This is the Life

by Joseph O'Neill

  Donovan’s first shot, his drive at the first hole, was just about the last shot that he hit properly. After that, as sports commentators say, the wheels came off. Almost every shot he aimed, wedges, woods, mid-irons, went terribly wrong. Either he duffed it, flying huge chunks of turf into the air, or, when he did connect, he sent the ball deep into the trees. I could barely watch. A large, strong man like him struggling to swat an immobile white ball; it was, in all honesty, a pathetic spectacle. The situation grew even more embarrassing when, after we had spent ten minutes raking around the undergrowth for Donovan’s ball, Mr Donovan began impatiently coaching his son.

  ‘Remember, keep your head down,’ he said as Donovan stood over the ball. ‘And for God’s sake, slow on the backswing.’

  Donovan looked silently at his father before turning to his ball. He concentrated for a moment and swished. The ball sliced away out of bounds.

  ‘Slow on the backswing!’ Mr Donovan exclaimed. ‘How many times do I have to tell you! Slow on the backswing! Look at Jim,’ he said, much to my discomfort, ‘look at the way he’s hitting it, nice and easy. Jesus,’ Mr Donovan said. Then, at the next hole, when Donovan had fluffed a 4-iron: ‘Hit through the ball! You’re hitting at it! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, anyone would think you’d never played before in your life!’

  What was interesting was Donovan’s reaction to all of this. He seemed completely unmoved. It was as though he was not bothered by his failure at all. This struck me as odd, because to come to grief on a golf course is, to most players, an intense personal disaster. To play like a rabbit, your every gaffe and blunder visible to the whole world, is a crushing experience. That was the reason I had put away my clubs these last years – because the pain of the game was simply too great. Donovan, though, seemed to have some kind of inbuilt anaesthetic. His mis-hits did not hurt him. He seemed completely unembarrassed about losing to me, an inferior, and to his father, a white-haired man in his seventies. There he was, calm as you like, and even when his father goaded him (‘You couldn’t hit a bull’s ass with a banjo,’ or, after a fresh-air shot in front of a gallery of members, ‘Jesus Christ. That’s it. That’s the last time I’m ringing you up for a game.’) he remained unmoved and equable, hardly speaking at all. I could not understand it.

  We stopped half-way through our round to sit down on a bench and eat a chocolate bar. Mr Donovan totted up the score and calculated that, at a pound a hole, I had won three pounds and he six. Then there was a silence as we rested. The course was hilly and the steep slopes had tired us. I lit a cigarette.

  Then Mr Donovan spoke up. ‘Jim, I’m going to let you into a secret.’

  I said nothing. I hunched my shoulders and sucked at my cigarette. Sandwiched between the Donovans, I felt uncomfortable.

  ‘Women,’ Mr Donovan said, ‘are like golf courses.’

  I stole a look at Donovan, who was sitting right next to me. From my acute angle it was hard to tell what he made of his father’s sudden pronouncement. Probably he had heard it before, because he was staring inanimately out at the horizon.

  Mr Donovan warmed to his theme. ‘You know what that means, Jim? It means if you want to know what makes a good woman, you look at what makes a good course.’ He laughed and turned to me. ‘You think I’m bullshitting? Well, just give it some thought. Just think about it.’

  We swallowed our chocolate bars and took our shots.

  ‘So, the next question is, what makes a good golf course?’ Mr Donovan asked as we walked down the fairway. ‘I’ll tell you. First and foremost, a good course is demanding – it’s tough. It stretches you, it shows up your limits. Number two – and this is less important – a good course looks good. Not pretty – that’s not necessary – but good. Ballybunion or Troon aren’t pretty, but they’re handsome all the same. Myself,’ Mr Donovan said, ‘I don’t like your tarted-up courses, the type you get in Spain, with their palm trees and their fancy bunkers. Give me a grizzly links any day of the week, something with real character.’ Mr Donovan pulled his trolley along. He caught me looking at him and laughed and said, ‘Am I right, Jim?’

  I smiled weakly, but my unease had by now grown acute. The situation felt all wrong: what was I doing playing golf with Donovan, and what was I doing beating him?

  We all reached the green. We took out our putters and stalked around, studying our putts. Meanwhile, Mr Donovan picked up where he had left off. ‘A good golf course is hazardous but fair,’ he said. ‘It rewards you for good shots and doesn’t screw you around.’ He got down on his haunches and peered at his line to the hole through the curves and borrows of the green. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘if you play badly, then it punishes you. Then it kicks your ass.’

