‘I’m going for a pee,’ I said.
When I got back, I could tell that Mrs Levy had been wistfully discussing with our other colleague, a newish young man with a local government background, the possibility of doing what the lawyer had implausibly suggested. There wasn’t a hope, not with the breach of Probation and the suspended sentence there already: she knew that really, but Mrs Levy is one of those justices who believe in going through all the motions of ‘considering all the options’ even when there aren’t really any options there any longer. The young man, however, was looking vaguely recalcitrant.
‘Don’t see how we can possibly let her off again, with her record,’ he said.
‘Oh, but further Probation wouldn’t really be letting her off –’
‘Oh, come on! She’d think it was, and she’d be right. She’d laugh at us. She’d probably go out shop-lifting again to celebrate.’
‘But we’ve been told that the Drugs Dependency Unit are prepared –’
I let the matter be kicked around for a few minutes for the look of the thing. The new boy was a bit too sure of himself, and I thought he ought to be made to argue the point. But fairly soon I’d had enough.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s not pretend to predict or talk in terms of what effect we may have on her, because the fact is, as you both well know, anything a Court can or can’t do has very little discernible effect on someone like this and that’s where the problem lies. If there was the sort of cause-and-effect logic in these cases that each of you is suggesting, then this particular girl would never have clocked up such a criminal record at all. Why her? Why not hundreds of others? It’s unanswerable. But meanwhile there really aren’t any grounds left for burdening the Probation Service with her. Even they admit that. It’s a waste of their time and resources. All this standard stuff about a ‘‘final chance’’ – look at her list of previous, she’s had her final chances, several of them. And there isn’t going to be a new life for her – not yet, anyway, not a sign of it. In years and years maybe, when the whole mixture has changed, if she lives that long … But for the moment she’s had it.’
Mrs Levy gave me a reproachful look. She does not approve of intemperate cynicism, particularly before junior members of the Bench, and I have to admit that, in calmer retrospect, I don’t blame her. She is really a nice, thoughtful woman, Cora Levy, and entirely sane except for a minor obsession about the evils of alcohol. But that afternoon I did not mind upsetting her. Crushed by my own inner weight, I wanted to.
‘Just had it,’ I repeated sadistically. ‘Some situations are not retrievable. Some people are not retrievable – or not by anything we can do here. I think we should face that.’
There was a silence, there on the draughty stairs. The old-fashioned lavatory cistern was still refilling itself noisily on the floor below. I think I had managed to shock even the other man, slightly. He cleared his throat and said;
‘Well I do agree that prison is the only place for her this time, if the Law isn’t to seem an ass.’
Mrs Levy sighed, but then said brightly after a moment:
‘I suppose there’s this to be said for prison, that it’ll get her off drugs. That’s something positive, isn’t it?’
Neither of us replied.
We argued a little more about the length of the sentence, but I forget now what we decided. I suddenly felt very tired.
Many, many years before it happened, years indeed before my own child was even born or I understood about such things, I was living in Paris as a young post-graduate student and I knew a couple who gave their child away. Much later, I was to feel shocked – no, beyond shocked, simply disbelieving – that I myself had played a subordinate, matter-of-fact role in this domestic tragedy. And after that, I think, I suppressed the whole thing.
That day, as I drove home from the Court in heavy traffic, recalling it all again as I had not done for so long, I was haunted by the sense of fearful import which can accompany elation or depression but goes into abeyance on the plains of ordinary living. I even found myself wondering if my thoughtless involvement then in what may have been a substantial wrong could have constituted some sort of first step in a complex sequence of cause and effect that had led me, half a lifetime later, to my own bereavement. Or no, not anything quite as marked as cause and effect – in my best bullying – realist tone I had just told Cora Levy and young Wilkinson that I did not believe in all that – but an obscure patterning, harder to establish but still more inexorable: a dark ebb-tide of fortune. If I had never met – never known – never been in Paris at all … Obsessional but essentially circular train of thought. I am now as I am because of the life I have led. I am my life, nothing else.
