The Life and Loves of a She Devil (16 page)

‘I hope you are going to a good dentist,’ said Lady Bissop to Polly, tentatively enough. She wondered why it was necessary for Polly’s large but evidently strong teeth to have to go, but did not like to ask outright for fear of offending her. She did not want Polly to hand in her notice. On the contrary, she wanted her to stay for ever; for the judge was fond of her, and in the shadow of her protection the children grew lively and looked happy; and the house ran smoothly, and the judge, less nervous about his sentencing after his talks with Polly, left her, Lady Bissop, alone at night, and had all but forgotten his uxorious passion for bondage and whips, for which — once she had recovered from the initial humiliation of having her servant preferred to herself as far as conversation was concerned — she could only be grateful.

‘The best dentist in the city,’ said Polly, a little thickly. ‘And certainly the most expensive.’

‘What exactly are you having done?’ asked Lady Bissop, cautiously.

‘I am having my jaw remodelled,’ said Polly, ‘with an eye to my future,’ and Lady Bissop thought, poor thing, what’s the use? If you took back the jawline it would make the brow look more like Frankenstein’s than ever.

‘I suppose you are right to try and improve on nature,’ she said, still doubtful.

‘It is not a question of right,’ said Polly firmly. ‘But it is what I mean to do. It’s just annoying that it all takes so long. Never mind. I am employing the time usefully.’

‘God places us in the world for a purpose,’ said Lady Bissop. ‘We should surely put up with what He gives us, in the way of nose, teeth, and so forth.’

‘His ways are far too mysterious,’ said Polly, ‘for me to put up with them any more.’

Lady Bissop had been brought up to believe that a woman’s function was to adjust herself to the times she lived in and the household she dwelt in, and that God worked His purposes out through the consent of the humble and faithful, and there was to be no arguing about these things. She crossed herself, alarmed. All the same she did not want to lose Polly.

‘So long as it doesn’t frighten the children,’ she said, ‘I suppose I can’t object.’

The children seemed happy enough with Polly’s gaping jaw. They would peer down into the black hole of her mouth and shriek with delight: dragons lived down there, they declared. Dragons and demons. They drew pictures of demons and dragons and Polly pinned them to the walls. Lady Bissop worried in case the children got nightmares. They never did. The whole household slept peacefully through the night: judge, wife, nanny, children and all.

The children went to bed at eight; Lady Bissop followed after at ten. The judge and Polly stayed together before the fire until midnight, and whatever happened, happened.

Justice Bissop had a particularly interesting case on his hands which he would discuss at length with Polly. The case had been hanging fire for months while the defendant’s lawyers tried to organise their defence, and failed. The defendant’s common-law wife kept interfering, dismissing counsel and hiring others.

‘Loyalty in women is an amazing thing,’ said the judge. ‘The worse the man, the blinder the woman. I have often noticed it.’

The case concerned an accountant who had been cheating his clients in a minor way for years — failing to pay over interest received on monies he’d held on their behalf and holding on to this money unduly long. It was a practice common enough with accountants. The temptation was great, especially in periods of high interest rates, but of course technically illegal. Later, however, the scoundrel had done worse: he had invested monies held in trust for clients in quick, sure-fire in-and-out currency speculation, for which fortunately he had a knack: an uncanny way of knowing the direction in which currency rates would move. His clients, of course, did not get the profits; they vanished out of his books and presumably into his pocket.

The accountant professed his total innocence of these early malfeasances and claimed someone had been tampering with his books. ‘White-collar criminals,’ observed the judge, ‘are always stubborn in the denial of their guilt. They feel secure in their ability to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. Blue-collar workers, on the contrary, are all too eager to confess, sometimes to a great deal more than they need — and then fling themselves upon the court’s mercy.’

The accountant’s house had burned down, and many of his files and records with it, thus confusing the issue.

‘How convenient!’ remarked Polly, and she and the judge had laughed knowingly.

‘This man’s audacity knows no bounds,’ said the judge. ‘His early frauds having escaped detection, he proceeded to large-scale embezzlement. Over a period of a few months he transferred large sums — amounting to millions of dollars — into his own account, and from there into the Swiss bank account of a young woman with whom he had been having an affair.’

