The English Understand Wool

You wait until each has decided whether he is dealing with someone he can trust. If there is no trust, there is no point in signing a piece of paper.

It is good for one to be reminded of the depths of idiocy to which one can sink even when, or perhaps particularly when, one means well.

It seemed to me that a lawyer who did not review a document to which changes might have been made must be of a singularly trusting disposition.

A friendly e-mail from Bethany laid much weight on the interest which would be added to the narrative if the fugitives were apprehended.

New Yorkers are extraordinary. One has a business matter of some delicacy to discuss, a personal matter so fraught it cannot be resolved over the telephone, and the New Yorker’s immediate instinct is to arrange a meeting in a crowded place where anyone might overhear. One proposes meeting in a hotel room, a private office, the home of the person concerned, and this is met with deep suspicion, not to say revulsion.

You are being asked to sign when you don’t know what you are agreeing to. If you were dealing with people of similar background you would know. But if you are dealing with people who are blind to bad taste there is no way of knowing.

“I am only seventeen,” I said. “I thought people did not sign contracts they had not read, when important sums of money were involved. In these days of electronic transmission, it is so easy for the wrong document to be attached; so easy for changes to be agreed and made and the revised file not saved. One would not expect a seventeen-year-old girl who had been through recent emotional trauma to catch such errors.”

“I amended the language to avoid ambiguity,” I said.

I proposed to write a first draft in one week and return to Marrakech. I had not anticipated the many objections raised by my editor to the sample pages submitted at her request.

I asked if we might hear Vengerov, who was playing at the Barbican. She said these things could certainly be arranged. In the morning she was gone.