by Tim Parks
Max was in good spirits and helped them carry in the chunks of wood. He held the trunk while Tom chopped and sawed. The evening was suddenly blowy as the light dimmed. All the better, Hilary clapped her hands. We can pretend it’s cold! There was something unsettling about the way she would move from alarm to lightheartedness. She’ll start to bake a cake, he knew. She did. Let’s have a crumble, she announced. I can bake a crumble. Fussing in cupboards, clucking back and forth, saying not to worry about the crumbs of bark falling on the new carpet, no problem, I’ll hoover, she said, it was suddenly, Judge Savage thought, as if they were both her children, Tom and Max. She was happy with this family. While Sarah sits alone in the old empty flat with a radio and a box of Mon Cheri.
Crouching, he started to tear up The Times and place it in the grate. Don’t you want to save your picture, Mr Savage? Max was the perfect addition to the family. Hilary said abruptly: Dan, I think you should go out to Martin and Christine’s and see what’s going on. But they’re not even answering the phone, he pointed out. So it seems unlikely I’d find them. I think you should go anyway, she told him. Leave a message. It’s so strange she didn’t come. Oh, not just now Mum! Tom protested. We’re just about to light the fire! Can I use your lighter, Max? It’s the best moment. I think you should go and see, Hilary insisted. Suddenly she was anxious again. After all, we need to know, don’t we? We’ll have to have something to tell the bank people tomorrow. We can’t just arrive at the deadline not knowing what’s going on.
Judge Savage had got his jacket back on and was at the door before he remembered the obvious. I’m not supposed to drive. Hilary looked up sharply. I’m sure you could, she said. You said yourself you were seeing perfectly. If I had an accident, he said, I’d be responsible. I haven’t got a sense of distance yet, he explained to Max. Hilary said nothing. She doesn’t want to be alone in the car with me, he realised. We’re exhausted. She’s convinced I was seeing Jane. His head ached with the stupidity of it. And they had given him the MBE. A member of the British Empire! I can take you, Mr Savage. Max wiped his hands. Hilary opened her mouth, then shut it again. Oh Dad! Tom protested.
Surprisingly okay thanks, Daniel told Max, just a bit tired, you know. The tall young man was larger still in his small car. He drove efficiently. When he shifted gear a cuff-link gleamed. He is the polite son-in-law from American films, Daniel thought. Of the fifties. There is no harm in him. I heard today, he tried, that you actually got to know us through Sarah. Max was good-natured. She took me to one of Mrs Savage’s church performances, he laughed. It was kind of you, he said, to take her some food at Carlton Street. Oh I just delivered a few things Mrs Savage gave me.
It came to Daniel then that Tom had been even more put out by Max’s leaving than his own. It’s a family Max wants, not a woman. And apparently the family wanted him. Sarah is going through a tough time, he said. Max drew a deep breath, nodded and sighed: She certainly is. Daniel insisted, Between you and me, Max, I mean, not a word to Hilary, but do you think she needs to see a psychiatrist? The young man didn’t immediately reply. Deliberately messing up her exams like that, Daniel added, you know the story don’t you, then the strange on-off tale of the bottle top, and coming back from Italy early when there were only a couple of days left anyway.
Actually, I did suggest to Mrs Savage, Max cautiously said, that she might contact a psychologist, an analyst or something. Frankly, I thought it was more a behavioural problem, you know, whereas psychiatrists always want to give you medicine. Daniel was surprised by this elaboration. You’re right, he told him. And what did Hilary say to that? She said she felt the moment we conceded that Sarah was ill, the girl might feel she had carte blanche to behave as weirdly as she chose. Daniel recognised his wife in these words. And I do think she’s got something there, Max went on. But do you have any idea, Judge Savage asked, what her problem is? An unwanted intensity was creeping into his voice. Max pulled out the lighter element to touch it to his cigarette. Daniel watched the purposeful pursing of his lips. Why am I so impressed, he suddenly asked himself, by the beauty and good manners of this young man? His generous red lips. Smoking is a stupid habit! He thought of Father Shilling and his racking cough. At least Sarah doesn’t smoke. Well, Max said, in his even, pondered way, I really don’t know, Mr Savage, it’s hard to guess. He blew out a stream of smoke. Then he said: It’s pretty obvious she has some kind of problem that prevents her from having a boyfriend.
