The Sunlight on the Garden (10 page)

‘Thank you for standing in for me.'

‘Always happy to be of help.'

‘I still feel absolutely ghastly.'

‘You look absolutely ghastly'

As, high heels clicking on the parquet, Maddy approached her court, she glimpsed the old woman outside it, sitting on a bench with an elderly, elongated man in a dark-blue pinstripe suit, the jacket sagging at the narrow shoulders and the trousers straining over a little paunch. There was a vague resemblance between the two – the same watery, washed-out blue eyes, the same bony hands, the same beaky noses. He must be the partner of the appellant, she decided, and she the sister whose name was on the order paper as the only other witness. The two of them could not enter the court to give their evidence until the appellant had been heard. The woman looked up at Maddy and gave that twitchy, lop-sided smile of hers. Maddy at once turned her head away.

Sometimes appellants imagined that it would help their cases if friends and relatives of theirs crowded the court. As far as Maddy was concerned, they were wrong about that, particularly if some of these supporters were children. Fortunately, today the court contained only herself, the appellant and the appellant's whiskery, grey-haired female barrister.

As Maddy entered, the barrister lurched to her feet and the appellant then did likewise. Maddy merely nodded as she took her place on the dais. She opened her laptop. As she listened to what, with patient assiduity, the gruff-voiced barrister was attempting to elicit from her seemingly reluctant client, Maddy also typed away, recording every sentence. But as her crimson-nailed fingers flicked at the keys, she was irritated that, after her previous laptop, this supposedly far superior replacement was putting up what she described later to Jake as ‘a kind of passive resistance'. She prided herself on her speed and accuracy as a typist.

The appellant, a Moroccan, was a fleshy youth, his heavily oiled hair cut close to his skull. In his sulky, somnolent way, he was handsome. The Home Office had already decided that he was not a homosexual and she herself now at once also decided, with satisfaction, that they had been absolutely right. She had dealt with other such individuals – a Jamaican only last week, an Algerian a few weeks before – who claimed firstly that they were in long-term partnerships with British men and secondly that, as homosexuals, their lives would be in danger if they were deported back to their homelands.

Maddy knew, partly from experience and partly from what the Home Office bundle had told her, precisely what to ask the man. In no time at all, he became confused, contradicted himself repeatedly, and kept dawdling to silence while desperately searching for an answer. When at one moment she was needling him with particular finesse, he shouted, his voice suddenly hoarse and strangulated, ‘Your question is racist!' The barrister jerked her head up and rolled her eyes, like a frightened horse. Maddy merely laughed and said: ‘I don't think that's a helpful line for you to take.' But secretly she was furious. These days it was less offensive to be called a bitch than a racist.

The appellant's ‘partner' – in her mind Maddy put the word in inverted commas – followed the Moroccan. He walked stiffly, one hand grasping a bony thigh as though he feared that it might snap under the pressure put on it by each footfall. Whenever he answered a question, he made a point of calling Maddy ‘ Madam'. On the first occasion she had thought, with momentary outrage, that he was using her first name. Usually it pleased her to be addressed as ‘Madam' in court. But this old boy reminded her too much of a camp shop assistant for it to please her now.

Every witness was first obliged to produce a passport as proof of identity. When the old boy had handed his to the barrister and the barrister had risen and passed it on, Maddy riffled through its pages. In addition to the usual formality of checking his identity, she was doing what the Home Office had suggested that she do. Unfortunately the passport was a new one, less than five months old. It recorded only a single journey. But she was happy with that single journey. She pounced. ‘Why did you spend three months in Tunisia?'

‘Three months?' The watery eyes blinked at her. ‘ I'm sorry madam …'

‘It says here – three months. Three months,' she repeated. She tapped the right-hand page open before her with a fingernail.

‘Oh, I think you're mistaken, madam. I spent only a week in Tunisia.'

‘A
week
? Then why does it say—?'

‘I think, madam, that you'll find that that stamp is the visa stamp.' That he corrected her with such humility exasperated her far more than if he had been indignant or triumphant.

‘A visa stamp?'

