Short Stories Page 2

  I remarked that one might expect a study of the Victorian novelists to have reminded her of the practical as well as the spiritual advantages of being on good terms with any relative of substantial fortune.

  “Trollope,” said Selena with evident approval, “is always very sensible about that sort of thing—I’m not quite sure about the Brontës. But be that as it may, Mr. Barnsley was quite content to accept Isabel’s account of things at its face value. It wasn’t only that he was pleased about the divorce—he was really very touched to think that his daughter still cared so much about him. After all, it was a long time since the offensive letter, and until she was seventeen he’d idolized her. He told Mr. Pitkin to put in hand the arrangements for the divorce, and wrote in affectionate terms to Amanda to arrange a meeting.”

  “Was it,” I asked, ” a successful reunion?”

  “Evidently, since shortly afterwards he mentioned to Mr. Pitkin that once the business of the divorce was dealt with he would have to do something about changing his will.”

  “Did he indicate what he had in mind?”

  “He still wanted to leave the bulk of his estate to Natalie, but to give a sufficient share to Amanda to show his affection for her—about a fifth was what he had in mind. Well, with both parties consenting and no arguments about property or children, the divorce went through pretty quickly, and he made arrangements to marry Natalie as soon as the decree was made absolute.

  “Mr. Pitkin admits to having felt a certain apprehensiveness about the occasion. It was going to be a very quite wedding in a registry office, with a small reception afterwards, but it was also going to be the first time that Amanda and Natalie had met each other, and he felt Mr. Barnsley’s view that they would get on like a house on fire might be a little over-optimistic. He remembered Amanda’s letter, and he didn’t quite trust her not to do something outrageous to show her disapproval. He also had the impression that Natalie was becoming a trifle jealous of Barnsley’s renewed affection for his daughter, and might have some difficulty in concealing it.

  “But as it turned out his misgivings were quite unfounded. Amanda wore a suitably pretty and feminine dress and was charming to everyone. She and Natalie shook hands, and Natalie said she hoped they would be great friends, and Amanda said she hoped so too, and then they had what Mr. Pitkin calls a very nice little conversation about how Amanda was getting on with her studies. So that by the time Mr. Barnsley and his bride left to go on their honeymoon, which they planned to spend driving around the Lake District, Mr. Pitkin feels able to assure me that everyone was getting on splendidly.

  “The only slight embarrassment was the fault of Mr. Barnsley himself—he judged it a suitable moment to remind Mr. Pitkin, in the hearing of both Natalie and Amanda, that he wanted a new will drawn up. It wasn’t, in the circumstances, an entirely tactful remark. But no one else took any particular notice, and Mr. Pitkin simply assured him that a draft would be ready for his approval on his return to London.

  “As it would have been, no doubt, if Mr. Barnsley had ever returned from his honeymoon.”

  She fell silent, while at the tables round us there continued the cheerful clinking of glasses and the noise of eager gossip about rumours of scandal in the City. I thought of Mr. Barnsley setting forth with his unsophisticated young bride, and reflected that those who lack glamour are not necessarily without avarice.

  I asked how it had happened.

  “There was an accident with the car. Barnsley and Natalie were both killed instantly.”

  “Both?” It was not the contingency I had envisioned.

  “Oh yes,” said Selena, “both. Something was wrong with the steering, apparently. Well, things sometimes do go wrong with cars, of course. But it was quite a new car, and supposed to have been thoroughly tested, so the local police were just a little puzzled about it. Enough so, at any rate, to ask Mr. Pitkin, very discreetly, who would benefit under Mr. Barnsley’s will. But he gave them a copy of the will made three years before, and when they saw that the beneficiaries, in the events which had occurred, were a dozen highly respectable national charities, they didn’t pursue the matter. There are limits to what even the most aggressive fund-raisers will do to secure a charitable bequest.”

