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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Caper Court
- Sprache: Englisch
Of the two pupil barristers at the prestigious chambers of 5 Caper Court, only one can win the coveted role of junior tenant. Penniless Anthony Cross is brilliant, hard-working, and longs to gain a foothold on this legal ladder to success. But his rival, Edward Choke - wealthy, good-natured, and not very bright - is also the head of chambers' nephew. In his quest for admission to the elite world of London's Commercial Bar, Anthony discovers that behind the elegant doors of chambers lie hard choices, deceitful politics, and dangerous corruption. And he must also cope with complications that threaten to ruin his career before it has even begun - his ageing hippy father, a fickle girlfriend, and above all a confusing relationship with charismatic barrister Leo Davies. . .
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Seitenzahl: 462
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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The Pupil
CARO FRASER
For Michael Fitzgerald
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Sir Basil Bunting, QC, was the head of chambers at 5 Caper Court, London, one of the most prestigious and successful sets of private and commercial litigation chambers in London. He was an elegant old man, with a serene countenance and a dignified manner. His white hair was crisp and thick, brushed well back from his high forehead; his shoes were well polished, his suits immaculately cut; his fountain pen, its old gold beautifully faded with the use of years, was always full of ink; his pocket handkerchief, thrust with careless arrogance into his breast pocket, was thick and white and large; his eye, as it rested with satisfaction upon the things in his life, was calm and majestic. To shake Sir Basil’s hand, its skin silkily translucent with age, was a dry and pleasant affair – but brisk, very brisk.
For Sir Basil, QC, was a great man. The very sight of him inspired confidence in his clients, those powerful businessmen and multinational corporations whose own reputations and substance echoed Sir Basil’s respectable worth. When Sir Basil rose to address a court on behalf of those clients, the calm assurance of his manner and grave modulation of his voice encouraged everyone, including the judge, to believe that truth and justice were on his side. The fees he commanded were legendary.
Part of Sir Basil’s greatness lay in the fact that he seemed a remote, solitary figure. Not reclusive by any means – quite the opposite; a debonair and sparkling conversationalist at cocktail and dinner parties, a popular speaker with a fund of fresh legal anecdotes, much in demand at the Annual Convention of the Shipping Bar and at Arbitrators’ dinners. But he was unmarried and seemed, therefore, to the outside world to be a man without a personal life.
He had been born shortly after the First World War, the eldest of three children. Law had been his calling from a very early age, as, indeed, his father had intended it should be; for Basil was destined, in his father’s ambitions at least, to succeed him as head of chambers at 5 Caper Court. There had been a brief flirtation with an army career, but ill-health had put paid to this, and he had reluctantly laid down his arms and resumed his practice at the Bar shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. This proved to be a fortunate occurrence, from Basil’s point of view, for while the war carried off most of Basil’s contemporaries at the Bar to fight for King and Country, Basil remained snugly ensconced in the Temple, performing a little fire-watching from time to time, with the field clear for him to establish a practice which put him far ahead of those contemporaries when they returned from active service.
And so, his reputation already golden before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, the path to the top had seemed open and without obstacle. The dignified contemporaries of his father were already tottering into dotage and disuse – those, that is, who had not taken their seat upon the Bench to live out a useful old age in the years of their declining faculties – and when Basil’s father, Sir Hector ‘Bunny’ Bunting, announced his retirement, the vote of chambers had gone unanimously in favour of adopting Basil as their head at the tender age of forty-four.
But, despite so much rapid success at so young an age, Basil had not found happiness beyond the long and absorbing hours spent in chambers. Perhaps the fact that he had not served during the war lent a strangeness to his contact with other men of his age, for he was aloof and uneasy in their company. He had grown accustomed to the somewhat ponderous and proper manners of the assortment of relics and oddballs that had remained at the Bar during the war years, and had himself assumed an arrogant and unsettled air that rendered him unattractive to men and women alike. As a young man, he was lonely and unsought, and spent most of his time pursuing his flourishing practice and nurturing the talents of new tenants in chambers.
Among his family, however, Basil was cherished and respected. Many of his happiest days were spent with his two sisters and their children, and if he harboured any regret concerning his single condition, it was that he had no son to succeed him at 5 Caper Court. He had, however, a nephew, Edward, the son of his sister, Cora, and her husband, Frederick Choke, and on him Sir Basil’s hopes were pinned.
Frederick Choke was a wealthy businessman whose success had enabled him, at a relatively early age, to retire to the countryside of Surrey and to the peace and seclusion of sixty thousand acres of farmland, whose management absorbed and delighted him as business never had. His wife, Cora, ran her social life with an industry and vigour that consumed all her energies and resources, and no one paid great heed to Edward, their son and heir, until, emerging at the end of a public school career of startling mediocrity, he presented them with the problem of his future. What Edward Should Do became a family topic, debated by parents, aunts, uncles and godparents regularly at mealtimes. It was not long, however, until it occurred to Frederick Choke that his brother-in-law, Basil, undoubtedly owed him a debt of gratitude. It had, after all, been Frederick who secured for Basil that opportune appointment as head of the Government Board of Enquiry into the Thanet Nuclear Disaster, whereby Basil had earned his knighthood. Sir Basil should find a place for Edward at 5 Caper Court.
Sir Basil had accepted the suggestion with alacrity. His dynastic sense was fired by the notion that, although he had no son, his own nephew might one day don the mantle of responsibility at 5 Caper Court. Cora Choke was both invigorated and relieved by the prospect of her son adopting a sufficiently noteworthy profession to enable her to brag about it at bridge, and Frederick regarded the matter as entirely settled as soon as the idea first entered his head. There was, of course, the problem of whether or not Edward would take kindly to the idea, but the bucolic Edward seemed both surprised and grateful that anyone should take the trouble to think of him, and acceded graciously. He had heard chaps vaguely talking about going to the Bar, and as it seemed to be one of those places where one might reasonably go, he didn’t mind if he went.
