Until that summer neither Jenny nor Liz had been inside a court of law. Julian had, since as a young man he had read for the Bar, with the secret intention of never practising. To both Jenny and Liz, it all struck strange, with the kind of discomfort an apprehensive person feels on entering a sick room or happening on a service in a foreign church.
In the courtroom, on a midsummer morning, there didn’t seem much to inspire any superstitious dread, yet Liz was feeling something close to that. True, the room, one of the courts nearest to the Strand, was the wrong shape, much too high for its floor space, like a basilica gone mad: but, waiting for the judge, the officials, the barristers, the solicitors, most of the spectators, including Hillmorton, looked comfortable enough. The benches were hard, it was going to be a long trial, trust this judge, someone was chattering, it was going to be hard on the backside. On opposite halves of the room, though separated by only three or four yards, Jenny and Liz were glancing at their solicitors for reassurance.
There sat Symington, reposeful after a word with the silk in front of him. When she noticed him, even Liz, who wasn’t struck by handsome men, for an instant thought that he was worth looking at. But she and Jenny, in this alike, as in other responses that morning, more than they could know, were feeling as other litigants had often felt. They didn’t enjoy the sight of the lawyers being so jolly among one another. Hadn’t they any nerves? Didn’t they imagine that others might have nerves?
The silk on the Underwoods’ side was porcine, Jenny’s silk was aquiline: they were having a cheerful insulting match, like undergraduates. As though the result of the case didn’t matter to them or anyone else – they weren’t even funny, Liz’s temper was sullen, why did they fancy themselves as humorists? Someone was still complaining about hard benches, as though that were the issue to be decided. At ten thirty precisely, a chime from a church outside could just be heard, an inside door opened, feet shuffled as people stood up, the judge came in, walked along the dais, gave an affable plump man’s bow. Then he settled in his seat, with the air of one not at all impatient, contented to be settled there for a good long stay.
Mr Justice Bosanquet had, in his own modest realistic view, a good deal to be contented about. He had become a High Court Judge distinctly late, so late that he had resigned himself to being passed over: no earnings to fret about now, and a more serious fret removed by a satisfactory pension at the end. The Family Division was a nice terminal job for anyone like himself, not much of an abstract lawyer, but still inquisitive about people. In fact, he was a shrewd and able man, with more than his share of human interest.
He had a round face, with small, very bright eyes, and vaguely suggested either a Dickensian philanthropist or a Chinese statesman Chairman Bosanquet. Or, since the Chinese teachers sat on mats, not chairs, the title should really have been translated, matmaster – Matmaster Mao, Matmaster Bosanquet. It would have fitted him. He would have sat on a mat, or on anything else possible to sit on, for any length of time he thought necessary to reach a judgement.
To those not domesticated to the courts, quick-thinking women like Jenny and Liz, and even to acquaintances such as Lorimer, who dropped in to give Jenny inarticulate support, the entire process seemed oblivious of time – and they felt like that before the end of the first day, not to speak of the days that followed. It was the impression which also damped down strangers, when they first listened to the parliamentary process. Were these people operating in periods of months or years? Or aeons? Or were they merely timeless?
The trouble was, of course, that for business purposes spoken speech was by now an anachronism. One was conditioned to reading: and one read three or four times as fast as anyone could speak. Jenny had read all of Symington’s briefs to counsel. He had come to respect her sharpness and precision. She wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense or blearing over or anything she couldn’t make sense of in the witness box. The final brief was the basis of her counsel’s opening speech that day. To read, it had taken her about half an hour, which included time for her own questions. In court, it lasted almost all of the first morning: that included time for gentle, pertinacious, twinkling questions from Mr Justice Bosanquet, and a few objections, part of the game, private badinage, incomprehensible to all but the lawyers, from the Underwoods’ counsel.
Listening to the opening speech Jenny at moments felt sensations of déjà vu, and at others of being a chilling distance away. This man, whose name was Lander, under his wig young-looking for a middle-aged man and in private entertaining, was talking of her father and herself. It was as though she had been dead some time, and someone had unaccountably written her biography and then adapted it for the stage: someone who didn’t know her, and had got a few things right and some grotesquely wrong. In this respect unlike Liz, no one was less superstitious than Jenny, but she was near to seeing ghosts, but not the authentic ghosts. She found herself painfully nervous. Whether it would have been better if there wasn’t a decision hanging on all this, she couldn’t have told.
