Cockfosters Page 6

  Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say. The last time I heard that expression was when the man I was sitting next to at the Dynamo gala dinner told me, ‘I have never raised my hand to my wife. To be honest, I’ve never felt the need to.’ I think he was expecting me to congratulate him. Well done, sir!

  The truth is. The truth is, no one would believe you back then. ‘A bit heavy-handed’ was how it was described if you had to visit A&E. Nothing happened when you told a teacher. The police had a good laugh. ‘Making a fuss about nothing’ was what they used to say; or, if it showed, ‘making a fuss’.

  He was still tinkering with the freezer controls. I started to tidy the kitchen, put some mugs in the dishwasher, straightened the pile of books and papers on the dresser.

  ‘My daughter’s doing Russian coursework now at school,’ I told him. ‘Would you be interested to see her textbook?’

  I held it out to show him. He had turned from the freezer to sip his water. He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.

  ‘But it’s about Russia,’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘Lies,’ he said.

  I blinked. I gave a little laugh before I realised he wasn’t joking.

  ‘No, honestly,’ I said. ‘It’s history.’

  ‘Lies,’ he repeated, compressing his lips, shoving his head back inside the fridge.

  Wow, I thought. Bloody hell.

  Wait till I tell Nigel he’s been barking up the wrong tree all these years, I thought; that he’s been wasting his time on Mesopotamia et cetera. Lies! I put the book back in the pile of Georgia’s coursework on the dresser.

  On the evening of my overnight business trip to Moscow Mr Petrossian had booked a table at a giant marble-clad sushi restaurant. I’d arrived early and was shown to a balcony table from where I could take in the sheer girth of the chandeliers shining light on the men at dinner all around me. The table nearest was occupied by two heavies growling stuff at each other when they weren’t growling into their mobiles; opposite them, ignored by them, sat two girls in thick make-up, very young, immobile as captive princesses and completely silent.

  I never lied about it but I did stay silent. Secrets aren’t the same as lies. It’s not something I’m proud of. I told the girls someone got me in the face during a doubles match when they asked about my wavy nose. So it’s not true I never lied; I have lied!

  Of course, it was another time, the Seventies. An earlier stratum of history altogether. And he was plausible, my dad.

  I’d had enough. My knee had started to throb and I realised I ought to rest it.

  ‘I have fixed it,’ said the man triumphantly, closing the freezer door.

  He glanced at his watch and scribbled something on his timesheet. I watched him as he started to pack his tools away.

  ‘Well done,’ I said.

  I felt weirdly wiped out.

  I knew I ought to ask him what it was that had gone wrong in the first place. I hadn’t forgotten about Nigel’s file of domestic notes; for some reason though I’d temporarily lost confidence in it. It can’t be that useful, I thought, otherwise we’d have got everything sorted ages ago. What if it’s not the condenser coils or the evaporator fan next time round? What if it’s a different part of the freezer altogether? And even if, thanks to the notes, we do find out what’s gone wrong, that won’t alter the fact that it’s gone wrong again.

  I did still ask him though, and I carefully wrote down what he said and dated it. After all, Nigel hadn’t once let me down in all the time I’d known him and I had no reason to doubt his way of going about things now. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to foul up his scrupulously recorded dossier.

  Cheapside

  ‘The question is, is it negligence to place a live body in a coffin?’ I said, peering at him over my reading glasses.

  My job as I understood it was to persuade him that the Law can be fun, a good degree course to choose, and to that end I’d dug out an odd little case from a distant back number of the Law Gazette to pique his interest.

  He was old-fashioned-looking, this boy Sam, thin and fair, with a spotty face and doleful blue eyes. He looked uncomfortable in his shiny sixth-form suit and wore a sullen hunted expression. I wasn’t too hopeful of success but I’d promised his father so I ploughed on.

  ‘This case all started with a hitchhiker walking through a Yugoslavian forest in the rain,’ I said.

