Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  But not always. The law is never more cruel, or more oblivious to the arguments of Escalus and Isabella, than when it claims to have God on its side. The proceedings of the Inquisition and the Shia laws, if enforced in Islamic states, can outdo the ancient criminal code of Vienna in wanton ferocity. A modern Angelo might be a regent in the Middle East prepared to order an errant wife to be stoned to death. And, in Europe, who would Isabella have to call on in this faithless age? No God, perhaps; but is there, in the bravest hearts, some system of natural justice better than current laws can provide? Can there be?

  The answer must depend on the view you take of the human condition. Are people naturally destructive, immoral, predatory and self-seeking, only to be kept in order by harsh laws and fiercely deterrent mandatory sentences? Or are men and women naturally orderly, merciful, humane and bred with a need for justice and mutual aid? Of course these qualities, or defects, are not evenly distributed, and undoubtedly there is much of each in all of us, but when it comes to the law some sort of distinction can be drawn. Are you a Shylock or a Bassanio?

  Shylock pinned his faith on the words in the contract, the nature of his bond and the duty of the state to uphold the letter of the law regardless of human suffering. Bassanio put another point of view. More important than the sanctity of the law was the plight of the individual parties in the particular case. If the enforcement of contracts were all-important, a man would die with a pound of flesh carved off near to his heart. Therefore Bassanio pleads to Portia, who has come to judge the case: ‘And I beseech you/Wrest once the law to your authority:/To do a great right, do a little wrong,/And curb this cruel devil of his will.’ So forget the wording of the statute, ignore the terms of the contract, and, in the name of natural justice, do what you think is right.

  The late Lord Denning, a man full of charm who passed judgement in short, workman-like sentences spoken in a carefully preserved Hampshire accent, always said he was a ‘Bassanio man’. What was important to him was justice in the individual case and not the omnipotence of the law. His decisions, on this basis, led to frequent appeals to the House of Lords, where the judges, apparently more sympathetic to Shylock's line of legal argument, frequently reversed his decisions. The gulf will still exist and Isabellas will be appealing to Angelos to show a little humanity far into the future.

  Perhaps she could have a word with the judges in the new, politically correct divorce courts, which have swung round to a different absurdity. In one of the last cases I was concerned with, a husband returning unexpectedly one afternoon to his home in Golders Green found his wife enjoying sex with three members of a pop group. To pay for her entertainment he found, after the divorce, that he had to sell his house and his business to give her half of all he possessed as well as half of his future earnings. I hasten to say that the law is not sexist in this respect. A famously successful woman writer, finding her husband in bed with her secretary, had to reward him equally and was faced with a similar financial disaster.

  A judge who also had medical qualifications once told me the following story. He was trying, long ago, a perfectly friendly action between a woman's husband and her lover to determine which of them, and they were both well off, should pay for her child's education and future support. The parties agreed to a blood test and when the judge got the report it was perfectly clear that neither of the two men before him, but some third, possibly penniless, stranger must be the father of the child. He tore up the report, threw it into the wastepaper basket and invited the two men to his room. There he told them that the blood test had established nothing with any clarity and that they should agree to share the cost of bringing up the child. What he did was certainly against the law and, just as certainly, right.

  21. Family Values

  When you hear a politician lecturing the nation on the subject of family values you know that he (it's almost always a he) has probably left a weeping wife at home, has quarrelled with his children and is having it off with his ‘work experience’ researcher. No doubt there are many happy families, and they're not all the same, but close families, like the quiet country cottages Sherlock Holmes observed from the train, can be torture chambers for those imprisoned in them. Murder has this in common with Christmas, most of it goes on in the family circle.

  Family values, down the centuries, have not had a particularly good press in literature – unless you count the works of Dickens, who, in real life, nailed up the door which led to his wife's bedroom. The domestic murder in a bath and the subsequent curse upon the house of Atreus, the unhappy state of the Danish royal family when a prince's father was poisoned by his uncle, the ghastly dinner parties hosted by the Macbeths when ghosts were on the guest list don't make encouraging reading for newlyweds. The home lives of Henry VIII, the Crippens or Mary Queen of Scots don't encourage family values.

