This is the Life

by Joseph O'Neill

  Mr Donovan started eating again. ‘A few days ago I spoke to Arabella’s solicitors.’ He noticed my interest and said, ‘Yes, that’s right, Jim, Arabella, my son’s wife – soon to be my son’s ex-wife unless you people – unless something is done. They told me that you are refusing to talk to them. Is that right?’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘You’re not talking to them?’

  ‘That’s not quite accurate, Mr Donovan,’ I said defensively. ‘I have been in regular communication with Mrs Donovan’s solicitors. Moreover –’

  He interrupted me. ‘Regular communication? Is that what you call it? You’ve been stonewalling every time her solicitor – what’s his name, Hughes – speaks to you! What’s going on, Jim? Maybe I’m stupid, Jim, maybe I’m just a dummy. That’s a distinct possibility, I’ll grant you that.’ Mr Donovan made a gesture of concession with his hands. ‘But as far as I can tell, if you were trying to smash the marriage for good, you couldn’t be going about it a better way!’

  Mr Donovan took a swallow of water and started speaking in a calmer voice. The thing is, Jim, that if Michael took some time to talk to Arabella, I’m sure this whole thing could be resolved. These silences must stop. We’ve got to start opening up the communication channels. Talking, I’m a great believer in talking.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Then, in my iciest voice, I explained that the only thing we refused to talk about with Philip Hughes was divorce. We were more than ready to talk about reconciliation.

  Mr Donovan said, ‘OK, but is that smart? Believe me, Jim, it’s time to shake things up. This is serious. I promised myself I’d get over here and light a fire under your ass, so you’ll forgive me if I’ve come across a little strong. But what you’ve got to realize, Jim, is that we can’t leave this matter in my son’s hands. He’s bound to screw up, the headstrong gobshite.’

  I made a discreet gesture of impatience with my eyes. The meeting was becoming most irregular.

  Mr Donovan kept talking. ‘What am I driving at? I’ll tell you. Number one: be careful about following my son’s instructions. Take them’ – Mr Donovan searched around the table and then picked up the salt cellar – ‘with a pinch of this stuff. Ask him what he wants. Watch him like a hawk, he’s more deceptive than he looks. Number two: keep me informed about what’s going on. Number three: stop the divorce. Whatever you do, Jim, stop the divorce. Whatever it takes, get Arabella back. That means start reconciliations. Now. Tell Mick to say he’s sorry. Let’s have none of this standing on his honour crap, tell him to go to her on bended knee. This is no time for pride or pettiness. Jim, I can’t stress what a disaster it would be if she left my son. He would fall to pieces.’

  I scratched my eyebrow sceptically. Number two, especially, was most unsatisfactory.

  ‘Enough said about all of that,’ Mr Donovan said. ‘I’ll leave you to think about it. You’re smart, you’ll make your own mind up about what I’ve just said.’

  I said nothing. I did not want to give Mr Donovan the slightest sign of encouragement.

  ‘I’ll be here for some time yet,’ Mr Donovan continued. ‘If anything comes up, be sure to call me.’ He chortled. ‘Now, what about some dessert, Jim? That trout can’t have filled you up. Mind you,’ he said, eyeing me, ‘by the looks of you you’d take some filling up.’

  ‘No thank you, I’m fine,’ I said coldly. If I were in better company I would certainly have considered a small pudding. Instead, I lit a cigarette.

  ‘Exercise. I find exercise is the key to health. Look at me, I’m seventy-three years of age. Are you going to make it to seventy-three, Jim? Ask yourself that question. And if you’re not going to make it to seventy-three, what are you going to make it to? Fifty-five? Sixty? Then ask yourself this question: how many years does that leave you with? Let’s face it, it doesn’t add up to a lot of time, does it Jim?’ He eyeballed me again, up and down, as if I were a specimen of horseflesh. ‘How old are you? Thirty-fivish? I’d say you’re well past the half-way mark.’

  My neck felt tight in my collar. ‘That may well be so, Mr Donovan, but I cannot see how that has any bearing on your son’s case.’ I glanced ostentatiously at my wristwatch.

  ‘Golf, Jim. You know what I do with my time? I play golf. Every free morning God gives me I’m up and going at those links. Do you play golf?’

