Exposure (23 page)

He could not blame Karen. She had done her insolent best to devalue his questions, certainly, but he felt sure that she had no more idea of her anarchic power over his body than spring itself. This was a peculiarly sentimental thought and he hurried it away with his papers and highlighter pens.

***

Sandra Bachelor, Ryan and Alistair took the lift back up to the Bar mess and the robing rooms without looking at one another. There was an obvious awkwardness in the air and Sandra said something banal about it being a late sitting, with which Ryan enthusiastically agreed, as he did with everything she said. It was becoming increasingly plain to Alistair that Sandra had noticed how flustered he had been and that she did not know what to say. Her comment on his cross-examination was conspicuously absent. Thankfully, Ryan was robustly oblivious. And, better still, it was the weekend and there would be no need to call Karen again as a witness.

In the silks' robing room, where his locker was, Alistair was accosted by an old friend, and by the time he came out, carrying his coat and his various bags, the hallway was teeming. As always on a Friday night, the Bar-mess area contained an end-of-term excitement that spilled down the stairs and into the hall. Sandra stood by the stairs, hurriedly reloading files into a bag whose handle had torn. Ryan was waiting beside her. 'Oh,
wretched
thing,' he heard her say. 'I really
must
get a new one.' Then she turned and smiled at Alistair—who was now obliged to exchange a few non-professional words with them. He went over to join them.

Sandra was saying, 'Are you going anywhere nice this weekend, Ryan?'

Alistair had noted all her attempts to make the boy relax.

'Well, it's my sister's twenty-first tonight. We're all going clubbing,' Ryan told her.

'I've always thought,' said Alistair, 'that particular activity sounds like the most awful blood sport.' He grinned at Sandra.

Ryan looked embarrassed. 'Oh, yeah. God, I suppose it does, doesn't it?'

'Will there be lots of you?' Sandra persisted—and immediately Alistair regretted his stupid joke.

'Tonight? About fourteen. Hopefully lots of my sister's pretty friends.' Ryan grinned, his habit of self-effacement giving way for the first time to a youthful ego. His face was beautiful, the eyes were a rich brown and there was a natural flush of health in his cheeks. Alistair studied it longingly, hungrily.

Sandra giggled.'
Goodness me.
Sounds like they'd better watch out.'

'Yeah, maybe. How about you? Are you doing anything fun, Sandra?'

She folded her gown and laid it on top of the files, looking pleased to have been asked. 'Yes, I am, as it happens. I'm going out for dinner with a very nice young man.'

'Are you? Maybe
he'd
better watch out,' Ryan ventured, smiling nervously.

'Yes. Actually, Ryan, I think he probably had.'

Was no one going to ask him what
he
was doing, Alistair thought.
Old people's
things, it was assumed. Something slightly embarrassing, something
poignant.
He noted the new camaraderie between the young and fertile as they put on their coats, smiling like conspirators.

Alistair had never been fooled by the sense, which had threatened to plague his twenties and thirties, that there was a great carnival called 'happiness' going on, just one street away, and that he was the only one not invited. He had always known that this was a message from the false heart to the long-suffering will. It was designed to tempt you away from your purpose. The only solution was to use your will to spite your heart into submission; to shut that damned heart up once and for all. And he had done exactly this, working on in his study when there really was no need, no hurry, listening to the family sounds of Christmas through the floorboards or the tap-tap of croquet on the lawn in the summer. He could relish his imprisonment in his own ambitions, ritualizing it like an act of obedient prayer. There was much to be thankful for, after all: he might have had a very different sort of life.

And when happiness came, it was nothing like a carnival, of course. It had simply always been there, waiting quietly to be recognized and he would catch it in the corner of his eye. There it had been while he looked through the windscreen at the approaching view of sunny French vineyards and golden hills, his arm resting outside the open window, Rosalind beside him and the two children singing in the back. These had been moments of fulfilled egotism, essentially, when the world had seemed to show them themselves—their youth, their hope, their fertility. It had been enough to make you believe God was a great artist.

Alistair set down his bags and put on his coat because it was a nuisance to carry. It was too heavy over his suit. He felt encumbered, stifled. He wondered if he had ever appreciated how valuable, how
perishable
the sensation of approaching those hills really was.

