Dreams of another day, p.32
Dreams of Another Day, page 32
As she closed the door of the flat behind her she knew that she might not have it for very much longer. She also knew that by the end of her trial she might be taken down from the court to a cell to await transport to Holloway prison. With her gloved hand on the brightly polished doorknob, she tried to stop imagining what that would be like. She had never managed to ask Max about life in prison and so she had no information to calm her wildly exaggerated speculations.
Down in the street, she summoned a taxi and asked the driver to take her to the Old Bailey. He drove her along the river all the way to Blackfriars Bridge and then turned up New Bridge Street. Normally Ming would have looked out for the buildings she particularly loved, for the dignified red-and-white ordered symmetry of the Royal Hospital, the squat greyness of the Tate Gallery, the gothic fantasy of the Houses of Parliament and the glories of the Richmond Terraces, but on that morning they all slid past her eyes in a kind of greyish blur.
She noticed nothing of the traffic either, as it held up the cab at junctions and cross-roads. Only the vast, juddering bulk of a brick-delivery lorry that pulled up alongside the taxi at a red traffic light was big and immediate enough to break into her concentration. When the cabbie eventually drew up outside the Central Criminal Courts in the Old Bailey he had to tell his passenger that it was time to get out.
Ming flinched at the sound of the driver’s voice and shook her head as though she had just surfaced from under the sea, but she got herself out of the cab, paid the driver and chose an appropriate tip from the handful of change he gave her.
‘Cheer up, miss,’ he said, accepting the shilling. ‘Whatever he’s done, he won’t forget a lady like you while he’s inside.’
Before Ming could do more than smile at the cabbie’s assumption, he had banged his nearside window shut, ground into gear and pulled out again into the increasingly thick traffic. Her momentary amusement did wonders for her spirits and she walked more confidently out of the hot, dusty street into the cool but bustling shadows of the court.
Walking up the broad staircase to the courts, she saw that the walls of the circular lobby were covered with historical paintings and the whole place a mixture of far brighter colours than she would ever have imagined from her earlier wait in the main hall downstairs. The sight of those incongruously vivid murals took some of the menace away from the building.
Feeling more in control of herself, Ming found her way to court IV. Mr Ratterley was already waiting outside its doors. He looked her up and down, rather as her father had always done before he took any of his children anywhere out of the house, and then smiled.
‘Most appropriate dress, if I may say so, Miss Alderbrook.’ He held out his hand.
Ming slipped the glove off her right hand and shook his.
‘I’m glad you think so. I’m afraid it’s going to be very hot and I’d hate the jury to think I was sweating from fear or guilt,’ she said with unwonted frankness.
Mr Ratterley, who was far too experienced in the eccentric behaviour of clients awaiting trials to be surprised by her uncharacteristic directness, merely said:
‘Are you nervous?’
Ming took off her other glove, smoothed it carefully against her naked hand and then looked up again.
‘When I remember that the trial could end in my going to prison,’ she said with great care to articulate her words precisely, ‘then I become extremely nervous. But I am not afraid of standing in the dock or answering questions; I won’t break down and weep or anything like that.’
‘I should hope not indeed. Aha, this must be your sister.’
Ming turned at once and saw Gerry, walking down the corridor with Mike. Ming held out both hands.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Mike and I are rooting for you all the way, you must know that.’
‘Even though you don’t really agree with me?’ she said to her brother-in-law.
‘Don’t be silly. Whatever I think, unlike some others we know about, I believe absolutely in your right to say, write or publish your ideas.’
‘Nothing but the office could have stopped him coming today and even then it would have had to be an international disaster,’ said Gerry cheerfully. ‘Flixe will be here, too, but she’s decided to sit up in the public gallery so that no one will notice the rage on her face if the prosecution goes too far.’
Ming managed to laugh at that.
‘Now, where do we go?’ Gerry asked.
