Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (16 page)

Very carefully Terry sat down on an upright chair with one leg missing and propped up by books. He said, ‘I should like to negotiate for these Chambers.’

‘I’m afraid it is quite impossible,’ said the woman in the seal-skin coat. She delicately tore the sandwich apart with her pink finger nails.

‘My name is Veneering.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘I was born Varenski.’

‘That has a
ring
,’ she said.

‘It seems that I am the one who inherited Mr. Parable-Apse’s estate. Though he promised me only twenty-five pounds.’

After he had finished his sandwich the young man repeated, ‘I am Tom Apse, a very distant relation just keeping the premises open. And this is my secretary, Mrs. Flagg.’

She nodded and picked up her knitting. She said, ‘I’m afraid that buying these premises will be impossible, Mr. Varenski. We will of course inform the Inn of your offer, as we do everyone else who comes in. Our only safeguard up to now has been that Mr. Apse is an
Apse
, like on the door. To keep them off . . . ’

‘And,’ said Tom Apse, ‘Upkeep for
any
tenant will be astronomical. And I have my Egyptology to consider, and Mrs. Flagg, well, she has Mr. Flagg. There is money though. I’m sorry sir, in spite of your interesting name—I’m sure we’ve heard it before somewhere—I’m afraid you won’t be able to make a case for yourself. Old Mr. Parable’s Slavonic heir was drowned at sea in 1941 on the evacuee liner
The City of Benares
.’

Terry stood up.

‘I am that evacuee,’ he said. ‘Except that I wasn’t. I had a premonition and good friends.’ (The world is singing! The light of heaven fills the sky! Dear God! Dear Sir. Dear Father Griesepert.) ‘I changed my name.’

Tom Apse and Mrs. Flagg also rose to their feet and the three shook hands.

‘At present I am without money,’ said Terry.

‘Then how do you think you can buy this?’

‘Borrow,’ said Terry. ‘There must be Security somewhere. And a proper search. There doesn’t seem, if I may say so, to be much paper-work about the office.’

‘We get few clients,’ said Tom Apse. ‘We pass them on. The Apse archive is very daunting.’

‘You must consider us
Caretakers
,’ said Mrs. Flagg, ‘as the desultory fight drags on. The cupboards and the cellar are full of paper, though some of it is still dampish after the Blitz.’

She arranged her coat around her shoulders and on high heels rocked towards the wall where she opened a cupboard and watched several shelves of documents, tied up with tape that had once been red, vomit all over the floor.

‘Work to be done! We’ll start tomorrow,’ said Veneering. Now, the three of us are going to The Wig and Pen Club. Right NOW!’

‘Sir,’ said Tom Apse. ‘I’m sorry—but identification? We only have your word. How do we know who you are?’

‘You don’t,’ said Veneering. ‘Put your coat on fully Mrs.—I can’t call you “Mrs. Flagg”. What’s your—Daisy. Oh, pretty. Come on Tom.’

‘But
money
, sir?’

‘Mr. Parable lived on ten shillings a week. I haven’t broken into next week’s yet and I’ll be sleeping here free tonight if we can find a hammock.’

* * *

In The Wig and Pen Club in the Strand sat the red-lipped Libel Silk with friends. He rose at once and came across.

‘So delighted to see you again, Mr.—er—I have been sending out search-parties. I find that I have a place for you in my Chambers after all. My Clerk, The Great Augustus, is very cross with me for not making myself clear.’

‘Too late!’ Terry shouted, signalling a barman. ‘I’m fixed up. I’m off to discuss matters with the Treasurer of the Inn tomorrow morning. I seem to have inherited a sleeping set of Chambers of my own.’

‘You are fixed up? Already? You’ll find it a very lengthy business on your own. Take years. Ask anyone about the Parable-Apse fiasco for instance. A disgrace. Dragging on. Dickensian.’

‘Well, I have an inheritance looming. Fallen, by the grace of God, into my lucky lap. Meet my secretary Mrs. Flagg—and my—junior clerk—Mr. Tom Apse. I have a good senior clerk already in mind.’

‘I’m afraid Mr.—er—, you have simply no idea! It will take a life-time.’

‘Yes. But I’m young. I have wide connections, you know, especially in the Far East. And thanks for the interview. And thank Augustus. Tell him I shan’t forget him.’

‘I don’t forget anything,’ he added.

