Acquired Tastes Read online

  I am not alone in my misgivings. Lawyers have been the object of heartfelt invective ever since man developed the intelligence to spell ‘litigation.’ “A peasant between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats,” says the Spanish proverb. “Lawyers and painters can soon change black to white,” says the Danish proverb. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, Emerson and many other good men and true have also expressed themselves in pungent and unflattering terms on the subject of our learned friends. How can it be, then, that despite centuries of well deserved unpopularity there are more of them around than ever before?

  There are many contributory factors, but perhaps the most basic is the language problem. For their own obvious ends, lawyers have perfected an exclusive form of communication. It has a passing resemblance to English mixed with a smattering of dog Latin, but to the man in the street, it might just as well be Greek. Thus, when he receives a writ or a subpoena or one of the other countless arrows in the legal quiver, he is completely mystified. What does it mean? What can he do? What else but hire an interpreter—who is, of course, a lawyer. And there we have the kind of situation that lawyers love: the two sides can settle down to a protracted exchange of mumbo-jumbo, most of it unintelligible to their clients and all of it charged at an hourly rate that defies belief.

  Then there is the law, not made by man but dictated by human nature, that requires that idle hands find mischievous employment. When there is not enough work for the legal population, you might reasonably expect the number of lawyers to decrease, with the less successful leaving to try their luck at something useful, like plumbing. Not a chance. If there is not enough work to go around, more work is created. Subdivisions of the law and their specialists spring up to make daily life more complicated for us and more remunerative for them. The result is that you find yourself having to deal with not one lawyer but a whole platoon of them.

  The first, let’s say, specialises in real estate. He will uncover the booby traps hidden (by another lawyer) in the fine print of your apartment lease. You will need a second to explain the subtleties built into your contract of employment, a third if you should disagree with the Inland Revenue about the size of your contributions to the national economy, a fourth if your doctor makes a slip of the scalpel, a fifth if you get divorced, a sixth… But the list is already too long and too depressing, and we haven’t even begun to venture into criminal law or that most overpopulated branch of an overpopulated profession, corporate law. Lawyers are everywhere except under the bed, and that might not be too far away if their numbers continue to increase.

  And why do we need them? Self-defence. Because the other side—be it landlord, employer, ex-wife, or whoever—has elected to have a long and expensive argument rather than a quick, cheap one, and has retained a professional representative to do it. It’s no good thinking that you, a rank amateur, can conduct your own case. Innocence will get you nowhere these days, and ignorance will cost you dear. You wouldn’t be able to understand more than one word in ten anyway. There is no alternative but to fight fire with fire and to employ your own legal bodyguard.

  So we have to assume that lawyers are necessary. But that doesn’t explain why they are so heartily detested, so frequently reviled and even, dare I say it, distrusted. To understand why these attitudes exist, we must look into the mind of the beast himself and see what it is that makes the lawyer tick.

  His guiding principle drummed into him from his first days as a callow student, is never, under any circumstances, to admit to being wrong, partly because his professional reputation for omniscience would suffer and partly because it might expose him to the awful possibility of a negligence suit. Now, it is obviously easier to avoid being wrong if you can avoid stating a clear opinion that may later prove to be arrant nonsense. This is why there is great fondness in legal circles for two well-tried secret weapons that have enabled generations of lawyers to retain the appearance of wisdom without the effort of original thought.

  The vaguer of the two is the Grey Area, into which the lawyer dives like a rabbit down a burrow if anyone should threaten him with a loaded question. On the face of it, he says, you seem to have a strong case. He nods encouragingly and peers at you over the top of his half-glasses. But there are some aspects of it, some mitigating factors, some imponderables, one or two possible extenuations—no, it’s not quite as cut and dried as it looks to the layman. In fact, he says, this particular instance is rather a Grey Area.

