Quite often we had a meal together, which was more than I ever did with any of the others. Of the three in my room, Allen was a precise spinster of a man, curiously happy, who said with simple detachment that he had none of the physical force and vitality of a successful barrister; he lived at his club, marked thousands of examination papers, edited volumes of trials, and for ten years past had averaged eight hundred or nine hundred pounds a year; he had a hope, at forty-five, of some modest permanent job, and made subfusc, malicious, aunt-like jokes at Getliffe’s expense; they were cruel, happy jokes, all the happier because they got under Salisbury’s skin. The other two were both pupils, only a term senior to me. One, Snedding, was hard-working and so dense that Percy erased him from serious consideration in his first month. The other, Paget, was a rich and well-connected young man who was spending a year or two at the Bar before managing the family estates. He was civil and deferential to us all in Chambers, and played an adequate game of chess; but outside he lived a smart social life, and politely evaded all invitations from professional acquaintances, much to the chagrin of Salisbury, who was a headmaster’s son and longed for chic.
Paget was no fool, but he was not a menace. I was lucky, I told myself, that neither of those two was a competitor, for it meant that I might get more than my share of the minor pickings. I told myself that I was lucky. But all the luck was put off till tomorrow, and I fretted, lost to reason in my impatience, because tomorrow would not come.
No one was better than Getliffe at keeping his pupils occupied. So Salisbury said, who was fervently loyal to Getliffe and tried to counter all the gossip of the Inn dining table. There were plenty of times when I was too rancorous to hear a word in Getliffe’s favour; yet in fact this one was true. From the day I entered the Chambers, he called me into his room each afternoon that he was not in court. ‘How are tricks?’ he used to say; and, when I mentioned a case, he would expound on it with enthusiasm. It was an enthusiasm that he blew out like his tobacco smoke; it was vitalizing even when, expounding impromptu on any note I wrote for him, he performed his maddening trick of getting every second detail slightly wrong. Usually not wrong enough to matter, but just wrong enough to irritate. He had a memory like an untidy magpie; he knew a lot of law, but if he could remember a name slightly wrong he — almost as though on purpose — managed to. That first slip with my surname was just like him; and afterwards, particularly when he was annoyed, apprehensive, or guilty because of me, he frequently called me Ellis.
So, in the smell of Getliffe’s tobacco, I listened to him as he produced case after case, sometimes incomprehensibly, because of his allusive slang, often inaccurately. He loved the law. He loved parading his knowledge and giving me ‘a tip or two’. When I was too impatient to let a false date pass, he would look shamefaced, and then say: ‘You’re coming on! You’re coming on!’
Then he got into the habit, at the end of such an afternoon, of asking me to ‘try a draft’ — ‘Just write me a note to keep your hand in,’ said Getliffe. ‘Don’t be afraid to spread yourself. You can manage three or four pages. Just to keep you from rusting.’
The first time it happened I read for several afternoons in the Inn library, wrote my ‘opinion’ with care, saw Getliffe flicker his eyes over it and say ‘You’re coming on!’, and then heard nothing more about it. But the second time I did hear something more. Again I had presented the opinion as professionally as I could. Then one morning Getliffe, according to his custom, invited all three of us pupils to attend a conference. The solicitors and clients sat round his table; Getliffe, his pipe put away, serious and responsible, faced them. He began the conference with his usual zest. ‘I hope you don’t think that I’m a man to raise false hopes,’ he said earnestly. ‘One would rather shout the winners out at the back door. But frankly I’ve put in some time on this literature, and I’m ready to tell you that we should be just a little bit over cautious if we didn’t go to court.’ To my astonishment, he proceeded firmly to give the substance of my note. In most places he had not troubled to alter the words.
At the end of that conference, Getliffe gave me what my mother would have called an ‘old-fashioned’ look.
He repeated this manoeuvre two or three times, before, during one of our afternoon tête-à-têtes, he said ‘You’re doing some nice odd jobs for me, aren’t you?’
I was delighted. He was so fresh and open that one had to respond.
‘I wanted to tell you that,’ said Getliffe. ‘I wanted to tell you something else,’ he added with great seriousness. ‘It’s not fair that you shouldn’t get any credit. One must tell people that you’re doing some of the thinking. One’s under an obligation to push your name before the public.’
I was more delighted still. I expected a handsome acknowledgement at the next conference.
I noticed that, just before the conference, Getliffe looked at the other pupils and not at me. But I still had high hopes. I still had them, while he recounted a long stretch from my latest piece of devilling. He had muddled some of it. I thought. Then he stared at the table, and said ‘Perhaps one ought to mention the help one sometimes gets from one’s pupils. Of course one suggests a line of investigation, one reads their billets-doux, one advises them how to express themselves. But you know as well as I do, gentlemen, that sometimes these young men do some of the digging for us. Why, there’s one minor line of argument in this opinion — it’s going too far to say that I shouldn’t have discovered it, in fact I had already got my observations in black and white, but I was very glad indeed, I don’t mind telling you, when my Mr Ellis hit upon it for himself.’
Getliffe hurried on.
I was enraged. That night, with Charles March, I thrashed over Getliffe’s character and my injuries. This was the first time he had taken me in completely. I was too much inflamed, too frightened of the future, to concede that Getliffe took himself in too. Actually, he was a man of generous impulses, and of devious, cunning, cautious afterthoughts. In practice, the afterthoughts usually won. I had not yet found a way to handle him. The weeks and months were running on. I did not know whether he would keep any of his promises, or how he could be forced.
He could not resist making promises — any more than he could resist sliding out of them. Charles March, who was a pupil in another set of Chambers, often went with me to hear him plead: one day, in King’s Bench 4, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe was only just in time. In he hurried, dragging his feet, slightly untidy and flurried — looking hunted as always, his wig not quite clean nor straight, carrying papers in his hand. As soon as he began to speak, he produced the impression of being both nervous and at ease. He was not a good speaker, nothing like so good as his opponent in this case; the strident note stayed in his voice, but it sounded thin even in that little court; yet he was capturing the sympathy of most people there.
At lunchtime, walking, in the gardens, Charles March and I were scornful of his incompetence, envious of his success, incredulously angry that he got away with it.
That night in his room I was able to congratulate him on winning the case. He looked at me with his most responsible air.