Speaking for Myself (12 page)

Like many other young barristers, we both worked in August. With everyone else away, it was a good time to pick up new cases and clients. Then we were off to Calais, making our way down through France and Switzerland to Italy, to Chianti country, where we had rented the bottom half of a villa. The pale blue Beetle had survived the year, but only just. I can remember us trying to get up St. Bernard’s Pass, where it felt as if we were pedaling, and just about making it to the top. In those days the Michelin Guide had a category called “Good Food at Reasonable Prices,” marked on the map with a red
R
, and we planned our route following the red
R
s religiously.

Until he met me, Tony’s girlfriends had all picked at their food. To go out with a woman who enjoyed her food was a real eye-opener for him.

“It’s probably a class thing,” he said.

What did he expect? I mean, here was I, a working-class girl, and we’d paid money for this food, so I was jolly well going to eat it. The idea of picking at a few leaves in a ladylike fashion verged on the criminal to me.

Derry, too, liked to see a girl enjoy herself, and when he was feeling expansive, he would take us out to incredibly fancy places, like La Gavroche. He also introduced us to El Vino’s, the celebrated drinking haunt of barristers and journalists on Fleet Street. It was incredibly expensive, so the only time I ever drank there was when Derry bought us drinks.

Enjoying eating is only a step away from enjoying cooking, and renting a villa meant that I could buy food at the local market and cook it at home. Although I enjoyed cooking in London, in the seventies it was difficult to get even garlic, let alone the eggplants and peppers piled up in Siena. The pages of the notebook I kept that summer have as many descriptions of meals as they have of churches and architecture.

The two weeks ended all too soon. The last morning I was up early, scrubbing the floors and cleaning so as to leave the villa as I would hope to find it. Naturally Tony was nowhere to be seen. My last task, inevitably, was the toilet.

So there I was, on my knees, cleaning the toilet, when Tony came up behind me and said, “You know, Cherie, I think maybe we should get married.” Without hesitation, I said yes.

Chapter 9

Marriage

S
ince early that summer I had no longer been living in Veena’s flat. Her parents needed it back. Having lived in luxury for two years rent-free, I could hardly complain.

The Bar is the ultimate nonlinear networking web, with each set of chambers acting as its own mini-hub. Whatever the requirement, chambers is always the best place to start looking, and so it proved in this case. A former pupil, I was told, had just bought a house and was looking for someone to help pay the mortgage.

I already knew Maggie Rae in a professional capacity. Following her pupilage, she had gone off and become a barrister in one of the first chambers set up outside the Inns of Court. Once there she decided that the Bar wasn’t for her and retrained as a solicitor. Now qualified, she was a partner in the left-leaning firm of Hodge, Jones and Allan, who regularly sent family law work to our chambers.

The house Maggie had bought was in Wilton Way, Hackney — one street north of London Fields, the only patch of green in the area. I had never been that far east before, and West Hampstead and St. John’s Wood were like posh Mayfair in comparison. The area hadn’t always been so run-down, as could be seen from the houses themselves, many of which were Georgian. The streets were both wide and wide apart, making for generous gardens. Hackney’s proximity to the City (London’s financial center), however, had resulted in its being heavily bombed in the Second World War, and where the bomb sites had been filled in at all, it had been with poor-quality housing and tower blocks.

Maggie’s house was a complete wreck — in fact, the whole front wall was missing. It had previously been divided into bed-sits, and the only heating was a gas cooker on the top floor (my bedroom) in what had been a little kitchenette. So there we’d be, up in my bedroom, the front wall covered with a tarpaulin and the door of the oven wide-open, with us huddled round it for warmth.

She was heavily into do-it-yourself, and I spent every free moment there with the sandpaper — from floors to doors to skirting boards. Tony got involved as little as possible; he has many fine qualities, but DIY is not among them. Maggie had even constructed her own bed, admittedly from a kit, and persuaded me to do the same. This time I did enlist Tony’s help. He would, after all, benefit personally. The result was totally hopeless. Not only was the bed wonky, but it tended to collapse at just the wrong moment. Building that bed had one single advantage: we learned very early on that DIY wasn’t for us, and when it came time to look for a house of our own, wrecks were out.

