# Borderlines

Michela Wrong

The debut novel by a British writer with nearly two decades of African experience – a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events.British lawyer Paula Shackleton is mourning a lost love when a small man in a lemon-coloured suit accosts her over breakfast in a Boston hotel. Winston Peabody represents the African state of North Darrar, embroiled in a border arbitration case with its giant neighbour. He needs help with the hearings in The Hague, Paula needs to forget the past.She flies to the state’s capital determined to lose herself in work, but soon discovers that even jobs taken with the purest intentions can involve moral compromise. Taking testimony in scorching refugee camps, delving into the colonial past, she becomes increasingly uneasy about her role. Budding friendships with a scarred former rebel and an idealistic young doctor whittle away at her pose of sardonic indifference, until Paula finds herself taking a step no decent lawyer should ever contemplate.Michela Wrong has been writing about Africa for two decades. In this taut legal thriller, rich with the Horn of Africa’s colours and aromas, she probes the motives underlying Western engagement with the continent, questioning the value of universal justice and exploring how history itself is forged. Above all her first novel is the story of a young woman’s anguished quest for redemption.

## Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Michela Wrong 2015

Cover photograph (map) © Shutterstock.com

Michela Wrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008147402

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008123000

Version: 2015-12-08

## Dedication

For Jessica, who had to wait her turn

Nothing that mankind has accomplished to this date equals the replacement of war by court rulings, based on international law.

Andrew Carnegie,

US steel magnate and philanthropist,

August 1913

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

If you fly often, this may have happened to you. You’re stuck in Economy, folded awkwardly against a window, legs twined like pipe-cleaners, half awake. It’s dark outside, the window blind has been pulled down, and you’re where you hate being: five miles high, defying the laws of gravity and plain common sense. The slight ache in your feet, which have been pressing upwards into the bottom of the seat in front (someone, after all, has to do the hard work of keeping this machine aloft), confirms this fact. You are bitterly aware that the atmosphere inside the plane has turned into one troubled communal fart. And then, quite suddenly, it happens. With no real warning – perhaps a brief bumpiness you assume to be high-altitude turbulence – the plane makes impact. For a moment, you know that you are dying, because this mid-air collision, so high above the Earth, will leave no survivors, no body parts even. You convulse in your seat. You gasp aloud and your neighbour gives you a worried glance. And then your brain executes a massive feat of intellectual recalibration. You flick up the blind with a trembling hand. That’s the ground outside the window – zipping past you terrifyingly fast, it’s true, but in a controlled and orderly manner. This is a landing, you idiot. Sleeping, you missed the change in engine tone, the dipping of the nose, the minutes of what feel like freefall, the clunk of landing gear descending.

Landing in mid-air. A sobering exercise in shattered assumptions, the shock realisation of ludicrously false premises. When I look back on my time in Lira, it often seems like a version of that heart-stopping mid-flight experience, extended over the space of a year. Well, what can I say? Some people are just a bit slow to catch on.

## [1]. 14 November 2005

By two a.m. the glare was really beginning to bother me. African airports don’t, on the whole, go in for soft lighting, and Lira International was no exception. I didn’t need a mirror to know what I looked like in the greenish-white light given off by the fluorescent strip running the length of the ceiling: baggy-eyed, sallow, prematurely old.

I lay on the stiff acrylic carpet, my bag under one ear as a makeshift pillow, hands between my knees, pretending to ignore my guard. He was actually in the next room, but the door had been propped open, and since most of the wall separating the two rooms was glass, he could see me without leaving his desk, where he sat reading a newspaper, occasionally sipping a glass of dark tea.

Earlier, I had gone through the outrage, shocked innocence and I-demand-an-explanation routine that seems de rigueur when a young white woman is suddenly, mysteriously, diverted from a path leading to a boarding gate, the trundle across the tarmac in the warm night air and then, aah, the microcosm of Western civilisation that is the modern aircraft, a little bubble of agreed conventions and soothing yogic rituals. I’d declaimed at considerable length on my key role in the Legal Office of the President. I’d dropped my boss’s name, demanded to speak to the presidential adviser and brandished my files, to emphasise how vital it was that I reach The Hague in time for the announcement of a historic ruling that would shape his country’s future.

