by Nina Bawden
He wrote to Johnny. That was all Mary knew. Johnny did not show her the letter, nor did he tell her what was in it. But she did see a letter Julian had written to Clara two weeks before the case came up at the Old Bailey.
It was not a love letter. Clara had broken off her engagement when she visited him in Paris. This was something she did not discuss any more than her mother would have discussed the details of her last illness with anyone but her doctor. She said, once, to Mary, ‘Of course we could not have got married now,’ and that was all. If she grieved for her own sake, it was entirely inwardly. She looked slightly older, but only as if a process that had been briefly arrested by her love affair had been set in motion again. It had taken charge of her a little more firmly, perhaps, so that now you could see quite clearly what she would be like until the end of her days: growing a little more angular, a little more brittle as the years closed in, reading all the best autobiographies, working with little or no pay for charitable institutions and listening even more readily than she had done before, to the troubles of people who could find no one else to listen to them. She began to wear again the leather coat that Julian had disliked and, though she would probably continue in a rather disdainful way to pay attention to her clothes, she would almost certainly wear the coat, Mary decided, until it fell to pieces or until she died.
She gave Mary the letter and went out of the room while she read it. It was obviously an answer to an appeal.
‘… in a way, you’re right, of course. I have always bowed to your moral judgement, Clara. The “decent” thing would be for me to come back and face the music. But my Boy Scout days are over and it looks as if the water may be a lot hotter for me than for anyone else. I apologize for mixing my metaphors. I think the water will be pretty tepid for Johnny. The eagle eyes of the law are bound to see, in the end, that he’s simply a Blue-eyed Boy who has been led astray by bad company.…’
The letter made Mary feel sick and angry but she thought it was more than likely that Julian believed this. Certainly Johnny seemed to believe it and after a little while, she came to believe it, too.
It wasn’t so difficult. The month of January before the case came up was a particularly beautiful-one; day followed day, bright and soft with a clear, high sun. They spent the weeks of the Christmas holiday with Martin, at Fitchet. Lester had brought him a pony for Christmas, a spirited little piebald with a long white tail like a circus horse. Mary protested but only half-heartedly. Lester had been very kind, had gone to endless lengths to show that the family stood four square behind Johnny, had offered to pay for the best advice money could buy. She stifled the thought that his delight in Martin’s pleasure was a shade too proprietary.
‘He’s a tough little devil,’ he said after the first ride they took together, Martin crimson with excitement, Lester solid and heavy on a powerful bay. ‘Took to horseback like a duck to water. Not like my boy—not like Johnny either, for that matter.’
‘Uncle Lester says I can hunt next holidays,’ Martin said.
‘Uncle Lester says …’
‘Uncle Lester says …’
He attached himself to his uncle with unreserved adulation, followed him everywhere like a puppy.
‘He’s not scared of him, that’s one thing,’ Johnny said. He sighed a little.
‘Lester spoils him,’ Mary said, but without real disapproval. For once she was glad that Martin was so happy at Fitchet, so completely absorbed. At week-ends, she and Johnny went for long, silent walks and sat silent in the village pub over warm pints of beer. They weren’t happy but they weren’t unhappy either. Mary worried, but the first appalled feeling of shock had faded or, rather, she had grown used to it so that she no longer felt it deeply or sharply. Staying with Lester, the comfortable reassurance of money and power worked like a barbiturate. As the month passed with its soft, freakish weather, she came to believe nothing very conclusive or even particularly alarming would emerge at the end of it. Johnny went up to London during the week and, with Lester’s help, wound up the affairs of the firm. There would be no money left; Lester was prepared to help but only to keep his nephew out of the bankruptcy courts. Mary stayed at Fitchet and helped Florence Prothero match silks for her embroidery and do the flowers in the church. She was treated like a daughter of the house, but she felt more and more like a visitor.
No one mentioned what had happened and she began to feel it would be a gross indecency to bring it up. Lester and his wife gave dinner parties at the week-end for local friends and the conversation was about income tax and farms run with a tax loss and sometimes the latest book or play. Someone was almost certain to say at some point during the evening that the effect of the Welfare State was not to finish off the very rich, who simply got richer, but to crush the middle-class out of existence. Occasionally, when everyone had gone, Lester would throw another log on the fire, bring out his best port, and speculate on the amount of the fine.
