A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  “I was, sir,” he answered.

  “If you gave instructions to the police to disperse, and a large group of them stayed together as a group near the Free People, were they in fact disobeying orders?” As I said that, I caught a glimpse of Inspector Williams; he was sitting just behind Draper, his head well down, pretending to concentrate on his papers. I was glad I had Runicorn in the box, not Williams, though I was fairly sure even Williams, nice as he is, would not be making better weather than his colleague.

  “That is totally incorrect, Mr. Grace sir. I gave general orders, not specific ones; one has to leave interpretation of orders to the men on the spot.”

  “Where were you standing, Inspector?”

  “I was near the platform, sir, a little to the right of the speakers—the speakers’ right sir, the demonstrators’ left.”

  “Why did you stand there, Inspector?”

  “I had a clear view of the whole proceeding from that position.”

  “And a clear view of a large group of your men standing just behind the Free People?”

  Runicorn consulted his map and we squabbled for a while over what exactly I meant by ‘behind’; eventually, with the help of Draper and the judge, we established exactly where Runicorn had been standing, where the Free People had been concentrated, and where the police had been mainly grouped.

  “Inspector, you have said you were expecting trouble from the Free People”—he hadn’t said this, but I thought it was worth trying to slip it through—“and had presumably briefed your men to expect trouble from them. So, when you dispersed your men, a number stayed near the Free People—quite sensibly, given the nature of their briefing. Given the fact you thought the Free People might start trouble, was this not an error of judgement?”

  “I don’t follow, Mr. Grace, sir.”

  “Come now, Inspector. Surely the placing of a large number of policemen obviously close to the Free People would be regarded by them as a provocative action?”

  “There was no provocation by the police, sir.”

  “Inspector, I am not asking if there was provocation by the police; I would be a fool to do so, and you would be a fool if you answered yes. What I am saying is different …”

  Draper was on his feet. I didn’t really need him to tell me, but he said, “My Lord, surely my learned friend is making a speech …”

  “Sorry, My Lord.” I interrupted. “What I am asking is different: did you not think the Free People might have regarded your action in leaving a number of policemen stationed right behind them as a provocative action?”

  Draper sat down, smiling.

  “No, sir; the police did not provoke any trouble.”

  “That is still not an answer to my question, Inspector. But is it not conceivable Buckleson’s cry from the platform—which my client is prepared to admit was, ‘Get those pigs off our backs!’—pigs meaning policemen—was a response to the presence of the police in force and to the various arrests the police were making from among the Free People rather than a signal to start fighting?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. Thank you, Inspector.” I sat down; I had made my points clearly enough for the time being. There would be more than enough corroboration later on, and I did not want the jury to think I was trying to destroy Runicorn.

  The other defence counsel followed my line. The only new evidence concerned the offensive weapons: Archie made much of the strawberry jam and clearly had great delight in disputing its offensiveness and suggesting that it was a theatrical prop rather than a weapon; but what we needed now were the policemen who had actually been involved in the fighting and who had done the arresting.

  In fact, perhaps because Draper knew he was on surer ground there, he first produced as witnesses the policemen who had found the various weapons, and then a policeman whose horse had fallen because of the marbles, and then the policeman whose face had been cut open. The weapons were produced, including the polythene bags of jam and paint, and were shown to the jury. My fellow defence counsel did their stuff, cross-examining hard, but it seemed to me likely the third charge at least would result in conviction.

