Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Though to many it seemed a contradiction in his nature, Martin had remained a committed radical. In terms of action, we had usually been at one.

Someone sent over tankards of beer, smiling at us. With public faces, Martin and I smiled back.

“Tell me,” said Martin, “those two aren’t mad, are they?”

“I’m not certain we know what madness means.”

“Are you evading it?”

“Do you think I should choose to, now?”

I went on: “Do you think I should? All I can tell you is, no one round them thinks they’re mad.”

He said: “They look — like everyone else.”

I replied: “I’m certain of one thing. In most ways, they feel like everyone else. The girl Kitty is in pain. She can’t get comfortable, she’s just as harassed as any other woman with sciatica having to sit under people’s eyes. I’m certain they wake up in the morning often feeling good. Then they remember what they’ve got to go through all day.” It had been like that, I said, when I had the trouble with my eye. The moments of waking: all was fine: and then I saw the black veil. I said that in the existential moments tonight, as they ate their supper and sat in their cells, they must be feeling like the rest of us.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Martin.

“The horror is,” I said, “that they are human.”

The dialogue was going by stops and jerks: soon it fell into doldrums, like an imitation of the doldrums of the trial. We dropped into chit-chat, not even the ordinary family exchange. Neither of us mentioned — and this was very rare — our children. Martin spoke (although I knew nothing of botany and cared less) about a plant he had identified on Wicken Fen. Sometimes we were interrupted, the bar was only beginning to empty. Still we didn’t want to leave. Somehow we seemed protected there. We fetched sandwiches, so as not to have to depart for dinner.

In the middle of the chit-chat, Martin made another start.

“Human beings are dangerous wild animals,” he said. “More dangerous than any other animals on earth.”

I didn’t disagree. But I added that perhaps there were some vestigial possibilities of grace. “You have to give us the benefit of the doubt. We need that, the lot of us, to get along.”

“I think you’ve given us all far too much benefit of the doubt,” said my brother.

Maybe. And yet I believed that in the end I was more suspicious than he was.

Later, as we still sat, talking about someone who had just left the bar, Martin suddenly interrupted: “What do you hope will happen to those two?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what verdict are you hoping for?”

I had explained the legal situation, and how I couldn’t understand why diminished responsibility hadn’t been brought in before now. Otherwise they might as well have pleaded guilty of murder and have done with it. He had already asked about diminished responsibility: what were the chances that the defence could win?

“Do you hope they win?” Martin pressed me.

I hesitated for a long time.

“I just don’t know,” I said.

It would be easier, of course, for their families, I went on, it would be easier for George, it would save some pain.

“It would be easier for everyone,” said Martin. He asked, in a hard and searching tone: “And you still don’t know?”

“Do you?” I replied.

It was his turn to hesitate. At last he shook his head.

By this time there were, beside ourselves, only a couple of men left in the room. It had become cavernous and quiet: now the aquarium light obtruded from behind the counter. Soon, said the barman, there would be another crowd, the after-dinner crowd, coming in. In that case, Martin said, he felt inclined to stay, he didn’t specially want to move yet awhile. Neither of us suggested going out, so that we could be alone, the two of us together.

ON the third morning, which was a Wednesday, Martin and I returned to our seats in the official box, having lingered about uselessly for George. In the courtroom the chandelier lights were switched on, the clouds pressing towards the windows were dense and purplish, there was a hubbub of wind and rain. Outside it was a dramatic, a faintly apocalyptic, day: but inside the court the proceedings were subdued, voices were quiet, nothing dramatic there.

In fact, police officers were giving routine evidence about the statements made by the two women. Statements which contradicted each other, but that was no news, we had heard it already. We had heard also the elaborations, the different versions, the excuses for past lies, that Kitty had made as the police played on her. None of this was new. It was all delivered flatly, with nothing like the confidence and projection of the medical witness the afternoon before. But it had the curious intimacy that sometimes descended on law courts — an intimacy in which the police, the criminals, the lawyers, the judge, seemed to inhabit a private world of their own, with their own understandings, secrets and even language, shutting out, like an exclusive club, everyone who hadn’t the right of entry.

In the middle of the morning — the gale was blowing itself out, the windows were lighter — Detective Superintendent Maxwell went into the witness box. He was, I knew well enough, a formidable man: but he didn’t look and sound formidable as he stood there, opposite to us, across the court. He looked less bulky, his eyes less probing and hot: he gave his evidence as flatly as the others, unassertively, almost gently.

“Yes, sir, when she was making her fourth statement the defendant Miss Pateman told me that they had picked him up at 5.45 on the Friday night.”

Bosanquet asked, in a similar tone, what she had said. “She said that he was glad to go with them.”

That had been included, in identical words, in Bosanquet’s opening. So had her explanation of the child’s wounds. Leaning confidentially on the box rail, Maxwell said: “She told me, We wanted to teach him to behave. She told me again, We had to teach him to behave.”

He sounded like an uncle talking of a game of parents and children. I hadn’t seen any man conceal his passions more.

The judge put in, also in an unassertive tone: “You went just a little fast for me, Superintendent. Was it — She — told — me — we — had — to — teach — him — to — behave?”

The judge’s pen moved anachronistically over his paper. Then Bosanquet again — When did they begin to ill-treat him? “She never gave me the exact time. All she said was, We started as we meant to go on.”

I was watching Kitty’s face, just then washed clean of lines. Was she out of pain? Her expressions changed like the surface of a pond. She was writing another of her notes.

Maxwell had led her through the Saturday and Sunday hour by hour. “We put him to bed at half past nine on the Saturday, Miss Pateman told me. I asked her, what sort of condition was he in then? She said, We gave him three aspirins and a glass of milk before he went to bed.” You couldn’t elicit how badly he had been hurt by that time, said Bosanquet neutrally. Just as neutrally, Maxwell said, no, she hadn’t made a positive statement. On the Sunday, she did tell him, they had been obliged to be strict. But they had let him look at television at Sunday tea-time. “What sort of condition was he in then, I asked her, but she never replied.”

The defence was raising no objection. There must be an understanding, or they must have a purpose, I thought.

It hadn’t been established, it still wasn’t clear, at what time on the Sunday night he had been killed. It might even have been early on the Monday morning. “I asked her,” Maxwell said, “did you tell him what was going to happen to him. She said he had asked them once, but they didn’t say anything.”