Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

The judge’s procession left: the heads of the two women dipped out of sight. It was about ten to three. Slowly, in jerks and spasms, the courtroom emptied. As soon as we got outside into the hall, Margaret lit a cigarette, as in an interval at the theatre. In the rush, we all found ourselves near the refreshment table, where I brushed against Archibald Rose, wig in hand, eating a sausage roll.

“Now we shan’t be long,” he whispered to me, in a casual detached tone. None of the others had heard that remark: but each of us, certainly George, was behaving as though Rose was right, as though the jury would be returning soon. We talked very little. It was a good many minutes before George said: “Well, I suggest we might as well have a cup of tea.” We lingered over it, so weak and milky, like the tea I had tasted in the jail. The hall was less crowded, people were edging away. We drank more cups of tea. All of a sudden the delay seized hold of me. I didn’t know about the others, but later Margaret and Martin told me it was the same for them.

At half past four I said: “Let’s go for a stroll.” George said that he wouldn’t bother, found a chair in the now half-deserted hall, sat down and lit a pipe. The others were glad to escape into the free air. Neither of them dissenting, we went away from the Assize Hall, not just round the block, but on into the centre of the town, getting on for a mile away. Margaret knew what I was doing: so probably did Martin. I was trying to cheat the time of waiting — so as to get back when it was all over. We had lived through times of waiting before this. I might have recalled that other time with George in this same court: but curiously, so it seemed to me in retrospect, I didn’t. Maybe my memory blocked it off. Instead, it was much more like times that each of us had been through: meaningless suspense: bad air trips, making oneself read thirty pages before looking at one’s watch: Martin knowing that his son was driving, not told when he might arrive.

“What does all this mean?” Martin said, without any explanation, after we had walked a few hundred yards.

“It must mean that the jury are arguing,” I replied.

“I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. He had taken it for granted that the defence didn’t stand a chance.

“Would you?” Margaret asked me.

“No.” I was wondering who might have done. Perhaps the Patemans. Were they hopeful now?

It could be, Martin supposed, that one or two jurors were holding out. None of us had any idea, then or later, what happened in that jury room.

We reached the opulent streets, women coming out of shops, cherishing new hair-sets, complexions matt in the clear sunlight. It would take us twenty minutes to walk back, said Martin.

In sight of the Assize Hall, we made out the policemen on the steps. We hurried into the entrance hall: there were a few people round the refreshment table, others scattered about, George still sitting down. He gave us his open, inattentive smile. “Nothing’s happened,” he said.

During the next hours, we couldn’t cheat the time of waiting any more. Except that I had a conversation with a colleague of Edgar Hankins, a bright-eyed, preternaturally youthful-looking man. We had met occasionally at parties, and in the hall he drew me aside. He wanted, he was full of his own invention, to discuss the treatment of criminals sane and not-so-sane. If we assumed that the two young women were sane, which he believed, then he believed equally that they would never do anything of the kind again. In that case they were no danger to society. So what was the justification for keeping them in jail? It was pure superstition, he was saying. I had always found his kind of brightness boring, and that evening, time stretching out, I found it worse than that. When I returned to Margaret and Martin, they asked what we had been talking about, but I shook my head.

At last — and yet it seemed unexpected — we heard that the jury were coming back. When we went into the courtroom, we saw it gaping, nearly empty: the time was nearly eight o’clock: most of the spectators hadn’t been able to see the end. The two women walked up to the dock, Kitty’s eyes darting — with something like a smile — to her family. Cora had brushed her hair, which shone burnished as the court lights came on. The jury trampled across the room, making a clatter; it was as though one had not heard the noise of feet before. As they settled in their box, I saw one of them, a middle-aged woman with thick arms, gaze intently at Cora Ross.

The judge took his place and bowed. Then the old routine, in the Clerk’s rich voice.

“Members of the jury, who will speak as your foreman?”

A grey-haired man said: “I will.”

“Mr Foreman, do you find the prisoner, Cora Helen Passant Ross, guilty or not guilty of murder in this indictment?”

“Guilty.”

The same question, about Kathleen Mavis Pateman.

“Guilty.”

“And those are the verdicts of you all?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Cora Helen Passant Ross, you stand convicted of the felony of murder. Have you anything to say why you should not now be given judgment according to law?”

Cora stood erect, shoulders squared, her expression unmoved. “No,” she said, in a loud voice. Kitty Pateman followed her with a quieter, perfunctory no.

The judge looked at them, and said clearly but without inflection: “The sentence is a statutory one, and it is that you, and each of you, be sentenced to imprisonment for life.”

He did not say anything more. He gave them a nod, polite, almost gentle, dismissing them. They were taken below for the last time.

Neither in the courtroom, talking to the solicitors and to his junior, nor outside in the hall, when the final ritual was over, would Clive Bosanquet accept congratulations: he had too much emotional taste to do so, in a case like this. He looked, however, modestly satisfied: while Jamie Wilson, speaking to no one, rushed ahead of the others to the robing-room, his face surly with self-reproach. Leaning against the refreshment table, Benskin chatted with vivacity to other lawyers and gave us a cheerful wave. Of all the functionaries at the trial, the only one I actually spoke to, as we made our way to the entrance hall, was Superintendent Maxwell. He spun his bulk round, came up to me in soft-footed steps, and said, in a quiet high mutter: “Well, they didn’t get away with it. Now we’ve got to keep the other prisoners off them. I don’t envy anyone the job.”

I didn’t hear many comments, among the relics of the crowd. There was none, absolutely none — and there hadn’t been during the last minutes in court — of the gloating fulfilment which years before I had felt all round me, and in myself, when I heard the death sentence passed. You could call it catharsis, if you liked a prettier name. There was none of that. So far as there was a general mood, it seemed to be almost the opposite, something like anti-climax, let-down, or frustration.

In the tone, firm and yet diffident, in which he always used to issue his invitations, George said to the three of us: “I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour.” Before any of us replied, my sleeve was being gently tugged and Mrs Pateman was saying, very timidly: “I wonder if you could have a word with him, sir. It might settle him down. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, I’m sure.”

She was quite tearless. In fact, she didn’t mention her daughter, only her husband, who was standing at the side of the hall, gesticulating as he harangued Dick Pateman. As she led me towards them, she asked me if I would “humour him a bit”. She said that she didn’t know how he would get over it.

When he saw me, his gaze was fixed and angry. He seemed possessed by anger, as though that were the only feeling left.