Actually Lander was being entirely competent, though in the newspapers next day the extracts made him appear either foolish or preternaturally bright. ‘Cordelia cut out by King Lear,’ said a headline: it was true that he hadn’t been able to resist a bumbling allusion. When she heard it (it was a product of counsel’s own genius, not Symington’s) Jenny blushed as she hadn’t for twenty years, and was thinking with snapping rage that she was as much like Cordelia as she was like Brigitte Bardot. She thought this more bitterly when she read the paper next day.
Lander began by saying that Massie when he made his last will was a very old man.
‘Old age is relative, but perhaps we can all agree that the late eighties is genuinely old age.’ It was the plaintiff’s submission that this was a case of undue influence. ‘In general old people are often susceptible to the pressure, influence and persuasion of those round them.
‘It is common knowledge that, if we live long enough, we find our memories likely to deteriorate, and also our resistance to influence likely to be weaker. And so this is a familiar story, one that many of us have heard of, a very very old man being grossly over-influenced, being psychologically coerced, I don’t wish to go further than that at this stage, by a very determined lady.’
That lady, Lander explained, was not his daughter. To Jenny, this was the passage, lasting perhaps only five minutes on the clock, where her skin grew thinnest and she couldn’t have given a précis of what she heard.
He was carefully not covering up the breach between father and daughter, and other lawyers thought that this was good pleading. There had been a breach: Mrs Rastall would be the last person to deny it, she would make it clear when she gave evidence. She couldn’t explain it: there hadn’t been a definite quarrel: her father didn’t approve of her marriage but that was long since ended, fifteen years before, and she had not married again.
His wife, her mother, had died when Mrs Rastall was in her teens, and had left her a small settlement. One couldn’t explore human motives, but conceivably that had begun to jaundice him (this was an interpretation of Lander’s own which Jenny did not for an instant believe). She had seen little of her father for years, simply because he demonstrated that he didn’t wish it. She had done her best to restore their relations but without success. It was here that Lander interpolated his patch of eloquence, smiling with vicarious regret, about Cordelia.
‘Mrs Rastall wishes to conceal nothing about this personal sorrow. On the other hand – and I now come to the real hard and in my submission completely unshakeable substance of her case. Many years after this break between father and daughter had come into existence – until quite recently, until the last will of all, made so shortly before his death – years after the last time he had seen his daughter, Mr Massie was still making will after will leaving considerable portions of his estate, never less than half, and more often the greater part of it, to Mrs Rastall. There is nothing surprising about that. It is what most fathers, however eccentric their behaviour, would consider it fitting to do for an only child.’
Lander broke off into an exposition of Massie’s will-making proclivities. The judge was smiling placidly, and there were similar smiles in the court. Jenny had ceased to wince: here was business, here was neutral territory. ‘Yes, the old man had enjoyed making wills,’ said Lander. It was not uncommon to meet this habit among the old, particularly among what he might call the rather cantankerous old. They had a sense of power and they relished tantalising people round them who had expectations (this was another of the quotations in the next morning’s papers). There was a burst of laughter in court, audibly from Julian Underwood, and tight grins elsewhere. There would be evidence about this series of wills from Mr Massie’s former solicitor, Lander laid a stress on the adjective. They had some features in common. They all began with a formula saying that the testator had no intention of leaving money to any institution, any place where he had been educated and specifically not to any establishment remotely connected with the Church of England. (Mr Justice Bosanquet asked impassively: ‘Am I right, Mr Lander, in getting the impression that the late Mr Massie had been a member of the Anglican Church, but had rather lost enthusiasm for it?’
‘Quite right, my lord.’ Deadpan reply, another burst of hilarity from Julian.)
Then various charities, appearing in one will, disappearing in the next as he became displeased with them. Bequests to personal attendants, doctors and the rest.
‘But we shall learn that the particular persons, the physician who attended him, his housekeeper and other servants, were all in due course changed as Mrs Underwood took charge of his household arrangements. Then at the end a bequest, and always a very substantial bequest, except in the last will when it was removed altogether, to his daughter.’
