A Week in December Page 9

  ‘Hello, Jenni love,’ said Barry. They shook hands. ‘Don’t half pong in here,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘one of the control room assistants on night shift has his meal here. He likes curry.’

  Barry Gaskell, a red-faced man in a suit with a small enamelled union badge on the lapel, looked at his watch. ‘Now look, what’s happening today is we’re going to see Mr Northwood, who’s our brief. Got that? He’ll want to go through a few things with us, make sure he’s got it all off pat.’

  ‘Is he a barrister?’

  ‘Yes. Just like Mr Hutton. But he’s the junior. He’s the powder-monkey who gives Hutton the ammunition for when he gets up on his hind legs in court. Hutton’s the big gun.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jenni. ‘And what about Mr McShane?’

  ‘He’s the solicitor, love. He’s the middle man. He’s in our control room at the moment. We thought it would be a good idea for him to have a look and see how everything works. But I think we’ll go and fish him out now, we need to be on our way.’

  The four of them made their way to the dark control room, where McShane was receiving a lesson from the duty assistant. In the twilight, a row of screens showed images from CCTV cameras. The control assistant pointed his pen at one of the pictures, which showed the interior of a stalled lift. He spoke into the microphone to a trapped passenger.

  ‘Please don’t swear, sir. We’re getting help to you as soon as we can. Please, sir, there’s no need for that language ...’

  Barry Gaskell chuckled. ‘It’s the raspberry switch, innit?’

  ‘What?’ said Margaret from HR.

  Gaskell coughed. ‘Raspberry ripple. Old-fashioned term for ... disabled. It’s really called the “mobility-impaired alarm button”, and it has to be set at a height where a wheelchair user can reach it. But what happens is, some bloke with a big arse leans back and sets it off by mistake. But the knob can’t be covered up to stop this happening because of the Disability Discrimination Act. All right, Mr McShane, we need to go now, please.’

  Jenni took her Oyster card from her bag and made for the ticket gate.

  ‘Oi, Jenni,’ said Gaskell. ‘This way.’ He pointed to the Exit stairs. ‘Union business. We’re taking a taxi.’

  They were met in the foyer of the chambers of Eustace Hutton, QC by Samson, the clerk.

  ‘Mr Hutton is in court, Mr Gaskell. He asked me to give you his regards. The conference, as you know, will be with Mr Northwood, who will be the junior in the case. A specialist in this area. This way, please.’

  Jenni followed down a warmly heated corridor over an oatmeal carpet. On the walls were hung prints of old lawyers – cartoons, she thought, caricatures or whatever they were called, from long ago – the time of Joseph Conrad, or even earlier perhaps. The men in them looked frightening, full of words and learning. It was odd, these old pictures in the modern offices: pictures of great men. Were they what today’s barrister wanted to become? Perhaps in their wigs and gowns they were already like that – a throwback.

  The man inside the office, when they’d been shown in, was modern, though. Jenni smiled momentarily to herself, a little laugh of relief suppressed. He was ever so thin, she thought; his ragged hair was in need of cutting; he wore a dark grey suit and a maroon tie, but it looked all right, not too olde worlde; in fact he looked a bit like one of the available ‘ur-maquettes’ in Parallax for ‘lawyer’.

  Jenni looked all round his room while he spoke to them; she didn’t take in what he said. There were no photographs, and that was odd. Surely he would want to have pictures of his wife or kids – or if he wasn’t married, then of his mum and dad. Jenni herself longed for an office she could make her own, with photos and plants and a proper coffee machine. There were hundreds of books on the shelves, of course: gold titles on scarlet and calfskin with roman numerals – and someone, she supposed, had read and digested every word inside.

  One thing was odd about this lawyer, Mr Northwood’s, room, Jenni noticed: some of the books seemed not to be law books, but to be novels or stories. There were at least a dozen by Balzac, whom she’d heard of but never read, and then there were some very thin paperbacks which she guessed would be poetry. There was a sandwich bag peeping out of his wastepaper basket under the desk; she could see the rim of a styrofoam coffee cup and a rolled-up newspaper covered in scribbles where he’d been working on the crossword. He was human.