Green Eyes, as I had mentally tagged him – like any good lawyer, I’d asked for his name but he’d only grunted – hadn’t turned a hair. The absence of reaction, in fact, was the most terrifying thing about the whole affair. An insincere apology, an attempt at intimidation, anything would have been better than the total lack of expression he’d shown as he had turned on me his light, limpid gaze – so disconcerting in this country of dark brown eyes – and said, ‘No flight for you tonight.’

He had taken me to identify my luggage so it could be removed from the pile. He had led me to Immigration to have my passport’s exit stamp crossed. He had walked me to the kiosk where I’d paid my airport tax to get the dollars returned. Each of these small transactions had been conducted in silence by the officials who had processed me twenty minutes earlier, this time without the friendly smiles. They knew now I was toxic, leprous. Then Green Eyes had brought me upstairs to this room, where the only furniture was a desk, pushed against the wall, and a plastic chair, and indicated I wait.

My first reaction had been to get out my mobile and start composing a text to Winston. I was just typing ‘detained at’ when Green Eyes held out his hand. I handed it over, unzipped my shoulder bag and took out my laptop as if to start it up. He held out his hand again, this time more brusquely, and I passed over my weathered Dell. ‘No computer. No mobile,’ said Green Eyes. ‘All is forbidden.’

Over the next hour and a half, I’d watched through the glass as the other passengers on the flight went through the routine I, too, had been planning: the pointless trawl of the airport shop in search of suitable presents (biography of Julius Nyerere, anyone? Copy of the Ministry of Health’s five-year plan?), a beer at the bar, cigarette on the terrace, the cluster at the boarding gate, a final cursory search before disappearing through the doors.

A few threw curious, embarrassed glances in my direction. Wasn’t that the deputy director of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency? I’d certainly met that blond young man – Norwegian Embassy? Danish? One of the Scandies, in any case – at some party. But I did not call out. ‘All is forbidden’ had somehow done its work. I was already aware of a film between me and my fellow expatriates, the gelatinous membrane that separates the innocent from the compromised. A strange shame held me back, the conviction that they would have walked on past me as I mouthed my silent appeal.

‘Come,’ said Green Eyes. I followed his beckoning finger out of the room, past the café-bar, now closing, and across to the terrace, which looked out over one of the least-used runways in Africa. Green Eyes pointed to where the Alitalia flight was turning on the tarmac, testing its flaps. I knew exactly what the atmosphere would be like on board. Some destinations specialise in jolly flights, others come tinged with relief, a few drenched in heartbreak. Flights from Lira always seemed infused with a certain grim pragmatism. No one aboard would be ending a wonderful holiday or laden with souvenirs. The airport was not the chosen port of departure for fleeing locals: too visible, too monitored. The expatriates, banking generous salaries for what was judged a hardship posting, would be heading off for briefings back at Headquarters, short breaks with semi-estranged wives and children parked at boarding-school. They would be back all too soon.

The plane hurtled past the terminal building. Heading out across the plateau, it wheeled until its nose pointed north-west. I could almost hear the clink of the mini-bar bottles as the air stewards handed out the required anaesthetics, tucking a few extras into seatbacks. A few minutes later, it was no more than a winking light in the careless splatter of stars that was the Lira night sky. Green Eyes savoured my expression, his point made. I was on my own.

‘Come,’ he said again. We walked back to my holding area, where my turquoise case crouched, like a giant scarab beetle. Funny how you can come to hate an inanimate object. In one of those side pockets nestled the passports, cash and academic certificates that I assumed lay at the root of this whole sorry affair. Someone, it was clear, had blabbed. I could guess who that might be.

For a while, I sat in the plastic chair. After an hour, buttocks numb, I moved to the floor, draping myself strategically over the case – a girl needs a pillow, no? I put my coat over my head to shield my eyes from the light and under that screen, my hands got working. At the very least, I needed to separate the money – an aromatic wodge of hundred-dollar bills – from the rest. I could claim personal ownership of the cash, even if that meant admitting to breaking currency regulations. The passports and certificates were another matter. Maybe there was somewhere in the airport I could dump the incriminating evidence. With infinite slowness, I opened the zipper into the bag’s side-pocket, closed my hands on the documents and slipped them up the sleeve of my sweater.

When I removed the coat from my head, Green Eyes was staring at me. Had he noticed the wriggling? ‘I need to go to the Ladies,’ I said.

‘Come.’

