Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“We should all like to know,” said Ted Benskin. “I’m damned if I do.”

A young man (I took him to be a pupil of Bosanquet’s, not long down from the university) said: either we are all responsible for our actions, or else no one is.

“I wish,” said Bosanquet, gazing at him like a patient, troubled ox, “I wish I were as certain about anything as you are about everything.”

“But if you were on that jury,” said Archibald Rose, more positive than his leader, “you wouldn’t follow the Cornford man—”

Bosanquet said, not eagerly but with weight: “No. I couldn’t do that.”

“If you were old Jumbo,” said someone, “and summing up, what would you tell them?”

“What will old Jumbo tell them, anyway?”

Someone else said: if we’re not responsible for abominable actions, then we’re not responsible for good ones. If you explain one set away, then you explain the other. It’s the ultimate reduction.

Ted Benskin said: “Anyway, I’ve got to put my woman in the box. I wish I could get out of it, but I can’t. Clive knows that.”

Bosanquet gave a professional smile. If Cora Ross didn’t give evidence for herself, the inference was, it was because she might appear too sane.

“It’s worse for Jamie here,” said Benskin. He pointed to Wilson, who was standing a little apart, looking handsome, hard, distracted. After a while, simply because he looked so miserable, I went into a corner and spoke to him alone. None of them was unaffected: but he was more affected than any. At a first glance in court, I had thought him insensitive. It was one of those impressions like that which Margaret often produced, which were the opposite of the truth.

“Yes, of course I’ve got to call her,” he was telling me. “And I’m afraid she’ll destroy anything the psychiatrists say.”

“You’ve met her, haven’t you?” he went on. “I’m afraid she’ll seem perfectly lucid. Mind you, I think some of these people are dead wrong,” he nodded towards the middle of the room. “I accept one hundred per cent what Adam Cornford said. Don’t you?”

“You’ve talked to her yourself?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, set-faced. “When I’m defending people, I always insist on getting to know them personally.”

He added: “It’s not pleasant to be tried for anything. Whoever you are and whatever you have done.”

Back among the central crowd, I let Ted Benskin refill my glass, while Martin was listening to some of the tougher lawyers. Freedom. Ultimate freedom. They had picked up the phrase from Adam Cornford. They didn’t know, as Martin and I did, how once it had been a slogan in George’s underground. But they knew that the two women had used it to excite each other. (I could remember a passage from George’s diary. “The high meridian of freedom is on us now. In our nucleus of free people, anyway — and sometimes I think in the world.” That was written in 1930, and I had read it two years later. I hadn’t imagined, any more than he had, what was to come.)

“It’s done a lot of harm, propaganda about freedom,” said someone.

“Freedom my arse,” said the Clerk of Assize with simpler eloquence.

“Keep your heads, now,” said Ted Benskin. “I tell you, my children are happier than we ever were. And I think they’re better for it.”

“We need a bit of order, though,” said Bosanquet.

“You’re getting old, Clive.”

“Order is important.” Bosanquet was as unbudgeable as in court. “This country is getting dirtier and sillier under our eyes.”

“Happiness isn’t everything,” said someone. “Perhaps it isn’t the first thing.”

“I tell you,” said Benskin, “if ever there was a time to keep our heads, this is. By and large, there’s been more gain than loss.”

Other lawyers rounded on him. How could anyone spend his life in the criminal courts, and believe that? Benskin replied that he did spend his life in the criminal courts: that he proposed to go on doing so, and give them all a great deal of trouble: and that he still believed it.

There were a number of strong personalities round us, clashing like snooker balls: Benskin was ready to go on clashing all night. As he stood there, shorter than the rest of us, with his urchin grin, one of the clerks began to speak of ‘topping’ (he was using the criminals’ slang for hanging). The 1957 Act was a nonsense. You couldn’t have categories of murder. Why was the murder in this case non-capital, whereas if they had shot the child—?

Mrs Rose, who by this time had put her family to bed, said with a firm young woman’s confidence that she was in favour of capital punishment. Good for you, shouted one of the lawyers. So far as I could tell, there was a majority in support — certainly not Wilson, not a couple of the pupils. Benskin hadn’t given an opinion. It was Bosanquet who spoke.

“No,” he said, as steady as ever. “I’ve always been against it. And I still am.”

Some rough comments flew about, until, in a patch of quietness, a voice said without inflection: “Even in a case like this?”

“Yes,” said Bosanquet. “In a case like this.”

Tempers were getting higher — Benskin, who seemed to have a passion for buttling second only to Arnold Shaw’s, was uncorking another bottle — when Archibald Rose mentioned that day’s appointments to the bench. It might have been a host’s tact: he had been disagreeing with his leader: anyway, whether it was a relief or a let-down, it worked. Two new appointments to the High Court. One was (I hadn’t noticed it in The Times that morning) an old acquaintance of mine called Dawson-Hill. Bosanquet, who might reasonably have expected the job himself, was judicious. Benskin, who mightn’t, being years too young, wasn’t. “We don’t want playboys up there,” he said. “He’s just got there because he’s grand, that’s all—”

“But why is he all that grand?” I asked. I was genuinely puzzled. It was one of those English mysteries. Everyone agreed that Dawson-Hill was grand or smart or a social asset, whatever you liked to call it. But it was difficult to see why. His origins were similar to Rose’s or Wilson’s in this room, perhaps a shade better off: nothing like so lofty as those of Mr Justice Fane, and no one thought him excessively smart.

“That bloody school,” said Benskin, meaning Eton.

“He went to our college,” said Martin. “And that’s about as grand as the University Arms.”

“He must have made a mistake that time,” said Benskin with a matey grin. “Anyway, you can’t deny it, any of you, no dinner party in London is complete without our dear D-H.”

As he drove down the path, away from the party, Martin remarked: “To say that was a popular appointment would be mildly overstating the case, wouldn’t it?”

Gazing over the wheel into the headlight zone, he wore a pulled down smile. The backchat about Dawson-Hill had softened the evening for him. He was a man whose emotional memory was long, sometimes obsessive, at least as much as mine. Often he found it harder for his mood to change. For the past three days he hadn’t been able to shrug off what he had been listening to. It had lightened him to be in the company of men who could. Driving on, he was asking me about them, half amused, half-envious. They were less hard-baked than he expected, most of them, weren’t they? Yes, I said, criminal lawyers seemed to have become more imaginative since my time. But the jobs mattered, Martin was smiling, they were pretty good at getting back out of the cold? Archibald Rose had been talking to him seriously about when he should take silk. They were pretty good at getting back on to the snakes-and-ladders, weren’t they? Of course they were, I said. I nearly added — but didn’t, since I was feeling protective towards my brother, as though we were much younger — that I had heard him written off as a worldly man.