‘That’s right, sweetheart,’ said Flo, trying to shield her son, ‘And he took a day off from work and all to help you.’
‘Work,’ said Dan. ‘Work. It’s not everyone who can work, either.’
‘Jack, why don’t you run along off to the pictures,’ said Rose.
‘But I want to see what happens in Court,’ said Jack.
Rose signalled to him with her eyes that Dan should be avoided: but Jack said: ‘The Court’s for nothing, and I’d have to pay for the pictures.’
‘That’s right,’ said Flo, trying to smile her man into good temper. ‘And so it won’t cost nothing if he stays.’
‘You can say cost,’ said Dan. ‘You can say it, you’re always saying you’re short of money, and I know where it goes.’
‘Now, now,’ said the lawyer. ‘There’s our case to consider. Let’s all keep calm and cool.’
Our case was on first after lunch. We went into the Court with Counsel’s anxious voice in our ears: ‘Do be careful what you say, please, please.’
They put Dan into the witness-box first. As soon as he was asked a question he replied: ‘I served my King and my Country, sir.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said our Counsel, in a coldly disapproving voice. ‘But! did. All through the war.’ ‘What’s that?’ said the ludge. Counsel, very irritated, said that this man had served in the Navy. ‘So I see from his papers,’ said the Judge, indifferently. Dan’s face darkened. His mouth had already opened in a shout of ‘Justice!’ when Counsel hastily dismissed him, and before they had time to establish even one of the rehearsed points.
Counsel now made a long and efficient statement, from which it appeared the old people were a variety of maniacal criminal. Everyone listened in a matter-of-fact way, like actors at a play. ‘How well he does it,’ the Court officials seemed to be thinking, as they listened to the earnest and accomplished young man practising a sober rhetoric which would one day take him to far more impressive surroundings than these, to argue big cases, important cases, involving large sums of money and large reputations. They were watching him as if he were a promising schoolboy in his last year, overripe to show what he could do in the great world; and when he concluded, elaborately grave, his voice sinking to a well-sustained note of quiet confidence, the Judge nodded, as if to say. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll go far.’ Then he returned to his notes.
In a few moments the opposing Counsel called Dan back again. This was a poor sort of man, who had long ago lost all hope of taking flight away from this dreary and unimportant Court. He was thin, worried-looking, and his voice was edged with a persistent sarcasm. He kept saying: ‘I put it to you …’ at Dan; and with every repetition of the phrase, Dan’s face clenched with uncertainty, tasting each separate word for a hidden trap. He was quite confused, and waiting for a familiar landmark. He did not understand that this Counsel was trying to establish the fact that he was a liar. He had been counting on Dan to deny he locked the bathroom against his clients. After a long preamble, designed to trip Dan up, which luckily he understood not one word of. Counsel arrived at the bathroom and was confounded by the way Dan, finding himself on prepared ground, drew himself up and entered into the part of a landlord concerned only to protect his tenants from the dirt and disease of the old couple. ‘And there are children in the house, too!’ Dan ended on a note of real sincerity. Thrown off balance, the opposing Counsel dismissed Dan, in order to find a fresh approach.
All this time the old people were sitting by themselves in a corner. The old man was slumped defeatedly against the back of a bench, suffering the continual jogs and jerks of his wife’s indignant elbow so slackly that each time she pushed that sharp bone into his side, his whole body slid a little way along the seat, till he righted himself with a straining pull of his shoulder muscles, pulling at the back of the high polished bench with a trembling hand. They were even older than I had thought, incredibly old, with the trembling fragility which comes to people so near their end that they have to conserve every movement in order that their strength may last through what they have to do. The old woman was trembling. A tiny parchment bag of bones, with a small white violent face on top; that was all she was, this terrible old woman of whom I’d heard so much and not really seen before. As the shameful disclosures about her way of living were made aloud for everyone to bear, she twisted her head about in a grimacing parody of scornful laughter, and cried in small gasps: ‘No, no, a lie,’ until the Judge looked gravely at her over his throne’s edge, and told her to be quiet. She put a handkerchief to her stretched and agonized mouth and remained still, but her trembling made the flowers on her soiled white hat rattle together, with a tiny dry sound; and the persistent dry rattling went on till people turned around to look, but the evidence of such misery in the midst of this official scene made them uncomfortable, and they turned away again.
By the time Dan had been dismissed for the second time, the Judge was in a bad temper. Details of emptied slop bowls, dirty lavatories, filth thrown downstairs, it was an offence to have to listen to them.
At first sight, Flo was a welcome change in the witness-box; a starched black Britannia, the embodiment of wrathful virtue. But as soon as she began to answer questions, it was a different matter, for the blood of her Italian grandmother responded at once to the drama of the situation; and our Counsel, with the expression of a man hurrying over the last few yards to safety, kept cutting her short, for fear of what might emerge.
Then the other Counsel took over. As he stood there in his dull black, the knobbly wig kept slipping backwards, exposing a large sweating expanse of red scalp, and he glanced continually at the notes in his hand, like a dull pupil in class. It was not that he had a bad case, in fact I think both our Counsel and lawyer expected him to win it; but he looked as if he hadn’t had a good one for years, and had forgotten the habit of confidence. And his manner was even more ponderously sarcastic than with Dan. With each supercilious phrase, Flo got more upset; she was already off balance because our own Counsel had shown no friendly emotion; and this man’s display of thin and peevish hostility caused her voice to rise and her gestures to enlarge.
‘Surely,’ grated Counsel, ‘no reasonable person would put
Flo shrugged. ‘That’s what I keep saying all the time, dear.’
‘You say …’ and Counsel consulted his notes, for the effectiveness of the gesture, ‘that she had a dish of pepper. Now what do you mean by that?’ Flo stared at him. ‘A
‘Well, if you don’t know what I mean I can’t help you.’ Flo held an imaginary pepper-pot over the edge of the witness-box, and shook it hard.
‘You mean a pepper-pot perhaps?’ smiled the Counsel.
‘I don’t mind what you call it, dear, it’s all the same to me.’
‘Mrs Bolt,’ said the Judge severely, ‘you really must not call Learned Counsel dear.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Proceed.’
After a pause Counsel said: ‘You will admit that pepper is very expensive.’
Flo raised her hands. ‘God knows,’ she exclaimed, ‘the way prices are going up it’s a wonder we are alive to tell the tale.’
‘I asked you if pepper was not very expensive.’
Flo stared again. ‘That’s what I said.’
‘Just exactly how much does pepper cost?’
‘I don’t rightly know, because I’m still using the pepper my friend from Edgware gave me when she had the blitz on her shop.’
‘Mrs Bolt,’ drawled the Judge, peering over the edge of his table like an irritated tortoise, ‘do please answer the questions put to you.’
Flo blushed at the injustice of it. ‘But I did answer. He said, how much does pepper cost, and I said I don’t know because…’
The Judge said reprovingly to Counsel: ‘I really do think the price of pepper is irrelevant to the point at issue.’
‘I was trying to establish a point, my lord.’
‘I think I can see the point you were trying to establish.’
At this evidence of the Judge’s short temper, our Counsel visibly brightened; but Flo was still miserable. ‘I was only trying to tell him because he …’
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,’ said the Judge.
After a long pause. Counsel pulled himself together for another onslaught. ‘What time of the year was this?’ he demanded cunningly.
‘Time of year? Tulip time.’