When Mrs Underwood took charge there were changes. They began, it was difficult to fix the exact month, but some time in 1966, four years before he died. The medical practitioner was changed.
‘I should say at once that we have nothing whatever against the competence, responsibility or good faith of any of the persons appointed. In particular there was a change in Mr Massie’s legal adviser. His former solicitor, Mr Balderstone, who had served him for a lifetime, was replaced to all intents and purposes by Mr Skelding. Mr Skelding happened to be Mrs Underwood’s solicitor, as of long standing. I have to reiterate that Mr Skelding is a well-known lawyer of high professional reputation. No one has the slightest intention of detracting from this. It was Mr Skelding who drew up the final will, learning from Mrs Underwood that these instructions were those of the testator. Mr Skelding was given copies of three of the previous wills, and was instructed that the initial formulae should be preserved including the remarks about the Church of England’ (laughter). ‘There was however to be a major alteration. The residual estate, that is the largest part of it, was no longer to go to Mrs Rastall, whose name as I have mentioned before disappears entirely, but instead to Mrs Underwood’s son. Mr Skelding in person took this will to Mr Massie and it was signed and witnessed a month before Mr Massie’s death.’
Then Lander went off on a disquisition which connoisseurs of such speeches judged unnecessary, or badly timed. He was talking of Mr Massie being immobilised in the downstairs sitting-room. For the last two or three years, that is, during the tenure of the new housekeeper, he had remained in that one room, and only Mrs Underwood and the new doctor had free access to him.
Though connoisseurs thought that this passage was at best tedious and added nothing, they might have been wrong. The case was being decided by the single judge, and this particular judge was the most tireless of men. It was conceivable that, in his career as a counsel, this was how he would have argued the case himself, not only leaving no stone unturned, but turning each stone several times. Certainly he showed no sign of boredom, and went on making notes as devotedly as a student in the last week before his examination. He looked up once, and asked:
‘Do we have any information about visitors to Mr Massie during this last period?’
‘I believe that visitors of any kind had to obtain permission from the doctor or Mrs Underwood, but that can be confirmed.’
‘That would be quite natural in his state of health.’
Jenny, with the suspiciousness of stretched nerves, heard that as a defence of Mrs Underwood.
The morning was pounding on, the audience was getting restless for lunch. But Lander’s last words were suddenly succinct, and attention stiffened.
‘I have to say one thing which may seem suggestive. At no time during Mr Massie’s last illness did Mrs Underwood communicate with Mr Massie’s daughter. Even when he was without any shadow of doubt approaching his end. There was no communication of any kind. Mrs Rastall had no warning that he was approaching his death. She had no opportunity of coming to his death bed. The first she knew that he had died was through the death notices in The Times.’
Liz had known all this, but rather as one knows a historical fact. She had been certain that it was a mistake. Ever since the will was challenged she had looked back over these mistakes. And yet to hear this out loud – it sounded different in kind, not a mistake, not even any of the things it might have been, a calculation or a sign of coldness, callousness or pure indifference, but more like a crime or worse still a shame. As though one had been turned down by a man and he was bragging about your offer to his friends. Liz had a prickle of gooseflesh, cold with fury and shame.
She glanced along the seat towards Jenny. Neither of them had seen each other before that morning, any more than had Mrs Underwood and Jenny. They would go on seeing each other in court and then perhaps not again. Liz felt nothing but dislike. Jenny felt dislike, with the faintest edge of curiosity. They were both passionate women, capable of hatred, and when they hated they had no room for efforts of refinement. And yet, since no one in court or anywhere else knew them both, or was ever to do so, there was no one to notice, much less to tell them, in what ways they were alike.
Ryle, who might have been perceptive enough, if he had met Jenny, was sitting behind Liz and trying to tell her that no points had been scored for either side that morning. Hillmorton, who might have been detached enough, had his interest otherwise engaged. What he actually said was, as at last the judge had given his bobbing bow and made his exit: ‘Well, I suppose everything has to have a beginning.’
Julian let out one of his hooting laughs. Hillmorton went on, gazing at the ultra-gothic ceiling as though architectural taste was the only conflict dividing the assembled company:
‘I must say, when our grandfathers were vulgar, they were remarkably vulgar, or perhaps you don’t agree?’