During the long drive back from Siena, my head was full of plans for the future. Tony’s proposal might have been a little unusual — definitely the wrong one on her knees — but I hadn’t needed to think about my answer. We were best friends and lovers, surely the ultimate combination for a happy and successful marriage. There was a constantly changing dynamic between us, and I knew that life with Tony would never be boring. What more could a girl ask for?

Possibly a ring. But then I have always hated my fingers, and Tony felt we should put everything we had into a house. There was just one thing he wanted to be sure of, he said, as we drove the Beetle off the ferry at Dover.

“What’s that, my darling?” I asked, giving his knee a squeeze. Could he want me to tell him how much I loved him yet again?

“Promise me you won’t say anything to anyone.”

I remember sitting there and thinking,
What?
Instead I said, “I see.”

“Nothing to worry about. I just think we need to be sensible about how we handle it, that’s all.”

As in, just in case I change my mind? My little balloon of happiness instantly deflated.

He did agree that we could tell my mother, and the first weekend we were back, we drove up to Oxford to see her. Even then, my husband-to-be pulled his punches, talking at some length around us buying a house. My mum, being very liberal-minded, thought he was saying, “Cherie and I are going to move in together.” Only later, when Tony suggested buying a bottle of champagne, did the penny drop.

“You mean you’re getting married?” she said. Up till then the mword hadn’t crossed his lips.

What mainly worried Tony was Derry. If he disapproved, it could have really negative consequences, he said. As far as I was concerned, it was not a question of “if.” Of course Derry would disapprove. He may have tolerated Tony and me as sweethearts, but marriage was another thing altogether. He’d always had a droit du seigneur attitude toward me, though naturally he didn’t put it like that.

“You’re much too young to get married,” Derry said, to no one’s surprise, when Tony eventually told him. “Don’t do it.”

Paradoxically it was Derry who made it possible, at least from a financial perspective. He brought Tony into a case to do with the Bank of Oman. For the next few months, Tony was always popping back and forth to the Persian Gulf. It was a nice earner, and it brought him his first really big fee, so we were able to start looking for a house.

My personal worry was closer to home. How would my mother react to my father giving me away? Unlike being called to the Bar, there were no precedents for the bride’s mother walking her up the aisle.

One morning early in November, I was at home, vaguely listening to the radio, getting ready to leave for chambers, when I heard my father’s name.

“Tony Booth, the
Till Death Us Do Part
actor, is in hospital after being severely burnt in a fire at his home. The other occupants of the building were unharmed.”

My first thought was to call Susie, though I hadn’t seen her or my father in months. She was very angry. He’d been taken to Mount Vernon Hospital, she said. Beyond that all I got was “drunk . . . locked him out . . . tried to burn the place down . . . may he rot in hell.”

I then called Mount Vernon. I should try to come in as soon as possible was all they would say.

I went on my own. I had nothing on that morning, and Lyndsey had to go to work. In any event, her feelings toward the man who had betrayed her were still not good.

There are no subways in Hackney, so I took a bus to Liverpool Street, and from there it was direct but slow. Eventually I had to transfer to another bus. The journey took more than two hours.

My father tells a complicated story of what actually happened the previous night. It involves the Special Air Service (SAS), counterespionage, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and a botched assassination attempt. Two SAS operatives, he claims (whom he met in a pub, naturally), helped him break into his own house by climbing on two paraffin drums to access a trapdoor to the loft. They then decided it would be easier to set fire to the front door, so they put a torch to the paraffin, which subsequently exploded, and flames engulfed him. I’ve never bought that version of events, and, strange to relate, the two key witnesses have never materialized. Some facts are indisputable, however. He was certainly locked out of the flat; he was certainly burnt; and he was certainly very, very drunk.

I knew the layout of the house from babysitting. His flat was on the top floor of a prewar mansion-house block. Opposite his front door was a storeroom where, among other things, he kept spare paraffin for the heater. He must have climbed up on the drum to access the trapdoor to the loft. Once there he could move about above the rafters and climb down through his own trapdoor. He had done it before. My dad was a heavy smoker and, on this occasion, insensible. Add paraffin into the mix, and what happened is not surprising. In all likelihood he had a cigarette in his hand. As he was hauling himself up into the trapdoor, it fell onto the paraffin drum — probably covered with spilled paraffin — and set it alight. It then exploded, and he fell feetfirst into a furnace of flames.

