David rose from an uncomfortable armchair in Forrest, Sharpe and Hollis’s waiting-room and went to gaze edgily out of the window at the quiet courtyard below.
“Solicitors always keep you hanging around!” the portly gentleman in rimless spectacles and a pin-stripe suit, who was his companion in impatience, complained. “If I did this to my customers, they’d go elsewhere to buy their goods.”
“Mine, too,” David agreed.
The man picked up a three-week-old copy of Punch, from the circular oak table dominating the room and left David to his thoughts.
Why had he put off making his will? And, now he was about to do so, why did he feel so jumpy? Because it somehow brought you that much nearer to death’s door? Possibly. But in David’s case there was also the distressing reason for him having decided to leave Sanderstyle to his grandson, instead of to his daughter.
Jim Forrest had been out of town when David initially called him for an appointment, and his secretary had not known exactly when he was due back. It had then been December 1956 and was now summer, ’57. In the meantime, Shirley had not been too troublesome, and David had pushed the matter of his will to the back of his mind. But yesterday his daughter had returned it to the forefront, he thought with feeling. David had complained of indigestion after eating too much trifle at Mark’s tenth birthday party, but Shirley had insisted that it was heart strain, from overwork – and had revealed that she was still in touch with the consortium who wanted to buy him out.
If it had not been Sunday, David would have telephoned Jim Forrest there and then. Instead, he had lain awake all night, unwilling to close his eyes, lest he die in his sleep before willing the business to Mark. If he died intestate, Sanderstyle would be split in whatever proportions the law decreed, between Bessie, Ronald and Shirley. Then Shirley would buy her brother out and, with her father gone, her mother would be putty in her hands. Oh no! David had thought. He had phoned Jim’s office at nine sharp this morning and been told that Mr. Forrest had no free time until next week. But his desperation must have shown in his voice – the secretary had eventually said she would manage to fit him in.
“Mr Forrest will see you now,” he heard her say from the doorway.
David followed her trim, grey-clad figure into a suite of offices as old-fashioned looking as the waiting-room. Dark oak doors, with polished brass knobs, lined the narrow corridor down which she led him. On the walls were framed prints of Manchester, the way it had looked when David was a lad and did no more. The prints were mounted on yellowing parchment, and had probably been there since those days, David thought as he passed one of Poets’ Corner, where there had once been a second-hand bookshop in which he and Jim had browsed when they were boys. Though David had not had much time for browsing, he recalled wryly. With his after-school job, and Bar Mitzvah classes, in addition to homework.
The mustiness assailing his nostrils continued to do so when he stepped inside Jim’s office.
“Please forgive me for the delay, Mr. Sanderton,” Jim said, shaking hands with him.
“If you keep your old pals waiting this long, I’m sorry for your mere acquaintances,” David answered with a smile. “And what’s all this with the Mr. Sanderton? We used to be Jim and David.”
Jim eyed him uncertainly for a moment. Then the grin David remembered from their schooldays creased his still-freckled face. “Good God! It’s David Sandberg!”
“That was,” David said dryly.
“The new name didn’t help me to recognise you. Nor did the avoirdupois,” Jim added with another grin and a glance at David’s waistline. “Where’s the lanky lad I used to know gone to?”
“Ask my missus,” David laughed. “But you’ve hardly changed,” he said, surveying the stocky man his old chum now was. The unruly hair the schoolboy-Jim had tried, unsuccessfully, to plaster down looked as obstinate as ever. Only it was now grey, instead of straw-coloured. “I’d have known you anywhere,” David said, swallowing down the lump that had risen in his throat. Jim Forrest had been a very special friend.
“So, take a seat already!” Jim smiled. “Remember how I used to mimic you?”
“From you, I didn’t mind.” Knowing Jim had taught David that all Gentiles were not anti-Semites. That friendship between Christian and Jew was possible. It had been the difference in their backgrounds socially and materially, not religion, that had cut David off from Jim. The poverty from which only hard grind could free David, while Jim continued along the golden path upon which the accident of birth had placed him.
David sat down in the client’s chair and watched Jim move behind the desk to sit in his.
