The Burden of Proof

by Roderic Jeffries

  “It’s a damn good job someone in the family is.”

  He changed the conversation. “How’s the house, Pat? Still the same? When I was inside — as we old boys refer to our alma mater — the only way I could begin to remain sane was to remember the house brick by brick, stone by stone, and then carry out all the repairs and alterations to it we’ve decided on. Incidentally, I thought that if we made the kitchen — ”

  She interrupted him. “I’m freezing to death and unless we go inside pretty damned quickly I shan’t be alive to see all these wonderful things.”

  “Sorry, Pat.”

  They climbed the three stone steps to the flagged front and went forward to the glass door. Patricia took a key from her pocket and handed it to him. “See yourself home.”

  He opened the door and then followed her inside the house. Just before he switched on the light, he stood still and smelled with silent thanks the strong fragrance that came from the banners, arms, and armour, a fragrance he had met nowhere else. He switched on the light. It was all there, exactly, unmoved by his departure or his return.

  “We can lose that bottle of champagne between us, can’t we, Pat?”

  “I’d rather just a short one, Roger, and then bed.”

  “Then no one will come with me and throw my hat over the moon? A short one it shall be, but I warn you, tomorrow it’s champers.”

  She rested her good arm on the chair that their great-great-grandfather had brought back from Russia. “How bad was it?”

  “Hell all the way, and no intermissions… Name your poison. Whisky, gin, brandy, rum, sherry…”

  “There’s whisky and nothing else. Just as when you left.”

  “And poor you hasn’t had time to order any more. Whisky it shall be, a reminder that one of our ancestors went so far in political leaning as to support the Jacobites and as a consequence of this recklessness was forced to fight his way out of captivity after the battle of Culloden at the expense of two spitted guards.” Before he left the hall he looked around it once more.

  *

  While they ate their breakfast, Roger looked through the mail that had accumulated over the weeks. Friends writing to ask if there was anything they could do to help and probably hoping to hell there wasn’t, bills, circulars, and the bank manager and the insurance company.

  The bank manager:

  I’m so sorry to have to tell you that head office has made further inquiries into the state of your account and has discovered that far from its having decreased since I saw you about it, it has increased to a noticeable extent. It has, therefore, instructed me to tell you that your account must be credited with one thousand pounds within the next seven days. As from today…

  There was a pathetic P.S. in the manager’s handwriting — clearly he’d not wanted his words to appear in the files.

  Even a hundred would help me to placate head office. Please accept my sincere apologies for troubling you in the middle of your other troubles.

  The letter from the insurance company was more direct.

  Further to our letter of the 17th. inst., we note that the sum of one thousand pounds owing to us under policy number Z4/61/347JsP has not been credited to our account. If we do not receive this sum within the next seven days we shall reluctantly be compelled to place the matter in the hands of our legal advisers.

  Roger looked across the table. “What’s happened, Pat? These two beauties gave you seven days’ grace but they’re dated way back.”

  “I got on to both lots and explained you were waiting to be tried and begged them to hold back until it was all over. The manager agreed at once and was highly embarrassed about the whole business, while the man in the insurance office didn’t seem to think he could possibly do it. But there must have been a suspicion of humanity in someone there because after they’d heard the deep sob in my throat several times, the fourth person I spoke to then agreed to my request.”

  He screwed up the two letters and flung them onto the floor.

  “It’s a nice lesson in the laws of humility: begging time. Shades of Dickens and a tall thin man in battered top hat, pointed chin and dripping nose, with scratch quill pen that draws the straight lines to the debtor’s prison.”

  “The estate’s been saved, Roger. They could walk on me for that.”

  “It’s funny the way you and I struggle and struggle to save something that’s become as anachronistic as the Brontosaurus. Where’s all our effort getting us? Perhaps another fifty years of Ventnors at Reton Park Hall. After that, the place is doomed, just as so many houses have already met their doom.”

  She stared at him. “Feeling very grey?”

  “Yes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Inevitable reaction from the euphoric state of previous mental intoxication. The patient is suffering from a depressive assimilation of past, present and future.”

  “Is that supposed to be sense?”

  “God forbid.”

  “Then why not snap out of it?”

  He poured himself more coffee. “Elizabeth and I would have been married by now and back from our honeymoon. The bank manager would be all smiles, their head office positively jocular, and the insurance company begging me for further business.”

  “But since that’s never-never, let’s be practical. Have you and Elizabeth fixed another date for the wedding?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She’s been a wonderful brick.”

  “That’s one thing you don’t have to tell me.”

  “She doesn’t want you to know, but she’s paying all the legal expenses for you.”

  He gestured with his hands.

  “Does that make you angry, Roger?”

  “Angry I can’t refuse the offer, yes. Or should I be more truthful and say humiliated?”

  “You didn’t mind discussing with her how you were going to spend her money on restoring the estate.”

  “Damn it, Pat, you know as well as I do that that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. That’s for the estate.”

  “Then start thinking that the lawyers’ fees are also on behalf of the estate and for goodness’ sake be practical and don’t try to refuse her help.”