  Violence, betrayal, lingering curses and sudden death aren't the only drawbacks to family life. Even as politicians are parading its virtues you can hear across the country the sound of stifled yawns. Mrs Patrick Campbell, in some ways an unlikely propagandist for marriage, spoke of it as ‘the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue’. The trouble with double beds is that people tend to go to sleep in them. When I did divorce cases I found that couples, married to other partners, had enthusiastic and apparently deeply satisfactory love affairs until a divorce set them free to marry. When they did so the excitement evaporated. There were no more furtive telephone calls, no element of danger when they listened for a creaking stair or an unexpected key in the front door, no hours snatched in the back of a Ford Cortina parked in a dark wood. It all became legal, respectable and above board and, in many sad cases, they went off it.

  Even the most happily married have a certain admiration for illicit lovers, who were always the heroes and heroines of ancient literature. Lancelot is a more attractive figure than King Arthur, Cleopatra than Octavia. We were once delayed for three hours at Heathrow Airport while an aged engineer with a beard did something to the pipes. The captain, a handsome middle-aged man with greying sideboards, carried his cap under his arm and walked among us from time to time, sympathizing with our frustration and promising that all would be well. When we finally rose into the air his gently reassuring voice came over the Tannoy. ‘This is your captain, Johnny Montague-Smith. We are now on our way and I can assure you that this aircraft is completely safe. If it weren't I wouldn't be in it because I have no intention at all of dying in a plane crash. My dear old father told me that the only decent way for an English gentleman to die is shot through the heart in the bed of his best friend's wife.’

  From there on we all, even the most respectably married, had every faith in Captain Johnny Montague-Smith and believed him when he said he wouldn't die in an aeroplane crash.

  With out chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

  The dreariest and the longest journey go.

  So wrote Shelley, whom Byron found the ‘least selfish’ and ‘mildest of men’, denouncing marriage as though he were a fugitive from a chain gang. Such dire warnings as this, and the American who said that marriage is very like a Florida hurricane, ‘it starts off with all that sucking and blowing and you end up by losing your house’, do more for family life than the hard sell of unreliable politicians. Because it's not as grim as all that. You may well find a true friend and not a deadly foe and the journey shouldn't be entirely dreary. Children who like their parents to be married are our only tenuous claim to immortality.

  In the future, when it's taken over by my heirs, there may be changes in the business of childbirth, when science becomes involved, with far-reaching results. Last week we were in New York to see the opening of a film starring my attractive actor son-in-law Alessandro. He also has a handsome, charming brother. They are members of an Italian-American family and have the fine looks of their Sardinian artist grandfather, who arrived penniless in New York in 1942 and was lucky not to be met with our present ‘crackdown’ o
n asylum seekers. After the opening of a film he starred in, Alessandro had a meeting with one of the film's executives, who inquired if he'd mind asking his father to donate his sperm to her lesbian girlfriend. Surprisingly enough, Alessandro's father, an adviser to the government in Washington, was reluctant to do so.

  Family life is going to take a battering from a new law suggested by politicians who proclaim its values; and this also concerns sperm donors. Those actors who have rested too long, or men of other professions down on their luck, who wank for a few pounds and provide a supply for would-be parents in difficulty must now make their names and identities known to the families they help to create. You can see horrendous scenes following. The resting actor might win the lottery and be sued for the maintenance of all the children his part-time occupation produced. Or, perhaps worse, the wanker for money might want to claim ‘his’ children and take over the family.

  Worse still, parents are to be compelled to tell their children whom their natural, or sperm-giving, father was. As a considerable percentage of children born in marriage are not in fact fathered by their mother's husband, secrets will be suddenly revealed to everyone's embarrassment and a sudden rise in the divorce rate will follow. Jewish custom, which traces descent solely from the mother, is more sensible and more discreet. Our own lawgivers can't accept the fact that there are many things in family life that are best kept shrouded in mystery.