Prison did not come into their reckoning. Why should it? Thieves went into prison and men who ill-treated their children. Criminals of that kind did not belong to the middle-classes. It wasn’t so ridiculous. People who read every day of the mounting casualties on the road never imagine that they might be knocked down today, crossing the street.
Even during the first days in court, the illusion held. It was with indignation rather than fear that they listened to the burden of the prosecution’s case against Johnny which was that the personal cheque he had given to Kranz was a deliberate bribe. There was no answer to this except the simple one that it wasn’t true, and, almost until the end, Mary believed that it would be enough.
Johnny gave his evidence in a clear, unfaltering voice. Certainly it was not a bribe … no, he had no explanation as to why it was necessary to pay Kranz this money, he had simply acted under instructions. Yes, he had applied for the export licence. He had believed the copper was going to Karachi. He did well enough under his own counsel’s careful questioning but rose to the prosecution’s cross-examination like a fish to the bait. Naturally, as co-director of the firm he took his share of the responsibility. No, he was not claiming he had been ‘used’. At this point, Lester put his hand over Mary’s and gave it an encouraging pat. She saw that he wore a remote, troubled frown and smiled to comfort him. Though she was desperately ashamed—stunned—by the fact that Johnny should be there at all, she was convinced that his rectitude shone out in the dock. She thought everyone must see it and was sure that the Judge did.
But the Judge, whom she thought looked a kind old man, was not kind at all. He reminded the jury that before the Customs had started their investigation, a sum of money that had stood to the credit of Abba Ltd. in a London bank, had been transferred to an account in Switzerland. Mr. Prothero had said that he knew nothing about this but there was no evidence to support his statement. It suggested, didn’t it, that the firm had been perfectly well aware of the possible consequences of what they intended to do? The jury might feel, perhaps, that Mr. Prothero had been taken in by his partner, Cloutsham, but they must remember that not only had the defence not produced this as an extenuating circumstance, but Prothero himself had denied it. He conceded that it was possible Prothero had been a fool rather than a knave, but even fools, he said, smiling at his own joke, had to pay for their folly. He crouched forward in his dark, high-backed chair like a spiteful old chimpanzee at a tea party.
Johnny was found guilty on one count, Kranz on three. The Judge sent Kranz to prison for three years. He sent Johnny to prison for nine months.
Johnny was pale, but pallor suited him, and when the Judge pronounced sentence, he seemed to grow inches. His face was lifted with a bright and glowing courage. Looking at him through shameful tears, Mary saw that his demeanour implied that he would have laid down his life for his friend. That the sacrifice demanded was only nine months made the whole thing ludicrous, a pompous bravery.
‘I must say, he took it remarkably well,’ Lester said. He spoke with a mysterious air of se
lf-congratulation. ‘Though it was a pity, perhaps, that he took the line he did.’ He twirled his monocle reflectively on the end of its cord and screwed it into his eye. His face was pink and bland, he smelt pleasantly of eau-de-Cologne. Given a waxed moustache, Mary thought, he would have looked like an elderly Victorian masher. ‘Rudge thought it was a pity. He could so easily have insisted that Cloutsham had simply led him up the garden path.’
‘They taught him not to sneak at school.’
Lester looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t upset yourself, dear. Finish your soup—it’s about the best thing on the menu.’
They were lunching in the Ladies’Room of Lester’s club, a large, dim room with walls the colour of porridge. Though the day outside was bright and exceptionally clear, the atmosphere was one of pervasive, foggy gloom: Mary remembered that Johnny had once said the club had a special plant for manufacturing it.
She put down her spoon. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, Lester.’
‘My dear girl, it doesn’t matter. Though it won’t help to starve yourself, y’know. You’re thin enough as it is.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You mustn’t take it so hard. It’s not such a terrible thing—the luck of the draw, don’t y’know?’
Mary looked at him. ‘It is terrible. It’ll be in the papers, everyone will know.’
