The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

His favoured formula was again effective. Dent’s expression wanted to be nothing but had discomfort bubbling underneath. The detective scratched the back of his head so noisily that the sound must have registered on the recorder he had just activated.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that.’

  The taping worried Ned. If it were just a sorry-and-goodbye, would they still Nixon it? Police stations, like surgeries and hospitals, should have cheery leaflets in which brightly shaded cartoon characters receive simple explanations of what will be happening to them.

  A sidelong glance at Claire to see if she had reacted, but she was auditioning to play Special in a film.

  ‘So,’ Dent said again, then stopped. The terrible influence on conversation of the results moment in TV talent shows.

  ‘Professor Edmund Marriott, you have attended today to answer bail on allegations of sexual offences against Wilhelmina Hessendon Castle and Jessamy Pothick.’

  Ned fought to quieten his breathing. The tape of this meeting would sound as if a gale were blowing through an open window.

  ‘Following a detailed investigation of these allegations, a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration.’

  Ned had often fantasized about the penalty in a World Cup final, championship point at Wimbledon, the putt on the 72nd hole at an Open. This must be a version of how it felt – a life of either ecstasy or regret proceeding from this moment.

  ‘After consultation with the CPS, I can inform you this morning that no further action will be taken.’

  Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, he felt his hand squeezed by Claire. Ned had pictured this moment so often, endlessly played on a loop of the two alternative scenes but, now that it had happened, his reaction was neither of those he had imagined.

  He showed no emotion.

  It was either the tranquillizers or the understanding that, from this position, there could be no such thing as victory.

  Dent nodded at Walters, who said: ‘Regardless of the outcome, the complainants have the right of anonymity in perpetuity, until their death and, in certain circumstances, afterwards. You must not name them – or otherwise risk their identification – in speech or in writing, in public or in private. Nor should you contact or approach a complainant – yourself or through others – in any way.’

  To have been exonerated yet still receive threats felt disconcerting. ‘And what about me? Do I get a public apology?’

  A twitch of irritability from Dent. ‘We have a duty to take all accusations seriously. Charging someone and not charging someone are both doing our job.’

  Claire’s fingers brushing his knuckles. ‘We can go through your options later.’

  Of course he had never wanted it to come to court. But at least a trial was shaped to have a climactic moment of catastrophe or catharsis. This long ordeal ended – in a small room that smelled of fear sweat and coffee breath and cheap disinfectant – with an announcement that nothing would happen.

  ‘I sort of feel someone should say, “You can go now,” ’ Ned said.

  Dent slightly smiled. Walters was closing her folder as if it were a fiendish puzzle.

  ‘We can go now,’ Claire said.

  The four-way handshakes felt like stumps in a drawn cricket match between two teams that hated each other.

  The Present

  In the spare room (‘I do love you, Tom, but I need to get my sleep on work nights’), he managed pill-assisted oblivion from 10pm until five to midnight. Turning over the soaked side of the pillow, he tried, 04:18 the last numbers he saw on the clock, to put himself under again by reading (a notoriously soporific historian of US foreign policy), masturbating (flaccidly) and the virtual journey through the rooms of his childhood house (which had sometimes worked for him).

  Each of these strategies seemed to fail but Tom was somehow deep in a dream – half replay, half terror, Director Neades opening a folder of medical test results – when Special’s ringing telephone turned out in the conscious world to be Helen’s extraloud alarm clock across the landing. A bleary stare at the clock: 07:00.

  Tom knew he should get up to see Hells off to work, do the dogs or make her tea and toast (he was desultorily attempting the duties of a house-husband) but his mind and body were screaming for more sleep.

  He fumbled for the foil strip of Diazepam hidden under the paper tissues – after Dr Rafi ended the prescription to prevent addiction, he had bought some packets online – and, after swallowing one, tested his mental sedatives again: ‘Caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, the State Department bethought …’ the long hair of a college girlfriend tickling his thighs as she bent over him, through the boot room and past the muddy wellington boots and the washing machine.

  The dogs were barking at something in the garden. 10:45. His tongue was furred and throat sore but he felt closer than for a long time to the feeling of waking refreshed. Even so, he had to force himself not to try to sleep again. He understood why the depressed, redundant or bereaved could be driven to the deepest, dream-free drop-off in their hope of finding a place of not knowing.

  As usual in their new schedules, Helen had piled the post beside his place at the breakfast table. Two envelopes with the UME crest he slid aside unopened, knowing that they must contain details of severance, pensions, the clearance of his office. And, although sure that the sentiments would be sympathetic, he felt no more able to cope emotionally with the rectangular hand-addressed mail that would contain the latest greetings cards from those colleagues – Ciara, the department five-asiders – who were shocked at what had been done to him or fearful that it might happen next to them. He dropped in the bin unopened three offers of new credit cards; he could not decide if it would be more worrying if the lenders’ algorithms had or had not spotted his impending insolvency.

  That left the familiar cardboard rectangle of a book bought online. Economizing since the shock of unemployment, he did not recall ordering anything. With a smeared butter-knife, Tom slit the end and shook out a paperback. Silas Marner by George Eliot in an edition called New Classics. He had never read it but had once watched part of a TV version, failing again in his promise to Hells to sit through a period drama with her.

