Exposure Read online

  God the great artist, Alistair thought, with His devastating sense of proportion.

  He said goodbye to the other two and to a few loitering colleagues as he made his way into the lifts and back through the rotating doors. When he walked out, it was dusk, a melancholy London early evening, with a faint metallic taste in the air like dust from the silver grey sky. There were lights on in the pubs along Old Bailey and Fleet Street—the Magpie and Stump, the Old Bell, the Tipperary, Ye Olde Cock Tavern. They implied festivity, leisure, the bachelor's freedom to hang around after work.

  Suddenly he felt reluctant to go home. The thought of having supper with Rosalind made him lonely and sad. Then he remembered that Anne and David Nicholson and the Grants were coming for dinner. Peter Grant had a new wife in her mid-thirties. It was all rather uncomfortable—Erica was devastated and there were torn loyalties. The women were appalled, threatened. Alistair wondered how Peter had the energy—or the inclination—to begin a marriage and a family all over again in his fifties. It required such faith, such optimism.

  He turned into Hare Place, an alleyway that led from Fleet Street, near the Royal Courts of Justice, into Mitre Court and onwards into the Inner Temple. Then he heard a voice say, 'Hello, there,' and he looked up to see the unmistakable figure of Karen Jennings coming towards him. He couldn't think what she was doing there.

  In fact, Karen had left her bags at Randall Schaeffer's chambers that morning and had returned for them after court. He nodded as he passed her. 'Good evening.'

  She giggled behind him.' Very friendly,' she called. 'Nice chatting to you.'

  He stopped and turned around. 'Forgive me. I—it's not allowed. We can't speak outside the courtroom, I'm afraid.'

  She wrinkled her nose mischievously—as if he had suggested she ought not to have a second helping of pudding. 'Oh. Why not?'

  'It's not ethical if you're involved in a case. Those are the rules. I'm sorry—it's nothing personal.' He wondered why on earth she would want to talk to him anyway. He must leave immediately.

  She walked a few steps towards him, widening her laughing eyes, 'But no one can see, can they?' she said.

  He felt painfully self-conscious. Of course he must seem absurd to her. He was also aware that at any moment a colleague might come round the corner and discover him talking to a witness. Again he told himself he must go back to chambers immediately.

  And yet he stood still.

  She chewed her gum for a few seconds, 'D'you want to come for a drink?'

  'A drink? I can't. It really isn't allowed.'

  At the end of the alleyway, behind her, he could see the cars moving slowly, unreal. In the flat light they were like a film of London traffic projected onto a screen. It was the indistinct time of the evening, when the quality of the light and the subtle muffling of city noise could have belonged just as easily to the early morning. He stood there for a moment, lost. Karen kicked her tiny high-heeled shoe against the cobblestones with a sudden, sharp movement and he felt himself wake up. This was a busy passageway and anyone might walk down it at any minute. He said briskly, 'Well, I should be going. Good evening.'

  'Oh, come on. Are you sure? What about if we went somewhere no one could see us? Then would it be all right?'

  'No, it's really not possible. It's not ethical. One can't be seen to be conversing—'

  She smiled and interrupted him, 'Yes, I know. You said. But if we weren't seen—'

  He glanced behind him, having imagined he heard footsteps. Why did he not leave immediately? He really must leave immediately.

  Karen chewed her gum and opened her handbag. He watched her, with stunned curiosity, as she brought out a pot of Hp balm, put her little finger into it and smoothed it over her lips. He could smell ... what was it? Artificial strawberries. It reminded him of his daughter Sophie and her friends, an indistinct tumble of girls coming out of the steamy bathroom with towels on their heads, trying not to giggle in their face packs. Fourteen years old and synthetic-fruit scented. He missed his daughter with a kind of physical hunger. It was a father's hunger for that blonde-haired, green-eyed benediction she used to give him when she threw her girl's arms round his neck.

  'I just thought it would be nice to have a drink with you,' Karen said. 'That's all.'

  'With me? I mean— why?'

  She laughed and shook her hair off her shoulders.

