through them was not apprehension at the questioning they were going to prompt but the briefest moment of nostalgia.
‘Do you recognize – remember – these photographs?’
‘Of course I do!’ replied Jordan, unthinkingly.
‘Of course you do,’ again mocked Bartle, as he looked up to the bench. ‘I would particularly invite your honour to look at the ring upon Alyce Appleton’s finger as I go through the numbered sequence. Here – dated as they all are – is Mrs Appleton boarding a yacht to another sailing excursion, this time to the lies de Porquerolles. And print five shows Mrs Appleton and Mr Jordan at Cagnes. Print six has them at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo and this,’ declared Bartle with the enthusiasm of a conjuror groping into his top hat for the rabbit, ‘is the photograph of Alyce Appleton passing through Nice airport for her return to America…’ Bartle paused, to create his moment. ‘Each of the photographs before you, your honour, very clearly show Alyce Appleton wearing the joke, inconsequential plastic ring so seriously slipped upon her finger by the defendant, the gesture celebrated with champagne.’
And he hadn’t once been aware of it being on Alyce’s finger after that one fun lunch at the Mouscardins restaurant, thought Jordan.
Alyce walked unaided but with her lawyer attentively close at hand to the witness stand, her doctor tensed forward from his chair behind, took the oath in a controlled voice and settled herself demurely in her seat, knees discreetly covered by her mid-calf skirt, hands crossed in her lap. Despite the lack of make-up, there was a tinge of natural colour to her cheeks. In a steady, controlled voice she went through the identifying formalities before looking expectantly to Daniel Beckwith. On her trip to France, she agreed, she had had an affair – the first in which she had engaged after her marriage to Alfred Appleton – with Harvey Jordan. She could not recall a time in her life when she had felt so lost, so abandoned. Having initiated the divorce proceedings after discovering she had a sexual disease and undergone successful treatment, she had tried to distance herself as far away as she could from a husband she despised and for whom she no longer had any feeling other than contempt. When she’d got to France she’d realized it was not the good idea she had imagined it would be. She was lonely, her confidence gone: there’d been days – specifically two, she admitted, under Beckwith’s questioning – when she hadn’t bothered to bathe or even get out of her hotel bed. Harvey Jordan had been kind. At no time had his attitude towards her been that of a predatory seducer. She’d been intrigued by his invitation to what emerged to be the prison in which the man in the iron mask had been held, never for a moment considering the possibility of his making a sexual advance. Which he didn’t. Feeling as she did because of her personal circumstances – the circumstances of being betrayed and abandoned – she had been deeply moved at seeing the cell in which someone had been shut off from the world, as she at that moment felt herself to have been.
‘What happened after you disembarked from the catamaran back in Cannes, to return to the hotel at which you were both staying?’ asked Beckwith.
Looking directly at the man, her voice even and clear, Alyce said, ‘Harvey asked if I wanted to have dinner. I told him no, that I was tired after being at sea all day and that I wanted to go to bed. But not alone.’
‘Had Harvey Jordan made any sort of sexual approach, any sexual advances, prior to your telling him that?’
‘No, none whatsoever.’
‘So the approach came from you, without any encouragement or pressure from him?’
‘Yes. Although when I said it I didn’t think of it – imagine it – as a sexual approach. I’d been too long alone, like the poor man who’d spent his life in jail for an offence that has never been positively known. I just didn’t want to be alone that night.’
‘But that night you and Harvey Jordan made love?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you a willing partner to the lovemaking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did Harvey Jordan force himself upon you?’
‘Absolutely not! I had only ever known one man, sexually, before Harvey, who was the most gentle, considerate man I could ever have imagined. Sex with my husband had been close to rape. Sex with Harvey was what I’d always imagined love to be, but never known.’
The reactions stirred through the court. From the Appleton table there was anger from the man himself, but a smile of satisfaction from Bartle. Beckwith irritably tapped his finger against his leg.
Quickly Beckwith said, ‘Did you imagine yourself – believe yourself – falling in love with Harvey Jordan?’
‘Of course not! Neither of us, from that night until I left to return here, to this divorce, had any illusions or fantasies about what was happening. We were having an affair, for my part a wonderful affair. But it ended with my flight taking off from Nice.’
‘You did not intend – plan – ever to see him again?’
‘Never.’
‘What was your reaction at learning that Harvey Jordan had been cited as a co- respondent in this divorce? And that a damages claim for criminal conversations had been filed against him?’
‘Great distress. I do not deny the affair in France. But according to my understanding of the damages accusation Harvey Jordan is not in any way responsible for me divorcing my husband. By the time I met Harvey Jordan there was not the slightest affection remaining to alienate me from my husband. There hadn’t been, for a very long time.’
As he sat, Beckwith leaned close to Jordan and said, ‘Better than I’d hoped.’
Apart from the actual moment of admitting that she had made the first sexual move, Alyce had avoided looking at Jordan. He thought she might have returned to him when her examination switched from Beckwith to Bartle, ready to give a smile of both thanks and encouragement, but she didn’t. She did shift on the witness stand, sitting more positively upright, as if preparing herself for the attack that was to come. But it was with an attitude of defiance – forced defiance maybe – not the lassitude under which she had appeared crushed throughout most of the hearing.
‘You went to France still considering another reconciliation with your husband, didn’t you? That’s why you took the final irrevocable documentation with you instead of signing it here, in America.’
‘I had no intention whatsoever of entering another attempted reconciliation with a husband who had given me venereal disease. The final documents were not signed here in America because they weren’t ready when I went to France. They were sent to me, for signature, while I was there.’
‘In France you fell in love with Harvey Jordan…’ Bartle paused, searching for the quote from his notes. ‘“The most gentle, considerate man I could ever have imagined”.’
‘No.’ Her face was more flushed now, with what Jordan inferred to be anger.
‘You were so much in love with him that you couldn’t wait to get into bed with him, could you? So eager, in fact, that you actually invited him to sleep with you?’
‘After enduring the life to which I was subjected by my whoring husband I welcomed gentility and kindness.’
‘Is that why you were happy to settle with a plastic token of love!’
‘I would…’ started Alyce, but stopped. Instead she said, ‘It wasn’t a love token. As Harvey has already told you, it was a joke, a silly joke that meant nothing.’
‘A silly joke that meant nothing but which you continued to wear throughout your time together in France, even on the plane coming back here for your divorce action that you didn’t finally initiate until you met Harvey Jordan?’
‘I’ve answered your question,’ said Alyce.
‘Not quite,’ argued Bartle. ‘You began answering but changed your mind about what you were going to say. What was that, Mrs Appleton, that you originally intended to say?’
‘I said what I intended to say,’ insisted the woman.
‘Did you set yourself a time limit, to take a lover in France?’
‘My purpose in going to France was to get as far away as I could from a man of whom my contempt and disgust was absolute, not to take a lover.’
‘She’s holding up well,’ Beckwith leaned sideways to whisper to Jordan. ‘He’s trying to run her down like a truck but she’s not letting him.’ Beside his lawyer Jordan was burning with fury, hands tightly gripped together beneath the court table.
