George Passant (34 page)

‘At times – I can imagine doing it myself.’

‘But still,’ I thought aloud, ‘it’s stronger with him than most men – even after today. There’s part of it he never will lose. He would be the last man to be able to get free.’

Getliffe laughed affectionately.

‘Anyhow, he got rid of a dash of it today.’

At Eden’s Olive and Jack were waiting: their solicitor had sent for them, to have a last word before their examination the next day. Olive told me that Martineau was leaving the town within the hour.

Soon I left them, and took a taxi to the omnibus station. George, his father and Roy were standing close to a notice of the services to the North.

Martineau was on the steps by the conductor, and as I hurried towards them he went inside. The engine burred, they lurched off; Martineau was still standing up, waving.

‘It’s a pity he had to go away tonight,’ Mr Passant said. Then he burst out: ‘He never ought to go without an overcoat, going right up there in this weather. He ought to know it isn’t doing any good–’

We were all sad that he could leave so casually, before the end of the trial. They were angry that he was free of their sorrows. Mr Passant said several times on the way to the Passants’ house: ‘I should have thought he might have stayed another day or two.’

He repeated it to Mrs Passant, who was waiting in her front room. ‘I didn’t expect much of him,’ she said.

‘He used to flatter you very nicely, though,’ said Roy, who had replaced Jack in her favour. For one instant her face softened in a pleased, girlish smile.

‘He couldn’t have made any difference–’ Mr Passant began.

‘If he had been a decent, sensible man everything would have been different. I shall always say it was his fault. He ought to have looked after you properly,’ she said to George. She got up and put a kettle on the fire; since I last saw her, her movements had grown stiff, although her face had aged less than her husband’s.

‘But he wasn’t worried by them this afternoon,’ said Mr Passant. ‘They couldn’t get him to say anything he didn’t mean.’

Mrs Passant was saying something in an undertone to George. Mr Passant looked at them, then said to me: ‘I couldn’t follow what Mr Martineau had been doing himself. I’m not pretending I could help him because I haven’t fallen into the same mistakes or misunderstandings. It isn’t that, Lewis.’

‘No one followed what he’d been doing,’ said Roy. ‘Believe me. That is so.’

‘The main thing is, we ought to be grateful to him,’ said Mr Passant. ‘When I heard them getting at him this afternoon–’

‘I suppose we ought to be grateful to him,’ George broke in.

‘Of course we ought,’ said Mr Passant. ‘It’s contradicted all they were saying.’

‘It’s very easy to exaggerate the effect of that.’ George turned round to face his father. ‘You mustn’t let it raise false hopes. There are a great many things you must take into account. First of all, even if they believe him, this is only one part of the case. It isn’t the chief part, and if they hadn’t been wanting to raise every insinuation against me, they could have missed it out altogether.’

Mr Passant questioned me with a glance. I replied: ‘It’ll have some effect on the other, of course. But perhaps George is right to–’

‘What’s more important,’ George went on, ‘is whether they believe him or not. You can’t expect them to believe a man who has left his comfort and thrown his money away, and who would sooner sleep in a workhouse than fritter away an evening at one of their houses. You can’t expect them to take him seriously. You’ve got to realise that they’ll think it their duty to put him and me in the same class – and feel proud of themselves for doing it.’

‘No, that’s not quite right,’ Mr Passant said.

‘You don’t know.’

‘I’ve been watching and listening–’

‘You don’t know what to listen to. I’ve had to learn. I’ve been fairly competent at my profession. If you want anyone to tell you whether my opinion is worth having, you had better ask Eliot.’

‘I know it, you can’t think I don’t know it–’

‘It can’t be much of a consolation for you,’ George said.

He was hoping more from Martineau’s evidence than he could let his father see. During their argument, I felt it was one of the few occasions on I had seen George deliberately dissimulate. Perhaps he had to destroy his own hopes. I wondered if he also consciously wanted to keep up the pretence that there was nothing in the case; and so told Mr Passant that his persecutors would disregard favourable evidence, just as they had invented the whole story of the fraud.

