The Last Testament (4 page)

Regretting that she had opened up this theme – more thera-pist territory than mediator’s – Maggie decided on a radical change of tack. OK, she thought, we need to move to final status. ‘Brett, what are your red lines?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your red lines. Those things on which you absolutely, positively will not compromise. Here.’ She tossed over a pad of paper, followed by a pencil, thrown a tad too sharply for Brett’s taste.

‘And you too, Kathy. Red lines. Go on. Write them down.’

Within a few seconds, the two were scratching away with their pencils. Maggie felt as if she was back at school in Dublin: the summer, exam season, the nuns prowling around to check that she wasn’t copying her answers off Mairead Breen. Except this time she was one of the nuns.
At last
, she thought.
A moment
of peace.

She looked at this couple in front of her, two people who had once been so in love they had decided to share everything, even to create three new lives. When she had met up with Edward again after, after . . . everything that had happened, she had dreamed of a similar future for herself. No more war zones, no more anonymous hotel conference rooms, no more twenty-hour days fuelled by coffee and cigarettes. On the wrong side of thirty-five, she would settle down and have a family life. Fifteen years later than the girls she had gone to school with, admittedly, but she would have a family and a life.

‘You finished, Brett? What about you, Kathy?’

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21

‘There’s a lot to get down here.’

‘Remember, not everything’s a red line. You’ve got to be selective. All right, Kathy. Give us your three red lines.’

‘Three? You kidding?’

‘Selective, remember.’

‘All right.’ Kathy began chewing the top of her pencil, before she realized it wasn’t a pen and pulled it out of her mouth. ‘Child support. My kids have to have financial security.’

‘OK.’

‘And the house. I have to have the house, so that the kids can have continuity.’

‘And one more.’

‘Full custody of the children, obviously. I’m having them.

There’s no shifting on that.’

‘For Chrissake, Kathy—’

‘Not yet, Brett. First you gotta give me your red lines.’

‘We’ve been over this like a thousand times—’

‘Not this way we haven’t. I need three.’

‘I want the children with me at Thanksgiving, so that they have dinner with my parents. I want that.’

‘All right.’

‘And spontaneous access. So that I can call up and say, I dunno,

“Hey Joey, the Redskins are playing, wanna come?” I need to be able to do that without giving, like, three weeks’ notice. Access whenever I want.’

‘No way—’

‘Kathy, not now. What’s number three?’

‘I have others—’

‘We’re doing three.’

‘It’s the same one I said before. No child support unless Kathy is a full-time mom.’

‘Are you sure that’s not just saying no to Kathy’s first red line? You can’t just block hers.’

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‘OK. I’ll put it this way. I’ll pay for child support only if I’m getting a five-star service for my money. And that means the kids get looked after by their mom.’

‘That is not fair! You’re using our kids to blackmail me into giving up my career.’

And they were off again, back to shouting at each other and ignoring Maggie. Just like old times, she thought to herself with a smile. After all, this was what she was used to. Negotiating a divorce between people who couldn’t stand the sight of each other, who were tearing each other’s throats out. An image flashed into her mind, which she quickly pushed out.

But it helped. It gave her an idea, or rather it made her see something she had not realized until that moment.

‘OK, Brett and Kathy, I’ve made a decision. These sessions have become useless. They’re a waste of time, yours and mine. We’re going to end it here.’ Maggie snapped shut the file on her lap.

The two people on the couch opposite suddenly turned their attention away from each other and stared at her. She could feel their eyes on her, but she ignored them, busying herself with her papers instead.

‘You don’t need to worry about the paperwork. I’ll get all that to the Virginia authorities tomorrow. You’ve both got lawyers, haven’t you? Course you have. Well, they’ll take it from here.’

She stood up, as if to usher them out.

Brett seemed fixed to the spot; Kathy’s mouth hung wide open.

At last, Brett forced himself to speak. ‘You can’t, you can’t do this.’

