Trial of Passion

by William Deverell

“Mr. Beauchamp,” says Charles, “I’m tremendously honoured. I’ve heard so much about you. Actually, I was at one of your trials — “

  “We’ll have time later for the passing of compliments. You don’t mind hopping in the back?”

  Charles and Paula look at the truck, look at me. They are deciding that I am eccentric. Perhaps I ought to have brought the Rolls.

  Augustina climbs in beside me. “Love this truck. I love it. You’re looking great, Arthur. I thought you’d be a wreck. I mean, I heard . . . about you and your wife. Sorry. What can I say?”

  “I feel fine, Augustina.”

  “Marriage is such a rotten institution anyway, I think. Never made it that far.” She sighs. “I never will. This case a winner, Arthur?”

  “Normally I’d say chances were excellent. But we can’t put O’Donnell on the stand.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  En route home I explain the problem to her: his lies to everyone — including the police — about his not-so-knightly behaviour with Kimberley, lies that severely compromise any defence that the woman consented.

  “He went to great pains to destroy evidence: he burned the sheets between which they frolicked. He lied to the investigating officer, denied intercourse. If we call him as a witness, he will be forced to admit to these untruths, and the Crown will have a field day. The jurors will ask themselves: Do we believe the candidly open complainant or the admitted liar?”

  “Arthur, if he doesn’t answer her charges, the jury is going to wonder why. They’ll want an explanation — you know, for the bruises and the lipstick.”

  “Quite true. The defence will be difficult.”

  “Unless you can trap her into a lie.”

  “That may be a Herculean task, my dear.”

  We ride in silence, Augustina watching the scenery roll by.

  “Not much happens here, I guess. Do you ever get bored?”

  “Only between crises.”

  The latest of which is still unfolding in my yard, where Stoney is practising his own peculiar form of bondage — he is tangled in his ropes high up the cedar tree, which was to be the anchor for the damaged alder. Somehow he has managed to loop one of his legs to a dead branch. Dog is at the base of the tree, holding one end of the rope and calling up instructions.

  My passengers alight and stare wordlessly at this scene, perhaps thinking I have arranged some mild entertainment for the morning. I offer a half-hearted explanation about the prospect of my house going the way of my former veranda should the alder tree plummet onto the roof.

  “Please join me in my office. I have told my secretary we’re not to be disturbed.”

  I remove my guests from the danger zone, leading them to the beach — the forecast has promised a sunny day in the wake of last night’s storm. We comfortably array ourselves on the bleached driftwood logs that are piled like benches.

  “Well, this is sure different,” says Charles Stubb. “It’s really odd to see you like this, Mr. Beauchamp, because last time I caught your act you were in your silks. That doctor you defended last year? A bunch of us students took a field trip. Your speech to the jury — I’m telling you, it had me trembling.”

  “It was that bad.”

  “Oh, God, no, it was —”

  “Cease and desist, Charles, I’m embarrassed. Now, you apparently have some something to tell us.” Augustina brings out pen and notepad.

  “Well, Paula here does. I pretty well said my piece at the preliminary hearing.”

  Yes, this floppy-eared young man was a solid rock of support for his beloved acting dean. My impression is that he has been prevailing on his girlfriend to aid the cause.

  “But Paula was never called at the prelim.”

  “I can speak for myself, Charles.”

  “Sure. You explain it.”

  Paula pauses, lights a cigarette. She is nineteen, small-boned, attractive, and soft-spoken. A badge is pinned to her khaki shirt that says simply, “Equality.” Doubtless a radical of sorts.

  “I don’t feel good about this, Mr. Beauchamp. I sort of feel I’m on the wrong side somehow. I think I’d better tell you — I was assaulted once myself. Romance rape, I guess you call it. I’m definitely not into protecting Professor O’Donnell if he did it.”

  “If he didn’t do it, you wouldn’t want to see him wrongfully jailed.”

  “No, I guess you’re right.”

  “That’s why she —”

  “Never mind, Charles.” Paula seems the dominant figure here.

  I pack a wad of tobacco into the bowl of my ancient Peterson bent. “Have you been interviewed by the prosecutor yet, Paula?”

  “An officer came by for a few minutes. He didn’t take any notes. I have an appointment to see Ms. Blueman. I don’t know what to tell her “

  “The truth. Just as I hope to hear it”

  “Okay, well, I don’t know Kimberley Martin. I’m in arts. I’d met a few of Charles’s friends in law school, but not her. And the night of the law-school dance .. . Well, frankly I was confused. For a while I thought she and Mr. O’Donnell were going together. I didn’t even know she was his student.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “Oh, just the casual way they interacted, like they’d known each other a long time. The way they joked and touched each other. I was thinking: Do they live together? I’d heard he wasn’t married.”

  “Did you have a sense that one was making advances to the

  other?”

  “She was all over him,” Charles says.

  “He was giving her attention, Charles. It’s something quite normal that men often do. I really hate getting involved in this trial, Mr. Beauchamp, but this has been grinding away at me a lot.”

  “Well, you tell me about it and let us see where we go from there.”

