She couldn’t accept even now, not in her flesh and bone, that he had deceived her. When she loved, she couldn’t help but trust. Even when she didn’t love, she found it easier to trust than distrust, in spite of her sensible head. She trusted me that afternoon (even while she was giving me the sacramental treatment of a bearer of bad news) but it was only with her head that she was believing me.
I asked her when she had last heard from him. She had written to him a good many times since Christmas, she said. She didn’t tell me, she let me infer, that she hadn’t heard from him.
“I can’t do any more,” she said. “I don’t think I can write again.”
That didn’t seem like pride, more like a resolve. We had all been through it, I told her. It was very hard, but the only way was not to write, not to be in any kind of contact, not even to hear the name.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got to know what’s happening to him.”
“It’s a mistake.”
She said: “I still feel he might need me.”
That was the last refuge. She was obstinate as her father: she had no more sense of danger — and she had her own tenderness.
Crossly, for I was handling it badly, I said: “Look here, I really think you ought to give a second thought to Leonard Getliffe.”
I was handling it badly, and that was the most insensitive thing I had done. Nothing I could have said would have made much difference: all the tact in the world, and you can’t soften another’s disasters. But still, I was handling it specially badly, perhaps because I had come to her from the extremes of death and horror, and, by the side of what I had been listening to, I couldn’t, however much I tried, get adjusted to the seriousness of love. Some kinds of vicarious suffering diminished others: unhappy love affairs — in absolute honesty, did one ever sympathise with total seriousness unless one was inside them? — seemed one of the more bearable of sufferings. So that I was, against my will, less patient than I wanted to be. Having met Leonard Getliffe at the Gearys’ for a few minutes the week before, which made me think perfunctorily of Vicky, I had merely wished — with about as much sympathy as Lord Lufkin would have felt — that they would get on with it. And now Leonard’s name had found itself on my tongue.
She gave a cold smile.
“No,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure you underestimate him.”
“Of course I don’t. He’s a great success—”
“I don’t mean in that way. I’m pretty sure you underestimate him as a man.”
She gazed at me in disbelief.
“Once you set him free, I bet you he’d make a damned good husband.”
“Not for me,” she said.
She added: “It’s no use thinking about him. There’s no future in it.”
She had blushed, as I had seen her do before when Leonard was mentioned. She still could not understand how she had inspired that kind of passion. Once more she used that bit of old-fashioned slang: there was no future in it. She was utterly astonished at being the one who was loved, not the one doing the loving. She was not only astonished, she was disturbed and curiously angry with Leonard because it was a position she couldn’t fit.
Then, as I became more impatient, she tried to prove to me that, of the two, it might be Pat who needed her the more.
36: Let-Down or Frustration
AT the close of Kitty Pateman’s evidence, the judge had announced that, on the following morning, the court would begin half-an-hour early, at ten o’clock, in the hope of finishing the case that day. When the morning came, and we sat there knowing that the verdict was not far away — the two women back in the dock, Kitty not scribbling any more, the triptych of Patemans in front of us — the proceedings were low-keyed and the three final speeches by counsel were all over by noon. It wasn’t that they were hurrying, but all they could do, in effect, was repeat the medical arguments for and against. The evidence for mental abnormality wasn’t disputed, said Benskin. What had been disputed was how much this abnormality impaired their responsibility: as he had put it to the Crown witness, Dr Gough, it was a matter of degree: and yet surely, after all the evidence, the impairment wasn’t in doubt? Could anyone, said Jamie Wilson, having heard Kitty Pateman’s history and having seen and listened to her in the witness box (that was the boldest stroke that either he or Benskin made), believe that she was capable of a free choice? That her state of mind allowed her to control what she had done? All that her doctors said showed that this was incredible, and all that she said herself made it more incredible still.
Clive Bosanquet spoke for longer than the other two, but for less than an hour. More than ever, he was meticulously correct. Prosecuting for the Crown, he said, he had the duty to bring home to the jury the attention that they ought to pay to the prisoners’ plea: there had not been many cases where such a plea had been thoroughly argued: no one, certainly not the Crown, wished to dismiss that plea if these women were mentally irresponsible. But — and then he examined point by point what Cornford had said, how Matthew Gough had rebutted it, and what “responsibility” had to mean. The unassertive voice went on, not with passion, but with attrition. At one stage he said that it would be possible, or at least theoretically possible, for the jury to admit the plea for one of the women and reject it for the other: but neither defence counsel had wished to argue this, and the prosecution did not admit it: the two were inseparably combined, and what applied to one, as all the technical evidence demonstrated, would apply to the other: it had to be all or nothing. That was all. With a gesture, he got on with the attrition.
All through those speeches, I couldn’t listen as I usually did. It was not till I read them later that I appreciated what had actually been said. Odd phrases stuck out, tapped away at circuits in the mind that I couldn’t break. Free choice. Who had a free choice? Did any of us? We felt certain that we did. We had to live as if we did. It was an experiential category of our psychic existence. That had been said by a great though remarkably verbose man. It sounded portentous: it meant no more than the old judge declaring robustly that he could decide — it was in his power and no one else’s — whether to take a second gin and tonic. It meant no more: it also meant no less. We had to believe that we could choose. Life was ridiculous unless we believed that. Otherwise there was no dignity left — or even no meaning. And yet — we felt certain we could choose, were we just throwing out our chests against the indifferent dark? We had to act as if it were true. As if. Als/ob. That was an old answer. Perhaps it was the best we could find.
Morality. Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn’t cheapen it by words. That was why the only people I knew — they were very few — who had any insight into the moral life, talked about it almost not at all.
On the stroke of twelve, the judge started to sum up. Suddenly I was listening with acute attention, absent-mindedness swept clean away. I watched the old, healthy, avian face as he turned, with his courteous nod, towards the jury box: I was listening, knowing already what his opinion was.
“Members of the jury, it is now my duty to sum this case up for you.” All through the trial his voice had shown, except in one rebuke, none of the cracks or thinning of age, and as he talked to the jurors, so easily and unself-consciously, it was still unforced and clear: but his accent one had ceased to hear except in old men. It belonged to the Eton of 1900, not cockney-clipped like the upper-class English two generations later, but much fuller, as though he had time to use his tongue and lips. “This, I think, is the seventh day on which you have listened with the utmost patience to the evidence and the speeches. And, at the end of it all, the issue in this case comes down to the point of a pin. It is agreed by everyone, I think, that these two young women have some degree of mental abnormality: is it enough to impair substantially — I have to remind you of that word — their mental responsibility? Are Miss Ross and Miss Pateman not responsible for the deeds, I need not tell you they are terrible deeds, that they have committed? Or, to make the point sharper still, are they not fully responsible, so that we have to make special allowance for them and accept their plea? Which is, you will remember, one of diminished responsibility. Either you will accept that, and bring in a verdict accordingly: which means, you understand, that they will be treated like mental patients who have perpetrated the crime of manslaughter. Or else you will decide that they were responsible for what they have done, and find them guilty of murder. In which case it will be necessary for me to pass the statutory sentence.”