‘His mistress!’ said Polly. ‘And I suppose then he meant just to change his name and start a new life with her?’

‘That is certainly the inference.’

‘What about his poor wife?’ asked Polly. ‘I suppose he was married. Such people usually are.’

‘She disappeared some time back, after the fire.’

‘How convenient,’ said Polly. ‘I think he’s lucky to be up merely for fraud, and not for arson and murder as well!’

‘A man of considerable sexual energy,’ said the judge, stretching his long, under-used limbs and looking at her heavy, downy legs. She wore white socks and white fluffy slippers which contrasted strongly and sharply with her dark skin and general unfluffiness and made him contemplate the line between reality and illusion, fact and artifice, and held his mind in a curious suspension, whose only relief, he began to see, would be violent physical contact with her, some kind of sexual mauling.

‘Once he’d got rid of his wife he went to live with his mistress, a writer of trashy novels. I must ask my wife if she’s read any. But all the time he was planning the great flight, the new life, with someone altogether different, and on his clients’ money too.’

‘It doesn’t look good for him,’ said Polly Patch.

‘It certainly doesn’t,’ said the judge. Her breasts were larger than life. Well, so was she.

‘So what went wrong?’

‘Something did. Probably his Swiss Miss took off with the money; or perhaps he was waiting for a call from her: we don’t know. The accountants moved in, got suspicious, the police were called, and that was that.’

‘Never trust a woman,’ observed Polly Patch, and the judge was glad she was unfashionable enough to indulge in the kind of sexist remarks which had once kept conversations so lively, and animation flashing between the sexes.

‘Of course, that’s the Prosecution case,’ said Polly.

‘I suppose so,’ said the judge. ‘But the Defence are going to have a hard time knocking holes in it.’

‘I hope he doesn’t get away with it,’ said Polly. ‘He sounds a very distasteful and dangerous kind of man.’

The judge stared into the dark cave entrance of her mouth. She spoke thickly. His wife had assured him that as soon as the gums had healed Polly would have false teeth fitted, at least as a temporary measure, while waiting for the cosmetic surgery that would take three inches out of her jaw. He longed to talk about it.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked at last.

‘Of course it hurts,’ she said. ‘It’s meant to hurt. Anything that’s worth achieving has its price. And, by corollary, if you are prepared to pay that price you can achieve almost anything. In this particular case I am paying with physical pain. Hans Andersen’s little mermaid wanted legs instead of a tail, so that she could be properly loved by her Prince. She was given legs, and by inference the gap where they join at the top, and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives. Well, what did she expect? That was the penalty. And, like her, I welcome it. I don’t complain.’

‘Did he love her,’ asked the judge, ‘in return?’

‘Temporarily,’ said Polly Patch. The firelight glinted on her black hair, making it reddish. The judge took her hand in his. It looked as if it should be warm, but it was cold. She brought the conversation back to the accountant.

‘Those who are most trusted,’ said Polly Patch, ‘sin most if they betray that trust.’

‘But their temptations are greater,’ said the judge. ‘Justice must always be tinged with mercy, and with understanding.’

‘How much mercy did he show his clients?’ asked Polly, her fingers moving with surprising delicacy inside his enclosing hand. ‘And they were writers, artists, people ill-fitted to look after themselves in a cruel world.’

The judge, who so often saw writers before him in the role of plagiarists, libellers and breachers of the Copyright Act, was not so sure that they deserved much pity.

‘How long will you give him?’ she asked. They sat closer together now, his skinny, grey-flannelled thigh running alongside her firm broad one. At any minute now Lady Bissop would be back from her bath.

‘A year,’ he said, ‘or so.’

‘A year or so! But you gave that poor mad dying woman three whole years! And he deserves so much more. A man in a position of trust, who coldly and callously and with intent cheats and defrauds and spits his insolence at a society which has done nothing but help him. There will be uproar! You will never be Lord Chief Justice if you are so lenient.’

‘Ah but,’ he said, ‘a single year to a middle-class man, accustomed to good living and high social station, is equal to five for anyone else. One bears in mind the humiliation he suffers, the destruction of his family, the loss of friends, career, pension, everything.’

