Trial of Passion

by William Deverell

  “You’re too kind, Arthur. I look like one of the walking dead. Sorry, but I just had to talk to you.” Jonathan seems fit, but has a tormented look about his dark and deep-set eyes. He is restive, agitated. I detect a faint odour of stale spirits on his breath.

  “Well, gentlemen, I suggest we repair to the manse. We will have tea and tour the grounds.”

  I spy Margaret Blake standing outside her truck in earnest conversation with Nelson Forbish. The roly-poly newshound spots me and chugs in my direction.

  “Mr. Beauchamp, wonder if I can get your reaction on being sued.” He is munching a large, sticky chocolate bar.

  “Not now, Nelson”

  “Sued?” says Bully. He senses scandal.

  “A minor altercation with a neighbour.”

  “Margaret Blake says —”

  “As I explained to you, Nelson, it is quite improper to discuss a matter that is before the courts”

  “Yeah, but, Mr. Beauchamp, I have a duty as a journalist, it’s a thing I can’t cover up.”

  Bully blanches. “What in heaven’s name is this, Arthur? What’s to be covered up?”

  Forbish is relentless. “It’s about him and a pig called Betsy.”

  “A pig” says Bully. “Did you say a pig?”

  “Calm down, Bully,” I say. “Restrain impure thoughts” I am one of the few in the firm who doesn’t have to measure his words with Bullingham. “A minor road accident. A pig in a poke. Two titans are about to clash in a court of law.”

  I try to steer my visitors up the hill towards the parking lot, but Forbish keeps apace. “So what’s up? I see you got some guests here.”

  I wearily halt the procession. Civil behaviour demands introductions. Bully, ever polite, extends his hand to the reporter, then quickly withdraws it, and stares with repulsion at the chocolate that stains his palm.

  “O’Donnell,” says Forbish. “You’re that professor” He seems in awe.

  Jonathan reacts oddly; the soft, resigned laugh of one who is surrounded and must surrender. “Yes, I’m that professor.”

  “Please, Nelson. Not now.”

  “Sure like to do an interview.”

  “Nelson, not now!” Patience has flown, and Forbish scuttles off in the wake of my wrath.

  Hubbell and Gowan are stifling laughter, but their smiles are replaced by looks of consternation as we arrive at my rusting, purple half-ton truck.

  “God almighty,” says Hubbell. “What manner of beast is this?”

  “A courtesy vehicle. Bit of a boneshaker, sorry about that”

  “Arthur,” says Bully, “are you sure this machine is safe?” He looks intently inside the cab as if to satisfy himself the truck has a steering wheel and brake pedal.

  “Jump in, Bully. No, this door, the other doesn’t open. The others will have to ride in the back.”

  “Surely that’s against the law,” says Bully. He is worried now that the firm may be disgraced with a traffic ticket.

  “There is no law on Garibaldi Island,” I say, “except on the second Tuesday of every month”

  Gowan, Hubbell, and Jonathan climb over the tailgate and sit upon some tires I keep there for the many island hitchhikers, and we bounce off to Potter’s Road. Yes, I will give this mob of city slickers a pungent taste of Garibaldi. Perhaps they will wish they’d never come — there are some who simply cannot handle the stress of country living.

  “We took you back in the firm, Arthur.” Bully has to shout, a birdlike screech above the unmuffled engine roar. “When you hit the rocks, we were there. We gave you the helping hand.”

  Bullingham has slid low in his seat, as if seeking refuge. Perhaps he does not wish to be seen.

  “It was big of you, Bully.”

  “I’d like to think we gambled a bit on you, Arthur.” He is referring to my hiatus from the firm a decade ago: two years spent on skid road, defending my fellow derelicts. The office took me back when I agreed to join AA.

  “And it paid off handsomely, I’m sure you’ll agree.” I need not remind him of the considerable retainers I’ve since brought into the office.

  Bully realizes I have a thin sense of gratitude and resets his sails for an assault on my pride.

  “Staying power, that’s what makes the world move forward. When I was sixty-two, I felt I was a young man. I remember thinking there was so damn much yet to accomplish. Don’t believe a lawyer comes into his prime until his sixties. What a waste, Arthur, what a waste.”