  “Egan Chornicky had a couple of grams of cocaine with him that night.”

  “I think I heard something about that.”

  “And I, ah, I had a couple of lines.”

  “I see. Where did you consume these lines?”

  “I got a kind of hand signal from Egan, and I followed him down into a little rumpus-type room in Professor O’Donnell’s basement and . . . we did the dust. The coke. And . . .”

  “And?”

  “Kimberley came down and joined us.”

  I puff my pipe and ponder this. “She partook?”

  “A couple of fat ones. And it was high quality. I do it once in a while, a little dope. It’s no big deal. I’m a rec user.”

  “I don’t approve,” says Charles. “It’s her business.”

  “Kimberley was already loaded. She’d had quite a few drinks.”

  “And did you notice if this drug had any effect on her?”

  “More animated, I guess, than she was before. Louder. Pushy. Got everyone up performing parts. She was overacting, I thought. She thinks pretty well of herself. I’m sorry, but that was my impression. But then . . . half an hour into this she just fell asleep . . . well, I didn’t believe it at all. Coke’s a truck-driver’s drug. You can’t sleep.”

  The song of a chainsaw intrudes.

  “We will continue this conversation.”

  I abandon my guests to return to the job site. Dog is working at the alder while Stoney stands by, testing the tautness of lines strung to cedar tree and garage post. They quiver like bowstrings.

  As the chainsaw cuts, the tree shudders, then leans ever so slightly towards its intended trajectory, the driveway.

  “Timber!” Stoney yells.

  But the tree does not fall. Now I can se
e that Dog is having trouble with the chainsaw, and its roar suddenly abates. I hear the words, “It’s pinched.”

  I venture closer, but Stoney warns me away. “Better stay back, Mr. Beauchamp, we got a chain caught here. Trunk is severed right through, but she’s still standing. Don’t know how, but that’s the way it is. Okay, Dog, let’s ease off on one of these ropes. We’ll let her down gently, Mr. Beauchamp, neat as a pin.”

  Though I was never much of a student of physics, I have a sense of something amiss in the configurations of tree and fastening posts, and when Stoney and Dog play out one of the ropes, the stricken alder tree does a slow, grotesque pirouette, falling as it turns.

  It collapses onto my garage and, with a great clatter of splintered wood, caves the roof in.

  I stoke my pipe and fire it up again. I blow a perfect smoke ring. I watch it wobble and lose its shape.

  I join Stoney and Dog at a window of the garage. The roof of the Rolls has managed to hold up fairly well, but the windshield has popped. An entire can of green paint has spilled on the hood.

  After what seems a very long while, Stoney says, “Little paint and bodywork and she’s good as new. You defend me on that weed charge, I’ll do it for free.”

  Though I emphatically decline the offer, I can’t help but admire his gall. I leave them to clean up the rubble. I return dolefully to my guests.

  After their interviews are done, Charles and Paula, perhaps to escape the continuing embarrassment of my sulking company, decide to walk to the ferry. Augustina stays — carefully avoiding topics that cause pain, such as alder trees and Phantom v’s — and instead rambles on about the O’Donnell case.

  “He gives them taxi fare,” she says. “They all take off. They leave Kimberley behind. I’ll just bet that Mr. Goody Two-Shoes Charley Stubb knew they were going to make out. He could have removed the temptation, but he probably wanted to be able to hold something over the professor. Feels guilty now, that’s why he’s being so helpful.”

  “Does cocaine — with some people — cause them to go over the edge? I don’t presume you’re an expert.”

  “I don’t think so. But maybe. I’ll do some reading.”

  Good afternoon, Jonathan.

  You’ve cut your hair, Jane. I like it.

  Different look. There’s a current trendy theory it alters personality. New look, new persona.

  It’s so short. Makes you seem younger.

  Thank you. You look much better yourself these days. Jonathan . . . look, let me say something at the outset: I was upset last time you were here. I wasn’t in very good form. I’d like to blame it on PMS or something facile like that, but I was just bloody taken aback when you admitted you had lied to me. I have to get that out of the way.

  I deserved it.

  Okay. So I want to ask you: Are there any other secrets?

  Um, no, Jane, there aren’t.

  Jonathan, how many relationships have you had? With women?

  Do you have affairs with men?

  Of course not. We’re not counting women I’ve merely dated.

  We are not counting one-night stands.

  I’m not very good at keeping relationships going, Jane, can’t seem to find the right woman.

  Well, that puts the blame squarely where it lies, doesn’t it? It’s their fault.

  I’ve never lived with anyone. I’m not very good at love affairs. My longest relationship? About seven months.

  Who was that?

  Part-time lecturer in the fine arts department. That was a couple of years ago. A sort of bohemian painter. Exotic woman. I think I like exotic women. Actually, there’s something of that quality about you. That’s not a come-on.

  Really?

  Yes.

  It was just a compliment?

  I suppose you think I’m a bit of a womanizer.

  I’m more interested in your self-analysis, Jonathan.

  Is there something horribly dysfunctional about being attracted to women? I’m single. Married rules don’t apply.

