I had, in any case, been noticed with my gun on Sunday morning by an old woman, as I tramped through the farmyard with the noisy dog. And I had been seen wading through the ford by some children, playing in the wood.
Two and two and two were quickly put together, an identification suggested.
Of course, I allowed all this to happen. I do know that really. A ‘kamikazi approach’ Lewis Greenfield later called it. Yes.
However, as I was to hear later also, it was only in the course of that busy Sunday that a local police officer, excitedly checking records, realized that the artist found shot was a man who had been in a car accident involving a fatality in the neighbouring district seven years before. It seems that no one had made that connection till then. The accident, on the road down to Argenton, had occurred some fifteen miles from Maryk’s village. Daffyd Huws, with the fancy spelling more suited to the artistic pose, had only established himself as a permanence in Maryk’s workshop several years later.
Whether it was also spotted on Sunday that the family name of someone they now wanted to interview coincided with that of the accident victim, I never heard. I like to think that the discovery was rapidly made: it must have been so satisfying for them.
Some time after, an experienced criminal lawyer said to me in the course of one of our many conversations, that Monsieur Brown-Hughes-Huws had shown a lack of taste and judgement, did I not think, in establishing himself so near the scene of the earlier accident, not to mention the territory of his previous dealings with my family? I said yes indeed, the same thought had occurred to me, but that ‘lack of taste and judgement’ seemed to me an inadequate diagnosis in the circumstances. Whatever else I believed I had fathomed about the workings of his mind, that particular crass move of his was, to me, inexplicable.
The lawyer remarked then that such apparent tempting of fate was ‘not untypical of the habitual wrongdoer’.
‘Men like that are often clever, I find, but ultimately they tend to commit some stupid or outrageous act because they literally do not see life in the same terms as most people. At some level, they really do believe that everything they want can be justified.’ He paused, and then added: ‘Perhaps quite a few people, in certain moods, may be subject to such distortion of view.’
I should have liked to have explored the theme further with this mild, intelligent man, but after a long pause, during which we gazed at one another, he brought our dialogue back firmly to the subject of my own actions.
But that long Sunday I knew nothing of the activity going on elsewhere. I sat quietly in the shadowy, lamplit kitchen. I was tired, weak I suppose, but not unhappy. I had eaten the stale bread that was left and finished the cheese. I had drunk most of the remaining bottle of Mad Wine, wishing only that I had some Real. One further thing I intended to do before I left. I knew that Jacquou had destroyed many of his Resistance papers when he surmised his end was coming, but I wanted to look over what remained and perhaps take some of them away with me. I opened one of Maryk’s chests and embarked on this. But, in the strange, vague state I was in, I got side-tracked, coming across some ribbon-tied bundles of letters in an ornate, browning copperplate. They turned out to be decorous but passionate love letters – I think from Jacquou’s father, the school teacher, Mayor and finder of the wooden angel, writing to his future wife. She must have kept them all her life, and after her death no one had wanted to throw them away. Jacquou had not; nor did I. I sat reading them, till the afternoon light began to fade again beyond the shutters, reading of emotions long appeased, of intricate daily plans now gone into the void, of vivid hopes for children not yet conceived and now all past and over themselves.
I was still reading when I heard several vehicles coming nosily down the track towards the house and then into the yard. I think I understood already, during that moment, that it was over.
I left the letters lying round the chest and went to open the door. Two police vans were drawn up, engines running, one with a blue light flashing. There was a police motor bike too, its radio babbling. I stood watching and, just as once before, when my Simca had been stolen, gendarmes tumbled from the vans. But this time they hurried to surround me, pistols drawn. One of them even had a submachine-gun.
Ridiculous over-reaction, I thought, in my Anglo-Saxon way. Do they think I’m going to shoot at them?
Note by Lewis Greenfield
I believe that Tom had intended to add a few pages more to complete his account, but never did so. However, I may be mistaken about this.