God the great artist, Alistair thought, with His devastating sense of proportion.

He said goodbye to the other two and to a few loitering colleagues as he made his way into the lifts and back through the rotating doors. When he walked out, it was dusk, a melancholy London early evening, with a faint metallic taste in the air like dust from the silver grey sky. There were lights on in the pubs along Old Bailey and Fleet Street—the Magpie and Stump, the Old Bell, the Tipperary, Ye Olde Cock Tavern. They implied festivity, leisure, the bachelor's freedom to hang around after work.

Suddenly he felt reluctant to go home. The thought of having supper with Rosalind made him lonely and sad. Then he remembered that Anne and David Nicholson and the Grants were coming for dinner. Peter Grant had a new wife in her mid-thirties. It was all rather uncomfortable—Erica was devastated and there were torn loyalties. The women were appalled, threatened. Alistair wondered how Peter had the energy—or the inclination—to begin a marriage and a family all over again in his fifties. It required such faith, such optimism.

He turned into Hare Place, an alleyway that led from Fleet Street, near the Royal Courts of Justice, into Mitre Court and onwards into the Inner Temple. Then he heard a voice say, 'Hello, there,' and he looked up to see the unmistakable figure of Karen Jennings coming towards him. He couldn't think what she was doing there.

In fact, Karen had left her bags at Randall Schaeffer's chambers that morning and had returned for them after court. He nodded as he passed her. 'Good evening.'

She giggled behind him.'
Very friendly,'
she called. 'Nice chatting to you.'

He stopped and turned around. 'Forgive me. I—it's not allowed. We can't speak outside the courtroom, I'm afraid.'

She wrinkled her nose mischievously—as if he had suggested she ought not to have a second helping of pudding.
'Oh.
Why not?'

'It's not ethical if you're involved in a case. Those are the rules. I'm sorry—it's nothing personal.' He wondered why on earth she would want to talk to him anyway. He must leave immediately.

She walked a few steps towards him, widening her laughing eyes, 'But no one can
see,
can they?' she said.

He felt painfully self-conscious. Of course he must seem absurd to her. He was also aware that at any moment a colleague might come round the corner and discover him talking to a witness. Again he told himself he must go back to chambers
immediately.

And yet he stood still.

She chewed her gum for a few seconds, 'D'you want to come for a drink?'

'A
drink
? I can't. It really isn't allowed.'

At the end of the alleyway, behind her, he could see the cars moving slowly, unreal. In the flat light they were like a film of London traffic projected onto a screen. It was the indistinct time of the evening, when the quality of the light and the subtle muffling of city noise could have belonged just as easily to the early morning. He stood there for a moment, lost. Karen kicked her tiny high-heeled shoe against the cobblestones with a sudden, sharp movement and he felt himself wake up. This was a busy passageway and anyone might walk down it at any minute. He said briskly, 'Well, I should be going. Good evening.'

'Oh, come on. Are you sure? What about if we went somewhere no one could
see
us? Then would it be all right?'

'No, it's really not possible. It's not ethical. One can't be seen to be conversing—'

She smiled and interrupted him, 'Yes, I know. You said. But if we weren't
seen—'

He glanced behind him, having imagined he heard footsteps. Why did he not leave immediately? He really must leave immediately.

Karen chewed her gum and opened her handbag. He watched her, with stunned curiosity, as she brought out a pot of Hp balm, put her little finger into it and smoothed it over her lips. He could smell ... what was it? Artificial strawberries. It reminded him of his daughter Sophie and her friends, an indistinct tumble of girls coming out of the steamy bathroom with towels on their heads, trying not to giggle in their face packs. Fourteen years old and synthetic-fruit scented. He missed his daughter with a kind of physical hunger. It was a father's hunger for that blonde-haired, green-eyed benediction she used to give him when she threw her girl's arms round his neck.

'I just thought it would be nice to have a drink with you,' Karen said. 'That's all.'

'With me? I mean—
why?'

She laughed and shook her hair off her shoulders.

He started violently as a group walked past the mouth of the alleyway, one of the men saying, 'Relax, James, I'm agreeing with you—I'm not surprised the jury didn't find him credible, either, to be honest ...' And somehow the strain of bearing this imminent danger added to the song of her lilting, girlish laughter.

