Chapter 75: Any Ashford Operating Entity
At twelve o'clock she had the nineteen pages laid out across the desk in three rows.
She had used the highlighter properly by then. Yellow on four clauses and one definition.
“Schedule two,” she said. “Page eighteen. Read it out.” I read it out.
Ashford Operating Entity means each of the companies listed below, together with their directors, officers, managers, employees, agents, and contractors, whether current or former.
Then four company names, in a list, with no numbering.
Willow Bank Care Limited.
Marlow Grange Residential Limited.
Sancroft Lodge Limited.
Ashford Coastal Care Limited.
“Now say what you notice,” she said.
“Willow Bank is first.”
She waited. She is good at waiting. She could sit through a silence longer than anyone I have known outside a weigh-in room.
“Alphabetical would put it last,” she said. “W.”
I looked at the four names again.
“It isn't alphabetical.”
“No.”
She did not push it any further than that. She is not a woman who makes speeches. She lets a fact sit on the desk until you pick it up yourself.
“Second thing,” she said. “Read 9.2 again and tell me who it protects.”
“The four companies.”
“And?”
“Their staff. Current and former.”
“And who does it not mention?”
I went back through it twice.
“Margot,” I said. “Julian. Damon, by name.”
“Damon appears at 9.1,” she said. “One line, standard, family and household. The people you actually had the incident with are in the short clause. The care companies have eleven pages.”
The radiator ticked. Somebody in the corridor outside took a phone call and lost the signal twice, and swore both times, quietly, like a man who had been raised well.
“There's a third thing,” she said, “and I want to be careful how I say it, because I am not going to put an idea in your head that isn't yours.”
“Say it.”
“Clause 9.2 purports to prevent you from communicating with a regulator.”
“Can it?”
“No.”
“No as in it's a bad idea?”
“No as in it is not enforceable,” she said. “You cannot contract out of the public interest. A clause that gags someone from speaking to a statutory regulator is worthless in front of a judge. Any competent drafter knows that.”
“Then why write it?”
She capped the highlighter, which she only did when she had finished thinking.
“That is the whole question,” she said. “In my experience there are two reasons a clause like that gets drafted. The first is that it was copied out of a template by somebody in a hurry.”
“And the second?”
“That it is not meant for a judge. It is meant for you. Nobody reads nineteen pages and then goes and takes independent advice on whether one line of it is enforceable. They read it, and they believe it, and they stay quiet for four years.”
I sat with that. My hands were flat on my thighs again. I made myself pick them up and put them on the desk, which took more from me than it should have.
Outside and below, the presses.
“The one thing I would say,” she said, “is that people who behave badly are usually behaving badly about something in particular. Broad clauses are not always sinister. Sometimes they are just greedy.”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes.”
She stacked the pages and squared them on the desk.
“Fourteen days,” she said. “They have given you until the twenty-eighth. That's shorter than I'd like and it is deliberate.”
“What happens on the twenty-ninth?”
“Nothing. It is a negotiating date, not a legal one. But it will feel like a cliff, and I want you to know in advance that the feeling is manufactured.”
I walked home instead of taking the bus, because I had learned in January that my head does not work sitting down.
Cold and bright, the pavements still wet from the morning. I walked past a school, two garages, and a bridge with a river under it the colour of tea.
And I did the thing I had been avoiding for eight weeks, which was to think about the building rather than about the family.
Not about Damon. Not about the hand at my collar or the twenty-two guests or the sound the room made.
About a corridor.
Vinyl floor, the kind with the flecks in it, laid in one piece so there is no seam to catch a wheel.
A handrail on both sides at waist height, pale wood, warm to touch.
The smell of it, which is not the smell people expect. Not bleach. Toast, mostly. Toast and laundry and the hot-metal smell of a hoist battery on charge.
And every Wednesday at ten past two, halfway down that corridor, a trolley.
I stopped on the bridge. I stood there a while, holding the rail, my thumb finding the rough patch where the paint had gone.
I knew the trolley. I could see the trolley, the height of it, the brake pedal, the dark blue drawer fronts.
I could not yet see what was wrong with it.