  Family life, in my experience, far from being dull and secure, is a constantly unfolding drama. One Saturday evening, at our home in the country, my youngest daughter had brought home a boyfriend with whom her relationship was over. He was naturally depressed, possibly suicidal. Alessandro's mother was staying with us and preparations for his and my daughter Emily's wedding were gripping the household like the production of a major film. In the kitchen where we assembled, the cat, who lives a secret life in and out of the upstairs windows, entered in pursuit of a mouse. The cat was pursued by a liberated Jack Russell, who showed every sign of wanting to eat it. With her nerves already at breaking point, my fox-hunting wife grabbed the mouse and prepared to kill it with a single blow from the wooden hammer more often used to flatten steaks. This led to a general uproar of protest from my daughters, the ex-boyfriend and Alessandro's mother. Raising the hammer, my wife was resolute. ‘If this mouse lives,’ she said, ‘there'll be eight more mice in the world before you've had time to count.’ As the argument increased there was a gentle knock on the kitchen door and Elizabeth, our neighbour from a mile down the hill, entered holding a cup. ‘Can any of you spare a little of that liquid you use for cleaning contact lenses?’ was what she asked.

  In her surprise, my wife relaxed her grip on the mouse, which made a dash for freedom. The cat was gathered up, the Jack Russell expelled and the now ex-boyfriend cheered up. Family values were seen at their best.

  22. Missed Opportunities

  ‘I'm not very good at sex, Jane. But with you I'll really try,’ is a pretty hopeless sort of approach to any woman, but I'm assured it was said to a friendly publicist by one of her more serious and not entirely successful authors. Equally hopeless are such gambits as ‘My wife doesn't understand me,’ or even worse, ‘Sex with you would do wonders for my prose style.’ If you want to improve your prose style, read Gibbon, Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh and Hemingway. If you want to make love it is better to say so plainly, without claiming any literary reward for your trouble.

  My wife overheard a different, more sporting approach on the hunting field. A would-be lover rode up to a handsome, lively middle-aged woman and said, ‘I say, Daphne, how about a gun in your shoot?’ The reply was, I'm afraid, disappointing. ‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I'm fully syndicated at the moment.’

  It's well known that John Betjeman, summing up his regrets on his deathbed, said, ‘Not enough sex,’ and it is the missed opportunities of your youth that will haunt your old age. I shall never forget the friendly girl who, long ago, said, ‘Let's go down to Soho and do something sordid.’ I, in my stupidity, thought she was suggesting some rather dirty restaurant and turned down the offer. There will be a long future of kicking yourself for not understanding such simple approaches as, ‘Where will you be spending the night?’ and you answered, ‘I'd better be going home. I've got a lot to do in the morning.’ A lot to do! Whatever it was has long been forgotten; what will always be remembered is the night that didn't happen.

  It's often said that men desire women for their looks but women fancy men for some less reliable quality, like their characters or their supposed position in the world. We, the vast majority of non-beautiful people, can only hope this is true.

  If it is, it puts men at an unfair advantage. If you work hard at it, you might be able to improve your character, or even your position in the world. Beauty is something you can do absolutely nothing about. It is distributed in the most unfair, politically incorrect and anti-democratic manner. It is bestowed on the least deserving and often denied to the best, unselfish and kindly intentioned people. Quite often the unfair nature of this gift causes resentment, not only from jealous women. I have known beautiful girls who have been badly treated and slighted by men who feel eclipsed by such spanking looks.