‘Mr Ratterley?’ Ming suddenly remembered that neither Gerry nor Mike had ever met him and quickly introduced them. He explained that they should wait until Julia Wallington arrived and then go on into the court.
Ming looked round for her and was faced instead with Roger Sillhorne. He was standing about twenty feet away, talking to his lawyer, but his eyes glared at Ming. Hot, suffocating hatred welled up in her.
‘Ah, here’s Julia.’ Mr Ratterley’s voice mercifully distracted Ming and she turned away.
Julia was already dressed in her short wig and black gown. The gown flying open over her well-cut black suit and plain white blouse made her look even taller than usual.
‘Good,’ she said when she had taken in the effect of Ming’s clothes. ‘Any sign of Connie?’
‘Here,’ called the familiar voice from the end of the corridor. They all looked round and watched as Connie hurried towards them. She, too, noticed Roger and stared at him contemptuously until his eyes fell. Then she came on to the others and they saw that exhaustion had put deep shadows under her dark eyes.
She also had obeyed Mr Ratterley’s instructions and was wearing a simple-looking suit made of blue-and-white flecked tweed. The skirt was plain and straight, but not too tight, and the short, cardigan-like jacket was edged with darker-blue braid. It made Connie look ordinary, which surprised everyone. She had managed to disguise both her tremendous distinction and the formidable air with which they were all familiar.
‘Did you two exchange notes?’ asked Gerry, sounding amused.
‘There wasn’t any need,’ answered Connie with a gleam in her eyes that belied the demure convention of her clothes. ‘Ming almost always wears blue-and-white.’
They were all smiling as Mr Ratterley pushed open the double doors and ushered them into the court, but it was an effort for all of them. The wood-panelled severity of the interior was sobering. Ratterley had a word with the usher, who took Ming and Connie to the dock, where their warders were waiting for them. At the sight of the uniforms, Ming felt her insides clench. There was a light singing in her head and she was afraid that she might not be able to hear anything that was said to her. Deliberately she looked down into the court, identifying the various people whom Julia had said would be there.
Apart from the clerk, who was sitting below the judge’s empty chair, the usher and the policeman who guarded the door, there was no one except Roger Sillhorne, his solicitor and Miles Coopering, QC, the barrister they had briefed. He looked about Julia’s age and obviously knew her well for they were leaning towards each other, apparently enjoying an entertaining conversation. At one moment Coopering laughed aloud and even patted Julia’s shoulder.
‘Doesn’t that seem odd?’ whispered Connie, who was also watching them.
‘A bit,’ said Ming, who had hated to see Julia on such good terms with the opposition, ‘but as soon as it starts, I imagine they’ll forget all that friendliness.’
The doors opened again and a motley collection of people filed nervously into the room. The first twelve were led to the jury’s benches and the others made to sit at the back. Ming watched Julia and the other barrister looking them up and down. Most were men, and most were middle-aged. Two looked rather like schoolteachers or perhaps local-government workers; one seemed vaguely artistic with long hair and a bow tie; three gave nothing away in their dress and of the rest one appeared to be a great deal richer than the others and much more impatient. He was good-looking in a rather heavy way and made Ming think of the City. He could have been a stockbroker, she thought. Another had a weatherbeaten face and such powerful shoulders and calloused hands that she decided he must be a builder or perhaps a gardener.
The two women were as different from each other as possible: one, perhaps in her late fifties, was dressed in a well-cut dark suit and a good hat and looked quite as formidable as Connie usually did; the other was a motherly woman at least twenty years younger, whose pleasant face was framed in a patterned headscarf. She looked both kind and sensible and Ming felt a tingling hope as she smiled.
‘Be upstanding.’
