Tenderness, page 54
Only we can see Michael Rubinstein, at the solicitors’ table, nod, in discreet triumph, to Sir Allen Lane and Hans Schmoller.
Then Dame Rebecca sails past their table, a stately galleon of good sense in what, her expression says, is a sea of nonsense.
xi
J. Edgar Hoover turns to the latest scrapbook. It’s been a long day in the office, but Shirley Temple is ‘at his side’ – kids are great company. Behind his desk, there’s a whole shelf of his scrapbooks. These bulging testaments to his career go all the way back to 1924, even before the F.B.I. earned its ‘Federal’.
That prefix had meant more to him than anything or anyone, except his mother and now Clyde, of course. Or it had until the Bureau got passed over for foreign intelligence work. Instead, the C.I.A. was dreamed up in ’47, and those son-of-a-bitch Ivy Leaguers were handed the prize.
And to think his Bureau had been required to train them! It was a slap on the chops. He’d never say it wasn’t. But life is full of injustice. He’s known that since he was a kid. He’s never had anything passed to him on a plate, but he doesn’t give up. He has faith and stamina, and he gets what he wants in the end.
If he’d had a daughter, she would have been just like little ‘Heidi’ herself. It’s a shame children have to grow up. If he’d been a father, he would have parceled up ‘lessons for life’ into little rhymes because jingles, just like slogans, stick in the brain.
The cherry in the cocktail might come a little late,
So fold your hands in your lap, be a good little girl and wait,
Because practice makes perfect, and one thing I can state,
Is that hard work pays, and you make your own fate.
He’s always had a way with words, ever since grade-school. He’s a stickler, too, for grammar and spelling. Someone has to keep up standards.
He’s behind on his scrapbook. It’s been hectic lately, and the clippings – cut out of the papers for him by Miss Gandy – have been piling up. The ‘sticking in’ is fiddly work for blunt fingers – those pesky corners – but if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Besides, his end-of-the-day routine helps his blood pressure.
He’s made history, alright – almost literally, like one of those engineers who forces rivers to flow this way or that, regardless of where it wants to go. Everything needs looking after. Everything needs managing. Life just can’t run itself or there’d be no law, no order, no nation. As he sticks the articles about the Chatterley trial in Edgar J. Hoover, 1960, he thinks, as he often does, about how proud his mother would be. ‘A trial – in London, England?’ she’d say, agog. But it’s his father who arrives, uninvited, in the inner sanctum of Hoover’s skull.
Dickerson Hoover is sobbing silently again in the middle of the street outside the family home, dressed only in a pair of faded long-johns. It’s the silence of those sobs, the silent movie of his father’s dumb anguish, that spooks him – now, just as it did all those years ago. How is it even possible, unless you’re Charlie Chaplin, to cry without making any sound at all?
Someone has to manage that particular crisis – his dear mother agrees – and manage it Hoover does. He drives his father that very day to The Laurels for a ‘rest’, even though his father will never rest again, or not until he’s seven feet under. No one in The Laurels ever rests (on their laurels – ha! – you bet they don’t). But the fact is, for a loony-bin, it’s a good one, a pricey one, and it looks pleasant enough. Maybe, if you’re a lunatic, it even is. Pleasant.
Hoover shudders.
If only his father had said something that day. Maybe then, he and his dad would have gotten somewhere. Maybe then, Hoover wouldn’t have had to drive him away.
It’s a troubling scene, there in the middle of the road outside 413 Seward Square. ‘For crying out loud!’ he says to his father again, as he gets him by the elbow and steers him – mute, clammy and quivering – inside the house.
The memory of the scene, all these years later, raises an unexpected trace of a smile on Hoover’s face. With hindsight, it occurs to him that what he said to his father was like some kind of pun. For crying out loud. When his father couldn’t.
Dickerson Hoover never left The Laurels.
J. Edgar Hoover sighs to sweet-faced Shirley Temple. If only his mother were alive to see the many rivers he has diverted from their misguided courses through history. He is a natural manager of men. Maybe even an engineer of the American soul. He has worked hard for his country. No one has worked harder than him.
