36
Leonard appeared before the magistrates court the same morning and was remanded in custody for a week charged with the murder of Tolson.
The most impressive and convincing part of his confession was that which described the interior of Tolson’s room at the time of the attack, accounting for details which Blakeley had not included, amongst them a broken glass of milk, an alarm clock and Tolson’s belt which had all been concealed beneath the upturned furniture. It was as if, in its clarity, he described a particular drawing for which he had had a long affection. In addition he had explained Blakeley’s presence at the scene and had produced, finally, the weapon itself. Between its claws were embedded the remains of hair and tissue which, several days later, were confirmed as having been torn from Tolson’s skull. This corroborated the evidence provided by Shaw who, at the initial hearing, stated that he had seen Leonard steal the hammer while it was still in Tolson’s use at Ewbank’s. The contractor’s name was stencilled on the shaft. Shaw also described in some detail the nature of the relationship that had existed between the accused and the victim, and a week later, when this latter evidence had been confirmed by several others, including Audrey and Ewbank himself, Leonard was sent for trial to the local Assizes.
Now that he was alone for the greater part of each day, his solitude only interrupted at predetermined times, Leonard found that he was less obsessed by thoughts and ideas that normally preoccupied him and more absorbed by certain images and visions. Even when his parents visited him he would turn aside their enquiries to describe to them the large figures hurtling through space by which he was now surrounded. His descriptions of these giants, white and black and trailing red flanges of cloud, and of massive shapes of flame and metal plunging from the sky, were interrupted with demands from his father to explain the circumstances of the confession and the delay between it and Tolson’s death. For John still believed in Leonard’s innocence, and saw his predicament as some hellish aberration of that plot fomented originally by Austen. Yet Leonard persisted in his descriptions, as though he were somehow instructing, advising them.
Then, one morning shortly before the trial, John visited him alone, making such demands for an explanation that Leonard, who had been absorbed in his heated description, looked up and said quietly, ‘You don’t realise at all, do you, how much I am on my own.… You don’t realise … and not just now but always. How I’ve always been so much on my own.’
‘But there’s been no need. It isn’t as if you’ve gone without love or affection,’ John said, more wretched himself as he saw that Leonard was almost in tears. ‘All these things have been available to you.’
‘I don’t know what it is. I think there’s something in me which, however sympathetic people might be at the beginning, eventually alienates them. Even frightens them. As if the more I need their affection and spontaneous interest the more sombre and menacing, the more threatening I become. It’s terrible. It’s a terrible thing. It’s like being damned before you’ve even been given a choice. Or like being shown what salvation is the moment after you’ve been told it’s no longer yours.’
For a while they sat in silence, Leonard looking at his father directly. Then he added, ‘I think there’s an element in us which refutes and condemns our understanding of ourselves, as if perversely we’re determined to be damned. I think that’s the key to everything.’
Such an outright rejection struck so deeply into John that he turned away, his face averted as though he had been physically assaulted.
‘It isn’t something for you to reproach yourself with,’ Leonard said. ‘I think all my ambition, what I’ve had, has been for something huge and impassive. Perhaps to that extent I’ve inherited it from you. I’ve always looked for something like that, something cold and northern and precise.’
Despite his distress, John was profoundly moved. For the first time he had come so close to Leonard that he felt he could now touch him. Even feel through him. When he asked him about the trial, Leonard said, ‘I don’t want you to worry on account of my loneliness. The strange thing is I’ve found something through it which is irreplaceable and couldn’t have been discovered in any other way. When I was younger, before I met Vic, I can’t tell you what it was like. The absolute loneliness, so that even the houses, the buildings I passed seemed to exude something that contaminated you and made you lonely. So sombre and remorseless. It terrifies me. At times I still can’t bear to look at certain things because they’re so black. As if they’re drained of life. And not just drained, but as if everything that appears to live, that attempts any sort of life is simply imitating some distant and incoherent ideal. Imitating. And it’s the sense of imitation that’s so forbidding. The whole impression of people playing. As though it’s all a deception, and the only person it doesn’t deceive is me. That’s what it is. The feeling that you’re isolated simply because you can’t be deceived.’
‘But I don’t understand. How can any compensation arise out of that?’
‘I don’t know. I think it must be the security of suffering. Despair breeds a kind of warmth which is intolerable yet a confirmation of something absolute, something final and secure. Beyond it you can see clearly where the end lies. It’s all blackness to me. Everything. But there are points of blackness so intense and absolute that it’s there I can feel a kind of joyless reassurance.’
He watched his father carefully a moment, then added, ‘I don’t think you realise what it was I found in Vic. What I almost found. But it was the separateness, the separateness of everything that lay between us. It wasn’t that one of us was good and the other bad, but that we were both these things because we were separate. Vic was my body, and I was his soul. We were one. Or could have been.… It’s the division that separates everything in life now, everything.’
