Anatomy of a Scandal

by Sarah Vaughan

  She is buoyed by his behaviour last night. They were both exhausted: she by the drive back and her apprehension at seeing him after poring over the evidence; him by the strain of sitting in court. His face was cloaked in grey and she felt an overwhelming and unexpected tenderness as he took her in his arms. How could she have doubted him? How could she have allowed herself to think he could say those terrible words, and worse, how could she imagine that he hadn’t cared enough about Olivia’s feelings? How could she even have half-formulated the suspicion that perhaps he was capable of rape?

  She feels disloyal just thinking it now. She had sunk into his arms and really held him, conscious that it was unprecedented for him to need her so entirely. His shoulders relaxed, just a little, and she had stood, feeling the warmth of his body flowing through hers and enjoying his dependence, brief and uncharacteristic, and all the sweeter for its novelty.

  And then they had made love. Properly made love in a way that they hadn’t since the story broke. Not sex fuelled by anger or a need to assert that they were fine, that they would be fine; or sex entered into because it was the easiest way to distil the anxiety, the fear and the doubt that had enveloped them for the past five and a half months: sex as a pure physical relief. No, they had made love: a tender lovemaking that communicated his need for her and his reliance; that exposed him at his most vulnerable – his face soft; no artifice; no need to impose a certain image. And afterwards, as she lay there, aware that she should get up but wanting to luxuriate in their closeness, she felt that he had told her, as perfectly and completely as he could without words, that he was innocent. A man who could make love like that, with the utmost tenderness and consideration – her husband; her children’s father – could never be capable of something as ugly and brutal as rape.

  She walks the few steps from the taxi to the approach to the Bailey holding his hand. Head up, shoulders back, chest out, eyes fixed on the paparazzi, who rush at them when they see them approaching. Don’t let them ask her a question.

  ‘Sophie – Sophie. This way.’

  A middle-aged man in a trench coat – scruffy hair, scruffy suit, a drinker’s red face – invades their space, clutching a notebook. ‘Does the PM still have full confidence in your husband, Sophie?’ His voice is abrasive; energy and anger packed tight in there.

  She shoots him a look that she knows is withering. She can do withering. How dare he shout at her? As if she is a dog, teased with a stick. And then John Vestey sweeps them through a door and they are safe, James’s hand still tight in hers. She gives it a squeeze, conscious of its warmth and the uncharacteristic smear of sweat. He releases her fingers.

  ‘OK?’ he asks, eyes fixed on hers, as if she is the only person that matters.

  She nods and steps back, allowing him to chat with his solicitor, remaining silent, loyal. Not required to join in the conversation but unquestioningly there.

  Behind the door, she imagines the photographers comparing shots and that reporter concocting some words. Why ask her about James and Tom – and why not throw that question to James? Perhaps they’re digging around about the Libertines again? Her palms prick and her heart beats faster: a rhythmic hammering that rings in her ears as she tries to calm herself, to steady her breathing, and to drown out a question.

  What exactly do they know?

  High up in the public gallery, she focuses on her husband: trying to convey the strength of her support for him though she knows he will not look up and see her. He looks authoritative in the witness box and for a moment she hopes the jury will be fooled into thinking he is just another witness; one who offers a different version, an alternative narrative, and not the man being tried for rape.

  There is a sign pinned to the wall, warning the public not to move during the judge’s summing up or to lean over the railings. She ignores it: peering down until she feels disorientated, blood galloping through her head and introducing a new sense of panic that momentarily thrusts out her disarming thoughts until she feels as if she is toppling. She sits back abruptly; welcomes the hard certainty of the bench.

  To try to steady herself, she scrutinises the heads of the barristers, shuffling papers around in the still few seconds before the judge intimates that the case should resume – and her husband give his evidence. She watches his QC, Angela, and tries to take some comfort in the breadth of her shoulders, the expansive way in which she fills her gown. Miss Woodcroft is slight in comparison though not short. A blonde ponytail peeping from behind her wig; a diamond band on her right hand; the most ridiculous shoes – patent courts with gold braid on them – the sort of shoes a female sergeant of arms might wear.

