‘Yes. Oh, she could give you the rounds of the kitchen if somethink was out of place, like if you forgot the serviettes.’
‘Made you feel bad sometimes?’
‘Well, I don’t like bein’ roared up. I did my best.’
‘Must have made you feel very hurt when you were discharged.’
‘Too right. With my dad sick and all.’
‘Are you employed at the moment?’
‘Part time in a bottling works.’
‘Do you like this as much as your previous job?’
‘No, but I don’t get my head blown off.’
Mr Hood turned away, then wheeled suddenly back. ‘Oh, just one other thing. Where exactly was the child standing when you saw Miss Scott hit him?’
‘In his bedroom.’
‘Where in the bedroom?’
‘Oh, I can’t say for sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, see, I was coming up the stairs—’
‘Oh! You were on the stairs! Could you see into the bedroom?’
‘Well, not right in but—’
‘Then you didn’t see the boy slapped at all.’
‘Well—’
‘Did you see the boy slapped?’
Diana clenched and unclenched her mammoth hands. ‘Well, no, but I heard it.’
‘You heard what sounded like a slap?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’
Moments later, the rattle of machine-gun fire as Miss Gwenevere Scott’s borrowed amber-glass beads broke and rolled in every direction as she mounted to the witness box.
‘Oh, my God, my beads! Sorry, terribly sorry.’
Laughter. Ushers scurrying around on the floor, bending and retrieving the noisy beads and handing them to Miss Scott, who meanwhile had dropped her bag.
The judge, patience worn thin, rapped and reproved everybody.
Now what on earth could Vere have to say?
Dressed like something out of a musical comedy, thought Vanessa, locking at Vere’s scavenged finery, a purple wool suit, large black velvet hat with a brass arrow which had apparently pierced her skull and emerged beside her left ear, and, to set off the ensemble, somebody’s stone martens.
Ettie murmuring, ‘Vere-de-Vere looks very nice,’ and giving Vere a little secret wave of encouragement.
No need to tell Vere to speak up; she was on the stage and her high, excited soprano voice rang through the court and echoed from the high dirty ceiling.
Logan Marriott had told her that he wanted Lila and George to have the child. He was worried to death because Vanessa was breaking the boy’s spirit. He wasn’t so very drunk when he said it either. No, they’d just had a couple of beers together at the Carlton and the reason he was scooting out of town on the train was because he was so thwarted by Vanessa.
So what?
Thworted, then. Logan knew what Vanessa was up to and he’d only come because he wanted a peep at his own son. Vanessa wanted the child all to herself. That was obvious. Why? Because Lila often let the boy visit her, Vere, for an afternoon at the pictures or the botanical gardens and Vanessa had only let her have him once and even then had created a most ‘undoing’ scene because they were five minutes late coming home and had attacked her so savagely that the child himself and Mrs Bult had tried to intercede. She had been told not to visit the house again.
Mr Hood stood up and waved a long finger at Vere.
‘Just one question. Don’t you think a guardian has every right to exert some discipline over a child?’
‘It depends on the child.’
‘Is this child different from others?’
‘No, but he’s a good child. I don’t think he needs to be disciplined.’
‘What do you think he needs?’
‘One less mother.’
The courtroom rocked. Even the judge smiled and Vanessa and Lila said ‘Absolutely’ to Ettie and to George. Mr Justice Hay-Piggott reminded Mr Gentle that he wished to interview the boy in chambers the next afternoon at two o’clock and set a date two weeks in advance for handing down his decision. It was over at last.
‘Did we win?’
‘We don’t know yet, pet.’
‘Oh.’ Annoyed with the idiocy of grownups who run courts. ‘When? When?’
‘Oh, very soon now. In about two weeks.’
‘Two weeks!’ Years! Just like grownups! ‘Wait and see.’ ‘Maybe.’
‘Guess what? Tomorrow we’re going into town and you’re going to talk to the judge, all by yourself. Scrumptious?’
Scrumptious! Did Lila really think that that was a treat?
‘Can Alan come?’
