Marietta leaned in and touched Featherby’s face with her finger.
‘After all,’ said Maserov, ‘one never knows, maybe the horse will talk.’
‘What?’
Maserov didn’t answer but looked down at his phone just long enough to trigger the now frequently dialled chosen number. He spoke quietly to the recipient of his phone call.
‘Jess, hi, it’s me.’ It was the first time he’d abbreviated her name. She noticed, he didn’t. ‘Don’t ask me to explain anything now but do you have the number of a psychiatrist or a psychologist that someone could see without much delay?’ There was a pause. ‘What do I mean, “not much delay”? I mean . . .’ Maserov looked at Featherby sitting helplessly in his stripy flannel pyjamas with Betga’s daughter on his knee. ‘I mean sometime . . . today.’
part seven
I
‘Marietta, this is no way to live, pining for a policeman. Let me remind you, he’s not Dada, I am. Perhaps later, when you’re older, say sixteen, you can call me Betga in a kind of ironic or postmodern way, if they’re still doing postmodernism then, if it’s still a thing then or indeed if anything is a thing then, if they still have things. But for now, I am Dada, loving, highly entertaining Dada. And I’m not talking about the early twentieth-century European avant-garde art movement, either. I’m using it in the sense of a diminutive for pater. I probably should’ve chosen my words more carefully since, I’ll grant you, there is some connection between postmodernism and Dadaism, but none at all between them and me, your dad.’
Betga was lying on the floor with two-year-old Marietta at Carla’s house talking to her and simultaneously making a soft, white, fluffy, now broken, wind-up rabbit dance around her in jerks that could best be described as spasmodic. No music had ever been composed that would accommodate movements like these.
There was no one else in the house. They were waiting for Carla to come home from her temping gig across town in Flemington working for a week-old start-up that made plastic wishbones for people so starved of the opportunity to otherwise divine their own destinies that they were willing to pay three dollars per wishbone. When Carla realised what the company’s core business was, she had managed to keep smiling but asked to be paid in cash. It was while earning this cash that her daughter’s free childcare came courtesy of her father, A.A. Betga, who, after a full day with his daughter, found himself bored out of his mind.
The plan had been for Betga to take care of Marietta until Carla came home and then they would wait together for Maserov to come over with the paperwork necessary to formalise the settlement with Torrent Industries. Carla had softened her attitude to Jessica after she had learned from Betga all that Jessica had done to help her and that Jessica was even willing to jeopardise her job. She felt that now it was she who owed Jessica an apology. So Jessica had been invited to toast the settlement as well. It was only later during the day that Carla wondered if, in extending an invitation to Jessica, she hadn’t unwittingly been disloyal to her new friend Eleanor Maserov but by then it was too late to revoke the invitation and, anyway, Carla was unsure of the precise nature of Jessica’s relationship with Maserov, as indeed were Jessica and Maserov.
In the meantime, Betga had played every game he could think of with Marietta, told her every fairy tale he could recall from his own fractured childhood but then had suddenly remembered Maserov’s advice to him when defending against an onslaught of boredom. He was to have a conversation with her as though she were an adult.
‘You have to know, darling Marietta, that it was always my intention to be in your life, right from the time you were born. It was Mummy who insisted the three of us not be together although I don’t want you to be cross with Mummy. We have to try to understand her. She was angry with Daddy for a moment of infidelity with a legal recruiter in a very tight job market. Already, I’m sure you can see both sides of this. Sometimes a man needs to be alone with a legal recruiter in order to do what he needs to do to safeguard the interests of his family. Additionally, and I say this in mitigation and because you might as well learn this now, when some socially under-evolved men see an attractive woman, certain regions of their brains light up in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Researchers have found that when these regions of the brain are particularly active, these men’s capacity to make moral judgments diminishes to an alarming degree astonishingly quickly. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. It’s a psychopathy that has been the cause of much suffering but it is treatable with cognitive behaviour therapy and education. Its precise neurobiology is something you might not learn till graduate school but you’ll learn it experientially before high school.
‘Then there was that study, I think it was in Nature, a study of the the nematode worm, which found that a neuron exists in its brain that allows it to memorise previous sexual encounters so strongly that they will override a conditioned salt aversion when they can’t get sex without salt. I’ve no doubt one would find similar results with other condiments. So, while a lot of men are unscrupulous, immoral shits extremely often and should never be left alone without their gonads clearly observable on a live CCTV feed, sometimes, at least when it’s your father, you have to cut him some slack.
‘If you do this, if you do forgive me for the intimacy incident with the legal recruiter, I promise not to let you or your mother down again. You will never need to be ashamed of me, at least not till high school, when you’re biologically programmed to be embarrassed and ashamed of both your parents. But you can always be proud to be a Betga. Betgas have fled Hitler and Stalin. Betgas have fought or agitated against Franco, General Jaruzelski, Erich Honecker and Jeff Kennett. We may not often have a lot of money but you can count on us to have all the right enemies.
