The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  She walked over to the adjoining door, opened it without knocking, put her head inside it, and said, “Your client is here.”

  Then I was ushered in to meet Nigel Clapp.

  He did stand up when I entered. Then he offered me his dead mullet hand and motioned me into the cheap orange plastic chair opposite his steel desk, and started shuffling through papers, and avoided my gaze. I noticed a couple of framed family photos on his desk, as well as a framed law degree. He must have spent a good two minutes going through my file, saying absolutely nothing, the only noise in the office coming from the traffic on Balham High Road and the stentorian voice of his secretary next door. Clapp seemed oblivious to this high-decibel distraction—the way, I imagined, that people next to a railway track somehow became immune to the constant sound of rattling trains. My file was laid out across his desk. When he finally spoke, he didn’t look up from the documents.

  “So your former solicitor,” he said in a voice so low and hesitant that I had to bend forward to hear him, “she never sought leave to appeal the order of the interim hearing?”

  “We parted company immediately after the hearing,” I said.

  “I see,” he said, his voice noncommittal, his eyes still focusing on the papers. “And this business with the house . . . can you remember the names of the solicitors who handled the sale?”

  I told him. He wrote it down. Then he closed my file, and reluctantly looked at me for a moment.

  “Maybe you’d like to tell me the entire story now.”

  “When you say ‘entire’?”

  “From . . . uh . . . I suppose . . . when you first met your husband to . . . uh . . . this morning, I suppose. The pertinent details only, of course. But . . . uh . . . I would just like an overall picture. So I can . . . uh . . . just have an overview, I suppose.”

  I could feel my spirits tumble even further into despair. This man had the personality of a paper cup.

  But still I took him through the complete tale of my marriage—from Cairo to London, to the early problems with the pregnancy, to the postpartum depression, to my extended stay in the hospital, and the nightmare that I had walked into upon returning from Boston. I was absolutely frank with him—telling him exactly how I made angry verbal threats against my son, and my difficult behavior in the hospital after his birth, the sleeping pills incident, my absurd decision to seek out Diane Dexter’s country home—in short, everything that Tony’s solicitors could use against me.

  It took around twenty minutes to get through the entire story. As I spoke, Clapp pivoted his chair in such a way that he was staring at a spot on the wall behind his computer screen. He showed no emotion as I spoke, he didn’t interrupt, he didn’t react to any of the more dire aspects of the tale. His presence didn’t register at all. I might as well have been talking to a goldfish in an aquarium, considering the lack of reaction I was getting.

  When I finally finished, there was another considerable pause—as if he didn’t get the fact that my narrative was finished. Then, when this dawned on him, he turned back to my file, shuffled the papers together, closed it, and said, “Uhm . . . right then. We have your address and phone number here, don’t we?”

  “It’s on the first page of the forms.”

  He opened the file again, peered inside, shut it.

  “So it is,” he said. Then he stood up and said, “Well, uhm, emergency legal aid will be available right now, although a final certificate won’t be authorized until the forms have been processed. Anyway . . . uhm . . . we’ll be in touch.”

  This threw me. Surely he was going to answer some questions, give me his legal point of view, speak about my chances in court, hint about the strategy he might adopt, anything. But instead, I was offered his dead mullet hand. And I was so flummoxed by this that I briefly squeezed his damp, flaccid fingers and left.

  An hour later, I was in Julia’s kitchen, accepting another shot of Absolut. I needed one.

  “This guy isn’t just diffident; he’s one of those people who seem to be missing in action while still sitting in the same room as you.”

  “Maybe that’s just his manner,” she said.

  “Damn right it’s his manner—and it’s a completely hopeless one. I mean, at first I thought: he’s just boring. Or to be more specific about it: he’s about the most boring person I’ve ever met in my life. But then—after taking him through every damn thing that’s happened to me for the last six months—what’s his reaction? ‘We’ll be in touch.’ And you should have seen this guy during my extended monologue. I’m positive he was doing Transcendental Meditation with his eyes open.”

  “Are you certain he’s not just a little shy?”

  “A little shy? He came across as pathologically shy . . . to the point where I can’t see how the hell he’s going to make any inroads for me.”

  “Don’t you think you should give him a little time?”

  “I don’t have much in the way of time,” I said. “Less than four months, to be exact. And they don’t call that final hearing final for nothing. I need someone who can, at the very least, attempt a little damage control here. I don’t expect miracles. But he’s like one of those freebie attorneys you read about in the States who get appointed to a capital murder case and end up sleeping through the prosecution’s summation.”

  I paused. Julia just smiled at me.

  “All right,” I said. “Maybe that’s just a little melodramatic. But—”

  “I know what the stakes are, Sally. I really do. And even though Nigel is your lawyer, I gather that you can get permission from the legal aid authority to change your solicitor if you put forward a good enough reason. So if you have absolutely no confidence in this solicitor, then call up the other solicitors on the list and find out when they can see you.”

