Dreams of Another Day, page 35
‘Is that why you haven’t been in touch with her?’
‘Partly.’
‘I think you’ve been rather unfair, because you’ve left her thinking that you don’t care about her any longer. Besides, you must know that she doesn’t subscribe to the view that wives should be judged by their husbands’status.’
He looked so surprised that Flixe added:
‘Think of the things she’s been writing every month, or haven’t you read them?’
‘Of course I’ve read them! I’ve read everything she’s ever written, but I hadn’t actually picked that out of them, though I do see what you mean.’
‘Perhaps I was exaggerating,’ said Flixe. ‘Do you know, I think that the pair of you have been protecting each other from knowledge that you both need.’
Mark gave up even trying to eat his chicken and pushed the nearly full plate to one side.
‘What has she been protecting me from?’ he asked.
Flixe tried to say nothing, true to her determination to let them find their own way out of their maze, but the knowledge of how badly they had lost themselves forced her on.
‘From the fact that she is most terribly in love with you; that your apparent rejection of her has hurt her bitterly; that she longs more than anything else to go back to when you asked her to marry you and manage things better this time – and avoid hurting you any more.’
Mark looked as blankly surprised as though she had hit him over the head with her handbag.
‘You must have known,’ Flixe said when it became obvious that he could not speak. He simply shook his head.
‘Then what made you come to the trial?’
‘I heard from David Wallington that she needed me,’ he said simply. ‘I couldn’t stay away, but I wanted to find out more before I waded in and upset her. That’s why I needed to talk to you.’
‘To be perfectly honest,’ said Flixe with energy, ‘I think that the only thing that would upset her is not hearing from you or seeing you. It’s half killed her, you know.’
‘And me,’ he said after a long pause. ‘I …’
‘Don’t tell me. Tell her.’
‘I will.’
‘Good. Well, since you couldn’t manage your chicken, there’s not much point in our ordering pudding. Shall we get the bill and go?’
Mark laughed and once again Flixe saw all the charm that had broken through whatever it was that had kept Ming solitary for so long.
‘I may be a clot, Mrs Suvarov, but I’m not one of your children.’
Flixe laughed with him and when they had settled the bill they went back to the court in an atmosphere of remarkably good friendship. She tried to make Mark agree to sit beside her, hoping that Ming would look up from the dock and see him there; but he refused and kept to his chosen seat at the back, where he could not possibly be seen from the dock.
Ming saw Flixe as soon as she and Connie went back to the dock. Flixe gave her a discreet victory sign and Ming smiled. Gerry had not been able to take another day away from her university commitments, and Ming found it very comforting to know that one of her sisters was there in court.
She needed comfort that afternoon. Julia’s last witness was a doctor, who testified first that he considered that it was on the whole beneficial to society that women should be fully informed about the subject of homosexuality. That was all Julia wanted of him and so she handed him to the prosecution counsel, whose first question was:
‘Would you yourself wish to read the excerpt published in the defendants’magazine?’
‘No. I find the prospect distasteful.’
Quite without meaning to, Ming looked at the back of Julia’s head with an expression of great hurt on her face. Julia knew that the statement might be upsetting her clients but she ignored them. Her brief had been to win the case for Ming and Connie; not to protect their sensibilities.
‘May I ask why?’
‘Because I dislike the whole subject of homosexuality.’
‘Again, may I ask why?’
‘You may: I consider it a perversion; injurious to family life and to health; unnatural; sterile and a waste.’
‘I see. For once I find myself in complete agreement with one of my learned friend’s witnesses,’ said Coopering, obviously inviting the jury to enjoy his amusement. Some of them accepted and one even laughed.
‘In that case why have you just testified that you consider its publication beneficial?’
‘I have already explained that,’ said the doctor, sounding irritable. Julia kept her gaze firmly on her own notes.
‘Will you please explain again. Some of us are a little confused,’ said Coopering.
‘I disapprove fundamentally of the physical expression of homosexuality, but I believe that ignorance of the entire subject is not in the public interest.’
‘Despite its possible effect on susceptible readers?’
‘Yes.’
‘In your opinion,’ said Mr Coopering, retreating once more to sarcasm. He looked as though he had been faced with the one thing he had never expected and was trying to make the best of it.
‘My opinion is what I was asked for,’ said the doctor quite mildly.
‘Thank you.’
Mr Coopering sat down and Julia got to her feet. Flixe thought that Julia looked slightly nervous and she could not imagine why.
‘Can you explain to the court why you believe that ignorance of this subject is undesirable?’
‘Anyone who has been in general practice for as long as I have will have treated innumerable hysterical girls and women and troubled boys. From what I have learned of human folly and distress during the years since I qualified as a doctor, I can say that accurate information dispels a great deal of unpleasant and damaging fantasy.’
Julia let him go and then spent a few moments tidying her papers before straightening her shoulders and facing the jury. Some of them were looking overcome with boredom; the housewife seemed depressed and anxious; but at least five were alert and apparently sympathetic.
