Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  In the meantime, they merely existed, hung on to the periphery of living, as purposeless and elemental as a limpet. Their chief connection with reality was in the visits paid to them by their friends and families, when they pushed quiet words and hurried messages at each other through the grille. For Charlie, these visits only served to remind him of the suffering he had caused. John came every time with masochistic regularity, determinedly hopeful. Elizabeth came once with a carefully rehearsed expression of brightness, but her presence brought an even more painful tension to these meetings, with her speaking in charged whispers, and she did not come again. Andy and Jim came once, and Charlie’s Uncle Hughie and some others. But with all of them, Charlie had the same feeling, though it might vary in intensity. He felt guilt. They all seemed to him people he had betrayed. They looked stunned and hurt, as if something had happened which had no right to be happening in their lives. Charlie’s guilt was not only that he had killed a man. It was not just that he had introduced something ugly and horrible into their lives, something that would shadow many of their lives until they died. That was terrible enough. But then he had sensed for a long time that something terrible was going to happen if the deliberate self-deceit and the casual cruelty that he had seen implicit in their lives was to be acknowledged. The real guilt lay in what he had failed to do, more than in what he had done. For he had failed to make the wrong that he had felt be acknowledged. The terrible action had taken place, and it had left in its wake nothing but numb despair, unbalmed by understanding. To them his action was a thunderbolt that shattered without illumination, a summary judgment based upon no reasons, an edict passed upon their lives by some divine whimsy. They saw only a terrifying freak of fortune, one of the aimless hazards of living, like flood or hurricane, that come without warning or purpose out of the mysterious darkness that surrounds our lives, wreak their havoc, and are gone. They were not aware of error that had produced it, but only of the error that it had produced. They saw only a wanton wastage. They knew only the unnecessary grief, the unprovoked suffering, the fortuitous tears, and the waste of lives.

  So it was that when Charlie saw them facing him through the grille he felt an awesome sense of guilt chill him. What meaning was in his action that could justify this? What right had he to have caused this havoc ? They came and sat before him, bemused and stricken with an alien grief, to look at the cause of it. He felt like an oracle that had failed. What had his vision of the wrong in their lives produced but pain? What had his violent conjuration called up but misery? Where was the revelation that should have accompanied it, the understanding that was to have given meaning to the agony? He was to have been harbinger to some kind of truth, without which they could not go on living. He had cleared a way for it in their lives through a man’s death, and it had not followed. There should have been something to offer them in return for the glib assurance that had been taken away – a deeper understanding of themselves, some kind of knowledge, some kind of truth.

  But there was nothing. There were only the painful visits with John sitting there, a living recrimination. There were the aimless parades round and round the prison yard when they seemed to be enacting their own pointlessness, engaging in a ritual celebration of their own nonentity. There was the sense of utter hopelessness that the prison taught to all its inmates, stamped it like a motto on their minds. It was evident in the way the prisoners talked among themselves in the yard. They discussed cases. But those who had any experience did not make the assumption that their actions had any meaning for those who were considering them, or that their meaning had any connection with what was going to happen to them. They simply accepted that when you did certain things you set some force into motion and you had to abide by certain rules. But what followed was no more than a sinister game of chance. There were rules. But the rules were self-contained and need have no relevance to the pressures that had provoked your action. You simply waited while the men who knew the rules applied them to your case.

  Some prisoners made forecasts among themselves about the outcome of their respective cases. Their lawyers had stressed certain points to some of them, indicating their particular importance, favourable or otherwise, with the result that they might sense their luck running one way or the other. But none of them understood what was going on and it was all so chancey that most of them tried to suspend thought on it and hold hope in abeyance until society had tossed its legal pennies and examined the entrails of their dead actions. They simply developed tricks of thought and held on to them like superstitions. One relied on the fact that he had been provoked, another on his family’s need of him, another on the faith he had in his lawyer. Armed only with these, they waited, like gamblers crossing their fingers and closing their eyes while the wheel spins or the horses jump.