Gerry, standing very close to her husband in the row of chairs behind the barristers, turned to give Ming an encouraging smile, which she did not see because she was looking at the judge. He reminded her irresistibly of statues of Horus she had seen in Egypt. Like the hawk-headed sky god, the judge had hard, punitive-looking eyes. His wig gave him the flat-topped look of a raptor’s head and his small mouth was pinched and quite overshadowed by his beak of a nose. He looked irritable, implacable and frightening. To hope for an acquittal began to seem childish.
The atmosphere in the room had changed completely with his arrival. Julia and Miles Coopering had retreated to their own seats and schooled their faces into severity. Even the clerk, who had been chatting to one of the ushers, seemed frozen into a caricature of legal dryness.
Ming’s throat tightened and she forced herself to turn her head away from the judge and concentrate on the motherly juror.
The judge lowered himself into his chair and everyone else sat down again. Each member of the jury in turn rose to take the oath. Julia challenged the rich, impatient-looking man and the prosecution barrister challenged the artistic one in the bow tie. They were replaced with one other woman, younger this time and looking like a welfare worker, and another nondescript middle-aged man in a baggy grey suit.
When the court was quiet again Mr Coopering got to his feet, straightened his gown, announced that he was appearing for the prosecution and that his learned friend Mrs Julia Wallington was appearing for the defence in the matter of R. v. Alderbrook, Wroughton and The World Beyond.
The formalities over, Mr Coopering began to outline the case he was going to make.
The two women in the dock sat and listened to his description of their magazine and its contents. Having paraphrased the excerpt from Story of a Lost Love, Mr Coopering added:
‘I do not think I have ever had occasion to read so flagrant a piece of filth in my entire career.’
Ming felt as though her lower jaw had dropped in surprise and hurriedly shut her mouth. She could not believe that a man so obviously educated and sensible could truly subscribe to such an exaggerated statement. Deliberately reminding herself of the friendliness with which he had been talking to Julia, Ming listened carefully.
‘And this disgusting story is printed in a magazine, ladies and gentlemen, that is intended to be read by wives and mothers. It is a magazine that might well be picked up by any of those women’s children. Think what the effect could be on an impressionable boy of reading an apparently approving account of behaviour that, I must remind you, is a crime in this country, whatever may be the case in France, where the story was first printed.
‘The charge against the proprietors of this magazine is that they have published an obscene libel, that is, ladies and gentlemen, material that would tend to deprave and corrupt people who might read it.’
Julia Wallington picked up her pen and wrote a brief note on the big, pale-blue-covered notebook in front of her and then relaxed against the back of her bench. She listened carefully to what her adversary said, showing very little emotion beyond a slightly amused scepticism.
Up in the public gallery, Flixe leaned forward, trying to see the expressions on the faces of everyone involved in her sister’s prosecution. It seemed to her outrageous that Ming should be pilloried for such a trivial cause. The smoothness of Mr Coopering’s delivery worried her and she wondered how her sister would stand up to being questioned by him.
Ming put up a hand to brush a stray hair off her face and Flixe saw that the hand was shaking. She looked away for a moment and her eye was caught by one of the other spectators, sitting at the furthest edge of the bench. A tall youngish man, he looked familiar but for a moment she could not identify him. Then he, too, turned and looked her full in the face. Flixe recognised Mark Sudley and her neatly plucked eyebrows twitched.
‘Is your name Roger Sillhorne?’
Flixe looked back into the court to see the first witness standing in the box. Rotund and full of self-importance, he bowed slightly as he said:
‘Yes, m’lord.’
The judge invited him to sit in the witness box, but Roger chose to stand. Miles Coopering led him to describe the excerpt of Story of a Lost Love. When he had finished, Coopering asked:
‘Do you believe that it is obscene?’
Julia wrote herself a note, and Ming remembered one of their many long conferences, when she had told her Counsel that they could rely on several eminent literary men and women to support their contention that there was nothing obscene about Story. Julia raised her eyebrows and explained that however eminent they might be, they would be of no help to the defence. It was for the court alone to decide, she had told Ming, whether or not the excerpt tended to deprave and corrupt.