  The sender had taken advantage of the discretion offered to gift-buyers and left blank the box on the invoice for payment details. Tom flicked through the opening pages to see if there was any kind of card.

  He found nothing, although there was perhaps a sort of message. On the title page, a line said: Introduction by Henry Gibson.

  Cuttings (5)

  BBC GIVES 100 REASONS NOT TO BECOME HISTORY

  As the BBC prepares for what are expected to be tricky discussions over a new Royal Charter and licence-fee settlement from 2017, the broadcaster has announced plans for ‘the most ambitious factual series in its history’.

  In an apparent bid to underline the Corporation’s public service credentials, senior managers attending ‘Does British TV Have a Future?’, an industry conference in Cambridge, indicated that executives are currently developing Who Was Who, a series of 100 one-hour documentaries about key figures in British history since the end of the First World War, which will run in five twenty-episode tranches across five years.

  Those speaking about the show refused to discuss possible presenters or subjects, saying that the project remained in the early stages of development. But sources suggest that Who Was Who is likely to be a co-production between BBC Worldwide and Ogglebox, an independent company with a strong track record in historical documentaries.

  TV insiders, however, are already predicting fierce debate about which historical figures will be included in the series. A leading programme-maker said: ‘The problem with this sort of exercise is that there are a few you have to include – Churchill, Elizabeth II – about whom there’s nothing new to say. And then the rest depend on your criteria: Agatha Christie or Harold Pinter? Margaret Thatcher and/or Tony Blair? Bobby Moore or David Beckham? And all of
those people are white, which is another issue.’

  Weaving (2)

  Introduction by Henry Gibson

  If there were Oscars for ostracism, the hero of George Eliot’s 1861 novel would be prominent on the shortlist. Philoctetes, in the play by Sophocles, knew that he had been exiled to an island because of the suppurating wound on his foot. However, when Eliot’s gentle ‘weaver of Raveloe’ is told to go anywhere but there, the instruction seems to come from nowhere, triggered only by a trumped-up charge involving a missing knife.

  The book itself also, in a sense, came from left field. Silas Marner was a literary gift or accident, of the sort that will often invade as compensation a writer’s brain when it is struggling to progress some other, complex project. In the late spring of 1860, when Eliot was travelling through Italy with the critic and philosopher George Henry Lewes, the male George was reading a book about Savonarola, the furiously censorious fifteenthcentury Dominican monk in Florence. Lewes suggested to his female first-namesake that the mad monk might make good material for an historical novel.

  Eliot eventually took up the suggestion – as Romola (1862–3) – but, as the novelist noted in her journal in November 1860, her work on that book was interrupted when ‘a new story thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating’. Something, though, of Fra Savonarola’s moral condemnations and vicious theological division of sheep and goats pervades the story of the weaver who is quixotically kicked out of his village.

  After 150 years, Silas Marner remains a fable for today. Kafka’s The Trial, with which it has obvious thematic similarities, is perhaps too easily dismissible by Western European readers because the travesty of justice occurs in an Eastern European setting that has become associated with the milieu of Soviet Communism. In Silas Marner, the bewilderingly illogical unfairness and judgementalism occur in the heart of the English countryside – a setting as smugly lovely to us as, say, Wiltshire or Buckinghamshire. As a result, what happens to the weaver cannot be spun as something that would only happen somewhere else.

  And, if Kafka dramatizes the fundamental fear of modern citizens that bureaucracy or authority may turn against them irrationally and unanswerably, Eliot touches on the equally elemental human insecurity that the community in which we live and work may reject and exile us without reason or appeal. (Such unexplained banishments have remained a trope in novelistic fiction, occurring as recently as Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Harvill Secker, 2014).)

  Contemplating Silas, falsely fingered as a knife-thief, today’s reader inevitably thinks of all those in our society for whom the knives have been unjustly out – the long-bailed but nevercharged suspects of operations Yewtree and Millpond and – perhaps above all – the employees, in a variety of institutions shamefully including places of higher learning, who have been found guilty and banished through processes as questionable to the humane as they are apparently unquestioned by the mob.

  Irony

  When Tom, failing to apply to his writing the energy that his two-hour post-lunch sleep should theoretically have given him, saw Ciara’s e-mail address in the window, he didn’t open it immediately, assuming it to be one of her regular check-ups on his liveliness, which it was but also, when he eventually read it, more specifically sympathetic.

  To: tkpimm@chatter.co.uk

  From: c.harrison@ume.ac.uk

  Subject: Irony?

  Hi, Tom. I know how strict you are about the mis-use of the concept of ‘irony’. I think, however (have I put ‘however’ in the right place?), that the data I have attached can only be described as ironic.

  As you will see, in the Customer Teaching Feedback Survey for the 2013–14 academic year, you finished in first place in History for Content of Teaching, Enjoyability of Teaching and Attitude to Customers. Admittedly, you finished in what I believe is known as the ‘lowest percentile’ for Fairness of Marking but most of us agree that asking students to grade their own work is like asking people to tell you how much they weigh. (Yes, Dr Pedant, I know that self-grading encourages over-statement and self-weighing under-statement but you know what I mean?)