  She is fussing slightly, this woman; double-checking something in a lever arch file the edge of which is thick with coloured Post-it notes; the pages bright with the fluorescent underlining of certain sentences. Her left hand scrawls furiously, a fat fibre tip pressing down. Along the bench, Angela has an iPad – as does her junior, Ben Curtis: no traditionalist, she is sharp; has a formidable memory, James says. Sophie finds his QC intimidating; knows instinctively that they have nothing in common; that she does not warm to her. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to like her: she just needs her to get her husband off.

  A hush falls on the court as the judge enters, a ripple of quiet like the stilling of a pool of water, and then James begins his evidence. He speaks well; his voice low and warm, with his habitual self-assurance but not one hint of arrogance. This is James at his best: the approachable politician, setting out his story in his most persuasive way.

  She still finds it difficult to hear. Angela tackles the infidelity head-on, and she listens as her husband explains that his affair with Olivia wasn’t something that he embarked on lightly.

  ‘I knew it was wrong,’ he admits, the fingers of his hands touching in that Blairite trope again: lightly pressing together – here is the steeple; here is the church.

  ‘You were a family man?’ Angela prompts.

  ‘I am a family man. My family – my wife and children – mean everything to me. It was deeply wrong of me to betray that trust and to become involved with Miss Lytton. It was wrong and weak and I feel profoundly guilty for the pain I have put them through every single day.’

  His QC pauses. ‘And yet you still put them through that pain?’

  ‘I did.’ James gives a sigh that seems to come from the depth of his body: the sigh of a man tormented by his failings. ‘I am not perfect,’ and here he holds his hands up in supplication, ‘as none of us are. I respected Miss Lytton as a colleague and, yes, I admit I was attracted to her, as she was to me. In a moment of weakness, we began an affair.’

  Sophie’s eyes brim now, her chest filled with self-pity and a growing sense of humiliation, and she tries to focus on someone other than him: the jurors perhaps, whose gaze varies: the middle-aged man sympathetic; an elderly woman in the back row and a young Muslim girl, sporting a dark headscarf, noticeably less so. She watches John Vestey, and the female solicitor from the CPS, a dowdy woman in a cheap grey suit who leans back, arms folded, making no attempt to pretend she thinks James could be innocent, or perhaps she is just bored. And she watches the prosecuting barrister, Miss Woodcroft, rifle through her notes as Angela leads her husband on, occasionally jotting the odd note in one of her blue legal notepads; and there is something about the way in which this woman inclines her head and in which she scribbles furiously that reminds her of someone else.

  The feeling builds through the stuffy next half-hour as James’s evidence continues. Perhaps it is easier to fixate on this woman than to tune in to her husband’s version of events, which seem designed to convey that, though he was married, his relationship with Olivia was respectful, consensual; his parliamentary researcher someone he cared deeply about. He sent her flowers; took her out for dinner and, in late July, bought her a necklace for her birthday. Her heart judders hard at this revelation: an acute physical pain followed by a difficulty in breathing as the extent of her husban
d’s deception is laid bare; his ease at living an entirely unknown life.

  ‘And what was this necklace like?’ Angela’s question grabs her attention.

  ‘It was a key,’ James explains. ‘A play on words. She was the key to my parliamentary office. I wanted to show that she was valued: that she was integral to the success of my job.’

  ‘You didn’t think she might see it as the key to your heart?’

  ‘I suppose that there was the possibility for that interpretation.’ His forehead furrows. ‘I don’t think I consciously intended her to think that. Perhaps I was naive but, well, I was a little smitten . . .’

  His words wind her: five blunt wounds. Her heart closes over: she wants to feel nothing; to be entirely numb.

  Angela pauses. Lets the significance sink in.

  ‘You were a little smitten?’ Her tone is interested but non-judgemental.

