Alchemy (16 page)

I uncorked the bottle and found two glasses.

‘Cheers!’

‘Salut. Tell me more about what you thought of this evening. Have you ever been chased by a Baron Ochs?’

‘There was a lecturer at Sussex, typical groper. Thought I was gamine or game. I wasn’t sure which. What about you?’

‘Oh, all the time. That’s what dinner parties are for. Footsie under the table and a hand up your skirt. And for getting on, making deals, networking of course. It’s all part of the game.’

‘Doesn’t anyone complain or say no?’

‘What would be the point? And who to when everyone’s doing it? You’ll have to learn some of the tricks yourself if you want to get on. Maybe I should teach you, take you in hand as they say.’

I felt like someone brought up in the forest by gentle wolves who now had to learn to talk, and the bitter ways of humankind. Helen took a packet of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of her bag and lit up. The little bright eye in the middle of the lighter, diamond or glass, winked at me. ‘I’ll need an ashtray if you don’t want me to flick ash all over your floor.’

‘I’ll find you something.’

‘You don’t smoke, I take it?’

‘Only an occasional cigar.’ I rummaged in the cupboard under the sink and came back with a saucer. Somewhere the temperature had dropped. Was she bored? Had I blown it?

‘So what did you think of Sophie?’

‘She’s an old-fashioned ingenue. He’s had his mistress but she has to be sweetness and light. At least that’s changed. There was only one girl I was at uni with who was a virgin, my best friend actually, and even she got it off in the end with a boring fellow student.’

‘And you?’

‘That’s a long story.’

‘OK. Another time then. I’d better go. Jim doesn’t worry about me but I had to borrow his car. Mine was being serviced and they hadn’t finished with it. So he’ll be twitchy until I bring his home safely’ She stubbed out her cigarette and tilted back her glass. ‘By the way, I’ve fixed for you to join him the next time he’s in court. His secretary will send you down the brief. He’s very good. You can learn a lot from watching and listening to him.’

She stood up and brushed at her skirt where some flakes of ash had settled. I put down my glass and stood too. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘My pleasure.’ I turned towards the door.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’

‘Are you sure you want me to?’

‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’

I moved towards her. Helen was wearing high heels that meant I had to reach up a little with my lips to find hers. It began as a chaste kiss, friends might almost have exchanged but then I heard her gasp a little, her mouth opened and our arms went out as if we had to hold each other up from falling in a tangle on the bed.

Helen drew back. ‘I think we’d better stop this or Jim will really have to worry about his car.’ She walked away from me to the door. Should I ask when I could see her again? We were out in the hall, the quaintly named ‘common parts’. Then I was standing on the pavement as she opened the car door and got in. There must be something I could say. She switched on the engine and wound down the window.

‘I’ll ring you. Soon.’

‘I’ll get a more decent bottle for next time.’

‘Some gin would be great.’ With a wave she drove off.

‘How are you?’ It was Helen’s voice next day on the internal phone. Was that risky? She hadn’t said her name or: ‘It’s me.’ She knew she didn’t need to.

‘Lonely,’ I risked. ‘What about you?’

‘A bit dazed I think. My mind doesn’t seem to be working properly. Someone’s at my door. I’ll call you again.’ She put down the receiver. It was weird knowing she was there in the building, that I only had to walk out into the corridor and I might bump into her heading for the loo, that I could climb the stairs or take the lift and knock on her door. I wouldn’t, of course. This was a delicate moment when she was maybe regretting
last night, wondering what she was getting into and where it could go.

Which of us was seducing the other or were we both the hunter and the hunted, the willing Leda in the swan’s clasp, the Venus trap for her many eager lovers whose goings-on adorn the walls of palaces and galleries and still have power to bring a blush or a flush, especially to those falling in love?

My head was full of half-remembered lines, rags of verse, unsatisfying scraps from the feast I’d left when I switched to the law.