  Charlie developed no such protective device. He submitted himself completely and honestly to the penance of afterthought that follows upon spontaneous action. The intensity of the process would not allow him to hide from the truth. He saw with terrible clarity that whatever his action meant had no bearing on what was happening now. What was happening to his action now seemed almost like a conspiracy to rob it of meaning. He was shut up here, and elsewhere, in places that he knew nothing of, men sifted facts and gathered fragments of evidence into arbitrary patterns. The only contact he had with it all was through the solicitor John had engaged for him. He visited Charlie a few times, telling him about what he called ‘the progress of the case’. He was there when Charlie made his second court appearance to be charged officially with murder. Each time he came after that, he had a different ‘angle’ that he wanted to talk over with Charlie. He had a list of people that he was visiting systematically, taking statements from all of them. His energy never flagged. He was a young man and though he always tried to show consideration for Charlie, he couldn’t quite control the sheer enthusiasm that he had in the whole thing as a case. When he came to the point of legal procedure, he had a tendency to talk with self-satisfied pedantry, quoting from statutes, savouring the sound of the official terminology. Murder must have been a rare commodity for him, and he was enjoying it.

  Being with him and observing him, Charlie felt utterly despondent, not so much at the lawyer himself as at the fact that he symbolized the whole process that was taking place around him. He was quick as a compass-needle to redirect his position according to the facts. He strained statements to the sediment. He wrote sentences in his notebook, pausing over them, bolting them together carefully. Then he re-examined them, feinting at them, trying to ambush them, until he was sure that they were impregnable. He kept referring to what ‘they’ would do and what ‘they’ would say.

  It was all somehow unreal, like a morality play with Charlie as the stage. His lawyer did everything possible to minimize his responsibility for what he had done. He emphasized the fact that Charlie had been drinking. He dwelt on the provocation of Mr Whitmore. He talked of filial piety until Charlie suggested that his conception of it must be fairly elastic if it could contain what he had done. He hinted at ‘a temporary state of diminished responsibility’.

  And the other side would be doing the opposite. The prosecution lawyer would be trying to make Charlie’s action seem one of unprovoked and unmitigated violence. It did not matter what they happened to believe personally, or if they believed anything personally. Nobody made any pretence of being involved in the reality of the thing. It was all just make-believe.

  Charlie could not bring himself to participate in their charade. He felt somehow as if he had played into their hands. When he had felt the injustice his father had suffered, they had offered him no means to express his feeling. They had ignored it, pretended that the injustice he felt did not exist. And when he had proven its existence by an action that they could not ignore, they isolated the action in himself, pretended that the injustice was his, existed only in the manifestation he had given it. It was as if they had let him trap himself in their own evil, and then attributed the evil
to him. His action had been an attempt to pass some sort of judgment on them, and now they were using it to pass judgment on him. They made his action a means of vindicating themselves. They did not relate his action in any way to themselves. They made it all so impersonal by reducing it to this mock conflict in which they took both sides. By their skilful ambivalence, they exonerated themselves whatever happened. And they did it all with such earnestness and humanity.

  The solicitor strove determinedly to make Charlie’s action as insignificant as he could. As the time for the trial drew near, he promised Charlie that his ‘counsel’ would be coming to see him. He said it as if it was very important, a significant gesture made towards Charlie, justice sending her official representative to his aid.

  But Charlie saw it as only another stage in refining what he had done to fit their own requirements, another part of the process his action was submitted to in this factory for the distortion of facts to fit society. He saw truth tethered and hobbled, helpless, lying ready for emasculation. ‘Counsel’ was just another name for one of those who were helping to hold it ready for the knife.

  Chapter 22

  IT WAS AN UNUSED CELL, REDOLENT WITH PAST MISERY and the loneliness of many men. A table and two chairs had been placed in the middle of the floor, but they did no more than offset the starkness of the stone room. The barred window relieved the gloom grudgingly, conceding a pittance of nicotined light.

