SOPHIE
28 April 2017
Twenty-five
James is nervous. Sophie, who thought she knew her husband entirely, has only seen him this rattled on one previous occasion.
And just like then, he must be more credible, more persuasive than he has ever been before.
‘You pulled it off, then,’ she wants to say, only neither of them want to be reminded of that time. And besides, the stakes here are higher. This time, his run-in with the police has ended in court.
You wouldn’t guess at his nerves. He is not a person who betrays his anxiety and he is not an anxious person: his innate self-belief, his confidence in his ability to achieve, overriding any troubling thought. She has always envied him that: this characteristic which is more intrinsic than the confidence she can shrug on when required, like a superhero’s cloak that gives the veneer of impermeability or at least competence. He knows he is impressive. Self-doubt – which she increasingly identifies as female; or at least as something that never troubles her husband and his predominantly male colleagues – has never troubled him. He will be acquitted, he reassures her, because he is innocent and because he has the utmost faith in the jury.
Nonetheless, he is not his usual urbane self. There is a tension in his jaw which juts so that he looks far more chiselled than usual; and he is particularly focused as he dresses: the tie in a fat Windsor knot; the double cuffs fastened with simple, unobtrusive links; his white shirt new – not one of the six she has had dry-cleaned.
Perhaps he has been like this every day of the trial. She has abandoned him so she wouldn’t know but Cristina intimates that he is more nervy this morning. ‘It’s good you are back,’ the au pair offers when they meet briefly in the kitchen, for Cristina is keeping a low profile and is largely out of the way. Sophie sips a black coffee she does not want and watches the girl compile a breakfast of fruit and yoghurt and honey; marvelling at her ability to eat for Sophie’s stomach is corroding.
‘He is much better now you are back. I think he needs you,’ Cristina adds as she ducks from the room, her tone matter-of-fact and non-judgemental. And it is true, she thinks, as she watches James give her the sort of smile he might give a civil servant, one that doesn’t reach his eyes but is made for courtesy’s sake.
He takes the coffee she offers and sips, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
‘Bit cold.’
‘I’ll make another.’
‘No.’ His tone is sharp and he corrects himself, smiles in amelioration. ‘No. It’s fine, really. I’ll do it.’
He begins to dismantle the coffee machine and she waits, imagining the grains splattering onto those pristine white cuffs and the re-dressing that must come.
‘Actually – would you mind?’ For a moment he looks helpless: like Finn when confronted with his football boots, unable to fathom how to do them up.
‘Of course.’ She goes to place a reassuring hand in the small of his back but he shifts away, almost imperceptibly and yet emphatic.
‘I’ll be in the front room – thinking.’
There is no need to mention that, of course, she’ll bring it through.
His uncharacteristic display of nerves forces her to be calm. Just as she has managed that veneer of serenity around her children so she manages it for him – being the type of steadfast, self-assured woman he so desperately needs her to be.
She is buoyed by his behaviour last night. They were both exhausted: she by the drive back and her apprehension at seeing him after poring over the evidence; him by the strain of sitting in court. His face was cloaked in grey and she felt an overwhelming and unexpected tenderness as he took her in his arms. How could she have doubted him? How could she have allowed herself to think he could say those terrible words, and worse, how could she imagine that he hadn’t cared enough about Olivia’s feelings? How could she even have half-formulated the suspicion that perhaps he was capable of rape?
She feels disloyal just thinking it now. She had sunk into his arms and really held him, conscious that it was unprecedented for him to need her so entirely. His shoulders relaxed, just a little, and she had stood, feeling the warmth of his body flowing through hers and enjoying his dependence, brief and uncharacteristic, and all the sweeter for its novelty.
And then they had made love. Properly made love in a way that they hadn’t since the story broke. Not sex fuelled by anger or a need to assert that they were fine, that they would be fine; or sex entered into because it was the easiest way to distil the anxiety, the fear and the doubt that had enveloped them for the past five and a half months: sex as a pure physical relief. No, they had made love: a tender lovemaking that communicated his need for her and his reliance; that exposed him at his most vulnerable – his face soft; no artifice; no need to impose a certain image. And afterwards, as she lay there, aware that she should get up but wanting to luxuriate in their closeness, she felt that he had told her, as perfectly and completely as he could without words, that he was innocent. A man who could make love like that, with the utmost tenderness and consideration – her husband; her children’s father – could never be capable of something as ugly and brutal as rape.
She walks the few steps from the taxi to the approach to the Bailey holding his hand. Head up, shoulders back, chest out, eyes fixed on the paparazzi, who rush at them when they see them approaching. Don’t let them ask her a question.
