KATE
9 December 2016
Seven
Friday night – and I am in a good mood as I make my way up the path to my oldest friend Ali’s house, in a suburban street in west London. It’s a week since Brian handed me the first set of papers for Whitehouse and I am still queasy with excitement at the thought of bringing this case to court.
‘Oooh, fizz! Christmas? Or have you won a case?’ Ali gives me a brisk kiss on the cheek as she takes the cold Prosecco and the bunch of flowers I bundle into her arms.
‘I’ve just been given a good one,’ I explain as I follow her through the hall of her Edwardian terrace. A forest of coats sways against me and I am enveloped by the smell of lasagne – onions, garlic, caramelised meat – as I move into her cluttered kitchen at the back of the house.
The house is busy: one child raiding a cupboard – ‘But I’m hungry’; another playing the piano badly, fingers floundering over the same bar then racing onwards, louder and apparently oblivious. Only Joel, at seven, the youngest, and my godson, is quiet as he works on the box of Lego I brought him in the hope of buying an hour’s uninterrupted chat with his mother. Fifteen minutes after ripping it open, he has almost completed the apparently-not-so-elaborate task.
Ali places a mug of tea in front of me, sweeps aside a day-old Guardian. She is busy but then she’s always busy: teaching four days a week; bringing up three children aged seven to thirteen; being a wife to Ed. She never needs to point out her busy-ness: it’s just there. A fact. And one in which I often sense a strain of resentment as if her busy-ness is of a richer texture than mine. Motherhood, marriage and a career – not a career as high-flying or well-paid as mine but still a career – drain her so that, by Friday night, she is probably not in the mood to listen to my triumphs, still less my problems. It’s lovely to see me; but she could do without it at the end of a long week, really she could.
I imagine her thinking this, of course. She gives no indication but I sense it simmering, implicit in her quick glance at my new handbag, oversized and of firm, rich leather; suggested by the utter exhaustion cloaking her face. It seeps out as she finally sits down, breath rushing from her like air from a deflated balloon, and as she scrapes her hair into a ponytail with quick, sharp movements and a grimace. It’s even implied by her hair: fine grey streaks and dirty blonde strands in which the roots need doing; and the fact that her forehead seems permanently furrowed between two unkempt brows.
‘I like your glasses. Are they new?’ I ask, wanting to say something positive.
‘Oh, these.’ She takes them off and peers at them as if seeing them for the first time. One arm is bent and the lenses are smudged with fingermarks. She thrusts them back on; flashes a look that manages to be both wry and defiant.
‘They’re ancient. Can’t remember when I got them.’
‘You used to hate wearing glasses.’ I think back to the girl who wore contacts through her late teens, twenties and early thirties; who I’d thought so glamorous for expertly balancing a lens on her forefinger and, mirrorless, brushing it into her eye.
‘Did I?’ Ali smiles. ‘Well, these are cheaper and a lot less hassle.’ She shrugs, not needing to state that she no longer has time for grooming or to recall that she was the one who once drew the looks – naturally slim, blonde, confident – while I was heavier and shyer. A gallery of old Kates and Alis in our various physical incarnations – memories heaped layer upon layer on one another – hover like a string of cutout paper dolls.
‘So – you’re well?’ Ali pushes her glasses onto the top of her head as she brushes aside random pieces of Lego. I wonder if she really wants to know. She seems distracted by the lasagne bubbling away in the oven; the second load of school uniform sloshing around the washing machine, or the first, in the dryer, that rolls with a heavy regularity, a repetitive thud.
Her attention flickers. ‘I said not to eat anything.’ She stands and slams a low cupboard door shut as her eldest boy, Ollie, ten and apparently permanently hungry, tries to plunder it. ‘Dinner’s in ten minutes.’
‘But I’m hungry!’ The boy stomps his foot, testosterone palpable as he runs from the room.
‘Sorry,’ she says, sitting back down and fixing me with a smile. ‘Hopeless trying to have a proper conversation around here.’
As if on cue, Pippa, her eldest, slopes in and curls around the back of my chair; sinuous as a cat. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Can you just go? All of you!’ Ali’s voice rises in exasperation. ‘Can you just let me talk to my friend for ten minutes in peace?’