‘Do what, exactly?’ Maggie had her back to him, as she put the file back on the shelf behind her.

‘You can’t just
abandon
us!’

Now Kathy joined in. ‘We need you, Maggie. There is no way we can get through this without you.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that. The lawyers will get it sorted.’

Maggie kept moving around the room, avoiding eye contact.

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23

Outside she heard the buzzer go again, and the sound of another person or people moving in and out of the apartment. What was going on?

‘They’ll kill us,’ said Brett. ‘They’ll take all our money and make this whole thing even more of a nightmare than it already is!’

This was working.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’ll sort this out, we promise. Don’t we, Kathy?’

‘We do.’

‘OK? We’re promising. We’ll get this done. Right here.’

‘I think it’s too late for that. We set aside a period of time to resolve everything—’

‘Oh, please don’t say that, Maggie.’ It was Kathy, now imploring. ‘There’s not such a lot of work to do here. You heard those red lines. We’re not so far apart.’

Maggie turned around. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes.’

In fact it took fifteen. But when they left Maggie’s office and walked into the sunshine of a Washington September morning, Kathy and Brett George had resolved to share the costs of child support proportionate to their income, Brett paying more because he earned more, Kathy’s financial contribution shrinking to zero if she gave up paid work to look after the kids. From now on, he would pay his way even if she carried on working, though she would have a genuine incentive to stay home. The children would live in their own house with their mother, except for alternate weekends and whenever either the kids or their father fancied seeing each other. The rule would be no hard and fast rules. Before they left they hugged Maggie and, to their surprise as much as hers, each other.

Maggie fell into a chair, allowing herself a small smile of satisfaction. Was this how she would make up for what she had done more than a year ago? Bit by bit, one couple at a time, reducing the amount of pain in the world? The thought was comforting for a moment or two – until she contemplated how 24

SAM BOURNE

long it would take. To balance all the lives lost because of her and that damned, damned mistake, she would be here, in this room, for all eternity. And still it wouldn’t be enough.

She looked at her watch. She should be getting on. Edward would be waiting for her outside, ready to hit the full range of Washington’s domestic retail outlets in a bid to equip their not-quite-marital home.

She opened the door to a surprise. Flicking through one of Maggie’s back numbers of
Vogue
, in the tiny area that served as Maggie’s waiting room, was a man who oozed Washington. Like Edward, he had the full DC garb: button-down shirt, blue blazer, loafers, even now, on a Sunday. Maggie didn’t recognize him, which didn’t mean she hadn’t met him. One of the troubles with these Washington men: they all looked the same.

‘Hello? Do you have an appointment?’

‘I don’t. It’s kind of an emergency. It won’t take long.’

An emergency? What the hell was this? She headed down the corridor, opening the door onto the kitchen. There she saw Edward, signing on one of those electronic devices held out by a man wearing delivery overalls.

‘Edward, what’s going on?’

He seemed to pale. ‘Ah, honey. I can explain. They just had to go. They were taking up too much space, they messed up the whole place. So I’ve done it. They’ve gone.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Those boxes which you’ve had sitting in the study for nearly a year. You said you would unpack them, but you never did. So this kind gentleman has loaded them onto his truck and now they’re going to the trash.’

Maggie looked at the man in overalls, who stared at his feet.

Now she understood what had happened. But she could not believe it. She stormed past Edward, flung open the door to the study and, sure enough, the space in the corner was now empty, the THE LAST TESTAMENT

25

carpet on which those two cartons had once sat more compacted, a different shade from the rest. She flew back to the kitchen.

‘You bastard! Those boxes had my, my . . . letters and photographs and, and . . . whole fucking life and you just THREW

THEM OUT?’

Maggie rushed to the front door. But, doubtless sensing trouble, the trash guy had made his getaway. Swearing, she pressed the lift button again and again. ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, tensing her jaw. When the lift came, she willed it down faster.

