The Pupil Read Online Free

obvious intelligence) and pity (for his inability to appreciate the finer things in life, such as Millwall and WorthingtonBest Bitter). Their discussions were normally limited to cars and television programmes, but now and then Len’s imagination would be fired by a leader in
The Sun
, and he would seek out Anthony to discuss current affairs with him, feeling that Anthony’s views lent breadth to his own, and that he could safely re-rehearse those views to his own credit later in the pub.
    Len had finished his mixed grill and was watching Anthony speculatively as he mopped up the last of his mushroom omelette.
    ‘’Ow long are you working ’ere, then, Tone?’ He lit a cigarette, leant his face on his hand, and stared deeply at Anthony. Anthony looked up.
    ‘I don’t know. Not much longer. Until I get a pupillage, I suppose.’
    ‘What’s one of them, then?’
    ‘It’s like a – a sort of apprenticeship for becoming a barrister.’
    ‘That’s not the same as a solicitor?’ Len had gleaned this from one of their more searching discussions concerning the law as a profession.
    ‘No, that’s right. Barristers are the ones who wear wigs and stand up and talk in court.’ Anthony was careful to explain things to Len in terms of reference to television drama.
    ‘So how long does it last, this apprenticeship?’ Len blew out a long plume of smoke.
    ‘A year. That is, you can’t earn anything for the first six months. I mean, you’re actually not allowed to until the second six months.’
    ‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Len in disgust. ‘You wouldn’t catch me going in for that caper.’ Anthony admitted that it was not, perhaps, quite Len’s cup of tea.
    ‘But it’s worth it, eventually. At least, it’s supposed to be. Once you become established in a tenancy, you can earn quite a lot.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Len’s interest was faintly aroused.
    ‘But I don’t think you’d like it,’ added Anthony quickly.
    ‘No. You need O-levels an’ that, don’t you?’ recalled Len wistfully. His memories of the remedial unit at Litt Park Comprehensive were stirred. O-levels had been bright, unattainable, shining things. His attention slipped away from Anthony and his career, a life that might have been, and moved on to more immediate interests.
    ‘You fancy coming to a disco in Hackney tonight?’
    Anthony shook his head; he had never yet accepted one of Len’s invitations, but he was touched that Len continued to issue them.
    ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go and see my father,’ he said. And then he sighed, thinking of his father and wishing that he could go to Hackney, after all.

    Anthony’s mother and father had met in the early sixties, when she had been plain, seventeen-year-old Judith Hewitt. Coming as she did from a background of solid respectability, with no aspirations beyond having a home and a family of much the same pattern as her mother’s, Charles Cross had seemed to her an anarchic, daring spirit, a revolutionary nineteen-year-old. He had long hair at a time when Beatle haircuts were considered outrageous, he smoked marijuana(and persuaded Judith without difficulty to do likewise), he read American underground magazines and admired Allen Ginsberg and Robert Crumb, and he had recently been expelled from his public school. Who could resist his eccentric charms? It appeared, unfortunately, that his own immediate family could – particularly when, without advance notice and at a time when he had no job nor any prospect of one, he married the then-pregnant Judith and asked them for money to assist matters.
    They had refused, becoming particularly unpleasant about the whole thing, and said that they would have nothing further to do with him unless he divorced Judith, and started a new life by going to university, still regarded in those days as something of a talisman by the aspiring middle class. Since he was already rather bored with Judith, and not especially interested in their future child, he agreed with