  Small green swallows flip and dive above roadside hedges of wild roses, and I am overcome with nature’s perfumed scent. We enter the atrium of a green cathedral and proceed up the aisle beneath a steeple of giant cedars, their fronds dancing in the breeze. A deer starts, then bounds into the white-blossoming salal. Look around you, Bullingham, see the appurtenances of my wasted life.

  Bully continues his whining, hortatory discourse. “We do a good deal of business with the university, Arthur. The Faculty Association refers its members to us. We could lose them. They might go down the street to Hansworth and Company.” An appeal now to guilt, duty, and obligation. “I should tell you, while we have this moment together, that O’Donnell doesn’t seem very happy with Cleaver.”

  “Nonsense. Gowan is an astute counsel.” I see him in my rear-view mirror, squatting uncomfortably on a tire, a thin-featured man, a pencil moustache beneath a narrow nose, hard-eyed and slim-lipped.

  “Oh, he’s quick of mind,” Bully says. “Doesn’t have the common touch, though. Too abrasive.”

  “May I make a suggestion then, Bully. Perhaps a woman barrister . . “

  “No one experienced enough. Can’t take the chance.”

  But whose fault is that? The firm of Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham remains for the most part a male bastion, and has not advanced its women far up the ladder.

  I wave cheerily at a passing motorist and take a turn past Stoney’s yard and its many wheeled hulks. Now I watch for four-footed jaywalkers as we rumble past Mrs. Blake’s gate. My skewed house comes into view, my imperfect, cosy palace.

  “No, Bully, I should as soon jump into a vat of boiling oil as enter a courtroom one more time.”

  Ah, yes, I fear the firm’s venture will end dismally. Jonathan O’Donnell has yet to look me in the eye. Nor had Annabelle when she told me she had recently “bumped” into him downtown. Was the bump pre-arranged?

  I would not decline his retainer, of course, for any such base reason as jealousy. That debilitating disease no longer infects me. And thoughts of Annabelle have ceased to paralyse my mind. I hardly think of her . . . hardly ever.

  Gowan, I can’t rid myself of the picture: the bishop and the screaming painted nude in a ridiculous tie. “He’s going to kill me” — is that what she said? Is it possible she was just having a nightmare? A good old-fashioned delirium tremens?

  The tie’s mine. A birthday gift from a prankster friend on faculty. I have to assume Kimberley had been poking into all my drawers — it was underneath my underwear and socks. She’s an outrageous snoop. Before I forget, earlier she ordered a special drink. I had this Martell Cordon Bleu, and she wanted to mix some Benedictine with it. Apparently some people do this sort of thing. Anyway, she had quite a splash of it in a large brandy glass. A few inches.

  So she came clumping down the stairs in my size-ten oxfords, white shirt, suit, tie. I didn’t know what to think. Some kind of fetish? I remember wondering if she was also wearing my Stanfield briefs. Then she was waving her arms and shouting, “I am a soldier! I will not be thought of as a woman! I will not dress as a woman!” I got the joke: Saint Joan as medieval cross-dresser.

  We laughed. Frankly, I just split my sides. Then she started performing this hideous imitation of me. God, do I sound that churlish in the lecture theatre? But I guess she had me down pat, my inflections, my patronizing insolence. It went something like: “My name is O’Donnell and I’m here to ram some property law into the yawning vacuum between your ears. Who wants to tell me wh
at the Magna Carta was all about? Anyone who says human rights, you’re out of here. You there, Miss Martin, when you’ve finished tidying your hair, tell me about the early English land laws. . . .”

  I felt — it was odd — naked. She’d taken on my clothes, my persona. And to be incredibly honest there was a kind of sexual tension in the air. You would have to be a decaying tree stump not to feel it.

  But I was damned if I was going to give in to it. Academia is strewn with minefields these days; you tiptoe around for fear of having your legs blown off. They shut down the whole damn political science department because a few instructors used politically indiscreet lan-guage. Words. Bedding with a student (however sexually voracious she or he may be) is on a level these days with mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

  I’m sorry, I’m wandering. The subsequent events become a little foggy in my memory. People seemed to come and go. I put on some music, the Baroque Ensemble, I think. I know we carried on with the play. I was the inquisitor, demanding she repent. “Take off that impudent attire!” And then suddenly we all noticed Kimberley wasn’t responding. She’d passed out.