  ‘Well, more than a little. She is a very attractive and intelligent young woman. ‘

  ‘And so you bought her a necklace. What was it made of?’

  ‘Platinum.’

  ‘So a very generous gift?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Far more generous than a usual gift for a colleague?’

  ‘I didn’t think of her as merely a colleague, by then.’

  ‘You were lovers?’

  ‘Yes, we were.’

  ‘She has told us she was in love with you. But were you in love with her?’

  ‘I think that’s a possibility.’ He pauses and it feels, to Sophie, as if every person in the court leans forward to catch his next words, spoken so softly and with such apparent sorrow that he seems to be confessing a secret. ‘Yes, I think I was.’

  She forces herself to listen as she hears how they spent the night together on Olivia’s birthday. She had been at her mother’s in Devon; had managed to speak to James briefly in the early evening after walking to the top of the nearest hill and catching a signal. He had sounded wistful and she had felt a nudge of guilt about abandoning him to his departmental papers while they all lazed around; going for swims; playing on the beach. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she had said, imagining his pang of frustration at being left alone in the sticky capital for a fortnight. ‘We could come home early but the kids would be so disappointed – and so would Ginny. They do love it here.’

  She remembered feeling the warmth of the day on her neck and being distracted by the sea, glinting at the end of the valley and merging with the sky at a barely perceptible horizon. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to leave and drive home.

  ‘Of course you must stay,’ he had said. ‘It’s just I miss you.’

  ‘Ah, we miss you, too,’ she had replied, heart softening.

  Olivia must have been waiting as he took that call in St James’s Park, perhaps rolling her eyes in impatience. And yet he hadn’t given the slightest indication that his evening held anything more exciting than his interminable red boxes and a salad and steak. The lies had tripped off his tongue; or rather the omissions. For the second time in minutes, she marvels at his dual life and how it came so easily to him. It reminds her of that other time, over twenty years ago, when his explanation didn’t convey the whole truth; was viscous; slippery in its omissions. And yet it did the job; was never aggressively questioned. Perhaps – like Emily with her tooth fairy; like her in Devon last summer – they were all just willing to be convinced.

  She shrugs the thought aside and tries to focus on his answers, once more; to will him to continue to come across as his personable self: flawed, yes; but all the more human because of this. Her nails pinch hard white crescents into her palm: the pain a welcome distraction from the dull throb in her chest, the overwhelming desire to cry.

  And then Miss Woodcroft interrupts.

  ‘My Lord. My learned friend is leading the witness.’

  The judge raises a hand and lowers it as if disciplining an exuberant puppy he really does not have the time for. Angela smiles – Sophie can hear the smile in her deep vowels; and her heavy condescension – and carries smoothly on.

  But Miss Woodcroft’s interjection preoccupies her: the tone, the timbre of that voice: well modulated, deep, like an expensive claret one wants to linger over. A voice replete with privilege that hints at a fine intelligence and exclusive education, so why is there something about her – a quality of intensity, perhaps – that reminds her of someone she hasn’t thought of for over twenty years?

  It must be her habit of writing. That feverish, left-handed scribbling as if her thoughts are so voluminous, it is a race to get them all down. Holly wrote like that – but so must plenty of people; particularly tenacious barristers for whom any chink in a narrative must signal another opportunity to prise a story apart. She can almost see this woman’s brain bulging beneath that wig: concocting ways in which to trip up her husband under cross-examination, though so far James doesn’t seem to have put a step wrong. He even has the less visibly impressed jurors – that older woman; the Muslim girl – watching him with less antagonism, while the rather obviously pretty younger women – eyebrows dark arcs; tans from a bottle – seem to have succumbed to his charm; are lapping up his words – at least at this point, while it’s a tale of infidelity; a messy, modern love story, and nothing more sinister. No mention of bruises or ripped knickers. No suggestion, yet, that he might have said: Don’t be such a prick-tease. She must stop it! There’s no point in repeating those horrible words.

