Never Such Innocence, page 2
Everyone except Sylvia laughed at Julia’s mock-tragic tone. Mark looked as though he was about to speak, but George started first.
‘Even Bill Tomkins is too sensible to let his well-known views on girl barristers make him waste the talents of one of the best juniors of either sex,’ he said.
Julia was touched and her face took on a gentleness it rarely wore in the company of any of her fellow-barristers.
‘Thank you for that, George,’ she said seriously.
Two weeks later Mark walked into her room in chambers and asked her if she had a minute to spare. Laying aside the brief on which she was working and closing her copy of Archbold, Julia leaned back in her revolving chair and waited for what he had to say. When it came it surprised her.
‘I’ve been asked to go to Nuremberg for the UN trials,’ he said abruptly, ‘and I’ll need an assistant. Would you come if I asked you? We’d probably have to leave in July or August.’
‘I can’t, Mark,’ she said, without even thinking about the pros and cons of his proposition.
‘Why not?’ he asked, his head on one side as he examined her face. ‘Surely you’re not one of these people who don’t believe that the Nazi leaders must be tried?’
‘Good Lord no!’ she said, ‘and I should think it would be a fascinating job … if rather horrible. It’s good of you to think of taking me with you. I’m flattered.’
‘But you won’t come,’ said Mark, ignoring her politeness and answering the tone of her voice. ‘You’re not really worried about your career at the bar when the men come back, are you? George was right on VE night: you of all people have no need to worry.’
Julia smiled at that and shook her head, although it was a real concern to her.
‘Then what?’ asked Mark.
‘Mark, how could I leave London?’ she said. ‘Now at last there’s a real possibility of getting news of Anthony. If I were to go away and he came back home, what would he feel? What would you feel if you were in his position?’
Mark sat straighter in his chair and grasped the lapels of his jacket as though they were the edges of his gown. His face settled into the familiar persuasive seriousness with which he always addressed juries on difficult points in a case. Julia looked out of the window at the plane trees in the middle of the square. Their leaves were heavy with dust. She did not want to hear what she knew he was about to say, but she could not stop him. All she could do was detach herself by looking away from him as he said it.
‘Julia, you mustn’t pin your hopes on his coming back. If there were any chance that he was still alive I’d urge you to stay; you know that. It’s not for my own selfishness that I want you to come away – although it would make life there much … Never mind that now – but because I just don’t want you to be living here on your own, waiting for news that’s never going to come.’
At that piece of pessimistic common sense Julia’s normally well-controlled temper snapped. She stopped looking patiently at the plane trees and faced him across her desk.
‘There is no more reason to suppose him dead than there is to believe that he is alive,’ she said as coldly as she had ever spoken to Mark. He winced and so she tried to moderate her voice as she went on: ‘You should know that. It’s our job to weigh up evidence. Anthony is missing. There is nothing to prove any more or less. He escaped from the camp when Italy surrendered to us in 1943. He’s probably been in hiding somewhere, unable even to get to Switzerland ever since. You know what it‘s been like in Italy since they changed sides.… Remember that piece I showed you from The Times last year about the British, American and Australian ex-prisoners who have been running partisan groups in the mountains?’
‘I don’t know what it’s been like in Italy and nor do you,’ said Mark. ‘Julia, God forbid that I should make you unhappier than you already must be: I just cannot bear the thought of your being strung out on unrealistic hope for years to come. You have to get on with your life. It’s two years since Anthony escaped from that camp. Don’t you think that if he had either been recaptured or successfully evaded capture for so long you would have heard by now?’
‘Not necessarily,’ answered Julia stubbornly. She got out of her chair and walked across the room to the long mahogany bookshelves that lined the wall opposite her desk. Squinting sideways at the dull gilt titles of the books, she went on:
‘You and I have meant a lot to each other in the last couple of years, and I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me or cease to thank you for it. I’ll always care about you more than anyone except … but I can’t let you take my last hopes away.’ She looked away from the books and addressed the back of Mark’s greying head. ‘They’re all I have now.’
‘Oh my dear,’ he said, sighing. He turned in his chair so that he could look at her and balanced himself with his hands on the chair back. Julia stood with her back against the bookshelves and watched his face. The misery in it dispelled some of her residual anger.
‘Mark, you seem to think that I’m clinging to a forlorn hope. It isn’t like that. Now that the war is over, there is a real chance of news. Until now there have been all sorts of reasons why I might not have heard anything. I’m not mad enough to spend the rest of my life waiting for him,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget that it’s been only two years – the law doesn’t allow a presumption of death after so short a time. Why should I?’
Something about the way she lifted her chin as she made her declaration touched Mark Heathwood and he could not protest any more. He had admired Julia Gillingham ever since she had come to his chambers as a shy but determined pupil ten years earlier, and he had watched her coming to terms with the intensely masculine and competitive world she had entered and gradually beating back its prejudices against her.
Somewhere on her journey to her present security in that world Mark had fallen in love with her: not with her face, which was no more than pleasantly attractive with its good bones and warm brown eyes, nor with her charm, which she rarely exercised. At times he had asked himself almost despairingly what he could possibly see in her to arouse such depths of feeling in himself. In the end he had decided that it was her gallantry, the courage with which she met difficulty and tedium and the horrible moral choices that their job threw up from time to time.
