by Tim Parks
In boxer shorts he paced the filthy carpet. He saw his wife crouching by the vase of white flowers. Tom had gone up to his room. She snipped off the dead flowers. It came home to him that he had no home now. Christine had been right that he hadn’t taken it in. You are sleeping here on the sofa like an adolescent runaway, like a teenager staying a week with his brother. Christine told you this. Christine isn’t all bad, he thought. She herself hasn’t taken in Martin’s death. How could she? How can you take in, in the space of a few hours, that somebody you have lived your life with has been cremated. I am dead to my wife, Daniel thought. The dead softness of Christine’s body had been most disturbing. His wife’s flesh was solid, robust, healthy. It no longer has anything to do with me.
And Frank wanted him out too. You have rediscovered Frank, you have reconciled yourself with a large part of your past. This had been a great relief. All the same and quite naturally your older brother doesn’t want you sleeping on the sofa for ever. Frank is changing, Daniel thought, from the merest adolescent rebel, a man who never grew up, into a successful if rather irritating adult with a thriving business. Frank accepts you because you fell from grace, he thought, but all the same he needs to concentrate on his business. This is Arthur’s doing, Daniel thought. And the consequence of his father’s death, his mother’s decrepitude. Our parents are gone.
Then Judge Savage rushed into the kitchen and found the photographs again. The tape that had held two thin folders to the wood was brown with age. Can you tell how old Scotch tape is? I know nothing of Martin’s life, he thought. He couldn’t remember a case that hinged on the age of Scotch tape. The man had been a regular churchgoer until his car accident. He stared at a little girl urinating. The body was chocolate brown. He shook his head. The face was scratched out. There was a shine to the child’s skin, the enamel shine of young brown skin. The photos were large, larger than those photos of moths. He turned on the kitchen light. He stared. He brought them to within an inch or two of his eye. How could you identify a child, without the child’s face? Do I know a single distinguishing mark of my daughter’s body, he wondered? Martin had scratched out their faces. They were gone. The evidence is entirely circumstantial, he reflected, but it does seem reasonable to infer that Martin did the scratching. The child was peeing onto an erect and decidedly adult male member. Surely Christine wouldn’t have done that, he thought. She wouldn’t have scratched out the faces and hidden the photos. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have told Hilary. No, the single indisputable fact of these photographs, Daniel told himself – they were A4 in size – alters everything I know about Martin. He remembered the odd girlishness of Christine’s behaviour in bed, his unease at her squeaky voice, the shaven skin between her thighs. What was that about? Sarah had wept at the funeral. It had surprised him. Suddenly his mind was fizzing. Don’t you know why he stopped work? the old judge croaked. And the car crash. Going no one knew where. I have to hide so much, Christine said at the funeral. She wept. There had been a sardonic look in Judge Carter’s eye. Why had the Shields decided to buy the Carlton Street flat? The possible connections between these events are multiplied ad infinitum by the appearance of a dozen A4 photos of naked children in obscene poses. Just matter, Martin had insisted. How earnestly he had leaned across the table, the beer-mats. His one earnest moment in all the evening. I was defending a man who had killed a child on a bicycle. Was it the ring road? It was a revelation, he had claimed, not something you arrived at by reasoning, Dan. You’re not ready for it, Dan, he said. He had laughed. Had he been trying to confess? These photographs are a revelation, Daniel thought. If not exactly a confession. Why hadn’t Martin destroyed them?
We mustn’t be caught with these photos, he had told Frank at once. A moth fluttered under the naked bulb of the kitchen. The world is full of moths. As harmless as they are irritating. There was a fly too that had settled on the table’s stickiness. Photos like this would take a lot of explaining. And now it seemed he didn’t know Hilary either. She would never again be the person she had been for him by the fire that Saturday afternoon. And with her refusal the past began to shift too. The fire died and went out. It went out in the past. There is no need to deny the past, Judge Savage told himself, to pretend it never was. It will shift on its own. A decision like that, today, he thought, alters a person’s identity to the core. And retrospectively. History was changed. Should he show her the photos? Should he show Hilary? He was quite sure this wasn’t the so-called dirt Christine had given her. That would be paltry stuff. Should he run to his wife apparently flabbergasted with these incriminating photos? I understood nothing of the core of Martin’s identity. He could show Hilary the photos. They would confront Christine together. Look at these photos! Christine, we demand to know the truth. Would that force something out of her? Who are these children? they would ask. They could go to the police.
Extremely agitated, Judge Savage rushed to the oven and started to burn the photographs. He turned on a gas ring, lit it, held the photos one by one over the flame. He watched young bodies curl and burn. Burn them, he thought. Get all this stuff behind. Tom and Sarah will be fine without you, he thought. I’ll see them regularly. The room – but how ludicrous to think it might be Tom! – stank with smoke and he hurried to open a window, burning the photographs one by one. He gathered the ashes. He was breathing hard. Think of all the damage you’re avoiding, he told himself, making an end of this. His mouth was dry. Don’t pursue it. Hilary is right to make an end, he decided. Start again.
