In Their Wisdom Read online

  They had been talking of a dinner in the City which they had to attend on the coming Friday night. March discussed their transport with gravity, as though planning a difficult military campaign:

  ‘The streets may be clear as it’s the weekend. But using ordinary prudence we can’t rely on that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t let’s use ordinary prudence.’ Irrepressibly Lander added: ‘Just for once.’

  March gave a deflated, lop-sided smile. Soon they went through the palace gates and crossed into St James’s Park. There they sat down. It was a warm and tranquillising night. They both lived in Belgravia close by. March was a shade more talkative and unrestrained than usual, the only external effect of his having drunk enough at the club. Enough, in his case, was a fair amount. Of the two, Lander, bright and loving entertainment, was the abstemious one. He thought that March drank more like a Scandinavian than a Jew: and not given to holding his tongue was accustomed to say so. That evening March had drunk a bottle of Burgundy and half a dozen stiff whiskies. Lander, after a lifetime still not entirely used to those habits, viewed with envy how his friend was entirely unaffected, except perhaps rather more fun.

  Up to that time of night they had not exchanged a comment about the Massie case. The truth was, it did not matter to them overmuch, except in the line of duty. They were not involved with their own principals, they invested no emotion in their side – unlike the solicitors, who in both camps had become more partisan as the months passed.

  Lander and March were quite outside all this. Certainly, as the case stretched on their own fees stretched out (the costs had now accumulated to something like £25,000); but again that, though mildly gratifying, didn’t matter to them much. Each of them was among the leading chancery barristers of the period, earning a minimum of £40,000 a year, sometimes much more. March was tipped to become, and soon, a High Court Judge. Lander might have to wait a while because of his excessive sparkle, but he too, the pundits said, would finish on the Bench. Money didn’t matter: this case didn’t matter: and it was casually, as they sat beside the ornamental lake, that March asked: ‘What’s the betting on this present job?’

  ‘Which job?’

  ‘What we’re supposed to be performing on this week.’

  Lander, who never betted, had learnt his friend’s language. He said: ‘I’d have thought something like evens, isn’t that it?’

  ‘That’s about right.’

  ‘Perhaps a bit in your favour.’

  ‘Perhaps six to four on.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lander, ‘no one knows what passes through what the old Tortoise (Bosanquet) is pleased to call his mind. I wonder if he does. He might decide almost anything. But if I had to judge it I should want some proof that the old man Massie was capable of being influenced by anyone.’

  Lander was arguing his friend’s case, but the point was obvious. They knew each other’s quality, even when competing there was no value in keeping secrets.

  ‘He was obviously an old horror,’ Lander went on. ‘I wonder if he was compos at the end.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said March, ‘if he was compos at the beginning. Or any other time.’

  ‘Come to that,’ said Lander, ‘your woman (he meant Mrs Underwood) must have behaved like an unspeakable fool. If you were going to bamboozle an old man out of his money, would you make it quite so public? Politely eliminating everyone who ever came near him. It does give a slightly unfortunate impression. Don’t you think that might have occurred to her?’

  ‘We’ll see what you do to her.’ March wasn’t implying physical assault, but cross-examination. In fact, in their different techniques either of them, cross-examining for the plaintiff, ‘would have done to her’ very much the same. There wouldn’t be much room or need for finesse.

  ‘Good God alive, most people don’t deserve to come into money!’ Lander cried. That was a poor man’s (or a relatively poor man’s, his father being a Cambridge don) cri du coeur. He asked: ‘I take it you’ve seen her, what’s she like?’

  ‘Not my cup of tea,’ said March. ‘Hard. Simple. Haute bourgeoise. You might meet her at a Tory party conference with feathers in her hat. Devoutly believing in hanging and flogging as a kind of moral exercise. To be restored, not for prosaic practical reasons, but for their own delightful sake.’

  ‘That son of hers,’ Lander was still musing on his cri du coeur, ‘stands to gain a quarter of a million.’ Then, as though there was some obscure connection, ‘I take it he’s a pansy.’ In which Lander, like a good many others, was possibly in theory correct, in practice remarkably wrong.

  In a similar equable disconnected fashion, March said: ‘What did you make of your woman?’ (This time it was Jenny Rastall who was meant.)

  ‘She wasn’t a bad witness, except when she presented you with something on a plate. God save us from our friends.’

  ‘Did you care for her?’

  ‘Would she care for me?’ Lander grinned. ‘She’s a bit tight-lipped, isn’t she? She’d decide that I was frivolous and lightweight. The old old story.’

  March was meditating, but not on misjudgements about his friend. He said: ‘I have a very faint idea that she might be rather fun in bed.’

  ‘You have odd tastes, you always have had. Still, you may be right, you sometimes are.’

  ‘Well,’ said March, ‘we shall never know. And we shall never know why her father wished that she was dead. That must have been true, mustn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ Sometimes Lander was the more cautious of the two.

  That was all they said about the case that night.

  They sat, comfortably tired, relaxed, gazing at the water.

  ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ said March.

  ‘That’s not exactly a contribution to thought,’ said Lander.

