In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  James snapped up from the sofa, plucked a book from the shelf, and handed it to me.

  The hard cloth-bound cover fell open, like the lid of a cigar box. I drew the tips of my fingers over the coarse paper and let the pages leaf out until the title sheet appeared. Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, By George Eliot.

  It’s lovely, I said.

  Thank you, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. It’s rather a nice collection, if I say so myself. Took some time to put together. My grandfather was quite a bibliophile, you know.

  Zafar is incredibly well-read, said Emily.

  I was actually admiring the bookcase itself—I mean the furniture.

  James grinned. Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern looked at me earnestly.

  What do you like about it?

  It has a good finish. Someone has taken care and I like that.

  But it’s nothing special. You don’t think it’s special, do you?

  It’s effective and sometimes that’s enough to make something special. Neither ostentatious nor, nor—

  Reticent?

  Exactly. It has the right molding for the room, picks up the dado, and all the edges are properly chamfered so the eggshell won’t chip or wear for a while yet. You can see, too, even at this distance, that the paint’s been sanded between coats.

  You’re able to see that?

  Bad paintwork shows a mile off, I replied, especially on MDF, since it absorbs so much paint. In fact, if you don’t give MDF a heavy primer to begin with, I continued, you end up having to lay on five or more coats of emulsion, which in turn increases the risk of paint runs.

  Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern was nodding agreement, as if already familiar with this. For the first time, but not for the last, I wondered if I was being manipulated.

  You then have to take even greater care to sand between coats, I added.

  As I talked to Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, I noticed Emily’s posture: her eyes fallen to the floor, her shoulders slumped.

  It’s a nice bookshelf, I added inanely.

  How do you know it’s made from MDF and not pine or a hardwood or even ply? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  MDF, I replied, is a standard material for this sort of furniture. It’s cheap—if it’s going to be painted, it doesn’t make sense to splash out on wood, so to speak. Bookcases and cabinets make good use of alcoves either side of a chimney breast. You can see, by the way, that the bookcase wasn’t installed at the same time as the rest of the woodwork in the room, such as the architrave around the door and the dadoes, because its skirting doesn’t precisely match the skirting boards where the walls meet the floor, although, very sensibly, the carpenter who built this didn’t try to form a ninety-degree miter joint where the two skirting boards meet, which would simply have failed to key up, but instead scribed the skirting of the cabinets at the bottom of the bookcase over that of the wall.

  I wanted to ask a question, but I knew that to do so would be to call attention to something potentially embarrassing. How does someone of her background—her social standing, which defines so many Brits—how does she know about MDF and ply? Brits are embarrassed—are required to be embarrassed—about showing they know about something that doesn’t properly belong to their orbit in life. And here I knew it in my bones that there was some kind of embarrassment just around the corner. I don’t know what tipped me off. I cannot point to anything specific that signaled the presence of a potential embarrassment in the room, but the presence was unmistakably there. It might have been the way Emily leaned forward in the same moment or the way James’s eyes glanced upward or perhaps it was the ear recoiling from the dissonance between the rugged contraction “ply,” instead of “plywood,” and the rest of the honorable Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s speech. I don’t know. Embarrassment is possibly the paramount emotion of the English, and efforts to avoid it account for many of the small peculiarities of social life in England.

  Mentioning “miter joints” and “scribing” should have called forth questions from Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, if she had been unfamiliar with those terms of trade, if only to ask out of surprise how I knew about such things. People do that, they ask you how you come to know about something, whenever the conversation shows you know a thing or two about a field of which they themselves know nothing.

  It is possible, looking back, that the fact that I hadn’t hesitated to use such language—miter joints and scribing—might have suggested to her that I’d noticed she had a knowledge of the carpenter’s vocabulary, that perhaps I had caught her reference to “ply” and caught her familiarity with things of which she ought to know nothing. It’s possible she was sitting there wondering why I wasn’t asking her how she knew about MDF.

  Therein lies the heart of the matter: England and an English education, in which to carry knowledge was a social act, a statement of class and position. At Oxford, young men and women sat on oak benches in the wood-paneled dining hall, beneath large gilt-framed paintings of great men. Here were Adam Smith, Cardinal Manning, and Charles Algernon Swinburne peering down the lengths of their noses, knowingly. Over there were three prime ministers of Britain, there were writers, judges, and field marshals, and there were dukes and earls, enough to fill an entire legislature. One day Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, more recent old boys, may join them, but for now, beacons of the age of Empire illumined the great hall, their white flames of hair, their ermine, their cocked heads full of mission, their fucking belief and self-belief commanding obeisance. And beneath these paintings, beneath the vast vaulted ceiling, there sat men and women—boys and girls, many still in their teens, for God’s sake—speaking as if their every utterance was borne aloft by God’s grace, as if their opinions resonated reflection and scholarship, effortless superiority in the place of effort. They inflated what little they knew to fill the voids. Because everyone knew and accepted this—a prerequisite of being in denial—no one upset the precarious suspension of disbelief, everyone was complicit in a stage-managed pretense. This then, right here, against the stone and ivy, beneath leaded windows and time-beaten timbers, is where my hate began. In England, the root of true, rightly guided power, the essence of authority, was not learning but the veneer of knowledge, while projecting genuine ignorance of all that is vulgar. This applies to the new aristocracy as much as it ever did to the old, to the neoaristocracy, an international elite waving passports bloated with visas and residence permits, permanently everywhere, shielded from the vulgar by fast tracks and VIP lounges.