‘Sophie – Sophie. This way.’
A middle-aged man in a trench coat – scruffy hair, scruffy suit, a drinker’s red face – invades their space, clutching a notebook. ‘Does the PM still have full confidence in your husband, Sophie?’ His voice is abrasive; energy and anger packed tight in there.
She shoots him a look that she knows is withering. She can do withering. How dare he shout at her? As if she is a dog, teased with a stick. And then John Vestey sweeps them through a door and they are safe, James’s hand still tight in hers. She gives it a squeeze, conscious of its warmth and the uncharacteristic smear of sweat. He releases her fingers.
‘OK?’ he asks, eyes fixed on hers, as if she is the only person that matters.
She nods and steps back, allowing him to chat with his solicitor, remaining silent, loyal. Not required to join in the conversation but unquestioningly there.
Behind the door, she imagines the photographers comparing shots and that reporter concocting some words. Why ask her about James and Tom – and why not throw that question to James? Perhaps they’re digging around about the Libertines again? Her palms prick and her heart beats faster: a rhythmic hammering that rings in her ears as she tries to calm herself, to steady her breathing, and to drown out a question.
What exactly do they know?
High up in the public gallery, she focuses on her husband: trying to convey the strength of her support for him though she knows he will not look up and see her. He looks authoritative in the witness box and for a moment she hopes the jury will be fooled into thinking he is just another witness; one who offers a different version, an alternative narrative, and not the man being tried for rape.
There is a sign pinned to the wall, warning the public not to move during the judge’s summing up or to lean over the railings. She ignores it: peering down until she feels disorientated, blood galloping through her head and introducing a new sense of panic that momentarily thrusts out her disarming thoughts until she feels as if she is toppling. She sits back abruptly; welcomes the hard certainty of the bench.
To try to steady herself, she scrutinises the heads of the barristers, shuffling papers around in the still few seconds before the judge intimates that the case should resume – and her husband give his evidence. She watches his QC, Angela, and tries to take some comfort in the breadth of her shoulders, the expansive way in which she fills her gown. Miss Woodcroft is slight in comparison though not short. A blonde ponytail peeping from behind her wig; a diamond band on her right hand; the most ridiculous shoes – patent courts with gold braid on them – the sort of shoes a female sergeant of arms might wear.
She is fussing slightly, this woman; double-checking something in a lever arch file the edge of which is thick with coloured Post-it notes; the pages bright with the fluorescent underlining of certain sentences. Her left hand scrawls furiously, a fat fibre tip pressing down. Along the bench, Angela has an iPad – as does her junior, Ben Curtis: no traditionalist, she is sharp; has a formidable memory, James says. Sophie finds his QC intimidating; knows instinctively that they have nothing in common; that she does not warm to her. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to like her: she just needs her to get her husband off.
A hush falls on the court as the judge enters, a ripple of quiet like the stilling of a pool of water, and then James begins his evidence. He speaks well; his voice low and warm, with his habitual self-assurance but not one hint of arrogance. This is James at his best: the approachable politician, setting out his story in his most persuasive way.
She still finds it difficult to hear. Angela tackles the infidelity head-on, and she listens as her husband explains that his affair with Olivia wasn’t something that he embarked on lightly.
‘I knew it was wrong,’ he admits, the fingers of his hands touching in that Blairite trope again: lightly pressing together – here is the steeple; here is the church.
‘You were a family man?’ Angela prompts.
‘I am a family man. My family – my wife and children – mean everything to me. It was deeply wrong of me to betray that trust and to become involved with Miss Lytton. It was wrong and weak and I feel profoundly guilty for the pain I have put them through every single day.’
His QC pauses. ‘And yet you still put them through that pain?’
‘I did.’ James gives a sigh that seems to come from the depth of his body: the sigh of a man tormented by his failings. ‘I am not perfect,’ and here he holds his hands up in supplication, ‘as none of us are. I respected Miss Lytton as a colleague and, yes, I admit I was attracted to her, as she was to me. In a moment of weakness, we began an affair.’
Sophie’s eyes brim now, her chest filled with self-pity and a growing sense of humiliation, and she tries to focus on someone other than him: the jurors perhaps, whose gaze varies: the middle-aged man sympathetic; an elderly woman in the back row and a young Muslim girl, sporting a dark headscarf, noticeably less so. She watches John Vestey, and the female solicitor from the CPS, a dowdy woman in a cheap grey suit who leans back, arms folded, making no attempt to pretend she thinks James could be innocent, or perhaps she is just bored. And she watches the prosecuting barrister, Miss Woodcroft, rifle through her notes as Angela leads her husband on, occasionally jotting the odd note in one of her blue legal notepads; and there is something about the way in which this woman inclines her head and in which she scribbles furiously that reminds her of someone else.
