‘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 favourably 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 non-fiction 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 baldly, 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 re-draft 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 for 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 £1500. 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 re-jig 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. Do-able. As long as I stuck to the task at hand. Didn’t allow my mind to wander. Didn’t dwell on the on-going 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 ‘B’s – and gradually move through the Bach family. And, my God, there were an enormous amount of works under review. Then there were 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 interpretative 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 re-invention ... to the point where, in the re-telling, 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 round my weekly visit with Jack, my bi-monthly talk with Jessica Law, my bi-monthly 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 mid-way 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 anti-depressants. A week later, while reading the section covering all complete sets of Vaughan Williams symphonies (the Boult was the favoured recording), I received word from Nigel Clapp that we had an exact date for the Final Hearing – June 18th.
‘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 chambers 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 non-stop 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 which 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 1538 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 anaesthetic, 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 mutual 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 these chambers. 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 likeably 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, centring in 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.’
‘Nigel Clapp is having the Dexter woman investigated?’
‘That’s what he told me.’
‘By whom?’
‘He didn’t say. Then again, as you’ve probably gathered by now, Mr Clapp is someone who, at the best of times, has difficulty with compound sentences. But, whatever about his interpersonal skills, he just might be the best solicitor I’ve ever worked with – utterly thorough, conscientious, and engaged. Especially in a case like this one – where he feels, as I do, that our client has been seriously wronged.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Hardly,’ she said with a smile. ‘But we’ve worked together often enough that I know there are times when he’s passionately committed to seeing things set right. This is definitely one of those instances. Just don’t expect him to admit that to you.’
I certainly didn’t expect such an admission – though when I did ask him, during our next phone call, if he had hired a private investigator on my behalf, he suddenly turned all diffident and defensive, saying, ‘It’s … uhm … just someone who looks into things for me, that’s all.’
His anxious tone persuaded me to ask no further questions.
In the coming weeks, I concentrated on what I had to do: get this damn manuscript finished. Long days of work, the weekly visit with Jack, the twice-monthly consultations with Dr Rodale and Jessica Law, the occasional phone call from Nigel Clapp, in which he would give me an update of how the case was proceeding – and also informing me that, as things stood now (and after consultation with Tony’s legal team), it looked as if the Final Hearing would last around two days. I had two further telephone conversations with Maeve Doherty, in which she cleared up a few points with me, and also assured me not to worry about whatever judge would be hearing the case – we wouldn’t know his name until the afternoon before the hearing.
Then, just two weeks before the date of this Final Hearing, I received a call from Nigel Clapp. It was nearly eight at night – an unusually late time for him to be calling me.
‘Uhm … sorry to be phoning so late.’
‘No problem. I was just working.’
‘How’s work?’ he said, in an awkward at
tempt to make conversation.
‘Fine, fine. Stanley is actually talking about another proofing job to follow this one. It looks like I might have a steady income soon.’
‘Good, good,’ he said, sounding even more distracted then ever. This was followed by another telltale Clapp pause. Then, ‘If you were … uhm … free tomorrow afternoon …’
‘You want to see me?’
‘Well, I don’t have to see you. But ... I think …’
He broke off. And I knew something was very wrong.
‘You need to tell me something face-to-face?’ I asked.
‘It would be better …’
‘Because it’s bad news?’
An anxious silence. ‘It’s not good news.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘If you could come to my office in Balham …’
‘Tell me now, Mr Clapp.’
Another anxious silence. ‘Well ... if you insist …’
‘I do.’
‘Uhm … it’s two-fold difficult news, I’m afraid. And the first part of it has to do with Ms Law’s CAFCASS report …’
I felt a cold hand seize the back of my neck.
‘Oh, my God, don’t tell me she ruled against me?’
‘Not precisely. She actually reported herself very impressed with you, very impressed with the way you have handled yourself in the wake of being separated from your son, very impressed as well with your recovery from your depression. But … uhm … I’m afraid she was also very impressed with your husband and Ms Dexter. And although it isn’t her business to make a recommendation, she has let it be known that the child is in very good hands with his father and surrogate mother.’
I felt the phone trembling in my hand.
‘Do … uhm … understand that this doesn’t mean she’s advised that the child stay with Ms Dexter—’
‘And the second piece of bad news?’
‘Well, this only arrived around an hour ago and … uhm … I’m still trying to digest it. It’s a letter to me from your husband’s solicitor, informing me that your husband and Ms Dexter are professionally relocating to Sydney for the next five years, where Ms Dexter has been engaged to start up a major new marketing concern.’
A Special Relationship Page 37
