Charles Snow - Time of Hope

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.’