Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was holding forth on the properties of medium-density fiberboard when Emily stood up.

Mother, I have to make a phone call, she said.

Without looking at her, she addressed her mother as “Mother,” a formality unknown to me, and which seemed odder still when I heard James call her “Mummy.” Is this how these people speak to each other?

If you must, darling, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

Emily’s exit tilted the balance of gravitational forces in the room, as if I had been a small satellite of hers. After all, I was in that room because of her.

She and I had been seeing each other for several months by then. I’m not sure you can call it a courtship; after exchanging emails and telephone calls, when I was still in New York, we began meeting up from time to time, when I came back to London. This went on for well over a year. An anthropologist will tell you that she was of a higher status than me. So I played hard to get and kept conversation on the level of ideas until one day outside a restaurant, where we’d had an excellent meal, she reached for my lapels and kissed me. I’m digressing. The point I want to make is that a few months of dating had been time enough for the ring of her cell phone — her use of it, the furtiveness — to condition me, condition my body, to respond with anxiety, but even so I persisted in telling myself that her furtiveness was only the impression left by a clumsy demonstration of good manners. She removed herself to make and take calls because she was polite, but she could do it better.

I understand you’re also a lawyer, said James.

Just starting out, I replied.

Is it everything you expected it to be? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

I didn’t expect much. I hoped it would be challenging.

Is it?

It’s still too soon to say, but the signs are good. Some things are a little confusing.

What are they?

This and that. I’m not really sure how to describe it.

Do try.

The social rules, I said.

Yes? she said, drawing me out.

It’s another world, isn’t it? The English bar, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns of Court. They’re all very odd institutions, don’t you think?

I’m not sure I follow.

It’s so far from the world I knew growing up. For that matter, it’s also a world away from Wall Street. I sense a lot of rules I don’t know, rules of conduct, rules about what to say and how to say it and what not to say, rules that everyone knows, the lawyers and judges, though they don’t seem to know that they know the rules, as if sensibility to the rules is seeded in the womb, an instinct coming before awareness. Those rules aren’t, as far as I can tell, written down anywhere.

Isn’t that true of every walk of life, every world , as you put it?

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern knows, I thought, that I had worked on Wall Street; neither she nor James asked why I had referred to Wall Street. Why should it surprise me that Emily had spoken to them about me? But it did. Will they ask about the world I knew growing up ? Aren’t they even curious? What else had Emily said to them?

There’s a question of degree. On Wall Street, for instance, the rules for traders like me were pretty straightforward: Make the firm money and you’ll be fine.

And at the bar all you have to do is win cases, surely?

Even if both sides in a case are represented by the top two barristers in the country, one of them still has to lose.

You only have to do well, then.

I hope so. It’s still early days. All I can say is that I have the impression there are things being said — and I mean even the stuff of idle banter in the corridors of chambers — things that mean more than the mere words being used to say them, and there are things that remain unsaid that possibly no words could convey.

From Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s perspective, getting on in legal practice was of course only about winning cases. The rest of it was a given to her, something to which she could only have been oblivious. But my experience at the bar had already confirmed to me that I would never be granted that security.

At the end of the first quarter of the year of training, which is to say right near the beginning, I was made aware of the presence of overarching social rules, if not their content. Edmund Staughton, the chair of the pupilage committee, gave me the first-quarter performance review. I sat in his chambers on an armless wooden chair across a leather-topped oak desk, repro through and through, as he leaned back in his capacious seat.

Zafar, he said, might I give you a word of advice? Perhaps — and I trust you’ll appreciate that this is meant well — perhaps you could conduct yourself with a little more reserve and even with a touch more deference toward senior barristers in and around chambers. That’s all I wanted to say, and I don’t think we need to dwell on the point any more than that.

I thought I saw embarrassment preventing him from elaborating; I hoped it was embarrassment. Of course there were certain things, particular moments, to which, I imagined, he might have been referring.

There was, I remembered, an awkward discussion with a senior barrister — or was it an exchange of monologues? — in the dining hall of one of the Inns of Court. There were a few other senior barristers in the group, and I happened to be there among them for a hot lunch late in an English autumn. A portly man, this barrister, but he had an oddly delicate touch as he made his way around the plate before him, knife and fork pinched between fingers, his movements gliding with improbable finesse over the heaped rubble of food.

So many of those lawyers look the same at that age, the late fifties. Quite a few sherries, g&ts, and more or less everything, so much consumption leaving a red hue in their faces, and the prospect of gout.

He explained that the other day he was reading a book and came across BCE . Have you come across BCE ? he asked the table generally.

BCE , he continued, means Before the Common Era ; that’s before Christ to you and me. And instead of AD , this book referred to CE, Common Era . Now of course I know this political-correctness business is a trifle overstated, but don’t you think BCE is stretching things somewhat? I mean, why can’t they say BC and AD ? Why not say that? It seems to me we’re being forced to adopt a language just to accommodate overly developed sensitivities.

One of the other barristers muttered agreement and the others plowed on with their meals.

How are you being forced? I asked.

An atmosphere of politically correct intimidation, he replied. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head, but that’s the beauty of it. Getting you to change the way you talk about things just by intimidation and all because certain words don’t suit them. Blast! We should jolly well say what we mean and not pussyfoot about because someone’s so preciously sensitive.

Another barrister glanced at me. My attention remained on my lunch.

Once the topic had edged off the table, I offered a comment on something that had made the press just that day, a report by a consulting firm on the economics of the bar and cost-effectiveness.

So, I said, the bar is anticompetitive, it seems, although I suppose that was never in doubt. Was it ever justified? Isn’t that the question? The Bar Council’s restriction on the supply of barristers is obviously anticompetitive. It’s a closed shop like any trade union, I said, catching the eye of the portly senior barrister.

He winced. Was it because he’d been reduced to vulgar membership in a trade union?

And, I continued, the requirement to hire a barrister, an extra lawyer, before you can take a matter to court, that’s just plain absurd. I’m sure American companies here must be baffled, to say the least. Some of them are probably asking themselves why they shouldn’t let their contracts be governed by New York law and steer clear of England altogether.