In Pursuit of the English Read online

  Rose continued: ‘What’s the use of Flo saying she lets the old people use the bathroom if Dan says he locked the door to keep them out?’

  ‘We didn’t do no such thing,’ said Flo virtuously, and Rose lost her temper and shook her by the shoulders.

  ‘You said so in your statement.’

  ‘Did I. dear?’ said Flo, ready to cry again.

  ‘Now listen. What you’ve got to do is to say that the dirty old things make such a mess in the bathroom and, anyway, she’s got filthy sores all over her legs.’

  ‘But she has,’ said Flo sullenly.

  There was a parrot-like screech from the next room; Flo and Dan glared; the old people glared back; Counsel and the lawyer still had their backs turned.

  ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’ said Rose. ‘You was protecting your tenants from disease, see? And every time they went into the bathroom, they made a mess, and you had to clean up after them, they made a mess on purpose, and you thought the old lady’s sores might be dangerous to other people.’

  The legal gentlemen, standing side by side and gazing out of the window, permitted themselves to nod encouragingly. Point by point. Rose framed their case for them, shaking Dan and Flo into silence whenever they opened their mouths.

  ‘Understand now?’ she concluded. By now she felt quite sure of herself, ‘What you’ve got to get into your heads is this,’ was her summing up, ‘All this law business isn’t anything to do with right or wrong, see? You’ll just get everybody confused if you start thinking so silly. Nobody cares what really happened. All they want you to do is to tell a good tie and stick to it afterwards.’

  The lawyer coughed, in a resigned way. Counsel’s left shoulder was observed to twitch. Flo and Dan, released by Rose, sat themselves down, in a heavy worried silence. The lawyer came over, offered Rose a cigarette, and gave her a grateful smile. ‘You’re a smart girl,’ he said. ‘You’d do well in law.’

  Rose was overcome, and blushed, saying: ‘Thanks, dear. But you need an education for the law. It’s true I know about it a little, because I had a policeman for a friend once.’

  The lawyer and Counsel now tackled Flo and Dan together. At the end of half an hour, they had succeeded in getting Yes and No in reply to certain basic questions. Then they began work on us, the witnesses. After a few minutes, they gave Jack up, for every time they enquired: ‘And what happened next?’ Jack’s admiration for the physical strength of his stepfather, so much deeper than his resentment of him, caused him to break into descriptions of assault and violence which made Dan nod proudly, Flo sigh approvingly, and Rose to groan: ‘Lord help us.’ They told Jack he could go back to work, but as he had a day off he remained seated in a corner with a bunch of physical culture magazines, oblivious of the furious looks Dan was giving him.

  Rose proved admirable but limited. When Flo said: ‘But. Rose, you said it was all right to lie,’ she replied, with an open contempt for everybody present: ‘I was just saying what everybody else thinks. I know what’s right and I’m sticking to it.’

  As for me, it was decided that since I knew nothing of the old people but what I’d heard, it was no use putting me in the box.

  Everything depended on the impression Flo and Dan would make when the time came.

  Our case was low on the list. We could hear the Court official calling out names; and as the cases worked themselves through, legal men kept dropping into the room for a cigarette, or to remove their wigs and scratch their hair, or to hold hasty conferences with witnesses. The old couple still sat through an open door, quite silent, staring in front of them.

  Dan was restless with suppressed belligerence. He needed to regain his position. He kept shooting glances of resentment at the pink-cheeked boy who had humiliated him, and al Rose, who had treated him like a child. But the discovery that these guardians of morality not merely overlooked but encouraged a good lie had made him feel their equal. We were all relaxed by now out of boredom. Flo had unbuttoned her coat. Aurora was asleep. Dan was leaning his weight on the table in the easy way he would have used in his basement.

  ‘You wouldn’t remember the war, sir, would you?’ said Dan to Counsel, who flushed angrily. ‘I served right through the war. Perhaps you could tell the Judge that. It’s more than some can say.’

  ‘My good man, it has nothing to do with the case.’

  ‘I saved a man’s life. And now I can’t say who’s to live in my own house.’

  ‘Mr Bolt, I’ve already told you, it’s irrelevant.’

  ‘He was a Lascar. And what gratitude do I get, nothing!’

