The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  It was a particular absence, however, that nagged at her; and she was soon reminded of it. Going into the room, she took a drink from the worryingly young-looking student, hesitating between apple juice and white wine before taking the alcoholic option which taunted by tasting like sour fruit juice.

  As Phee reached the artificially cheerful semi-circle of her stepmother and the Pimms, Tom asked, ‘Your other half?’ his usual greeting when she was solo socially. Rebuked once by Daddy for resorting to the sort of recycled phrase he condemned from others, Tom had triumphantly insisted that he wasn’t: in this case, it was conceptually precise.

  ‘She texted me,’ Phee said. ‘To say she wouldn’t be coming. She didn’t want everyone waiting in suspense.’

  ‘Well, that was thoughtful of her,’ said Tom. ‘I mean, the letting us know part, not missing her old man’s Lazarus lecture. She’s keeping bad company. Dom Odd is the other notable noshow. Did you see his debut as a TV presenter? An elephant joining the Royal Ballet would be a more natural transition.’

  Phee had watched ten minutes of the opening programme and become depressed about human dispensability.

  ‘Daddy is here?’ she checked with Emma.

  ‘Of course. He said he wanted to read through the speech quietly in a corner. TBH, I think he’s gone to the Gents again. At their age, it’s a vicious circle: thinking they might have a problem means they …’

  Tom spun his head until he found the sign on the wall with an arrow and a male silhouette, and headed towards it. ‘You’re certainly not taking the piss when you say that.’

  ‘Tom, are you … ?’ asked Helen.

  ‘Yes, I really do need a pee. I won’t be found dangling in a cubicle.’

  ‘Tom, I didn’t …’

  When he was too far away to hear and argue back, Phee asked Helen: ‘How’s he managing? And you, of course … ?’

  Helen made a so-so face: ‘I try to keep cheerful for him. But it just seems so … unfair …’ The beginning of tears blinked away. ‘He says it’s like living as a criminal without having the nicety of a trial. I tell him it’s not as bad as that but it probably is. I wanted to go over and say something to that gigantic waste of space but Tom doesn’t want to spoil things for your dad.’

  ‘He’s been such a good friend to Ned,’ said Emma. Phee asked her: ‘You haven’t brought Tobes?’

  ‘No. He’s flexi-boarding at Abbey Grove. He’ll have a much better time there.’

  ‘You’ll be able to afford to send him to Eton soon?’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Daddy said there was some big American book about texts from the dead or …’

  ‘Oh, that. Second time through, it didn’t really live up to the title. I passed on it.’

  Phee felt the familiar kiss on the top of her head and one of the two voices she had known longest: ‘Cupcake.’

  It was hard getting used to Daddy so much broader and bald. Last time Phee was round for Sunday lunch, Emma had been trying to persuade him to ‘book an appointment’ before the lecture, but he said: ‘With this, you can’t put the cat back in the bag without being ridiculed.’ His appearance was still a shock; like it might be, Phee thought, if there were suddenly a world shortage of hair dye and you found out what older women really looked like.

  There was a line of painted-gilt chairs along one wall, presumably intended for those without the stamina for standing round for half an hour before the start-time, a courtesy of which Granny and Grandpa Jack had now taken advantage. Granny looked a little agitated – not who-am-I? bad but probably overwhelmed by the occasion and worried about her son – so Phee excused herself and went across to be granddaughterly.

  After the greetings and cheek kisses: ‘Just you tonight, darling?’

  ‘Yes, Granny. She had a work thing she just couldn’t get out of.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Your dad was singing your praises about what a rock you’ve been.’

  ‘A rock chick,’ said Grandpa Jack, weirdly.

  ‘Jack thinks Edmund should bring a civil case against the lying little madams,’ Granny said.

  ‘There has to be a stand,’ her stepgrandfather, or whatever he was, added. ‘Too many good chaps being dragged down by this sort of thing.’

  ‘I think to be honest, Granny, it’s better to let it go. Daddy’s policy is business as usual, like tonight.’

