In Their Wisdom Page 10

  The trouble was, of course, that for business purposes spoken speech was by now an anachronism. One was conditioned to reading: and one read three or four times as fast as anyone could speak. Jenny had read all of Symington’s briefs to counsel. He had come to respect her sharpness and precision. She wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense or blearing over or anything she couldn’t make sense of in the witness box. The final brief was the basis of her counsel’s opening speech that day. To read, it had taken her about half an hour, which included time for her own questions. In court, it lasted almost all of the first morning: that included time for gentle, pertinacious, twinkling questions from Mr Justice Bosanquet, and a few objections, part of the game, private badinage, incomprehensible to all but the lawyers, from the Underwoods’ counsel.

  Listening to the opening speech Jenny at moments felt sensations of déjà vu, and at others of being a chilling distance away. This man, whose name was Lander, under his wig young-looking for a middle-aged man and in private entertaining, was talking of her father and herself. It was as though she had been dead some time, and someone had unaccountably written her biography and then adapted it for the stage: someone who didn’t know her, and had got a few things right and some grotesquely wrong. In this respect unlike Liz, no one was less superstitious than Jenny, but she was near to seeing ghosts, but not the authentic ghosts. She found herself painfully nervous. Whether it would have been better if there wasn’t a decision hanging on all this, she couldn’t have told.

  Actually Lander was being entirely competent, though in the newspapers next day the extracts made him appear either foolish or preternaturally bright. ‘Cordelia cut out by King Lear,’ said a headline: it was true that he hadn’t been able to resist a bumbling allusion. When she heard it (it was a product of counsel’s own genius, not Symington’s) Jenny blushed as she hadn’t for twenty years, and was thinking with snapping rage that she was as much like Cordelia as she was like Brigitte Bardot. She thought this more bitterly when she read the paper next day.

  Lander began by saying that Massie when he made his last will was a very old man.

  ‘Old age is relative, but perhaps we can all agree that the late eighties is genuinely old age.’ It was the plaintiff’s submission that this was a case of undue influence. ‘In general old people are often susceptible to the pressure, influence and persuasion of those round them.

  ‘It is common knowledge that, if we live long enough, we find our memories likely to deteriorate, and also our resistance to influence likely to be weaker. And so this is a familiar story, one that many of us have heard of, a very very old man being grossly over-influenced, being psychologically coerced, I don’t wish to go further than that at this stage, by a very determined lady.’

  That lady, Lander explained, was not his daughter. To Jenny, this was the passage, lasting perhaps only five minutes on the clock, where her skin grew thinnest and she couldn’t have given a précis of what she heard.

  He was carefully not covering up the breach between father and daughter, and other lawyers thought that this was good pleading. There had been a breach: Mrs Rastall would be the last person to deny it, she would make it clear when she gave evidence. She couldn’t explain it: there hadn’t been a definite quarrel: her father didn’t approve of her marriage but that was long since ended, fifteen years before, and she had not married again.

  His wife, her mother, had died when Mrs Rastall was in her teens, and had left her a small settlement. One couldn’t explore human motives, but conceivably that had begun to jaundice him (this was an interpretation of Lander’s own which Jenny did not for an instant believe). She had seen little of her father for years, simply because he demonstrated that he didn’t wish it. She had done her best to restore their relations but without success. It was here that Lander interpolated his patch of eloquence, smiling with vicarious regret, about Cordelia.

  ‘Mrs Rastall wishes to conceal nothing about this personal sorrow. On the other hand – and I now come to the real hard and in my submission completely unshakeable substance of her case. Many years after this break between father and daughter had come into existence – until quite recently, until the last will of all, made so shortly before his death – years after the last time he had seen his daughter, Mr Massie was still making will after will leaving considerable portions of his estate, never less than half, and more often the greater part of it, to Mrs Rastall. There is nothing surprising about that. It is what most fathers, however eccentric their behaviour, would consider it fitting to do for an only child.’

  Lander broke off into an exposition of Massie’s will-making proclivities. The judge was smiling placidly, and there were similar smiles in the court. Jenny had ceased to wince: here was business, here was neutral territory. ‘Yes, the old man had enjoyed making wills,’ said Lander. It was not uncommon to meet this habit among the old, particularly among what he might call the rather cantankerous old. They had a sense of power and they relished tantalising people round them who had expectations (this was another of the quotations in the next morning’s papers). There was a burst of laughter in court, audibly from Julian Underwood, and tight grins elsewhere. There would be evidence about this series of wills from Mr Massie’s former solicitor, Lander laid a stress on the adjective. They had some features in common. They all began with a formula saying that the testator had no intention of leaving money to any institution, any place where he had been educated and specifically not to any establishment remotely connected with the Church of England. (Mr Justice Bosanquet asked impassively: ‘Am I right, Mr Lander, in getting the impression that the late Mr Massie had been a member of the Anglican Church, but had rather lost enthusiasm for it?’

  ‘Quite right, my lord.’ Deadpan reply, another burst of hilarity from Julian.)

  Then various charities, appearing in one will, disappearing in the next as he became displeased with them. Bequests to personal attendants, doctors and the rest.