  “Thanks for all your sympathetic understanding.”

  “You don’t need sympathy any more, just something to kick you back into fighting trim.”

  “And how do I go about fighting the bank and the insurance company who’ll be on my back the moment they hear I’m free?”

  “Tell the bastards to wait. Anyway, there’s no hurry for them now.”

  He looked up at her.

  “So I swore for once. And I damn well enjoyed doing it.” She stared at her coffee. “I suppose I really feel like you — suffering from a non-alcoholic hangover.”

  They both had a cigarette. As he flicked open his lighter, he heard a car come to a halt outside the house.

  He hurried through to the hall and by the time he’d reached there, Elizabeth was already in the house and had closed the door behind her.

  She was wearing the trim three-piece check suit he liked so much, and the double row of pearls her mother had left her and which were worth the earth.

  He went to kiss her, but she turned her head to one side.

  “What’s up, Liz?” he demanded.

  “I’ve come… I’ve come to say I can’t carry on. I just had to tell you as soon as possible.”

  “Can’t carry on?” he repeated the words. Something made him look down at her left hand and he saw that her engagement ring — a diamond solitaire that had belonged to his grandmother — was not on her finger. She opened her handbag and took out the ring.

  “Please take this, Roger. Look after it, it’s very beautiful.” She handed it to him.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked roughly.

  “I just can’t face an engagement at the moment… Maybe later on, when it’s been over a long time…”

  “Liz, I know just how you feel — all battered and sliced to bits. I�
��m the same, and so’s Pat. But it’ll wear off and then we’ll be back to where we were and all this’ll be nothing but a distant nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry, Roger, but it’s no good. There’s no need to tell everyone right away and then they won’t think — ”

  He picked up her words. “Think you’re throwing me over because of what’s happened.”

  She bit her lips and there were tears in her eyes.

  “Don’t rush it, Elizabeth. Wait until you know your mind’s clear. This blasted feeling of reaction — ”

  “My mind’s been clear for a long time but I wasn’t going to say anything while you were so desperate and needed someone to help you. Please try to understand, Roger.”

  “Understand? How can I? Why throw me over now when all the world knows I’ve been cleared? If you’d wanted to get rid of me, why didn’t you do it earlier when everyone would have applauded your actions?”

  She brushed tears from her eyes. “Do you remember how it all began, Roger?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And how you wouldn’t tell me the full story all at once, but kept adding another piece to it each time you were forced to? At first it was just a casual mention — you’d once known a girl called Margaret Stukeley who’d been found dead in your old gatehouse. If you’d really wanted to, that was the time to tell me everything, but you didn’t want to, did you? Instead you made out that you hadn’t seen her from the day we became unofficially engaged.”

  “You know I didn’t want to hurt you by making you wonder what had been going on.”

  “And did you suppose I wouldn’t wonder, when you came along a few days later and confessed you had met her since March?”

  “How was I to know that force of circumstances would make me give you the story bit by bit?”

  “What a wonderful way of putting it!”

  “Elizabeth, you’ve got to start seeing things in their real light.”

  “Why d’you think I’m here now, saying what I am?”

  “Once I’d met you, Margaret didn’t mean a thing.”

  “Is that why you went to that doctor for the abortion pills?”

  “She blackmailed me into helping her.”

  “How could she, when she meant nothing to you?”

  “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  “Do you remember what the lawyers were saying to each other when we came up to them outside the courtroom?”

  “What the hell’s it matter what they were saying?” He tried to cast his mind back to that moment but all he gained was a blurred recollection in which nothing was sharp enough to have meaning.

  “They didn’t know we were standing just behind them, Roger, and they were talking freely. Yorker said you escaped because of three things. The police tried too hard, the cinema manager was caught out although it didn’t really matter whether it was Friday or Saturday, and you were charged with murder instead of some other offense.”

  “Well? So they said that.”

  “Can’t you still understand? They didn’t once suggest you got off because you were innocent.”

  He studied her face and was shocked by the ugly expression on it. “Are you accusing me of having given her the pills?”

  She turned and put her hand on the handle of the door,

  Rage — even though he recognised it instantly as futile and dangerous — overcame his mind. “The jury found me not guilty but you prefer to believe the bloody police. Why? Is it more fun to listen to them than to me? What a wonderful picture of loving trust!” He opened his mind to a little common sense. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I swear I didn’t give her those pills.”

  She opened the door and went out, slammed the door shut behind her.

  He watched her cross to her car and climb into it and he did not move. He looked at the ring in his right hand. It was without life yet it seemed to be jeering at him.

  He turned and went through to the kitchen.

  “Was that Elizabeth?” asked Patricia.

  He put the ring on the kitchen table. The large brilliant-cut diamond caught the light from the near window and reflected it in a shower of sparkling pinpoints of colour.

  Patricia looked at the ring, then at him. “She’s broken the engagement?”

  “Fractured it.”

  “I… I was terrified it was going to happen.” She seemed to shiver. “Why did she do it?”