He said sharply, ‘Don’t think I like it!’ Then he looked genuinely distressed. ‘But one must keep a sense of proportion, don’t you think? Most people sail pretty close to the wind from time to time. The damnable thing is, the regulations may well be changed next year.’ He smiled in a chilly way. ‘It’s not as if he’d done a murder, y’know. It’s a technical thing almost—a piece of damned bad luck.’
She saw that he meant this and it shocked her. The shame that ate into her bones did not touch him. It was simply a piece of damn bad luck. Presumably he thought of prison as a kind of respectable martyrdom.
‘I suppose I have a suburban desire for respectability,’ she said angrily. ‘All I can see is people looking at me and whispering behind their hands.’
‘My dear girl—that isn’t important.’
‘I know that. It makes me even more ashamed.’ A hand descended and removed her half empty plate of soup.
Lester said, ‘Try the chicken, Mary.’ His voice was persuasive, he might have been coaxing an unwilling child. She smiled a little: Lester liked to see people eat.
She said, ‘Johnny won’t be able to bear it.’
He didn’t answer for a minute. She looked at him but his face was a blank wall behind which his thoughts retreated. Finally he said, ‘Oh—I don’t know. I daresay he’ll stand up all right. No use thinking about it, anyway, no use crying over spilt milk.’ He paused and added in a hoarse rumble, ‘He’s got to take his medicine, y’know.’
Mary stared at him, shaken by inner laughter. Any moment now, she thought hysterically, he’ll say, ‘Prison will make a man of him.’
But he went on thoughtfully, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. You’re bound to try to—we’re all bound to try to. It’s natural. Though to be honest with you, I don’t see where we went wrong.’ He sipped at the hock the waiter had poured into his glass and nodded. The man filled both their glasses. Mary wished he would wait until he had gone away but Lester took no more notice of a waiter than he would have taken of a piece of furniture. ‘He had everything—good schools, that sort of thing. The family did their best for him—anyway, my father did. Spoiled the boy, to my mind.’ There was an odd edge of wistfulness to his voice.
Mary said suddenly, ‘What was Johnny’s father like?’
‘Funny sort of chap. Quiet, soldierly, and all that, but sometimes he talked almost like a Socialist.’ He jabbed his fork into his green salad with an expression of surprised distaste as if he had just found a slug there. ‘I daresay you know what he did when we gave up India! That was a damned odd business. Sent Christine home, and stayed on in an Indian village with some queer Quaker unit. Lived in a mud hut—went native, you might say. They were supposed to be digging some sort of well. That was the story, anyway. Naturally we all wrote and told him to stop playing the fool but he never answered. Except once. He wrote to my father and said he was trying to retrieve the family honour. Of course we knew then that he was mad as a hatter.’
Mary said with interest, ‘I knew what he’d done, of course. But not that he’d said that.’
‘No. My father didn’t tell Johnny. Thought it wasn’t necessary to upset him. Anyway, he died not long after. Kidneys.’
‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘I remember.’ Johnny had rarely talked about his father: she supposed that he shared Lester’s view. The only photograph she had ever seen of Colonel Prothero rose up before her mind’s eye and she regarded it with vague, academic surprise. There was nothing in the still, soldierly face to suggest what might have caused such a queer aberration, what had led him to pay such penance for the Imperialism he had served for so long.
She sighed. ‘Of course Johnny barely knew his father.’
‘No. He wasn’t home much. But the boy was all right at Fitchet. Clara too. Things were easier in those days—people could go off to the ends of the earth and know their children would be looked after at home without putting too much strain on the domestic front.’ He looked seriously at her through his monocle. ‘Y’know, Mary, in a way it was the end of the British Empire when you couldn’t get servants any more.’
It would have been unkind to laugh at him. But the tension in her stomach had slackened. She was able to eat her chicken. Lester looked at her empty plate with approval. ‘Good girl. You’ve got a bit more colour in your cheeks. I recommend a liqueur to round off the treatment. They’ve got some quite reasonable brandy here.’ He signed to the waiter; brandy was brought in balloon glasses, black coffee in tiny cups. He lit her cigarette and cleared his throat noisily as if from some thick obstruction.
