Cockfosters

by Helen Simpson

  ‘Why? He would say just common sense. If you haven’t got the sense to come in out of the rain …’

  ‘He should have waited for a covered truck, shouldn’t he, if he didn’t want to get wet.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t,’ I snapped.

  Us lot, the lawyers from my sort of background, the ones who watched Crown Court on television after school, we thought we’d be Criminal lawyers. Ha. Now this lot are saying they only want to do human rights cases. Double ha. Ha ha! Of course we got siphoned off into corporate tax, or commercial property, or dispute resolution.

  Bev said lawyers are the little birds that fly into the open mouth of the crocodile so as to feed on the scraps of decaying meat between its teeth; pretty low down the food chain, she used to scoff. Luckily I’m fairly thick-skinned. You have to be, if you’re a lawyer. Let’s kill all the lawyers! That’s Shakespeare. We’re probably on a par with politicians in the popularity stakes, which figures: every other politician these days will be or will have been a lawyer.

  ‘Sam,’ I said, ‘I think we need to take a more granular and nuanced approach.’

  I was starting to lose patience.

  ‘The way that English law would approach this,’ I continued, ‘is by looking at whether the tort of negligence has been committed. You know what tort is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a wrongful act in cases where there is no contract, leading to civil legal liability.’

  He looked clueless, puzzled and depressed.

  ‘You know what a contract is?’

  ‘Like when you make a deal?’

  ‘Correct,’ I said, a touch wearily. ‘A contract is a written or spoken agreement enforceable by law and I think we can both see that our hitchhiker and truck driver hadn’t made a contract. Clear so far?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Here, negligence is a tort because there was nothing agreed in speech or writing; there was no mutual bargain or exchange on the cards. OK?’

  He nodded again, without enthusiasm.

  ‘And the question an English court would ask would probably be, was there sufficient proximity in this case for either the truck driver or Hitchhiker One to assume a duty of care to Hitchhiker Two?’

  He stared down at his plate and started to tear little pellets off his bread roll.

  ‘Do you follow me?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ he mumbled.

  Sort of, I thought; not good enough.

  ‘All right, I’ll try to be clearer,’ I said. ‘“Proximity” is the legal word for a relationship that’s close enough to give rise to a duty of care.’

  ‘What’s a duty of care?’

  ‘What do you think it is?

  ‘It sounds like something you have to do if you get married.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Or have children. You ought to care for them. It’s your duty to care for them.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not it.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Look, I’ll give you an example,’ I went on. ‘If I offer someone a lift in my car that means I’ve got a duty of care towards them. OK so far?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It’s my duty to make sure the car is roadworthy and that my driving is safe. I’ve got a duty of care to my passenger. Yes?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So do you think the truck driver has a duty of care towards any hitchhikers he might pick up?’

  ‘Not if he doesn’t ask them into his truck; not if they ask themselves.’

  ‘Ah, so you would argue would you that if you ask yourself along for the ride, anything that happens after that is at your own risk?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then you would be pleading the doctrine Volenti non fit injuria!’

  ‘Eh?’

  He goggled at me, startled, blue eyes flying wide open.

  ‘To a willing person no injury is done.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘No.’

  Things reached breaking point when we got to forty-three. Classic mid-life crisis stuff I suppose. Two children, a great big mortgage and she was still refusing to take my career seriously. ‘It’s not war time!’ she said. ‘There’s no need to live like this.’ She called me the absentee landlord. She said I only stopped off at home to refuel; that I’d turned the house into a garage. I wanted to hang on to her and the children and not be there at the same time, she said; that was me having my cake and eating it according to her. When I look back it was like having a fifth columnist in the house, constantly criticising and undermining.

