In Their Wisdom Page 11

  Lander: Has it been a sadness to you, though?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes, I can say that. It has.

  Lander: Do you remember him showing you signs of affection? When you were a child perhaps.

  [She gave a sudden smile, as though boasting and ashamed of it.]

  Mrs Rastall: I did rather well at school. He seemed to like reading my reports, and when my results came through. He seemed to be proud of me, a little, then.

  Some in the court who were well disposed to her and one or two who weren’t had a glimpse of a clever girl, amusing, demurely cheeky, expecting happiness, before life sobered her.

  Mr Justice Bosanquet, entirely amiably, destroyed that moment through his addiction to detail. Leaving nothing to chance he asked what those ‘results’ had been, ‘O’ levels, ‘A’ levels?

  Jenny, smile retracted again, said ‘Both.’

  After that Lander took her through her biography. She hadn’t gone to a university; it had been discussed, but the war started and she got a job in a government office. Her father had made her an allowance until her mother died. After she came into a settlement, the allowance was stopped. If she had asked him for money–? He might have helped her. She had never tried. Marriage. No financial support. After the separation (‘My husband left me,’ said Jenny, defiantly flaunting the truth) she was left on her own. Yes, on the occasions she saw her father – they were very few, once a year or less – he referred to his estate and what he was leaving her. ‘You may as well have it, there’s no one else,’ was her recollection of one of his remarks: she couldn’t be sure of the exact words. ‘You’ll be able to spread yourself when I am gone.’ He had said something like that to her certainly three times, possibly more, the last on their final meeting. That had been not quite five years – as usual her memory was precise – before he died.

  Finishing, Lander asked her whether she had heard that he was dying.

  ‘No, not a word.’ That was said sternly. She saw the announcement of his death: nothing to do except attend the funeral.

  When David March, the leading counsel for the defendants, got up to cross-examine her, he seemed to her less porcine. He had a face oddly and unreadably mobile, in the American sense homely, in circumstances other than in court a comfortable face. His eyes, though, were as sharp as her own. He had a thick deep voice, and some of his questions were innocuous and bumbling. She had to tighten her control, so as not to vacillate between agreeing with him too easily (yes, there were times when she was tempted to do that) or claiming too much for herself.

  On the record, her answers, especially the more relevant of them, stood out clear enough. Thus, after a long desultory exchange of no significance, March’s question was abrupt and not prepared for:

  March: Did your father talk to you about his will? About any intentions for you?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes. I said so.

  March: You told my learned friend so. But it is easy to get a wrong idea of a conversation, wouldn’t you agree?

  Mrs Rastall: Sometimes.

  March: We all are liable to wish-fulfilment, aren’t we? You could have formed a definite impression out of something extremely indefinite, couldn’t you?

  Mrs Rastall: I suppose I could have, but I didn’t.

  March: You said, if I remember rightly, that your father made this kind of – what should I call it? – indication two or three times –

  Mrs Rastall: Certainly three. Perhaps more.

  March: But your memory could be exaggerating, possibly, and making it all more definite. That is, there need never have been anything really like a statement of intention, if you genuinely search your memory –

  Lander: My lord, I must object. My learned friend appears to be imputing misinterpretations or inventions to my client. At the time she reported these interpretations, and years afterwards, we have the clearest possible documentary evidence that Mr Massie in his wills was making Mrs Rastall a principal legatee.

  Mr J Bosanquet: I don’t think that Mr March was making implications. I certainly hope not. In any case, the wills are in front of me. (To March): I suggest that it isn’t profitable to pursue this topic any further.

  A later extract from the record. As a matter of tactics, March wasn’t following a chronological order, and again broke out with one of his abrupt not-led-up-to questions.

  March: I put it to you, from the time of your marriage, you were completely estranged from your father?

  Mrs Rastall: Not so far as I was concerned.

  March: I put it to you, it takes two to make a complete estrangement?

  Mrs Rastall: That’s not what I’ve found.

  March: And also it takes a cause? Something happening between you –

  Mrs Rastall: I haven’t found it so.

  [Two pages of the typescript record further on.]

  March: You didn’t really try to look after him at any time, did you? When you once left home –

  Mrs Rastall: I offered to, several times.

  March: How did you offer to?

  Mrs Rastall: Usually I wrote.

  March: When was the last time you wrote?

  Mrs Rastall: 1960.

  March: Ten years before he died. Not afterwards?

  Mrs Rastall: No.

  March: Why not?

  Mrs Rastall: After one has made so many offers there comes a point when you can’t do any more. When you can’t inflict yourself any more.

  March: Inflict yourself? Is that the voice of total filial affection, should you say?

  To that there was no reply on the record. March knew as well as she did that when she said ‘inflict yourself’, she meant something harder, she meant humble yourself.

  Last pages of Jenny’s testimony:

  March: You told my learned friend that you knew nothing of your father’s final illness. There was nothing to prevent you telephoning his house, was there?

  Mrs Rastall: I didn’t even know that he was ill.

  March: Come, he was a very old man. It would have been natural – wouldn’t it? – to make enquiries from time to time?

