Chapter 90: The Verdict I
Come up the stairs with me. Mind the third one, it’s been going since November and I’ve had other things on.
Because Carbery has just said four words down a phone at half past nine on a Tuesday morning in April, and I am about to find out whether my father’s ground exists.
"Sam. It’s come."
"Read it."
"I’m not reading you a Lands Chamber judgment down a telephone. It’s forty pages."
"Carbery."
"Come to the office," he said, and his voice did something at the end of it that I could not read, and I have thought since that he did that on purpose, because he is a decent man and he wanted me to hear it sitting down.
I put the phone in its cradle. Clatter. I sat in my chair in an office above a marsh with my hands flat on the desk.
And I asked the thing in my head, one last time, the way a man rattles a locked door.
Nothing. Grey wall. Not so much as a flicker.
Nine months ago it handed me a World Cup. That morning it could not tell me what was in an envelope 30 miles away, and I sat there and understood, properly, that I was going to have to walk into that room as an ordinary man and take an ordinary answer.
Maureen was in the doorway with her coat already on.
"Well," she said. "Come on then."
Here is what I did not expect.
I got down to the car park and there were 40 people in it.
Nobody had rung anybody. There’s no phone tree in Tilbrook. It’s just that Yasmin had taken the call transfer from Carbery’s clerk on the club line, and Yasmin told her uncle, and Murat shut the kiosk, rattle of the shutter coming down, and told the queue why, and the queue told the high street.
By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, Bald Tony was leaning on my car.
"You’re not going on your own," he said.
"Tony, it’s a solicitor’s office. It’s not a cup final."
"Nah." He didn’t move. "You went to London on your own and we come with you. You’re not doing this one on your own neither."
And Raj pulled up, toot, window down, and there were three men in the back of his cab already, and he said, "Get in, and don’t argue, I’ve turned the meter off."
So I went to hear the verdict on a 1923 covenant in the back of a minicab, with a docker’s elbow in my ribs and Bald Tony in the front seat telling Raj how to drive.
Crunch of gravel as Raj pulled in. Ted was already there. He’d walked. It’s a mile and a half and he’s 79 and he’d walked it, in the scarf, and he was stood outside Carbery’s window with his cap in his two hands, turning it, turning it.
And there was a lad of about 23 with a notepad, hopping about, who I’d never seen before.
"Mr Mercer? Danny Vine, Tilbrook and District Gazette." Dictaphone in his hand, no idea which end. "Is it true it’s come back? Only my editor says if you win it’s the front page and if you lose it’s the front page, so either way, could I get a quote?"
"Give me an hour, son."
"There’s a satellite van coming an’ all," he said, miserable. "Someone tipped them."
Sully. He leaked it in January and he’d leak the ending, because a man like that wants the theatre whichever way it lands.
I went in.
Carbery’s office smells of paper and pipe smoke and it has not changed since I was a boy coming in here with my dad to sign something about the ground. Tick of the long-case clock in the corner. He had the judgment squared on the blotter. Forty pages. A tribunal seal.
He didn’t hand it to me. He put his hand flat on it.
"Sit down, Sam."
I sat down.
"I want to read you one paragraph," he said. "And then you can have the rest of your life to read the other thirty-nine."
Rustle of a page turning. He put his glasses on. His hands, I noticed, were not steady, and Edwin Carbery is 81 years old and has been doing this since before my father was born.
"Paragraph one-one-four," he said. "The applicant’s contention that the restriction is obsolete is not merely unpersuasive; it is contradicted by the evidence of the applicant’s own conduct. A restriction is not rendered obsolete by the deliberate acts of a party who seeks its discharge."
He looked up at me over the glasses.
"He caught him," he said. "The Member caught him."
And then he read me the paragraph that I will have carved on something one day.
"The Tribunal was particularly assisted by the evidence of the objectors themselves. It was told, by a retired dock worker, that his father’s ashes lie beneath the penalty spot.
By a mother, that the ground is the only place her son can play. By a man of seventy-nine, that he met his late wife upon its terrace. The Tribunal does not regard such matters as sentiment.
Ted won it. Nicola won it. Dennis Coyle and his father’s ashes won it.
Not my money. Not the QC. Not the thing in my head, which was a grey wall from the day the date was set and never flickered once.