  She paused and sipped her wine, regarding me over her glass with an expression of pellucid innocence. I have known her too long, however, to be deceived by it, and I had detected in her voice a certain sardonic quality: I concluded that I was overlooking some point of critical importance. After a moment’s thought I realized what it was, for the rule in question is one of considerable antiquity.

  “Surely, I said, “unless there has been any recent legislation on the matter of which I am unaware, the effect of Mr. Barnsley’s marriage-?”

  “Quite so,” said Selena. “As you very rightly say, Hilary, and as Mr. Pitkin discovered for the first time this morning, when he instructed his Probate assistant to deal with the formalities of proving the will, the effect of the marriage was to revoke it. I’m afraid a great many people get married without fully understanding the legal consequences, and in particular without understanding that when they say “I do” they are revoking any will they may previously have made. But there is no doubt, of course, that that is the position under English law. So Mr. Barnsley died intestate.”

  “I fear,” I said, “that I have a somewhat hazy recollection of the modern intestacy rules. Does that mean that his estate will pass to Natalie’s next-of-kin? There is a presumption, I seem to remember, where two persons die together in an accident, that the younger survived the older?”

  “That’s the general rule, but actually it doesn’t apply on an intestacy if the people concerned are husband and wife. In those circumstances neither estate takes any benefit from the other. But even if Natalie had survived her husband by a short period, her next-of-kin would take relatively little—the widow’s stautory legacy, which is a trifling sum by comparison with the value of the estate, and half the income arising from the estate during the period of survival.”

  “In that case,” I said, finding myself curiously reluctant to reach this conclusion, “I suppose that the whole estate goes to his daughter?”

  “Who, if her father had died before his marriage, would have taken nothing, and if he had lived to make another will would have taken a comparatively small share of it. Yes. She is, as Mr. Pitkin was careful to tell me, entirely ignorant of legal matters and will be even more astonished than he was to learn that that is the case. So naturally he didn’t want to give her such momentous news until he’d had it confirmed by Chancery Counsel, and that, he’d said, was why he’d come to see me. But the question that was really troubling him, you see, was one he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and which it would have been outside my competence to answer. That is to say, ought he to mention to the police how very advantageously things have turned out from the point of view of Miss Amanda Barnsley?”

  It now for the first time occurred to me that I possessed an item of knowledge of possible relevance to the events she had described. Uncertain whether or not I should mention it, and having had no time to weigh the consequences of doing so, I remained silent.

  Selena leant back in her chair and gave a sigh, as if telling the story had eased her mind.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s lucky that Amanda’s reading a nice harmless subject like English literature. If she’d happened to be reading law it might all look rather sinister. But non-lawyers don’t usually know that a will is revoked by marriage, and I wouldn’t think, would you, that it’s the sort of information she’d be likely to come across by accident?”

  The hour of my engagement being at hand, I was able to take my leave of her without making any direct answer. During dinner I put the matter from my mind, thinking that during the journey back to Oxford I would be able to reach a decision. But the train has passed Didcot, and I remain undecided.

  It seems extraordinary and slightly absurd that I should find myself in such a qua
ndary on account of an item of knowledge which is not, after all, in any way private or peculiar to myself. Indeed, if the work of the late Mr. Wilkie Collins were held in the esteem it deserves, the plot of his admirable novel No Name, in which the revocation by marriage of her father’s will deprives the heroine of her inheritance, would no doubt be known to everyone having any pretension to being properly educated. As it is, however, I suppose that relatively few people have any acquaintance with it—unless they are studying English literature, and specializing in the nineteenth-century novel.

  The Triumph of Eve

  “When I was a girl,” said Eve, leaning back comfortably and sipping her brandy, “everyone assumed that I’d have to make my living from crime, but I was determined I wouldn’t.” She smiled; though she was, beyond question, no longer a girl, her dark eyes were still bright under arching eyebrows and the lines that the years had drawn on her features were of irony and skepticism. “So it was rather a disappointment when I began my career with a murder.”

