Читать книгу Daddy’s Girls - Tasmina Perry, Tasmina Perry - Страница 14

Cornwall Chambers was housed in an austere, imposing Georgian building on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a prim London square that reeked of establishment values and dour respectability. However, inside, in the office of Charles McDonald, QC, there was a party atmosphere. Grey-haired men in Savile Row suits were smiling broadly and chinking glasses, a rare break in the usual sobriety of one of the best commercial practices in London.

Charles McDonald tapped his crystal tumbler of tonic water with the back of a silver teaspoon and cleared his throat.

‘I don’t need to tell you what a productive month these chambers have had,’ he said to his colleagues in his rich Edinburgh drawl. ‘So productive that I felt it would be rude not to finish it off with drinks, even though I’ll only be joining you with a mixer.’

Light laughter rang politely around the room. Barristers, particularly heads of chambers, were not known for their sense of humour, so any levity always raised a disproportionate amount of laughter.

‘Gerry and David,’ he nodded over to a round man with a florid face and to a smaller, thinner man in moon-shaped glasses by his side, ‘a fantastic win in the Petersham libel case. Look out for a page three interview with Gerry in next week’s Lawyer.’

More laughs as Charles once again raised his glass. ‘Can I also take this opportunity to congratulate Cornwall Chambers’ resident celebrity, Miss Camilla Balcon. A wonderful victory in the Kendall versus Simon case. I frankly thought it was unwinnable. Congratulations, Camilla.’

All the men in the room turned towards the attractive blonde woman in the corner, always grateful for an opportunity to look at her. Camilla Balcon nodded politely, smoothing down the skirt of her bespoke Gieves & Hawkes suit to look even more presentable for her audience.

As she sipped at her flute of champagne, she wondered whether this acknowledgement might finally trigger a more heavyweight and prestigious caseload. She was getting impatient to reach the top of the legal tree. For any other twenty-nine-year-old woman at the bar, Camilla Balcon’s career trajectory would have been termed stratospheric. Balliol College, Oxford, top five in her year at Bar school and a tenancy in one of London’s most elite chambers. In the last twelve months alone she had been junior counsel for the chambers’ top silks in three major fraud cases. She had a growing reputation as an astute and brutal cross-examiner in her own right, and consequently was topping six figures in yearly fees. Not bad for someone regularly dismissed as posh totty.

But still, it was not quite good enough for Camilla, whose entire life had been spent plotting her next conquest, her next brilliant achievement. It was her legacy as the third child in a high-achieving family. You either gave up before you’d even started, or you worked your damnedest to outshine them all. And Camilla wanted to shine.

She turned to look at her colleagues and reflected that they might just be the reason her career was going more slowly than she would like. While her commercial chambers had a fantastic reputation, with so much ego and talent in one building it was hard enough to get noticed, let alone scramble up the ladder. So while Charles McDonald might throw her the odd compliment during a Friday night’s drinks, she felt sure it was simply to pacify the chambers’ only female tenant.

A tall, gangly, but good-looking man bounded over with a bottle of Moët. ‘I see somebody’s glass needs a refill,’ said Matt Hornby, one of chambers’ senior clerks with a blush. ‘Charles has splashed out on the good stuff so we might as well quaff it.’

‘Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean we have to drink it all,’ said Camilla, holding out her glass with a coquettish smile. Aware that Matt, a twenty-five-year-old East Ender, had been hopelessly in love with her since she started at Cornwall Chambers, she didn’t want to encourage him, but he had a kind, handsome face, peppered with freckles, and she found it rather cute that he considered champagne such a treat.

‘Saw you in those Evening Standard party pages last night,’ continued Matt, drinking the Moët in nervous gulps. ‘So what are you up to this weekend that could possibly be more glamorous than tonight’s soirée?’

She laughed and sipped her champagne. ‘Lots of invitations to things – not looking forward to any of them. In fact, in about two hours I should be at a Charles and Nigella’s dinner party. The food will be fantastic, but nothing sounds better right now than being tucked up in bed with a video and a Chinese.’

‘Why don’t you take me along and let me be the judge of what’s the best night out?’

She smiled, unable to stop herself. ‘Where to?’ she purred, ‘Charles and Nigella’s or back to mine?’

‘Oy, you little minx. Are you flirting with me?’

She slapped him on the arm and put her glass on the table. ‘Absolutely not. And anyway, I think Nat might freak if I turned up with you as Friday night entertainment.’

Matt tried to smile at the mention of Nathaniel Montague, whom he’d only met twice but regularly saw gurning in the Daily Mail diary pages.

‘You have a point,’ laughed Matt, filling his flute to the rim and stuffing his mouth with a handful of Japanese rice crackers. ‘He scares the bejesus out of me.’