I followed him down the corridor. Three sinks, dripping taps, the smell of bleach, more bad lighting and a wall-to-wall mirror, which confirmed that, yes, I did indeed resemble a warmed-up corpse. Disconcertingly, Green Eyes did not make his excuses. I entered one of the cubicles, locked the door, sat down without dropping my trousers. Think! Where could I stow the documents? Down the drain? That would cause a flood. How about the cistern, Al Pacino-style? If Green Eyes had not followed me in, maybe. But he would certainly hear the scraping as I lifted the heavy porcelain lid. As for the Papillon solution, no orifice was going to accommodate two passports. I’d run out of ideas. I transferred the papers from my sleeve to my knickers and flushed the toilet. Then I walked past Green Eyes with my face set. Hollywood had failed me, as it tends to. If he wanted to find my cache, he would.

I resumed my previous position slouched over my bag. Green Eyes was playing it cool, so I would match him for insouciance. I would simply fall asleep from sheer boredom. But, of course, too many internal voices were clamouring to be heard. One was near-hysterical, something approaching a banshee shriek: ‘Oh, how could you? How could you – how could you do this to your parents? And what about Winston? After all he’s done? You stupid, stupid, stupid cunt.’

I began composing a speech, my last presentation. ‘I fully realise the mortifying position I have placed you in, and I can only apologise for that,’ it began. ‘Not only do I expect you to disassociate yourself from me, I demand it. I betrayed you personally and put the case at risk, both unforgivable acts. I have surrendered any claim to professionalism. No one else should pay the price for my rashness.’

The other voice was quieter, grimly realistic: ‘So, let’s think this through. To anticipate is to be strengthened. This is a pretty serious offence. Winston will fight for you, you know that, whatever you tell him. The embassy might try to help, but that could just make things worse. The one thing going for you is your skin colour. No government wants the Amnesty International press releases, the Human Rights Watch reports that go with torturing or executing people like you. Even this government. So we’re probably talking, if you’re lucky, a few years in a container on the coast. Can you handle that? Hottest place on earth. No privacy. Malaria. Cholera.’

A girding of the loins. And the answer that came back was a slight surprise: ‘Yes. Yes, I think I can.’

But then an image came to mind, of a rough sketch I’d spotted on Winston’s desk, drawn by a young man who had compensated for his limited artistic ability with a certain graphic brio. It showed someone lying on their stomach, back arched, knees bent, hands reaching behind to seize toes. In yoga, something similar is known as the Bow Pose, a good way of stretching the spine. In the enemy prisoner-of-war camp into which that youngster had had the misfortune to fall it was known as the ‘helicopter position’. The accompanying text, written by a doctor from the Red Cross, helpfully explained that the same technique was used in Iran, where it was called ‘the chicken kebab’, and in Latin America, where it was dubbed ‘the parrot’s perch’. It became intensely painful after a few minutes, the doctor wrote, and, if sustained, could cause deformed bones, deep sores and, in a few recorded cases, pulmonary embolism.

The doctor’s name, I remember, was Boronski. A Pole? I could remember the photos paper-clipped to the drawing, showing the welts and scars. The ugly Polaroids flashed across my mind’s eye, like lurid prompt cards. If the other side used that technique, you could be sure our boys did, too. And how about rape? Maybe I could handle it once, but repeatedly? Day in, day out? What would that be like? I remembered a newspaper article about a hospital in eastern Congo that treated male soldiers raped so often they’d had to use sanitary pads. But, hang on, this wasn’t Congo. What had Winston once said, explaining why it was important never to shout in the office? ‘This is a society where nothing is seen as more shaming than a loss of self-control.’ But now we were back to Winston again, and how he would react, my parents and their feelings, that tidal wave of mortification.

I briefly tried the line of argument that had powered me so effectively through the last few years. The one that ran: ‘Without Jake, there is nothing left to lose. There is nothing at stake.’ But despair no longer consoled. My anxiety scurried like a gerbil on a wheel. The passports had long ago shifted from pleasantly cool to clammily sticky against my skin. I tried some deep breathing, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and my mouth was so dry that my lips kept sticking to my gums. At intervals, I lowered the coat off my face to ask Green Eyes for water, and once in a while, he ordered a colleague to fetch me a plastic beaker.

At a certain point, though, the adrenalin runs out. And then you find the peace of acceptance, the passivity of the internee. By the time I noticed that dawn was about to break, golden shards of light piercing the long grasses at the far end of the runway, I felt Valium-calm and as ancient as the landscape. There was nothing they could do to me now that would frighten or surprise me. I had done their work for them. I had dismantled myself.

