Trial of Passion

by William Deverell

  “I’ll say you’re not the man you used to be. Grass. I gave that up at eighteen. Jesus, Dad, what do you think you’re doing, discovering the 1960s or something?”

  “How embarrassing.”

  “Well? Explain yourself.” But she finds it hard to be stern; she is laughing.

  “Caught in the act.”

  “I’ll say. Second childhood. Are you stoned right now?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, there’s something about you. You’re all so bright-eyed.”

  “I am happy for the first time in my life.” I light my pipe and blow a little smoke ring.

  “Since Mother left you. I always knew you’d be happier when you were free. Never thought you’d turn out like this. A post-generational, long-haired hippie freak.” But she is still grinning, happy for me. “I was shocked when I heard about it, her and that Roehlig, and then I thought, how wonderful, you are finally out from under her.”

  Abruptly she changes the subject, cross-examining me about Margaret, and though I respond evasively (I fear my daughter is not ready to hear her flower-child father has fallen in love), Deborah cuts to the quick.

  “Are you courting her?”

  Forbish rounds the bend, scratching his belly, heading for the appetizers.

  “Caught your dad there in a dark house with her last night.”

  “Dad!”

  I redden. “It was all quite proper, my dear. Candlelight dinner.”

  “Must’ve lasted a long time,” Forbish says. “Hear he didn’t get home till three in the morning.”

  “You rogue, Dad.” Deborah claps her hands in delight.

  Nicholas comes from the house with a portable phone: It’s Augustina.

  “Jonathan called in. He’s at his therapist’s office. Last-minute crisis counselling, I guess. He sounded pretty whacked out.”

  “Sober?”

  “I think so.”

  The tortured wretch has kept his bargain with me and earned his defence. Well, I will try to do him justice. (I am moving into trial mode, I can sense it.)

  Thanks for this. I’ll pay double overtime.

  It’s all right. I had nothing to do. I was thinking about you, actually. The trial tomorrow . . . Did you manage to get your sabbatical moved up?

  No. The headmaster gave me three weeks’ leave after a cheery speech of support. However, a careful reading between the lines tells me the leave will become permanent if I’m convicted. Jane, I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t think. It’s consuming me like some flesh-eating virus. Would you like me to prescribe more Valium?

  No, I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of going over the edge.

  Well, is it just the trial?

  Oh, God, it’s that, and it’s . . . Arthur Beauchamp won’t be putting me on the stand. It will be her evidence against my silence. The judge will tell the jury they must not read anything into my failure to testify. They will therefore read something into it. My guilt.

  Maybe Kimberley won’t be believed.

  She’ll turn the jury into a screaming lynch mob. She’s a brilliant actress, Jane. I’ve never once seen her flub a line. I saw her ghastly play four times. Two evenings, two matinées. I became an addict, the phantom of the opera, waiting and writhing until the next curtain opening. But as soon as the lights went down I went into a blank-eyed staring trance, missing every punchline, haunted, mesmerized by my tormentor. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It’s as if she’s cast a spell on me.

  The word obsession comes to mind.

  I don’t know. Maybe I’m trying to piece her together, seeking a clue why she’d do this to me.

  Another word is masochistic.

  Which brings us to . . . Look, Jane, there’s something I want to tell you, it’s really bothering me. It’s about . . . some of the sick stuff you’ve been trying to drag kicking and screaming from my psyche. I think I mentioned Dominique Lander to you, the woman I was seeing a few years ago.

  Yes, your Bohemian love affair.

  Bohemian? Hell, she’s from Transylvania. She’s a bloodsucking vampire — Steady.

  God, why is this happening to me? I don’t mind doing time nearly as much as being a laughingstock for the rest of my life.

  Tell me about Dominique Lander.

  A pagan princess. A hundred and eighty degrees removed from other women I’d known, beautiful, dark, haunted. Like her art. But intelligent. Devious, I didn’t know about until later. We carried on for half a year. Longer. But eventually I became, I don’t know, a little nervous about her. She was a clinger, she was like sticky gum, always there, demanding, talking about lifetime commitments.

