A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘Did she actually say stenchful?’ I asked, wanting to sound politely interested, but also becoming increasingly worried about the passage of time. I glanced at my watch. Ten-ten. I had to cut him off, and somehow make my pitch. But now he was going on about how, just three weeks earlier, she’d returned from a fortnight’s visit to Atlanta to inform him that she’d fallen in love with her former high-school boyfriend …

  ‘And no, his name’s not Bubba. But it is Brad. And he is one of the biggest property developers in Atlanta, and a keen golfer, and the sort of guy who probably drives a big White Merc, and—’

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ he said, ‘listen to me running off at the mouth.’

  ‘It’s just ... I really have to go in about two minutes.’

  ‘How are things yourself?’

  ‘My husband and I broke up.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. But didn’t you just have a kid?’

  ‘That’s right. Listen, Jason … you know I’m a very adaptable journalist. I’ve written copy, I’ve covered wars, I’ve run a bureau—’

  ‘Sally, you don’t have to convince me. Hell, you taught me so damn much those couple of months I was in Cairo. The problem here is lack of budget. I mean, I’ve been told to cut two staff-—’

  ‘But you just said that CNN Europe was hiring freelancers …’

  ‘They are. But not, for the moment, in London. If you wanted to try for six months in Moscow or Frankfurt, I’m pretty sure you’d have a very good shot at it.’

  ‘I can’t leave London,’ I said.

  ‘Then there’s really nothing I can do.’

  ‘All I’m asking for, Jason, is something even part-time. Two, three days a week. More if you can – but the thing is: I really need the work.’

  ‘I hear you, Sal. And God knows, I’d love to help. But Atlanta has tied my hands in this regard. Anyway, like I told you on the phone, I’m off tomorrow to run the Paris bureau for a month …’

  I glanced at my watch. Ten-eighteen.

  ‘Jason, I have to leave.’

  ‘Hey, no problem. And I’m really sorry. But let’s keep in touch, eh? Like don’t become a stranger on me, okay?’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said and dashed for the door.

  Outside, the traffic on the Aldwych was flowing freely. But there was a problem. I couldn’t find a cab. At least a dozen of the black beasts drove by me – all with their lights off. I waved frantically in their direction, hoping one of them might have forgotten to turn their light on. Not a chance. At ten twenty-five, I realized emergency action was required, so I started running towards the Embankment Station – a ten minute stroll at the best of times. My hope was to find a taxi heading down The Strand, and tell him to step on it. Around ten cabs passed me by, all with passengers. My gait now turned into a canter. As I ran, I used my mobile to call Directory Enquiries, and get the number for the Wandsworth Contact Centre. But the operator couldn’t find a specific listing for a Contact Centre under Wandsworth Council, so she gave me the general number for Wandsworth Council. But it rang around twelve times before someone answered and put me on hold, by which time I was at Embankment tube, my suit now drenched with sweat, my expensive hairstyle a shambles, and with only fifteen minutes to get to Garratt Lane. Even if a helicopter had been standing by, it’s doubtful I would have made it in time. But I had no choice but to hop the District Line and fret like a lunatic all the way to East Putney – cursing Jason for his tardiness, and wasting my time by not being able to tell me over the phone what he already knew: there were no jobs going at CNN London.

  And now … now... I was going to be desperately late for my one weekly hour with Jack. All the way south on the tube, I kept trying to use my phone – and managed to get connected to Wandsworth Council for a moment when the train briefly appeared above ground at South Kensington. But then the line went dead.

  The next time I had a signal was when I alighted at East Putney station. It was eleven-twenty. I dashed down the steps, turned right and ran directly to a grubby little mini-cab despatch office located on a parade of shops on the next street. The despatch guy seemed a little bemused by my franticness, but he did find me a cabbie (in a battered Vauxhall) who couldn’t do much in the way of speed when faced with road works on the Upper Richmond Road, with the result that I finally reached Garratt Lane by eleven-forty.

  The receptionist seemed to be expecting me.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said, then picked up the phone and dialled a number. After a moment, Clarice Chambers came walking down the hall.

  ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am,’ I said as I followed her back down towards the contact room. ‘I was at a job interview in the West End, the guy was late, I couldn’t get a cab …’

  However, instead of turning into the contact room, we veered left and entered a small office.

  ‘Please shut the door and sit down,’ she said. I did as requested, immediately feeling worried.

  ‘Has something happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, something’s happened,’ she said. ‘You’re forty minutes late.’

  ‘But I was trying to explain to you …’

  ‘I know: a job interview. And judging from your clothes, I’m sure you’re telling the truth. But this one-hour period is your sole chance to spend time with your son during the week. And the fact that you’ve missed the second visit …’

  ‘I haven’t missed it. I’m here.’

  ‘Yes, but I sent your son home with his nanny ten minutes ago.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘But you weren’t here, and the child was having a touch of colic …’

  ‘Bad colic?’

  ‘Colic is colic. But he was kicking up a bit, and as you weren’t here ... well, it seemed best to send them home.’

  ‘But I tried calling.’

  ‘I never received a message. I am sorry.’

