A Perfect Obsession

January in London. Heavy overnight frost and a twenty-four-hour tube strike. Morning rush hour traffic standing bumper to bumper along the Hanger Lane gyratory system, the A40, the A2 and the M25. As leaden dawn lightens to pale-grey day, the trains, buses and offices stir into life, the computers hum, the money markets begin to chatter, and the wheels of commerce revolve.

At the centre of this bustling world, in an oasis of apparent antiquity, lies the Temple, a scant square mile of elderly buildings, of lanes and squares and alleyways and courtyards bearing dusty names – King’s Bench Walk, Pump Court, Serjeant’s Inn, Paper Buildings, Crown Office Row. This sequestered spot, with its fountains and gardens, its flagged courts and cobbled lanes, stands tranquil in the teeming heart of the City of London, and is home to the cream of the English legal system. Here toil
the barristers and QCs, their keen minds and well-honed intellects hard at work, delivering views on a multitude of knotty legal questions: on matters of taxation, of banking, of planning, of litigation both civil and criminal, on obscure points of succession and inheritance, on dreary drifts of European directives, on ponderous affairs of international law, on questions which will shape the politics and economic policies of the day, and on smaller matters which will touch the lives of the petty criminal and the humble litigant. They are served and mastered by their clerks, whose job it is to arrange the affairs of chambers, to set dates, exact fees from solicitors, distribute briefs, and to knit seamlessly together the working days of the lawyers. The dignity of the clerks is supreme, their authority unquestioned, and their percentage very healthy.

In the Temple, somewhere between Inner Temple library and Middle Temple Lane, lies Caper Court, a flagged courtyard bounded by handsome buildings, with two trees in its centre and an antique sundial set high up in the wall of one of the buildings. Number 5 Caper Court houses a moderately sized, but elite and marvellously successful set of chambers, where the barristers specialise in commercial and civil litigation, with the odd spot of fraud and shipping thrown in.

Later that same January day, a Wednesday lunchtime, a well-dressed man with sharply handsome features emerged from 5 Caper Court. Hands thrust into the pockets of his navy cashmere overcoat, his prematurely silver hair glinting in the cold sunshine, he strode briskly down King’s Bench Walk to where his car was parked. While clerks and office workers thronged the sandwich shops and lawyers and
brokers jostled in wine bars, Leo Davies made his way to Highbury to spend a nourishing hour with his therapist.

‘It’s about sexual orientation.’

‘It’s about equivocality. I haven’t got a sexual orientation.’

Julius Guest looked with bemusement at his patient. He and Leo were old friends – something which, Julius felt, did not perhaps create the best foundation for psychoanalysis – but how little he had known of Leo, he realised, despite those years of friendship. Here was Leo, a man in his
mid-forties,
looking younger than his years despite his oddly attractive, grey hair, fit, good-looking, established in reputation and practice as a QC, in search of solution to some personal problem. What intrigued Julius was to find the problem, rather than the solution.

‘Everyone has a sexual orientation.’

‘All right, I’ve got more than one.’ He looked at Julius doubtfully. ‘Is that too many?’

Julius, a small, intense man of Leo’s age, with a neat, pepper-and-salt beard and shoulder-length hair, laughed and spread his hands. ‘Have as many as you like. Look, you’ve told me that you sleep with men as well as women. OK. And I know all about your wife Rachel, about the divorce, and your affair, last year with this boy, Joshua. OK, both those relationships made you unhappy—’ Julius waved a vague hand ‘—but let’s put them aside for one moment. The question is—this equivocality, call it what you like, does it make you unhappy?’

‘Unhappy? Jesus, Julius, that relationship with Joshua … When it ended, I thought I was ending. I still—’

‘No, no. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about any specific relationship. That involves dynamics far more complex than mere sexuality. I’m talking here simply, purely—’ He leant forward in his chair, making a compartmentalising gesture with his hands, ‘—about you. And sex. Does the fact of your bisexuality upset you? In a general sense.’

There was a silence. ‘It troubles me.’ Leo spoke slowly. ‘That is, it troubles me to think that it’s at the root of my problems. But in terms of morality—’

‘No, please!’ Julius gave an anguished laugh. ‘No morals. Facts. Facts.’