“I got into a spot of bother at Flanders,” Jim said casually, apropos his stiff gait. “My grandchildren call me Long John Silver.”
“I was in Flanders, too,” David said, hiding his distress. “But I was one of the lucky ones. Not even scarred.” He changed the subject. Commiseration with a man like Jim was not called for. “But I didn’t make this appointment to talk about old times. You’re a busy chap, Jim, and so am I.” He told Jim the purpose of his visit.
“If you’re sure that’s what you want to do, David, I’ll carry out your instructions,” Jim said.
David watched him select a pipe from the rack beside his pen-tray and fill it with tobacco from an antique humidor. The note of caution in Jim’s voice had been plain, but he was not the kind to say more and for this David was grateful. Aaron would have been reading him the riot act by now.
“I’ve made up my mind, Jim.”
“Very well.”
Jim looked surprised when David insisted upon signing a simple last will and testament there and then.
“I have a heart condition, Jim,” David revealed though Jim had not asked for an explanation. “When I’ve made my will, I can forget it. I’d like you to be my executor.”
“Fine.” Jim made no further comment and, after the will was signed and witnessed, walked with David to the lift. “It’s good to see you again,” he said simply whilst they waited for the ancient contraption to creak its way up from the ground floor.
“Same here,” David answered gruffly. “Do you still live in Alderley Edge?”
“No. My wife prefers Prestbury.”
David had noticed the photograph of a pretty silver-haired woman on the desk, the kind he would have expected a man from Jim’s background to have married.
“Nigel, my son – he’s in the practice with me – lives in Prestbury, too,” Jim smiled. “So, I see a lot of my grandchildren, which compensates for never having seen my daughter’s kids. She married a New Zealander and went to live out there, after the war. My wife has been out to see them, but I’ve never managed to make the time.”
“I know the feeling,” David said. It had taken him nearly ten years to get around to visiting Miriam and Sammy. “Are your parents still living at ‘Forrest Dene’, Jim?”
“Father died some time ago. Mother stayed on there for a while, then she had a stroke and my sister took her to live with her.”
A scene from the distant past flashed before David’s eyes and, for a split second, he was a gawky lad again, watching little Lucy Forrest play with a puppy on a sunlit lawn. “I remember your little sister,” he smiled.
“She’s a parson’s wife now, in the depths of Devon. And not so little!”
But the way she was then, playing with the dog whilst a housemaid in a frilly apron retied the satin ribbon in her Alice-in-Wonderland hair, the gracious house and well-kept gardens, the whole ambience of that long-ago afternoon, had brought home to David the insurmountable difference between his life and Jim’s.
The lift arrived and Jim drew back the heavy iron gate. “Perhaps you and your wife would come and dine with Clarissa and me one evening, David?”
David thought of the woman in the photograph. Whom Bessie would call “the pearls and twinset type”. And what would Clarissa, whose name epitomised David’s pre-impression of her, call Bessie? With the best will in the world, the twain could not meet on any but the most strained and superficial ground.
David was probably wealthier than Jim but had long since lost his youthful illusion that affluence was an equaliser. A compensator, yes. But when you had to compensate yourself for something, the original lack remained. Bessie would have nothing whatsoever in common with Clarissa Forrest. And what did David share with Jim, now? Only their schoolboy past.
“Why bring the women into it?” he said with a chuckle that belied his feelings. “You and I can meet for lunch sometime, Jim.”
“Fine.”
They shook hands and David stepped into the lift.
“I’m glad you’ve done so well, David,” Jim said. But there was no condescension in his voice.
“I know you are, Jim.”
The next time David saw his mother, he told her he had reencountered Jim Forrest.
“Him, I blame for everything,” Sarah said.
David laughed. “Because the first time I broke the Sabbath laws was when I went by train on a Shabbos to his house?”
“That, you would have done sooner or later anyway. Like the rest of the Shaboss-breakers in this family! What I blame him for is giving you such big ideas.”
“Bigger than I’ve yet achieved, Mother.”
“And you won’t be satisfied until you do, though getting there could put you in your grave, David.”