  ‘But we shall learn that the particular persons, the physician who attended him, his housekeeper and other servants, were all in due course changed as Mrs Underwood took charge of his household arrangements. Then at the end a bequest, and always a very substantial bequest, except in the last will when it was removed altogether, to his daughter.’

  When Mrs Underwood took charge there were changes. They began, it was difficult to fix the exact month, but some time in 1966, four years before he died. The medical practitioner was changed.

  ‘I should say at once that we have nothing whatever against the competence, responsibility or good faith of any of the persons appointed. In particular there was a change in Mr Massie’s legal adviser. His former solicitor, Mr Balderstone, who had served him for a lifetime, was replaced to all intents and purposes by Mr Skelding. Mr Skelding happened to be Mrs Underwood’s solicitor, as of long standing. I have to reiterate that Mr Skelding is a well-known lawyer of high professional reputation. No one has the slightest intention of detracting from this. It was Mr Skelding who drew up the final will, learning from Mrs Underwood that these instructions were those of the testator. Mr Skelding was given copies of three of the previous wills, and was instructed that the initial formulae should be preserved including the remarks about the Church of England’ (laughter). ‘There was however to be a major alteration. The residual estate, that is the largest part of it, was no longer to go to Mrs Rastall, whose name as I have mentioned before disappears entirely, but instead to Mrs Underwood’s son. Mr Skelding in person took this will to Mr Massie and it was signed and witnessed a month before Mr Massie’s death.’

  Then Lander went off on a disquisition which connoisseurs of such speeches judged unnecessary, or badly timed. He was talking of Mr Massie being immobilised in the downstairs sitting-room. For the last two or three years, that is, during the tenure of the new housekeeper, he had remained in that one room, and only Mrs Underwood and the new doctor had free access to him.

  Though connoisseurs thought that this passage was at best tedi
ous and added nothing, they might have been wrong. The case was being decided by the single judge, and this particular judge was the most tireless of men. It was conceivable that, in his career as a counsel, this was how he would have argued the case himself, not only leaving no stone unturned, but turning each stone several times. Certainly he showed no sign of boredom, and went on making notes as devotedly as a student in the last week before his examination. He looked up once, and asked:

  ‘Do we have any information about visitors to Mr Massie during this last period?’

  ‘I believe that visitors of any kind had to obtain permission from the doctor or Mrs Underwood, but that can be confirmed.’

  ‘That would be quite natural in his state of health.’

  Jenny, with the suspiciousness of stretched nerves, heard that as a defence of Mrs Underwood.

  The morning was pounding on, the audience was getting restless for lunch. But Lander’s last words were suddenly succinct, and attention stiffened.

  ‘I have to say one thing which may seem suggestive. At no time during Mr Massie’s last illness did Mrs Underwood communicate with Mr Massie’s daughter. Even when he was without any shadow of doubt approaching his end. There was no communication of any kind. Mrs Rastall had no warning that he was approaching his death. She had no opportunity of coming to his death bed. The first she knew that he had died was through the death notices in The Times.’

  Liz had known all this, but rather as one knows a historical fact. She had been certain that it was a mistake. Ever since the will was challenged she had looked back over these mistakes. And yet to hear this out loud – it sounded different in kind, not a mistake, not even any of the things it might have been, a calculation or a sign of coldness, callousness or pure indifference, but more like a crime or worse still a shame. As though one had been turned down by a man and he was bragging about your offer to his friends. Liz had a prickle of gooseflesh, cold with fury and shame.

  She glanced along the seat towards Jenny. Neither of them had seen each other before that morning, any more than had Mrs Underwood and Jenny. They would go on seeing each other in court and then perhaps not again. Liz felt nothing but dislike. Jenny felt dislike, with the faintest edge of curiosity. They were both passionate women, capable of hatred, and when they hated they had no room for efforts of refinement. And yet, since no one in court or anywhere else knew them both, or was ever to do so, there was no one to notice, much less to tell them, in what ways they were alike.

  Ryle, who might have been perceptive enough, if he had met Jenny, was sitting behind Liz and trying to tell her that no points had been scored for either side that morning. Hillmorton, who might have been detached enough, had his interest otherwise engaged. What he actually said was, as at last the judge had given his bobbing bow and made his exit: ‘Well, I suppose everything has to have a beginning.’

  Julian let out one of his hooting laughs. Hillmorton went on, gazing at the ultra-gothic ceiling as though architectural taste was the only conflict dividing the assembled company:

  ‘I must say, when our grandfathers were vulgar, they were remarkably vulgar, or perhaps you don’t agree?’

  11

  As the days in court became a habit – though a good many onlookers, of whom Hillmorton was one, took to attending only for odd sessions or even single pieces of testimony – one detached person said that whoever arranged the trial had no sense of drama, it was very poorly staged. It was too much like the Church of England marriage service, the exciting bit came far too early.

