This is the Life (9 page)

The water: Donovan had switched off the water supply before he left.

This was a disaster. I had to do something, or Donovan would come home to a pile of faeces, my faeces. I ran down the stairs to the basement in a sweat. A switch, or a tap, there had to be one somewhere. Walking down a steep and rickety wooden staircase, I came into a room like a refinery, full of gurgling boilers, tanks and mechanisms. As there was not the slightest prospect of pinpointing the water tap, I activated the likeliest looking appliances that I could see. Then I ran back up the stairs.

Nothing. Not the smallest percolation. Oh no, I thought. Oh no. I picked up the toilet brush and tried forcing the material under water, down along the curved swan-neck of the bowl and out of sight. This met with only partial success: parts of the excrement disintegrated and floated back up to freckle the surface. Now the water had an unmistakable brown colour. There was only one thing for it.

The scoop was in a broom cupboard downstairs. It took me half an hour to pour the lavatory’s soiled contents into a bucket, and then to pour the contents of the bucket out of a window into the garden. The paper I put into a plastic bag which I planned to dump in the first wastebin I saw on the way home. It was a horrible, dirty job, but it was almost wholly effective. Someone had taken the precaution of stocking the lavatory with a whole range of odorizers, and aerosol cans with redolent names waited on a pine shelf:
Fragrances of the Forest, Alpine Breeze, Meadow Sweet.
I sprayed a fresh aroma into the air and wiped the seat clean. With luck, Donovan would not notice a thing. Then I went back down to the cellar and moved the levers back to their original positions. I washed my hands in a drop of tapwater and in my relief poured myself a final whisky for the road.

A burning down-in-one later, I made for the front door. The mail, I thought. I had almost forgotten all about it. I bent down
on a knee and rummaged around. There was nothing of interest as far as I could see. Recent portions of law reports, letters from the bank, unexciting brown envelopes and junk mail. Nothing from Arabella or her solicitors. Then, straightening up, it occurred to me that I should check the ansaphone. Perhaps the solicitors, or Arabella herself, had left a message for Donovan there. Donovan would want me to satisfy myself on that score, I reasoned.

There was only one message, spoken in a mild Irish accent. ‘Michael, this is your old man. Son, I’m coming to London on the 6th of November. That’s a Sunday. I’m just over to do one or two things. I’ll be staying at the Savoy for a week or two. Could you give me a ring as soon as you can? Bye, son. Thanks.’

The 6th. That was tomorrow. It looked like Donovan Sr was out of luck, because his son would not be back for weeks. He sounded friendly enough, I thought, as I walked to the door. Then I thought that it was a funny thing, Donovan having a father. This was a silly thing to think, I know, but Donovan was not a man you associated with mundanities; the idea of him as his father’s son had never occurred to me. In the way that you never see a movie star straining on the lavatory, there were certain human functions which seemed to pass Donovan by, at least in my observation. He defied, as far as I was able to tell, the forces of gravity that anchor the rest of us down to earth, the downward tug of the kids, the dishes, the emotions. Donovan was up there in the atmosphere, in that azure above the weather zone, occasionally touching down to resolve the frictions of nations. It seemed almost unnatural, unwholesome even, for a man like that, an astral sailor, to be earthbound by something as prosaic as a father.

I did not ponder it any further. All I wanted was to go, to leave the whole evening far behind me. I replaced the key inside the railing and in my urgency began jogging along the dark and wet street towards my car – when it struck me that all those whiskies had put me over the limit. I would have to take a taxi. There was no question of a man of my position, a lawyer
with a reputation to protect, being convicted for drink driving; and besides, the minimum disqualification period of one year deterred me in any event. The car I could come back for tomorrow.