  She didn’t exactly have any helpful suggestions as to what I should do about it. Retrain as a teacher? A cab driver? I think not. In the heat of the moment I referred to her little job in arts admin as a ‘luxury’ and of course she remembered that. ‘I earn my keep! I pay my way!’ But it was a luxury by that point. Considering how little she earned it would have been much easier all round if she’d just accepted that the domestic side of things and the childcare was all down to her and simply got on with it; stopped all that farcical talk of juggling and sharing, all the bloody moaning. Compared with what I’d started to bring in, the money she earned was pathetic. But she refused to stop working; she said that would be like taking the King’s shilling and if she did that she’d forfeit her right to speak out.

  Lauren’s current part-time job in HR brings in significantly more than Bev’s ever did, but she doesn’t bang on about it all the time. She knows whose job is more important. It’s the job of the one who earns the most. Obviously.

  I had been scraping pale ribbons of flesh from the skate’s ribbed wing all this while. It hadn’t seemed terribly fresh, the fish, but I was hungry and had tucked in. Eventually, though, I could ignore the ammoniac whiff no longer. It smelt of urine and I should know, with two infants at home still in nappies. I called the waiter over.

  ‘It’s fresh, sir,’ he said. ‘I saw it come in myself this morning.’

  He took my proffered plate and sniffed the remaining fish.

  ‘It won’t harm you,’ he added.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Do you want to say something about it to the manager?’ he asked half-heartedly.

  I glanced at Sam, who was looking decidedly green around the gills at this little conversation, and decided against. No, enough fish, I said; but some more bread rolls, please. And the pudding menu.

  We were deep into the dog days of summer, after all, and nowhere near the sea.

  Matters came to a head when I got the offer of partnership from a Magic Circle firm. Any normal woman would have been thrilled for me but she said if it meant me working more hours then I shouldn’t take it. She said that would be unreasonable. Unreasonable! She was the unreasonable one.

  Be home two nights a week by eight so we can eat together, she said; if I promised to be back two nights a week by eight then she’d back me up and carry on. She was the unreasonable one! There was no way I could promise that if I joined the Magic Circle, there was just no way. Not two nights; not one night.

  ‘Have you heard of the Magic Circle?’ I asked Sam now as he pored over the puddings on the menu.

  ‘Yes!’ he said, to my surprise, perking up.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the premier organisation in the world.’

  ‘Well you’re on the right track,’ I said, sitting back, rather pleased at this development. Maybe he wasn’t as clueless as he looked after all. ‘Did your parents tell you about it? Or the school careers people, maybe?’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘I went to an open day with my friends.’

  ‘An open day?’

  ‘Yeah. It was brilliant. We’re going to join when we’re eighteen.’

  ‘I’m not sure it works like that,’ I said, light slowly dawning. ‘What open day was this?’

  ‘They have regular open days at their headquarters in Euston,’ he said.

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘The Magic Cir
cle.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘What happened at this open day?’

  ‘They did these really unbelievable card tricks,’ he told me earnestly. ‘But even the ones with coins were amazing.’

  I sighed.

  He started some feat of legerdemain involving his grubby shirt cuff and a 50p coin.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’

  Anyway, I joined the Magic Circle and my wife jumped ship. I didn’t think she’d do it but she did. The lady vanished. I ignored her objections and accepted the offer assuming, of course, that she’d see sense. ‘Money is enough for some people I suppose,’ was what she said. ‘But for anyone with a heart this way of life is brutal.’ I assumed she’d eventually come round; that she’d stop all the sobbing and going on at me in the middle of the night. I simply couldn’t afford to pay too much attention to that sort of carry-on at the time. Next thing I knew she’d gone, taking the children with her. ‘What’s the point,’ she said. ‘You’re never there.’

  Divorce is the most expensive thing you’ll ever do, I wanted to tell the boy; might as well give him some useful advice to take away from the lunch. Sometimes I feel a spurt of anger that Bev didn’t chuck in her little job and spend her energies on buy-to-let like other cannier women I could mention. Lauren’s mother, for instance. Then I might have been able to ease up a bit more at this stage. As it is, the golf course is nothing but a distant mirage in the desert.