  ‘Yugoslavia,’ he said. ‘Is that, like, Serbia?’

  ‘That general neck of the woods, yes,’ I said. ‘Croatia as well now, and, er, a few others. This was back in the Seventies though when it was still all one big communist state.’

  ‘I went to Belgrade in the summer,’ he said, brightening up. ‘Interrailing.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, quellingly.

  Sam’s father had sorted me out earlier in the summer after that bout at the gym. He’d overridden me, which isn’t easy as anyone will tell you; he’d insisted I go to A&E instead of the meeting I was set on attending, and in so doing he’d probably saved me from something much nastier than a spot of medical balloon magic. Death, even. So when he got on to me about his boy I could hardly refuse. August is a slack month anyway, with the courts in summer recess. These days heart surgery isn’t the big deal it used to be; it’s more like high-class plumbing crossed with conjuring tricks. They blow up tiny balloons in your arteries to unblock them. No need to open you up! I was back at the office the same week. All pretty seamless.

  Anyway, Sam had to decide in the coming school term which subject to take at university. Both his parents were GPs but he was refusing to follow their path so I had been deputed to persuade him that a Law degree was a good idea. I was also supposed to offer him some last-minute half-term work experience to include in the all-important personal statement, but from the evidence before my eyes I wasn’t sure he was up to more than a spot of light photocopying.

  ‘Your dad was telling me you’re not sure yet what subject you want to take at university,’ I said.

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘But you don’t want to follow him into medicine.’

  ‘Blood,’ he said, and shuddered.

  ‘What’s your favourite A-level subject?’

  ‘Dunno really,’ he shrugged. ‘History’s OK. Sometimes.’

  ‘Ah yes, History. That can be a very good route into a legal career, the practice it gives you in analysing events, marshalling information and coming to a conclusion based on the facts.’

  ‘I don’t know what job I want to do,’ he said with sudden force. ‘I don’t want to decide yet.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Freedom!’ he said, giving me a wild look.

  ‘Freedom. Ah yes, freedom versus security. Yes.’

  ‘I might take a gap year.’

  ‘Erm, I’d think carefully about that if I were you,’ I said. ‘We’re finding the best universities for Law now prefer students not to do that because they “go off” in the interim, as they put it.’

  This made him drop his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Getting back to our hitchhiker,’ I said. ‘After a while, out in the rain, he managed to thumb a lift. The driver nodded at him from his cabin to hop in the back of the open truck. Once on board he wasn’t too thrilled to discover a coffin there, but the rain was torrential and he was miles from the next town so he made the best of things and settled down beside it. OK so far?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  This boy had no responsibilities. He was still a child.

  Abi is one now and Ava is three. It’s a privilege to be doing it all over again and hopefully I’ll be able to avoid some of the mistakes I made first time round with Hannah and Martha.

  Being wanted by someone, being desired again, and by an attractive young woman like Lauren, that was the most amazing feeling after those years in the post-divorce wilderness. Less so since the babies of course, but still! Yes OK Lauren is young enough to be my daughter, as Hannah and Martha have pointed out more th
an once. But that only makes me realise how lucky I am to get a second chance. It also makes me see I have a responsibility to look after my health and ensure I live another good few years if I want to see Abi and Ava through university. No more steak frites for me!

  ‘He’d been sitting there for a little while, our hitchhiker,’ I continued, ‘when the lid of the coffin lifted and a voice asked, “Has the rain stopped?” This caused him to scream out in terror and then to leap from the moving truck, breaking his leg in the process.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos he overreacted,’ said Sam.

  ‘Are you ready to order, sir?’ said the waiter, appearing with his notepad.

  ‘Another couple of minutes, please,’ I said, turning my attention back to the menu.

  No oysters, of course; no R in ‘August’. Fried whitebait, smoked eel, skate with black butter. I’d chosen this hundred-year-old fish restaurant partly to give Sam a dose of City tradition, but mainly because I’m trying to be sensible since the stents. I chose skate, on the grounds that it’s more substantial than other fish. Without the black butter, obviously.

