Scales of Justice

Members of the jury, I swear to you by everything that I hold
sacred, by God the Father and Scheherezade, by Hans Andersen and the
Brothers Grimm, I am not guilty of murdering my wife. I am as snow
white as on the day I first met Dorothy Grant. Members of the jury, we
must go back a long time if you are to understand. We must go back more
than 20 years. We must go back to my childhood.
When I was a boy I spent a fortnight's holiday every year at the home
of my Aunt Agnes in the small north-eastern fishing port of Wetherford.
I was an orphan. I had no brothers or sisters, you understand. I was
delicate and shy. My timid, my awkward overtures to the Wetherford boys
and girls were met with hostility and my pride prevented me persisting
in seeking friendships. I was the loneliest of children wandering along
that chilly shore.
It was on my second visit to Wetherford, when I was eleven years old,
that I first took any particular notice of Dorothy Grant. I was lying
in the sand dunes that day, reading a book, Robinson Crusoe, I believe,
when I heard a sound like squabbling sea gulls.
I looked up to see a gang of children by the edge of the sea. They
were throwing sand and pebbles at a small dark girl. After they'd gone
she lay sobbing on the sand for a long time. And then she cast off her
thin brown frock and waded through the waves and then went swimming far
out to sea. It was a big grey boisterous sea and she looked like a
matchstick. Soon she was swallowed up in the spray and the roll of the
waves.

When I got home I asked my aunt about this girl and she said I should
be kind to Dorothy Grant, because the poor child was an even greater
outcast in Wetherford than I was, and for two reasons.
In the first place, Dorothy's mother had made enemies of the entire
female population of the place by undercutting their rates for
filleting fish, until she monopolised the entire business. And
secondly, Dorothy was suspected of being responsible for the drowning
of a boy. She had swum out with him on the journey from which he never
returned.
The village used this tragedy to punish the mother through the girl
and every child was like a knife turned against old mother Grant.
It was not until the following summer that I spoke to Dorothy. I'd
been given a small black rubber dinghy and she came up to me as I was
blowing it up at the water's edge.
Her first question surprised me. "Have you got any relations?" she
asked. And when I replied that I was an orphan and had just my aunt and
a grandfather she seemed pleased and boasted that she had a mother. "Up
there," she said, sweeping a thin brown arm toward the cliff top known
as Wetherford Stump. "And I've got relations all over the world - more
than you'd ever guess."
In all the time I knew her she never lost this habit of boasting of
her immense loving family, yet all the time I knew she was a love child
and had no relations at all - at least, none who would admit kinship
with Dorothy and her disfigured and cantankerous mother.
But there was instant sympathy between us that warm overcast morning
on the shore and soon we were splashing and sailing about in the
shallows.
Those were the first truly happy moments of my life and they were soon
followed by my first really frightening ones.

While we were skylarking, the dinghy drifted out to sea and I suddenly
turned and saw that a great stretch of water separated us from the
sands. I was a poor swimmer and had never been out of my depth before.
I paddled hard against the tide but instead of making headway I found
myself being carried further and further out.
Then I looked around and saw that Dorothy was towing me out to sea by
the mooring rope. I yelled at her to stop but either she couldn't hear
or she'd decided to ignore me.
Soon all signs of land vanished, except for Wetherford Stump itself,
and that had been reduced to a little black dot like a distant bird on
a telephone wire.
When I turned back to plead with Dorothy the mooring rope was doing a
snake dance just beneath the surface and Dorothy was nowhere to be
seen. I was stupefied. I had drowned her.
When several more minutes had passed and a wave had gobbled me down, I
paddled my little oar in the water and gradually found that Wetherford
Stump was growing bigger. By the time I made land I had worked out in
my slow way that Dorothy had not drowned, that she'd just tricked me,
but it was still a great relief to see her prowling the shore next
morning. Of course I ducked down in my dune and avoided her for the
rest of the holiday.
I spent the next four summers with my grandfather at his home on the
Danish island of Funen and didn't return to Wetherford until I was
sixteen years old.
I thought I'd put Dorothy out of my mind but the truth is I was wild
to see her. The morning after I arrived I went down to the shore,
carrying a book. I believe it was Tolstoy's Resurrection. I'd been told
it was a book that would change my life.