And so Edward secured a place, on the strength of his A-levels in history, economics and English (these had struck his careers master, who regarded Edward as ‘difficult to place’, as a good, broad career base) at Cambridge, where he did not distinguish himself in any way, and emerged with a dubious lower second in law at the end of three years. The first steps on the road to Caper Court had been taken.
So it was that, at the end of the long vacation in the year in which Edward had taken his final Bar examinations (passing them at the second attempt), he was about to take up his pupillage, that arduous, year-long apprenticeship of researching and book-carrying, under the tutelary authority of Jeremy Vane, one of the fast-ascending stars in the legal galaxy.
In the fortnight before Edward’s arrival, Sir Basil was sitting in his room in chambers contemplating a variety of letters spread out before him on the polished surface of his desk. After consideration, he drew several into a pile and placed them dismissively on one side of the desk. The remaining three he arranged in a row before him, cleared his throat lightly, and fell to their re-perusal. As he read, a gentle knock sounded at his door and a tall, gaunt man of forty or so, dark and slender to the point of painful thinness, came in.
‘Michael,’ said Sir Basil, casting a cold but courteous glance over the top of his spectacles, ‘thank you for sparing these few minutes. How is your case before the Lord Chancellor coming along?’
‘Slowly,’ replied the thin man with a smile, settling himself in one of the various handsome chairs that stood around Sir Basil’s desk, vacant reminders of the important persons who generally sat there in conference. Michael Gibbon was a quiet, thoughtful man with a mild sense of humour; as a lawyer, he was painstaking and exacting. He was not altogether fond of his head of chambers, but tried to treat him with respect and cordiality. For his own part, Sir Basil found Michael’s abstracted manner and slightly ill-kempt appearance profoundly irritating. However, since Michael achieved regular, quiet success in his practice, Sir Basil treated him with forbearance and only occasional impatience.
Sir Basil sat back in his chair.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we must discuss the tiresome matter of the pupil quota. Quite why the Bar Council thinks it necessary to tell us how many pupils we are to take in a year, I cannot think. Still, there it is. Apart from my nephew, Edward, whom you know, we must select another. I suppose they have their uses, fetching and carrying, that sort of thing.’
‘They do also serve a function eventually – as members of chambers, I mean,’ said Michael, the faintest of smiles lighting his face.
‘Naturally,’ replied Sir Basil testily. ‘But we do not take more than one tenant every two or three years, and it is my hope that Edward will be joining us at the end of his pupillage. Any other young man that we take will have to look for a place elsewhere, once his year as a pupil is up. His value to us is necessarily limited. As he is to be your pupil, whoever he may be, you may feel it something of a waste of your time. Were it up to me, we should take on no more pupils than we can usefully employ.’
‘I imagine I’ll find a pupil rather an asset,’ said Michael. ‘And might it not be better to take the view that he stands at least as good a chance as Edward of getting a tenancy here? After all, accusations of nepotism, that sort of thing …?’
Michael knew that he was treading on thin ice with this last remark, but somehow he could not resist needling his head of chambers. On this occasion, Sir Basil had to bite back a reproving remark to the effect that the choice of the next tenant lay with him. It was, after all, technically a matter which concerned everyone in chambers.
‘Let us not concern ourselves with that at this stage.’ He drew the three letters towards him. ‘Now, of the six that you have interviewed, only the letters of three strike me as being in any way suitable. I feel we should choose from among these – Cross, Letchworth and Peters.’
‘What about Mr Ramisamola? I thought him most promising.’
Sir Basil sighed. Michael seemed determined to make this a trying afternoon. ‘I hardly think,’ he said, ‘that chambers is quite ready for a coloured – ah – element. Do you?’
Michael said he supposed not. Still, one didn’t want to appear racially prejudiced, even if one was, he observed, by now thoroughly enjoying himself.
‘No one beyond these four walls is likely to hear of our decision in that regard,’ replied Sir Basil waspishly, realising too late that this made him sound both bigoted and underhand. ‘I have not included Mr Ramisamola, in any event, because his background is not quite suitable.’
‘Well,’ said Michael, ‘of those three you mentioned, I rather liked Cross and Peters. Letchworth was a bit stodgy, as I recall. Cross is the one with the scholarship, I think – maybe it would be rather a waste of his year if he’s not likely to get a tenancy here.’
‘A year spent at 5 Caper Court could hardly be called a waste of any young man’s time. Don’t you think?’ Sir Basil’s eyebrows rose a shade.
‘No, but—’ Michael began, sensing the contradiction.
‘Cross seems to be an exceptional scholar – a first from Bristol, I see; Pembury Prize for Jurisprudence; Jeffers Memorial Scholarship.’
‘I liked him,’ observed Michael. ‘I suspect there’s not much money at home, hence all the scholarships. It’s a difficult year to get through, without support.’
‘What about Peters?’ Sir Basil scanned the letters again and glanced up.
‘Oh, very able. On the whole, I think I preferred Cross.’
‘Well, as he is to be your pupil, your preference is what counts. Perhaps you could see to answering all these?’ He swept the letters towards Michael. ‘Now,’ he said, glancing at his wristwatch, ‘I think it may be time for a little sherry.’
Michael would far rather have been on his way to El Vino’s, but it was one of the penalties of a late-afternoon conference with the old man that one had to partake of his sherry. Not so much the sherry that anyone minded, but the business of making friendly conversation with Sir Basil sometimes seemed a bit of a strain.
It was with a light heart and a sense of relief, therefore, that Michael clattered downstairs at six o’clock, just in time to catch one of the typists before she left.
‘Joyce, would you mind …? Just a very short letter. I want to get it out tonight, if I can.’ Joyce, with one sleeve of her coat already pulled on, gave a wry smile, took her coat off, and switched on her typewriter.