There came a changing of the guard. The morning shift arrived, a shorter, older official taking over from Green Eyes, who gave me a knowing, strangely intimate look as he headed out the door. There was a woman with him, small and busty in a tightly fitting uniform, carefully made-up. ‘Hello, sister,’ she said coldly, and gestured to me to follow. And in this country where, as I had once explained in an email to my British friend Sarah, no one ever allowed you to carry anything (‘My arms are atrophying’), Whitey was this time left to lug her own bag. The new dispensation.

I knew what to expect now. I’d be led to a car so nondescript it could only belong to the secret police. I’d be taken to an equally anonymous room and there my luggage and clothing would finally be properly searched, the passports and cash immediately discovered. I would be professionally interrogated, my story picked over until, inevitably, it fell apart. And then I would be asked to sign something, and I would be taken to a real cell, with bars, cockroaches and an open toilet, not the soft-focus version of internment I’d been treated to up till now.

Instead, the two walked me out of the deserted airport to the taxi rank. I noticed a woman, swathed like a mummy in white cotton, sitting on the concrete kerb. A little boy lay across her lap, fast asleep, saliva crusting his lips. The female officer rapped on the window of the only cab waiting and what had looked like a bundle of linen stirred and straightened, morphing into a bleary old driver, who automatically pulled the seat forward and groped for his keys.

The male officer turned to me. ‘You will pick up your passport from the Ministry of Immigration, Room 805.’

Oh, sweet Jesus, they were letting me go. Suddenly I rediscovered my lost outrage. ‘What was this all about?’

‘Room 805. Ministry of Immigration. This afternoon.’ Indifferent, they turned and headed back towards the terminal.

Louder now. ‘What’s been going on here?’

The woman officer swivelled and looked back at me. She had a half-smile on her face, and I noticed that her eyebrows had been plucked entirely away, then redrawn in black pencil. ‘We had an information about you.’

I scrabbled at the taxi’s door handle, my hands suddenly shaking so violently I could hardly open it. I gabbled instructions and we headed downtown. Lira was beginning to stir. In a night-chilled courtyard, a first dog barked. The bark was taken up by the dog next door, and their joint yelping relayed from one neighbourhood to another, a widening chorus of syncopated alarm spreading to wake the reluctant, befuddled city.

I sat huddled in the corner of the taxi, trying to control a juddering that had now spread to my legs. One thought occurred. After all those months of velvet-glove treatment, I’d finally been paid the ultimate compliment. Paula Shackleton had been treated like a local.

## [2]

‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’

That was the running gag of an unlikely friendship forged in a bar down an alley with the cabbagy reek of open drains, hidden away from the Horn of Africa’s punishing highlands light. There’s a long, meandering answer to the question, and then there’s the one-paragraph executive summary, easier to digest but lacking in nuance. I’m opting for the former, and that means jumping back a bit.

The Chicago law firm I worked for in 2004, Grobart & Fitchum – or ‘Grabhard and Fuckem’ as I liked to think of them – was involved in a complicated negotiation between a Swiss department-store chain raising capital to expand into Eastern Europe and a banking client who was running the deal out of their Boston headquarters. The job involved a huge amount of conference calling, and since the Swiss were our overlords, they got to arrange the schedule around their bedtimes. Grobart & Fitchum had flown in a five-man team, and as the days went by, we began to resemble a group of sleep-deprived inmates from Guantanamo Bay, pale-faced and pouchy-eyed. The mood between us was wary: we had been at it long enough to grasp who could stay lucid and keep powering through without enough sleep and who was becoming so loopy their workload would soon have to be added to ours.

Luxury is the knee-jerk consolation prize in this business and Dan, my immediate boss, had automatically booked suites at the Langham, housed in a former Federal Reserve building. There’s something uniquely depressing about being offered a range of services, from the however-many-metres swimming-pool to a range of ‘Chuan scrubs and wraps’ you know you will never get time to use, and the British puritan in me was disgusted by the extravagance. The carping refrain No wonder they’re all obese ran through my head every time I surveyed the breakfast buffet with its mountains of pastries and steaming trays of bacon. The Langham was just like every other gilded cage I’d stayed in, a fitting setting for my botched, interrupted, pointless demi-life.