As soon as it arrived on the ground floor and the door opened a crack, she squeezed through it, running through the main doors of the building and out onto the street. She looked left and right and left again before she saw it, a green truck pulling out. She ran hard to catch up, coming within a few yards. She was waving wildly, like someone flagging down traffic after a road accident. But it was too late. The van picked up speed and vanished. All she had was half a phone number and what she thought was the name: National Removals.

She rushed back upstairs, frantically grabbing the telephone, her fingers trembling over the buttons. She called directory information, asking for a number. They found it and offered to put her through. Three rings, then four, then five. A recorded message:
We’re sorry, but all our offices are closed on Sunday. Our regular
opening hours are Monday to Friday
. . . If she waited till tomorrow it would be too late: they would have destroyed the boxes and everything they contained.

She went back into the kitchen to find Edward standing, defiant. She began quietly. ‘You just threw them out.’

‘You’re damn right I threw them out. They made this place look like a student shithole. All that junk, all that sentimental crap. You need to drop it, Maggie. You need to move on.’

‘But, but . . .’ Maggie wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the ground, trying to digest what had just happened. Not just 26

SAM BOURNE

the letters from her parents, the photographs from Ireland, but the notes she had taken during crucial negotiations, private, scribbled memos from rebel leaders and UN officials. Those boxes contained her life’s work. And now they were in a dumpster.

‘I did it for you, Maggie. That world is not your world any more. It’s moved on without you. You’ve got to do the same.

You need to adjust to your life now, as it is. Our life.’

So that’s why he had been so keen to get her locked away in the consulting room this morning. And she thought he just wanted her to get a punctual start to the day. She had even thanked him! The truth was that he just wanted the garbage men in and out before she had a chance to stop them. For the first time, she met his gaze. Quietly, as if unable to believe her own words, she said, ‘You want to destroy who I am.’

He looked back at her blankly, before finally nodding towards the other end of the apartment. In a voice that was ice cold, he said, ‘I think someone’s waiting for you.’

She almost staggered out of the room, unable to absorb what had happened. How could he have done such a thing, without her permission, without even talking to her? Did he really hate the Maggie Costello he had once known so much that he wanted to erase every last trace of her, replacing her with someone, different, bland and subservient?

She stood in the landing that served as the waiting area, her head spinning. The man in blue was still there, now turning the pages of
Atlantic Monthly
.

‘Bad time? I’m sorry.’

‘No, no,’ Maggie said, barely out loud. On auto-pilot, she added. ‘Is your wife coming?’

He made a curious smirk. ‘She should be along soon.’

Maggie gestured him into the consulting room. ‘You said it was some kind of emergency.’ She was struggling to remember THE LAST TESTAMENT

27

his case, to remember if he was one of the handful of clients she said could contact her out of hours.

‘Yes. My problem is that I’m finding it hard to adjust.’

‘To what?’

‘To life here. Normality.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘I was all over. Travelling from one screwed-up place to another.

Always meant to be doing good, always trying to make the world a better place and all that bullshit.’

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘You could say that. I try to save lives.’

Maggie could feel her muscles tensing. ‘And now you’re finding it hard to adjust to being back home.’

‘Home! That’s a joke. I don’t know what home is any more.

I’m not from DC; I haven’t lived in my hometown for nearly twenty years. Always on the road, on planes, in hotel rooms, sleeping in dumps.’

‘But that’s not why you’re finding it hard to adjust.’

‘No. It’s the adrenaline I miss, I guess. The drama. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?’

‘Go on.’ Maggie was remembering everything that was in those boxes. A handwritten letter of thanks she had received from the British prime minister, following the talks over Kosovo.

A treasured photo with the man she had loved through her mid-twenties.

‘Before, everything I did seemed to matter so much. The stakes were high. Now nothing even comes close. It’s all so banal.’

Maggie stared hard at the man. The words were coming out of him but his eyes were flat and cold. She began to feel uneasy at his presence here. ‘Can you say more about the work you were doing?’

‘I started with an aid organization in Africa, working with 28