Now Leo looked bemused. ‘Very well.’ He pondered Julius’s question again. ‘No. No, it doesn’t trouble me. My response to any man or woman, in terms of desire, is individual, perfectly genuine. I’m not unhappy with that.’

‘Well, then?’

Leo sighed. ‘I still have this notion that there should be – could be one special person; someone I can share my life with. But relationships – well, they just never go the distance.’

‘Maybe
you
don’t.’

Leo rubbed a hand across his face. ‘I think that’s what I meant. I remember saying it to someone once – my ex-wife. It was a kind of warning.’

‘Well?’

‘It was true then. The relationship with Rachel was never going anywhere. The whole episode was pretty discreditable, if I’m being honest. I shouldn’t have married her. Up till then, I’d been more or less happy with the life I led. I never wanted any stability, any
commitment or permanence. But since the divorce …’

‘Since the divorce you’ve felt lonely. Is that it?’

Leo pondered this. ‘Not quite. I think maybe the whole thing has to do with Oliver, my son. He’s only eighteen months old. He’s my family. Having him has made me aware of how important it is to have someone in your life – someone to civilize you, keep you from being egotistical and selfish and living only for yourself. I thought Joshua might be the one, the person to share things with. I see now that I was being naive. He was too young, the balance between us was all wrong.’

‘So it had nothing to do with sex. Sex is immaterial. It’s about love.’

‘I suppose so. I’d hardly say that sex was immaterial.’ Leo glanced at his watch. ‘Your metre’s running out. Come to that, mine probably is, too. I’ve got to get back to chambers. Got a con at two.’ He rose from the comfort of the padded leather chair and slipped on his jacket.

Julius got up. ‘Tell me, do you feel these sessions help at all? I’ve known you for fifteen years, you’ve been coming to me on and off for six of them, and I sometimes wonder whether you don’t need someone more detached, someone who can go more deeply into things. Friendship can throw up certain barriers to effective psychoanalysis, you know.’

Leo smiled. ‘I like seeing you. And yes, I think the sessions do me good. Besides, I like keeping you in business. Anyone with five children needs all the help he can get.’

‘Your beneficence is mightily appreciated, Leo. Especially when it comes to paying school fees. Not that you know anything about that. Not just yet.’ He walked with Leo to the door. ‘Still,
you’re doing all right. Didn’t I see your name mentioned in that piece in
The Guardian
the other day about fat-cat lawyers? Fees topping the million-a-year mark, as I recall.’

‘I wish. Don’t believe everything you read, Julius.’ Leo shrugged on his overcoat as Julius opened the door. They walked out together through the receptionist’s office.

‘By the way,’ said Julius, ‘when’s the opening of this new museum in Shoreditch? I recall you mentioning it last time you were here.’

‘Chay had been hoping to have the opening at Christmas, but you can imagine what it’s like with renovations, contractors and so forth. It’s all fallen a bit behind. Probably some time in February. Why don’t you and May come along? I know she likes modern art, even if you don’t.’

‘A free drink and the chance to schmooze with the likes of Chay Cross is always acceptable.’

‘Good. I’ll put a couple of invitations in the post.’

Leo went downstairs and out into the cold January air. His car was parked a couple of blocks away. He drove back to chambers through the lunchtime traffic, reflecting on what he had told Julius. It wasn’t really true. These monthly sessions with Julius were of little value. Leo knew he used Julius as a sounding board, as much as anything else. He simply talked to him, much as one might to a friend. It went no deeper. In fact, during that dreadful time just after Joshua left him – which was as close to nervous depression as Leo had ever come – it hadn’t occurred to Leo to seek help from Julius. He had only told him after the event. Nor, significantly, had he ever told Julius about Anthony. Anthony was a fellow barrister in Leo’s chambers at 5
Caper Court, young, good-looking, and bound to Leo by an attachment which neither of them had ever fathomed. Anthony was too important, and the nature of Leo’s relationship with him too delicate to touch upon. While it cost him nothing to lay bare to Julius the wretched facts of his brief marriage to Rachel, or to examine the nature of his relationship with Oliver in the light of his own father’s departure from his life at an early age, Leo could not bring himself to explore with any other person the complexities of his feelings for Anthony.