‘So I guess what I’m saying, my darling little girl, is that I love you with all my heart. I’ve loved you from the moment you were born and I will love you beyond my last breath. I also love your mummy with all my heart and am determined to prove it to her, no matter how long she treats me like a miscreant cocker spaniel. I guess, to some degree, I deserve it but if you repeat that I’ll deny it and never let you have your teeth straightened no matter in how many different directions they point. You and your mummy are the best things in my life and I want to live with both of you in a situation that, to the very best of my ability, approximates a conventional bourgeois family. I can’t promise to be conventional but by the power vested in me to sign passport applications, I will do my damnedest to be bourgeois.’
Betga heard footsteps in the hallway closer than they ought to have been. His heart rate quickened slightly as he wondered how much of his monologue Carla would have heard. He looked at Carla’s face in an attempt to discern where in his monologue her hearing had cut in.
‘I was just talking to Marietta,’ he said slightly nervously.
‘I heard.’
‘Really? What did you hear?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing other than what you heard.’
‘Then you know what I heard.’
‘But not how much. What did you hear?’
‘When I came in you had just described yourself as a cocker spaniel.’
‘Oh,’ said Betga, unable to hide his relief.
‘Don’t flatter yourself. You should be so lucky to be a cocker spaniel. They’re famously loyal. You’re infamously disloyal.’
But her tone was softer than it had been in a long while and she came over to him and kissed him. Betga tried as best he could to recall in sequence what he had just said to Marietta. If Carla really had heard what he’d said only from ‘cocker spaniel’ then she’d heard that he loved her, that she and Marietta were the best things in his life and that he wanted to live with them both as a family and she wouldn’t have heard anything about a moment of infidelity with a legal recruiter in a very tight job market or about the male nematode worm. Certainly, the kiss was consistent with this. He breathed a little more easily now.
There was
a knock at the door. They looked at each other and both wondered whether it was Maserov.
‘Don’t be disappointed,’ Betga suddenly found himself saying.
‘Why, do you know something?’
‘No, but there’s no guarantee Malcolm Torrent will behave rationally. He should but . . . you know . . . just in case. Don’t be disappointed. We’ve got our family. That’s more important than money.’
Suddenly two thoughts with opposing effects on her emotions competed for primacy in her consciousness; the possibility that not only would Mike Mercer escape punishment but that she might not even receive a remotely fair monetary compensation and the possibility that Betga could, after all, provide a ballast to her and Marietta’s lives. And when she opened the door all possibilities remained alive. It wasn’t Maserov.
‘Hi,’ said Jessica, handing Carla a chilled magnum of champagne. ‘I hope you don’t consider it bad luck for me to bring this before we know what Stephen is going to come back with. I nearly didn’t bring it but then I thought, “What the hell? Why not be optimistic!”’
‘Come in, come in,’ said Carla, kissing Jessica on the cheek and taking the champagne towards the fridge. ‘This is very kind of you. No, I’m not superstitious.’
‘Yes she is,’ called Betga. ‘My God, she is. She goes to church although she’s not otherwise religious.’
Carla turned around. ‘That’s not superstition, that’s being rational. I’m hedging my bets.’
‘So let’s open the champagne then,’ entreated Betga.
‘Not till we hear what Stephen has to say. Being rational leaves no room for optimism.’ Carla put the champagne in the fridge and then returned to Jessica. ‘I want to thank you. It sounds like you really stuck your neck out for me.’
‘To be honest, I’m not yet sure what it’s done for me but there was no way I could find your account of the assault addressed to Aileen van der Westhuizen and her post-it note with the lawyer’s advice to bury it, and then do nothing with it. I had no choice. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.’
‘No, but you did have a choice. You went looking for it in the first place, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You had a hunch they’d covered it up and then went looking for the evidence to prove it, even if it meant exposing yourself to some kind of payback from your boss. Your job is to sweep this sort of thing under the carpet and instead you dug it up.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Then no matter what Stephen comes back with, I’ll forever be grateful to you. I owe you an apology for the way I’ve spoken to you. I’ll never be able to repay you, Jessica.’
‘You don’t need to repay me. Listen, unless we stick together we don’t have a hope of changing things. And they’ve got to change. What kind of society is it where half the population feels vulnerable and then, if and when they report an incident, are likely to be silenced or disbelieved? The victim’s very reporting of it gets more scrutiny than the assault itself. Decent men don’t do this kind of shit. And when you find a decent one you’ve got to grab him with both —’
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door, an interruption that stopped her mid-sentence.
‘Well, unless someone ordered pizza, that’ll be Maserov,’ said Betga calmly, trying to mask a certain cocktail of impatience and anxiety. He too had a lot riding on the news Maserov had waiting on the other side of the door.
‘Betga, can you let him in?’ Carla asked. ‘I won’t be able to stop myself trying to read his face in the doorway.’
‘Just leave the hall light off.’
‘I’ll get it,’ Jessica volunteered.
Betga and Carla listened to Jessica open the front door and quietly greet Maserov and then ask him how it went. They didn’t hear his answer because he didn’t reply before the two of them were back in Carla’s living room. Both Betga and Carla stood up and looked expectantly at Maserov who seemed to be searching for the right words with which to begin.
‘Well, you saw him, right?’ Betga asked.
‘Yeah, finally.’
