A book – it was the draft of a new book. Carefully, making sure my fingers did not leave a smudge, I leafed through the sheets. Yes, there was no doubt about it. This was a major new work.
Here I have to stop. Here I have to call a halt to this headlong gallop of words, because it is from here on in that things begin to get a little less straightforward. Until now the going has been easy, until now it has been a canter: but the moment has arrived to proceed with caution. In cowboy films you sometimes see a group of riders, a posse, after some outlaw. For a while their man is visible in the distance, a puff of smoke among the buttes. Then the terrain changes. The land starts to undulate and the riders lose sight of the outlaw behind hills. They are forced to dismount, to study the ground for his trail. Now perhaps I am being a little fanciful, but right now I could be in that posse, hot on the heels of Donovan’s mystery; and, likewise, I am going to have to start looking out for tracks in the dust. Why? Because I am approaching the moment when the incomprehension that afflicts me begins to set in, when things start knotting mazily in my head. My problem is not that I am not sure exactly what occurred next. I have an outline of the facts in my mind right at this moment. If the telephone rang and someone asked me to relate the events that followed, I could do so without any difficulty at all. No, I have no doubts at all about what took place: only I am beginning to think that there is a difference between what took place and what really happened. Now it may be that I am splitting hairs – maybe, as lawyers are fond of saying, I am drawing a distinction without a difference. But I do not think so; because the facts, on their own, lead me to confusion. Somewhere, during this last year, I lost track of Donovan, which means that somewhere there is a spoor that I have missed.
As I have said, leafing through the sheaf of papers I had no doubts: this was a major new work. I made a calculation: Donovan’s last book (the third edition of his text-book) had come out in 1980, which meant that he had been working on this new book for almost ten years.
I went cold. I had to have a copy.
I began searching around the office. I opened drawers and ran through heaps of documents. I scoured and rummaged and exhaustively ransacked (I cringe when I think of my molestful, unconscionable actions!), and at last I uncovered the floppy disc I was looking for. Quickly I activated the word processor. Up flashed the Introduction to the book, showing up on the monitor in green, painful letters. The Introduction, which was twenty-three pages long, would have to be enough. There was no question of printing out the whole text.
Minutes later I switched off the computer and slipped into my raincoat. Under my arm was the bundle of papers that I had printed out, and it was time to be on my way. Then, instead of leaving, I behaved disgracefully.
As I walked out of the study I saw that the door to the adjoining room was ajar and that inside was an unmade double bed. Without the slightest hesitation I went in. It was their bedroom. By the high windows Arabella’s toiletries filled the surface of a dressing-table. Shamelessly I surveyed bottles of scent, mascara sticks, cotton buds for cleaning ears, several powder brushes, lipsticks and bottles of baby lotion. (Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, that is what I did. As I write now and feel myself back in that house, grubbily sifting through those private belongings with my sweating, blotchy hands, rifling around in breach of trust, in my raincoat, a hot, ineradicable shame fills me to the brim. Inexcusable! My behaviour was inexcusable!)
I looked around. On the bedside table stood a photograph in a glass frame. I picked it up and studied it. It was a strange photograph, really. It showed the top half of a woman. She was wearing a huge circular straw hat, and its disc covered almost her entire back. There was no sign of her face or her hair, and what revealed her to be a woman were the bare, bangled arms that protruded outwards and upwards from the side of the hat, fingers outstretched – slender, hairless arms that could only belong to a woman. Arabella. It had to be. She was looking out to the sea, the bar of blue with a sun-burned, yellow-rocked island on its rim. It was clear that this was a holiday snapshot, but that was all that I could deduce. I tried to read more into it, but all I came up with was that this was Arabella on holiday. Any guesses or theories I entertained (about her looks, about why Donovan might like this picture) just bounced off the photograph as though it were a mirror.
