In London that morning, they told Oliver that things were progressing more or less as expected, and that he should prepare himself to be called either late that afternoon or first thing the next day. He would not be permitted to observe the proceedings or hear other people’s testimony. He was free to leave, of course, but it would be appreciated if he would return by three o’clock. It was then ten-thirty. The intervening hours stretched emptily before him. ‘What am I meant to do until then?’ he asked plaintively.
‘Go to a gallery? A film? First showing’s around midday in the West End. It’s a nice day. Sit in one of the parks, perhaps. Go and see the rose garden – it’s lovely at the moment.’ The official was briskly sympathetic, leaving an impression that she had made this identical set of suggestions a thousand times before. Oliver felt helpless. He was reminded of one of his favourite novels – The Warden by Anthony Trollope – where Mr Harding was forced to pass several hours in central London while he waited for a very similar appointment to Oliver’s own. He had walked up and down the Strand, just as Oliver felt constrained to do, pausing for a long slow drink in a coffee shop. The parallel was disorienting and by midday he was resolved to break it.
There would be birds in the parks, he presumed, if only town sparrows and pigeons. His interest in birds had blossomed over twenty years into a passion. He knew every detail of their bone structure, the way feathers grew and beaks were adapted to different food types. He knew about their social patterns, and which species dominated which. He knew the songs and calls, and the size of their broods. Now and then he dreamt he was an eagle, soaring high and watching the world’s puny affairs unfold far below. He understood that he had been in that detached mode for the greater part of his life, and that it was both desirable and deplorable.
But instead, here he was, embroiled in something so repulsive, he still could not find words for it. His own motives were opaque and fragile, the compulsion to testify in public an astonishment from which he still had not recovered. For a while he had assumed it to be revenge, pure and simple. That would be easy to understand and relatively easy to live with. But it was infinitely murkier than that. He lingered on the word testimony, suspecting that the clue lay within it. A setting straight, an exposure of a reality that was in many ways banal, but which had done extreme damage. For a man to escape into fantasies of becoming a bird, because normal human life was impossible for him, was at best a waste. Every life should engage in some ordinary interaction with other members of the same species. He would have enjoyed being a father, and all the sociable exchanges that family life involved, if he had been allowed to develop into the person he expected to become when he was still young and innocent.
He had been betrayed and worse. He had been damaged beyond repair, and the truth of it could not remain hidden any more. There was a basic morality to it that the world had, much to his amazement, come to recognise so powerfully that proceedings such as he was now participating in were commonplace. With great trepidation he had presented himself, never expecting to be embraced as a key element, to be treated with such gentle respect. His age had only increased the sympathy, it seemed. ‘The law pays no regard to the passage of time,’ they said, and reminded him of senile Nazis and derelict tyrants, facing their accusers in the final moments of their lives.
Faces filed through his imagination, as he sat in St James’s Park, watching pigeons with deformed or missing toes. Faces that belonged to another part of London altogether – the sooty ghettoes of the East End, in the calamitous decade that had been the nineteen forties. His father, craggy and aloof, in the Victorian costume that his profession demanded. A grand old man by any standards, living to the age of ninety-nine, energetic to the last. His death had come less than a decade before, his presence still real for a great many people. There had been women fawning over him right to the end. His mother was infinitely less memorable: the younger second wife, colourless and eternally exuding a faint disgust with everything around her. She had been dead for so long that the only lingering details were that little pucker of her lips and a scent of lily of the valley. And looming over it all, he could not evade the image of his older motherless brother, Cedric, who had been capable of anything. It still made Oliver breathless to remember what Cedric had been capable of. And finally Fraser, the rebel, whose motto, after all the bereavements wrought by the war, was there’s nothing more to lose. In his way, Fraser, too, had been capable of anything. It was mere good luck that his nature was essentially benign, and his adventures accordingly harmless and ordinary. A near-forgotten bereavement brought another blurred and wispy face to mind. Their baby sister, Joyce, with her huge eyes and tiny hands. Joyce had died when she was two, choking and resisting to the end. Oliver remembered her little white coffin more vividly than he remembered the child.
Later, a new generation slowly emerged. Fraser’s exotic daughter Maureen, and Cedric’s late-begotten boy. Oliver had played with Maureen now and then, before his brother took himself and his family off to the other end of the world.
The rediscovery of Fraser’s one-time girlfriend meant little to Oliver. He had no recollection of her, had not been aware of the relationship at the time. He had been eighteen or so, living with his parents in the gloomy premises that had been rocked and cracked by wartime bombs, but somehow survived unchanged.
His stomach reminded him that the day was passing. He should eat. And the morning coffee had filtered down to his bladder, which was now uncomfortable. Physical needs that he found faintly irritating sent him out of the park and through Trafalgar Square. Charing Cross Station would answer his needs. He could sit there and watch passengers, almost as distracting as birds, and not entirely dissimilar, until it was time for his reappearance at the court. The big central court, where all the most notorious and sensational criminals were tried and judged and sentenced, and the press gave such great prominence to the stories that unfolded there.
It was the press that Oliver gave most heed to; it was the press, in the end, that decided him to stand up and speak – they would be his mouthpiece to the wider world, which should know precisely what had been done to him.