SOPHIE
13 December 2016
Eleven
Court Two of the Old Bailey is not as Sophie imagined it. She had anticipated something intimidating and impressive: not this tawny oak-panelled room that looks distinctly shabby, as if its glory days are long past.
She can barely believe she is here – in these surroundings that remind her of the Commons: the same poison-green leather on the seats emblazoned with gold; the same wood – forming five sturdy thrones and a crest. The same nod to past grandeur: glimpsed in the carved wooden wreaths of flowers and grapes, coated in dust, that drape above each door.
She perches on the edge of a bench, high up in the public gallery, and tries to distract herself from the fact that her husband is sitting in the dock below, flanked by a security officer; showcased behind sheets of bullet-proof glass. He looks vulnerable from this angle: his shoulders as broad as ever but his hair thinning just a touch at the top, she notices for the first time. A wave of fear ambushes her. Her knees begin to quiver and she puts her palms down on them firmly, hoping that the teenage tourists, glancing at her with frank curiosity, won’t wonder why she is quaking. Stupid. Of course they’ll guess. She places her handbag – X-rayed; opened; pored through – on her knees and when that doesn’t quite stop the juddering, crosses her legs and hugs them close.
A loud gurgle from her stomach. She can sense the acid swilling though she hasn’t eaten this morning. Little wonder that she has lost nearly a stone in the six weeks since James’s arrest. This is only an initial appearance – the plea and trial preparation hearing – so how emaciated will she look by the trial next year?
She swallows, trying to dislodge the sharp plum of pain in her throat. She could wail. She, the most calm and controlled of individuals, who was brought up to temper any unpleasant feelings with dry humour or to keep them firmly suppressed. Her insides have hollowed out and a potent bank of emotions presses up: horror, incredulity, revulsion, and above all a deep, all-encompassing shame. She clamps her lips tight. It frightens her, this intensity of feeling. Only once before has she experienced anything similar and then it was a shadow of this. She dabs at her eyes with a tissue. Letting her emotions overwhelm her isn’t an option. She has the children to think about and, of course, James.
But she knows now, with a certainty that she hadn’t before today, that she can’t attend each day of the trial. Just running the gauntlet of the photographers outside the court has shown her that she couldn’t. Maintaining her smile while James’s fingers almost crushed hers: his fist such a clamp of iron she nearly winced. She had sensed his nerves, then: something he hasn’t admitted to, even in the still quiet moments of the night when she lets herself shift into the warmth pooling from him in bed and whisper: ‘Are you OK?’ He hasn’t shown a chink of vulnerability since being charged nor has he raised the possibility of being convicted. If they don’t speak of it, perhaps it cannot happen. And it has seemed so far-fetched. That cliché: a living nightmare.
It all feels very real now. As solid as the sturdy oak that stretches everywhere: the witness box, the jury benches, the judge’s bench, the counsel’s row, upon which James’s barrister, a stout, somewhat formidable woman called Angela Regan, and the prosecuting QC, a Miss Woodcroft, are piling lever arch file after lever arch file of evidence.
Her husband will stand trial for rape. She tastes the squat word, ugly like the offence itself. She knows it is happening and yet, despite the reality forcing its way upon her as she stares down at him in the dock; as she drinks in the details of the court; the patrician gaze of the judge who, in her normal life, she could imagine talking to at a drinks party, it still doesn’t make sense.
He is innocent. Of course he is innocent. She knows that; has known it ever since that terrible Tuesday when he was arrested. She knows all the flaws in his personality and he could never be capable of this. So how has the situation escalated this far? She thinks of recent party investigations, one presided over by a lawyer, who’d been at school with James and Tom, the other by a friend from Oxford: men who could provide a patina of independence and still guarantee the right conclusion; and she wonders why that couldn’t have happened in this case. Tom owes him. Oh, how he owes him. But, once the police were involved, even the prime minister’s close friendship, those ties that have bound them for over thirty years, haven’t been tight enough to protect him.
‘So if we can agree on that week in April?’ James’s QC, Miss Regan, cuts through her thoughts: her voice, with its Belfast accent, an almost-masculine gravel. She and the judge are referring to ‘the housekeeping’ – as if James’s case is something to be tidied away.
The hearing seems to be coming to an end; there is a date set for April; bail is confirmed; and now John Vestey, James’s solicitor, is pushing back his seat and allowing himself to smile as he whispers something to the QC.
Sophie stares up at the ceiling, as they gather their documents and the court clerk asks them to ‘be upstanding’. It is high and formed of eighty-one opaque glass panels. She counts, trying to impose order: a neat nine by nine. The sky is a thick grey; bland, oppressive, uninviting, and a blur of a bird flutters above it, a dark smudge mocking the humans below; mocking her husband, granted bail but not granted any real freedom. The limpid light barely filters through and she craves sunshine and openness: lush green fields and the quiet contentment of an empty mind.
April means they have more than four months of this limbo – but now she just wants to get on with it. To put an end to this encroaching sense of dread. She has already had six torturous weeks in which to prepare herself and to consider and reconsider her options. Six weeks of long runs along the Thames, and frenzied gym sessions that exhaust her body but not her mind. Long enough to assess and reassess her relationship and to ask herself: what do I really want here?
