A Voyage Round My Father Page 7

  You could catch better fish than that. I’m prepared to take a bet on it … (He shivers slightly.) It’s getting cold.

  ELIZABETH (gets up, unsmiling). I’ll take you in.

  The FATHER gets up and ELIZABETH leads him off the stage. The SON enters, wearing a black coat and striped trousers.

  SON (to the audience). In that case his advocacy failed. In time he became reconciled to me as a husband for his daughter-in-law.

  Pause.

  He was right, though. I hadn’t bargained for the Vim.

  ELIZABETH enters downstage to the SON. She is in a bad mood, stirring something in a pudding bowl.

  ELIZABETH. Made lots of money this week?

  SON. Ten guineas. For a divorce.

  ELIZABETH. That’s marvellous, darling! I had to get them new vests.

  SON. What the hell do they do with their vests? In my opinion they eat their vests.

  ELIZABETH. And knicker linings. I put them on the account at John Barnes.

  SON. The account at John Barnes is assuming the proportions of the national debt.

  ELIZABETH. But you ought to be rich.

  SON. Ought?

  ELIZABETH. I’m up all night. Typing your divorce petitions. They must be paying you – for all those paragraphs of deep humiliation and distress.

  SON. You don’t get paid for years. In the Law.

  ELIZABETH. Can’t you ask for it?

  SON. Of course I can’t.

  ELIZABETH. Why not?

  SON. You just can’t knock on someone’s door and say, ‘What about the ten guineas for the divorce?’

  ELIZABETH. I’ll go and knock if you like …

  SON. Anyway, George collects the fees …

  ELIZABETH. George?

  SON. Our clerk. That’s his department.

  ELIZABETH. He told me his real name’s Henry.

  SON. My father calls him George.

  Light change, upstage a desk. Dim light for the barristers’ chambers. GEORGE, the clerk, a dignified, white-haired figure with a stiff collar and cuffs, comes in, sits down at the desk, opens a drawer, takes out a sandwich and eats.

  ELIZABETH. Whatever for?

  SON. Because he once had a clerk called George, who was killed on the Somme … So when Henry took over my father went on calling him George.

  ELIZABETH. Henry doesn’t much like that, if you ask me.

  SON. He doesn’t mind.

  ELIZABETH. You always think no one minds – about your father …

  The SON moves to her, puts an arm round her shoulder, to cheer her up.

  SON. Let’s go to the pub.

  ELIZABETH. What on?

  SON. The Family Allowance.

  ELIZABETH. All right. Shall we play bar billiards?

  SON. Like we were doing the night Peter walked in. Remember?

  ELIZABETH. And said, ‘This is the end of our marriage. I see you’ve become entirely trivial.’

  SON. Do you miss Peter?

  ELIZABETH. No. (Pause, she looks at him.) Do you?

  SON. Of course not.

  ELIZABETH. I’m sorry about John Barnes.

  SON. That’s marriage, isn’t it?

  ELIZABETH. What’s marriage?

  SON. An unexpectedly large expenditure on Vim, children’s vests and suchlike luxuries …

  Pause. ELIZABETH looks at him suspiciously.

  ELIZABETH. Who’s that – a quotation from?

  Silence. He doesn’t answer. They stand for a moment, looking at each other. Upstage, GEORGE closes the drawer, gets up, takes a hat and umbrella and goes. Downstage ELIZABETH and the SON go off in different directions; she’s still stirring.

  Light change and the SON re-enters upstage. He looks at the drawers of GEORGE’S desk. Is tempted. Opens one crack. Peers in. Shuts it when he thinks he hears a noise. Then opens it slowly. Puts in his hand and pulls out a cheque. He looks at the cheque and then whistles with delight. As he is doing so, GEORGE re-enters: looks at the SON and the open desk drawer and bridles with outrage.

  GEORGE. We have been going, sir, to our personal drawer!

  SON. But, George, it’s a cheque, for me …

  GEORGE. We should’ve given it out to us, sir. In the fullness of time …

  SON (kisses the cheque). Fifteen guineas! Thank God for adultery.