The feeling builds through the stuffy next half-hour as James’s evidence continues. Perhaps it is easier to fixate on this woman than to tune in to her husband’s version of events, which seem designed to convey that, though he was married, his relationship with Olivia was respectful, consensual; his parliamentary researcher someone he cared deeply about. He sent her flowers; took her out for dinner and, in late July, bought her a necklace for her birthday. Her heart judders hard at this revelation: an acute physical pain followed by a difficulty in breathing as the extent of her husband’s deception is laid bare; his ease at living an entirely unknown life.
‘And what was this necklace like?’ Angela’s question grabs her attention.
‘It was a key,’ James explains. ‘A play on words. She was the key to my parliamentary office. I wanted to show that she was valued: that she was integral to the success of my job.’
‘You didn’t think she might see it as the key to your heart?’
‘I suppose that there was the possibility for that interpretation.’ His forehead furrows. ‘I don’t think I consciously intended her to think that. Perhaps I was naive but, well, I was a little smitten . . .’
His words wind her: five blunt wounds. Her heart closes over: she wants to feel nothing; to be entirely numb.
Angela pauses. Lets the significance sink in.
‘You were a little smitten?’ Her tone is interested but non-judgemental.
‘Well, more than a little. She is a very attractive and intelligent young woman. ‘
‘And so you bought her a necklace. What was it made of?’
‘Platinum.’
‘So a very generous gift?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Far more generous than a usual gift for a colleague?’
‘I didn’t think of her as merely a colleague, by then.’
‘You were lovers?’
‘Yes, we were.’
‘She has told us she was in love with you. But were you in love with her?’
‘I think that’s a possibility.’ He pauses and it feels, to Sophie, as if every person in the court leans forward to catch his next words, spoken so softly and with such apparent sorrow that he seems to be confessing a secret. ‘Yes, I think I was.’
She forces herself to listen as she hears how they spent the night together on Olivia’s birthday. She had been at her mother’s in Devon; had managed to speak to James briefly in the early evening after walking to the top of the nearest hill and catching a signal. He had sounded wistful and she had felt a nudge of guilt about abandoning him to his departmental papers while they all lazed around; going for swims; playing on the beach. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she had said, imagining his pang of frustration at being left alone in the sticky capital for a fortnight. ‘We could come home early but the kids would be so disappointed – and so would Ginny. They do love it here.’
She remembered feeling the warmth of the day on her neck and being distracted by the sea, glinting at the end of the valley and merging with the sky at a barely perceptible horizon. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to leave and drive home.
‘Of course you must stay,’ he had said. ‘It’s just I miss you.’
‘Ah, we miss you, too,’ she had replied, heart softening.
Olivia must have been waiting as he took that call in St James’s Park, perhaps rolling her eyes in impatience. And yet he hadn’t given the slightest indication that his evening held anything more exciting than his interminable red boxes and a salad and steak. The lies had tripped off his tongue; or rather the omissions. For the second time in minutes, she marvels at his dual life and how it came so easily to him. It reminds her of that other time, over twenty years ago, when his explanation didn’t convey the whole truth; was viscous; slippery in its omissions. And yet it did the job; was never aggressively questioned. Perhaps – like Emily with her tooth fairy; like her in Devon last summer – they were all just willing to be convinced.
She shrugs the thought aside and tries to focus on his answers, once more; to will him to continue to come across as his personable self: flawed, yes; but all the more human because of this. Her nails pinch hard white crescents into her palm: the pain a welcome distraction from the dull throb in her chest, the overwhelming desire to cry.
And then Miss Woodcroft interrupts.
‘My Lord. My learned friend is leading the witness.’
The judge raises a hand and lowers it as if disciplining an exuberant puppy he really does not have the time for. Angela smiles – Sophie can hear the smile in her deep vowels; and her heavy condescension – and carries smoothly on.
But Miss Woodcroft’s interjection preoccupies her: the tone, the timbre of that voice: well modulated, deep, like an expensive claret one wants to linger over. A voice replete with privilege that hints at a fine intelligence and exclusive education, so why is there something about her – a quality of intensity, perhaps – that reminds her of someone she hasn’t thought of for over twenty years?
