In the Light of What We Know (17 page)

At Harvard, when I attended, it was different. Knowledge there, amid the innocence of the New World, was regarded differently. The people and their history was of another kind. Many were Jews and East Asians, many bearing the mark of outsider, for whom knowledge was never a citadel of power to be defended against the hordes but the object of assault, the prize to be fought for, so that when it was won, it was hard earned and, being wrested from those who would deny it them, it was opened up, the turrets blown apart by egalitarian rage. I did indeed expect it to be the same in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as in Oxford, England—power is power, isn’t it?—but it wasn’t. Maybe it will be one day, if power hardens over time, like water under pressure, as layers of snow turn to ice under the accreting burden of subsequent snowfalls. But that day has yet to come in America. That’s why America frightens and seduces Brits, especially the British elite. It bears the forbidden fruit of egalitarian hope, and everyone, high and low, can shake the branches of that tree.

I believe that Zafar was rather naïve about his American experience, though not wholly unaware of it; why else say
when I attended
, a caveat to his description of Harvard that could only serve as an out? Why bulletproof the eulogy unless you thought it vulnerable?

Am I naïve? he continued. Am I wrong? Let me tell you about the High Court judge—Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge—who interrupted counsel during a trial to ask who the Spice Girls were, when that girl band was at the peak of its popularity. Among the elite of Britain, education, which is to say the administration of knowledge and learning, at places like Eton, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge, is about ensuring ignorance of all the right things—or is that wrong things?—all about ensuring disdain toward them, or better still, blessed indifference.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was holding forth on the properties of medium-density fiberboard when Emily stood up.

Mother, I have to make a phone call, she said.

Without looking at her, she addressed her mother as “Mother,” a formality unknown to me, and which seemed odder still when I heard James call her “Mummy.” Is this how these people speak to each other?

If you must, darling, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

Emily’s exit tilted the balance of gravitational forces in the room, as if I had been a small satellite of hers. After all, I was in that room because of her.

She and I had been seeing each other for several months by then. I’m not sure you can call it a courtship; after exchanging emails and telephone calls, when I was still in New York, we began meeting up from time to time, when I came back to London. This went on for well over a year. An anthropologist will tell you that she was of a higher status than me. So I played hard to get and kept conversation on the level of ideas until one day outside a restaurant, where we’d had an excellent meal, she reached for my lapels and kissed me. I’m digressing. The point I want to make is that a few months of dating had been time enough for the ring of her cell phone—her use of it, the furtiveness—to condition me, condition my body, to respond with anxiety, but even so I persisted in telling myself that her furtiveness was only the impression left by a clumsy demonstration of good manners. She removed herself to make and take calls because she was polite, but she could do it better.

I understand you’re also a lawyer, said James.

Just starting out, I replied.

Is it everything you expected it to be? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

I didn’t expect much. I hoped it would be challenging.

Is it?

It’s still too soon to say, but the signs are good. Some things are a little confusing.

What are they?

This and that. I’m not really sure how to describe it.

Do try.

The social rules, I said.

Yes? she said, drawing me out.

It’s another world, isn’t it? The English bar, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns of Court. They’re all very odd institutions, don’t you think?

I’m not sure I follow.

It’s so far from the world I knew growing up. For that matter, it’s also a world away from Wall Street. I sense a lot of rules I don’t know, rules of conduct, rules about what to say and how to say it and what not to say, rules that everyone knows, the lawyers and judges, though they don’t seem to
know
that they know the rules, as if sensibility to the rules is seeded in the womb, an instinct coming before awareness. Those rules aren’t, as far as I can tell, written down anywhere.

Isn’t that true of every walk of life, every
world
, as you put it?

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern knows, I thought, that I had worked on Wall Street; neither she nor James asked why I had referred to Wall Street. Why should it surprise me that Emily had spoken to them about me? But it did. Will they ask about
the world I knew growing up
? Aren’t they even curious? What else had Emily said to them?

There’s a question of degree. On Wall Street, for instance, the rules for traders like me were pretty straightforward: Make the firm money and you’ll be fine.

And at the bar all you have to do is win cases, surely?

Even if both sides in a case are represented by the top two barristers in the country, one of them still has to lose.

You only have to do well, then.

I hope so. It’s still early days. All I can say is that I have the impression there are things being said—and I mean even the stuff of idle banter in the corridors of chambers—things that mean more than the mere words being used to say them, and there are things that remain unsaid that possibly no words could convey.

From Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s perspective, getting on in legal practice was of course only about winning cases. The rest of it was a given to her, something to which she could only have been oblivious. But my experience at the bar had already confirmed to me that I would never be granted that security.

At the end of the first quarter of the year of training, which is to say right near the beginning, I was made aware of the presence of overarching social rules, if not their content. Edmund Staughton, the chair of the pupilage committee, gave me the first-quarter performance review. I sat in his chambers on an armless wooden chair across a leather-topped oak desk, repro through and through, as he leaned back in his capacious seat.

Zafar, he said, might I give you a word of advice? Perhaps—and I trust you’ll appreciate that this is meant well—perhaps you could conduct yourself with a little more reserve and even with a touch more deference toward senior barristers in and around chambers. That’s all I wanted to say, and I don’t think we need to dwell on the point any more than that.

I thought I saw embarrassment preventing him from elaborating; I hoped it was embarrassment. Of course there were certain things, particular moments, to which, I imagined, he might have been referring.