‘Seeing as it’s you,’ she said, and sat poised over the keyboard, waiting for Michael to start.
‘To Anthony Cross, 24 Croft Road, East Dulwich. Dear Mr Cross, I am pleased to inform you that, after careful consideration, we have decided to accept your application for pupillage at 5 Caper Court. Perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone me at chambers to discuss a suitable date for you to start, although I would hope that next Monday would not be too early. I look forward to hearing from you, etcetera.’
‘New blood, eh, Mr Gibbon?’ Joyce rattled out the envelope and handed the letter to Michael.
‘New blood, indeed, Joyce. I hope you will be kind to him as only you and Violet know how.’ Joyce laughed with all the conceit and vigour of the worldly-wise twenty-four-year-old.
‘Long as he’s not too cocky, we’ll be just lovely to him.’ She pulled on her coat. ‘Just like we are to you.’
‘Ha,’ said Michael, fiddling with the franking machine. ‘Goodnight, Joyce.’
At six-fifteen, Michael stepped out into the lovely late-summer air and headed through Caper Court and up King’s Bench Walk towards El Vino’s. He was looking forward to having a pupil; it would take some of the weight off his shoulders, even if it did mean explaining everything as they went along and checking all his work. It might be amusing, too. Michael thought, with a faint conceit, that he would make rather a good sort of pupilmaster. As for Sir Basil’s nephew, God help him with Jeremy Vane. A most unattractive prospect, being the pupil of one of the Bar’s most arrogant personalities. Small chance of the boy learning anything. But the evening and life generally were far too good to worry about Edward Choke.
Coming through the back door of El Vino’s from Clifford Court, Michael found it already thronged, the air thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. In those days, Fleet Street was still alive with newspapers, and the clientele was a rumbustious mixture of journalist and lawyer. David Liphook and William Cooper, the youngest of the nine members of chambers at 5 Caper Court, were at a small table in the far corner, halfway through their first bottle, David’s face slightly flushed and his thick hair a trifle disordered.
‘… the most incredibly tight dress,’ he was saying, while William listened, wolfing down the remains of the basket of table water biscuits. ‘Hullo, Michael!’ David acknowledged Michael’s arrival briefly, then carried on. ‘But by the time I’d gone to order a cab and got back to the table, she’d gone off with that moron Swales. So that was a promising night of romance nipped in the bud.’ William made a sympathetic noise through his biscuits, then swallowed.
‘Michael, you made it. We thought you might never wrest yourself away from Sir Basil’s sherry clutches. ’Scuse me,’ to a passing barmaid, ‘can we have another glass here?’
‘And another bottle,’ added David. ‘I was just telling Will about this most fantastic girl I met at Annabel’s. God, she was gorgeous.’
‘The one that got away, eh?’ said Michael, winking at William. David Liphook, a diminutive, stocky man, was a legendary womaniser, lusting after most of the skirt in the Temple, and famous for his indiscriminate worship of the fairer sex. He was especially renowned for his astonishing number of failures. Just when the most fabulous creature in the world seemed to be about to fall prey to his ruthless charm, fate or some other fellow would rob him of her. But even throughout his regular accounts of these near-misses, he remained bright-eyed with optimism, patiently scanning the crowd in every bar and at every party for The Face, the one with whom it would all end and with whom he would find eternal joy and peace. William Cooper, a patient, faded young man with pale, long features and a yearning eye, had been listening to David’s outpourings with apparent sympathy and interest. Now he gave a deep sigh and leant back in his chair.
‘Let’s have some smoked salmon sandwiches,’ he said. As he was ordering them, David quizzed Michael about his session with Sir Basil.
‘Oh, we were discussing who I’m to have as my pupil. Amazing, really – we must have had over forty applications.’
‘We’re such a bloody good set, that’s why,’ said David, taking a satisfied slug of his wine. The fresh bottle came and he filled the glasses up almost to their brims. David believed neither in modesty nor moderation. Michael lowered his face and sipped from the overfull glass without lifting it from the table.
‘It was a bit strange, though,’ he continued, ‘making the choice in that arbitrary way. I can’t say I really cared, mind you. The three we’d narrowed it down to were all perfectly adequate, in their way.’
‘It’s a somewhat random way of determining someone’s fate, I suppose,’ said William, casting his poet’s gaze mournfully towards the plate of smoked salmon sandwiches that was weaving its way towards them, balanced in the middle of the arm of the waitress, who was also expertly wielding two bottles and a number of glasses.
‘Well, any choice is random, come to that,’ said David.
‘Renshaw only chose me because I was the only applicant who’d been to the same college at Oxford as he had,’ said Michael, squeezing a wedge of lemon over the interior of a sandwich. ‘I picked this chap – Cross, his name is – because he seems extremely bright. Anyway,’ he added with a sigh, ‘it doesn’t really matter in the end, because Basil has apparently decided that his nephew is to be our next tenant.’
‘Bloody cheek,’ said David mildly. ‘It’s not up to him – it’s up to the whole of chambers. And on point of principle, I certainly wouldn’t pick any nephew of Sir Basil Bunting’s. Mind you,’ he added, chewing on a sandwich, ‘he’s a nice bloke, Edward Choke. I’ve met him a couple of times.’
‘As for it being a chambers decision,’ said Michael, ‘you’ll discover that Sir Basil’s wishes count for a good deal. Look at that business over the coffee makers.’
‘I still think chambers should pay for them,’ muttered David.
‘It all comes to the same thing,’ said William, ‘except that those who didn’t want a coffee machine in their room—’
‘Yes, well, without breaking open that particular debate again,’ interrupted Michael, ‘the point I was trying to make is that, as you have yet to discover, when it comes to a major question of chambers policy or make-up, the old man is very influential when it comes to the final decision. Anyway, everyone always agrees on these things in the end.’
