Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“It’s absolutely over for him? He won’t go back and play her up again?”

“I guarantee he won’t.”

“He’s not above leaving a thread he likes to twitch. When he’s got nothing better to do.”

“Not this time,” said Martin.

“Why are you so sure?”

“I’m afraid that he’s made up his mind. Or someone else has made up his mind for him.”

Martin was speaking with kindness of Vicky, more than kindness, the sympathy of one who was fond of women and who might have felt his eyes brighten at the sight of this one. But he was also speaking with obscure satisfaction, as though he had news which he couldn’t yet share but which, when he forgot everything else, gave him well-being, and, as he sat there beside me in the garden, something like animal content.

BACK in court the following morning, we were listening to more psychiatrists, as though this were the normal run of our existence and the family conversation in a garden as unmemorable as a dream. These were the psychiatrists called by the prosecution, and we knew in advance that there would be only two. That was planned as the total evidence in rebuttal, and they were as careful and moderate as the defence doctors, without even the occasional wave of Adam Cornford’s panache. In the result, though, through the moderate words, they were each saying an absolute no.

Obviously by prearrangement — as I whispered to Martin, sitting at my side in the box — neither Benskin nor Wilson pressed the prison psychiatrist far. Bosanquet had questioned him about his knowledge of the prisoners: yes, he had had them under observation since they were first arrested. He was a man near to retiring age, who had spent his whole career in the prison service: he had seen more criminals, psychotics, psychopaths, than anyone who had come into court, and yet he still spoke with an air of gentle surprise. Miss Ross and Miss Pateman had shown no detectable signs of mental disorder. Some slight abnormality, perhaps, nothing more. Medically, their encephalograms were normal. He had conducted prolonged interviews with Miss Pateman: Miss Ross had, under examination, not usually been willing to discuss her own history. So far as he could judge, they were intelligent. Miss Pateman had asked for supplies of books from the prison library. Their behaviour was not much different, or not different at all, from other prisoners held on serious charges. Miss Pateman exhibited certain anxiety symptoms, including chronic sleeplessness, and her health had caused some concern. Miss Ross had a tic of obsessive hand washing, but this she admitted was not new or caused by her being in prison. Neither had at any time been willing to speak of the killing. Occasionally Miss Ross went in for something like talking to herself, monologues about what appeared to be imaginary scenes, in which she and Miss Pateman figured alone.

“None of this has made you consider that they are not responsible for their actions?”

“No.”

“From all your observations, you would not consider that they acted in a state of diminished responsibility?”

“No. I’m afraid I can’t give them that.”

“After your long experience, you are positive in your opinion?”

“I am.”

It was while Benskin, in his first questions, was asking the doctor to say what he meant by a “slight abnormality of mind”, that Martin, plucking my sleeve, pointed to the body of the court. Since the morning before, when the medical evidence had begun, the attendance had fallen off, as in a London theatre on a Monday night: the gallery was almost empty that morning, and the lower ranges only half-full: but there (he had not been present at the beginning of the session, he must have entered during the Crown examination) sat George. His great head stood out leonine; he was staring at the witness box with glaucous eyes.

I scribbled on the top of a deposition sheet We shall have to sit with him this afternoon . As Martin read that, he nodded, his brow furrowed, all the previous night’s relaxation gone.

Benskin was asking, weren’t those opinions subjective, wasn’t it difficult or impossible even for an expert to be absolutely certain about some mental conditions? Could anyone in the world be certain about some mental conditions? Weren’t there features of the doctor’s observations, given in his examination-in-chief, which might be regarded as pointers to deep abnormality—? Just for an instant, Benskin (who often suffered from the reverse of l’esprit de l’escalier , who thought of the bright remark, made it, and then wished he hadn’t) was tempted away from his own strategy. He began to ask when “our expert” had last been in touch with professional trends? Had he read—? Benskin shook himself. The jury wouldn’t like it, this was an elderly modest man, the sooner he was out of the box the better. The tactic was to reserve the attack for the heavyweight witness. Disciplining himself, anxious at having to waive a marginal chance, Wilson kept to the same line. He asked a few questions about Miss Pateman’s state of health, her record of psychosomatic illness, and then let the doctor go.

The heavyweight witness was a Home Office consultant, brought in as a counterpoise to Adam Cornford. When Bosanquet asked “Is your name Matthew Gough?”, that meant nothing to almost everyone in court, and yet, before he answered the question at all, during the instant while he was clambering up to the box, he had been recognised, as no one else had been recognised in the whole trial. The fact was, he appeared often on television, under the anonymous label of psychiatrist, giving his views — articulately, but with as little fuss as Cornford in court — on crime, delinquency, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, race relations, censorship and the phenomena relating to Unidentified Flying Objects. On the television screen he gave the impression of very strong masculinity. In the witness box this impression became more prepotent still. He was dark-haired, vulture-faced, with a nose that dominated his chin. Despite his peculiar kind of anonymous fame, which brought him some envy, his professional reputation was high. He wasn’t such an academic flyer as Adam Cornford, but his practice — in a country which didn’t support many private psychiatrists — was at least as large. He was said to have had a powerful and humane influence upon the Home Office criminologists. I had heard also that he was — this came as a surprise in his profession — a deeply religious man.

In the box, his manner was kind, not assertive, but with a flow of feeling underneath. He had, he answered, spent a good many hours with each of the two women. He had found Miss Ross — in this he was odd-man-out from the other doctors — as communicative as Miss Pateman, sometimes more completely so. It was true that occasionally she put up total “resistance”: but his judgment was that this was deliberate, and could be broken when she wanted. Not that he blamed her, that was one of her protective shields, such as we all had. To the puzzlement of many, he differed flatly from the others in his attitude to Cora Ross; he seemed to find her more interesting, or at least more explicable, than Kitty. Miss Ross’ father had left her mother when she was an infant; not much was known about him, Miss Ross’ memory of him was minimal and her mother was dead: there was some suggestion that he had been (and possibly still was, for no one knew whether he was alive) mentally unstable. He had been an obsessive gambler, but that might have been the least of it. Miss Ross had been left alone in her childhood more than most of us: it had been an unusually lonely bringing up. Perhaps that had conduced both to her immaturity (about which he agreed with Cornford) and to the sadistic fantasies, which she had certainly been possessed by since an early age: but that was common to many of us, so common that the absence was probably more “abnormal” than the presence.