False Witness (21 page)

I tossed down the book, causing the cover to fall off in a small puff of dust, and I rushed to the telephone outside the Common
Room. I phoned the clerks.

“Steve, what are the visiting hours at Battersea?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I already told you, Mr. Fawley. Couldn’t get you a con.”

“What are the visiting hours at Battersea, Steve?”

“Starts two thirty. But I—”

“Ring the prison. Tell them I shall be there at two o’clock.”

“They won’t like it,” he said defensively.

“They’re not meant to keep people out. They’re meant to keep people in, for Christ’s sake.” I hung up on him which is something
I had never done before.

My chest was tight, my fists clenched. I knew I ought to think clearly, but was sure I could not. How could Kingsley know?
I had told no one except Penny. Justine wanted to keep it quiet. Perhaps we had been seen? Maybe by one of the officers in
the case? I sat in one of the rusty armchairs in the Common Room and waited for two o’clock.

The Common Room itself was an indulgently comfortable area. On the tables in front of the armchairs were chess sets and unfinished
games of backgammon. The furnishings were soft, faded, and the walls were covered with the finest literature and poetry. It
was a place frequented by law students in awkwardly fitting suits pretending to be barristers, and barristers drinking warm
beer and eating peanuts trying to relive their student days.

I tried to close my eyes and rest. My sleep was becoming more and more troubled. But when I shut my eyelids, the images that
flashed before me were far worse than my racing thoughts. Yet again I saw Stonebury. But now I was closer and stood at the
outer circle. I could not keep still and suddenly found myself with an anthology of poetry.

The poem on page ninety-three was familiar:
those
feet taking a walk in ancient times, green mountains, but—as I suspected—nothing about rivers and streams. Four verses in
outdated typescript. But there was a footnote for the penultimate line; it concerned the word Jerusalem.

“Lines from (Preface to)
Book of Milton
. Known commonly as ‘Jerusalem.’ Not to be confused with the long prophetic poem,
Jerusalem
.”

There are
two
Jerusalems.

Then the sweet odor of twelve-year-old whisky was unmistakable. Jamie’s gait was almost steady as he walked through the door,
but his cupped right hand shook just a little. Insert a small glass and no one would have noticed the withdrawals. He looked
as rough as I felt. Was this how I was beginning to appear to people?

“Come to brush up your iambic pentameters?” I said.

“Early bath,” he replied and sat down heavily opposite me.

“Client didn’t turn up?”

“Oh, he turned up all right, the little tea-leaf. So did his mother. Said I was drunk. Can you believe the effrontery. It’s
an—”

“It’s an outrage, Jamie. That’s what it is.”

“Anyway,” he said, smoothing out a newspaper on his lap, “he can get his beloved mother to defend him.” He looked at me, pleading
with the wide eyes of a child who knows he has been caught. “I swear, Tommy. This morning… I never touched a drop.”

“I know,” I said. It was probably true. But I also knew that he did not need to. The recognized boundaries between morning
and night had long since lost their clarity in Jamie Armstrong’s hazy world.

He said, “I see that old bat Hardcastle is out pontificating again.”

“Nine thirty tonight, isn’t it?” I said. “Too close to the watershed for my liking.”

“No,” he said. “She’s droning on at six.” He handed me the paper open on the Court Circular page. Visits by dukes and duchesses,
the closing of factories, the opening of job centers. Halfway down the page was this entry: “Lecture. European Society of
Christian Lawyers. Hardcastle J. 6 p.m. Friends Meeting House.”

“She is on the box later as well,” I said. They must have planned to tape her speech, considering it far too risky to unleash
the firebrand wit live to the nation.

While Jamie looked forlornly at the locked bar, I surveyed the page. It was an odd mixture. Births and Deaths, Flat-shares
and Funeral Arrangements. The In Memoriam section was the saddest. It was headed “Private.”

JD Always yours. RL LC Never forgotten. DC

Who was supposed to read these? I almost felt as if I was intruding as I scanned through these messages of private grief.
As I handed the newspaper back to Jamie, I noticed the next entry.

Who’s met or seen red? M

Then I saw the dedication. It was to TF. Then I realized that the newspaper, of course, was
The Times
.

TF. Who’s met or seen red? M

I
FOUND A BOOKSHOP ON A SOUTH-FACING CORNER OF
Fleet Street, not far from the round church of St. Mary’s in the Temple. In the eleventh century bands of crusaders set off
to wrest the Holy Land from the “infidel.” By 1118, one band had assumed the name of Knights of the Temple and they built
a round church which still stands. Of course, I could never hope to match their grandeur. But I, too, had a private search
for Jerusalem. Not so much a quest as a grubbing around in the undergrowth trying to sniff out the truth.

I imagined that a Greek dictionary would be rather intimidating for someone whose grasp of antiquity was limited to a couple
of years of Latin,
Up Pompeii
and Frankie Howerd in a toga. But once in the bookshop, I used an index of Greek letters to translate
drus
into the funny symbols that Aristotle once used. I vaguely knew that our letter D was delta in Greek. The rest came quickly.
Soon, I found the place.

“
Drus
, oak tree.”

So now I knew.
Drus
was Greek for oak tree. What is more, I knew that oak tree in Greek was
drus
. But how did that help? In my experience, oaks were about as English—and about as banal—as bangers and mash. They hardly
resonated with mythical significance. Perhaps I was missing the point?

I was more optimistic about William Blake. In a far corner was a shelf full of black-spined paperbacks claiming to be classics.
I tilted my head to that ridiculous angle people adopt in bookshops, and scanned the Bs.

Bacon, Balzac, Baudelaire, Beauvoir (de), more Balzac (why did he write so many novels?), Beckett, Bible (The), Blake.