  She’s running some festival now in Norwich with a man with a ponytail. Poetry, yoga, that sort of thing. She was always on about balance and now she can stand on one leg for five minutes with her eyes shut. Good for her. She organises courses in mindfulness too. Breathe in, breathe out. Amazing what you can charge for these days.

  Part of why I haven’t progressed quite as planned at work was that I did go slightly overboard at one point, on the self-medication front as I think it’s now called. Luckily I stopped in time, with Lauren’s help. Lauren was in our HR department, she saw what was happening and she saved me. She really was my human resource! She showed me love when I was at a very low ebb and for that I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.

  ‘What’s Spotted Dick?’ asked Sam, looking up from the menu with the suggestion of a smirk.

  ‘It’s a currant and suet pudding which they serve in slices with custard,’ I said reprovingly. Not nearly as disgusting as it sounds, actually, but there was no way Spotted Dick was on the menu for me any more. Strawberries, hold the cream; that would have to do me.

  I’d been feeling below par at the gym when it happened. I’d told myself not to be such a wuss and made myself increase the incline on the running machine. Just before I fell off and blacked out the thought flashed into my mind, oh Christ are my chargeable hours up to date? And amazingly, as I fell, I remembered that they were.

  Lauren sees an action-packed future for us, the four of us off on adventure-discovery holidays as soon as the girls are old enough. Zip wires across the Amazon rainforest, gorillas in volcanic craters, that sort of thing. The Galapagos Islands have been mentioned. I can’t help wondering whether she’s anticipating my demise and planning lots of visual evidence for the photo album in advance. Very proactive, Lauren.

  Somebody’s got to be responsible. Somebody’s got to take care of that side of things. Diet and exercise! Think of your heart as a piece of chewing gum said the physio; if you don’t stretch it and chew it all the time it hardens into an inelastic lump.

  ‘So was it reasonably foreseeable that an injury could arise?’ I continued, making an effort. ‘What do you think, Sam?’

  Tenacity is the name of the game; he’d better get used to that fact if he was going to be a lawyer.

  ‘Not really, as regards the truck driver, was it,’ I persisted. ‘The truck driver stayed in the dry in his front seat so no, he couldn’t reasonably foresee that a hitchhiker would lie in the coffin. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sam.

  Most lawyers these days marry other people in the same sort of job so both parties know what they’re signing up for. Bev didn’t sign up for that, she didn’t know the deal, and I suppose that was my mistake – trying to make her live a life she hadn’t signed up for.

  ‘Come on Sam, was it reasonably foreseeable that an injury could arise as regards the actions of Hitchhiker One?’ I chivvied him. ‘This could be argued with more chance of success. To rise up out of a coffin asking if the rain’s gone off – yes, in most people’s minds they might feel embarrassed or worried about causing alarm by so doing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the boy unexpectedly. ‘Hitchhiker One was wrong if anyone. He didn’t, like, think. He didn’t put himself in the other one’s place.’

  ‘Ah, failure of imagination. Not actually a legal offence,’ I said. ‘Though some might argue it ought to be.’

  ‘He was just thinking of himself.’

  ‘That’s not a crime.’

  ‘But he was stupid!’

  ‘Still not a crime.’

  I’m very much at the stage now of not scaling back. With Hannah going in for a Law conversion course and Martha wanting to take a Masters in Psychology I’ll be shelling out for them both for a while yet. Not to mention the hefty deposits they’ll need when they come to buy. As for Abi and Ava, Lauren quite rightly wants our daughters to have the same advantages as their sisters, so it looks like I’ll be staying very much in harness for the foreseeable future.