‘And now Mrs. Flagg and I are off to find a bed.’

Dizzily on the pavement Daisy Flagg burst into joyous tears. ‘Oh, come
on
,’ said Terry, spinning her around, ‘Beautiful coat. Is it real?’

‘It’s only coypu,’ she wailed, happily. ‘It’s only a superior kind of rat.’

‘When I come into my Kingdom,’ said Terence Veneering of Parable Chambers, Inns of Court, ‘You shall have sables.’

And so Terry Veneering was established in his own Chambers as if by angelic intervention. And so began the long, slow, interminable legal process of disinterring his Parable inheritance.

He was never one to reflect on the meaning of life. Or the shape of his own life. He knew that from childhood he presented the figure of one certain to succeed, charm, delight and conquer. Not for him the grave, moral pace of the gentlemanly Edward Feathers.

But had he ever considered doing anything as dull as writing an autobiography he would certainly not have chosen as a pivotal point. He would have chosen the day some six months later when he had had to scrape the bottom of the judicial barrel down at the Brighton County Court alongside the beginner, little Fred Fiscal-Smith, and against—needless to say—Edward Feathers: the case of the over-sexed lion-tamer’s apprentice. For this was the day he realised that he had no stomach for Crime, even if it had not been so badly paid.

Stepping out of Victoria station at the end of that dreadful day his heart sunk even further, for in London there was fog. London fogs were getting worse again. During the War coal had been rationed. Now coal was back and so were the fogs that swirled about the East and West End. They nuzzled and licked and enwrapped everyone in yellowish limp fleece. They stained your clothes, your hair, got up your nose and down your ears. Your chest wheezed. When you sneezed, your handkerchief was dark ochre. You muffled your mouth. You coughed and coughed.

It was only when they stepped out of the Brighton Belle on Platform One that the three lawyers realised that, during their day in breezy, wholesome Brighton, the fog in London that had hung about for days had reached Dickensian proportions. It had turned into ‘The Great Fog’. It might last for days. It was also getting dark and there was no transport of any kind to get them home.

Old Filth was all right, he lived just round the corner in his spartan, curtainless apartment where there were two small electric radiators, and Fiscal-Smith suggested that he might stay the night there as well. In case—though he knew he was probably safe—Feathers asked him to stay too, Veneering announced that he would go to The Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace and not more than two minutes from the station and he set off holding his arms out in front of him, his brief-case between them. He immediately vanished thinking vaguely that somewhere there would be a taxi. Any hotel was way above his means, let alone The Goring. So, as a matter of fact, was a taxi. The brief fee for the lion-tamer’s boy had been seven guineas—the shillings to go to Tom Apse as Clerk—and anyway it hadn’t yet been paid.

London had fallen into the silence of death and all its lights were gone. Abandoned cars stood in the middle of the road. Occasionally a shadow trudged past him emerging from and disappearing into the mist like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. London had lost its voice.

Taking twenty minutes to cross into what he hoped was Grosvenor Street he collided with an elephantine shape standing lightless and empty. It seemed to be a bus. He turned from it, thinking that this was going to be slow, and stepped in front of a car whose lights were smudges. He thought that the nearest Underground station would be the only hope and cannoned into a lone newspaper boy shouting a cracked refrain—
Star
,
News
,
Standard
—to nobody.

‘Goin far, Guv?’

‘Inns of Court.’

‘You’ll not be there by morning.’

‘How are you getting home then?’

‘I’ll doss down the back of the statue.’

‘What, Marshall Foch?’

‘Don’t mind which Marshall. Any Marshall. Marshall and Snelgrove. Cheers, Guv.’

It was three hours later that Veneering reached Fetter Lane. There were a few flares burning here and there and along the Strand in front of the empty shops and restaurants. He went almost hand over hand towards Lincoln’s Inn—what he hoped was Lincoln’s Inn—decided that it couldn’t be, clutched at some masonry beside him and toppled upon the steps of Parable-Apse.

He fell inside. He found a light. He slammed his front door upon the murk. There came a flash of memory of a blue sea—his sunburst of life in the post-war Navy. His—hum, yes, well—his wife and lanky little boy.

In the office the fire was not lit but a sack of coals stood beside the shabby old grate. There was nobody now to tumble the coals down to the cellar via the coal hole in the road and nobody to drag it up to the grate from the cellar if they did. Coal, he thought.