  I saw that I would have to answer. ‘I have played,’ I said.

  ‘Well, we should have a game sometime. When I’m at home I’m on those fairways every day, rain or shine. I play Ballybunion. Do you know Ballybunion? Marvellous course. When we came back from Switzerland, my wife wanted to go back to Limerick, I wanted to move to Ballybunion. So we compromised and went to a place called Askeaton. I live in the Old Rectory there. The old wreck, I call it. My wife’s dead,’ Mr Donovan said. ‘She’s been dead for six years now.’

  Mr Donovan stopped talking to think about his dead wife. After a long silence, I decided to change the subject, and then to leave as soon as the next pause in the conversation arose. ‘Switzerland, you said?’

  ‘That’s right. Geneva. I worked in Geneva from 1946 to 1977. Thirty-one years. I was with the Glayer Corporation – you know, the American outfit. Nowadays they’re probably the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, but in those days, when I joined them, they were just chickenfeed.’ Mr Donovan laughed. ‘Anti-anxiety drugs, that was my racket. Jesus, the crap people swallow these days.’ He folded his napkin into a neat triangle. ‘Mikey went to the International School. A grand school. They taught him three languages, French, Italian and German.’ He chuckled and began to boast. ‘He creamed the French at French and the Germans at German. He wiped the floor with the Italian kid at Italian. He skipped two years. He took his baccalaureate when he was sixteen. Mention très bien,’ Mr Donovan said proudly. Three months later he got a scholarship for Cambridge. He had a great future ahead of him. That’s what everybody said. “Fergus, your son’s got a great future.” What the hell does that mean, a great future?’

  He paused to reflect and I seized my chance. I thanked Mr Donovan for the meal and rose to go. He did not just shake my hand, he gripped it. ‘Don’t forget what I said,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Use your initiative. Stay in touch.’

  Walking back to the office, I resolved to avoid Mr Donovan like the plague.

  EIGHT

  Two days after my meeting with Mr Donovan, events took a bizarre, if not grotesque, turn’. I was at work and Mr Lexden-Page was sitting at my desk. I was trying to dissuade him from continuing his ill-judged action against the local authority responsible for the paving-stone he claimed to have stubbed his foot on.

  ‘The likelihood is that your claim will be struck out as frivolous and vexatious,’ I was explaining. ‘You will be forced to pay not only your costs, but also the costs incurred by the council. I can assure you that these will not be negligible. They could easily run into thousands of pounds.’

  Lexden-Page said, ‘I don’t care how much it will cost me. I’m not in this for the money. There’s more to life than just money, Jones.’

  I tried another tack. ‘Let’s take the best possible scenario,’ I said. ‘Let’s say we win.’

  ‘We will win,’ Lexden-Page asserted.

  I spoke slowly. ‘Now, even if we manage to show that the council was negligent, we will be in great difficulty over damages. For a start, we have no medical certificate from a doctor regarding the injury to your toe.’ My words, I saw, were making no impact. Lexden-Page sat with his arms folded, gazing at the rooftops behind my head. Then there is the question of the shoeshine you’re claiming for,’ I persisted. There’s a problem with causation here: would you not have gone for that shoeshine in any event? Who’s to say your accident caused you to have a shoeshine you would not otherwise have had?’

  ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ Lexden-Page said. ‘I don’t care how petty the damages will be. I’m going ahead with it.’

  ‘Mr Lexden-Page, litigation is, for better or worse, all about
money. The courts are unsympathetic to plaintiffs who simply seek to air a grievance. I advise you in the strongest terms to settle this matter or, better still, to discontinue it altogether.’ Lexden-Page plundered his ear with his little finger, which he then pointedly examined. Clearly he was having difficulties hearing me, so I decided to use more graphic language. ‘If you will pardon the expression, any money you pour into this action is money down the lavatory bowl.’

  I froze.

  ‘Are you my solicitor or the council’s?’ I heard Lexden-Page say. ‘I pay my taxes, same as everybody else. The courts belong to me, d’you hear? Those judges are my servants.’

  The episode in Donovan’s lavatory. The plastic bag full of turds and toilet-paper. I had left it in his house.