Dorothy was lying in my dune, waiting for me, and it became the
enchanted summer granted to all of us just once. I suppose twice would
be too much or our hearts to stand. We were both dazed with pleasure
and oblivious of everybody and everything else. You know the feeling,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
One morning as I leaned against the cliff rail before Dorothy's
cottage, waiting for her, the Widow Grant, as she was known, approached
me with a bucket brimming with fish guts and made as if to fling it in
the sea, but instead of tossing it over the cliff she showered me from
head to toe with the stinking entrails.
But I was so sun- struck that summer that I went about for the rest of
the day - and it was a scorcher - caring nothing that I stank to high
heaven. Far from shrinking from me, Dorothy just laughed and snuggled
closer. "I like that smell," she said.
My aunt, who had given a feeble swimmer free rein with a little dinghy
on a wild coast, gave me free rein with Dorothy, too. I think it was
her belief that without risks there can be no freedom or
happiness.
When I went back to school I had made little progress with Tolstoy's
Resurrection but my life was certainly changed. I wrote to Dorothy
every week and she replied on cheap comic seaside postcards.
Every summer I returned to her and all that divided us was her love of
the sea and my dread of it. But as Dorothy said, "If I don't go in for
my dip how are you to find time for all your writing and
studying?"
Which was quite true. Most of my early tales were written in a sand
dune and if they have a tenderness and a current of shining hope it is
because they were only scribbled to hasten the moment when Dorothy,
with her breasts brown and her hair sleek from the sea and the goose
pimples strangely prominent on her arms and legs, returned to bless my
labours with her salty kisses.

The only opposition to our marriage came from her mother. As a boy I
had known her as Widow Grant, the fish wife, which made me think she
had married a fish. I found out later, with deep disappointment, that a
fish wife is simply a shrewish woman or one who guts fish for a living.
Dorothy's mother was both.
Her face had been melted by fire into the lidless, lipless and
flat-nosed mask of someone with a nylon stocking pulled over the head.
Her eyes were black and alert but her skin was set like old putty and
utterly lifeless, except when the sun glanced off stripes of dead
tissue that shimmered like a fly's wing. All the red seemed to have run
into her hands. The brine was forever opening cracks in her fingers
until they bled over the fish. For all that, she gutted fish with
amazing sped and with enjoyment, too. When the nets were empty she was
restless and out of temper and strode continually to the rail of the
cliff to see if the boats were homebound, bearing new bellies for her
blade. Gutting fish was more than a livelihood for Mrs Grant, it was an
obsession.
When I started to tell her of my brilliant prospects she ignored me
and turned to Dorothy.
"There's nowt so clear cut as marriage and once it's set going it
can't be put back like the clock," she said. "My lassie, you're so
young. You still need to find out who you are and what you are."
She prodded her blade at me. "And so do you, my lad. Dorothy might be
the moon in the sky at the moment but one day you could see the sun and
cry for that instead."
And what were these fine prospects of mine? I was a kiss mammy scholar
and scribbler, not a real solid chap like a fisherman.
"I've been offered a job at Cambridge," I said.

"Well that caps all. Our Dorothy'll never be happy away from the sea.
And how are you going to keep her in clothes? She wants four times more
frocks than any woman alive."
This was a fatal argument because I had a longing to heap Dorothy with
beautiful dresses.
Later on Dorothy took out a grubby little list she had made. "Why
can't you work at some other university? One near the sea? Look here -
Newcastle, Bangor,Aberdeen, Sussex. I've got friends and relations in
all those places."
"But darling, Newcastle and Bangor and Aberdeen and Sussex haven't
asked me."
But I promised to take her to the sea every weekend.
It was an old fashioned Wetherford wedding in the Baptist Chapel on
the Stump and for our honeymoon we went to Scarborough, less than
thirty miles down the coast.
Dorothy said she had relations there but once she arrived she spent
all her time in the sea.
One day she lost her wedding ring on the sands and hundreds of people
abandoned their deck chairs to hunt for it. Towards nightfall the ring
was found.
In Cambridge we rented the top floor of an old parsonage. Dorothy had
only to walk down the long thin kitchen garden and pull aside two loose
palings to be on the river bank. Then off with her frock, and into her
element.
At night she lay on the hearth rug at my feet like a dog. She rarely
spoke. If I spoke she would listen. If I wanted to write she was happy
to stare into the blazing logs she had gathered during the day.

My one worry was money. My college stipend was not generous and
although my reputation was growing my income from writing hardly paid
for ink and paper and postage. Every weekend we went to Aldeburgh and
Felixstowe and she would swim while I wrote.
I grew expert in describing waves and seabirds and could elaborate
minutely on the various shades of grey in the Suffolk skies. But it was
had on my pocket. We usually went by train, because Dorothy said
travelling in a car made her feel like a tinned sardine.
I fell in love with Cambridge - leaf, stone and water - almost as
deeply as I had with Dorothy. I also began to find in others the
intellectual diet she could not provide. There were beautiful and
intelligent women in our circle. Some say I fell in love with Annie
Dragonetti, but that is not true.
I must admit, however, that when Dorothy renewed her old plea to move
to Newcastle or Bangor or such, I did suspect it was out of jealousy of
Annie. But no, she cried. It was just that she was too far from the
sea, that sleeping out of earshot of its whisper was an agony for
her.
"It isn't more swimming you need, it's less," I argued.
I was worried because she grew cold too easily and the upper parts of
her arms and legs were permanently patterned with goose flesh, even on
the warmest days.
It was about this time that the bank manager wrote to say our joint
account was heavily overdrawn and that most of the damage was caused by
Dorothy's spending at dress shops. It was then she told me, in all
seriousness, that she needed four times more clothes than normal
women.
"What on earth for?"

