by C. J. Driver
The judge summed up; it was a perfectly fair version of the salient evidence, and if anything was weighted slightly towards the defence. The most important thing he said concerned the fact that Buckleson and the others had not given evidence. “You may think that because none of the accused was called in his own defence, there is suspicion that the full story has not been told in this court. You are of course entitled to think so, but you must not allow it to affect your decision, since it is fundamental to our legal procedure that the accused need not give evidence. You must make up your minds not on what you have not discovered, but only on what you have discovered.”
The jury retired a little before the lunch adjournment; it is nearly always true that if you send a jury out when a meal-time is due, they make up their minds very quickly, and this jury was back in the court with a unanimous decision by 2.30. On the first charge, they found all five accused not guilty. On the second they found Buckleson not guilty, and the other four guilty, and, on the third charge, that of possessing offensive weapons, the other four guilty too.
The foreman sat down, and Kinglake turned to John. “Buckleson,” he said, “you have been found not guilty on the charges made against you; you may therefore leave the dock.” As John stepped down from the dock, I turned to him; I suppose I expected some sign of relief in that pallid face, or at least some expression, but his face was blank. I bowed to the judge and with John walked to the door of the court. I was about to go out when John stopped me. “Can we wait to hear the sentences on the others?” he said.
“Of course.”
Ever since I first appeared in a court, I have felt the one moment in a trial which has any reality outside the ritual of the law is the moment of sentencing. Inspector Williams went into the stand and quietly mentioned the personal details of the four Free People; only one of them, the youngster Durdon, had ever been in trouble before and that when he was thirteen—he had been sent to a special school because his parents found it impossible to control him. The others had no criminal records; they all lived with the Free People in the commune, none of them was in full-time employment but they often had casual work, and so on. Archie and Rumbold made their pleas in mitigation, making the usual points about youth, idealism, and the over-zealous police.
The judge passed sentence. He had, he said, been tempted to give all four short prison sentences to make it clear to them and to others like them that while the law respected the right of everyone to hold diverse opinions, it did not allow anyone to take the law into his own hands; if a man felt that a policeman or police officer was behaving in an unjust or unwise way, he had only to complain to a police station and the complaint would be investigated. No one had the right to attack a policeman in the execution of his duty, however the policeman interpreted his duty. However, he had decided to be lenient to first offenders, and would fine the four accused £40 each on the second charge, and £10 each on the third; he would also bind all four over for twelve months, and for the sum of £200 each, to keep the peace. “I hope too,” the judge said, “that having to pay the amount of £50, for which I shall allow you six months and no more, will encourage you to serve your society more profitably and sensibly than you appear to be doing at the moment.” Judges are allowed to say things like that.
I turned to see how John had reacted to the sentence, but he had slipped out of the doors of the court before me. I suppose I wanted from him some kind of recognition, some word of thanks; I did not get it. Oh, lots of the other Free People said nice things to me; but John said nothing; was it because he hated not being in the forefront, hated having someone else do the talking for him? Yet I was profoundly glad we had decided not to let any of the accused give evidence, because they could only have made things worse.
*
Out in the lobby, I looked round for John; there were lots of Free People there, and they swarmed round me, saying things like, “You were fantastic”, “Who does that Judge think he is anyway?”, “Christ, the pigs look like tits now, don’t they?” and various other enlightening things. But I could see no sign of John, nor of Tella. I went up to change. Draper was sitting there; even his paunch looked deflated. “Well done, Grace,” he said as I went over to him.
I sat down next to him. “Bloody awful brief you had, wasn’t it?”
“Christ, yes; that nonsensical charge against your chap. I can tell you, I shall have something to say to the D.P.P. about that.”
“I thought you really did quite well with what little you had,” I said, as consolingly as I could. “That was a good final speech.” You always do what you can to patch up the fraternity at the end of cases; there are fortunately very few of us who get so committed to our pleading we cannot do so. Draper was already looking more cheerful. He stood up and took off his gown and wig.
“I must say, Grace, the police really seem to have got their knives out for that chap Buckleson; Williams was bloody furious when he was acquitted.”
“Perhaps that’s why they put up the second charge,” I suggested.
“Probably. If they get him on something else like this, they’ll throw the book at him.”
“Well, they’ve got an informer around, haven’t they? If Runicorn had come clean on that one, or if they had stuck an informer in the box, they would have had Buckleson cold.”
“I tried to get Runicorn to come clean about the informer,” Draper said confidentially. “He wasn’t prepared to give an inch on it. I’m pretty sure it’s someone right in the organisation.”
“Really?” I said, trying not to show undue interest.
“And I shan’t be surprised if I read in a newspaper in a few months time that Buckleson is back in court, on a real charge too.” To Draper I was only a colleague who had just finished a successful defence; he was not to know I felt any other interest. “Well, I’m off now,” he said. “I expect we’ll meet again before long. Next time I hope it will be a nice straightforward fraud case, with lots of nice straightforward evidence. I don’t like these political cases. Cheerio, old man; and congratulations.”