There was, I remembered, an awkward discussion with a senior barrister—or was it an exchange of monologues?—in the dining hall of one of the Inns of Court. There were a few other senior barristers in the group, and I happened to be there among them for a hot lunch late in an English autumn. A portly man, this barrister, but he had an oddly delicate touch as he made his way around the plate before him, knife and fork pinched between fingers, his movements gliding with improbable finesse over the heaped rubble of food.

So many of those lawyers look the same at that age, the late fifties. Quite a few sherries, g&ts, and more or less everything, so much consumption leaving a red hue in their faces, and the prospect of gout.

He explained that the other day he was reading a book and came across
BCE
. Have you come across
BCE
? he asked the table generally.

BCE
, he continued, means
Before the Common Era
; that’s before Christ to you and me. And instead of
AD
, this book referred to
CE
,
Common Era
. Now of course I know this political-correctness business is a trifle overstated, but don’t you think
BCE
is stretching things somewhat? I mean, why can’t they say
BC
and
AD
? Why not say that? It seems to me we’re being forced to adopt a language just to accommodate overly developed sensitivities.

One of the other barristers muttered agreement and the others plowed on with their meals.

How are you being forced? I asked.

An atmosphere of politically correct intimidation, he replied. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head, but that’s the beauty of it. Getting you to change the way you talk about things just by intimidation and all because certain words don’t suit them. Blast! We should jolly well say what we mean and not pussyfoot about because someone’s so preciously sensitive.

Another barrister glanced at me. My attention remained on my lunch.

Once the topic had edged off the table, I offered a comment on something that had made the press just that day, a report by a consulting firm on the economics of the bar and cost-effectiveness.

So, I said, the bar is anticompetitive, it seems, although I suppose that was never in doubt. Was it ever justified? Isn’t that the question? The Bar Council’s restriction on the supply of barristers is obviously anticompetitive. It’s a closed shop like any trade union, I said, catching the eye of the portly senior barrister.

He winced. Was it because he’d been reduced to vulgar membership in a trade union?

And, I continued, the requirement to hire a barrister, an extra lawyer, before you can take a matter to court, that’s just plain absurd. I’m sure American companies here must be baffled, to say the least. Some of them are probably asking themselves why they shouldn’t let their contracts be governed by New York law and steer clear of England altogether.

The senior barrister, a man who made his livelihood in the comfort of the bar’s protectionist rules, pressed his flubbery lips together but said nothing.

When Staughton and I met in his chambers, for my first performance review, and he told me things that he believed were self-evident, things that went, if not without saying, then without saying very much at all, I was troubled. What part of me was I being asked to give up?

I did have one question for him.

And how was my work these past three months? I asked.

Excellent, he replied.

Unless I’d misread him wildly, Staughton was oblivious to the point I had just made. I felt as if we were rehearsing a play but reading from entirely different scripts.

Of course, I mentioned none of this to Penelope Hampton-Wyvern; I shared none of my stories but kept my discussion to a few words about vague social rules.

I wonder if you might not be quite so confused after all, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. You seem, if I may say so, rather thoughtful and I daresay you’re coming to the bar with a much wider experience of the world than other barristers I know.

Might she be referring to her ex-husband, I thought, the High Court judge and former barrister; might that friendly remark have actually been a little dig elsewhere? James was grinning at me. Emily had not yet returned from her call.

Every part of life has its own ways, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Don’t you think?

I suppose you’re right.

Are you worried you might miss an important social rule and stumble?

It’s possible, I replied.

Well, you’ll just have to pick up the rules as you go along. And if you stumble, you’ll have to pick yourself up, won’t you? said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

Yes, I will.

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern addressed her son: I expect you need to be getting on with your packing?

Quite right, he said, standing up. I’m off grouse shooting in Scotland. Do you shoot?

I’ve never yet had occasion, I replied.

James again gave me a smile. It seemed to me a warm and generous smile, a boyish smile. But there was more in that smile, and though I could not know what exactly he had in his mind, I did believe then that his little grin acknowledged the distance I would have to cover to go from not shooting to shooting. Perhaps, I thought, it even acknowledged the distance I had covered to meet the Hampton-Wyverns. Not long afterward, however, I would learn that the Hampton-Wyverns had covered that distance already, going the other way.

James had barely stepped out of the room when Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern leaned forward in her seat.

You seem like an affable young man, she said. You may consider this out of turn but I must say it. Zafar, be careful with my daughter.

Of course, I said earnestly. It was exactly what a solicitous mother might say. In point of fact, I was flattered that she thought of my relationship with her daughter as serious, and I was also gratified to think that Emily must have represented it to her in such a way. I wanted to reassure Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern more, but Emily had appeared at the doorway. I could not immediately tell if she had heard anything of what her mother had said.

*   *   *

Zafar broke off there to make us both some coffee, but when he resumed his narrative, he did not pick up where he had stopped. At the time, I thought he was just veering off on another aside. Only later, when he talked about meeting Emily in Kabul, did it become apparent that what he framed in general terms was actually an observation drawn from very personal experience. He would return to the Hampton-Wyverns, but now he wanted to talk about Afghanistan and for that he was laying some groundwork.

Many years ago Zafar told me about a TV program he had seen in the junior common room at college. It was a time when liberals in the Church of England were condemning the brutality of Thatcher’s economic project. The archbishop of York appeared on the show, and the presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, said to him:
Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt.
The archbishop paused to reflect. With his hands clasped, as if in prayer, he replied:
Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?
This memory comes back to me now as a sign that his more recent preoccupations have actually been some time in the making.