There must, once, have been key choices and decisions. Mustn’t there? I know that when I was a Head and talked routinely to leaving sixth formers of their ‘choice’ of career, I used as a matter of course the language of self-determination. It was indeed the language in which I was reared by my good, enlightened, unselfish parents who wanted only the best for me. In the home on the Cadbury estate in which I grew up, the presiding spirits were J. H. Muirhead and Joseph Chamberlain, the ethos that of the Birmingham Midland Institute: the civic pride of self-made men, technocracy leavened by a spiritual vision, the legacy of Methodism plus the expanding motor industry. And, preceding Methodism, an older tradition of high-minded dissent: my ancestors were Huguenot refugees, Protestants from south-west France. They were silversmiths and weavers who settled in the Midlands at the beginning of the eighteenth century with their modest home-industry skills; their descendants saw the place transformed into the industrial nexus of the world.
A scholarship at eleven to King Edward’s School … a growing aptitude and taste for work … the friendship and influence of good teachers … a place secured at university … Paradoxically, the moment of choice and decision that had been an essential part of my parents’ dream for me never quite seemed to occur. At every well-mapped stage the next step seemed clear. Even Army service, that classic intervention which altered the course of some young men’s lives for ever, just seemed to me like more of the same competitive endeavour in a different guise. Unlike many boys from sheltering lower-middle-class homes, I did not mind the coarse life of barracks. Nobody bullied me, which at the time I liked to imagine was due to the force of my personality but which probably owed as much to the fact that I am built like a brick shithouse – as the crudest of my uncles used to say. I am not especially tall, not quite six foot, and, dressed, I look unremarkable, but I am very solid and even now, approaching sixty, I am stronger than most other people. I like to think my distant forebears were too, for ‘Ferrier’ is the old French term for blacksmith – a shoe-er of horses: becoming silver-workers was presumably a later refinement. In any case, by and by the Army gave me a commission: I was the ‘right sort’. I was sent to Germany in 1946, and there, as an officer in a victorious army of occupation, of course I thrived.
So, I went on to Oxford to read History, my ‘best’ subject. So, towards the end of my third year, my tutor suggested that a post-graduate degree at the Sorbonne might, since I seemed particularly interested in France, be a logical ‘next step’. Flattered by his confidence in me, I cheerfully agreed that a couple of years in Paris doing a thesis on some aspect of modern French history, and being an assistant in a Lycée part-time to help support myself, would suit me nicely. So, was the die already cast by then?
Of course, what I mainly wanted was to get out of England for a bit. It was 1951, and I was typical of those who had grown up since the war and for whom the Utopian hopes of 1945 already seemed a little embarrassing, as belonging to another, more innocent era. Limited as our experience of foreign travel still was, even we had become aware of the peculiar and seemingly interminable dowdiness of post-war Britain, officially sanctioned as ‘austerity’. A brief holiday in Paris the previous year had introduced me to that city, a prelude to a lifetime’s relationship with it. It was still physi
cally the Paris that had been liberated in 1944, a capital in which quantities of people still lived with single water-taps at the back of greasy-cobbled courtyards; yet it made every British city including London seem ill-lit, provincial, populated by dull people in hand-knitted cardigans reading inane tabloid papers and eating cheap sweets. I still liked my compatriots, but I was ashamed of them. I was also inclined to the contemptuous belief, derived from the limited experience I had now acquired, that whereas on the Continent sex was rightly regarded as important, in England people tended to prefer hot-water bottles and sentimental films.