‘But Mum . . .’ Joel looks aghast as he is unceremoniously shooed out. His big sister peels herself from the back of my chair and stalks out, her slim hips swishing in a parody of a model. I watch her, this girl-child: half in awe of the woman she will become, half fearful for what her future brings.
‘That’s better.’ Ali sips her tea with relief; emits a tiny, satisfied sigh. Why aren’t we drinking the Prosecco? It’s a Friday night. Once upon a time we would have been three quarters of the way through a bottle by this point. But Ali has stashed it away in the fridge. I sip my own tea, too strong for my liking for she never gets it quite right, reach for the huge plastic carton of milk on the counter and pour a little more in.
‘So – you said something about a case?’
So she is interested. I feel a wave of relief and then my apprehension wells up inside me.
‘It’s a big one. A rape. Quite high-profile.’
‘Sounds exciting?’
I am torn. I am itching to divulge just a little: not to run through the evidence but to let her know whom we’re talking about here.
‘I can’t really talk about it.’ I slam the possibility of disclosure shut and catch her expression: a be-like-that-if-you-want smile; a slight sigh; a distancing between us when we seemed, briefly, to be easing back into being our familiar, gossipy selves.
‘It’s James Whitehouse.’ I break my own rules, eager to regain that closeness; and more than that, to check her reaction.
Her blue eyes widen. I have her attention. ‘The minister?’
I nod.
‘And you’ll be prosecuting?’
‘Yes.’ I roll my eyes. I still can’t quite believe it.
Her breath eases out and I wait for further, inevitable questions.
‘So – do you think that he’s guilty?’
‘The CPS believes it has a strong case.’
‘Not the same thing.’ She shakes her head.
I wrinkle my nose and offer my usual, bland, straight-as-a-die response. ‘He says he’s innocent. The CPS submits that there is sufficient evidence to convict and I’ll do my best to convince the jury of the case.’
Ali pushes back her chair; picks cutlery from a drawer with a silvery rattle. Six knives; six forks; the cruets held in her other hand like a pair of maracas. She turns quickly; pushes the drawer closed with her hip.
Perhaps she’s irritated by my use of legalese: inevitable, when it’s the language I use in court. Hard, when discussing a case, to slip into something more colloquial just as I find it hard to shed my lawyerly precision, my tendency to cross-examine when trying to prove a point. I watch for the telltale signs that she’s angry: a refusal to meet my eye, a tension around her mouth as if she’s forcing herself not to speak. But Ali looks more thoughtful than cross.
‘I can’t believe it of him. I mean, I know he had that affair but I genuinely thought he was one of the good guys. He seemed to be doing a good job: reaching out to Muslim communities rather than automatically pillorying them. And he just seemed lovely.’
‘Lovely?’
She shrugs her shoulders, momentarily embarrassed. ‘The one Tory I wouldn’t kick out of bed.’
I’m shaken by her tone but, ‘Not really your type, is he?’ I tease, for he is as unlike Ed, her partner since our early twenties and now a rather earnest, balding head teacher, as it is possible to be.
‘I just think he’s beautiful.’ She looks at me, frankly, and all the baggage she wears so heavily – as wife, as mother, as teacher to small children – slips from her with this uncharacteristic admission. We could be getting ready for a college bop, freshers discussing which boy we had our eye on; both eighteen again.
I shrug and busy myself by clearing her table, troubled by her response on several levels. This is what we are up against. A man who will win over every female member of the jury by virtue of being beautiful; may win over some male members, too, for his looks are never going to alienate. The chiselled jaw, the high cheekbones, those green eyes, his height, his charisma – because that’s what it is; this rare quality that marks him out so clearly – are those of a leading man. And then there’s his charm – for James Whitehouse has this in abundance. The effortless, unostentatious courtesy that is the trademark of an Old Etonian, that cannot help but flatter so that you feel, when their attention is on you, that they are genuinely interested; genuinely concerned to help. As Olivia Lytton found, it can be seductive. I have no doubt that, if he is put in the box, as he surely will be, he will use every ounce of this charm, every trick up his sleeve.