  Students were circulating among the groups, asking guests to make their way to the Tuchman Lecture Theatre. Daddy was being ushered away by a tense-looking woman with a lanyard round her neck. When he tried to kiss Emma goodbye, she flicked her head aside so that he just brushed the side of her ear.

  Heading for a precautionary wee, Phee passed Tom, coming in the opposite direction.

  ‘Ophelia, has he given you his address?’

  ‘What? Oh, his speech. No, he said it had to come from his heart not a committee.’

  Claire, the black lawyer (no, the lawyer, her skin irrelevant) came out of the Ladies.

  ‘Oh, hello, you two.’ Greetings all round. ‘Sorry, tiny bit of shop talk, Tom. Something I forgot to say, last time we met: you must never ever again use that word in print anywhere ever.’

  ‘What word? You may not be familiar with the size of my vocabulary.’

  ‘The word. The one in B & H that isn’t Hedges.’

  ‘Oh, that one. Well, I’m not sure I’d be able to write it.’

  ‘No, seriously. From now on, you can’t even write, I don’t know, Napoleon was regarded by some of his soldiers as a benson. The President was accused of bensoning the Senate.’

  ‘Really? What, in case some twitterer thinks I’m a hypocrite?’

  ‘No. Because it increases the chances of a web-search coming up tom pimm bensoning. It’s something to do with algorithms – a nephew explained it to me.’

  Claire’s eyes suddenly wandered. ‘Don’t look now,’ she said.

  But Tom followed her gaze, as Phee did, to a man – tall, tanned, dark hair greased back – who was going into the Gents. When Tom winced and turned away, Claire told him: ‘I warned you.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Phee asked.

  ‘The dude from Campus Karma, or whatever they call it, who heard Tom’s appeal.’

  ‘Oh. Daddy said it was rejected?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Tom explained. ‘They said that, as it wasn’t officially an appeal, it could neither be rejected or upheld.’

  ‘So, is that it?’

  ‘Well, unless you turn out to be Portia rather than Ophelia.’

  ‘I think we’re going to sue the bottom off them,’ said Claire.

  ‘Subject to budget,’ Tom added. ‘Might ask your old man for a bung.’

  Washing her hands, Phee found herself next to the nice professor, Ciara, who said: ‘You must see a lot of Tom? I hope you can get across to him how much the students – the good students – miss him. This place is crazy. They’re offering another round of redundancies and I think I’m going to take it.’

  In the hall, there was the always satisfying frisson of picking up a Reserved notice and sitting on that chair. Phee, Tom, Emma, Helen, Granny and Grandpa Jack sat next to each other about ten rows back, a compromise between Daddy’s fear of being able to see them and her grandparents’ concern about being able to hear him. Ciara was just in front. A group of men who gave Daddy a thumbs up as he passed were, Tom explained, the five-a-side football team.

  Daddy sat on a chair to the right of the stage, drumming the floor with one heel. With a rush of sympathetic nerves, she felt the reversal of the situation at school plays twenty years earlier.

  At the back of the stage was a screen with the legend: TB Macaulay Memorial Lecture 2015. The dark-suited emcee for the evening – an Ulsterman with a grain-sack gut – stumbled up steps at the side of the stage, shuffled to the lectern and wheezed: ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I’m Sir Kevan Neades, Vice Chancellor of the University of Middle England. As you will see from the list in your p
rogrammes, this event has attracted a long – as it were – history’ – his was the only laughter for the joke – ‘of distinguished speakers.’

  In an instinctive group-move, the audience, including Phee, found the page to which their host had alluded. Many of the names she knew from her father’s conversation or TV series they had watched together: Barbara Tuchman, Robert A. Caro, Lady Antonia Fraser, Tristram Hunt, David Starkey, Kathryn Hughes, A. N. Wilson, Dominic Sandbrook, Amanda Foreman, Simon Schama, Mary Beard. As Daddy had pointed out when he e-mailed her invitation, alert readers would notice that the list of previous speakers jumped from 1971 to 1973. In the intervening year, the lecture had been delivered by Professor Padraig Allison.

