Arthur & George (24 page)

He imagined all these people looking at him—and now they were joined by Mr. Hands the bootmaker. Mr. Hands would think that George, after having himself expertly fitted for a new pair of boots, had gone calmly home, eaten his supper, deceitfully retired to bed, then crept out, struck across the fields and mutilated a pony. And when George imagined all these witnesses and accusers he felt such a wash of sorrow for himself, and for what had been done to his life, that he wanted to be allowed to stay in this subterranean dimness for ever. But before he could even hold himself at this level of misery, he was swept away again, because of course all these Wyrley folk would not be looking at him in this accusatory way—at least, not for many years. No, they would be looking at his parents: at Father in the pulpit, at Mother as she made her parish rounds; they would be looking at Maud when she entered a shop, at Horace when he came home from Manchester—if he ever came home again, given his brother’s downfall. Everyone would look, and point, and say: their son, their brother did the Wyrley Outrages. And he had inflicted this public and continuing humiliation upon his family, who were everything to him. They knew him innocent, but this only doubled his sense of guilt towards them.

They knew him innocent? And then despair bore him down further. They knew him innocent, but how could they stop turning over in their heads what they had seen and heard over the last four days? What if their belief in him began to falter? When they said they knew him innocent, what did that really mean? To know him innocent, they must either have sat up all night and observed him sleep, or else been on watch in the Colliery field when some lunatic farm-hand arrived with an evil instrument in his pocket. Only thus could they truly know. So what they did was believe, truly believe. And what if, over time, some words of Mr. Disturnal, some assertion of Dr. Butter, or some private long-held doubt about George, began to undermine their faith in him?

And this would be another thing he would have done to them. He would have sent them on a dismal journey of self-questioning. Today: we know George and we know him innocent. But perhaps in three months: we think we know George and we believe him innocent. And then in a year: we realize we did not know George, yet we still think him innocent. Who could blame anyone for this declension?

It was not just he who had been sentenced; his family had been too. If he was guilty, then some would conclude that his parents must have perjured themselves. So when the Vicar preached the difference between right and wrong, would his congregation think him either a hypocrite or a dupe? When his mother visited the downtrodden, might they not tell her she would be better off saving her sympathy for her criminal son in his distant gaol? This was another thing he had done: he had sentenced his own parents. Was there no end to these tormented imaginings, to this pitiless moral vortex? He waited for a further descent, a washing-away, a drowning; but then he thought again of Maud. He sat on his hard stool behind iron bars, while somewhere in that gloom Constable Dubbs whistled tunelessly to himself, and he thought of Maud. She was his source of hope, she would keep him from falling. He believed in Maud; he knew she would not falter, because he had seen the look she gave him in court. It was a look that did not need interpretation, that could not be corroded by time or malice; it was a look of love and trust and certainty.

When the crowds outside the courtroom had dispersed, George was taken back to Stafford Gaol. Here he encountered another realignment of his world. Having been in prison since his arrest, George had naturally come to regard himself as a prisoner. But in fact he had been lodged in the best hospital cell; he received newspapers every morning, food from his family, and was allowed to write business letters. Unreflectingly, he had assumed his circumstances to be temporary, attendant, briefly purgatorial.

Now he was truly a prisoner, and to prove it they took his clothes away. In itself this was ironic, since for weeks he had regretted and resented his inappropriate summer suit and otiose straw hat. Had the suit made him look less serious in court, and thus harmed his cause? He could not tell. In any case, suit and hat were taken away, and exchanged for the heavy weight and felty roughness of prison attire. The jacket overhung his shoulders, the trousers bagged at knee and ankle; he did not care. They also gave him a waistcoat, a forage cap, and a pair of wife-kickers.

“You’ll find it a bit of a shock,” said the warder, bundling up the summer suit. “But most get used to it. Even people like yourself, if you don’t take offence.”