David looked darkly at his wine.
‘I have to go,’ said Michael, draining his glass and standing up to leave. ‘See you tomorrow. Off for a spot of serious nightclubbing, David?’
‘Good God, no. Not after last night. Will and I are going to Mario and Franco’s for a bite. Won’t you come?’
‘I don’t think Elizabeth would like it, somehow,’ replied Michael with a smile and some regret. ‘Anyhow, I have some letters to write to the disappointed hordes who failed to become my pupil.’
CHAPTER TWO
Wednesday was not going well for Anthony Cross. His day had begun at 4 a.m., and it was now nearly nine. It had been drizzling steadily since the first grey shadows of dawn had crept over the City, and the lanes and alleyways around Spitalfields market were glistening with rain and vegetable refuse. The great steel barn of the fruit market echoed with the shouts of porters, the whinings of forklift trucks, the crashings of crates and the tramp of feet. Things were only just beginning to slacken off.
Anthony had a holiday job in the market as a porter. He worked for an importer called Amos Oxford, and was subject to the brute tyranny of Mr Mant, a lowly clerk in the employ of Mr Oxford. What Mr Mant did was not very clear, but it seemed that he had been doing it at Spitalfields, man and boy, for forty years. While Anthony hauled crates and tallied sacks of onions, Mr Mant would emerge regularly from the cracked wooden den that he called his office, and where he spent murmuring hours thumbing through dirty lists of produce, and shuffle across to the café with his little stainless-steel teapot. There it would be filled, and Mr Mant, small and dark and bent and unwashed, would make his way back to his office with his tea and a doughnut. He never offered to share his tea with Anthony. His communication with the outside world during working hours was limited to shouting ‘You effin’ little bastard!’ at Anthony and to offering gratuitously unpleasant, if sincere, compliments to the passing office girls. At nine o’clock each morning, after four trips to the café and back, Mr Mant would betake himself to the Gun, the public house that opened at four in the morning for the benefit of the market traders, and there soliloquise over a pint of Guinness and a roll-up.
It was the mere fact of the steady rain that made Anthony’s life so miserable. Wheeling the heavy handcart, with its iron-rimmed wheels, in and out of the market, he had become drenched. There was nothing waterproof he could wear without sweating horribly, and now he could feel the damp seeping in under his jersey, through his shirt and into his skin, blotting and chilling him. The rain made the cobbles slippery, and a treacherous film of muck and rotten vegetable matter lay everywhere. Anthony’s working gloves had become sodden and unmanageably heavy, forcing him to discard them, and now his hands were chafed from tiny splinters on the sides of the raw wooden pallets. Dodging the roaring forklifts, he made his way to the café and bought his first cup of tea of the day. He leant against a pillar of the market and gazed vacantly as he drank it, a tall, good-looking boy, with a soft, girlish mouth, deep, thoughtful eyes, and dark hair matted with the rain. He stared unseeingly at the mountains of produce, at the piles of fat melons and bloom-covered purple grapes, at the light wooden boxes afloat with parsley, the gleaming green peppers, box upon box. The overhead lights gave everything an unreal lustre, like a great, bountiful harvest in a stone and iron setting.
Through the cockney clamour of the porters and traders, the sharp bubble of Indian and foreign voices rose and fell. Buyers of every race and description crowded the refuse-strewn lanes around the market with their vans and carts; Bengalis in small, sombre knots, silent families of dispossession and alarm; tall, swaggering Pakistanis with full faces and lazy eyes; lone Hasidic Jews with their old plastic carrier bags and doleful demeanour, skirting the crates while the rain pattered on their high-crowned hats; Soho Chinese (sensitively referred to by Mr Mant as ‘bleedin’ slopes’) darting watchfully from lorry to forklift, their high voices jabbing the air with orders; and the calm, cynical cockneys, battered faces as old as the centuries, milling slowly and cheerfully back and forth, whistling, occasionally breaking into an unlikely rapture of song, lighting up, stubbing out, bantering and bullying.
As Anthony watched it all, he saw out of the corner of his eye Mr Mant returning from the pub. With a sigh, he tossed his plastic cup among the rest of the rubbish and turned to his final, distasteful task of the morning, the disposal of five rotten bags of potatoes. Through the fibre of the sacking oozed liquefying potato, and the stench choked Anthony as he hauled at the slimy sacks, dragging them across to the other piles of refuse near the car park, where the scavengers were already congregating. Lone West Indian women with plastic carrier bags fished among the rotting mangoes and blackened cabbages, the rain soaking their sandals and squelching between their bare toes. More organised gangs, Indian families from Brick Lane, with vans and hatchback saloons, were loading crates of discarded lemons and piles of shrivelled chilli peppers into their vehicles. God knows what restaurant those would end up in, thought Anthony.
As he pondered the dreadful possibility of spending one’s entire life as a market porter, with the echoing sheds of Spitalfields forming the boundaries of one’s vision, the very epitome of his musings suddenly turned the corner from a side street and came lurching towards him in a forklift truck driven at full speed. Len and he were friends, if only by reason of their proximity in age, but the differing scopes of their separate ambitions and dreams often formed part of Anthony’s private meditations. Apart from a burning but unrealised longing to play striker for Millwall, Len’s great ambition in life, ever since he had first come to work in the market at the age of sixteen, had been to drive a forklift truck. It struck him as the height of sophistication to career around in a battered Toyota at speeds far greater than were strictly desirable or necessary, exchanging banter and obscenities with other drivers, forking up sheaves of pallets with utter disregard for the safety of their contents, and, of course, chain-smoking throughout the entire operation without ever seeming to move one’s hands from the controls. Len had eventually achieved his ambition at the age of twenty. Someone had once foolishly remarked in Len’s hearing that it was particularly difficult to overturn a forklift truck; snatching up this gauntlet, Len had proceeded to overturn two Nissans and a Toyota within the space of three months, before receiving a severe warning from the supervisor. He had then stopped reversing around corners at top speed and settled down to comparatively sober driving, making only occasional forays against innocent motorists who happened to cut through the market, and only now and again demolishing entire loads of produce through carelessness.
