Quite Honestly

by John Mortimer

  ‘I suppose he trusted her, yes.’

  ‘And this court is being asked to grant bail so she can live with a thief.’

  ‘A thief who may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

  ‘Thank you, Bishop.’ And Mr Hastie sat down. I suppose he thought he’d done a great job.

  Mr Bethell made a short speech after that, promising not to quote the Bible and stressing the fact that Lucy had never been in trouble before. Then Madam Chair, who hadn’t cracked a smile during the whole proceedings, announced that they’d retire. I told myself that there was still a small hope, but I didn’t really believe it.

  I don’t know why they retired. Probably to have a coffee, or go to the loo, or tell each other what shocking opinions Lucy’s dad had about sex and never mind about the Bible. Anyway, they were back ten minutes later and for the first time there were smiles on the faces of Madam Chair and both the sidekicks.

  ‘We have decided that we cannot grant bail in this case,’ Madam Chair was delighted to say. ‘The defendant will be remanded in custody. Take her down.’

  Lucy stood up and was removed to the cells. She didn’t turn to look at me but I was ready, however badly I felt, with smiles of encouragement.

  As we left court I asked DS Ishmael Macdonald when I could get to see Lucy.

  ‘You’ll be able to visit her in Holloway,’ he said.

  Holloway. That wasn’t particularly good news.

  29

  What I really couldn’t bear about that so-called bail application was the way they treated my dad.

  All right, I know Robert lives in a world of his own. All sorts of things seem important to him which have never seemed particularly important to me, although I’m sure we felt close to each other in the days when I wanted to do some sort of good in the world.

  Since that time I know he’s been worried about God, who seems to have got too close to people like Bush and Blair for Robert’s liking. I know he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with gay marriages and, quite honestly, I can’t see what’s so wicked about that. And he had some really interesting ideas about thieves getting into heaven which that awful woman up on the bench might have been well advised to listen to, instead of allowing Robert to be teased and baited and knocked all round the courtroom by that poncey little man from the Prosecution Service. Of course, I blame that Mr Bethell, who I don’t think ever understood my case, but it must have been a horrible experience for Dad and I’m really sorry.

  Those charming policemen in Aldershot had told me terrible things about Holloway, but to tell you the truth I didn’t find it so bad as all that, not at least when you compared it with the horrible boarding school I went to in Ludlow. Robert and Sylvia sent me there because they thought I was an only child who’d be lonely at home, so they packed me off to St Swithin’s, where I was a good deal more lonely, at any rate to start with. Looking back on it, I think I was made more welcome, and immediately got on better with the other girls, in prison.

  I was in a dorm with four others (at Holloway, that is). We had to share one loo, which at times was difficult, but we could wear our own clothes and not those dreadful gym tunics they forced us into at St Swithin’s. The food was equally stodgy, but at least in Holloway you got bacon and eggs for breakfast, which was an improvement on the awful St Swithin’s soggy cornflakes. It’s true that there were cockroaches in Holloway - you could watch them marching along the window sills - but it didn’t have St Swithin’s smell of over-boiled cabbage mixed with the drains. And as for the girls - well, I’ll tell you more about them later.

  The thing was that I was what they called a ‘remand prisoner’. That’s to say, I hadn’t been tried and convicted, not yet. So I could have as many visits as I wanted. I had hardly looked around, let alone got used to the place, when Terry came to see me.

  We sat at a table in the small, crowded visiting hall, with girls seeing their boyfriends or their children and some persistent offending old dears with their grandchildren. I hadn’t seen Terry since he was looking down at me from the public gallery in that dreadful magistrates’ court, and I looked away because I couldn’t stand the idea that we were going to be separated and I didn’t know if I’d be able to bear it.

  When they told me I was going to have a visit I was really excited and I couldn’t wait to see Terry. But now, as we sat at the table and he looked at me, strangely silent, in fact not saying anything at all, I felt a space between us that was much wider than the table.

  ‘Well, here’s a funny situation!’ I said, as brightly as I could manage.

  ‘I can’t see what’s funny about it.’

  ‘Well, I’m in prison and you aren’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s funny about that.’

  ‘It’s not how we started out.’

  ‘No, it’s certainly not.’

  ‘But we’ve ended up more together than we ever were before.’

  ‘I’m in Notting Hill Gate and you’re in bloody Holloway. How can we be more together than we were before?’

  ‘Because now we’ve done all the same things.’

  ‘That’s what you always say.’ He gave a big sigh, heavier than I thought was necessary.

  ‘But now it’s true! I did a more important burglary. I planned it on my own. All right, I wasn’t particularly good at it.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘And I landed up in prison. Like you did, Terry.’

  ‘Are you saying that’s a good thing?’

  ‘I’m saying now I can understand you completely. And of course I felt it, just like you said.’

  ‘Felt what?’

  ‘The excitement. You said it was the greatest excitement in the world, being in a house when no one knew you were there. Taking the risk of Robin waking up. You said that was the best feeling in the world.’

  ‘I might have said a lot of things.’

  ‘You know you said that.’ I was going to be seriously disappointed if Terry tried to wriggle out of it.

