Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  Alistair's letter inspired a few articles about the issue and he had to endure the increasingly irksome mention of his name again and again in connection with it, along with the back thumps of colleagues whom he knew to feel he had acted rashly. 'Good for you,' they said, 'bloody well written letter.'

  This was the darker side of the camaraderie: the potent sympathy for a colleague's failures.

  Aside from the loss of earnings involved in missing out on good long trials, Alistair was forced to see many friends take silk before him. Each of them asked him to have a drink with them to celebrate. Sometimes there were dinners. He raised his glass and felt himself passed over.

  But it finally happened—after a nine-year delay. At last came the ceremony at the House of Lords, where he was sworn in by the Lord Chancellor. Rosalind came along and looked very beautiful in a pale blue suit. He was aware that the picture his daughter Sophie took that afternoon had caught in one moment the satisfaction of nearly all of his ambitions. How many people could say they had as much?

  He went to the House of Lords loo and had to suppress nervous laughter as he stood at the urinal. Did anyone ever lose the sense of having sneaked in uninvited? He straightened his shirt and reminded himself that he had earned his invitation to this place fair and square. It was a satisfying thought, although, by implication, it threw out a net of uncertainty over the rest of his life. He went out again brightly and knocked back his glass of champagne.

  And now the defining photograph of that day sat on his desk, beside one of Rosalind on a boat in Crete and one of Luke and Sophie in their ski-clothes aged around fourteen and sixteen. Alistair found he looked at these photographs to remind himself of himself—just as Luke did when he stared into his fridge. The comparison would not have rung true to Alistair, though: he thought himself irrevocably unlike his athletic and mildly dyslexic son. He was also of the opinion that this kind of thinking was, philosophically speaking, meaningless, and so he was surprised by how often he did it. He did not like the implication that he was somehow separate from his own mind, that in some sense it ran on without him. This sounded chaotic, risky—and, of course, philosophically meaningless. Who exactly was making this implication, after all? The question made him feel tired. It sent him over to the shelves for a volume of Blackstone's, thick and leather-bound and heavy in the hand.

  In the House of Lords photograph, Rosalind was holding down her pale blue hat in the breeze and Alistair had noticed recently that there was a single bird in the fragment of sky above her head.

  The satisfaction of nearly all my ambitions, he thought ...

  What was left? He had been a QC now for eleven years. He had been offered the chance to become a judge but had felt he would miss the life of a barrister and that judicial solitude would not suit him.

  He was a popular man at the Bar, well respected, and even though he liked to eat alone sometimes, he was just as likely to ask colleagues along or to hear a genial knock at his door on the days he worked in chambers. It was agreeable to be among so many like-minds. It was reminiscent of his Oxford days, only he knew how to talk now: he had all the right accessories.

  Seeing his clothes, his house in Holland Park, his impeccable wife, his children, no one would have suspected that he had grown up in a shabby boarding-house and that he did not know who his father was. Alistair had a silk bag for his wig and gown, just like everyone else.

  Ian, his clerk, had made quite a show of the kidnap case. 'This'll have you in the papers,' he said, when he handed over the brief and the first box of ring binders. And Alistair had soon thought it was possible Ian was right, though one never knew what would seize press attention. At any rate, it was an interesting case. The Crown Prosecution Service had sent it to him at the express request of the junior barrister in the case, a woman named Sandra Bachelor, who had particularly wanted Alistair to lead her. He had never met her before. It was always a pleasure to meet new barristers, particularly when they had paid you this professional compliment.

  She was in her mid-thirties with frizzy brown hair and acne scars on her cheeks. Sandra's intelligence made her stutter, as if she was hurriedly bailing out her observations for fear of drowning in them. Sometimes she blinked too hard in the frenzy and dislodged a contact lens—she carried spares for this eventuality. Her pupil, Ryan, was twenty-four and had just finished his law conversion course, having done his first degree in history at Edinburgh University. He did not speak very fluently and Alistair suspected he would not be offered a tenancy at Sandra's chambers. It was so competitive, these days. Perhaps there would be a backstage career for him in the Crown Prosecution Service.

