Michela Wrong - Borderlines

‘This is nuts. We’ve barely met. You don’t know anything about me.’

‘Well, I know what I saw in your face the other day. I’ve rarely seen a bleaker expression. And actually,’ he took a slurp and shot me a look over the cup’s rim, ‘I know slightly more than you think. As I said, Dan and I go way back. He briefed me on your, er, personal circumstances over lunch a few months ago. I knew we’d bump into each other one of these days. Dan suggested Grobart & Fitchum was no longer the right place for you. Oh, he had nothing but praise for the quality of your work but he thinks you’d do better – be happier – elsewhere.’

I flushed. ‘How very considerate of him.’

There was a pause. He took another slurp and said slowly, ‘My own policy is to welcome kindness when I see it, however clumsy or awkward a form it takes. It’s a rare commodity, especially in our profession.’

I looked away, my eyes pricking. ‘I think I heard you use the phrase “ pro bono ”. I need to eat. Grobart & Fitchum pay extremely well. My savings account looks pretty healthy these days.’

‘Well,’ he leaned forward to hold my gaze with those sorrowful, honey-coloured eyes, ‘your savings account may look healthy, but you certainly don’t. In any case, you’d get a decent salary. The North Darrar government can afford to pay one international lawyer’s stipend – I’ve persuaded them they have to. It took some doing, believe me.’

I was beginning to feel cornered. I’d met this man only two days ago, and already he had arrogated a say over my future. It was absurd. ‘You said this was a border case? That’s totally out of my area of expertise. I do corporate law.’

‘Nothing you can’t handle, believe me. Dan assures me you’re one of the smartest lawyers he’s ever employed. I’ll hold your hand, and they do say that I’m a born teacher. I notice you wrote your thesis on –’ he took out a card ‘– “Challenges of peace: when former Latin American guerrilla organisations turn law-makers”. So it seems you already have some interest in the developing world.’

Ah, yes, my thesis. An eccentric pimple on the bland epidermis of an otherwise unremarkable post-graduate degree. Fuelled by the sheer lust I’d harboured towards Gavin, the sole Caribbean student on our LSE course and the only one who brought books by Chomsky and Che Guevara into lectures. A sudden mental image. Gavin dashing into the sea one miraculously mild October weekend in Dorset. A dark Michelangelo’s David , nipples erect in the chill, pulling off a pair of jeans as I watched from the shingle. I’d wanted to impress him, hence the thesis; its drafting had outlasted the relationship.

‘Regard this as the equivalent of a further degree in international law, prepared under expert guidance,’ Winston continued. ‘I’ll be expecting you to do some of the presentations, so you’ll get priceless experience. I know lawyers in their mid-forties who are still waiting for their law firm to grant them permission to stand up in a courtroom and argue a case. They’re not even halfway up a chain twenty links deep. Put in a few years and you’ll come out of this with a whole new skill set. All courtesy of the North Darrar government. I’d call that a pretty attractive offer.’

I sat in silence, surprised I had allowed the conversation to go on as long as it had.

Winston picked up his briefcase and turned his head slowly from side to side, uncricking a stiff neck and carrying out a panoramic survey of the café, with its gaggles of chatting students, the odd loner hunched over a laptop and a muffin. He was considering what form to give his closing remarks. Had he chosen the bombastic – anything on the lines of ‘doing something worthwhile with your life’, or ‘helping millions of poor Africans who never had your chances’ – I would have slipped off his gleaming hook, like a sliver of jelly off a fork, consigning the whole episode to the surreal-encounter-best-ignored category as swiftly as I left campus.

‘Look, Paula. One of the great satisfactions I’ve discovered, working in Africa, is being able to have a disproportionate impact per hour of effort put in. Call it big-fish-small-pond syndrome, call it stroking my own ego, whatever. I’m not, despite appearances, the world’s brightest lawyer. But there is – and I’m not boasting here, just stating the facts – no one in that entire country who has my skills. They’ve been fighting for nearly three decades, they know how to repair Kalashnikovs and make a handful of lentils and a gourd of water last a week. They’re confident they can build a socialist Utopia, but they can’t do this. And I can. I cannot describe to you the professional satisfaction that brings. You may never experience it anywhere else ever again.’

It was a deft, manipulative appeal. But I was ready to be manipulated, pining to be told what to do. I was so tired of being master of my fate.

We met on the ice.

A woman on the cusp of thirty, with a muss of brown hair, sits on a bench by the side of the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink in New York in mid-February 1999. Having laced up her hired skates, she stands with wobbly care. It’s been a long time since she had these on, but she is determined to see this through. Hitchens, the firm where she works as a transactional lawyer, crossing the legal t’s and dotting the i’s on bond deals, overlooks the sunken rink and she has been watching the skaters from her office window for weeks, envying their fluid grace.

These two, though, she does not envy. They are graceless and comic. A bearded, middle-aged man in grey jeans and a lumberjack shirt, flailing and juddering on his skates, and a ponytailed brunette, all white cleavage and heavy eye-liner, draped, giggling, on one arm. Her eyes skim over them – she assumes they’re a couple. The buxom girl must be wife number two or three. Only she is not going to be allowed to ignore them. Because just as she ventures warily onto the ice the two career towards her. There is a loud scream, the girl falls, showing even more of that milky cleavage and still laughing, and the woman is knocked violently back. Her skates slide out from under her and she finds herself half lying, half sitting on the ice with the man sprawled on top. For a split-second, his eyes, grey-blue, are locked on hers. As, arms flailing, he attempts to right himself – ‘God, I’m so sorry’ – he briefly places a hand on her left breast.

‘Straight for my tits. What a lech,’ she will chide him later on. The episode is something they both enjoy examining, returning to.

‘Only way of getting your attention,’ he will reply, looking absurdly pleased with himself. And then he will usually kiss the top of her head as you might a child’s.

‘The custom, where I come from, is to shake hands,’ is what she says at the time. On his second attempt to get up, the man is careful to place his hand on the ice for leverage. His hands are the most atypical thing about him, she will come to know. They are a peasant’s hands, stubby-fingered and as wide as paddles.

‘Oh, I believe in cutting to the chase,’ he replies, then apologises again. And she later finds out that this is not a joke. Just as she has been watching the skaters, admiring their grace, he has been watching her, noting her daily routine, plucking up the courage to introduce himself. He works in the same building.

They both stand up – she will sport large bruises on her buttocks for weeks. Names are exchanged, the girl, slapping ice dust off her trousers, is introduced. She is Sophie, his younger daughter. So he is older than he looks. Her accent is remarked upon and she gives her usual trite explanation of how a junior British lawyer ends up on Wall Street. Then he gestures to where a figure wrapped in a cashmere scarf, fur hat and gloves stands on the far side of the rink, near the gilded statue of Prometheus, a chilled silhouette radiating boredom. Two glossy pedigree dogs pull impatiently at their leads. ‘My wife is waiting. And so are Laurel and Hardy. We’d better go. Till the next time.’