In Their Wisdom Read online

  Mrs Underwood: I really am not quite certain what that means.

  Lander: Look at the facts. You got him to do precisely what you wanted, isn’t that so?

  Mrs Underwood: Not at all. He was a very strong-willed man,

  Lander: But Mrs Underwood, may I remind you, he let you – or maybe he wasn’t in a state to resist – he let you introduce a new doctor, a new solicitor, a new housekeeper, all before you had been in his house a year?

  Mrs Underwood: I have explained already that that was absolutely necessary.

  Lander: Whether it was necessary or not, it happened. We agree on that, don’t we?

  Mrs Underwood: I am very glad that it happened.

  Lander: No doubt, But he couldn’t resist you doing it, could he?

  Mrs Underwood: He took some persuading, of course.

  Lander: Persuading? Persuading, Mrs Underwood?

  Mrs Underwood: Certainly persuading, what else could I do?

  [Lander tried other versions of the question but got no further. He had to switch his thrust.]

  Lander: Mrs Underwood, you have lived in this world. You can’t have been in Mr Massie’s house for long without realising that he was distinctly well to do.

  Mrs Underwood: I didn’t give it much thought.

  Lander: But you did realise it?

  Mrs Underwood: He was living like a man of some means.

  Lander: And in the not too distant future those means would inevitably have to descend on other people.

  Mrs Underwood: I did not give that any thought at all.

  Lander: Does that sound entirely probable?

  Mrs Underwood: Certainly. I saw a job of work that I could do for him. Making his last years more bearable, that was what I thought about.

  Lander: Nothing else?

  Mrs Underwood: Nothing else at all.

  [More pressure, satire from Lander, confidence from Mrs Underwood and no give whatever.]

  Lander: Yet, even you have to recognise there is a faint difference in his final will? From anything before you took charge?

  Mrs Underwood: Naturally, I was glad that he wanted to show some recognition.

  Lander: Equally naturally, you discussed his will with him?

  Mrs Underwood: He told me what he wanted to do.

  Lander: After you had persuaded him? Or influenced him, shall we say?

  Mrs Underwood: He had made up his own mind.

  Lander: You didn’t think of dissuading him? You could have influenced him in other directions. You might have reminded him that he had responsibilities. His daughter, for instance.

  Mrs Underwood: He didn’t feel any responsibility for her.

  Lander: No discussion, no influence. You might have influenced him against such a curious will, mightn’t you?

  Mrs Underwood: I was very grateful. That would have been a ridiculous thing to do.

  Lander: After all your efforts.

  Mrs Underwood: I think it would have hurt his feelings.

  Lander pressed on, asking how many times the old man had actually seen Julian in the flesh. Perhaps three or four. Towards the end he wished to see only her and the doctor. She was still invulnerable. Dissatisfied with himself and his technique, quite uncertain about what impression she had left, Lander had to let her go.

  In fact, on most people in court she had made a strong and favourable impression. A great many on her own side were certain that she had clinched the case. Even Liz, hypersensitised, had phases when she dared to think so.

  There were a few sceptical thoughts. It was all so tidy, so rationalised, so free from hesitation: did anyone behave or think like this? But then, in such an audience, there were bound to be a few who didn’t give anyone’s self-explanation the benefit of the doubt. A few more were speculating on what the conditions had really been, inside that gloomy-sounding house. She had made it seem too like a nice orderly business meeting, someone observed. It couldn’t have been quite like that. Whether the old man was senile and defenceless or not. After all, she had said herself that he had been an obsessive drinker, his glass ready at hand night and day. To which the answer was that she had no conceivable need to bring that out. It was another proof of how straightforward she was.

  In the final tailing-off of evidence, there was one glimpse of a scene in that terminal downstairs room. Mr Skelding answered questions, composed, quite unperturbed, about his connection with Mr Massie. Yes, he had been introduced by Mrs Underwood. Yes, he had advised her for a good many years, and her husband before that. Yes, he had had conversations with Mr Massie. Yes, Mr Massie was entirely capable of attending to business. Yes, Mrs Underwood had instructed him of Mr Massie’s wishes about his last will. Yes, he had been shown copies of previous wills and asked to preserve the identical form. The signing and witnessing of the will, was, of course, all in order.