  Although it was some years since Eve Lampeter had practiced as a barrister at 62 New Square, the older members of those Chambers still regarded her with sufficient affection. the younger with sufficient pride, for her elevation to senior judicial office to be thought a proper occasion for a Chambers dinner. As the habitual chronicler of events in New Square, I had been invited to be among the guests.

  The dinner was held in the nearest restaurant to Lincoln’s Inn to have what Basil Ptarmigan Q.C., the head of Chambers, considered a more or less tolerable wine list. During the meal we had conscientiously tested its merits: by the time we reached the coffee and liqueurs the mood of the gathering was relaxed and convivial. Basil had then risen to make a graceful little speech, full of elegant compliments to the guest of honor, proposing the toast “To women at the Bar.”

  “And to our progressing more rapidly in our profession,” said Selena Jardine, “in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth. Considering that it’s nearly eighty years since women were first admitted to the Bar, don’t you find it rather discouraging, Eve, that even now there are so few women judges?”

  “But you must remember,” said Eve, “that judges are usually appointed thirty or forty years after being called to the Bar. And in the past forty years, things have changed a great deal.”

  It was thus that she came to tell us about the murder—which was, she added in extenuation, her first and only crime.

  “Ah yes,” said Basil, “I remember about your murder, Eve. You secured an acquittal, as I recall, before Mr. Justice Rattlestick—many seasoned criminal lawyers would be proud to boast as much. A triumph, my dear Eve—not merely for you personally, but, if I may so express it, for the Chancery approach. We are not so ungracious, I hope, as to ask you to sing for your supper, but I know we should all like to hear about it.”

  Eve, at first demurring, yielded to universal persuasion.

  “By the time I was come to the Bar,” said Eve, “women had already made some measure of progress—there was nothing extraordinary in itself about a woman being a barrister. Quite a number of women had been called to the Bar since the end of the Second World War and several had been very successful. They had all, however, specialized in crime—not in commercial or property cases. Twenty years before, the accepted opinion had been that women couldn’t be effective as advocates. The accepted opinion now was that they could be quite effective in those cases where they could appeal to the emotions of the jury—that is to say, in criminal cases. In civil litigation, on the other hand, where it was the judge who had to be persuaded, and what counted was clear, logical reasoning, they would of course be perfectly hopeless.”

  “Outrageous,” said Selena, with warm indignation.

  “Quite so, but still, as I say, a measure of progress. The trouble was, from my point of view, that I simply didn’t want to practice at the criminal Bar. What I was interested in was the law of property—-entails and contingent remainders and the rule against perpetuities. As far as I was concemed, criminal law hardly counted as law at all. So clearly the place for me was the Chancery Bar and my first step, after passing my exams, was to look for a Chancery pupillage.

  “It was at that point that I began to get pitying smiles from everyone I asked for help or advice. In a profession, they said, not noted for radicalism, the Chancery Bar was the most conservative section—they used such expressions as ‘reactionary’ and even ‘hidebound.’ Very few Chancery barristers would be willing to take a woman as a pupil; even if I found a pupillage, I was most unlikely to obtain a tenancy afterward; and even if I did get a tenancy, I would never get any work—no solicitor would dare to instruct a woman in connection with a Chancery case. It was true that one or two women had somehow got tenancies in Chancery chambers; but they had, I was told, other sources of income—their professional earnings barely covered their Chambers expenses. If I wanted to make my living as a barrister, it would have to be at the criminal Bar.

  “But I was an optimist at that age and rather obstinate,so I went on looking for a Chancery pupillage. There was no formal procedure for finding pupillage in those days—one just asked anyone one could think of whether they could help. In the end one of my tutors at Oxford gave me an introduction to Christopher Dove, who was a senior Junior at 62 New Square and the editor of the leading textbook on easements of light. Christopher was quite old-fashioned in many ways, but he didn’t seem to mind at all about me being a woman.”

  “That,” said Basil, “was because he didn’t notice. He was often heard to speak of you as a nice young fellow, very sound on the Settled Land Act.”