  Which frightened you no end.

  I started avoiding her. I began seeing other women.

  Is that typically how you run away?

  Well, you have to understand, um, the sex was getting a little weird, too. That’s really the reason I started backing off. Lovers experiment, I suppose, and it can be fun for a while, it’s okay. You said so yourself. You prescribe it: creative role-playing. But this got really strange.

  Go on.

  She was into, ah . . .

  Yes?

  She’s going to be a witness, Jane. She’s going to say she and I were into, um, a sort of S and M thing. I see.

  And, uh, we were. Uh-huh.

  I guess it’s something I’ve been having a lot of trouble unloading on you.

  You’re telling me.

  It’s embarrassing.

  Talk about it.

  Okay . . . okay, here it all comes. We had this game, she liked me to tie her up. She was the slave and I was the master. A lot of bare-bottom spanking, and, ah, she liked me to force sex on her, that way, from behind. She would beg, plead, sometimes scream. She liked being whipped with a riding crop. This is hideous. I can’t . . .

  You didn’t enjoy it?

  I, ah . . .

  Well, can you answer me?

  I think I did. It . . . well, it extended things for me. Creative role-playing — that’s basically what we were doing, playing out our fantasies. I guess you’d call them sick.

  I don’t call them sick, Jonathan. Maybe not the role-playing I’d recommend.

  Why are you looking at me that way?

  Just shifting the paradigm a little bit. And did you ever change roles?

  Occasionally.

  Did you like being whipped?

  No, I … I don’t know.

  Did you prefer that to being the dominant party?

  You’re the analyst; you tell me.

  And these sessions gave you staying power?

  Kept me erect.

  A riding crop. Isn’t that what your father used on you?

  Yes . . .

  I’m sorry, Jonathan, I can’t hear what you’re saying. . . .

  Hated him.

  What?

  I hated him.

  But you also loved him.

  Aw, shit.

  Would you like some coffee? We have a lot of work to do today.

  PART THREE

  Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and value at a penny all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again: for us, when our brief light has set, there’s the sleep of perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses.

  CATULLUS

  I awake before dawn after dreams dimly recalled, but pulsing, erotic. I am confused: What is that distant electric buzz that confounds the stark silence I have grown so used to? I am in the city; it breathes raspy outside those windows.

  I feel buoyant, rested. I have slept well again. I rise and shower and dress, slip quietly from the house, and walk north to English Bay, to the long, flat beaches of Spanish Banks. I do my tai chi here on the sands of ebb tide, dancing barefoot as the eastern sky begins to colour: face east, raise both hands slowly, turn on the right hand, face north.

  North: I am at the centre of the compass of my trial. To the west, above the Point Grey cliffs, the campus and the law school. Facing me, the mountains of the No
rth Shore, dressed in a cloak of cloud. Just beneath those peaks, high in the British Properties, the abode of Clarence de Remy Brown. Lower down, the house of alleged shame where Jon O’Donnell restlessly sleeps. Not far to the east, the former atelier of Dominique Lander.

  And beyond, buried amidst those towers gleaming golden in the morning sun: the courts. Where all things will be decided. Where I must play my unwished for role: inquisitor at the auto-da-fé of Joan of Arc, her public burning. This saucy scamp is telling false — I have no choice but to believe that. She, not Jonathan, is the evildoer. I will not abide any other possibility. I must quell any doubts I harbour about his innocence.

  Yet I feel uneasy, lacking in confidence. Has the soft life of my island idyll caused me to lose the lust for victory? Formerly, I compensated for a career of impotence in bed with a show of virility in court. Ironically, have recent rigid stirrings in the night rendered me a less virile warrior for justice? I must be bloody, bold, and resolute.

  As I walk east — Locarno Beach, Jericho Park, Kitsilano Beach — my thoughts turn to Margaret, to my island, but as I tramp up Burrard Street Bridge, my other, sweeter world begins to melt away. As I find my way into the busy downtown streets, I feel myself begin to mutate into a previous life form. I am becoming a lawyer again.

  Roberto whirls dramatically about my unruly thatch with scissors and clippers, hair flying in all directions.

