Speaking for Myself (11 page)

So I turned up, got there at ten o’clock, and was standing outside the court. Everyone was milling about, as they do. There are dozens of cases listed every day. There are defendants, witnesses, barristers, solicitors, and everyone in between. They all look much the same — solicitors in suits, barristers in gowns, defendants and witnesses in their Sunday best. And there I was, calling out my client’s name: Mr. Bloggs? Then it suddenly occurred to me: Mr. Bloggs was not going to be standing outside the court because he was getting a bail application, which meant he was locked up in the cells below the court.

I can’t remember whether Mr. Bloggs ever got bail, but I well recall that the morning was nearly a complete disaster.

On another occasion early in my career, I handled a guilty plea. Despite my impassioned argument that the accused be given a second chance, he was sentenced to imprisonment. On his being sent down into the cells, I went down with him, because that’s what you do. The sentence was lenient, so I tried to tell him it wasn’t too bad. After saying good-bye, I went into what I thought was the elevator. I pressed the button to go up, and when it stopped, I got out, looked round, and realized that I wasn’t where I had expected to be. I was in a room with two doors on either side and nothing else. The elevator door closed behind me, and I heard it rumble back down again. At the same moment everything went black.

I had no idea where I was and could see nothing. First I groped round the sides of the lift, looking for a button. Nothing. I groped round the room, looking for a light switch, anything. Then I started banging on the walls, on the lift door, and shouting. I remember thinking,
I’m going to die! They are going to find my body, and my mum will be so upset.
I imagined them hiding this skeleton in the corner, identifiable only by her briefcase, a promising career tragically ended.

Suddenly I heard the elevator rumbling up again. The doors opened, and I practically fell into the arms of two court officials.

“Now then,” said one, “you’re all right, miss. Got yourself trapped between court one and court two, that’s all. You were making such a racket up here, they had to suspend the sitting in court two!” I’d taken the prisoners’ elevator and ended up in a holding room.

As 5 Essex Court was in the Middle Temple, we would generally eat in Middle Temple Hall and use the Middle Temple library. In Crown Office Row they tended to go to Inner Temple and use the library there. Yet Tony kept coming to the Middle Temple library, and I started avoiding the Inner Temple library, where John would often be found. Also, because I was still deviling for Derry, I would regularly find myself going back to Crown Office Row.

As far as Essex Court was concerned, John was my boyfriend. John, meanwhile, was aware that Tony was around. He knew that we sometimes went out, but he didn’t know how far the going out went, and he was very keen that it stop.

One Saturday afternoon John was round at Veena’s flat. It must have been sometime in October. I don’t remember what I was doing. I just remember the knock on the door and a voice saying, “It’s me.” Tony.

I remember watching as John walked over and looked through the spy hole. Next I heard the click of the lock as he turned the key — not to open it; to lock it. I remember staring at him aghast. John leaned on the door with his head in his hands. It was terrible.

The knocking continued. John shouted at him to get lost, but Tony wasn’t budging. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew now that John was there. He knew that I would never have turned a lock against him.

“Cherie? What’s going on? Just let me in. I promise you that whatever else happens, I will never keep you against your will.”

This was my home. It may not have been my flat, but it was my home.

So I got up and walked to the door, turned the key, and opened it. Tony, eyes blazing, came in.

“Right,” said John immediately. “You’ve made your choice. I’m off.” And he picked up his bag and left.

There was no showdown. No saying you must choose one or the other of us. John had never been one for the melodramatic. He was always calm. In fact, they both were.

But he was right. I had made my choice.

John should have been the more comfortable choice for me, because he hadn’t gone to a posh public school, just the regular local one, and he was clever and kind and all those sorts of things. But I was probably the dominant one in the relationship. This was not the case with Tony. There was no way that Tony was going to be dominated by me, nor was I necessarily going to be dominated by him. It was much more of an equal thing, so much more challenging.

My friend Felicity always says, “You can see why Tony wanted Cherie, but we’re not quite sure why Cherie agreed to take Tony!” Perhaps she thought that he needed a working-class girl to give him working-class credibility. But she couldn’t understand why I needed a charming public-school boy when my principles were so clearly to the left.

