This is the Life (16 page)

‘I’m afraid that I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘I take my instructions from Michael. I cannot involve myself in schemes behind his back. You know that, Mr Donovan. Another thing,’ I continued. ‘I must impress it upon you that Michael knows what he’s doing. You can rest assured that he has a stratagem which will address all of these problems.’

‘A stratagem? What are you talking about, stratagem?’ Mr Donovan spluttered. He lost his temper. He raised his voice. The time for games is over! We’re way past that stage! No more bullshit! Look where all his tricks and wangles have got him today!’

‘Please, Mr Donovan, calm yourself. Please.’

‘He’ll blow it!’ Mr Donovan exclaimed. ‘Mark my words he’ll blow it with his goddamn strategies!’

He must have seen the expression of scepticism on my face, because he expanded on his remarks in an urgent whisper. ‘Yes, that’s right, he’ll blow it. Jim, I’ve been around for a long time and, believe me, when it comes to blowing it I know what I’m talking about. If Michael blows it, Jim, that’s it. There won’t be any second chance. When it’s over it’s over. That’s a terrible thing to realize, Jim – that you’ve had your last chance
and you’ve not taken it. I’m talking about remorse, Jim,’ Mr Donovan said. ‘Remorse.’

‘What do you suggest Michael does?’ I said.

‘He should come out on his hands and knees and beg for forgiveness!’ Mr Donovan whispered furiously, panting for breath. ‘He should cut down on his workload, devote himself to what matters – to what really matters. That’s what he should do, the idiot, instead of hatching his little plans.’ He stopped to breathe deeply. ‘He’s the one in the wrong – so it’s for him to set things straight.’

His outburst completed, Mr Donovan sat back tiredly in his chair. He acceded to my suggestion that we leave. I saw him to his hotel, and on the tube home I reflected that I disagreed deeply with him about the rights and wrongs of his son’s situation. Donovan, give up his work for Arabella? The idea was preposterous. On the contrary, it was Arabella who should be making the sacrifices. This was not for the crass reason that she was the wife and he the husband – no, this had nothing to do with sex or with emancipation or subjugation. We were not talking about an ordinary domestic situation here: the ordinary rules and norms did not apply. This is what Fergus Donovan and Arabella failed to realize. What made everything different here was that Donovan was a man of genius, of destiny. Allowances had to be made. History had to be accommodated in the household. Arabella should take a leaf out of the book of Mevrouw de Groot, Grotius’s wife. She stuck with her man through thick and thin – she even, if my memory served me correctly, went to prison with him when he was locked up with a life sentence. A man such as Donovan called for special devotion and loyalty. Unlike, say, a man like myself, an ordinary man with ordinary roles in life – shopper, friend, voter, propagator and taxpayer – Donovan’s gifts called him to lead an extraordinary and precious life. A woman could rightfully expect a man such as myself to provide her with the mundane benefits – children, money, love, diversion, time. But to expect these things, these niceties, from Donovan? Did these people not realize what a waste
this would be? Imagine it! It was like asking Rembrandt to devote himself to the garden, or requiring a great scientist – Fleming, say – to put away his petri dish and concentrate on making his wife happy. Happiness? What was the happiness of one person compared to the advancement of humanity? Donovan was not in the personal happiness business. The rest of us, perhaps – let us be frank, what else are we good for? – but not Michael Donovan.

Let me qualify what I have just said before I give a misleading impression. As a solicitor, the rights and wrongs of a case are not my affair – indeed, I would be remiss if they were. It is not that in my professional capacity I must wash my hands of good and bad, but that, rather like a surgeon at the operating table, I must wear gloves. This suits me well, because I find it no easy matter to reach conclusions about ethics. The variables are generally so complex, the computations so intricate, that rarely do I have the wit or the heart to pursue them. Anyway, I find, you usually finish up by pointing the finger at both sides, so quite often the whole exercise does not advance things very far. But I think it would not be honest if I did not admit that, in this case, my hands were bare, and sticky with the virtues of those involved. I was on Donovan’s side.