He allowed himself to think about Anthony as he sat in the slow crawl of traffic on the Embankment. They were going through one of their periodic phases of discord, characterised by a general aloofness on Anthony’s part, and studied indifference on Leo’s. Leo thought back to the events of a couple of months ago which had precipitated it. If only Sarah, troublesome as ever, had not chosen that particular evening to call round for a drink. Leo had always found it hard to resist her. He had first met Sarah Colman a few years ago when she was just nineteen, the well-connected daughter of a senior member of the judiciary, blonde, blue-eyed, with a fresh and innocent manner which quite belied her sexual appetite and complete lack of morals. Leo had invited Sarah, plus a young male friend of hers, to his country house at Stanton to share a ménage à trois for a memorable summer. Like all good things, it had come to an end. He and Sarah saw one another infrequently thereafter. He had been too busy taking silk and shoring up his reputation by making a respectable marriage to have
any truck with sweet, scheming Sarah. It didn’t escape his attention, however, that she was careful to hover on the edges of his life. She had even gone so far as to have a volatile affair with Anthony, from motives which Leo did not care to examine. And last summer, by a coincidence which Leo could only marvel at, she had started work as a pupil at 5 Caper Court. The propinquity was not one which Leo exactly relished. He liked to keep his private life set well apart from his public one. The kind of sexual intimacy he had shared with Sarah, and the things she knew about him, made her dangerous, particularly given her proclivity for mischief-making. But that evening he had been glad to see her, glad of her cheerful, idle company and the easy warmth of her body, as familiar and pleasurable as ever. He hadn’t expected Anthony to call round, just as he’d divested Sarah of her last piece of clothing.

The traffic up ahead suddenly stirred into life, and Leo’s thoughts returned to the present. It was already ten past two, and his client – an American cruise operator who had lost several million in an unhappy joint venture – was doubtless already waiting for him, together with the instructing solicitor from Stephenson Harwood. Leo parked his car and hurried into chambers. Henry, the senior clerk, a sad-faced young man in his late twenties, was standing in his braces by the photocopier. He glanced up as Leo came in, and nodded his head in the direction of the waiting room. Leo nodded in reply and shrugged off his overcoat, smoothing down his hair.

‘Ask one of the girls to nip out and fetch me some sandwiches for when this con is over, would you, Henry? I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast.’ He headed for the
stairs. ‘Give me half a minute and then show them up.’

Henry ran a few more documents off and then went to the waiting room to show the clients up to Leo’s room. When he came back down Felicity, a fellow clerk, had just returned from lunch. Henry smiled forlornly at her, in the way that he always did, a smile born out of devotion and hopeless longing. Bright, pretty, energetic, bad-tempered, occasionally foul-mouthed, and with a taste in clothing which ran to the plunging and thigh-revealing, Felicity didn’t quite match up to Henry’s cherished vision of the ideal woman, but he had been captivated by her ever since she had first come to 5 Caper Court two years before. She was a good clerk, too, quick-witted, practical and hard-working. Henry was proud of the fact that he had trained her to be as capable as she now was, but he nurtured his true feelings for her discreetly. Apart from the impossibility of any relationship between two clerks working side by side, Henry knew for a fact that he wasn’t Felicity’s type. Felicity went for the well-muscled, good-looking, glib kind, in the shape of a waster called Vince, with whom she had been living for two years. Last October Vince had got into a fight with a couple of youths, one of whom had hit his head on the pavement and subsequently died. At the same time, Felicity had lost the baby she was carrying. All in all, it had been a dreadful time. Vince had been charged with murder and was still waiting to hear the date for his trial. Henry had no real idea how this had affected Felicity’s feelings towards Vince, but, knowing Felicity, he assumed that it had only served to strengthen them.
Felicity was loyal and loving, much to Henry’s despair.

‘Bloody brass monkeys out there,’ remarked Felicity, unwinding her scarf and setting her sandwiches and coffee down on the desk. From outside came the clang of scaffolding pipes and the whistling of workmen. Felicity went over to the window and glanced out. ‘I wish they’d get a move on and finish the annexe. I can’t stand that racket all day long. And the looks you get from those workmen when you cross the court!’

‘Can’t say I’ve experienced that problem,’ replied Henry. ‘Have you seen some papers that came in from Middleton Potts for Simon?’