  He was an extremely handsome boy with light brown hair and a pale, smooth complexion. He used the word 'fascinating' a great deal, which made Alistair and Sandra smile and avoid each other's eyes for fear of laughing when he did. It was good to be around his excitement. And it was good to be around his beauty, even if it did heighten Alistair's sense of sexual invisibility when he saw how women stared at Ryan. It was so frank—the desire. He had been looked at like that once.

  They had prepared the case, with numerous conferences, over a period of many weeks. When it came to court, they soon found themselves entrenched, and it was obvious that this case, in all its complexity, would take precedence over all other commitments.

  Court thirteen at the Old Bailey became entirely familiar. It is one of the modern courts, with strip-lighting and the barren smell of a new car, which never leaves it. Every day, between ten thirty a.m. and one p.m. and, after a break for 'the short adjournment'—known to ordinary people as lunch—followed by the afternoon session, they sat in this room. The defendant looked broad-shouldered and almost obscenely fit when compared to his diminutive barrister, Randall Schaeffer.

  Randall had been a contemporary of Alistair at Oxford, two years above. He had always been thin but now he was hunched as well. And he seemed to have developed a squint. It shocked Alistair to observe the sudden ageing of his friends. Not just furrowed brows or grey hair but painful limps, actual loss of height. You saw people you hadn't bumped into for a year and they appeared to have shrunk inside their clothes. This would happen to him, of course. Soon enough.

  He had begun to avoid looking into mirrors a few years before. Between twenty and thirty he had barely changed: youth had grown on trees. Between thirty and forty he had noticed only a slight decline—usually on holidays, when he levered himself out of a swimming-pool, uniquely aware of himself as a picture, as film footage, the water running down his brown back, the strong, male legs flipped up on to the side of the pool. But between forty and sixty-three the changes had been quick and violent. His hair grew thin and its texture had altered, becoming coarser and less orderly. It was as if it had evolved, like grass and bracken, to prolonged rough exposure. His back—and shoulder-ache suggested he had been on a long journey, carrying heavy bags. He woke in the night to urinate two or three times and invariably a little fragment of a sad and embarrassing conversation would lodge in his mind as he stood before the loo. His old friend Henry had leant towards him—on the tube of all places!—and whispered with quiet agony, 'My equipment's just stopped working, Al. I'm no use to Katherine at all. No use at all! Henry slapped his newspaper against his leg.

  Alistair read Pascal, Montaigne to lift himself out of these bodily concerns. But being fifty-eight made him feel bodily, made him feel lecherous in a way he never had before. He looked at young women—and, very secretly, at young men—and desire was a kind of envy, a longing for the suppleness of youth.

  They passed through the metal detector and turned right for the lifts up to the Bar mess and the barristers' robing room. As they walked through the doors, there was a smell of eggs and bacon, which drifted down the stairs from the kitchen.

  They went into the mess for coffee and to have a brief discussion of the case. The canteen tables were already unevenly strewn with newspapers and plates and along them sat barristers, already in their wigs and gow
ns, drinking coffee and smoking and hurriedly writing speeches.

  'Morning, Langford,' said Richard Evans. He was at the head of the short queue, just paying for a few pieces of fruit and a yoghurt. He was one of those who had kept himself in good shape; he always had a rather suspicious-looking tan.

  Alistair smiled and nodded. 'Evans.' Many of the older barristers still addressed one another by their surnames, as they had at boarding-school. Of course, Alistair had never been to boarding-school, but this detail was long hidden.

  Evans said, 'Not seen you about for a while. You've got a goodie, haven't you? How's it coming on? Something of an Athenian playboy, I'm told.'

  'Defendant? Yes, he is. I'm against, actually—he's Schaeffer's chap. Not going too badly, thanks. Cross-examining the girlfriend this afternoon, if all goes to plan.'

  'Really? Blonde and gorgeous, no doubt. Playboy bunny!' Evans chorded lustily and Sandra Bachelor sent some oranges bouncing out on to the floor.

  She chased after them and put them back into their basket, saying, 'Oops. Clumsy clogs. Sorry,' and blushing deep red.

