Judicial Whispers (29 page)

Someone had the presence of mind to buzz down to the night porter before Vince and Benjy could reach the front door and make their escape. But they buzzed in vain. As Vince and Benjy legged it into the night, Ted and Sean, one of the cleaners, were discussing Millwall’s chances in the Cup in the back office.

At 5 Caper Court, the members of chambers sat around morosely in Sir Basil’s room after the ambulance had gone. Leo had slipped fifty pounds to Vi, one of the tearful group of typists, and told her to take the girls to the pub so they could drown their upset. There was no question of carrying on with the party.

Anthony sat next to Leo and poured him some more of Cameron’s Scotch. He had been moved at the sight of Leo, crouched next to Mr Slee as they waited for the ambulance, murmuring, ‘Poor old Bill. You’re going to be OK. Don’t worry,’ while everyone else paced about saying where was that bloody ambulance.

‘Thanks,’ said Leo.

‘I suppose we should just push off home,’ said Michael, who had rung Mr Slee’s wife ten minutes earlier. ‘There’s not much we can do.’

‘I have to hang around,’ said Leo. ‘I told Rachel to drop by. I’ll have to wait for her.’

As Leo knocked back his Scotch, Anthony glanced at him. Leo’s voice was tired; he had spoken Rachel’s name with all the familiarity of possession. Perhaps he was sincere. Perhaps Rachel had got lucky. Anyone who had Leo, thought Anthony, was lucky. Confused by his thoughts, distressed by the events of the evening, Anthony rose and said he was going. The others murmured goodnight.

As the sound of Anthony’s feet on the wooden stairs died away, Leo said to Sir Basil, ‘I’ll lock up, if you like, Basil. If you want to get off home, that is.’

Sir Basil nodded. The long, normally serene face seemed to have slackened and aged with shock and unhappiness. The ambulance men had been very concerned about William’s condition, and had rushed him off. Now Sir Basil wondered if he should have gone in the ambulance with him. William was one of his oldest friends. He had never realised that until now. How odd it was with people. One was with them so long, day in, day out, throughout the years that it never occurred to one how close they could become, how much a part of one’s life.

Sir Basil fetched his coat, said goodnight to Leo and the others, and left. The others gradually drifted off, too – Michael, Cameron and Roderick to their homes, David and William for an emergency dinner in Covent Garden with a few bottles of wine. Jeremy had left the party before any of this had happened.

Leo sat alone in the utter silence of chambers. He had often been there alone, working late, but never before had the silence closed so completely, so forcefully, around him. The settling creaks, the tiny ticks and sounds of an aged building empty of people, fell loudly upon his ears. He nursed his glass and looked around him, thinking of the history that lay within these walls, within every building in the Temple, every brick, every stairwell, every room. All the voices down the years, now silent, their words faded and forgotten; the feet upon the stairs, now silent; the names upon the board, painted out now, replaced by the lustre of fresh faces … He thought of these, and he thought of William. Poor Bill.

After a while, he heard feet upon the stairs, hesitant at first, then quicker. He knew it must be Rachel. He realised he did not want her to interrupt his meditations. He would rather have sat there alone, with the whisky and the shadows for company.

Rachel came slowly into the room. How clean and fresh and laundered she always looked, thought Leo with mild boredom.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, eyes wide.

‘Party broke up early,’ replied Leo. He sighed and set his glass down on the table, then rose to kiss her absently. ‘Our head clerk, William, had a heart attack. They took him off to Guy’s. Everybody felt pretty awful about it, so they all went home.’

‘Oh, God. How dreadful. Is he going to be all right?’

‘I haven’t a clue. He looked pretty rough when the ambulance came. I’ll ring in an hour or so’s time.’ He paused. ‘I feel rather bad at not having gone with him. I suppose one of us should have, but …’

‘Oh. Oh, well …’ She laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

Why is she here? wondered Leo. Why on earth did I ask her to come round? Then he remembered – giving her a high profile, keeping her in full view of the crowds. Now there were just the two of them in this silent room, and he wished he could simply send her home. But that was not possible.

‘Let’s go and have dinner somewhere,’ he said and, with an effort, gave her a smile.

He lay in bed with her later, his face against the pillow, wanting only to sleep. She was still talking. She could talk for hours, it seemed, about nothing. About him. About her. About them. About nothing. All he had to do was murmur ‘Mmm’ occasionally. He heard her voice stop, felt her hand sliding round his back, grazing his stomach, moving downwards. God, he’d made love to her once – wasn’t that enough? He rolled over onto his back and found her smiling tenderly down at him as her fingers stroked, trying to arouse him.