One of the things preying on my mind in the time before the hearing of the pre-trial review was Susan. Her absence after our encounter was a relief at first, and then, as it persisted, disquieting. When over a week had passed without a word I decided, for my peace of mind, to contact her at work. I was worried that something might have happened. The problem was that when she answered the telephone it struck me that I had nothing to say – or no specific information to convey, at least.

‘I was just wondering how you were,’ I said.

‘I’m fine,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m also quite busy.’ She was eating something and making chewing noises as she spoke.

I hesitated. The occasion was more difficult than I had foreseen. ‘I see,’ I said finally. When she said nothing to this I added, ‘Well, all right then. I’ll see you around.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Susan said. ‘I don’t think we can take things very much further, do you?’

‘I … Well, you may be right.’

‘Goodbye, James.’

So that was that. Exactly what she was thinking I found hard to imagine, but I did understand her wish simply to put a stop to things. It was time to put us behind us once and for all. We had reached, as they say, the end of the road. Now some roads, like tributaries running into rivers, end by merging into other, larger roads, taking on their names and their bright destinations. My road with Susan, though, had not led anywhere special. It had just petered out.

By contrast, the Donovan road has side-tracked me into a wilderness. Lost, I think, is the only fair way to describe my present situation, lost amongst alien places.

Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Whereas at night, when I am at home reliving the past year, the world is clear and familiar and real, every morning my office grows increasingly strange. At first, when I began to recount these episodes, I was deeply and organically meshed into my workplace. The ecosystem in operation – the social pyramids, the networks of understandings, the unspoken expectations, the subtle pecking orders, the position I occupied in all of this – I was on intricate terms with. The workload? I took care of that with my eyes closed. But with the passage of the days, a foreignness has introduced itself into my surroundings. I do not know where I am any more. The material placed before me has made less and less sense, until, finally, when I went into work today, the letters melted into hieroglyphs. Now the voices that come through on the telephone are speaking pure mumbo-jumbo. The office furniture seems to have changed, too. Now I am uncomfortable in my chair (my chair, where I have swivelled, slept and worked for years, where my body has indented its very contours!); the
nibs on my pens are either too thick or too scratchy; the papers on my desk give off an odd dazzle and it tires my eyes to look at them; even June, my dear June – frankly, I barely understand a word she says to me. Two or three times an hour she strides in to place before me a sheaf of typing for my inspection and waits there, arms folded, foot lightly tapping.

‘That’s fine, June,’ I say. I have gazed at the papers and pretended to check them. ‘That’s just fine. Thank you.’

June says exasperatedly, ‘It’s not. You’ve missed four mistakes,’ she says, pointing them out. ‘Look.’

‘Oh yes,’ I say gratefully. I circle them with my pen. ‘Thank you for spotting those, June; you’re a marvel.’

Of course, June will not buy that. Such compliments cut no ice with her at all and she turns tail and rattles away, her quick step signalling her discontent.

I am assailed by fundamental doubts. My occupation is beginning to strike me as a deeply outlandish mode of activity. What is this? I find myself asking when yet another task presents itself. What on earth am I doing? Advise on the effects of this leasehold? Why should I?

Of course, all of this has not gone unnoticed. Batstone Buckley Williams is a small, delicate organization. Unfitting, boat-rocking behaviour is not often missed. Today, shortly after lunch, the senior partner, Edward Boag, took me aside. It was the first time we have spoken alone since my first day at the firm.

‘Everything all right, Jones?’

The senior partner is now seventy-three years old and hard of hearing, so he speaks at a disconcerting volume.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.

‘Happy with us, are you?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The senior partner nodded. He shouted, ‘We’re happy with you too, Jones. Very happy.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, most happy indeed,’ he said. ‘Most happy.’ He
looked at me. ‘Well, carry on then, Jones,’ he said, and ambled off, nodding to himself.

It was a clear warning; even in my befogged state I could see that.