  He started violently as a group walked past the mouth of the alleyway, one of the men saying, 'Relax, James, I'm agreeing with you—I'm not surprised the jury didn't find him credible, either, to be honest ...' And somehow the strain of bearing this imminent danger added to the song of her lilting, girlish laughter.

  She said, 'Why wouldn't I want a drink with you? What's wrong with you? You're interesting. You're the first lawyer I've ever met—except Randall Schaeffer.' She crossed her eyes in mockery of his poor sight and Alistair felt a pang of sympathy for his old colleague. The young were so vicious. 'Can't you see that might be interesting?' she said.

  Did she want to discuss a possible career in the law, for God's sake? It was all very unsettling. He felt embarrassed and—old. Increasingly he found himself worrying that he was the victim of a joke. And, aside from these faintly paranoid concerns, at any given second anyone might discover them talking!

  She laughed at him again. 'Don't you ever do something just because it's interesting?'

  'No,' he said. 'And I'm afraid I'm too old for that formula to sound as exciting to me as it does to you.'

  At this, Karen's manner altered. She tilted her head on one side. 'Oh, OK, whatever. Is it any wonder I need a drink, though? You gave me hell in there today. You were really scary, you know? Oh, I see, you think it's funny, do you?' she said.

  'I'm sorry—I was just wondering if I'd ever seen anyone look less scared.'

  'Oh, that's all front—that's all bullshit. We're all bullshitters, aren't we—in our own ways?' She spat her gum into the gutter and grinned.

  'Yes,' he said.

  Any moment, anyone, he told himself,'Langford, talking to a witness

  'Just one drink between old bullshitters, then. How about that?' She winked at him and he smiled involuntarily. 'Look, I don't want to discuss the sodding case anyway. I'm bored stiff of it.'

  'There truly isn't anywhere we could go.'

  'God, you haven't got much imagination, have you? For a brilliant barrister.'

  'Barristers aren't required to have imagination. We wouldn't want to lose hold of the facts.'

  She tapped her shoe again on the cobblestones—from side to side, as if she was about to dance. 'Oh, yes, but there's other bits in your brain—other than the barrister bits. You haven't got to be anywhere, have you?'

  'No,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean—' Who had told her he was 'brilliant', he wondered.

  ' Well, then. We could go somewhere you won't know anyone.'

  Alistair tried to imagine this place. His mind was immediately crowded to suffocation with a hundred friendly salutes and falling smiles of confusion from nearby tables, with friends putting on their wives' coats, catching sight of him: 'Isn't that Alistair? Alistair Langford?'

  'Where? Good God! Yes, but who's he with, darling? Don't wave, for God's sake.'

  Karen drew in her breath sharply. 'I know. A hotel. Why would anyone who lives in London be in a hotel?'

  He laughed—at what he felt sure was the spontaneous presentation of a tried and tested formula. He suspected there were other jewels in this box—'You went back and bought it for me? That expensive dress?'—and so on. Then, unexpectedly, he felt a brandy-like flood of warmth through his body and realized this was what it felt like to contemplate the idea of a drink with a girl in her twenties with sooty mascara and comic-book curves.

  She said, 'We could go to the Ridgeley, couldn't we? By the river. That place with the big things outside—oh, you know.'

  'This is totally impossible,' he said, thinking there really was not the faintest chance of anyone he knew bei
ng at the Ridgeley. It was a new hotel done up by some fashionable interior designer, catered by her celebrity-chef husband. He had read about it in the business section of The Times. It had flaming torches outside it. He would be the oldest person in there by thirty years.

  She smiled hard at him. 'Oh, go on. One drink on your way home.'

  His mind felt weightless. It was professional insanity to have a drink with a witness. It was enough to get you disbarred.

