A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘Yes – something’s happened.’

  Pause.

  ‘If you want to talk about it …’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Both, please.’

  She poured in a dash of milk and one sugar. She handed me the cup. I stirred it. I put my spoon down. I said, ‘They took my son away from me seven weeks ago.’

  She looked at me with care. And then I told her everything. She said nothing. She just sat there and listened. When I finished, the tea was cold. There was a long silence. Then Julia asked, ‘Are you going to let them get away with it?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do next.’

  She thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Well, let’s find you someone who does know what to do next.’

  Eleven

  FROM THE MOMENT I walked into his office, I didn’t like the look of Nigel Clapp. Not that he appeared strange or threatening or abnormal. Actually, what first struck me about him was his absolute ordinariness – the sort of guy you would pass on the street and never register. He came across as a truly grey man who seemed like he was born at the age of forty, and had spent his entire life cultivating a grey functionary look, right down to the cheap grey suit he was wearing over a polyester white shirt and a grubby maroon knit tie.

  I could have handled the bad clothes, the sallow countenance, the thinning black hair, the light sleety accumulations of dandruff on both shoulders, and the way he never seemed to be looking at you while talking. ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ as my wonderful mom (who had a thing about needlepoint mottos) used to say.

  No, what really bothered me about Nigel Clapp was his handshake. It was virtually non-existent – a brief placement of four damp, limp fingers into your right palm. It not only made you feel like you’d been given a dead mullet, but also that the purveyor of this hand had no personality whatsoever.

  This perception was exacerbated by his voice. Low, monotonic, with a slightly hesitant cadence. It was the sort of voice that almost forced me to cup my ear to discern what he was saying. Coupled with the permanently stunned expression on his face (one which made him look like he’d just tumbled into an empty elevator shaft), he certainly didn’t inspire confidence.

  Which was something of a worry – considering that Nigel Clapp was my new solicitor, and my one hope of ever getting my son back.

  Why did I end up with Nigel Clapp? Once again, I must recite another of my mother’s preferred platitudes:

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  Actually, the way I found myself in the offices of Nigel Clapp was courtesy of a process that started in Julia Frank’s kitchen. After hearing my story, she called a friend who worked as a deputy editor at the Guardian, handling (among other duties) a couple of weekly Law pages, which often dealt with family law cases. She outlined my situation, mentioning that I was married to a well-known journalist, but then playing coy about his name. The deputy editor told her that, as I had no income at present, I should qualify for Legal Aid – and gave her the number of a barrister named Jane Arnold, who specialized in family law cases. Julia called Jane. Who put her in touch with a friend named Rose Truman who happened to be an information officer at the Law Society (the registrar of all solicitors and barristers in England). Rose Truman in turn promised to post me out today a list of solicitors in my area who handled legal aid.

  The speed at which Julia negotiated all this was dazzling. It also made me realize how little I understood about the way things worked here.

  ‘Well, that’s sorted then,’ she said, ‘though I know my friend at the Guardian would love me to drop the name of your husband to her.’

  ‘I don’t want to spread gossip about Tony. I just want my son back. Anyway, as I told you, he’s no longer at the Chronicle. He’s a full-time father who’s also probably trying to finish his novel.’

  ‘And the smart bastard found a wealthy patroness to subsidize his literary endeavours. I’d put serious money on your little boy being part of the Faustian Pact they made.’

  I stared into my teacup. ‘That thought had crossed my mind, yes.’

  ‘You know what I also think?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said, looking up.

  ‘I think you need a very large drink.’

  ‘So do I. But I’m on these pills …’

  ‘Are they anti-depressants?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘What kind?’

  I told her.

  ‘Then a large vodka won’t kill you.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I was on them during my divorce … and also because my sister’s a chemist. And she gave me the all-clear for a shot of Absolut every so often. You do like vodka, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, that would be very welcome indeed.’

  She opened the freezer compartment of her fridge, retrieved the bottle of vodka, then found two glasses and poured out two small shots.