‘Ordinary people,’ she said, ‘for the most part are impetuous: they err by accident; the middle classes err by design. The penalties should be doubled, not halved.’

He put his other hand over her mouth to stop her talking which meant that he had to leave his chair and crouch above her. Once the mouth was covered he felt less endangered, less likely to be engulfed.

She shook herself free of him and stood with her back towards the fire, silhouetted against the leaping flames. There was a sudden increase in the flames and crackles behind her.

‘You must listen to what I say,’ she said, ‘because I am the voice of the people, or as near to it as you will ever get.’

‘I hear you,’ he said. And indeed she stood blotting out the light, as the Statue of Liberty does in New York Harbour, or the figure of justice on the law courts in London: the law itself, taken solid form. He took notice of her, and of what she had to say, which was perhaps the same thing.

Lady Bissop came in, in the navy towelling dressing gown he most disliked.

‘Maureen,’ said the judge, ‘do go to bed!’

Lady Bissop asked tentatively if she could see the judge alone. Polly Patch obligingly left the room.

‘Please don’t do anything unwise,’ said Lady Bissop. ‘Polly might leave, and then what would I do? I’ve come to depend upon her so.’

‘My dear,’ said the judge, ‘please leave me to be the best judge of what’s best for you.’

And Lady Bissop, reassured, went to bed and the judge took himself off with Polly to the spare room, where he stayed for two hours. He was a conscientious man and would spend only so much of the night in revelry — he needed to be fresh for the morning. Polly understood, as she understood so much, and did not press him to stay.

The next morning Polly was at the breakfast table as usual, performing her duties, wiping chins, finding shoelaces, positive and cheerful, and Lady Bissop had had a good night’s sleep, free of her husband’s conjugal attentions, and her various bruises and abrasions given a chance to heal, and she was well able to see the advantages of the new arrangement. She even went into the city to have her hair done, so suddenly lifted were her spirits, and her morale.

The judge, finding a more willing sexual partner in Polly than in his wife, was relieved of guilt, and looking round his world could see little wrong with it. He was almost happy. He permitted his children more latitude. They were allowed to play in the garden, now that his nervousness in case they damaged a plant by kicking a ball had abated. He watched his wife sink back into childishness and even that did not distress him. He now decided to spread his sentencing sessions more evenly over the month, and although this caused some confusion to his staff they quickly adjusted to the new regime. The judge spent pleasurable if hard-working hours with Polly by night, binding her hand and foot to the bed, beating her with an old-fashioned bamboo carpet beater.

‘Am I hurting you?’ he’d ask.

‘Of course you are,’ she’d reply, politely.

‘I’m not a sadist,’ he once said. ‘This is merely the effect of the work I do.’

‘I understand,’ she said, ‘perfectly. What you are expected to do is unnatural and this is your response.’

He almost loved her. He thought she was immeasurably wise.

Lady Bissop decided that perhaps purple was too strong a colour for the carpets and settled on a tawny red shade, in eighty per cent natural wool, and for a time the household seemed much like any other, if you left out what happened nightly in the spare room. Lady Bissop even began to entertain a little, as her husband’s suspicions of her friends grew less acute, and he felt less convinced they were either laughing at him or making mental notes of the lay-out of the house, the better to burgle it.

The question of bail for the accountant came up. Polly Patch opposed it.

‘But he’s been waiting in prison for a full year,’ said the judge. ‘And without trial!’

‘But we all know he’s guilty,’ said Polly. ‘And of far worse things than embezzlement. Save your pity for those who deserve it. Good family men, blue-collar workers, those who act on impulse, those who’re not likely to go back on their word —they’re the ones who deserve bail. But is this man going to honour his bond?’

‘The money’s being put up by his mistress. The woman must be spending a fortune on him. If he can call out this response in her, he can’t be all bad.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Polly. ‘She loved him and he betrayed her. He will do it again. He lived with her but slept with other women. He was preparing to abandon her. Why should he be true to her now? No! Save the poor woman her money. No bail, say I! He will merely abscond.’