The door opened again, and, one of those officers on either side of her, Cora stood in the doorway. She was wearing one of her own dresses, one which she had worn on the first day of the trial. She nodded as Mrs Bryden greeted her and said goodbye to me.
As the two of us sat there alone, I offered her a cigarette, grateful right at the beginning — as in a hospital visit — for anything which got some seconds ticked away.
I had to break the silence.
“You know George has gone away?” My voice sounded loud and brusque.
Again she nodded.
While I was thinking of another opening, she said: “I liked George.”
“He’ll come back some time.”
“Will he?” she said, without reaction.
Another interval. My tongue wouldn’t work any better — maybe worse — than when I saw her before the trial.
“What’s it like in here?”
Her glance met mine, slid viscously away, pale-eyed in the heavy handsome face. She gave a contemptuous shrug.
“What do you think it’s like?” she said. Then her tone became a violent mutter: “There’s the soap.”
“What?”
“The soap. It’s diabolical. Every morning when I go to wash, it makes me want to throw up.”
I listened to a long, unyielding, gravelly complaint about the soap. It sounded as though she had a sensitive nose. Against my will, I felt a kind of sympathy.
“Why don’t you tell them?”
“They wouldn’t care.”
She gave up complaining, and sank into muteness again. Inventing one or two questions, I got nothing but nods. Calmly she asked: “Will they let me see her?”
“I don’t know.” I did know: but it wasn’t for me to tell her, or at least I rationalised it so.
Another patch of muteness. Again calmly, she said: “What’s the position about letting us out?”
I said, surely her solicitors had told her already. She said yes, and then, with implacable repetitive calm and obstinacy, asked the question once more.
Well, it spun the time out to explain. The sentence, as she knew, I said, was a statutory one: but, as she also knew, it didn’t mean what it said. In some years, no one could tell quite when, the authorities would be reviewing their cases: if there was thought to be no danger, then they might be released.
“How long?”
“In some cases, it’s quite a short time.”
“They won’t do that for us. People will be watching what happens to us.”
That was more realistic than anything I had heard from her before. Raising her voice, she asked: “I want to know, how long do you think they’ll keep us in?”
I thought it was a time to speak straight. “If they’re sure there’s no danger, my guess would be something like ten years.”
“What are you talking about, danger?”
“They’ll need to be sure you won’t do anything of the same kind again.”
She gave a short despising laugh.
“They needn’t worry themselves. We shan’t do anything like that again.”
For an instant I recalled that colleague of Hankins, too clever by half, making bright remarks before the verdict. Then, more sharply, Mrs Pateman talking of her daughter.
“We shan’t do anything like that again,” said Cora.
She added: “Why should we?”
I couldn’t reply. Not through horror (which at that moment, and in fact through that interview, I didn’t feel): through something like loneliness, or even a sense of mystification that led into nothing. It was a relief to ask her commonplace questions — after all, if my guess was right, when she came out she’d still be a young woman, wouldn’t she? Not much over thirty, perhaps? What did she intend to do?
“I haven’t got as far as that,” she said.
But she had. It came out — she wasn’t unwilling to let it — that she had been making plans. The plans were down-to-earth. They would go and live somewhere else, in a large town, perhaps London. They would change their names. They might try to change their appearance, certainly they would dye their hair. They wouldn’t have much difficulty, if the labour market hadn’t altered, in getting jobs. They would have to cover up for not having employment cards, but still they’d manage. In all she said, there was no vestige of a sign that she was thinking of reshaping her life — no more than George ever had, though about that I had once believed otherwise. She had no thought of finding another way to live. I was listening for it, but there was none at all. All she foresaw, or wanted to foresee, was picking up where she had left off.
Throughout she had been using the word ‘we’. It was ‘we’ who were going to find another place to settle in. Was that going to happen in ten years’ time? How would she endure it, if it didn’t happen? It was difficult to have any prevision of what Kitty would be like. She might be imagining a different kind of life. If she were capable of that, when the time came she would throw Cora away as though she didn’t recognise her face.
The hour wore on. I was trying, when she dropped her chin, to catch a glance at my wristwatch below the table.
“I don’t know how to pass the time,” she said. She hadn’t observed me: she was saying it — not as a complaint, but as a matter of fact — about herself. What did she do all day? I couldn’t make out. Sometimes ‘they’ let her listen to the radio.
“It’s all right for her,” she said, once more as a matter of fact, without envy. “She’ll be doing a lot of reading.”
She repeated: “I don’t know how to pass the time. She’ll be learning things.”
She seemed to be thinking of tomorrow and the next day, not of the stretch of years.
My time, not hers, was nearly up. I said that I should have to go. As though she were imitating the judge after he had sentenced them, she gave me a dismissive nod.
Meanwhile, I had been having another reminder, which, except by disconnecting the telephone, I could not escape. I had told Mr Pateman — in his frenetic state, when his wife led me to him — that he was at liberty to talk to me. He took me at my word. When we had returned to London, on the first evening, the telephone rang. A personal calclass="underline" would I accept it, and reverse the charges? Mr Pateman’s grinding voice: “I can’t let it go at this.” His daughter was ill. They hadn’t listened to what the doctors said. They were behaving like rats in mazes. Something must be done about his daughter. Something must be done about people in her condition. What about the authorities ‘high up’: when could I get them moving? Patiently that first night, I said that neither I nor any other private citizen could do anything at alclass="underline" this was a matter of law — “I can’t be expected to be satisfied with that.” When should I be coming to the town again, so that he could explain his ‘point of view’? Not for some time, I had no engagement there: in any case, I said, I knew very well how he felt. No, he had to explain exactly.
The conversation was not conclusive. Three or four times a week the call came through: reverse the charges? The same voice, the same statements, often identically the same words. Rats in mazes. Authorities high up. His point of view. He wasn’t rude, he wasn’t even angry, he just went grinding on. Once he had found words which contented him, he felt no need to change them.
It was no use Margaret answering the telephone, and saying that I was out. He was ready to ring up again at midnight, 1 a.m., or very early the following morning. We thought of refusing to accept the calls: but that we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Whatever his wife had feared, whether it was that he might become clinically deranged, seemed not to be happening to him now. In hectoring me, in grating on with this ritual, he had found an activity which obsessed and satisfied him. He might even have lost contact with what the object of it was. Over the telephone I couldn’t see — and didn’t want to see — his face. I suspected that he was beginning to look as when I had first seen him, the dislocation going, the confidence of folie de grandeur flooding back.