Politics and religion certainly played a part. John wasn’t interested in politics, although he would have described himself as left of center. David, while far from left of center, was a Catholic and would have been the safest choice: going back to my hometown and doing okay, but never really being able to spread my wings. Tony might not have been Catholic, but religion was more important to him than to anyone I had ever met outside the priesthood. In terms of politics, we might not always have agreed on the details, but we were never that far apart.

Over the years I have thought about what made me choose Tony. It was partly chemistry — I fancied him rotten and still do — but partly because I thought even then that he had something. Behind the charm there was a steely quality to him. Frankly, he fascinated me, as I had never met anybody quite like him before, somebody who could give me a run for my money. Life with the others would have been easier but not so challenging.

Foolish girl — to think how simple my life could have been . . .

There turned out to be a curious symmetry between Tony’s family history and mine. His paternal grandparents were actors — music-hall performers — who met on tour in the north of England. In 1923, in Yorkshire, a son was born: Tony’s dad. A week or so later they arrived in Scotland and decided — no doubt for all the right reasons, just like my parents — that the life of a traveling player was no life for a baby, particularly one born out of wedlock. So the child was fostered out to a Glaswegian electrician and his wife, James and Mary Blair. The little boy’s parentage was acknowledged in his new name: Leo Charles Lynton Blair: Charles for his father (born Charles Parsons) and Lynton for his father’s stage name, Jimmy Lynton — which strikes me as a bit hard on his mother, who got precious little thanks for her contribution. (For the record, her name was Mary Wilson, née Bridson, stage name Celia Ridgeway.) Although Leo’s birth parents eventually married and desperately wanted their only son back, Mary Blair refused to relinquish her much-loved adopted child. If you’re looking for a parallel there, think no further than my grandmother, similarly distraught when she had to hand over me.

Another thing Tony and I have in common is ambition. We are both driven. It has been suggested that Tony needed to accomplish what his father couldn’t because of his stroke. I certainly felt the need to make it up to my mum and grandma for their disappointments. My mum’s father, Grandad Jack, had extraordinary ability, but he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. As for my dad, for all his success, charm, wit, and innate intelligence, he didn’t do his mother proud. Not that she wasn’t proud of him. On the contrary, she was immensely proud of him. And with reason: he was a very talented actor. Sadly, though, he never reached his full potential. Perhaps his charm was his undoing. Tony is charming like my dad, but he has the steel my dad lacks.

Did I see in Tony the man my dad might have been? No. I see that in myself.

My mum never got to Canada; the romance fizzled out. In November 1977 she moved down to Oxford. The travel bureau of the Oxford branch of the department store chain Selfridges was in some kind of trouble, and the head office asked her to sort it out and then take over the management. When I was at the LSE, she had been brought in to troubleshoot at Selfridges in London, and they had offered her Oxford then, but she’d turned it down. Lyndsey was still at school; Mum had left a daughter once and wasn’t about to do it again. Only now, with both of us having left home and Lyndsey set to come to London for her final two years of practical legal studies, known as Articles, did she feel she could think of herself. It would be a promotion, and with the increase in salary, she would be able to buy a small house. As she said to me at the time, “Well, I either stay in Liverpool for the rest of my life, or I take this one chance to move nearer you and make a better life for myself.” Lyndsey had made it clear that she wasn’t planning on staying in the north either, so it made sense for Mum to move south.

In the spring of 1978, her finals over, Lyndsey came down to London. I was able to help get her an articled clerkship. It didn’t pay much, but thanks to Veena’s flat, she could stay in Abercorn Place for nothing.

Once my mum was in Oxford, getting to see her was much easier. Realizing it would take time for her to get to know people and build up her own circle of friends, Tony and I used to go up most weekends. She had bought a little terraced house with two bedrooms, so it was perfect. It seems strange now, but the first friends my mum made in Oxford were Geoff and Beverley Gallop, and we would always meet up with them. They were living in a small flat in north Oxford, and we became like a little family. Geoff was doing his Ph.D. Beverley had been a teacher in Australia and later became a very successful potter. As Gale was only twenty years older than me, the age difference was never an issue. In spite of the David complication, my mum and Tony got on right from the start. In a way, from his point of view, she became a substitute mother. To her, Tony was still a boy.