  The law, as you subsequently discover if you’re unfortunate enough to be involved with it often, is almost entirely made up of Grey Areas, and they are deeply, deeply valued for providing opportunities to say absolutely nothing in a highly professional manner. The only glimmers of clarity in this fog of obfuscation occur when your case happens to be an exact replica of another case on which judgment was pronounced fifty years ago and hasn’t been challenged since. This is when the second secret weapon is triumphantly produced.

  Precedent! What a wonderful labour-saving, definitive thing it is. When a lawyer is stuck for an answer, he consults precedent. When he wants to flatten an opponent, he quotes precedent. When he disagrees with some proposed legal novelty, he argues that there’s no precedent for it. But what exactly is precedent? Somebody’s opinion, grown old and respectable with the passage of time, but still only an opinion. ‘Precedent’ is probably the most popular word in the legal dictionary, and it has a great advantage over the Grey Area because it permits lawyers to be decisive without having to take any responsibility for the decision.

  But enough of these disparaging comments on the devious nature of the legal personality. Let us now move on to the matter of fees and costs, because it is here more than anywhere that the ordinary man’s attitude towards the legal man changes from mild suspicion to violent outrage.

  We have all read about cases where the costs run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and the settlements into millions. But those figures are so ridiculously overblown, like the budget deficit, that is impossible to take them seriously. They’re not real. They do, however, provide us with dramatic examples of that compulsion, common to all lawyers, for extracting every last cent from a situation. This is not necessarily to make the punishment fit the crime or to put a true and proper value on justice. It is the natural and inevitable consequence of the pound of flesh mentality.

  All lawyers have it. They can’t help it, it’s in their genes, and it shows itself at every level from the multimillion dollar lawsuit down to the smallest, most fleeting incident. If a pound of flesh isn’t immediately available, a couple of ounces will suffice. I myself have been charged £150 for a cup of coffee and a ten-minute chat, but at least the chat took place in an office. A friend of mine was actually billed for a phone call he made to his lawyer inviting him out to dinner. I didn’t ask if there was a further charge for time spent eating of the free dinner, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  I don’t have the exact figures, but I am told that the current growth rate in the legal profession is, in relative terms, far greater than the growth in population. Lawyers are being hatched like chickens, and it is only a matter of time before the entire country is overrun. Everywhere will become like those parts of Los Angeles where lawyers outnumber people. The more affluent families will have live-in attorneys. Litigation, once the hobby of the rich, will take over from baseball and football as a leisure activity, and Berlitz will offer courses in Legalese. I have seen the future, and it’s a Grey Area.

  6

  Which Side Do You Dress?

  Of the many small indignities that we have to suffer in life, perhaps one of the most expensive and deflating is our first visit to a bespoke tailor—particularly one of those London tailors whose forebears made breeches for Lord Nelson or moiré hunting underwear for the Prince Regent. There they stand, these lords of the cloth, corseted in sixteen-ounce worsted, surrounded by mahogany wainscoting and framed bills (probably stil
l unpaid) for Oscar Wilde’s frock coats, waiting for innocents like you and me who feel the urge for a handmade suit.

  They run a polite but disparaging eye over you and what you have always thought to be your smartest outfit, worn specially for the occasion. “Yes,” they murmur eventually, “I think we can do a little better than that.”

  Having destroyed your suit, they settle down to the serious business of recording your physical curiosities. This is a practised double act: the man with the tape measure and the cryptic comments, and his scribe, who notes your defects in a large book, already bulging with past deformities. It isn’t overtly insulting. It’s simply as if you were a deaf, inanimate and inconveniently shaped object to be shrouded as tastefully as possible.

  Many of the comments are unfamiliar. None of them sounds flattering. Trying desperately to remain impassive, you eavesdrop and hear about things you never knew you had: a dropped left shoulder, a slipped chest, slight lordosis in the lower back, the suspicion of a hump, legs of unequal length—“Do we normally stand like that, sir?”—and several other revelations too ghastly to commit to print.