  Then Draper produced the policeman who had arrested John. He was a Sergeant Collins, a very large man whose uniform heaved and bulged over his enormous shoulders and chest. Draper examined him. Yes, he had been at the demonstration. Yes, he had been briefed that some sections of the demonstrators might start trouble. Yes, he had been ordered by Runicorn to ‘disperse’, and had gone to stand near the Free People. Yes, he had gone into the crowd to help a couple of his colleagues who were having trouble arresting someone who was not in this court. Yes, he had heard Buckleson’s shout from the platform and had immediately been attacked. Yes, he had seen the Free People try to encircle the police. He had himself pushed his way out through the circle; he grinned delightedly as he consulted his note-book at that stage, and I flashed a look at the jury. They too were smiling, and I knew that the large Irishman who didn’t have trouble breaking the ranks of demonstrators had taken their fancy. Yes, as he got out of the circle, he had seen John Buckleson, whom he knew because he had been on the platform, coming towards the fighting, so he had arrested him …

  That was the first real break I had had; it was so obvious I too nearly laughed, and I could see that Draper was as flabbergasted as I was, though he did not look like laughing, then or later. It was a perfect example of appalling briefing, for how could Buckleson be charged with ‘unlawfully fighting and making an affray’ if he had been arrested before he reached the fighting? Unless, of course, Draper argued from intention, which is always tricky to do. I had simply assumed that Buckleson had reached the fighting and had piled his five feet seven of pallid gracefulness into the first policeman he saw. But if the large Collins had arrested him before he reached his comrades, the second charge was probably nonsense, and Draper knew it was probably nonsense. Sergeant Collins was a uniformed policeman, and perhaps the Special Branch hadn’t checked his story carefully enough when the Director of Public Prosecutions was preparing the case, or perhaps the D.P.P. had simply briefed Draper very badly.

  Either way, I had to wait until Draper finished. Obviously, someone had made a silly mistake and, though Draper tried to race his examination forward in the hope I wouldn’t have noticed, he must have known clearly I would pick up the point. The police had left Buckleson out on the ‘offensive weapons’ charge, and they should have left him out of the second charge too.

  Draper finished, sat down, beckoned angrily to his solicitor, and the judge asked me if I wished to cross-examine. “If you please, My Lord,” and then turning to Sergeant Collins, “Sergeant, you had no difficulty in breaking through the ranks of the Free People?”

  “No, sir,” he smiled.

  “I quite understand that, Sergeant, looking at you. Presumably you had no difficulty in arresting Buckleson?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He did not attempt to resist arrest?” I asked gently.

  “No, sir; he was very angry and he was swearing, but he was not resisting.”

  “And exactly at what moment, in relation to the other events that you have told us of, did you arrest Buckleson?”

  “Well, it was after he shouted out that stuff from the platform; and he got down from the platform and started towards the others. And I arrested him just before he got there.” Collins still did not seem to realise what he was saying.

  “You are absolutely sure about that.”

  “Well, yes sir.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. It was five minutes to one—I had more I wanted to get from him, but I thought it would be very nice to let him sweat over the lunch-adjournment. Draper would want his food and drink, and Kinglake … I flashed a quick glance at him; no, he was a starveling—he’d probably have a sandwich and a glass of milk brought in to his rooms. I asked Collins a couple of inconsequential questions, Kinglake sighed, I asked another, and Kinglake adjourned the court.

 
In the lobby, crowds of the Free People milled about in their white uniforms, talking and laughing; through the doors I could see more of them on the pavement outside and spilling over into the road. As John appeared with me from the court dozens of them hurried over and began talking to him. I did not fancy going with that mob to find a restaurant for lunch, so I slipped away from John and went to get rid of my robe and wig; but even though I dawdled a bit there, chatting to a couple of other barristers, John was still waiting for me downstairs, though fortunately most of his followers seemed to have gone away. “Mr. Grace,” John called out as I came into the lobby, “Tella says she wants to buy us lunch.” He turned to the girl standing next to him. “And this is Tella, if you couldn’t guess.”

  Peale was right: she was good-looking, though somehow her face did not seem to fit her body. In a way she looked almost Oriental, with high cheek-bones, slightly slanting eyes and an olive skin; I supposed her father at least must be Jewish—you expected that face to be attached to a body slightly plump and pleasantly rounded, not to a long-legged, skinny, elegant one. The face breathed passivity, the kind that marries a nice young businessman and looks kindly on four children and runs a comfortable and well-fed household and is never very ambitious, and the body contradicted all that.