  At Harvard, when I attended, it was different. Knowledge there, amid the innocence of the New World, was regarded differently. The people and their history was of another kind. Many were Jews and East Asians, many bearing the mark of outsider, for whom knowledge was never a citadel of power to be defended against the hordes but the object of assault, the prize to be fought for, so that when it was won, it was hard earned and, being wrested from those who would deny it them, it was opened up, the turrets blown apart by egalitarian rage. I did indeed expect it to be the same in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as in Oxford, England—power is power, isn’t it?—but it wasn’t. Maybe it will be one day, if power hardens over time, like water under pressure, as layers of snow turn to ice under the accreting burden of subsequent snowfalls. But that day has yet to come in America. That’s why America frightens and seduces Brits, especially the British elite. It bears the forbidden fruit of egalitarian hope, and everyone, high and low, can shake the branches of that tree.

  I believe that Zafar was rather naïve about his American experience, though not wholly unaware of it; why else say when I attended, a caveat to his description of Harvard that could only serve as an out? Why bulletproof the eulogy unless you thought it vulnerable?

  Am I naïve? he continued. Am I wrong? Let me tell you about the High Court judge—Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge—who interrupted counsel during a trial to ask who the Spice Girls were, when that girl band was at the peak of its popularity. Among the elite of Britain, education, which is to say the admin
istration of knowledge and learning, at places like Eton, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge, is about ensuring ignorance of all the right things—or is that wrong things?—all about ensuring disdain toward them, or better still, blessed indifference.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was holding forth on the properties of medium-density fiberboard when Emily stood up.

  Mother, I have to make a phone call, she said.

  Without looking at her, she addressed her mother as “Mother,” a formality unknown to me, and which seemed odder still when I heard James call her “Mummy.” Is this how these people speak to each other?

  If you must, darling, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  Emily’s exit tilted the balance of gravitational forces in the room, as if I had been a small satellite of hers. After all, I was in that room because of her.

  She and I had been seeing each other for several months by then. I’m not sure you can call it a courtship; after exchanging emails and telephone calls, when I was still in New York, we began meeting up from time to time, when I came back to London. This went on for well over a year. An anthropologist will tell you that she was of a higher status than me. So I played hard to get and kept conversation on the level of ideas until one day outside a restaurant, where we’d had an excellent meal, she reached for my lapels and kissed me. I’m digressing. The point I want to make is that a few months of dating had been time enough for the ring of her cell phone—her use of it, the furtiveness—to condition me, condition my body, to respond with anxiety, but even so I persisted in telling myself that her furtiveness was only the impression left by a clumsy demonstration of good manners. She removed herself to make and take calls because she was polite, but she could do it better.

  I understand you’re also a lawyer, said James.

  Just starting out, I replied.

  Is it everything you expected it to be? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  I didn’t expect much. I hoped it would be challenging.

  Is it?

  It’s still too soon to say, but the signs are good. Some things are a little confusing.

  What are they?

  This and that. I’m not really sure how to describe it.

  Do try.

  The social rules, I said.

  Yes? she said, drawing me out.

  It’s another world, isn’t it? The English bar, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns of Court. They’re all very odd institutions, don’t you think?

  I’m not sure I follow.

  It’s so far from the world I knew growing up. For that matter, it’s also a world away from Wall Street. I sense a lot of rules I don’t know, rules of conduct, rules about what to say and how to say it and what not to say, rules that everyone knows, the lawyers and judges, though they don’t seem to know that they know the rules, as if sensibility to the rules is seeded in the womb, an instinct coming before awareness. Those rules aren’t, as far as I can tell, written down anywhere.

  Isn’t that true of every walk of life, every world, as you put it?

  Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern knows, I thought, that I had worked on Wall Street; neither she nor James asked why I had referred to Wall Street. Why should it surprise me that Emily had spoken to them about me? But it did. Will they ask about the world I knew growing up? Aren’t they even curious? What else had Emily said to them?

  There’s a question of degree. On Wall Street, for instance, the rules for traders like me were pretty straightforward: Make the firm money and you’ll be fine.

  And at the bar all you have to do is win cases, surely?

  Even if both sides in a case are represented by the top two barristers in the country, one of them still has to lose.

  You only have to do well, then.

  I hope so. It’s still early days. All I can say is that I have the impression there are things being said—and I mean even the stuff of idle banter in the corridors of chambers—things that mean more than the mere words being used to say them, and there are things that remain unsaid that possibly no words could convey.