  Lander made no attempt to challenge any of Mr Skelding’s previous evidence and his cross-examination was short.

  Court Record:

  Lander: Did you ask Mr Massie whether he understood his will?

  Mr Skelding: No. I should have thought that was impertinent.

  Lander: Did you have any conversation with him?

  Mr Skelding: It wouldn’t have been suitable. When I arrived the witnesses were already present in the room.

  [The witnesses were father and son from a house close by.]

  Lander: Was anyone else present?

  Mr Sbelding: Mrs Underwood was there.

  Lander: What happened then?

  Mr Skelding: I presented the will to Mr Massie. He looked over it.

  Lander: Could he take it in?

  Mr Skelding: To the best of my knowledge and belief, of course. He signed. His writing was good and firm right up to the end. The witnesses signed.

  Lander: Did anyone speak?

  Mr Skelding: So far as I can recollect, no.

  Lander: You mean, all this took place in complete silence?

  Mr Skelding: I think I remember Mr Massie at the end saying something like thank you.

  14

  On the Thursday morning, after counsels’ speeches, Mr Justice Bosanquet announced that he would take the rest of the day to reflect and give his decision the following morning. Another night of waiting for the anxious: and they went on waiting during the first careful, non-committal hour or so of Mr Justice Bosanquet. Sitting contentedly in his place, teacher-like, he began with a homily. He didn’t fancy himself as an orator, and actually there was a marked lack of resemblance between his effect on an audience and that of Trotsky at his most inspired. Nevertheless, Bosanquet was not deterred from utterance and in secret enjoyed it. His homily was, like all his other homilies, sensible, indefatigably so. It dealt with the unwisdom of going to law whenever the legal process could be avoided. Cases like the one before him could and should be settled between the parties: compromise was to be preferred to litigation.

  That wasn’t said so simply, and the clock ticked on. Then he approached somewhat nearer the point. Undue influence. That was the bone of the plaintiff’s pleading. Of all the cases that came before this Division of the High Court, those of undue influence were the most difficult, and sometimes it seemed the most unrealistic, to decide. Undue influence, what did it or could it mean? There was no satisfactory definition. Imagine that he (Mr Justice Bosanquet) is a very old man to whom in the nature of things death cannot be far away. There is no relative close at hand to minister to him, but there is, shall we say, a nurse. A nurse who is always available, makes him feel less lonely, understands his worries. She will talk to him about whatever is on his mind and will help him make his decisions. Is that influence, can it become undue influence?

  He may easily become grateful to his nurse and ask her how he can express his gratitude. He may easily ask her if she would care to be included in his will. She may tell him that there is something that would make her happy. Is that undue influence? She may of course take advantage of a decline in faculties, and put suggestions into his
mind which wouldn’t have been admitted when he was fully capable. That one would regard as undue influence, but where and how is the line to be drawn? Most people appeared to respond strongly to those nursing them in their final illness – sometimes with great dislike, usually with trust.

  Usually there was bound to be influence, undue or not. It was unsatisfactory to have to make a decision in law about anything in this misty landscape. Still, that was his duty this morning.

  At which Mr Justice Bosanquet at last got down to the case. He said firmly, impassively: ‘I listened with great respect to the evidence of the plaintiff, Mrs Rastall. I have no hesitation at all in saying I believed every word she said. She was, in my judgement, telling us the entire truth of a very painful situation, as it affected her.’ This sounded ominous in some ears, not in March’s, who had known him before he was a judge. It was still anyone’s bet, March was thinking, how he would come down. March knew that Bosanquet, who though prosy was less vain than most men, had one spot of vanity. He was vain about his human sense.