  “You were very clever, Mr. Grace,” she said; her voice had only a hint of the flattened vowels of a white South African.

  “The prosecution is very angry with its masters: did you see Draper’s face?”

  “What was really interesting,” John Buckleson said, “was the business about the information.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course; the police must have a plant right in the Free People. I’d love to know who it is.” There was no threat in his voice, just a mild curiosity; I looked at him—why was there no anger? In a way he sounded almost pleased; and perhaps he was, since this was evidence the police actually cared about the Free People, actually thought they were dangerous. I looked around the forecourt; I could not see Williams or Runicorn anywhere, but still I did not feel like standing in the Old Bailey discussing police informers with a client. “If we are going to eat and get back to court by two,” I said, “we had better get moving.”

  *

  So I met Tella Raymond, daughter of Charles Raymond the ‘humane millionaire’ (or so the papers always call him), wealthy in her own right since her grandmother had left her a fortune, beautiful in her odd way, and lover of failure. Is it being born rich that has made her shun success? Certainly now John is no longer around she chooses her men carefully from the ranks of those who are bound to fail; she uses her money to promote their success, but if success even winks at them she moves on to a new man. I remember John calling her the ‘survivor’, and perhaps she is a chameleon like me, taking her colouring from her surroundings, though she enters the disrupted chain of being from the other end. If a revolution comes in her lifetime—if it comes at all—I am sure she will survive it physically unharmed, psychologically independent, and as morally ambiguous as ever, though she and her father are quintessentially capitalists, making their old-fashioned money out of an abundance of cheap labour in Africa, yet proud to call themselves both humane and progressive.

  I’ve never met her father, though he comes quite often to London and takes her off to expensive hotels and fashionable restaurants; from the photographs of him that appear regularly in the business and finance sections of newspapers I’d guess Tella has something of her father’s look, for he seems to be not at all the ruthless wheeler-dealer in money and men-as-objects he’s sometimes made out to be, but rather a pleasant, plump, soft-cheeked Jewish businessman. It’s a look which accords well with the odd naïveté streaking the sophistication of the daughter; is it a Jewish softness or the social ineptitude of a white South African? Or is it simply an un-English directness? I’m not sure, though the mixing is as attractive as Tella’s softly passive face on that athletically sexual body.

  Not that I discovered so much about Tella during the first adjournment lunch; not only did we have to be back in court by two, but John was suddenly very moody. We ate in a Chinese restaurant near the Old Bailey; John and Tella started by having a row because she said she would eat no meat—she has phases in which she is either entirely a vegetarian or a meat-eater or a rich girl on a diet of eggs and milk. But the waiters gave her exactly what she wanted. It is a fashion of her kind that waiters should serve her well. They never treat me like that, even when my pocket is bulging with fivers; but Tella, though she was barefoot and in the white peasant uniform of the Free People, got instant and perfect service. John thought she was being silly about her food, and John never bothered to keep quiet about things. Tella insisted; John shut up and kept shut up for the rest of the meal. Tella and I talked desultorily; she tried to find if we had any mutual acquaintances, which we didn’t of course. I tried to get her to talk about South Africa, which she wouldn’t do. We talked about Chinese habits, about English law, about American universities—she had spent a year at one of the smart women’s colleges in the Ivy League—and about the idiocy of women’s fashion. And all the time John sat in morose silence.

  Yet I did not resent his silence, partly because I liked Tella and enjoyed our pleasantly pointless chat. I’m not usually much good at small-talk, but perhaps Tella’s unEnglishness made me talk more easily. More than that, John’s silence did not seem rudeness; he had such a notion of his own specialness that somehow the ordinary rules of civilised behaviour did not apply to him. He did what he wanted to; he was true to himself, and believed so much in himself it did seem like truth.

