Remedy is None (28 page)

Charlie could not bring himself to participate in their charade. He felt somehow as if he had played into their hands. When he had felt the injustice his father had suffered, they had offered him no means to express his feeling. They had ignored it, pretended that the injustice he felt did not exist. And when he had proven its existence by an action that they could not ignore, they isolated the action in himself, pretended that the injustice was his, existed only in the manifestation he had given it. It was as if they had let him trap himself in their own evil, and then attributed the evil to him. His action had been an attempt to pass some sort of judgment on them, and now they were using it to pass judgment on him. They made his action a means of vindicating themselves. They did not relate his action in any way to themselves. They made it all so impersonal by reducing it to this mock conflict in which they took both sides. By their skilful ambivalence, they exonerated themselves whatever happened. And they did it all with such earnestness and humanity.

The solicitor strove determinedly to make Charlie’s action as insignificant as he could. As the time for the trial drew near, he promised Charlie that his ‘counsel’ would be coming to see him. He said it as if it was very important, a significant gesture made towards Charlie, justice sending her official representative to his aid.

But Charlie saw it as only another stage in refining what he had done to fit their own requirements, another part of the process his action was submitted to in this factory for the distortion of facts to fit society. He saw truth tethered and hobbled, helpless, lying ready for emasculation. ‘Counsel’ was just another name for one of those who were helping to hold it ready for the knife.

Chapter 22

IT WAS AN UNUSED CELL, REDOLENT WITH PAST MISERY
and the loneliness of many men. A table and two chairs had been placed in the middle of the floor, but they did no more than offset the starkness of the stone room. The barred window relieved the gloom grudgingly, conceding a pittance of nicotined light.

Mr Bertram laid his brief-case on the table and took a few measured paces back and forth in the cell, like a general assessing the strength of his position. He checked his battery of arguments, making sure they were ready to be trained on target. He found that he was relishing the encounter. Charles Grant promised to be interesting. A working-class university student. Apparently more articulate than most of those who faced a murder charge. That was what made it interesting. Violence wasn’t necessarily the monopoly of morons, but too often, he had found, it seemed to go along with a certain inability to express oneself in more civilized directions. Those who suffered from it scrawled their frustrations on society’s attention the way that children chalk obscenities on a wall.

Mr Bertram lingered over the thought. It pleased him. He was a man who liked the neat abstraction, the sweeping analysis. In a world recalcitrantly irrational and incalculable, he delighted in any situation that was separable from elements of chance and uncertainty, and to which a formula could be applied. That was his reason for being here today. He could justify his presence to himself on more pragmatic grounds. Mr Edwards had been having trouble with Grant. Their client was hardly being helpful. Mr Bertram had decided to see him, but he had discouraged Mr Edwards from attending their interview. Mr Edwards would no doubt be concerned
with incidental points in the case and Mr Bertram had decided that these were sufficiently clarified already. He saw this meeting as an opportunity to show Grant the image he must try to project during the trial, not as a matter of legal quibbling. Every trial followed a known formula, and Mr Bertram was pleased to reflect that he was familiar with that formula.

A warder entered, bringing with him one of the formula’s components.

‘Mr Grant,’ he said, shaking hands with Charlie. His face troubled with sympathy for a second before it went bland again. ‘As you no doubt know, my name is Alexander Bertram. I’ll be representing you at your trial.’

The warder had gone out, leaving the door slightly ajar, so that the room eavesdropped on the muted sounds of the rest of the building. Footsteps came and went on the edge of the silence. Voices assailed the cell quietly and intermittently, as delicate as mice.

‘Please sit down.’

Charlie sat in the chair facing the door and watched the man sit down opposite, his immaculate clothes looking sombre in this false twilight. His brief-case rested on the table, massive and thick, a leather strong-box. Charlie wondered what was in it. His own defence. The meaning of what he had done. For this was it. The final conference before his action was officially submitted for judgment. The place was appropriate to the occasion. The bleakness seemed somehow terminal, a dead-end in stone and wood. Here only fundamentals could exist, the hardest of facts, the ultimate realities. You could not bring pretence or sophistry or self-deception here. Everything but the truth broke in transit. Here all you could do was turn and face yourself. So what was the conclusion they had reached?

