She swallowed back despair. Why, after all these months of forbearance and watchfulness, after agreeing with Joe that neither one of them would rock the boat, was she here? Because she’d taken to heart Baldwin’s description of Twenty-eight as ‘the device that works best when used in the solitude of private battles, against oneself. You manoeuvre your own back against the wall to spur yourself on to the highest achievement.’
Last Friday Baldwin had barked out commands in their faces and filled the tiny room with the spirit of a Warring States desperado. ‘Break your cauldrons! Smash up your boats! Roast your oxen using your own wagons as firewood for a final feast! Know when it’s time to leave your own men absolutely no escape, nothing but a ferocious fight to the death.’
He peppered the blackboard with a flurry of advancing arrows shooting back and forth, ‘Burn the bridges behind your advance! Now! There’s no escape!’
He leaned down at them, his eyes fiery and his light hair silvery in the overhead light. Jane heard the battle cry of hundreds of clashing swords advancing to the final showdown and Baldwin’s crescendo, ‘There is NO WAY BACK!’
‘Ms Gilchrist?’ A dozen tinny bracelets jangling in Jane’s ears brought her back to the law office.
KP Higgins was leaning out of her private chamber. Jane followed the plump Indian woman, draped in fuchsia silks and a Maharajah’s worth of bangles, into the inner office. A desk neatly stacked with manila folders dominated the centre of the room.
‘How do you do? My father-in-law is a bit tired, these days. I’ll be consulting you. We receive a lot of referrals from Mr Stevens.’
Higgins extended a manicured hand with shimmering shell-pink nails. Jane started her story and KP Higgins was quick to catch the gist. She swiftly recited back a thumbnail summary of the Gilchrist evolution; they’d gone from a hip media couple with one child out-of-wedlock in defiance of bourgeois values to tired-out middle-aged-nobodies with no time or energy to change their situation.
‘Until now.’ Higgins shook her head.
‘Well, now I need to know where I stand,’ Jane explained. ‘It’s time I asked someone.’
‘No adoption discussion, at any time?’
‘Adoption?’
‘Was there ever a surgical interventions that could be used to establish paternity? Any insurance coverage linking father to daughter? There’s always DNA testing if it serves. I wish I could say it was more extraordinary, but if both names are on the leasehold . . . We’ll have to protect you and your mother there. Is it possible you never discussed regularizing this situation, at any point, in all these years?’
Where had the years gone? They rewound in Jane’s mind, days of chores and hours at the library, Joe and Sammie coming and going. Those years must count for something, she thought.
‘Mrs Higgins, what are the rules about common-law-marriage? My mother and Joe joked about it from time to time.’
Higgins sighed. ‘A rather poor joke on you, if you were counting on that. Joe is Canadian. Your mother is American.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Quite simple, really. Common-law-marriage exists in Canada. The Ontario Family Law Act specifically recognizes common-law spouses in Section Twenty-nine dealing with spousal support issues. The requirements are living together for three years or having a child in common and having cohabited in a relationship of some permanence. In America, many states recognize common-law marriage.’ Higgins chirped, ‘In some states, it’s harder to get out of than to get into.’
‘Are you saying they were both wrong about England?’
‘Oh, yes, completely, I’m afraid. Quite amusing.’ Higgins’s expression stayed serious. ‘I’m afraid the extent of women’s rights are widely misunderstood, particularly in this society. Western women lack many social and cultural protections that less-developed countries would find abhorrent. You enjoy no protection of the law. Now, it is my job to see if we can turn that to your advantage, somehow.’
Clearly Higgins found the romantic posture of media artists or misguided feminists just a tiresome ignorance that again and again required the illuminating beam of her law books. In front of this professional amazon armed with eyeliner, hairspray, and kilos of peachy embroidered pongee, Jane felt a fool. KP Higgins clearly had no problem with bourgeois style, disposable income, or womanly rights.