That Wednesday, Anthony watched him as he sped through the rain, dropped down a gear, braked, and came to rest in a crate of lemons.
‘’Allo, Tone,’ he said nonchalantly, flicking his fag end into a puddle and jumping down from his cab. ‘Bloody hell,’ he remarked, surveying the spilt lemons with pride. ‘That’s a bit of a waste. Better tell your old lady to make some pancakes, eh? Fancy some grub?’
Anthony’s mouth watered at the thought of a mushroom omelette and fried bread, washed down by a large cup of hot, sweet coffee. He glanced round. Mr Mant had apparently gone back to converse with his circle of acquaintance in the Gun. He nodded, and they set off through the rain to the café.
Len was a tall, well-made youth of twenty-two, cheerful of disposition and, it must be said, fairly simple. He regarded Anthony with a mixture of admiration (for his obvious intelligence) and pity (for his inability to appreciate the finer things in life, such as Millwall and Worthington Best Bitter). Their discussions were normally limited to cars and television programmes, but now and then Len’s imagination would be fired by a leader in The Sun, and he would seek out Anthony to discuss current affairs with him, feeling that Anthony’s views lent breadth to his own, and that he could safely re-rehearse those views to his own credit later in the pub.
Len had finished his mixed grill and was watching Anthony speculatively as he mopped up the last of his mushroom omelette.
‘’Ow long are you working ’ere, then, Tone?’ He lit a cigarette, leant his face on his hand, and stared deeply at Anthony. Anthony looked up.
‘I don’t know. Not much longer. Until I get a pupillage, I suppose.’
‘What’s one of them, then?’
‘It’s like a – a sort of apprenticeship for becoming a barrister.’
‘That’s not the same as a solicitor?’ Len had gleaned this from one of their more searching discussions concerning the law as a profession.
‘No, that’s right. Barristers are the ones who wear wigs and stand up and talk in court.’ Anthony was careful to explain things to Len in terms of reference to television drama.
‘So how long does it last, this apprenticeship?’ Len blew out a long plume of smoke.
‘A year. That is, you can’t earn anything for the first six months. I mean, you’re actually not allowed to until the second six months.’
‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Len in disgust. ‘You wouldn’t catch me going in for that caper.’ Anthony admitted that it was not, perhaps, quite Len’s cup of tea.
‘But it’s worth it, eventually. At least, it’s supposed to be. Once you become established in a tenancy, you can earn quite a lot.’
‘Yeah?’ Len’s interest was faintly aroused.
‘But I don’t think you’d like it,’ added Anthony quickly.
‘No. You need O-levels an’ that, don’t you?’ recalled Len wistfully. His memories of the remedial unit at Litt Park Comprehensive were stirred. O-levels had been bright, unattainable, shining things. His attention slipped away from Anthony and his career, a life that might have been, and moved on to more immediate interests.
‘You fancy coming to a disco in Hackney tonight?’
Anthony shook his head; he had never yet accepted one of Len’s invitations, but he was touched that Len continued to issue them.
‘I can’t. I’ve got to go and see my father,’ he said. And then he sighed, thinking of his father and wishing that he could go to Hackney, after all.
Anthony’s mother and father had met in the early sixties, when she had been plain, seventeen-year-old Judith Hewitt. Coming as she did from a background of solid respectability, with no aspirations beyond having a home and a family of much the same pattern as her mother’s, Charles Cross had seemed to her an anarchic, daring spirit, a revolutionary nineteen-year-old. He had long hair at a time when Beatle haircuts were considered outrageous, he smoked marijuana (and persuaded Judith without difficulty to do likewise), he read American underground magazines and admired Allen Ginsberg and Robert Crumb, and he had recently been expelled from his public school. Who could resist his eccentric charms? It appeared, unfortunately, that his own immediate family could – particularly when, without advance notice and at a time when he had no job nor any prospect of one, he married the then-pregnant Judith and asked them for money to assist matters.
They had refused, becoming particularly unpleasant about the whole thing, and said that they would have nothing further to do with him unless he divorced Judith, and started a new life by going to university, still regarded in those days as something of a talisman by the aspiring middle class. Since he was already rather bored with Judith, and not especially interested in their future child, he agreed with unseemly promptitude, and Judith was left without even the wherewithal to salvage the semi-detached lifestyle to which she had formerly aspired, and which she had so recently rejected (on Charles Cross’s recommendation) as bourgeois and contemptible. No sweet daily routine for her of Housewives’ Choice, trips to the shops with the Silver Cross pram, ironing, hoovering, baking and darning, making and mending. While her husband was disporting himself on an East Anglian campus (from which he dropped out after three terms), she was left in a pair of rented rooms with a new baby and only the scantest of support from her own unsympathetic family.
Some months after the baby was born, its father, in a fit of sentimentality, visited Judith in her two-room flat, bringing with him as a present five ounces of Lebanese Gold, which they smoked together. He persuaded Judith to name the baby Anthony, and not Kevin. He visited regularly after that, bringing money now and then, and three years later, Judith found herself pregnant once again.
When Charles Cross (or Chay, as he had taken to calling himself) subsequently heard that his ex-wife had begun proceedings against him to obtain maintenance payments for baby Anthony (and, presumably, for the new baby), he refused to have anything to do with the new child, let alone interfere in the choice of name for it. As a result, the unfortunate child was christened Barry.