  ‘All right, I said it. But you didn’t have to try it.’

  ‘I didn’t have to. I wanted to.’

  ‘And now look where it’s got you.’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’

  ‘What?’ He obviously didn’t believe me.

  ‘I said it’s not too bad. You can get bacon and eggs for breakfast.’

  ‘I could cook you that at home.’

  ‘I know you could, darling.’ I put my hand on his across the table. Things were going better. ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too.’ Then he kissed me. I wasn’t behind a screen or anything. All we gave each other was a kiss and then the visiting time was over. It was a moment to enjoy, because it wasn’t much use thinking about the future.

  As I say, I was in a dorm with four other girls and one lavatory. I call them girls because that’s what we called ourselves, as though we were quite young and not really responsible for our actions - although the crimes we were in for were, I suppose, quite serious.

  Anyway, some of the girls were there when I arrived and still there after I left. There was Devira, a serious Indian girl who wore glasses and talked in a clear, precise voice quite slowly as though everyone she talked to had only a moderate understanding of English. There was Martine, a sensible and cheerful girl who had done a burglary to pay for crack cocaine that her mother had started her off on around her fourteenth birthday. There was Daisy, who was pretty, blonde and so quiet that you couldn’t believe she’d ever been part of a gang of street muggers. Then there was Rachel, a dark-haired girl whose conversation usually started off with phrases like, ‘When I was in Mexico City’ or ‘I met this guy in Zanzibar’, because she had gone round the world and stayed in some of the best hotels, all on stolen credit cards.

  There had also been a girl called Louise, who was a professional ‘carer’. That is, she cared for old or sick people, I suppose for wages from the National Health. No one, it seemed, had been quite clear what
she was in for, but then someone discovered what had happened. Louise had found the old man she was caring for so irritating that she had smothered him with the cushion off his wheelchair, pressing it tight across his mouth and nose until he died. This was a crime which the other girls thought unforgivable and Louise was in constant danger of being smothered or worse by the harsh judges of the Holloway establishment. In fact Louise was in such danger for what she’d done as a carer that she had been removed to a security wing to protect her from the other girls and I suppose I took her place.

  ‘I work in the laundry,’ I told Terry on one of his visits.

  ‘And then I work out in the gym. Rachel’s wonderful on the trampoline. She does sort of somersaults.’

  ‘And Martine? You told me about Martine.’

  ‘Martine doesn’t do it because she’s pregnant!’

  ‘I hope you’re not.’ Terry looked worried.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t have minded. I wouldn’t have minded at all. Then he began questioning me.

  ‘You told me how you felt when you got into Robin’s house,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I told you.’

  ‘You got in through the kitchen window, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s how I got in.’

  ‘You weren’t alone, were you?’

  ‘What do you mean, I wasn’t alone?’

  ‘Well, you had other people with you. Screwtop, for instance.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Never mind who told me. I get to hear things around the place.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything about anyone else,’ I told him. ‘I’m fully responsible.’

  ‘Then you’re mad!’

  ‘Probably.’ I had to admit it.

  ‘Tell them that Screwtop and Ozzy Desmond led you into it.’

  ‘That was what Mr Bethell wanted me to say, but I can’t do it.’

  ‘Screwtop and Ozzy Desmond work for Chippy. Did Chippy know all about it? Did you talk to him?’

  ‘I’m not saying.’

  ‘You’ve got to tell them that they led you into a life of crime.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be true. They didn’t.’

  ‘Who did then?’

  ‘You!’

  Well, it was true, so I had to say it. Terry went rather quiet, but he still kissed me before he left.

  The last girl to be hanged in England was Ruth Ellis, executed in old Holloway. Of course, we all knew about her. Rachel had read a book on her and told us all about it.

  Ruth was only twenty-eight when it happened - not all that much older than me. She’d been a waitress and a nightclub hostess and married a dentist called George Ellis, but they soon parted. During the war she had a child by a French-Canadian serviceman and now I can’t remember exactly what happened to the child.

  Anyway she fell in love with a glamorous young racing driver of twenty-seven. His name was David Blakely. They lived together but she saw other lovers. They quarrelled and he drank a lot. David tried to leave her from time to time and he refused to tell her when he was going out and who he was going with. She’d had an abortion and got insanely jealous. In the end, and when she found him outside the Magdala Tavern, a pub near Hampstead Heath, she shot him dead.

  At her trial Ruth was asked what she’d intended to do when she found her lover. It was her chance to say, ‘I only wanted to scare him’ or ‘I was so emotionally disturbed that I didn’t know what I was doing’ or ‘I’d just recovered from losing my baby and I think I went mad for a moment’ - all that sort of thing. But all she did was to tell the truth. ‘I intended to kill him,’ was what she said. I respected her for that.

  They never reprieved her. They say the executioner, Pier-point, gave up his job after that, but she was still, we sometimes felt, hanging around our jail. There was a cat, for instance, called Ruth Ellis who was always mewing pathetically. And when I came in from the garden in the dark, or when I went up a lonely, poorly lit passage, I sometimes thought I saw the flickering image of a blonde young woman holding a fully loaded Smith & Wesson revolver. And if I blinked she was gone.