  ‘You sure about this?’ I asked.

  ‘It never did me any harm. But, then again, I am from Glasgow.’

  ‘You don’t sound Scottish.’

  ‘Glaswegian parents. Spent my first seven years there, then my father brought us south. Never went back – which probably means I’m completely deracinated.’

  We clinked glasses. I took a tiny sip, I had forgotten how anaesthetizing frozen vodka can be. I allowed the liquid to loll about my mouth for a few moments, before letting it delightfully burn the back of my throat. After it slipped down, I let out a little sigh.

  ‘Do I take that as a sign of approval?’ Julia asked.

  ‘You have good taste in vodka.’

  ‘It makes up for the bad taste in men,’ she said, lighting up a cigarette. ‘You don’t mind if I indulge my filthy habit?’

  ‘It’s your house.’

  ‘Good answer. You can stay.’

  She downed her vodka and poured herself another small finger.

  ‘May I ask you a direct question?’ I said.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Did you like anti-depressants?’

  ‘Enormously And you?’

  ‘I’d recommend them to anyone having their child taken away from them …’

  I shook my head, took another small sip of the vodka, and said, ‘Sorry, that was crude.’

  ‘But accurate.’

  ‘How long were you on them for?’

  ‘Nearly a year.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s not impossible to kick, especially if you’re taken off them slowly. But, I must say, anytime these days that I find myself fighting off the black dog, I do think fondly back to my extended anti-depressant interlude.’

  ‘What do you use instead nowadays?’

  ‘Marlboro Lights and Absolut – neither of which really have the same efficacy as anti-depressants when it comes to dealing with what you’re going through, which makes my ghastly divorce seem like a paper cut.’

  ‘Paper cuts can be painful. Was your divorce really ghastly?’

  ‘Anyone who says that they had an amiable divorce is a liar. But yes, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.’

  ‘Had you been married long?’

  ‘Nine years. And though it went through the usual ups-and-downs during that time, I was just a little surprised when Jeffrey announced he was moving in with this French cutie he’d been seeing on the sly. I think that’s the worst thing about discovering a long-term infidelity – being made to feel like such a slow-witted fool.’

  ‘Never underestimate the male propensity for the clandestine … especially when it comes to sex. Were you devastated?’

  ‘Yes, I was shattered. “The death of love” and all that. I read somewhere – I think it was in some Irish novel – that a divorce is worse than a death. Because you can’t bury the bastard – and you know that he’s off somewhere else, having a life without you.’

  ‘And have you had a life – without him?�
��

  ‘Good God, yes.’

  ‘Anyone now?’

  She took a deep drag on her cigarette.

  ‘That’s a rather direct question.’

  ‘I’m a bloody Yank,’ I said, imitating her accent. ‘Direct’s my thing.’

  ‘Well then to be bloody direct about it: yes, there was somebody. But it ended about six months ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She then explained that, around the time of her divorce, the small publishers for whom she worked as an editor were gobbled up by a major conglomerate, and she was one of the casualties of this merger-and-acquisition (‘They blamed it all on “economies of scale” whatever that means.’) At the time, she was living with her husband and her son Charlie in a large terraced house in Barnes. As part of the divorce settlement, Charlie resided with her, and she received just enough money to buy this cottage outright in Putney (‘which puts me ahead of ninety-eight percent of the population of the planet, so I’m not complaining … even if the bastard only gives me £500 a month in child support’). But she had been able to find enough steady work as a freelance editor to keep her life ticking over.

  ‘I make enough to give Charlie and myself a good life. And though I might not have a chap on hand right now, the fact that I still have Charlie for the next few years makes everything …’

  She stopped and said, ‘I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. What you said is true. Which is why this is so fucking hard.’

  ‘Once that list arrives tomorrow from the Law Society, find yourself a solicitor who’s willing to fight your corner.’

  ‘Against a rich woman with a lot of money and a big fat dossier of evidence against me? I doubt any solicitor is going to want to take me on,’ I said.

