A Special Relationship (44 page)

‘To your husband. I’d like to establish … uhm … that you want contact with him as regards your son’s well-being in his new home ... as regards how this Ms Dexter is treating him, and what his plans are for the future. I’d also like to suggest that you propose a face-to-face meeting … just the two of you ... to discuss Jack’s future.’

‘But I really don’t want to meet him right now, Mr Clapp. I don’t think I could face him.’

‘I can appreciate that. But … uhm … unless I am mistaken ... and I could be mistaken, I have been mistaken in the past, I do make mistakes ... uhm ... I don’t think he’ll want to see you. Guilt, you see. He’ll feel guilty. Unless I am wrong …’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’re wrong. In fact, my sister had a similar idea.’

‘About what?’ he asked. And I dropped the subject before things got more confused.

But that evening I did write the letter.

Dear Tony

I cannot begin to articulate the grief you have caused me. Nor can I fathom how you could have betrayed me and your son in such a ferocious, self-serving way. You used my illness – a temporary clinical condition, from which I am now largely recovered – as a means by which to snatch my son from me, and reinvent your life with a woman whom you were obviously seeing while I was pregnant with your son. The fact that you then manipulated the facts of my post-partum depression to claim that I was a danger to Jack is unspeakable both in its cunning and its cruelty.

But it is another, more pressing matter that compels me to write you. I am troubled by the fact that, as Jack’s mother, I have been deliberately kept in the dark as to who is looking after him, whether he is being properly cared for, and if he is getting the proper maternal attention that an infant needs.

There are also questions about his upbringing – no matter what the final custody arrangements turn out to be – which we must decide together.

That is what I want to most emphasize now – the fact that, despite the desperate anguish I feel by being unfairly separated from my son, and despite my anger at your terrible betrayal – my primary concern is Jack’s welfare and his future happiness. For this reason, I am willing to put aside my anguish to sit down with you for the first of what must be an ongoing series of conversations about our son and his future. For his sake, we should put all our animosities to one side and talk.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly, proposing a time and place when we should meet.

Yours

‘My, you are clever,’ Julia said after I showed her the final draft.

‘You can thank Mr Clapp for that. He made me write three different drafts before he was happy with the letter.’

‘Are you serious? Mr Clapp – the original Mr Tentative – actually
edited
you?’

‘Not only that – but he kept emailing me back with assorted suggestions as to how we could push the knife in deeper … though, of course, he would never be so crude as to suggest that we were attempting to trip up my estranged husband, even though that was precisely the object of this exercise.’

‘Well, I must say that it is a most cunning letter. Because it points up your victimization without falling into self-pity. At the same time, it sticks it to him about two-timing you, and also raises all sorts of questions about his real motivations behind all this. And you then show tremendous graciousness about putting your anger to one side in order to do what’s best for your son …’

Three days later, I received a letter from Tony.

Dear Sally

Considering the threats you made against the life of our son – and considering your complete lack of maternal interest in him following his birth – I find it rather extraordinary that you write me now, speaking about how I betrayed you. Especially when it is you who so betrayed an innocent baby.

As to your accusation that I was betraying you while pregnant, you should know that Diane Dexter has been a close friend of mine for years. And I turned to her as a friend for support when your mental health began to decline during your pregnancy. Our friendship only turned into something else after your breakdown and your irresponsible, endangering behaviour against our son.

She could not be a better surrogate mother to my son – and has provided Jack the safe, calm environment he needs in these early days of his life. I am most certainly aware of the fact that you – as Jack’s mother – should have an important input into decisions about his future. But until I am certain that you are no longer a danger to him, I cannot sit down with you to ‘talk things out’. I do hope that you are on the road to mental recovery – and have begun to face up to your injurious behaviour against our son. Do understand: I hold no grudge against you whatsoever. And I only wish you the best for the future.

Yours sincerely

Tony

c.c. Jessica Law, Wandsworth DHSS.

The letter shook in my hands as I read it. I immediately faxed a copy to Nigel Clapp, and then knocked on Julia’s door. She offered coffee and commiseration.

‘You know a lawyer worked with him on this,’ she said.

‘Just like my letter.’

‘Only yours was, at least, in your own voice. This missive … it sounds downright Victorian in places.
”Your injurious behaviour against our son.”
Who uses language like that nowadays?’

‘It’s certainly not Tony’s prose style – which is tight and clipped. And he never goes in for touchy-feely stuff, like:
”I hold no ill will against you whatsoever. And I only wish you the best for the future.”
He holds complete ill will against me, and hopes I’ll walk under a bus at the earliest possible convenience.’

‘It’s a divorce. And in a divorce, it always turns ugly. Especially when the stakes are so high.’

Late that afternoon, Mr Clapp rang me.

‘Uhm … about your husband’s letter …’

‘It has me worried,’ I said.

‘Oh, really?’

‘Because it’s allowed that bastard to refute everything I said in the first letter. And because it also allowed him to put on the record his contention that she “saved” my son … which besides being a total lie is also totally offensive.’

‘I could see how … uhm … you might be upset by such a comment. But as regards the damage the letter might do … it’s what I expected.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Oh yes, I am being quite serious. It’s what I expected and wanted.’

‘You
wanted
this sort of reply?’

‘Uh, yes.’

