Charles Snow - George Passant

The prosecution could produce, over the farm business, several consistent and interrelated stories. The total effect was bound to be strong. But they did not possess an indisputable concrete piece of evidence.

It was that singularly which threw the story of the Arrow into relief. When Jack had approached people to borrow money to buy the agency, George had proved its soundness by showing them a definite figure for the circulation. He had put this figure on paper; and his statement had come into the hands of the prosecution. They were out to show that it was deliberately false.

That figure was the most concrete fact they held. Apart from it, they might have omitted the count of the agency altogether.

I have anticipated a little here. We did not possess the structure of the case so completely when we went into the police court on the twenty-ninth.

Before we had been there an hour, I knew, as any lawyer must have known, that we had no choice. It would go for trial; we were compelled to reserve our defence.

The man opposite built up a case that, although we could have delayed it, was not going to be dismissed. During the morning, everyone began to realise that nothing could be settled; Olive told me later that she felt a release from anxiety — as soon as she was certain that this could not be a decisive day.

The prosecution ran through their witnesses. The first was one of the four whom Jack had induced to lend money to buy the advertising firm, a slow-voiced man with kindly and stupid brown eyes.

‘Mr Cotery made a definite statement about the firm’s customers?’ asked T—, the prosecutor.

‘Yes.’

‘He mentioned the previous year’s turnover?’

‘Yes.’

‘Also the number of advertisers the firm were agents for?’

‘Yes.’

After other questions, he asked whether Jack referred to the circulation of Martineau’s advertising paper.

‘Yes.’

‘Can you reproduce that statement?’

‘I made a note of it at the time.’

‘Will you give me the figures?’

He read them out. The figure of the circulation sounded unfamiliar: I remembered it in George’s account as 5300; now it appeared as 6000. I looked up my own papers and found that I was right.

‘Didn’t those figures strike you as large?’

‘They did.’

‘What did Mr Cotery say?’

‘He said they’d be larger still now Mr Martineau had disappeared and his religious articles would be pushed out of the paper.’ There were some chuckles.

‘Did you ask for some guarantees?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you tell us exactly what you did?’

‘I asked Mr Cotery if he could show me what these figures were based on. So he introduced me to Mr Passant, who told me that he was a solicitor and had a good deal to do with figures and had known the former owner of the agency, Mr Martineau. He said he had received a statement from Mr Martineau giving the actual circulation. It was not 6000. Mr Cotery had been a little too optimistic, it was just over 5000. He offered to show me his notes of this statement. And if I were doubtful he promised to trace Mr Martineau, who had gone away, and get him to write to me.’

‘Did you take advantage of that offer?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t see any reason to. I had known Mr Cotery for some time, I felt sure it was all above board. I could see Mr Passant knew what he was talking about.’

The other witnesses followed with the information that T— had foretold in his speech; similar stories to the first, some including Olive. Then an accountant brought out some figures of the agency’s business, in particular those of the Arrow : ‘What was the average circulation in the year 1927?’

‘Eleven hundred per week. So far as I can tell. The books are not very complete.’

‘What would you say was the maximum possible for that year? Making every allowance you can?’

‘Perhaps fifteen hundred.’ This had been threatened in the speech.

They brought up witnesses against the farm. It was at this stage we realised for certain the legal structure of the case. Essentially the story was the same. George had taken a less prominent part, Olive substantially more. The information which Jack had given his investors was more complicated, not easy to contradict by a single fact; but several men attacked it piece by piece. Jack had asked advice about the business from a man who ran a hostel himself in another part of the country; the accounts he had given second-hand of this interview were different from the other’s remembrance of it. The statistics of visitors to the farm before 1929 were compared — though here there were some uncertainties — with those given by George and Jack to several witnesses.

At lunch time I said to George: ‘If we defend it today — it is bound to go for trial.’

He argued bitterly, but his reason was too strong in the end.

‘You’d better play for safety,’ he said. ‘Though I still insist there are overwhelming advantages in getting it wiped off now.’

‘If we try that,’ I said, ‘there’ll be a remand for a week or two. We shall have to show our hand. And they’ll still send the case on.’

‘If these magistrates were trained as they ought to be,’ said George, ‘instead of amateurs who are feeling proud of themselves for doing their civic duty, we could fight it out.’

He turned away. ‘As it is, you’d better play for safety.’

I told Eden and Hotchkinson. Eden said: ‘I always thought you’d take the sensible view before it was too late.’

When the prosecution’s case was finished I made the formal statement that there was no case to go before the jury, but that the nature of the defence could not be disclosed.

The three were committed for trial at the next assizes; bail was renewed for each of them in the same amounts.

THE local papers were lying on a chair in Eden’s dining-room when I got back from the court. Under the bright reading lamp, their difference of colour disappeared — though I remembered from childhood the faint grey sheen of one, the yellow tinge in the other. On both of the front pages, the police court charge flared up.

There was a photograph of Olive. ‘Miss Calvert, a well-known figure in town social circles, the daughter of the late James Calvert, J P’… ‘Mr Passant, a qualified solicitor and a lecturer in the Technical College and School of Art’…a paragraph about myself. The reports were fair enough.

Everything in them would inevitably have been recorded in any newspaper of a scandal in any town. They were a highest common factor of interest; they were what any acquaintance, not particularly friendly or malign, would tell his friends, when he heard of the event. But it was because of that, because I could find nothing in the reports themselves to expend my anger on, that they brought a more hopeless sense of loneliness and enmity.

‘Allegations against Solicitor.’ The pitiful inadequacy of it all! The timorous way in which the news, the reporters, the people round us, we ourselves (for the news is merely our own voice) need to make shapes and counters out of human beings in order not to endanger anything in ourselves. George Passant is not George Passant; he is not the man rooted in as many complexities as we are ourselves, as bewildering in action and yet taking himself as much for granted as we do ourselves; he is not the man with his own private history, desires, mannerisms, perversities like our own, cowardice and braveries, odd habits of mind different from ours but of the same family, delights and, like us all, private oddities in love — a man of flesh and bone, as real as ourselves. He is not that; if he were, our own identity and uniqueness would have gone.