Yet, listening to him, we had all been brought to a pitch of inordinate strain. He had started out to dissimulate, but his own passion filled the words, and he did not know himself how much was acted. Before he stopped, he could not conceal an emotion as violent as that of the night before.

We all looked at him. No one spoke for a time. Then George said: ‘Where are you preaching on Sunday?’

‘I don’t know for certain.’

‘The trial will be over,’ said George. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to preach. Where’s the circuit this week?’

Mr Passant mentioned the name of a village.

George said: ‘It’s grotesque that they always give you the furthest places. You’ve got to insist on fair treatment.’

‘It doesn’t matter, going a few miles more,’ said Mr Passant.

‘It matters to them and it ought to matter to you. But anyway, this place is presumably fixed for Sunday. I want you to go.’

Mrs Passant suddenly tried to stop their pain.

‘That’s the place old Mr Martineau started his acting tricks, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I should like to know what culch he’s getting up to now.’

‘I don’t know,’ said George.

Mrs Passant said: ‘He ought to have looked after you. He used to think you would do big things. When you went to Mr Eden’s, he used to think you wouldn’t stay there very long.’

‘If I had wanted, I could have moved.’

‘I never thought you would, somehow,’ she said.

‘Because I found something valuable to do,’ George said.

‘You found something you liked doing more. I always knew you would. Even when I told people how well you were getting on.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with acceptance and without reproach. George looked at her with something like gratitude. At that moment, one felt how close she had been all his life. She understood him in the way Jack did; she, too, did not believe in the purpose and aspirations, she had always seen the weaknesses and self-deceit. Like Jack, she had discounted the other sides of his nature, and possessed a similar power, the greater because of the love between them.

FOR a time the next morning, the feeling of the court was less hostile. Martineau’s evidence had raised doubts in some onlookers; and they responded to Getliffe’s new zest. Jack’s examination went smoothly and he soon made a good impression. The touch of genuine diffidence in his manner seemed to warm people, even in court, to his frank, spontaneous, fluent words. As he answered Getliffe, I thought again how there was a resemblance between them.

He gave an account of his positions in the years before they bought the agency – he was twenty-nine, a year older than he used to tell us in the past, a fact which I should have known if I had studied the register of our old school. He said of the transaction over the agency: ‘I wanted money very badly, I’m not going to pretend anything else.’

‘About the information you gave to people when you were borrowing money,’ said Getliffe, ‘that was never false?’

‘No. I’d got a good thing to sell, and I was selling it for all I was worth.’

‘You told them what you believed to be the truth?’

‘Yes. Naturally I was as enthusiastic as I could honestly be.’

‘You were certain it was a good thing, weren’t you?’

‘I put every penny I had got into it, and I spent every working hour of my time improving it for months.’

‘You felt like that yourself after you had received Mr Martineau’s information?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘If I’d heard – for instance, that the circulation of the
Arrow
was much smaller – I shouldn’t have become as keen. But even so, I should have known there were possibilities.’

‘It was a perfectly ordinary business venture, wasn’t it? That is how you would look at it?’

‘It was a good deal sounder than most. It did quite well, of course. There’s a tendency to forget that.’

Once or twice he drew sympathetic laughter. He kept to the same tone, responsible and yet not overburdened, through most of Porson’s cross-examination. He denied that he had known the real state of the agency.

‘I was a bit puzzled later, but all sorts of factors had to be taken into account. I set to work to put it right.’ About the farm he would not admit anything of the stories of Miss Geary and the others. It was noticed on all sides that Porson did not press him. But after several replies from Jack, Porson said: ‘The jury will observe there are two accounts of those interviews. One was given by several witnesses. The other was given by you, Mr Cotery.’ He added: ‘Incidentally, will you tell us why you gave different people so many different accounts of yourself?’

Getliffe objected. Porson said: ‘I consider it essential to cross-examine this witness as to credit.’

The judge said: ‘In the circumstances, I must allow the question.’