Apart from his feet and lower legs, the worst burns were on his hands. Even in extremis my dad knew what his most precious asset was, and his first instinct was to protect it. I know that’s what he did, because over the months I subsequently visited him, it became an obsession.

When I first saw him, he was in a terrible state. His hands were encased in what looked like plastic bags, and he was rambling. One of the nurses changed me a £1 note for some coins, and I called my grandma from the pay phone in reception. He wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, I told her. It was a lie. I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. Just hearing her voice was enough to bring tears to my eyes, in a way that seeing my father hadn’t. Then, I had been in shock. Next I called Auntie Audrey. I told her the truth. He was in a desperate state, I said. Everything was desperate. The hospital building was a prefab, and there was a constant noise of people crying out in pain.

When there was nothing more to do, I kissed my dad’s head and left. (Later, interestingly, when he was undergoing skin grafts, such ordinary human contact wouldn’t be possible.) Meanwhile I had called and left a message for Tony. David, the chief clerk, said he was back from Oman but was with Derry reporting on the case. I said that my dad had had an accident, that I was going into chambers, and that I’d explain when I saw him. Could he please call me.

Back at Essex Court, I sat there waiting for Tony to ring. When he did, it wasn’t from chambers. I could hear the noise of a bar in the background.

“I’m having a drink with Derry in El Vino’s. Why don’t you join us?”

“Tony, my dad’s in a really bad way. I need to talk to you.”

“So come over.”

“But you don’t understand. He’s ill, really ill.”

“Just come over!”

I went over. This was in the days when Fleet Street was still Fleet Street, and El Vino’s was packed with its usual crowd of journalists and a sprinkling of lawyers. It was a very masculine world, and women were not very welcome. I remember standing in the doorway looking across this mass of suits, and then I saw Tony sitting at a table with Richard Field, who had been Derry’s pupil after me. All three men had their heads back in laughter. I went over, and Richard pulled out a chair.

“Tony, I really need to speak to you,” I said. Neither Derry nor he took a blind bit of notice. I tugged at his sleeve and repeated what I’d said. Nothing. Then I burst into tears.

“You know what, my dad is dying, and you won’t talk to me,” I said, then got up and walked out.

Tony had no reason to like my father, but once he realized that his life was in danger — and, more important, saw how much my father mattered to me — he felt terrible about how he’d behaved. He knew the moment I got up and left, and then, of course, he came running after me. It was just bad timing: there he was, back from his first big job, full of stories of Oman and the rest of it — and my being in a state wasn’t what he expected or wanted.

Whatever residual anger I might have felt toward my dad evaporated over the next few weeks. Whatever bad things he’d done in his life, I decided, I would not wish this on my worst enemy. He had nobody now except me, so every Monday I made my way out to the hospital. I felt I owed it to my grandma and to Auntie Audrey to be there. They had to know there was someone from the family looking after him.

My dad was now resident in the burn unit and making very slow progress. His lungs had been damaged by smoke inhalation, and he was having skin graft after skin graft. That was when he was in the most pain: the thicker the graft taken, the less the eventual deformity, but the greater the pain. He was not alone. Everyone in the unit was in pain. You could hear them screaming, and people were dying all the time. When shifts changed, I’d overhear the nurses saying, “So-and-so won’t survive the night.” One woman, a nurse, had 90 percent burns. She’d been lighting the gas in the oven when it exploded. By the following Monday she was dead. The body can’t survive that amount of damage.

My dad nearly died twice from liver failure. He was, of course, an alcoholic. Above all, they had to prevent infection. Before going in to see him, I had to dress completely in plastic. While the grafting was continuing, in order to avoid the skin stretching, he couldn’t exercise. His legs and arms were covered with what looked like stockings. We just sat and talked. His one great terror, to which he returned again and again, was whether he would ever have an erection again. I mean, did I want to have this conversation with my dad?