  ‘Why should I not be able to sue the bloody council just because I haven’t broken an arm and a leg? Was I the one who left the pavement in a shambles? A man can’t even walk down the street any more. What’s the point in living in a democracy, what’s the point of freedom, if a man can’t even walk down the street? Eh?’

  I would have to go back. Hopefully the key would still be in the railing. The prospect of Donovan discovering the plastic bag did not bear thinking about.

  ‘Look here, Jones, you know what I want and I’ve heard your spiel. Now let’s get on with it. This whole business has been delayed enough.’

  Feeling slightly unwell, I returned my attention to my client. Lexden-Page was about twenty-eight, although his puffy, rosy face suggested a younger man. He was wearing a tweed suit and circular spectacles. A transparent moustache grew hesitantly from his nostrils. He made grimaces as he spoke, twisting his mouth and wrinkling up his eyes into unpleasant, irritating contortions. He snorted.

  ‘Well? Are we going to see something happen or not? Or do I have to take my business elsewhere?’

  He curled his nostrils, and I realized to my surprise that he filled me with loathing. My clients rarely made an emotional impact on me. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Lexden-Page,’ I said coldly.

  I would leave for Colford Square immediately after work.

  The keys were where I had left them, in the rust-cavity in the railing. Furtively I fumbled at the front door, trying the locks until the bolts gave way and clacked satisfyingly in the woodwork. I spotted the plastic bag immediately, a white translucent heap against the wall. Thankfully there was no smell. Quickly I picked it up and turned to leave. Then I stopped. Upstairs, I remembered, were the tapes and the notebooks.

  Don’t go up there, I said to myself. Don’t do it. Just walk out of the door and go home.

  Maybe it was the tension of the situation, I do not know, but all of a sudden I found it difficult to balance myself on my feet. My head spun slightly and I swayed from side to side, as if the house keeled and rocked on foundations of waves. So I stood still, leaning against the wall, breathing deeply. Then everything suddenly accelerated. Before I knew what was happening I had released the bag and was transported up the staircase, up to Donovan’s study. I found myself overtaken by events; I found myself in my raincoat, quickly inserting into the recorder the cassette I had played on my last visit. I replayed Tape 1, dated 25 September 1988, until I came to the tongue-twisters and the eerie, disembodied laughter, the point where I had stopped listening on that last night.

  What I heard next was Donovan speaking in French. To my ear the accent was flawless and the sentences perfectly cadenced and modulated. It was practically a joy to listen to. I could not make head or tail of it.

  I continued playing the tape. An authoritative chunk of German issued from the machine, followed by what sounded like a fluent outpouring of Italian (I could not be sure, my knowledge of these languages is almost non-existent). What was he saying? What message was he relaying?

  Then everything fell into the place.

  Tired of trying to decode the incomprehensible foreign utterings, my mind turned lazily, almost by way of recreation, to the dates of the writings and recordings – the last week of September 1988. It came to me instantaneously.

  September 1988: it was in the beginning of September 1988, on the 8th of September to be exact, that Donovan had lost his powers of communication; that was when his ability to speak and write had deserted him, in Luxembourg, on his feet in the European Court of Justice. Of course, of course, I thought, of course! These notebooks and tapes were exercises in communication! The drawings of the squares and triangles, the list of words taken from the opening of a dictionary – they were all self-imposed writing drills, a systematic relearning of the ABCs! It fitted in, even the tapes of tongue-twisters – they were verbal circuits, designed to lick his speech back into shape. With these recordings Donovan was exercising his vocal cords for the first time in weeks, putting his pharynx, larynx, lips and glottis through their paces, forcing his organs of speech through the oral equivalent of squat-thrusts, sit-ups and star-jumps.

  I switched the tape back on with a new sense of purpose.

  Indiscriminately, senselessly it seemed to me, Donovan began articulating extracts from treaties, slowly quoting provisions of multilateral conventions – it was hard to say, from the tone of his delivery, whether he was relying on recollection or whether he was reciting from books at hand. What was clear was that he was plainly enjoying himself; in all probability this was the first time he had spoken properly since his breakdown in court. He was eating his words. Like a starved man at a banquet he pigged himself with vocables of any kind. He was wolfing down vowels, phonemes, diphthongs and consonants, making a meal of sibilants and alveolars and slowly regaling on labiodentals. He was licking clean the platter of pronunciation, and so palpable was his gastronomical relish that it almost made my mouth water. In the same way that his father’s enthusiastic eating habits gave me an appetite, hearing Donovan like this made me feel like saying a few words myself.