‘That is a matter for the court,’ said Roger, who had obviously been told the same thing. ‘I cannot possibly say more than that I find it distasteful in the extreme and not fit for the eyes of decent readers.’
The judge looked derisively at Miles Coopering. A little flustered, he picked up his notes and then raised his handsome head again.
‘Who are the likely readers of this magazine?’
‘Its circulation is composed principally of young married women with children. It can also be found in public libraries and in the libraries of various educational institutions.’
‘And so it might be read, for example, by teenage boys?’
‘It might indeed. The very people who need most protection from such filth.’
‘Thank you, Mr Sillhorne. Please wait there.’
Julia rose as he sat down. She shook out the full sleeves of her gown and turned to the witness box with a smile.
‘Is the youth of England more vulnerable now than in earlier generations?’ she asked in a voice of gentle surprise.
Roger launched at once into an explanation of how the declining standards of behaviour since the war had sapped the country’s lifeblood. England was, he said at one moment, just as much at risk as she had once been from the Nazis, but the new enemy was the creeping fifth column of immorality.
Julia let him talk, rarely asking anything and allowing him to show himself as a man obsessed. She also used his outburst to gauge the jury’s opinions. At least two of the men appeared to approve of much of what Roger was saying, while one smiled openly at his increasing hysteria. When she had learned enough, Julia thanked Roger, asked him to wait in case Prosecution Counsel wanted to re-examine him and sat down.
Miles Coopering declined to ask Roger anything more and called his next witness, a woman in her thirties who described herself as a wife and mother of two children. She had left her only job as soon as she married and spent her days caring for her family.
‘Do you subscribe to The World Beyond?’
‘I have done in the past, yes.’
‘Why did you do so?’
‘Because of the letter I was sent by my school old-girls’association, which said that the magazine was being published to give women who were at home with children all day some insight into what happens in the outside world. It sounded interesting.’
‘Have your children ever picked it up?’
‘Yes. My son is thirteen and he wants to be an artist. He has always liked the covers they have on the magazine and often asks what is in it. Until the October issue I’ve always told him and often showed him articles.’
‘And now?’
‘As soon as I read the October issue I cancelled my subscription,’ said the woman, making a face that suggested some foul miasma was rising from the front of the witness box.
‘Why was that?’
‘I felt as though I’d crawled through slime, as though I’d never get myself clean again.’
There was so much satisfaction in her voice that Julia was tempted to provoke her into an outburst like Roger Sillhorne’s, but that would have given the prosecution far too great an opportunity for a searching re-examination and so Julia restrained herself. She asked only about the witness’s education, which elicited the fact that she had passed School Certificate and qualified as a shorthand typist at a secretarial school.
‘I see. Thank you,’ said Julia in a polite, almost uninterested voice and offered Miles Coopering no opening for any more questions.
Up in the public gallery Flixe was astonished at Julia’s lack of enterprise. It seemed absurd to leave the jury thinking that she had no way of challenging the woman’s evidence. Flixe also wondered how on earth the prosecution had found her.
Before Miles Coopering could say anything, the judge leaned forward.
‘Mr Coopering, I see that it is almost half-past twelve. I think that we should adjourn for lunch.’
‘As your lordship pleases,’ said Coopering, bowing to the judge.
‘Be upstanding.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Ming as she and Connie reached the passage outside the court. ‘I loathed listening to that woman.’
‘I’m not surprised. The whole business is foul. And it’s not helped by the heat in there,’ said Connie, dabbing at her forehead with a handkerchief.
Mr Ratterley was waiting for them outside the court with Gerry.
‘We have time to pop across the road for a bite, I think. Shall we go?’
‘All right. I don’t feel awfully hungry, but I suppose I ought to eat something. Is Flixe coming?’
‘I haven’t seen her, Ming, and we have no time to waste. The public gallery has a separate entrance. We may see her outside. Come along.’
