The Crime of Huey Dunstan (18 page)

“Where are we now?” I remember saying in London, as Lisbeth piloted me across Grosvenor Place. And, as we turned into Buckingham Palace Road, “How far to the Gate? Can we see it yet?” At this stage I still needed goals, zones of reach beyond the limits of my body and the outstretched cane, just to keep me surviving. But I came back from that walk to Buckingham Palace stimulated by the London crowd, my head bursting with new ideas and horizons. And indeed something of that rejuvenated curiosity began to infect me now, percolating into my being as I groped my way back into town through the forgotten streets of Cornford. Asking passers-by, “Where am I now?” And, “How far to the courthouse? Can we see it yet?”

A fresh northerly was blowing; it rained in showers and I had to take shelter more than once; the soughing in the giant willows growing along the river eventually gave me my bearings. I crossed the bridge leading to the RSA and courthouse complex. There had been no call from Lawrence on the mobile phone and the courthouse, when I got there, was deserted.

I had just got into my room at the hotel when the phone rang.

“They’re back,” I said. “Are they back?”

“No. They came back with a question, that’s all. Not good, Ches.”

“What about? Don’t tell me. The goddamn street lamp.”

“Yes.”

It was not only not good, I thought, it was diabolical.

“Nothing else,” Lawrence said. “Try and keep your dinner down.” He rang off. It was then a quarter past six. I showered and walked about the room naked, scuffing my heels on the carpet, towelling myself. I was bathed in a lather of sweat when I went down to the dining room.

The jury returned at 9.15 p.m.

There was little warning. Lawrence came for me at the hotel shortly after nine o’clock. I had finished dinner and was sitting at the table fortifying myself with coffee laced with whisky when his call came. Somehow I had missed the jury when they had come in earlier for tea. According to one of the waiters, a laconic specimen called Albert, the jury had been marched in and out of the dining room in short order about five-thirty.

“How did they seem?” I asked him.

“Hungry. One of them was reading a book.”

“Yes, but their mood. What sort of mood were they in?”

“Noisy lot. Bit cross, I thought. The ladies wanted wine. Not allowed.” That’s something, I thought to myself.
But then Albert spoiled it, saying: “One of them was bawling. Little fat chook. I’ve seen her about. She was bawling her eyes out.”

“Silence. All stand!”

The formula may be shorter and the scarlet robes gone, but the words spoken and the hush of anticipation when a jury returns on a capital charge have barely changed since Elizabethan times.

“Will the foreman please stand—”

Extra chairs were being brought in when we arrived. Lawrence did a nice thing, piloting me deftly through the well of the court to sit beside him at his table. I knew, because he told me, that Lawrence had established eye contact with one of the jurors who had a habit of nodding emphatically when he, Lawrence, or for that matter the prosecutor, Sparrow, scored a point. (The same juror, it turned out, who had come into the dining room reading a book.) It further turned out that the judge’s three-hour summation had left Lawrence feeling confident, uncertain only about one lone juror who had refused to look at him again and listened stony-faced throughout. “I wonder if he is with us or against us.” Lawrence remarked to his junior.

I heard the click of the dock-gate behind me as Huey was brought back by the guards. The court reassembled and I tried not to fidget with my hands. I have heard it said that even experienced counsel get so overwrought waiting—the time between the announcement that a verdict has been
reached and the delivery of the verdict can seem like hours though it is normally only twenty or thirty minutes—that they wet themselves. But Lawrence was not of that breed. Nor, I guessed, was he watching to see where the jury would glance when the accused was brought in—on the rule-of-thumb that if a jury instinctively glances towards the dock as if to check the accused isn’t the ogre they thought when the trial started, the verdict will be a favourable one. No, Lawrence was waiting, watching for one man. Now, as the jury filed back into the courtroom, even before the foreman rose to give the verdict, Lawrence took hold of my little finger under the table and pinched it, and I knew instinctively he had been given a nod, another nod but this time a clear nod, a nod with meaning, and that we had won. I choked on the verdict nevertheless.