  He beamed and approached with his hand held out. He was immaculate with women. 'I don't think we've met,' he said, 'Richard Evans.'

  'How d'you do? I'm Sandra Bachelor.' Her whole arm jolted as he shook her hand. 'And this is my pupil, Ryan Townsend,' she told him.

  'I'm her pupil,' Ryan repeated, still feeling the need to justify his presence in these rarefied surroundings. He recognized Richard Evans because he had seen him speak at the Law Society dinner. It had been a fascinating speech about legal reform. These older male barristers seemed to Ryan to have a priestly, incense-scented gravitas. He stumbled towards it urgently, terrified that he might just drift, playing 'Dragonman 4' all day as he had done before he decided to do the law course.

  'Well,' Evans said, 'I'd better get mobilized. I'm up for drug-smuggling in court nine. Would you believe it? I had five kilos of raw cocaine in a car boot full of children's teddies.'

  'Did you now?' said Alistair.

  'And I've got absolutely no idea how it all got there.'

  'Extraordinary.'

  They went on in their superior sing-song (this rather inhuman game was another mode of detachment, another strategy for survival) while Richard Evans straightened his gown and Alistair paid for his breakfast.

  'Yeeees. No idea at all ...' Richard Evans sighed, shaking his head. He pulled the thick pile of papers into his chest and turned towards the stairs. 'He's going to go whistling down, I'm afraid. Not a lot I can do for him.'

  They exchanged a wry smile.

  Alistair said, 'Are you going to be at Philip's retirement dinner next Thursday?'

  'Yes. You?'

  'I shall see you there.'

  'Good, good.' Richard nodded to Ryan and half bowed formally to Sandra Bachelor. He took pride in being particularly courtly to plain women.

  When they had eaten breakfast and finished discussing the strategy Alistair would employ in his questioning of the arresting police officer, Inspector Radley, they heard their case being called over the Tannoy: 'Would all parties in Giorgiou please come to court thirteen immediately? All parties in Giorgiou!

  By the time of the short adjournment it seemed it was going to be an uneventful day. Sandra popped out to get some things from the chemist, Ryan read a novel about a hotshot American attorney and Alistair ate his shepherd's pie in silence while flicking through the newspapers. He noticed there was a new biography of Gladstone, which had got very good reviews, and thought he might like to buy it.

  After this, the early part of the afternoon was devoted to a series of expert witnesses. Professor Aitken and Dr Ellis offered their respective analyses of voice recordings and various medical details, such as the curious absence of chafe-marks on Giorgiou's wrists, which had allegedly been bound for seven days.

  After a great many technical details, it was obvious the jury was flagging and the judge thought it wise to allow a little recovery time. He suggested a short break. The court would sit again at three forty-five.

  And so, after their respective sandwiches and bars of chocolate and telephone calls and quick trips to the loo, the human components of the courtroom shuffled back into place for the last session of the afternoon. The solicitors, who had ventured out of the Old Bailey at lunch for a large curry, sat behind the barristers in a sleepy gang. Along the benches at the side of the room were the twelve members of the jury in their various shapes and sizes. At the head of the room was the raised dais from which the judge presided. One level beneath it were the court clerk, an obese woman with a florid, sceptical face, and the inspired-looking figure of the court stenographer, permanently bent over his keys.

  After everyone had settled down, then risen for Judge Morton and settled again, an atmosphere of anticipation grew and spread around the room.

  In terms of entertainment, it had been a bleak day. Inspector Radley, the arresting police officer, had proved to be a man with no exceptional features, either physical or behavioural. He had mousy-coloured hair, a bland, even face and a level, bureaucratic voice. As he gave his account of the conditions in which he and his fellow police officers had discovered Alexis Giorgiou, several members of the jury struggled to stay awake or found themselves wondering what the life of such a colourless person might be like. Did he have a lonely boiled egg for breakfast? Did he have a cat? Did he go for walks on his own in the park?

  Neither of the expert witnesses was cause for celebration either. They had the generic brutally scrubbed look of scientists, and their evidence was soon reminiscent of interminable physics lessons at school.