Then there was another of his signature pauses, hinting that he wanted to move on to another topic of conversation.

‘May I ask you if you’ve had any further success finding work?’

‘I’ve been trying, but I just don’t seem to be having much luck.’

‘I spoke with Dr Rodale, your … uhm …’

He cleared his throat, obviously not wanting to say the embarrassing word. So I helped him out.

‘Psychiatrist.’

‘Yes, your psychiatrist. She told me that she will write a report, stating that, in light of your … uhm …’

‘Depression.’

‘Yes, your depression, she considers you still unfit for full-time employment. That will, at the very least, cover us in case your husband’s barrister raises the issue of your lack of work at the hearing. But if you could find some sort of job, it would reflect favourably on your recovery from the … uhm …’

‘Depression.’

‘That’s the word.’

A couple of days later, I received a phone call from Julia. She explained that she was in the office of an editor friend. I’d mentioned to her in one of our early chats that I had spent my summer holidays during college working as a proofreader at a Boston publishing house.

‘And when my editor friend here said he urgently needed a proofreader for a big job – and his two usual proofreaders were otherwise engaged – I immediately thought of you. If, that is, you’re interested …’

‘Oh, I’m interested …’

The next day, I took the tube to Kensington High Street and spent an hour in the office of an editor named Stanley Shaw – a thin, quiet, rather courtly man in his mid-fifties. He worked in the non-fiction division of a major publisher and largely handled big reference volumes, including their ‘Guide to Classical CDs’, which was published every other year and was a vast door-stopping paperback of some fifteen hundred pages.

‘Are you at all knowledgeable about classical music?’ he asked me.

‘I can tell the difference between Mozart and Mahler,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s a start,’ he said with a smile, then quizzed me about my proofreading background – and whether I could adjust to Anglicisms, and technical musical terminology, and an extensive number of abbreviations that were a component part of the guide. I assured him that I was a fast learner.

‘That’s good – because we’re going to need the entire guide proofread within the next two months. It is going to be technically demanding – as it is a critical compendium of the best recordings available of works by just about every major and minor composer imaginable. Put baldly, it’s a huge job – and, to be honest about it, not one which I would hand over to someone who’s been out-of-practice as a proofreader as long as you have been. But I am desperate – and if Julia Frank believes you can do it, then I believe you can. That is, if you believe you can do it, and can have it all to me within two months.’

‘I can do it.’

We shook hands on it. The next day, a motorcycle messenger arrived at my house with a large, deep cardboard box – and over fifteen hundred pages of proofs. I had cleared the kitchen table for this task – already installing an anglepoise lamp and a jam jar filled with newly sharpened pencils. There was a contract along with the page proofs. Before signing it, I faxed it over to Nigel Clapp. He called me back within an hour.

‘You’ve got a job,’ he said, sounding surprised.

‘It looks that way. But I’m worried about something – whether my fee will invalidate me for Legal Aid.’

‘Well … uhm … you could always have them re-draft the contract, guaranteeing you full payment upon publication, which is … according to the contract … eight months from now. So we could show the court that you have been working, but that you’ll be remunerated after the Final Hearing, which would keep you qualified for Legal Aid. That is, if you can manage to afford not to draw a salary right now.’

The hearing was in ten weeks’ time, and I was down to the equivalent of £1500. It would be insanely tight.

‘Say I asked Stanley for a third of the fee up-front?’

‘Yes – that would still put you well within the Legal Aid threshold.’

Stanley Shaw was only too willing to re-jig the contract, pointing out that, ‘In the thirty years I’ve been a publisher, this is the first time that a writer or an editor has asked for a delayed payment … which, of course, I’m most happy to facilitate.’

That evening, I did a bit more simple mathematics. I had a total of sixty-one days to do the job. Fifteen hundred by sixty-one equals 24.5 pages per day, which divided by eight made three.

Three pages per hour. Do-able. As long as I stuck to the task at hand. Didn’t allow my mind to wander. Didn’t dwell on the on-going agony of missing Jack. Didn’t succumb to the perpetual fear that the judge at the Final Hearing would side with Tony, and limit me to an hour a week’s visit until …

No, no … don’t contemplate that. Just go to work.

It took me four days to cross the threshold of the ‘A’ composers (Albinoni, Alkan, Arnold, Adams) into the ‘B’s – and gradually move through the Bach family. And, my God, there were an enormous amount of works under review. Then there were the critical pros and cons – the way the editors of the Guide discussed whether, in the recording of the
B Minor Mass,
you should opt for the traditional
kappelmeister
approach of Karl Richter, or the leaner, reduced period forces of John Eliot Gardiner, or the interpretative brilliance of Masaki Suzuki, or …

That was the most intriguing thing about working on this Guide (especially to someone with as little musical knowledge as myself) – the discovery that, in musical performance, interpretation changes with every conductor, every instrumentalist, every singer. But though you can play games with metronomic markings and tempi, you can’t really deviate too much from the score. Whereas all stories are always open to speculation, conjecture, even re-invention ... to the point where, in the re-telling, you begin to wonder where the original narrative has gone, and how the plot line has been hijacked by the two principal protagonists, both of whom are now presenting diametrically different versions of the same tale.

‘You must be going crazy, reading all that musicological stuff, word-by-word,’ Sandy said one evening during our daily phone call.