“Same to you, old man,” I said as he went out.
When I got down to the forecourt again, John was looking for me. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I was fixing Tella to go and pay the fines. The court won’t have to wait six months for that money at least, though these suspended fines with the binding-over are a bastard. Bloody effective way of controlling opposition.”
“Tella paying?”
“No. Communal funds.”
“You’ve got that much?”
“That and more. Everyone who joins the Free People puts a percentage of his salary from any source into the funds.”
“Really? How much?”
“As much as they like. We’re not amateurs, Mr. Lawyer, we’re professionals.”
“So am I, so am I.” I suppose I was still waiting for a word of thanks; or was I reacting to the way John could not help revealing his class—it had to be ‘salary’ for him, it was never ‘wages’? Whichever way, my voice was as ironical as I could make it.
He flashed back at me. “You’ll get your fee. Don’t worry about that, Mr. Lawyer.”
“That’s Peale’s business, not mine,” I said shortly, and turned away. I had not been thinking about my fee at all.
Inspector Williams was standing the other side of the forecourt, disconsolately watching the noisily elated Free People prancing about, much to the annoyance of the attendants, who were trying without success to get them outside. I went over to him.
“Congratulations, Mr. Grace,” he said.
“That’s nice of you, Inspector.”
“Just playing by the rules, sir.”
“By the rules someone’s got to lose.”
“Usually,” he shrugged. “Though perhaps, Mr. Grace, if you knew as much about young Buckleson and his associates as we do you wouldn’t look so pleased.” He gestured to where John was standing surrounded by his people; they were arguing with the attendants who wanted th
em out of the forecourt. For a moment I looked at them; I could take John seriously, I could even treat Tella as a serious person, but I could not take the followers, the adepts, the pretend-peasants, the mini-revolutionaries as anything but kids who needed excitement and lacked maturity. I turned back to Williams to say, “I can’t say they look very dangerous to me, Inspector.”
“Not yet, Mr. Grace, not yet; but you wait and see. There’s some there …” and he shook his head. Draper was wrong; Williams was not angry, he was genuinely disturbed, perhaps even a little frightened. Was that why he had taken the trouble to put an informer into the Free People?
I tried to tease him. “Policeman’s intuition, Inspector?”
“Not only that,” he answered. He was too serious a man to understand teasing. “You know, sometimes I wish I was back dealing with ordinary villains; they play by the rules, you see—oh, they’re not written-down rules, and they’re not the Judges’ Rules, but it’s only sometimes they—and you—know the rules are being broken.”
“You break the rules too, don’t you Inspector?”
“Not the rules which aren’t written, Mr. Grace. There’ve been times when I’ve lifted a fist to a villain, there’ve been times when I’ve cheated to get villains inside; but those things are still part of the rules, and you took your chance with your superiors and with judges and lawyers. But these kids are different; maybe they have got rules, but I don’t know them.” He was silent for a moment or two. “Anyway, I’ve got other things to do beside watch them. Good-bye, Mr. Grace; I’ll see you, I expect.”
“Hadn’t you better go and help the attendants?” I said. “They can’t get those kids out of here.”
“No, Mr. Grace; I’m going home now. I’m going to take off my suit and I’m going to mow the lawn. I want no more anarchy.” We shook hands and he went away.
By now the Free People were not simply noisy, they were getting riotous in their jubilation, and the attendants looked flushed and angry as they tried to shepherd them out of the forecourt. In a moment or two there was going to be a row, and since I did not think I would like to defend anyone on a charge of having created a public disturbance in the Bailey itself, I shoved my way through the middle of the crowd to where I guessed John must be, right at the centre of things. Finally, I managed to heave my way to his shoulder and to shout into his ear. “John, for God’s sake get this place clear; you are going to have the police here any minute.” John nodded, then turned to face the crowd. He held both hands above his head, and clapped three or four times. When the Free People had stopped cavorting, John spoke to them quietly in his public voice and, within two minutes, the forecourt was clear. John turned to me, “O.K., Mr. Lawyer?” he said. “No trouble on your home ground, eh?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I must say I’m glad I didn’t get nobbled on that one.”
Tella, who had come back from paying the fines, suddenly put her arms round me and hugged. “You were marvellous,” she said. I enjoyed being hugged by Tella; and I suppose what John had said could be interpreted as thanks.
“We must have a party tonight to celebrate,” said Tella. “Will you come, Mr. Grace?”
“I think you’d better call me Tom after that hug,” I answered. I did not know whether I wanted to go to a party to celebrate; like Williams, I felt a little that the best thing I could do would be to go home to mow the lawn. There is no better antidote to a fear of anarchy than a little hard mowing of a lawn.
6
I suppose it is a necessary part of our lives as lawyers that we keep a distance not only between our lives at home and in court but between ourselves and the work we do; lawyers who substitute passion for intellect seldom win their cases. The distance helps above all, I suppose, to win and lose cases gracefully. We are a fraternity which excludes those we work for and those against. The distinction in a criminal court is not between evil-doer and righteous, but between those of Society and those of the Law, Society both in its evil-doing and its righteousness. The idiotic uniform is part of that—it helps to hide us from ourselves.
