The Sleep of Reason (43 page)

Cornford
: Precisely.

Bosanquet
: And you suggest, when it is crossed, people are driven by forces out of their control, that is, they are not responsible?

Cornford
: That is rather further than I intended to go.

Bosanquet
: Or, at any rate, their responsibility is diminished?

Cornford
: In many cases, not necessarily all, yes, their responsibility is diminished.

Bosanquet
: I don’t think we have heard you make exceptions before. What exceptions would you make?

Cornford
: I don’t want to go into the nature of responsibility in general. That’s too wide to be profitable.

Bosanquet
: But you are prepared to talk about responsibility in particular cases? Such as the present one?

Cornford
: Yes, I am.

Bosanquet
: This case is, even to those of us who have had more experience of such crimes than we care to remember, a singularly horrible one of sadistic killing. You will agree with that?

Cornford
: I am afraid so.

Bosanquet
: And you have stated your opinion that the two women who performed it were acting with diminished responsibility?

Cornford
: Yes. I have said that.

Bosanquet
: And you would say exactly the same of any similar case of sadistic killing?

Cornford
: I can only talk as a psychiatrist of this particular case about which I have been asked to express a professional opinion.

Bosanquet
: But you would be likely to give the same opinion in any comparable case? Of killing just for the sake of killing?

Cornford
: I can’t answer that question without knowing the psychiatric background of such a case.

Bosanquet
: (sternly) I have to ask you as an honest and responsible man. In any such case, where a person or persons had been living in a morbid fantasy world, and then carried out those fantasies in action, you would be likely to say that that was an example of diminished responsibility?

Cornford
: (after a pause) I should be likely to say that.

Bosanquet
: That is really your professional position?

Cornford
: That is going too far. It might, in a good many cases, be my professional position.

Bosanquet
: Thank you, Doctor Cornford. I should like to suggest to you that this is a curiously circular position. You are saying that, when people commit certain terrible crimes, they wouldn’t do this unless there was no gap between fantasy and action: and that therefore they ipso facto are acting with diminished responsibility. That is, the very fact of their committing the crimes implies that they are not responsible. Isn’t that what you are saying?

Cornford
: It is not so simple.

Bosanquet
: Isn’t it precisely as simple? Committing the crime is proof, according to your position, that they are not responsible. How else are we to understand you?

Cornford
: I’m not prepared to generalise. In certain cases, where I can explore the psychological background, I may be convinced that committing the crime is, in fact, a sign of lack of responsibility.

Bosanquet
: Surely that is making it very easy for everyone? Don’t you see that, if we accept your view, if we accept that people don’t commit crimes when they are responsible, we can dispense with a good deal of our law?

Cornford
: It is not for me to talk about the law. I can only talk as a psychiatrist. I can only talk about specific persons whom I have examined.

Bosanquet kept at him, but Cornford was quite unruffled. He was intellectually too sophisticated not to have gone through this argument, and what lay beneath it, in his undergraduate days. But he was in court, he was determined not to leave his home ground. And further, he had no patience with what he regarded as pseudo-problems. Free will, determinism, the tragic condition, all the rest, if there had been any meaning to them we should have found the answers, he thought, long ago. He was as positive-minded as Martin, but in the opposite sense. We should each of us die, but he liked making people better while they were alive. He was a good doctor as well as a psychiatrist: he was benevolent as well as arrogant, and his world was a singularly sunny one.

Through the morning and afternoon (the cross-examination was going on after the lunch break) I kept thinking that, in private, he was more variegated than this. He had a touch, as he remarked in his harmonious clinical manner, of the manic-depressive. In the box, however, he was more uniform and consistent than anyone we had heard, reminding me of one of those theologians who set out with sharp goodwill to reconcile anything with anything else, every fact of life being as natural as every other, everything being overwhelmingly and all-embracingly natural: reminding me also of a military spokesman giving a battle commentary on what might have seemed to be a disaster (and which actually was), explaining it away and encouraging us about the prospects to come.