Next to the clippings on his desk, Miss Gandy has provided, as ever, a cloth with a finger-bowl, so he can wipe the newsprint from his fingers when he’s finished. He reviews the headlines.
‘Day 2: “Is It a Book You Would Wish Your Wife or Servants to Read?” ’
‘Lady Chatterley: Could “USE UP HALF A DOZEN MEN” Says Expert’
‘Cambridge Don Says: 13 Sex Scenes “NOT REPETITIVE” ’
‘Penguin’s SIR Allen Lane Faces 3 Years LOCK-UP’
‘Throw THE BOOK at Him!’
Hoover puts on his glasses, the ones he rarely reveals in public. In the small photograph which accompanies the last clipping, a woman is on her way into the Old Bailey. She’s wearing a coat, unbuttoned, and a black fur hat. She’s clutching a paperback, presumably the sex-maniac’s.
He cannot believe his eyes.
‘Dame Rebecca West: Star Witness for the Defence’.
Is it a misprint?
No. Because there she is again, in the next clipping.
He slumps back in his chair, as if his heart has given up.
He doesn’t understand.
The bouquet he had Miss Gandy send her was huge. It cost a bomb. Plus, there was the American Garden, the fancy restaurant and high tea. There was his letter of congratulations on her damehood. There was all his personal attention.
He has to unbutton his collar and find the flask in the bottom drawer. It’s no coincidence, he tells himself, that the woman wrote a book – wrote the book – on treason and betrayal.
Then he roars for Miss Gandy.
‘Telephone the London Bureau. I don’t care what time it is over there! Tell the jerk who works for us he’s fired. Phone him at home if you have to, and don’t let him down gently. Tell him from me it’s the end of the line!’
* * *
—
At Whelan’s Family Drugstore, Mel Harding is finished for the day. He leaves through the staff door at the back, and walks two blocks along quiet residential streets. Only then does he dip onto Main Street and double-back in the direction of his car.
One of Hoover’s men falls into step behind him – again, in spite of his zig-zagging. He recognizes the beat of the man’s gait, because it used to be his own. Bureau men learn, by unspoken example, how to stride in a Bureau way. He could slow down; he could force the man to pass him. But what would that achieve? It would only say that he cared enough to present a challenge. Either that, or that he was ‘frit’.
He isn’t followed daily or even weekly; that would be too predictable. In predictability lies comfort. Watch – your – step, watch – your – step. That’s what the beat of the agent’s shoes are telling him. The agent will be a guy from the Boston office. He’ll have enjoyed the drive down to the Cape. The scenery, the sunshine.
Sure, the flashlights through the curtains in his motel room get to Harding sometimes. But this – watch – your – step – it’s standard.
After a year and a half of controversy, he finds it odd, almost disconcerting, to walk into the bookstore on Main Street, pick a copy of the book off the shelf, the Grove Press edition, and slap $6 down on the counter.
‘Would you like a paper bag, sir?’ says the clerk. There’s a tone to her voice which tells him most people do.
‘No. That’s fine,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’
Before his last copy was confiscated from his room by his former colleagues, he’d had about eighty pages left to read. Lady Chatterley was trying to escape Wragby Hall. Did she?
‘And then when I come back,’ she said, ‘I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?’
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
‘You’ve never been to the colonies, have you?’ he asked her.
‘No! Have you?’
He’ll get back to it tonight, for a half hour before lights-out. He wants the final chapters to last. Maybe he’ll take it to work tomorrow; read a few pages over lunch. He’ll be discreet. The Bureau briefcase will be more respectable than a paper bag. When he handed over his badge, revolver and manuals on the porch outside his motel room that day, he’d completely forgotten about the briefcase. He’d used it so rarely, and had had no need of it at the Kennedys’. Sometimes he heard it as he drove, knocking around in the trunk. Then he grew accustomed and stopped noticing the noise at all.