Feeling locked out and frustrated, I put the photograph down and went over to a big white wooden cupboard. Its wellmade door slid open with just a push of the finger. One half of the cupboard, with the exception of two dresses, a thermal vest and some tinkling clothes-hangers, was deserted, while in the other half were suspended some suits and shirts. Some more clothes were scattered about the room, including a clean, wrinkly mountain of whites by an opened ironing-board. A bathroom joined the bedroom and I went in there, too. Inexplicably (what could I have been thinking of?), I rooted around the aftershaves and moisturizers and toothbrushes. Of course, I found nothing of interest. Undeterred, I climbed the stairs to the third floor. What could a childless couple do with such a big house? I asked myself. Unsurprisingly, the rooms were simply used as guest rooms or as spare rooms filled mostly with books and suitcases. What did I do? I rummaged around. I opened trunks and unpacked boxes, I pried and snooped and intruded. Needless to say, my discoveries were banal: old clothes, tool-boxes, old novels, spare rugs, bicycle tyres.
(Why did I not stop to think about what I was doing? And anyway, what was I expecting to find? Secret doorways? Diaries? Treasure? A message? Who did I think I was, one of those teenage sleuths in children’s thrillers, the ones who crack drugs rings on their holidays? What – no, who, possessed me that I did these things? I have said that Donovan unlocked me like an old house: who moved into me? Who was the new lessee?)
My intrusiveness did not end there. Before I left I went down to the telephone answering machine. You never know, I figured: there just might be something important. I depressed the button and, apart from Fergus Donovan’s old message, heard the following, spoken in ripe, emotional tones that I recognized: Michael, this is Arab. A hesitation as the speaker thought of what to say. Then, almost ferociously, Stop it. Just stop it. Another hesitation. Bye.
NINE
Given the way of things, it was some days before I actually perused Donovan’s work. Away from the heightened atmosphere of his study, I was disinclined to muster the concentration and time that was needed for the task. Also, I had other preoccupations which I could not simply brush aside. Foremost amongst these was my date with Susan.
The meeting was Susan’s idea, not mine. She telephoned me at work, out of the blue: to see how I was, she said. Then, awkwardly and bravely, she had suggested we meet. Not wishing to rebuff her, I quickly said, Yes, of course, good idea – and that was that. I had committed myself.
Saturday night, therefore, found me in a taxi on the way to a restaurant in Leicester Square, uneasy and a little anxious. I was profoundly unsure about the whole encounter. We had originally arranged to see each other the previous Saturday, but I had been forced to cancel because of my appointment to meet Donovan in Colford Square. I had telephoned Susan beforehand and begun apologizing profusely. She breezily interrupted me. There’s no need to explain anything, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘If you can’t make it, you can’t make it. That’s all there is to it.’
I hesitated. It was unlike Susan to make so light of such a thing.
She registered my surprise and said, ‘It’s not as though we owe each other anything, is it? The days of making excuses are gone, Jimmy.’
I hastily agreed. If one thing was clear in my mind, it was that I did not want us to resume our old relationship. That was over and done with, and a good thing too. In my recollection the inconveniences had clearly outweighed the satisfactions. What made me qualmish in the taxi was that Susan’s intentions were less clear. I suspected that what she wanted was, at the very least, some form of discussion about, and examination of, our time together. That was how she was, she had an almost archaeological approach to
our relations – she liked to disinter them, hold them up for inspection, label and analyse them. It was a habit I had found tiring and disconcerting, and it was one reason why I associated Susan with a terrible weightiness; by the end I felt in her presence like a man deeply submerged, the air a far-off roof of light, the water like concrete. I made up my mind to take a firm grip of the evening. The talk was not to take any untoward direction.
I arrived at the restaurant, a place called Garfunkel’s, in good time. I had suggested the place. It was not a romantic venue: synthetic tabletops, harsh lights and a floor overcrowded with an unappealing clientele (students, parents with troublesome children, downmarket types generally). The food (steak and chips, scampi, beefburgers etcetera – ‘honest’ food, I think it is called) was on the fast side, which meant that the meal would not be lengthy. I took a seat at a table and ordered a bottle of house red. By the time Susan arrived (at eight on the dot) I had drunk two glasses and smoked three cigarettes.