  Once more March gave a lopsided grin, and obstinately repeated the remark. Not long afterwards, they got up and, with an outward appearance of middle-aged lawyers of some eminence, walked home.

  13

  March did not open the case for the defendants until the end of the week. When at last he did so, he simultaneously looked more deliberate and actually was more succinct than his friend. He disclaimed any special interest in Jenny: she was someone, and there were others, to whom money might or might not have been left according to what the old man finally desired. The essential things, March broke out, with the sudden thrust and bite which was one of his techniques, were what his state of mind was, whether he knew what he wanted or was being told: and whether Mrs Underwood’s intervention in his last years wasn’t just a simple act of kindness. March said that that was the most natural explanation, and the most natural explanation was usually the best. Here was an efficient woman who couldn’t bear the sight of the old man’s solitariness, and set about clearing it up. A well-run home wasn’t everything in one’s eighties, but it was preferable to squalor. All she could give him was her energy and her time and this she had done.

  That was unsensational, deliberately so, and so was the evidence he called that Friday. The doctor who had been present in Skelding’s chamber the previous October, head on one side in court like an exceptionally judicious bird or a politician being interviewed on television, pressed by Lander in cross-examination about Massie’s state of mind – at the end of which some observers in court weren’t going to be moved from the opinion that the old man was senile. A good many others thought that he was using old age to get his own way, and that he had a kind of self-willed, dislikeable cunning. None of the evidence, either that day or on the following Monday, cleared up the discrepancy.

  There were other witnesses who had attended to him physically, humbly or not so humbly. A surgeon who had operated for a prostate, the chiropodist, a barber who saw more of him than the doctors, shaving him three times a week and cutting his hair once a month. ‘He was one of the old school,’ said the barber with irrepressible cheerfulness. ‘He couldn’t stand his hair being long: not that there
was much danger of that, to tell you the honest truth.’ Which remark, the humour of the court as of all assemblies being elementary, gave much simple pleasure.

  During the weekend which interrupted this stream of prosaic evidence (marshalled by David March to give a sense, even a dulling sense, of comparative normality), Liz and Julian Underwood spent their time in Julian’s flat. It was a flat which at first sight, and certainly at second sight, a perceptive woman would have found discouraging if she was set on marrying the man. Liz had felt so, before she got herself entangled.

  Not that the flat was degraded, or suggested corruption, or was even untidy. On the contrary, it was only too immaculately kept. Julian was very good at looking after himself, far too good, Liz had judged in her less hallucinated days. Books all dusted, pictures well lighted, a view over the gardens at the back, sunlit that weekend. In the pantry his own food, hygienically chosen so as to prolong life, including a remarkable quantity of yoghurt and garlic. No drink for himself, a bottle of sherry for his guests, with which Liz, a non-ascetic drinker, had to be content whenever she stayed with him.

  Between them, on the Saturday, was a question of judgement and a question of superstition. Liz believed that his mother’s evidence, which must be heard early the next week, might be decisive. Julian, who was being unusually thoughtful and protective, doubted it. Not in this kind of case, he argued with her gently. Nothing is as decisive as all that. And if it comes to an appeal even less so. Then it is all read on paper and it looks very different.

  ‘Appeal,’ she said, ‘are we going to have any more of this?’

  ‘Anyone’s guess,’ said Julian. ‘We shall win, but we ought to be prepared for anything.’

  Liz was not convinced. She could resist him when he was being sensible. Perversely, she couldn’t, or she had to struggle, when he was elevated into one of his fugues – fugues of talk, unreason, pseudo-science, clouds of shimmering psychic explanation. Then he dominated her. He had made her as superstitious as he was. That Saturday she was being more so.

  Julian was a superstitious man, and one of his superstitions was attached to sex. At the beginning she had thought this was part of his sadistic play. Later she believed it, or wasn’t certain when to disbelieve; what was in his mind was hers. Open-eyed, solemnly, fluently, absurdly (was he jeering at her, provoking her, making fun of her?), he had lectured her. Copulation on a Tuesday meant bad luck the following day. Or even milder sexual pleasures. It had happened to him more than once. It had become an absolute tabu.

  Now it was her turn. It might have been revenge, but it didn’t feel like that. Before an ordeal or a crisis (and his mother’s appearance in the box had for Liz become unshakeably just that) – if they had enjoyed themselves, then all would go wrong. No, she wouldn’t risk it. They would feel guilty afterwards. This would all soon be over, and then they would be released.

  Julian tried to talk her round. Himself, he felt distinctly like it. Magnificent weather, pleasant to look at the sky from bed level, after they had had enough. No one to disturb them for forty-eight hours. Shame to waste the time. Crisis, anxiety, brought him on, and so (he knew all her nerves) they did her too.

  Her expression was dark, loving, determined. He could possibly have coaxed her. He could have forced her. She was in his power. But he held back. He was as selfish as a man could reasonably be, or perhaps not more than other men but more shamelessly so. At the same time, he had his own kind of good nature. He enjoyed understanding her moods. She would enjoy herself frenetically and then the instant they finished feel bad. And feel worse when they got into court again. Perhaps he enjoyed making up for times when he had ill-treated her. So he was gentle to her all the weekend, did the cooking and, as an unprecedented concession, went out and bought her half a bottle of gin. He was more gentle, she thought, than he had been when he was first seducing her: when, despite or because of all his practice, he had been deliberately slow – soon, so slow as to test her patience – in making the first move.