Although such incoherence frightened John, he asked, ‘If you did kill Tolson … why have you waited so long to confess?’ He was now more than ever convinced of Leonard’s innocence, of the perversion of his son’s mind, through having witnessed the event; that it was, in fact, Blakeley’s crime.
‘Why have I waited? It was because I wanted a long, slow pain which I could control.’
‘But what do you mean?’ John said.
‘I couldn’t have tolerated a sharp pain. Tolson’s pain. One that overwhelmed all the senses. I wanted a slow pain, however intense, so that I could think while I had to endure it. So that I would know. That’s why Christ had to die slowly.’
John left in distress, though knowing that he would see Leonard immediately before the trial in the cells under the court room.
When he returned to the Place Stella, after watching his wretchedness for longer than she could bear, said wildly, ‘Why do you torment yourself so much with him?’
‘But can you cut yourself off so completely?’
‘How can I cut myself off?’ she said. ‘How can I? He’s the only person I’ve ever known who has gone through the whole of life without forming one single human relationship. You can’t cut yourself off from that. How can you separate yourself from something that doesn’t exist?’ And recognising the despair of her logic John could find no way of answering.
The trial created intense interest. Each morning large crowds of women surrounded the entrance to the court building, and on the fourth day, due to a mistake over the allocation of seats, there were angry scenes in the forecourt. Several women were injured, others arrested, and the hearing postponed for an hour until some who had managed to get into the building were rounded up and expelled.
The prisoner’s awareness during the trial appeared to fluctuate enormously. At one moment he would follow the proceedings with concentration, and at the next he would gaze up abstractedly at the glass dome of the ceiling as though the room were deserted. When matter-of-fact details were being given to the court he would unexpectedly blush and look utterly confused, whereas when accounts of the intensity of his relationship with Tolson were being provided he would look down on witness and officials alike with a scornful composure. This was particularly obvious when evidence was provided by Colonel Wetherby and the girl Enid who described between them what they had observed of the five days he and Tolson had spent alone looking after the marquees. When several drawings and paintings, provided by Austen, were submitted to the court, he listened blushing to his counsel’s description of them as unmistakable indications of mental derangement. He bowed his head, his hands clutched tightly between his knees.
The medical report submitted by the defence stated that Radcliffe was a psychotic who under duress became insane: there was an egotism, a concealed obsessive sexuality, and a mania for detail which were only associated with the insane, even an ability to explain all his own vagaries of feeling and action in terms of an irreducible and terrifying logic.
The report submitted by the prosecution stressed his rationality and intelligence, his strongly defined sense of independence, a thoughtful and careful attention to detail, and a sense of reasoning and argument that was both highly articulate and persuasive. Duress acted as a stimulus to these qualities, sharpening his perceptiveness and self-awareness to a point where it might reasonably be assumed that he could deceive most people. There was no physical evidence of homosexual practices.
The last witness to appear was Leonard himself. Until now he had shown no signs of real fear, even when listening to the evidence of Ewbank, Shaw, Pilkington and Audrey. Yet as he was led across the court to the witness box he seemed suddenly to become aware of sounds above his head; in the balcony, below which he had been seated throughout the hearing, was a solid crowd of women. They seemed to cling like a huge corporeal emblem to the wall of the room, a giant, prostrated bat. For a moment he faltered, filled with genuine dismay, even turning to one side as if he would go back. Then, flushed and responding to the pressure of the warder at his side, he crossed the room and climbed slowly into the stand. In the illumination that fell directly into the room from the glassed dome in the ceiling he appeared absurdly small and emaciated.
He answered his counsel’s questions with a curious lifelessness, as if he were either too embarrassed or too uninterested to speak. His expression alternated between boredom and momentary bouts of confusion. Occasionally when the barrister could not make himself heard, questions were written on a piece of paper and passed up to Leonard to read. At other times when, quite factually and in a toneless voice, he recounted incidents between Tolson and himself that had led up to the murder, and particularly one that had taken place immediately before the killing, and he witnessed the sensation they caused both in the gallery and in the court around him, he appeared quite dazed. And when asked to clarify what he had just said, he stared round the courtroom as though he had lost all sense of his situation and was privately speculating on some other problem. Such pauses became more frequent as the hearing progressed, but in no way discouraged his counsel who, if anything, took advantage of the laborious and repetitious method necessary to communicate with his client.
Only under cross-examination did he suddenly reveal any emotion, when the prosecutor questioned his description of Blakeley as a man suffering from intermittent fits of ‘histrionic schizophrenia’. Then he cried out, ‘I’ve read books! I know how to diagnose things of this sort. He was an evangelist. And like all evangelists he was incapable of distinguishing between destruction and sacrifice.’
