Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘So who designed this, then?’

  I frowned as Abraham pulled up at the main gate, showing our permit to the armed policeman on the barricade. The Peace Palace loomed above us, framed by fussy flowerbeds and what from a distance resembled Astroturf but was presumably lawn. Part neo-Gothic cathedral, part turreted Disney castle, part red-brick municipal library, it looked like the outcome of an architectural game of Consequences. Around the gate eddied a coachload of elderly tourists, posing for photographs and ignoring the policeman’s shooing gestures.

  Winston barely bothered to glance up from his mobile phone, which he was trying to fit with a new Dutch SIM card. ‘Couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid. I do know that it was built with American money – the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, robber-baron-turned-philanthropist, put up the funds. I didn’t know you were interested in architecture, Paula.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not. It’s just that the architectural style is rather familiar to me, for reasons I won’t bore you with. Not my taste.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be beautiful. It’s supposed to impress upon people that what happens here is important. “This stuff matters. These decisions will last,” it’s telling the world. And so it is, and so they do. This is where the principle that international law made war unnecessary was enshrined in bricks and mortar. Interestingly,’ said Winston, still struggling to remove the back of his mobile, ‘Tsar Nicholas the Second was the international peace movement’s main driver. Maybe he had a premonition. The Peace Palace was finished just in time for the First World War, and a few years later, poor old Nicholas and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks.’

  ‘Why did they pick The Hague? Wouldn’t New York have made better sense, next to the United Nations?’

  ‘Tut, tut, Paula. I see your grasp of history is as shaky as that of my countrymen,’ Winston scolded. ‘This was four decades earlier. The UN wasn’t even a twinkle in the eyes of its creators. Why The Hague? Apparently the Dutch and Russian royal families got on famously. I think you’d better do this,’ he said, handing me the segments of his dismantled phone. ‘Too fiddly for my old fingers.’

  We drove into the car park hidden at the side of the palace. ‘Let Abraham handle those,’ Winston said, with an airy wave towards the files stacked in the boot. ‘I want to show you around. The whirlwind Peabody Tour available at a knock-down price, one day only.’

  He lowered his voice as we walked into the foyer. The marble floor acted as a megaphone. ‘This way.’ I trotted behind him as he tip-tapped his way purposefully past the ticket booth, gift shop and cloakroom and, placing a finger to his lips, carefully pulled open the vast wooden door on the right side of the hall.

  He poked his head in cautiously. ‘Coast clear, come on in.’ With its stained-glass arched windows and ornate wooden panelling, there was something distinctly cathedral-like about the Great Hall of Justice. The raised dais towards which all the shiny brown leather seats were turned, though, was designed not for priests but for men of law, and carvings of Veritas and Justitia, rather than saints, looked down impassively on the table that ran its length. A vast wall fresco showed three Biblical figures in flowing robes, dispensing wisdom, framed in celestial light.

  ‘This is where the International Court of Justice has been meeting since 1945,’ whispered Winston. ‘Fifteen judges, all in black robes and white bibs, ruling on cases that UN member states bring against one another. This was the court that decided the Reagan administration was violating international law in Nicaragua by supporting the Contras – caused one hell of a stink. I sat in on quite a few of those sessions, fascinating times. The cases can drag on for years, so most of the judges set up home in The Hague. Rather them than me. Pleasant enough city, I suppose, but dull, dull, dull.’

  He took my elbow and steered me back the way we had come, to an antechamber on the left of the entrance dominated by a giant black vase, garlanded with a two-headed golden eagle. ‘Gift from the doomed tsar – he hadn’t got long to go.’ Winston traced a Latin motto on the wall. ‘“Peace will extinguish the flames of war!” Ha. Interior decorators with a sense of historic irony. And this – this is us.’

  The Small Hall of Justice was cosier and warmer, but decorated in the same style. With its oak panelling, dovetail wooden ceiling and rows of brown leather thrones, it could almost have been a London members’ club. A painting wriggling with winged angels and dragons rampant dominated the room.

  ‘Headquarters of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Small but perfectly formed, I like to think. You don’t have to be a nation state to use this. It’s the court Joe Public has never heard of because the arbitration that takes place here is kept private nine times out of ten. Which, in my view, is one of its major failings.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because once you leave it to the parties involved to decide the rules of engagement and you remove public scrutiny and any right of appeal – all these findings are “final and binding” – bizarre things happen. It’s amazing just how eccentric apparently sober members of the judiciary can turn when they know the nitty-gritty of their findings won’t be picked over by their peers or denounced in the newspapers. Remember the old principle that “Justice should not only be done, but be seen to be done”? Here the detail isn’t seen, so it’s often not done. Well, that’s the game we’ve signed up for, and this is where our commission will meet. The commissioners will sit there –’ he pointed to a long main desk, lined with red baize ‘– ‘our legal teams will be on either side, any observers we agree to allow perch at the back and those booths are for the interpreters. Proceedings are recorded and a transcript is usually ready within hours. The typists are incredibly fast.’