  He was seventeen, this boy, and I was fifty-six. What he didn’t know was that keeping his options open now would likely lead to extra hard work later on. I wasn’t at all sure about his parents’ enthusiasm for Law anyway. Every bright kid these days is doing a Law degree or a Law conversion course and it’s massively oversubscribed as a profession. Be that as it may, this wasn’t the message his parents wanted to hear so I soldiered on.

  ‘You could do History at university then take a Law conversion course afterwards,’ I said. ‘That would defer things a bit.’

  That’s what they’re doing now after degrees in Anthropology or History or Old Icelandic, the children of my colleagues – a Law conversion course. At vast expense to their parents I might add. My own girl Hannah has insisted on taking this route, so I should know. Funny, the four of us together again at her graduation in June. Bev had gone grey since the last time I saw her. She hadn’t had it cut, her Wild Woman hair, and it looked quite eccentric. Lauren’s is smooth as glass.

  ‘Of course, if the Law conversion course is not an option you could try entering a law firm at a lower level,’ I told Sam. ‘Go in as a paralegal.’

  ‘What, like a paramedic?’ he said, looking alarmed.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘No.’

  I worked out early on that I’d have to be a lawyer. I couldn’t do science and I didn’t want to teach: ergo, the Law. And getting paid to argue for a living sounded all right to me. Bev used to say that in the unlikely event of my being assigned a coat of arms, one of its quarters would have to feature the hind leg of a donkey.

  At the time I did my articles female lawyers were still pretty thin on the ground, though by the time we divorced they were all over the place. Naturally enough women will often go part-time once they have children, but they’re still very well rewarded in this profession and provide a high-quality second-tier service. Because you can’t be in charge of a big case and not give it everything, that’s the thing, and that’s what Bev never was able to understand. The work comes in intense bursts, sometimes for several weeks at a time, and obviously your personal life is going to have to go on hold to a certain extent when that happens.

  She was too emotional.

  ‘What’s a Buck Rarebit?’ asked the boy.

  ‘It’s a Welsh Rarebit with a poached egg on top.’

  ‘What’s a Welsh Rarebit?’

  ‘It’s cheese on toast,’ I said. ‘Don’t they teach you anything at school?’

  His face turned red, deeper and deeper as I watched, even his forehead.

  ‘Only joking,’ I said, thinking to myself that he wasn’t going to get very far without a bit more bounce.

  We met at the height of punk at some student party in Corpus where everyone was pogoing beneath the medieval rafters, jump-dancing competitively – ridiculous! – and Bev, who was reading History, was laughing at me and the other Law students as we all danced to ‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won’. Whatever happened to punk, eh? I’ve still got my vinyl forty-fives in lime green and bubble-gum pink – the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Clash.

  I looked around the room for the waiter so we could order. The shiny cream paint, the wood panelling and the steel jugs of tartare sauce gave it a collegiate feel, as did the watercolour cartoons of nineteenth-century statesmen up at cornice level and the framed signed cricket bats and sports shirts in glass boxes on the walls.

  We were both part of that brief wave when Oxbridge let the oiks in. My father managed a branch of Mac Fisheries in Southport and hers was a school caretaker in Lewisham, the old bugger. That was in the late Seventies with the whole country in the doldrums and us separately doing our homework by candlelight during the three-day week. There was much doom and gloom at that point about the end of days, but then we surfed into the Eighties and everything went global.

  Our generation was lucky. The whole world opened up. All sorts of not terribly bright people have done extremely well in the last thirty years. They’ve had to put in the hours, sure; but even the ones who didn’t work hard and had no ambition have done all right compared with their parents. If they lived down south, that is. And lots of us did up sticks and move down south during that time.