‘Look, my dear, you must let me know exactly how things are. Money and so on. This will be a bad patch for you.’
‘You’re very kind.’
‘You can come and stay with us. You don’t have to rattle about in that empty flat. Won’t do you any good.’
She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. She felt quite irrationally that she did not want it any more. Nor did she want Lester’s money. ‘It’s kind of you, Lester—you’ve been more than kind. But I think I can manage.’
He looked visibly startled. ‘But you haven’t a penny, have you?’ He frowned. ‘I’m sorry—that was damnably blunt.’
She found it quite easy to smile at him. ‘It’s all right. It’s almost true. But I can get a job.’ She half appealed to him. ‘I’d like to, Lester.’
‘Independent, eh? All right, if that’s how you want it. Perhaps I can help with the job.’
He sounded quite humble. She said, softening, ‘That would be nice of you. I can type, though I’m a bit rusty.’ She made a grimace. ‘My father made me take a secretarial course. He said it would come in useful one day.’
‘I daresay. But it won’t take you very far.’ He made a vague gesture. ‘The boy’s school fees, for example.’
‘He’ll have to leave.’
He looked dumbfounded. ‘But you can’t … it’ll interrupt him, won’t it? There’s no need for Martin to suffer.…’
‘I want to take him away,’ she said steadily. She felt suddenly almost buoyant. It was as if she had suddenly stumbled upon an enormous reserve of strength she had not known she possessed.
He looked at her, perplexed, drumming his fingers on the table. ‘Well—if that’s how you feel … I suppose I can’t stop you.’ He gave her a set, disapproving smile. ‘If you change your mind, the offer is always open.’
‘Thank you, Lester.’
His smile grew a shade less stiff. ‘You’re a good girl, Mary. Are you going back to the flat now? I’ll see you into a taxi.’
He spoke to the porter and they waited in the hall of the club beneath the enormous stuffed head of a bison. Mary loo
ked at the inscription and saw it had been presented by Lt.-Colonel Pertwee-Binks in the year nineteen hundred and three. Lester kissed her before they parted, a brush of soft lips on her cheek. It was like being kissed by a bar of scented soap.
‘Now—you’re not to worry too much about Johnny. He’s taken a bad fall but he’ll get up again. There’s a lot of spunk there, a lot of spunk.’ He spoke with real emotion; she thought that it was the first time she had heard him mention Johnny with affection and smiled at him gratefully. As he helped her into the taxi he said, ‘Remember—if there’s anything I can do—don’t hesitate. Particularly if there is anything I can do for the boy.’
Martin’s school was in a Georgian house thirty miles from London. Part of the gardens had been landscaped by Capability Brown. It was a ‘traditional’school; the little boys with their scrubbed, bright faces were taught Greek and the team spirit at scratched old desks in what had once been the servants’wing, dark, chilly rooms that poorer parents would have regarded with hygienic horror. In the main part of the house, the ceilings were by Decimus Burton, the marble overmantels by Flaxman of Chelsea and the Headmaster, Geoffrey Sandlewood, by Eton and Oxford. He was, Mary thought, a perfect specimen of his kind.
He had been a young man when Johnny was at school and now, though he was not much more than fifty-five, he had the tired blue eyes and the slow, weighty way of talking of a much older man. Parents, listening to his ponderous pauses, felt that they were putting their sons into the hands of a man of the world, though in fact he was no such thing: he had been a pupil at the school himself, had gone from it to Eton, from Eton to Oxford and from Oxford back again to the school, unchanged, one could guess, except that his voice had broken and he had grown a moustache.
As a result his moral judgements had never lost their spring freshness, there was no reason why they should have done. Though like most unworldly men, he was almost irritatingly uncensorious: he sat in his schoolmaster’s desk and looked down on the world with tolerance and understanding as if it were a naughty boy that would learn in time. He was the type of man, Mary thought, who is devastatingly easy to sneer at and, face to face, difficult not to feel inferior to, because he was not a type at all but a kind man and a good man.