But there was more to it than that. Despite Julia’s determined avoidance of sentimentality, there was a tremendous fund of warmth in her, and it was on that he had drawn so heavily during the excruciating misery he had suffered when his elder son had been killed in Crete. Without Julia’s unfailing if rarely expressed sympathy, he sometimes thought he would not have been able to go on. Sylvia had dealt with their tragedy by pretending that it had never happened and that she had never had another son but Richard.
There had been times in the months after the telegram when Mark had watched his wife endlessly prinking before her looking glass and wanted to throttle her. He could not even remember what it had been about her that made him believe himself in love with her twenty-five years earlier. His hands clenched on the back of his chair.
‘Mark?’ Julia’s cool voice broke into his thoughts. His eyes focused and he relaxed his grip on the back of the chair, untwisted his back and stood up.
‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘I was dreaming.’
Julia’s pale face broke into a smile of such affectionate sympathy that he almost lost control of himself and told her again that he loved her, that if her husband could be proved to have died, he would divorce Sylvia and beg Julia to marry him. But they had fought that battle long ago and had agreed to ignore the temptation that each represented for the other.
‘What were we talking about?’ he said, feeling exhausted almost beyond bearing by the struggle to keep going, to forget his anguish for his dead son and his anxiety for Richard, crippled at twenty-one; to ignore his frustrated love for the sensible, rational, kind, intelligent woman in front of him, and his growing loathing for the beautiful, unintelligent one that he had married so long ago.
‘You were trying to persuade me again that Anthony is dead,’ Julia said drily. ‘Please don’t.’
He shook his head.
‘No, it was Nuremberg. Are you really sure, Julia? It would do your career no harm at all. It’s the most important trial I can imagine happening in my lifetime or yours …’
‘I can’t leave London,’ she said again, walking back towards her laden desk. ‘Not until I know what has happened and …’ Her voice almost broke and she took a deep breath before ending the sentence: ‘whether he is alive or dead.’
Chapter Two
Two weeks later, Julia was in Bristol, defending a man who had been discovered to have two wives, one living in Bristol and one in Southampton. It had appeared at first sight to be a case of the utmost simplicity. The man had two wives, and he was therefore guilty of bigamy, either deliberate or accidental. Julia’s intention was to prove that it had been accidental. Her client had told his solicitor that he believed the first Mrs Smith had died in one of the bombing raids on Southampton and neither the solicitor nor Julia had any evidence to prove that he was lying. But he had not waited the necessary seven years to have her death presumed and his apparent ignorance of that part of the law was no defence.
The house the Smiths had rented in Southampton had been bombed to smithereens, and when Mr Smith was able to go back there on leave from the aircraft factory where he worked as a skilled mechanic, he had not been able to find any trace of his wife. None of the neighbours had seen her since the bomb, but he alleged that none of them had told him that they had not seen her for months before it either.
The prosecution alleged that Smith knew perfectly well that his wife had been staying with her parents in a farmhouse well inland in the middle of Hampshire at the time of the raids on Southampton, and that he had not even bothered to write to his parents-in-law to ask if they had any news of her. What complicated the case was that both of Mrs Smith’s parents had since died and could neither confirm nor deny the defendant’s story that he had in fact written to them.
The prosecution’s evidence took most of the first day to present, and Julia began her cross-examination of the first Mrs Smith in the late afternoon. She looked scared, which was not particularly surprising, but she looked malevolent, too, and that aroused Julia’s suspicions. She had a reputation at the Bar for being able to find the weak links in any chain of evidence quicker than most, but her greatest skill was probably her talent for seeing past the improved character a witness presented in the box to the hidden reality with all its inadequacies and petty lies. She was known around the Temple as Boadicea, because she cut such a swathe through her opponent’s witnesses.
‘Now, Mrs Smith,’ said Julia in a voice that betrayed no emotion other than a mild sympathy, ‘please don’t be alarmed. Could you tell the jury in your own words just how you and your husband communicated during the war?’
‘He didn’t do no communicating,’ answered Mrs Smith with a satisfied glance at the prosecuting counsel.
Julia smiled kindly.
‘And you, Mrs Smith? Where did you address your letters to him?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t know where he was, Miss,’ answered Mrs Smith, looking less satisfied. ‘It’s his fault. He knew where I was but he never did no communicating.’
‘Do you mean, Mrs Smith, that from 1942 until January 1945 you never even tried to get in touch with your husband? How did you live? Did you not expect him to send you any of his pay?’
‘Not him,’ answered the woman, clutching her scuffed black handbag. ‘He wasn’t never a good provider. When he disappeared I thought Good riddance! That’s what I thought.’
Julia cast a sideways glance at the prosecuting barrister and saw his thick black eyebrows twitch together in an unusually frank expression of irritation with his witness.
‘And you never tried to write to him at the factory?’
‘I didn’t know he was at any factory,’ she said. ‘One day I came home to get his tea ready and all I found was this note saying he was leaving me. I’ve never had a word from him since.’