  GEORGE. We have never had a gentleman in Chambers that had to grub for money in our personal top drawer …

  SON. But, George, we’re desperately short of Vim.

  GEORGE. These things take time, sir.

  SON. And what’s the point of keeping good money shut up with a box of old pen nibs and a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie. Is it supposed to breed in there or something? (Pause.) If you could only get me some more work.

  GEORGE. We can’t expect much can we? We must wait until a few clients learn to like the cut of our jib.

  SON. I’ve got a talent for divorcing people.

  GEORGE. It’s not our work. It’s our conversation to solicitors that counts. While we’re waiting to come on, at London Sessions.

  SON. Conversation?

  GEORGE. Do we ask them about their tomato plants? Do we remember ourselves to their motor mowers. Do we show a proper concern for their operations and their daughters’ figure skating? That’s how we rise to heights, in the Law.

  SON. My father doesn’t do that.

  GEORGE. Your father’s a case apart.

  SON (rather proud). My father’s obnoxious, to solicitors.

  GEORGE (suddenly shouts). ‘The devil damn thee Black, thou cream-faced loon!’

  SON (taken aback). What?

  GEORGE. He said that to Mr Binns, when he’d forgotten to file his affidavit. Your father is something of an exception.

  SON. Yes.

  GEORGE. I sometimes wonder. Does he realize I’m one of the many Henrys of the world?

  SON (reassuring). Yes, George. I’m sure he does …

  Pause. GEORGE looks at the SON more sympathetically.

  GEORGE. Mr Garfield goes down to the Free Legal Centre, Holloway Road. That’s where he goes of a Thursday. He picks up the odd guinea or two, on poor persons’ cases. And I don’t have him in here, sir, ferreting about among my packed meal, sir.

  SON. Mr. Garfield lives with his mother – he spends nothing at all on Vim!

  GEORGE. He takes the view he might rise to fame from the Free Legal Centre. He says a murderer might rush in there off the streets any day of the week …

  Light change. The SON moves forward and speaks to the audience downstage left. Upstage, GEORGE goes. Downstage right, a table and a chair, a portrait of George VI. A SOCIAL WORKER with glasses, chain smoking over a pile of files, enters.

  SON. So I went to the Free Legal Centre. To a small room that smelt of old gym shoes and coconut matting where you could hear the distant sounds of billiards and punch ups from the Youth Club and pray that a murderer, still clutching the dripping knife, might burst in from the Holloway Road and beg urgently for Legal Aid.

  He turns hopefully to the SOCIAL WORKER.

  No murderers in tonight I suppose, Miss Bulstrode?

  SOCIAL WORKER. I’m sending you up to my Mr Morrow. I chose you out for him specially.

  SON. Why me?

  SOCIAL WORKER. He makes Mr Garfield faint.

  The SOCIAL WORKER hands the SON a file and goes. The SON starts to look at Mr Morrow’s file.

  Change of light upstage and the FATHER enters in a black jacket and a light waistcoat, on GEORGE’S arm. GEORGE sits him down at the upstage desk. The FATHER lights a cigar and starts to read a page of braille as the SON waits for his Free Legal client.

  SON. Back in Chambers my father, smelling of Eau-de-Cologne and occasional cigars, sat among his relics, the blown duck egg on which a client’s will had once been written, the caricatures of himself in great cases, the photographs of the signatures in a notorious forgery. He wrote a great textbook on the law of wills … becoming expert in the habits of mad old ladies who went fishing for go
ld under their beds and left all their money to undesirable causes.

  FATHER. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.

  SON. In the Holloway Road, I waited for more obscure problems.

  MR MORROW comes in downstags to the SON. He is an innocent-looking, smiling, balding, middle-aged man in a macintosh.

  MR MORROW. Are you the lawyer?

  SON. Mr Morrow? Is it matrimonial? (He opens the file and starts to fill in a form.)

  MR MORROW. Yes, sir. In a sense …

  SON. You were married on … ?

  MR MORROW. The sixth day of one month. I prefer not to use the heathen notation.