  “Basil,” said Eve, “you exaggerate. Well. I enjoyed my pupillage enormously. We were at the beginning of the great boom in property values that characterized the 1960s, and some people, not always very scrupulous, had already started buying up areas of land which they thought suitable for development. So there was a good deal of interesting litigation going on in the Chancery Division about contracts for the sale of land and Christopher was getting his fair share of it.

  “l was short of money, of course, but I’d expected that. Pupils weren’t paid anything in those days—on the contrary, the pupil paid the pupil master a hundred guineas. Apart from some teaching and editorial work, I had to rely on the generosity of my parents to keep me from starvation. Still, I wasn’t unduly worried about my financial position—I thought that once I’d finished my first six months of pupillage, and was entitled to accept instructions from solicitors to appear in court, I’d start to have some fees coming in.

  “When the great day came, however, it didn’t appear to be an occasion for which solicitors up and down the country had been waiting with bated breath. The days and weeks went by and not a single brief arrived with my name on—not so much as a claim for possession of a cowshed in Little Piddlecombe or an uncontested winding-up on Monday morning in the Companies Court. After a month, I was feeling rather discouraged—when a friend in the Middle Temple rang up and said he was in difficulties on the following day and wondered if I could help him out, I wasn’t in any mood to turn him down.

  “He was junior counsel in a trial that was due to start at the Old Bailey and another of his cases had suddenly come up for hearing in the Court of Appeal—-he wanted me to take over his brief at the Bailey. I didn’t need, he said breezily, to know anything about the case—he was being led by Hector Pomfret, who was a very experienced criminal Silk and knew the case inside out—-all I had to do was sit behind Pomfret and take a more or less legible note of the evidence. ‘Money for old rope’ was how my friend described it, and I have to admit that the brief fee was very attractive.

  “By the time he got round to telling me that his client was charged with murder, I’d committed myself to doing it. So he sent the papers across to me and I spent the evening reading them.

  “It wasn’t even an interesting or glamorous sort of murder, just a common or garden bank raid that went rather horribly wrong—the senior cashi
er had tried to be heroic and one of the raiders had shot him. There were three men involved—-the two who actually carried out the raid and the driver of the getaway car. From the descriptions given by witnesses, the police were pretty sure of the identity of the two raiders—a pair known in the circles in which they moved as Basher and Boozy. They both had impressive criminal records and usually worked together. Since the case was one of murder, the police search for them was fairly intensive and they were picked up only a few hours later. With them was a young motor mechanic by the name of Ronnie Baxter. On the assumption, of course, that he’d been the driver of the getaway-car, he also was arrested, and like the other two charged with murder.

  “Ronnie Baxter was my client. He had several convictions, though for minor offenses, and it seemed that he acted fairly regularly as a sort of errand boy for people engaged in more serious criminal activities. Still, he’d never been involved before in anything violent and I didn’t get the impression that he was a dangerous criminal who deserved to be locked up for the rest of his life.”

  “It doesn’t sound,” said Selena, “as if the case against him was very strong.”

  “Well,” said Eve, “it wouldn’t have been, if it hadn’t been for the alibi.” She sighed and sipped her brandy. “Basher and Boozy, when questioned by the police, had very sensibly exercised their right to remain silent and left the Crown to prove its case. My client, on the other hand, had made a statement. He didn’t know anything, he said, about the raid and hadn’t seen Basher and Boozy until several hours after it happened. One or other of them had rung him up on the previous day and asked if he’d like to earn himself fifty pounds--when he said that he would, they’d arranged to meet.

  “Before they could tell him, however, what it was that they wanted him to do, the police had arrived and arrested them all. Ronnie had no reason, he said, to think that it was anything illegal and he certainly didn’t know that it had anything to do with a bank raid. Besides, he had an alibi—the raid had taken place in the middle of the afternoon and all that afternoon he’d been at home, in a house that he shared with his younger brother, Gary Baxter. His brother, he said, would confirm it.” She sighed again.