‘In England, Common-law Marriage ceased definitively with the Marriage Act of 1753. You cannot demand child-support payments from Mr Gilchrist. A father who was not married to the child’s mother when that child was born will not automatically have parental responsibility for that child—no matter what the DNA says. He can acquire that responsibility by agreement with the mother, which you say you never obtained, or by applying to the court. He could have acquired it by marrying you after Samantha’s birth. So your situation is now quite ambiguous on the child-support, especially as he’s moved out, which implies far less commitment to your family unit than before, and it was already quite minimal by legal standards.’
‘Although he’s assuming partial custody of her now?’
‘Oh, Ms King, no one talks of “custody” these days. The law regards “shared parenting” as beneficial to the child and would wish it to continue. You’re not here to stop that, are you? Because your history might enable you to cut off his contact, but as long as both parents are fit—’
‘No, I suppose not.’
Jane wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she was startled to learn how the law stood. Higgins was already moving into financial matters. Jane found it hard to keep up. The speed of the consultation made it clear that Higgins Minutes were very costly units.
‘ . . . Having said that, removing a name from a joint account isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Some banks will only take the instruction from the “main account holder”, who is simply the person whose name was put first on the form that opened the account. Yourself? Higgins clapped her dainty brown hands together, ‘Oh, we can thank the gods for small favours and lucky accidents. That does make things easier. To save you any inconvenience, I’ll write a quick note to your bank manager straight away whilst you are sorting out your split, explaining what you want them to do, and we’ll get you both to sign it . . . ’
Jane was following Higgins with one mind and wondering at the same time how Joe would take all this.
‘How do you think Mr Gilchrist will react?’ The Asian woman’s telepathy was unnerving. Or was it just that she did this every day, every week, for all districts of London, in all colours of the rainbow?
‘Oh, he won’t agree.’
‘Very good. Very good.’ Higgins ticked off a small box on her interview form. ‘Irreconcilable differences. But how will he behave? Comport himself?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. That depends on his state of mind. He was nearly violent the other day. Practically smashed my face in with a stool.’
Higgins thrust her jaw forward and eyes blinked faster, as if she and Jane were now sisters joined at the dhoti. ‘Do we need a court injunction?’
‘Gosh. I don’t know. He never stuck a stool in anybody’s face before. You see, he discovered me in a compromising situation with another man.’
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ the shaking bangles chastised. ‘That attitude will not do! Anything more compromising than his living with the godmother of your only child? We find that ironic, no more. We must make it clear to him that he enjoys no rights under your roof. No rights at all. No, no, no. Also, I wouldn’t encourage him to chauffeur Samantha any longer, if you want to press this point—’
Jane could only think of the night Sammie had deliberately binged on alcoholic pop drinks for attention, or the discovery Sammie was toying with bulimia and cutting her arms—all those times when Joe and she had forgotten their rift long enough to share the grief and worry of parents. She thought of the relief they exhaled together when Bella brought Sammie home. Joe would always be there for his daughter, no matter how deep his discomfort with Jane.
Jane
also remembered the fleeting calm that swathed Number 19 as she listened to Joe spend the night in the locked bathroom, the obvious window of escape somehow ignored. Perhaps Joe wanted to be there for her, too, in some subconscious way.
‘Mrs Higgins, I don’t want to waste your time. Perhaps I’m here too soon. I’m not sure what I want. I was hoping that once I got into your office, I would harden up, feel pushed to cut the ties, barricade him out. Feel strong enough to—’
‘Wipe the slate clean?’
‘Yes. Muster my forces better. Well, at least keep him from coming to the house at all hours—’
‘We can do that.’ Higgins nodded her balloon of shining, lacquered hair.
‘At least make it clear to him that if there’s another baby, I mean, a child by Miss Crawford, that my own child’s interests won’t be hurt—’
‘Yes, yes, an important point. We must spell it out. I’m afraid Samantha’s situation is linked to the status of any other theoretical child, especially if your ex-partner marries Miss Crawford or adopts infants with or by her—’
‘That’s possible. She’s been displaying weird Angelina Jolie fantasies lately. Well, what should I do?’
‘Well, I can write Mr Gilchrist a letter: We propose adoption of Samantha, mindful of her interests as defined by the Children Act 1989, with its expressed support for shared residence and keeping in mind there might be future issue. In which case, her financial claims on Mr Gilchrist’s estate should be formally established.’
