by C. P. Snow
Before we had been there an hour, I knew, as any lawyer must have known, that we had no choice. It would go for trial; we were compelled to reserve our defence.
The man opposite built up a case that, although we could have delayed it, was not going to be dismissed. During the morning, everyone began to realise that nothing could be settled; Olive told me later that she felt a release from anxiety – as soon as she was certain that this could not be a decisive day.
The prosecution ran through their witnesses. The first was one of the four whom Jack had induced to lend money to buy the advertising firm, a slow-voiced man with kindly and stupid brown eyes.
‘Mr Cotery made a definite statement about the firm’s customers?’ asked T—, the prosecutor.
‘Yes.’
‘He mentioned the previous year’s turnover?’
‘Yes.’
‘Also the number of advertisers the firm were agents for?’
‘Yes.’
After other questions, he asked whether Jack referred to the circulation of Martineau’s advertising paper.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you reproduce that statement?’
‘I made a note of it at the time.’
‘Will you give me the figures?’
He read them out. The figure of the circulation sounded unfamiliar: I remembered it in George’s account as 5300; now it appeared as 6000. I looked up my own papers and found that I was right.
‘Didn’t those figures strike you as large?’
‘They did.’
‘What did Mr Cotery say?’
‘He said they’d be larger still now Mr Martineau had disappeared and his religious articles would be pushed out of the paper.’ There were some chuckles.
‘Did you ask for some guarantees?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you tell us exactly what you did?’
‘I asked Mr Cotery if he could show me what these figures were based on. So he introduced me to Mr Passant, who told me that he was a solicitor and had a good deal to do with figures and had known the former owner of the agency, Mr Martineau. He said he had received a statement from Mr Martineau giving the actual circulation. It was not 6000. Mr Cotery had been a little too optimistic, it was just over 5000. He offered to show me his notes of this statement. And if I were doubtful he promised to trace Mr Martineau, who had gone away, and get him to write to me.’
‘Did you take advantage of that offer?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t see any reason to. I had known Mr Cotery for some time, I felt sure it was all above board. I could see Mr Passant knew what he was talking about.’
The other witnesses followed with the information that T— had foretold in his speech; similar stories to the first, some including Olive. Then an accountant brought out some figures of the agency’s business, in particular those of the Arrow: ‘What was the average circulation in the year 1927?’
‘Eleven hundred per week. So far as I can tell. The books are not very complete.’
‘What would you say was the maximum possible for that year? Making every allowance you can?’
‘Perhaps fifteen hundred.’ This had been threatened in the speech.
They brought up witnesses against the farm. It was at this stage we realised for certain the legal structure of the case. Essentially the story was the same. George had taken a less prominent part, Olive substantially more. The information which Jack had given his investors was more complicated, not easy to contradict by a single fact; but several men attacked it piece by piece. Jack had asked advice about the business from a man who ran a hostel himself in another part of the country; the accounts he had given second-hand of this interview were different from the other’s remembrance of it. The statistics of visitors to the farm before 1929 were compared – though here there were some uncertainties – with those given by George and Jack to several witnesses.
At lunch time I said to George: ‘If we defend it today – it is bound to go for trial.’
He argued bitterly, but his reason was too strong in the end.
‘You’d better play for safety,’ he said. ‘Though I still insist there are overwhelming advantages in getting it wiped off now.’
‘If we try that,’ I said, ‘there’ll be a remand for a week or two. We shall have to show our hand. And they’ll still send the case on.’
‘If these magistrates were trained as they ought to be,’ said George, ‘instead of amateurs who are feeling proud of themselves for doing their civic duty, we could fight it out.’
He turned away. ‘As it is, you’d better play for safety.’
I told Eden and Hotchkinson. Eden said: ‘I always thought you’d take the sensible view before it was too late.’
When the prosecution’s case was finished I made the formal statement that there was no case to go before the jury, but that the nature of the defence could not be disclosed.
The three were committed for trial at the next assizes; bail was renewed for each of them in the same amounts.
29: Newspapers Under a Reading Lamp
THE local papers were lying on a chair in Eden’s dining-room when I got back from the court. Under the bright reading lamp, their difference of colour disappeared – though I remembered from childhood the faint grey sheen of one, the yellow tinge in the other. On both of the front pages, the police court charge flared up.
There was a photograph of Olive. ‘Miss Calvert, a well-known figure in town social circles, the daughter of the late James Calvert, J P’… ‘Mr Passant, a qualified solicitor and a lecturer in the Technical College and School of Art’…a paragraph about myself. The reports were fair enough.
Everything in them would inevitably have been recorded in any newspaper of a scandal in any town. They were a highest common factor of interest; they were what any acquaintance, not particularly friendly or malign, would tell his friends, when he heard of the event. But it was because of that, because I could find nothing in the reports themselves to expend my anger on, that they brought a more hopeless sense of loneliness and enmity.