"Because I grow bigger or smaller according to the moon and
tides."
"That's lunacy. You'll have to think of something better."
"Haven't you noticed how my wedding ring falls off every now and then,
because my fingers are so thin? And then three or four weeks later it
gets so tight that it hurts? Really I should have two or three wedding
rings."
"Two or three wedding rings?"
"Yes."
"Are you telling me you grow bigger at high tide and smaller at low
tide?"
"Of course. And it isn't funny, Henry."
"I think the bank manager will agree with you."
"Henry, just look at the size labels on my dresses."
So I went to her wardrobe, and it was true. Her dresses were of four
different sizes.
"But what does it mean?"
"You'll have to ask my mother," she said. Then she quickly cried, "No,
don't. It would kill her."
We drove to Wetherford next day.
The Widow Grant was horrified that Dorothy had told me. She stumbled
and had to hold on to a chair.
Then she sat down and began to talk.
"All this happened to me more than 20 years ago. It was a foul
December night just eighteen months after our house was burnt to the
ground and all my family with it. They'd slapped my face together, what
was left of it, and stuck me away in a little two-room cabin down by
the shore, a place normally rented to holidaymakers.

"I couldn't sleep at night for pain and grief. If they'd wanted me to
drown myself they couldn't have chosen a better time or spot. But I
suppose they were just thoughtless.
"On Christmas Eve I got up because my face felt as though it was on
fire. It was after midnight and I headed for the sea. God knows what I
intended but the wind just picked me up and blew me about like a fish
and chip paper, until I tripped over a long low rock stretched out in
my path. Then the moon came out from behind a cloud to show me it was
not a rock. It was a man and he was coated with ice.
"I knelt down to his lips and started kissing the life back into him
until he began moaning and jabbering in some foreign tongue. God alone
knows where I found the strength but I dragged him along like a sack of
frozen cement along that great length of sand and up the slipway and
into the cabin.
"Then I slammed the door. I warmed his lips with brandy. He moaned and
shuddered and shivered. I dragged him up to bed and piled blankets and
coats on top of him. Then I got in by his side. Some time towards
morning he must have opened his eyes and seen my face by the light of
the moon, because I suddenly woke to find him gone.
"I ran to the window and there he was on the shore, crawling into the
sea. I ran out and tried to drag him back, but he was covered in tiny
scales and he thrashed and slithered out of my hands like a fish and
fetched me a great crack with his tail - yes, with his tail, because he
was not a man, he was nothing but a great fish."
At this the Widow Grant suddenly sat up straight in her chair,
clutched at her breast and fell back dead.
She was buried in the family plot behind the Baptist Church and
Dorothy did not come to bed with me that night. When I awoke she was
still at the window, gazing out to sea.

"You'll freeze to death,"I said. "Look at the goose pimples on your
arms."
"Goose pimples? Look again, Henry. Look closer, dear."
And I went up close and they were not goose pimples but tiny,
perfectly formed fish scales.
"So you see why I can't go back to Cambridge with you. There's only
one home for me."
"You mean this cottage?"
"No, Henry. I mean the sea."
Before I could move she was out of the door and running to the cliff
rail. I chased after her and pleaded with her as she slipped off her
dress. Below us on the water a man was rowing out to his lobster pots.
The sun was reflecting off a million silvery points on her body and
when she moved she changed colour like a shot silk dress. I took her by
the arms and for a moment she clung to me. Then she wrenched herself
away and dived into the sea. The lobster fisherman rowed to the spot
where she landed, but of course her body was never found.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am not guilty. Because of my trade
- because I am a story teller - I know my word is suspect. He's made it
all up. That's what you think.
I know that Mr Cork Herbert for the prosecution will tell you in his
final address that I am one of the most accomplished writers of fairy
tales alive today - but will remind you that you are no longer children
to be taken in by fantastic fabulations. I have heard such remarks from
the police throughout their investigations.
But I swear that all I have told you is the truth. I appeal to you to
think as children. To think with your imagination. To think with your
heart. I did not murder my wife. Dorothy is alive and swimming in the
sea.