances but, kneeling between the paramedics as they worked, Tony had held his ear close to the patient’s mouth, aiding both hearing and privacy, and heard the gasped transgressions of a life (infidelities, neglects, small cruelties). He granted absolution as the man went into cardiac arrest. When he read in the local paper that the traveller had died in hospital two days later, it bothered him that his ministrations might have slowed or obstructed the medical efforts and he suffered a very Graham Greene-ish period of dubiety, but the help he had given had been wanted and therefore, he had to believe, beneficial.
Confessions in extremity were rarer now, as was all individual penitence since the spread of general absolution, a system, prone to theological abuse in his view, which permitted sinners to mark their own sin scripts privately in their heads, with the priest wafting God’s forgiveness communally across the congregation. Just once in recent years had he dispensed the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance (as it was now called) outside of the expected drawn-curtained suburban bedrooms, hospital side-rooms, hospices and rest homes. The recipient – an elderly Irishman – had been taken ill on a transatlantic flight and the PA plea for a medically trained professional on board had been followed by a request for any Roman Catholic priest in the cabins to come forward which, being rarer, won a whoop from the passengers. The apparently dying flyer recovered to the extent that he later sent a flight attendant to bring the confessor through to business class again, where he sought assurance that the details he had revealed would go no further in this life. When Tony returned to his seat, travellers nearby had asked him excited questions, as was often the case in such situations, about whether he had conducted any exorcisms. He had used this story, with details disguised, as the basis for a Thought for the Day.
Ned Marriott was not, he assumed and prayed, at specific risk of death but Tony suspected that he might be in need of some pastoral attention, whether or not confession. Having received no reply to his first e-mail, he sent a second version. Dear Ned (if I may, again) …
Everyone is Guilty
During the night before he answered bail, Ned re-read The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.
The first of his second thoughts was that, although Böll gives the title character’s age as twenty-seven, she is actually, according to the birth date and day of arrest specified by the writer, twenty-six: a version of the confusion caused online when the year but not the month of someone’s birth is known, leading scrupulous Wikipedists to enter something like 48/49 in the age line. And yet ‘twenty-seven’ comes from a newspaper report and so it is possible that the novelist was being satirical rather than slapdash, inserting a sly comment on journalism’s tendency to error. He also noticed on the re-reading, even allowing for his own exaggerated frame of reference, the extent to which Böll is a Catholic novelist, although without the doctrinal plotting of Graham Greene. The book was about the definitions of sin, guilt and redemption.
Ned’s final re-reflection was that almost every protagonist in the literature of false accusation is in some way guilty: not of the charges used to destroy them, but of something else.
Only Ronnie Winslow is completely innocent. Thomas Stockmann is probably the best of the rest, but clearly an arsehole. John Proctor is an adulterer and, by modern standards, possibly a child-abuser as well. Professor Lurie breaks campus rules by seducing a student in an encounter that some readers might view as rape. Professor Silk has been, by any reasonable standards, ‘living a lie’ in the favoured tabloid phrase, and, although he intends no racial slur against the absent students, may not have used the word ‘spooks’ completely innocently; he certainly once knew the other meaning of the word, which could have lodged in his subconscious as an insult from his time as a negro. John, the professor in Oleanna, is provoked and traduced by a student of dubious intentions but his handling of a difficult teaching situation would have been unwise even before these inquisitorial times.
Josef K, who kisses his landlady on an impulse and has impulsive sex with at least two colleagues, would, these days, be vulnerable to charges of sexual assault and work-place harassment, while his raging denunciation of court officials clearly contradicts the University of Middle England’s ‘Workplace Harmony’ code. So K is guilty of B and H.
Katharina Blum – although the book invites, even commands, readers to be appalled at her destruction by the media, trolling before its time – is a murderer, or at the very best manslaughterer, even if Böll strongly encourages the reader to see her actions as justifiable homicide because her reputation has been destroyed by society’s tendency to demonize female sexuality and left-wing politics. The equivalent provocations in his own culture, Ned reflected, were male sexuality and celebrity.
The literary explanation for the ambiguity of these characters was that complex sinners make more satisfying fiction than simple saints. But an alternative interpretation was that everyone is guilty of something which, should they be indicted, will complicate their plea of innocence.
And so – in the humid, clock-ticking, too-bright night – Ned finally and properly contemplated the two questions that torment all of the accused: am I guilty? / will I be found guilty?
PART THREE
FACTS
Proposition / Preposition
She rolls the napkin into a point, and dabs at his chin, where she must have spotted some bolognese splash. He dislikes it when a girlfriend does this, the gesture of a mother not a lover. He pulls away.
‘Hold still. You look like you’ve cut yourself shaving and bled orange.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘I just want you to look your best,’ she says in a pouty bigsorry voice.
‘It’s fine.’ He waves at the plate. ‘Would you like some more?’
‘No, thanks. That was smashing but I’m full up.’
‘I hope you’ve got some spaces somewhere.’
She either doesn’t get it or pretends not to. He is already beginning a stiffie at the thought of the next stage of the evening. Their relationship is at a stage where, unless she is ‘off games’ or has food poisoning, agreeing to stay over means sex.
On the plastic portable TV set, with its bare wire aerial like an angel’s halo in a school nativity play, News at Ten continues with the sound down. The small sandy-haired Carter and the tall, bald Ford standing at podiums in the presidential debate. A march of black people with banners in what might have been South Africa but, when they cut to Ian Smith chairing a cabinet meeting, is obviously Rhodesia.
Pointing to the screen, she says: ‘Should we watch it?’
‘No, no.’ If she insists on seeing it to the end, they’ll be lucky to be in bed by quarter to eleven. ‘News makes historians nervous. We’re not interested until it’s over. It’s like expecting lumberjacks to get worked up over acorns.’