  Even without this day-long drought, though, the arrival of Karen Jennings would have been an event. Inappropriate as it was, the jury members were in awe of Alexis Giorgiou, who looked, as the foreman himself had conceded, 'like a genuine celebrity'. Everyone wondered what the girlfriend of this proud, muscular, TV-looking Greek would be like.

  Not one of them had got it right. She was not tall and elegant; she was not posh; she was not spoilt and sulky. She was a miniature mousy blonde with a cartoonishly erotic figure and a permanent smirk on her lips.

  As the usher brought her in, Karen Jennings peered about her, seeming unable to contain her amusement. She had the appearance of a giggling schoolgirl brought before the headmaster and her small, plump, playfully mocking presence worked a friendly kind of magic on the room. She made tired people smile, men and women alike. Sandra Bachelor, who was one of these, decided immediately that Karen was the sort of girl who would ask for a lick of your ice-cream and that no one on earth would refuse it. There was something innocent about her sexiness because, even though her curves were almost a parody of the female form, she appeared to take an uncomplicated pleasure in her body, enjoying her youth and her health as much as her power to seduce. In essence, she appeared to be having a good time—an adventure, a laugh, and at no great expense to anyone.

  Karen was, in fact, less than five foot three, but she carried herself with a defiant sensuality. This attitude gave her more stature than she actually had, and although it did not make her intimidating, it did make her impossible to ignore. Sandra Bachelor noticed, with a faint envy (because her tall, thin body never had and never would have this effect), that some of the male members of the jury were rapt. In particular, she watched the tattooed, stubbly man in the back row whisper to the spectacled man beside him. They were unlikely friends, but at the sight of this potent dose of femininity, they both grinned the same grin.

  Karen was wearing a partially transparent white cotton blouse and a breathtakingly tight dark blue skirt. The heels on her shoes were so high and narrow that it was a kind of miracle she could walk at all. Her clothes seemed to have been designed to inhibit her but, as if this was all part of a wicked double bluff, they served only to emphasize the fluid action of her waist and her hips.

  As soon as she had taken her oath, which she punctuated with curious little glances about the room, Randa
ll Schaeffer cleared his throat and began: 'Are you Miss Karen Jennings of Flat 234, River Court, Balham?'

  Karen drew a long breath, then giggled with relief. 'Well, this one's easy at least,' she said.

  A few of the jury members smiled in identification with her; they sympathized with her all-too-human nervousness and her all-too-ordinary London accent. This was a girl who ate fish and chips with her brothers and sisters, whose dad watched the football with a can in his fist. She was not like the rich Giorgious, or the sneering barristers. Karen had immediately generated an atmosphere of us-and-them: overworked, dry, stuck-up lawyers versus young, plump, smiling girls. She pressed her hand to her chest to calm her nerves and even the female members of the jury were visibly charmed.

  Sandra Bachelor did not believe in Karen's nerves for a second. She looked forward to hearing Alistair's cross-examination and hoped Randall would not draw out the defence questions for too long.

  Thankfully, Randall obliged and it was soon Alistair's turn. He rose to his feet and, as was his habit, flipped pages for a few seconds, to establish an air of imperturbable purpose. Then, in a firm voice, which suggested he had not in fact noticed the exaggerated breasts, or the wild arc of the hips or the frank outline of the knickers in the dark blue skirt, he said, 'Miss Jennings, am I right in thinking that you and the defendant have been conducting a relationship for some eighteen months now?'

  Karen nodded and shrugged.

  'Please just answer yes or no, Miss Jennings,' said the judge.

  'Sorry. Yes, then. We have been,' she lowered her voice and frowned portentously, '"conducting a relationship" for eighteen months odd. Just to be certain, the way I can remember is because it was since I went darker blonde so, yes, that's about right.' She wrinkled up her nose at her own silliness.

  'I see,' Alistair said. 'And am I right in thinking that you were in the habit of meeting Mr Giorgiou at Buzzy's Restaurant and Casino in Piccadilly every Friday evening?'