‘Allegations against Solicitor.’ The pitiful inadequacy of it all! The timorous way in which the news, the reporters, the people round us, we ourselves (for the news is merely our own voice) need to make shapes and counters out of human beings in order not to endanger anything in ourselves. George Passant is not George Passant; he is not the man rooted in as many complexities as we are ourselves, as bewildering in action and yet taking himself as much for granted as we do ourselves; he is not the man with his own private history, desires, mannerisms, perversities like our own, cowardice and braveries, odd habits of mind different from ours but of the same family, delights and, like us all, private oddities in love – a man of flesh and bone, as real as ourselves. He is not that; if he were, our own identity and uniqueness would have gone.
To most of the town tonight George is ‘a solicitor accused of fraud’. ‘I hope they get him’; a good many men, as kind-hearted as any of us can ever be, said at the time that I was reading. We are none of us men of flesh and bone except to ourselves.
Should I have had that reflection later in my life? Maybe I should have thought it over-indulgent. For in time behaviour took on a significance to me at least as great as inner nature. It was a change in me: not necessarily an increase in wisdom, but certainly in severity: a hardening: not a justification, but a change.
Excusing myself from dinner, I went to George’s. He was alone listening to the wireless by the fire. ‘Hallo,’ he said. His cheeks were pale, and the day’s beard was showing. He seemed tired and lifeless.
‘I didn’t know whether anyone would come round,’ he said.
Jack and Olive entered as we were sitting in silence. Although there was a strained note in hi
s laugh, Jack came as a relief.
‘We’d better do something,’ he said. ‘It isn’t every day one’s sent for trial–’
‘You fool,’ cried Olive and put her arm round his waist.
Soon the room was crowded. Roy came in, Daphne, several of those I had seen at the farm in September. They had made a point of collecting here tonight. George whispered to Daphne for a while, and then, as the others addressed him with a pretence of casualness, he said: ‘I didn’t expect you all.’ He was embarrassed, uncontrollably grateful for the show of loyalty.
Jack laughed at him. ‘Never mind that. We’ve got to amuse them now they’re here. This has got to be a night.’
A girl replied with a sly, hungry joke. There was a thundery uneasiness. The air was full of the hysteria of respite from strain, friendliness mixed with the fear of persecution and the sting of desire. We left the room, and packed into Olive’s car and Roy’s and another young man’s. In the early days none of us thought of owning a car. We were poorer then; but now even the younger members of the group were not willing to take their poverty so cheerfully for granted.
We drove to a public house outside the town. The streets were still shining with the lights of Christmas week; a bitterly cold wind blew clouds across the sky; the stars were pale. As Olive drove us past the last tramlines, she took a corner very fast, swerved across the road, so that for a second we were blinded in a headlight, and then brought us away by a foot – a flash of light and the road again.
‘Silly,’ Olive cried.
In this mood, I thought, she could kill herself without it being an accident. Once or twice in our lives, we all know times when some part of ourselves desires to turn the wheel into a crash; just as we shiver on a height, feel the deathwish, force ourselves from the edge.
At the public house they were quickly drunk, helped by their excitement; Olive and Jack danced on the bar floor, a rough whirling apache dance. Everyone was restless. As the night passed, some of them drove to another town, but before midnight almost the entire party had gathered in Rachel’s flat.
‘They can’t do much harm now,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s a good job there’s somewhere safe for them to come.’ The flat took up the top storey of an unoccupied house near the station. Rachel had become secretary of her firm, and it was her luxury to entertain George’s friends, while she watched them with good-natured self-indulgence.
Olive and I stayed in the inner room. Through the half-open sliding doors we saw some of the girls and heard George’s voice throwing out drunken and passionate praise. Jack came to Olive.
‘When are we going home?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. She was smiling at him. Her words were as full of excitement as George’s. ‘You want to stay, don’t you?’
He laughed – but suddenly I felt that he had become dependent on her. He went back, and from our sofa she could see him caressing a girl, and at the same time attracting the attention of the room.
Olive’s eyes followed him.
‘I don’t mind that as much as I did once,’ she said to me. She added: ‘He isn’t as drunk as the rest of us. He never has liked drinking, you know. He’s as – temperate as Arthur. It’s queer they both should be.’ She went on talking quickly about Morcom, among the noise of the other room.
‘You know,’ she went on, ‘I never felt he was such a strong man as the others did. I liked him, of course.’ Then she said: ‘He wasn’t my first lover, perhaps you don’t know that. You knew me best when I was still frightened of my virginity, didn’t you? Strange how strong that was. But it wasn’t strong enough–’ She looked into the room with a half-smile. ‘Jack seduced me one night–’
‘When?’ I had not known.
‘Before my father died.’
‘Were you attached to Jack, then? I didn’t think–’
‘I was always fond of him, of course. But not in the way that’s got hold of me since,’ she said. ‘No, it just happened – we met in London somehow. He never was a man to fail for want of trying. I had one or two weekends with him, afterwards. At odd times. You know how erratic he used to be. It didn’t matter much, just for once he’d think it might be a good idea.’
‘And you?’