  But for some reason—and perhaps it was simply out of indignation at the conspicuous lack of interest Ryan and Sandra had shown in his life—this dangerous idea appealed to him. Somehow his thoughts insisted the only alternative in the world was going straight home to dinner with Rosalind. And suddenly this felt like dying. (There was a terrible silence in the house sometimes—the ticking clock, the thick curtains, the paintings still and heavy on the walls and Rosalind's pale absence from the room. Sometimes it occurred to him that this silence was not so very different from the silence at the boarding-house when he was a child, when the beds were done and his mother had gone to the shops. He would listen to her shut the front door as if it was the lid of his coffin. Then he would sit at the kitchen table digging the varnish out of the cracks with his thumbnail, hot tears in his eyes for the horrifying randomness of where God chose for you to be born.)

  Just then he should have been laying his briefcase on the passenger seat of his car and heading back to his gently lit house in Holland Park. He would kiss Rosalind, tell her there were lovely smells coming from the kitchen, go up to change (cords, a checked shirt, a cashmere V-neck, loafers) and come down to help her by decanting the wine and laying the table, perhaps. But his mind presented him with two choices: recklessness or death. He felt like laughing, like crying. Why was he feigning a belief in this intoxicating rubbish?

  'Just one little drink in secret?' She wrinkled her nose and smiled.

  He met her eyes and felt another thrill pass through him. It was not exactly a sexual thrill—although she was almost comically attractive, an illustrated pin-up—it was the same thrill he had felt the time he stole a shilling from the floor underneath the till in Geoff Gilbert's shop when he was eight. It was the same thrill he had felt, perhaps a year or so later, when he stole a custard tart from the plate in Ivy Gilbert's kitchen. Aunty Ivy and Uncle Geoff, who were poor like them—whom he stole from. He had lost the shilling as he ran up the road towards the cliffs, but it hadn't mattered. The custard tart had got so coated in fluff from his pocket it was inedible and he had chucked it to a stray dog. But it hadn't been the shilling that was important; it hadn't been the custard tart. What was the important element? What had made him run as hard as he could up the cliff path feeling an electric storm in his chest?

  He really must go home to Rosalind, he told himself. There would be a delicious dinner and good friends and the lullaby of their quiet habits at night: her light off first, her hand sleepily pressing his arm as she turned away from him. 'Don't read too long, darling,' she always said. Her face cream smelt of lilies—as it always had. On his bedside table was the same photograph he had on his desk, of the day he was sworn in as a QC, the picture that constituted the satisfaction of nearly all his ambitions. He was ashamed that he rarely looked at it without wishing it had been Luke, not Sophie, stuck out of the picture behind the camera. He missed his darling little daughter and the lost, picnic days of her perfect admiration, the days when he had known the answer to everything. It was so hard to believe she was thirty now.

  Feeling as if he was setting fire to himself, but also to this terrible sense of dread, of loss, of tedium, of death, he said, 'All right, one drink. Why not? But I'll have to meet you there. You get a taxi and I'll come on afterwards.'

  He followed her a few steps towards the road, watching the outrageous curve of her hips outlined by the streetlight ahead. He waited at the mouth of the alleyway, feeling a breathless relief to be out of such imminent danger. And he felt a kind of passion, too, though this was still somehow an abstraction from the idea of desire—a variation on the theme of desire, rather than the feeling itself, he thought. It struck him that Karen was the kind of girl his son would find attractive and this appealed to him shamelessly. Physically, she was an amalgamation of all the girls Luke had brought back. But Luke's girlfriends—in particular the current one, Lucy—were all dull, obsessive, preoccupied with becoming wives. They were all terrified of Alistair, sycophantic to Rosalind. It irritated Alistair to the point of incomprehension. There was no need for Luke to marry a girl like that because, unlike him, Luke had been lucky enough to start out with every advantage in the world. That boy had everything— everything!

  Karen put out her arm to a passing cab and it stopped beside her. She said something through the window to the driver and walked back towards him, smiling. 'If I go, you will definitely come? You won't just leave me waiting there like an idiot?'

  She looked hopeful as a child in the streetlight in front of him, and his heart moved protectively. It was the first time she had shown her age by accident, rather than flaunting it calculatingly, like a low-cut dress. Of course, it was more dangerous this way. He told her he would meet her in the bar at the Ridgeley. She could order him a whisky and water.