  “She believes I gave Margaret the pills because it was my kid. She’s been certain for a long time but her remarkable sense of loyalty wouldn’t let her say so until I’d been officially declared not guilty and saved. I wonder what she’d have done if I’d been found guilty? Sacrificed herself, no doubt, and remained my fiancée throughout eternity.”

  “Remember she’s terribly upset emotionally.”

  “She knows what she’s saying… She even said that maybe later on, when everything was quiet, it might be possible to get together again. She knew she didn’t mean a word of it.”

  Patricia said nothing.

  He sat down and stared at the two letters he had thrown to the floor before Elizabeth had come. “There’s all the money we’ve got to find.”

  “Yes,” she answered simply.

  “We haven’t a hundred, let alone thousands.”

  “You’ll have to sell.”

  “What? The only things in this house worth heavy money are the family portraits.”

  “They’ll have to go.”

  “They’re worth a thousand. Where do we find all the rest of the money we need so desperately if we’re to keep the bank and insurance company quiet, and do the repairs to the house and farms that have to be done if anything’s to be standing in twenty years’ time?”

  “Some of the land will have to be sold.”

  “That’ll bring on the landslide. The two large mortgages are on the land and the house, and if we sell some of the land they’ll force us to sell a lot more to cover their bloody bills. The moment that happens, the death duty boys will start saying they must be paid in full, or else. By the time they’d all finished we’d be lucky to be left with the rose garden.”

  Patricia looked as though even her hope had been extinguished.

  *

  Roger was helping to muck out the cows.

  So far as the men were concerned, the trial was forgotten, even though it had only been over for four days. He had returned to the big house and so they had far more important things to discuss. The kale wasn’t making the growth it should, one of the sows had rolled on her fifteen newly born piglets and squashed all but two, mastitis was dying away, but not nearly quickly enough, and some of the cows seemed to have lost a quarter, the cow shed roofs were leaking more than ever before, and if the milking parlour wasn’t extended very soon… He pushed a stubby lever forward and the scraper blade was lowered by the hydraulic arms. He put the tractor into gear and pushed the dung across the concrete yard to the pile beyond.

  As he reversed, he saw Patricia and, by her side, a man with long legs, who was having to go very slowly to keep pace with her as they walked toward the yard. Roger stopped the tractor and cut the ignition. He climbed down and walked across to meet the others. The wind was raw and it flicked his ears with icy fingers.

  Patricia came to a stop with an obvious sigh of relief, and she massaged her bad leg with her hands. “Roger, Mr. Denton wants a word with you. He’s from the Sunday Globe.”

  “Hard at work, eh?” Denton shook hands with a flourish and unnecessary force. He wore a handlebar moustache that was in need of considerable pruning.

  “We’d better go back to the house,” said Roger, as he tried to scrape off some of the dung that had stuck to his wellingtons. He called out to one of the men to finish the job for him and then the three of them returned to the house. Roger and Denton went through to the sitting room while Patricia left to go to the kitchen and make coffee.

  “Not a bad little place you’ve got here,” said Denton facetiously as he stared around the room and at
the family portraits. “Cobwebs and culture.” He laughed, and instead of being the deep booming sound that would have suited his size and appearance, the laugh was thin and feminine.

  “We like it,” said Roger dryly.

  Denton had not noticed the unspoken snub. “As I told your sister and she told you, Mr. Ventnor, I’m from the Sunday Globe — and there’s no need to start sharpening those knives, what? Had enough of the press over the last few weeks, I’ll be bound… You used to lead quite a life, didn’t you?”

  Roger disdainfully shrugged his shoulders.

  “There’s that photograph of your bath-towel party.”

  The press had even reissued that old one. The hopeful starlet’s bathrobe was still slipping.

  “You were slap-bang in the middle of the Chelsea bunch. Drink, drugs and a nice old hunk of eroticism, eh? Well, here’s the pitch. My editor, bless his name five times a day and bow to Mecca, called me into his office this morning — he shares it with two female secretaries and a male p.a., and no one’s quite certain who does what and to whom — and he said to me, ‘I’ve got it, Ronald! The million dollar jackpot!’ A very enthusiastic worker, our editor, bless his name five times a day and bow to Mecca. ‘We’ll have a series of articles on the Chelsea Set,’ he said. ‘What makes them tick and why, and we’ll shove in all the usual: sex, sadism and suggestion. And who better to write it for us than that bloke who’s just sprung his trial? What’s his name?’ He meant you.”

  “I’m honoured.”

  “You’re lucky. You’re the right man in the right place at the right time. Landed aristocracy going very thin at the bank balance, a girlfriend with a bun in the oven, a wealthy heiress as a fiancée, and a murder charge you escape. Made to measure for the part. The public will simply love the articles.”

  “Because of their added sense of enjoyment from their belief in my guilt?”

  “It all counts.”

  “Is that the full proposition?”

  “It is.”

  “Then you go and tell your editor he can bow to Mecca for as long as he likes, but as far as I’m concerned he can stuff his famous idea.”

  “I’ll tell you straight, old man, I just wish I had the nerve to speak to him like that, but he’s strangely sensitive to criticism and I’ve five girlfriends to support.”