I look forward to hearing from you shortly, proposing a time and place when we should meet.
Yours
“My, you are clever,” Julia said after I showed her the final draft.
“You can thank Mr. Clapp for that. He made me write three different drafts before he was happy with the letter.”
“Are you serious? Mr. Clapp—the original Mr. Tentative—actually edited you?”
“Not only that—but he kept emailing me back with assorted suggestions as to how we could push the knife in deeper . . . though, of course, he would never be so crude as to suggest that we were attempting to trip up my estranged husband, even though that was precisely the object of this exercise.”
“Well, I must say that it is a most cunning letter. Because it points up your victimization without falling into self-pity. At the same time, it sticks it to him about two-timing you, and also raises all sorts of questions about his real motivations behind all this. And you then show tremendous graciousness about putting your anger to one side in order to do what’s best for your son . . .”
Three days later, I received a letter from Tony.
Dear Sally,
Considering the threats you made against the life of our son—and considering your complete lack of maternal interest in him following his birth—I find it rather extraordinary that you write me now, speaking about how I betrayed you. Especially when it is you who so betrayed an innocent baby.
As to your accusation that I was betraying you while pregnant, you should know that Diane Dexter has been a close friend of mine for years. And I turned to her as a friend for support when your mental health began to decline during your pregnancy. Our friendship only turned into something else after your breakdown and your irresponsible, endangering behavior against our son.
She could not be a better surrogate mother to my son—and has provided Jack the safe, calm environment he needs in these early days of his life. I am most certainly aware of the fact that you—as Jack’s mother—should have an important input into decisions about his future. But until I am certain that you are no longer a danger to him, I cannot sit down with you to “talk things out.” I do hope that you are on the road to mental recovery—and have begun to face up to your injurious behavior against our son. Do understand: I hold no grudge against you whatsoever. And I only wish you the best for the future.
Yours sincerely
Tony
c.c. Jessica Law, Wandsworth DHSS
The letter shook in my hands as I read it. I immediately faxed a copy to Nigel Clapp, and then knocked on Julia’s door. She offered coffee and commiseration.
“You know a lawyer worked with him on this,” she said.
“Just like my letter.”
“Only yours was, at least, in your own voice. This missive . . . it sounds downright Victorian in places. ‘Your injurious behavior against our son.’ Who uses language like that nowadays?”
“It’s certainly not Tony’s prose style—which is tight and clipped. And he never goes in for touchy-feely stuff, like: ‘I hold no ill will against you whatsoever. And I only wish you the best for the future.’ He holds complete ill will against me, and hopes I’ll walk under a bus at the earliest possible convenience.”
“It’s a divorce. And in a divorce, it always turns ugly. Especially when the stakes are so high.”
Late that afternoon, Mr. Clapp rang me.
“Uhm . . . about your husband’s letter . . .”
“It has me worried,” I said.
“Oh, really?”
“Because it’s allowed that bastard to refute everything I said in the first letter. And because it also allowed him to put on the record his contention that she ‘saved’ my son . . . which besides being a total lie is also totally offensive.”
“I could see how . . . uhm . . . you might be upset by such a comment. But as regards the damage the letter might do . . . it’s what I expected.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh yes, I am being quite serious. It’s what I expected and wanted.”
“You wanted this sort of reply?”
“Uh, yes.”
Then there was another of his signature pauses, hinting that he wanted to move on to another topic of conversation.
“May I ask you if you’ve had any further success finding work?”
“I’ve been trying, but I just don’t seem to be having much luck.”
“I spoke with Dr. Rodale, your . . . uhm . . .”
He cleared his throat, obviously not wanting to say the embarrassing word. So I helped him out.
“Psychiatrist.”
“Yes, your psychiatrist. She told me that she will write a report, stating that, in light of your . . . uhm . . .”
“Depression.”