  Rose hissed resignedly: ‘Oh, my God, that tears it, if he’s going to start. I hope he doesn’t forget to tell how he did six months’ hard for nearly killing a man in a bar.’ She took out her knitting, which she had brought with her in case of just such an emergency.

  Counsel, the lawyer, and various knots of people in doorways or seated on the benches had their eyes fixed on Dan. Every one of them looked slightly irritated. It was the facinated irritation caused by a phenomenon we don’t understand. The fact was, Dan was holding their attention simply by sitting there, and they didn’t know why. The angry power of his body was not evident, muffled as it was in the commonplace suit. And his face expressed nothing but the desire to express – it was long, flattish, yellowish, and almost contorted with his frustration at not being able to communicate.

  ‘Yes, he was a Lascar,’ said Dan, aggrieved, ‘a black man if you like, but he was human, and I could have died.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Counsel, Dan turned the hot beam of his eyes at him, and the boy became silent.

  ‘There I stood on deck,’ said Dan. ‘We had docked that day.’ He was remembering it so powerfully that although he did not move a muscle, we stood on deck with him. ‘It was a black night and dead quiet. I heard a splash.’ He closed his eyes a moment. There was a silence. He still had not moved. His great hands lay in loose fists on the table before him, not moving. Yet we heard ripples flow out and break softly against enclosing dock walls. ‘I looked over.’ Dan stared ahead of him, not blinking. We saw him bent over a rail at a black cold sea. ‘There was nothing,’ he said. ‘But I had my duty. I climbed and jumped.’ Even Rose let her knitting lie in her lap, and became part of the story. ‘I went down and down, my arms above my head.’ Dan clenched his fist and the cloth of his sleeves bulged out. For a terrifying moment we watched him sink through the lightless harbour water under the black hulls of ships, ‘I saw him. I grabbed.’ Dan’s body stiffened slightly. His hand opened and the fingers flexed rigid on the palm. We saw the hand clutch at something slippery. ‘I pulled him to the surface by the hair. He was fighting, I hit him.’ Dan clenched his fists tight, his head went back, his chin came forward, he half-shut his eyes. ‘I shouted. No one heard. No one on deck. Everyone on shore. First night in harbour for six weeks. I held him and I shouted. I held him and I shouted again. Then I dragged him up the side of the ship.’ Dan gripped his teeth together and the veins swelled in his neck. We saw him heave the Lascar up the ship’s dark side. ‘I put him on deck and worked on him till he came round, ft was a Lascar. Drunk. Can you blame him, sir? The officers’ mess sent for me. Dan, have a drink, they said. Sir, thank you, I said. But I’ve had enough for one night. Ask me for a drink another night.’ Dan half-shut his eyes, and looked woodenly dignified. ‘The Captain came to me.’ Now Dan’s deliberate stupidity was an insult to all authority. ‘I won’t forget this my man.’ ‘Sir,’ said Dan, and he suddenly saluted, with a smart quiver. The shock of that movement was like being slapped: it was only when his hand quivered at his temple that we realized he had told the story without gesture, with no more than an occasional tightening of a muscle. It was with a sting of astonishment that we saw the man was still sitting on the bench by the table. He had come to himself, sitting loosely, looking around dazedly, mouth open over prominent white teeth, taking in the bare dusty room filled with the fancy-dress gentlemen in their curly wigs and
black robes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ Then he violently crashed his fist on to the table and shouted: ‘But that doesn’t help me, does it?’ I’ll never forget this, my man, the Captain said to me, and that’s the last I heard. Justice, they call it. Justice!’

  ‘Dan,’ said Flo, warningly, giving ingratiating smiles to everyone.

  ‘I don’t care who hears,’ shouted Dan, over the drone from the Court, through a door left slightly open because of the heat. Someone from inside the Court tiptoed over and shut the door. Every eye followed the squat figure in folds and tags and pleats of grimy black, who frowned at us so portentously that the young Counsel blushed: he, like the rest of us, had forgotten his surroundings. ‘Not so loud, please,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Dan automatically.

  There was a high titter from the other doorway. The old lady, white-faced and trembling with hatred, glared in at us from among other faces, which were curious or amused or indignant. Our lawyer gave her a puzzled glance and might have asked who she was, but Dan was speaking again. ‘When I left the Navy I had four hundred pounds. Do you know how I got that?’

