A Week in December Read online

  What it meant was that he wanted to be with her all day long. It wasn’t enough to look forward to Friday night, when Erich was invariably away, and to maybe one other meeting snatched excitingly in the course of the week. He counted all the time he wasn’t with her lost. He wondered at what point he’d forfeited control. She had seemed to outrun him by so much at the beginning that he’d felt uneasy about an inequality of passion, not believing he would ever feel as much, though happy at the same time that he seemed less exposed to harm. He viewed her with a detached amusement that seemed both to frustrate and charm her. ‘It’s as though you don’t quite believe in me,’ she said once.

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ said Gabriel. ‘Someone like you doesn’t happen to someone like me. The norm of life is a sort of qualified failure. And I was quite happy with that. I’ve learned to live with it, like everyone else. You don’t expect your perfect woman to sit down next to you one day. And then to ring and come round to your flat in beautiful clothes bringing wine and flowers and—’

  ‘I am real,’ she said.

  ‘But still hard to believe in.’

  When he went to his mother’s Hampshire village at Christmas he felt he wasn’t present in the bare garden where he tidied up the last leaves and the broken flowerpots for her. He was peeling back his padded glove to see his watch and work out what Catalina was doing in Copenhagen, in the family house near St Frederik’s Church, ringed by verdigrised statues. The pie his own mother heated for supper on Christmas Eve became in his imagination the feast of sweet-cured fish, roast goose, fried apple slices and ‘glögg’, a red-wine punch Catalina had lovingly described to him. He could barely spare a glimpse for the choir in church, needing both eyes to scrutinise his mobile-phone screen for the promised text, in case one eye alone might miss the season’s greeting, the only one he cared about: ‘1 message received’.

  Catalina made anything seem possible, or more than that, irradiated. Since almost every aspect of their love affair, beginning with its beginning, had been improbable, so her later miracles, such as making the evening appear worth living for, the day worth rising to greet, were accepted by him as mundane stuff, well within her compass. When he tried to work out where he’d lost himself, yielded control or whatever it was he had surrendered, the answer didn’t seem to relate to himself or to his past; it seemed only to be about her. He was enslaved by it now, as a criminal client in his early days as a barrister had once told Gabriel he was enslaved by heroin; whatever in their inner landscape had predisposed them both to dependency was now beside the point.

  To be that much in love was not good for you. It wasn’t healthy. The likelihood of what doctors called a ‘good outcome’ was slight, and this much Gabriel recognised even at the time. There was a flaw in the heart of most of the Western books he’d read, the plays he’d seen, and it had shaped the way he’d come to think about himself. Centuries of occidental culture seemed to suggest that the greatest emotions were the best: this love for another, this desperate passion, was the earthly happiness that you should aim for, and those who never found it had in some way failed in life; the minority who’d known, and the even smaller number who’d secured it, or together watched it develop into something less exhausting, were the ones who had done best. At the sound of the Last (secular) Trump, theirs would be the laurels and the crowns.

  Yet was it really such an enviable way to live, always at the edge of panic, desperate for a facile cellphone bleep, all your judgements skewed? Even in the grip of such a passion, wanting only to see his lover again, Gabriel allowed himself to enter what the Appeal Court would have called a dissenting judgment.

  And yet the loss of such a woman might be enough to make anyone unhappy – for the rest of his life, thought Gabriel. Why would you look forward to tomorrow, when it, like all the other days, was going to deny you the one thing you most wanted? But it wasn’t that, he felt. he’d been able to be philosophical in a way about losing Catalina. He concentrated on remembering and reliving the intense joy he’d known with her. To ask for more would have been unreasonable. He had a photograph of her on his mobile phone, just one, taken in a café in Stockholm where they’d been for a last-minute weekend. But he’d changed phone since then and couldn’t find a USB cable that would fit the old one to download the picture. In any case, the battery was kaput and they didn’t seem to make replacements. Sometimes he held the old phone in his hand, throwing it gently up and down, feeling the weight of loss in his palm.

