A Crooked Sixpence Read online

  She was wearing a check suit, with a white hat perched on her snub-nosed, honest English head. Approaching, O’Toole saw through the glass door that her face was sombre and that she had, not all that long ago, been crying.

  ‘Hullo, James,’ she said huskily. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you at your office like this, but I had to say goodbye. I’m leaving first thing in the morning and I have a world of packing to do.’

  ‘Where on earth are you going?’ asked O’Toole, filling in until he could think of a comment.

  ‘Ceylon,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve spoken to Henry on the phone, and explained as much of the situation to him as I thought I should, and he’s been very nice about it and cabled me the air fare. We’re to be married almost as soon as I arrive.’

  ‘Isn’t this rough on Henry?’ O’Toole asked.

  The girl twisted a glove in her hands. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said. ‘I’ve been quite honest with Henry, and that is all he expects.’ She looked up and smiled wanly at O’Toole. ‘As you would say, I am not asking for your comment on this, just putting you in the picture.’

  ‘Very right,’ said O’Toole slowly. ‘I don’t suppose there is any point in saying I would like to be your friend, as if we’d met in the Navy or something.’

  ‘We will always be that,’ said the girl. ‘I would like to see you again one day, when I can trust myself alone with you, that is. Please understand that I’m not reproaching you at all, James I remember you said something once about Yale keys not fitting Union locks and I know exactly what you mean, from your point of view, although I expect you know it doesn’t always work the other way round.’

  O’Toole nodded soundlessly.

  ‘I’m sure you know what I want to say, James, so I won’t bother with the words,’ she went on. ‘Would you mind if I was to write to you, sometime in the future? Don’t be surprised if you get a letter one day addressed to Joan O’Toole. I...I...and she bit her lip, and then suddenly stood, leaned over O’Toole and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘At least I found out what it can be like,’ she whispered. ‘I shall never forget you. Goodbye, darling.’

  And, before O’Toole could say anything, she turned and, straight and brave, walked out of the office.

  O’Toole sat for a long time staring at the wall of the waiting-room. The things that he wanted to say to Elizabeth rushed through his head: that he would never forget her, either: that the fact that there was no place or time for them was the same lousy deal that life gave everybody: that while he had ranted and raved at her, hour after hour, built his monstrous childish fantasies about the big time and the bleeding heart, here was someone alongside him who knew the score all the time, who could not explain it to O’Toole because it had sounded too simple and harsh and unsubtle for him to understand: that while she had learnt the names of some fashionable writers from him, and some zipped-up new opinions, she had shown him that grown-up people can grasp a painful truth, can cut their losses and start again with courage and dignity, can pity the executioner because he can no more help himself than his victim.

  Then, realising that he could say nothing of this to her now, or perhaps ever, and that it was the yellow goat-eyed thing which had divided two people who liked each other very much, he walked unseeing out of the waiting-room and almost bumped into Starsh.

  ‘Now look here, James,’ said Starsh. ‘Your private life may be murky, as you said on Saturday, but we really can’t have you bringing your women into the office in working hours. I mean, we must maintain some sort of standards of discipline in this operation. This isn’t one of your houses of assignation, you know.’

  O’Toole had been silent too long: the dam burst.

  ‘Oh, you crummy little Marxist moralist,’ he said. ‘You’re very fast with the crooked statistics but when it comes to looking at the shabby deal life really is, all you can do is run. A man in trouble is as likely to go to you for help as he is to Stalin, and that goes for the working-class too. Norman Knight may be a mother-fixated Catholic obscurantist but at least he knows what it is to bleed. He’s got something to bleed with. What the hell have you got for suffering humanity?’

  Little texts of Marx

  Keep girls out of parks.

  ‘It’s a good job you got tired of worrying about the starving workers before they spat you out in disgust. All your life you’ve wanted to suck power out of some bone-headed Beria with big boots and now you’ve found him. Go and help Barr play with his lying, crooked stories, you snivelling literary bootblack.’