So, in the autumn of that year, I found myself occupying my own domain on the seventh floor of an antiquated building (Gaz á tout étage) overlooking a lighted boulevard. It was a tiny, brick-floored room tucked away like a rat’s nest behind the building’s fortress-like facade, and it was reached by a scrofulous service staircase and a windowless corridor as in a bad dream, but I like that room almost better than any other I have ever lain in. I was often lonely in it (a fact I concealed successfully much of the time even from myself); my new life was not easy, strung out as it was between the medieval aloofness of the crowded Sorbonne and the demands of a classroom full of sharp-eyed Parisian adolescents, but as I clung grimly onto the French language and to my own self-esteem, stunning myself every night with quantities of the cheapest food and wine, I dimly perceived that I was living through what might be some of the most important days of my life.
I was simply an early swallow in what would, as the fifties advanced, swell to a great flock. Within a few years, growing prosperity all over the western world would bring rolling into Paris a great army of young men and girls to whom foreign travel seemed almost a birthright, a democratic generation too young to remember the war clearly and careless of its old alliances. This army would create its own international city within the décor of the old streets. But the trickle of foreign students and adventurers who had found their way there by 1951 were attracted to it not by any promise of affluence but by its obsolescent culture of poverty, within which they could scrape a living like urban gipsies.
Such a one was Evan. Evan Brown. That was his unsuitably nondescript name.
An adventurer, Evan. A sharp-eyed boy from a back street in some Welsh town (Cardiff?), who’d had the acumen to turn his provincial origins to good account. Half professional Welshman, half cosmopolitan polyglot – for somewhere in his self-educating wanderings he’d picked up convincing French, the clever bastard. He was clever, you had to hand it to him: in no time, it seemed, he’d learnt his way about the Left Bank, spoke of Sartre and Greco, was on terms (if you believed him) with the American jazz musicians who lived in the Hôtel de la Louisiane. He was a painter, naturally, but unlike every other Paris dauber of conventional abstracts he had the shrewdness to paint neat little ‘naïve’ pictures that were then rather unusual: views of Wales like improbably ideal children’s drawings, all bright blue skies and surprised sheep. He and his girl – Joyce, yes: her name, which had evaded me in the Courtroom, came back to me only then, driving heavily homeward to a London suburb through the rain – he and Joyce used to hawk the pictures round the larger cafés and sell them in Montmartre on Sundays. In spite (or because) of their Parisian know-how, they managed to give an impression of exotic rurality, in that time when men still used Brylcreme and women wore permanent waves and cheap-smart tailored suits. Evan wore corduroy trousers and a battered sheepskin jacket; Joyce grew her hair long with a crooked fringe, like Juliet Greco. Her dusty black clothes seemed a little large for her, thus subtly suggesting the cosmopolitan waif or urban refugee. I learnt by and by that it was Evan who had invented this style for her, and their joint appearance was picturesque, arresting: beatniks and hippies years before the words were invented, purveyors of the radical chic fantasy a generation before it became the cliché of mass fashion.
So, remembering Joyce with her own few words of broken French disarmingly cajoling purchasers in the Deux Magots, remembering too her sitting on the unmade bed in some minimal hotel talking insistently to me about Evan’s talents, Evan’s needs – remembering now all sorts of nostalgic and pointless details that, for years, had dropped right out of my mind – I eventually parked the car and went into my house. Ann had got home before me.
She wanted, as usual, to ask me questions about my day in Court. But I did not want to talk about that. Or about anything much. Ann observed me tactfully, and busied herself making a pot of tea.
We drank it, and then I made an effort and said:
‘A case we had today … Never mind what, a girl, it doesn’t matter, that’s not the point – reminded me of a couple I once knew who gave their baby away.’
‘You never told me about them.’ Ann looked eager. She is really more interested in people than in anything else, though she tries, poor girl, she does try, to ‘share my interests’ in other ways.
‘I never told you about them because I’d forgotten all about them myself. It must be – oh, thirty years ago that I knew them. In Paris.’
As always when anything touching on France comes up, Ann looked a little tense, but she said: ‘Oh yes? Go on.’
‘It was when I was doing my Great Work on the French Left,’ I said, wishing already I had not embarked on this pointless tale, for what was I trying to convey? ‘They were just an English couple hanging round the Latin Quarter scrounging a living. The chap was a sort of bogus painter.’
