Time of Hope (33 page)

With a craftsman’s satisfaction, Percy described how he kept the trust of the solicitors; how he never overpraised a young man, but how he reminded them of a minor success; how he watched over a man who looked like training into a winner, and how gradually he fed him with work; how it was no use being sentimental and finding cases for someone who was not fitted to survive.

Percy was able, I was thinking. He liked power and he liked his job – and he liked himself. It was a pleasure to him to be hard and shrewd, not to succumb to facile pity, to be esteemed as a clear-headed man. And he cherished a certain resentment at his luck. He had not had the chances of the men for whose work he foraged; yet he was certain that most of them were weaklings beside himself.

‘I want to know what strings you can pull, sir,’ said Percy. ‘Some of our young gentlemen have uncles or connexions who are solicitors. It turns out very useful sometimes. It’s wonderful how the jobs come in.’

‘I can’t pull any strings,’ I said. He was not a man to fence with. He was rough under the smooth words, and it was wiser to be rough in return.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy.

‘I was born poor,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no useful friends. Apart from my studentship – you knew I’d got one?’

‘I see Mr Getliffe’s correspondence, sir,’ said Percy complacently.

‘Apart from that, I’m living on borrowed money. If I can’t earn my keep within three years, I’m finished – so far as this game goes.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy. Our eyes met. His face was expressionless.

He said nothing for some moments. He seemed to be assessing the odds. He did not indulge in encouragement. He had, however, read Eden’s letters and, with his usual competence, remembered them in detail. He reminded me that here was one solicitor with whom I had some credit. I said that Eden’s was a conservative old firm in a provincial town.

‘Never mind. They’ve paid Mr Getliffe some nice little fees.’

‘Eden’s got a very high opinion of him.’

‘I suppose so, sir,’ said Percy.

I was fishing for his own opinion, but did not get a flicker of response.

He had asked enough questions for that afternoon, and looked content. He banished my future from the conversation, and told me that he bred goldfish and won prizes for them. Then he decided to show me the place where I should sit for the next year. It was in a room close to Getliffe’s, and the same size. There were already four people in it – Allen, a man well into middle age, who was writing at a roll-top desk, and two young men, one reading at a small table and two others playing chess. Percy introduced me, and I was offered a small table of my own, under one of the windows. The view was different from that in Getliffe’s room: one looked across the gardens to another court, where an occasional light was shining, though it was teatime on a summer afternoon. The river was not visible from this window, but, as I turned away and talked to Allen and the others, I heard a boat hoot twice.

I came to know the view from that window in Chambers very well. I spent weeks in the long vacation there, though it was not realistic to do so. I learned little, and the others had gone away. Getliffe had asked me to produce some notes for him, but I could have taken my books anywhere. Yet I was restless, away from my place: it was as though I had to catch a train.

I was restless through that autumn and winter, through days when, with nothing to do, I gazed down over the gardens and watched the lights come on in the far court. There was nothing to do. Though Getliffe was good at filling in one’s time, though I marked down every case in London that was not sheer routine, still there were days, stretches of days, when all I could do was read as though I were still a student and, instead of gazing from my garret over the roofs, look out instead over the Temple gardens. Some days, in that first year, when I was eating my heart out, that seemed the only change: I had substituted a different view, that was all.

I was too restless to enjoy knowing the others in Getliffe’s chambers. At any other time I should have got more out of them. I struck up an acquaintance, it was true, with Salisbury, who worked in the other room; he had three years’ start on me and was beginning to get a practice together. He boasted that he was earning seven hundred pounds a year, but I guessed that five hundred pounds was nearer the truth. Our acquaintance was a sparring and mistrustful one; he was a protégé of Getliffe’s, which made me envy him, and in turn he saw me as a rival. I half knew that he was a kind, insecure, ambitious man who craved affection and did not expect to be liked; but I was distracted by the sight of his vulpine pitted face bent over his table, as I speculated how he described me to Getliffe behind my back.