  As the tirade had begun, Starsh had jumped back as if he expected O’Toole to hit him. Pale, lower lip trembling, he heard O’Toole out and then turned on his heel, without a word, and walked to his office.

  O’Toole stumbled to his desk and sat down, his head in his hands. He realised at once that he had hurt Starsh deeply, had thrown in his face a political past which had been, at least, selflessly intended, which had cost Starsh a great deal: that he had been brutal to a man who had been kind to him and had no need to be, and that Starsh’s rebuke, even, had made no more than sense from Starsh’s point of view, seeing that he had no way of knowing what was happening in O’Toole’s life and had merely interpreted O’Toole on the data O’Toole himself had supplied.

  He was ashamed of himself, but he knew, at the same time there was nothing he could do to repair the situation. Then it occurred to O’Toole that he might be merely afraid of Starsh of his power with Barr and thus over O’Toole’s prospects, and that he might be looking at Starsh with a convenient and temporary fair-mindedness as phoney as the forgiveness of big-hearted Britain. Incapable, for the moment, of seeing anything certain in himself at all, O’Toole got up, called ‘Something to do’ to Jacobs at the other end of the newsroom, and went down into Fleet Street to walk it all into some sort of shape.

  Fleet Street, bent, spurious, garish buildings, milk-bars and disposals stores, didn’t help him much....

  Later in the afternoon, tired of walking, he came back to the office, indifferent about the reception he might get. There was no noticeable change. He had not long sat down when Jacobs gave him a bundle of nondescript correspondents’ stories to look through, asking him to watch out for angles worth following-up on the phone, but there were none. Later Norman Knight came in and O’Toole gave him a compressed account of his scene with Starsh, but Knight said such brushes were common in the office and seldom had any consequences.

  In the following days O’Toole had the quietest time of his Fleet Street career. Starsh pretended that he didn’t exist: Barr rather too regularly made special journeys to his desk to say such things like ‘Getting along all right, laddie?’ with a mechanical fatherly smile which O’Toole guessed might last until the libel action had been decided: Jacobs, apparently by direction, gave him only trivial and innocuous stories, obscure murders to be done by phone and cases of indecency and assault which had no chance of making the paper because of the News of the World’s invincible monopoly.

  During the week O’Toole saw the usual procession of evil-looking men confiding in Jacobs in the waiting-room, and sometimes shouting about money to Barr, but no one told him what villainy was being hatched. He was bothered by ingrained professional curiosity, troubled by his own distress at being left out of the know, but he was obliged by the code of the trade not to show interest in other men’s stories.

  The promised transcript of his evidence arrived from the legal department: it was headed ‘James O’Toole will say...’ and typed on brief-paper nearly as big as a page of the Sun. O’Toole found nothing to quarrel with in it.

  That Saturday night O’Toole discovered, with an automatic shock, that for the first time since he had joined the Sun no story of his appeared in the paper: it was possible that one of his murders might have made a few lines in some slip edition, aimed at provincial hometown pride, but he had nothing in the main London edition, the one that counted.

  Norman Knight drove him home and left him with a cheerfu
l ‘See you in court. Digger.’

  O’TOOLE had often walked past the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, and never much liked the look of them. Of grey stone, turreted, machicolated, they seemed to bear the same relationship to justice as the nearby newspaper offices of chrome and plate glass did to Hampden and John Wilkes. O’Toole guessed that the same architect might have put up the Gothic buildings in Australia. Still, he thought, it’s what the tourists want to see.

  On a Tuesday morning of late autumn the great hall of the courts was cold and depressing. The place was huge, a cathedral with no altar, dedicated to nothing. Around the walls were the portraits of Lords Chief Justice, larger than life-size and indicating by their expressions that they could not conceive it possible that they had been mistaken. You’re the bastards who valued a man’s life below a loaf of bread, thought O’Toole idly, staring the nearest LCJ in his oil-painted eyes. Those whiskers don’t fool me.