Porson asked whether Jack had not invented several fictitious stories of his life – one, that he had been to a good school and university, another that he had been an officer in the army? Jack, shaken for the first time, denied both.

‘It will be easy to prove,’ said Porson. He looked at the jury. He had given no warning of this surprise. ‘Do you deny that–’

‘Oh, I don’t deny that I’ve sometimes got tired of my ordinary self. But that had nothing to do with raising money.’ Jack had recovered himself. He replied easily to Porson’s questions about his stories: some he just admitted.

At last Porson said: ‘Well, I put it to you, Mr Cotery, that you’ve been living by your wits for a good many years?’

‘I think that’s true.’

‘You’ve never settled down to a serious occupation? If you like, I can take you through a list of things you’ve done–’

‘You needn’t trouble. It’s perfectly clear.’

‘You’ve spent your entire time trying to get rich quick?’

‘I’ve spent my time trying to make a living. If I’d been luckier, it wouldn’t have been necessary.’

Porson asked a number of questions about the ways in which he had made a living. To many, there was something seedy and repellent in those indications of a life continuously wary, looking for a weakness or a generosity – they were identical when one was selling an idea. But most people actually in court still felt some sympathy with Jack; he was self-possessed, after the moment of anger about his romances, and he answered without either assertiveness or apology. Once he said, with his old half-comic ruefulness: ‘It’s harder work living by your wits than you seem to think.’

Porson said, after a time: ‘You don’t in the least regret anything you’ve done? You don’t regret persuading people to lose their money?’

‘I’m sorry they’ve lost it – just as I’m sorry I lost my own. But that’s business. I expect to get mine back some day, and I hope they will.’

Porson finished by a reference to Olive’s part in the transactions; she had been trying to raise money for the purchase, he suggested, at a time when Jack was taking other women to the farm.

‘She was already your mistress as well, wasn’t she?’

‘Need I answer that?’

As Jack asked the question, several people noticed the distress and anger in his face, but they nearly all thought it was simulated. The general view was that he had chosen his moment to ‘act the gentleman’; curiously enough, some felt it the most unprepossessing thing he had done that morning.

‘I don’t think you need,’ said the judge.

Jack’s reputation with women was well known in the town, and it was expected that Porson would make a good deal of it. To everyone’s surprise, Porson let him go without another question.

Olive entered the box: Getliffe kept to the same lines as with Jack. All through she was abrupt and matter-of-fact; she made one reply, however, which Porson later taxed her with at length. It happened while Getliffe was rattling through his questions over the agency.

‘You had considered buying other businesses?’

‘Several.’

‘Why didn’t you go further with them?’

‘We wanted a run for our money.’

‘But you became satisfied that this one was sound?’

‘It was a long way the best we had heard of.’

‘Can you tell me how you worked out the possibilities?’

‘On the result of Mr Passant’s talk with Mr Martineau.’

‘You didn’t actually see Mr Martineau yourself, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t want to know any more about it.’

Very quickly, Getliffe asked: ‘You mean, of course, that you were completely satisfied by the accounts Mr Passant brought? Obviously they convinced all three of you?’

‘Of course. There seemed no need to ask any further.’

Many people doubted whether there had been a moment of tension at all. But when Porson cross-examined her, he began on it at once.

‘I want to go back to one of your answers. Why did you say that “I didn’t want to know any more about it”?’

‘I explained – because I was perfectly well satisfied as it was.’

‘Do you think that’s a really satisfactory explanation of your answer?’

‘It is the only one.’

‘It isn’t, you know. You can think of something very different. Just listen to what you said again: “I didn’t want to know any more about it.” Doesn’t that suggest another phrase to you?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Doesn’t it suggest – “I didn’t want to know too much about it”?’

‘I should have said that if I meant it.’

‘I suggest you meant exactly that, though – before you had your second thoughts?’

‘I meant the opposite. I knew enough already.’

Porson kept her an inordinately long time. His questions had become more slowly and truculently delivered since Martineau’s evidence, his manner more domineering. It was his way of responding to the crisis of the case, of showing how much he needed to win it: but that would have been hard to guess.