In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [88]
They put Dan into the witness-box first. As soon as he was asked a question he replied: ‘I served my King and my Country, sir.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said our Counsel, in a coldly disapproving voice. ‘But! did. All through the war.’ ‘What’s that?’ said the ludge. Counsel, very irritated, said that this man had served in the Navy. ‘So I see from his papers,’ said the Judge, indifferently. Dan’s face darkened. His mouth had already opened in a shout of ‘Justice!’ when Counsel hastily dismissed him, and before they had time to establish even one of the rehearsed points.
Counsel now made a long and efficient statement, from which it appeared the old people were a variety of maniacal criminal. Everyone listened in a matter-of-fact way, like actors at a play. ‘How well he does it,’ the Court officials seemed to be thinking, as they listened to the earnest and accomplished young man practising a sober rhetoric which would one day take him to far more impressive surroundings than these, to argue big cases, important cases, involving large sums of money and large reputations. They were watching him as if he were a promising schoolboy in his last year, overripe to show what he could do in the great world; and when he concluded, elaborately grave, his voice sinking to a well-sustained note of quiet confidence, the Judge nodded, as if to say. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll go far.’ Then he returned to his notes.
In a few moments the opposing Counsel called Dan back again. This was a poor sort of man, who had long ago lost all hope of taking flight away from this dreary and unimportant Court. He was thin, worried-looking, and his voice was edged with a persistent sarcasm. He kept saying: ‘I put it to you …’ at Dan; and with every repetition of the phrase, Dan’s face clenched with uncertainty, tasting each separate word for a hidden trap. He was quite confused, and waiting for a familiar landmark. He did not understand that this Counsel was trying to establish the fact that he was a liar. He had been counting on Dan to deny he locked the bathroom against his clients. After a long preamble, designed to trip Dan up, which luckily he understood not one word of. Counsel arrived at the bathroom and was confounded by the way Dan, finding himself on prepared ground, drew himself up and entered into the part of a landlord concerned only to protect his tenants from the dirt and disease of the old couple. ‘And there are children in the house, too!’ Dan ended on a note of real sincerity. Thrown off balance, the opposing Counsel dismissed Dan, in order to find a fresh approach.
All this time the old people were sitting by themselves in a corner. The old man was slumped defeatedly against the back of a bench, suffering the continual jogs and jerks of his wife’s indignant elbow so slackly that each time she pushed that sharp bone into his side, his whole body slid a little way along the seat, till he righted himself with a straining pull of his shoulder muscles, pulling at the back of the high polished bench with a trembling hand. They were even older than I had thought, incredibly old, with the trembling fragility which comes to people so near their end that they have to conserve every movement in order that their strength may last through what they have to do. The old woman was trembling. A tiny parchment bag of bones, with a small white violent face on top; that was all she was, this terrible old woman of whom I’d heard so much and not really seen before. As the shameful disclosures about her way of living were made aloud for everyone to bear, she twisted her head about in a grimacing parody of scornful laughter, and cried in small gasps: ‘No, no, a lie,’ until the Judge looked gravely at her over his throne’s edge, and told her to be quiet. She put a handkerchief to her stretched and agonized mouth and remained still, but her trembling made the flowers on her soiled white hat rattle together, with a tiny dry sound; and the persistent dry rattling went on till people turned around to look, but the evidence of such