There were two books. The first was called
Songs of Innocence and Experience
. Hurriedly flicking through it, I was intrigued, if slightly repelled, by the poems, which were surrounded by gaudy pictures.
I had never seen such images.

Flaxen-haired children in nauseatingly colored smocks walked through strange woods with lambs at their feet and serpents in
the trees. And the words were even more fantastic: tiger spelt Tyger, invisible worms flying through the night, poison trees,
a little girl lost, beds of crimson joy.

The second book was instantly more promising.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. That was something I could relate to, and inevitably thought of Penny.

I was getting nowhere. Where was
Jerusalem
? However, there were no more books by Blake so I tried the
New Companion to English Literature
.

J: Jabberwock, Jane Eyre, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (The Strange Case of Dr. Jeronimo, Jerusalem.

Something, somewhere clicked.

“
Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion
. A long prophetic poem by Blake.”

Giant
Albion
. What was it Danny shouted as he was led away in handcuffs? Why did that word keep coming up? Who or what was Albion?

There was a growing queue at the till, which was out of order. A secretary, purchasing her weekly Mills and Boon, waited for
her change from a young assistant. He had clearly been brought up on credit cards and calculators and struggled with the sums.
Glancing at my watch, I saw it was nearly twelve o’clock.

I pushed to the front of the queue. “Where can I buy this?” I asked pointing to the entry in the
New Companion
.

“What?” said the assistant.

“
Jerusalem
.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Not in print.”

“Why not?”

“Ask the publishers, mate.”

“Well, I’m asking you.” My patience was waning. “And don’t call me mate.”

“Move on,” said the youth. “People are waiting.”

“Where can I find a copy of it then… to read?”

“Dunno.”

“Well, can’t you find out for me… mate?”

The assistant seemed about to mouth some sort of obscenity when the manager emerged from a trap door, somewhere behind the
till. He was tall, thin and aesthetic-looking, wearing John Lennon glasses and a herringbone waistcoat.

He took off his glasses, cleaned them and then looked at me solemnly. “You want the Tate,” he said.

On arriving at Pimlico tube station, I passed through a strange hinterland of seedy guest-houses and sophisticated mews before
reaching the Tate Gallery. On the cascade of stone steps outside the museum was the usual scattering of the youth of Europe,
browsing through
Rough Guides
and listening to their Walkmans. The gallery’s collection was blessed with an embarrassment of artistic riches. But there
was only one thing I wanted to see.

As I approached the rooms that housed the permanent Blake collection, my steps started to echo in the empty rooms and the
light seemed to fade. Surrounding me, strewn across the walls, were images of strange gods, corruption and decay. There was
a painting of a man standing before a fiery chariot. He was naked and his head was bowed by the brilliant light emanating
from a wrathful figure with a shock of white hair and a fearsome nose.

“God judging Adam.”

It was a woman’s voice. I used to hate people speaking to me in public. For me, galleries were little different to churches:
places for silence and for some sort of reflection—whatever you could manage. And for those reasons I had long before abandoned
going to either.

“Don’t like it, do you?” she said.

I still hadn’t taken my eyes from the frightening colors of the painting.

The voice was small, but hectic, all over the place like a buzzing fly. “I suppose I quite like the horses,” she said. “They
are horses, you know—two of them, you can just see the hind legs of the second. See?” A delicate arm covered in brushed denim
and smelling somehow of adhesives, hovered near the canvas. “People used to think those lines came from this painting. You
know, ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’—all that chariots of fire stuff. But it’s really nothing to do with it at all; shame
really; still, it’s interesting. Well, if you’re interested in that sort of thing—of course, I am. But then I would be… oops.
Here I go. Gabbling on. Better dash. Work to do and—”

“Don’t go,” I said.

She was small, as fragile as one of the children in the poetry book, but her hair was not flaxen. It was tied behind her small
head. She constantly bobbed up and down on the balls of her feet, trying to hide her lack of height, but she was not the sort
of person to wear heels. She had thick glasses that reflected the yellow and red streaks from the melting sun in the painting.

She continued, “Sorry to butt in. We don’t get many people down this end really. Everyone goes to the Turner. You know, tour
parties: Blake? Who the—is William Blake? Which way to the Turner, they ask? Still, their loss is… sorry, there I go again.”

“No, please. I don’t mind.”

“It’s just… I hardly speak to anyone all day. Then when I see someone: bang. Away I go.”

“Do you work here?”

“Sort of. I’m doing some research on old W.B. Oh, it’s too tedious. I won’t bore you with—actually, it’s called: ‘Blake—mystic
or madman?’ That’s the trend nowadays. Snappy titles for your thesis. User-friendly.”

“I need some help.” Before us Adam still cowered.

“Help? Really?” She tried to hide her excitement, failed, moved her head toward me. The flanks of the horses appeared in her
right-hand lens.

“Yes. Some help with Blake,” I said.

She threw both denim sleeves toward the ceiling. “Oh, thank you, God. Thank you.” Then she looked at the fearsome visage of
judgment. “This way,” she said, leading me into a shadowy corner with all the fanaticism of a train-spotter at Clapham Junction.

“Should be a doddle.” She seemed pretty confident after I explained what I was looking for. Not everything. Just what was
safe, and sane, to relate. “We’ve got color copies of all one hundred plates of the book of
Jerusalem
. My name’s Anna, by the way. Where do you want to start?”

As we wandered along rows of dimly lit reproductions, the girl chattered away at a thousand words a minute. She told me about
the Romantics and opium and hallucinations; about giant fleas and about God, but not in that order.

“I think this is what you want.” Before me was a plate with minutely printed writing. Intense writing, the writing of a man
with something to say. “
Felix culpa
, really. Well, Blake’s version.”