  I ran my hand along the red baize. Compared to the grandiose main hall, the room felt like an afterthought. Whatever took place here would certainly attract far less attention. I felt both disappointed and relieved. ‘This is going to be fine,’ I said, more to myself than Winston.

  Jake collected me from the breakfast room, where I had been brooding on my encounter with Aunt Julia. We drove down a bumpy dirt track until we reached a glade that looked out onto Lake Lacombe. Griffin House had disappeared from view and in its place rose a simple whitewashed boathouse. Behind it, mist rose from the water.

  ‘Voilà. Lake Cottage. This is what I really wanted you to see.’

  He fished out a large iron key, opened the door and led me round. Someone had been there very recently. The timbered rooms had all been freshly painted in white. The wooden banisters had been polished, and there was a smell of solvents in the air. The furnishings were basic: some faded Turkish kilims, a collection of stones and bleached tree trunks.

  On the mantelpiece sat a single framed photograph. I peered at the sepia image. It showed a handsome man with a handlebar moustache, thumbs buried in his waistcoat, standing on a saddle-shaped rock. His sturdy boots were coated with dust, and gypsy locks tumbled over his ears. Chest out, he grinned defiantly at the camera, eyes rimmed with grime. He appeared to be standing on the edge of a precipice. Behind him rolled waves of mountain, each layer stacked like millefeuille. ‘Edward, Darrar, 1868,’ someone had scrawled in pencil on the cardboard mount.

  ‘Who’s he? A pirate?’

  ‘Looks like one, doesn’t he? The black sheep of the family, my great-great-uncle.’

  ‘Where was it taken?’

  ‘Edward ran off to Africa, hoping to make his fortune. He started building a railway up a mountain for the Italians but the funding collapsed. He died not long after that photograph was taken, probably of malaria. Maybe I imagine it, but I think you can see the fever in his eyes. We should go there one day, see if we can find his grave. We keep the photograph here as Lake Cottage was originally his idea. He couldn’t stand the main house.’

  ‘I share his taste, I think. This is much nicer.’

  ‘None of that Griffin House pomposity, eh? It’s very simple, not much decoration.’

  ‘You don’t need any – you have th
e lake on three sides. I feel as though I’m on a yacht, sailing out to sea.’

  ‘Look,’ Jake ran his fingers through his hair, ‘I asked Miguel to get the cottage cleaned up because I wanted to know how you would feel about moving in. I can’t keep shuttling between my wife’s apartment, my studio and your place indefinitely. Nowhere has ever felt more like home, and for the last few months I’ve been fantasising about sharing it with you.’

  He had taken me by surprise. ‘Give me a minute.’

  I gazed across the blue expanse. Three ducks chose that moment to land, slamming on the brakes as they hit the water. ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘She’s started seeing someone, I gather, a stockbroker. As long as we can maintain the public fiction of a happy marriage, trooping out the family at weddings and the like, she may be satisfied. This arrangement may suit her quite well, in fact. Officially, I’m on the family estate, spending time with my increasingly frail aunt. Laurel and Hardy would love it here, too – they’d finally get the exercise they need.’

  I hesitated. ‘There’s another side of things to think about. I’m pretty sure Julia hates my guts, Jake. Sorry, but we didn’t really hit it off.’

  He flopped down on a wicker sofa and eyed the room, probably working out where he would set up his laptop and desk. ‘Really? I didn’t notice. I suppose it makes sense. She adores Olivia. Her enthusiasm, looking back, was one of the reasons we married in the first place. She’d so disliked all my previous girlfriends, I was relieved there was one she warmed to.’

  ‘I’m beginning to feel a bit like the narrator in Rebecca, battling the ghost of an ex-wife in the mansion on the hill. Or maybe that should be Jane Eyre.’

  ‘Well, I’m done with all of that, Paula. I’m too old to care. Julia’s not the woman in my life, you are, and if you’re worried about rubbing up against her, I can reassure you that she spends six months a year on her cruises, where she dances with millionaires and plays bridge with her razor-thin widow friends. Hang on to your apartment in Greenwich Village for a bit, if you like. If it all falls apart you can run back there. But I’m really tired of commuting. I can feel time ticking away. Life’s short, and I want to spend more of it with you.’

  He walked over and captured both my hands in his. ‘Want to live in sin, Paula? I honestly don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t say yes.’

  15

  The commission was a three-man team. Practical, democratic, compact. One commissioner picked by our side, one by theirs, and a chairman both sides endorsed, making a voting stalemate impossible. Despite its determination to modernise, the commission had failed to challenge stereotypes in several predictable areas. ‘All white, all male, all in their sixties and seventies,’ Winston had commented, as he’d handed me over the commissioners’ CVs. ‘Typical of our hide-bound profession. If I’d been on board when they were picking ’em, you can be sure the line-up would have been more interesting. But our African employers were after credibility, above all else, and thought assembling a panel of doughy-faced members of the establishment with letters after their names was the way to win it. Who knows? Maybe they were right.’