“Yes, your depression, she considers you still unfit for full-time employment. That will, at the very least, cover us in case your husband’s barrister raises the issue of your lack of work at the hearing. But if you could find some sort of job, it would reflect favorably on your recovery from the . . . uhm . . .”
“Depression.”
“That’s the word.”
A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Julia. She explained that she was in the office of an editor friend. I’d mentioned to her in one of our early chats that I had spent my summer holidays during college working as a proofreader at a Boston publishing house.
“And when my editor friend here said he urgently needed a proofreader for a big job—and his two usual proofreaders were otherwise engaged—I immediately thought of you. If, that is, you’re interested . . .”
“Oh, I’m interested . . .”
The next day, I took the tube to Kensington High Street and spent an hour in the office of an editor named Stanley Shaw—a thin, quiet, rather courtly man in his mid-fifties. He worked in the nonfiction division of a major publisher and largely handled big reference volumes, including their Guide to Classical CDs, which was published every other year and was a vast door-stopping paperback of some fifteen hundred pages.
“Are you at all knowledgeable about classical music?” he asked me.
“I can tell the difference between Mozart and Mahler,” I said.
“Well, that’s a start,” he said with a smile, then quizzed me about my proofreading background—and whether I could adjust to Anglicisms, and technical musical terminology, and an extensive number of abbreviations that were a component part of the guide. I assured him that I was a fast learner.
“That’s good—because we’re going to need the entire guide proofread within the next two months. It is going to be technically demanding—as it is a critical compendium of the best recordings available of works by just about every major and minor composer imaginable. Put badly, it’s a huge job—and, to be honest about it, not one which I would hand over to someone who’s been out of practice as a proofreader as long as you have been. But I am desperate—and if Julia Frank believes you can do it, then I believe you can. That is, if you believe you can do it, and can have it all to me within two months.”
“I can do it.”
We shook hands on it. The next day, a motorcycle messenger arrived at my house with a large, deep cardboard box—and over fifteen hundred pages of proofs. I had cleared the kitchen table for this task—already installing an Anglepoise lamp and a jam jar filled with newly sharpened pencils. There was a contract along with the page proofs. Before signing it, I faxed it over to Nigel Clapp. He called me back within an hour.
“You’ve got a job,” he said, sounding surprised.
“It looks that way. But I’m worried about something—whether my fee will invalidate me for legal aid.”
“Well . . . uhm . . . you could always have them redraft the contract, guaranteeing you full payment upon publication, which is . . . according to the contract . . . eight months from now. So we could show the court that you have been working, but that you’ll be remunerated after the final hearing, which would keep you qualified fo
r legal aid. That is, if you can manage to afford not to draw a salary right now.”
The hearing was in ten weeks’ time, and I was down to the equivalent of £1,500. It would be insanely tight.
“Say I asked Stanley for a third of the fee up-front?”
“Yes—that would still put you well within the legal aid threshold.”
Stanley Shaw was only too willing to redraft the contract, pointing out that, “In the thirty years I’ve been a publisher, this is the first time that a writer or an editor has asked for a delayed payment . . . which, of course, I’m most happy to facilitate.”
That evening, I did a bit more simple mathematics. I had a total of sixty-one days to do the job. Fifteen hundred by sixty-one equals 24.5 pages per day, which divided by eight made three.
Three pages per hour. Doable. As long as I stuck to the task at hand. Didn’t allow my mind to wander. Didn’t dwell on the ongoing agony of missing Jack. Didn’t succumb to the perpetual fear that the judge at the final hearing would side with Tony, and limit me to an hour a week’s visit until . . .
No, no . . . don’t contemplate that. Just go to work.
It took me four days to cross the threshold of the A composers (Albinoni, Alkan, Arnold, Adams) into the Bs—and gradually move through the Bach family. And, my God, there was an enormous amount of works under review. Then there was the critical pros and cons—the way the editors of the guide discussed whether, in the recording of the B Minor Mass, you should opt for the traditional kappelmeister approach of Karl Richter, or the leaner, reduced period forces of John Eliot Gardiner, or the interpretive brilliance of Masaki Suzuki, or . . .