It was quite a surprise when, on pressing the bell at the end of the small drive, the gate clicked immediately. Daniel had taken it for granted that the trip would be fruitless. Through the bushes a light came on over the front door. I’ll wait in the car, Max called. And Daniel’s mind now made a sudden shift. At the click of the gate, he was entirely engrossed by the question of Christine and Martin.
Dan! The breeze of an hour before had already died. It was Christine. The rain hadn’t come. Dan, I just spoke to Hilary! Daniel found himself embracing a woman soft from the shower in a towelling robe on her doorstep where the outside light in the summer evening was quickly gathering a storm of moths. Mmm, she said, it’s nice to see you. I’m not alone, he told her. I know, she said. There’s that boy with you, isn’t there? But despite Max, Christine decided to shut the door behind him. That’s better. And she explained then that she had called Hilary’s mobile around four-thirty, found it engaged, wasn’t able to get hold of, in the heat of the moment, the solicitor’s number and so had called Carlton Street and spoken to Sarah who had promised to phone her mother and father at once. Only it now turned out she didn’t of course. I’m so, so sorry, Christine said. She pushed damp hair back from her face. It seems you have real problems with the girl. Then she told him that Martin had had to be rushed to hospital. He couldn’t breathe. He kept vomiting.
They stood as they had a month before in the panelled hallway. Perhaps she liked to see him here. There was a box by the door, full of bottles to be recycled and another of newspapers and on the wall a portrait someone had painted of Martin as a child. But why? he asked. She sighed. He could just see the freckles on the swell above the cleavage. Something he caught, she said vaguely – her eyes were pale green – from all that fussing with funguses and moths. Then she asked, Kiss, Dan? There had been a colleague’s wife, he remembered, who would only make love to him in the basement. So lovely, she breathed.
They drove back to the ring road, then round to the south and the hospital. Max wouldn’t accept thanks. The sodium lights raced by. The weather had disappeared. Max began to say how amazed he was that whatever time he drove round the ring road, no matter when, it was always busy. It’s one of those things like thinking your heart is always beating, he said. This thing always always always going on. Let’s hope it does, Daniel commented.
Then while Judge Savage was noticing, as ever, the girls and their bored posturing in the wind that the cars made as they rushed by, Max said: That’s the bridge they threw the rocks from, isn’t it? Daniel glanced up but already it was gone. Already one would be dead. You know, he told Max, they loaded up stones in a quarry miles away and actually drove them to the bridge on purpose. Can you believe that?
Martin had been given a private room. Can’t hold down anything, he whispered. Do they know what’s wrong? They’ve run some preliminary tests. The two men exchanged glances. Martin’s face was white, his beard grey. Well, I was up on the fifth floor, Daniel finally said. Intensive care. And if I got out of here, you’re bound to. But that sounded wrong. This man had climbed out of a high-speed accident without a scratch. Now he looked seriously ill, above all gaunt and beaten. Christine said something about having got infected from your toadstools and whatnot. It’s just an idea, Martin said weakly.
There was a silence. Was his old friend happy to be visited? It occurred to Daniel to tell him about the meeting with Frank. He’s living just off North Side, he explained. Really? There was a flicker of interest in dull eyes. Daniel sat on the chair beside the bed. Can you bel
ieve he’s opened a stall at the market, Doherty Street. Having a whale of a time, it seems. But he was always the eccentric. A nutcase, Martin said. There was a time in their lives when they’d spoken endlessly of Frank. Of the colonel’s family. Antiques, Judge Savage explained. It had been Frank had brought them together after all. Frank was in Martin’s class. Did you ever think he was gay? Daniel asked. Because he’s living with this young American man. They run the stall together. I suddenly thought it might explain everything.
Martin seemed to be in trouble. For a moment Daniel thought he had burst out laughing; in fact he had begun to choke. Now he was retching so violently that Daniel reached for the switch hanging by his bed. No one came. Daniel moved to put his arm round his friend and pull him up. Martin! Come on mate. For Christ’s sake! Martin struggled, coughing furiously. His face was livid. The main light snapped on and an Indian girl was shooing the judge out of the room. He needs to rest! Another nurse appeared. A fat, white, middle-aged woman. There aren’t supposed to be visits, she said, after eight-thirty.