Mr Gentle was waiting for them by a big iron gate outside a very dirty old building which had iron bars on the windows. For a moment, he hung back and held on to Lila’s hand. Was this really a jail, like Winnie had said, and had Lila and George just been telling a lot of fibs about him having to see the judge? They went through the gate and up some steps to a big door on which there was an emu and a kangaroo holding up a shield. Mr Gentle rang a bell and after a little wait the door was opened by a fussy young man who seemed in a hurry and said everything twice very quickly—come in-come in, sit down-sit down—and sat them down in a dark office full of books and papers. While Lila took off his overcoat and gloves and combed his hair, the young man spoke into a box on the desk and said, ‘Your honour, the Marriott boy is here,’ and there were some rumblings and sputterings from the box and a click and Mr Gentle told him not to be nervous and to be sure to tell the truth about everything; no matter what the judge asked him, and Lila was saying, yes, darling, tell the truth, it’s very important, and kissed him. Then there was a long wait and so they all stared at the walls and from time to time Lila asked Mr Gentle a question and Mr Gentle sucked at his pipe and said maybe, perhaps, we’ll see, and that he hoped that it wouldn’t take too long because he had someone waiting at his office for him right now. Finally there was a loud buzz on the box and the fussy young man listened to some rumbles and said, ‘Yes, your honour,’ and told them the judge was ready now and Lila said again don’t be nervous now, pet, and tell the truth, and the fussy young man tapped on a door and opened it and beckoned him to go in. Even Vanessa would have thought the room was very grand, like something in the Hollywood pictures. The walls were of shiny, polished wood and there were bookshelves right up to the high ceiling. The carpet was soft and deep like long grass and everything was very big—very big leather chairs and a desk as big as a tennis court and a fireplace twice as high as he was, in which a big fire crackled and popped. But the biggest thing of all was the judge, standing by the fireplace and looking down at him, and he suddenly thought of God. The judge was exactly like God to look at, with his white hair and white eyebrows, only wearing a suit. So like God, in fact, that he almost got down on his knees but instead held out his hand politely and the judge gave him a huge, cold, white hand and said, ‘How do you do? Are you PS?’ and he said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ and the judge smiled and now all at once he didn’t feel nervous at all, only impressed, the way he’d be if it really was God.
The judge said, ‘Sit down, PS,’ and helped him up into one of the leather chairs, which was so big that his feet just stuck out in the air.
The judge said, ‘Do you like chocolate?’
Yes, he said, thank you, and the judge handed him a big shiny red-and-gold package of Nestle’s, the giant size which must have cost at least two shillings, and he said, overwhelmed, ‘Thank you very much.’
‘Don’t eat it all at once,’ said the judge. ‘If you got sick, your aunt would blame me.’
Which aunt? Vanessa, of course. She didn’t believe in chocolate for children because of their teeth and so very likely she’d given the judge strict orders about it and perhaps the judge didn’t like that, was a teeny bit annoyed with Vanessa. The way he’d said ‘your aunt’ sounded as though he might be, and that was good. That meant everything was going to be all right and the j
udge was going to tell him in a minute that he was going to give him back to Lila.
‘Now then,’ said the judge, sitting down near him and folding his big, white, marble-looking hands. ‘Now then, PS, I’m going to ask you one or two questions and I want you to remember that this is all just between you and me, so don’t be afraid to tell me the truth, understand?’
He nodded.
‘Do you have a puppy?’ asked the judge.
‘No.’ Was the judge going to give him a puppy too?
‘If you had a puppy, would you care for it and look after it?’
‘Oh, yes.’
He was thinking how Vanessa hated puppies, would never let him have one. She always shooed stray dogs out of the garden. ‘Go away, you nasty thing.’ Once when they had been walking down the road, a little brown puppy had come running up to him and Vanessa had snatched his hand away from beginning to pat it and said, ‘No, don’t touch it, PS, it might have ticks. Shooo—go away, go on,’ and the poor little pleading thing had cringed and shivered all over with fright. Lila had given him a little mongrel puppy when he was four, but the stupid baker’s boy had left the gate open and the puppy had got out, been run over. Lila had cried over it much more than he had and when he had asked for another, had said, ‘Oh no, oh no, pet; I couldn’t stand any other dog to have poor little Winky’s collar.’
The judge was saying, ‘Now a puppy has to be taught, doesn’t it? Not to do certain things in the house? Has to be spanked when it’s naughty? Eh? So it will grow up to be a nicely behaved dog?’
Yes, he agreed, wondering what this was all about anyway.
Well, in some ways he was like a puppy, the judge explained. He wasn’t old enough yet to know everything that was right and wrong and so he must be cared for and looked after until he was able to decide things for himself. Did he understand this?
