Charles Snow - Time of Hope

The first time it happened I read for several afternoons in the Inn library, wrote my ‘opinion’ with care, saw Getliffe flicker his eyes over it and say ‘You’re coming on!’, and then heard nothing more about it. But the second time I did hear something more. Again I had presented the opinion as professionally as I could. Then one morning Getliffe, according to his custom, invited all three of us pupils to attend a conference. The solicitors and clients sat round his table; Getliffe, his pipe put away, serious and responsible, faced them. He began the conference with his usual zest. ‘I hope you don’t think that I’m a man to raise false hopes,’ he said earnestly. ‘One would rather shout the winners out at the back door. But frankly I’ve put in some time on this literature, and I’m ready to tell you that we should be just a little bit over cautious if we didn’t go to court.’ To my astonishment, he proceeded firmly to give the substance of my note. In most places he had not troubled to alter the words.

At the end of that conference, Getliffe gave me what my mother would have called an ‘old-fashioned’ look.

He repeated this manoeuvre two or three times, before, during one of our afternoon tête-à-têtes, he said ‘You’re doing some nice odd jobs for me, aren’t you?’

I was delighted. He was so fresh and open that one had to respond.

‘I wanted to tell you that,’ said Getliffe. ‘I wanted to tell you something else,’ he added with great seriousness. ‘It’s not fair that you shouldn’t get any credit. One must tell people that you’re doing some of the thinking. One’s under an obligation to push your name before the public.’

I was more delighted still. I expected a handsome acknowledgement at the next conference.

I noticed that, just before the conference, Getliffe looked at the other pupils and not at me. But I still had high hopes. I still had them, while he recounted a long stretch from my latest piece of devilling. He had muddled some of it. I thought. Then he stared at the table, and said ‘Perhaps one ought to mention the help one sometimes gets from one’s pupils. Of course one suggests a line of investigation, one reads their billets-doux, one advises them how to express themselves. But you know as well as I do, gentlemen, that sometimes these young men do some of the digging for us. Why, there’s one minor line of argument in this opinion — it’s going too far to say that I shouldn’t have discovered it, in fact I had already got my observations in black and white, but I was very glad indeed, I don’t mind telling you, when my Mr Ellis hit upon it for himself.’

Getliffe hurried on.

I was enraged. That night, with Charles March, I thrashed over Getliffe’s character and my injuries. This was the first time he had taken me in completely. I was too much inflamed, too frightened of the future, to concede that Getliffe took himself in too. Actually, he was a man of generous impulses, and of devious, cunning, cautious afterthoughts. In practice, the afterthoughts usually won. I had not yet found a way to handle him. The weeks and months were running on. I did not know whether he would keep any of his promises, or how he could be forced.

He could not resist making promises — any more than he could resist sliding out of them. Charles March, who was a pupil in another set of Chambers, often went with me to hear him plead: one day, in King’s Bench 4, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe was only just in time. In he hurried, dragging his feet, slightly untidy and flurried — looking hunted as always, his wig not quite clean nor straight, carrying papers in his hand. As soon as he began to speak, he produced the impression of being both nervous and at ease. He was not a good speaker, nothing like so good as his opponent in this case; the strident note stayed in his voice, but it sounded thin even in that little court; yet he was capturing the sympathy of most people there.

At lunchtime, walking, in the gardens, Charles March and I were scornful of his incompetence, envious of his success, incredulously angry that he got away with it.

That night in his room I was able to congratulate him on winning the case. He looked at me with his most responsible air.

‘One is glad to pull off something for the clients’ sakes,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest fault to forget that they’re the people most concerned. One has to be careful.’

‘Still, it’s very nice to win,’ I said.

Getliffe’s face broke into a grin.

‘Of course it’s nice,’ he said. ‘It gives me a bigger kick than anything in the world.’

‘I expect I shall find it the same,’ I said. ‘If ever I manage it.’

Getliffe laughed merrily.

‘You will, my boy, you will. You’ve got to remember that this ancient Inn wasn’t born yesterday. It was born before HM Edward Three. No one’s ever been in a hurry since. You’ve just got to kick your heels and look as though you like it. We’ve all been through it. It’s good for us in the end. But I’ll tell you this, Eliot’ — he said confidentially — ‘though I don’t often tell it to people in your position, that I don’t see why next year you shouldn’t be able to keep yourself in cigarettes. And even a very very occasional cigar.’ He smiled happily at me. ‘When all’s said and done, it’s a good life,’ he said.

Years afterwards, I realized that, when I was his pupil, I crassly underestimated Getliffe as a lawyer. It was natural for me and Charles March to hold our indignation meetings in the Temple gardens; but, though it was hard for young men to accept, some of Getliffe’s gifts were far more viable than ours. We overvalued power and clarity of mind, of which we both had a share, and we dismissed Getliffe because of his muddiness. We had not seen enough to know that, for most kinds of success, intelligence is a very minor gift. Getliffe’s mind was muddy, but he was a more effective lawyer than men far cleverer, because he was tricky and resilient, because he was expansive with all men, because nothing restrained his emotions, and because he had a simple, humble, tenacious love for his job.

It was too difficult, however, for Charles March and me, in the intellectual arrogance of our youth, to see that truth, much less accept it. And I had a good deal to put up with. I had just discovered Getliffe’s comic and pathological meanness with money. He had a physical aversion from signing a cheque or parting with a coin. In the evening, after a case, we occasionally went to the Feathers for a pint of beer. His income was at least four thousand a year, and mine two hundred, but somehow I always paid.

My pupil’s year was a harassing one. I was restless. Often I was unhappy. Those nights with Charles March were my only respite from anxiety. They were also much more. Charles became one of the closest friends of my life, and he introduced me into a society opulent, settled, different from anything I had ever known. His story, like George Passant’s, took such a hold on my imagination that I have chosen to tell it in full, separated from my own. All that I need say here is that, during my first year in London, I began to dine with Charles’ family in Bryanston Square and his relatives in great houses near. It seemed my one piece of luck in all those months.

I had to return from those dinner parties to my bleak flat. Apart from the evenings with Charles, I had no comfort at all. On other nights I used to stay late in Chambers, and then walk up Kingsway and across Bloomsbury, round Bedford Square under the peeling plane trees, past the restaurants of Charlotte Street, up Conway Street to number thirty-seven, where there was a barber’s shop on the ground floor and my flat on the third. Whenever I threw open the door, I looked at the table. The light from the landing fell across it, before I could reach the switch. There might be a letter or telegram from Sheila.