  Mrs Rastall: I knew no one there.

  March: You did nothing at all?

  Mrs Rastall: I wrote.

  March: When?

  Mrs Rastall: April 1970. Some months before he died. I got no reply.

  [The last questions concerned the final will.]

  March: Did you expect to benefit?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes.

  March: Were you certain?

  Mrs Rastall: His death came as a shock to me.

  March: That sounds a little dubious, if I may say so.

  Mrs Rastall: I hadn’t thought about any prospects of money for a long time.

  [This answer was to many people in court the most surprising she had given. Some, perhaps most, didn’t believe it.]

  March: Well. So what steps did you take?

  [She had rung up Balderstone, whom she remembered from the past, and who put her on to Skelding’s firm.]

  March: And you were told you were getting nothing?

  Mrs Rastall: Yes.

  March: Wasn’t that a blow?

  Mrs Rastall: Of course.

  March: What did you do then?

  Mrs Rastall: I’ve had other blows. I thought I had to take it.

  March: I should like your lordship to pay particular attention to that answer. (To Mrs Rastall:) Your first impulse was not to contest the will. Why not?

  Mrs Rastall: I know very little about these things.

  March: You mean, you thought the whole situation perfectly reasonable.

  Mrs Rastall: I mean nothing of the sort. I didn’t know what had been happening to my father, I didn’t know any of the people round him.

  March: In fact, you knew nothing at all about him, and didn’t expect to be remembered?

  Mrs Rastall: I didn’t know the people round him, but I happened to know a certain amount about very old people.

  It looked neutral on the record, but it wasn’t said l
ike that: it was said with her kind of lively defiance, sarcastic, provocative. She was glad that she had, just by straining herself, kept to the truth, especially in the answer which March invited the judge to notice and which wouldn’t do her good. Now she was entirely prepared to talk about the old, and how she had seen some of her pensioners prevailed on to will their bits of money away. March had an instinct for danger, and stopped short.

  March: You didn’t contest the will for some while?

  Mrs Rastall: I think you have the date.

  March: There was quite a long interval before you did. Perhaps you had advice in the meantime?

  Mrs Rastall: Of course I had advice. I’ve never contested a will before.

  Her spirit was emerging now, demureness had retired. March judged it safer to let her go. She went back, with the elation of one who has just finished a speech and is delighted with it, to her place, among the people supporting her.

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said Swaffield, but looked at her only briefly and then glanced away. From a couple of rows in front, Symington turned round, smiled a social smile, nodded, and turned back. That was all. It wasn’t so much the breath of blame, it was absence of praise. She felt extreme let-down. Only Lorimer, as the session at last ended and he walked beside her in the grandiose central hall, chilly as a cathedral in the summer afternoon, managed to mutter:

  ‘You did fine.’

  She was so grateful that the tears pricked. She went on being grateful when, just as lamely, he asked if he could give her dinner that night (in front, Swaffield, arms gesticulating, was making a vehement noise to Symington, but none of them minded leaving her alone). Then Lorimer asked if he could call for her: that sounded to Jenny like old-fashioned manners, very old-fashioned, though she wasn’t so much the younger.

  As she gave him her address, she said: ‘It isn’t very grand, you know.’

  He showed a grain of humour. ‘Nor’s mine.’ He told her he had a small flat in Pimlico.

  When Jenny got home, still only half past five, Lorimer not due for a couple of hours, she did what she hadn’t done for years. She lay on her bed and cried. Tired, disappointed, criticised, by this time conscious that she might have played it wrong. But she hadn’t been trying to play it, she began to encourage herself. She had enough spirit to become angry, and that warmed her. If they couldn’t understand that she was being honest, so much the worse for them. What was it all in aid of? Her realistic soul reminded her, a considerable sum of money. What was that worth? What a world. These people were playing a game according to their rules, but it wasn’t her game. They weren’t her kind of people. It was good to be going out to dinner. She might have wished it was with someone more exciting. She would put on her best dress for him.

  It wasn’t very grand, she thought sarcastically as she took it out of the cupboard, any more than this bedsitter was. It was as good as she could do. She would try to be some sort of company.

  12

  Lorimer took her in a taxi from Earl’s Court to Soho. It was a longish fare, and when she watched him ordering dinner she wished that she had insisted on travelling by tube. For she knew as much as anyone in London about the devices of the genteel poor. She saw him pressing nice things on her, and choosing the cheaper ones for himself. No, he didn’t eat much at night, he didn’t want that to put her off: perhaps he’d just have soup and an omelette. But she must have a decent meal. Wine? She pretended not to have any palate, and suggested a carafe of vin ordinaire. When she noticed that he liked his drink, she hesitated about how much another pound would hurt him and then let him order a second. Herself, she was in need of alcohol that night.

  She wasn’t finding it, however, too much of an effort to show gaiety or at any rate interest. Particularly when he had said something which pleased her. He was a most inarticulate man. He did force himself to say something about her performance in the witness box, but he did so in the identical words he had used four hours before. He said: ‘I thought you did fine this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  He paused for a long time, framing some words.