  The quotes from so many of those formerly known as students – about what they learned from you and how much you helped them – almost made me cry, so you should read them with care. You should, though, read them.

  If it is any more consolation, there continues to be, as I am sure you will have heard, widespread horror here at what has been done to you. But, cowardly as it may seem, none of us dare say or do much because the overlords are so scary to deal with. I think that probably qualifies as another irony as well?

  Take care.

  With love, C xx

  She did not mention Ned, either from tact over the divergence in the verdicts or possibly, Tom wondered, from unease over the nature of the charges against the professor. It was most likely, though, that she had considered Ned innocent until proven guilty and now proven innocent. If so, this attitude would make her as antique a relic of the English past as real tennis.

  Home Truths (4)

  ‘Do you know about this?’

  ‘What?’

  Emma origamied a page of the Guardian and held it up across the kitchen table. ‘This big new history series.’

  Ned glanced at the headline. ‘I saw. It’s the sort of thing you might hope your agent would tip you off about.’

  ‘Fuck off! You’d have to be in the frame, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Ogg has summoned me next week. Maybe that’s what it’s about.’

  The Literature of False Accusation (8)

  Summary: John, a college teacher of a subject that is never specified but seems to be educational theory, is seen in one tutorial and two subsequent meetings with Carol, a somewhat passive student. In the first scene, the teacher is cocky at the prospect of professorial tenure and the purchase of a new bigger house for a family just expanded by a son. John complains about the poor quality of an essay from Carol, in which she has struggled to understand a set-text book written by the professor. When she expresses intellectual insecurity, he puts a consoling arm around her shoulder.

  During their next encounter, he is trying to persuade her to withdraw a complaint to the Tenure Committee, alleging that he inappropriately touched her and used sexist and racist language during their tutorial.

  By the time of their final meeting, he has lost his job, house and (living alone in an hotel to ‘think’) possibly his wife. Arrest may soon be added to these problems, as Carol has upgraded her complaint to attempted rape. Just before the final blackout, the sacked academic punches and kicks his former student to the floor and calls her a ‘cunt’.

  Reader Review: Among the stories of seven denigrated men and one woman (Katharina Blum) on Nod’s study list, Oleanna was the one that Tom had most resisted. He had seen it in (the play text reminded him) 1992, with Hells, Nod and the First Mrs Marriott, and, recalling that the teacher’s downfall was caused by sanctimoniously accusatory pupils, feared that it would prove too close to his own situation.

  As a ruined tutor, he now hoped for therapeutic elucidation from David Mamet. It was one of three texts on Reputation 101 (along with Roth and Coetzee) that were set in universities, and as all came out within a decade – Oleanna (1992), Disgrace (1999) and The Human Stain (2000) – the beginnings of the modern madness of amateur arraignment might be dated to campuses at that time.

  Tom’s memory was that, although his party had been impressed by the savage dialectic of the play, he and Ned had argued that such educational intolerance was specific to America and likely to be isolated even there.

  But, re-read in his disgrace of today, the collisions of Carol and John seemed not just globally prophetic of colleges but of culture generally. The student objects to being exposed to facts and opinions in class that make her feel uncomfortable or confused, and demands the removal of certain texts from the syllabus. John’s response – ‘My job is to provoke you’ – would be
Tom’s creed for teaching even now. And, when the academic refers to the ‘accusations’ of his student, she insists that: ‘They are proven. They are fact.’

  Here, decades before Millpond and Traill, were the statutes of the new inquisition. John even uses a legal metaphor to explain the difference between equality and necessity: everyone has the right to a fair trial but it does not follow that a life without becoming a defendant is somehow lacking. (Although now, it might be argued, an appearance in some dock or other was nearly obligatory.)

  What surprised Tom was that, having initially seen John as the sympathetic protagonist and Carol as an almost satanic antagonist, he now found himself having more sympathy towards the young woman.

  As she railed against male power, he appreciated that John may indeed have assumed a superiority to Carol that was possibly patriarchal. But can teacher and pupil ever be equal? Surely, for education to have any effect, the views of the instructor must be worth more than those of the learner. Imagine a driving lesson conducted on equal terms. And yet, as often on this forced reading course, he now saw that the male hero (and by implication victim) was less agreeable than he first seemed. Was this shift in perspective the result of Tom’s contrition or his prescription? Certainly, the dramatist generally seemed to weight the scales in John’s favour; it was surely not coincidental that, seven years later, Mamet would make a film of The Winslow Boy.

  And Tom finally understood the title. This play was from a period – also including Speed-the-Plow and Wag the Dog – when Mamet gave scripts strange names that were not explained in the dialogue. Now, search engines revealed that Oleanna had been a utopian colony, set up in mid-nineteenth century Pennsylvania by a Norwegian idealist, Ole Bull, who had styled it with a combination of his own name and that of his mother, Anna. The experiment in non-disputatious living had rapidly failed but was immortalized in a Scandinavian folk-song, Americanized and recorded by Pete Seeger.