  ‘Not as sorry as me.’

  ‘Next week will be here very soon,’ she said.

  ‘Couldn’t we arrange another visit before then?’

  She shook her head. ‘That would be contravening the court order. None of us here can do that.’

  I shut my eyes. I cursed myself for so botching this up.

  ‘In the future,’ Clarice said quietly, ‘it’s simply best to keep Wednesday morning completely free. You have to be here.’

  This point was emphasized to me again two days later when Jessica Law came calling on me at home – buzzing me a half-hour before her arrival to ask me if I wouldn’t mind her dropping by this afternoon. I knew what was coming – a verbal spanking, a ‘talking to’. But Jessica Law didn’t go all schoolmarmy on me.

  On the contrary, she accepted a cup of coffee and several Stem Ginger biscuits, and then said, ‘Now I’m sure you realize why I decided to make this rather sudden visit.’

  ‘If I could just explain …’

  ‘Clarice did fill me in. And do understand: I am in no way trying to berate you for what was quite evidently a mistake …’

  ‘The thing was,’ I said, ‘I had this job interview, and it was the only time the man could do it, and he was so late and …’

  ‘I have read Clarice’s report.’

  This stopped me short.

  ‘She wrote a report about this?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid she had to. You didn’t make a supervised visit with your son, as specified by a court order. Now you know, and I know, that this happened because of circumstances somewhat beyond your control. The problem is, it is still a black mark against you – and one which your husband’s lawyers might try to use against you at the Final Hearing … but you didn’t hear that from me, now did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But what can I do to try to rectify the damage?’

  ‘Never be late for a visit again. And I will write up a report of my own, stating that we’ve had this talk, and that you were delayed due to a job interview, and in my opinion, this one bit of tardiness should
n’t be classified as “irresponsible behaviour”, especially as you were seeking employment at the time. How did the interview go by the way?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Keep looking,’ she said, her way of telling me that, without a job, my chances in the Final Hearing would be lessened. And given that there was enough going against me right now …

  But my attempts to find work were fruitless ones. If you’re an outsider with few contacts, a vast global city like New York or London becomes an impenetrable fortress when you try to force your way into its economic structure. This is especially true when you have spent your professional life to date breathing the rarefied air of print journalism, but suddenly find yourself outside of your circle of contacts, not to mention your own country. And the great rule of thumb among all would-be employers in the media is always: when in doubt, discourage.

  Well, I spent the next few weeks being constantly discouraged. I tried all the major American newspapers and networks, using my few contacts at NBC, CBS and ABC. No sale. I tried the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and even my old stomping ground, the Boston Post. Once again, they had their own staffers running their bureaus. And when I called Thomas Richardson, the editor-in-chief of the Post, his assistant informed me that he was otherwise engaged, but he would get back to me. This he did a few days later, with a polite, to-the-point email:

  Dear Sally:

  As I haven’t heard from you in a while, I – presume that you will not be taking up our offer of a position back in Boston. Naturally, I am personally disappointed that you won’t be returning to us – but wish you well in all future endeavours.

  As soon as I received this email, I wrote him a reply, explaining that, as before, my newborn son was keeping me in London, but would the paper be willing to offer me a freelance contract for a few stories a month from this part of the world? I also played up the years of loyalty I had given to the paper, that I wasn’t asking for a staff position, and also intimated (in as subtle a way as possible) that I really needed the work.

  Thomas Richardson was always efficient, and his response arrived on my computer a few hours later.

  Dear Sally:

  If it was my call, you’d still be one of our correspondents in London. But my hands are tied by the money-men – and they are adamant: no additional staff or freelancers at any of our ever-dwindling foreign bureaus.

  I’m truly sorry about this.

  So that was that. I had no choice but to start working the British papers again. Here, the problem was: nobody knew who I was (and I certainly wasn’t going to play the ‘I’m Tony Hobbs’s estranged wife’ card, as it might just blow up in my face). Still, after about a week of non-stop phoning, the features editors I managed to get through to at the Guardian and the Observer asked for ideas by email and samples of my work. Well, I sent off the requisite clippings and a couple of ideas. A week went by. I made the requisite follow-up phone calls. The editors were otherwise engaged. I followed up with reminder emails. No response. Which is what I expected – as journalism works that way. Especially if – in the eyes of the people to whom you’re trying to sell an idea – you’re a nonentity.

  Even Margaret’s husband, Alexander, made a couple of transatlantic calls on my behalf, seeing if there was something for me at Sullivan and Cromwell in London. I sensed that guilt about steering me into the hands of Lawrence and Lambert was behind his efforts on my behalf (that – and Margaret probably screaming at him to redress the mess by helping me out). But as I told Alexander, I had no skills that would be of use in a law firm. His colleagues in London concurred. I was neither a legal secretary, nor a legal writer, nor did I possess any qualification at all that allowed me to practise as an attorney. So all I could do was thank Alexander for his efforts on my behalf and tell him to stop feeling guilty about the incompetent Ginny Ricks. It wasn’t his fault.