‘Yes, madam, the Tunisians, er, give visas for a minimum of three months. One can also get them for, er, six months and even a year, I believe. But then one pays more. Naturally one pays more.' He gave a little cough, raising one hand to his mouth. ‘ I think, madam, that if you look on the opposite page you'll see the date stamps – arrival in Tunis, departure from Tunis.'

Maddy tossed the passport down on to her desk. Her face had flushed. He had made her look a fool and she did not care for that. But she had got him anyway, she consoled herself. He had been out of the country without the partner who, he had claimed in his statement in the bundle, was absolutely essential to his well-being.

Later in her examination of this pathetic creature (as she later referred to him when telling Jake of her day over dinner), she put it to him: ‘So you rely a great deal on the appellant?'

‘Oh, yes, madam. Yes. I couldn't manage without him. He's an exceptionally kind man. And efficient. When I was in hospital for an operation, a major operation, he spent the whole day by my bedside. Day after day. I kept urging him to go home but, no, he insisted. He even gave me a bath when I was well enough to get out of bed. He insisted on that. He wouldn't let the nurse do it.'

‘I see.'

The trap had closed. Later she would write in her Reasons for Refusal: ‘Mr L'Estrange maintained in his statement that he relied entirely on the appellant. This hardly accords with his visit, unaccompanied, to Tunisia for a holiday.' It was better not to specify that the period of the holiday had been only a week. Ideally, she would have liked to have been able to write ‘a holiday of three months'.

At the close she said: ‘Now, Mr L'Estrange, do you think that you can more precisely define for me the nature of your relationship with the appellant?'

He paused. Then, with unexpected boldness, he met her gaze and held it as he replied in a loud, firm voice: ‘ I love him. He loves me. That's the long and the short of it.'

‘You are sure of that?'

‘Absolutely'

‘I can understand your being sure about your own feelings. But how can you be sure about his?'

‘We have now lived together for more than four years. He could not keep up a charade for that long.'

Muddy gave a small, pitying smile. It said: Oh, you self-deceiving fool!

‘You're a retired dentist. Am I right?'

‘That's right.'

‘A distinguished dentist? You have a lot of letters after your name.'

‘Oh, I don't know about that.' He smirked as he looked down at the long, folded hands that had been so skilful at dealing with expensive root-canal fillings and implants.

‘Were some of the well-known people who wrote letters of support for you former patients of yours?'

‘Yes. Yes, that is the case.' Intelligent enough to see what she was getting at, he hurriedly added: ‘But they have all – well, most of them – met Mahmoud – er, my partner. They long ago came to regard me as a friend, and many, I think I'm right in saying, now also regard him as a friend.'

Again she gave that small, pitying smile.

‘It is odd that there are no supporting letters from friends of his, in addition to those from these friends of yours.'

‘My friends are his friends. He has no Moroccan friends now. He prefers it that way. In any case' – once again his voice surprised her by its loudness and firmness – ‘would a recommendation from a fellow Moroccan carry much weight in a court of this kind?'

She paused, head lowered, as her nails still clicked over the keyboard. Then she looked up: ‘ Since you are retired, surely you could go to live in Morocco with the appellant? What's to prevent that, if you do not want to be separated?'

‘Well …' He glanced first left, then right, as though for invisible support. ‘I am an old man, eighty-one. My life is here. My friends are all here. I have lived in the same house for – let's see – yes, twenty-nine years. It's full of my books, my pictures, possessions. I have a bad heart condition. Cardiomyopathy. I see my specialist regularly. In Morocco I might not get the same standard of treatment. Might I? Then there are my two sisters. They are both widows. Both older than me. One is now in a nursing home. She's got senile dementia. One is – is here today. She is to be a witness. Her health is also bad. I like to think that I am a support to them – not just a financial support, in other ways too. I must be near them.'

