Dolby had the copy of the agreement his client had signed twelve years ago with Martin Beaumont. He waited until Vanda was seated opposite him and the door of his private office was closed, then looked down with unconcealed distaste at the document. ‘May I ask who was your legal adviser when this agreement was drawn up, Ms North?’
Vanda felt like an impulsive sixth-former called before the headmistress as she said, ‘I don’t think I had any legal advice at all on the terms of the agreement.’ She watched him nod sadly several times, then felt she must break the silence with which he reinforced his disapproval of such wanton rashness. ‘I realize now that I was rather foolish not to have it vetted.’
Dolby renewed his nodding at this. He turned over first one page and then a second, winced a little at what he saw there and said at last, ‘Rather foolish is putting it mildly I’m afraid, Ms North.’
‘I was too trusting of the major partner in the business. I realize that now.’
He nodded his agreement, almost eagerly, she thought.
‘I’m afraid our wide experience of human conduct makes us lawyers rather cynical, Ms North. It’s a sad thing, but we have to advise people against being too trusting.’
‘Yes. I understand now that I should have tempered trust with a little healthy suspicion.’
He winced a little at the aggression of the word. ‘We wouldn’t see it as suspicion, of course. We would prefer to use the term discretion.’
Vanda shrugged her shoulders hopelessly. How could she explain to a man like this the excesses induced by an overwhelming sexual attraction? She had signed this hideous tract at the height of her passion for Martin Beaumont, very probably after an intense session between the sheets. It was a lover’s concession, a lover’s declaration of trust, a lover’s assurance to a man who held her in thrall that she trusted him with the rest of her life, that she did not need dry legal agreements when she was throwing in her lot with him. How could she ever make this dry stick of a man, this Dickensian caricature of legal caution, understand a vulnerability which at this distance she could no longer understand herself?
She reminded herself sternly that she was paying this man handsomely for his services, that there was really no reason why she should slip into the role of chastened schoolgirl. ‘I realize now that I should have taken legal advice at the time, that I was very foolish not to do so. What I want to know is whether I have left myself any room at all for manoeuvre.’
James Dolby nodded his acknowledgement of the query, then looked once again at the brief document and shook his head sadly. ‘Very little room at all, I fear. May I ask how good your present relationship with the senior partner in this enterprise is?’ He made a great show of turning back to the beginning of the document, though she was certain he knew perfectly well by this time the name he was seeking. ‘This Martin Beaumont.’
She suddenly wanted to shock this paragon of respectability, this moving statue of decorum. ‘At the time when this agreement was drawn up, I was sleeping with Martin Beaumont. He was rogering me daily and I was thoroughly enjoying it, Mr Dolby. I’m afraid my feelings at the time affected my judgement, as you can see all too easily from what is in front of you.’
He was disappointingly unruffled. He raised the grey legal eyebrow the merest fraction, then nodded his head. ‘I wondered if something of the kind was involved. You did not strike me as the sort of woman who would normally tolerate something like this.’
Vanda supposed that was meant as a compliment. He knew more about the way life worked than she had given him credit for. She had a distressing image of a pinkly naked James Dolby, standing with a lascivious smile at the foot of her bed and launching himself upon her with a most unlawyerlike bellow of ‘Geronimo!’. It was most disconcerting. She told herself sternly that she must banish this most unsuitable of pictures, but it was vivid enough to rear its unwelcome head at various moments during the rest of her day. She said as steadily as she could, ‘I acknowledge now that I was a fool, and I don’t want you to pull any punches to save my feelings. What I need to know is whether this agreement is of any use to me at all at this moment.’
‘Do I take it that your feelings for this gentleman are no longer so. . er, warm?’
‘You do indeed. I would willingly put a gun to his head, if I thought I could get away with it.’
Dolby held up a restraining hand. ‘You should not voice such thoughts, Ms North, even in jest.’ But a tiny smile played about the edge of his mouth as he spoke the words, and Vanda apprehended for the first time that he was quite enjoying the rituals of this little exchange. She had no idea whether she was pleased or outraged by this realization. Dolby enquired innocently, ‘And am I right in presuming that Mr Beaumont no longer retains intense and intimate feelings for you?’
‘We haven’t slept together for at least eight years. And you can see from what is in front of you that he never entertained intense feelings for me. I was infatuated with him and I persuaded myself that he felt the same way about me. I know now that that was wishful thinking, mere self-deception. The proof of that is in those pages you have in front of you.’
‘I’m afraid it is indeed, Ms North. Everything in this document is overwhelmingly to Mr Beaumont’s advantage. I can only assume that he prepared the agreement himself, with his own interests pre-eminent throughout.’
‘I agree. What I want to know from you is whether I have any hope of overturning some of those provisions which so obviously favour him.’
This time he looked genuinely rather than merely professionally disappointed for her. But perhaps that was just one of the skills lawyers developed to justify their fees, she thought. Dolby leaned forward earnestly and said, ‘My only hope was that the other party in this was favourably disposed towards you. Now that you have assured me that that is not the case, I’m afraid I have little comfort to offer you. You put?80,000 into Abbey Vineyards with no clear guarantee of any return. You own one sixth of the business, but with such strings attached that it is a highly illiquid asset. You cannot dispose of your share of the business, nor even withdraw your capital, without the full consent of the major partner.’
‘Which he steadfastly refuses to give me. Beaumont claims that under the terms of this agreement, my investment is made in perpetuity.’
‘Which it clearly is, in the terms agreed by you in this document. It is an eminently one-sided and unfair agreement, in my view, and we could go to law and challenge it on those grounds. The trouble is that you signed your full consent to all these clauses at that time, almost like a wife eager to support her husband’s enterprise. I fear that a plea of sexual infatuation is not one that is readily acceptable in English law. We might win, but I could not guarantee it and it would in any case be a costly business. If we lost, you see, the considerable legal costs of his defence might well be awarded to Mr Beaumont. In these circumstances, I could not recommend you to take this matter to court.’
‘That is what I feared you would say.’ Vanda flicked her short fair hair back over her forehead, resisting a sudden, unexpected wish to cry.
‘In my view, you are probably correct in your assumption that Mr Beaumont drafted this very unfair document himself. It does not have the stamp of a professional legal mind. In particular, it makes no mention of what happens to the business in the event of the demise of either partner, which is a most unusual omission.’