  She hadn’t really been listening to the Irish guy but joined the applause triggered by the words ‘Professor Ned Marriott’.

  As the Vice Chancellor laboriously left the stage, Daddy came to the lectern, walking stiffly, she thought.

  ‘Thank you for that very special introduction,’ he said. Tom laughed as if something funny had been said.

  ‘The question I’m addressing tonight,’ Ned began, ‘is: can the past be given a fair trial? It is not my intention to talk in detail about a recent well-publicized ordeal of my own: I am unable to do so for a combination of legal, medical and temperamental reasons. But these experiences provided the epigraphs that preface the printed text of this lecture. During my year of persecution and suspicion, I first read – and then saw a production of – Arthur Miller’s great 1953 play The Crucible: written in response to his own suffering of false accusation and opprobrium during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts in America but with wider – and escalating – relevance to other cultures in other times, up to this day in England. Two speeches from the play seemed to be speaking directly to me and, I think, now always will. In one scene, the protagonist, informed by the court that the claims against him have been accepted as fact, while his own case will not be heard, asks: “Is the accuser always holy now?” Later, when told that his life will return to normal if only he will give a signature to an apology for something he did not do, he explains why he cannot sign: “Because it is my name! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” These, it seems to me, are phrases that we must emblazon on our highest buildings as a charm. Historians are familiar – even weary – with the desire to reduce each period of history to some pithy, alliterative summary. But it seems clear to me now that we are living through an Age of Accusation, a Culture of Comeuppance.’

  In the silence of intense collective attention, Phee heard fierce whispering and, turning, located a muttering huddle – two elderly men and a pair of middle-aged women – several rows behind. Perhaps distracted by this kerfuffle, her father stopped to swallow almost two-thirds of the tumbler of water on the lectern.

  His voice was slightly burpy as he resumed: ‘I believe that we are living through a period that will be judged – in the near future – to have misapplied what it misunderstood to be the lessons of the recent past. Ours is a culture in which allegation is assumed to be fact and the bleating of the self-righteous equals justice. I am haunted by the fact that – in an era when most teachers and writers of History concur that it is unwise to aver with any certainty exactly what happened in the past – the CPS, the police, newspaper columnists, victim support groups and HR departments seem suddenly possessed by twentytwenty hindsight, however thick the mists of time, doubt or confusion. I know of police forces – and HR departments – where the word complainant has officially been replaced by victim. This is presented as a small linguistic shift but it speaks volumes of a country that has substituted for objective justice the rule of mob orthodoxy and the appeasement of special interest groups.’

  From behind the line of Ned’s supporters came the sounds the public speaker most fears: the scrape of chair-leg on floor and the shuffling and mumbling of a disrupted row. Before she could turn round, Phee saw the four whisperers to her left, as they clomped towards their nearest fire exit.

  ‘Do take it personally,’ Tom said to Phee and Emma. ‘Although they’d only have come in so that they could walk out. Savlon, Daggers, Horny, Quatermass.’

  Daddy seemed equally laid-back about the reduction in numbers, pausing for a sip of the remaining drink while staring at his departed colleagues until the door rattled behind them.

  ‘A culture in which some people literally cannot bear to hear opinions that challenge their received wisdoms,’ he said.

  That, Phee suspected, was an improvised put-down and Tom, seemingly feeling the same, started a round of applause that was taken up by others in the audience, including Ciara and the football team.

  ‘This Age of Accusation,’ the lecturer went on, ‘has had necessary successes in its pursuit of child-abusers – or at least those in the lighter areas of 1970s Light Entertainment in television – who had escaped justice for decades. But against those placed in jail – or found guilty in their absence in their graves – we must balance the names that have been destroyed by whisper, innuendo, over-publicized arrest and excessively elongated bail before being let go without charge but never – for the rest of their lives – without shadow.’

