The Sleep of Reason (32 page)

“You’ve been in prison this afternoon, Lewis, haven’t you?” he said to me. He said it with taunting good nature, eyes bright, as though this was the sort of eccentric hobby I should indulge in, having no connection with serious living.

I said that I had.

“Well, I’m out of prison myself, you’ll be glad to know,” he announced. “And that means that I’m going to give us all a drink.”

At a quick and jaunty trot he left the room. As we waited for him, Vicky was happily flushed but didn’t speak. For me, his one casual question had triggered other thoughts.

He returned balancing a tray on which shone two bottles of champagne and three tulip glasses. While he was twisting off the wire from one bottle, Vicky burst out: “So everything is all right, is it?”

“Everything is all right,” he said.

The cork popped, carefully he filled a glass, watching the head of bubbles simmer down.

“Yes,” he said, “I shall be going at the end of the term.”

“What?” cried Vicky.

“I’m resigning,” he said, filling another glass. “I’ve told them so. Of course they’ll treat it as confidential until I get the letter off tomorrow. I had to explain the protocol–”

“Oh, blast the protocol,” said Vicky. Tears had started to her eyes.

I had been jolted back into the comfortable room, into their company.

“You can’t do it like this, Arnold,” I began.

“You’ll see if I can’t. It’s the right thing to do.”

“You must give yourself a bit of time to think.” I was finding my way back to an old groove, professional concerns, the talk of professional men. “This is an important decision. You’ve got to listen to your friends. You haven’t even slept on it–”

“Quite useless.” He spoke with mystifying triumph. “This is final. Full stop.”

Vicky, cheek turned into her chair, was crying. For once, she was past trying to boss him: she wasn’t often like a child in his presence, but now she was. She couldn’t make an effort to dissuade him. She didn’t seem even to listen as I said: “Hadn’t you better tell us what has happened?”

“It’s simple,” said Arnold Shaw. “They were all very friendly–”

“In that case, this is a curious result.”

“They were all very friendly. No one minded speaking out. So I asked them whether, if I went on as Vice-Chancellor, I had lost their confidence.”

“And they said–”

“They said I had.”

“In so many words?”

“Yes. In so many words.” Arnold refilled his glass, looking at me as though he were master of the situation.

“I must say, it all sounds very improbable,” I told him.

“They were absolutely direct. I respected them for it.”

“You must find respect very easy.”

“I don’t like double-dealing,” said Arnold Shaw.

“But still – why have you got to listen? These are only three or four young men–”

“No good, Lewis.” Shaw’s expression was happy but set. “They’re my best young professors. Leonard is alpha double plus, but the others are pretty good. They’re the people I’ve brought here. They’re going to make this place if anyone can. A Vice-Chancellor who has lost the confidence of the men who are going to make the place hasn’t any business to stay.”

“Look here, there are some other arguments–”

“Absolutely none. It’s as clear as the nose on your face. I go now. And I’m right to go.”

Arnold, like one determined to have a celebration, poured champagne into my glass. He was so exalted that he scarcely seemed to notice that his daughter was still silent, huddled in her chair. At a loss, I drank with him, for an instant thinking that of all well-meant interventions Francis Getliffe’s had been the most disastrous. It was the only advice I could remember Arnold Shaw taking. Without it he would have battered on, unconscious of others’ attitudes, for months or years. Yet, though unlike my old father he had no nose for danger, he took it far more robustly, in fact with elation, when he was rubbed against it. Of course, he was many years the younger man. My father, when his own dismissal came, had nothing else to live for. But still – it was an irony that I didn’t welcome – it was often the unrealistic who absorbed disasters best.

“I remember, Lewis, I told you one night in this house,” Arnold pointed a finger, “I told you I should decide when it was right to go. No one else. It didn’t matter whether any of the others, or any damned representations under heaven, were aiming to get rid of me. If I thought I was doing more good than harm to this place, then I should stay and they would have to drag me out feet first. But I told you, do you remember, that the moment I decided, myself and no one else, that I was doing more harm than good, then I should go, and that would be the end of it. Well, that’s the position. I can’t be anymore good in this job. So I go at the earliest possible time. That’s the proper thing to do.”