  To pass a little time he stood inside a delicatessen, pretending to examine a packet of breadsticks. What did she see him as? he wondered. A wealthy older man, the source of some unspecified luxury, some dubious paternal reassurance. Well, it was an age-old formula, wasn't it? The man behind the counter asked if he could help and Alistair said, no, he was fine. Just looking, he said.

  He picked up a different packet of breadsticks and thought: What exactly is so awful about a drink, a litde flirtation, the possibility of more held tantalizingly ahead and ... approached, like golden hills and sunny vineyards? Of course he would turn back delicately at the last moment. He could do what the older man did—buy her some good champagne, order her some oysters, or whatever accorded with the picture in her mind. Attempt to fulfil the role—as he always did.

  And in what sense was this role so inferior to the others he played? Just then it seemed only to be a rather wearisome question of aesthetics. What right did he have to think in these rarefied terms, anyway? The truth was, he did a passable tired-but-loving-husband but he undermined it by losing the thread of what he was saying, by pausing to wonder if his wife heard his voice any more. He did an uninspired wise-but-vague-loving-father and was secretly frightened of his own children, wary of exposure to their problems, of exposure by their problems. He really did not know how to help, what to say to them—and they must know it, he thought. Not that Luke challenged anyone much. Quite unexpectedly, he had put that terrible bolt through his eyebrow, but when he finally found a job that interested him, he simply took it out again. Old Luke was resilient, predictable. His darling, brilliant little daughter on the other hand—she starved herself, she cut her own arms. What did it all mean? He couldn't bear to imagine.

  Sophie had begun to kiss his forehead when she greeted him—as one kisses children, or the old and confused.

  Where was the beauty in any of this? These were thin performances and he saw through them himself. Somehow, in the years since both the children had left, since the satisfaction of nearly all his ambitions, he had got lost outside his own life. He did not know how to signal to Rosalind. Not that she would have noticed: she was so busy, these days, with those dreadful friends and their furniture catalogue.

  He waited until three taxis had passed. Then he put down the breadsticks, walked on to the road and hailed one. He slammed the door after him.

  There was plenty to distract the eye along the river. The Oxo tower stood out against the sky, lights were coming on in the restaurant boats and across the bridges and in many of the penthouse river-view flats, and each one of these lights was reflected in the glittering Thames. Very gradually, London was putting on its jewellery in preparation for Friday night.

  Alistair began to feel calmer, less
reckless. He told himself that there had been plenty of occasions on which he had noticed other women before. Of course there had been other occasions in almost forty years of marriage. But as he tried to remember these occasions, this sly old habit of his, he could come up with only one example. He had once had dinner with an Italian solicitor at a pub in King's Lynn when he was staying there defending a murder charge. Otherwise he had not been alone with—or alone and attracted to—a single other woman. Surely this avoidance of desire had taken thought and planning. It was almost frightening that he had never been conscious of it.

  His briefcase slid across the seat as the taxi rounded a corner and some papers came out of the side pocket. He gathered them up and stuffed them into his pockets. Sylvia, her name was—the solicitor. Sylvia Dolci. She had been working on another case; she had been there only for the night. They had eaten good fish pie together and drunk Chablis and she told him about her litde daughter, her useless ex-husband. She was very funny, dry as the wine. He had liked the smell of her thin cigarettes. And all the way through, particularly when they had finished their coffee and the moment came for one or the other of them to ask for the bill, he had felt an overwhelming sense of missed opportunity. He remembered it as a physical sensation: it had been like rushing back for your towel down a corridor of hotel rooms and seeing someone else's room through a half-open door, an unlicensed glimpse for no more than a few seconds—the maid flipping up a sheet, brilliant in the sunshine, the better sea view, the brighter sunlight across the wall. The sensation was longing: for another life, which might so easily have been his. It had been Sylvia who asked for the bill, sighing conclusively.

  They had said goodbye outside her room: 'So, Alistair,' she said, with the charmingly random emphasis that made her words seem translated and all the more exotic,'thank you. It was a lovely evening.'