Quite often we had a meal together, which was more than I ever did with any of the others. Of the three in my room, Allen was a precise spinster of a man, curiously happy, who said with simple detachment that he had none of the physical force and vitality of a successful barrister; he lived at his club, marked thousands of examination papers, edited volumes of trials, and for ten years past had averaged eight hundred or nine hundred pounds a year; he had a hope, at forty-five, of some modest permanent job, and made subfusc, malicious, aunt-like jokes at Getliffe’s expense; they were cruel, happy jokes, all the happier because they got under Salisbury’s skin. The other two were both pupils, only a term senior to me. One, Snedding, was hard-working and so dense that Percy erased him from serious consideration in his first month. The other, Paget, was a rich and well-connected young man who was spending a year or two at the Bar before managing the family estates. He was civil and deferential to us all in Chambers, and played an adequate game of chess; but outside he lived a smart social life, and politely evaded all invitations from professional acquaintances, much to the chagrin of Salisbury, who was a headmaster’s son and longed for
chic
.

Paget was no fool, but he was not a menace. I was lucky, I told myself, that neither of those two was a competitor, for it meant that I might get more than my share of the minor pickings. I told myself that I was lucky. But all the luck was put off till tomorrow, and I fretted, lost to reason in my impatience, because tomorrow would not come.

No one was better than Getliffe at keeping his pupils occupied. So Salisbury said, who was fervently loyal to Getliffe and tried to counter all the gossip of the Inn dining table. There were plenty of times when I was too rancorous to hear a word in Getliffe’s favour; yet in fact this one was true. From the day I entered the Chambers, he called me into his room each afternoon that he was not in court. ‘How are tricks?’ he used to say; and, when I mentioned a case, he would expound on it with enthusiasm. It was an enthusiasm that he blew out like his tobacco smoke; it was vitalizing even when, expounding impromptu on any note I wrote for him, he performed his maddening trick of getting every second detail slightly wrong. Usually not wrong enough to matter, but just wrong enough to irritate. He had a memory like an untidy magpie; he knew a lot of law, but if he could remember a name slightly wrong he – almost as though on purpose – managed to. That first slip with my surname was just like him; and afterwards, particularly when he was annoyed, apprehensive, or guilty because of me, he frequently called me Ellis.

So, in the smell of Getliffe’s tobacco, I listened to him as he produced case after case, sometimes incomprehensibly, because of his allusive slang, often inaccurately. He loved the law. He loved parading his knowledge and giving me ‘a tip or two’. When I was too impatient to let a false date pass, he would look shamefaced, and then say: ‘You’re coming on! You’re coming on!’

Then he got into the habit, at the end of such an afternoon, of asking me to ‘try a draft’ – ‘Just write me a note to keep your hand in,’ said Getliffe. ‘Don’t be afraid to spread yourself. You can manage three or four pages. Just to keep you from rusting.’

The first time it happened I read for several afternoons in the Inn library, wrote my ‘opinion’ with care, saw Getliffe flicker his eyes over it and say ‘You’re coming on!’, and then heard nothing more about it. But the second time I did hear something more. Again I had presented the opinion as professionally as I could. Then one morning Getliffe, according to his custom, invited all three of us pupils to attend a conference. The solicitors and clients sat round his table; Getliffe, his pipe put away, serious and responsible, faced them. He began the conference with his usual zest. ‘I hope you don’t think that I’m a man to raise false hopes,’ he said earnestly. ‘One would rather shout the winners out at the back door. But frankly I’ve put in some time on this literature, and I’m ready to tell you that we should be just a little bit over cautious if we didn’t go to court.’ To my astonishment, he proceeded firmly to give the substance of my note. In most places he had not troubled to alter the words.

At the end of that conference, Getliffe gave me what my mother would have called an ‘old-fashioned’ look.

He repeated this manoeuvre two or three times, before, during one of our afternoon tête-à-têtes, he said ‘You’re doing some nice odd jobs for me, aren’t you?’

I was delighted. He was so fresh and open that one had to respond.

‘I wanted to tell you that,’ said Getliffe. ‘I wanted to tell you something else,’ he added with great seriousness. ‘It’s not fair that you shouldn’t get any credit. One must tell people that you’re doing some of the thinking. One’s under an obligation to push your name before the public.’