  Jenni sat back in the modern chair and folded her hands in her lap. Gabriel Northwood had a low, cultured voice – ‘BBC’, her mother would have said – suggesting layers of knowledge and unvoiced jokes at her expense.

  Barry Gaskell seemed to be taking it all in OK; he was nodding and making notes. McShane, the solicitor, did most of the talking, handing Gabriel some papers and asking Barry for others.

  When he wanted to read them, Gabriel put on black-rimmed glasses, which made him look older, Jenni thought. She wondered if he was short-sighted and what a nuisance it must be; she herself had almost perfect vision, her instructor had happily noted.

  Where would someone like Mr Northwood live? she wondered. Although she covered so much of London every day, Jenni knew little of the streets above her head. She went up West occasionally, to Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square; she knew a few of the smaller streets and clubs in Soho from hen nights and birthday parties; but if someone said to her ‘St James’s Park’, she just thought ‘shiny floors’ – which you’d expect, as it was TfL headquarters. Gloucester Road meant a giant panda head between platforms, and Sloane Square was merely little shops under green arches and the rumour that once, not long ago, there had been a bar on the platform where commuters stopped for beer and cigarettes on their way home. Of its streets and houses she knew nothing.

  And Mr Northwood? Marylebone? Hampstead? Or maybe he lived in what they called the ‘chambers’. Perhaps the man Samson was like a butler, who took them food upstairs and put them all up in bed at the end of the day, in a dormitory, like in a boarding school ... Jenni found herself having to bite the inside of her lip again.

  ‘We could always arrange for you to have a ride with one of the drivers, if you liked,’ said Barry Gaskell. ‘To give you a sense of what it’s like as the train comes into the station – how little time you have to react to a determined jumper.’

  Gabriel looked surprised by the suggestion. He took off his glasses. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I will. I suppose I ought to go with Ms ... er, Fortune herself.’

  Jenni appreciated the pause he put before her surname.

  ‘Would that be all right, Jenni?’ said Margaret.

  Jenni shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  She saw Mr Northwood flinch a little at her surliness, but it was a first defence that was too deeply ingrained to change.

  ‘We’ll have a look at the shift rota when we get back to the depot,’ said Barry, ‘then I’ll give you a call with some possible times.’

  There were another ten minutes in which Gabriel went through more paperwork, writing in a blue foolscap notebook. His questions were about training and recruitment of drivers as well as the obvious detail about safety precautions. Eventually, he showed them to the door.

  He held out his hand to each in turn. Jenni couldn’t quite meet the candid, slightly anxious look in Gabriel’s brown eyes and kept her own on the floor as she briefly offered, then withdrew, her hand.

  In the course of the first trial, Jenni had come to know Gabriel, and also Eustace Hutton, QC, his ‘leader’ as they called him.

  Hutton’s room, where they next met, was piled with boxes and files, some of them on porters’ trolleys.

  ‘Sorry about the clutter,’ said Hutton waving his hand. ‘The price of success, I’m afraid. Upcoming briefs. Worst of all is I have to read the wretched things.’

  ‘We could go to my room,’ said Gabriel. ‘It’s certainly uncluttered by success.’

  Hutton ignored him. ‘Take a seat, Miss Fortune.’ He left no tactful pause between the two w
ords. ‘Right. Let’s see. We’ll have to ask you a few questions in court, I’m afraid.’

  This was what Jenni had feared: being on trial.

  Hutton looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘You do understand, don’t you, that there is no question of your having done anything wrong? The plaintiff’s action is against your employer. They allege that the safety precautions were inadequate.’

  ‘They’re no different than what they ever were,’ said Jenni.