She said, 'Why wouldn't I want a drink with you? What's
wrong
with you? You're interesting. You're the first lawyer I've ever met—except
Randall Schaeffer.'
She crossed her eyes in mockery of his poor sight and Alistair felt a pang of sympathy for his old colleague. The young were so vicious. 'Can't you see that might be
interesting?'
she said.

Did she want to discuss a possible career in the
law,
for God's sake? It was all very unsettling. He felt embarrassed and—old. Increasingly he found himself worrying that he was the victim of a joke. And, aside from these faintly paranoid concerns, at any given second anyone might discover them talking!

She laughed at him again. 'Don't you ever do something just because it's
interesting?'

'No,' he said. 'And I'm afraid I'm too old for that formula to sound as exciting to me as it does to you.'

At this, Karen's manner altered. She tilted her head on one side. 'Oh, OK, whatever. Is it any wonder I need a drink, though? You gave me hell in there today. You were
really scary,
you know? Oh, I see, you think it's
funny,
do you?' she said.

'I'm sorry—I was just wondering if I'd ever seen anyone look less scared.'

'Oh, that's all front—that's all bullshit. We're all bullshitters, aren't we—in our own ways?' She spat her gum into the gutter and grinned.

'Yes,' he said.

Any moment, anyone,
he told himself
,'Langford, talking to a witness

'Just one drink between old bullshitters, then. How about that?' She winked at him and he smiled involuntarily. 'Look, I don't want to discuss the sodding case anyway. I'm bored stiff of it.'

'There truly isn't anywhere we could go.'

'God, you haven't got much imagination, have you? For a
brilliant barrister.'

'Barristers aren't required to have imagination. We wouldn't want to lose hold of the facts.'

She tapped her shoe again on the cobblestones—from side to side, as if she was about to dance. 'Oh, yes, but there's other bits in your brain—other than the barrister bits. You haven't got to be anywhere, have you?'

'No,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean—' Who had told her he was 'brilliant', he wondered.

' Well,
then. We could go somewhere you won't know anyone.'

Alistair tried to imagine this place. His mind was immediately crowded to suffocation with a hundred friendly salutes and falling smiles of confusion from nearby tables, with friends putting on their wives' coats, catching sight of him: 'Isn't that Alistair? Alistair Langford?'

'Where? Good God!
Yes,
but who's he
with,
darling? Don't
wave,
for God's sake.'

Karen drew in her breath sharply. '
I
know. A
hotel.
Why would anyone who lives in London be in a hotel?'

He laughed—at what he felt sure was the spontaneous presentation of a tried and tested formula. He suspected there were other jewels in this box—'You went back and bought it for me? That expensive dress?'—and so on. Then, unexpectedly, he felt a brandy-like flood of warmth through his body and realized this was what it felt like to contemplate the idea of a drink with a girl in her twenties with sooty mascara and comic-book curves.

She said, 'We could go to the Ridgeley, couldn't we? By the river. That place with the big things outside—oh, you know.'

'This is totally impossible,' he said, thinking there really was not the faintest chance of anyone he knew being at the Ridgeley. It was a new hotel done up by some fashionable interior designer, catered by her celebrity-chef husband. He had read about it in the business section of
The Times.
It had flaming torches outside it. He would be the oldest person in there by thirty years.

She smiled hard at him. 'Oh,
go on.
One drink on your way home.'

His mind felt weightless. It was professional insanity to have a drink with a witness. It was enough to get you disbarred.

But for some reason—and perhaps it was simply out of indignation at the conspicuous lack of interest Ryan and Sandra had shown in his life—this dangerous idea appealed to him. Somehow his thoughts insisted the only alternative in the world was going straight home to dinner with Rosalind. And suddenly this felt like dying. (There was a terrible silence in the house sometimes—the ticking clock, the thick curtains, the paintings still and heavy on the walls and Rosalind's pale absence from the room. Sometimes it occurred to him that this silence was not so very different from the silence at the boarding-house when he was a child, when the beds were done and his mother had gone to the shops. He would listen to her shut the front door as if it was the lid of his coffin. Then he would sit at the kitchen table digging the varnish out of the cracks with his thumbnail, hot tears in his eyes for the horrifying randomness of where God chose for you to be born.)