  After this curious piece of delicacy (drawing-room emotions, Dr Pemberton would have said with more than his usual scorn) Mrs Underwood, giving her evidence on the Tuesday morning, did not appear delicate at all. She was handsome, authoritative, smartly dressed, warm-voiced. She gave no sign of doubt or what she might have described as butterflies. And yet, though only Julian knew it, she had been sick twice after breakfast. She was one of those on whom strain acts directly on the body, not on consciousness: like Polish officers in the war, among whom the rate of anxiety neurosis was vanishingly small by comparison with the Anglo-Americans, that of heart conditions much higher.

  David March wasn’t above learning from his opponent and friend, who had carefully not covered up the breach between Jenny and her father. March, after planning his examination over the weekend, adopted a similar tactic, but was bolder, asking the thin-ice questions himself.

  Mrs Underwood’s first statements were simple and undecorated. With her husband, she had met Mr Massie once or twice in the past. When she met him again, years after, it was through being taken by neighbours of his to his home in Sussex. At that time he was merely an old acquaintance. It was later that she came to regard him as an old friend.

  She didn’t like the state he was living in. She had time on her hands. First she visited him frequently: then she took to staying in the house. It needed a little while for her to understand the whole position. She decided that the doctor was a good competent man, but not the right doctor for Mr Massie’s temperament. The housekeeper was not satisfactory: he wanted food at strange hours, not much food but snacks, often in the middle of the night, and the food wasn’t provided. He needed alcohol and that was permitted to run out. He didn’t drink excessively, but on and off throughout the twenty-four hours. It was one of the few comforts he had left.

  Court Record:

  March: It would be fair to say, would it, that for the last three years or so you devoted most of your life to him?’

  Mrs Underwood: That’s not for me to say.

  March: But you came to be on call day and night?

  Mrs Underwood: Yes, that is true.

  March: You sacrificed all your ordinary life?

  Mrs Underwood: It had to be done.

  March: So you did devote yourself to him?

  Mrs Underwood: I was obliged to, I felt –

  March: You did it out of duty?

  Mrs Underwood: Oh well, he was sad and lonely and I wanted to help.

  March: Tell us this. When you began to devote yourself in this fashion, did you have any idea of his testamentary intentions?

  Mrs Underwood: Absolutely none at all.

  Yes, she had realised that he had some money. She didn’t enquire where it was going. She knew vaguely that there was a daughter. She had never met her, The daughter was not mentioned. Mrs Underwood assumed that she had gone right out of his life.

  March: You didn’t talk about her?

  Mrs Underwood: Of course not.

  March: You didn’t remind him about her?

  Mrs Underwood: He didn’t want to be reminded.

  March: You didn’t communicate with her when he was dying? Or when he actually died?

  Mrs Underwood: She was a complete stranger to me. And by that time I took it for granted that she was to him also.

  Yes, in that last year or thereabouts he had discussed making a new will. By that date he had accepted Mr Skelding to do some of his legal work. His other solicitor was very busy, and sometimes Mr Massie wanted information (she obtained it herself on the telephone) at short notice, or an interview late at night. Mr Skelding was someone in whom she had complete confidence and Mr Massie soon felt the same. In the end Mr Massie described to her what he wanted the new and final will to contain. He wished to repeat the rubrics from some of his previous wills, of which there were copies in his files. She relayed his instructions to Mr Skelding. He came down in person with the document, Mr Massie had it read to him and signed it in the presence of witne
sses. It was as simple as that.

  March: Tell us one last thing. Anyone can understand that Mr Massie should wish to show appreciation for all your sacrifice and devotion. But it might seem a little strange that he expressed this by leaving most of his estate to your son?

  Mrs Underwood: That is very simple too.

  March: It would be helpful to get this entirely clear. How often did Mr Massie meet your son?

  Mrs Underwood: He came and stayed in Mr Massie’s house several times when I was there.

  March: They talked?

  Mrs Underwood: Yes, but the reason for Mr Massie’s bequest was very simple. I was sixty-five and it wasn’t sensible to risk two sets of death duties. Also I am moderately well provided for so long as I live, but most of my income comes from pensions and annuities which won’t go to my son. I made the whole position clear.

  After March’s sustained piece of pre-emptive tactics, which all the lawyers appreciated, his rival wasn’t left with many points of entry. For once, though this wasn’t apparent, he was somewhat at a loss. He had long ago decided that he daren’t touch the old housekeeper’s story of Mrs Underwood’s plans for marriage; neither he nor Symington could bring themselves to believe it, and it hadn’t been mentioned in evidence. Instead he had to retreat into a repetition of Mrs Underwood’s changes in the household. She answered as confidently as to her own counsel; she wouldn’t accept any implication, they were what any responsible person would have done.

  Lander had to force a sharper tone.

  Court Record:

  Lander: You wouldn’t deny, Mrs Underwood, that you had great influence on the old gentleman?