Today, Tuesday, the day that Penelope has chosen to leave her husband, is the first really warm day of spring...' Penelope has always done her best to be a good wife, a good mistress, a good mother - and a good magistrate. Today she is more conscious that usual of the thinness of the thread that distinguishes good from bad, the law-abiding from the criminal. Sitting in court, hearing a short, sad case of indecent exposure and a long, confused theft, she finds herself examining her own sex life (how would all that sound in court?) her own actions and intentions while she observes the defendants in the dock. This novel is a tour-de-force , an ingeniously constructed novel in which Nina Bawden counterpoints public appearance with private behaviour in her heroine, Penelope. The result is a marvellous picture of a not always admirable but engagingly complex and very human heroine. As always, Bawden offers a compelling story, sharply witty and beautifully observed. But it is also an honest and provocative book tracing the divergent courses of morality and justice, and uncomfortably posing, as Penelope does of herself, the question: who and what is a good woman?
Release date:
May 5, 2011
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
191
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Today, Tuesday, the day that Penelope has chosen to leave her husband, is the first really warm day of spring. Her decision,
last-minute but well researched, happens, through some chance (or perhaps characteristic) ineptitude, to coincide with her
sitting, at ten o’clock in the morning, in judgement on her peers. She is a Justice of the Peace, a scrupulous woman, and
the absurdity of this arrangement is evident to her – the errant suburban housewife posing as one of society’s respectable
pillars – but it is much too late to get out of it now. Petty sessional courts are required to provide magistrates to assist
circuit judges at the Crown Court, and Penelope’s place on the rota was fixed months ago. Although she could telephone the
Clerk to say she has been taken ill suddenly, it seems wrong to start her new life with a lie. She is aware of the irony here;
but life is full of small ironies, and at her age, which is forty-seven, she has learned to accept them. Indeed, this one
comforts her as she takes a last look in her bedroom mirror (she is wearing her new blue velvet suit and is pleased to see
how well it becomes her) before going downstairs to kiss Eddie goodbye. At least she is not leaving her husband, innocently
washing the breakfast dishes in his sunny kitchen, to go straight to the arms of her lover.
Eddie’s kiss tastes and smells of tobacco. He says, ‘Have a good day, Penelope, darling,’ and I feel a faint pang at the sound of my name. Penelope was such a faithful, long-suffering wife, wasn’t she? But the guilt I begin to feel as I drive
away (seeing my stay-at-home Ulysses cheerily waving, dishcloth in hand, at the door) is not because I am leaving him, nor
because he doesn’t yet know it. Since I must go, this is much the best way. Eddie cannot bear scenes. They make him weep;
and, although most of his minor failings – his drinking, his idleness, his boastful, arrogant driving – no longer annoy me,
his tears make me angry (they embarrass me, I suppose), and I don’t want to leave him in anger. I am too fond of him – have
felt, perversely, more genuinely loving towards him these last few days than I have for a long time. Dear Eddie! Poor Eddie
-how will he manage? And so on, and so forth. I have consoled myself with the thought that no one is indispensable and he
will be better off, once the first shock is over, without me. As will the two girls. Like their father, they have leaned on
me for too long; like him, they are lazy. It is time they learned how to arrange their own lives without always running to
Mummy! (The Liberation of Middle-aged Parents is a cause much closer to my heart than Women’s Lib., I sometimes jokingly tell
them.) Though no doubt their childish dependence will be a useful distraction for Eddie in his new situation. Two great daughters
to comfort and care for will give him plenty to think about; provide him with a rewarding, fatherly role to play that my more
dominant presence may, in the past, have denied him.