Higgins widened her limpid brown eyes and cocked her head, a Bollywood Bambi with a steel trap mind.
‘I thought you said she has no claims on his support.’
‘That’s between you and me. I won’t spell out in writing that Joe has absolutely no legal obligation to offer financial support. Let his solicitor do his job. We stress our moral claims, of course. Joe might suddenly stumble on a huge pot of gold. His childless Canadian brother might divorce and make Joe heir to the family timber business.’ The bangles rattled, but the diction was pure cut glass.
There were various fine points of the law to wrap up. The gleaming Higgins briefed Jane Gilchrist with a dispatch only softened by a patronizing gentleness—like a veteran aid worker in the Third World dispensing her legal remedies to an ignorant client lacking all feminine wile.
At last, Higgins reached the end of her checklist. She placed Jane’s fresh dossier on the top of her pile and folded her hands as if to signal, another day, another European sister saved from the ashes of feminist folly. Sweeping layered metres of rustling pink, gold and peach silk around the corner of her desk, she escorted Jane back to the outer office.
‘I’ll send the letter right away. Neutral wording, nothing acrimonious,’ Higgins assured her. ‘If you might accept one comment. The man who can’t stay away from a house where he’s not wanted, and the woman who doesn’t change the locks the very day after he leaves her, these two people just might love each other after all.’
‘Take her advice, woman,’ barked the elderly Higgins, carrying a battered teapot through the waiting room. ‘My son didn’t listen to her. Now she owns the whole partnership.’ He held the heavy office door open for Jane and waved her off with the indifference of the truly aged.
Joe had asked Jane not to do anything rash, and she had asked him not to upset Sammie with public displays until after exams. Now she’d used Stratagem Twenty-eight on herself and rode alone into that mysterious land known as ‘legal proceedings.’
Charred bamboo bridges that once linked her to Joe smouldered in her wake.
Chapter Twenty-nine, Shu Shang Kai Hua
(Tie Silk Blossoms to a Dead Tree)
The first thing Jane did after the Higgins meeting was to change Number 19’s front door lock, an antique that required the attention of a specialist in nineteenth century hardware.
‘Easier just to swap the whole door for a new one,’ the grizzled Mr Wardle sniffed. He jiggled the warped wood. ‘I mean, whot’s to keep me from doing this?’ He kicked the 1860-circa antique planks hard with his boots. ‘Or this,’ he drove his screwdriver into the hairline fissure between the peeling frame and a bit of plaster patching up the old wall. He shrugged, ‘I’m willin’ to take it off your hands for nuthin.’
A greedy glint in Mr Wardle’s eyes dodged Jane’s glance. Was the old door worth more than firewood scrap? In the old days, a sturdy handyman might have given Joe sage advice at the kitchen table in exchange for a cup of tea. But Jane lived alone now and Mr Wardle seemed convinced that a woman alone in the square was either a celebrity or divorcee with money to burn. Jane knocked down his original estimate by twenty per cent and saw off the disgruntled Wardle with honeyed thanks and private relief she still had any doors to lock behind him.
That Thursday afternoon, as a matter of course, she carried up a new spare key along with the tomato soup and Wisconsin cheese on Lorraine’s tray. Her mother’s A Little Night Music DVD blared through her front door. Balancing the tray in her arms there on the landing, Jane was about to give a loud knock when a devilish thought popped into her head. For a second, she almost held the wicked proposal back from herself. Then she let the possibility swim around for a second—do a lazy breaststroke, not exactly a determined crawl.
Still, why not? There would be consequences, but how bad? When and how Lorraine discovered she couldn’t swan in and out of Jane’s flat without first ringing down, she might take it hard, throw a wobbly, do a bit of Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie or even channel some maternal harridan from Eugene O’Neill.
Yet, why should everyone have access to Jane’s home? Why had it always been a given that she knocked on her mother’s door, but the daughter got no privacy?