I watched her peer around the numerous tables with squinting eyes until she spotted me. When she started walking towards the table I really began to feel nervous. It was our first face to face meeting since our split-up – our first meeting for one month and twelve days, to be exact. Rising from my chair I saw that she had awkwardly extended her arm, and for the first time in our lives we shook hands. I caught the waiter’s eye as soon as we sat down and we ordered before conversing.
‘I’m still in Hounslow,’ Susan said positively when I asked her about her work. ‘But I’m looking to start afresh somewhere after Christmas, once I’ve picked up my bonus. There are one or two things in the pipeline.’
‘Good,’ I said encouragingly. It must be said that I bore absolutely no ill feelings towards Susan. Quite the contrary, I wished her well. I wished her every happiness.
I loosened my tie. Although we were sitting at a spacious table for four, I felt peculiarly claustrophobic. My trousers felt tight around my thighs and my jacket constrained my shoulders. Recently I read one of the poems they put up on the underground nowadays, among the advertisements for secretarial agencies and skin creams. The poem was by a man called Muldoon, an author with whom I am unfamiliar (I do not read poetry as a rule). Although I did not understand the second half of the poem, its first half was clear enough and has stayed in my mind. It is about two people sitting down for a meal and cleverly describes how there was barely enough room at their table for themselves plus their former selves. The same applied to Susan and me – not only were we seated at the table, but also pulling up a chair were myself as her lover, herself as my girlfriend, the James Jones that had bored and irritated her, the Susan Northey that had caused me anxiety and all the other people we had been together – jokers, cooks, drinkers, travelling companions, tired employees and lustful sexual partners. I sensed them flapping open their napkins and picking up their knives and forks. They were elbowing me in the ribs and crowding the space under the table with their feet.
The food arrived. ‘What about you?’ Susan said.
‘I’m still at Batstone’s,’ I glumly. ‘Some old boring stuff really.’ I wanted to impress upon her how dull my life was, and how fortunate she was to be out of it. To remove any doubt about my unattractiveness, I had taken care not to shave and wore an unflattering suit which revealed my corpulence.
We chewed our food in silence. I could hear the iceberg lettuce crunching and resounding in my mouth and the cutlery clanking against the plates. I decided to steer the talk to a neutral topic which would, with luck and careful management, see us through a significant part of the evening. I said, There is one case, though, which is rather interesting. But you must promise not to tell anyone what I’m going to tell you. It’s confidential.’ Then I ran through the Donovan story, taking it from his collapse to my second, clandestine visit to his house (concerning the latter I told only of my discovery of the manuscript, omitting my shameful searches thereafter).
When I finished there was a silence. Susan had not asked any questions during my discourse and she bore an indifferent expression. Obviously she could not see the significance of what I had said. I realized that she did not grasp Donovan’s greatness. ‘What you’ve got to understand,’ I said, ‘is that Donovan is the kind of lawyer who comes along once every hundred years. What happens to him is, well, history.’
She looked at me doubtfully. After a pause she said, ‘Jimmy, I’d like to talk about us.’
‘Us?’
‘Yes, us – you and me.’ She fixed a determined gaze upon me.
I looked down at my plate. A guiltiness passed through me. I could think of nothing to say.
Susan spoke. ‘I think that things ended rather messily between us, don’t you? I’d like to, you know, talk about it a little – tidy things up a bit.’ She laughed anxiously. ‘I mean, we had some good times together, didn’t we Jimmy?’
I stopped sawing out a triangle of medium rare steak and looked up. Susan was suddenly looking uncertain and vulnerable and I said quickly, reassuringly, ‘Yes, we did. We did have some good times. Of course we did, Suzy.’