  Mr Bertram laid his brief-case on the table and took a few measured paces back and forth in the cell, like a general assessing the strength of his position. He checked his battery of arguments, making sure they were ready to be trained on target. He found that he was relishing the encounter. Charles Grant promised to be interesting. A working-class university student. Apparently more articulate than most of those who faced a murder charge. That was what made it interesting. Violence wasn’t necessarily the monopoly of morons, but too often, he had found, it seemed to go along with a certain inability to express oneself in more civilized directions. Those who suffered from it scrawled their frustrations on society’s attention the way that children chalk obscenities on a wall.

  Mr Bertram lingered over the thought. It pleased him. He was a man who liked the neat abstraction, the sweeping analysis. In a world recalcitrantly irrational and incalculable, he delighted in any situation that was separable from elements of chance and uncertainty, and to which a formula could be applied. That was his reason for being here today. He could justify his presence to himself on more pragmatic grounds. Mr Edwards had been having trouble with Grant. Their client was hardly being helpful. Mr Bertram had decided to see him, but he had discouraged Mr Edwards from attending their interview. Mr Edwards would no doubt be concerned with incidental points in the case and Mr Bertram had decided that these were sufficiently clarified already. He saw this meeting as an opportunity to show Grant the image he must try to project during the trial, not as a matter of legal quibbling. Every trial followed a known formula, and Mr Bertram was pleased to reflect that he was familiar with that formula.

  A warder entered, bringing with him one of the formula’s components.

  ‘Mr Grant,’ he said, shaking hands with Charlie. His face troubled with sympathy for a second before it went bland again. ‘As you no doubt know, my name is Alexander Bertram. I’ll be representing you at your trial.’

  The warder had gone out, leaving the door slightly ajar, so that the room eavesdropped on the muted sounds of the rest of the building. Footsteps came and went on the edge of the silence. Voices assailed the cell quietly and intermittently, as delicate as mice.

  ‘Please sit down.’

  Charlie sat in the chair facing the door and watched the man sit down opposite, his immaculate clothes looking sombre in this false twilight. His brief-case rested on the table, massive and thick, a leather strong-box. Charlie wondered what was in it. His own defence. The meaning of what he had done. For this was it. The final conference before his action was officially submitted for judgment. The place was appropriate to the occasion. The bleakness seemed somehow terminal, a dead-end in stone and wood. Here only fundamentals could exist, the hardest of facts, the ultimate realities. You could not bring pretence or sophistry or self-deception here. Everything but the truth broke in transit. Here all you could do was turn and face yourself. So what was the conclusion they had reached?

  ‘My reason for coming to see you, Mr Grant, is not in order to discuss the case as such with you. I am too well aware of Mr Edwards’ competence to consider that necessary. He’s been in touch with you several times and he will have indicated to you the lines we’ll be following. No. My real reason is a simpler one. I just wanted to see you, and let you see me. Mr Edwards tells me – let me be frank – that your attitude at times has been almost obstructive. I think I can appreciate how you feel. The legal process must seem pretty impersonal to you. So I think it’s important that we should at least know each other before the trial. A courtroom is hardly the best place in which to make someone’s acquaintance. Cigarette?’

  He gave Charlie a cigarette and leaned across the table to light it for him. So far, so smooth, Charlie felt. It seemed a very studied performance. Straight out of the Lawyers’ Handbook. Fig. i – Making the Prisoner Feel at Home. Remarks should be punctuated with friendly gestures, e.g. passing of cigarette. Allow him to smoke for a moment before resuming.

  ‘I would like to give you some idea of what’s ahead of you during the trial. I don’t want you to be completely bewildered. Your behaviour during the trial is important. So that I want you to know what’s going on. Is there any part of the procedure you want clarification on ? Any questions you want to ask?’

  Charlie blew out smoke, shaking his head.

  ‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Only whit a’ this is supposed tae have tae dae wi’ onything.’