  When the taxi came I honestly assumed the others were going to arouse Kimberley and take her with them, but they didn’t. She looked such a rara avis lying there in my suit, but (I have to say) incredibly lovely, and she had this impish sleeping smile. Mischievous. I recall standing there, looking down upon her, wondering — what? Who she was, what fires had shaped her, what intriguing secrets did she hold.

  And then the last act is shrouded in an alcoholic haze. I know I found a sheet, and I carried her into the living room and I laid her — you will notice I have scratched that word out — placed her gently on the couch. Christ, Gowan, I know I’ll blurt out something asinine like that on the stand. I may as well just cop a plea.

  Anyway, I must have gone to bed. I don’t remember doing so.

  I hear horns hooting. I hear shouts of joy. A new year is born, squalling and wriggling, and gasping for air. Time to put on my paper hat. And take another cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.

  Yours despondently,

  Jonathan

  A chilly southeasterly wind is coming off the water, bringing clouds across the choppy bay, so after the obligatory tour of beach, orchard, and garden we assemble in my living room, where I ask my guests to be comfortable. Jonathan, who has been lugubrious and silent, plunges into my favourite chair, doing little to improve his desperate chances to win my favour.

  Exhausted from too much fresh air, Bullingham nestles into my old chesterfield as Hubbell and Gowan join me in the kitchen ostensibly to help boil water for tea.

  “Look, Arthur,” Gowan begins, “there’s been a bit of a rupture between O’Donnell and me. I don’t know what his problem is, I’m on top of it, had the provincial judge virtually licking my dick all through the prelim. Anyway, the professor and I have been having a little nose-to-nose combat, and, ah, he’s thinking of taking his trade elsewhere.”

  “He wants you, Arthur,” adds Hubbell, “that’s what he really wants. Hell, a week of your bloody valuable time is all we ask.”

  “It might not take more than a day,” Gowan says. “Case might not even have to go to trial. I mean it, the judge is in our back pocket. Impressed by Honourable Jonathan O’Donnell. Aristocrat. Son of a life peer.”

  I remain mute. From my refrigerator I bring out a bowl of my special peanut butter cookies.

  Hubbell takes over. “You see, Arthur, the preliminary continues next week. Set for two days. That … ah, what’s-her-name, Kimberley Martin, she’s the only witness left. There’s a feeling we could avoid a trial altogether if the girl is handled right. The provincial judge just might discharge him then and there.”

  I say wearily, “At preliminary, the judge must give benefit of the doubt to the Crown. Since he won’t hear any defence witnesses, how can he not send Jonathan to trial once she’s given her evidence?”

  “He could dismiss, Arthur, if the girl is … you know, damaged enough,” Hub says.

  “She’s seeing a shrink,” says Gowan. “I don’t think she’s very tightly wrapped, Arthur. You hear her tapes?”

  “I played them, yes.”

  “Yeah, and don’t you think she’s a few bricks short of a full load? If you could get her to collapse under the weight of her own lies, she might recant, and that’s an end of it. I could do it — I’d love to do it — but O’Donnell says he doesn’t want me to touch her. He’s also seeing a shrink. Guy needs a brain surgeon. A lobotomy.”

  “Arthur, it’s not as if it’s a consent defence,” says Hubbell. “I know you don’t like to take those. I’m with you on that. You know, prying into a woman’s sexual history, having to show she came across. But it’s not like that. O’Donnell didn’t do it.”

  “He never laid a finger on her, Arthur. She lied to keep her goddamn fiancé, it’s as obvious as a knock on the head”

  “I see. And why does our innocent paragon seem in such an abysmal funk?”

  “Wouldn’t you be depressed?” says Hubbell. “His whole career is on the line — whatever happens, win or lose, his name is scarred for life. He could have been dean. A Supreme Court judge. He’s smeared all over the press. He’s got feminist coalitions forming up against him.”

  “He’s become a symbol,” says Gowan. “Male power figure versus cowering, helpless female student.”

