In his level tone, he asked: “Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kill a child?”
She looked at him, eyes steadying, and replied without a pause: “I don’t think I thought anything like that. No, that would give the wrong idea. You see, no one does anything cut-and-dried, you understand—”
Bosanquet was determined to stop her going off on another conversational flight.
“Miss Pateman, there is no doubt that you planned, methodically and over a period of weeks or months, to kill a child. Apparently it needn’t have been Eric Mawby, you picked on him at random. I am asking you, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”
“Well, kidnapping is one thing that we might have talked about—”
“I asked, Miss Pateman, when did you first make plans to kidnap and kill a child?”
“I was saying, we might have talked about catching hold of one for a little while, you know, we talked about all sorts of things, you know how it is, anyone can make a suggestion—”
“When did this happen?”
“It might have happened at any time, I couldn’t tell you exactly.”
“It might not have happened at any time, Miss Pateman. When did it happen?”
The judge was regarding her, and spoke as considerately as ever in the trial. “You must try to tell us, if you can.”
“Well, if I had to put a date to it, I suppose it would be about the time when I had this second breakdown.”
Her counsel had let her introduce “this second breakdown” and then gone no further, as though he and she assumed, and the court also, that she had been living in a haze. But Bosanquet — for once less imperturbable — was having to struggle to clear the haze away. What was this second breakdown? She realised that it had not been adduced in the medical evidence? She had not at any time during this period considered consulting a doctor? She had been working effectively at her job, and living her life as usual in the room at home and out at the cottage?
“You don’t know about breakdowns unless you’re the one having them, no one could know, not even—” and then she added, with a curious primness — “Miss Ross.”
“You were entirely capable of doing everything you usually do?”
“No one who’s not had a breakdown can understand how you can go on, just like a machine you know—”
“You were entirely capable of making very careful detailed plans, everything thought out in advance, to abduct this child and kill him?”
“But that’s just what I was saying, you can go on, and you don’t know what’s happening—”
“You didn’t know what was happening when you brutalised this child? And killed him? A child, Miss Pateman, who if you were a year or two older might have been your own?”
“No, he wasn’t, that’s got nothing to do with it, it didn’t matter who he was.”
That reply, like many that she had made, might have been either fluent or incoherent, it was difficult to know which. Just as it was difficult to know whether Bosanquet’s thrust of rhetoric, so different from his usual method that it must have been worked out, had touched her. Were the psychiatrists right, how much was she deprived, how much had she wanted to live as other women? How much did those dolls of hers signify? As she lied and weaved her answers in and out, most of us were as undecided as when we heard her first word. Bosanquet brought up the remark — to many the most hideous they had listened to in court — “we wanted to teach him to behave”. What did that mean? Wasn’t that the beginning of the plan? Who said it first?
“Oh, it was just a way of explaining afterwards, I don’t think anyone actually said it. I’m sure I didn’t, that’s not the way you speak to each other, is it, even if you aren’t living through a breakdown.”
“You found the idea so attractive that you planned everything methodically to abduct the child and then go on to ill-treat him and murder him?”
“No, that’s not the way things go, you know how it is, you say lots of things that you don’t mean, ever, we used to say, wouldn’t it be nice if one could do things, but we didn’t mean it.”
Her answers were shifting and shimmering like one translucent film drawn across another: underneath them there were marks when a fragment of their day-to-day life appeared, and then was obfuscated again. The two of them in that front room at the Patemans’: yes, someone had said “it would be nice if we could do things”: it might have seemed like an ordinary sexual come on, voice thick, eyes staring! Who had spoken first? Did that matter? In the witness box, Kitty Pateman was not making the attempt to shield Cora as Cora had done her. She was just intent on seeming crazed. It still had the elaboration, almost the compulsion, of a piece of acting, yet sometimes one felt that, through pretending to be crazed, she had hypnotised herself into being so. Had she — or both of them — pretended like that before? In retrospect, when our minds were cooler, one thing struck most of us. She had far more imagination than Cora. But imagination of a kind which one sometimes meets in the sexual life, at the same time vatic and obscene. She might have, and almost certainly had, prophesied to herself a wonderful life through sex, more wonderful than sex could ever give her: and simultaneously she would never leave a sexual thought alone.
Martin said later that her imagination — or else her nervous force — had its effect on him. Despite the beams of sunlight, the courtroom seemed shut in as a greenhouse.
But Bosanquet was not a suggestible man. As with Cora, though this was technically the harder job, he wanted to domesticate her answers. He went through a similar routine about their workaday lives. Once or twice she tried a fugue again, but then gave up. Here she couldn’t sound unbalanced. Mostly her replies were shrewd and practical. Then he asked her about the books she read. Yes, she read a lot. She produced a list of standard authors of the day. “Sometimes I go a bit deeper.” “Who?” “Oh well—” she hesitated, her glance flickered — “people like Camus—”
At that, I should have liked to question her, for I suspected that she was lying again: not this time because of some thought out purpose, but simply because she wanted to impress. She might even be, I thought, a pathological liar like Jack Cotery in his youth.
For once Bosanquet was taken aback. He was a good lawyer, but he wasn’t well up in contemporary literature. He recovered himself: “Well, what do you get out of them?”
Again she hesitated. She answered: “Oh, they go to the limit, don’t they, I like them when they go to the limit.”
I was now sure that she had been bluffing: somehow she had brought out a remark she had half-read. But it gave Bosanquet an opening. He didn’t know about Camus, but he did know that she wanted to show how clever she was. Hadn’t she enjoyed showing how clever she was — when they were planning to capture the child? Hadn’t she felt cleverer than anyone else, because she was sure that she could get away with it? She had said a good deal to her counsel about being “different” and “special” — wasn’t that a way of proving it?
She was flustered, the current of words deserted her.
“No. It wasn’t like that. That was my second breakdown, that’s all.”
She spoke as though she was astonished and ashamed. She gave the impression that he had hit on the truth which she was trying, at all costs, to conceal. Yet Bosanquet himself and others of us, knew that wasn’t so. Certainly she had enjoyed feeling clever, set apart, someone above this world — but none of us, looking at her, could conceive that that was all.