‘Members of the jury,’ said Julia, smiling openly at them without a trace of patronage or mistrust, ‘you have heard a great deal of contradictory evidence over the past two days and in a short time you will have to decide what to believe and what to dismiss in order to make up your minds about the truth of this case.’
Even those jurors who had been doodling on their notepads or fighting yawns with difficulty seemed to sit up straighter and listen properly.
‘M’learned friend has asked you to consider the effect of the five thousand words excerpted from Story of a Lost Love on a young boy who might pick up his mother’s magazine. I would like you to exercise your memories, gentlemen, and your imagination, ladies.’
The efficient-looking woman and the housewife both smiled at Julia.
‘How likely do you think it is that any young man or boy would willingly pick up one of his mother’s magazines? I am a mother myself and I find it very hard to imagine my son doing any such thing.’
Ming’s eyebrows twitched together in surprise. Knowing that Julia’s son was only just five, it seemed almost wrong that she should suggest what she had done. But, watching the jury, Ming could see that most of them sympathised with the point.
‘Yes, it is an amusing picture, isn’t it?’ Julia went on. ‘I didn’t raise it to make you laugh, but because that is really one of the very few points at issue here. You do not have to decide what you think of homosexuality; you do not have to decide what you think of the current laws regarding it; you do not have to decide whether you think the five thousand words my clients published are unpleasant, distasteful, even disgusting. All you have to decide is whether they could corrupt and deprave the people who are likely to read the magazine.
‘In a case that took place here just over two years ago, the judge, in summing up, asked the jury to consider who might be corrupted by the book that was then on trial. One of his suggestions of such a person was a fourteen-year-old girl, and he asked the jury whether they believed it right that our literary standards should be based on what might be suitable for a fourteen-year-old girl. In this case, I suppose the question is really, are we now to take our standards from what is suitable for a fourteen-year-old boy.’
Ming saw Michael Coopering making a note.
‘If we are,’ Julia went on quietly but implacably, ‘what then could be considered suitable to be published in a magazine for married women? Nothing to do with childbirth, certainly: that might well upset a young boy. Married love, too, would have to be outlawed; any discussion of women’s health and monthly difficulties would be hard to include. In fact, if we are to take our standards from that imaginary boy, all women’s magazines would have to be written at a level of, say, the William books.’
There was laughter from the public gallery then and Mr Coopering made another note.
‘That is to reduce the proposition to absurdity,’ said Julia, once more taking the wind out of his sails. ‘But it is an absurd proposition to begin with. Even if our imaginary boy were to take up his mother’s magazine and read his way through all the articles that preceded Story of a Lost Love, what would happen to him then? You have heard Dr Gort explain that the causes of homosexuality are such that they completely exclude the reading of an article like this. If that is so, it is very difficult to think what other corrupting or depraving effect it could have.
‘It might shock them, although that seems hard to believe, but if they were shocked, what would happen to them? Would it be so very dreadful? People are frequently shocked and disgusted by items in the newspapers, but no one suggests that they have been depraved and corrupted by that shock.
‘You have heard a witness state that the boys he teaches have no difficulty in distinguishing between those aspects of ancient Greek civilisation they should admire, such as democracy, and those, such as slavery and homosexuality, that they should deplore. If that is true, then they should have no difficulty in making the same distinction in the unlikely event that they read this magazine.’
Julia paused, partly to take a drink of water and partly to give the jury time to absorb what she had said.
‘Surely their mothers, too, would be able to make the same distinction? It would be a curious world, members of the jury, if schoolboys were to be allowed to make such a judgment on the subject of homosexuality but their mothers were not.’
For the first time, the housewife on the jury looked positively determined.
‘Members of the jury, foreigners often point a finger at us in this country and say that we are a nation of hypocrites. Let us give the lie to such sneering criticisms. In your verdict, you have it in your power to show yourselves as the decent, rational, sensible, unhypocritical and – above all – unhysterical men and women that I know you to be.’
She sat down and Connie for one felt like applauding. Ming had to hold her hands tightly together in her lap to stop them from shaking visibly. She licked her lips, which felt dry and cracked under her tongue.
Miles Coopering stood up.
‘M’learned friend,’ he said in his rich voice as he bowed to Julia, ‘has put in a plea for you to fight the charge of hypocrisy by, in effect, granting a licence to publish an account of utterly distasteful behaviour. Whatever standards may obtain on the Continent, in this country the sanctity of family life remains paramount. Do we really want our homes and families, our children, polluted with the kind of filth that has been printed in the defendant’s magazine? I am confident, members of the jury, that you, as right-thinking citizens of this nation, will answer a stalwart “no” to that question.
‘In this country homosexual behaviour is outlawed; it is a subject not fit for decent homes. The magazine that included this excerpt is, by the defendants’own acknowledgement, designed to be read in just that sort of home, a home in which young children are learning about the kind of civilised behaviour that is expected of them as they grow up. Could there be any less suitable setting for a discussion of a disgusting crime?
‘Once again, the right-thinking answer is “no”.