  ‘I thought I saw a ghost,’ I told Terry on his next visit.

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I know I didn’t. I just thought I did. The ghost of Ruth Ellis.’

  ‘She was a murderer.’ Terry sounded deeply disapproving of the idea that I should be associating with a murderer, even in a ghostly form.

  ‘She might have had some excuse for what she did.’ I spoke out for Ruth.

  ‘There’s no excuses, not for murder,’ Terry told me seriously.

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said. ‘All the same, they were wrong to hang her.’

  Terry didn’t answer that one. He changed the subject.

  ‘I’ve been reading some of your books,’ he said.

  ‘My books?’

  ‘Yes. The books you used to pass your A levels with.’

  ‘My school books? Yes, I kept some of them.’

  ‘I never got any A levels at all.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘Once you get out into life no one seems to bother about A levels any more.’

  ‘I was reading your Milton book, Paradise Lost. That’s a good one.’

  ‘I never really cared for it,’ I had to admit.

  ‘What’s wrong with it then?’ Terry seemed unexpectedly protective of Milton.

  ‘No jokes. I liked Shakespeare better. There are jokes in Shakespeare. Were you honestly reading Paradise Lost?’

  ‘Quite honestly.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Maybe I want to better myself.’

  ‘I don’t want you better, Terry. I want you exactly as you are,’ I told him, but then they rang the bell and the visit was over.

  ‘Life! They gave me life!’

  I was working in the laundry with Devira, who ironed sheets with grim thoroughness and determination. She folded them so she was only doing a quarter of a sheet at a time, but then slammed down the iron and flattened the pile mercilessly. She finished a sheet long before I had got mine under control so she attacked that as well. When the sheets were ironed to her satisfaction we stood apart, held one end each with part of it tucked under our chins and then we approached each other, refolding it neatly as we moved steadily together.

  ‘I read in the paper where it says, “Life should mean life.” Well, it does. That’s what it means exactly. My life is in here. What have I got when I get out - an old woman no one wants around the shop?’

  In general, we didn’t discuss the reasons for us being in Holloway, but Devira was different. I’d heard she talked about what she’d done quite freely and often, so I knew a little about what she was going to tell me.

  ‘He was my husband, you know. A horrible man.’

  One sheet was now thoroughly folded and we parted to either end of another.

  ‘Igbal.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘The husband they decided I had to marry. They sent for him all the way from Chandigarh. Travel expenses paid for by my father out of the profits of our corner shop in the Edgware Road area.’

  ‘I know that area.’ I remembered honking my horn for Terry outside the maisonette and us buying a picnic. ‘Plenty of Middle Eastern shops.’

  ‘Ours is not Arab. Sikh shopping.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Another sheet was folded and we started another.

  ‘I tell you, Igbal was a truly horrible man.’

  ‘Why did you marry him then?’

  ‘It was long ago decided by our families. I had no choice whatever in the matter. Igbal was a very sexual person. He couldn’t keep his hands still because of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I smiled, trying to lighten her mood a little. ‘Is that such a terrible thing?’

  ‘It is when you’re as bad as Igbal. He looked bad. He smelt bad. His temper was bad and he was bad at sexual relations. But he wanted them. Even in th
e shop. He wanted me to come behind the bead curtain and do it for him. Even when I was busy serving a customer.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ That was all I could say.

  ‘Don’t be sorry. I was just explaining why I had to kill him.’

  We’d folded all the sheets we’d ironed and Devira sat down on a stool while I pulled another lot out of a big pile on the floor.

  ‘How did you manage it?’ By this time I genuinely wanted to know.

  ‘When he was asleep.’

  ‘Yes, but how?’

  ‘I set fire to him.’ Devira said it with a heavy sigh, as though having to tell this part of the story had begun to bore her.

  ‘Wasn’t that very difficult?’ I asked, with my arms full of unironed sheets.

  To this, the quiet, calm Indian girl answered simply, ‘Petrol.’

  ‘Now, you two. This is work time, not a mothers’ meeting.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’ Devira stood up obediently and we went back to work.

  The screw who had ticked us off was called Helen, known as Hell, Wickstead. She had a short haircut and a voice which could carry down the longest corridor. I didn’t like her, although I had an uncomfortable feeling that she liked me.

  30

  All the time I had been talking to Mr Markby, and having discussions about my future if I managed to get a bit of further education into me, I still told him that I was simply helping out in a couple of restaurants round Notting Hill Gate.

  This wasn’t entirely true. I was still working for Chippy, no longer doing the important jobs but some of the routine house-breakings he left to less important members of his group. Why was I still doing it? Because crime had been a way of life to me since I was a kid and there didn’t seem to be another way to make sure of a reasonable income. I don’t say I didn’t feel bad about going on with crime when Mr Markby was doing so much to help me, because I did. But once I was away from his office and went to get instructions from some of his staff round the maisonette or the Beau Brummell Club, I could forget Mr Markby, or at least put him to the back of my mind and promise myself to attend to him later.