‘Rachel,’ he said gently, lifting her hand away and kissing her fingers, ‘I’m an old man—’

‘No, you’re not,’ she said, still smiling.

‘I’m a middle-aged man who feels quite old, and who has to clear up some papers and drive all the way to Wales tomorrow, and I really think I need some sleep. Besides …’ He put a hand over his eyes and yawned hugely.

‘Besides?’

He stopped yawning, took his hand away and stared at the ceiling. ‘I’m a bit worried about William.’ He had rung Guy’s earlier and had learnt nothing, except that William was in Intensive Care. He glanced at her lovely face, which now wore an expression of compassion and concern. Like those elegant suits she has, thought Leo, she always has the correct expression for every occasion. What a sod I am, he thought a moment later. Literally and figuratively. He took her suddenly in his arms and kissed her. ‘Now go to sleep,’ he said firmly, and rolled over.

‘Think I broke his nose,’ said Vince into Felicity’s bare shoulder, grinning in the darkness.

Felicity gasped and then giggled. ‘That’s terrible! He looked dreadful when they carted him off. A right mess. Vince, you shouldn’t have, you know.’

‘Why not?’ Vince’s voice was muffled. ‘Bastard deserved it. He won’t go groping you again in a hurry.’ There was silence for a moment. ‘You should have seen Benjy. He played a stormer. Half those blokes were so shit-scared of him they couldn’t move.’

‘I’ve really had it at work now,’ sighed Felicity.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Vince. ‘You said you were fed up there, anyway. Besides, I didn’t mention any names. No one’s to know it had anything to do with you.’

‘That’s a point,’ murmured Felicity.

‘Except him,’ added Vince.

Leo’s mother, Maeve, lived in Llanryn, a small, sad town near Bangor, in North Wales. Like a fly caught in amber, thought Leo, as he arrived there on Christmas Eve. The place was still redolent of the fifties – the smokey chimneys, the rows of unpretentious grey houses, the light, high calls of children playing in the empty winter streets, the corner shops. In some ways he liked to go back, liked to visit all that he had escaped, playing that childish game of haunting himself with what might have been. In other ways he hated it, depressed by the grey hopelessness of his beginnings, the drab streets and the small minds.

On Boxing Day he left his mother’s house and walked down to the canal, taking the back route to his old school. He passed a dog, an old man, and two teenage girls who went past him in a giggling stumble on the towpath. The light in the sky was violet at the edges, as though threatening snow, and the ground was like iron. His breath billowing out in the air, Leo turned off the towpath and up across wasteground, picking his way through the gravel and weeds past dirty puddles, until he came to the street. On the other side stood his old school. He crossed
over and stood at the railings for a while, remembering himself, remembering a classroom behind those tall windows, the boys, the teachers, the dense, clouded minds. Or so they had always seemed. He had known then – was it possible that he had been as young as nine when the knowledge had come to him? – that he must get away. That there was a bigger, brighter world somewhere, and that it was not Wales.

He moved away from the railing and walked in the direction of the Llanryn Arms. Was his world now so very different from the world of his childhood? The world of the City, the world of the law and the Temple. It was still a small, grey world, hemmed in, claustrophobic – and threatening, now. Yes, that was the true nature of the feeling which had been haunting him for the past months. He felt threatened by the very society in which he lived, by its tight rules and strict values, and he did not like it. It was an uncomfortable sensation, that of one’s own charmed world turning upon one. He tried to shrug off the feeling, telling himself that a few stiff drinks would help, as he pushed open the shabby little door of the pub and let its smokey, small-town warmth envelop him.

‘I met Brendan Lewis in the pub,’ he said later to his mother. She was sitting in a chair next to the fire, going through notes for the WI, of which she was the local chairwoman, while Leo made tea.

‘Brendan Lewis? I don’t remember that name …’ She looked up, a small, square-set woman with Leo’s prematurely white hair and a still-pretty face.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Leo, cutting pieces of Christmas cake and setting them tidily on a plate. ‘He was at primary school with me. Big lad. We always used to call him Dan.’

‘Oh, God, Dan Lewis!
Diawl bach
…’ Maeve Davies laughed and went back to sorting out her papers. She ruminated for a
moment, then grimaced. ‘His brother was a bad lot. He was in prison a while back for robbery, or some such thing.’

‘Well, Dan used to make me laugh,’ said Leo, bringing the tray over and setting it on the low table in front of the fire. ‘He wasn’t afraid of any teacher. He was a funny kid.’