  I did just that the next morning, leaving three messages for three different solicitors. One of them, Helen Sanders, rang back. She didn’t have time to see me face to face this week, but would be pleased to speak to me now. So, once again, I spent fifteen minutes telling this woman the entire saga—from beginning to end. Her verdict was stark and uncompromising.

  “Whatever about the inherent unfairness of what happened to you,” she said, “the sad fact of the matter is: they do have a strong case against you. More to the point, as perhaps other solicitors have informed you, once a child is settled with one parent, the court is loath to relocate him again.”

  This is exactly what the dreadful Ginny Ricks told me in the wake of the interim hearing disaster. So I asked Helen Sanders, “Are you saying that my case is hopeless?”

  “I couldn’t make a judgment like that without studying all the relevant documents and court orders. But from what you’ve told me so far . . . well, I’m not going to lie to you: I can’t see how you’ll have any chance of winning custody of your son.”

  She did offer to see me at her office next week, if I wanted to discuss matters further. But I simply thanked her for her time and hung up. What was there to discuss? Mine was a hopeless case.

  “You mustn’t think that,” Julia said after I related this conversation to her.

  “Isn’t it better to face up to the truth?”

  “I’m sure the right solicitor could dig up the right dirt on your husband’s relationship with that Dexter woman, and how they set this whole thing up.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I really need someone out there now, tracking stuff down, trying to look into Dexter’s background to see if there’s any dirt worth digging. And three months isn’t really much time to pull all that together.”

  “Don’t you have any mega-rich friends who could help you hire a private detective or someone like that to snoop around on your behalf?”

  The only people I knew with any substantial money were Margaret and Alexander Campbell. But I felt that if I approached them now, it would seem as if I was demanding something back for referring me to Lawrence and Lambert. Like it or not, that would end things with Margaret. Once you’ve a
sked for money from a friend, the friendship is doomed.

  “As I told you before, my only family is my sister. She’s broke. My parents were schoolteachers. Their only asset was their house—and thanks to what lawyers like to call ‘bad estate planning’ and the suddenness of their death, their one asset, their house, was largely consumed by the government. Then there was the lawsuit after their death.”

  “What lawsuit . . . ?”

  I paused for a moment, staring into my drink. Then I said, “The one against my dad. The autopsy report found that he was about two glasses of wine over the legal limit. Not a vast amount, but he still shouldn’t have been driving on it. And the fact that he hit a station wagon with a family of five in it . . .”

  Julia looked at me, wide-eyed.

  “Was anyone killed?”

  “The mother, who was all of thirty-two years old, and her fourteen-month-old son. Her husband and their two other kids somehow managed to walk away.”

  Silence. Then I said, “The thing was—the husband of the woman killed . . . he turned out to be an Episcopal minister, and one of those very principled types who really believed in Christian axioms like turning the other cheek and not seeking vengeance. So, when it came out that, technically speaking, my father was driving while intoxicated, he insisted that the whole thing be kept out of the papers, not just for the sake of Sandy and me, but also—he told me later—for his own sake as well. ‘There’s been enough tragedy already. I don’t want public pity, any more than I want to see you and your sister vilified because your father made a mistake.’

  “I think he might have been the most extraordinary man I’ve ever encountered . . . though, at the time, I wondered if his goodness was some sort of posttraumatic disorder. Isn’t that an awful thing to think?”

  “It’s honest.”

  “Anyway, Sandy and I agreed that we should settle for whatever their insurers demanded. Which was essentially all our parents’ insurance policies, the house, and just about everything else. So we both came out of it with virtually nothing. Our own lawyers kept telling us we should fight—that giving them the insurance policies was enough. But we felt so desperately guilty, we handed it all over to the minister and his children . . . even though he actually called me once and said we didn’t have to go so far. Can you imagine someone saying that . . . not seeking revenge or retribution? But it convinced us even more that we had to give him everything. It wasn’t just penance. It was an act of contrition.”

  “But you didn’t drive the car,” Julia said. “Your father did.”

  I fell silent for a while, wanting not to say any more. But then: “You’re right, he drove the car. But before he got into the car, he was with my mom at a college graduation party for me. He was having a great time, talking with all my friends, being the usual nice guy that he was. Late in the evening, I handed him a glass of shitty Almaden wine, and he said he really couldn’t handle anything more, and I said—and I remember this so damn clearly—‘You going middle-aged on me, Dad?’ And he laughed and said ‘Hell no,’ and downed it in one go. And—”

  I stopped. I looked down into the vodka glass. I shoved it away.

  “I still can’t get over it. All these years later. It’s there, every hour of every day. And it’s now been with me so long that I just consider it part of my weather system—something that encircles me all the time.”

  “What did your sister say when she found out?”

  “That’s the thing—she never did find out. Because I couldn’t bring myself to tell her . . .”

  “Whom did you tell?”

  I didn’t answer. Finally she asked, “You never told anyone?”

  “I spoke with a therapist about it. But—”

  “You never said a word to your husband?”