  You saw that in another, minor way when the bill came for lunch. I tried to pay it, but Tella wouldn’t let me. John didn’t say a word; it wasn’t that he was embarrassed not to pay (or not to be able to pay), for he seemed aware of us again for the first time as we quarrelled politely—he looked up, suddenly bright-eyed with interest as we ‘insisted’ and ‘no, pleased’, and when Tella won the battle for the bill—which she did by saying simply, “Look, Mr. Grace, I’m richer than you, and I’m going to pay,”—he smiled happily as if something had been proved.

  “How do you know?” I answered Tella; but of course she knew. That’s one of the things about money which just is: even its past absence shows. My daughters won’t have that, because their clever legal daddy earns £8,000 a year, but clever legal daddy himself will never escape the days when he thought himself lucky to get sixpence a week pocket-money; and John, who was middle-class enough to despise money, was not interested in who paid, but in who paid.

  You never escape that, any more than you escape the knowledge that the language you speak is not entirely your own; always lurking under the clipped vowels and the slurred final syllables of your legal voice are the broad vowels and the emphasised consonants, the singing ‘g’ of ‘sing-ging’. I suppose Tella and I shared that, because the one thing she loathed was to be told you could hear she was a South African. I noticed whereas John and his middle-class friends in the Free People were continually aping what they thought were working-class accents, she never altered her voice for anyone. Or was that the plutocrat in her, the rich girl who never needed any voice but her own? I, of course, never pretend to speak with the voice of the Midlands, because I spent years getting rid of it; maybe there are some professions where a Midlands accent is a paying proposition—advertising, TV, perhaps even the Civil Service these days—but judges like the soothing tones of standard Southern English. Perhaps one day if I do what Wynstanley thinks I should, I shall go back to my father’s voice, and to the days before grammar school taught me to say I wash my hands with soup rather than with so-ap; but in the meantime I shall stick to legality and Southern smoothness. Out of fear perhaps, fear of having no voice at all.

  *

  The court reconvened at two. Sergeant Collins was still in the witness stand; first, I had another go at John’s verbals about the police and machine-guns, then, when I had made my point clearly
enough, asked if Buckleson had been armed in any way. No, he hadn’t been.

  “Did you search him when you arrested him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He could not have thrown anything away before he was arrested?”

  Before Collins could answer, Mr. Justice Kinglake said from the bench, “Mr. Grace, I fail to see why you need this line of questioning. As I understand it, your client Buckleson has not been accused of the possession of offensive weapons.”

  “Quite so, My Lord. The point I am trying to establish is that if Buckleson was a party to a conspiracy to make an affray, he came to the event singularly ill-equipped, either in his person—physically he is hardly a match for Sergeant Collins, for instance—or in his weapons.”

  “I see, Mr. Grace.”

  “In fact, My Lord, I think that concludes my questioning of Sergeant Collins to my satisfaction.” I sat down, trying not to smile: Kinglake had given me the ideal opportunity to make my point. I had thought it was going to take me some time.

  The other defence counsel did not spend very much time on Sergeant Collins; Archie tried to show that the Free People could not have been very effective street-fighters if Collins had as little difficulty as he apparently had had in breaking through their ranks. But Collins had really been my man, and there wasn’t much he could say about their clients.

  Next, Draper called two eye-witnesses from among the demonstrators of political ideas rather different from those of the Free People. One of them was a middle-aged lady called, as far as I remember, Mrs. Hamper; while she was ‘proud to call herself a liberal’, so she said, she had been shocked at the behaviour and language of the Free People, and disgusted by their unprovoked attack on the police. She had gone to the demonstration as a serious exercise of her rights as a citizen, though she deeply regretted now that she had involved herself in such an unsavoury set. Yes, she did not consider there had been any provocation by the police. Yes, she had heard Buckleson’s words from the platform and she had taken them to be a signal. Yes, the fighting had started immediately after Buckleson’s words.