  “We don’t want to be frightening the jury, do we? Like some mad hermit just down from the hills. Fatherly, that’s how we want you. Kindly and wise. But a military cut to the beard — I call this creation the naval commander. We are sending messages of firmness. We are in control.”

  Augustina Sage stands by, absorbed in one of her briefs of law. Gowan Cleaver is pacing in the hallway outside. Three young articling students are also out there, with valises and bookbags. A limousine is parked out front.

  “Augustina, you must tell that mob to disperse. I don’t want the jury feeling the Crown is outnumbered, or that we’ve money coming out of our ears. And tell Gowan to get rid of the limousine. We will take a homely taxi.”

  She leaves to do this.

  “You see, the magic is working,” says Roberto. “We are in control.”

  He whirls me around to the mirror. Roberto has re-created me. Commander Beauchamp at the tiller of his leaky man-of-war.

  Now I am in my undershorts in the barristers’ changing room. I am putting on an iron-fresh white shirt with a wing-tip collar. I am slipping on my black vest. I am tying on my dickey. I am hoisting up my pinstripe pants, and fastening my suspenders to them — the belt which comes with these pants is meant for a certain former fattie. Finally I don my robe, and I am now in my silks, costumed for the play.

  My role, of course, being one of those comic-book heroes in tights and ceremonial capes. And suddenly I am feeling surges of a Batmaniacal strength. Perhaps the power of love is adding fuel to the adrenalin that courses through me in a courtroom. Omnia vincit amor.

  It is ten o’clock as I walk from the dressing room and down a hall empty but for a few lawyers scurrying to their courtrooms. I climb the stately wide staircases of the atrium-lobby to the fifth floor. And I stop as I turn a corner. A vast, milling throng is in the mezzanine seeking entry into this spectacle ad captandum vulgus: the prurient, the tantalized, and the merely curious. A flock of young people — probably law students. The Women’s Movement seems well represented. Reporters are having their credentials checked by Barney Willit, the brown-uniformed sheriff’s officer, so they can be assured of seats.

  “Morning, Mr. Beauchamp,” he says. “Sold-out house today. The judge wants everyone sorted out before he opens court. Jury panel’s in there now.”

  I peek inside at the backs of sixty heads, citizens called from home, office, and plant to do their democratic duty. Court staff but no lawyers. Where is Augustina, where the client?

  At the end of a hall, by the door to a witness room, I spy Kimberley Martin and Clarence de Remy Brown. Kimberley wears a blue, ankle-length outfit that looks both chic and chère, but she does not seem as blithe and bouncy as when last observed climbing from a hot tub. In fact, she looks spent, enervated, as she grips the arm of her fiancé. There are dark areas under her eyes. I had not expected she would be under so much stress — or is this a sensitive portrayal of the vandalized maid? Mr. Brown, with his cyanide-spill problems in South America, seems none too happy either. They are in close session with Patricia Blueman and her junior: Gundar Sindelar, a ten-year veteran, squat as a barrel, with the reputation of a pit bull.

  Ah, here comes Augustina Sage, up the stairs and weaving through the assemblage.

  “Jonathan is one floor down, watching a trial,” she says. “I think he was really whacked out after his session with his therapist yesterday. I hope he’s ready. Are you?”

  “Champing at the bit.”

  “Not in some kind of transcendental state of abandon? Did you bring her flowers?” She chucks me under the chin.

  “I’m preoccupied only with this trial,” I bluster, and quickly change the topic. “How are our chances of getting our hands on that lie detector test?”

  “It’s iffy. There’s that bad case in the Supreme Court.”

  “And Dominique Lander?”

  “Previous similar acts by a rape defendant are admissible to prove a consistent or unique pattern: Ontario Court of Appeal. We’re in trouble there.”

  “Is Miss Lander here?”

  “That’s her.”

  A pale, striking woman dressed in black, her features appear pencilled onto her face: a thin line of a mouth, the merest crescent moons for eyebrows. She is at the edge of the crowd, sketching on a large pad, and when she catches Augustina’s eye she nods and returns to her art. Augustina’s perception is probably accurate: She is a loose cannon and she is here to sink the Commander’s ship.