It is a Sunday morning. I am sitting in a chair in my back garden, watching the insects clocking in and clocking out on the flowers, envying those bees their job sites. Although I am no gardener, I take pleasure in this little patch of nature that is mine. My predecessor took great pains to introduce to the soil a varied and durable flora, and he conveniently inserted small plastic identification-tabs next to the shrubs he planted. That is how I know, for example, that over there that is a forsythia which blooms in those yellows. Without those tabs I would not know what was growing in those beds. Behind the forsythia, at the back of my garden, is a crumbling brick wall which separates my property from the neighbours’. Wild and acrobatic cats, real down-and-outs with chewed-up, clawed-at fur, are always running along the wall, looking for trouble, trapezing over fences erected in their paths or rolling up into orange balls for a snooze.

Taking my cue from those tomcats, I close my eyes for a moment. The sun heats my ears. Somewhere a dog barks, somewhere else someone is hammering at wood, sinking the nails with sharp reports until they disappear. Blat, blat. Blat, blat. There is, I realize with surprise, a cacophony in the air. The tweetering of urban birds in the skimpy trees and on the rooftops, the conversation of a gang of churchgoers, the sounds of water falling down a drainpipe, a hullabaloo of sirens from the direction of the tower blocks, the yelps of children, another dog barking and, now, Edith Piaf resounding from an open window.

This morning I envy goldfishes too. Living in the pure present, swishing and circling around their bowls, each minute a brand-new world. I am tempted, in this untutored early spring warmth, to forget all about this Donovan business. To close my eyes on the past. To wake up, to live in the here and now. That is, after all, where I used to live. Susan remarked upon it once. We were walking from her flat to the tube together one morning. We walked side by side, holding our briefcases. We overtook a couple in their mid-twenties on their way to work. They had reached the crossroads at the end of the street and their paths were about to diverge – he was going right, she left – and they were kissing. It was an old-fashioned spectacle; he held her in his arms and she was on tip-toes, her mouth turned upwards and expectant. I had seen these two together before and knew they could not walk down the street without continuously hugging, squeezing and making eyes at each other. It was the man, in fact, who made the nuzzling, pawing advances; the woman made little attempts to take avoiding action, wiggling and ducking until, delightedly, she allowed herself to be snared and kissed. She would then push him away and then, after a few paces, the whole thing would start again. According to Susan, this was how they were every day, first thing in the morning. Anyway, that particular morning we saw them break from each other at the crossroads and head off in opposite directions along the avenue. Susan and I were on the other side of the road, but we could clearly see the two of them. With every five steps they took they turned round, cocked their heads and sent each other a little wave of the hand. Maybe this set Susan thinking, because she frowned and said, ‘Jimmy, you know, I think we live in different …’ She paused, struggling with her words. ‘I think we’re not living at the same time as each other. Do you know what I mean?’

I hesitated. I was not sure what she meant. ‘Yes,’ I said. I had to admit it, there were times when I did have the impression that we inhabited different time zones. Sometimes, when we spoke and our words overlapped and interfered
with each other, it was as though we were speaking on the telephone from different corners of the globe and were not where we were, in bed together in England. It felt as if it was morning where she lay and that I lay twelve hours away, in the middle of some intercontinental night. But I was not sure that this was what Susan meant.

‘Where would you say you lived, Jimmy? In the past or the present or the future?’

We were walking past a newsagent’s and we stopped while I bought a newspaper. Susan’s question took me unawares. It was, I suspected, a very good question. It went straight to the heart of something – quite what, I was unsure, but it flew like an arrow. I paid the newspaper man his money.

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

She was frowning. Like me, Susan is not blessed with particularly fetching looks. Her hair is shoulder-length and falls in mousy, lanky strands, like rain. Her ankles are on the thick side and although she is small, due to her slightly bulging physique she is not petite. Her best feature is her skin, and her eyes, too, are pleasantly bright when she removes her glasses.

‘I live mainly in the future, but also in the past,’ she said. ‘I’m not like you. You’re lucky, you just live from day to day – I bet you don’t even know what you’re doing tomorrow, do you?’ She was right, I did not. I had no plans for the next day. ‘I’m not very happy with things,’ Susan said simply. ‘That’s why I have to look forwards and backwards to things.’

This was Susan all over. This was the sort of thing she always thought about. It put me under pressure, all this talk of happiness, all this analysis.

