but this was the merest professional habit, the result of a lifetime spent sowing doubt in jurors’ minds, for which he was peremptorily called to order after an objection by the prosecution.
Judging by the looks of coherent hatred he lasered across the courtroom at me, Clive must have worked out the truth by now, but it didn’t do him any good. Rather the opposite, in fact. You could tell that prison life didn’t really suit Clive. He looked not just older but also weaker, internally damaged, structurally unsound, as though some vital load-bearing element had collapsed. Not the least part of his torment must have been the discovery that the truth was not a marketable commodity in his current situation. His legal representatives were prepared to reverse the plea, if he insisted, but not on the basis of his having been kidnapped by myself and A. N. Other. The jury would never buy anything as far-fetched as that.
Instead, his counsel opted for damage limitation. He accepted that his client had met Karen off the train at Banbury, that they had set off together in his car, and that Clive had subsequently attempted to dispose of her body in the reservoir. Where he begged to differ from the prosecution was over the question of how she had met her death. To bring in a verdict of murder, he reminded the jury, they would have to be convinced that the evidence proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Clive had assaulted his victim with deadly intent. A pathologist for the defence would testify that the injury from which she died was consistent with those which might be sustained in the course of a road accident, while evidence before the court would show that the near-side wing of the Lotus had been badly damaged, indicating that it had been involved in a serious collision.
In his summing-up, prosecuting counsel treated this argument with the contempt it deserved.
‘It would no doubt be possible to construct an almost infinite number of ingenious scenarios which more or less fit the facts. But if you look at the situation not in the abstract but in the flesh, not as a theoretical problem but as a human reality, taking into account the cold-blooded and methodical manner in which the defendant acted after the victim’s death, then you may well conclude that his original account of the circumstances surrounding that event, as contained in the signed confession which he made to the police, is considerably more plausible than this belated and ignoble attempt to evade responsibility for his loathesome crime.’
They did. Clive got fifteen years and a stern rebuke from the judge for wasting everyone’s time. The police were complimented on their speedy and efficient handling of the case.
Life is polyphonic, narrative monodic, as I had occasion to remark one evening at Alison’s. There were eight of us to dinner, including a local purveyor of up-market crime fiction who monopolized both the wine and the conversation, to say nothing of ogling our hostess in a way I found extremely distasteful. My response was the donnish strategy of rubbishing by implication. To suggest that he was a second-rate writer, although true, would have been unacceptable. To argue that writing fiction is a trivial pursuit of interest only to second-rate minds, precisely because this is evident nonsense, was perfectly legitimate.
To confound the fellow further I illustrated my argument with a musical analogy, asserting that a horizontal medium such as narrative could offer only a faint and passing allusion to, or rather illusion of (appreciative laughter), life’s vertical complexities, like the implied harmonies in Bach’s works for solo violin. Human experience, however, was not a matter of one or two voices but a veritable
It never occurred to me that the boot would so soon be on the other foot and that I myself would be struggling with the intractable limitations of narrative. For in my attempt to describe fully and clearly the events which followed my discovery of Karen’s body that Friday night I have necessarily omitted everything which did not directly bear on these developments, in particular their effect on my relationship with Alison. Each new detail which emerged — Karen’s violent death, her illicit pregnancy, Clive’s involvement in both — amounted to another brick in the wall which the affair was erecting between us. When such a garish light was being cast on the activities of people close to me, I myself was inevitably lit up in an undesirable way. PLOs (‘persons like ourselves’, known as ‘people like us’ to those who aren’t, quite) instinctively shun anything and anyone which attracts general attention, from star tenors to vogue foods, let alone the subject of lurid articles appearing in the popular press under such headlines as SEX KILLING HUSBAND STERILE, POLICE TOLD.
But once both Karen and Clive had, in their different ways, been buried, the situation changed dramatically. The very factors which had made Alison take her distance from me earlier became a source of allurement once the whole affair was safely relegated to the past. Old scandals are as much a credit to a good family as new ones are an embarrassment. To the public, the dramatic termination of my marriage was a nine days’ wonder, soon forgotten for fresh sensations, but for Alison and me it was a secret we shared, an ordeal we had come through and which brought us closer together, while making it proper for us to be close.
Even so, we were circumspect about it. The public might have forgotten, but our friends hadn’t, and it was their judgement which would ultimately make or break us as a couple. This was not some reckless and torrid romance in which we would live for and through each other, letting the world go wag. We were both too old and wise to have any wish to run off to a desert island together. On the contrary, the basis of our mutual attraction was a feeling that the other was a suitable partner to share the lives we already led. I didn’t want Alison in the abstract, divorced from the rich and varied habitat which sustained her. Nor would she have wished to be wanted in that way. She would have found such adoration meaningless, and slightly disturbing. Our relationship not only had to be blameless, it had to be pronounced such by a jury of our peers. We had to be seen to have behaved
Our initial encounters were thus fairly furtive affairs, usually taking the form of trips to concerts and plays in London, where we could be reasonably sure of not being seen together by anyone we knew. Occasionally we risked going out to eat locally, and it was in the course of one such evening that our secret was finally revealed when we found ourselves sitting two tables away from a group including Thomas and Lynn Carter.
It was all rather awkward at first, with a good deal of pretending not to pretend not to be looking at each other. Finally Thomas came over and sat down with us. He pointed to Alison’s untouched portion of
‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’
‘Well no, actually.’
He seized a spoon and tucked in.
‘Call me Autolycus.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘I do,’ sighed Alison. ‘And it’s terrible.’
Thomas fixed me with a merry eye.
‘ “A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”. I didn’t know you two were seeing each other.’
‘We’re not,’ said Alison. ‘At least, we
‘Well we are,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘Well it depends what you mean.’
Realizing that he’d put his foot into wet cement, Thomas adroitly changed the subject to some problem involving the next meeting of the madrigal group.
A few days later Alison and I received invitations to dinner at the Carters’ the following weekend. The invitations were separate, but from the moment we arrived it was clear that we’d been invited as a couple. The other guests were a historian from Balliol whose wife sang with the group, and a senior editor at the University Press whose Dutch husband worked at the European nuclear research project near Abingdon. I was flattered by the quality of the company, and still more by the fact that Thomas had not invited any of the folk I’d met through Dennis and Karen. It was as if he wanted to make clear that that phase of my life was now over.
In return for his thoughtfulness I made a special effort to charm the other guests. The Dutch physicist, though a man of few words, was perfectly pleasant, and his wife was warm and witty, with a fund of anecdotes about a dictionary project she was supervising. The problem was the other couple. The wife was the classic North Oxford matriarch, that formidable combination of nag and nanny, like an intellectual Margaret Thatcher. She was undoubtedly the power behind the Chair her husband held, but he was an even thornier proposition. Eccentric as the comparison may appear, Oxford dons always used to remind me of
