The Sleep of Reason

by C. P. Snow

  No one in that court but me had heard the judge’s remark about Kitty Pateman. As I sat listening to her, several times it came back to me, but it did nothing but add to the disquiet. For a strange thing was, that as the hours passed and Kitty talked, I couldn’t get any nearer forming an opinion about whether that remark had truth in it or not.

  There were other strange things. Much of the time I, along with other observers, was certain that she was acting, and Jamie Wilson, without realising it, was helping her to act. His examination didn’t sound, and didn’t stay in the memory, like the ordinary questions-and-answers of a trial. It was much more like a conversation in which she was playing the major part, and a part which was quick-tongued, elaborate and bizarre.

  Glance flitting to the jury box, the judge, once to her family, she described what she called her “first breakdown”, words hurrying out. Sometimes she could recall it all, sometimes she couldn’t: she had told the psychiatrists, but not everything, because she got flustered, and she didn’t like to mention that she had heard voices. Yes, voices when she was eighteen, that she thought someone was managing to produce in her radio set, tormenting her. Or perhaps taking charge of her, she didn’t know at the time, she was frightened, she thought she might be going “round the bend” or else something special was happening to her. She heard the voices over a period of months: sometimes they came just like a telephone message. They told her all sorts of things. They were advising her against her father. He was her enemy. He was keeping her at home, he was planning to keep her at home until her brother had grown up: he wanted her to be a prisoner. They told her to trust “this man” (the man whom Dr Kahn had mentioned). She had thought that he was meant to be her escape. But he wasn’t, it had been a disaster. The voices told her that he was her enemy, like her father. She was intended for something different, no one was going to imprison her. But then they stopped speaking to her, and she hadn’t heard them for years.

  The light voice fluted on: I was too intent to get any sense of how others were responding, even Martin – though later I heard a good many opinions, some mutually contradictory, about this part of her evidence. For myself, I had no doubt, on the spot or later, that most of it was a lie. At least the story of her voices was a lie. She was clever enough to have picked up accounts of people’s psychotic states: of how some had precisely that kind of aural hallucination, certain that they were spoken to (in earlier times they would have heard the messages in the air, nowadays they emanated from machines) over the wires. She might even have known such a person, for they weren’t uncommon. But I didn’t believe that it had happened to her. She was mimicking the wrong kind of breakdown. If she were ever going to become deranged – or ever had been – it would be in a different fashion.

  But that wasn’t all, it was merely clinical, and only made her seem more ambiguous and shifting than before. For when people lied as she was lying, they usually couldn’t help showing some stratum of the truth. She invented stories of what those voices told her about her father: they said something – though nothing like all – of what she felt for him herself. In the voices, which perhaps as she invented them seemed both romantic and sinister, and flattered her imagination, you could smell something much more down-to-earth, the antiseptic smell of the Pateman house. And you could hear something not so down-to-earth, but which emerged from that same house, and was seething in her imagination – “something special” was happening to her, she was “intended for something different”.

  People afterwards said they hadn’t often seen a face change so much. At times she looked young and pretty, at others middle-aged. In the box, which gave her height, she had lost her air of hiding away, and no one thought her insignificant. She made an impression which separated her from the lookers-on, and yet didn’t repel them, almost as though she touched a nerve of unreality. Certainly it was an impression that Clive Bosanquet, as soon as he began to cross-examine, wanted to dispel.

  In his level tone, he asked: “Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kill a child?”

  She looked at him, eyes steadying, and replied without a pause: “I don’t think I thought anything like that. No, that would give the wrong idea. You see, no one does anything cut-and-dried, you understand–”

  Bosanquet was determined to stop her going off on another conversational flight.

  “Miss Pateman, there is no doubt that you planned, methodically and over a period of weeks or months, to kill a child. Apparently it needn’t have been Eric Mawby, you picked on him at random. I am asking you, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

  “Well, kidnapping is one thing that we might have talked about–”

  “I asked, Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”

  “I was saying, we might have talked about catching hold of one for a little while, you know, we talked about all sorts of things, you know how it is, anyone can make a suggestion–”

  “When did this happen?”

  “It might have happened at any time, I couldn’t tell you exactly.”

  “It might not have happened at any time, Miss Pateman. When did it happen?”

  The judge was regarding her, and spoke as considerately as ever in the trial. “You must try to tell us, if you can.”

  “Well, if I had to put a date to it, I suppose it would be about the time when I had this second breakdown.”

  Her counsel had let her introduce “this second breakdown” and then gone no further, as though he and she assumed, and the court also, that she had been living in a haze. But Bosanquet – for once less imperturbable – was having to struggle to clear the haze away. What was this second breakdown? She realised that it had not been adduced in the medical evidence? She had not at any time during this period considered consulting a doctor? She had been working effectively at her job, and living her life as usual in the room at home and out at the cottage?

  “You don’t know about breakdowns unless you’re the one having them, no one could know, not even–” and then she added, with a curious primness – “Miss Ross.”