At twenty to eleven I arrived at the registrar’s chambers for the pre-trial review. There was no waiting room and everybody was made to stand about in the tacky, smoky corridor until the usher called them in. The atmosphere was tense. Children were held firmly by the hand and bunched-up little groups were camped in corners, throwing furtive looks over their shoulders and conferring in low tones. It was not easy for the separating spouses to avoid each other: to stay within earshot of the usher you had to remain in the corridor, and everybody in the corridor could see everybody else. A man was looking carefully at the green wall, closely examining its texture as though he was studying a work of art. Another man was cleaning, or wiping, his hands with a handkerchief. They looked clean to me, his hands, but still he kept wiping them. Mostly people were quiet. You could easily pick out the lawyers: they were the jovial ones with the loud voices. Donovan was nowhere to be seen. He was, I guessed, on his way from the airport.

Leaning against a wall, my ear against a gurgling pipe, I lit a cigarette and tried to match up one of the faces in the corridor with Arabella. I had two things to go on. There was the photograph by Donovan’s bed, which revealed only her lovely slender arms outstretched from that disc of straw; and secondly there was the picture that I kept of her in my mind’s wallet. Looking around, I saw that one or two women almost fitted the bill, but what dissuaded me from a positive identification was they lacked what to my mind was Arabella’s central
characteristic: beauty. (Yes, I knew, even at this stage, before I had caught so much as a glimpse of her face, that Arabella was beautiful. And not simply beautiful: I also had a hunch about what kind of beauty she would possess. She would have brown-black, glistening hair that fell thickly past her shoulders, a slim, curving figure and serene big eyes. She would not, in fact, be unlike the tennis stars’ girlfriends you see in the guest-box at Wimbledon, the ones in sunglasses perched nervously next to the coach, clapping sweetly whenever their man plays a winner, bravely standing by him when he is knocked out of the championship. Yes, Arabella had taken a very clear shape in my mind.)

None of the women I saw could properly be described as beautiful. One or two of them were desirable, certainly, and not without charms. But none of them possessed the necessary radiance, none of them looked like the heartbreaker I was looking for.

I was on my second cigarette and becoming increasingly flustered (it was eleven o’clock, where was Donovan?) when someone softly tapped my shoulder. There he stood, travel bag in hand, clean-shaven, unhurried and refreshed. His dark hair fell boyishly over his forehead and his smiling face actually glowed. I had not seen him looking better.

The usher called out ‘Number twelve, Donovan’ and a knot of people trooped into the registrar’s small room. There were two rows of desks. Donovan sat at the front and I took my place behind him. As I began snapping open my briefcase a man took a seat alongside Donovan. Philip Hughes, I correctly guessed: I had seen him in the corridor, together with his colleague who now sat behind him, next to me. Like me, she was taking out a notebook to transcribe what was said. As for Arabella, she had not turned up.

The registrar, a woman in her late thirties, emerged from a side door. Then, while intently reading the papers of the case, she listened to Philip Hughes making his application for directions. Then Donovan said his piece simply and unemotionally. He spoke in his usual detached manner, as if he
was representing a third party. Instead of referring to himself in the first person singular – instead of simply saying ‘I’ – he spoke of ‘the Respondent’. ‘Madam, the Respondent raises no objection,’ he said, for example. I would not say that the effect was disconcerting, but it did seem a little strange. When he had finished the registrar reflected for a moment. She looked at her papers and gave what she was going to say some thought.

‘I’m deeply troubled by the direction which this case is taking, Mr Donovan,’ she said. ‘Without in any way passing judgment on the course you have chosen to pursue, I must ask whether you are certain in your mind that you want to be contesting this case.’ She looked coldly at me. ‘I take it you have been fully advised as to the perils of your position.’

‘Yes, Madam,’ Donovan said. ‘I have.’

The registrar then voiced another misgiving. She said, ‘It really is far from ideal, Mr Donovan, that you should choose to represent yourself in this matter. I am extremely surprised that you, of all people, do not appreciate this.’