But then, once more on the sofa, still unable to sleep, Daniel’s mind raked back and forth across the ashes of their lives, the arguments, the reconciliations, the being with Hilary and the betraying Hilary, the being with her by betraying her – another strange thought – two ongoing states that curled on and on together like smoke and flame, or two twigs curling together as they burned and now burned quite out. We are burned out now, he announced. And the sequence of all that burning from beginning to end, the excited kindling, the tall blaze, the little spurts, the sparks and coloured gases, the winking embers and lively unexpected flickering over and over – how it flared and sparked and blazed again out of the dark! – was beyond him, beyond all comprehension, but somehow had gone on and on for twenty years fed and fanned from here or there – winds that came from you knew not where, breezes that blew and blew themselves out – how could you know or understand why your wife suddenly wanted to make love, was she thinking of Max, did Max remind her of Robert, surely not, she blazed with excitement, there in the empty house, until now the coals were suddenly hard and charred and the old embers raked apart.
Raked apart, Daniel Savage announced. The words felt cool. They cooled him. Still he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just they two, he told himself now, but a whole world that had been burning, burning in ways he couldn’t imagine, in ways no one was controlling. To control a fire you set it in a Swedish-made cast-iron fireplace with a surround of Regency stone. But it had already been over when they did that. The flames were already dying. He sensed he wasn’t going to sleep now. The world was never even remotely as you thought it. Frank and Martin and Hilary and Christine. They were fuelled by fires you never dreamed of. You too, he thought, perhaps have fuelled fires you know very little of: in Jane’s life, in Minnie’s, perhaps even in Martin’s. Didn’t I speak to Martin of unseen chains? No, I boasted of them. He had been deliberately provocative. When you make love to a woman, he had told Martin, you bind yourself to people you know nothing of. That was the excitement. The loss of control, the secret links. But it was more like a fire than a chain. Everything you do could set a flame alight, elsewhere, perhaps years from now. How deeply his relationship with Jane would burn into stupid Crawford’s heart. There had been other women too. The more their marriage goes on, Daniel thought, the more her relationship with me will smoulder on. It was a burning net of fire. Could it have been Crawford feeding these stories to the press? Yes! Why didn’t I think of that? Daniel had other wome
n, Jane might tell her stupid husband one night. I was only one of many, Gordon. When you’re old you’ll make do with anything, Tom had sniggered. Daniel sat up again. Of course the children are involved! A poor woman on a distant continent makes casual love to an older man, making do perhaps. Two dry sticks are rubbed together. Or perhaps it’s an adolescent, drawn to the blaze of first experience. The prostitute takes him in her arms. He must lose his innocence, he is Tom’s grandfather! A flame is lit. The boy’s eyes sparked with dark and casual life. When you’re old you’ll make do with anything, he sneered.
Oh why can’t I sleep! Daniel cried aloud. Why? Burning the photographs, their secrets possessed me, he decided. Martin’s malignant secrets. I’m possessed. He jumped off the sofa. This most English of friends! The carpet was full of grit. I hate portentous thoughts! Taking pictures of moths had been a sort of penance, for Martin perhaps. I will not have portentous thoughts! Martin used to think in those terms. Had he confessed to his mother, to the frail old woman who had wept in their sitting room? Christ! Daniel sat up again and stared around the dark room. It was curious he didn’t pour himself a drink. You could pour a drink over your burning mind, he reflected. A whisky. Frank has some whisky somewhere. He was afraid it would flare up on him. How the sleepless mind sizzles in the quiet dark of the early hours. Was that when Martin went out in his garden to photo the moths? In the early hours. The world of matter falls silent and the mind sizzles and burns.
Yet in the end it’s good that one gets burned, Judge Savage muttered. What is life if not people setting each other alight? How frightening not to be burned and consumed. To sit still and watch soaps, to have the burning mind extinguished by wet soaps. It was right, he thought, that a marriage should wear out, wear you out. Me. How terrifying to be forever soft and fresh with soaped and perfumed skin and the pudenda of a child. Could that be Christine’s case? She was unconsumed. What if she were still a virgin? Daniel asked himself. Are such things possible?
Daniel Savage stood undecided, pacing about his brother’s sitting room. There was a soft deadness to Christine, a perfumed mummification. Unconsumed and seeing her husband burnt out with contradictions, Christine craves to have something happen. Determined to start a fire, she talks to your daughter about her father’s philanderings. There’s a spark. Christine is a pyromaniac, he told himself. That’s obvious. Unconsumed herself, she would burn up those she knew. From the smoking ashes she runs back to her Sunday school. I’ll work for Save the Children, she said. Part time. But Daniel was furious with himself for thinking of such things. Speculation is an illness, an inextinguishable fever! I must always interrupt when counsel engages in speculation. Always the paranoid, Frank laughed. He was right. But Frank had cut those strange lines in his back when they were at school together. How can you not be paranoid when people do that to you? How could you fail to imagine you were somehow important, if people insisted on doing that to you? We will be blood brothers, Frank said, as if etching those wounds he could kindle some love between them. Decades later three men he didn’t know had beaten him within an inch of his life.
