Sam Bourne – The Last Testament (страница 5)

She gestured to them to sit down, reminded them where they had got to the previous week and what issues remained outstanding. And then, as if she had fired a starting gun, the pair began laying into each other with a ferocity that had not let up since the day they had first walked in.

‘Sweetheart, I'm happy to give you the house. And the car for that matter. I just have certain conditions—’

‘Which is that I stay home and look after your kids.’

‘Our kids, Kathy. Ours.’

They were in their early forties, maybe seven or eight years older than Maggie, but they might as well have come from another generation, if not another planet. She had listened with incomprehension to the rows about who got to use the summer house in New Hampshire, which in turn triggered an almighty clash over whether Kathy had been a good daughter-in-law to Brett's father when the old man was sick, while Kathy insisted that Brett had been consistently rude whenever her parents came to stay.

She had just about had it with the Georges. The two of them had sat there on that couch, slugging it out for four consecutive weeks without taking a blind bit of notice of a word she said. She had tried it soft, saying little, offering a gentle nod here and there. She had tried it hands-on, intervening in every twist and turn of the conversation, directing and channelling it like a stream running through the middle of the room. She preferred it this second way, firing off questions, chipping in with her opinions, no matter if Little Missy over there turned up her nose or if Mr Rod-Up-His-Arse squirmed in his seat. But that didn't seem to work either. They still came back in as much of a mess as when they first started.

‘Maggie, do you see what he did there? Do you see that thing he does?’

Listening to the pair of them made Maggie despair that she'd ever made this move in the first place. It had made sense at the time. ‘Mediator’ the job spec said and that's what she was. OK, this was not quite the area she was used to, but mediation was mediation, right? How different could it be? And, after all, she couldn't face going back to the work she had done before. She had become frightened of it, ever since she had seen what could happen when you failed.

But Jesus Christ, if these two weren't convincing her she'd made a terrible mistake.

‘Look, Maggie, I hope this is already firmly on the record. I am more than happy to pay whatever maintenance budget we all decide is reasonable. I'm no miser: I will write that cheque. I just have one condition—’

‘He wants to control me!’

‘My condition, Maggie, is very, very simple. If Kathy wants to receive my money for the upbringing of our children, in other words, if she wants me to effectively pay her to bring them up, then I would expect her to do no other job at the same time.’

‘He won't pay child support unless I give up my career! Do you hear this, Maggie?’

Maggie could detect something in Kathy's voice she hadn't noticed before. Like a rambler spotting a new path, she decided to follow it, see where it led.

‘And why would he want you to give up your career, Kathy?’

‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’

‘Brett, the question was directed at Kathy.’

‘I don't know. He says it's better for the kids.’

‘But you think it's about something else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, for Christ's sake—’

‘Go on, Kathy.’

‘I wonder sometimes if, if … I wonder if Brett kind of likes me being dependent.’

‘I see.’ Maggie saw that Brett was silent. ‘And why might that be?’

‘I don't know. Like, maybe he likes it when I'm weak or something. You know his first wife was an alcoholic, right? Well, did you also know that as soon as she got better, Brett left her?’

‘This is outrageous, to bring Julie into this.’

Maggie was scribbling notes, all the while maintaining eye contact with the couple. It was a trick she had learned during negotiations of a different kind, long ago.

‘Edward, what do you say to all this?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I'm sorry. Brett. Forgive me. Brett. What do you make of all this, this suggestion that you are somehow trying to keep Kathy weak? I think that was the word she used. Weak.’

Brett spoke for a while, refuting the charge and insisting that he had wanted to leave Julie for at least two years but didn't feel it was right until she had recovered. Maggie nodded throughout, but she was distracted. First, the intercom had sounded while Brett was speaking, followed by the sound of several male voices, Edward's and two or three she did not recognize. And, worse, by her ridiculous slip of the tongue. She wondered if Kathy and Brett had noticed.

Regretting that she had opened up this theme – more therapist 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?’

‘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.’

‘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.