  She leans back; tells herself to relax. To forget about Holly. She must listen: must force herself to drink it all in. And so she turns back to James; to her cheating husband, who she is beginning to loathe herself for loving, and who she is starting to like just a little bit less . . .

  His evidence continues. She still closes her mind to much of it and lets his words wash over her like water applied to a thick block of parchment. They are getting closer to the kernel of the case: the incident in the lift. And she senses that she must conserve her energy for that moment when she will hear her husband’s version of that event, spoken under oath. Her attention must be pin-sharp, then.

  Miss Woodcroft speaks again. Another point of law, another weary dismissal by the judge. How could she have reminded her of Holly? This barrister has stick-like arms; no hint of a bust; slight shoulders. A skinny bird of a woman: studious; a little neurotic? Not someone who will land a lethal blow on her husband; who will cut through his easy charm – for he still comes across as relaxed, despite taking the process seriously; and it is only she – alert to every tic – who can sense, in the slight tightening of his jaw, the tension in him. His voice brings her back to the present. His deep, persuasive voice that often holds the potential for a laugh but then slips into one of confident authority. His tone is sombre, now. The politician taking responsibility for his failings but careful not to say anything to implicate himself at the same time.

  ‘I’d like to take you back to what happened in the committee room corridor, on the morning of October 13th,’ begins Angela Regan, and she smiles at him, easily.

  ‘Ah yes,’ says her husband. ‘After Miss Lytton called the lift.’

  Later, Sophie wonders quite how she sat through it all, craning over the side of the gallery, trying to imagine the thoughts of the jury: those twelve diverse individuals who will decide her husband’s fate. She wonders how she dealt with the frankly inquisitive glances of those around her – who have recognised her, there on the front row; and have shushed and exchanged meaningful looks as she sidled past them. Shame seeps through her, angry and hot. To think that she once enjoyed being looked at, as a young woman at Oxford. This is a different kind of look: a gossip-fuelled, judgemental, overtly bewildered analysis. That’s his wife. Is she married to a rapist? Did he do it, after all?

  She tries to block them out; and almost succeeds for James’s evidence is compelling: a very different narrative to that she has read in the papers. An account she so desperately wants to believe. This is a version of events in which the woman
who has ripped her marriage apart called the lift and told her husband he was ‘devastatingly attractive’; in which she ushered him in and he – preoccupied by the Times article and grateful for some privacy in which it might be discussed – had naively, unthinkingly followed.

  ‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ he says with the self-deprecating smile she knows so well; the one that works with the mothers at the school gate; with the children’s teachers; with constituents. ‘But I just wanted to talk to her. She had always been a good sounding board. I suppose I doubted myself – found myself questioning if my manner could be construed as arrogant – and I thought she of all people would put me straight.’

  ‘But you didn’t talk?’ Angela prompts him.

  ‘No, we didn’t talk.’ He shakes his head, as if at a loss to explain how he could have found himself embroiled in this situation. ‘She reached up to kiss me and I found myself responding. It was a moment of madness, of sheer weakness.’ He pauses and his voice trembles, pregnant with a sincerity that comes easily. ‘It’s obviously something I deeply regret.’

  His counsel pushes on: taking him through his version of the kissing, the bottom touching, the blouse opening. ‘I never wrenched her blouse open,’ he elaborates, and he looks around the court as if the idea is preposterous. ‘As I remember, she helped me unbutton it. I’m not brutish. Not the sort of man who would ever wrench a woman’s clothes off. That’s not my kind of thing.’

  He is clever, thinks Sophie. Careful not to say what she knows he thinks: that he is not a man who ever needs to wrench a woman’s clothes off; that Olivia was practically panting for him.

  ‘And what about the laddered tights?’ prompts his barrister. ‘They were very fine tights. Fifteen denier. The sort of tights that easily snag.’

  ‘That must have happened when she tugged them down and I tried to help her.’ He pauses, almost risks looking rueful. ‘I’m afraid things got a bit frenzied in the heat of the moment,’ he says.