  Hutton beamed. ‘Indeed. The core of our argument of course is that the transport provider is required to take reasonable precautions to ensure the safety of its passengers – or clients as, alas, I think they prefer to call them. Such precautions have been in place for many years and have not successfully been called into question before. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. I’m sure you remember the fire at King’s Cross in 1987, which—’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Jenni. It was the worst day in the history of the Tube: thirty-one people had died when a lighted match fell down the side of an escalator into an area that had not been cleaned since the thing was built in the 1940s. As well as a lot of mechanical grease, there was a nice bit of tinder supplied by sweet papers, discarded tickets and – the bit that stuck in Jenni’s memory – rat hairs.

  ‘The fact that fire precautions had previously been thought adequate doesn’t mean that they actually were adequate,’ said Hutton. ‘And more importantly from a legal point of view, it doesn’t mean that the subsequent public inquiry found that they were adequate either. Are you with me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There is a second difficulty, and that concerns the provisions of the Human Rights legislation which our government chose to bolt on to our existing legal system.’

  Mr Northwood coughed at this point. ‘I can probably explain that at some other—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Hutton. ‘Miss Fortune is clearly a highly intelligent young woman. The Human Rights Act derives from the European Convention on Human Rights, which was drawn up by the Allies in the wake of the Second World War. It was intended to help occupied countries with slightly less sophisticated legal systems than our own to make sure they observed certain proprieties when bringing Nazis to justice. A good idea in principle. Then our own government, fifty years later, fancied trying to graft it on to our own legal system, which has evolved quite satisfactorily on its own. It was like recalling all modern Aston Martins and fitting them with running boards and squeeze-horns. Are you with me?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Jenni.

  ‘The government loved legislation, and especially if imported from Europe. More the merrier. And of course anyone opposing something as pleasant-sounding as a human rights act risked appearing a bit of a cad. We tried to warn them that the two systems wouldn’t sit well together. I predicted that the only people who would profit from the mess would be the lawyers.’

  ‘And have you?’ said Jenni.

  ‘Enormously!’ boomed Hutton. ‘And the contradictions are such that many cases get heard three times. At first instance, in the Court of Appeal and in the House of Lords. I have three bites of the cherry.’

  Gabriel coughed. ‘I wouldn’t want Ms Fortune to think—’

  ‘My conscience is clear,’ said Hutton. ‘I wrote to the Attorney General and the chairman of the Bar Council, warning what would happen. I wrote two articles in legal journals and one in a national newspaper. Moreover—’

  ‘What it means in your case,’ said Mr Northwood, looking at Jenni, ‘is that quite a large amount of the argument will be what you might call hypothetical, about duties of care and who is responsible for what. And a lot will be about what previous judgments tell us. Not much will be about what actually happened. And I’d like to repeat that there’s absolutely no criticism of what you did. So when we ask you about the events, it’s just to establish the nature of your training. It’s not to suggest that you did anything wrong. You’re not on trial.’

  He smiled at her encouragingly, and Jenni nodded.

  Gabriel Northwood disliked his reputation for being melancholy and did what he could to undermine it. He sent humorous e-mails to Andy Warshaw, his tireless friend in Lincoln’s Inn; he made sure he didn’t subscribe to the Eustace Hutton view, that the modern world, with its short-termist, ignorant politicians was something to be mocked. He was careful not to slip into the Inner Temple way of talking, with its clubbish phrases, mispronounced Latin tags and unvoiced conviction that its members were cleverer than the rest of the world. Most of the barristers who lunched on the wooden benches in the dining hall seemed to view non-lawyers as wilful children, fit for an amused reproof; even solicitors, the ‘junior branch’ of the profession, were really more like accountants or management consultants, out there in modern offices and shiny suits. Gabriel made sure he read tabloid papers as well as ones with the Law Reports; he watched television, he saw new films and went to galleries where they showed video installations of a homeless naked man sitting in a chair for twenty minutes on end. He learned how to cook modern food from bestselling books and didn’t sniff at them because their authors had been on television; he liked the taste of chilli, ginger and garlic, with organic vegetables and flame-seared meat.

  Even with all these efforts, he never found his spirits lift to meet the day. The call of the alarm clock didn’t fill him – as he was pretty sure it filled Eustace Hutton, Samson the clerk, Andy Warshaw or even that train driver Jenni Fortune – with pleasurable anticipation and a desire to get things done. The day never looked like a challenge he could deal with, but more like a blankish stretch of time in whose margins he would seek small intellectual pleasures to get him through till home time and a bottle of wine in his cramped rooms in Chelsea.