Then later, when he was trying to describe the relationship that had existed between Tolson and himself, he said, almost in tears, ‘The battle was so intense between us because we could see something beyond it. It was the split between us that tormented us; the split in the whole of Western society.’
When it was suggested that he was trying to obscure something which was intensely personal and distasteful to him by giving it an air of objectivity, by disguising it in terms of some general theory, he stated vehemently, ‘You’ve got to accept that there is a love that exists between men which is neither obscene nor degrading, but is as powerful and as profound, and as fruitful, as that love which bears children. The love that men have for other men, as men, may be beyond some people’s powers of comprehension. But it has a subtlety and a flexibility, a power that creates order. Politics, art, religion: these things are the products of men’s loving. And by that I mean their hatred, their antagonism, their affection, as men, and their curiosity in one another as men. It isn’t that women have been deprived of these things, but simply that they can’t love in this way. They have been given something less abstract, more physical, something more easily understood. Law, art, politics, religion: these are the creation of men as men.’
After a considerable silence following this outburst, the prosecutor said quietly, ‘Do you think it’s unusual, or exceptional for men to kiss one another?’
‘This is wrong,’ Leonard said, incensed. ‘It wasn’t physical satisfaction I looked for, and it wasn’t something personal either. I’ve tried to explain. It was something almost communal and impersonal. You’re deliberately trying to misunderstand me.’
‘But don’t you feel that you’re obscuring something which is personal by giving it this cloak of objectivity, by theorising? And that you’ve done this consistently in all the behaviour you’ve described with Tolson? That, in fact, you are so aware of what occurred that you can only overcome your sense of distaste and guilt by explaining it in terms of the general corruption of society?’
‘No! No, it was the other way around!’
‘Why then did you kill him?’
‘Because I had to!… Whatever we did we destroyed. Everybody! Everything!’
‘What does that mean?’
Leonard had turned away. He seemed senseless. ‘Oh, God!’ he cried, shaking his fists at the court. ‘I wanted something huge and absolute! I wanted an absolute! I wanted an ideal! I wanted an order for things!’
‘But what does that mean?’ the prosecutor said, singularly unmoved by this display.
‘I wanted to love him. Everything: it was to love him. And as a man, as a human being.’
‘Not just as a man, physically?’
‘No … no. It was for everyone. I wanted to love him for everyone.’
Shortly after this the court was recessed and the Judge called the two opposing counsel to his chambers.
It seemed to Leonard, afterwards, that the trial had only been incidental. The hugeness by which he was now surrounded enveloped everything that had preceded it, so that even Tolson’s death was only a detail of the vast structure by which he was enclosed. It had a completeness, a wholeness, that dazed him, making him so exultant he could scarcely breathe. It contained everyone and everything. It was complete.
As he listened to the closing speeches of the trial he appeared calm and reflective, only turning his head slightly at certain phrases as though he caught some fragment of their implication. ‘… A guilt so monstrous that, like all the other emotions his puritanical mind finds intolerable, it is manufactured into some heartless theory about the destiny of men in general.… He has asked us to look at his crime as if it were the simple illustration of an elaborate theory which he is holding up for our approval.… Asking us to approve of his sensations: sensations he has twisted into a logic that would not only explain with indifference the death of seven people, but seventy, seven thousand, seven million. Every action that this man has ever committed has been a blind attempt to deny his own intolerable conscience.’
After a while, he seemed quite impervious to the voices and sat with hunched shoulders, slightly bored, gazing down at his feet. Only when a verdict of diminished responsibility had been returned and he was asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed did he stand up and look uncertainly around him, like someone waking from a dream.
He gazed at the wall opposite him for a while, then started speaking slowly, as though repeating something he had carefully rehearsed.
‘Whatever my limitations or my weaknesses,’ he said, his eyes moodily fixed on the insignia above the Judge’s head, ‘whatever they are and however misunderstood I have been, I’m absolutely sure that men desire above all things a moral authority. And that it was from a will for moral authority that I acted, and with a sense of moral authority that I saw everything. You’ve tried to judge my actions as though they were subject to the Common Law of the land, whereas the moral ground on which my struggle with Tolson took place was at a level outside that of Common Law. And this is its vulnerability, that the Common Law is separate from and only coincidental with morality. Its single quality is its expediency and not its justice. It is only by chance that what is morally right coincides with what is judicially expedient. What happens when a moral man has to act politically.…’
As the Judge attempted to intervene, Leonard added more vehemently, even drowning his voice, ‘This has been a trial before men when it should and could have been a trial before God. To have found me insane is insanity itself, for you should have tried to determine whether I acted in accordance with a corrupt world, or against the principles of an uncorrupt world. I’m condemned not because of what I am but because of what you are. My crime is clear. It is that you have been content!’