Oh, yes.
‘Now then, if you had a puppy and you had to give it away, to whom would you give it?’
That was a hard one. Who? Winnie? Alan? Cynthia Lawson?
The judge helped him out. ‘Wouldn’t you give it to the person who you knew would look after it the best?’
‘Yes,’ he said gratefully, knowing for sure now that the judge meant Lila because she loved puppies and was always stopping in the street to pat them: ‘Oh, you dear little thing. Oh, wazza sweet ittle baby ting oo is!’
The judge seemed to know, like God, what he was thinking because he said, ‘Your Aunty Lila has been very kind to you, hasn’t she?’
Oh, yes, he told God; oh, yes, he loved Lila and George.
‘And your Aunty Vanessa? Hasn’t she been very kind to you also?’
Yes, oh, yes. He supposed it was better to be polite about Vanessa. ‘Specially now that he was sure the judge was going to give him to Lila.
‘Why didn’t you want to go back to her?’
Funny. It was hard to say why. He’d never thought so before, but it was. He’d never been asked why straight out before and he began thinking of all the things, the sadness he felt away from Lila in the big house, Vanessa and her strict orders, Miss Pile and Miss Colden, the fright about going away to England and Vanessa hugging him on the bed with her and—it was like being asked a hard question in class with everyone looking at you and being nervous that if you came out with the wrong answer, then everyone would laugh at you, and now he saw that the judge was frowning and tapping his fingers together as if he was in a hurry.
‘I don’t know,’ he said to the judge.
‘Why did you tell her you didn’t want to go back?’
On the phone that night? Was that wrong? Of course he’d had to tell Vanessa himself. Lila had explained that to him but perhaps she hadn’t explained it to the judge.
‘Lila said I had to tell Vanessa that I decided myself.’
The judge seemed to understand completely because he nodded, and turning around, picked up a gold pencil and wrote something down on a pad on the big desk.
Just as he was going to explain to the judge, in case Lila hadn’t, how it had all started that Sunday and about his plan to escape from Vanessa, the phone buzzed and the judge picked it up and said, ‘Yes, who? All right, put him on. Hello, Sir Frank …’ and went on talking for a long time, so he read as much as he was able to of the label on the chocolate wrapper and then looked around at the pictures on the wall, which weren’t very interesting; mostly old old men wearing long grey wigs who stared back at him crossly. There was also a very large photograph of the King. He was thinking how sad the King looked (and no wonder, with all the troubles he had) when the judge put down the phone, and catching him looking at the King, said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ ‘The King,’ he said and noticing that the judge looked pleased that he knew, and feeling certain that the judge of all people must have inside information, asked, ‘Is he sad because they’re going to shoot him?’
‘Nobody,’ said the judge sternly, ‘wants to shoot the King of England, son. Who told you that?’
‘Winnie,’ he said, explaining who Winnie was. Then the judge said that Winnie was wrong and that everybody in the British Empire was loyal to the King. Occasionally, the judge explained, there were bad kings who had got themselves shot. But they were in foreign countries and they were not like King George, who is good and kind to everybody, even the blacks. The judge gave him quite a lecture about it, blowing his nose every now and then very fiercely, making scratching noises on his bristly white moustache, which was neatly waxed into two little points. Finally the judge took a big gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket, gazed at it for a minute, wound it, put it back and said, ‘Well, PS, thank you for coming and having this little talk.’
So it was over and it hadn’t been bad at all, a treat almost, because the judge had been so nice. So nice, in fact, that it seemed perfectly all right to ask straight out:
‘Can I go home now?’
‘Yes,’ said the judge, ‘you may.’
If the judge had wanted, he would have given him a big kiss on his white old cheek, but he shook hands politely again and then, feeling the need to do something more to show his gratitude, he made his dancing-class bow.
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Goodbye,’ said the judge.
All the way home on the ferry, sitting inside because it was cold, he burbled to Lila about the interview and she nodded and laughed a little about the puppies, said, ‘Fancy, pet,’ and ‘Aha,’ until he got to the bit about the King, when she said almost crossly, ‘You shouldn’t have said that. We don’t believe that.
‘Yes, but—’
‘Why do you always have to tell everything? Always telling Vanessa everything. And now the judge. Don’t you know the judge is hired by the government, which is the King? And fancy bothering the judge with what Winnie said. Goodness. What a funny boy you are; you’re just like your mother—never tell me anything but prattle about everything to a stranger.’
