‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t see any reason to. I had known Mr Cotery for some time, I felt sure it was all above board. I could see Mr Passant knew what he was talking about.’
The other witnesses followed with the information that T— had foretold in his speech; similar stories to the first, some including Olive. Then an accountant brought out some figures of the agency’s business, in particular those of the Arrow: ‘What was the average circulation in the year 1927?’
‘Eleven hundred per week. So far as I can tell. The books are not very complete.’
‘What would you say was the maximum possible for that year? Making every allowance you can?’
‘Perhaps fifteen hundred.’ This had been threatened in the speech.
They brought up witnesses against the farm. It was at this stage we realised for certain the legal structure of the case. Essentially the story was the same. George had taken a less prominent part, Olive substantially more. The information which Jack had given his investors was more complicated, not easy to contradict by a single fact; but several men attacked it piece by piece. Jack had asked advice about the business from a man who ran a hostel himself in another part of the country; the accounts he had given second-hand of this interview were different from the other’s remembrance of it. The statistics of visitors to the farm before 1929 were compared — though here there were some uncertainties — with those given by George and Jack to several witnesses.
At lunch time I said to George: ‘If we defend it today — it is bound to go for trial.’
He argued bitterly, but his reason was too strong in the end.
‘You’d better play for safety,’ he said. ‘Though I still insist there are overwhelming advantages in getting it wiped off now.’
‘If we try that,’ I said, ‘there’ll be a remand for a week or two. We shall have to show our hand. And they’ll still send the case on.’
‘If these magistrates were trained as they ought to be,’ said George, ‘instead of amateurs who are feeling proud of themselves for doing their civic duty, we could fight it out.’
He turned away. ‘As it is, you’d better play for safety.’
I told Eden and Hotchkinson. Eden said: ‘I always thought you’d take the sensible view before it was too late.’
When the prosecution’s case was finished I made the formal statement that there was no case to go before the jury, but that the nature of the defence could not be disclosed.
The three were committed for trial at the next assizes; bail was renewed for each of them in the same amounts.
29: Newspapers Under a Reading Lamp
THE local papers were lying on a chair in Eden’s dining-room when I got back from the court. Under the bright reading lamp, their difference of colour disappeared — though I remembered from childhood the faint grey sheen of one, the yellow tinge in the other. On both of the front pages, the police court charge flared up.
There was a photograph of Olive. ‘Miss Calvert, a well-known figure in town social circles, the daughter of the late James Calvert, J P’… ‘Mr Passant, a qualified solicitor and a lecturer in the Technical College and School of Art’…a paragraph about myself. The reports were fair enough.
Everything in them would inevitably have been recorded in any newspaper of a scandal in any town. They were a highest common factor of interest; they were what any acquaintance, not particularly friendly or malign, would tell his friends, when he heard of the event. But it was because of that, because I could find nothing in the reports themselves to expend my anger on, that they brought a more hopeless sense of loneliness and enmity.
‘Allegations against Solicitor.’ The pitiful inadequacy of it all! The timorous way in which the news, the reporters, the people round us, we ourselves (for the news is merely our own voice) need to make shapes and counters out of human beings in order not to endanger anything in ourselves. George Passant is not George Passant; he is not the man rooted in as many complexities as we are ourselves, as bewildering in action and yet taking himself as much for granted as we do ourselves; he is not the man with his own private history, desires, mannerisms, perversities like our own, cowardice and braveries, odd habits of mind different from ours but of the same family, delights and, like us all, private oddities in love — a man of flesh and bone, as real as ourselves. He is not that; if he were, our own identity and uniqueness would have gone.
To most of the town tonight George is ‘a solicitor accused of fraud’. ‘I hope they get him’; a good many men, as kind-hearted as any of us can ever be, said at the time that I was reading. We are none of us men of flesh and bone except to ourselves.
Should I have had that reflection later in my life? Maybe I should have thought it over-indulgent. For in time behaviour took on a significance to me at least as great as inner nature. It was a change in me: not necessarily an increase in wisdom, but certainly in severity: a hardening: not a justification, but a change.
Excusing myself from dinner, I went to George’s. He was alone listening to the wireless by the fire. ‘Hallo,’ he said. His cheeks were pale, and the day’s beard was showing. He seemed tired and lifeless.
‘I didn’t know whether anyone would come round,’ he said.
Jack and Olive entered as we were sitting in silence. Although there was a strained note in his laugh, Jack came as a relief.
‘We’d better do something,’ he said. ‘It isn’t every day one’s sent for trial—’
‘You fool,’ cried Olive and put her arm round his waist.
Soon the room was crowded. Roy came in, Daphne, several of those I had seen at the farm in September. They had made a point of collecting here tonight. George whispered to Daphne for a while, and then, as the others addressed him with a pretence of casualness, he said: ‘I didn’t expect you all.’ He was embarrassed, uncontrollably grateful for the show of loyalty.
Jack laughed at him. ‘Never mind that. We’ve got to amuse them now they’re here. This has got to be a night.’
A girl replied with a sly, hungry joke. There was a thundery uneasiness. The air was full of the hysteria of respite from strain, friendliness mixed with the fear of persecution and the sting of desire. We left the room, and packed into Olive’s car and Roy’s and another young man’s. In the early days none of us thought of owning a car. We were poorer then; but now even the younger members of the group were not willing to take their poverty so cheerfully for granted.
We drove to a public house outside the town. The streets were still shining with the lights of Christmas week; a bitterly cold wind blew clouds across the sky; the stars were pale. As Olive drove us past the last tramlines, she took a corner very fast, swerved across the road, so that for a second we were blinded in a headlight, and then brought us away by a foot — a flash of light and the road again.
‘Silly,’ Olive cried.
In this mood, I thought, she could kill herself without it being an accident. Once or twice in our lives, we all know times when some part of ourselves desires to turn the wheel into a crash; just as we shiver on a height, feel the deathwish, force ourselves from the edge.
At the public house they were quickly drunk, helped by their excitement; Olive and Jack danced on the bar floor, a rough whirling apache dance. Everyone was restless. As the night passed, some of them drove to another town, but before midnight almost the entire party had gathered in Rachel’s flat.
‘They can’t do much harm now,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s a good job there’s somewhere safe for them to come.’ The flat took up the top storey of an unoccupied house near the station. Rachel had become secretary of her firm, and it was her luxury to entertain George’s friends, while she watched them with good-natured self-indulgence.