‘Oh, one of them, I know,’ said Ann, who doesn’t. ‘There were lots of those around, I expect?’
‘Yes, but not quite like him,’ I said irritably. ‘The point is, he was using Art as an expedient. He had other irons in the fire – or would have. He wasn’t a negligible person. Rather, somehow, voracious. He had to do everything everyone else did. Have what they had. Admirably ambitious, you could call him.’ Just as when I used to speak of him long ago, I heard a careful if false note of fairness in my voice, of judicial pseudo-detachment. ‘He’d already been involved in some fringe theatre group in London – as a scene-painter, I rather think, but he’d scraped acquaintance there – made friends, I should say – with actors and directors, and had plans for setting up some low-budget film company. Well, it was probably just pie in the sky, but that sort of scheme didn’t cost the earth then as it would now. The cinema in France was becoming fashionable again, and Evan had a very good Geiger-counter for that …’ Hauling my memory back again from the over-grown side-tracks down which it was wandering, I added, with an effort at briskness: ‘His girl was quite different though, I think. She tried to be what he wanted – streetwise it would be called today. But really, I think, she was just a loving female wanting a home and a man who would stay in it. Poor cow.’
Some of the people I meet in the teaching world, particularly the younger ones, get annoyed these days when I make remarks like that. They feel their feminist principles are affronted by such truths – or they think they ought to feel that. But one of the good things about Ann is that she is far too honest for that sort of pretension. In fact she looked happier now at my feeble attempt to describe Joyce. She said softly:
‘What happened?’
What indeed. I couldn’t, really, understand it myself, much less explain the situation succinctly to Ann all these years later. There was some core of meaning here that was nagging at me but evading me. And, packed round that core, too much old, confused distress and resentment – long-dried griefs that were trivial in comparison with the other things that came later, but which, now that I recalled them, had left a scab of pain.
‘Well – she was pregnant. And not for the first time, I think. I wouldn’t really know …’ Other details rose unpleasantly to the surface of my mind; I pushed them aside and continued doggedly. ‘Anyway this time she was quite far on. People had illegal abortions all the time in France in those days, as there didn’t seem to be any birth control, but it was too late for an abortion. Anyway she and Evan decided to have the baby adopted at birth.’
‘But why? I mean, if they were together. Why couldn’t they just have kept it? Why couldn’t they actually have got married? Isn’t that what people did in those days?’
‘Yes, quite. That’s been bothering me now too. I just can’t quite work out how the case for not keeping the baby was argued. I seem to remember a lot of talk about it being ‘‘better for the baby’’ that way. And Joyce – that was the girl – was only eighteen or nineteen.’
‘Masses of girls that age have babies and bring them up.’ Ann sounded censorious, for her.
‘Yes of course. But she was very much under Evan’s influence – very much in love, I suppose I mean. And he was persuasive, a very strong character. When he didn’t get his way he could also turn quite nasty.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Oh – my sort of age. Mid-twenties. Maybe a year or two older.’
‘Tom, this is a dreadful story.’
‘I know. That’s the point of it, I expect.’
‘He forced her – Joyce – to give up the baby because she loved him?’
‘Something like that. Certainly she must have been afraid he’d push off if she tried to make a stand about the baby. And probably she was right.’
‘How horrible.’
Of course I agreed, but her instant indignation made me perverse:
‘Not necessarily, Ann, not necessarily. Perhaps he did have a point about it being better for the baby to be brought up in a proper family. Perhaps in insisting that, he was trying in his own way to be honest – to show that he knew Joyce and he weren’t a permanent arrangement, whatever she might hope.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Something like that, I think.’ I really could not remember. Evan had always talked a lot.
‘Well – he must have felt very guilty.’ Ann readily decides that people must have felt guilty.
‘But it turned out to be true. When I ran into Joyce after it was all over, about a year later, she was on her own.’
Give Them All My Love Page 2