So perhaps I should never have taken Buckleson as a client; perhaps I should have abandoned the defence before the first trial, and made some half-hearted excuse to Peale for crying off; and perhaps when John got into trouble again—which was inevitable, considering what he wanted from life—I should not have accepted the brief which was thrust at me. I took on a brief where my private interests were involved and so was bound to step beyond the boundaries of the law. Perhaps it would have been better for us both if we had kept apart. But ‘perhaps’ is dead now; I killed it myself, knowing what I was doing. And yet it was never an irreversible choice; at any stage I could, if I had chosen to, have gone home to mow the anarchic lawn. A life of separations has its comforts, both moral and physical.
Yet I chose differently; and one stage of the choice was as silly as going to a party. For I did go to the celebratory party in Tella’s flat, and it was there I met Henderson the psychiatrist, and Caister, and Bowland, and Lester, and O’Brien, and … well, the rest of them, the leaders of the Free People, John Buckleson’s friends and enemies, those who destroyed him, those who made him. Henderson especially, though it wasn’t until the second trial that I realised the extent to which Henderson had made John Buckleson.
Yet the irony of Henderson was that, of all the people I met who surrounded John, he was the one who looked at him most coolly. Which is not to say he had no sympathy for him, since in his way I suppose he loved him. But it was a love which stood a long way away and looked very carefully at the object. Psychiatrists get a bad press these days; I suppose we tend to distrust them because they have an apparent ability to stand their distance and look with the same cool detachment at the hunchbacks of the human spirit—ambition, lust, greed, anger—as they use for Adonis and Venus. Yet I, who share that distrust, liked Henderson from the first moment I met him. (The ghost of John Buckleson cries in my head, “You like people too much, Tom, you’re a sentimentalist, and like all sentimentalists you’ll end in despair …”) But I did like Henderson, and I like him still.
He is a big, burly man who could be a prosperous farmer or a country solicitor if it were not for his pallor and dark-ringed eyes which reveal, I imagine, too many hours spent in half-dark rooms listening to patients; he tried to disguise himself a little in that company by wearing an embroidered Indian shirt and flared trousers, but he still looked what he is, an intelligent and successful middle-aged professional man who works hard and makes, almost without meaning to, a great deal of money. Yet from the start there was something oddly atypical about him, something too casual to be called watchfulness, too ironical to be called seriousness. For one thing, his manner—so bluff it was at times military—could shift suddenly and unexpectedly to show a man in much more doubt and confusion than you had expected. For another, he was apparently totally indiscreet, always telling you this or that about this or that patient, but when you thought about what he had actually told you, the indiscretion had disappeared, because he hadn’t in fact told you anything either hurtful or even substantial about his patient.
It was Tella who introduced us, thinking I suppose we might find each other more interesting than the swarms of young, who, in John’s words, kept the party small. Fortunately, Tella’s flat was enormous, six large rooms on the top two floors of a Victorian house in Chelsea, so there was a room for talking and serious drinking, a room for loud music, various rooms for the drunks, highs and lovers, and another for—well, I supposed it was pot-smoking; I am not an adept in the mysteries of drugs, dreams being more than mysterious enough for me, but I have defended a couple of cases of possession of cannabis, and the acrid smell is always cited as evidence. In the territory of the Free People there was no question of cannabis’s being dangerous; indeed, in the strange puritanism of the young, people like Henderson and me who smoked tobacco and drank whisky were made to feel we were the people endangering ourselves (as indeed we probably
were).
So Henderson and I talked, or rather he talked and I listened; the habits of the young, and John Buckleson. It made me feel very middle-aged, and I said so.
“You’re not middle-aged,” Henderson laughed. “You’re young, and they …” he gestured round us, “… they’re very young.”
“Middle-aged.”
“That sounds very sombre.”
“I was watching John.” He was in the far corner, talking in his passionate and violent way to a group of the Free People and some elegant young who were obviously Tella’s friends; for all their smooth and expensive clothes, they were obviously as taken with him as were the Free People in their scruffy white tunics.
“Does he have that effect on you?”
“No, it’s just sometimes he makes me feel very old.”
“You really don’t look it.”
“Thirty-six,” I answered. “Well-preserved.”
“Well, if it weren’t for thirty-six-year-olds, he’d be spending this evening in a very different way.”
“Yes,” I tried to laugh. “You’ve dealt with him professionally too?”
“Yes. I suppose there’s no secret about that. He’s really an ex-patient now, but we see each other a bit still, at parties like this and so on.”
“I suppose your dealings with him are a secret—unlike mine, that is.”
“Yes,” he said. Either the sudden sombreness of my mood or the subject had infected him too, for he spoke seriously now, with none of the detached manner he had used before. “Anyway he was a patient for nearly six years, until he went to the States, so the dealings would take a lot of telling, even if I could do so.”