‘My reason for coming to see you, Mr Grant, is not in order to discuss the case as such with you. I am too well aware of Mr Edwards’ competence to consider that necessary. He’s been in touch with you several times and he will have indicated to you the lines we’ll be following. No. My real reason
is a simpler one. I just wanted to see you, and let you see me. Mr Edwards tells me – let me be frank – that your attitude at times has been almost obstructive. I think I can appreciate how you feel. The legal process must seem pretty impersonal to you. So I think it’s important that we should at least know each other before the trial. A courtroom is hardly the best place in which to make someone’s acquaintance. Cigarette?’

He gave Charlie a cigarette and leaned across the table to light it for him. So far, so smooth, Charlie felt. It seemed a very studied performance. Straight out of the Lawyers’ Handbook. Fig. i – Making the Prisoner Feel at Home. Remarks should be punctuated with friendly gestures, e.g. passing of cigarette. Allow him to smoke for a moment before resuming.

‘I would like to give you some idea of what’s ahead of you during the trial. I don’t want you to be completely bewildered. Your behaviour during the trial is important. So that I want you to know what’s going on. Is there any part of the procedure you want clarification on ? Any questions you want to ask?’

Charlie blew out smoke, shaking his head.

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Only whit a’ this is supposed tae have tae dae wi’ onything.’

‘Mr Grant. First of all. I would prefer you to speak in English. You’ve been to university. Presumably, you’re reasonably articulate. I see no need for this . . . linguistic affectation. It’s in no way to your advantage to talk as if you were on a terracing. I don’t have any personal antipathy to Lallans. When it
is
Lallans. But juries are recruited primarily from the middle classes. And they tend to judge people by the way they speak. They may not try to. But it’s liable to get to them.’

Charlie paused on the thought that it was difficult to see the connection between murder and the way you spoke. A remark half-formed in his mind, something to the effect that they might as well reach a decision by burning his hand and waiting to see if it festered. But it died of indifference. What was the point here? Sarcasm was too glib to have survived
with him as long as this. Yet he couldn’t quite avoid a hint of Eton in his voice, the ghost of former fluency.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘I was wondering what relevance all of this had to what I’ve done.’

‘Thank you. That’s better. Actually, it is very relevant. Any jury consists of fifteen good people and true. Or as close to these prerequisites as forethought and careful pre-selection can come. But above all it consists of fifteen very fallible people. Fifteen people who are pretty ordinary. And being ordinary, they are not greatly given to self-scrutiny or to the examination of their mental processes. Now, in the strange context of a jury-room and under the special stimulus of the responsibility they bear, they will try to arrest their thought processes, to overtake instinct and study their reactions. To achieve a concentration and an honesty alien to their everyday lives. They
will
try. But how far will they succeed? It’s a hard discipline. How many thoughts are pure of prejudice? How many ideas enter the mind completely unalloyed with error? And having entered, how many ideas can stay untainted by what is there already? By what has gathered there through years of hurried living, of makeshift thinking, of all the small necessary deceptions that people practise on themselves. A residue remains. Something that stains whatever comes in contact with it. Bias becomes built into the mind. Do you see what I mean?’

Charlie made no answer, as if the question was rhetorical, part of some ritual in which he was not a participant, merely an onlooker. But silence was all the response the lawyer needed. His theme sustained him without the incentive of reply. The blankness of Charlie’s expression was no more than a mirror in which his own conviction was reflected.

‘You see. What will come together in that jury-room and in that court will not be fifteen minds. But fifteen people. And people contaminate their minds. It’s unavoidable. That’s what it means to be human. They reshape them to suit themselves. They people them with their own gods. They remake the world to fit them. Institute their own laws. Enthrone
whims. They harness their minds to small snobberies, little prejudices. And this is what
we
are up against. This is what
we
have to deal with.’