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barques of yore…

I wish I were where Helen lies

Night and day on me she cries…

And most potently:

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Thy lips suck up my soul…

It was as if my memory had been storing them up with some terrifying foresight by a kind of osmosis, against the time when they would leap out at me like a tune that unspools again and again in your head no matter how much you try to press the stop button or chase it away with another. Except that I wasn’t trying. I was happy to sink into the repetition of her name, to wade out into its clear green waters and drown.

At lunchtime I walked to Covent Garden and bought a CD of
Der Rosenkavalier
in the Royal Opera House shop: highlights with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marschallin and Christa Ludwig as Octavian. That night, alone in my flat where I could still see her sitting in my armchair, the smoke rising from her
cigarette in an incense prayer to some goddess, could still taste her mouth with its tang of wine and that same smoke, I played it endlessly, obsessively, cutting out the bits that said nothing to me, until I could sing along in my head with the bits that did. I finished the bottle of wine and fell asleep on my bed, to wake shakily seeing it was three o’clock, and undress, drink a glass of water and fall asleep again to the Marschallin’s aria near the end of the first act, her outpouring of melancholy and the anticipation of love lost.

Helen didn’t call the next day. I played it cool and didn’t ring her but by the evening I was desperate, prey to
the plus ça change
of Shakespeare’s sonnet:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

I rang Joel and signed him up for an evening in the local pub so that I shouldn’t be left drinking at home alone. I didn’t feel like a club where there’d be dancing. We sat over our pints revisiting the Gateshead we’d neither of us seen in a decade, wondering if we could keep up the payments on our flats. Joel’s in Norbury was much cheaper than mine in Earl’s Court and as an accountant he was already earning more but I’d had a little nest egg from Nana I’d been able to put down as deposit. We talked about the property boom and should we sell now.

‘You’d only have to buy somewhere for just as much unless you got out of London. But then you’d never get back.’ It was the scene that was the great draw for Joel only equalled by Manchester, but the attraction of the northern Piccadilly set was offset by the thought of starting again, finding a job, somewhere to live, without friends. I didn’t tell him why I specially needed his company tonight. Tomorrow was Friday. If Helen
didn’t ring then there was the whole weekend to get through not knowing how she was feeling, whether she was regretting the whole thing.

Joel went off to catch the last bus to Norbury while I wandered back along the Old Brompton Road, under the lamplit silhouettes of the plane trees, their branches heavy with the broad palmed leaves of August, coated in a thin film of carbon from the constant flow of traffic beneath them, their bark starting its annual peel of fibrous scabbed patches, a scurf of dead cells. If she didn’t ring I would have to look for another job. It would be impossible to inhabit the same building day after day with all the likelihood of a chance encounter: the eyes cast down, a brief hallo as our bodies brushed past each other. Or worse, nothing, her eyes looking straight ahead without acknowledgement.

There was a stack of files on my desk in the morning, neat, fat dark-blue ring-binders with the firm’s name across each. Inside the first was a small yellow sticker. ‘What are you doing on Monday evening? I’ll ring. H.’

I shut the cover again quickly in case Drew should spot the bright yellow slip. Only when he left the room to go to the loo did I open it again and make sure I’d read it all right. I studied the writing but couldn’t make anything much of it, except that it was fluent, middle sized with no obvious quirks. Before Drew came back I detached the sticker and reapplied it to that day’s page in my diary. Dimly I remembered something about Queen Elizabeth I putting away Leicester’s final note, sent as he was dying, with ‘His last letter’ written on it. But maybe I’d made that up. Anyway this was Helen’s first and perhaps last too. It was already a relic to be preserved.

James Chalmers’ secretary was on the line. ‘Did you get the brief and the witness statements? Could you study them over the weekend? The case starts on Tuesday but Mr Chalmers would like you to attend a short conference at two this afternoon and
then a fuller one on Monday when you’re more familiar with the details.’

That took care of my weekend. I’d have to work like hell to get my head round the stuff, not to let Helen down, after all she’d recommended me so her head was on the line too. I’d dazzle everyone with my brilliance, especially the boss, her husband. While we discussed the case I’d be thinking: I kissed her.