Judith stumbled on through life. After a few years she resumed her studies and eventually obtained, with the help of her relenting but ever-grumbling mother, who looked after the children while she studied, a teaching qualification. Bewilderment still lived in her eyes, but she had not entirely abandoned the dreams and hopes of her youth. She invested much ambition in her two sons, and watched with surprise and delight Anthony’s careful, brilliant academic progress. It seemed to her that he was destined to travel on roads where she could not possibly follow; she was immensely proud of him.
Barry – Barry was not the kind of child in whom one could absorb one’s lost hopes. At eighteen, with none of his brother’s dark charm and intellectual ability, he was a laconic, large youth with an irrepressible sense of humour, quite devoid of any ambitions or cares. He attended a local sixth-form college, where he supposedly studied for A-levels. No one, least of all Barry, seriously hoped he would obtain any. He and Anthony regarded one another with an affectionate tolerance.
When Anthony returned that morning with his carrier-bagful of lemons, the house was empty, his mother at work and Barry at college. The silence and the rainy morning light filling the kitchen gave Anthony a dreary sense of futility. The day stretched ahead of him, life stretched ahead of him, both unfilled. He made himself a cup of tea and went through to the sitting room to fetch his book. It was then he saw the letter lying on the hall table, addressed to himself. He picked it up. It was postmarked EC4. It was probably, he knew, a polite rejection from any one of the sets of chambers to which he had applied for pupillage. But still his heart raced as he tore open the envelope. He read and re-read Michael Gibbon’s letter, as though unable to comprehend its contents. Excited beyond words, he paced round the empty house, longing for someone to return so that he could tell them. Caper Court! The best, the very best! Why had they chosen him? Well, they had, there it was. The man Gibbon and he had got on well, but he had never dared to hope … Suddenly the unfilled day was possessed of brilliance, life seemed full and promising. With a pupillage like that, he told himself, one could do anything. If one worked hard enough – and hadn’t he always worked hard? – then the pupillage might turn into a tenancy, and there was the future, clear and assured. To fly with the gods and angels of 5 Caper Court. The arduous slog at school, at university, at Bar School – it had all been worthwhile. Never mind the work ahead, it would be proper work, in the real world. This was one pinnacle of achievement, with greater and better things to come. He forgot his tea, picked up the letter again and took it with him from room to room, reading it over and over.
Next Monday! Only five days away. A surge of fear and excitement rose in him at the thought of next Monday. Oh, God, how blessed he was. The urge to tell someone was now too great. He rang his friend Simon, but he was out. Who could he ring?
Bridget immediately came to mind, but he found himself vaguely reluctant. She had been his girlfriend at university, a relationship formed at a time when the young and lonely cleave to one another – the first term. Absorbed in work and too emotionally apathetic to take any positive step, he had allowed it to drift on. In ways it was convenient, financially, particularly when it came to finding rooms and flatshares. But of late, Anthony had become aware that Bridget was seeking anxiously in the relationship some form of security, and the promise of a conventional future. For although she was a mediocre creature – moderately pretty, marginally intelligent, and only minimally demanding – she did love Anthony with the habitual affection that often passes for love in those who yearn only for safety. She had recently begun her articles with a firm of Holborn solicitors and, anxious to consolidate matters and move into the grown-up world of mortgages, joint accounts, engagements, and similar absorbing projects, had begun to nag Anthony about his ambitions at the Bar.
‘Why don’t you switch and become a solicitor instead?’ she had said. ‘It’s much more secure, and you’d always have a regular income. The way things are going, I can’t see you ever getting a pupillage.’
Anthony had been stung by the notion that he should suddenly abandon his cherished project and slide into the murky half-life, as he saw it, of a City solicitor. How second-rate. She seemed to have no idea of how much it meant to him, how hallowed a place the Temple was and how blessed all those who lived and worked there, even unto the lowliest criminal hack. She understood nothing. But then, for Bridget, law was a means to a financial end, to a decent job, car, house, nanny. It might as well have been computer programming, for all the intellectual pleasure it gave her.
The nagging had only fixed Anthony more deeply in his ambitions, and also aroused in him a sense of resentment that Bridget should presume so much. True, he had let the relationship develop into a much more serious pattern than he had ever wished or intended, mainly through a mixture of apathy and a genuine desire not to be unkind. Recently, however, he had begun to realise that, unless steps were taken to end it, things would become tiresome and very difficult. Bridget seemed to attach considerable significance to the last four years, as a portent for the future.
Nonetheless, his elation and happiness that day naturally overcame his misgivings, and so he rang her office. Bridget, of course, was pleased, and when she suggested going out the following evening to celebrate, his prudence deserted him and he agreed. It was only later that it occurred to him that the conversation the next night would have to be carefully engineered, if their mutual pleasure at his brightening prospects were not to develop into a fatal case, on Bridget’s part, of ‘making plans’.
By the time his mother came home from school, Anthony’s euphoria had flattened out a little. He had rung Michael Gibbon, been told he was in conference, and had left a message to say that he would be there at nine-thirty next Monday. To have spoken to someone, even a secretary, had relieved him. The matter was settled; if they’d written to him by mistake, they would have said so. They hadn’t.
His mother, when he told her, was delighted but not in the least surprised. She had unwavering faith in her son’s abilities, fully expecting him to achieve anything he wanted.
‘That’s wonderful. Is it a good firm?’
‘It’s called a set, Mum. A set of chambers.’
‘Oh. Is it a good set?’
‘Brilliant. The best there is.’ Anthony remembered to show the letter to his mother. She liked the tangible evidence of his successes, and kept all his prizes, diplomas and certificates, piling them up against the day of his absence, so that she could trace and recall him. She read Michael Gibbon’s letter now as though it told her something of the deep, mysterious future.
‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t it? God, yes. If this goes well, I mean, if they like me and I do well, then they might take me on as a tenant.’