  Our side had chosen Professor François Rainier, a cadaverous-looking academic with eyebrows so luxurious they appeared to possess a life of their own (‘French. Expert on maritime law. Don’t ask me’). Theirs had gone for Eddie Connors, who bore a passing resemblance to Santa Claus (‘American, set up Darrar’s Human Rights Commission, married a local, one of those more-Catholic-than-the-Pope types’).

  The chairman was His Excellency Judge Ulrich Mautner, the son of a German lawyer who had fled the Nazis and settled in Buenos Aires, assimilating with the speed of the truly terrified. With forty years of international law under his belt, Judge Mautner had won his spurs representing the grieving families of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’ and now sat on the boards of a spray of refugee organisations. He was beaky, rake thin, and must once have stood well over six feet tall, but age had curved him. He had a habit of putting his hands into his pockets and jangling coins stored there, hiking his trouser hems to reveal a pair of startling scarlet socks and raw-looking ankles. ‘Those socks, those socks,’ Winston mused. ‘There’s hope for a man who wears red socks in court. We may be dealing with a closet iconoclast in the person of Judge Ulrich Mautner.’

  I had expected them to be wearing black gowns and white lawyer’s kerchiefs, but it seemed any dressing-up was reserved for the International Court of Justice. For the filing of the counter-Memorials, they were in what counted as civvies: blazers and ties. They had swivelled the microphones to one side and, using their hands as screens, were whispering to one another, exchanging meaningful glances. It was impossible, somehow, not to feel slighted by this matey complicity. This is a contest, I thought. You’re not supposed to become best pals.

  There was a cascade of footsteps in the hall outside, and the door opened. The opposition had arrived, a team of seven to our modest three. There was a great deal of kerfuffle as the younger members of the delegation – a pair of willowy girls with their hair neatly pigtailed and a crew-cut youngster – wheeled two trolley-loads of documents to the front table. A giant tadpole of a man, the resemblance underlined by his plain black suit, settled on the other side of the strip of carpet that formed our invisible border. Head, neck and shoulders sloped into a broad seat – if he’d been a woman you’d have said he had child-bearing hips; his feet, in comparison, looked strangely tiny. I had a sudden memory of Jake in bed, trowel feet sticking out from under the duvet, admiring the flexibility of his toes as he solemnly announced, ‘One thing life has taught me, Paula. Never trust a man with small feet.’

  ‘Must be their new chief counsel, Henry Alexander,’ said Winston, with a barely perceptible nod.

  Next to Alexander sat a mottle-complexioned giant, who kept adjusting his spectacles with big, long-fingered hands. His hair, cut in a style disturbingly reminiscent of Richard Clayderman’s, was making an uncertain transition from sandy to white.

  ‘Breast Boy,’ muttered Winston. ‘Reginald Watts. Washington lawyer. Pretty average. Lacks the killer instinct. Was here last time. Blushes a lot.’

  ‘Breast Boy?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  The bustle around the front table was gradually subsiding. The youngsters, their unloading complete, retired to the back of the room. The two counter-Memorials were now sat stacked side by side. I found my hand had risen to my mouth in an instinctive movement of alarm, and lowered it as imperceptibly as I could. Our counter-Memorial was one volume, five inches thick. They were presenting ten wads of documentation, each at least as thick as our entire counter-Memorial. A chair creaked as Alexander, taking in the difference, folded his arms over his paunch, raised one eyebrow and gave us a Cheshire-cat smile. ‘No contest,’ his expression said.

  Judge Mautner surveyed the room, waiting for silence to fall. ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank all of you for being here today. I know many of you have had to travel a very long way and I hope you are well rested. We have gathered to witness the submission of the counter-Memorials. Thanks to modern technology, all this evidence and argumentation could in theory be presented digitally, which would have saved you many hours in airports and railway stations. But the world is watching us, bearing witness. However laborious for the individuals concerned, physical attendance possesses, in the commissioners’ view, a value in itself, underlining the absolute necessity to respect their eventual findings. So I am grateful for your indulgence.’

  Winston and Alexander nodded in a noncommittal manner.

  Judge Mautner continued: ‘Mr van Straaten, could you please check that both counter-Memorials are present and correct?’

  There was a pause while the clerk checked the submitted documents against a list, then nodded. ‘All present.’

  ‘Many thanks. In that case,’ said Judge Mautner, ‘I thank both sides for the work. The commissioners will give them all the attentio
n they deserve. Your two nations, and the Horn of Africa, deserve no less. The submission stage of these proceedings is now at an end. No fresh evidence can be presented before the hearing. To underline the importance of this stage, we invite both delegations to join us at tonight’s cocktail party in the Japanese Room. We see this event as helping to create a climate of mutual goodwill ahead of what we trust will be a constructive legal process. I look forward to seeing you there.’

  He banged his gavel and the room rose.

  Winston gestured Abraham over and pointed towards the other side’s counter-Memorial. ‘We’re going to need a few of those plastic tubs from the back of the car.’