He was arraigned in France for the ‘voluntary homicide’ of Evan Brown, alias David Hughes or Huws; but, as both he and the dead man were British subjects, the case was eventually transferred to the British Courts. This caused some unfocused indignation in the French press, the confusion centering on Tom’s true nationality. The assumption that he was surely French stemmed partly from his Huguenot name and his family connections in France, but also from the nature of the charge: the French public affected to believe that such a crime passionel would be alien to the phlegmatic British temperament. The lack of any noticeable sub judice restrictions in France had ensured that the supposed facts of the case, plus a wealth of background information and speculation, had been copiously publicized in advance of any judicial hearing. Le Pére Vengeur – ‘the Avenging Father’ – became almost a cult figure in some popular papers, while a more right-wing and intellectual weekly ran an alternative sideshow on the Danger of Anarchy and the folly of pointing the finger at a dead man who, criminal as he might be, could not speak for himself. Everyone else, however, seemed to speak a great deal. The police gave interviews. The examining magistrate for the prosecution gave interviews. So did assorted Mayors, farmers, café proprietors and old ladies. To anyone reared on British legal constraints the whole thing was a farce.
Almost a year after the event, Tom appeared here at the Old Bailey, where (I afterwards learnt) a garrulous and polyglot woman juror did not hesitate to tell her fellows everything she had read in the French papers. I had fixed him up with a QC, a good friend of mine, Harvey Bron. The charge was murder. Harvey induced Tom to plead Not Guilty to this but to offer an alternative plea of Guilty to manslaughter – which, however, the prosecution were disinclined to accept. So matters had to proceed as for a full trial. Harvey had also wanted Tom to plead diminished responsibility, but of course he would not. In fact his evidence was a model of lucidity and reason, almost damningly so, I was afraid. It made Harvey’s speech in mitigation, about the extent of Tom’s previous suffering and its effect on his mind, seem a little specious. Although I believe myself that what Harvey said was true.
The Judge (who had also read the French papers on his summer holidays) made a meal of telling the jury to consider only what they had heard in Court, a useless request in these or any other circumstances, I’m glad to say. He then went on to talk about ‘a measure of sympathy’ – but that people must not imagine they can take the Law into their own hands. Especially not well educated, respected citizens with distinguished careers. And especially not a magistrate, ‘of all people’, who should, rather, set an example. The rule of Law embodies, indeed, the fundamental principle that the execution of justice should not be left to the injured party. Or supposedly injured party … hearsay evidence … And so on and so forth. ‘Oh Jesus’ I thought at this point. But then he changed course again, reverted to extenuating factors, directed the jury to accept the Guilty plea to manslaughter only which they obligingly did – and Tom ended up with four years. He could have fared a great deal worse. Another example of rough justice, you might call it.
Tom turned down any suggestion that he might appeal against sentence. He served just under two years, mainly in an open prison, worked in the prison library, wrote a lot. When I visited him there he said how peaceful and decent a life it was on the whole, and that he often thought of Piotr Mihailovitch and how much he must have suffered by comparison. He – Tom – had made friends with the prison chaplain who, he sa
id, was ‘a bit of an old woman’ but nice, had worked in Africa and was interested in Amnesty International. I could tell from the way Tom spoke, without him spelling it out, that he had come to regard himself as being in some sense a ‘prisoner of conscience’. ‘I did what seemed to me right and I had to do it,’ he had said to me before the trial. I did not argue with him.
He also became particular friends with a fellow prisoner, a chartered accountant serving a sentence for embezzlement, who was an amateur ornithologist: the prison was in a remote area near the east coast, and there were lots of birds to watch. ‘Old Peter taught me a lot, I shall miss him – and the birds,’ Tom said to me the morning I came to collect him. He had just been paroled, officially because he had had a slight heart attack but really because everyone concerned wanted to let him out.
He seemed well in himself, a bit withdrawn but cheerful, and more simply affectionate than I have ever known him. Ann, poor girl, took great care of him, but he had another attack and died unexpectedly, at the end of 1987.
Although he died in London, he lies buried in France, in Limoges Protestant cemetery, near his distant ancestors and in the same vault as his father-in-law and his daughter. I arranged this, with Ann’s distraught acquiescence. It was one thing I felt I could do for him.
The following year Myra and I and the two younger ones were driving through France to stay with friends in the south. I took the opportunity to visit the cemetery on my own. I had been there once before, on the terrible day of Marigold’s burial, but now it seemed a quiet, pleasant enough place under the summer sky. On the stone rim of the grave I left a small round pebble, which I had picked up earlier beside a road in the Creuse. In my faith we do not believe in personal immortality. And we do not say ‘forgive’, we say ‘remember’. An indestructible stone is what we leave to show respect and continuing memory for the loved dead.
Copyright
First published in 1989 by Hutchinson & Co.
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Gillian Tindall 1989
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Give Them All My Love Page 27