  He might have said, and had sometimes done so, that his snap judgements about witnesses were likely to be only a little better than an even chance, he was perhaps a shade more likely to be right than wrong: but to himself he trusted his insight more than that. That morning he was using it with confidence. March listened with some interest. He thought that the judge wasn’t clever and not his favourite dinner companion. But was worth listening to about people.

  Bosanquet was describing the father-daughter relationship and its effect on Jenny.

  ‘I completely accept that she couldn’t persist in forcing herself upon him. Some women would have done so, but, so far as one can interpret Mr Massie’s personality, one of the more obscure features of this case, I believe that he would have rejected her. I further believe that he had inhibited his daughter’s display of affection, not the affection itself which she naturally possessed.’

  More about Jenny, temperate and kind. Then: ‘However, none of this is central to the core of the case. It is common ground that Mrs Rastall and her father were on distant terms. It is also common ground that nevertheless in all the series of wills, the rather peculiar series of wills which Mr Massie executed, Mrs Rastall was always the principal legatee – in all that series of wills until the last one. So the relation between father and daughter is not of the first relevance. What is of the first relevance is how Mr Massie came to change his mind in that last will.’

  That brought Bosanquet, carefully unemphatic, to the actions of Mrs Underwood. No one had tried to deny, or could possibly deny, that she had ‘dedicated almost all her time and energy’ (that was the phrase he continually picked out, as though with a pair of tweezers) for nearly four years to this old gentleman. Four years was a considerable stretch in anyone’s life, the more so when one was not in one’s first youth. It was not entirely easy to reconcile the medical testimony, but at the very least Mr Massie was by this time physically frail, and mentally his moods appeared often to have been clouded.

  The judge went on: ‘He was much alone, and Mrs Underwood had gone out of her way to relieve that loneliness. But’ (at that moment the ‘but’ was left in the air, and there were some whose attention tightened) ‘–it is possible to consider that some of the steps she took may have increased his loneliness, She has explained her reasons for dispensing with doctors and others who had served him for so long. However satisfactory these actions were to Mrs Underwood, the effect must have been to isolate this old man from all those he had normally been connected with. Getting rid of one professional adviser or attendant could be a coincidence, getting rid of all of them might appear to bend coincidence rather far. Mrs Underwood may very well have persuaded herself that she was doing it for the best. The conclusion, however, was that she was left as the only confidante or, even more, the only source of influence surrounding the old man.’

  An eye-flash passed between March and his opponent. By this time, they – and other persons with a share of perception – had realised that the judge mistrusted Mrs Underwood. He hadn’t been overpowered by her confidence or conscious rectitude. In retrospect, some thought that though he was straining himself to be fair in his own mind, he wasn’t – or rather that this was someone who, in private as well as public, he couldn’t have had sympathy with. He said, and repeated it, and refined what he had repeated, that she could have believed that she was acting with the best of intentions: but in his heart he wasn’t moved by that excuse. He had decided that she had carried out a planned and calculated campaign. He probably thought that she was more of a piece than she actually was: he had never seen her craving for her son’s affection. But, as March and Lander argued later with a detachment not granted to others in the case, it was a nice problem in psychological disparity.

  The judge was a man in touch with his own experience. What he felt, he recognised without cover. Mrs Underwood was a woman of action. Between the introspective and the person of action there was one of the oldest miscomprehensions. Persons of action were good at not letting the right hand know what the left hand did: and often, with ardent and genuine sincerity, denying it. ‘In this case,’ said Lander to March, ‘the right hand was getting the old man his bedpan night and day: and the left hand was making sure of the dibs. Is that hypocrisy? Quite possibly not. Horizontal cleavage, if you like.’ In that amicable conversation, Lander added cheerfully: ‘Still, for my money, the old Tortoise was in the right of it. Come on, David, you’re not a specially good man, but you’ve never deceived yourself about a motive in your life.’