He kept his in the sack, covering it with a blanket on the few occasions when anyone called. But too late—too tired—to light a fire tonight. He found a bottle of whisky in the cupboard and some cream crackers and swigged down the whisky. The greatest joy he had ever known!

He thought of the threat that the government were to ban coal fires in London and he thought of his mother. He informed her and asked what she thought, but received no answer. The fog had entered the house with him. It was wreathed above his head. It smeared the window. How it stank.

‘Mam—I’m packing this in. The Law. I’ve an interview with a paper. Foreign correspondent.’

‘Your collar’s filthy,’ she said.

‘It’s the fog.’

‘Steep it and wash it. You’ve got an iron?’

‘You lived by coal.’

‘I’d no option. You have.’

‘I need sleep.’

‘There’s time to sleep and there’s time to waken.’

Veneering crawled across the floor towards the bedroom stair. ‘I’m drunk, Mam. I want to go to bed.’

‘You’ll do it. Remember your father.’

‘He had you.’

‘Well, you have me, too.’

He was in his bed. He drew a cover over him. He slept. The horrible city sprawled outside in thick unanswering silence. Veneering was ready to leave it for ever. And so, to the horrible, still-yellowish morning.

* * *

The knocking upon the front door had the desperate, dogged quality of a long assault. On it went, on and on.

At last, ‘Message,’ said a youth Veneering had not seen before as he peered blearily round the door.

‘What?’

‘Message for Mr. Veneering. Urgent. Reply essential. Shall I step in?’

‘No,’ said Veneering, taking the note and shutting the door on the boy, feeling about in the dark vestibule, finding the door to his office, groaning and grunting. He read:

‘
Mr. Veneering
. Appointment this morning, April 30th, ten o’ clock at No. 21, St. Yyes Court, Gray’s Inn. Respectable dress essential. Clear head. Mr. William Willy will see you for interview for possible place in new Chambers at present being established. Anticipating overseas connections. Reply to boy. Signed Augustus.’

‘Nobody could be called Mr. William Willy,’ said Terry Veneering. ‘On the other hand the Great Augustus—I’ll put my head on the block to it—has never made a joke.’

‘Oh, well then. Shame. After yesterday’s fiasco in the world of the eternal circus, he’s too bloody late, Augustus. I go a hundred miles to defend a poor little gormless insect who tickles ladies’ private parts as they’re sitting enjoying the lions and tigers and he gets three months!
Three months
for a bit of harmless fun. Clearly I’m not cut out for Crime. First and only time most of them ever got tickled. Most of them never even noticed. Great Grandee Edward Feathers has palpitations of shock-horror. He’s never tickled anybody’s legs. Never will.
Gross
indecency—etc. Is this what we got our First Class honours for? “Pom, pom, pom” honks Feathers, County Court moron judge nodding in support, all his chins wagging like blancmange. Little lad gets three months in gaol. Fuck the English Bar, I’m off to
The New Statesman
. Journalism for Veneering. Get the words about the world, not into the fly-spotted Law Reports. Sorry, Augustus, Willy is too late. I’m dressed for a different play. I am about to approach the political rostrum. You—laddikins—take a note back saying I’m busy.’

‘I can’t do that, sir.’

‘And for-why?’

‘Because Augustus has you in mind. You can’t
not
reply to Augustus, Mr. Veneering.’

‘It is, I know, very early in the morning but could you just try to realise, BOY, that even you are not the slave of this Olympian monster? Whoever he is—you are not in his THRALL. There are many barristers in thrall to their clerks. There are
Judges
in thrall to their clerks. Some clerks on the other hand have been murdered by—I am my own man, Boy, I make my own choices. Thank Augustus and say I have a previous engagement.’

He shut the outer door and listened to the boy marking time on the stones on the other side of it. After a while the boy rang the bell for a second time

‘YES?’ Veneering immediately flung it open. ‘YES?’

‘I think you better come, sir. Nothing to lose. Much to gain. And Augustus—well, you don’t want ’im for your enemy, now, do you?’

‘Oh, well then. O.K.’ said Veneering, ‘O.K. Say I’ll come. Soon. Better shave. I’ve a very important interview this morning already, at
The New Statesman and Nation
. Tell Augustus. And tell him that to be summoned before someone called Mr. Willy sounds an unusual command.’

‘Yes, sir. Shall I wait and take you round?’