The answer she has fumbled towards – for nothing is a certainty now; nothing has been certain since that terrible evening in October – is that she wants to keep her family intact. She wants James. Despite the humiliation he has heaped on her, her anger at his infidelity and at his selfishness in putting them through this, she still wants to be with her husband. She has never doubted his innocence, so why would she not be with him?
She needs him, of course, and sometimes she hates herself for this dependency. Perhaps it is hardwired into her DNA? This need to hold on to her man, a feeling she knew acutely as a student when she guessed, of course she guessed, that he was unfaithful, whatever he chose to think. Or perhaps it developed when she saw the impact of her father’s infidelity, not least the financial insecurity that came when Max left Ginny just before her fiftieth birthday. All three of his daughters had left home and so there was little financial recompense despite her choosing to be his wife as her career. Her mother claimed to be ‘perfectly happy’; but the former rectory was sold and she had downsized to a cottage in Devon. Her life was more emotionally stable – with none of those heightened periods of self-loathing that had occurred every time Max had found another woman and that had characterised Sophie’s childhood – but she had lost her home, her social life and her status. Somewhat reclusive, she lived alone, with her dogs: a black Labrador and a liver-coloured springer spaniel.
Sophie doesn’t want that. She is too young to dedicate herself to her children or to become a country-living eccentric. Nor does she want to become the sort of woman her friends shy away from: the attractive divorcee. Never invited to dinner parties for fear she can’t be trusted with their husbands. As if her ex-husband’s infidelity were contagious or her neediness, and a ruthlessness about remarrying, clung like a musky sexuality.
Perhaps it would be easier if she had some sort of a career. But she didn’t go back to her job as a junior editor in children’s publishing after having Emily, the childcare eating up most of her salary; James, whose mother had never worked, more than happy for her to focus on their babies and him. She suspects that was a mistake. Children’s literature was the one thing that had interested her in her degree: she had even written a dissertation on the use of menace in Narnia, exploring Lewis’s use of the priapic faun myth and the theme of abduction. Incredible to think she could write about such a thing. She had briefly hoped that she might stumble upon the next J.K. Rowling. But then she had drifted into pre-school literature where the only jeopardy was the difficulty of pulling on an odd sock or of finding a lost dinosaur, and it was hard to justify leaving her baby in a nursery to edit such things.
Besides, marriage and a family were what she had always wanted. When she was a little girl, she repeatedly painted pictures of herself in a wedding dress. A husband – and a good-looking, high-achieving husband – was on her wish list along with children and a period property with stables for horses and a vast walled garden. It was what she had experienced in her childhood and what she was brought up to aspire to. Well, she has achieved two of the three.
Even at Oxford, finding a husband had been a priority. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been. She looks at photographs of herself then, and wonders why she wasted so much time worrying about being alone and obsessing about holding on to James? She was quite a catch but then he had finished with her at the end of her first year and they didn’t see each other for seven years. And she had managed. There were other boyfriends – kind, good-looking, fun – who she had finished with when it was clear they weren’t husband material; and there were even periods, a couple of months on two occasions, when she was on her own. And she had coped with it.
But she hadn’t liked it and, if possible, she doesn’t want to have to manage again. James has been her priority for too long. A boyfriend and then husband whom she knows other women covet but who chose her, and who has been faithful throughout their marriage before this blip: this terrible, destructive thing that has threatened to rip their marriage apart. Hearing Olivia giving evidence is the thing she fears the most. Having to listen to that bitch detail the event; and hearing her describe their relationship before this happened – for she fears she will be led through all of this by James’s barrister: how they met; where they first kissed; how frequently they had sex; whether this was a proper relationship – a five-month affair, as James had said – rather than a hurried, violent fumble: an uncharacteristic one-off.
For James’s defence, of course, is that this was consensual sex: sex Olivia agreed to, and which they both sought despite his knowing it was morally reprehensible. ‘Classic woman scorned. A love affair that went wrong,’ as Chris Clarke said in the early days.
This isn’t rape – but neither was it about love and it infuriates her that it might be dressed up as this. This, and she thinks she knows her husband well enough to understand this: this was all about sex.
Of course, she has made James tell her all about it. It was John Vestey, his solicitor, who suggested it. Better that there be no shocks in court; that, if she comes – as Chris Clarke thinks she should; as she knows she might eventually have to – she will be forearmed, forewarned.
And so he has told her the facts of their affair. Where. When. Why. How many times. ‘I see,’ she said, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘And what about what happened in the lift?’ The temptation to scream about the fucking lift was almost overwhelming but she stayed in control, as she always did. She and her children – they were her children at the moment, not his – needed her to stay calm. She imagined a veneer of serenity encasing her: a hard, impenetrable varnish.
She hated listening to the answers – his calm assertion that it had been a moment of passion; a madness though entirely consensual – but she made herself sit there, fury wedged tight in her chest. Her eyes burned but she was too angry to cry. She didn’t ask him if he loved Olivia or if Olivia had ever thought she loved him. She pretended the question was irrelevant but, the truth was, she didn’t want to hear.