Jamie just shook his head. Along the bench from me, his mother mirrored the action. The press were scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I had no need to record anything; even now, I can virtually recite some of the key speeches from the case. Memory, I was discovering, acts completely differently when you give it a little notice. When you know at the beginning of a day that every word will count, even extraneous details imprint themselves in your long-term consciousness. It’s when events sneak up on you that things become disordered. There should be different words for the different ways we can remember.
‘You were lying on one of those counts. Which one?’
‘I’m not lying,’ said Jamie. Oh, but you are, I thought to myself, and they’re going to see through you, just like I did.
‘It almost doesn’t matter. Let’s press on,’ said Polglase. ‘I refer you to Ms Taylor’s testimony from earlier. It’s not just your opinions of the rape that are in conflict. You both arrived on the same day, which was the Wednesday, but that’s about all you agree on. Let’s go through the day before the rape, shall we? It was you who first touched the complainant Miss Taylor’s thigh, wasn’t it?’
Jamie appeared back on safe ground. ‘She pressed up against me.’
Antonia stopped twisting her engagement ring; the diamond caught a shaft slanting through the skylight, and beamed a point of white light across the room.
‘Whose suggestion was it that you accompanied her back to her tent?’
‘Mine. I thought she was vulnerable.’
‘In fact, you insisted on accompanying her despite her several assurances that she would prefer you not to, isn’t that so?’
‘No.’
‘Her actual words at the threshold of the tent were, I believe, ‘‘Not in a million light years.’’ Polglase paused for a pantomime wince. ‘Ouch,’ he said with a little moue. ‘No one likes to be rejected, but that’s got to sting, hasn’t it?
‘No,’ said Jamie. ‘Because it didn’t happen.’
‘It’s humiliating. You wanted to teach her a lesson, didn’t you?’
‘That’s not true,’ said Jamie, but the charm had peeled away from his voice in what I hoped was a precursor to losing his temper. Let them see the real you, I thought. Let them see what I saw.
‘Ms Taylor says that she stayed awake until she was sure that you had gone, that she was frightened to go to sleep while you were there. Is that the experience of a woman who would the following day enter into consensual sex with you?’
‘She’s lying because she was embarrassed at being caught.’ Jamie’s tone was somewhere between patience and pity. ‘Maybe she hadn’t done anything like that before, I don’t know. It was out of character for me, too. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. The whole sky was changing.’
Polglase turned to the jury. ‘Mr Balcombe now appears to be excusing his actions on the position of the planets. Whatever next? Star signs?’ The tattooed juror stifled a laugh. ‘This isn’t out of character for you, though, is it, Mr Balcombe?’
‘That’s because I didn’t do it.’
‘You have a history of pursuing what you feel entitled to, regardless of the cost to others, don’t you?’
He drawled the words, like they were too boring to bother with. ‘I really don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘Were you successful on your first application to the McPherson Barr internship?’
Kit and I exchanged puzzled glances. ‘No,’ said Jamie, but he no longer sounded bored.
‘So how did you change their minds?’
‘I made approaches to them at a charity event, and persuaded them how keen I was.’
I could just picture him making his way through the drinks and the canapés, gliding on his entitlement like a set of castors.
‘But what about the original, successful applicant?’
Now Jamie scowled. Kit raised his eyebrows at me. I nodded an acknowledgement, but couldn’t take my eyes off the witness box.
‘What exactly did you tell Octavia Barr, the CEO of the company? I remind you that you are under oath.’
‘I told her that the other applicant had had a caution for affray. I didn’t think that was the kind of person who deserved such a responsible position.’ Jamie tilted his chin squarely at Polglase, evidently to underline how seriously he took his responsibilities as a citizen.
‘So you denigrated the successful applicant and usurped him?’
‘You make it sound far more underhand than it was.’ Jamie’s colour didn’t rise and his skin remained matte. There was none of my nervous sweating or of Dr Okenedo’s crumbling under pressure.
‘I make it sound exactly like it was,’ said Polglase. ‘You don’t take no for an answer, do you?’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it true that you have a history of responding to rejection with spite?’
‘It’s not the same thing at all – is he allowed to do this?’ Jamie asked his barrister.
Nathaniel Polglase addressed his reply to the judge. ‘It’s relevant to character, Your Honour.’
‘Go on, Mr Polglase,’ said the judge. Fiona Price waited until the judge wasn’t looking to shake her head.
‘Isn’t it the case that you harassed her at the campfire, you followed her back to her tent and you followed her on the morning of the eclipse, even when she asked you to stop?
‘No.’
‘Far from mutually deciding to observe the eclipse from the caravan park, you followed her, biding your time until she was at last in a location so remote that you were able to take, without permission, the thing you had wanted since you first set eyes on Ms Taylor. Didn’t you, Mr Balcombe?’
‘No!’ The word was a whip cracked through the stuffy air. Polglase gave us a few moments to absorb its resonance, taking a sip of water. Jamie did the same.
‘Mr Balcombe. Did Ms Taylor actively say, I would like to watch the eclipse with you, or words to that effect?’
‘No, but not everything has to be said, does it?’ He spoke at half his previous volume.
‘I would argue that it does, Mr Balcombe. I would argue that the very basis of this case is about spoken, unequivocal consent, but despite repeated use of the word no . . .’ Polglase paused to let the word reverberate around the court and I held my breath: if he attributed this to eyewitness statement, Kit would know it could only have come from me – and it wasn’t something I would have kept from him. ‘You exercised its very opposite, didn’t you?’
I was spared, again, for now. I looked to Jamie.
‘No,’ he said, closing his eyes.