A Week in December (11 page)

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 words. '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 well 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?

What it meant was that he wanted to be with her all day long. It wasn't enough to look forward to Friday night, when Erich was invariably away, and to maybe one other meeting snatched excitingly in the course of the week. He counted all the time he wasn't with her lost. He wondered at what point he'd forfeited control. She had seemed to outrun him by so much at the beginning that he'd felt uneasy about an inequality of passion, not believing he would ever feel as much, though happy at the same time that he seemed less exposed to harm. He viewed her with a detached amusement that seemed both to frustrate and charm her. 'It's as though you don't quite believe in me,' she said once.

'I'm not sure I do,' said Gabriel. 'Someone like you doesn't happen to someone like me. The norm of life is a sort of qualified failure. And I was quite happy with that. I've learned to live with it, like everyone else. You don't expect your perfect woman to sit down next to you one day. And then to ring and come round to your flat in beautiful clothes bringing wine and flowers and--'

'I am real,' she said.

'But still hard to believe in.'

When he went to his mother's Hampshire village at Christmas he felt he wasn't present in the bare garden where he tidied up the last leaves and the broken flowerpots for her. He was peeling back his padded glove to see his watch and work out what Catalina was doing in Copenhagen, in the family house near St Frederik's Church, ringed by verdigrised statues. The pie his own mother heated for supper on Christmas Eve became in his imagination the feast of sweet-cured fish, roast goose, fried apple slices and 'glogg', a red-wine punch Catalina had lovingly described to him. He could barely spare a glimpse for the choir in church, needing both eyes to scrutinise his mobile-phone screen for the promised text, in case one eye alone might miss the season's greeting, the only one he cared about: '1 message received'.

Catalina made anything seem possible, or more than that, irradiated. Since almost every aspect of their love affair, beginning with its beginning, had been improbable, so her later miracles, such as making the evening appear worth living for, the day worth rising to greet, were accepted by him as mundane stuff, well within her compass. When he tried to work out where he'd lost himself, yielded control or whatever it was he had surrendered, the answer didn't seem to relate to himself or to his past; it seemed only to be about her. He was enslaved by it now, as a criminal client in his early days as a barrister had once told Gabriel he was enslaved by heroin; whatever in their inner landscape had predisposed them both to dependency was now beside the point.

To be that much in love was not good for you. It wasn't healthy. The likelihood of what doctors called a 'good outcome' was slight, and this much Gabriel recognised even at the time. There was a flaw in the heart of most of the Western books he'd read, the plays he'd seen, and it had shaped the way he'd come to think about himself. Centuries of occidental culture seemed to suggest that the greatest emotions were the best: this love for another, this desperate passion, was the earthly happiness that you should aim for, and those who never found it had in some way failed in life; the minority who'd known, and the even smaller number who'd secured it, or together watched it develop into something less exhausting, were the ones who had done best. At the sound of the Last (secular) Trump, theirs would be the laurels and the crowns.