This is the Life (2 page)

What Donovan had forgotten was that my name is Jones, James Jones. It is a plain, transparent name and, until an unrelated namesake induced a mass-suicide in Guyana, was an unremarkable one. I am a junior partner in Batstone Buckley Williams, an unprestigious firm of solicitors in the West End of London. I have a general, unspecialized practice: quite a lot of personal injury, family, some landlord and tenant, conveyancing, the odd bit of crime. I think it is true to say that, by commonly accepted standards, I am not an especially successful lawyer. I do not regret this, as professional success is not something I set great store by. Of course, it would be nice to wake up in the morning a highly paid and famous lawyer, respected and admired by my fellow men – given that option, I would take it like that, in the click of two fingers. But the pain of actually achieving that type of standing, the sacrifices, the boredom – these are not for me.

By contrast, for those of you who have not heard of him, Professor Michael Donovan QC was, in the autumn of 1988,
one of the most triumphant practitioners at the English Bar. He was easily (there is no doubt about this) the top international lawyer in these islands, the possessor of a world-class legal mind. That mind of his … It was naturally and freakishly powerful, like a once-in-a-blue-moon tidal wave, or a tree-plucking wind in England. Perhaps this is a pedestrian or fanciful metaphor, but I most easily visualize it as one of those fat Swiss army penknives, deceptively stocked with cutthroats and instruments of severance, disassembly and dissection: razors, scissors, corkscrews, bottle-openers, screwdrivers, magnifying lenses, the lot. In a flash, before you could mobilize a brain cell, he would have dismantled an issue, anatomized its components and analysed its implications. He had all the intellectual tools, and this showed, this shone, in his writings. He was a great academic – innovative, controversial, scholarly – a star. He wrote his books and articles in a simple, transparent style, using short, pithy sentences, which meant that apart from anything else, he was immensely readable. He was the M. J. P. J. Smith Professor of International Law at Cambridge University, and his publications excited interest and envy around the world.

Donovan, then, was equipped for any contingency of legal warfare. For myself, I can safely say that he was the most brilliant court lawyer I have ever seen, and probably the most feared as well. His advocacy, whether in court or at the negotiation table, was – I was about to say brutal, but that word has connotations of crudeness that would not be quite right – inexorable. I for one have never seen anything like it. The only feasible comparison I can think of is with the American heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. If you have seen this man boxing in his prime you will know what I am talking about. He is not especially tall, so it is hard to pick him out in the crush when he pushes through the bodyguards, photographers and spectators that crowd him on his way to the ring. But when he finally stands disrobed and gleaming in the floodlight, he is unmistakable: black, baggy silk shorts, long bludgeoning arms and eager, focused eyes. Then the bout:
some combinations to the torso, an uppercut, then
bam
– a sickening bullseye to the jaw, and Tyson’s opponent is on his back, seeing stars.

I am not suggesting that Donovan’s entrée to the courtroom was the same as Tyson’s to his forum, or that he disposed of cases in a matter of minutes; but Donovan, like Tyson, had a capability unhesitatingly to unleash inimitable, efficient destruction. He would immediately detect any flaw in an argument, spontaneously expose it, and then carefully cudgel it with spot-on, shuddering verbal blows. There was no holding back, but nor was there vindictiveness: personal feelings, emotions, did not enter into it.

I must return for a minute to what I have roughly called Donovan’s inexorableness. It marked everything he did. His actions had an unrelenting shape to them, the shape of things to come. He was streaming forward at such a speed, and so unerringly, that his future seemed a foregone conclusion.

In short, then, reading that item in the newspaper turned my thoughts to Donovan for the first time in a long time. Going up to my office that morning in the full-up elevator, I worried about his well-being. Collapse? What was it, heart? Stroke? At his age? In his mid-forties?

