Judicial Whispers (38 page)

Sir Edward Appleby blinked, making his glasses jump, glancing from face to face as he listened. Oh dear, thought Sir Frank, and took another sip of his drink. Then he rallied, squaring his shoulders slightly, lifting his chin. Taking on Sir Bernard was always something he would do his best to avoid, but on this occasion …

‘Do you know,’ he said suddenly, ‘I have been given to understand that all these rumours are purely mischievous, that they have been put about simply to sully Davies’ reputation at a critical time. That, in short, they are nonsense. I personally felt that they should be – ah – discounted from the outset. I am surprised, Bernard, that you should still be perpetuating them, given the damage they can do.’ Sir Bernard stared at Frank with a face like elegantly carved stone. ‘The man has done nothing, to my certain knowledge, that deserves reproach. He is one of our most brilliant up-and-coming men, and I think it ill behoves us to – ah, as it were – to seek to discredit him. He is to be married shortly, he has applied to take silk, and I, for one, wish him well on both counts.’

Sir Edward Appleby nodded vigorously, and Sir Basil, into whose mind a doubt had crept as he listened to Sir Bernard, added, ‘Quite. Such rumours are clearly scurrilous nonsense. I very much hope he will be successful.’ It gave him some satisfaction to assist in this squelching of Sir Bernard.

Sir Bernard said nothing but, with the faintest of smiles,
excused himself from the little group. It broke up shortly thereafter, and Sir Mungo accosted Frank.

‘What was all that?’ he asked, catching at Frank’s sleeve, having heard him speaking in rather sterner and more forthright tones than were customary with him at a social gathering.

Sir Frank drew himself up and smiled. ‘We were discussing Leo Davies’ marriage. An excellent thing, don’t you think? I would say it fairly scotches those rumours we’ve all been hearing, wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, I should say it does,’ answered Sir Mungo, looking round for one of those chappies to come and refill his glass. A waiter caught his eye and came over. ‘Another gin and tonic, please. I knew nothing of this,’ he added, turning back to Frank. ‘I suppose it’s that girl we met at Lincoln’s Inn a while ago … Oh, you weren’t there, were you? Very charming. Very lovely.’

Sir Mungo nodded to himself, waiting for his drink to arrive, thinking of all that had been said about Leo. The last he’d heard was that he was damned in the Lord Chancellor’s eyes, and those of his department. Well, now was the time to put all that right. His drink arrived, he excused himself to Sir Frank and ambled off in the direction of Lord Steele. Sir Frank’s eyes followed him happily.

‘Attaboy, Mungo,’ he murmured to himself.

‘Well, of course, Mungo,’ Lord Steele was saying some ten minutes later, ‘I never liked passing judgment on any man on the basis of scandal. I’m very pleased to hear that there is no cause for concern of the kind that the Judicial Appointments Group had feared. You know, of course,’ he added, ‘that we must be careful in these matters. But clearly we can expect the necessary stability … I was always reluctant to pass up a man of Davies’ undoubted ability.’

‘I think you will find,’ said Sir Mungo with determination, 
‘that when you come to invite comments from the Lords of Appeal, they will be of a favourable nature.’

The Lord Chancellor nodded and smiled; he would enjoy taking a firm line on this with Colin Crane tomorrow morning.

The party at Caper Court the next evening went well; it made up, in some measure, for the abrupt and depressing termination of the Christmas party. Everybody was in high spirits, pleased to have something to lift the gloom of raw early March.

When Leo finally left at nine o’clock, he felt happy, and slightly the worse for drink. He would have liked to go on for dinner with the rest of them – had very nearly agreed to do so, as in the old days – but he had realised later that he was no longer part of the younger, raucous element in chambers. There had been a time when he and Michael had been the first to continue festivities of any kind, regardless of whether one was in court the next day or not. But he was conscious that that mantle had now been passed to the likes of William and David. Roderick, Cameron and Sir Basil had left a little earlier, as befitted their dignity. Now Leo felt that he, too, should bow out and leave the rest to it.

He slipped downstairs and out into the cold air of Caper Court, pushing back the sides of his unbuttoned overcoat and thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets. The Temple was quiet, deserted, as he walked towards the cloisters, his footsteps ringing clear on the cold paving stones.