‘And? You told him what Jessica found?’ Maserov’s face wasn’t giving much away, if anything he looked a little shell-shocked, maybe almost sombre.
‘I didn’t just tell him what she found, I showed him.’
‘Well, what was his reaction, what did he say?’
‘He was pretty upset, to put it mildly.’
‘Stephen, is it bad?’ Carla asked. ‘You guys said you thought I could get five or six hundred thousand. Is it a lot less? Is he going to make me go to court and testify in public?’
‘Stephen, what happened?’ Jessica asked.
‘Okay, well, I’m not here with the offer we discussed.’
‘Oh fuck!’ said Betga under his breath.
‘But,’ Maserov continued, ‘if you’ll sign the offer I did bring with me, in full and final settlement of this matter, replete with a confidentiality clause, and with each side agreeing to bear its own costs, Torrent Industries will pay you . . . 2.6 million dollars.’
‘You got him to offer me 2.6 million dollars?’
‘Yep, that’s right.’
‘Oh fuck!’ said Betga, no longer under his breath, before embracing Carla more strongly than he ever had before. When he released her she saw that Maserov and Jessica were also just coming out of their own embrace. Then Carla went over to Maserov to hug him.
‘Stephen, I’m stunned! I can’t believe you did this. I can’t thank you enough.’
‘Don’t thank me. It’s Jessica. I think I could have got you five or six hundred thousand, like I’d said. It was Jessica who added two million to this.’
‘Jessica!’ said Carla, now hugging her.
‘Now we can open the champagne,’ said Jessica, and the two of them went over to the fridge. ‘Where are the glasses?’
‘You get offers for Pauline, Lilly, and Monika?’ Betga asked Maserov quietly.
‘Yep,’ said Maserov, handing him a slip of paper with figures corresponding to offers for the other three plaintiffs, all of them significantly higher than they would have been had Jessica not done her detective work. Betga smiled.
‘Ooh! Good man! We can certainly live with those figures.’
‘Again, it was Jessica’s good work,’ said Maserov, who put out his hand to shake Betga’s hand. But Betga wasn’t having any of it. He had Maserov in a hug too tight for Maserov to speak and only released him when he saw Jessica and Carla returning with the glasses of champagne.
‘What did he say when you showed him Carla’s report and the post-it note in Aileen’s handwriting?’ Jessica asked.
‘He was furious. I think at that moment he wanted to fire every second person in the company’s internal phone directory. I was even worried he might want to shoot the messenger. I still am.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him that, in my opinion, the immediate interests of the company were best served guaranteeing that these claims went away as soon as humanly possible.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He saw the sense in this.’
‘What’s he going to do about Aileen van der Westhuizen?’ Jessica asked.
‘What’s he going to do about Featherby?’ Betga asked.
‘I don’t know. He said I’ve given him a lot to think about. As you can imagine, he wasn’t happy. He asked me what I thought were the lowest figures that would make these cases go away in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘He really put you on the spot.’
‘Yeah, he often does.’
‘But he always listens to you,’ said Jessica. ‘He always takes Stephen’s advice,’ she explained to the others with a small glint of pride.
‘Well, he wants to see me in his office tomorrow morning at eleven. I guess he wants to talk through the ramifications of all of this.’
‘Well, I’m pretty happy!’ said Carla. ‘To Stephen and Jessica.’ And she and Betga drank to t
heir guests.
‘To Jessica and Stephen!’ Betga added. ‘And to your lawyer, too, who made everything but the original assault possible! Come on you guys, let’s party like it’s Y2K and we’ve just been engaged to perform a “due diligence” for Lehman Brothers!’
‘Yes, let’s party,’ said Carla. ‘Although we might well need to get more champagne. It’s on me! I’m happy to spend at least as much as Mike Mercer would spend on his Indian and Iraqi marketing campaigns.’
‘Marketing? He’s not in marketing,’ questioned Betga.
‘No, I know, but every time he would go out for one of his boozy lunches with Frank Cardigan he’d tell me to get the marketing company to reimburse him.’
‘Who was he marketing to?’ Maserov asked.
‘I don’t know exactly but he’d tell me he was pitching to the Indian or the Iraqi government, part of one of the tender campaigns. He’d get me to invoice some marketing company and then send it through to Frank Cardigan. I always thought it was bogus but they always seemed to pay up so maybe it was legit. They even bought him a car.’
‘What? The Torrent Industries marketing department bought him a car?’ Maserov asked incredulously.
‘No, it wasn’t Torrent’s marketing department, some other third-party marketing company. Can’t remember the name. I don’t know how he did it but Frank Cardigan always made sure Mercer got paid. I know because he used to make me do his banking, some of it anyway. I also had to get his dry-cleaning. Unbelievable perks that bastard got. Anyway, to hell with them both. I don’t want to think about him. Not even in therapy. We’re going to need more champagne. But first I have to put this little one to bed,’ she said, picking up her daughter off the floor. ‘Give Uncle Stephen and Aunty Jessica a kiss goodnight.’
Carla brought Marietta over to Jessica, who kissed the little girl on the top of her head.
‘Carla, she’s such a beautiful little girl.’
Maybe the Horse Will Talk Page 25