I was visited by a flashback. Susan and I had, from time to time, gone away for weekends – to Lincoln, to Paris, to Dublin. What I remembered was walking up the cobbled hill at Lincoln and also along a leafy bank of the Seine on blazing days, and on each occasion Susan clutching me suddenly and pressing herself against me, saying, ‘Oh Jimmy, I am so happy.’ At the end of the weekends she would say, ‘Oh, we’ve enjoyed ourselves so much – haven’t we Jimmy? It’s been lovely, hasn’t it?’ And I would say, with all the tenderness I knew, ‘Yes, my love, it has. It’s been lovely,’ and I would reach my arm around her and squeeze hard. I could see her logging away the weekend as a happy one, one with a tick of approval alongside it, two days to be cherished, two days with a future. Always she cried when, bags in hand, we stepped out of the bed-and-breakfast or hotel to leave. Her small eyes gleamed and she buried her wettening face in my chest as the arrival of every new minute brought with it a fresh and tearing dispossession.
I repeated myself. ‘We had plenty of fine times,’ I said with warmth.
She slowly ate her last morsels of scampi. When she spoke again I saw once more that determined, gritty look. The jaw was set, the mouth pursed intently, the crease between her faint eyebrows deeper. I knew that look from somewhere, and it made me apprehensive. I poured out what remained of the wine. The sooner we drank up and left, the better.
‘What went wrong between us Jimmy?’ she asked quietly. ‘Hmm? What do you think happened?’
This was exactly what I had feared: a reconstruction of our relationship – an excavation, dusting-off, scrutiny and reassembly of the shards. Susan could not leave well alone. Why didn’t she just enjoy the dinner? I looked around for the waiter to ask for the bill, but the man was nowhere to be seen.
‘I don’t know,’ I said unenthusiastically. ‘Things just didn’t work out, I suppose.’ A bland smile played on my lips. I saw from Susan’s face that this reply was unsatisfactory, so I decided to play for time. Luckily, my legal training came to my help and a semantic device occurred to me. ‘I’m not sure that it’s useful to talk about what went wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that anything, or many things, went wrong. I think it was more the case that not enough things went right.’ She looked unconvinced, so I continued. ‘You see, when you say that something went wrong, you imply things were right in the first place. I’m not sure that that was so with us.’
Susan considered what I had said then visibly rejected it. That gritty expression settled once more on her face and it came to me where I had seen that look before. She had worn it one day when she had set about unblocking her kitchen sink. I was ready to call the plumber and be done with it, but Susan persisted. She pressed and drove the plunger again and again until finally the plughole yielded up its stubborn contents. She wore that look right now. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when I caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for the bill with a scribbl
ing movement of the hand, Susan firmly said, ‘And we’ll have another bottle of house red, and coffee.’ There was to be no escape.
And then it happened. I was powerless to prevent it, the matter was out of my hands. We had more, lots more, to drink, and soon – well, soon, as they coyly say, one thing led to another. First of all the discussion of what had gone wrong was, to my relief and surprise, abandoned, and instead we reminisced; and of course we reminisced about those moments when things were magical: soon we recalled how we first met, at a friend’s party, and how exciting our courting days had been.
‘At the beginning, every time you rang I felt sick,’ Susan said, blushing. ‘The first time, when I picked up the phone I nearly swooned.’
I smiled, fingering my glass. We had had this conversation before, but it was always nice to hear it again. How many other girls had ever felt faint at the sound of my voice?
‘What about you?’ Susan asked. She allowed herself a grin. ‘How did you feel?’
‘I felt pretty excited, too,’ I said.
‘How excited? How exactly?’
I gave a shy smile and pretended to give the question thought. ‘I felt a knocking in my chest. Thump, thump, thump,’ I said. ‘It was my heart. My heart was jumping all over the place.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said. She was blushing with pleasure. ‘When I picked up the phone to ring you, my ears were pounding too; it was like I was listening to my heart with a stethoscope.’ I poured it on. She loved it when my talk grew lyrical. She revelled in it. ‘I could hardly hear your voice my ears were pounding so much.’
‘Jimmy, I feel dizzy now … Stop, stop it now …’
This is the Life Page 9