  “I considered telling him around the time I got pregnant. But I thought . . . I don’t know . . . I thought Tony would have belittled me for holding on to such guilt. He would have said I was being pathetic. Now I realize that, had I told him, he would have turned this admission against me in a court of law. Not just a misfit mother, but an accessory after the fact to a vehicular manslaughter.”

  “But hang on—you don’t really believe that you were responsible for the death of that woman and child?”

  “I gave my dad the glass of wine that sent him over the limit.”

  “No—you just handed him the glass and then gently teased him about being middle-aged. He knew he had to drive after the party. He knew how much he’d drunk before you showed up with that last glass of wine.”

  “Try telling my conscience that. Sometimes I think that the real reason I eventually fled overseas was that I was trying to put as much geography as possible between myself and all that lingering guilt.”

  “The French Foreign Legion approach.”

  “Exactly—and it kind of worked for a while. Or, at least, I learned how to cohabit with it.”

  “Until they took Jack away from you?”

  “I guess I’m that obvious. And yes, once this all happened, I was certain that this was some sort of cosmic retribution for causing that accident; that Jack had been taken away from me because I had given my father the drink that made him crash the car that killed a little boy.”

  Julia reached over the table and put her hand on my arm.

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “I don’t know anything anymore. During the last few months, all logic’s been turned on its head. Nothing makes sense.”

  “Well, one thing must make sense. You are not receiving some sort of divine punishment for your father’s accident—because you had absolutely no role in that accident, and because it just doesn’t work that way . . . and I speak as a semi-practicing Catholic.”

  I managed a small, bleak laugh.

  “God knows, I wish I’d confessed all this to my sister years ago.”

  “But what good would that have done?”

  “Recently, I’ve had this enormous need to confess all to her.”

  “Promise me you’ll never do that. And not just because I truly believe that you have nothing to confess. It would just drop all the guilt you’ve been feeling for all these years right into her lap. And—this is the real Catholic in me talking now—there are many things in life that are far better left unsaid. We all want to confess. It’s the most human of needs imaginable. To ask for some sort of absolution for making a mess of things—which everyone before us has done, and everyone afterward will continue to do as well. Sometimes I think it’s the one great constant in all human history: the ability to screw it up for ourselves and others. Maybe that’s the most terrible—and the most reassuring—thing about life: the fact that everyone’s messed up like this before. We’re all so desperately repetitive, aren’t we?”

  I thought about that later, as I sat at home staring at the list of alternative legal aid solicitors, supplied to me by the Law Society. There was an entire section of lawyers dedicated to family law—and all I could think was how, for these specialists in domestic dissolution, all stories must start to overlap or, at the very least, come down to a few basic plot points: He met somebody else . . . We fight about everything . . . He just doesn’t listen to me . . . She feels she doesn’t have a life beyond the house and the kids . . . He resents the fact I make more money than him. And all this dissatisfaction and disgruntlement and disappointment may, in part, be rooted in the usual bad matchups, the usual inability to cohabit. But Julia was right: it also stems from a need for turmoil, for change . . . all of which might be linked to that very human fear of mortality, and the realization that everything is finite. It is this knowledge that makes us scramble even harder for some sort of meaning or import to the minor lives that we lead . . . even if it means pulling everything apart in the process.

  I narrowed my new solicitor possibilities down to four names—all of whom I chose because they were located within walking distance of my house. No doubt, they’d all tell me the same thing: you’re in a no-win situat
ion. But I still had to find someone to represent me during the final hearing. I was about to start phoning up these four candidates, but it was now around five PM on Friday afternoon, which meant that I would either be talking to answering machines or secretaries who were itching to get home, and certainly didn’t want to be speaking to a legal aid case so late in the day. So I decided to start working the phones first thing Monday morning—and would now treat myself to an extended walk by the river. I was still reeling a bit from the disclosure I’d made to Julia. But I didn’t feel relieved or unburdened. Nor did I take great consolation in what she said. Though others can advise you to divest yourself of all guilt, the ability to do so is always impossibly difficult. The hardest thing in the world is forgiving yourself.

  I found my jacket, put on a pair of shoes, and was heading toward the kitchen bowl where I always tossed my house keys when the phone rang. Damn. Damn. Damn. A part of me wanted to let the machine take it—because there was a break in the weather, and I really needed an extended stroll in the open air. But being a glutton for punishment, I reached for the receiver.

  “Uh . . . I’d like to speak with Ms. . . . uh . . . Goodchild.”

  Wonderful. Just wonderful. Exactly the man I wanted to hear from late on a Friday afternoon. But I maintained a polite tone.

  “Mr. Clapp?”

  “Oh, it is you, Ms. Goodchild. Is this a good time?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Uhm . . . well . . .”

  Another of his awkward pauses.

  “Are you still there, Mr. Clapp?” I asked, trying not to voice my impatience.

  “Uhm, yes . . . Ms. Goodchild. And I just want to say that the court hearing went fine.”

  Pause. I was genuinely confused.