  “You were entirely capable of doing everything you usually do?”

  “No one who’s not had a breakdown can understand how you can go on, just like a machine you know–”

  “You were entirely capable of making very careful detailed plans, everything thought out in advance, to abduct this child and kill him?”

  “But that’s just what I was saying, you can go on, and you don’t know what’s happening–”

  “You didn’t know what was happening when you brutalised this child? And killed him? A child, Miss Pateman, who if you were a year or two older might have been your own?”

  “No, he wasn’t, that’s got nothing to do with it, it didn’t matter who he was.”

  That reply, like many that she had made, might have been either fluent or incoherent, it was difficult to know which. Just as it was difficult to know whether Bosanquet’s thrust of rhetoric, so different from his usual method that it must have been worked out, had touched her. Were the psychiatrists right, how much was she deprived, how much had she wanted to live as other women? How much did those dolls of hers signify? As she lied and weaved her answers in and out, most of us were as undecided as when we heard her first word. Bosanquet brought up the remark – to many the most hideous they had listened to in court – “we wanted to teach him to behave”. What did that mean? Wasn’t that the beginning of the plan? Who said it first?

  “Oh, it was just a way of explaining afterwards, I don’t think anyone actually said it. I’m sure I didn’t, that’s not the way you speak to each other, is it, even if you aren’t living through a breakdown.”

  “You found the idea so attractive that you planned everything methodically to abduct the child and then go on to ill-treat him and murder him?”

  “No, that’s not the way things go, you know how it is, you say lots of things that you don’t mean, ever, we used to say, wouldn’t
it be nice if one could do things, but we didn’t mean it.”

  Her answers were shifting and shimmering like one translucent film drawn across another: underneath them there were marks when a fragment of their day-to-day life appeared, and then was obfuscated again. The two of them in that front room at the Patemans’: yes, someone had said “it would be nice if we could do things”: it might have seemed like an ordinary sexual come on, voice thick, eyes staring! Who had spoken first? Did that matter? In the witness box, Kitty Pateman was not making the attempt to shield Cora as Cora had done her. She was just intent on seeming crazed. It still had the elaboration, almost the compulsion, of a piece of acting, yet sometimes one felt that, through pretending to be crazed, she had hypnotised herself into being so. Had she – or both of them – pretended like that before? In retrospect, when our minds were cooler, one thing struck most of us. She had far more imagination than Cora. But imagination of a kind which one sometimes meets in the sexual life, at the same time vatic and obscene. She might have, and almost certainly had, prophesied to herself a wonderful life through sex, more wonderful than sex could ever give her: and simultaneously she would never leave a sexual thought alone.

  Martin said later that her imagination – or else her nervous force – had its effect on him. Despite the beams of sunlight, the courtroom seemed shut in as a greenhouse.

  But Bosanquet was not a suggestible man. As with Cora, though this was technically the harder job, he wanted to domesticate her answers. He went through a similar routine about their workaday lives. Once or twice she tried a fugue again, but then gave up. Here she couldn’t sound unbalanced. Mostly her replies were shrewd and practical. Then he asked her about the books she read. Yes, she read a lot. She produced a list of standard authors of the day. “Sometimes I go a bit deeper.” “Who?” “Oh well–” she hesitated, her glance flickered – “people like Camus–”

  At that, I should have liked to question her, for I suspected that she was lying again: not this time because of some thought out purpose, but simply because she wanted to impress. She might even be, I thought, a pathological liar like Jack Cotery in his youth.

  For once Bosanquet was taken aback. He was a good lawyer, but he wasn’t well up in contemporary literature. He recovered himself: “Well, what do you get out of them?”

  Again she hesitated. She answered: “Oh, they go to the limit, don’t they, I like them when they go to the limit.”

  I was now sure that she had been bluffing: somehow she had brought out a remark she had half-read. But it gave Bosanquet an opening. He didn’t know about Camus, but he did know that she wanted to show how clever she was. Hadn’t she enjoyed showing how clever she was – when they were planning to capture the child? Hadn’t she felt cleverer than anyone else, because she was sure that she could get away with it? She had said a good deal to her counsel about being “different” and “special” – wasn’t that a way of proving it?

  She was flustered, the current of words deserted her.

  “No. It wasn’t like that. That was my second breakdown, that’s all.”

  She spoke as though she was astonished and ashamed. She gave the impression that he had hit on the truth which she was trying, at all costs, to conceal. Yet Bosanquet himself and others of us, knew that wasn’t so. Certainly she had enjoyed feeling clever, set apart, someone above this world – but none of us, looking at her, could conceive that that was all.

  And yet, of all the questions put to her in the witness box, these were the ones that upset her most. He picked up a phrase of hers – she had gone to the limit, hadn’t she? Wasn’t killing a child going to the limit? That didn’t upset her: she got back into her evasive stream. Then he said: “After it had all happened. Didn’t you feel cleverer than anyone else, because you thought you had got away with it?”