‘Cheer up,’ I said, and touched her shoulder. She was sad, and when we turned into the tube station she wordlessly boarded her packed train. I kept my eye on her in the carriage as the windows clouded up. She forced herself between pinstriped commuters, gripping a stainless steel bar an inch from her face. The train rolled off. She was on her way, heading for her office in Hounslow. She worked in the office equipment
business. Her job was to follow up on the photocopiers and computer terminals and telephone systems that her company had sold, and to make sure that everything was to the clients’ satisfaction. It did not sound like a very fulfilling job to me, especially for an intelligent person like Susan. How perceptive of her, for example, to note that she lived in the future! She was right, as well. She was continually preoccupied with upcoming events – ‘It’s my birthday four weeks on Tuesday,’ she would announce. ‘The bank holiday is sixteen days away. What are we going to do?’ Or she would ask: ‘This time next year: I wonder what I’ll be doing this time next year? Or this time ten years from now?’ Poor Susan, I thought, as I stepped on to my train. Poor thing, I thought. I found a seat, opened the newspaper and read about Donovan’s collapse in court.

I would like, then, to put all thought of Donovan out of my mind, but I cannot, not even on a balmy morning like this one, full of easy distractions. So perhaps the best thing would be to take a robust, broad-brush approach to it all, so that I can be done with it, quickly and once and for all? Surely all I need do is state the main facts and draw the necessary conclusions? There is, after all, a limit to how many conclusions one can sensibly draw from events of this sort. And I know that I am no great analyst of human affairs, but is it really necessary, even for me, to go through all the facts at such length?

It is, of course. The truth is, I am miserably incapable of quickly picking out what matters, what is salient and what is not.

Enough asides and irrelevances; seated at my garden table in my dressing-gown, I return to the morning of another Sunday, the morning after my trespass in Donovan’s house. I awoke like an adulterer, racked with guilt, and stepped straight into a powerful shower to cleanse myself. I dressed quickly and caught the tube to Notting Hill. By lunchtime I was back home with my newspaper and a creamy coffee, and everything was back in its place. Enough of Donovan, I thought. No more escapades.

On Monday morning, too, all I wanted was peace and quiet, a return to normality. The last thing I wanted was anything to do with Donovan.

‘James, I have a Mr Donovan for you,’ said June.

A surge of nausea passed through me. He knew. Donovan knew that I had been snooping around his house. Somehow he had found out.

‘I’m not in,’ I said. ‘Tell him I’m out. Tell him I’m in a meeting.’ I had to stall. One of the pieces of equipment the man carried around in his head was a polygraph – in cross-examination he registered lies and evasions instinctively, uncannily – and with my hopelessness at deceit, he would sniff the truth and the whole truth out of me in two seconds flat. It was imperative that I did not speak to him.

I listened to June decisively stalling Donovan. She has a natural talent for that type of task – speedy, unhesitating deception.

‘What did he want?’ I asked.

‘He wants to have lunch with you. He left a number for you to ring at the Savoy.’

The Savoy?

‘June, did Mr Donovan have an Irish accent?’

‘More American, I thought. But yes, he did have a bit of a brogue too, come to think of it.’

I exhaled with relief: that was not Donovan, that was Donovan’s father. Next question: what did he want?

‘I want to talk to you about my son’s divorce,’ said Mr Donovan when he called back. ‘There are one or two things I feel we ought to discuss.’

‘Mr Donovan, you’re aware that my relationship with Mr Donovan – your son, that is – is confidential. I’m not allowed to discuss what we have discussed together, if you understand me.’

‘I know that. But let’s put it this way: I’ve certain things to tell you, and all I’m asking is that you listen. Now, that’s not unethical, is it? I won’t be asking you to disclose anything you feel is between yourself and Michael.’ I hesitated. ‘Mr Jones,’
said Mr Donovan, ‘I would be very appreciative if you could come, because I know your time is scarce. But I really do think it would be in everybody’s interest if we met. Do you have any problem with eating here? At my expense, of course.’