On the morning in question I was sitting over a plate with a single bread roll placed defiantly in the centre – none of that greasy crap for me, thank you – staring into the middle distance, when a blur in my blind spot crystallised into the shape of a small black man. Compact, neat, a clipped corona of greying curls framing a high, round forehead, he wore a crumpled linen suit in an unusual shade of lemon custard. He stopped as he reached my table and gave me a very direct look from a pair of long-lashed, honey-coloured eyes. I noticed a distinctive spattering of moles around his nose, as though someone had taken a coffee stirrer and flecked espresso in his face.

‘It isn’t mandatory.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You look like someone trapped in Purgatory. Boredom and frustration aren’t obligatory. You could try something more stimulating.’

For a moment I thought he might be a Jehovah’s Witness and I was about to get the ‘Have you been saved?’ routine. My face assumed a rictus of polite refusal and I raised a palm in an instinctive fending-off motion.

He blinked those long lashes a couple of times, then gave me a shy smile of enormous sweetness. ‘You’re the British lawyer, aren’t you? Part of the Grobart & Fitchum crew?’

I nodded warily.

‘Paula? I noticed you all earlier in the lobby. I’m Winston Peabody. Dan and I go way back. We both did time at the Justice Department.’ We shook hands and he nodded at a signboard in the lobby. ‘I’m here for the seminar on my favourite topic, corporate sleaze. But I’ll also be giving a speech for the human-rights crowd. Can I tempt you? It’ll make a change from your usual fare. And sometimes I have work for people like you.’

‘People like me?’

He pursed his lips and gazed at me speculatively, like a tailor measuring his client for a suit. ‘Oh, people with that questing look in their eyes. The Unrooted, I call them. Take it as a compliment. Complacency’s not exactly attractive. Anyway, come along. I’m trying to rustle up an audience. Nothing more embarrassing than talking to an empty room.’ He scribbled the venue and time on the back of a business card, placed it on my table and walked off.

That last bit was one of his little jokes, of course. Winston Peabody III, the first black partner at the Washington firm of Melville & Bart and a celebrity on the human-rights circuit, did not need to beg strangers in hotels to attend his talks. When seats ran out, people would stand. He was one of those speakers adored by the media and envied by academics, who could popularise without dumbing down, rendering dry specialisms so accessible that listeners who had never dreamed of opening a law book found themselves wondering whether they had missed their calling. There are men who seem to change shape, to grow in stature when they climb onto a public platform. Behind a desk, over the phone, Winston was always formidable. On a podium or presenting in court, he became positively sexy, acquiring a town-hall charisma, the spiky, sardonic edge and instinctive timing of the stand-up comedian who knows how to play an audience. Had he wished to at that moment, he could have tapped almost any woman – and a fair number of the men – on the shoulder and they would have considered fucking him a privilege. But in the seconds it took him to step off the stage, he visibly shrank, folding, like an empty Coke can in a weightlifter’s fist, to become just a small, slightly paunchy man in a creased yellow suit whose salt-and-pepper halo of hair could not conceal advanced male-pattern baldness and a tendency to dandruff. Incredible Hulk to mild-mannered Bruce Banner in the blink of an eye.

I honestly can’t remember the details of Winston’s speech, hosted by a human-rights group that had hired a hall on Harvard’s campus for the purpose. Sheer exhaustion had brought matters to a head on the Swiss deal. My skills were not required for the final session with Zurich, and I found myself with a free afternoon. He must have spoken about the hunger for justice in societies emerging from war, how ending the climate of impunity held the key to peace. He probably talked about the debt the West owed developing countries for the horrors of slavery and colonialism and the cynicism of the Cold War. I do recall that he gave some gory examples, anecdotes from visits to East Timor and Cambodia, work done in Colombia and Sierra Leone. Members of the audience gasped at references to stairwells daubed with blood, defence attorneys disembowelled in their offices, human-rights campaigners pulled over on remote country roads and beheaded in the spotlights of their killers’ cars. I saw one girl, long brown hair falling to her waist, close her eyes and lean her head on the shoulder of her boyfriend, who put his arm round her in a manly gesture that signalled: it’s OK, I’m here. What impressed me, though, was not the heartrending stuff, or that Winston spoke in meticulously punctuated sentences – you could actually hear the semi-colons, dashes and quotation marks and when he told his audience: ‘I’ll come back to that point later,’ it wasn’t just a phrase, he really did return, topping and tailing his thought processes like a chef preparing green beans – no, it was the surgical coolness of his eye. This was an impassioned, angry man, but one who never allowed his emotions to interrupt a methodical taking of notes. On his deathbed, as his nearest and dearest gathered to weep, Winston Peabody would be calling, ‘Hush’, the better to analyse the timbre, tone and length of his own death rattle.