Even if these arguments are a bit specious, a bit hypocritical, I honestly do not feel, at this moment, any real guilt about Eddie. The nagging discomfort that invades me as I drive down the leafy, suburban road this lovely spring morning
has another cause altogether. And a much odder one. Last week I received through the post a brown envelope containing twenty
loose aspirin tablets. Nothing to say where they came from: my name and address printed on the envelope in scarlet ink, in
clumsy block capitals, but no letter inside. As the postmark was local I assumed, to begin with, that the sender must be some
aggrieved, convicted defendant in a case I had recently sat on. The message, though, seemed somewhat arcane. ‘Hemlock is hard
to get hold of, perhaps,’ was Eddie’s suggestion and, although I laughed when he made it, I have been uneasy since. All this
last week a growing disquiet has been my constant companion. Several nights I have woken up, my heart pounding with vague,
formless fears. What frightened me, I slowly decided, was not so much who had sent me those tablets, but why. What was I supposed to have done? An explicit attack would have been much less disturbing. Lying awake, Eddie snoring thunderously
by my side in the darkness, I found myself hoping another letter would come. Not because it might throw light on the first
one (though I would have given this logical reason if asked), but because I felt, superstitiously, that if the event were
repeated it would lose power in some semi-magical way. I set the alarm-clock half an hour early in order to be first downstairs,
first to pick up the post from the mat. I wanted to spare my family worry. I also wanted to keep my shame private. There is
always something shameful in an anonymous, undefined accusation – there is no smoke without fire, people say – and from the moment that letter arrived I have felt increasingly threatened. Even out of doors
in broad daylight, walking our elderly dog on the common (poor old chap – he will miss me; no one else bothers with him), I have felt absurdly exposed, a marked woman; even this morning, safe inside
the warm womb of the car, I am conscious of eyes, watching and jeering. But the commuters have already left for the City,
for their offices and their banks and their Harley Street surgeries, and it is too early for their wives to be shopping. There
is no one about at this time of the morning, no one to see me leaving my home for the last time, leaving my husband and daughters
…
Open white gates and a fine, spreading cedar, paletipped with new growth, mark the end of our road; the exit and entrance
to the private housing-estate of Cedar Grove. My daughters call it ‘Funny Farm Wood’ because it is built round the old mental
asylum. This towered and turreted Gothic extravagance (the charitable gift to the nation of an eccentric patent-medicine millionaire)
is still in use as a hospital for psychiatric patients, but its landscaped grounds were sold in the thirties and are now covered
with comfortable, prosperous houses, each secluded behind high hedges and concealing shrubberies. Rhododendrons grow well
in this soil and are in flower now; heavy blossoms against stiff, polished foliage.
Through the white gates I turn left past the village. Neat, bright-gardened cottages cluster round a wide green with a pond
and a public house carefully restored to rustic antiquity. On one side of the green the main tower of the asylum rears up on the skyline, balancing, in its bizarre fantasy, the weird moonscape of the motorway that is being built
on the other. Both are lunatic invaders in this gentle valley, ridiculously out of scale with the small fields, the little
hills, the pretty toy village; but the road, being new, is the obvious enemy. For some, anyway. Local industry needs the road.
It is the rich residents of Cedar Grove who have fought against it, and their class-based hostility seems to me greedy and
ugly. Men’s jobs – in the gravel pits, in the plastics factory – are more important than their lovely view! I am afraid I
put this point of view rather forcefully to my indignant neighbours when they came to ask for my signature to one of their
selfish petitions. Did one of them, perhaps, send me those aspirins? Meaning what? ‘You God-awful prig, you give me a pain’?
Or ‘Finish yourself off, why don’t you?’
Bumping carefully over a ramp, a damaged stretch of road under the soaring arch of the motorway, I feel my stomach muscles
contract. I gave a loud, stupid laugh (as if to cover up an involuntary, public fart) and say, ‘Ho, hum. No. Oh, no. Really!’
It is too crude a thought. No one I know would go in for such a crude bit of spite. Eddie is right. Malicious chance aside,
the most likely thing is some small local villain, a loutish boy I have fined or sent to an attendance centre, getting a bit
of his own back. Seeing it as a bit of a giggle! And it is a more harmless protest than having your car tyres let down, or
a brick heaved through your drawing-room window! Certainly Eddie would have said so if I had let him know how deeply upset
I was. ‘A very minor hazard of being a respected mouthpiece of justice, my old duckiedoo.’ Several times I have longed to hear his gravelly, chain smoker’s voice
say something like this, see his small, pale, almost lashless eyes blink with concern. Even one of the dotty endearments he
uses (once out of shyness, now simply from worn, married habit) would have comforted me. But it hardly seemed fair in the
circumstances, when I was on my way out, so to speak, to lumber him with my silly worries.
Why am I so upset? Transferred guilt about Eddie? Something in that, perhaps, but it is not the whole answer. Perverse pride comes
into it. I enjoy my judicial function, the sense of power and position it gives me; but at the same time I want to be seen
as a merciful woman, tempering the wind to the shorn lambs who appear before me. A kind of Lady Compassion, loved by her victims!