‘I see you’ve got the call to higher things,’ Drewpad picked up the first of the files. ‘When does the trial open?’

‘Tuesday I think, but the boss wants me for a conference this afternoon.’

‘You’d better get used to it Drew; you’re on your own from now on.’ He was only half joking.

‘No boss can come between me and my buddy. Let’s have a drink tonight to start the weekend. It’s the last one I’ll get until I’ve got a grip on this lot.’

Dutifully I presented myself at Chalmers’ office, joining a group of three others, apart from himself, eager young suits who’d been taking the witness statements. All I could do was listen while they sparred above my head, flashing their findings and opinions and probably wondering why the hell I’d been brought in. At the end Chalmers said: ‘Is there anything you want to add, Jade?’

‘I think I’d rather listen today. Maybe by Monday I’ll have had some thoughts.’ I couldn’t wait to get back to Drew, realising suddenly as I made my way along the anonymous corridors that neither of us would get on unless we became as thrusting as the rest, that as Helen had said, rising up the hierarchy depended as much on performance as knowledge, and maybe it was already too late for Drew.

‘I’m thinking of moving on,’ he confided as we sat in a corner of the Mitre, leaving the pavement outside and the standing room by the bar to the noisy crew of overgrown kids let out of school but not ready to go home yet. ‘I can’t see any future for
me with S & F. You’re going to be okay. Someone up there obviously loves you.’

‘I haven’t done anything to earn it.’

‘I’m not blaming you. These things have their own mysterious dynamic. I just haven’t connected. I’ve been there four years. It’s time to move on.’

‘Have you put out any feelers?’

‘A few.’ He looked down at his pint of lager.

‘I think you should.’

‘Nobody may want me. That’s why I’d rather you didn’t say anything at S & F.’

‘As if I would. But of course there’ll be firms wanting to snap you up, with your qualifications and experience.’

‘I might go back into company practice where I can make something of my own. How did it go with the boss man today?’

‘I tried not to show my complete ignorance of the case, the procedure, you name it. I just hope I’m better briefed by Monday.’

‘Lucky you. I wish I could spend a quiet weekend with work instead of having to entertain the cousins from Bangalore, looking for a nice girl for their son and expecting me to be the marriage broker when I haven’t been able to find one for myself.’

Drew’s life was a succession of visiting family from all over the world, all believing succour could be had in Maida Vale for their diverse needs: education, employment, finance, marriage. After a couple of drinks we set off for the nearest tube where a handwritten notice warned us of a signal failure that meant the line wasn’t going further than Marble Arch. I left him staring at the criss-cross coloured lines of the underground map, trying to figure out a way home.

There had been no call from Helen as promised in the note. Maybe after my inarticulate performance at the conference, James had convinced her I wasn’t worth bothering with. I did myself a fry-up of egg, tomatoes, mushrooms on toast, decided I’d better stay off the booze for at least an hour and opened the first file.

It was one of our media cases: the division and stripping of assets after an independent TV company had succumbed to the tentacular embrace of a corporate. Jobs and contracts had been scrapped and now those who’d gone down in the rationalisation were trying to claw something back. We were representing the corporate Goliath. Not a pretty sight since he also had the sling. I set to with my magic marker on the statement of case.

The phone rang about eight. It was Helen.

‘I didn’t know you had my number.’

‘Oh I have my ways. Are you on for Monday?’

‘Sure.’

‘James is out at a Silks’ dinner. He thought you were very cool.’

‘Just plain ignorance I’m afraid.’

‘Anyway you went down OK. What are you doing now?’

‘Sitting here boning up on the paperwork. And you?’

‘I’ve had some people in for drinks. They’ve just gone. I’m going to have a long soak. We’re off to the country tomorrow; a wedding in Berkshire.’

‘I’ll be stuck with more of this.’ I didn’t want to tell her this weekend was also Sunday lunch with Linda and Rob, Roger, Jenny and the children, the dog and cat, in the suburbs.

‘I thought we’d go to the movies on Monday. Jim’s out and there’s nothing I particularly want to hear. Is that OK with you?’