‘And have you got the note?’ asked Julia in a voice of the utmost reasonableness.
‘I burnt it.’
‘Now, Mrs Smith,’ said Julia. ‘Are you really asking the jury to believe this story? And to accept that you never asked for information at your husband’s place of work? After all, they knew perfectly well that he had been sent to Bristol.’
When Mrs Smith had eventually been persuaded to admit that she had never tried to track down her husband, the judge leaned forward from his high, red-leather chair to adjourn the court for the day. Julia had a word with her instructing solicitor and their client, packed up her papers and retired to the hotel where her clerk had booked her a room. She shared a depressing dinner of thin soup and horse-meat stew with the solicitor and went early to bed to console herself with a new book she had bought at the railway station.
The next day she set about demolishing the prosecution’s case. Gradually, with the skill she had developed over the years, Julia cast doubt on each piece of evidence they had tried to establish, showed the first Mrs Smith’s actions to have been eccentric at least, and built up a picture of her client as a patriotic man genuinely believing his wife to be dead, who had buried his grief in hard work producing aircraft for the RAF and in the innocent affection of a young woman who worked for him at the factory.
With her own long wait for news of her husband at the back of her mind, Julia did not find it at all difficult to produce a moving plea on her client’s behalf and towards the end of the second day the jury acceded to her plea for clemency and refused to convict him.
Later, when she had removed her wig and gown in the room that had been set aside for her when it was discovered that Mr Smith’s barrister was to be a woman, Julia went to get herself a cup of tea before leaving for London again. On her way to the tea room she ran into the barrister who had been acting for the prosecution.
‘Nice work, Mrs Gillingham,’ he said with a wry smile. Julia had not appeared in a case with him before and hardly knew him; it was pleasant to be complimented when she had inflicted a galling defeat on him.
‘Thank you, Mr Hands,’ she said and asked him whether he was on his way to the tea room. He looked quickly down at his watch.
‘No, I’m afraid I must run if I’m to catch the four-forty back to London. My wife worries if I’m late. Aren’t you …?’ Julia shook her head.
‘It’s too much of a rush,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take the later train. Goodbye.’ They shook hands and parted.
Three minutes later, Julia was sitting in front of a cup of milkless tea in the almost empty canteen, envying her late adversary his desire to get home. Hers was almost the last place she wanted to be. She sipped the scalding, bitter tea and tried to remember her home as it had been when they had all been happy there.
It was a big house in one of the shabby Georgian squares that made up so much of Bloomsbury, and Julia had bought it with her husband and his sister in the autumn of 1936 soon after she had completed her pupillage.
She and Comfort had become such close friends at Oxford that they had decided to share rooms in London when they had finished their last exams, protecting each other from the pains and difficulties of emerging from the chrysalis of university life. They had shared their fears, their early failures and their slowly increasing successes, and when Julia and Anthony fell in love the three of them formed such a close alliance that after the wedding it would have seemed unthinkable to any of them that Comfort should be excluded.
They had spent months searching for a house close enough to the hospital where Anthony worked and big enough to contain a studio for Comfort as well as rooms for them all to live and entertain in and yet not so vast that they would need armies of servants to run it.
Eventually Comfort had found a house in Brunswick Square and shown it to the others with a tentativeness that was rare in her. Julia saw its possibilities at once and joined her sister-in-law in trying to persuade Anthony that he would like it as soon as the horrible decorations had been changed and the grime scoured from the windows and the paintwork. He had stood in the dusty drawing room and put one arm around each of them, she remembered, and told them that if they liked it so much, he would do his best to learn to appreciate it, too.
Julia had then watched in admiration as Comfort had transformed the house, ignoring both the conventional rules of interior decoration and the cold excesses of the modernists. When she had finished, it was light and elegant, but comfortable, too, with room for them all to live and work without getting in each other’s way.
They had moved in soon after the New Year and been happy. Trouble was brewing in Europe and the possibility of war loomed, but it did not seem to affect any of them then. They had behaved as though they had time for everything they wanted to do and the means with which to do it. Comfort had painted better than ever, Julia had battled to persuade her clerk to give her briefs, and Anthony had pursued his dangerous, brilliant, experimental surgery at the children’s hospital. Then the war had come, he had volunteered at once and been sent straight out to the Middle East.
Julia had kept her doubts about his action to herself, believing that she had no right to interfere in a decision of such importance, but Comfort had shown no reticence at all. There had been terrible scenes in which she had demanded that he think of his patients if not of her and Julia. There was no need for him to go to war, she had told him over and over again. The work he was doing in London was essential. He would be wasting himself, possibly throwing his life away for nothing. At thirty-five he was years older than the other volunteers or conscripts.
Julia had tried to keep them from hurting each other, but she had failed. They had parted in furious anger and it was clear that Comfort blamed her for it. Rationality had never been Comfort’s strongest suit, and whenever she was unhappy she tended to look for someone to blame. Julia had always known that and accepted it as part of Comfort’s character. It put a high price on their friendship, but it had been a price that Julia had been prepared to pay, because she cared for Comfort and because their friendship gave her so much that she had lacked throughout her lonely childhood.
