George Passant (24 page)

‘I suppose we can.’

‘You’re afraid there’s a bad patch to go through first?’

‘I shan’t be sorry when it’s over.’ He laid a hand on her knee, with a gesture for him clumsy and grateful. He was dominating the room no longer. He said: ‘I always told you I should get into the public eye. But I didn’t imagine it on such a grand scale.’

It surprised me that he, as much as George, was full of the fear of disgrace. Often of disgrace in its most limited sense – the questions, the appearance in the dock, the hours of being exposed to the public view. They would be open to all eyes in court. Jack could imagine himself cutting a dash – and yet he showed as great a revulsion as George himself.

‘Anyway, we’ve got some time,’ said Jack. ‘When are the assizes, actually?’

Then George spoke: ‘I can’t accept the view that this is bound to go beyond the police court. I have thought over your objections, and I refuse to believe that they hold water.’

‘We’ve told you why you refuse to believe it,’ said Jack casually. But there came an unexpected flash of the George of years before. He said loudly: ‘I don’t regard you as qualified to hold an opinion. This is a point of legal machinery, and Lewis and I are the only people here capable of discussing it. I don’t propose to give you the responsibility.’

‘Jack is right,’ said Olive. ‘You’re thinking of nothing but the group.’

‘I’m thinking of ending this affair with as little danger as possible to all concerned,’ said George. ‘It’s true that I have to take other people into account. But, from every point of view, this ought to be settled in the police court. Of course, wherever it’s tried, if they understood the law of evidence, our private lives are utterly irrelevant. But in certain circumstances they might find an excuse to drag them into the court. In the police court they can’t go so far. Lewis can make them keep their malice to themselves.’

‘Is that true?’ said Olive.

I hesitated.

‘I don’t think they will bring it up there. They will be too busy with the real evidence.’

‘You’re still quite certain that, even if we show our defence, they’ll clearly send us for trial?’ said Jack.

‘You’re exaggerating the case against us,’ said George. ‘And even if you weren’t, it’s worth the risk. I admit that I want to save other people from unpleasantness as well as myself. But since you’re so concentrated on practical results’ – he said to Jack – ‘I might remind you that our chances are considerably better if that unpleasantness is never raised.’

Olive asked: ‘Do you agree?’

‘If there were a decent chance of finishing it in the police court,’ I said, ‘of course George would be right. But I can’t believe–’

‘You can’t pretend there’s no chance of finishing it,’ George said. ‘I want you to give a categorical answer.’

The others looked at me. I said: ‘I can’t say there’s no chance. There may be one in ten. We can’t rule it out for certain.’

‘Then I insist that we leave the possibility open. I reject the suggestion that we automatically let it go for trial. If you see a chance, even if it’s not absolutely watertight, we shall want you to take it.’ George raised his voice, and spoke to the other two in the assertive, protective tone of former days: ‘You’ve got to understand it’s important for both of you. As well as myself. You realise that the prejudice against us might decide the case.’

‘So long as they get us off the fraud–’ Jack said.

‘I’ve got to impress on you that the sort of prejudice they may raise is going to be the greatest obstacle to getting us off the fraud,’ George said. ‘You can’t separate them. That’s why I insist on every conceivable step being taken to finish it before they can insult us in the open.’

Olive said to me: ‘George is convincing me.’

I said: ‘I can’t go any further than this: if there’s any sign of a chance on the twenty-ninth, I’ll go for it. But I warn you, there’s not the slightest sign so far.’

Jack said: ‘If we let you do that, it isn’t for George’s reasons. You realise that?’ he said to George. ‘You can’t expect–’

George said: ‘I intend to be listened to. I’ve let you override me too easily before. This time it’s too important to allow myself to be treated as you want.’

THEY appeared before the magistrates’ court in the town hall on 29 December 1932.

In the week before, I had gone over the whole case with Eden and Hotchkinson. I explained to them that, if the unlikely happened and a chance opened, I might risk going for an acquittal on the spot. They both disagreed; I knew that they were right and that they thought I was losing my judgment; for I could not give them the real reason. I was contemplating a risk which, on the legal merits of the case, I should never have taken.

Eden was puzzled, for he knew that I had the case analysed and mastered. It was not an intricate one, but slightly untidy in a legal sense. It depended on a few points of fact, not at all on points of law.

The substance of the case was this: the evidence of fraud over the agency was slight, apart from one definite fact, the discordant information upon the circulation of the
Arrow
. The evidence over the farm and hostels was much stronger, but with no such definite fact. There were several suspicious indications, but the transactions had been friendly, with no written documents except the receipts. (The largest loans were two sums of £750 each from acquaintances of Jack’s, and £500 from Miss Geary.)

There existed no record of the information which was supposed to have been given. This was, so the prosecution were to claim, deliberately untrue in two ways: (1) by the receipts of the hostels being falsely quoted – those of the farm itself, by manipulating the figures of the money spent there by George and his friends from ’24 to ’31; (2) by Jack pretending to have managed such hostels himself and giving details on that authority.

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.

To most of the town tonight George is ‘a solicitor accused of fraud’. ‘I hope they get him’; a good many men, as kind-hearted as any of us can ever be, said at the time that I was reading. We are none of us men of flesh and bone except to ourselves.

Should I have had that reflection later in my life? Maybe I should have thought it over-indulgent. For in time behaviour took on a significance to me at least as great as inner nature. It was a change in me: not necessarily an increase in wisdom, but certainly in severity: a hardening: not a justification, but a change.