His profiles of all our lives, I thought, would have sounded just as sensible, a little sunnier than those lives had been to live. One could imagine how he would have described mine, or Margaret’s, or Sheila’s, or Roy Calvert’s. But one couldn’t imagine it all: he had his own insight, lucid, independent. He would have told us things we didn’t recognise or admit in ourselves. He would certainly have been more penetrating, and wiser, about George Passant than I had been. If Sheila had been a patient of his, he would have worked his heart out to reconcile her to her existence. He could not have admitted that to her – and at times to the rest of us, though not to him – it was not tolerable to be reconciled. He would have thought that she was resisting treatment: while she would have gone away, not ready to have her vision blurred, even if it meant living in a nightmare.

When he left the box, it was something like a star going off the stage, to be succeeded by a competent character actor. This was the psychiatrist called on behalf of Kitty Pateman, a dark, worried man whose name was Kahn, not so eminent in his profession, nothing like so articulate. In fact, for the rest of the afternoon, he told very much the same story and gave the same opinion. A clear case of abnormality of mind and substantial impairment of responsibility. He gave, to me at least, a strong impression of self-searching and difficult honesty. He did produce one new piece of evidence. At eighteen, a year or two before she met Cora Ross, Kitty had had, without her parents knowing, an affair with a married man. The details were not clear, but Dr Kahn testified that she had suffered a traumatic shock. In his view this had been one of the causes which had driven her into her relation with Cora Ross.

THAT was the evening when Martin and I were due for the party at Archibald Rose’s house. Driving slowly past the thickening hedges, Martin did not want to talk about the trial. Instead, he was asking me, how much had this bit of the county changed since we were boys? Not much, we thought. It was still surprisingly empty. Now and then a harsh red brick village interrupted the flow of fields. It was a warm day, unusually so for April, windless and pacifying: looking out into the sunshine, one felt anthropocentrically that the pastures, rises and hollows, were pacified too.

Unlike the house to which Vicky had driven me the previous summer, this one lay half-hidden, down beside a wood. When we got inside, there were other dissimilarities, or really perhaps only one: there was nothing like so much money about. Children were running round, Rose’s wife, a young woman in her twenties, greeted us, noise beat cheerfully out from what in the nineteenth century might have been used as the morning-room. This had once been a dower house, and was still called that; it hadn’t been much restored: from the morning-room, where the party had already begun, the windows gave on to a rose garden. It was a room which, like the smell of soap in the morning, wiped away angst, or certainly the lawyers seemed to find it so. They were all there, the two defence counsel and their juniors, Clive Bosanquet, the Clerk of Assize, the judge’s clerk, various young men who could have been pupils in chambers. Glancing through the crowd, I didn’t notice any of the solicitors. Plates of cold chicken, duck, tongue, ham, stood on the side table, glasses, bottles of red and white wine. The Roses weren’t as rich as Vicky’s business friends, but they spread themselves on entertaining. Rose’s wife, one child holding on to her hand, was cheerful among all the men. The lawyers were walking about, plates and glasses in hand, munching, drinking, and above all talking. Martin and I might have been inhibited, as we drove out, from talking about the trial: not so these. For a good part of that evening, they were talking of nothing else. During the war and after, Martin had spent plenty of time with high civil servants: he was used to their extremes of discretion: with Rose’s Uncle Hector, for instance, one had to know him, literally for years, before he would volunteer an opinion about a colleague (which, in his case, was then not specially favourable). Martin hadn’t seen lawyers relaxing in private during a trial. Ted Benskin, more than ever glinting with grim mimicry, came up and asked what we thought of Cornford’s evidence. Bosanquet was standing by. Martin, not certain of the atmosphere, feeling his way, gave a non-committal reply.

“We should all like to know,” said Ted Benskin. “I’m damned if I do.”

A young man (I took him to be a pupil of Bosanquet’s, not long down from the university) said: either we are all responsible for our actions, or else no one is.

