Chapter 109: The Nineteenth of September
The letter went to Ruth's office, because Julian did not have my address and had not asked for it.
Two sides of cream paper, handwritten, in the sloping hand he used for thank-you notes.
He wrote that he had read the report. He wrote that there was something he should have said in February.
He asked to meet. He did not use the word sorry anywhere on either side.
Ruth read it to me twice and then said the only thing that mattered.
“Your bail condition covers the complainant and any prosecution witness. Your husband was a prosecution witness at the bail hearing.”
“So I can't see him.”
“Not without an application. I'll make one. It takes nine days, it will be granted, and it will be granted on terms.”
The terms were that contact take place at a solicitor's office, with a note taken.
So we met, on the twenty-ninth, in a room with a table too large for four people.
He came in wearing a coat I had bought him.
He is thirty-eight and had lost weight the wrong way, the way people do when they stop eating.
He sat down without shaking anybody's hand, because he did not know whether he was allowed to.
His own solicitor was a woman called Enwright who said four words in ninety minutes, all of them good ones.
He had a folder. Everybody in this year of my life arrived carrying a folder.
“I've made a statement,” he said. “It's a draft. It hasn't been signed.”
“To whom?”
“To your side. My solicitor has sent it to Miss Achterberg's clerk.”
Ruth put her hand flat on the table, which is what she does instead of interrupting.
“Read it to her,” she said.
He read it. It was four pages and it took him eleven minutes, and his voice went at the top of page three and came back.
Paragraph one confirmed the eleven occasions.
Between the January of our first year and the December of the third, I had been required to kneel in the drawing room at Fenchurch Row.
Paragraph two gave four dates, because he had put them in his diary at the time. Not as a record of anything. As appointments.
The seventh of March. The second of June. The nineteenth of September. The twenty-fifth of December.
I had all eleven. His four matched mine exactly, and that is what a jury needs, because my memory alone is a woman's memory of her own humiliation.
Paragraph three said that in the July before the wedding his mother had commissioned a background report on me from an agency in Leeds.
That he had read it. That it ran to nine pages.
That it contained my conviction, my probation, the date of my retirement from the sport, and the name of my last coach.
That was five months before the wedding. I had known it since March, and hearing him say it in his own voice was a different injury.
Paragraph four said that Damon had a habit, going back years, of taking hold of people by their clothing when he wanted their attention.
Two examples. A waiter in Portugal. His own wife, at a christening, by the sleeve.
Paragraph five was about the door frame.
He said that in the second year he had come down at two in the morning and seen me doing pull-ups on the frame between kitchen and hall.
One-handed. He counted eleven before he went back upstairs.
He said he had a joiner fit decorative beading to that frame the following week.
He said, in a sentence his solicitor had plainly tried to talk him out of, that he had done it so that I would stop.
Not so I would not hurt myself. So I would stop.
He put the pages down and looked at the table.
“Why now,” I said. It was not a question and I did not put a question mark in my voice.
“The report was published on the eleventh.”
“That's a date. It isn't a reason.”
Enwright said her first two words. “You may.”
Julian said: “The property company is being sold. My name is on eleven years of accounts and four leases. I've been advised to establish, in writing, what I knew and when I knew it.”
“There it is.”
“I'm not doing it because of that.”
“You're doing it while that. Those are different words and I'm not interested in which one is true.”
He said the statement would be signed whatever I said in this room.
I believed him. I still believe him. That is not the same as it counting for anything.
Ruth asked one question, in the flat voice she keeps for the things that matter.
“Mr Ashford. At the bail hearing in February you gave evidence about Christmas Day. Was any part of it untrue?”
He said no.
“Was any part of it incomplete?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“All of it,” he said.