  But the list arrived, and I discovered two things. Legal Aid wasn’t entirely free. If you were destitute, with no assets, you could obtain legal representation without charge. But if, like me, you had no income, but did have part-ownership of a house, then the system operated more like a loan – in which all the costs you ran up eventually had to be repaid (with low interest, but interest nonetheless) from the eventual sale of said property. In other words, I’d be running up another debt – and one that would probably have to be settled once the house was sold from under me. At least, the legal aid rates were nothing compared to those charged by a private incompetent like Ginny Ricks.

  The second thing I found out was that there were more than two-dozen solicitors within the borough of Wandsworth who handled Legal Aid cases. I didn’t really know which one to choose, or where to start – so I just began to ring up every name alphabetically.

  The first four solicitors on the list were otherwise engaged that morning – and, judging from what their secretaries told me, tied up for most of the week. But when I reached name number five on the list – Nigel Clapp – his secretary said that, yes, he could see me tomorrow at ten-thirty.

  But as soon as I saw Nigel Clapp, I thought: no way. It wasn’t just his spiritless appearance that I found disheartening. It was also his office. It was located in another sector of Wandsworth called Balham. As I was car-less and very conscious of costs, I decided to eschew a £10 mini-cab ride to this eastern corner of the borough, so I walked to the Putney rail station, changed trains at Clapham Junction, then rode two stops south to Balham. The trains were strewn with rubbish. The seats were stained. The carriages themselves were covered with graffiti. And the thing was: even though I still glanced with momentary distaste on such shabbiness, another part of me had come to be inured to such public squalor; to almost expect it as part of the territory. Is that what living in London did to you – make you accept the dilapidated, the shabby, as commonplace?

  Balham High Road was the usual mixture of chain stores, and curious commercial left-behinds from the nine-teen-sixties (a shop that sold used professional hairdressing equipment), and the occasional signs of encroaching gentrification (designer cappuccino bars, designer modern apartment blocks). Nigel Clapp’s office was located above a dry cleaner’s in an archetypal redbrick Victorian house. I entered his premises by a door on a side street; a door with old-style frosted glass, on which had been painted the name Clapp & Co – Solicitors. I negotiated a constricted, ill-lit stairwell, reached another door and rang the bell. It was opened by a plumpish, matronly woman in her fifties, with what I had come to recognize as a pronounced South London accent.

  ‘You the one here for the death cert?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Sally Goodchild.’

  ‘Who?’ she said loudly, as if I was a little deaf. I repeated my name again. ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ she said. ‘The Legal Aid case. Come in. He’s busy right now, but shouldn’t be too long.’

  Clapp & Co. comprised two rooms and a small waiting area, which was actually a narrow corridor, with a cheap sofa, two plastic potted plants, and a magazine rack, filled with six-month-old copies of Hello! and assorted estate agent magazines. The walls were painted a dirty shade of cream, the floors were covered in yellowing linoleum, the lighting was provided by two fluorescent tubes overhead. The sole decoration was a calendar on the wall from a local Indian take-away: With the Compliments of Bengal House, Balham High Road. The plumpish woman – Clapp’s secretary and general dogs-body – worked in a small cramped office without a door. As I waited in the hallway – idly browsing through a magazine for the local branch of Foxton’s Estate Agents, noticing with amazement that you could easily spend £750,000 on a family house around here – she answered a steady stream of phone calls with that brutish voice of hers, while working her way through an open packet of bourbon creams on her desk. After a few minutes, she got up and said to me, ‘See if he’s finally off the phone now.’

  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 non-committal, his eyes still focusing on the papers. ‘And this business with the house … can you remember the names of the solicitors who handled the conveyancing?’

  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 postnatal depression, to my extended stay in hospital, and the nightmare that I had walked into upon returning from Boston. I was absolutely frank with him – tell
ing him exactly how I made angry verbal threats against my son, and my difficult behaviour in 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 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 seems 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.’