  Partly, he supposed, it was because he seldom slept well. The undersheet, when he stood up from the bed, was corrugated from his night-long turning. Blister packs of pills curled on the bedside table – mild over-the-counter, risky prescription, useless homeopathic or American depth charges shipped by an online supplier in Tampa, Florida. He had looked with incredulous envy at the side of the bed occupied for five years off and on by Catalina, now gone. When she rose to make tea, the sheet and duvet bore almost no imprint of her passing – any more than a vellum envelope might be ruffled by the insertion and removal of a stiff invitation.

  Catalina ... there was a story or a reason in itself, Gabriel thought. Perhaps the loss of her had made him miserable for ever. She was married to a diplomat and Gabriel had met her when they’d found themselves next to one another at a charity dinner. He’d tried to entertain her as he believed he was charitably required to do, making routine conversation about the cause and why he supported it, the crumby bread rolls, the immigrant waitresses and what was in the news that day. Catalina’s wide eyes stayed on his face throughout; she seemed to listen, which was always encouraging, and told him about her childhood in Copenhagen, her American father, her Danish mother, her three sisters – whatever, as Jenni Fortune might have said. Gabriel did some conversational time with the woman on his other side, sat back and waited as the speeches began, to be followed by the silent auction and the quiz game hosted by a TV impressionist.

  He was surprised when Catalina tried to engage him further; the convention was that once you’d done a stint to right and left and the ‘entertainment’ had begun you were off the hook. But this woman, intent and humorous, seemed to want to go beyond politeness. Surely, Gabriel thought, no one he’d met at a public function could really be interested in his thoughts about local authority liability or the invasion of Iraq. So he started to listen more carefully to what Catalina herself was saying, to its harmonic line. She had a faint accent, a contralto voice that lifted into laughter of an unexpectedly girlish kind. He estimated she was about three years older than he was, maybe thirty-six. What struck him most, though, was her determination to tell him her story and the elegance with which she did so – amused by her own failings, it seemed, as wel
l as fond of all those sisters. She also had two children, though they featured less in her conversation. This surprised Gabriel, who had generally found young mothers keen to share tales of nursery or school. Her husband was with the German Embassy in London, though he spent much of his time travelling. At the end of the evening, Catalina made Gabriel write down his phone number on the back of her place card. And then she rang it.

  A year later, when they were lying in his bed one winter Saturday afternoon, she said, ‘I knew from the moment I sat down next to you. I just knew I had to have you, that I couldn’t rest until I had you in my bed.’

  He called her names that marvelled at her daring, but she replied with dignity that he was only the third lover she had had, the first having been a student, the second her husband; she was not the grande horizontale of his imagination, just a woman who had met her perfect lover and had had the wit to recognise him when chance placed them next to one another on cheap gilded banqueting chairs. Gabriel had felt uneasy about adultery, but Catalina told him emphatically that that problem was hers, not his, to wrestle with. She referred to her husband as she might refer to the day of the week or the Tube map, something given that had to be consulted; she neither disparaged nor repined over him, but told Gabriel when he would be in London and when she was required to be with him. Gabriel stopped asking for information about him, feeling that until the other man’s name (Erich) crossed his lips he had no true existence. He did wonder how Catalina, a rather transparent person in many ways, managed her double life, but she only said something about Chinese walls, compartments, and repeated that it was not for him to fret about.

  Love grew slowly in Gabriel until he saw, one day in the course of a tearful phone conversation, that it was too late; there was no way back. It felt as though the reserves he’d held in various accounts had been drained, electronically, without his knowledge, presenting him with the paper statement – the first he knew of it – that all he owned was now vested in Catalina. In some ways he was glad of this development, since the other holdings had been in largely trivial matters, the emotional equivalents of National Savings. On the other hand, wasn’t the conventional wisdom for diversification? Eggs/baskets?