  Sure. But you’re not a very successful womanizer, are you? You’re attractive enough. You’re bright, you’re engaging when you want to be, you have this world-weary sense of anomie that appeals to many women. But it only adds up to a bunch of occasional dates and seven months with a bohemian artist. Isn’t that about it?

  I guess a phobia about marriage runs in the family. My brother never married. And you know about my father. He’s on his fifth try.

  The sins of your father are not hereditary.

  Maybe I’m afraid I’ll be like him, promiscuous in marriage, chasing after younger and younger women, thinking I’m thirty when I’m seventy. Or taking a fling at marriage, and failing miserably and hurting a good woman — someone like Mom. The old warhorse never found a woman he ever loved. And neither, I’m afraid, will I.

  You don’t think you’re capable of love?

  What’s the diagnosis? I’m emotionally castrated, aren’t I? Obviously unable to relate to women on any committed basis. I consider them mere objects and playthings, don’t I?

  Stop making up false images of yourself. I’m not saying that. I think you’re perfectly capable of love. I think you also may be afraid of it. I’d like to know why.

  Fucked-up childhood.

  That’s often such an easy excuse, Jonathan.

  We had such a strict moral code, except when it applied to my father. I suppose the seminal event in our loving relationship was when I walked into the bedroom and caught him and Mother in the act.

  How old were you?

  Six. He spanked me raw. I was seven when I was graduated to the whip. Sign of manhood. If it was good enough for Viscount Caraway, it was good enough for his sons. He got whipped as his forefathers got whipped. I can hear him carrying on: “Trouble with Charles and Diana and that lot, no one’s ever applied a nice bit of leather to them.”

  Did he abuse your mother?

  He never raised a finger. It was his whoring around that tore up the marriage.

  Yet you sound ambivalent towards your father. I used to be angry at him. Because of his strictness?

  No. For ignoring me. Christmas cards and the odd letter, that was all. For almost twenty years. But there was a kind of rapprochement — after Mother died. He tracked me down when I was in London, asked me up to his club. Turns out he’s been following my career, had both my books. I remember, we were laughing about the most recent cabinet sex scandal. Little did we both realize . . . He couldn’t figure out why I turned out so well while brother Bob became a lazy playboy. Bob’s one of those hilarious Brit snots. You have to like him.

  Have you heard from your father since this business with Kimberley?

  No. I hate to imagine what he thinks. They’ll be talking at the club. “I say, old boy, sounds like something out of the sodding House of Commons.”

  Do you think your father ever loved you?

  I don’t know.

  Did he ever say so?

  Of course not. Wasn’t done, you know.

  How do you feel about that?

  I don’t have any feelings about it.

  Bullshit.

  On this last Monday of July, the day when justice pays its bimonthly visit to Garibaldi Island, the weather continues uncommonly hot. The grassy spaces outside the community hall — our jury-rigged courthouse — have been toasted sere by unrelenting Apollo, who rides naked and high in the heavens. Though I arrive late, I see no sign of plaintiff Margaret Blake.

  What must she think of me now? That ugly episode with Emily Lemay is all about the island, magnified, twisted
into many farcically obscene versions. I disgust Mrs. Blake. I am the lecher who lives down the road. My hopes for comity with the woman — and I expect nothing more — have been dashed.

  Inside the hall, profusely sweating, fuelling himself with sugared doughnuts, Not Now Nelson Forbish of the Echo sits at a small table. About twenty folding chairs — several of them occupied — are set haphazardly about. Near the front is that miscreant Bob Stonewell, alias Stoney, toppler of trees and garages. I’d forgotten: He faces trial today as an accused cannabis gardener. His case has just begun, and on the witness stand is his arresting officer, Constable Horace Pound, the lawman who controls crime on Garibaldi every second Tuesday of the month. He is a serious young man with a permanent frown.

  The circuit judge for these islands is his honour Timothy Wilkie, judge of the provincial court, a former small-town Lions Clubber whom I recall as lazy and slow of thought. He recognizes me and nods, but almost surreptitiously, as if embarrassed to see me as a common defendant in his court. He is in his shirt sleeves — the metal roof of the building radiates heat like a convection oven. But Constable Pound is bravely uniformed.

  “Upon arriving at the premises, which I have visited on several previous occasions, I observed numerous scrap vehicles as well as a workshed and a partly built house with only one room closed in. I ascertained that no one was present in the woodshed, though I noted the presence within it of a hoe and some garden tools, and fertilizer. I then proceeded to the house.”

  Why do so many officers tend to talk in this stilted foreign tongue? What fussy master of the particular and the correct trains them in their speech? I can picture the ROMP instructor who is charged with the teaching of strangled English: stern, incorruptible, and humourless.

  “Did you have a search warrant?” the prosecutor asks. She seems too young to have had much experience.

  “I was in possession of same based on information received. On proceeding to the front door, I knocked, and upon obtaining no response, I walked around to the side of the house, where I observed a garden hose attached to an outdoor faucet on the wall. I followed this hose to where water was running through it into a shallow ditch in which twenty-three items were growing which I recognized as being marijuana.”