When the verdict came, Lawrence was still holding my little finger, squeezing it. “Eureka, eureka,” he seemed to say. Although it might have been, “Wonderful, wonderful,” like Samuel Butler looking down from the southern alps when he first sighted the land of
Erewhon
.

Hot tears were sliding down my cheeks. I needed to get out. An emotionally incontinent witness is not a pretty sight. I waited for the judge to speak—“I don’t expect to see you again, young man,” I heard him say, illogically, as if Huey was walking free (he had still to be re-sentenced on the lesser charge of manslaughter). The judge thanked and dismissed the jury, and I departed the courtroom in a wash of mewing noises. I had the impression of passing
by a group of people glimpsed round a fire with their faces in the light, as if engaged in a form of communal activity like rain dancing. Huey’s family, I later learned, had come forward. Throughout the trial they had occupied a block of seats at the back, the father wearing a knotted tie and holding his hat, the mother in a knitted jersey with her hair tied in a bun, the two of them coming and going from the court unobtrusively, like shadows, as if to deflect attention from themselves, or wrath. Although the father, however unprepossessing, must have been a presence for Lawrence who disappeared to the back for thirty-second conversations with him at almost every break. Now the aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews were all swarming over the rails to embrace the figure in the dock, bobbing up and down making noises like little animals.

Outside it was raining again. I stood on the steps of the courthouse feeling the wetness of the night. Lawrence was talking to reporters. We said goodnight and arranged to meet again in the morning. I felt the spray from the swishing of passing cars and the breath of the night come up from the street, and as I was stepping down I felt a touch on the elbow and something damp in my palm, like a paw. A small wet hand was grasping mine. It was cupped, then the fingers were extended to clasp my own in a way that I recognised. It was the father. We stood there in the rain, holding hands, and I had the impression as we parted and I walked off into the night that his eyes were shining.

Fifteen years later I still have that impression. As I sit
here in front of my computer, I feel that something must have happened to make a person like that stand out and be luminous. Just as something must have happened to make me conscious of possessing his touch all these years later. I still have it, that touch. For, as the poet says: 

THE OTHER DAY I came across a letter from a woman living in Antwerp who had read a paper I wrote for a Dutch journal,
Psychology Today
. She said she was one of the twelve jurors who acquitted Huey at his second trial. Her letter ended, “I never wanted to let him off but got talked roundby the others. I still think he was lying. If I'd had my way, I would have hanged the bastard.”

She left me feeling in much the same case as Tolkien who after the spectacular success of his fairy story,
The Lord
of the Rings
, received a savage letter from a correspondent crying out that Frodo should have been executed as a traitor. “Believe me,” Tolkien wrote to a friend, “it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how ‘topical' such a situation might appear.” In the same way I had no
idea when I began to write Huey's story that it might have any sort of universal application, underlining a thorn of child-abuse allegations in which the fear of devil worship and the persecution of witches belonging to the dark ages would be revived in my lifetime. Of course Huey's case which has a happy ending is unusual. It bucks the trend. We assume at the outset that his memory will be shown to have been fabricated. And it is not fabricated. For all that, ancient impulses still hover about our courtrooms, and while we no longer burn witches at the stake or return verdicts of homicide against mischievous or inanimate objects said to be possessed by the Devil, like haystacks and locomotives, we still incline to usurp the judge and, deep down, prefer to consign honest beings like Huey Dunstan to the execution squad.

I wonder if the woman who wrote to me from Antwerp was the one in the dining room that night who Albert said was bawling her eyes out. I still mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.

Huey was released after a few months. Acquitted of murder, he still had to serve out his time on the lesser charge of manslaughter. He's married now I gather with two small children—and, yes, is running a small tree-pruning business with his father somewhere up country. At least he was, when I last heard from Lawrence.