He was just as intransigent as when he was resisting any compromise or moderate suggestion in the Court. He was more than intransigent, he felt victorious. He was asserting his will, and that buoyed him up: but more than that, he was behaving according to his own sense of virtue or honour, and it made him both happy and quite immovable. He had scarcely listened to anything I said: and, as for Vicky, perhaps she realised at once when first she heard his news and began to cry, how immovable he was.

At last she had roused herself and, eyes swollen, began to talk about their plans. Yes, they would be moving from the Residence, they would have to find another house. She didn’t say it, but she was becoming protective again. How much would he miss his luxuries, and much more, all the minor bits of pomp and ceremony? Would he be impregnable, when once he knew that he had really lost his place? Vicky said nothing about that, but instead, in a factual and prosaic manner, was calculating how much income they would have.

Arnold insisted on opening the second bottle of champagne, I didn’t want it, but he was so triumphant, in some way so unshielded, that I hadn’t the heart to say no.

THE Patemans’ house was not on the telephone, and I sent a note that I should call on them at half past six, at Cora Ross’ request, before I caught my train back to London. That was the day after my visit to the jail. The clear weather had broken, it was raw and drizzling in the street outside, the street lamps shone on the dark front window, curtains left undrawn.

Mrs Pateman let me in. The light in the passage was behind her, and I could not see her face. She said nothing except that my overcoat was wet. I put down my suitcase and went into the parlour, into claustrophobia and the disinfectant smell. There, sitting at the table, plates not cleared away, were both Mr Pateman and his son. Dick nodded, Mr Pateman, head thrown back, gave me a formal good evening. I sat down by the slack fire, no one speaking. Then Mr Pateman said, in a challenging, more than that, attacking tone: “I hope you’re bringing us good news, sir.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

He stared at me.

“I don’t want you to make any mistake from the beginning. I don’t credit a single word that anyone brings up against my daughter.” He was hostile and at the same time his confidence seemed invulnerable. But now I could, though the room was dim, watch Mrs Pateman’s face: it was washed youthful by fear. I said: “I’ve got nothing to say about her.”

“I didn’t expect it,” said Mr Pateman. “Some of us don’t need telling about our children.”

“I’ve only come,” I said, “to give you a message from her friend.”

“Mind you,” said Mr Pateman, ignoring me, “I know that certain people want to drag her through the courts.” With confidence, with the brilliance of suspicion, he went on: “I’ve got my own ideas about that.”

I tried to speak gently, in the direction of his wife: “You’ve got to prepare yourselves for the trial, you know.”

“Thank you,” said Mr Pateman, “we are prepared for more than that. My daughter’s room” – he pointed towards the front of the house – “is waiting for her as soon as this trial is over. It’s waiting for her empty, with not a penny coming in.”

How soon would the trial be? Mrs Pateman asked in a timid voice. I explained that they would be sent from the police court to the assizes – that would be two or three months ahead. To my surprise, Mr Pateman accepted this information without protest: perhaps he had discovered it already. Would he accept a different kind of information, if I warned him that his hopes were nothing but fantasy and that he was going to hear the worst? I might have warned him, if we had been alone: in the presence of his wife, certainly frightened, maybe clinging to his hopes, I hadn’t the courage to speak.

“I’ve only come,” I repeated, “to give you a message from Cora Ross.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that woman,” said Mr Pateman.

“It was just this – when it comes to the trial, she wants you to know, they’re going to be loyal to each other.”

“I shouldn’t expect anything else. From my daughter,” said Mr Pateman, with complete opacity, dismissing the news as of no interest, getting back to his own suspicion: “I never liked the look of that woman, she was a bad influence all along. I always had my own ideas about her.”

He stared at me accusingly: “I don’t want to say this, but I’ve got to. I never liked the look of that woman’s uncle. He’s a friend of yours, sir, I’ve been told?”

“That’s true,” I said.

“I don’t want to say this, but he’s been the worst influence of all. Even if he is a friend of yours, he’s a loose liver. There’s bad blood in that family, and it’s a pity my daughter ever came anywhere near them. That’s why certain people want to drag her through this business. They think anyone who goes round with that woman must be as bad as she is. And that woman wouldn’t have turned out as bad if it hadn’t been for her uncle.”