  In any event, he thought, perhaps his problem was not so much the loss of Catalina as a failure of engagement – or rather an incongruity. Here was this world – London, the park and trees and the people in his chambers and the precedents he studied, the case law, paperwork; there was the culture it threw at him in cinemas, in galleries and in the self-devouring press and television with all its horrifying ‘reality’ programmes; and then the weather, chance of travel, other people, going out. That was what was on offer, out there. And then on the other hand there was him – the sum of random mutations among his ancestors, one outlying bud of an unstable species. Why would you expect b to like or enjoy a? What, really, were the chances of an overlap, a rough fit, let alone a congruence? The odd thing wasn’t that his spirit – if that was what it was, the flickering of electrical charge and spill of chemicals through a synapse – failed to lift to meet this world; the more remarkable thing was how many people did seem to like it, slotted into it and felt right at home there. Lucky them.

  Gabriel put his day together in slabs of time. If you could break it down into smaller parts, it became easier. Denial helped – not going to the Corkscrew at lunchtime so that his daily ration of wine was still untouched when he got home. Working, just pushing himself through papers passed on to him by busier colleagues. Talk in the clerks’ room with Samson and Jemima, the junior clerk, known to everyone as Delilah. The cryptic crossword. The announcement of the latest international football squad with player assessments in the evening paper. Tea. The ping of e-mail with a wine offer from Rhône Direct or a joke from Andy Warshaw with a link to a risqué video clip.

  He didn’t much like Internet porn, which was odd, because he didn’t consider himself to be prudish. The arrangement with Catalina had been that she was shameless, yet they never lost the sense that what they did was also forbidden. He looked into her brown eyes, and they didn’t flicker from their diplomatic politeness as he described what he would like to do next, or was already doing, and she agreed, or volunteered for something more. There was always a sense of borders crossed – never a Nordic wholesomeness, but shame and trepidation.

  He had had no lover since Catalina. He did look at women who came in for conferences, black-stockinged junior solicitors in court, bankers in the Corkscrew or secretaries at the sandwich counter in Alfredo’s. He appreciated their pretty hair or eyes or legs, but that was all. Then he went back to his room and thought of something else.

  His father had died when Gabriel was seventeen and this had given him an early awareness of the immanence of death, its bulk invisible behind the empty static of the day. The white nights that normally came to people in middle age, he’d been told, brought on by the weakening and death of parents, had been known to Gabriel from an earlier age. At twenty, he was familiar with 4 a.m., and what it brought. But he was reckoned to be the more level-headed and the more sanguine of the two brothers (Adam was the elder) and he tried to live up to this billing. His reputation (a volatile stock since it was made up in equal parts by those who knew him well, those who didn’t, and those who misunderstood him) was for being melancholy, not easy to approach, but essentially kind-hearted.

  The case of Jenni Fortune and TfL was the first one Gabriel had had for almost twelve months. He was at a loss to explain the trough in his fortunes, but it made life tense in chambers, where the rent arrangements were such that the more successful subsidised (‘carried’ was their word for it) those less in demand. It was sometimes hard to meet the eye of Eustace
Hutton or of Jerry Sanderson, the senior silk who’d billed over a million the previous year.

  The conference or ‘con’ on Monday was what Barry Gaskell called a ‘heads up’, by which he seemed to mean a chance to go over old ground and summarise where they were before the Appeal Court hearing in January. It wasn’t in Gabriel’s view a necessary meeting, but he could bill Gaskell’s union for it and he could also conduct it himself, since Hutton was in court.

  Gabriel first tried to put Jenni Fortune at her ease, though this wasn’t easy. As they were settling themselves, he saw her eyes slide down his bookshelf over the spines of some novels by Balzac.

  ‘Have you read any Balzac?’ he found he had said, without thinking.

  Jenni shook her head in silence.

  Gabriel cursed himself. ‘I ... I just saw you looking. Are you ... Are you a big reader?’

  ‘Nah. Not really.’

  He saw a glimmer. ‘But a bit.’

  ‘A little bit.’

