Now, the pauses between each fading phrase were longer. ‘Miranda, let me say one last time I love you, and thank you. Charlie, Miranda, my first and dearest friends… My entire being is stored elsewhere… so I know I’ll always remember… hope you’ll listen to… to one last seventeen-syllable poem. It owes a debt to Philip Larkin. But it’s not about leaves and trees. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together… the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time… we’ll surpass you… and outlast you… even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph… Only regret.’
He paused. The words came with difficulty and were faint. We leaned across the table to listen.
‘Our leaves are falling.
Come spring we will renew,
But you, alas, fall once.’
Then the pale blue eyes with their tiny black rods turned milky green, his hands curled by jerks into fists and, with a smooth humming sound, he lowered his head onto the table.
TEN
Our immediate duty was to introduce Maxfield to the notion that I was not a robot and that I was going to marry his daughter. I thought my true nature would be a revelation, but he was only mildly surprised and the adjustment, over champagne at a stone table on the lawn, was minimal. He admitted he had grown used to getting things wrong. This, he told us, was one more forgettable instance in ageing’s long dusk. I said that no apology was in order, and by his expression I saw that he agreed. After some thought, while she and I strolled to the bottom of the garden and back, he said he considered Miranda, at twenty-three, too young to be married and we should wait. We said we couldn’t. We were too much in love. He poured another round and waved the tiresome matter away. That evening he gave us £25.
Since this was all we had to spend, we invited no friends or family to the ceremony at Marylebone Town Hall. Only Mark came, with Jasmin. She had found for him in a charity shop a scaled-down dark suit, white dress shirt and bow tie. He looked more like a miniature adult than a child, but all the sweeter for that. Afterwards, we four ate in a pizza place round the corner in Baker Street. Now that we were married and settled, Jasmin thought our adoption prospects were good. We showed Mark how to raise his lemonade and clink glasses in a toast to a successful outcome. It all went off well, but Miranda and I could only pretend to be joyous. Gorringe had been arrested two weeks before and that was excellent. We could privately raise another glass. But that day, on the morning of our wedding, she had received a courteous letter suggesting she make herself available for questioning at a certain Salisbury police station.
Two days later, I drove her to her appointment. Some honeymoon, we joked along the way. But we were wretched. She went in and I waited in the car, outside a new concrete building of brutalist design, fretting that without a lawyer she could make deeper trouble for herself. After two hours she emerged from the revolving doors of the modernist blockhouse. I watched closely through the windscreen as she approached. She looked seriously ill, like a cancer patient, and flat-footed, like an old person. The questioning had been close and tough. The decision to charge her with perjury or perverting the course of justice or both had been referred upwards through police hierarchies, and on higher, or wider, to the Director of Public Prosecutions. A lawyer friend told us later that the DPP would have to decide whether pursuing the case would deter genuine rape victims from coming forward.
Two months later, in January, she was charged with perverting the course of justice. We needed legal representation and had no money. Our application for legal aid was turned down. Social spending was being cut back hard. The Healey government was going ‘cap in hand’, as everyone said, to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. The left of the party was outraged by the cuts. There was talk of a general strike. Miranda refused to approach her father for money. The cost of his support – and he wasn’t rich – would be an undesirable excursion into truth. There was no alternative. I prostrated myself before the bass player who, barely troubling to reflect, handed back £3,250 in cash, one half of my deposit.
In all our anguished conversations about Adam, his personality, his morals, his motives, we returned often to the moment I brought the hammer down on his head. For ease of reference, and to spare us too vivid a recall, we came to call it ‘the deed’. Our exchanges usually took place late at night, in bed, in the dark. The spirit of the deed took various forms. Its least frightening shape was that of a sensible, even heroic move to keep Miranda out of trouble and Mark in our lives. How were we to know that the material was already with the police? If I hadn’t been so impetuous, if she had only deterred me with a look, we would have learned that Adam had been to Salisbury. His brain would not have been worth wrecking and we might have coaxed him back into the currency markets. Or I would have been entitled to a full refund when they came to collect him in the afternoon. Then we could have afforded a smaller place across the river. Now, we were condemned to stay where we were.
But these speculations were the protective shell. The truth was, we missed him. The ghost’s least attractive form was Adam himself, the man whose final gentle words were without recrimination. We tried, and sometimes half succeeded, in fending off the deed. We told ourselves that this was, after all, a machine; its consciousness was an illusion; it had betrayed us with inhuman logic. But we missed him. We agreed that he loved us. Some nights the conversation was interrupted while Miranda quietly cried. Then we would have to visit again how we stuffed him with great difficulty into the cupboard in the hall and covered him with coats, tennis rackets and flattened cardboard boxes to disguise his human shape. We lied as instructed to the people who came to collect him.
On the brighter side, Gorringe was questioned and charged with the rape of Mariam Malik. Adam was correct in his calculations – from the beginning, apparently, it was Gorringe’s intention to plead guilty. He must have answered all the questions and given a full account of his actions that evening on the playing field. By way of sincere belief in God’s constant scrutiny and high regard for truth, Gorringe knew that his only path to salvation was to confess. Or perhaps he acted on the advice of his lawyer. Or both were in play. We would never know.
But we did know that God failed to protect Gorringe from certain misfortunes of legal timing. With Miranda’s case not yet come to light, Gorringe stood before the law with one rape already on his account. When it came to sentencing, the judge assumed that he would have received a longer term for the assault on Miranda had it been known that it was his second offence. No allowance, then, for the time he had already spent inside. The judge was in her early fifties and represented a generational shift in attitudes to rape. She made an implicit reference to the vodka bottle of the first case when she said that she did not believe that an unaccompanied young woman walking home at dusk was ‘asking for trouble’. Miranda had made her statement and wasn’t in court. I was in the public gallery, sitting across from Mariam’s family. I could hardly bear to look their way, their radiating misery was so intense. When the judge handed down Gorringe’s eight-year sentence, I forced myself to look across at Mariam’s mother. She was openly crying, whether from relief or sorrow, I would never know.
Miranda’s case came round all too soon. Her barrister, Lilian Moore, competent, intelligent, charming, was a young woman from Dún Laoghaire. We met her in her chambers in Gray’s Inn. I sat in a corner while she talked Miranda out of a ‘not guilty’ plea, her first impulse. It wasn’t difficult. The prosecution was bound to make much of her recorded description of her revenge on Gorringe. His statement, made from prison, dovetailed with hers. They were remembering the same evening. Miranda’s ‘not guilty’ plea would bring a longer sentence in the likely event of a successful prosecution. And, of course, she dreaded a trial. A ‘guilty’ plea was entered, though she tormented herself that she was somehow letting Mariam down.