  I have a beautiful wife and beautiful daughters and I would never say they don't deserve such luck. The fact is mildly surprising, however, as I look, as some newspaper put it kindly, ‘like a bag of spanners’. The great majority of male spanner lookalikes must work out a careful approach and avoid anything as hopeless as promising to try hard. Stendhal, no oil painting but a man who notched up his conquests on his braces, relied on laughter and boasted, perhaps truthfully, that he could beat the record of the best-looking men. There is much to be said for this approach. My experience as a counsel for the defence down at the Old Bailey was that if you could get the jury laughing you were likely to win the case. The more solemn the proceedings became, the less happy the verdict was likely to be.

  If it's not true that men are loved only for their characters, or their positions of power, it's equally mistaken to believe that all women are called upon to be reproductions of Miss Dynamite or Catherine Zeta-Jones. One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them. Awkward, even impossible people find love and it's a great convenience if they find it with each other. As someone said, it was very kind of God to arrange for Thomas Carlyle to marry Jane Carlyle, because ‘it meant that only two people were unhappy instead of four’.

  The mysterious forces which compel the most unlikely to dedicate their lives to each other can't be explained. I can only repeat that missed opportunities, in life and love, may haunt you for ever. Opportunities should be taken gratefully, even if the results may be somewhat bizarre. Long ago, in the distant days of Angus Steak Houses and Mateus Rosé and Frankie Vaughan singing ‘Give Me the Moonlight’, I took a new-found friend out to dinner. Later I drove her back to her flat in a London square in which the front doors were flanked by rows of bells for different apartments. She suggested I come up to hers after I'd parked the car. Before she left me she touched her hair and said, ‘I'd better warn you. All this comes off.’

  Left alone in the car, I came to the conclusion that what she had told me meant that she was bald. Did I want to get into bed with a bald-headed woman? No, I did not. Should I not then turn the car around and drive straight home without any further explanation? Perhaps. But wouldn't that be a cowardly, even a mean and unkind thing to do? It wasn't, after all, her fault that she was bald and it would be dreadful to remind her of the fact in such a dramatic fashion. I hit on another solution. I'd take my glasses off. My sight is so short that I wouldn't be able to see how bald she was.

  After I'd parked the car I rang the top bell, as I had seen her do beside the front door, and was rewarded by a deeply sexy voice saying, ‘Come upstairs.’ I obeyed, with my glasses off, and found the top flat's door opened by a blurred but distinctly bald figure wearing a dressing gown. I threw my arms round it,
only to discover it was a bald-headed, quite elderly man and I was in the wrong house.

  Having beaten a hasty and apologetic retreat, I finally got to the right flat and found that my companion had perfectly acceptable hair which had been covered with a wig. It was, as I say, a bizarre evening but not one I've lived to regret.

  23. Making a Fuss

  At one time, again it was in the time of my youth, the hotels, the restaurants, the railway stations of England rang to the sound of middle-aged, middle-class men making a fuss. Cold plates, warm drinks, late trains, slow waiters would set them off in a roar. Their voices, raised in anger, could be heard in Europe as they progressed from Calais to the Promenade des Anglais in Cannes, complaining about the state of the lavatories or the inadequacy of the breakfasts.

  They had, no doubt some of them had, been unhinged by the 1914–18 war. We had a prep school master who used to shout, ‘Strafe and shell you, boy!’ as he hurled books at our heads and then, wretchedly apologetic, compensated us with small gifts of money. Our young ears were blasted by middle-aged rage. For the children of such men, life was a perpetual embarrassment; you had to pretend that the red-faced aggrieved adult seated at your table was no sort of relation.

  The law courts, in these early days, echoed with ill-temper. There was a judge who used to throw his pencil down in a pet and call out in a loud voice, ‘We are not a stable!’ if he thought his court wasn't receiving the respect it deserved. Another would greet a nervous barrister by saying, ‘If you want to practise I suggest you practise at home.’ Offended advocates would bang out of courts; clerks would have to be sent to reconcile them to judges who had gone too far. Even without such interruptions, proceedings were often unfriendly. ‘Your argument, Mr Smith,’ said one judge to the future Lord Birkenhead, ‘is simply going into one of my ears and out of the other.’