It must be her habit of writing. That feverish, left-handed scribbling as if her thoughts are so voluminous, it is a race to get them all down. Holly wrote like that – but so must plenty of people; particularly tenacious barristers for whom any chink in a narrative must signal another opportunity to prise a story apart. She can almost see this woman’s brain bulging beneath that wig: concocting ways in which to trip up her husband under cross-examination, though so far James doesn’t seem to have put a step wrong. He even has the less visibly impressed jurors – that older woman; the Muslim girl – watching him with less antagonism, while the rather obviously pretty younger women – eyebrows dark arcs; tans from a bottle – seem to have succumbed to his charm; are lapping up his words – at least at this point, while it’s a tale of infidelity; a messy, modern love story, and nothing more sinister. No mention of bruises or ripped knickers. No suggestion, yet, that he might have said: Don’t be such a prick-tease. She must stop it! There’s no point in repeating those horrible words.
She leans back; tells herself to relax. To forget about Holly. She must listen: must force herself to drink it all in. And so she turns back to James; to her cheating husband, who she is beginning to loathe herself for loving, and who she is starting to like just a little bit less . . .
His evidence continues. She still closes her mind to much of it and lets his words wash over her like water applied to a thick block of parchment. They are getting closer to the kernel of the case: the incident in the lift. And she senses that she must conserve her energy for that moment when she will hear her husband’s version of that event, spoken under oath. Her attention must be pin-sharp, then.
Miss Woodcroft speaks again. Another point of law, another weary dismissal by the judge. How could she have reminded her of Holly? This barrister has stick-like arms; no hint of a bust; slight shoulders. A skinny bird of a woman: studious; a little neurotic? Not someone who will land a lethal blow on her husband; who will cut through his easy charm – for he still comes across as relaxed, despite taking the process seriously; and it is only she – alert to every tic – who can sense, in the slight tightening of his jaw, the tension in him. His voice brings her back to the present. His deep, persuasive voice that often holds the potential for a laugh but then slips into one of confident authority. His tone is sombre, now. The politician taking responsibility for his failings but careful not to say anything to implicate himself at the same time.
‘I’d like to take you back to what happened in the committee room corridor, on the morning of October 13th,’ begins Angela Regan, and she smiles at him, easily.
‘Ah yes,’ says her husband. ‘After Miss Lytton called the lift.’
Later, Sophie wonders quite how she sat through it all, craning over the side of the gallery, trying to imagine the thoughts of the jury: those twelve diverse individuals who will decide her husband’s fate. She wonders how she dealt with the frankly inquisitive glances of those around her – who have recognised her, there on the front row; and have shushed and exchanged meaningful looks as she sidled past them. Shame seeps through her, angry and hot. To think that she once enjoyed being looked at, as a young woman at Oxford. This is a different kind of look: a gossip-fuelled, judgemental, overtly bewildered analysis. That’s his wife. Is she married to a rapist? Did he do it, after all?
She tries to block them out; and almost succeeds for James’s evidence is compelling: a very different narrative to that she has read in the papers. An account she so desperately wants to believe. This is a version of events in which the woman who has ripped her marriage apart called the lift and told her husband he was ‘devastatingly attractive’; in which she ushered him in and he – preoccupied by the Times article and grateful for some privacy in which it might be discussed – had naively, unthinkingly followed.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ he says with the self-deprecating smile she knows so well; the one that works with the mothers at the school gate; with the children’s teachers; with constituents. ‘But I just wanted to talk to her. She had always been a good sounding board. I suppose I doubted myself – found myself questioning if my manner could be construed as arrogant – and I thought she of all people would put me straight.’
‘But you didn’t talk?’ Angela prompts him.
‘No, we didn’t talk.’ He shakes his head, as if at a loss to explain how he could have found himself embroiled in this situation. ‘She reached up to kiss me and I found myself responding. It was a moment of madness, of sheer weakness.’ He pauses and his voice trembles, pregnant with a sincerity that comes easily. ‘It’s obviously something I deeply regret.’
His counsel pushes on: taking him through his version of the kissing, the bottom touching, the blouse opening. ‘I never wrenched her blouse open,’ he elaborates, and he looks around the court as if the idea is preposterous. ‘As I remember, she helped me unbutton it. I’m not brutish. Not the sort of man who would ever wrench a woman’s clothes off. That’s not my kind of thing.’
He is clever, thinks Sophie. Careful not to say what she knows he thinks: that he is not a man who ever needs to wrench a woman’s clothes off; that Olivia was practically panting for him.
‘And what about the laddered tights?’ prompts his barrister. ‘They were very fine tights. Fifteen denier. The sort of tights that easily snag.’
‘That must have happened when she tugged them down and I tried to help her.’ He pauses, almost risks looking rueful. ‘I’m afraid things got a bit frenzied in the heat of the moment,’ he says.
‘And the knickers, with their ripped elastic? Can you say when these were damaged?’