  So I was right, then. I allowed myself a grunt of vindication. Oliver Owen was wrong. Donovan had not, after all, faked his collapse. It had been a bona fide breakdown.

  The recording came to an end. Sweating a little (I was still in my raincoat, I was not planning to stay long) I went back to the notebooks to steal a last glance at their contents before I went. I picked up a fresh one dated 26 September 1988 – the day after Tape 1 had been made. When I saw what was written, I took off my raincoat. This I had to read.

  The first thing I noticed was this: Donovan’s handwriting had progressed from the careful, scuttling script of the previous notebook. He wrote more cursively, in the semi-legible fashion I recognized from my pupillage, the letters small and purposeful, and I could tell that he was at ease with himself. Then I thought: what was it he had written down so flowingly?

  Cases. Set out, for twenty-seven pages, and in no particular order, were law cases. It was an extraordinary sight. There were decisions from just about every field of the law I knew something of, cases in company law, contract, tort, conflicts of laws, criminal law, insurance law, road traffic law, public international law, commercial law, Islamic law, employment law and constitutional law. There must have been thousands of authorities on those pages – and not just famous ones like Donoghue v. Stevenson or Salomon v. Salomon, but piddling, minute cases nobody had ever heard of, like Lochgelly Iron & Coal Co. Ltd. v. Crawford and Re Euro Hotel (Belgravia) Ltd. In awe I realized what Donovan had done: effortlessly, as though he were emptying his pockets, he had turned his mind inside out. What was remarkable was not simply the number of cases on view (not many lawyers could, off the top of their heads, name more than a hundred), but the fact that there was no mnemonic device that I could spot: no numbers, no alphabetical sequences, no classification according to subject. Yes, he knew those cases like the back of his hand. In fact, so fluid and complete was Donovan’s grasp of his legal materials that it did not seem as though his powers of recall came into it. He had not remembered these names, he had taken biological possession of them; it was as though they had entered him intravenously and now ran through his veins.
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  This blood relationship was illustrated by the next two lists, which organized the cases into, firstly, calendrical order, then into thematic blocks. I shook my head. Surely no one had ever known so much law so well! In a daze I turned to the last list – the names, I guessed, of all of the actions in which Donovan had ever received a brief. Again, this was an extraordinary feat – the equivalent, I would say, of naming every person you had ever met, in order of appearance.

  I breathed deeply and sat back in my chair. I knew, of course, the purpose of these lists – they were a continuation of the training programme that Donovan had imposed on himself to regain his fighting fitness. This was like Mike Tyson pumping iron in the mountains. I marvelled at his self-discipline and his determination. With all his natural talent, still he drove himself to the limit of his abilities.

  Closing the notebook, I happened to look down. There, in the corner of the room, I noticed for the first time a large terrestrial globe. It was not a political globe. There were no borderlines or territorial delineations or colour schemes denoting spheres of political influence. The cartographer was concerned only with the natural features of the planet. Mountains, oceans, gulfs, continents, rivers, deserts and volcanoes were given their names, but there was no sign of states, cities, duchies, sheikhdoms or dioceses. Submarine gradations and profundities were particularly detailed, with the continental shelves shown in silver-white, the abyssal plains in cobalt and the deep ocean trenches in delft blue. All in all, the world looked pretty good like that, I thought. (It was only later that I realized the globe’s significance to Donovan.)

  Then, looking further around, I saw, among the rows and rows of law reports that ran around the walls, a section of the shelves filled with miscellaneous law books. I recognized a few names – Lauterpacht, Jennings, McNair, Brownlie, H. L. A. Hart – but nothing unusual caught my eye. Nothing, that is, until I saw a stack of computer paper of the continuous, perforated kind, on the bottom shelf. I stood up and went over. The sheaf of papers was at least four inches deep, and on the top page were printed the words Supranational Law.