The use of ‘we’ made Charlie cringe. He recoiled from it as if it were the hand of a drowned man plucking at him. He looked round the cell and its recalcitrant stone was counterpart to his despair.

‘So we have to take this into account and adjust to suit. We have to try to make our actions anticipate their reactions. We must understand that much of their thinking will simply be rationalization from accepted points of prejudice. So it’s up to us not to offend any such prejudice. Otherwise, we may effect blockages in their thinking. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I think this aspect of it is of prime importance. Not at all. I’m not trying to say that the scales of justice balance on prejudice. Our legal system is a good one, and what matters most, of course, is the case, the two sides of it which the law presents. This will still be the jury’s main concern. All I’m saying is that it will not be their only concern. The trial will be a multiple experience for them. They will be seeing and hearing people all the time. And these people will affect them not only by what they say. But also by the way that they say it. By their manner. By their very appearance. Trivial factors. Yes. But then a trial is a complex of important and trivial factors, interacting upon one another. I just want you to be aware of this. Remember that while the lawyers debate, the jury will be watching you. Small things will lodge in their minds. Your expression. The way you move your hands. Your manner of speaking. You may be creating impressions in their minds that may have some sort of influence on their thinking, however minimal. I want you to be conscious of the impression you are creating. You are playing a part. That is all. And more important than any good impression that you might create is the need not to create any bad impression. Such as your speech might have done if you had been speaking in a court there. This is what I’m getting at. Have you been following me?’

Where to? Charlie thought. Down the rabbit’s burrow? To the land of make-believe, where we can play at being people? So much for truth. He could bid it goodbye here. This was as far as his action took him, this bleak dead-end. The rest was a backing-away from it, the covering of his tracks with dead leaves and twigs of reason. Why did it have to be like this? Was the truth he had wanted them to face too terrible to face? So that they had to cover it up, to obscure it with irrelevances, to make it into something different before they could bear it? Somehow what he had done had destroyed its own meaning. His action had been an attempt to halt glibness, to tear off superficiality, to make the truth be faced. Instead, it had merely created its own glibness, a greater need for superficial reasons to conceal its true nature. His truth had spawned its own falsehood. He had forced them to deny the true meaning of his action. For some things are too terrible to be acknowledged if life is to have any meaning, is to continue on a practical footing. As a wound craves bandages, the truth he had revealed to them craved concealment. And they were doing an expert job of concealment, performing immaculate plastic surgery on themselves. And what could he do about it?

‘Mr Grant. Have you been following me?’

It seemed senseless to talk about it. What was talk going to achieve now? But the question was there, like a performer’s hat. It was only polite to put a penny in.

‘Following you? Ah widny exactly put it that way. I wouldn’t exactly put it that way. You don’t seem to be going anywhere. Except round in circles.’

‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

The lawyer’s voice had gone quiet, but its quietness was ominous with the tension of anger on a leash. Charlie felt that it was hardly worth offending him just to go on with this. Enough had been done already. Too many people had been hurt. And it all added up to nothing. What use was there in adding even one more insult to it or prolonging it in another moment’s anger? But the lawyer was there. And he owed him at least an answer.

‘All I mean is, I don’t see any point in the part you’re asking me to play. I can’t identify, as it were. All this elaborate pretence. It’s so trivial. I mean, what
is
the point of it?’

‘I thought I had made myself clear, Mr Grant. I’m not pretending that it isn’t trivial. In fact, I specifically said that it was. All right. I’m not even saying that it’s going to make much difference. It might not make
any
difference. Indeed, to be quite honest with you, in a case as clear-cut as this one, I don’t see that it
will
make any difference. But while there exists the slightest possibility that it might, then it is my business to consider it. And I’m trying to make it yours. While there is any factor, however slight, which might weigh in your case, however fractionally, then it is my duty to try to see that you get the benefit of it. A human being is at stake. No feather of fact can be ignored. Nothing, no matter how trivial, can be discounted if it might possibly off-set your case. And I won’t let it be discounted. Not even by you. A mote is enough to blind us to the truth.’