The Pupil Read Online Free Page B

– it had all been worthwhile. Never mind the work ahead, it would be proper work, in the real world. This was onepinnacle of achievement, with greater and better things to come. He forgot his tea, picked up the letter again and took it with him from room to room, reading it over and over.
    Next Monday! Only five days away. A surge of fear and excitement rose in him at the thought of next Monday. Oh, God, how blessed he was. The urge to tell someone was now too great. He rang his friend Simon, but he was out. Who could he ring?
    Bridget immediately came to mind, but he found himself vaguely reluctant. She had been his girlfriend at university, a relationship formed at a time when the young and lonely cleave to one another – the first term. Absorbed in work and too emotionally apathetic to take any positive step, he had allowed it to drift on. In ways it was convenient, financially, particularly when it came to finding rooms and flatshares. But of late, Anthony had become aware that Bridget was seeking anxiously in the relationship some form of security, and the promise of a conventional future. For although she was a mediocre creature – moderately pretty, marginally intelligent, and only minimally demanding – she did love Anthony with the habitual affection that often passes for love in those who yearn only for safety. She had recently begun her articles with a firm of Holborn solicitors and, anxious to consolidate matters and move into the grown-up world of mortgages, joint accounts, engagements, and similar absorbing projects, had begun to nag Anthony about his ambitions at the Bar.
    ‘Why don’t you switch and become a solicitor instead?’ she had said. ‘It’s much more secure, and you’d always have a regular income. The way things are going, I can’t see you ever getting a pupillage.’
    Anthony had been stung by the notion that he should suddenly abandon his cherished project and slide into the murky half-life, as he saw it, of a City solicitor. How second-rate. She seemed to have no idea of how much it meant to him, how hallowed a place the Temple was and how blessed all those who lived and worked there, even unto the lowliest criminal hack. She understood nothing. But then, for Bridget, law was a means to a financial end, to a decent job, car, house, nanny. It might as well have been computer programming, for all the intellectual pleasure it gave her.
    The nagging had only fixed Anthony more deeply in his ambitions, and also aroused in him a sense of resentment that Bridget should presume so much. True, he had let the relationship develop into a much more serious pattern than he had ever wished or intended, mainly through a mixture of apathy and a genuine desire not to be unkind. Recently, however, he had begun to realise that, unless steps were taken to end it, things would become tiresome and very difficult. Bridget seemed to attach considerable significance to the last four years, as a portent for the future.
    Nonetheless, his elation and happiness that day naturally overcame his misgivings, and so he rang her office. Bridget, of course, was pleased, and when she suggested going out the following evening to celebrate, his prudence deserted him and he agreed. It was only later that it occurred to him that the conversation the next night would have to be carefully engineered, if their mutual pleasure at his brightening prospects were not to develop into a fatal case, on Bridget’s part, of ‘making plans’.

    By the time his mother came home from school, Anthony’s euphoria had flattened out a little. He had rung Michael Gibbon, been told he was in conference, and had left a message to say that he would be there at nine-thirty next Monday. To have spoken to someone, even a secretary, had relieved him. The matter was settled; if they’d written to him by mistake, they would have said so. They hadn’t.
    His mother, when he told her, was delighted but not in the least surprised. She had unwavering