I was finally beginning to realize how hard it must have been for Mum, living all those years under her mother-in-law’s roof. She never really was able to make a life for herself. There was a relative of Grandma’s, a chauffeur whose employers lived in the northwest, and sometimes he would take us out in his car for long weekends. I remember a trip to Scotland when I was about nine and my sister was seven. Something was obviously going on between him and my mum. He was a nice man, but Lyndsey and I were not terrifically encouraging, to put it mildly. Mum never complained, however, and it was only much later that I realized what a brake we had been on her love life.

Whenever Veena’s parents came to London, Lyndsey would move out and stay with Tony’s friend and fellow tenant in 2 Crown Office Row Charlie Falconer in the house he’d recently bought in Wandsworth, across the river in south London. When he’d gone to view it, one of the things Charlie had liked was the little garden. “This will be lovely for breakfast in the morning,” he’d said to the woman showing him round. He remembers that she looked at him strangely, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, his house was just under the railway arches, directly beneath the main flight path to Heathrow, and bang next to the underpass/roundabout/ dual carriageway. You could never go out there.

Tony moved in with Charlie, and as a result, I got to know the house — and their domestic habits — quite well. When it came to basic housework, they were a disgrace. Slobs, the pair of them. Whenever I arrived for a visit, I’d find my feet sticking to the kitchen floor because it was so dirty. So the first thing I’d do was get down on my hands and knees and scrub. Then I’d spend the rest of my time — as did Lyndsey when she was there — straightening up, changing the sheets, and cleaning the bathroom.

That summer Geoff, Bev, Tony, and I went on holiday to Brittany. Unlike me, Tony hated to fly, and since Bev was newly pregnant, we went on the ferry. This venture required a car, and Tony had this idea that he would like a Morris Minor. He managed to find one through an ad in a local newspaper. After only two weeks, it collapsed — completely packed up. Tony was absolutely furious; it was clear he’d been sold a dud. So Tony went back to the chap he’d bought it from and threatened him with legal action if he didn’t give Tony his money back. He was about to get into fisticuffs when he had the presence of mind to say, “I’m a barrister,” and the chap paid up. Luckily one of my colleagues in Essex Court was selling his old Beetle, so Tony bought that instead.

As my mum had never learned to drive, we’d always gone on package holidays to resorts. This freewheeling was a totally new experience, and I loved it. (Only when it came to reading the map did the jovial atmosphere deteriorate.) Tony was quite used to this pile-everything-into-the-car kind of holiday. His mother had come from Ballyshannon, in County Donegal in the Irish Republic, so when he was a boy, they went every summer to his mother’s family’s place. When the Troubles began, they switched to France.

All in all, we had a great time. That holiday consolidated a friendship with the Gallops that would continue on down the years, with Tony and I becoming Tom’s (Bev’s bump) surrogate godparents. (Geoff and Bev were not religious so their children weren’t actually christened.)

During that trip we just followed the French coast. Bev’s pregnancy wasn’t proving easy, and my overriding memory is of inspecting the toilets at the various places where we stayed to ensure they were fit enough for her to be sick in. I also had my first experience of oysters.

We marveled at the standing stones at Carnac — rows and rows of them, more than three thousand in all — and the swimming, from little coves to great, sweeping Atlantic beaches of yellow sand (not so different from Crosby, bar the temperature). At Nantes we turned the Beetle inland and headed down the Loire Valley.

Tony and I were now definitely an item. When he introduced me as his girlfriend, I no longer made a face. In spite of my fears that Derry would take umbrage, in the end he was fine about it.

The following September we drove to Italy. Tom Gallop had been born, so this time it was just Tony and me. Love and marriage were definitely in the air. Marc and Bina Palley had tied the knot, with Tony as best man. Everyone said his speech was the best that summer.