I don't hear much from Lawrence these days. Having won an acquittal for murder and established a legal
precedent—a number of law schools I'm told now teach from the case—Lawrence made a further appeal and sought to demonstrate that Huey's actions, being involuntary, justified a complete acquittal. This appeal failed. Personally I think the appellate judges didn't want to face up to it. Lawrence wrote to me afterwards, disgusted, saying he intended to go to the Privy Council for a definitive ruling “as to whether people can be criminally responsible for acts over which they have no control”. But Lawrence's life then changed. He made the mistake of standing for the mayoralty in Cornford a second time, and becoming elected. He has since been re-elected and is now involved in Mayors for Peace International. He travels all over the world.

Lisbeth and I carry on much as before. I celebrated my eighty-second birthday last month by getting a new passport and attending a conference on refugee trauma in Taiwan. Lisbeth still goes to the hospice and I stumble out to study the miseries of the world as best I can.

So in the end everything turned out well, in a manner of speaking. There is a dictum that people will forgive you anything except the help you have given them. It may be true although as Lisbeth says it's not true of the father—“He turned the boy in, abandoned him—a terrible thing to do. But then he felt ashamed and rallied the family to try to save him. He never gave up on the boy.”

Lawrence wrote to me once, “His face in my mind remains a driver in my antipathy towards racial and poverty
discrimination.” There is a parable here somewhere, if only I could find it.

Certainly the father's gratitude was enormous. I am less sure about Huey. I mean I'm puzzled about the way he kept going on about “the trouble I've caused”. Try as I might I can't get to the bottom of what he meant that time about honesty being “the loneliest word in the dictionary”. Maybe it was just a form of politeness made him say he regretted these things. (Politeness isn't the right word.) I don't know what Conrad would have made of it.

I said at the beginning that Joseph Conrad was brought up with a silver spoon. Wrong. When Joseph was five his father was sent into exile and Joseph subsequently ran away to sea, much as I did. Now why am I talking about him again? I know. When Conrad was twenty-one he got into trouble and tried to commit suicide, just like Huey. Somehow Conrad and his personal problems, what he had to overcome as a young man, bring Huey even closer to me. They're the same colour, orange, a warm glinting orange. I can bring the colour up almost at will, whenever I like, and it is never dark. I hope I won't be thought sentimental when I say that I miss Huey. It's a fact. I do.

I still dream about him sometimes, though not I have to say about my mother. That's the thing. That
is
the thing! When the case ended the dreams about my mother stopped completely. Talk about gratitude. Huey doesn't owe me a penny, not a blind cent. It's the other way round. Thanks to him, I seem finally to have found closure, a kind of
redemption in my mother's house.

I worry sometimes that I may have stolen the limelight, taking credit that is due to others—a nurse and a psychiatrist who were the first to notice Huey's distress and have barely been mentioned, an anonymous citizen who sat with Huey in prison and took food to his family in the boot of his car, even, dare I say it, the Crown prosecutor who for all his retributive zeal took Lawrence at his word and instructed the police to find the abuser. They are the heroes of this tale. And of course Lawrence.

Now I have a confession to make. Please don't ask me if I invented the hinge scene, when Huey broke down in hospital and told me everything. I have sleepless nights over this, imagining myself accused of putting words in his mouth that weren't his. For while it may be true that the words were already there, imprisoned and waiting to be set free, it is also true in a metaphorical sense that I invented them.

In 1967 I attended a lecture at Harvard given by the blind Argentinian poet, Jorge Luis Borges, in which he said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four evangelists invented Jesus. So you could say (but please don't tell the Court of Appeal!) that I am the man who invented Huey Dunstan.

Many books have been written on the subject of buried memory; most of them I have not read. Two books have helped me while writing this novel:
Victims of Memory
by Mark Pendergrast and
A City Possessed
by Lynley Hood. Also, on the subject of blindness, John Hull's wonderful memoir,
Touching the Rock
.

I am profoundly grateful for the help of a number of professionals, two of whom have allowed me to pick their brains mercilessly over the years, besides several friends. I hope they will forgive me for not naming them, in order to protect those who are still living. I am also indebted to my agent Michael Gifkins, my two editors, Harriet Allan in New Zealand and Jane Pearson in Australia, and especially my wife Helen for her sight of blindness and her love, as always.