When I had ascended to the fourth floor I stepped quickly into my office, preoccupied by the business. I helped myself to a black coffee and sat in the chair behind my desk. It was half-past eight, I had about half an hour to myself before everyone would come in. So Donovan had collapsed on his feet, I thought to myself. What did that mean, collapsed? I tried to imagine it: had he fallen over the lectern clutching his chest, powerlessly splashing papers everywhere? Or had he buckled at the knees and slumped to the floor, folding up like an old deckchair? What had happened?

I decided to telephone his chambers at 6 Essex Court to find out. There was no need for me to look up the number because after all these years I still knew it by heart – 583 9292.

I stopped dialling and put the receiver down at 583. It did not feel right – it was too direct, too embarrassing. I would have to find out in due course, the same as everyone else. It was not as though I was a particularly close friend of the man, or family, or especially connected to him. In fact, Donovan did not even know who I was any more.

Of course, there had been a time when Donovan did know me, when he knew exactly who I was. I am thinking of my time as his pupil barrister.

My whole pupillage lasted for a year, and it was the second part of that year that I spent with Donovan. My first six months had also been spent at 6 Essex Court, but with a different pupil-master, a man called Simon Myers. Head of chambers at the time was Bernard Tetlow QC (later, of course, Lord Tetlow of Herne Hill). Six Essex was just as fashionable a set then as it is now. The work flowing through chambers was high-class commercial law: shipping, reinsurance, private international law, banking and so forth. There was no crime, no family, no landlord and tenant, no dross whatsoever. The pigeon-holes of the tenants bulged with lucrative briefs from Linklaters & Paines, Slaughter & May, Freshfields and Herbert Smith, the papers wrapped like offerings in their bright pink ribbons. You certainly would never see any work from my firm, Batstone Buckley Williams, floating about the place.

Simon Myers, my first pupil-master, was good to me. Myers was very punctilious and he scrupulously took pains to ensure that I was properly trained. He gave me some useful habits of mind which to this day hold me in good stead. ‘Always ascertain the facts. Visualize what has happened: imagine the people sitting down to write letters. Remember dates. Always make up your own mind about something. And remember, never give a definitive answer to any question: always express clearly the subjectivity of your opinions. Use qualifiers to hedge your bets: “In my opinion, in my view, in my analysis, as I see it, from my perspective.” Sprinkle your sentences with phrases like “it follows that” and “accordingly” and “therefore”. They lend a veneer of logical force to your argument.’ There were also tips of a more general nature. ‘Look sharp: a tidy appearance betokens a tidy mind. Here, take this.’ He handed me a card. ‘My tailor. Get yourself a new suit. And this.’ Another card. ‘My financial adviser. And this. My stockbroker. Get yourself a pension, you won’t regret it. Get yourself a portfolio. And while we’re on the subject of investments,’ Myers said, drawing a ten-pound note from his wallet, ‘here, go put this on Royal Burundi to win the 3.30 at
Haydock. You’d do well to invest a pound or two yourself.’ Then the golden rule: ‘Look the part. No matter what, always look as though you know what you’re doing.’

Simon Myers liked me and recommended to the head of chambers that I be seriously considered for a tenancy. It was for this reason, I think, that I was allocated to Michael Donovan for my second six months of pupillage. They wanted to stretch me, to see what I was really made of.

Donovan had his own specialist, personalized practice – public international law with a sideline in private international and European Community law. That is not to say that he possessed a narrow expertise – not Michael Donovan. Even in areas of the law he was supposed to know nothing about, like defamation or insolvency, he would run rings around the specialist practitioner, tantalizing him with far-fetched hypothetical that would push a principle to its limit and then, after the other had given up or had proposed an inadequate solution to the problem, he would supply an elegant analysis that seemed, in retrospect, blindingly obvious.

So it was an enormous privilege to work alongside Donovan. When I say alongside, I do not mean physically, although my desk was in his room, next to his desk. In fact we saw each other rarely – it was not often that we actually laid eyes on one another. Most of the time Donovan would be away, usually overseas, at an arbitration or conference, and I was left to hold the fort in chambers, turning over paperwork and manning the telephone. But no matter how far away Donovan was, we never lost touch. It is not just that we spoke daily by telephone, no, our communications went deeper than that. I knew what he wanted without his telling me, I anticipated his every unspoken wish. It was as though some wire, some humming conductor, ran between us.