  “I’ll get Jonathan,” says Augustina.

  Court 55 has now been opened to the public, and is quickly filling. I make my way in, issuing loud good mornings, and banter a few moments with some of the court staff while I look over the prospective jurors. Canadian lawyers do not enjoy the American luxury of acquainting themselves with jurors through long, friendly cross-examinations; we know only names, addresses, and occupations. A barrister must have his senses tuned to the silent nuances: the smiles and frowns, the bold or timid stances, the presence or lack of eye contact.

  Which one is Hedy Jackson-Blyth, the feminist union leader? Gowan Cleaver has scrawled a big “No” against her name.

  Patricia Blueman plumps a heavy bookbag on her table. “Ready, Arthur?”

  “Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.” “

  “Means what?”

  “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

  Augustina leads in Jonathan O’Donnell, who seems inert, depressed. He is startled by my smile, my words of cheerful welcome, the vigour of my handshake. (These gestures are heartfelt: His spirits must be buoyed; but there is a cynical side to this — jurors watch lawyers for signs of caring, a belief in innocence.)

  I lead Jonathan to the prisoner’s dock behind the counsel tables. “Stand tall when you make your plea. Keep your voice firm.”

  Jonathan vents one deep sigh, then steps into the box.

  “I’ll fetch the judge,” says the court clerk.

  The fetching is quick — Wally Sprogue has been waiting in the wings for his grand entrance. He swaggers out, chest swelling under the red-sashed robe that denotes his recently elevated station: a showy display of inflated ego. Feet shuffle and limbs creak as the audience rises then settles back onto benches and chairs.

  Sheriff Willit barks the words that for long centuries of the English common law have heralded the beginning of a criminal jury assize, the trial of citizen by citizens: ” Oyez, oyez, oyez. All persons having business in this Court of Officer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery draw near and give your attention and answer to your names when called.”

&
nbsp; Ah, history, ah, theatre. We are in the very womb of English law, the time of that hapless ruler Henry III. “Oyez!” calls out the court crier to the citizens attending this grave commission into treasons and felonies committed in this county against His Majesty. Oyer et terminer, to hear and determine. In this age of speed and cybernetics, there is comforting tradition in the ancient discipline of law.

  Jonathan does stand tall as charges are read and pleas taken to counts of sexual assault, confining, and kidnapping. He is not afraid to look at the jury panel — that is good.

  “Not guilty,” he says each time, and I am pleased that his voice does not crack.

  I rise. “May the defendant be allowed to join me at counsel table?”

  Patricia objects: “Accused persons usually remain in the dock.”

  “I fear she’s right, Mr. Beauchamp,” Wally says. “Be he pauper or professor, I can’t grant special privileges.” Should I have expected else from this born-again advocate of equal access? “Are we ready to pick the jury? Let’s start with fifteen names, Mr. Sheriff.”

  Sheriff Willit shakes a wooden box containing cards with names of the panel members, then begins the draw, and ultimately fifteen persons are lined up beside the bench.

  The first twelve seem quite an acceptable bunch — an equal mix of the sexes and several youthful faces: youth being preferred in morals cases. All twelve have been vetted by Gowan Cleaver, and have passed scrutiny. But the thirteenth person brought forward is the risky Hedy Jackson-Blyth, who looks bright though stern and distrusting, a woman of about forty, barren of any jewellery, liberated from the curse of female makeup. If any of the first twelve jurors is excused by the judge, she will be the next one sworn. Dare I take a chance that will not happen?

  “A moment, m’lord.” I attend at the prosecution table. “We can spend a couple of hours at this, Patricia, or we can take the first twelve.”

  She looks over her copy of the list — a big exclamation mark is beside the name of Jackson-Blyth.

  “The first twelve. Okay.”

  Her assent is too quick, and I have a sense she knows something I don’t. And, of course, that is so: when the judge asks if anyone has a legitimate reason to be excused, panellist number three says his mother has just died. “My condolences,” says Wally, and he lets him go.