Anthony and his mother had discussed this often enough for her to know what such a thing would mean. A chance for success, to turn the academic intangible into a prosperous reality. Money, an escape from the smaller, drearier end of suburbia. As for doing well and being liked, neither she nor Anthony had the remotest doubt that he would do both. But then, neither of them knew anything, as yet, of the existence of Edward Choke.
When she had fully digested the wondrous news, and stowed away Michael Gibbon’s letter with Anthony’s other trophies, which started with a jigsaw won at the mixed infants sports day and ended, so far, here, Judith turned her attention to the evening meal. She saw the carrier bag of lemons standing by the sink.
‘Anthony, what on earth am I meant to do with these?’ she demanded. She was vexed at the prospect of throwing them out, helpless in the face of her upbringing. Waste not, want not.
‘Len suggested pancakes.’
‘Oh. Len.’ Len’s wit did not amuse her.
‘I tell you what. I’ll take half of them round to Dad’s tonight.’ Anthony could never bring himself, in spite of his father’s requests, to call him Chay.
‘Oh, I’m glad you reminded me. I’ll just make something for myself. Put the news on, will you?’
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ called Anthony, going through to switch the television on. ‘I’ve told Barry that we’re both supposed to be going round, but he’ll probably back out at the last minute.’
But Barry, when he returned home with the fruits of his academic labours stuffed in a dilapidated sports bag and a Hawkwind album under his arm, responded to Anthony’s reminder of their father’s invitation with enthusiasm.
‘Oh, yeah, that’s right! Good. I want to see this new girlfriend of his. Hope she’s better than the last one.’
Judith said nothing. Although she absorbed all the information that her sons brought home concerning their father, she never asked any questions. She lent Anthony the car keys, ate a solitary omelette, and after watching the news for the second time that day, went to bed with some marking and lay, pondering the hope, the brilliance, that was to be Anthony’s future.
It was quite a long way to the Chay Cross Islington squat, and by the time they got there, even Anthony’s high spirits had begun to flag. They had stopped at Unwins to buy a bottle of white wine, which was warming well in Barry’s grasp as they mounted the wide, echoing staircase to Chay’s flat.
Strictly speaking, the flat was not Chay’s. As a squat, it had originally housed a commune of five people, all dedicated to the arts and vegetarianism. One by one, they had succumbed to Chay’s oppressive influence, and left. Quite how someone who smiled so benevolently and constantly, whose voice was never raised in anger or complaint, and who never imposed his views or his music on others except in moderation – quite how this model of self-effacement had managed to wear down four like-minded individuals was a mystery even to themselves. But there he remained, smiling and alone (except for the ever-present, ever-changing girlfriend), quite unperturbed by the disdain and resentment of his law-abiding, rent-paying neighbours. For his was a noble squat, set in a handsome if decaying terrace, populated largely by people of his own age and background, the only difference being that Chay lived there free.
Anthony and Barry’s views regarding their father had varied over the years, and it was only in the past seven or so that they had begun to realise that he was somewhat out of the norm for ordinary fathers. Chay was still very much a child of the sixties, the kind of relic that Anthony and Barry recognised from historic television footage of the black-and-white era. Barry rather admired his father’s bohemian lifestyle as one to which he, too, aspired, but which he knew he could never brave. The tree-lined streets of suburbia, which he could denigrate in the cosy comfort of the canteen at the sixth-form college, offered too much of a warm, known haven.
Anthony viewed him somewhat differently. He had never taken his father very seriously, had never much liked him, and stayed out of his way as much as possible. During his vulnerable years at university he had referred to his father as ‘an artist’, when asked. That was all very well, so far as it went. But only that day, and in the light of the prospects which he imagined were opening up before him, Anthony realised that Chay could become something of a serious social handicap.
Chay Cross was a thin, spindly man of forty-one, with the eager, faded countenance of the ageing hippy, rootless and feckless. He smiled a lot, a serene, knowing smile. His history was one of hedonistic self-justification. He had inherited and squandered money; borrowed from his family until they were weary; indulged in every lunatic experiment conceivable – physical, spiritual and chemical; embraced several religions, from Christianity through Buddhism to Bahá’í and back again; dabbled with all known drugs, and several less well known, from mescalin to cocaine. He had used, cheated and discarded friends, lovers and family. He had embarked upon various artistic careers with neither the desire nor the ability to succeed, it seemed, in any of them – painting, sculpture, weaving, writing, poetry, metalwork. He satisfied his vanity by achieving smatterings of knowledge and endless terms of reference, catchphrases, the breathed names of the successful, their cast-off canvases and clay, their ex-lovers. He was a man of immense superficiality, anxious for the approval of the supposed arbiters of taste and intellectual and artistic fashion, seeking always to tap the vein of the present trend. At the same time, he managed to cultivate an image of eccentric naivety, purporting to disdain material wants and cares. He was, in truth, a complete fabrication of a man, a fact of which Anthony was all too readily aware.
The first shock that greeted his sons that evening was their father’s newly shaven head. For as long as they could remember, he had worn his hair, which had of late become grey and thinning, to his shoulders, occasionally tying it back with ponytail bands bought at the women’s haircare counter at Boots. But tonight they saw his rather pointed, knobbly skull gleaming unpleasantly through grey, bristly, day-old growth. It gave Chay’s neck a strangely elongated look, and somehow aggravated the irritating quality of his bland smile.
‘Oh, very cool, Dad,’ said Barry, giving him a glance and then heading for the kitchen with the wine. He was hunting out Chay’s new woman. Anthony was too startled to say anything. He was aware from his grandmother that he was supposed to look like his father, and had spent anxious, furtive half-hours at his grandmother’s house, scrutinising old photographs of his father to see if it were true, and if there was any frightful possibility that he might, in middle age, look the way Chay did. The shaven head expanded the possibility alarmingly.