  Bev used to say, why not employ double the lawyers and pay them half? It would still be plenty and that way they’d get some life outside work too. She just didn’t get it. There is no such thing as the work-life balance. That’s the point! You cannot be both driven and laid-back. You either step up to the plate and embrace the fourteen-hour day; or, you don’t. Sure, there’s life outside work if you’re a lawyer. But that doesn’t mean never working through the night or a holiday – sorry!

  ‘You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper, Sam?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, morose. ‘My dad already told me it.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So. Back to our hitchhiker and his broken leg.’

  ‘The idiot.’

  I was beginning to think I should have fallen back on the usual hackneyed example, the one about whether it’s ever OK to eat a cabin boy.

  It’s a question of attitude, I wanted to tell him; it’s to do with stamina and combative strength; courage, even. I mean, for example, the rugby player who reset his dislocated knee on the pitch and carried on.

  ‘What’s your favourite sport?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t like sport.’

  That figured.

  It was fine for our parents: job security and next to no unemployment. You worked not very hard and you had enough. A job with a proper pension, too! Those were the days. But it’s been different for us and this was what I wanted to get over to Sam before we finished the meal. Now there is no halfway house, not even in the public sector.

  Bev said, enough’s enough: we’re lucky and we’ve grown up in a country with free schools and healthcare so let’s move outside London and make the most of it. She suggested I move away from the City, practise in the country, a bit of light probate and conveyancing, but what she didn’t understand was, they’re really struggling now, those two-horse outfits. Everyone accepts that we’ll never see a return to the stability that was once a hallmark of our profession.

  Also I would have found that boring.

  ‘After a certain point the more a man earns the less I think of him,’ Bev said. Ridiculous. ‘Oh, and what point would that be?’ I asked her. ‘The point of elegant sufficiency,’ she said. Which was like a private joke we had; it was what her grandmother in Catford used to say when she asked us whether we’d had enough to eat: have you had sufficient? We used to go there for Sunday lunch or tea, all those years before we had children.

  Lauren has nothing of the old hippie about her, I’m glad to say. No, Lauren has her head screwed on all right.

  Bev decided to take the shame of world economic inequality on her
own shoulders, the guilt at global greed. As if it hasn’t always been like this! Any normal woman would have been proud of what we’d achieved. It’s not like we inherited anything – we never had a bean from our families. Whereas Lauren has a healthy sense of entitlement. Maybe it’s a generational thing.

  Divorce is no fun. No. I’m surprised how it still rankles, this much further down the line. But, life goes on.

  The waiter arrived with a big pale meaty wing of skate for me and a small scorched slice of toasted cheese for the boy.

  ‘Are you sure that’s all you want?’ I asked. ‘Are you slimming or something?’

  Again he blushed that furious shade of crimson.

  ‘I don’t like fish,’ he mumbled, glancing at the pile on my plate and recoiling.

  ‘Ah, that is unfortunate,’ I said.

  I should have taken him for a sandwich in the crypt of St Mary-le-Bow and had done with it. Then I could have pointed out the churches dovetailed between City high-rises, the way a Wren church will cradle an office block in the crook of its arm. I could have shown him the figure of Justice on top of the Old Bailey with a sword in her right hand and the scales of justice in her left, and that would probably have had more of an effect on him than this lunch seemed to be doing.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Let’s return to our hitchhikers.’

  He looked at me hopelessly.

  ‘What had happened, of course, was that an earlier hitchhiker, let’s call him Hitchhiker One, had got into the back of the truck and decided to climb inside the empty coffin, pulling the lid over himself to keep the rain off. He heard the truck stop for another hitchhiker, our man, whom we will call Hitchhiker Two, but he didn’t come out of the coffin at that point because he could still hear the rain pouring down. Then, after a while, when the rain sounded less heavy, he lifted the lid and we know what happened next.’

  ‘Yeah, he broke his leg.’

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘Hitchhiker Two was an idiot,’ said Sam. ‘And Hitchhiker One was a nutter. To get into a coffin.’