George nodded. He observed, gratefully, that the officer had spoken to him in just the same tone, and with just as much civility, as he had done over the previous eight weeks. This came as a surprise. He had somehow expected to be spat upon and reviled on his return to the gaol, an innocent man now publicly labelled guilty. But perhaps the terrifying change was only in his own mind. The officers’ manner remained the same for a simple and dispiriting reason: from the start they had presumed him guilty, and the jury’s decision had merely confirmed that presumption.

The next morning, as a favour, he was brought a newspaper, so that he might see, one final time, his life turned into headlines, his story no longer divergent but now consolidated into legal fact, his character no longer of his own authorship but delineated by others.

SEVEN YEARS PENAL SERVITUDE.

WYRLEY CATTLE-KILLER SENTENCED.

PRISONER UNMOVED

Dully, yet automatically, George looked over the rest of the page. The story of Miss Hickman the lady doctor appeared also to have reached its end, subsiding into silence and mystery. George noted that Buffalo Bill, after a London season and a provincial tour lasting 294 days, had concluded his programme at Burton-on-Trent before returning to the United States. And as important to the
Gazette
as the sentencing of the Wyrley “cattle-killer” was the story right next to it:

YORKSHIRE RAILWAY SMASH

Two trains wrecked in a tunnel
One killed, 23 injured

BIRMINGHAM MAN’S THRILLING EXPERIENCE

He was held at Stafford for another twelve days, during which time his parents were allowed daily visits. He found this more painful than if he had been hustled into a van and driven to the most distant part of the kingdom. In this long farewelling each of them behaved as if George’s current predicament was some bureaucratic error soon to be remedied by an appeal to the appropriate official. The Vicar had received many letters of support and was already talking enthusiastically of a public campaign. To George this zeal seemed to border on hysteria, and its origins to lie in guilt. George did not feel his situation to be temporary, and his father’s plans did not bring him any comfort. They seemed more an expression of religious belief than anything else.

After twelve days George was transferred to Lewes. Here he received a new uniform of coarse biscuit-coloured linen. There were two broad vertical stripes up the front and back, and thick, clumsily printed arrows. They gave him ill-fitting knickerbockers, black stockings and boots. A prison officer explained that he was a star man, and therefore would begin his sentence with three months’ separate—it might be longer, it wouldn’t be shorter. Separate meant solitary confinement. That was what all star men began with. George misunderstood at first: he thought he was being called a star man because his case had attracted notoriety; perhaps the perpetrators of especially heinous crimes were deliberately kept apart from other prisoners, who might vent their anger on a horse-mutilator. But no: a star man was simply the term for a first offender. If you come back, he was told, you will be classed as an intermediary; and if your returns are frequent, as an ordinary or a professional. George said he had no intention of coming back.

He was taken before the Governor, an old military man who surprised him by staring at the name before him and asking politely how it was to be pronounced.

“
Ay
dlji, sir.”

“Ay-dl-ji,” repeated the Governor. “Not that you’ll be much except a number here.”

“No, sir.”

“Church of England, it says.”

“Yes. My father is a Vicar.”

“Indeed. Your mother . . .” The Governor did not seem to know how to ask the question.

“My mother is Scottish.”

“Ah.”

“My father is a Parsee by birth.”

“Now I’m with you. I was in Bombay in the Eighties. Fine city. You know it well, Ay-dl-ji?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never left England, sir. Though I have been to Wales.”

“Wales,” said the Governor musingly. “You’re one up on me then. Solicitor, it says.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve rather a slump in solicitors at the moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Solicitors—we’ve a slump in ’em at the moment. Normally we have one or two. One year we had more than half a dozen, I recall. But we got rid of our last solicitor a few months ago. Not that you’d have been able to talk to him much. You’ll find the rules here are strict, and fully enforced, Mr. Ay-dl-ji.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Still, we’ve got a couple of stockbrokers with us, and a banker as well. I tell people, if you want to see a true cross-section of society, you should visit Lewes Prison.” He was accustomed to saying this, and paused for the usual effect. “Not that we have any members of the aristocracy, I hasten to add. Or”—with a glance at George’s file—“any Church of England ministers at present. Though we have had the occasional one. Indecency, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now I’m not going to ask exactly what you did, or why you did it, or whether you did it, or whether any petition you might forward to the Home Secretary stands more chance than a mouse with a mongoose, because in my experience all that’s a waste of time. You’re in prison. Serve your sentence, obey the rules, and you won’t get into any further trouble.”