‘Sometimes I refused. In the end, I was driven back, though. I suppose one’s always driven back. Then I didn’t see him for a long time.’
‘What about Arthur, then?’
‘I’d thought a lot of him. I’d heard from him all the time we were away. Then when I came back, he wanted me more than ever. Just then I didn’t see why not.’
‘She paused. ‘You’ve no idea how hard a time it was. He was jealous, madly jealous at times. Of anyone I seemed to like. And I couldn’t help it, I kept playing on it. There were times when he was so jealous that he only got any rest when we were sleeping together. I drove him to that. He wanted me not really to make love – just to be sure of me. And I couldn’t help the little hints, that would set him off tearing himself with suspicion–’
I know,’ I said.
She said: ‘He used to treat me rough now and then. I didn’t mind that, sometimes I want it. You’ve guessed that, haven’t you? But even then I couldn’t believe the will was there.’ She went on: ‘We didn’t reach happiness. We both deteriorated, we were both worse people. Counting it all up, I don’t know who got hurt more. I can’t bear to think of his life just then; jealousy going on and on. It was like that in the old days, of course. Funny that he was always more jealous of Jack than anyone else. Even when there was no reason for it in the world.’
And so you left him and went to Jack?’ I said.
It was bound to hurt him – more than if I had gone to anyone else,’ she said. ‘But that had nothing to do with it. I tell you, I was really in love for the first time in my life.’ She added: ‘You’ve seen me with Jack. I want you to tell me that I’m not deceiving myself.’
I know you love him–’
But you think it isn’t simple – even now?’ She broke out. ‘I’ll confess something. When I went to Jack – I was certain that I belonged to him – I still wondered whether it was because of Arthur. That kept coming back. You imagine, it came back when Jack was after a new girl, when I wanted him and felt ashamed of myself. But I’m certain that I belong to him more than ever. It would have happened, if I’d never let Arthur come near me. I know it isn’t simple, it isn’t just a love affair. I expect he would prefer to have picked up one of those girls in there. I’ve had too many nights when I’ve wanted to break it off – and still been making plans for keeping him. But neither of us had any choice–’
Olive’s nerves were tightened with fatigue, fear, the laughs of hysterical enjoyment from the outer room. But she was exhilarated by putting Jack off, sitting within a few yards of his drunken party, and then confiding how much she needed him. She had thrown off any covering of self-pity, however. She seemed stronger than any of us. She was still cherishing some petty sufferings, as she had always done. Her longing for humility was real, but it sprang from the depth of her intense spiritual pride. No one could have mistaken – under the surface of her restless nervousness, full of the day’s degradation – still warmed and roused by Jack’s voice, tired as she was – that she was speaking from an inner certainty of herself.
If he quits before the trial, mind you, Lewis–’ she began.
I exclaimed.
You know that he’s thought of that?’
Of course I know,’ said Olive. ‘I’m not blind when I love. He’s thought of getting abroad. On the whole, I don’t think he’ll try.’
If he did?’
I should run after him. As soon as he cricked his finger. Whether he cricked his finger or not.’
I thought of George’s safety: when she asked, ‘How easy is it – for us to get abroad?’ I kept the details out of my answer.
Just then I heard George’s voice above the rest. The partition had slid further back, and from our room we could see him; he was half-lying on a sofa with Daphne on his knee, one arm round her; in the other hand he held a glass. He had begun to sing at the top of his voice, so violently his hand shook and the spirit kept spurting out.
Daphne jumped from his knee, and stood behind the sofa, trying to quieten him. He sang on: the words were so loud that I could not disentangle them, but it sounded like one of his father’s hymns.
There’s George,’ said Olive.
She watched him.
Some people once thought there might be something between us. They were stupid. We’ve never had the slightest feeling for each other.’ She went on: ‘I know what you were afraid of a minute ago. If Jack flew, I should be ready to desert George. That’s true. Yet he’s been close to me – in a way I’ve never understood.’
She got up, and walked into the other room. Some of them looked in Jack’s direction, expecting her to go there. But she went and stood by George. I had not seen her touch him, not once in those years.Now she dropped on her knees by the sofa, and took his hand in hers.
30: George’s Diary
I left them at three o’clock. Some hours later, when I was still in bed, a telephone message came from the hospital: would I go to the children’s clinic at once? Morcom was on duty there, he urgently wanted to see me. The streets were filling up as I went out; out of the shops, women bustled by, their cheeks pink in the frost. The indifference of the scene, the comfort, like a Breughel picture, only brought out my anxiety. It was an actual relief to see Morcom’s face, meeting me with a look of question and acute strain.
He could ask nothing; a nurse was in the room, and a batch of boys, round the age of twelve or so. As I watched, it was his gentleness which fascinated me. They responded to him immediately, with shrill, high, squealing laughs. With the nurse he was sharply efficient: but, as he talked to the boys, his manner became natural and self-effacing, so that they gathered round him, their nervousness gone, chaffing him. Some of them had noticed his pallor: ‘Have you got a headache, Mr Morcom?’