  Across the hall he saw, standing in a group. Knight, Starsh and Firebrace the lawyer, improbably disguised in short wig and gown. They nodded as O’Toole came up. A dozen yards away, O’Toole spotted Eileen and Ifor Morgan: Eileen in suit, hat and pearls, like a barmaid done up for a spree. Morgan looked contemptuously at O’Toole: Eileen avoided his glance.

  Firebrace consulted a gold watch with white enamelled face which he took from his waistcoat pocket. ‘I think, gentlemen, we might go into court,’ he said, turning to lead the way, with Starsh beside him, still avoiding O’Toole, who brought up the rear with Norman Knight.

  The procession went upstairs from the main hall, along a corridor on the next floor and paused outside the heavy glassed doors of the courtroom itself, where two stunted and elderly attendants in blue uniforms cleared a way for them through the crowd of would-be spectators, the same endlessly curious English crowd of old-age pensioners, pimply typists and hero-worshipping housewives who turn up at coronations, hangings, building sites, street accidents and any other public events likely to go down in history in the newspapers or the newsreels.

  Starsh, embarrassed, brushed aside an autograph-hunter who held a book out to him and said, ‘Be a sport, Arthur,’ and while the crowd railed at him in a good-natured way, the group passed through the doors into the calm of the courtroom.

  It was like a miniature theatre, familiar to O’Toole from British movies. Above the judge’s bench was a high oak canopy, unnecessarily sheltering the space beneath from the weak sunlight which filtered through the dusty glassed-in roof, and supporting a big, meticulously carved and brightly painted royal coat-of-arms. Ten or twelve feet below the Bench, in the well of the court, was a long table piled with books and papers, behind which sat the two Queen’s Counsel who were to conduct the case, flanked by junior barristers and assorted helpers. From the bar table the seats for witnesses sloped up, like the stalls in a theatre, and behind them again, reaching almost to the roof, the gallery for spectators, reached by a circular cast-iron stair.

  Knight and O’Toole went to the first row of witnesses’ seats, from where they looked down on the curled tops of the counsels’ wigs. Firebrace and Starsh were sitting at one end of the bar table, Ifor Morgan and Eileen at the other end, beside their lawyers.

  ‘That’s Godfrey Barker, QC, leading for Eileen,’ Knight whispered. ‘He’s the top libel man in the country. She’s lucky to get him. He usually appears for us.’

  O’Toole identified the famous counsel, a shrivelled little old man with a pink, lined face under his wig, like an intelligent windfall apple. He was nodding, apparently half-asleep, while his junior had a whispered conversation with Ifor Morgan, suburban in a crumpled suit.

  ‘Who’s our man?’ O’Toole asked, looking at the other end of the bar table, where Firebrace was conferring with a tall, handsome man with the bewildered look of well-intentioned people.

  ‘Geoffrey Harrison,’ Knight told him. ‘He’s more of a company law expert. I wouldn’t have picked him myself for a dirty case like this: he’s a very brilliant chap, but he hasn’t got the killer instinct. I believe he’s got something to do with the Labour Party. He’s against hanging and H-bombs and all that sort of thing. Still, I suppose they had to take what they could get.’

  There was a sudden murmur as the attendants opened the doors and the spectators streamed into the public gallery. The lucky ones—there were no more than a score of places—settled themselves down for a day’s entertainment, waving to friends a few seats away, pointing out the people in the court and speculating on their identities, and a few of them chewing surreptitiously behind morning newspapers.

  Then the judge, preceded by an official, came in from a door behind the bench. As he appeared, everyone in the court rose, a few balky ones, unaccustomed to the procedure, looking around in alarm and then imitating the general movement, and when the judge sat the assembly followed suit, collapsing fluttering like washing when the line breaks.

  The judge was a dark, middle-aged man, like an older version of Starsh, incomparably more magnificent in wig and scarlet gown. He smiled in reply to the bowed greeting of the counsel, and his associate, from a table below him, formally summoned the participants in the case.