  Things don’t necessarily get easier at work as you progress in seniority. It’s recently been made clear that it won’t be viable for me to maintain my place on the lockstep. Unless. That word! Unless I put in the next few years sorting out the Dubai office. There’s also talk of switching our remuneration system from lockstep to merit-based – or Eat-What-You-Kill as it’s more commonly known. Which would not be good news for me at this stage. So I’d better nail down the proposed arrangement pronto.

  It did make me think twice, I’ll admit it. The time I’d gone to our Dubai office to consult our man Russell McKie, I got the distinct impression he’d gone slightly mad. Out there for the school fees: grew up on a housing scheme himself but his sons are down for Eton. Talk-talk-talk, he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways. He was too much on his own with his thoughts, that was the impression I got.

  It’s a really enormous airport, Dubai, and it was absolutely heaving with people when I arrived at three in the morning. Then there were miles of gigantic motorways and flyovers. The pillars of the flyover supports were incredibly fancy and decorated. Everything was new. It was all unreal somehow. I didn’t really take to it.

  But needs must and I’m no spring chicken. Highly responsive legal solutions in every time zone, we’re passionate about that, and Dubai is obviously key to this strategy, sitting on the time line as it does. It’s the place the Middle East has decided it’ll do business with the West.

  Skype helps, apparently. You can be there on-screen for the bedtime story, Russell was telling me, so that’s something. Lauren wants to stay in Putney so she can be near her mother and also keep her job ticking over. They’ll come out for holidays, though not between May and October of course when it’s forty-five, fifty in the shade and the sea gets too hot for swimming in.

  I’m boning up on sharia law at the weekends, Murabaha and all its crafty ways of getting round direct involvement with usury. Now that really is having your cake and eating it!

  And of course I won’t need to pay tax, so two years there will be the same as four years back home. Maybe. If they keep me at the same level on the lockstep.

  One part of me wishes she’d come out with the babies to live with me in Dubai; but I don’t think anything I say would persuade her. She’s extremely determined, Lauren, when she’s made her mind up.

  I’ll be able to get some reading done in my spare time, as she pointed out the other day, some of those mega novels I’ve not had time for till now. War and Peace; Moby-Dick!

  I should be back in p
lenty of time to plan a blow-out sixtieth birthday party if my heart behaves itself.

  ‘So, where are we after all that?’ I said, polishing off the last of my strawberries. ‘What’s your verdict, Sam? Eh?’

  ‘Guilty,’ said Sam, scraping the remains of his jam roll from the plate.

  ‘The word “guilty” is normally associated with Criminal law,’ I said. ‘But we’ll let that pass. I think we’ve established a clear case of negligence on the part of Hitchhiker One, though, don’t you?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  He met my eye and broke into a grin, probably in relief that it was almost over.

  ‘Thanks for lunch,’ he added.

  ‘A pleasure,’ I said, trying to attract the waiter’s attention for the bill.

  This boy wasn’t the only one who was eager to be off. I had a two-thirty meeting at Crutched Friars with a visiting lawyer from the Bulgarian Water Company we were dealing with, and I’d have to get a move on now if I was going to be on time.

  ‘So then,’ I said once we were outside on the pavement, shaking his hand, ‘good luck with everything.’

  ‘Same to you!’ he said with another guileless smile. He had jam on his tie, I noticed.

  As I scanned the horizon for a cab I watched him walk away from me into the sunny afternoon and I wondered why his hands were up underneath his chin. Next thing I saw, he was tearing his tie off and stuffing it into his pocket. I didn’t envy his parents. He wriggled his shoulders, gave a little skip like a goat or a lamb, then started to run. I don’t know where he thought he was going; he was heading in completely the wrong direction for where he’d come from. I was surprised how fast he was, though; he was really flying down Cheapside. I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him. Then my BlackBerry buzzed and when I looked up again he must have disappeared off down Bread Street.

  Arizona

  18:07 NEEDLES

  ‘Can you feel that?’

  ‘Ouch. Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘A sort of pulling sensation. Is that right?’

  ‘“The therapeutic ache.” Yes.’