  ‘I don’t know much about it. But you didn’t try to make things better for yourself, did you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I liked that.’

  ‘How nice of you.’

  She was surprised, by this time astonished that anyone should have any glimmer of what she thought was decent: astonished that it should come from a man as dumb as this. He wasn’t alluring, and yet she was moved.

  It made her eager to cheer him up, and learn about him. Nevertheless, there was no doubt whatever that he was, if not dumb, then unquestionably mute. He was also, she would bet, very little used to women. He was certainly poor. Here her judgement would be more accurate than that of his House of Lords acquaintances. He was probably a shade better off than she was, not much. He had been married once. A failure. He hadn’t succeeded anywhere. He wished he had stayed in the army. He might have ‘done all right’ there. Of course, he said, he would have been ‘on the shelf by now’. Yes, he’d just about have made colonel, thought Jenny.

  She asked him, did he often go to the House of Lords?

  ‘Nearly every day when they are sitting,’ said Lorimer.

  ‘Do you often speak?’

  ‘No.’ He looked constrained, or embarrassed. ‘I haven’t started yet.’ He burst out: ‘You know, I’d like to have a go.’

  She said (and in a moment wished she hadn’t, finding it was her turn to be embarrassed;) ‘How long have you been there, in the Lords, I mean?’

  ‘Eleven years.’

  When they left the restaurant it was still daylight outside, though her watch said nearly half past ten. She wouldn’t let him take another taxi, and so they walked to the Leicester Square underground. She felt quite peaceful, after the day’s strain and hurt. She had had a good dinner and enough wine to give her a lift. This man didn’t make her footsteps light, but he had understood something and that still heartened her.

  They gazed at the striptease posters, the pornographic bookshops. Sleazy, as sleazy as any capital on earth. He remembered coming to restaurants round here when he was a young man: it was better then. She had been here too, once or twice, in her teens. Yes, it had been better before the war.

  Of course, they were romanticising a little, putting the sweetness of life, the douceur de la vie, back into their own youth along with all the decorum. In historical fact, this street had been moderately sleazy in the thirties, though not as shameless. They were romanticising with the homesickness, the indulgence, with him the subdued bite of rancour, of those who had themselves in their own lives seen better days, and whose kind (one might say class, except that they came from two sub-classes, delicately different) had also seen better days, never to return. However, some of their regret was unselfish. They each had what Lorimer as a boy had been taught to call a code, and their codes were very much the same. One hadn’t to go far in central London that night to feel that such a code – like the class who formed it, whether they kept to it or not – had gone for ever.

  Jenny was used to viewing the scene round her with distaste and not repining. She wasn’t repining now: the day, the nervous day, was over, that was a blessing. She was asking a casual question, looking up towards him, when she saw him gazing at the bright sky.

  As usual the words didn’t come.

  At last he said: ‘When I was in the desert, that was the one thing I missed.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Nights like this. The short summer nights. Northern summer nights.’

  For an instant, she thought he was attempting to distract her, and then decided against. No, he wasn’t thinking of her, it was the only independent vestige of poetry she had heard him mutter.

  A few minutes later, as they were walking down Cranbourn Street he had the same reflection again. Once he had found words he didn’t let them go, and so he said, pointing to the sky: ‘When I was in the desert that was th
e one thing I missed.’

  ‘You told me that before.’

  ‘Sorry. But I did miss them. Short summer nights.’

  ‘They’d be even shorter in Iceland, wouldn’t they?’ she said, bright-eyed, deadpan.

  He said, without humour: ‘I suppose they would.’

  At about the same time another couple were walking in the lucid midsummer evening. These were the two leading counsel in the hearing, Lander and March, and they were walking from their club, which was the Reform, along Pall Mall. They were intimate friends, intimate to a degree that, say, Hillmorton and Ryle could not have been. People often wondered about them. They seemed an ill-matched pair. Apart from their professional skills, they were very different men. March came from an old established Jewish family, something like Jewish Forsytes: he was wily, tactful, guarded, intuitive, over-mature and often gave the impression of dilapidated phlegm. While his friend, by a fluke looking much more like a Jewish stereotype than March, who didn’t in the least, was vivacious, a bit of a dandy, bright-tongued, in private likely to give offence by the same bright tongue, though he was by a long way the kinder and more dutiful of the two: entirely English, though foreigners expecting the English to be stiff and silent didn’t believe it.

  Why should these two be so intimate? The explanation was commonplace. They knew, and had known since they were at school, the secrets of each other’s sexual lives: and, as young men, had had features of a sexual temperament in common. These weren’t sensational features, and nowadays the two of them had half forgotten or submerged even the memory, though Lander, not excelling in tact, sometimes reminded his friend. Simply, they both had been unusually insecure and unconfident, too long so for their own composure, doubtful of their virility, uncertain whether they would satisfy women or be loved by them. All that was odd to recollect, now that they were middle-aged men, long since married, sons grown up, the tentativeness belonging to other people and a dead past, both used since they had become star barristers to admiration from women, whom once they might have been frightened of. It was that kind of similarity, and the knowledge that each had of it, which had made them close, for life.