‘I see.' Again the nails tapped briskly on the keyboard. The she looked up. ‘ That will do.' The tone was curt. Other adjudicators said ‘Thank you' to terminate an interview. ‘ Thank you' and ‘please' were words that she herself preferred not to use when presiding in court. She believed strongly that, while in court, one had to show who was master. A lot of adjudicators – like that ass that she had replaced the day before – were far too eager to ingratiate themselves with appellants and their lawyers and witnesses.

The one-hour adjournment for lunch had ended. Maddy had eaten her sandwiches in the office with two of her female colleagues. The Moroccan and the old man and woman had found a café filled with workmen with dirty boots and loud voices and braying laughs.

The old woman now struggled to her feet. Her macintosh was draped over the back of the chair beside her and her beret, looking like a vast, hairy toadstool, lay on the seat. The barrister jumped up to help her, taking her left arm, the good one, even though it was with the hand of that one that the old woman was grasping her ferruled stick. ‘ Lean on me, dear,' she said not in her usual loud, gruff voice but in a liquid, cooing one. ‘That's it.'

‘I get giddy when I first get up. I'll be all right in a moment.'

‘Take it easy! No hurry!'

‘Since my stroke I tend to get this giddiness. After my first one I was fine, but since this one …'

‘No hurry, no hurry!'

The barrister looked up at Maddy on the dais, in expectation of a sympathetic response. But Maddy was feeling far from sympathetic. She was asking herself: Is this, consciously or unconsciously, some kind of playacting? Appellants often put on a performance. Only two or three weeks ago the fair-haired, pale-faced English wife of a Kosovan had arrived in court with a newborn baby in a pushchair, in order to be a witness. She had gazed adoringly at the Kosovan while rocking the baby in her arms. The court usher had later told Maddy that, on leaving the courthouse, the wife had got into one car with the baby, while the appellant had got into another, much larger one with two male friends. There had been the most perfunctory of goodbyes between husband and wife. The husband had paid absolutely no attention to the baby.

‘I hope that I can hear properly,' the old woman said, having sat down. She appealed to the barrister: ‘I wonder if you could just help me adjust my aid. It's difficult for me with my wonky arm.'

‘Of course, dear.' It was said in the same liquid, cooing voice. ‘What number do you want?'

‘Could you turn it up to three? No, four might be better.'

Slowly, solicitously, the barrister began to take the old woman through the statement already presented in the bundle. Yes, Mr L'Estrange was her brother, her older brother. Yes, they had always been close. That was natural since her husband had been killed in the War, less than two years after he had married her. He had been a pilot, she added. Fighter Command. Yes, she had recently had the second of two strokes. That meant that she could no longer look after her little garden – or put out the rubbish – or lift the cat's tray. That sort of thing. Her brother and Mahmoud – his friend – were wonderful in that respect. She had only to ring them. It was Mahmoud of course who usually did all these little jobs. Her brother now had that heart problem.

The barrister leaned forward: ‘ Could you say something about the nature of the relationship between your brother and his – his friend?'

Briefly the old woman looked non-plussed. She pursed her lips, put a hand to her paralysed cheek, sighed. Maddy also now leaned forward. She was feeling a cynical amusement and also, yes, a cynical admiration. She often felt those emotions when listening to witnesses.

‘It's not the sort of relationship that I ever knew much about until he – Mahmoud – came on the scene. I think my brother met him in some pub. There was the difference of age, a big difference. And there was the difference of interests. I don't want to sound snobbish in any way, but my brother is – well – well, he has no financial worries, none at all. And he's had a good education, loves books, opera, is interested in archaeology. Mahmoud is – different. He's an excellent sportsman. When not working in the restaurant, he spends most of his time playing football with a team on Highgate Heath or watching television. One has to accept that. But Mahmoud has made my brother happy. My brother's wife died five or six years ago – they had no children – and my brother then seemed to go into some kind of decline. He was horribly depressed. He stopped going out, entertaining. But now, with Mahmoud, he is happy. Happier than I've ever known him, I think – even during his marriage. They love each other – yes, they love each other. I'm sure they love each other. At first that seemed odd to me – even – yes – even rather shocking. But now … Oh, I think it wonderful that they've found each other. It would be cruel if they had to separate. Terribly cruel.'