He followed his father into the long attic room that served as living room, dining room and bedroom, and tried to pay attention while his father showed him some of his recent efforts in his new field of creative endeavour, drawing cartoons. To Anthony, there was something faintly repellent in Chay’s enthusiasm for his own work and its display to others; perhaps his own innate habit of self-deprecation was to blame. Still, he had to acknowledge that his father never admitted artistic defeat.
‘Have you sold any?’ he asked, ever seeking some evidence that someone might find something of substance in his father.
‘One or two. Not to mainstream publications, of course. This stuff’s far too way out for them.’ His father continued to use the antiquated slang of the sixties; in some ways it was rather endearing, but it never failed to offend the delicate, modish sensibilities of Barry.
‘Who’s that meant to be?’ asked Barry, reappearing from the kitchen.
‘Denis Healey.’
‘Looks more like Sue Lawley. Here, cop a glass of this, Dad.’ He handed his father a tumbler full of wine. ‘I’ve just been meeting Jocasta,’ he said with a grin, stuffing crisps into his mouth.
A young woman came through from the kitchen and smiled at them.
‘Hi,’ she said nervously, and held out her hand. Anthony shook it and introduced himself. She could have been no older than himself, he thought, rather lovely in an inane way, with long, straight, black hair and bright, anxious blue eyes. They get younger and younger, thought Anthony. Anyone Chay’s own age would laugh their head off, he supposed. Jocasta. Yes, well, that figured.
‘I hope you’ll like what I’m cooking for supper,’ she said, and then proceeded to describe something which Anthony could not visualise, consisting of ingredients of which he had largely never heard.
‘What’s that? Soul food?’ said Barry.
‘We’re vegans now,’ said Chay, by way of explanation.
‘Well, we’re not,’ said Barry, following Jocasta into the kitchen.
Over dinner, which Anthony suspected was mainly aubergines, cabbage and pine kernels, with ginger in it somewhere (although he could not specifically visually identify any of those things, except the pine kernels), Chay expanded on his veganism. Jocasta beamed at him worshipfully from behind the casserole.
‘It’s part of a whole purification system. For your body to operate your brain, it needs good, pure fuel. Red meat just makes you sluggish and excitable.’
‘How can you be sluggish and excitable at the same time?’ asked Anthony.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Chay, running a leathery hand over his bristles. ‘A mass of contradictions. A body that’s incapable of functioning properly with gross and unnatural food intake. Hence the head is full of hate, the heart full of poison. For humans to use animal products is unnatural.’
‘Even leather for shoes and belts,’ put in Jocasta, glancing at Chay for approval. He nodded.
‘That’s right. Jocasta has made us both moccasins from hessian and velvet, so that animal products don’t come into contact with our flesh.’ He stuck out a bony foot from under the table; from the end of it dangled something that looked like an ill-fitting velveteen boot.
‘That won’t take you far on a nasty night,’ observed Barry, abstractedly trying to mash the remains of his food into as small a lump as possible. Jocasta was staring at his plate.
Anthony changed the subject by telling his father about his new pupillage. Chay looked laid-back and amused. His contempt for the world of commerce, and for lawyers, bankers and stockbrokers, was well known.
‘A web of corruption, greed and deceit. Still, if that’s what you want, I wish you well of it.’
Anthony would have liked to point out to his father that he, Chay, had never seriously contemplated any real form of work in his life, simply squandering other people’s money to stay alive, but he didn’t. He knew too well the pointlessness of such an exercise.
‘What about you, Barry?’ said Chay, turning to his younger son. ‘You going to become one of Thatcher’s children?’
‘No,’ said Barry, pouring more wine into everyone’s glass, ‘I’m hoping for a sixties revival, so that I can fart about in a pair of flared jeans with some joss sticks, doing nothing.’ Anthony laughed. Chay got up to fetch his tobacco tin.
‘What about you, Dad?’ asked Barry. ‘What’s the latest craze? What’s next in the line-up of loony doings?’
‘Well, since you ask,’ replied Chay tolerantly, lighting an after-dinner joint, ‘I’m undertaking fire-walking. At the moment, I’m involved in mental and physical preparation for the experience.’
‘How d’you prepare yourself – drop lighted matches down your socks?’
Chay ignored him, taking a deep drag on the joint and passing it to Jocasta, who took it reverently. ‘It’s a process of cleansing the mind and body,’ he continued, ‘hence the veganism.’ Hence the drugs, thought Anthony. ‘Over a period of weeks one elevates the spirit to a condition where pain can be transcended. Then one is ready.’ Jocasta’s eyes glowed as she listened to him, a sweet, holy smile on her lips. ‘All physical sensation can be sublimated if the spirit is in harmony with the elements that surround us. Earth, fire, water.’
‘Are you going to try it?’ Anthony asked Jocasta, shaking his head as she offered him the joint. She looked worried and rather shocked at the question.
‘No. I don’t think so, anyhow.’ She looked over at Chay.
‘Why not? Don’t you believe you can transcend pain?’ asked Barry. ‘No thanks,’ he added, refusing the joint.
‘Jocasta’s very young,’ said Chay, with a condescending smile. ‘She hasn’t undergone the years of intellectual discipline and physical tempering required to undertake such a test of the spirit, and of one’s faith.’ He took the joint from Jocasta and inhaled; the tobacco glowed redly. The gesture suddenly swept Anthony with irritation. They bored him; their drugs bored him; his father’s posing bored him. None of this was real – their food, their attitudes, their absurd posturing.
‘I’ve got to be going,’ he said, and got up. Barry joined him. They thanked Jocasta for the meal and Chay promised Barry he would let him know when the fire-walking was to take place.
Out in the street, Barry counted his change. ‘Good. Enough for a quick pint and a McDonald’s. She was a bit of all right, wasn’t she?’ They walked on for a bit. ‘Can you imagine him in bed with her?’
‘Don’t,’ pleaded Anthony. He thought of Chay’s shaven skull, and wished Barry hadn’t said that.