I walked in with the only advantage a dead man gets, and it was switched off, and I won anyway, and I won with a town.
Then Carbery went to his cabinet and took out a brown envelope and slid it across the blotter.
"They’ve released the exhibits," he said. "Case is concluded. It’s yours."
My dad’s scrapbook, with a tribunal sticker on the cover, EXHIBIT SM/1, and a strip of tape holding the spine where somebody official had been careful with it.
It went to London in a solicitor’s folder and it came home with a number on it.
Then he read the words.
The covenant is upheld. The application is dismissed. The land at Marsh Road, twelve acres, given by Eliza Pargeter on the 9th of November 1923, remains what she said it was.
Ours. For ever.
And the room went a long way away from me.
I want to describe this properly because I have never had it before and I do not expect to have it again. The sound went first.
Carbery kept talking and I could see his mouth doing it and there was nothing coming out of it that I could use.
Then my hands started, on the arms of the chair, not shaking exactly, more like something running through them, and there was a heat coming up my neck and into my face like I’d been stood too near a fire.
It held.
Forty years. A crane driver who could barely spell, who left school at fourteen, who stood his boy on a milk crate and told him something in this world was his, and was right. He was right. He died being right and nobody ever told him.
And a sound came out of me.
I do not know what to call it. It was not crying. It was the noise you make when something you have carried for two lifetimes goes down and your arms don’t know what to do with themselves.
It came up out of my chest and I could not stop it, and it happened in a solicitor’s office in front of an 81-year-old man, and I put my head down on Edwin Carbery’s desk, on the blotter, next to a tribunal seal, and I howled.
He didn’t touch me. He didn’t say there there. He got up, and he went and stood at the window with his back to me for a long time, and let me have it.
And when I could hear again he was still stood there, and his voice was not steady either.
"Your father came in here in 1994," he said, to the glass. "With a photocopy of that deed he’d got out of the library. He was convinced somebody would try it one day. He wanted to know if it would hold."
Tap of his pipe on the sill. His hand was shaking.
"I told him yes. He said, right, well. That’s that, then. And he went back to work."
He took his glasses off and pressed his thumb and finger into his eyes, hard, the way old men do when they will not be seen doing it.
"Fifty-one years I’ve had this desk," he said. "That’s the best afternoon I’ve had at it."
Then he turned round and looked at the ceiling of his own office.
"It held, Bill," he said.
Then I had to go and tell 40 people in a car park, and I got about as far as the door.
Because Ted was looking through the glass, and Ted has been reading men’s faces for 79 years, and he saw mine, and he turned round to the car park and he put both arms straight up in the air, like a referee, and he did not say a single word.
And the car park went off like a bomb. ROAR, then a car horn, then every car horn, paaarp, paaarp, the whole length of the high street picking it up before it knew what it was cheering.
And then it had me.
Forty people, and I went into the middle of them like a man going into surf. Hands on my back, my arms, the back of my head. Somebody’s wet face against my ear.
I could not tell you who was shouting what because it was all one noise, one great warm animal noise, and I was in it and I could not breathe properly and I did not want to.
Bald Tony got hold of me and lifted me clean off the pavement, whump, all 61 years and one working lung of him, and he was sobbing. Bald Tony. Who has never in my hearing said a serious word about anything.
"Your dad," he kept saying, into my shoulder. "Sam. Your dad. Your dad."
That’s when I nearly went again.
Raj was on the roof of his own cab, thud, thud, which he will regret, because it has a dent in it now.
Murat came up the street at a dead run in his apron with a tray of chips he’d not charged anybody for, going, "IT IS OURS. IT IS OURS," and giving chips to strangers, and one of the strangers was the man from Sky.
Nicola was there with her nine-year-old, who had no idea what was going on and had been taken out of school for it, and she stood with her hand over her mouth.
"So he can still play Sundays?" she said. "That’s all. Can he still play Sundays."
"He can play Sundays for the next hundred years."
She put her face in her hands and her boy looked up at her, alarmed, and pulled at her sleeve, and said, "Mum? Mum, are you sad?" and she laughed with her hands still over her face and could not answer him.
That’s what we were fighting about. Not a deed.
And in the middle of all of it, with a town coming apart around me in a solicitor’s car park, I did the thing you do.