A shoeshine boy on the sidewalk outside the barber’s asks if he wants a shine. ‘Not today,’ he says. He has a new pair of shoes. They still look okay. After the episode on the beach, his old ones were ruined beyond the talents of any shoeshine, and he’d needed a decent pair for his job interview. Old Mr. Whelan had showed him into the processing room and, from there, into the cubicle of the darkroom, waving an arm at the enlarger, the trays and the shelf of chemicals. ‘My print-boy just left me. Got a job as a stringer on the local paper. A good job. He’s saving up for college next year. I don’t know what in the blazes to do with all this…I was going to open a soda-counter in this part of the store instead. But if you think you have an idea about how to work it all, I’ll give you a three-week trial.’
Harding arrives at his car. The agent has disappeared. The nights are drawing in early now. November will soon be upon them. November 1st. All Souls’. All the ghosts. Sometimes he thinks of his mother – her unhappiness, her abandonment. He never could put it right. He never could track down his father for her. For himself. For his seven-year-old self. What would he have said if he had? He has no idea.
Maybe Howard Johnson, the Washington S.A.C., was right. Maybe that was why he’d applied to the Bureau. Not just for the investigative skills, but for a father figure – one who was always going to be there, whether you wanted him or not; an older man who was never going to leave you alone.
Now he’s in a dead-end job, and living out of a crappy motel room with Hunter, Killbuck, Racer and Snap foaming at the mouth next door. He’s surviving. He no longer expects anything more.
At his car, in the darkness, he opens the trunk and grabs the briefcase. It’s a nice one. He turns it over and hits the light in the trunk. Good leather. No distinguishing marks or Bureau insignias – of course. And it comes to him, now that his mind is clear. He last used the thing in Butte, going to and from his one-man office. He never had anything to put in it, but it was the only mark of respectability he could cling to in that desert of a year, May ’58 to May ’59.
Harding eyes up the case. He’s wondering if he should take it back to the shoeshine – when he hears a funny rattle inside. He turns the key that dangles on the key-chain tied to the strap, then hits the latches. They don’t pop.
Which is when he remembers: the case has no compartment, only a false bottom. The button-release is on the bottom of the case. His finger locates it but the case is empty, and the rattle persists.
For a moment, there in the gathering gloom of late October, on a street that’s empty except for gusts of leaves, he’s back there: May of ’58. Springtime in D.C. A new job and a new rank at the Washington Field Office, the office that’s closest, in every sense, to HQ, and to the Director himself.
He’s been tasked with the delivery of Howard Johnson’s classified report to Hoover at the Mayflower. The drop-off is required by Mr. Hoover. He places the Manila envelope in the false bottom of the case and snaps it shut. It’s a nice-looking briefcase, new from the Lab, and real leather, not imitation. Everyone says presentation matters. Before he leaves, he checks his teeth in the men’s room.
At the Mayflower, he’s shown to where Mr. Hoover and the Associate Director are having lunch, at the table always reserved for them in the dimly-lit dining room. As he approaches, Harding can smell the steam coming off the cream of mushroom soup.
Tolson isn’t sitting in the chair across from Hoover, as Harding would have expected, but next to him, on the red banquette. Harding registers the fact, but he only wants to make a good impression as he approaches the Director. This has been a long time coming; twelve years in the heat and stink of the New York Field Office. Plenty of top agents. It was hard to stand out. He got his promotion a lot later than most.
When he saw the two men sitting close, he should have gotten the hell out – before he saw Hoover’s hand on Tolson’s. Before Hoover saw him see.
Instead, Harding found himself hitting the punch-latches, fiddling with the strap and turning the damned key, until his brain lurched, and he remembered the hidden compartment. Nerves. He blamed his nerves. He hit the release-button. He was never this ham-fisted, he wanted to say. Not that he could say anything. Don’t speak until spoken to.
Standing by the trunk of his car, he listens to the rattle again. Then he digs for his tools, stored with the spare and the jack, and finds his Swiss Army knife.