  “Ah, the kettle is boiling. Take up the tray, Hubbell. Those pickles are from the Koroluks, they live down by West Shore Road. This is goat cheese, from the Willinghams in Oyster Bay. The cookies come from my own oven.”

  On our return to the living room, we find Bully upright but snoozing on the worn chesterfield and Jonathan pacing morosely beside my wall of bookcases. His trousers pocket shows a pint-sized bulge — I have a trained eye for hidden bottles.

  I offer him a teacup. “It won’t bother me if you touch it up. Or I can get a glass.”

  He doesn’t blush, pulls his bottle out: Dewar’s, I remember it well. “Normally I only drink on weekdays,” he says. “Anyone care to celebrate with me?”

  Gowan declines, but Hubbell, after a glance at the sleeping Bullingham, says, “Sure you don’t mind, Arthur?”

  “Not at all,” I say heartily.

  “Just to be sociable.” Hubbell goes back to get a glass, but Jonathan merely pours a dollop into his tea.

  “You are well on your way, Jon.”

  “Oh, God, no, it’s only my third this morning.”

  “You’re becoming a problem drinker.”

  “I’m only an alcoholic when I drink, Arthur.”

  “He was pissed as a newt, for instance, on the very night in question,” says Gowan, his tone censorious. “Tippling away when he composed his statement to me.”

  Jonathan studies my dog-eared collection of poetry. “Show me anyone with a better reason.” He turns to me. “I never understood yours, Arthur. You had everything, fame, friends, future. I don’t have a future. I only have fame.”

  “You seem not to lack for friends. The entire populated universe has been over here to speak on your behalf.” For a moment, I ponder adding, “Annabelle, among them,” but restrain myself.

  Hubbell returns and pours a dram from the Dewar’s bottle into a glass — just as Bully opens his eyes. “A little early for that,” he says.

  I intercede. “Come now, Bully, it’s a weekend. Here, I poured you some tea.”

  “Arthur,” says Jonathan, “I just want to hear it from your own voice — why won’t you take my case?” “Because it’s too preposterous,” I say. “What do you mean?”

  “Sit down, Jonathan. No, please, take the club chair. Be comfortable.”

  I stare solemnly out the bay windows of my living room, where a calliope hummingbird samples the snapdragons in my window box, hovers briefly, then disappears in a wink. In the bay, a frothy surf, a family of little sandpipers pursuing the retreating waves, seeking the ocean’s leavings. My guests clink their cups an
d wait in silence for me to begin.

  “Bizarre,” I say, “the woman running off like that to the neighbour’s.”

  “Into the bosom of the Church of England,” says Jonathan. “Poor old Dr. Hawthorne. A lifetime of service to God doesn’t prepare you for streakers in the night.”

  “Otherwise a straightforward case. Your word against hers. No reason yours ought not be believed, is there?”

  “God knows.”

  “No proof of intercourse. No sperm, no semen stains. Yet . . . well, Jonathan, you act like a man already convicted.”

  He looks directly at me, then quickly away.

  “The accusation has driven you not just to drink but to shrink. This strikes me as an unlikely reaction. Anger, yes. A righteous anger might be appropriate. The anger of enraged innocence.”

  “I tried anger. Punched a hole in the closet door. It cost three hundred dollars to replace. Depression is cheaper. Arthur, my bloody career hangs in the balance.”

  “Ah, yes, and I sympathize. You enjoy teaching, and you are good at it. Popular with the students, that’s ninety per cent of the battle, I suspect.”

  “Helps.”

  I tear myself away from the window, and observe my associates shift noiselessly in their seats, their faces shining up at me, expectantly.

  “According to your account, you were particularly popular with Miss Martin.”

  “She seemed to have a shine for me.”

  “But at the same time were you not attracted to her?”

  “I’d prefer to put it more passively. I found her attractive.”

  “A traffic-stopper was the expression used, I believe. A traffic-stopper with a sense of humour. You enjoyed her company.”

  “Sure. Okay, I’m guilty of being human. Where are we going with this, Arthur? Is this some kind of cross-examination?”

  “Yes, perhaps it is. Before a jury of friends. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  Bully, our foreman, nods. They are on the witness’s side, eager to acquit.