  But if the job search was bearing nothing, at least I seemed to be in the good books of my handlers from the Wandsworth contact centre. I showed up for my weekly visits fifteen minutes early. Clarice told me that I seemed to be bonding well (that verb again) with Jack, and he was happily awake for all our sessions, which meant that I could feed him, and change his nappy, and try to get him interested in assorted infant toys, and hold him close, and wish to God that I didn’t have to hand him back at the end of the hour. I resolved not to cry anymore during these sessions, deciding that I needed to show a certain stability and equilibrium in front of Clarice, to prove that I was dealing with the enforced separation from my son, even though it was agony. But as soon as the session was over I would walk slowly out of the building, my head bowed, and stumble out into the grey, litter-strewn shabbiness of Garratt Lane, and find the nearest wall, and put my head against it, and cry like a fool for a minute or so, and then collect myself and try to get through the rest of the day.

  At heart, all grief centres around the realization that you can never escape the bereavement that has stricken you. There may be moments when you can cope with its severity; when the harshness temporarily lessens. But the real problem with grief is its perpetuity. It doesn’t go away. And though you are, on one level, always crying for the loss you’ve sustained, you’re also crying because you realize you’re now stuck with the loss, that – try as you might – it’s become an intrinsic part of you, and will change the way you look at things for ever.

  I didn’t mention these cry-like-a-fool post-visitation moments to Jessica Law. All I would tell her was, ‘I find this situation desperately hard.’

  She’d look at me with a mixture of professional coolness and personal compassion, and say, ‘I am aware of that.’

  What else could she say – that, like a massive migraine, it would eventually abate? It wouldn’t. We both knew that. Just as we both knew that – given the evidence stacked against me – the best I could hope for at the time of the Final Hearing was some sort of shared visitation situation.

  ‘I do hope that you keep your expectations about a future with Jack realistic,’ she said during our third ‘chat’.

  ‘In other words, I’m not going to get him back.’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Sally. And a lot could happen in the four-and-a-half months. But the truth is …’

  She paused, trying to find the right neutral language. I decided to cut to the chase.

  ‘I’ve been declared an unfit mother – and once that’s on the record, it’s hard to erase.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly it. But that doesn’t mean that an arrangement can’t be worked out with the court. It may not be perfect. It may not give you the access you want. But it will be better than what you have now.’

  After this conversation, I sensed that, in her own circumspect way, she was hinting that she didn’t consider me unsuited to motherhood. Just as she was gently compelling me to grasp the reality of my situation. Whereas Sandy kept telling me not to lose hope in order to move forward, Jessica Law was inverting that same sentence: in order to move forward, you have to lose hope.

  As I made my way home from my fourth supervised visit with Jack, trudging through the rain down West Hill, the American in me didn’t want to accept the pragmatic pessimism which Jessica Law espoused, and which struck me as so desperately English. I wanted to embrace that old hoary American fighting spirit. No wonder the English were so privately attracted to the pastoral. It was an antidote to all that hard-headed realism – the recognition that the Elysian Fields were merely the stuff of folklore, undermined by the merciless reality of class, personal limitations, and the crushing purposelessness of life which you must still somehow confront to give order and shape to the day.

  Whereas, like most Americans, I was brought up on that stale mythological idea that, with hard work and boundless optimism, you could be what you wanted to be – that the world was infinite in its possibilities and there for the taking.

  In order to move forward, you have to lose hope.

  The entire abstract logic of that stat
ement was anathema to me. But as I turned into Sefton Street – and looked at the tidy terraces of middle class houses, and saw a nanny loading her infant charge into the baby seat of a Land Rover, and remembered how Jack nuzzled his head against my cheek just ten minutes earlier, and realized that, like it or not, I would have to confront the letter which currently resided in the back pocket of my jeans (a letter from Tony’s solicitors, informing me that the twenty-eight-day grace period had passed, and they would now take legal steps within seven days to put our house on the market unless I accepted their financial offer) – I stopped moving. And I suddenly lost all hope.

  I sat down on the hood of a car parked outside my house, and started to cry again – fully cognizant that I was weeping on the street where I lived, and unable to get myself through the doorway and into the home that would soon be taken away from me.

  ‘Sally?’

  It took me a moment to realize that someone had just called my name. Because I wasn’t used to being called by my name on Sefton Street. I knew no one there. Except …

  ‘Sally?’

  I looked up. There was my neighbour, Julia Frank – the woman whom I’d met in the newsagent’s all those months ago. Now standing by me, her arm on my arm.

  ‘Sally … are you all right?’

  I took a deep breath, and wiped my eyes. ‘Just a bad morning, that’s all.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’ll be okay. But thank you.’

  I stood up to leave.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  She led me into her house, and down a corridor to her kitchen. She put the kettle on. I asked for a glass of water. I saw her watching me as I pulled my bottle of anti-depressants out of my jacket pocket, removed a pill, and washed it down with the water. She said nothing. She didn’t try to make conversation. She just made the tea. And arranged cups and saucers, and milk and sugar, and a plate of biscuits. She poured me a cup and said, ‘I don’t want to pry, but … has something happened?’