  ‘Mr Grant. First of all. I would prefer you to speak in English. You’ve been to university. Presumably, you’re reasonably articulate. I see no need for this . . . linguistic affectation. It’s in no way to your advantage to talk as if you were on a terracing. I don’t have any personal antipathy to Lallans. When it is Lallans. But juries are recruited primarily from the middle classes. And they tend to judge people by the way they speak. They may not try to. But it’s liable to get to them.’

  Charlie paused on the thought that it was difficult to see the connection between murder and the way you spoke. A remark half-formed in his mind, something to the effect that they might as well reach a decision by burning his hand and waiting to see if it festered. But it died of indifference. What was the point here? Sarcasm was too glib to have survived with him as long as this. Yet he couldn’t quite avoid a hint of Eton in his voice, the ghost of former fluency.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘I was wondering what relevance all of this had to what I’ve done.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s better. Actually, it is very relevant. Any jury consists of fifteen good people and true. Or as close to these prerequisites as forethought and careful pre-selection can come. But above all it consists of fifteen very fallible people. Fifteen people who are pretty ordinary. And being ordinary, they are not greatly given to self-scrutiny or to the examination of their mental processes. Now, in the strange context of a jury-room and under the special stimulus of the responsibility they bear, they will try to arrest their thought processes, to overtake instinct and study their reactions. To achieve a concentration and an honesty alien to their everyday lives. They will try. But how far will they succeed? It’s a hard discipline. How many thoughts are pure of prejudice? How many ideas enter the mind completely unalloyed with error? And having entered, how many ideas can stay untainted by what is there already? By what has gathered there through years of hurried living, of makeshift thinking, of all the small necessary deceptions that people practise on themselves. A residue remains. Something that stains whatever comes in contact with it. Bias becomes built into the mind. Do you see what I mean?’

  Charlie made no answer, as i
f the question was rhetorical, part of some ritual in which he was not a participant, merely an onlooker. But silence was all the response the lawyer needed. His theme sustained him without the incentive of reply. The blankness of Charlie’s expression was no more than a mirror in which his own conviction was reflected.

  ‘You see. What will come together in that jury-room and in that court will not be fifteen minds. But fifteen people. And people contaminate their minds. It’s unavoidable. That’s what it means to be human. They reshape them to suit themselves. They people them with their own gods. They remake the world to fit them. Institute their own laws. Enthrone whims. They harness their minds to small snobberies, little prejudices. And this is what we are up against. This is what we have to deal with.’

  The use of ‘we’ made Charlie cringe. He recoiled from it as if it were the hand of a drowned man plucking at him. He looked round the cell and its recalcitrant stone was counterpart to his despair.

  ‘So we have to take this into account and adjust to suit. We have to try to make our actions anticipate their reactions. We must understand that much of their thinking will simply be rationalization from accepted points of prejudice. So it’s up to us not to offend any such prejudice. Otherwise, we may effect blockages in their thinking. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I think this aspect of it is of prime importance. Not at all. I’m not trying to say that the scales of justice balance on prejudice. Our legal system is a good one, and what matters most, of course, is the case, the two sides of it which the law presents. This will still be the jury’s main concern. All I’m saying is that it will not be their only concern. The trial will be a multiple experience for them. They will be seeing and hearing people all the time. And these people will affect them not only by what they say. But also by the way that they say it. By their manner. By their very appearance. Trivial factors. Yes. But then a trial is a complex of important and trivial factors, interacting upon one another. I just want you to be aware of this. Remember that while the lawyers debate, the jury will be watching you. Small things will lodge in their minds. Your expression. The way you move your hands. Your manner of speaking. You may be creating impressions in their minds that may have some sort of influence on their thinking, however minimal. I want you to be conscious of the impression you are creating. You are playing a part. That is all. And more important than any good impression that you might create is the need not to create any bad impression. Such as your speech might have done if you had been speaking in a court there. This is what I’m getting at. Have you been following me?’