  ‘There are certain traditions of the British Navy,’ said Counsel, conveying that he found the word Navy, on Dan’s lips, repulsive.

  ‘Oh. I know that,’ said Dan, as if delighted to be reminded, sharing them, so to speak, with Counsel, ‘For people with the money there’s nothing like it. I was personal servant once to the Surgeon Commander. His wife was in England. Ah, he knew how to enjoy himself. There was a girl. She fell for my boss. Five months of it, every night, war or no war, being stuck in harbour on account of a torpedo. I used to let her out, three, four in the morning, five shillings a time. Plenty of money there. Dan, she used to say. I know you are my friend. Yes, miss, I used to say. She was a lovely girl. Black hair. Black eyes. Lovely figure.’ Dan let his fingers curve together on the table, with such appreciation that various eminent legal gentlemen winced and looked away. ‘I used to sit down below and envy him. Then his wife came. She went sniffing about in his pyjamas and all over.’ Dan imitated a cold shrewish drawl: ‘“Really, darling, I cannot think what you’ve been doing.” She thought all right. She used to come to me, smiling sweet as cherries in syrup. “Dan, I do hope my husband has been comfortable?” And she’d give me a look to kill.’ Dan, without moving his head, let his eyes move in a cold curious stare from Counsel’s face, to the lawyer’s. ‘But sixpence, that’s all.’ He bared his teeth in a silent, contemptuous laugh. ‘And all the time, my boss was hanging around trying to hear. He’d come in, casual. “Women are curious,” he’d say. “They’re as curious as monkeys.” I’d say: “That’s right, sir. Wear the life out of a man, a curious woman. They go on and go on until you think what’s the use, might as well tell and be done with it.”’ Dan stuck his fist into his left pocket and brought out an imaginary note. His right hand accepted his note with oft-hand gratitude, stuffing it carelessly into the other pocket. ‘ “That’s right,” he’d say. “But it’s worth keeping your mouth shut in the long run.’” Dan heaved out more soundless laughter. ‘In one way and another I did well out of that couple.’

  ‘Tell them about the nylons,’ shouted Flo. ‘go on, tell them.’ Dan froze. ‘What nylons?’

  ‘You know, the nylons …’ Flo saw she had made a mistake, and sat smiling pathetically, while Dan glared at her.

  Rose whispered to me: ‘Dan brought in nylons all through the war, he wound them round and round his body under the uniform. A smuggler, that’s what he was.’

  Dan said hastily, ‘And so that’s how I bought ray house, fair and square, with four hundred pounds I had after the war.’

  ‘My house. My house!’ came a shrill voice from the door.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Counsel sharply.

  ‘That’s those dirty old beasts, dear,’ said Flo. ‘Them what we’re here for.’

  ‘Good God,’ said the lawyer. He dropped his voice: ‘How long have they been listening?’ He rose and slammed the door.

  ‘But I didn’t know you’d mind,’ said Flo. ‘They always listen, dear. That’s what they’re like.’

  ‘Well. I really don’t know!’ said the Counsel. He looked at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime.

  ‘So if the Judge could take my war service and the Lascar into account,’ said Dan, remembering why he had begun his confidences.

  ‘I’m going to lunch,’ said Counsel, and went, deeply offended. The lawyer went with us to lunch, to make sure nothing worse could happen. It was a difficult meal. Dan’s bad temper had focused itself on Jack. ‘Yes,’ he kept saying, belligerently. ‘Yes. And if we lose the case I’ll know who to thank.’

  ‘Now, now,’ the lawyer said. ‘Now, now. It’s not everyone who can make a good witness.’

  ‘That’s right, sweetheart,’ said Flo, trying to shield her son, ‘And he took a day off from work and all to help you.’

  ‘Work,’ said Dan. ‘Work. It’s not everyone who can work, either.’

  ‘Jack, why don’t you run along off to the pictures,’ said Rose.

  ‘But I want to see what happens in Court,’ said Jack.

  Rose signalled to him with her eyes that Dan should be avoided: but Jack said: ‘The Court’s for nothing, and I’d have to pay for the pictures.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Flo, trying to smile her man into good temper. ‘And so it won’t cost nothing if he stays.’