  There was a pause, but she offered nothing more. Gabriel felt he had just about got away with it. Over the many months that he had known the Tube team, he had often seen such flickers from Jenni. He was fairly certain that she followed the legal points more clearly than any of the others, including McShane, the solicitor, but any attempt to bring her into the conversation resulted in her shaking her head and disowning any interest.

  Once or twice, usually when Barry Gaskell was giving a leisurely tour d’horizon, Gabriel found himself wondering about Jenni’s background. There was something unusual about her, something unresolved. Her skin was quite dark, but her features didn’t look fully Afro-Caribbean. Her voice was London, but without West Indian inflection. Her manner was offhand to the point of being rude, but he sensed, or hoped, this gruffness was partly a defence.

  He gathered himself and refocussed. When it came down to it, Jenni Fortune’s life was not his business.

  After she had gone, Gabriel started thinking about the evening ahead and at what time he might allow himself a glass of wine. To celebrate, in advance, the cheque that would eventually come his way for the conference, he could have a glass of the house red in the Corkscrew.

  As he looked out of the window, he found a garbled quotation trying to reassemble itself in his mind. ‘Man comes and drinks the wine and sits below ...’ Something like that. Omar Khayyam, was it? He looked online for the quotation, but without success, then went on to refresh his memory of the Rubaiyat. Odd, he thought, that such a glorification of drinking should have come from Persia, a country where alcohol was now banned. There had long been a theory that the Shiraz grape, backbone of the northern Côtes-du-Rhône and other wines he favoured, had even originated in the Iranian city of that name, but DNA tests had lately shown that this was not possible ...

  Such news, along with much else that was pointless or untrue, can be discovered, Gabriel knew, by a man with a mouse in his fingers and time on his hands.

  The Shiraz question reminded him, via Iran, of the Koran. Before the Leicester schoolgirl case had made it urgent, he had long intended to read it. He suspected that some demagogues wanted to inflame and some to soothe, but probably neither told the truth of what was really in the book. He had wanted to know, for instance, how strict it was on the alcohol question. How much of a problem anyway had liquor been in Medina and Mecca in AD 630? It seemed odd, also, that Jewish and Muslim dietary laws – pork, shellfish, milk – seemed to follow the logic of hygiene in a hot country, but on drink the religions so dramatically diverged, with Muslims going dry and Christians giving their Messiah the supply of top wine as his very first miracle, at Cana ...

  IV

  In Ferrers End, in his book-lined sitting room, R. Tranter was posting an early opinion of a new novel on a popular bookseller website. He had found that the first review could set the tone, so that whatever later bouquets were offered by newspapers or online readers, the prompt and mocking disparagement of Cato476, Lollywillowes or makepeacethack1 (he had any number of e-mail accounts) could linger like a floating Chernobyl cloud, blighting the praise that followed. He usually hadn’t read the book in question, but it was easy enough to piece together a plausible critique from the summary in the publisher’s catalogue, and it was vital to be first up.

  On this occasion, however, he was distracted from his routine task by a familiar anguish. It wasn’t only novelists who made Tranter miserable. For many years he had also been tormented by the work of a reviewer called Alexander Sedley. From nowhere, or possibly from Oxford, this young man had appeared at book launch parties, introducing himself to his elders, then following up next day with obsequious letters. (‘It was a privilege to meet you last night. I have long admired your pages as almost the last remaining forum for serious discussion in our depleted culture ...’) Tranter had seen one such letter lying around when he’d stopped by Patrick Warrender’s office to deliver a review. Surely no one had written like that since the 1930s?

  To anyone with space to fill, young Sedley offered long reviews, unpaid, on any current or forthcoming book. He even volunteered to deliver something over the weekend on the 600-page Canadian magic-realist novel that had sat for six weeks on Patrick Warrender’s desk, catching the poor man’s eye when he forgot to screen it from his gaze with the covering of that day’s paper.

  Sedley’s combination of private-school manners and iron tenacity had eventually broken the reserve of even the most world-weary. Somebody had to review The Treasury of Eighteenth-Century Anecdotes, and here was a piece from Sedley sent in on spec; if he set aside an hour’s labour after lunch to remove the self-congratulation, Patrick Warrender told himself, it would exactly fill the space at the bottom of the page.