And so I was his anchor man. I laboured night and day for him, unobtrusively ensuring that everything ran smoothly on the home front. Saturdays and Sundays would find me alone in chambers, poring over the books in the basement library until late into the night, my desklamp the only light burning in
the Temple, my face on fire. I worked like crazy. No one at Batstone’s would believe me if I told them, but in those days I never stopped. The responsibility was not just stimulating, it was like a dynamo, shooting wattages through me that I have never known at any other time in my life. In the mornings I would shake off the reins of tiredness and feel a great horsepower pumping up inside me. My work was my reward. When an opinion or pleading I had devilled for Donovan went out unchanged bearing his signature, far from being displeased or resentful at this exploitation of my free labour (like most other pupils, I was unpaid), I was gratified – to think that I, James Jones, had produced a work worthy of the brilliant Professor Donovan!

In my new state of excitement I became fired by ambition – real ambition, not just wishfulness. I desired that tenancy at 6 Essex like nothing else – more than anything in the universe I wanted my name, Mr James Jones, up on the blackboard bearing the tenants’ names in white paint. I would envisage each letter of my name there when I walked in every morning, fantasize over each brushstroke. It would happen, I knew it would; my visions were so vivid that they could only be premonitions. I knew the room I would occupy down to the last detail, down to the paintings I would buy to hang on the wall. My future was under my belt. It all made sense, it all fell into place: sometimes I would awaken from my work and suddenly the ineluctable nature of my situation would be revealed to me: of course, I would think, this is it. This is how it was meant to be.

Looking back on my time at 6 Essex afresh, I think that I was perhaps too unobtrusive, too quietly efficient, too mole-like, for my own good. Just recently I saw a documentary about moles on the television. Moles work night and day. They never rest. If they are not paddling out fresh corridors of earth they are maintaining their existing galleries and tunnels, snapping and crunching intruding roots and mending the walls. The point is, most of this was not known until they sent down one of those fantastic subterranean cameras. Before that
happened, the moles received no credit for their industry. For all anyone knew they were bone idle. Likewise, if I had been a little more prominent about my efforts in the basement, if my profile had been a little higher, then perhaps, just maybe, I would have been offered a tenancy. But I thought there was no need for self-promotion. I thought that Donovan would recognize my worth and stand by me when the decision came to be made as to which one of the seven pupils would be taken on. I thought he would say, Consider Jones, he hasn’t put a foot wrong in six months. I thought he would say, Jones: look no further than Jones.

But no. When the chambers meeting came around Donovan was in Alexandria, with the result that at the meeting there was no one in my corner, no one rooting for me. Oliver Owen was taken on, I was not.

The afternoon that the axe fell I was in the chambers library with the other rejected pupils. All six of us were seated around the oval central table while we numbly contemplated our Weakening futures. Oliver Owen was at El Vino’s with the head of chambers, celebrating.

Then Alastair Smail, the head of the pupillage committee, the man who had made us and broken us, entered the library, whistling a tune through his bright pink lips as though nothing had happened. After searching and craning among the bookshelves he turned round and asked whether anyone had seen
Westcott on Trusts
anywhere. Receiving no reply, he went energetically through the borrowers’ index, fingering the cards and commentating loudly on his progress. Then he looked around and sensed, for the first time, the gloom. ‘What’s the matter with everyone? It’s like a funeral parlour in here,’ he said, leaving without waiting for an answer.

While the others just looked at each other, I got up and followed him, eventually catching up with him in the corridor outside. I needed to speak to him urgently about getting a pupillage elsewhere, in another set of chambers. I had neglected to take precautions on that score (my work had taken up
all my time), and there was a real danger that I would miss the boat completely if I did not act quickly.

‘Alastair, I wonder if I could have a word with you.’