Driving home, Max agreed that it was the most normal thing in the world for someone to make themselves ill when a relationship was breaking up. After what I went through with my parents, he laughed, I doubt I’ll ever tie the knot! Apparently his mother and father were separated. Mother had got breast cancer immediately afterwards.
Thank God, Hilary said, that whatever else is going on, at least we’ve got our health! By the time they arrived back she was in quite an emotional state. She’d been on the phone to Christine again. Thank God! She must have said it four or five times. Later, watching the dog pee in the mothy dark of the garden, Hilary leaned against her husband and put an arm round his shoulder. Martin’s crisis has given us an excuse to make up, he realised. He was relieved. The grass is just sprouting, she whispered. It has that green shadow. Let’s not argue, she said. Please Dan. Let’s be happy. He kissed her.
Shortly after 2 a.m. the phone rang. Daniel had been sound asleep. Mattheson! He sat up. It’s Sarah, Hilary said. She shook her head. She wants to speak to you. Sarah! He sank back on an elbow. Is that you, Dad? Sure it’s me, love. The girl seemed very cautious. He caught a glimmer of his wife’s eye watching. I just got a weird phone-call, Dad. Oh yes? Then Judge Savage heard his daughter explain that she had spoken to a distraught person called Minnie. She said she didn’t have your new number, I think her name was Minnie. He kept the receiver firmly to his ear. She says she really needs somewhere to sleep. She said she was in trouble. And? Well, I didn’t want to give her your number. Uh huh. So I told her she could come here. Dad. I thought that was the best thing.
SIXTEEN
IF SOCIETY IS held together by the respect people somehow nourish in each other’s regard, together with the belief that it really is better to live a decent rather than a criminal life, then the function of a trial and the task of a judge becomes clear enough. Or so Judge Savage had always thought. Sitting down at his desk, he opened a drawer and pulled out a pad of plain paper. Wherever such respect and belief have been shattered by some awful crime, then the trial must publicly assert the significance of what has happened. The community, even if it can’t quite believe Man was made in God’s image, nevertheless gives notice that such matters are very serious. They won’t be tolerated.
Daniel had often reflected in this way. He leaned across the desk and chose a pen. Woe betide the person who decides all this is farce. We will punish him.
Yet if a breach of the general trust hasn’t actually been noticed, he once put it to Martin, what then? Daniel stared at the blank paper. He had once defended two Irish menials, man and wife, who had defrauded the elderly lady they were looking after to the tune of half a million pounds. The lady had long since succumbed to Alzheimer’s and hadn’t even noticed. She had no heirs who stood to lose from the theft. The Irish couple looked after her well and even affectionately. Half a million was less than half her fortune. In this case, to make the crime public knowledge actually damages public faith, finding evil where before people had only seen good. After the couple were gaoled, the old lady made her exit in very short order.
Or what about this, Daniel had suggested (he always enjoyed playing devil’s advocate with Martin): what if some sportsman, long dead, some soldier, politician, national hero, admired in biographies and lauded in school – there were monuments to him no doubt – were found to have cheated in some way, or to have fondled a pretty retarded girl in the back seat of a car? Does such knowledge help? Daniel gripped the pen tightly. Does it help the young first-time taxpayer to know that almost all his elders and betters have evaded something sometime somewhere?
Yes, many crimes perpetrated remain undiscovered, Daniel reminded himself this morning, sitting at his desk, waiting for the moment when he would begin to write. He ploughed a hand into a grey fuzz of hair. Still waiting, he turned to his diary and discovered he was supposed to attend a meeting. Trial scheduling for young offenders. It was annoying.
But what had Martin said on that occasion? He couldn’t remember. Something about having confessed to his mother, as an adolescent, that he had stolen money from her purse. Was that possible? Daniel was perplexed. Perhaps he didn’t remember rightly. It was too stupid. Begin, he told himself. Begin with the date. For God’s sake! The biro wouldn’t write. For a moment he dragged it angrily back and forth across the paper.
August 25th.
