‘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.’

  The judge turned down the request. Bobbo went back to prison to await trial.

  The dentist fitted Polly Patch with a row of shiny temporary teeth, so that she now talked less thickly and more precisely. The judge was rather sorry. He had liked the thunderous rumble of ill-defined sound that for a time came out of the dark labyrinth of her throat. He had enjoyed thrusting his tongue into the raw chasm where once her teeth had been, rasping it over the little filed points to which her molars had been reduced. She did, however, look a little more ordinary now; she fitted in better with the rest of the household.

  Sometimes he wondered where Polly Patch came from and where she was going; but not often. He was used to people appearing before him out of nothing, into the vivid central colour of the court, before disappearing again into the greyness of its perimeter, and perhaps because of his profession rather than in spite of it he asked few questions. He did not have an enquiring mind. He did not need one. A judge waits for facts to present themselves: he does not have to nuzzle them out. Others do that for him.

  Polly Patch told him one night that sexual energy illuminated the universe: it must be shone like a torch into its darkest corners. Only then would there be no shame, no guilt, no war. She said that pain and pleasure were one, and that to do what one willed was the whole of the law.

  Spoken, as these words were, in harsh tones, from a gaping mouth (for her teeth had gone back to the dentist for reshaping) they had the power of oracle. He thought on reflection that it was the oracle of Hades, not Olympus; of hell, not heaven. Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.

  Polly Patch went on a diet of 800 calories a day, but lost no weight. No one could understand it. Lady Bissop, on the same diet, lost a stone in a month, and became so emaciated that the judge felt a renewal of his sexual interest in her — the more unfortunate she seemed, alas, the more he appreciated her — but she shrieked so loudly he felt obliged to return to the spare room once more and the more stoical and better-padded Polly.

  The accountant’s case came up for its preliminary hearing. Much anger was felt because the accused was uncooperative, and would not pass on information to the police as to the whereabouts of his lady accomplice, thus preventing the recovery of the stolen money. She had worked in his office for a time, been fired — presumably to pull the wool over the eyes of the staff —left her husband, flown to Lucerne — and there the trail had been lost.

  ‘How did he look in the dock?’ asked Polly Patch.

  ‘Unexceptional,’ said Judge Bissop. ‘He had the grey skin of a man who’s been in prison a long time, and the muddy complexion that goes with prison food.’

  ‘I daresay he’s used to caviar and smoked salmon,’ said Polly. ‘Poor thing!’

  ‘Save your pity,’ said the judge. ‘He is ruthless and without remorse. He clings to his story. He’s stubborn.’

  ‘How long will you give him?’

  ‘The case hasn’t even come to trial,’ protested the judge. ‘We don’t know what the jury will say. But I’d reckon five years.’

  ‘Not enough,’ said Polly Patch.

  ‘Not enough for what?’ He was teasing her. He held the carpet-beater over her buttocks. When he brought it down and raised it again she would have a neat pattern of weals on her flesh.

  ‘Not enough for my purposes,’ she said.

  ‘Seven years!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘That will do!’ she said, and he brought the beater down so hard that for once she seemed to feel it, and shrieked so loud the sound could be heard through the house and the little boys stirred in their slumber, and Lady Bissop sighed a sleeping moan, dreaming as she was of lacing tinned mushroom soup with pepper, and an owl outside hooted into the blackness.

  ‘The sound of a devil leaving hell,’ he exclaimed, sucking the essence from the bruised flesh, and whether he was talking about him or her who was to say? He began to see that perhaps he belonged to Hades, where the soul and body are one, and not to Olympus after all. Criminals must take their chance and so must judges. The pain of one was the pleasure of the other. Nightly he rammed the message home, bruising the distinction, blurring the divisions between the holy and the unholy, the white and the black; marking and pulping flesh to make it spirit.

  ‘Of course,’ he said to Polly Patch one night, in relation to the accountant, who now seemed to obsess him, ‘they might tempt him to plead insanity. Then he could have an indeterminate sentence, in some secure mental institution, and never get out. Perhaps that’s the best thing to do with a man who’s not just an embezzler but in all probability an arsonist and a murderer as well.’

  ‘I think it a weakness in the judiciary,’ said Polly Patch, ‘to allow insanity as a plea. Judges must face human evil head on, and not side-step into concepts of mental ill-health. It is the crime that must be judged, and not the motive for that crime, or the reason. The function of the judge is to punish, not to cure, reform or forgive.’

  It was a long time since Judge Bissop had heard such opinions so firmly put. He took her words as symptomatic of changing public opinion. The needle of government had been swung for many years firmly over to the left, and the public had been vociferous in its demand for stiffer penalties for crimes against the person rather than against property. But now the needle was shaking, and quivering, and preparing for violent movement; a sharp swing to the right, and property and money would again be sacrosanct and human pain and inconvenience but a passing thing. He welcomed it.

  When finally the accountant came to trial it seemed reasonable to Judge Bissop that he should receive a severe sentence. The man’s two children were in court for some of the trial, chewing gum and in general apathetic, and seeming not to care one way or another what happened to their parent. They were dressed sloppily, and reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t remember whom. He thought they should have been presented for the occasion better combed and washed and dressed, and that their demeanour and attire amounted to insolence to the court.

  In view of the seriousness of the charges —cold, calculated and deliberate fraud by someone in a position of trust — he could not, as he pointed out to the Defence in his summing up, consider any notion of a suspended sentence, even bearing in mind the many months the accused had spent in custody. Delays in the hearing had been of the accused’s own making, since he refused to admit moral responsibility for his crimes, made no attempt at restitution, even declined to give the police the information they required regarding his co-conspirator. Let the Defence not believe he was a lenient judge — he was a fair one.

  The accused had callously abandoned a wife and taken two or more mistresses, thereby causing distress to many, and although a citizen’s private life was his own affair and no business of the court’s — which the jury should remember in reaching their verdict — irresponsibility in one sphere of life was contagious to all others. ‘Moreover,’ he remarked, ‘property is the pivotal point on which is balanced the whole moral structure of society.’ He looked to see if the court reporters had taken this last down, and they had, and he was pleased.

  The jury filed out and almost instantly filed back in.

  ‘Guilty,’ said the Foreman.

  ‘Seven years,’ said the judge.

  Shortly after the trial Polly Patch left Lady Bissop’s employ. The judge arrived home from sitting on a commission enquiring into reform of the abortion laws — he took the view that abortion should remain a matter for the State rather than the individual parent, and be in general disallowed, on the grounds that white-middle-class babies were at a premium, and these were the ones most frequently lost to the surgeon’s knife — and found his wife in tears.

  ‘She’s gone,’ she said. ‘Polly Patch has gone! A chauffeured car came to take her away. She wouldn’t even take her wages.’

  ‘She wasn’t entitled to any,’ said the judge, automatically, ‘if she left without notice,’ but he wept too, and so did the children, and all clung together in their grief, achieving a closeness not normally theirs, but to be remembered as long as they lived.