Chapter 110: Two Inches
I read the statement myself afterwards, at the table, while he sat there.
It took me twenty minutes, because I read documents the way I was taught to watch video, which is twice at speed and once stopping.
Tobias taught me that at fourteen. It has been more use to me than any throw.
I found three problems and I marked them with Ruth's pencil.
The first was paragraph two. He had the second of June as a Sunday. It was a Saturday. There had been a lunch.
If a date is wrong the Crown will spend forty minutes on it and the jury will remember only that a date was wrong.
The second was the word “asked”. He had written that I was asked to kneel.
I put a line through it and wrote told, and pushed the page back across the table, and he looked at the word for some time and then said, “Yes.”
He did not argue. He never argued. That was always the whole of it.
The third was paragraph five, the door frame. He had written that he had the beading fitted so that I would stop.
I did not change that one. That one was the only sentence in four pages that cost him anything, and it was accurate.
“Sign it in front of Enwright,” I said. “Today, if she'll witness it. Not next week.”
“Nadia.”
“Statements that get signed the same week get signed. Statements that get signed next week get amended.”
He said my name again and Ruth did not stop him.
That was a decision she made, and she later told me she had thought about it.
“Can I ask you something,” he said.
“You can ask.”
“Was there anything I could have done?”
I want to be exact about this, because I have been told since that I was cruel.
People should have the facts before they decide.
I was not cruel. I was accurate, which people find harder.
“There were eleven of them,” I said. “You were in the room for nine.”
“I know.”
“On every one of those nine, my right hand came off my thigh. Not far. About two inches. Then I put it back.”
He did not say anything.
“Two inches is what a trained person does before they decide not to. It's visible. It is extremely visible, if you are looking at somebody's hands.”
“I wasn't looking at your hands.”
“You were. Twice I caught you. The second of June and the twenty-fifth of December two years ago.”
He put his own hands under the table, which I noted and did not remark on.
“So yes,” I said. “There was something you could have done. You could have said one sentence in that room. Any sentence. 'Mother, no.' Three words.”
“And you'd have forgiven me.”
“No. But there would still have been somebody in that building on a Wednesday, because I'd never have been arrested.”
“And none of the rest of it would have happened either.”
I stopped, because that was not fair and I knew it while it was leaving my mouth.
“That last part isn't your fault,” I said. “I'm withdrawing it. Ruth, don't note that.”
Ruth said she noted everything.
He asked, then, the question men ask at the end, and he asked it looking at the window.
Whether I had ever loved him.
Here is what I said, and I have never improved on it in the years since, and I have not tried.
“I don't know. I spent three years in that house making myself smaller by an amount I measured daily. I don't know what was left over to love with, and I'm not going to invent an answer to make this easier for you.”
He nodded, once, the way you nod at a diagnosis.
“That's fair,” he said.
“It isn't fair. It's just true.”
We were finished. It had taken an hour and fifty minutes and there was a note of it in two files.
At the door he said, “I could put money into an account for you. It wouldn't come from the company.”
“No.”
“It isn't a bribe. Nobody's asking you for anything.”
“I know. It's still no, and I'd rather not explain it, because the explanation would sound noble and it isn't.”
The real reason is that I did not want to be able to hear his voice in a shop.
He signed the statement that afternoon in front of Enwright, at ten past four, and her signature is under his on all four pages.
It was the single most useful document in my trial, and it was nine months late, and both of those things are simply the case.
I went out onto the street and bought a return ticket to the ring road for four pounds twenty.
I sat upstairs at the front like a child.
The divorce was made final the following February by a district judge who never saw either of us.