  On the screen behind the lectern, the title of the lecture blurred and was replaced by the word, its first symbol declaring twenty-first century as rapidly as the substitution of f for s signalled the 16th: #tbmml2015.

  ‘Does he know they’ve got a live Twitterfeed?’ whispered Helen.

  ‘Another sentence unlikely in the eighteenth century,’ said Tom.

  Phee felt a presentiment of dread. ‘I wouldn’t think so. He can barely send a text.’

  Her father’s voice, un-broadcast for almost a year, was loudening and modulating as he luxuriated in performing publicly again. ‘Apart from those whose lives and careers are interrupted temporarily – and their reputations permanently – by vague claims that never become charges, we read at least weekly – in footnotes rather than the headlines given to the few sent to prison – of schoolteachers suspended for a year or more before being cleared by juries in minutes – literally minutes – of assaults for which the only evidence was the claim of a pupil or former pupil with whom they had clashed over disciplinary or educational issues. Young men whose name will forever yield, on Google-searching, the word “rape” or the phrase “rape allegations”, despite the fact that they were rapidly cleared by juries, while their female accuser receives legally protected anonymity for ever.’

  R U watchin this victim blaming? appeared on the screen in giant italic script. The comments multiplied behind the lecturer:

  Y they letting this raypist speak?

  #raypist

  #students boycott UME

  # UME = Useless Men Everywhere

  ‘And, outside of these serious legal issues,’ the TB Macaulay Memorial Lecture continued, ‘are those who are prosecuted and convicted within seconds by the jurors in the global kangaroo court convened by those with a Twitter app and too much spare time. The politician, employee or university lecturer who offends – or is judged by others to have offended – some gender, racial or sexual grouping in society. The lives, careers and reputations of these unfortunate victims are also sacrificed on the pyre of wrong-headed self-righteousness. In a few decades, we have moved from a world in which any opinion, regardless of how harmful, could be dismissed as a “joke” to one in which even the most harmless remark is refused any defence of humour or fair comment.’

  #paedo

  #sackhim

  #fucking psycholiberal

  ‘I wish to stress as clearly as possible …’ He paused, an increase in glances up from his text the only sign that he was disconcerted by the eyes increasingly focusing over his shoulders. ‘I wish to stress that I am not in any way diminishing the horrific crimes of rape or child abuse or offering a judgement as to the accuracy of any specific claims made. The point I am making is that history and logic tell us that all such allegations must be rigor
ously questioned and tested and that this must be done in a way that does not result in the consequences of suspicion or even exoneration becoming indistinguishable from those of conviction.’

  #kill this cunt

  #victim-blamer

  #deadwhitemale

  #sack this guy

  #resign

  #gomeansgo

  Even as Daddy attempted to clear his name, it was being further attacked, literally behind his back. As with so much that had happened in this year, the spectacle was at first shocking but then seemed almost instantly inevitable. Emma reached across a hand to try to hold Phee’s but the sweat on both their palms meant that the attempted contact sheared off. Through the blur of tears, she saw that Tom was shaking almost uncontrollably, while Helen pressed her hands down on his shoulders. A bewildered Granny gazed at Grandpa Jack for explanation.

  #this guy’s history

  The sudden slowness and emphasis of Daddy’s voice signalled that he was reaching his conclusion. ‘If I claim that I have been burgled, defrauded, defamed or even nearly murdered, my contention will be tested to destruction by a legal system that understands that an assumption that the accuser is telling the truth risks – even guarantees – corruption and injustice. This robustness cannot be suspended in any area of the law. Nor can justice be sub-let to media and social media whose operating principle so frequently seems to be: “Give me that stick so that I can get hold of the wrong end of it.” Contemporary convention is that I should end by apologizing for any offence I have given but I cannot. History tells us that – if offence and debate become impossible – we will all ultimately be sorry. Although many of you won’t thank me, I thank you.’

  Aware that almost no one in the auditorium was looking at his face, he finally turned and stood with his back to the ragged applause that came from only sections of the audience as he read the surge of words down the screen.