Judge Savage went to the corridor, picked up his dispatch case, returned to the kitchen, switched on the light and banged out files and notebooks on the table. He slapped them on the unwiped surface and at once began to draft notes for the summing up. R. v. Sayle and others. He strained his eye. The light wasn’t good. There were still at least two days of the trial to go and still one more defendant to be examined. But the case is clear enough now, he thought. The evidence is pretty well there, he decided. You can set up the outline at least. Sum up then. Work is solid, Daniel Savage told himself. I have this good fortune. I have something solid. My work. Crawford, he thought, was one person who might know of his philandering in general, but not about the girl on the jury in particular. It could have been Crawford. His eye strained in the yellow light. It was five a.m. Work is a slow controlled burn, he told himself, over a sensible stove. He wrote:
The first, the most determining, and possibly the easiest decision you must take, members of the jury, is whether the stone that caused the death of Mrs Whitaker was, or was not, thrown by one of the eight defendants. Mr Sayle, Mr Grier, Miss Singleton, Mr Davidson, Mr Simmons and Mr Riley have all claimed that as they arrived on the bridge from the city side of Malding Lane in Mr Grier’s car they saw three children, whom they have placed between twelve and sixteen years of age, running in the opposite direction and into the wooded area beyond the bridge. They presume these children perpetrated the crime. No independent witness has been found to corroborate this evidence.
This was not the proper tone for a summing up at all, Daniel Savage told himself. Why was he writing like this? But never mind. The thing was to concentrate, to think. Not to think of other things. The form could be altered later.
Three of the defendants, Mr Riley, Mr Grier and Mr Simmons, have spoken of having been more than once accosted on the bridge by a foreigner, a journalist they believed, who offered money to anyone hitting a car with a stone. They believe this man may have encouraged the young children they saw. Two witnesses have corroborated this account. Both of these witnesses, we must remember, were erstwhile members of this group, and albeit not present on the bridge on March 22nd they may be considered to be in a special relationship with the defendants and their evidence must thus be considered with due caution. There is also a certain discrepancy to be considered here, in that although, in the witness box, the three defendants and the two witnesses all agreed that the man was white and middle-aged with an East European accent, one of the two witnesses, in her first statement to the police referred to the man as young and of Indian or Pakistani origin.
Apart from these accounts, there are also two initial interviews that two defendants gave to the police in which, independently of each other, they stated that the stone had indeed been thrown by one of the defendants. These interviews, however, contained notable discrepancies with regard to the numbers of stones thrown and the attitude of the other members of the group who did not throw stones to those members who did. The remarks were later withdrawn and it was claimed that they were made under extreme police pressure. However, one of the defendants has given here in court what we might think of as a more articulated and complicated version of her original account in interview. Again, however, this account contains a number of serious discrepancies, and should in any event be treated only with the utmost caution as it includes elements which might be considered self-serving at the expense of other members of the group.
Judge Savage paused. He had been scribbling very fast in the early hours of the Sunday morning, quite unaware, of course, that a few miles away the victim of the crime under consideration had only minutes ago stopped breathing. He was beginning to feel better and again set pencil to paper:
Throughout the trial, and this is one of the most problematic issues for you to decide ladies and gentlemen of the jury, no evidence given by the defendants or by any other witness has explained the presence on the bridge of such a large stone, a stone, we remember, of a kind not to be found in the woodland around the bridge, or indeed for a distance of some miles. Examining the ring road that same night, the police found two other such stones within fifty yards of the bridge. Counsel for the prosecution has pointed to the circumstantial evidence of the presence of fragments of similar stone in the back of the car used by Sayle and Grier to arrive at the bridge, arguing that the stones were loaded into the car with the express purpose of throwing them from the bridge. It is largely on the basis of this circumstantial evidence that the prosecution has rejected all the defendants’ versions of the evening’s events, including that of Miss Janet Crawley, insisting that all members of the group were equally involved in the reckless behaviour that eventually caused grievous bodily harm. Mr Grier, we will remember, however, has accounted for the stone fragments in the back of his car, by offering evidence of the rockery he set up with his uncle in the garden of the latter’s home using similar stone
s. It has been established that this rockery, which does indeed use such stones, was set up in May of 1998, almost a year before the crime we are here to consider. However, it is not impossible that fragments of stone should remain for many months in the boot of a car.
Sitting in Frank’s kitchen, Judge Savage could already see how he would raise his eyes, his eye, from his notes at this point and gaze for a moment at his nondescript jury with the irritating, unattractive, brash young woman in the front row. Then having highlighted what he was about to say with this anticipatory pause, he would continue:
The first question you must ask yourselves, then, will be: Is the circumstantial evidence together with the fact that two defendants albeit amid discrepancies and withdrawals have offered incriminating eyewitness accounts, sufficient to convince you beyond reasonable doubt that the stone was thrown by one of the defendants? If you are not so convinced, you need proceed no further and the defendants must be acquitted. If, however, you are absolutely convinced, so that you are quite sure in your minds, that the stone was indeed thrown by one of the defendants, then you must proceed to the more difficult task of establishing who did what, who abetted whose actions and, in general, who is responsible for what. At this point we should consider the evidence we have for each of the defendants . . .