Jane Gardam - Last Friends

Four jaws ceased to move. Four eyes stared. Terry said, ‘I believe that you are a firm of solicitors?’

‘Ah,’ said the young man, putting the sandwich down on a clean handkerchief on his desk. ‘Not exactly! Not for a few years. We are in a state of flux. But may we help you?’

‘You must know — have known Mr. Parable? Mr. Parable-Apse?’

‘No, sir. I’m afraid all the old partners in the firm are dead. We keep the names on the door in the old tradition. It is rather like the memorial friezes on the walls of the tombs of the Pharaohs. I am a very, very distant Apse. Thomas.’

‘And so this is — a set of Chambers?’

‘Well no. For years it seems to have been a solicitor’s office. One of a string of almost charitable centres for the poor — an early Legal Aid — set up by the founding Apse, a northerner. A lonely philanthropist who made a considerable amount of money.’

‘And he. .?’

‘Was killed in the war. We are in the process of being dispossessed by the Inn. Desperate for space. Work here is rather slow and no-one is really in charge. All the first Mr. Apse’s fortune was left to someone quite outside the family with a strange name, and he is dead.’

Very carefully Terry sat down on an upright chair with one leg missing and propped up by books. He said, ‘I should like to negotiate for these Chambers.’

‘I’m afraid it is quite impossible,’ said the woman in the seal-skin coat. She delicately tore the sandwich apart with her pink finger nails.

‘My name is Veneering.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘I was born Varenski.’

‘That has a ring ,’ she said.

‘It seems that I am the one who inherited Mr. Parable-Apse’s estate. Though he promised me only twenty-five pounds.’

After he had finished his sandwich the young man repeated, ‘I am Tom Apse, a very distant relation just keeping the premises open. And this is my secretary, Mrs. Flagg.’

She nodded and picked up her knitting. She said, ‘I’m afraid that buying these premises will be impossible, Mr. Varenski. We will of course inform the Inn of your offer, as we do everyone else who comes in. Our only safeguard up to now has been that Mr. Apse is an Apse , like on the door. To keep them off. . ’

‘And,’ said Tom Apse, ‘Upkeep for any tenant will be astronomical. And I have my Egyptology to consider, and Mrs. Flagg, well, she has Mr. Flagg. There is money though. I’m sorry sir, in spite of your interesting name — I’m sure we’ve heard it before somewhere — I’m afraid you won’t be able to make a case for yourself. Old Mr. Parable’s Slavonic heir was drowned at sea in 1941 on the evacuee liner The City of Benares .’

Terry stood up.

‘I am that evacuee,’ he said. ‘Except that I wasn’t. I had a premonition and good friends.’ (The world is singing! The light of heaven fills the sky! Dear God! Dear Sir. Dear Father Griesepert.) ‘I changed my name.’

Tom Apse and Mrs. Flagg also rose to their feet and the three shook hands.

‘At present I am without money,’ said Terry.

‘Then how do you think you can buy this?’

‘Borrow,’ said Terry. ‘There must be Security somewhere. And a proper search. There doesn’t seem, if I may say so, to be much paper-work about the office.’

‘We get few clients,’ said Tom Apse. ‘We pass them on. The Apse archive is very daunting.’

‘You must consider us Caretakers ,’ said Mrs. Flagg, ‘as the desultory fight drags on. The cupboards and the cellar are full of paper, though some of it is still dampish after the Blitz.’

She arranged her coat around her shoulders and on high heels rocked towards the wall where she opened a cupboard and watched several shelves of documents, tied up with tape that had once been red, vomit all over the floor.

‘Work to be done! We’ll start tomorrow,’ said Veneering. Now, the three of us are going to The Wig and Pen Club. Right NOW!’

‘Sir,’ said Tom Apse. ‘I’m sorry — but identification? We only have your word. How do we know who you are?’

‘You don’t,’ said Veneering. ‘Put your coat on fully Mrs. — I can’t call you “Mrs. Flagg”. What’s your — Daisy. Oh, pretty. Come on Tom.’

‘But money , sir?’

‘Mr. Parable lived on ten shillings a week. I haven’t broken into next week’s yet and I’ll be sleeping here free tonight if we can find a hammock.’

* * *

In The Wig and Pen Club in the Strand sat the red-lipped Libel Silk with friends. He rose at once and came across.

‘So delighted to see you again, Mr. — er — I have been sending out search-parties. I find that I have a place for you in my Chambers after all. My Clerk, The Great Augustus, is very cross with me for not making myself clear.’

‘Too late!’ Terry shouted, signalling a barman. ‘I’m fixed up. I’m off to discuss matters with the Treasurer of the Inn tomorrow morning. I seem to have inherited a sleeping set of Chambers of my own.’

‘You are fixed up? Already? You’ll find it a very lengthy business on your own. Take years. Ask anyone about the Parable-Apse fiasco for instance. A disgrace. Dragging on. Dickensian.’

‘Well, I have an inheritance looming. Fallen, by the grace of God, into my lucky lap. Meet my secretary Mrs. Flagg — and my — junior clerk — Mr. Tom Apse. I have a good senior clerk already in mind.’

‘I’m afraid Mr. — er—, you have simply no idea! It will take a life-time.’

‘Yes. But I’m young. I have wide connections, you know, especially in the Far East. And thanks for the interview. And thank Augustus. Tell him I shan’t forget him.’

‘I don’t forget anything,’ he added.

‘And now Mrs. Flagg and I are off to find a bed.’

Dizzily on the pavement Daisy Flagg burst into joyous tears. ‘Oh, come on ,’ said Terry, spinning her around, ‘Beautiful coat. Is it real?’

‘It’s only coypu,’ she wailed, happily. ‘It’s only a superior kind of rat.’

‘When I come into my Kingdom,’ said Terence Veneering of Parable Chambers, Inns of Court, ‘You shall have sables.’

And so Terry Veneering was established in his own Chambers as if by angelic intervention. And so began the long, slow, interminable legal process of disinterring his Parable inheritance.

He was never one to reflect on the meaning of life. Or the shape of his own life. He knew that from childhood he presented the figure of one certain to succeed, charm, delight and conquer. Not for him the grave, moral pace of the gentlemanly Edward Feathers.

But had he ever considered doing anything as dull as writing an autobiography he would certainly not have chosen as a pivotal point. He would have chosen the day some six months later when he had had to scrape the bottom of the judicial barrel down at the Brighton County Court alongside the beginner, little Fred Fiscal-Smith, and against — needless to say — Edward Feathers: the case of the over-sexed lion-tamer’s apprentice. For this was the day he realised that he had no stomach for Crime, even if it had not been so badly paid.

Stepping out of Victoria station at the end of that dreadful day his heart sunk even further, for in London there was fog. London fogs were getting worse again. During the War coal had been rationed. Now coal was back and so were the fogs that swirled about the East and West End. They nuzzled and licked and enwrapped everyone in yellowish limp fleece. They stained your clothes, your hair, got up your nose and down your ears. Your chest wheezed. When you sneezed, your handkerchief was dark ochre. You muffled your mouth. You coughed and coughed.

It was only when they stepped out of the Brighton Belle on Platform One that the three lawyers realised that, during their day in breezy, wholesome Brighton, the fog in London that had hung about for days had reached Dickensian proportions. It had turned into ‘The Great Fog’. It might last for days. It was also getting dark and there was no transport of any kind to get them home.