‘No. They may have snagged as she pulled them. I can’t remember hearing them rip but, as I say, it was somewhat frantic. From memory, it was Miss Lytton who pulled them down.’
She wants to retch. She can see it, all too clearly. She has been in a Commons lift: a tiny, rickety affair whose oak walls are so close together it’s impossible not to nudge against those standing beside you. When they kissed, they would be thrust against each other; the space encouraging a tight embrace. Olivia would be helping him undo her buttons, perhaps even unbuttoning them all; tugging at her tights; yanking her pants. And James, frantic, desperate, perhaps gentlemanly at first but then unable to resist trying to help her, would be piling in.
And, at the same time, her skin tightens with the realisation that what her husband says is not quite right. It’s nothing major: just the tiniest frisson; a sense that things are out of kilter; that the exact truth isn’t quite being conveyed. He has said he would never wrench a woman’s clothes off – yet she can remember occasions where he tore her clothes in the hurry to get to her: a bias-cut slip of a dress whose straps he broke at a ball; a blouse with a complicated front opening he couldn’t wait to get into; a skirt whose buttons he popped as he pulled it open. Moments from long, long ago, when he was an impulsive, passionate young man – twenty-one, twenty-two – and evidence of the strength of their mutual desire, for she had wanted him just as badly. But just because he has long since stopped behaving like this with her, it doesn’t mean he hasn’t with Olivia. He is more than capable of wrenching, whatever he says.
She cannot think. Barely listens as he explains away the bruise as just an overexuberant love bite.
‘Had you given her one before?’ asks Angela Regan.
‘Yes,’ admits her husband. ‘It was something she wanted when we made love; just something I did in the throes of lovemaking.’
She shakes her head, trying to order her thoughts. She knows he has lied before: he did it to the police, in 1993, and he lied to her about Olivia; she has had continual, irrefutable evidence of his lies ever since the story broke. He is professionally evasive, too. It’s part of the political game, together with the manipulating of statistics, the massaging of figures, the deliberate omission or burying of facts that may undermine an argument and must be smoothed out of the way.
But lying in court about not wrenching her clothes? That’s a new step for him, isn’t it? Or perhaps not: perhaps he thinks it no worse than an omission or a half-truth? I’m not the sort of man who would wrench clothes off, now. What else is he lying about? That put-down? Or whether Olivia said no? A kaleidoscope of possibilities cascades before his voice wrenches her back to the present, crucial moment in time.
For it is the evidence that she has most feared and yet that she feels compelled to listen to; and like her prurient neighbours in the public gallery she cranes forward as Ms Regan addresses the thorny issue of consent. The court stills: the air taut with an uncanny silence as the QC rises lightly on her toes before lowering herself and coming to the legal heart of the case.
‘Miss Lytton’s evidence is that you said: “Don’t be such a prick-tease.” That would suggest that you knew she didn’t want sex. Did you say that?’
‘No. It’s a foul phrase.’ He is appalled.
‘Did you say: “Don’t tease me”?’
‘No!’ He is adamant.
‘What about: “You’re teasing”?’
‘I may have said that,’ he admits, ‘as a lover’s endearment. But it was long before we got to this stage. It’s possible I may have murmured it when she reached up and gave me that first kiss.’
‘Miss Lytton’s evidence is that she said: “Get off me. No, not here.” Did you hear her say that?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Is it possible she could have said it and you didn’t hear her?’
‘No. We were in close proximity. There was no way that if she said something like that – or indeed anything – I wouldn’t hear. Besides’ – and here he pauses as if what he has to say is delicate and it pains him to point this out, though he must do – ‘she gave every indication that this was something she very much wanted. At no point did she lead me to believe that she didn’t consent.’
There is a sharp intake of breath from someone behind her but Sophie feels her breath ease from her. She watches as he takes his time to address the jury, eyes moving from one to the other, for he knows that this is the crucial moment, the evidence he needs them to remember when they are back in the jury room determining his fate.
They are the words that Sophie needs to hear him say. He speaks in a tone of the utmost sincerity: his voice deep and reassuring. At this moment, when he is at his most persuasive, she should believe him entirely.
And yet, perhaps because she has heard that voice so many times before and she knows it can be switched on for moments of high drama, he fails to quell her sense of unease. It builds, this churning disquiet, as he reiterates his point, pausing to let the magnitude of his words resound around the room:
‘I know for definite that she never asked me to stop,’ he says. ‘At no moment was I under the impression that she didn’t want it.’
And Sophie, knowing her husband – his love of sex, his self-absorption, his relaxed attitude to the truth; his slipperiness – and it pains her to pinpoint all this now – is left with an unpalatable feeling.
She is not sure if she quite believes him.