That was the most intriguing thing about working on this guide (especially to someone with as little musical knowledge as myself)—the discovery that, in musical performance, interpretation changes with every conductor, every instrumentalist, every singer. But though you can play games with metronomic markings and tempi, you can’t really deviate too much from the score. Whereas all stories are always open to speculation, conjecture, even reinvention . . . to the point where, in the retelling, you begin to wonder where the original narrative has gone, and how the plot line has been hijacked by the two principal protagonists, both of whom are now presenting diametrically different versions of the same tale.
“You must be going crazy, reading all that musicological stuff, word by word,” Sandy said one evening during our daily phone call.
“Actually, I’m rather enjoying it. Not just because I’m finding it interesting, but also because it’s given me something I’ve been craving for months: a structure to the day.”
Three pages an hour, eight hours per day—the work broken up into four two-hour sessions, with a half-hour break between each period. Of course, I had to work this schedule around my weekly visit with Jack, my biweekly talk with Jessica Law, my biweekly consultations with Dr. Rodale. Otherwise, the work defined my time. Just as it helped me mark time, and accelerate the agonizing wait for the final hearing. Yes, I did find such intensive proofreading to be frequently exhausting. I was also simultaneously bored and overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. But there was also a certain pleasure in pushing my way deeper and deeper into the alphabet. After three weeks, Berlioz was a distant memory, as I’d just polished off Hindemith and Roy Harris. Getting through the entire recorded corpus of Mozart was a bit like a drive I once took across Canada—during which I kept thinking: this has got to end sometime. Then, in the middle of week five, I began to panic. I was just entering the big S section, with wildly prolific composers like Schubert and Shostakovich to work through. Stanley Shaw (another S!) checked in with me once, reminding me that the deadline was just two and a half weeks off. “Don’t worry—I’ll make it,” I told him, even though I myself was beginning to wonder how I’d do it. I increased my workday time from eight to twelve hours. This paid off—as midway through the sixth week, I had managed to finish off Telemann and was dealing with Tippett. And during my subsequent session with Dr. Rodale, she informed me that I was now appearing so much more balanced and in control that she was going to begin the gradual reduction of my dose of antidepressants. A week later, while reading the section covering all complete sets of Vaughan Williams symphonies (the Boult was the favored recording), I received word from Nigel Clapp that we had an exact date for the final hearing—June 18.
“Uhm . . . the barrister I want to instruct . . . and who does this sort of case very well . . . and . . . uhm . . . is also on the Legal Aid register . . . well, her name is . . .”
“Her?” I said.
“Yes, she is a woman. But perfect for your situation . . . sorry, sorry, that sounds all wrong.”
“I know what you’re saying. What’s her name?”
“Maeve Doherty.”
“Irish?”
“Uhm . . . yes. Born and raised there, educated at Oxford, then she was part of a rather radical practice for a while . . .”
“I see . . .”
“Did a lot of . . . uhm . . . substantial work. Especially in the family law area. She’s available. She does legal aid. She will respond to the predicament you are in.”
“And say she ends up facing a traditional judge who can’t stand her politics?”
“Well . . . uhm . . . one can’t have everything.”
I didn’t have time yet to dwell on this potential problem, as Vaughan Williams gave way to Verdi and Victoria and Vivaldi and Walton and Weber and Weekes and—twenty-four hours to go—I was still working on Wesley, and drinking nonstop cups of coffee, and assuring Stanley Shaw that he could have a courier at my door at nine tomorrow morning, and I was negotiating the complete organ works of Widor, and somewhere around midnight, I reached the last listing (Zwillich), and suddenly the sun was rising, and I tossed the final page on top of the pile, and smiled that tired smile that comes with having finished a job, and ran a bath, and was dressed and awaiting the courier when he showed up at nine, and received a phone call an hour later from Stanley Shaw congratulating me on making the deadline. An hour after that, I was holding my baby son under the increasingly less watchful eye of Clarice Chambers, who told me that she was going to leave us alone this morning, but would be down the corridor in the tea room if we needed her.