No difference, I like to tell myself, between them and me except a small shift of luck. Persuading myself that I often see
in their faces (the faces of the defeated, the inadequate, the unlucky, the lost) my own face reflected; hear, in their stumbling
attempts at some mitigation of their small crimes, an echo of my own voice. And indeed, to be fair to myself (and, if I can’t
be fair to myself, how can I be trusted to be fair to others?), in the magistrate’s court, where I sit almost weekly, the
margin of error that puts me on the side of the judges and not of the judged sometimes seems very narrow.
Shoplifters, for example. Women my age steal from supermarkets assorted ragbags of articles. Three packets mixed nuts, two tins scouring powder, a bottle of lemonade, black boot-polish, a pound of beef sausages, a dozen light-bulbs, a
pair of nylon tights not their size. Caught, they say much the same things. They ‘can’t remember what happened’. They ‘don’t
know what came over them’. They usually have enough money on them in their worn purses, are willing – eager – to pay. They
have recently suffered from depression/the menopause/some domestic unhappiness. Husbands, taking the day off work, speak on
their behalf with lined, concerned faces. They have been married twenty/twenty-five/thirty years. Have two/ three/five children.
Nothing like this has ever happened before. The wife often weeps at this point, the court usher takes her a glass of water
and the magistrates look away while she drinks it: her situation, so unbelievably terrible to her, is embarrassingly common
to them. Only rarely does some small thing make a case of this kind memorable, turn the court-room into a theatre. A husband
stumbles as he speaks of a family tragedy. Defending counsel leads gently. ‘I believe one of your children was ill at the
time this incident happened?’ The husband weeps; old, shaking, veined hands clutching the edge of the witness box. ‘Our son
is dead now.’
Empathy, easy enough in a case of this kind, is harder in others. Even as tears mist my vision, remembering that sad, humbled
pair (their physical appearance still clear in my mind’s eye: her pallor and crumpled cheeks, his bruised look of defeat),
I recognise that I cannot imagine myself throwing a bomb or beating up some poor, defenceless old queer on the common. My heart does not bleed for savages, nor for professional criminals. Thugs and thieves
are not social victims to me, still less social heroes. Burglary is a job in which the rewards, though irregular, are often
better than an honest occupation; the hazards known and accepted.
As falling foul of the law is often accepted, too, by the poor. You can’t pay your rates, the television licence, the tax
on your car, your ex-wife’s maintenance. You land up in court and they fine you and you can’t pay the fine. This situation
is not without dignity, and some are aware of it. On the dual carriageway (illegally speeding towards the Crown Court) I shoot
past a lumbering truck and think of a young lorry-driver whose handsome looks and good-natured expression went a long way
to explain the fix he found himself in. He had recently married for the third time. His new wife had just given birth to twin
boys. Her retired father and crippled sister lived with them, and although they both had small pensions the lorry-driver’s
wages were swallowed up by rent and other household expenses. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be supporting, on several
court orders, his two previous wives and their children. The arrears, predictably, were enormous. Asked by our chairman (a
kind, elderly lady and noted soft touch) if he could possibly manage to pay some of them, he smiled with a lovely, warm, amused
tolerance. And instead of calling her Your Worship or Madam he said merrily, ‘No, m’dear, bless you!’ which along with the
smile, she said afterwards, set up a pleasant flutter in her grandmotherly breast.
Few people, appearing in court, behave so agreeably. Reactions vary from the timid and terrified to the boldly defiant. Some
motorists (noticing my speedometer flickering in the high seventies, I ease my foot on the accelerator) are frankly outraged.
Company directors, caught belting along in their Rolls or their Bentley, put on superior smiles, exaggerate the drawling gentility
of their voices, make subtle appeals to the magistrates as social equals. Absurd that people like us should be here at all,
called to account in this humiliating way! As if we were criminals! Motoring offences are not really crimes - we all know that, don’t we?
An unattractive attitude. Understandable, though, if you put yourself in the place of these solid citizens, used to judging
their own behaviour, totting up their own deeds, good or bad, acquitting or convicting themselves. A court of law not only
sharpens up, illuminates this everyday, private process, but also takes it out of their hands. And this is, in some way, defiling.
To accuse yourself, even harshly, is one thing; to be accused quite another. Even if only by an anonymous letter, a handful
of aspirins.
Was that, after all, such a crude accusation? I feel a shock of coldness like an icepack applied to the back of my neck, the
nerve. . .
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