In the end, Lorraine didn’t answer the door and Jane found her snoring in her sagging chintz chair near the dormer window seat, her face unguarded. Almost motherly. On the television screen, Diana Rigg was spitting out the cynical Sondheim’s ‘Everyday a Little Death,’ ‘Love’s disgusting, love’s insane . . .’
Jane switched off Diana. She deposited the tray on a footstool and laid Mr Wardle’s shiny key next to the crackers. Then she pocketed the key again. If anyone needed it, it was Sammie.
Downstairs, she stretched out on the sofa, just as Joe used to do time and again, and watched the dull grey clouds skitter beyond the tops of the shivering plane trees under a late and indecisive January sky.
It was an ideal time to catch up with her research for Camille—plans by Google, Microsoft and Amazon to scan millions of books on to the web. She reread her notes for coming interviews with the New York Public Library, Carnegie Mellon’s Million Book Project, Tufts University’s Perseus Press specializing in Greek and Latin text, the Alexander Street Press digitizing the letters and diaries of American immigrants, the University of Michigan’s controversial Hathi Trust, the Library of Congress, the British Library. . .
Could the digitizing of human knowledge be the most profound cultural event since the invention of the printing press? Could it democratize the third century BC Alexandrian ambition of collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place? If you believed London Times, this rampant revitalization of millions of forgotten volumes would ‘encourage more people to go in search of the real thing.’
On the other hand, The New York Times sounded a gloomy death knell, ‘The end of the book as we know it.’
Where should their new programme put its sympathies? With the Kindle or valuable leather volumes collecting dust? Jane didn’t want the end of the book as she knew it but she liked this dream of books reaching everyone—not just people who could visit libraries or afford Waterstones. Was it a librarian’s utopia or nightmare—if all texts, past and present, multilingual, on any subject, were viewable? At long last, there could be a universal archive, the cosmic library.
Jane shivered. Who would curl up by the fire with Holmes, Moriarty and a glass of sherry? Who would forget to set the table because Wonderland was more wonderful? Was it up
to the quaking librarians to lead the charge headlong into the infotopia battle to help readers simply survive?
She wrapped her imagination around the library of the future. How could they present these arguments on screen? The project absorbed her for hours. The muffled roar of traffic off Regent’s Park Road mixed with the happy shrieks of children braving the chill outside. Ten years ago, the noisemakers had included Sammie, a red-cheeked urchin child rushing up the stairs for dinner in an animal gust. Jane’s ears used to comb through that traffic noise for the churn of one special engine into the square signalling Joe’s return.
Now all the hubbub had subsided into a neutral hum. The new lock was in place—barricading her from possessive Joe, her intrusive mother and even Dan’s distracting interruptions. This unfamiliar solitude felt like safety, not loneliness.
The trees’ pointed black claws scraped at the fading light. Would they ever sprout tiny nubs of brown, then little hooks of green, and at last, whole gloves of leaves, then puffed sleeves of foliage? Her face upturned to the graceful windows framing the falling dusk, Jane wondered: were things grinding to a halt for her, in some irrecoverable way? It wasn’t a question of ageing—even Lorraine had booked herself for one last performance.
‘ . . . Attach lifelike silk blossoms to a dead tree. All but the most discerning will assume your tree is capable of bearing flowers,’ Baldwin instructed them the following evening. He wagged a long finger, ‘Don’t even ask, Kevin! It’s come down to us through the ages, and I’m sure that at some point, during some dynasty, somebody tied silk blossoms to a tree. Yes, Nigel? Your quibble du soir?’
‘Boosting your strength by resorting to outside forces, yet again. Twenty-nine is so similar to killing with a borrowed knife.’
‘Both stratagems, Nigel, demonstrate the East’s preference for indirect action over direct confrontation. But they aren’t the same, if you study the extended uses. Killing with a borrowed knife is considered one of the Concealment strategies, while Twenty-nine is a Simulation ploy. In other words, you use something at hand, yes, it might be an ally, Nigel, or it might be quite neutral—the weather. Twenty-nine aims at getting your enemy to believe something that isn’t true. Maximize tiny resources into gigantic weapons.’
Love and the Art of War Page 30