I was more delighted still. I expected a handsome acknowledgement at the next conference.

I noticed that, just before the conference, Getliffe looked at the other pupils and not at me. But I still had high hopes. I still had them, while he recounted a long stretch from my latest piece of devilling. He had muddled some of it. I thought. Then he stared at the table, and said ‘Perhaps one ought to mention the help one sometimes gets from one’s pupils. Of course one suggests a line of investigation, one reads their
billets-doux,
one advises them how to express themselves. But you know as well as I do, gentlemen, that sometimes these young men do some of the digging for us. Why, there’s one minor line of argument in this opinion – it’s going too far to say that I shouldn’t have discovered it, in fact I had already got my observations in black and white, but I was very glad indeed, I don’t mind telling you, when my Mr Ellis hit upon it for himself.’

Getliffe hurried on.

I was enraged. That night, with Charles March, I thrashed over Getliffe’s character and my injuries. This was the first time he had taken me in completely. I was too much inflamed, too frightened of the future, to concede that Getliffe took himself in too. Actually, he was a man of generous impulses, and of devious, cunning, cautious afterthoughts. In practice, the afterthoughts usually won. I had not yet found a way to handle him. The weeks and months were running on. I did not know whether he would keep any of his promises, or how he could be forced.

He could not resist making promises – any more than he could resist sliding out of them. Charles March, who was a pupil in another set of Chambers, often went with me to hear him plead: one day, in King’s Bench 4, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe was only just in time. In he hurried, dragging his feet, slightly untidy and flurried – looking hunted as always, his wig not quite clean nor straight, carrying papers in his hand. As soon as he began to speak, he produced the impression of being both nervous and at ease. He was not a good speaker, nothing like so good as his opponent in this case; the strident note stayed in his voice, but it sounded thin even in that little court; yet he was capturing the sympathy of most people there.

At lunchtime, walking, in the gardens, Charles March and I were scornful of his incompetence, envious of his success, incredulously angry that he got away with it.

That night in his room I was able to congratulate him on winning the case. He looked at me with his most responsible air.

‘One is glad to pull off something for the clients’ sakes,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest fault to forget that they’re the people most concerned. One has to be careful.’

‘Still, it’s very nice to win,’ I said.

Getliffe’s face broke into a grin.

‘Of course it’s nice,’ he said. ‘It gives me a bigger kick than anything in the world.’

‘I expect I shall find it the same,’ I said. ‘If ever I manage it.’

Getliffe laughed merrily.

‘You will, my boy, you will. You’ve got to remember that this ancient Inn wasn’t born yesterday. It was born before HM Edward Three. No one’s ever been in a hurry since. You’ve just got to kick your heels and look as though you like it. We’ve all been through it. It’s good for us in the end. But I’ll tell you this, Eliot’ – he said confidentially – ‘though I don’t often tell it to people in your position, that I don’t see why next year you shouldn’t be able to keep yourself in cigarettes. And even a very very occasional cigar.’ He smiled happily at me. ‘When all’s said and done, it’s a good life,’ he said.

Years afterwards, I realized that, when I was his pupil, I crassly underestimated Getliffe as a lawyer. It was natural for me and Charles March to hold our indignation meetings in the Temple gardens; but, though it was hard for young men to accept, some of Getliffe’s gifts were far more viable than ours. We overvalued power and clarity of mind, of which we both had a share, and we dismissed Getliffe because of his muddiness. We had not seen enough to know that, for most kinds of success, intelligence is a very minor gift. Getliffe’s mind was muddy, but he was a more effective lawyer than men far cleverer, because he was tricky and resilient, because he was expansive with all men, because nothing restrained his emotions, and because he had a simple, humble, tenacious love for his job.

It was too difficult, however, for Charles March and me, in the intellectual arrogance of our youth, to see that truth, much less accept it. And I had a good deal to put up with. I had just discovered Getliffe’s comic and pathological meanness with money. He had a physical aversion from signing a cheque or parting with a coin. In the evening, after a case, we occasionally went to the Feathers for a pint of beer. His income was at least four thousand a year, and mine two hundred, but somehow I always paid.