The Pupil (2 page)

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.’

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.