“As a lawyer, I am used to rules.”

George meant this neutrally, but the Governor looked up as if it might have been a piece of insolence. Eventually, he settled for saying, “Quite.”

There were indeed a large number of rules. George found the prison officers to be decent fellows, yet bound hand and foot by red tape. There was no talking to other prisoners. There was no crossing of legs or folding of arms in chapel. There was a bath once a fortnight, and a search of the prisoner’s self and belongings whenever the necessity arose.

On the second day, a warder came into George’s cell and asked if he had a bed-rug.

George thought this an unnecessary question. It was perfectly plain that he had a multi-coloured and reasonably heavy bed-rug, which the officer could not miss.

“Yes, I do, thank you very much.”

“What do you mean, thank you very much?” asked the warder with more than a touch of belligerance.

George remembered his police interrogations. Perhaps his tone had been too forward. “I mean, I do,” he said.

“Then it must be destroyed.”

Now he was completely lost. This was a rule which had not been explained to him. He was careful with his reply, and especially with its tone.

“I do apologize, but I have not been here long. Why should you wish to destroy my bed-rug, which is both a comfort and, I imagine, in the harsher months, a necessity?”

The warder looked at him and slowly began to laugh. He laughed so much that a colleague ducked into the cell to see if he was all right.

“Not bed-rug, number 247, bed-bug.”

George half-smiled in return, uncertain if prisoners were allowed to do so under prison regulations. Perhaps only if granted permission. At any rate, the story passed into prison lore, and followed him down the succeeding months. That Hindoo lived such a sheltered life he didn’t even know what a bed-bug was.

He discovered other discomforts instead. There were no proper conveniences, and a lack of privacy when it was most required. Soap was of a very poor quality. There was also an idiotic regulation that all shaving and barbering had to be done in the open air, which resulted in many prisoners—George included—catching colds.

He quickly became accustomed to the altered rhythm of his life. 5:45 rise. 6:15 doors unlocked, slops collected, bedclothes hung up to air. 6:30 tools served round, then work. 7:30 breakfast. 8:15 fold up bedding. 8:35 chapel. 9:05 return. 9:20 go to exercise. 10:30 return. Governor’s rounds and other bureaucracy. 12 dinner. 1:30 dinner tins collected, then work. 5:30 supper, then tools collected and put outside for the next day. 8 bed.

Life was harsher and colder and more lonely than he had ever known it; but he was helped by this rigid structure to the day. He had always lived to a strict timetable; also with a heavy workload, whether as schoolboy or solicitor. There had been very few holidays in his life—that outing to Aberystwyth with Maud was a rare exception—and fewer luxuries, except those of the mind and spirit.

“The things star men miss the most,” said the Chaplain, on the first of his weekly visits, “is the beer. Well, not just the star men. Intermediaries and ordinaries too.”

“Fortunately, I do not drink.”

“And the second thing is the cigarettes.”

“Again, I am lucky in that regard.”

“And the third is the newspapers.”

George nodded. “That has been a severe deprivation already, I admit. I have been in the habit of reading three papers a day.”

“If there was anything I could do to help . . .” said the Chaplain. “But the rules . . .”

“It is perhaps better to do entirely without something than hope from time to time that you might receive it.”

“I wish others had your attitude. I’ve seen men go crazy for a cigarette or a drink. And some of them miss their girls terribly. Some of them miss their clothes, some of them miss things they never even knew they were fond of, like the smell outside the back door on a summer’s night. Everyone misses something.”

“I am not being complacent,” replied George. “I am just able to think practically in the matter of newspapers. In other respects I am like everyone else, I am sure.”