He was suddenly so overcome with a fit of coughing, one in which his face turned a bright crimson, that he had to be helped into a chair.
A short while after his trial, Leonard began to feel that he’d been released. Something now was so complete and whole as to be unbreakable. He was surrounded by solidity, by the heaviness of things. Even the thick, featureless walls of the prison confirmed it. Clouds roared intermittently across the sky, great nervous sheets of vapour, convulsed by freakish disturbances of the air; then periods of stillness, so that all the human sounds that came to his ears, of voices, of feet shuffling, completely enraptured him. Whenever he saw people, particularly someone he had not met before, a new warder, a new doctor, a new minister, he was frequently overcome with breathlessness, as though he could scarcely contain his sense of them, his feeling for them. He touched them, smiling at them reconcilingly. He could touch everything.
Some while later he was transferred to a mental institution for criminal defectives. His behaviour had become so eccentric that it amounted to the continual and open soliciting of other prisoners, and to fits of incoherent moralising whenever he was confined for his behaviour.
In this new institution he was carefully segregated from the other inmates and only allowed to mix with them under supervision for short periods of each week. He became thinner, and increasingly intense, didactic and apologetic by turn in conversation; and frequently, when alone in his cell, given to long bouts of preaching in which he confirmed his discovery of the brotherhood of man.
His behaviour became even more extreme. Unless restrained, he tended to rush at people, flinging himself upon them in violent attempts to embrace them. He would hurl himself against the walls and the door of his cell, and had often to be secured to his bed before any attempt could be made to console him. Here, while waiting for the injection, he would lie straining and crying at his bonds, and shouting the word ‘Love!’ until he was finally subdued.
One night, when it seemed his fragile and emaciated body could no longer contain the violence which possessed it, he suffered a haemorrhage of the brain and, shortly after his parents reached him the following morning, he died.
He was thin and barely recognisable. The bone had almost penetrated the skin and even in death his body seemed contorted by some incredible power. He had a beard and his hair was long, almost white, the face itself so narrow and pale that it was like some deeply-carved piece of stone. The resemblance to their son was so remote that his parents appeared to suffer little remorse or pain at seeing him; more, a sense of distaste.
The combination of horror and shock had the effect of turning his father aside from normal life. He became silent, self-absorbed and unapproachable. He scarcely slept and was haunted by such strange visions that whenever someone spoke to him he was apt to stare at them with an expression of naked terror. Finally, at Alex’s suggestion, Stella was encouraged to take the old man away to the South.
Elizabeth, at her own insistence, was left with Austen and Isabel. She had become a determined and confident woman. In the summer her child was born. It was a boy, with a physique peculiar for a Radcliffe in its size and strength. It had, however, unmistakable Radcliffe eyes, dark and enigmatic. Occasionally, as she watched it, Elizabeth saw in its face the gaze of her brother, quiet and uncompromising. But then some energetic movement of its body would dispel the brief impression and, as it grew, its look of confidence, its peculiar independence, became a source of consolation to her.
There had been some suggestion that Austen should take over John’s place at Beaumont, but after considering various municipal schemes, it was eventually agreed that it should be pulled down.
Elizabeth, Austen and Isabel moved to the South, and were never heard of in the district again.
For a year the Place stood empty, crumbling under the fingers of vandals by day, and by night under its own aged momentum. It grew more derelict and forbidding, its blackness no longer relieved by occasional lights and gleams from its windows, its grounds no longer maintained by patient and persistent hands. Beyond its fringe of trees and shrubs it seemed to be waiting, crouched, its stone shielded by those dark trunks that grew about it like limbs. Sometimes at night the inhabitants of the nearer houses heard crashes echoing from its empty rooms. But each morning it still stood there whole and complete. It was almost as if it were struggling unseen within itself.
When the workmen came, tractors tore effortlessly at the old stonework. Steel hawsers were clamped round the walls and pillars, and within a few days the building that, in its older parts, had stood for nearly five hundred years was levelled to the ground.
The church too was demolished, its foundations pronounced to be dangerous from subsidence due to the mining beneath; the cost of renovation was too high. Its various treasures were distributed amongst local museums, though the sculptured effigies themselves were broken up. A more serviceable church of brick was constructed and, although equally deserted, it was larger, cleaner and uncluttered by decoration.
The housing estate that had previously enclosed the Place on all sides seized quickly on this last piece of ground; a crescent was laid out where it had stood, and council houses, erected on either side, finally linked the two avenues that had flanked it and its denuded grounds for two decades. All this happened within two years, so that now there is no evidence, except for a slight undulation of the ground, that the Place stood on this particular spot, or that a family, whose history extended over six centuries, had ever made its mark on this hard and indomitable landscape. Occasionally, as men dig in the gardens of the new houses, they unearth fragments of carved stone. These they stack to one side against the low fences, or use to decorate their rockeries.