  By this time, your main concern is to get to a doctor as quickly as possible, but duty calls. You must now choose your cloth and make vital decisions about buttons, flaps, vents, lapels, stitching—all those delightfully arcane details that make a handmade suit so much more satisfying than clothes tailored in a factory. It should be a deeply enjoyable experience, lasting for an hour or two and leaving you in the mood for a glass of champagne. But unfortunately, the shock of discovering that you are nothing but a human potato with posture problems has left you demoralised, with your decisive powers in paralysis. Feeble and unprotesting, you are steered firmly by the tailor into the standard establishment suit. Better made, certainly, than your previous suits, but somehow not quite what you had in mind.

  After my first handmade suit, I retired, hurt, for several years. And yet, every once in a while, the urge would return to spend a morning among the swatches and discuss horn buttons with someone sympathetic who wouldn’t make me feel like a basket case with a cheque book.

  Did such a tailor exist? Yes, he did, according to George, the elegant London antique dealer. George and his tailor had a rapport that went far beyond the perfunctory measuring of an inside leg and the exchange of clothes for money. George and his tailor were friends, and George’s suits were the best-looking I had ever seen. I wanted one. No, I wanted half a dozen. Most of all, I wanted a tailor I could feel at ease with. And so I took my dropped left shoulder, my lordosis and my legs of unequal length along to 95 Mount Street in Mayfair to meet Douglas Hayward.

  His shop is in complete contrast to the wainscoting and dusty-relic school of decor still favoured by the elders of the tailoring business. It’s more like a living room, except that the shelves are filled with shirts and ties and sweaters instead of books. There are invariably one or two people sitting round exchanging jokes and insults. Music comes from the cutting room in the back. Anguished phone calls come from clients who have had one lunch too many and need their trousers let out. Black London cabs come to ferry suits to Claridges or the Dorchester or the Los Angeles flight from Heathrow. Sales representatives come for a five-minute call with their wool and linen and cashmere and leather, and stay for half an hour and a cup of tea. It is not in the least daunting, and I say that as one who’s daunted very easily.

  Hayward himself is as relaxed as his shop. Unlike most tailors, who wear suits of such rigid perfection that they don’t look real, he is handsomely dressed in clothes that can clearly cope with the normal range of bodily movements. (Some English tailors, to this day, are so conscious of their heritage of eighteenth century military tailoring that their suits are only really happy when standing at attention.)

  The next pleasant surprise is that you are never aware of being inspected for sartorial crimes. You can turn up for a fitting in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt without raising any eyebrows. I once saw a customer dressed only in a shirt, tie and jacket, having a cup of coffee while his trousers were being pressed in the back room. In this sort of atmosphere, it is almost impossible not to feel at home. The process of ordering a suit is therefore what it should be—that is, informal, friendly, and unhurried. It happens more or less like this.

  Your first visit will probably last about an hour. Most of this time will be spent chatting with Hayward. By the time the tape measure finally comes out, he will have some ideas about cloth and cut. Unless you have very precise requirements—and most men don’t—it is always best to go along with what he suggests. Someone has to be in charge of the suit, and he’s better at it than you are.

  He takes you into the back to be measured. The process is as devoid of trauma as anything involving waist measurement can be, because by now you’re discussing the respective merits of hopsack or flannel, raised seams, side vents, concealed ticket pockets and that most intimate of matters—whether your genitals prefer to be housed to the east or the west of the zip. In tailoring language, this is called dressing to the left or the right, and an extra accommodation is made in the appropriate trouser leg. As you can imagine, with all this going on, you are far too busy to notice the muttered instructions that are being jotted down in the book. The ordeal by tape measure is painless.

  With the measurements taken, the cloth chosen and the style agreed upon, you leave Hayward to get on with it. He cuts your pattern and the actual material. His assistants assemble and stitch. Suits are made on the premises. (In fact, having served his time as a tailor’s apprentice, Hayward can make the entire suit by himself, which is rare and becoming rarer. There are now only four tailors’ apprentices in the West End of London, where there were once hundreds.)