He slices through the casing and reaches up into the internal side compartment to pull out…a de-commissioned Robot Star II camera. He’d almost forgotten he’d ever given it a try – what? three? maybe four? years ago. A great little camera, heavy but neat. Three inches long. The only problem had been the angled viewfinder, built into the case like a bad periscope. Almost impossible for covert work. The Bureau replaced it, a year or two after, with the F-21 camera. Six ounces. Easy to fit in umbrella handles and things you could actually point. It was the F-21, not the Robot Star, which had given him his ‘money-shot’: Mrs. Kennedy in the G.P.O.
When he was shipped off to Butte, no one had come calling for the briefcase or its camera, and when his Bureau items were recovered at his motel door, almost two months ago already, the agent’s checklist didn’t mention either.
He gets in the car, and lays the camera and book on the passenger seat. Life has taught him, little by little, how not to hold on; how to keep expectations low. Yet here was the gift of a good camera. A bit of luck. Finally.
For twelve years, he’d been made aware on a daily basis that he wasn’t the standard cut of agent. He was the butt of jokes even before the transfer to Butte. Yet something in him had always known, since the day his father had abandoned him and his mother: for someone to make you feel inferior, you had to give your permission.
He was through with giving permission.
Outside her house that day, she could have made him feel like something on the bottom of her shoe. Instead, she’d shaken his hand. She’d offered him her name. ‘Jacqueline,’ she said in that soft voice of hers. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was something more.
She spoke to him like he existed.
Now, he had a camera, a book, and a car. And he had the freedom of the twenty-two inches inside his own head.
xii
Outside Court Number One, the great domed hall of the Old Bailey has the look of a left-luggage office in a train station. Witnesses arrive at their appointed time and wait to be re-claimed by the Defence team. Matron keeps vigil with each on a hard bench, sometimes for hours. She keeps a careful eye on her charge’s colour and composure. She makes small talk or holds her tongue, as the situation requires. She reaches into her pocket for boiled sweets. In a few instances, she pulls out a thermometer and checks a pulse. Then, at last, the heavy door opens and the bull-necked usher appears at the threshold to boom out a name. One by one, over three days, thirty-five stray souls are re-claimed.
‘I once was lost but now am found,’ murmurs Dr John Robinson, with a nervous smile, as his name is called. He and Matron have enjoyed their chat. She takes the liberty of passing him a comb, then watches as the 41-year-old Bishop of Woolwich, in his violet Bishop’s vest and pectoral cross, disappears, as if for the Final Judgement.
At the solicitors’ table, Michael Rubinstein has taken to smoking his pipe to steady his nerves. He cannot forget that each witness mounts the witness box at his behest. He has done his best to rehearse them, as has the ever-affable Mr Hutchinson, but now, like children released into the world, they have to see off Mr Griffith-Jones on their own.
Beside Michael Rubinstein, publisher Allen Lane maintains an upright, concentrated posture. Pragmatic though he is, he cannot shake entirely from his mind his official designation: ‘the Prisoner’. Next to him, Hans Schmoller, Lane’s right-hand man, doodles surreptitiously on the Old Bailey notepaper, and is arguably more accomplished than the artists sent by the papers to sketch the better-known faces.
The days of late autumn darken early over the Old Bailey. Indeed, the sun has hardly emerged from London’s murk this week, and it tends to disappear altogether by four. After lunch, one or two of the male jurors sometimes nod off, as points of law are tested by the barristers or expanded on by the Judge.
Then: ‘Dr John Robinson! The Bishop of Woolwich!’
Heads jolt.
* * *
—
Enter Mr Gardiner from stage-right, straightening his wig, as if he’s just retrieved it from the gents. ‘Bishop Robinson, I will not waste your time. What would you say are the ethical merits of the book, specifically with regards to its sexual content?’
The Bishop of Woolwich: My answer cannot be entirely straightforward. It is obvious that Mr Lawrence did not have in mind a Christian valuation of sex as he wrote this novel, and the kind of sexual relationship depicted in the book is not one I would necessarily regard as ideal. But what I think is clear is that what Lawrence was trying to do was to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred—