He heard someone call his name, and stopped to turn as he drew near to the stone pillars; Anthony came towards him through the gloom, his own step unhurried. He stopped as he reached Leo.

‘Hello,’ said Leo, ‘you going this way?’ He jerked his head in the direction of King’s Bench Walk.

‘No,’ said Anthony. He paused, and they regarded one
another; Leo’s face was half in the shadow of the cloisters, his expression neutral, cautious. Anthony had scarcely spoken to him all evening, but had managed to make this meeting look accidental. ‘I just wanted to say – well, all the best.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Leo, a little amused at the sombreness of Anthony’s tone. Anyone would think he was leaving on an Antarctic expedition. He suspected that Anthony had drunk a good deal that evening. Suddenly Anthony stepped forward, held Leo by the arms, and kissed him, briefly and firmly, on the mouth. It was all Leo could do not to embrace Anthony and draw him to him. His limbs tingled with emotional electricity, and he remembered, with clarity, how things had been between them two years ago. Anthony had risked much, had confronted himself, in this act. For a wild, fleeting moment, Leo wished that none of the past few months had ever happened, that he could renounce the whole thing, leave the Bar, cease the emotional sham of his life, and … and what?

Anthony stepped back, leaning against one of the pillars; now his face was lost in shadow. ‘Tell me—’ he said.

‘What?’ Leo’s voice was low, expressionless, lost.

‘Do you love her more than you loved me?’

There was a silence of several seconds before Leo answered, pushing his hands back into his pockets so that he might resist the temptation of reaching out for Anthony.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘No.’ And he realised in that moment where Anthony’s jealousy had always lain, the reason for that scene in Leo’s room, the words on the landing just before William’s heart attack. He could not trust himself to say more; drawing his overcoat around him, he turned and walked quickly through the cloisters towards King’s Bench Walk, away from Anthony.

In the two weeks since they had returned from Florence, Rachel had been aware of a distraction, a restlessness about Leo. The
realisation filtered gradually through her own haze of happiness, with days taken up by another of Mr Nikolaos’s disasters, visits to her gynaecologist, house details from the estate agents.

‘We can’t stay here for ever,’ Leo had said of the mews house. He no longer wanted to stay there; the place belonged to his past, to a time when he had been another person, his life his own. He did not wish to share it with Rachel. He suggested during their stay in Florence that they should find another place. ‘We’ll start looking for something bigger as soon as we get back.’ But since their return it had been she who had visited the estate agents, going enthusiastically through the bundles of information they sent. Leo had become vague about the whole business.

The vagueness and distractedness, however, she put down to his work and the approach of Easter. It must be stressful, she told herself, waiting to hear whether he would take silk or not, simply having to wait through the days for the letter to arrive.

‘If it’s big and bulky,’ he had told her light-heartedly one evening, ‘then it’s all right. They have to put in all the bits and pieces about what to wear, where to go, when the ceremony takes place. If it’s small and flat – well, that’s it, isn’t it?’

But Leo had taken soundings, spoken to Frank and others, and he had come to understand that the thing would go smoothly, that he had little to worry about. The rumours had died away, all was as before. James had been given a few hours’ community service and told not to do it again, and Leo had paid some money into an account for him and put him in the way of some work in the West End. Since Sir Basil’s elevation to the Bench, it seemed likely that both he and Stephen would take silk. Had it all been an unnecessary waste of time? he wondered. Need things have been taken to such extremes? He no longer knew. He only knew that the thing was done, that Rachel was his wife, and that his life was now changed completely.

He did not think of Anthony. Since the evening in the
cloisters, that was curiously painful. He saw him routinely during the day and all was fine, with no hint of what had passed between them. But when Leo was alone, when his attention strayed momentarily from his work, he had to prevent himself from allowing his thoughts to dwell on the past.

On Wednesday morning in the week before the Easter weekend, Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table in the mews house, going through yet another sheaf of estate-agent mail.

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘they send far too much. If only they’d send the kind of thing we’re looking for, instead of all this irrelevant rubbish. Half of it’s no good.’ She frowned. ‘I wish we could sell the flat. That would help. But look,’ she added, holding up two sheets of paper stapled together, ‘here’s the one I was telling you about last night. I’ve only just found it. Shall we go and look at it this evening?’