  SON. 1940?

  MR MORROW. Yes. 1940.

  SON. I have to put it down on this form, you see. (Pause.) Now – matrimonial offence: I mean, what is the trouble?

  MR MORROW. The corpuscles.

  SON. There’s no place on the Free Legal form for corpuscles.

  MR MORROW. Which, however, is the trouble … That’s what I want, sir. The legal position … She’s on to the red ones, now. I could just about stand it when she only took the white. And my child, sir. My Pamela. I have a very particular respect for that child, who is now losing her hearty appetite.

  SON. What’s your wife doing exactly?

  MR MORROW. She is eating our red corpuscles.

  SON. If you’re feeling unwell, Mr Morrow …

  MR MORROW. She drains them from us, by the use of her specs. That is how she drains them out. She focuses her rimless specs upon our bodies, and so our bodies bleed.

  SON. Mr Morrow …

  MR MORROW. I was standing upon the hearth rug, sir, which lies upon my … hearth. I looked down between my legs and I saw it there. The scarlet flower. There was the stain of blood on my white fleecy rug sir, red between my legs.

  Pause.

  SON. Have you spoken to your wife about this at all, Mr Morrow?

  MR MORROW. I haven’t spoken to her, sir. But she is forgiven. All the same I feel she has let me down. When it was the white she trained her eyes on, sir, it was more or less immaterial. But now she’s after my vital strength.

  SON. Legally …

  MR MORROW. A man stands entitled to his own blood, surely. It must be so.

  Pause.

  SON. I know of no case actually decided, on this particular point.

  MR MORROW (eager). You’re advising me to go to Doncaster, then?

  Pause.

  SON. You … might as well.

  MR MORROW. It’s your considered and expert opinion, her destructive eye won’t be upon me in Doncaster?

  SON. Why not try it anyway?

  MR MORROW. Very well, sir. I bow to your honest opinion. I shall discontinue all legal proceedings and proceed to Doncaster. Will you require my signature to that effect?

  SON. Well, no. I hardly think so.

  MR MORROW. That’s as well, as it so happens. I never sign, for ethical reasons. (He moves away.) It’s not the blood I miss, sir. It’s the child we have to consider. With all due respect.

  He goes. The SON is left alone. He closes the file and puts it down on the table. Upstage the light increases on the FATHER upstage. He repeats loudly.

  FATHER. ‘Let’s choose executors and talk of wills!’

  The SOCIAL WORKER comes in downstage to the SON.

  SOCIAL WORKER. Mr Morrow looks well contented.

  SON. He should. He has absolutely no need of the Law.

  The SON and the SOCIAL WORKER go off downstage left.

  FATHER.

  ‘And yet not so … For what can we bequeath?

  Save our deposed bodies to the ground.

  Our land, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s.

  And nothing can we call our own but death

  And that small model of the barren earth …

  The SON enters upstage, hangs up his hat.

  That serves as paste and cover to our bones.’

  … You’re back from lunch.

  SON. Yes.

  FATHER. You took a long time.

  SON. I was talking to a man – he might want to put on my play …

  FATHER. Possibly you’d work harder if you were a woman barrister.

  SON. Possibly …

  FATHER. I’ve often said to George, ‘Let’s have a woman in Chambers.’ Women work so much harder than men, they can be imposed on so much more easily. Look how seriously girls’ schools take lacrosse! They’d treat the Law like that. I could get a ridiculous amount of work from a woman pupil.

  SON. What does George say?

  FATHER (sad.) He says there’s not the toilet facilities … But you know old Carter Davidson once had a woman pupil. He occupied the basement here, rooms easily visible from the garden where the Masters of the Bench stroll, after dinner. Well, they were strolling there, history relates, after a Grand Night with some kind of Royal Personage, King, Queen, Princess … something of the kind, and glancing down, what did they see?

  SON. Well – what?

  FATHER. Carter Davidson and his woman pupil! Naked as puppies, stretched out on the Persian rug. Well, not a word was said, but do you know?

  SON. What?

