Cameron has limited the questioning to their night together. That’s the worst thing he could have done. It’s the one thing Watt doesn’t want to answer questions about.
Watt can’t bring himself to look up at Manuel but the jury are looking straight at Manuel. They shouldn’t be. Watt thinks he will set an example by refusing to look straight at him. He stares at the jury, moving his gaze along the two rows. He can see the shape of Manuel in the corner of his eye, he’s the only person moving in the court. Everyone else is completely still, mesmerised by him.
He sees the shape of Manuel come around the table, undo the buttons on his jacket, pull it back to rest his hand on his hip, look at papers. He’s Clarence Darrow to the very life. He seems to be smiling at the jury.
As Watt watches, one of the women jury members presses her lips together in a non-committal reciprocative smile. The rest of the jury glance away as if they don’t trust themselves not to submit to his charm. They don’t meet Watt’s eye though.
‘Mr Watt,’ Manuel begins, ‘do you recall the first occasion upon which you and I met?’
He sounds so normal. Watt is aware that he can’t keep staring at the jury, it looks very odd, almost threatening, so he shifts his eye to Lord Cameron.
‘I do,’ he says soberly.
It sounds as if he is agreeing to marry Lord Cameron.
An abrupt laugh explodes from a woman up in the public gallery. She stops herself, afraid of being thrown out, but the reverb hangs in the air long after it can be heard, a tuning-fork hum. Watt doesn’t mean to be funny but he is. Journalists are smirking. The jury are screwing their faces up. Even Lord Cameron frowns deep at his papers. People have always found Watt ridiculous, he knows that, but this is not the time.
Manuel continues. ‘It was a meeting, I believe, which you said transpired between you and I with no one else present, other than Mr Laurence Dowdall and he departed our company after ten minutes or so. Is that your recollection?’
Watt has never heard Peter Manuel talk like that. Even his accent sounds different.
‘That assertion is correct,’ Watt tells the side of Lord Cameron’s face.
‘Do you remember meeting me in a restaurant in Renfield Street? “Whitehall’s”, I believe, is the name of that establishment?’
Watt says yes to the side of Lord Cameron’s face. ‘Do you remember going over Crown Street to a public house, “Jackson’s Bar” in the Gorbals. Is that your recollection?’
‘Yes.’
Whitehall’s. Jackson’s. Manuel is working through the night, through the venues. Watt is suddenly back in Jackson’s, remembering the smell and the noise and the ambience. It is a whisky-smelling, happy memory of being best and winning. The room is glowing orange and they have the corner and he is warm and drunk.
But Jackson’s is rough. Everyone knows what Jackson’s Bar is like, the sorts of people who go there. Still, it’s not the roughest bar he was ever in. Thinking that brings the Moulin Rouge to Watt’s undisciplined mind. The Moulin is the roughest bar he was ever in.
The Moulin was a dive, a crumbling basement in the Gorbals, rats under tables, sawdust on the floor, warm cloudy beer and whisky best-drunk-not-smelt. Watt was a half-partner in the Moulin just after the war, a time when everything was up in the air and a man could make his way.
The Moulin Rouge. Watt stands in the pristine High Court, every eye on him and the worst, the very worst, of his youthful late nights at the Moulin invade his thoughts in bright snapping images. Big Mamie doing her act in a back room. That guy Hector doing the elephant trouser gag. Moroculous Martin being sick into his pint glass and then trying to drink it because he thinks it is still beer.
The disembodied voice of Manuel continues, asking if Watt recalls being in Jackson’s from seven o’clock until about a quarter past nine?
Watt feels caught out. He can still see Big Mamie’s open-mouthed grin and tiny teeth. Well, he tells Lord Cameron, the timing was not something he was keeping a record of, but his throat is closing up. His fingertips are tingling. Talking to Cameron is like talking to a wall with eyebrows.
Manuel asks if he remembers the conversation which, at that time, took place between Mr Watt and himself?
Watt blusters, ‘There was a very great deal of conversation during the time we were there.’
Cameron ignores him again, but his eyes slide over to him as if he is building up to telling Watt to leave him alone.
‘Do you or don’t you remember our conversation?’
‘I do.’
Manuel can’t take it any more and raises his voice. ‘The question has been asked by me, not by His Lordship.’
Watt has been shocked into looking straight at Manuel. And it certainly is Manuel.
It’s Peter Manuel and he’s looking back at him. Peter Manuel has his back to the rest of the court, trespassers on their conversation. He gives Watt a tiny encouraging smile. We’re still us, Billy, he seems to be saying. We’re still pals. The two guys in the car, in those bars, at the Gordon.
Reflexively, Watt’s eyes smile back. Now they’re locked together, looking at each other.
Watt attempts a smile at the rest of court, feels his lips and cheeks sliding around in smile-suggesting ways. He knows he hasn’t pulled it off. The press look back at him, blank. The women on the balcony are staring at him, mouths agape. He looks at the clerk, the stenographer, other officials. Everyone here hates him.
But then Marion’s voice comes into his head so strongly and clearly that it makes him want to cry: don’t be silly, Bill. This isn’t about being liked, it’s business. You’re just being silly, aren’t you?
‘You remember our conversation, I take it?’
‘Yes,’ Watt tells his dead wife, Marion.
‘Do you recall, in particular, part of the conversation in which you professed yourself agreeably surprised?’
It’s such a wordy sentence that it throws Watt. He’s angry that Manuel is using words like ‘profess’ and ‘agreeably’.
But he must answer. He begs pardon and asks what he was supposed to be ‘agreeably surprised’ by?
Manuel purrs, ‘Why, by meeting me.’
Watt tuts, ‘I do not remember saying anything of the kind.’
‘Do you remember telling me that you could “drive a car better than Stirling Moss any day of the week”?’
‘That is a lie. You are lying.’
As Manuel fiddles with his notes Watt realises he’s alluding to the driving back overnight from Cairnbaan allegation. Manuel isn’t bringing up Dickov or the Gordon Club. He catches sight of Dandy in the public benches, sitting back, happy.
‘In the course of that evening,’ says disembodied Manuel, ‘do you recall raising the matter wherein you alleged you had been selected, or nominated, as President of the Merchants’ Guild of Glasgow?’
In among the lawyers in the well of the court, one or two faces rise slowly to look at William Watt. Lips tighten, glances are exchanged among the professionals. President? Of the Merchants’ Guild? Did they hear right? How has Peter Manuel come to be discussing the Merchants’ Guild?