  In court, the judge had made it clear that Mrs Underwood had deceived herself about her motive: or at least that that was the most charitable assumption. ‘The lady has told us that, when she took up residence in Mr Massie’s house, and for a considerable period afterwards, she had no knowledge of, or even interest in, how he was proposing to dispose of his estate. In its full significance, that I do not find entirely easy to accept, though I am sure Mrs Underwood was making a conscientious attempt to recollect…’ (A few minutes later.) ‘We have to bear in mind that Mrs Underwood is quite patently a most able and efficient woman. She is used to handling money. She is used to meeting people like herself, who have to give thought to their financial affairs and their final disposition. It is not easy to accept that this experience didn’t lead her to acquaint herself with Mr Massie’s mind about his own final disposition…’ (Later.) ‘All this evidence appears to me cumulative and leads me, despite the reservations I made earlier about the uncertainties of this kind of case, to one finding. I have decided that one cannot study the final will without seeing in it the influence of Mrs Underwood. In the light of all the weight of the cumulative evidence I have decided further that one cannot avoid seeing undue influence. I have therefore to declare that the will of 6 September 1970 is invalid.’

  He added, in a reflective tone: ‘For the present I shall suspend the award of costs.’

  Muriel Calvert was not present in court that morning. Though she had a glacial interest in some of the personalities, she had none in the result. If she had been there she might have observed that Mr Justice Bosanquet had no sense of dramatic shape: for, instead of stopping short at his decision, he spent a further five minutes repeating his strictures on unnecessary litigation and the desirability of rational compromise.

  Listening to the judge’s verdict, which in fact she along with the lawyers had anticipated many minutes before, Liz felt a flood of dark flushing anger, together with a curious naked shame, as though she as well as Mrs Underwood were being exposed to jeering censorious prurient gazes. But the shock, the bitterness of disappointment, made her more active. Before the judge had finished, she was already stirring with a sunburst of plans. It was no use being quiet any longer.

  Meanwhile Jenny had heard the verdict and had, for an instant, felt an extraordinary and to her unknown sensation, as though she had been transformed into a vacuum inhabited only by herself. Then the blankness passed and
she listened to the judge prosing away with a warmed and almost patronising satisfaction, wishing to congratulate someone in the vicinity, someone not herself.

  As they got out into the hall that well-being was soon nibbled away. Swaffield and Symington were talking together, Swaffield caught her watching them and said he was taking them out for lunch, Symington pressed her arm and said: ‘So far, so good.’ It did not need a woman as fine-nerved as Jenny to detect that that wasn’t the voice of unmitigated triumph, of struggles packed away and won.

  Swaffield had them all driven to Prunier’s in one of his grand cars. On the way he was in the best of tempers, which meant there were glints of happy malice.

  ‘That woman (Mrs Underwood) – not quite enough people to hear, not quite enough. Still, she heard, unless the Lord suddenly made her deaf. That’s something.’ It wasn’t until they were sitting at their table that he congratulated Jenny.

  ‘Well, my girl, you did your stuff with the judge. I didn’t think you could have done. That shows how wrong I can be.’

  For Swaffield, this was apologetic and handsome. He went on: ‘But you mustn’t throw your hat in the air just yet.’

  ‘That’s about the last thing I feel like doing,’ she said with acidity.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Symington.

  ‘That’s the question I ought to ask, what is the matter?’

  ‘Oh, we were more or less prepared for it, there’s some talk of an appeal.’

  While they were still standing in the Law Courts’ hall, he had left them for some minutes. She now realised it was to confer with the lawyers, their side and the other’s.

  ‘Is it sensible?’ said Swaffield. But as rapidly as anyone in court he had realised the significance of the judge’s last decision, or rather non-decision. He wouldn’t have held up an award of costs if an appeal was only the slimmest of chances.

  Symington regarded Jenny. Both men knew her well enough by now to know that she could stand the truth. ‘The old judge said today that these cases are anyone’s guess. Another judge might just have tilted the other way. As for being sensible, it depends on how much money everyone is prepared to spend. The costs are going to be quite impressive.’