Leo thought of Dan supping reflectively at the drink Leo had bought him in the pub, eyeing the butter-soft leather of Leo’s expensive Italian overcoat. Leo had wished, at that moment, that he had not been wearing it. Dan, out of a job for two years now, did not seem to have much to laugh about nowadays. Leo had not stayed long in the pub.

Leo and his mother sat over their tea, chatting. At length Maeve got up, taking off her spectacles.

‘Right. I’m going down the road to Pat’s, give her these patterns. She’s got her fifth grandchild on the way now, you know.’ She could not help saying such things, despite her good intentions not to get at her son. But she longed for him to marry, so that she could have grandchildren of her own to boast about. It seemed a pointless kind of thing to her, life, if your only son was just going to let the line die out like that.

But Leo just smiled up at her, not rising to the bait. There were so many of these sighing, sweet, half-chiding remarks. They had been going on for years.

‘I think I’ll clear some of the stuff out of my old room,’ he said.

‘I wish you would. I don’t think it’s been touched since you went to university,’ replied Maeve. ‘You’d be doing me a good turn if you’d get rid of some of it, give me some more cupboard space.’ She shrugged her shoulders into her coat. ‘Mind and show me what you’re throwing out, though,’ she added.

Leo took the tea tray through to the kitchen and stood looking out over the little net curtain strung across the window above the sink. It was a new piece of net, he realised, not the
pattern of lacy swans through which he had seen so many dawns and dusks as a child. Of course it was new. She must have changed it countless times over the years. Still, he had expected to see the swans.

He thought suddenly of the other members of chambers, and of the different ways in which they would all be passing the day. Roderick on his Boxing Day shoot at his splendid place in the country, Sir Basil with his sister and her family, the famously dimwitted Edward included, the rest in middle-class affluence. None of them washing up the teacups in the tiny scullery of a terraced house, looking out onto a grimy back garden and rows of other houses. Except Anthony, perhaps. Only he and Anthony came from the same sorts of beginnings.

From Anthony, his thoughts moved inevitably and unwillingly to Rachel. Upstairs in his suitcase was the present she had given him before he left London. It was a book about Fauve paintings, published by the Yale University Press. She must have gone to some trouble to find it. It must have been that conversation they had had about André Derain, about whether his work was political or merely cultural. That she should remember that fleeting conversation, that she should find him such an apparently impersonal gift, yet one implying such intimacy of ideas and understanding, both touched and troubled him. He had opened the gift at a service station on his way to Wales, and had sat with it in his hands, feeling its slender weight as another small burden in their relationship.

Leo was not accustomed to giving and receiving presents. He would have to buy her something when he got back to London. Or would he? A book was a small enough thing, but he knew how much love and thought lay behind it. These tokens, these slender threads that pulled people closer and closer …

And there was no doubt, too, that the tone of their relationship had altered since the night of Sir Basil’s party. For
Rachel, the enchantment and frivolity had been replaced by something deeper and more serious. Leo could feel this. It was as though she felt charged with some mission, as though Leo’s sexuality were within her keeping, her responsibility. Each act of love between them seemed like a commitment to some unspoken future. Yet Rachel did not realise, did not know, that there was to be no future.

I do not want to think about any of this, Leo told himself. He rinsed the cups and plates and put them on the draining board, then went upstairs to the little back room which had been his as a child. He no longer slept there when he came to visit his mother. Now he slept in the guest room, the larger, airy room on the other side of the landing.

The room was much as it had been when he first left home, apart from a few extra boxes and bags of remnants which his mother had stacked by the bed. The bed itself looked slight and forlorn, denuded of its covers, the red-striped mattress thin and shabby. There were still some RAF squadron stickers from a comic pasted to the cheap wooden headboard. A narrow wardrobe stood in one corner, next to it a chest of drawers, and by the bed a little cabinet, its varnish chipped.

Leo began to fish through drawers and boxes, trawling through the debris of his childhood and adolescence. Some of it amused him, some of it saddened him. At length, from beneath the bed he pulled out three cardboard boxes containing lecture notes and essays from university and Bar School. He could not remember having brought these back to Wales, and wondered why he had. He thumbed through a thick slab of revenue law notes, noting how rapid and compressed his writing had been then, the blue of the fountain-pen ink faded upon the yellowing paper. It was more haphazard and arrogant these days. Then, he had been too consumed by ambition to be arrogant. Revenue law, thought Leo, marvelling at all the forgotten industry –
he didn’t know the first thing about it any more. So much for learning. Well, these notes could go, for a start. To think he had once imagined that they might one day come in useful.