‘Well,’ he said, cross with Lila for not giving him credit, ‘anyway, we won. The judge said I could go home.’
But Lila didn’t seem to be listening; she was staring out of the cabin window at the grey harbour and the screeching seagulls following the ferry.
Agnes, when he told her, bursting with importance on to her little glass porch, seemed to agree with him. She said in a faraway voice:
‘In America, where I have lived and lectured, they don’t need a king. They have President Roosevelt.’
But why?
Why, he protested, did they have to go back to the court? It was all over, wasn’t it? The judge had said so, had said that he could go home.
Lila, washing his face (quickly, because she knew they would miss the nine-thirty ferry, knew they would be late, that things would have to go wrong this morning, like the clock), said, ‘Not quite.’ The judge hadn’t quite meant that. Why? Had the judge fibbed to him then? No, pet, of course not. It was something to do with red tape. The judge had to hand down something called the minutes of the court and the
y had to be there and so did Vanessa. No, George was not going. Poor George was too worn out.
‘Quickly now, PS. I’m waiting to know which tie you want to wear. Don’t stand there wasting time.’ Then, wasting time herself, hugged him.
Agnes, putting on her funny hat, said, ‘Even though my affidavit was refused, Lila, I will pray for you for Sinden’s sake.’ Kissing him, she said, ‘PS, in thy father’s house are many mansions,’ and Lila said, ‘Let’s hope after today there’ll only be one.’
George, getting ready for bed, ruffled his hair and said, ‘Well, old chap, tonight we’ll kill the fatted calf, eh?’
There wasn’t time to ask what this meant for Lila was already hurrying him through the front gate and down the road to the tram stop. When a scraggly black cat darted in front of them and squeezed through some palings, Lila said, ‘Oosssff,’ as though she had stepped on something sharp. ‘Pretend we didn’t see it,’ she said, and later, hoisting him up the step on to the tram, ‘On the other hand, it could be lucky.’
They went, hand in hand, up the dirty steps into the wide, cold hallway of the court, where men in black gowns and grey wigs were hurrying up and down and people were sitting on benches, waiting, with long, sad, worried faces. One lady was crying and the other people looked at her and then looked away and went on reading their papers or just staring ahead of them. There was a smell of ink and coal and damp stone walls and the bare wooden floors were worn very smooth with all the hundreds and thousands of people who had walked in and out. It was dirtier than the Neutral Bay School, he told Lila as they sat down on a hard bench, and Lila said she hoped he hadn’t told that to the judge, but yes, it was a very old building, over a hundred years old and it had been built by the convicts. Fancy that.
‘Fancy that now,’ said Lila in her put-on cheerful voice and with the laugh she used when she pretended everything was all right though it really wasn’t. How about a nice little marmite sandwich, she asked him as if they were at the zoo having a treat. No, he said, shaking his head at the little damp package of sandwiches she took out of her bag. No, not now. Why did they have to wait? Where was the judge? In the court, Lila told him. There were other cases ahead of theirs and Mr Gentle would come and get them when it was time. He must be very quiet and still when they went into court, she told him, putting the sandwiches into his pocket in case they had to wait a long time before lunch. Oh, it would be so interesting for him to see the judge up on his high bench in his robes and he must try to remember every bit of it to tell Winnie and Alan when he got home tonight. And Lila, as she said this, caught her breath suddenly as though she had swallowed a fishbone and he saw that Vanessa had come through a door with a tall, very black-haired man, the same man who had come with her in the car that night there had been all the screaming. It was the first time he had seen Vanessa since that night and it seemed now so long ago that he had almost forgotten what she looked like. It was as if Vanessa had never been real, only make-believe in a game, and yet here she was, swinging through the door in her dark-blue dress and her fur coat, her black hat with a gold ball on it, Vanessa, very real, very tall and straight, ready to give strict orders. When she caught sight of them she drew herself up sharply, and for one frightened moment he thought that she was coming straight for them, coming to shout at them, perhaps to hit him for being so wicked to her. But Vanessa simply stood very still, staring at Lila, and looking up at Lila, he saw that she was staring back at Vanessa and it was as though they had never seen each other before and yet at the same time as if they had been told awful secrets about each other.
Careful, He Might Hear You Page 29