As Matt disappeared to ‘find some more snacks’, Camilla felt a tall presence at her shoulder. ‘Are you staying around for a little while or are you dashing off?’ asked Charles McDonald, in a manner that wasn’t so much a question as a request.

‘I haven’t got to be anywhere until about eight p.m. Why?’

He gently put his hand on her shoulder, steering her towards the door conspiratorially. ‘Shall we go somewhere quieter?’ he said, ‘I need to talk to you about something you might find interesting.’

Camilla felt her stomach flutter as they went down the staircase to her office on the second floor. This had to be the talk about improving her workload, she thought. Charles stopped Camilla at the door and picked up her Armani coat from the hat stand.

‘I think we should get out of here,’ he said, holding up her coat. ‘This is fairly confidential. Walls have ears, and all that.’

The Pen and Wig, tucked away in a side street behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was the perfect barrister’s watering hole. Dark and Dickensian, its stools were upholstered in faded red velvet, while caricatures of corpulent judges sat holding court around the bar. It was busy, full of lawyers killing time before they returned to wives and children in Victorian villas in Wandsworth Common. Not exactly the ideal place for a private chat, thought Camilla, as Charles fetched her a gin and tonic from the bar. Still, if he was about to increase her caseload, or move her to the more prestigious upper-floor offices, it was probably best if he did so out of the earshot of the other tenants.

‘Thank you so much for your acknowledgement of my work earlier,’ she said, impatient as always to cut to the chase. ‘Hopefully you’ll see that I’m ready to move up to lead counsel soon.’

Charles paused, putting his orange juice down carefully. ‘Actually, it wasn’t chambers I wanted to talk to you about,’ he began, fixing Camilla with his gaze and leaving a dramatic pause. It was a technique Camilla had seen him use to devastating effect in court when he was about to annihilate someone under cross-examination.

‘Camilla, you’re almost certainly the most ambitious law student I have ever interviewed for pupillage,’ said Charles. ‘And, believe me, we’ve had a lot of gung-ho lawyers through the doors of Cornwall Chambers.’

‘Isn’t everyone super-ambitious when they’re twenty-two and trying to get into good chambers?’ she smiled, relieved that she hadn’t been brought here for a dressing-down.

‘I suppose. But I always found it strange with you, with your background. We’ve had a lot of public school- and Oxbridge-educated barristers in this chambers, but I’ve always been suspicious of taking on the truly privileged ones.’ Charles whispered the word ‘privileged’. ‘Lazy bastards, a lot of them.’ He stopped.

‘Which is why I was hesitant to take you on, Camilla.’

Beginning to wonder where this conversation was going, Camilla began swirling the ice cubes at the bottom of her glass around and around.

‘Do you remember when I took you out for lunch in your first week?’ asked Charles.

Camilla remembered it well. It was to Wilton’s in Belgravia. She was the only woman in the restaurant and she ate pheasant when she knew she should have ordered the fish. It was the first time she had felt small, scared and a little out of her depth. Rather like now, in fact.

‘Do you remember that Michael Heseltine was sitting in the next booth and you became terribly excited?’ said Charles.

Camilla smiled. ‘I think I even said hello.’

‘I think you might have been a little drunk, actually. Don’t worry,’ he chuckled, lifting his orange juice. ‘Lunchtime drinking never agreed with me, either. But I remember thinking at the time, why is this girl so excited about meeting Heseltine when she must have met dozens of high-ranking political sorts through her family? I think your father was a Lords’ frontbencher at the time, wasn’t he? You had a fierce look in your eye and you told me that Heseltine had once said the president of the Oxford Union was the first step to becoming prime minister. And that’s the reason why you went for it, and won it.’

‘Actually, I think he said it was a chore that had to be suffered,’ remembered Camilla, thinking back to the months of Machiavellian plotting required to secure the prestigious Oxford office, and then the weekly attendance at one fatuous debate after another.

‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘it didn’t quite work out that way for him, did it? So much for the Oxford Union plan.’

‘He didn’t do so badly,’ said Charles, his voice serious, ‘he got deputy prime minister. And I think you, Camilla, could do just as well.’

Camilla stopped and looked at Charles intently.

‘Politics? But what about the law?’

‘Ach, do you really want to be a QC?’ said Charles dismissively. ‘Would that be the end of a satisfying career for you?’

Camilla knew she had to tread carefully. But the truth was, the law didn’t put the fire in Camilla’s belly. Yes, she was good at it. She had the discipline and the intelligent, incisive mind to reach the very top of the profession, and once she knew she was good at something, she didn’t stop until she was the very best she could be. But Camilla wanted more, much more.

‘It’s something I have thought about,’ she replied truthfully. ‘But I’ve still got my work here and I’m not even thirty.’

‘Don’t even begin to bring age into it,’ chuckled Charles. ‘Did you know I ran about, gosh, thirty years ago now?’

She shook her head. ‘I assumed the law was your life.’

‘Many barristers are frustrated or failed politicians,’ laughed Charles. ‘I’m one of the failed ones.’

‘So what happened? You’d have been excellent.’

‘I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine when I ran for parliament. I won a Tory nomination OK, but they made me fight some unwinnable seat in South Wales that had been held by a Merthyr Tydfil teacher for twenty years. I didn’t have a chance with my Edinburgh accent.’ He started shaking his head at the memory.

‘I can’t imagine you gave up that easily, though,’ said Camilla, leaning forward, fascinated and excited at the same time.

Charles shrugged. ‘Well, I did. I was making good money in fees, my name was being mentioned as a future silk, and that’s nice when you’re married with a couple of kiddies with a big fat mortgage to pay. Truth is,’ he said slowly, ‘it gets too tempting to stay put in the law. Who wants to trade a five-hundred-thousand-pound salary for fifty thousand as an MP? I didn’t. And maybe now I regret it.’

Camilla looked at the sad expression on Charles’s craggy face and wondered how it was possible for a successful man to have such a huge, unfulfilled ambition. And suddenly she felt a desperation, a desire to reach that pinnacle Charles had so regretted turning away from.

‘Isn’t your wife chairwoman of a Conservative Association somewhere?’ asked Camilla.

‘Esher,’ he replied. ‘Do you know Jack Cavendish?’

She nodded again. ‘Well, my father knows him. Tory MP for Esher, right?’

‘Yes, but who knows for how much longer?’ Charles responded softly. ‘A whisper has started that Jack is going to stand down at the next election, which could be as soon as May next year.’

‘Is Esher a safe seat?’

‘Not by a long shot. His majority has been whittled down to a couple of thousand. But if he does stand down, the party will be inundated with CVs. It’s a wonderful seat for somebody. Wealthy, close to London …’

Camilla could barely contain her excitement at where this conversation was going. ‘What sort of candidate is the party looking for?’ she asked, trying to keep her cool.

‘Someone capable of winning a campaign. Someone like yourself, Camilla.’

‘How do you know I’m a Conservative?’

‘Oh dear,’ laughed Charles, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I assumed like father, like daughter.’

Truth was, Camilla was political without having any particularly strong party affiliation. Some of her opinions swung to the right, others were squarely towards the left.

But in her mind, politics wasn’t about policies, and there was very little between the three major parties now anyway. To her, politics was about power. It was the thought of the respect and authority that turned her on. The glamour of her heels clicking down the corridors of Westminster, the credibility she would get when compared to Cate and her fancy magazines or Venetia with her over-decorated society houses. More importantly, to the outside world she would no longer just be a satellite in Serena’s Stardust-sprinkled universe.

‘I voted Tory in the last election,’ she replied, without adding, ‘only just.’

‘Then you have everything you need to win a campaign,’ nodded Charles, pulling a leather cigar holder from out of his top pocket. ‘Do you mind?’

Camilla shook her head. One of her first memories was the heavy smell of cigar smoke and damp tweed; she was used to its sticky, woody aroma.

‘You have political nous; you have determination. And you have profile. Never discount the importance of celebrity,’ he smiled. ‘Look at Boris Johnson and Glenda Jackson. And surely your father could canvass some support for you.’

Camilla doubted that. Her father wanted more than anything to get back into the Lords in one of the elected seats, but had been defeated in the last two by-elections. She wondered how he’d take to the news of Camilla running for the Commons. Not well, she suspected.

‘Are you sure I’m not a bit young?’

‘No. The party needs an injection of youth and fresh, modern ideals. It needs to modernize – completely – in the way New Labour did in the nineties, and that process has already begun.’

‘You’re sure I’m eligible?’

‘You’re the daughter of a baron. It’s fine.’

She paused, more confused than she thought she would be. ‘If I do decide it’s something I want to do, and if Jack Cavendish announces his retirement, what do I do next?’

‘I assume you’re not on Central Office’s approved candidates’ list?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, that’s step one.’

‘It’s obviously something I need to think about carefully,’ she replied, running her thumbnail up and down the grain of the table. Then she looked up into Charles’s knowing eyes. ‘But I don’t suppose there’s any harm in looking into it, is there?’ she grinned.

‘I’ll smoke to that,’ replied Charles, inhaling his big fat brown Cohiba and blowing a perfect smoke ring into the air as a fat-faced barrister behind them started coughing. And Camilla began to smile.