  Again she couldn’t answer. This time she stood as mute as Cora.

  “Didn’t you talk it over together? You’d brought off something very special, which no one else could have done, didn’t you tell yourselves that?”

  “No. We never said anything about it.”

  That, I suspected again, but without being sure, was another lie. It was possible that “going to the limit” had disappointed them, grotesque as the thought might be.

  Bosanquet left her standing there quietly, not flying off with an excuse which would smear over the picture of the two of them sitting together, congratulating each other on a scheme achieved. At once Wilson set her going again, fugue-fluent, on her breakdowns, first and second, and we listened without taking in the words.

  About an hour later – still heavy after the afternoon of Kitty Pateman – I called at the Shaws’ new house. During the weekend I had rung up Vicky, asking if I could see her: I wanted to get it over, after my talk with Martin, as much for my sake (since I still detested breaking bad news) as hers. The house was in a street, or actually a cul-de-sac, which I remembered well from my boyhood and which had altered very little since, except that there used to be tramlines running past the open end. On both sides the houses showed extraordinary flights of pre-1914 fancy; most were semi-detached in various styles that various human minds must have thought pretty: one stood by itself, quite small, but decorated with twisted pinnacles, and led into by a porch consisting mainly of stained glass. In the patch of front garden the only vegetation was an enormous monkey puzzle. When I was a child, I didn’t notice how startling the architecture was: I probably thought it was all rather comfortable and enviable, because the people who lived there – it was only half-a-mile away from our house – were distinctly more prosperous than we were. One of them, I recalled, was a dentist. It looked that afternoon as though the social stratum hadn’t changed much, a good deal below that of the Gearys’ neighbours, considerably above that of the streets round George’s lodgings. The Shaws’ house was one of a pair confronting one at the end, unobtrusive by the side of the art nouveau and suburban baroque, but built at the same time, front rooms looking over a yard of garden down the street, perhaps six rooms in all. When I rang the bell, it was Arnold Shaw who opened the door. After he had greeted me, his first words were: “This is a long way from the Residence.” He wore a taunting smile.

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” I replied.

  He led the way into the front room. Vicky jumped up and kissed me, knowing that I had come for a purpose, looking at me as though trying to placate me. Meanwhile her father, oblivious, was pouring me a drink.

  “I needn’t ask you what you like,” he said in his hectoring hospitable tone. There was an array of bottles on the sideboard. However much Arnold had reduced his standard of living, it hadn’t affected the liquor.

  I gazed round the room, about the same size as our old front room at home. The furniture, though, was some that I recognised from the Residence.

  “It’s big enough for me,” said Arnold Shaw defiantly.

  I said, of course.

  “Anything else would be too big.”

  With the enthusiasm of an estate agent, he insisted on describing what he had done to the house. There had been three bedrooms: he had turned one of them into a study for himself. “That’s all I need,” said Arnold Shaw. They ate in the kitchen. No entertaining. “No point in it,” he said. “People don’t want to come when you’ve got out of things.”

  He hadn’t mentioned the trial: to me, at that moment, it was lost in another dimension. Not noticing Vicky, half-forgetting why I was visiting them, I felt eased, back in the curiosities of every day. It was a relief to be wondering how Arnold was really accepting what his resignation meant, now that he was living it. He was protesting too much, he was putting on a show of liberation. I nearly said, all decisions are taken in a mood which will not last: he would have known the reference. And yet, the odd thing was, although he probably put on this show for his own benefit each day of his life, he was also, and quite genuinely, liberated. Or perhaps even triumphant. I had seen several people, including my brother Martin, give up
their places, some of them, in the world’s eyes, places much higher than Arnold Shaw’s. Without exception, they went through times when they cursed themselves, longing for it all back, panoplies and trappings, moral dilemmas, enmities and all: but, again without exception, provided they had made the renunciation out of their own free will, underneath they were content. Free will. For one instant, listening to Arnold, I was taken back to that other dimension. Free will. Arnold had, or thought he had, given up his job of his own free will. He felt one up on fate. It was a similar superiority to that which some men felt, like Austin Davidson, in contemplating suicide: or alternatively in bringing off a feat which no one else could do. Just for once, in the compulsions of this life, one didn’t accept one’s destiny and decided for oneself.

  It didn’t sound as exalted as that, with Arnold Shaw grumbling about his pension and discussing the economics of authorship. The university had treated him correctly but not handsomely (that is, they hadn’t found him a part-time job): he was hoping to earn some money by his books. His chief work would be appearing in the autumn, he had the proofs in his study now: it was the history of the chemical departments in German universities, 1814–1860. It was the last word on the subject, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt it. That was the beginning of organised university research as we know it, said Arnold Shaw. I didn’t doubt that either. It ought to be compulsory reading for all university administrators everywhere: how many would it sell? Ten thousand? That I had to doubt a little, and he gave me an angry glare.