  The commentator was Muriel Calvert, who added that so far as her own marriage went she would have done better without any exciting bit at all. This kind of brightness didn’t amuse Jenny, who disliked the young woman for herself and disliked anyone who came to the court as she did, not alone in this, out of sheer cool curiosity. Yet she had a point. She was meaning that Jenny’s evidence, which might be critical to her own case, and maybe seem even more critical than it was to onlookers moved by that same sheer curiosity, came early on the second afternoon. After that, a flow of evidence on the plaintiff’s side, days of it with no climaxes, the verbiage of evidence that in the verbatim record stretched out over page after page of typescript.

  Muriel Calvert, not disposed to spoil her sarcasm, didn’t recollect that Mrs Underwood’s evidence was bound to be critical too: and then at the end however execrable the staging they would all be waiting for a resolution, they would have to hear the judge decide. Still, it was fair comment that, from ten thirty to one and two till four thirty, on many days there were the long passages of anticlimax or more truly of sustained lack of climax.

  That applied to evidence about old Massie’s state of mind, though to the lawyers and a few attentive laymen, it caused some interest. It came from the doctor who had been in charge of Massie’s health before Mrs Underwood’s regime. He was a diffident witness, but his answers were straightforward. The old man had some unusual physical quirks. He had the strongest neurotic objection to having his blood pressure taken. He was an unusually firm-minded old man.

  To the lawyers, that wasn’t an answer to be neglected: but its effect was rubbed away when in cross-examination the doctor averred just as firmly that when he last saw Massie, three years before his death, he judged him to be getting somewhere near a state of senile depression, with possible, not absolutely definite, clinical indications.

  Evidence about Mr Massie’s series of wills, from his former solicitor, Balderstone, who was trying to prove that he hadn’t lost the old man’s confidence and had continued to handle parts of his business. That the court scarcely listened to, but when he described the wills a kind of subterranean hilarity spread through the room. The Christmas wills, the New Year wills, all dated like vintages of claret. Apparently the old man had been in the habit, by way of celebrating Christmas or New Year, of making a new will, and then informing both the gainers and the losers of his intentions ‘in time for them to start the New Year straight’.

  Gainers nearly always had only a temporary status. Next Christmas, as the wills demonstrated, they were likely to be written out. On one occasion, bequests made in the Christmas will of 1962 were cancelled in a New Year will of 1963. All this was on the files of Balderstone’s firm. The judge had already received copies. He asked if the defendants wished to have them confirmed. Their leader blandly said that he would challenge none of them, and in cross-examination asked the solicitor only a few perfunctory questions. This disappointed some of the more inexperienced on the Underwood side: but actually nearly all the facts mentioned in Lander’s speech or anywhere in the case were ‘common ground’ and it rested on how Bosanquet would interpret them.

  Jenny went into the box at two forty-five on the second afternoon, after the finish of some testimony by a gardener, curiously like parliament, Ryle thought, in which the announcement of a national calamity was likely to be delayed by the answer to a question about travel facilities in the Kyle of Lochalsh. This was the first time Mrs Underwood and Liz had had a clear view of their enemy. She stood there, face sensitive, finely drawn, incongruously so over good strong shoulders. A man might have found that incongruity pleasing, but Mrs Underwood wanted to dismiss the sight of her and Liz viewed her with as much distaste as though she had been one of Julian’s women.

  Deliberately Jenny had refused any coaching as to how she should give her evidence. Swaffield had bullied her, forcing advice upon her, but she had resisted, in the end brusquely. Symington had been more subtle, but to him she said – she liked him, though, with another resemblance between enemies, she no more than Liz was beglamoured by his looks – that she must do it her own way. She must say what she had to say. She told him that politely, almost regretfully. In fact, she had resolved to tell the truth so far as she was capable. In that, although she didn’t know it, she had made the same decision as competent people make before a security interrogation. In her realistic mind she didn’t expect it to be easy.

  Lander, whom she had me
t only once and then in a conference with Symington, began with a quiet question:

  ‘Mrs Rastall, if your father had asked for your presence at any time you would have gone to him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The court record went on:

  Lander: You would have stayed with him?

  Mrs Rastall: Of course.

  Lander: I want his lordship to be clear on this. If your father had asked you to be at his disposal at any time during his last illness or before, you would have gone?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes. Naturally.

  Lander: For any length of time?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes.

  [Those answers came easy, nothing but the truth.][1]

  Lander: I have to ask you this. What were your relations with your father?

  Mrs Rastall: [She felt more nervous, but her voice was strong.] Not good.

  Lander: Recently, that is?

  Mrs Rastall: No, for most of my life.

  Lander: Did you love him?

  [She hesitated.]

  Mrs Rastall: I think I loved him so far as you can love anyone who doesn’t love you back. [She hesitated again. She wasn’t going to be extravagant.] I think I had a daughter’s feeling for a father.

  [Lander had been ready for responses similar to this. Symington had told him that she was an unusually honest woman.]

  Lander: I want to take you back to your childhood. When you were young did your father love you?

  Mrs Rastall: He didn’t show much sign of it. No, I doubt whether he ever did.

  Lander: Did that upset you?

  Mrs Rastall: Very much, when I was a girl. Later on, I had to live with it.