Then of course many crimes that are discovered remain unsolved. He had come into chambers early. The police solve only one in ten reported. Or some such statistic. Despite doctor’s orders, he had driven here himself. But how much the worse off are we for that? Could we imagine the police solving everything? The courts would be packed. Yes, Martin had spoken about confessing a theft to his mother, about his personal experience of the cleansing powers of exposure and shame, the way these feelings reintegrated one in a larger society, released you from the isolation of guilt. He’s a Christian, Daniel remembered. Suddenly it was astonishing to him that his old friend and reader of Sartre was a Christian. Or had been. Martin had been irretrievably solemn. That was why you respected him. Even pompous. But what would the world be like if every everybody confessed to everything? Nothing had been said of Christianity in these months of Martin’s strange despondency, and now very real illness. He is mortally ill, Daniel muttered. Though Christine too was a churchgoer. How did that business in the King’s Head about us all being carbon, fit in with Christianity, with the cleansing power of confessing thefts to your mother? I should have put that to him. Unless it was the very rigidity of Martin’s earlier vision that had made him vulnerable to being swept away like that.
And, finally, how many crimes that are solved remain unpunished all the same? Many of those Daniel himself had defended, for example. This was another thing they had talked about. Many whom the CPS didn’t even bring to court. How much does that matter? How much would we gain if absolutely every misdemeanour were brought to court? How much had been gained by bringing the Mishra case to court? People adapt their point of view to suit their situation, Daniel thought. Albeit unconsciously. Your daughter becomes intensely Christian, fundamentalist even, she talks about it endlessly, for six months she goes out every evening proselytising. It’s disturbing. Then quite suddenly she stops talking about it. She stops mentioning God. She stops visiting the Community. He put the pen down. She becomes Christian, to solve a problem, to overcome some discrepancy between the way she sees the world and the way it is. She cuts her hair short and shaggy. She’s ill at ease. She talks about divine intervention in her school curriculum. Daniel reflected. It was forgivable, surely, to postpone your confession for a few moments to think about your daughter. Then a few months later she writes obscenities on her exams. The anonymous letters, Daniel remembered, were a mixture of fundamentalism and obscenities, a radical discrepancy.
The August morning was clammy. In a moment he was going to start writing. Daniel wiped his hands. He wasn’t worried that he might chan
ge his mind. He had understood what must happen the moment he put the phone down last night. How could he go on living with such vulnerability? He had explained to Hilary that Sarah had wanted to apologise for her scene earlier on. That’s why she asked for me. But already he had seen what he would have to do. How could he function under the constant threat of scandal? Minnie had left home. Belatedly, she had taken his advice of seven years ago. She has decided on a Western life, rather than an oriental. She is rejecting rules of total obedience and coming out into the open. Now you too will be obliged to adapt, he thought, now the shit will hit the fan.
And it had been such a meaningless misdemeanour, such a casual tangling of utterly different lives!
Judge Savage looked at his watch. These philosophical issues might be interesting, but they were hardly appropriate just at the moment. Mattheson, after all, was working on something that had been most visible: the assault and battery of a crown court judge after a controversial verdict in a matter fraught with repercussions for local race relations. Far from being hidden, the crime had been broadcast nationwide as an outright attack on the community and the due process of law. Its perpetrators must be punished. Even if the truth was that it hadn’t been what it publicly appeared to be at all. On the contrary it had been a defence of a different kind of community, a defence based on a misunderstanding. But this is irrelevant, Daniel told himself. This is the kind of crime that, once solved, will be brought to trial with great rapidity and punished with exemplary severity. Again his pen hovered. I have a suspect Mattheson had said. Who?
Only after I had confessed, Martin had explained on that occasion, did I feel that the thing was truly behind me and that I would never do it again, precisely because of the shame I’d felt confessing it. Was it possible that an intellectual like Martin had offered such a feeble and personal response to such a complex question, the exposure of evil in the public domain? Was it possible that he had spoken about the need for total candour in marriage? Perhaps Martin had always been ill, Judge Savage thought. What was the value, for example, of putting something behind you, if you destroyed your whole life in the process? And perhaps the lives of others too. This was Sunday School talk. Again Daniel wiped his hands. My womanising was just a phase, he told himself. Frank’s life had been entirely determined by one single exposure of what was probably a brief aberration, his rancour against his parents cruelly taken out on an adopted younger brother. It would have stopped the day Daniel had stopped trying to please him.