“Drugs? Of course, a lot of the students experiment, and as you know we try to get rid of the hard core, but you were about the last student I would have suspected of getting hooked. For a start, drugs and mathematics don’t mix, and your work was particularly clear-headed. This magazine article is all rubbish.”
I beseeched him to put those views in writing, which he did with emphasis.
“Good luck,” he said when I left. “These journalists get away with murder.”
I hiked back to my car and drove across country to my old school at Malvern.
There on its hillside campus, steep like Exeter University, though not so big, I sought out the man who had taught me mathematics. He passed the buck to my onetime housemaster, who listened and sent me to the head.
The headmaster walked with me down the broad familiar stone-floored passage in the main building and up the stone stairs to his study, where I showed him a copy of SHOUT! and also a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter.
“Of course I’ll support you,” he said without hesitation, and wrote, and handed me the handwritten page to read.
It said:
Benedict Juliard attended Malvern College for five years. During the last two, while he was successfully working towards his A levels and university entrance in mathematics, he spent all breaks either riding racehorses — he won three steeplechases — or skiing, in which sport he won a European under-eighteen downhill race.
In addition to those skills he was a considerable marksman with a rifle: he shot in the school team that won the prestigious Ashburton Shield.
In all these activities he showed clearheadedness, natural courage and a high degree of concentration. It is ludicrous to suggest that he was ever under the influence of hallucinatory drugs.
I looked up, not knowing quite what to say. “I admire your father,” the headmaster said. “I’m not saying I agree with him all the time politically, but the country could certainly do worse.”
I said “Thank you” rather feebly, and he shook hands with me on a smile.
Onwards I went to Wellingborough, where I briefly called in to see the chairman to tell him what I’d been doing and what I proposed to do. Then, taking a couple of the photocopies of Vivian Durridge’s letter and his reference from their folder, and making copies of all the letters I’d collected, I drove to Wellingborough station and, tired of the roads, I caught the train to London.
SHOUT! emanated, it transpired, from a small and grubby-looking building south of the Thames. The editor wouldn’t in the least want to see me but, late in the afternoon, I marched straight into his office shedding secretaries like bow waves. He was sitting in a sweatshirt behind a cluttered desk, typing on a keyboard of a computer.
He didn’t recognize me, of course. When I told him who I was, he invited me to leave.
“I am going to sue you for libel,” I said, opening the copy of SHOUT! at the center pages. “I see from the small print at the beginning of this magazine that the name of the editor is Rufus Crossmead. If that’s who you are, I’ll be suing Rufus Crossmead personally.”
He was a small, pugnacious man, sticking his chest out and tucking his chin in like a pugilist. I supposed briefly that dealing with wronged and furious victims of his destructive ethos was a regular part of his life.
I remembered how, five years earlier, my father had pulverized the editor of the Hoopwestern Gazette, but I couldn’t reproduce exactly that quiet degree of menace. I didn’t have the commanding strength of his vibrant physical presence. I left Rufus Crossmead, however, in no doubt as to my intentions.
I laid down in front of him copies of the strong letters from Spencer Stallworthy, Jim, my Exeter tutor and the headmaster of Malvern College, and I gave him finally a copy of the letter Vivian Durridge had sent.
“The only good defense in a libel suit,” I said, “is to prove that the allegations are true. You can’t use that defense, because you’ve printed lies. It will be easy for me to establish that Sir Vivian Durridge is now hopelessly confused after a stroke and doesn’t know what he’s saying. Usher Rudd must have been aware of it. He was trying to revenge himself for my father having got him sacked from the Hoopwestern Gazette. No reputable paper has employed him since. He suits your style, but he’s dropped even you in the shit.”
Rufus Crossmead gloomily read the various papers.
“We’ll settle out of court,” he said.
It sounded to me as if he’d said it often before, and it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I wasn’t sure it was even what I wanted.
I said slowly, “I’ll tell you what I’ll settle for...”
“It’s up to the proprietors,” Crossmead interrupted. “They’ll make you an offer.”
“They always do?” I asked.
He didn’t exactly nod, but it was in the air.
“Then you tell the proprietors,” I said, “that I’ll settle for a retraction and a statement of sincere regret from you that your magazine’s accusations were based on incorrect information. Tell your proprietors that I’ll settle for a statement appearing very visibly in next Tuesday’s issue of SHOUT! In addition, you will send immediately — by registered mail — a personally signed copy of that retraction and statement of regret to each of six hundred fifty or so members of Parliament.”
Twelve
It wasn’t enough, I thought, to defend.
I should have written in that pact, “I will attack my father’s attackers.”
I should have written that I’d go to war for him if I saw the need.
At almost eighteen, I’d written from easy sentiment. At twenty-three, I saw that, if the pact meant anything at all, it pledged an allegiance that could lead to death. And if that were so, I thought, it would be feeble just to sit around waiting for the ax.
It had been Tuesday when SHOUT! had hit the newstands, and late afternoon on Wednesday when I’d crashed into Rufus Crossmead’s editorial office. On Friday I drove from Wellingborough to Hoopwestern, and spent the journey looking back to the end of that confrontation and the answers I’d been given.
I’d asked SHOUT!’s editor why he had sent Usher Rudd to see Vivian-Durridge, and he’d said he hadn’t, it had been Usher Rudd’s own idea.
“Usher — well, his name is Bobby — said he’d been asked to dig into everything you’d ever done, and come up with some dirt. He was getting ultra-frustrated because he couldn’t find any sludge. He went blasting on a bit that no one could be as careful to stay out of trouble as you had been, and then there was this announcement of Sir Vivian Durridge’s retirement, which said you had ridden for his stable, so Bobby went off on the off chance, and he came back laughing. Crowing. He said he’d got you at last. So he wrote the story and I printed it.”
“And you didn’t check.”
“If I had to check every word I print,” the editor had said with world-weariness, “our sales would plummet.”
On Wednesday, early evening, I’d phoned Samson Frazer, the editor of the Hoopwestern Gazette.
“If you’re thinking of reprinting a story about me from SHOUT!” I’d said, “don’t do it. Usher Rudd wrote it. It’s not true and it’ll get you into court for libel.”
Gloomy silence.
Then, “I’ll reset the front page,” he’d said.
On Thursday, with prudent speed, SHOUT!’s proprietors had acted to avoid the heavy expenses of a libel action and had written and mailed the retractions I’d asked for to the members of Parliament.