The Last Testament

‘Actually not the whole day,’ Edward shouted, the sound of the shower not quite drowning him out. ‘You've got that morning appointment first. Remember?’

Maggie played deaf and, still horizontal, reached for the TV remote. If she was going to be up at this hideous hour, she might as well get something out of it. The Sunday talk shows. By the time she clicked onto ABC, they'd already started the news summary.

‘Nerves on edge in Jerusalem this hour, after violence at a peace rally last night, where Israel's prime minister seemed to be the target of a failed assassination attempt. Concern high over the impact of the latest events on the Middle East peace process, which had been hoped to yield a breakthrough as early as—’

‘Honey, seriously. They'll be here in twenty.’ She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. The show was hopping back and forth between correspondents in Jerusalem and the White House, explaining that the US administration was taking steps to ensure all the parties kept calm and carried on talking. What a nightmare, thought Maggie. The last minute external event, threatening to undo all the trust you've built, all the patient progress you've made. She imagined the mediators who had brought the Israelis and Palestinians to this point. Not the big name politicians, the secretaries of state and foreign ministers who stepped into the spotlight at the last moment, but the backroom negotiators, the ones who did all the hard graft for months, even years before. She imagined their frustration and angst. Poor bastards.

‘The time coming up to 9.15 on the east coast—’

‘Hey, I was watching that!’

‘You haven't got time.’ As if to underline his point, Edward was towelling himself in front of the TV set, blocking her view of the blank screen.

‘Why do you suddenly care so much about my schedule?’

He held the towel still and faced Maggie. ‘Because I care about you, honey, and I don't want your day getting off on the wrong note. If you start late, you stay late. You should be thanking me.’

‘OK,’ Maggie said, finally hauling herself upright. ‘Thank you.’

‘Besides, you don't need to follow all that stuff any more. It's not your problem now, is it?’

She looked at him, so different from the man in chinos and grubby polo shirt she had met three years ago. He was still attractive, his features straight and strong. But he had, as she would have said back in her school days in Dublin, ‘scrubbed up’ since they'd moved to Washington. Now an official at the Commerce Department, dealing with international trade, he was always clean-shaven, his Brooks Brothers shirts neatly pressed. His shoes were polished. He was a creature of DC, not too different from any of the other juiceless white males they would see at the suburban brunches and cocktail parties they went to, now that he was part of official Washington. These days only she would know that somewhere under that button-down exterior was the stubbled, unkempt do-gooder, working for an aid organization, distributing food, she had fallen for.

They hadn't got together straight away. He had been transferred to South America soon after they first met. By the time he came back to Africa, she had moved on to the Balkans. That was how it was for people like them, an occupational hazard. So it remained no more than a spark, a maybe-one-day, until they met again just over a year ago, back in Africa. She was falling through the air after the episode they almost never spoke about these days – and he caught her. For that, she would never stop being grateful.

She stumbled into the shower and was still drying off when the intercom sounded: the clients, down at the entrance to the apartment building. She buzzed them in. Allowing for the lift journey, she would have about a minute to get dressed. She scraped her hair back into a rapid ponytail and reached for a loose grey top, which fell low over her jeans. She flung open a cupboard and grabbed the first pair of low-heeled shoes she could see.

Just time for a quick glance at herself in the mirror by the front door. Nothing too badly out of place; nothing anyone would notice. This had been her habit since she had come to Washington. ‘Dressing to disappear,’ Liz, her younger sister, had called it, when she was over on a visit. ‘Look at you. All greys and blacks and sweaters that a family could camp in. You dress like a really fat person, do you know that, Maggie? You've got this drop-dead gorgeous figure and no one would know it. It's like your body's working undercover.’ Liz, blogger and would-be novelist, laughed enthusiastically at her own joke.

Maggie told her to get away, though she knew Liz had a point. ‘It's better for the work,’ she explained. ‘In a couples situation, the mediator needs to be a pane of glass that the man and woman themselves can look through, so that they see each other rather than you.’

Liz was not convinced. She guessed that Maggie had got that bullshit out of some textbook. And she was right.

Nor did Maggie dare let on that this new look was also the preference of her boyfriend. With gentle hints at first, then more overtly, Edward had encouraged Maggie to start tying her hair back, or to put away the fitted tops, tight trousers or knee-length skirts that constituted her previous urban wardrobe. He always had a specific argument for each item: ‘That colour just suits you better’; ‘I think this will be more appropriate’ – and he seemed sincere. Still, she couldn't help but notice that all his interventions tended to point her in the same direction: more modest, less sexy.

She wouldn't breathe a word of that to Liz. Her sister had taken an instant, irrational dislike to Edward and she didn't need any more ammunition. Besides, it wouldn't be fair on him. If Maggie dressed differently now, that was her own decision, made in part for a reason that she had never shared with Liz and never would. Maggie had once dressed sexily, there was no denying it. But look where that had led. She wouldn't make that mistake again.

She opened the door to Kathy and Brett George, ushering them towards the spare room reserved for this purpose. They were in the couples' programme devised by the state authorities in Virginia, a new ‘cooling off’ scheme, in which husbands and wives were obliged to undergo mediation before they were granted a divorce. Normally, six sessions did it, the couple working out the terms of their break-up without any need to call a lawyer, thereby saving on heartache and money. That was the idea anyway.

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.

‘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. 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 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 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 butons. 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 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 autopilot, 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 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.’