‘Bit shallow of me to be swayed by his looks, isn’t it?’
‘Not shallow. I’m worried it’s natural. That the jury will think it.’
‘I keep imagining his poor wife and family. He’s a father and husband. I think that’s what makes it so difficult to believe.’
‘Oh, Ali. Most rapists are known to their victims. They’re not men with knives who pounce down alleyways.’
‘I know that. You know I know that.’ She starts slamming the cutlery down.
‘You’ll be telling me you don’t believe in marital rape, next!’ I laugh to cover my frustration; my disbelief that she can think the best of him.
‘That’s not fair, Kate. Not fair at all.’
The temperature in the stuffy kitchen suddenly drops five degrees. She is red-faced, her eyes dark beads as she looks up at me. It strikes me that she is properly cross.
‘I didn’t mean to patronise.’ I row back; aware that the gulf is widening between us – a chasm that began with a chink when I got my first, and she her low 2:2; and that has widened as she entered teaching and I progressed to the Bar. She has long been chippy about feeling intellectually inferior and yet, once upon a time, she would argue as passionately as me; would be joining me in lecturing about feminism and sexual politics and putting her point across, sometimes forcefully. Is it marriage, motherhood or just age that has changed her? Made her more conservative. Less willing to believe that a good-looking – no, a beautiful – man, and an upper-class one at that, could be capable of such an ugly crime? We all mellow with age: we make compromises; bend our opinions; become less strident. Except that I don’t. Not when it comes to rape.
I feel prickly but it’s unfair of me to direct my exasperation at her. This case – and the likelihood of James Whitehouse getting off – has affected me in a way it usually wouldn’t. For, despite the heat of my fury, I am good at remaining emotionally detached. On the rare occasion I lose a case, it’s my failure that bugs me as much as the implications for the complainants – the girls whose dress sense, levels of alcohol consumption and sexual behaviour are pored over in the witness box, as if we were prurient tabloid readers, and whose stories are still not believed after all that.
Usually, I bounce back from any loss: a fast run; a stiff gin; plenty more work in which to immerse myself, for the pressure of my job means that I cannot wallow in self-pity. I presented the evidence and the decision was out of my hands, now move on. That’s what I always tell myself and, usually, it’s what I manage to believe.
But not this time. This case is under my skin. And the odds are stacked against us. Just like Ted Butler and Stacey Gibbons, there was a relationship here, though there was little that was domestic. An affair conducted in the workplace: in lifts and on office desks; over bottles of Veuve in hotel rooms and at her flat. And some of the evidence hints at a casual violence simmering beneath James Whitehouse’s charming exterior; suggests – with his utter disregard for his one-time lover’s feelings; his extreme sense of entitlement – he is a sociopath.
I can’t discuss any of this with Ali. Can’t share Olivia’s witness statement. The details of exactly what happened. It’s not that I don’t trust her. It’s not even because it’s professionally unacceptable. Perhaps it’s that I don’t want to make myself vulnerable: don’t want to admit that this high-profile prosecution of a charismatic, credible figure will be almost impossible to pull off. Or perhaps it’s because I fear it’s evident that I am losing my objectivity – and that’s something that can never be questioned, at all.
‘Let’s not argue.’ My dearest friend is holding out a glass of wine, a peace offering that I take gratefully.
‘Come here.’ She opens her arms, suddenly maternal, and I give her a quick, tight hug: enjoying the warmth that flows from her; the familiarity of her small, soft body against my tall, lean one.
‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ I admit, above the top of her head.
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I don’t know if I can get him convicted.’ I pull away, ashamed at the admission.
‘Not your decision, is it? Isn’t that what you always say? That it’s up to the jury.’
‘Yes, it is.’ The thought is bleak.
‘I think you might have your work cut out.’ She takes a swig of wine. ‘Wasn’t he having an affair with her – and didn’t she go to the papers when he called it off to be with his wife and kids? Doesn’t sound like she’s much of a victim: more a woman getting her own back,’ she says.
‘That doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped before that happened.’
My voice sounds choked: the words hard, angry clots, and, behind my back, my hands clench involuntarily into fists.