“I wish,” said Bosanquet, gazing at him like a patient, troubled ox, “I wish I were as certain about anything as you are about everything.”

“But if you were on that jury,” said Archibald Rose, more positive than his leader, “you wouldn’t follow the Cornford man–”

Bosanquet said, not eagerly but with weight: “No. I couldn’t do that.”

“If you were old Jumbo,” said someone, “and summing up, what would you tell them?”

“What will old Jumbo tell them, anyway?”

Someone else said: if we’re not responsible for abominable actions, then we’re not responsible for good ones. If you explain one set away, then you explain the other. It’s the ultimate reduction.

Ted Benskin said: “Anyway, I’ve got to put my woman in the box. I wish I could get out of it, but I can’t. Clive knows that.”

Bosanquet gave a professional smile. If Cora Ross didn’t give evidence for herself, the inference was, it was because she might appear too sane.

“It’s worse for Jamie here,” said Benskin. He pointed to Wilson, who was standing a little apart, looking handsome, hard, distracted. After a while, simply because he looked so miserable, I went into a corner and spoke to him alone. None of them was unaffected: but he was more affected than any. At a first glance in court, I had thought him insensitive. It was one of those impressions like that which Margaret often produced, which were the opposite of the truth.

“Yes, of course I’ve got to call her,” he was telling me. “And I’m afraid she’ll destroy anything the psychiatrists say.”

“You’ve met her, haven’t you?” he went on. “I’m afraid she’ll seem perfectly lucid. Mind you, I think some of these people are dead wrong,” he nodded towards the middle of the room. “I accept one hundred per cent what Adam Cornford said. Don’t you?”

“You’ve talked to her yourself?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, set-faced. “When I’m defending people, I always insist on getting to know them personally.”

He added: “It’s not pleasant to be tried for anything. Whoever you are and whatever you have done.”

Back among the central crowd, I let Ted Benskin refill my glass, while Martin was listening to some of the tougher lawyers. Freedom. Ultimate freedom. They had picked up the phrase from Adam Cornford. They didn’t know, as Martin and I did, how once it had been a slogan in George’s underground. But they knew that the two women had used it to excite each other. (I could remember a passage from George’s diary. “The high meridian of freedom is on us now. In our nucleus of free people, anyway – and sometimes I think in the world.” That was written in 1930, and I had read it two years later. I hadn’t imagined, any more than he had, what was to come.)

“It’s done a lot of harm, propaganda about freedom,” said someone.

“Freedom my arse,” said the Clerk of Assize with simpler eloquence.

“Keep your heads, now,” said Ted Benskin. “I tell you, my children are happier than we ever were. And I think they’re better for it.”

“We need a bit of order, though,” said Bosanquet.

“You’re getting old, Clive.”

“Order is important.” Bosanquet was as unbudgeable as in court. “This country is getting dirtier and sillier under our eyes.”

“Happiness isn’t everything,” said someone. “Perhaps it isn’t the first thing.”

“I tell you,” said Benskin, “if ever there was a time to keep our heads, this is. By and large, there’s been more gain than loss.”

Other lawyers rounded on him. How could anyone spend his life in the criminal courts, and believe that? Benskin replied that he did spend his life in the criminal courts: that he proposed to go on doing so, and give them all a great deal of trouble: and that he still believed it.

There were a number of strong personalities round us, clashing like snooker balls: Benskin was ready to go on clashing all night. As he stood there, shorter than the rest of us, with his urchin grin, one of the clerks began to speak of ‘topping’ (he was using the criminals’ slang for hanging). The 1957 Act was a nonsense. You couldn’t have categories of murder. Why was the murder in this case non-capital, whereas if they had shot the child–?

Mrs Rose, who by this time had put her family to bed, said with a firm young woman’s confidence that she was in favour of capital punishment. Good for you, shouted one of the lawyers. So far as I could tell, there was a majority in support – certainly not Wilson, not a couple of the pupils. Benskin hadn’t given an opinion. It was Bosanquet who spoke.