  ‘You can say cost,’ said Dan. ‘You can say it, you’re always saying you’re short of money, and I know where it goes.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said the lawyer. ‘There’s our case to consider. Let’s all keep calm and cool.’

  Our case was on first after lunch. We went into the Court with Counsel’s anxious voice in our ears: ‘Do be careful what you say, please, please.’

  They put Dan into the witness-box first. As soon as he was asked a question he replied: ‘I served my King and my Country, sir.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said our Counsel, in a coldly disapproving voice. ‘But! did. All through the war.’ ‘What’s that?’ said the ludge. Counsel, very irritated, said that this man had served in the Navy. ‘So I see from his papers,’ said the Judge, indifferently. Dan’s face darkened. His mouth had already opened in a shout of ‘Justice!’ when Counsel hastily dismissed him, and before they had time to establish even one of the rehearsed points.

  Counsel now made a long and efficient statement, from which it appeared the old people were a variety of maniacal criminal. Everyone listened in a matter-of-fact way, like actors at a play. ‘How well he does it,’ the Court officials seemed to be thinking, as they listened to the earnest and accomplished young man practising a sober rhetoric which would one day take him to far more impressive surroundings than these, to argue big cases, important cases, involving large sums of money and large reputations. They were watching him as if he were a promising schoolboy in his last year, overripe to show what he could do in the great world; and when he concluded, elaborately grave, his voice sinking to a well-sustained note of quiet confidence, the Judge nodded, as if to say. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll go far.’ Then he returned to his notes.

  In a few moments the opposing Counsel called Dan back again. This was a poor sort of man, who had long ago lost all hope of taking flight away from this dreary and unimportant Court. He was thin, worried-looking, and his voice was edged with a persistent sarcasm. He kept saying: ‘I put it to you …’ at Dan; and with every repetition of the phrase, Dan’s face clenched with uncertainty, tasting each separate word for a hidden trap. He was quite confused, and waiting for a familiar landmark. He did not understand that this Counsel was trying to establish the fact that he was a liar. He had been counting on Dan to deny he locked the bathroom against his clients. After a long preamble, designed to trip Dan up, which luckily he understood not one word of. Counsel arrived at the bathroom and was confounded by the way Dan, finding himself on prepared ground, drew himself up and entered into the part of a landlord concerned only to protect his
tenants from the dirt and disease of the old couple. ‘And there are children in the house, too!’ Dan ended on a note of real sincerity. Thrown off balance, the opposing Counsel dismissed Dan, in order to find a fresh approach.

  All this time the old people were sitting by themselves in a corner. The old man was slumped defeatedly against the back of a bench, suffering the continual jogs and jerks of his wife’s indignant elbow so slackly that each time she pushed that sharp bone into his side, his whole body slid a little way along the seat, till he righted himself with a straining pull of his shoulder muscles, pulling at the back of the high polished bench with a trembling hand. They were even older than I had thought, incredibly old, with the trembling fragility which comes to people so near their end that they have to conserve every movement in order that their strength may last through what they have to do. The old woman was trembling. A tiny parchment bag of bones, with a small white violent face on top; that was all she was, this terrible old woman of whom I’d heard so much and not really seen before. As the shameful disclosures about her way of living were made aloud for everyone to bear, she twisted her head about in a grimacing parody of scornful laughter, and cried in small gasps: ‘No, no, a lie,’ until the Judge looked gravely at her over his throne’s edge, and told her to be quiet. She put a handkerchief to her stretched and agonized mouth and remained still, but her trembling made the flowers on her soiled white hat rattle together, with a tiny dry sound; and the persistent dry rattling went on till people turned around to look, but the evidence of such misery in the midst of this official scene made them uncomfortable, and they turned away again.

  By the time Dan had been dismissed for the second time, the Judge was in a bad temper. Details of emptied slop bowls, dirty lavatories, filth thrown downstairs, it was an offence to have to listen to them.

  At first sight, Flo was a welcome change in the witness-box; a starched black Britannia, the embodiment of wrathful virtue. But as soon as she began to answer questions, it was a different matter, for the blood of her Italian grandmother responded at once to the drama of the situation; and our Counsel, with the expression of a man hurrying over the last few yards to safety, kept cutting her short, for fear of what might emerge.