  The empanelling and swearing-in of the jury took only a few minutes, as there were no challenges. O’Toole was relieved to see that the principle of a jury of one’s peers hadn’t been taken too literally: ten of the jurors were men in expensive suits, with waistcoats, evidently business men who could be spared from their offices, and the two women looked as if they had left maids in charge of the house. O’Toole guessed that they were not the sort of people who would read, or approve of, the Sun, but they were even less likely to approve of Eileen or her un-middle-class style of life.

  Barker began the case by reading the article and having copies taken to the jurors. His reading was a theatrical exercise in disgust, with long pauses between the paragraphs, during which Barker studied the jurors’ faces, but whatever they thought they looked stolidly back at him. O’Toole thought that they might not be accustomed enough yet to the atmosphere of the courtroom to express their emotions, if they had any.

  Then Barker put Eileen into the witness-box and conducted her through her evidence with solicitous deference, as if she was doing him an infinite favour by appearing. Eileen twisted a handkerchief between gloved hands as she told her story: do all women do that when they’re up against it? O’Toole wondered. She told it as Ifor Morgan had told Knight and O’Toole in the waiting-room: the two reporters had called on her, claiming to be friends of her husband’s—here she looked suitably near tears—and in courtesy she had asked them in for tea and a chat with her young friend, with whom she had been watching TV: there had certainly been no disrobing, and, good heavens, no suggestion of money passing hands, and no, she had no idea why she, a respectable woman, had been selected as the subject of this foul and wanton attack.

  Then, in his turn, Harrison rose to cross-examine. He was polite and gentle, a shade less phoney than Barker, O’Toole thought, but there was very little in it. He had one matter to raise, he said: was the young lady who had been present that night now in court? No, said Eileen. Why not? Eileen began to say she believed she was abroad, when Barker rose to object that he was conducting the case, and the plaintiff was not responsible for the subpoena of witnesses, and Harrison agreed urbanely and sat down.

  That, said Barker, concluded the plaintiffs case, subject to the addresses: he did not propose to call evidence that the plaintiff had, in fact, been damaged by the article, as this would be self-evident. The judge nodded and turned to Harrison, who consulted a list and said to the judge’s associate: ‘Call Nicholas Starsh.’

  Starsh had evidently been waiting for the summons and was on his feet as the official called his name. The reporters in the Press box began whispering together, and the court shorthand-writer leaned toward Harrison’s end of the bar table, where his junior said in a low voice ‘Starsh-S-T-A-R-S-H.’ The shorthand-writer nodded his thanks.

  St
arsh had now reached the witness-box, the railing of which reached high on his chest. O’Toole, knowing his shyness and dread of public appearances, felt a twinge of pity for him, for his thin shoulders, ill-fitting hand-knitted sweater, his olive face set in a grim expression, with a dark stubble even this early in the morning.

  The associate came toward him with a card on which the form of the oath was printed, and Starsh leaned over and whispered something to him. The associate went over to the judge and in turn whispered to him: the judge nodded and gave some instruction. The associate began rummaging among books on his desk, while a court attendant went along the bar saying softly ‘A hat? Is there a hat the witness might have for a moment?’

  Finally a navy-blue peaked cap was handed from somewhere to the attendant: it might have been a chauffeur’s, or perhaps belonged to one of the court flunkeys. The associate took it, and a different Bible which he had found, to Starsh, who put the cap on. It was much too big for him and fell down to his ears. Starsh flushed with embarrassment as he picked up the Bible and recited the oath.

  O’Toole saw the jurors whispering together, and someone near him said, ‘He’s a Jew.’ Norman Knight, next to O’Toole, shook his head and said softly: ‘All this fuss!’

  Starsh took the cap off, put down the Bible and turned to face Harrison.

  ‘You are the features editor of the Sunday Sun, Mr. Starsh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you are responsible for the final form in which this article appeared in the paper?’

  ‘I wrote the final version, yes.’

  ‘Where did you get the facts?’

  ‘From the story written by Mr. Knight, with, I believe, the assistance of Mr. O’Toole.’