He stacked them behind the door and pulled a fourth box from beneath the bed. He recognised the spines of some of the books protruding from it, and for a moment his hand hesitated, about to push the box back. But instead he pulled the books out and glanced at their titles. They were play scripts, thin little volumes with shiny, frayed covers. Rattigan, Shakespeare, Shaw … I could have been an actor, and not a barrister, mused Leo. And what would life have been like, then? He remembered playing Viola in
Twelfth Night
, remembered the peculiar pleasure with which he had dressed as a girl, then as a girl disguised as a boy.

He blushed now at the recollection of his conceit. He picked up the script and glanced through it, the annotations, the underlinings, the little directions to himself. Then he put it back in the box and picked up a copy of
The Rivals
. He knew what he would find within its pages. He slid it out between his fingers and stared at it, feeling something rise and catch in his throat, some emotion long suppressed. The pose in the head-and-shoulders photograph struck him as quaintly dated now – the slightly rumpled lock of blonde hair falling over the brow, the open shirt neck, the full mouth and the Dirk Bogarde stare. But it was still Christopher, and he was still beautiful.

What a transition that had been, from the school drama group to the sophistication of the Cambridge Dramatic Society. He had first seen Christopher in their production of
The Rivals
, and then in
A Man for All Seasons
– which part had he played? The King? Not a big part, but he had been, for Leo, quite marvellous. Leo smiled to himself and turned the pages of the text. He had been the prompt; all the cues were marked in ink. He remembered sitting there in the wings, the musty wooden smell rising from the floorboards, sounds and light turned away
from him in sideways projection, so that one felt adrift, cut off, not part of the cast, nor of the audience …

He had only seen him once after that, some years after their brief affair had ended, when he was playing Tommy in
Entertainmg Mr Sloane
in an out-of-town rep, strutting his way through the part, blonde, beautiful and androgynous. But seeing him had only opened up the deep wound again, and Leo had been glad, thereafter, that Christopher did not become famous – not even remotely well known. He was spared that much. The memory of that first love made his heart ache, literally, with its pathos, its quality of irreclaimability. Where was Christopher now? And where would I be, wondered Leo, if Christopher had not taken me and changed me for ever? Who would I be?

He was about to slip the photograph into his pocket, then changed his mind and put it back into the pages of the book, which he returned to the box. That was all past. He had borne the little pain of looking on Christopher’s face once again, and he did not wish to keep it with him.

In the bottom of the wardrobe he found old Kodak wallets stuffed with photographs, some from his teenage years, some from university. More of Christopher – but these, taken with groups of friends, far-off images in fields or on picnics, in pub gardens or by the river, had none of the tender intentness of that other picture. Smiling, Leo pulled out a few which included himself to show to Rachel. She was always asking him what he had been like when he was younger. These might amuse her. He quite liked the idea of her pleasure, her laughter. He stared at his own youthful image for a moment. He could scarcely remember what it had been like to look in the mirror and see a dark-haired reflection.

Sighing, he put the handful of photographs on the worn carpet next to him. He was about to stuff the others back into the wardrobe when, from the back of one of the
packets, there fell out a larger photograph, black and white, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a man in uniform. He recognised it as his father – not from recollection, for he had no memory of what his father had looked like, but from the fact that he was very like Leo. A younger, softer Leo, the face slightly longer – Leo had his mother’s square jaw – but the same eyes, the same brow and mouth. He must have found the picture as a boy and decided to keep it for himself with his other possessions. He could not recollect doing so, nor the impulse that had led him to it. It struck him as odd to think how many pieces of one’s past – gestures, impulses, words, emotions – lay buried and obliterated. How many people one could be in a lifetime. He looked back at the photo. And where was his father now? Dead, perhaps. No, Maeve would have said. Perhaps she knew where he was. But Leo had no desire to see his father now. In Leo’s mind he was merely a ghost, and Leo did not wish to conjure him up. He, too, could stay in the past.

He put the rest of the photographs back and closed the wardrobe door. Straightening up, rubbing the cramp from his thighs, Leo glanced up and saw, on top of the wardrobe, his old record player. God, what a priceless possession that had been. He remembered the Christmas when his mother had given it to him. He had been sixteen. She must have saved up religiously in the Co-op Christmas Club. He stretched up and pulled it down by its plastic handle. It was one of those record players that folded up like a boxy little suitcase. He flipped up the rusty snap fasteners, his thumbs stroking the grainy beige plastic of the lid, and opened it. How flimsy and pathetic the plastic stylus looked – even its very shape was a breath of the sixties. The sight of it brought back days of his adolescence with a rush of familiarity that was almost heady in its potency. Where were his records?