  Sedley was as tireless as Tranter, but with better connections. To Tranter’s irritation he turned up at parties in a charcoal grey suit of expensive-looking cloth, while most male reviewers wore egg-stained trousers and brown shoes. He looked ridiculous, like a partner at a family bank, but what was annoying was that no one else seemed to think so. It was frustrating to see one paper after another begin to print young Sedley’s contributions. There was a time when the sharpest young newcomer had been one RT, but now this youngster was making him look old hat – or vieux chapeau as he would doubtless have put it (Tranter didn’t speak French and thought it affected to use phrases from another language: ‘Nostalgie de la boue, my aunt Fanny,’ as he’d told the readers of The Toad).

  In the whippersnapper Sedley’s journalism there soon developed the prematurely weary voice of one who appeared to believe that, since the death of Lionel Trilling, it had fallen to him alone to uphold the purity of Literature. It sounded like hard going. The young man so recently scrabbling for work now appeared bowed down (‘the finest life of Belloc that we have’) by the gravity of his own significance. Yet more and more work seemed to flow his way.

  Eventually, the gods relented. Though the seas threatened, as Prospero might have put it, they were merciful. After some years of successful self-promotion as the Leavis of the new millennium, Sedley made what Tranter could see straightaway was a schoolboy error: he proposed to publish a novel of his own.

  As soon as he heard word of it, Tranter rang Patrick Warrender’s office, but of course he was out, and his posh secretary made it sound unlikely that he’d call back even if he did get back from lunch before five o’clock. Then Tranter e-mailed Warrender about a review he was doing (‘Just checking the word length on the Updike’) and dropped a casual PS: ‘I gather A. Sedley is venturing into fiction. It might be interesting? Happy to have a look if you have no one else in mind. RT.’ There was no reply to that either, and he was forced into a daily blitzkrieg of telephone and e-mail. Eventually, he cornered his man.

  ‘Yes,’ said Patrick, ‘I thought I’d let Peggy Wilson have a riffle through it. She’s a great enthusiast for first-timers. Charming woman. D’you know her?’

  Tranter stuttered at the other end. Peggy Wilson was the softest touch in town. Her group ‘round-
ups’ were like a nursery teacher’s first reports: all were ‘special’ and all must have prizes.

  ‘Oh, I think it’s a bit more of a big deal, actually, Patrick. We wouldn’t want to lose it in some sort of group thing. I’ll probably be reading it anyway. Just out of interest.’

  ‘OK, I’ll think about it. Is the Updike any good?’

  At a party the following week, Tranter was appalled to see a young woman reviewer with a finished copy of Sedley’s book in her shoulder bag.

  He rang Patrick again the next day. Finally, his luck was in.

  ‘Thank God you rang, RT. I’d completely forgotten about young Sedley. Peggy Wilson’s having her hip done. She had a fall at the weekend and she’s going to be out of action for a month at least. I’ll get the publisher to send it straight to you. Let’s do it for next weekend. Five hundred words.’

  The next day R. Tranter received by motorcycle courier the parcel he had long been wanting. The padded bag fell open to reveal a slim but expensively produced hardback from one of London’s snootier publishers. The title alone gave him grounds for hope: A Winter Crossing. Inside was a compliments slip from the publicity department. ‘We’re all very excited about Alexander Sedley’s wonderful first novel. We publish on March 1st. I do hope you like it. Rachel x.’

  Tranter took the package upstairs to his flat, where he opened it carefully and sampled a sentence. He was too agitated to take it in properly. He flipped open the jacket at the back, where he hoped to see the face of his tormentor, but no: it was stylishly minimal. Sedley had supplied no photograph, and the two-line biography had no reference to his elite private school or even to his university. Good call, Tranter conceded. But even in the restraint, was there not smugness? ‘Alexander Sedley is chief literary critic for ...’ Who was he kidding? He’s a penny-a-line reviewer like the rest of us, thought Tranter, not Sir Arthur Quiller-Bloody-Couch.