  From Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern’s perspective, getting on in legal practice was of course only about winning cases. The rest of it was a given to her, something to which she could only have been oblivious. But my experience at the bar had already confirmed to me that I would never be granted that security.

  At the end of the first quarter of the year of training, which is to say right near the beginning, I was made aware of the presence of overarching social rules, if not their content. Edmund Staughton, the chair of the pupilage committee, gave me the first-quarter performance review. I sat in his chambers on an armless wooden chair across a leather-topped oak desk, repro through and through, as he leaned back in his capacious seat.

  Zafar, he said, might I give you a word of advice? Perhaps—and I trust you’ll appreciate that this is meant well—perhaps you could conduct yourself with a little more reserve and even with a touch more deference toward senior barristers in and around chambers. That’s all I wanted to say, and I don’t think we need to dwell on the point any more than that.

  I thought I saw embarrassment preventing him from elaborating; I hoped it was embarrassment. Of course there were certain things, particular moments, to which, I imagined, he might have been referring.

  There was, I remembered, an awkward discussion with a senior barrister—or was it an exchange of monologues?—in the dining hall of one of the Inns of Court. There were a few other senior barristers in the group, and I happened to be there among them for a hot lunch late in an English autumn. A portly man, this barrister, but he had an oddly delicate touch as he made his way around the plate before him, knife and fork pinched between fingers, his movements gliding with improbable finesse over the heaped rubble of food.

  So many of those lawyers look the same at that age, the late fifties. Quite a few sherries, g&ts, and more or less everything, so much consumption leaving a red hue in their faces, and the prospect of gout.

  He explained that the other day he was reading a book and came across BCE. Have you come across BCE? he asked the table generally.

  BCE, he continued, means Before the Common Era; that’s before Christ to you and me. And instead of AD, this book referred to CE, Common Era. Now of course I know this political-correctness business is a trifle overstated, but don’t you think BCE is stretching things somewhat? I mean, why can’t they say BC and AD? Why not say that? It seems to me we’re being forced to adopt a language just to accommodate overly developed sensitivities.

  One of the other barristers muttered agreement and the others plowed on with their meals.

  How are you being forced? I asked.

  An atmosphere of politically correct intimidation, he replied. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head, but that’s the beauty of it. Getting you to change the way you talk about things just by intimidation and all because certain words don’t suit them. Blast! We should jolly well say what we mean and not pussyfoot about because someone’s so preciously sensitive.

  Another barrister glanced at me. My attention remained on my lunch.

  Once the topic had edged off the table, I offered a comment on something that had made the press just that day, a report by a consulting firm on the economics of the bar and cost-effectiveness.

  So, I said, the bar is anticompetitive, it seems, although I suppose that was never in doubt. Was it ever justified? Isn’t that the question? The Bar Council’s restriction on the supply of barristers is obviously anticompetitive. It’s a closed shop like any trade union, I said, catching the eye of the portly senior barrister.

  He winced. Was it because he’d been reduced to vulgar membership in a trade union?

  And, I continued, the requirement to hire a barrister, an extra lawyer, before you can take a matter to court, that’s just plain absurd. I’m sure American companies here must be baffled, to say the least. Some of them are probably asking themselves why they shouldn’t let their contracts be governed by New York law and steer clear of England al
together.

  The senior barrister, a man who made his livelihood in the comfort of the bar’s protectionist rules, pressed his flubbery lips together but said nothing.

  When Staughton and I met in his chambers, for my first performance review, and he told me things that he believed were self-evident, things that went, if not without saying, then without saying very much at all, I was troubled. What part of me was I being asked to give up?

  I did have one question for him.

  And how was my work these past three months? I asked.

  Excellent, he replied.

  Unless I’d misread him wildly, Staughton was oblivious to the point I had just made. I felt as if we were rehearsing a play but reading from entirely different scripts.

  Of course, I mentioned none of this to Penelope Hampton-Wyvern; I shared none of my stories but kept my discussion to a few words about vague social rules.

  I wonder if you might not be quite so confused after all, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. You seem, if I may say so, rather thoughtful and I daresay you’re coming to the bar with a much wider experience of the world than other barristers I know.

  Might she be referring to her ex-husband, I thought, the High Court judge and former barrister; might that friendly remark have actually been a little dig elsewhere? James was grinning at me. Emily had not yet returned from her call.

  Every part of life has its own ways, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Don’t you think?

  I suppose you’re right.

  Are you worried you might miss an important social rule and stumble?

  It’s possible, I replied.

  Well, you’ll just have to pick up the rules as you go along. And if you stumble, you’ll have to pick yourself up, won’t you? said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  Yes, I will.

  Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern addressed her son: I expect you need to be getting on with your packing?

  Quite right, he said, standing up. I’m off grouse shooting in Scotland. Do you shoot?

  I’ve never yet had occasion, I replied.