‘M’learned friend has tried to persuade you subtly that the subject of homosexuality is not really so bad by bringing in one of the very few Classical texts that treats of the subject in an admiring way. You will not be deceived by her. Every schoolboy – and for that matter the mother and the sister of every schoolboy – knows that throughout history appalling things have been done and condoned and even admired. All schoolchildren are taught to admire, for example, Queen Elizabeth I; and yet it is well known that in her reign Roman Catholics were burned at the stake and prisoners were routinely subjected to the most barbaric tortures. It is not difficult for any schoolchild to understand which of Gloriana’s actions are to be admired and which condemned.
‘Mrs Wallington has said that such a schoolchild would have as little difficulty in distinguishing between the activities to be admired and condemned in a modern magazine. But that is a completely different question and there is no connection to be made between historical barbarities and filth such as the article you are asked to condemn.
‘And condemn it you must, members of the jury, if the children of this country are to be assured of the clean, honest and secure upbringing they both deserve and need.’
It seemed to Flixe, sitting impotently in the spectators’gallery, that it was enormously unfair that Julia had no opportunity to refute her opponent’s speech, to show the jury where he had failed to provide rational answers to her points and where he had glossed over irrefutable truths. Looking down at the judge, Flixe wondered whether he could be trusted to do it for them. She felt very depressed.
‘Be upstanding.’
Flixe had been so absorbed in her thoughts that she had completely missed the judge’s decision to adjourn for the day. Looking down at her watch she saw that it was almost a quarter to five. He must have decided to let the proceedings overrun the usual half-past-four deadline in order to give the prosecution’s closing statement no more weight than Julia’s. Her depression lightened a little and she looked round for Mark.
He had already gone. Flixe dawdled, hoping that Mark had waylaid Ming. But when Flixe reached the ground floor, she found only Connie and Ming standing waiting for her.
‘Where are the lawyers?’ she asked when she reached them.
‘Gone. There’s nothing more any of us can do now,’ said Connie. She took a sidelong look at Ming, who looked ashen-faced and ill. ‘What about tea, Flixe?’
‘Good idea,’ said Flixe, who was also looking at her sister. ‘Come on, Mingie. We’ll get a taxi.’
She stopped the cab outside Lavell’s sweetshop in Kensington High Street and told the others she would follow them on foot.
‘No. Do let me come, too,’ said Ming, thinking that if she were left alone with Connie she might either burst into fervent apologies or unanswerable questions about what might happen on the following day.
‘We’ll all come,’ said Connie, calmly paying off the driver.
They went into the brightly lit shop together. Flixe made a modest selection of sweets with which to keep her daughters happy and then chose a box of liqueur chocolates for Brigitte, who had uncomplainingly worked much longer hours than usual.
Ming, meanwhile, had asked for a quarter of a pound of peardrops. She had not eaten them since childhood and, remembering the comfort of her previous evening’s nursery supper, thought that they might soothe her terrors. They were weighed and poured in a red and cream-coloured stream into a small white paper bag.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the girl who took her money. Flixe paid for her own purchases and the three of them walked slowly up the hill towards her house.
The children gave them a rapturous welcome and Ming felt warmed by their obvious pleasure when she hugged them.
‘Will you sit next to me, Auntie Ming?’ asked Fiona, sliding a slightly sticky hand into Ming’s.
‘And me,’ said Sophie, tugging at her other hand. Ming’s handbag and the bag of peardrops fell to the floor, spilling their contents far and wide.
Sophie looked nervously up at her aunt, but Ming smiled and bent down on hands and knees to pick everything up. Her nieces joined in, concentrating on the sweets, and Fiona put one in her mouth.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Ming gently. ‘It’s been on the floor. You mustn’t eat that.’
She put out her hand and the child obediently spat the sweet into it. Recoiling from the slimy sensation, Ming hurried to tip the sticky sweet into the waste-paper basket. As she was rubbing her hand on her handkerchief, she recognised the scent of the sweets.
‘Flixe!’ she said suddenly. ‘Smell the peardrops.’
Flixe relieved her elder daughter of the torn bag full of sweets and smelled it.
‘Ah, that’s what smells like nail-varnish remover but isn’t. Well done, Ming!’
Chapter Twenty-Five
The next morning they were all in court again. Connie had decreed that she and Ming should dress in clothes suitable for triumph instead of cravenly wearing some dark colour as though they expected to be convicted. She herself had chosen a new, vivid green coat and skirt, which she wore with a smart black hat, black shoes and handbag.
Ming, unable to forget that they might end the day in a prison cell, had had to battle hard to resist putting on clothes that would have been more suitable for a funeral. Eventually she picked out a simple spring dress and jacket made of light tweed. Although it was grey, it was a silver colour that looked stylish rather than dim, and it made an excellent foil for both her pearls and her pink-and-white complexion. At the last minute she pinned one of Mark’s red roses to the left lapel with a pearl brooch her godmother had given her at her christening.
When Ming reached the court Gerry was already in her old place at Mr Ratterley’s side, having persuaded a colleague to take her morning lectures, and Flixe was once more in the gallery.
Unknown to Ming, Flixe had a fresh bag of pear-drops in her handbag and she arrived deliberately late so that she had an excuse to squeeze in beside the plump young woman who smelled of inexpensive violet scent.
