‘They’ll all be seasick tonight,’ muttered Hilary, ‘that’s one comfort. Nothing like it to prevent you from thinking of the future or the past.’
She went into Adrian’s after leaving him, and was rather disconcerted to find her Uncle Lionel there. They stopped dead in their discussion. Then the Judge said:
‘Perhaps you can tell us, Dinny: Is there any chance at all of mediating between those two before this unpleasant business comes on?’
‘None, Uncle.’
‘Oh! Then seeing as I do rather much of the law, I should suggest Clare’s not appearing and letting the thing go undefended. If there’s no chance of their coming together again, what is the use of prolonging a state of stalemate?’
‘That’s what I think, Uncle Lionel; but, of course, you know the charges aren’t true.’
The Judge grimaced.
‘I’m speaking as a man, Dinny. The publicity will be lamentable for Clare, win or lose; whereas, if she and this young man didn’t defend, there’d be very little. Adrian says she would refuse any support from Corven, so that element doesn’t come in. What is all the trouble about? You know, of course.’
‘Very vaguely, and in confidence.’
‘Great pity!’ said the Judge: ‘If they knew as much as I do, people would never fight these things.’
‘There is that claim for damages.’
‘Yes, Adrian was telling me – pretty medieval, that.’
‘Is revenge medieval, Uncle Lionel?’
‘Not altogether,’ said the Judge, with his wry smile; ‘but I shouldn’t have thought a man in Corven’s position could afford such luxuries. To put his wife into the scales! Thoroughly unpleasant.’
Adrian put his arm round Dinny’s shoulders.
‘Nobody feels that more than Dinny.’
‘I suppose,’ murmured the Judge, ‘Corven will at least have them settled on her.’
‘Clare wouldn’t take them. But, why shouldn’t they win? I thought the law existed to administer justice, Uncle Lionel.’
‘I don’t like juries,’ said the Judge abruptly.
Dinny looked at him with curiosity – surprisingly frank! He added:
‘Tell Clare to keep her voice up and her answers short. And don’t let her try to be clever. Any laughter in court should be raised by the judge.’
So saying, he again smiled wryly, shook her hand, and took himself away.
‘Is Uncle Lionel a good judge?’
‘Impartial and polite, they say. I’ve never seen him in court, but from what I know of him as a brother, he’d be conscientious and thorough; a bit sarcastic at times. He’s quite right about this case, Dinny.’
‘I’ve felt that all along. It’s Father, and that claim for damages.’
‘I expect they regret that claim now. His lawyers must be bunglers. Angling for position!’
‘Isn’t that what lawyers are for?’
Adrian laughed.
‘Here’s tea! Let’s drown our sorrows, and go and see a film. There’s a German thing they say is really magnanimous. Real magnanimity on the screen, Dinny, think of it!’
Chapter Twenty-nine
OVER was the shuffling of seats and papers, which marks the succession of one human drama by another, and ‘very young’ Roger said:
‘We’ll go into the well of the court.’
There, with her sister and her father, Dinny sat down, bastioned from Jerry Corven by ‘very young’ Roger and his rival in the law.
‘Is this,’ she whispered, ‘the well at the bottom of which truth lies, or lies?’
Unable to see the rising ‘body’ of the court behind her, she knew by instinct and the sense of hearing that it was filling up. The public’s unerring sense of value had scented out a fight, if not a title. The Judge, too, seemed to have smelt something, for he was shrouded in a large bandana handkerchief. Dinny gazed upward. Impressively high, and vaguely Gothic, the court seemed. Above where the Judge sat red curtains were drawn across, surprisingly beyond the reach of man. Her eyes fell to the jury filing into their two-ranked ‘box’. The foreman fascinated her at once by his egg-shaped face and head, little hair of any sort, red cheeks, light eyes, and an expression so subtly blended between that of a codfish and a sheep that it reminded her of neither. His face recalled rather one of the two gentlemen of South Molton Street, and she felt almost sure that he was a jeweller. Three women sat at the end of the front row, no one of whom, surely, could ever have spent a night in a car. The first was stout and had the pleasant flattish face of a superior housekeeper. The second, thin, dark, and rather gaunt, was perhaps a writer. The third’s bird-like look was disguised in an obvious cold. The other eight male members of the jury tired her eyes, so diverse and difficult to place. A voice said: