Now
The University of Law looks like any other building on Bunhill Row, the ground floor painted a dark grey, the rest an exposed sandy brick. Beside it is Fleet, one of Dulwich & Sullivan’s main clients, it can’t be more than a few weeks ago that I crossed their marble reception, swiped my visitor pass at the gates, headed up to the third floor for a meeting. At the time, it felt so mundane, asking their legal team how they wanted to proceed, sending out clarificatory emails. But now, walking past it, I want to make impossible trades. Rewind the reel. Go back to when my baby was taut and proud in front of me. When I confidently said how many weeks I was.
The campus has been refurbished, it used to be white walls, grey linoleum floors, blue sofas. Now, there are pops of colour – orange bookshelves displaying the latest legal journals, a pair of low-slung lime sofas, red bar stools. The café is in the same place though; Emma and I have sat there hundreds of times. I met her on the Dulwich & Sullivan vacation scheme. As soon as I saw herpearly silk shirt, her diamond pendant, how she held out her arms in greeting, I knew she was exactly my kind of person, someone whose outsized drama would overwhelm my own. It was Emma who introduced me to Kit – they read economics together. I liked how obvious it was that he liked me, how he blushed whenever I looked at him, how he already knew Pepe’s, my favourite £1 pizza place behind the station. How, even after he said, ‘Well, if this isn’t a date, I don’t know what is,’ he was still too nervous to kiss me.
Daniel heads to the café. He buys a bottle of water, asks me what I want. I refuse, I can pay for my own drink, but it’s getting awkward so I ask for a tea. The waitress beams at him, she thinks him handsome. He could be a lecturer here, company or trust law, something that means he’s made his money elsewhere, something that explains the sharp cut of his blazer, those unblemished leather loafers. She doesn’t think criminal.
I choose a table in the middle. There are only two students at the café tables - it’s July, exams are finished - but a few weeks ago, this place must have been rammed with students chanting cases while mainlining espresso. I remember Emma bounding up to Kit and me at the vending machine in the corner just before our contract law exam. ‘Tell me a case, any case,’ she said, wild-eyed, and then, the reversal confuses me: Daniel and me here, Kit at home.
‘This is where you read law?’ Daniel asks, removing his blazer.
I nod.
‘I can’t see you here, studying law, being a lawyer,’ he says, unscrewing the cap of his water. ‘It’s the complete opposite of botany, of conservation. So corporate and mercenary. No discovery or beauty.’
‘You realise I’m a lawyer, not a banker?’ I say, hackles rising. ‘I’m not destroying the worth of the Indian rupee or taking positions in South American debt.’
‘It’s all the same though, isn’t it?’ He swallows half his bottle of water in a single mouthful. ‘Keeping rich corporations rich.’
It is the first time I realise that our history, however earth-shattering, is only one moment in time, a point I’ve travelled very far from. Now, Daniel is the type of person Kit and I would warn each other about at a dinner party, whose eyes glaze over when we say, ‘We’re lawyers,’ no idea of what this entails, no interest in finding out. He doesn’t see that law is like botany, like lepidoptery. That it has its own ecosystem where there is mystery, discovery, beauty.
‘You should have studied biology.’
‘I did that at undergraduate, at Oxford.’
His face lights up, he looks like he’s about to hug me. ‘That’s all I wanted for you. That’s exactly what I would have chosen.’
I want to slap the smugness off his face; watch it roll to the floor. WhatIwould have chosen? Possessing my body wasn’t enough. He must imagine making my choices too.
‘Why did you stop?’
I don’t tell him he ruined botany for me. That the labs reminded me of lepidoptery. That I would shiver whenever I looked down a microscope. I will not give him the satisfaction. Instead, I say, ‘There’s no money in biology.’
‘Money isn’t everything.’
‘It is when you don’t have it.’ In my second year of university, I was mercenary about which law firms I applied to, comparingsalaries, maintenance grants, whether they paid course fees, ruthlessly applying to firms with the most generous offerings. They were all American. Henry, a friend on my corridor who was reading law, laughed when I told him, ‘You know they’re going to beast you, right?’ I didn’t care. Beast me. Until I become a beast too.
‘You could have used the trust fund. I set it up for you.’
‘I didn’t want to depend on you more than I already had.’
‘You say it like it’s such a hateful thing.’
I let that hang in the air.
The waitress arrives, she smiles at Daniel, her dark hair falling over her face. He ignores her. She hands me my tea. On her wrist is a tattoo of a dove. I want to press my thumb into the spray of its wings, hold her there.You’re lucky, I want to say to her.You’re too old.
He leans in when she leaves. ‘Did you like studying law?’
‘I loved it actually.’ I press my tea bag against the side of the mug. ‘I liked criminal law best.’
He takes his bottle of water, squeezes the base.
‘I liked the clarity of it, how everything divided into neat categories. Offences against property, offences against the person. Fatal offences against the person, non-fatal.’
‘Nothing is ever that neat.’
My eyes flick towards the ceiling, was it in one of the classrooms above us where I first read the Sexual Offences Act 2003? The words stole the air from my lungs; I had to grip Emma’s arm to steady the ratcheting of my heart. She took me to the toilets and then back to the flat we shared; I shut my bedroom door,pretended I was dehydrated, exhausted, when really, I was sitting at my desk, wondering if I was brave enough, strong enough to open my textbook and turn the analysis on myself. I was not. I didn’t get through copying out a single offence before I set my lined paper on fire over one of Emma’s scented candles, watched it burn. Later, when Kit dropped by with two Hawaiians from Pepe’s, he asked me why I smelt of burning.