  A month or so goes by, and then you come back for the first fitting. This can be surprising unless you know what to expect, because no sooner are you casting a discreetly admiring eye at your reflection in the mirror than Hayward pounces on you, mouth bristling with pins, and rips the sleeves from the jacket. There follows a few hectic minutes of adjusting and pinning and scrawling hieroglyphics here and there on the suit with tailor’s chalk before he stands back in the manner of a sculptor casting a critical eye over a promising but unfinished chunk of marble. One final twitch of the chalk, and you and your suit part company until the next fitting. The suit will now be taken apart completely, seams pressed flat, adjustments made according to the coded chalk marks and then put together again, this time with the finished hand stitching that is one of the subtle but unmistakable marks of bespoke tailoring. A second fitting takes care of any vestigial tucks and wrinkles. (The entire process requires about six weeks, less for subsequent orders. Informal deliveries are made to the United States whenever Hayward goes to New York or Los Angeles. He usually arrives with twenty suits over his arm for American clients.)

  Then the suit’s all yours. You don’t even have to look in the mirror. It feels right. It feels comfortable. What it doesn’t feel is new. There is minimal padding in the shoulders, and none of that stiff and cumbersome upholstery around the chest that makes so many London stockbrokers look like stuffed pinstriped fish. That’s not to say your suit will be, in the currently fashionable way, ‘unconstructed.’ It will have a graceful, almost fleshy roll to the lapel. It will sit smoothly on your shoulders. It will fit snugly at the back of the neck, where poorly cut suits always have a ridge. The buttons on the sleeves will undo, as buttons should. There will be a tiny loop behind the left lapel to anchor the stem of the carnation in your buttonhole. In other words, it will be a very constructed suit. But comfortable.

  It will also make you look slightly thinner and an inch or two taller than you look in less well fitting suits. And as long as you don’t want to look like a rumpled parachute one season and an extra from Brideshead Revisited the next, you will be wearing your suit with increasing pleasure over the next fifteen or twenty years. It won’t date. Hayward doesn’t make extreme clothes.

  Alas, he doesn’t make inexpens
ive clothes, either. Suit prices start at about £800, jackets at £500. Which brings us to the one area where Hayward and traditional tailors have something in common. When I asked him what was the single most difficult part of making suits for gentlemen, he didn’t hesitate for a second. “Getting paid,” he said. It is ever thus between men and tailors.

  7

  The Millionaire’s Mushroom

  Early, on a raw winter morning in Provence. The café in the small village is doing a brisk trade in breakfast jolts of marc and calvados. Strangers coming through the door bring muttered conversations to an abrupt stop. Outside, men stand in tight, unsociable groups, stamping their feet against the cold and looking, sniffing, and finally weighing something that is handled with almost reverential care. Money passes, fat, grimy wads of it, in 100-, 200-, and 500-franc notes, which are double-checked with much licking of thumbs and glancing over shoulders.

  It is less than a two-hour reckless drive from Marseilles, and your first thought is that you have stumbled upon a gathering of rustic smack runners. In fact, it is unlikely that these gentlemen know, or care, about dope in any form. They are dealing in a perfectly legal substance, although their marketing methods may from time to time be questionable. They are selling, at outrageous prices, wart-encrusted, earth-covered lumps of fungi. They are traders in fresh truffles.

  This informal market is an early stage in a process that leads to the tables of three-star restaurants and the counters of frantically chic Parisian delicatessens such as Fauchon and Hédiard. But even here, in the middle of nowhere—buying direct from men with dirt under their fingernails and yesterday’s garlic on their breath, with dented, wheezing cars, with old baskets or plastic bags instead of Vuitton attaché cases—even here, the prices are, as they say, trés sérieux. Truffles are sold by weight, and the standard unit is the kilo. This year, a kilo of truffles bought in the village market will cost you at least 2,000 francs, or £200, and you will have to pay in cash. Cheques are not accepted, receipts are never given, because the truffiste is not eager to participate in the crackpot government scheme the rest of us call taxation.