At the end, I dutifully took my place in the throng of acolytes gathering around him. Don’t ask me why. I think I wanted him to know I’d bothered. Waiting, I registered that I was a good decade older than the rest.

‘Mr Peabody, I just feel, like, what’s happening is just so awful. What can I do?’ twittered a pigtailed blonde, her cheeks flushed with emotion. She was almost pogoing with enthusiasm, flashing glimpses of a toned stomach and pierced navel. I spotted the gleam of metal in her mouth. Dear God, she was actually wearing braces. This was not the place for me. I turned to leave, but at that moment Winston caught my eye. He reached forward, the human Red Sea somehow parted before him, and placed a restraining hand on my sleeve. ‘Please. Don’t go.’

Fifteen minutes later, the flock of groupies had dispersed and we were in the campus canteen drinking coffee.

He spoke as though picking up an interrupted conversation. ‘So, since 1997 I’ve been working pro bono for the government of North Darrar, in the Horn of Africa. I don’t expect you’ve heard of it?’

‘Well, actually …’

His eyebrows shot up in query.

‘I’ve heard of Darrar, that’s all.’

‘That’s more than most people can say. Good. In many ways North Darrar encapsulates the problems faced by traumatised post-conflict nations. A breakaway state that has just come through the second of two wars with its neighbour and former occupier, and finds itself having to negotiate its border – prove the country’s right to exist, in essence – in The Hague. They’re trying to build a democracy from scratch, but their best people were either killed or fled into exile during the independence struggle so the last thing they need is this kind of international court case. They weren’t rich to start off with – the last war bankrupted them and there’s only so much you can make exporting badly cured hides and potash to the Middle East – and the other side hires the best.’

‘And?’

‘Well, up till now I’ve been fighting this battle virtually single-handed, juggling the job with my paying clients. Melville & Bart help out on the practical side, preparing documents, making our evidence look halfway presentable. But that’s just basic drudgery. We’re reaching a crucial stage. This is complex, sophisticated stuff, and I simply can’t do it alone. I need a deputy. Will you help?’

I blinked. I’d been wondering where the preamble was leading, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be its destination. ‘Look, I really don’t understand why you think any of this is my business … Why don’t you get one of your admirers to pitch in? I’m sure one of those kids would jump at the chance.’

He sighed. ‘Sadly, experience proves that the eager intern is more hindrance than help. The first had an attack of the runs, decided he’d caught cholera and insisted on being medevaced out. The second went mountain biking, hit a camel and broke her wrist – no more typing. I can’t play nanny – I’m temperamentally unsuited to it. I spend all my free time in Lira, but I need someone based there to keep the show on the road during my necessary absences. Are you interested?’ He was spooning sugar into his cappuccino as though determined not to acknowledge my disbelieving eyes.

‘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.’

A wife, she notes. Why bother with ‘till the next time’? But she will bump into him later, in the ground-floor café of their building. She will discover that he works for a respected firm of architects, then that he not only set up the firm but has a claim on the entire building in which she works. Jake Wentworth is, in a minor way, a local celebrity, the well-liked unpretentious scion of a WASP family that made its fortune hurling railroads across the United States. One day he will inherit the family fortune, but in the meantime he is doing the job he loves, juggling draughtsmanship with a regular arts column and the directorship of a charity for political asylum seekers, funded by Wentworth money. She will meet him on the ice again, alone this time, and neither will get any skating done. Instead, they will talk about politics, discuss the Coen brothers’ latest film, and he will give her a witty-yet-not-unkind potted résumé of twenty years’ New York high society gossip, for these are circles to which his name grants entry. They will both be surprised to find that it feels like a conversation between old friends after a long break, rather than a first exchange between strangers. And soon she will discover, thanks to a personal assistant’s indiscretions, that the impatience she glimpsed in the female figure by the skating rink extends further than irritation at the cold: there are independent bank accounts, solo holidays, separate bedrooms. And the young woman will find herself hoovering up office tittle-tattle with unbecoming greed.

He has made contact. He has made her care.