  FATHER. Next day Sir Carter Davidson was appointed Chief Justice of the Seaward Isles. They shipped him off, ten thousand miles from the Inns of Court. He couldn’t ever understand why. (Laughs.) Well, that’s one way to get a blooming knighthood … Enjoying the Law, are you … ?

  SON. Not all that much.

  FATHER. Plays are all very well. Photographs in the paper may be all very fine and large. But you need something real! Hold hard on the Law.

  SON. Are you sure the Law’s real?

  FATHER. What on earth do you mean?

  SON. No one seems to need it … except lawyers …

  FATHER. The Law’s not designed for imbeciles, or your friends who combine the art of being called Bill with membership of the female sex. It’s not exactly tailor made for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley … No! The whole point of the Law is – it’s designed for the ordinary everyday citizen seated aboard the ordinary, everyday Holborn tramcar.

  SON. I don’t think they have trams in Holborn any more.

  FATHER. That’s hardly the point.

  SON. No trams and no ordinary commonsense citizen sitting on them or anywhere else in the world. They’re all busy thinking of the things that really worry them, like the shapes on the ceilings and the stains on the carpet, and they only pretend to be ordinary commonsense citizens when they need lawyers. It’s a disguise they put on, like the blue suits and old Boy Scout buttons and the terrible voice they use to take the Bible oath. They’re deceiving you, that’s what they’re doing. They think if they play your game we’ll let them off their debts, or order their wives to permit them sexual intercourse, or liberate them from old pointless crimes no one holds against them anyway. All that commonsense legal language we’re so proud of – I tell you honestly, it might as well be Chinese …

  FATHER (conciliating). Oh, well now … You can get a lot of innocent fun out of the Law. How’s your cross?

  SON. What?

  FATHER. Your cross-examination. In Court – have you the makings of a cross-examiner?

  SON. I don’t know.

  FATHER. Timing is of great importance. In the art of cross-examination.

  SON. That’s show business.

  FATHER. What did you say?

  SON. An expression, used by actors.

  FATHER (without interest). Really? How interesting. Now I always count, in silence of course, up to forty-three before starting a cross-examination.

  SON. Whatever for?

  FATHER. The witness imagines you’re thinking up some utterly devastating question.

  SON. And are you?

  FATHER. Of course not. I’m just counting. Up to forty-three. However, it unnerves the gentleman in the box. Then, start off with the knock out! Don’t leave it till the end; go in with your guns blazing! Ask him …

  SON. What?

 
; FATHER. Is there anything in your conduct, Mr Nokes, of which, looking back on it, you now feel heartily ashamed?

  SON. Is that a good question?

  FATHER. It’s an excellent question!

  SON. Why exactly?

  FATHER. Because if he says ‘yes’ he’s made an admission, and if he says ‘no’ he’s a self-satisfied idiot and he’s lost the sympathy of the Court.

  SON. Anything else?

  FATHER. Say you’ve got a letter in which he admits something discreditable … like, well having apologized to his wife for instance … Now then, how’re you going to put that to him?

  SON. Did you, or did you not …

  FATHER. Not bad.

  SON. Write a letter apologizing to your wife?

  FATHER. Well, I suppose you’re young.

  SON. Isn’t that right?

  FATHER. Not what I should call the art of cross-examination.

  SON. So how … ?

  FATHER. You be Nokes.

  SON. All right.

  FATHER. You behaved disgracefully to your wife, did you not?

  SON. No.

  FATHER. In fact, so disgracefully that you had to apologize to her.

  SON. I don’t remember.

  FATHER. Will you swear you did not?

  SON. What?

  FATHER. Will you swear you didn’t apologize to her?

  SON. All right.

  FATHER. Now please turn to the letter on page 23. Just read it out to us will you?

  SON. I see. (Pause). What’s the point of all this actually?

  FATHER (standing up, very positive). The point. My dear boy, the point is to do down your opponent. To obliterate whoever’s agin you. That’s what the point of it is … And of course, to have a bit of fun, while you’re about it.

  Tapping with his stick, the FATHER feels his way off. The SON moves down stage and speaks to the audience.