“I don’t agree with that,” said Dick Pateman, who had been sitting with an expression as aggressive as his father’s.

“Some of us,” said Mr Pateman, “have spent a lifetime summing people up.”

“Passant would have been all right,” Dick went on, “if only they’d given him a chance.”

“I can’t agree.”

Dick continued. “They” were to blame, “the whole wretched set-up”, the racket, the establishment, society itself. We should have to break it up, said Dick. Look what they had done to his father. Look at what they were doing to him. His discontent was getting violent (I gathered he was having more trouble with examinations at his new university). Kitty would be happy in a decent society. There was nothing wrong with her. As for Cora Ross, if she’d “done anything”, that was their fault: no one had looked after her, she’d never been properly educated, she’d never been found a place.

I didn’t answer. What did he believe about the crime? Certainly not the naked truth. He was more lucid than his father, and more angry. He seemed to accept that Cora Ross was involved. But his indignation comforted him and at the same time deluded him. It removed some of the apprehension he might have had about his sister. So much so that I had to ask one question: had he talked to her solicitors? No, he said, his father had done that.

All the news in that home, then, had come from Mr Pateman. He and Dick must have sat in the parlour arguing with no more sense of the fatality than they showed tonight. It was intolerable that they should be so untouched. The dark little room, with its single bulb, pressed upon one. We were shut in, they didn’t mind being shut in. Their faces were as bold as when I had first seen them. The disinfectant smell seemed to become stronger, mixed with the sulphuretted smell of the slack fire.

“Yes,” said Mr Pateman, “I’ve done my best with those people” (the solicitors to whom Eden & Sharples had sent Kitty’s case).

He confronted me with glass-bright eyes.

“And thereby hangs a tale”, he announced.

For an instant, I thought he was going to give some of their opinions.

He said: “They’re running up their bills, those people are. I want to know, where is the money coming from?”

It was a question for which I was totally unready. I hadn’t even asked George about the legal costs for his niece. In the midst of shock, I hadn’t given it the vestige of a thought. Yet it was certain that George couldn’t afford to pay himself. His friends in the town were better off than they used to be: perhaps they had already supported him, but I didn’t know.

“It will cost some money,” I said.

“That doesn’t get me very far.”

I said that the whole expenses wouldn’t be less than several hundred pounds.

“You’re not being very helpful, sir.”

I said: “I’m just telling you the facts.”

“Do you think it’s helpful to mention a sum like that to me, after the way I’ve been treated?”

I said (I was recalling that the structure of legal financing had changed since the time I practised) that they were not to worry. Legal aid would be forthcoming. In a case like this, no one had to think about solicitors’ and barristers’ fees.

“Oh no,” said Mr Pateman, “we’ve already been granted legal aid. So has the other one, they tell me.”

“Then what are you worrying about?”

“Charity,” said Mr Pateman with a superior smile. “I don’t like my family receiving charity.”

My patience was snapping. “You can’t have it both ways–”

“I always believe in exploring avenues,” he went on, still invulnerable.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking of.”

“Newspapers. That’s what I’m thinking of.”

Yes, he had heard of newspapers paying for the defence in a murder case, and getting an article out of it afterwards. Wasn’t that true?

“Do you really want that to happen?” I asked.

“It would recoup us all for some of our losses. It would mean my daughter was paying her way.”

He appeared to want, though he didn’t specifically say so, advice about the popular press, or perhaps an introduction. I had no intention of giving either, and got up to leave; once more Dick nodded and Mr Pateman and I exchanged formal good nights. In the passage Mrs Pateman, who had followed me out, plucked at my sleeve.

“Please,” she whispered. “Come in here a minute.”

With quick scurrying steps (such as I had noticed in my glimpses of her daughter) she opened the door of the front room. It looked, as soon as the standard lamp was switched on, bright, frilly, feminine: the lamps gleamed behind painted Italian shades: from the passage one could see straight across the room to a long, low dressing-table, looking-glass shining under the lights. The floor was swept and polished, just as on an afternoon when the young women were returning from their work. And yet I had an instant of holding back before I could cross the threshold, an instant which was nothing but superstitious, as though I were entering a lair.