“How about that, Jack?” I said after she headed off. “We’re on our own at last.”
But Jack was too busy sucking down a bottle to respond.
I crashed out that night at seven, and slept twelve straight hours without interruption. I woke the next morning, feeling less burdened than I had felt in months. This lightening of mood carried on into the next week—when Stanley Shaw rang me and asked, “I don’t suppose you’re free to do another job?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“Tremendous. Because it is another doorstopper of a book. Our film guide. Currently clocking in at fifteen hundred thirty-eight pages. It needs to be fully proofed in nine weeks. Same terms as before?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Well, come by the office tomorrow around noon—and I’ll take you through the basic parameters of it, and then I can buy us both lunch somewhere pleasant, if that’s agreeable.”
“You’re on,” I said.
Two days later, I was back at work, slowly inching my way through this fat critical compendium. And when Sandy asked me how I could mentally handle long stretches of such detailed work, I said, “I just fall into it—and black everything else out for the next couple of hours. So it’s a bit like novocaine—a temporary, fast-acting anesthetic, which keeps everything else numb for a short amount of time. The pay’s not bad either.”
Around three weeks into this job, I received a phone call from Maeve Doherty. Whatever about her childhood in Dublin, her accent was Oxbridge, tempered by a pleasant phone manner. She explained that Nigel Clapp had given her the brief. As she liked to be instructed well before the date of the hearing and always met the individuals she would be representing, she would also like to meet me as soon as our mut
ual schedules permitted.
Four days later, I took an afternoon off. I hopped the underground to Temple, walked up to Fleet Street, and entered a passageway called Inner Temple, which brought me into what seemed to be a miniature Oxbridge college, of mixed Tudor and Gothic design: a small, calm enclave of the law, hidden away from London’s continuous din. I came to a door, outside of which was a wooden board, upon which had been painted, in immaculate black letters, the names of fifteen barristers who made up this practice. Miss M. Doherty was near the top of the list.
Her office was tiny. So was she, with petite features to mirror her small stature. She wasn’t pretty—in fact, she almost could be described as plain—but there was an attractive studiousness about her, and the hint of a deeply strong resolve that she had latched on to as a way of countering her diminutive size. Her handshake was firm, she looked me directly in the eye when talking to me, and though she was all business, she was likably all business.
“Let me say from the start that I do think you’ve been unfairly vilified. And I gather from Mr. Clapp that the barrister who acted for you during the interim hearing was only briefed on the case around a half hour before the actual hearing. What was his name again?” she asked, rummaging through the file. “Ah yes, Mr. Paul Halliwell . . .”
“You know him?” I asked, picking up the hint of contempt in her voice.
“It’s a small world, the law. So, yes, I do know Mr. Halliwell.”
“Well, the culpable party really was my solicitor, Virginia Ricks, of Lawrence and Lambert . . .”
“No, formerly of Lawrence and Lambert. She was let go last month after fouling up a very big divorce proceeding involving a very substantial Dubai client. She’s now considered an untouchable.”
She then talked strategy for the better part of a half hour, quizzing me intensely about my marriage to Tony, about his personal history, focusing on the way he shut himself away in his study all the time after the baby was born, the late nights out on the town, the fact that he was so evidently involved with Diane Dexter during my pregnancy.
“I saw that letter you wrote your husband just a few weeks ago, as well as his reply. Very adroit strategy—especially as it got him to state, in writing, that theirs was just a platonic relationship. And if Nigel Clapp’s investigations into her background yield what we hope they’ll yield, then we really should have an interesting case to present against them.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 100