Leo helped himself to another cup of coffee and glanced at her eager, lovely face. He felt empty, without any desire to go and look round houses. He wished he could shake off this mood. His life seemed to have lost all its impetus, as though he were falling into a state of fuddled domestic inertia, from which he would never rise. It’s just the change in circumstances, the adjustment, he told himself. And this stifling, claustrophobic feeling was probably just the effect of two people living together in a place that was too small for them.

‘Not tonight,’ he replied, draining his cup and slipping on his waistcoat. He smiled at her, trying to cheer himself, to inject something more positive into his mood. ‘I have to go with solicitors to see the director of this pharmaceuticals company this afternoon, the one who’s involved in this swap deals case. Apparently he’s too important to come all the way down to the Temple. It might go on a bit, and I may be late. Why not fix it up for tomorrow night?’

He heard the apologetic tone of his own words as he made
excuses, accounted for his time. He had never expected to have to do that. But he was married now. He was entirely accountable.

He put on his jacket, watching as she rose from her chair, smiling, and put her arms around him. She kissed him happily.

‘Aren’t you going in to work today?’ he asked, running his hand with curiosity over the slight swell of her stomach beneath her robe.

‘I’m going in late. I think I’ve earned a couple of hours at home. Anyway, my new secretary is so tremendously efficient … How’s Felicity, by the way?’

‘Oh, she’s doing well. No major disasters so far. Look, I have to run.’ And he slipped from her embrace and left, while Rachel went happily back to her house details.

Frederick Seely’s offices were housed in the City in a building of sumptuous starkness; one could sense the many hundreds of thousands which had been expended on its apparent minimalism. Leo came in through high glass entrance doors; the reception area, where a uniformed security guard sat, was isolated in a sea of shining marble flooring. Leo signed himself in and took the little plastic visitor’s tag which the security guard handed him.

‘Twenty-second floor, Mr Davies,’ he said, and Leo walked across the gleaming floor to the lift, whose doors slid back noiselessly and swiftly as he approached.

The atmosphere was rather more intimate on the twenty-second floor, but still the whispering voice of vast corporate wealth could be heard everywhere, in the tinkling fountain which played beside the reception desk, in the bank of small video screens on the wall opposite, which gave out soundless images of Seely’s scattered empire, and in the lush carpeting and furniture. There was none of the bustle and chatter of a busy office. The heavy carpeting soaked up what sound
there was. The polished creature at the reception desk smiled at Leo in an unhurried manner, her movements impressively slow and serene as she informed Frederick Seely’s inner sanctum of Leo’s arrival.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Leo, ‘that Mr Leslie, who should be with me, has been delayed for half an hour or so. He should be joining us.’

The receptionist smiled and nodded, and asked Leo to take a seat. He sat for ten minutes or so on a glossy, high-backed black leather chair, thumbing through a copy of Seely’s latest annual report and reflecting on the habitual unpunctuality of solicitors, until the polished wooden doors which fenced Frederick Seely off from the rest of the world opened and a young man came out. He approached Leo and held out his hand.

‘Mr Davies? I am Francis Bryan, Mr Seely’s personal assistant. I do apologise for keeping you waiting. Would you come this way?’

The young man was tall and fair-haired, with an oval face and charming features, which bore no trace of a smile. His entire demeanour exuded cold efficiency, and he was impeccably dressed. His movements as he led Leo into Mr Seely’s domain were graceful, yet a trifle exaggerated.

‘Mr Leslie, the solicitor, should be joining us,’ Leo explained as they reached the doorway. ‘As I told your receptionist, he has been detained for a short while.’

The young man surveyed Leo’s face expressionlessly. He said nothing, then ushered Leo in, leaving him alone with Mr Seely.

The conference was delayed by Mr Leslie’s late, puffing, apologetic arrival, and it was well after six-thirty by the time their business was finished. Glancing at his watch as he gathered his papers together, Leo was surprised to see that Francis Bryan was still in attendance at that late hour, flitting in and out of the room, bearing Mr Seely the messages which had accumulated throughout the afternoon.