  He then said suddenly, ‘Jim, my wife, Mikey’s mother, she was, you could say, a major championship course. She was like a Hoylake, or an Augusta or Brookline.’

  We putted out and walked up a hill and over a bridge to the next tee. A natural silence descended. There was only the sounds of our steps, the breeze, the motorway behind the trees humming like a sea behind dunes. I looked down at my feet, spiking through scrolled, orangey leaves as I walked. Suddenly and queerly everything had become emotional.

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Donovan said, ‘you don’t get many women in that bracket. They’re scarcer than hen’s teeth. Arabella,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Arabella is one of them. That’s right, isn’t it, Mikey? She’s one in a million.’

  Again I thought: why is it they hold Arabella in such high regard? Apart from being her father’s daughter, she was just an ordinary person as far as I could see. Why, then, the big deal?

  Donovan did not say anything and at first I could not see any expression on his face. He stood up on the tee and shaped to hit his drive and I pointed my eyes down at my feet. But then, when after quite some time I had not heard the swish of the swing, I looked up. Donovan was furiously gripping his club, and his skin had gone red. Then I saw his eye secrete a drop of clear fluid. It ran down his nose and dripped off its tip, like a drop from a tap. I was taken aback. Some kind of lachrymal activity was taking place, that I was sure of, the tear ducts were visibly functioning: but surely Donovan could not be crying? As another drop leaked from his eye, I came to the conclusion that, extraordinary as it might seem, some form of weeping was indeed occurring. I did not jump to this conclusion, most certainly not: I was driven and cornered into it by the facts. There was no wind or sand blowing into Donovan’s face, nor was there any real question of the fluid being sweat or some other exudative. Therefore either he had suddenly developed a leaky eye (a common enough condition, but one I had never witnessed in him), or he was crying. The latter was plainly the more probable.

  Michael is crying! I suddenly thought.

  He swung at the ball and badly mis-hit it. I shivered with shame and guilt and wished myself back at home, in my bath. I stood still and said nothing. He would hate me for ever for having seen him in his moment of weakness. He brushed his nose with his sleeve and walked quickly after his ball.

  My head pulsing with blood, I walked softly behind my playing partners. Old Mr Donovan went into the bushes to help his son to look for his ball. I judged it wise to leave them by themselves and went over to my own ball, forty yards away, and, trying to blend into the background, waited. I watched the two of them snooping around in the undergrowth, thwacking away for a long time. From their postures I saw that they were talking – or rather, the father was talking and the son listening.

  I was watching a scene of intimacy and I felt ridiculous; in all my life I had never felt so out of place. The Donovans and me: was there ever a more ill-suited three-ball? So why, then, had Mr Donovan asked me to come? Did he hope that the three of us might discuss the case afterwards, in the clubhouse? Or had he planned to reveal another Michael to me, a more vulnerable Michael, Michael the duff golfer? Perhaps he hoped that the spectacle would puncture my admiration for his son. Perhaps he thought I had too grand a vision of him and that this would cut hi
m down to size, thus giving me the confidence to exert greater influence over him.

  More fool he! I thought to myself. What did he take me for, a simpleton? My esteem for Donovan was purely professional, nothing more, nothing less. Did he think I was incapable of distinguishing the man from the lawyer? I had no expectations of Donovan on the personal front – he was a normal man on that side of things, an unexceptional man. Indeed, there was a slight uncanniness about this – the fact that his extraordinariness as a jurist went hand in hand with this utter normality. Just as evil men do not sport tails with tridents or bare yellow fangs, so with Donovan was there no outward manifestation or advertisement of his genius. On the surface he was a regular guy. He pulled on his trousers in the morning like the rest of us. He hooked golfballs into water hazards just like you and I. Did Mr Donovan imagine that I did not know this?

  They emerged from the bushes. They were still talking, and their conversation continued out of my earshot during the remaining holes of the round. I wondered what they were talking about, but as soon as I approached them they fell silent. It was obviously a private and important matter. Thus excluded from the talk, I concentrated on my game. I did well. By the end I had won six pounds.

  Afterwards we sat on the clubhouse terrace, looking down on players putting on the eighteenth green. When I say ‘we’ I am referring to Mr Donovan and me – Donovan himself had rushed off immediately, despite his father’s entreaties to him to stay. (‘Stay Mikey, just for one drink,’ Mr Donovan had said. ‘Come on, we’ll have a beer together. I’ll buy. Come on, son.’ ‘I can’t,’ Donovan had said. ‘I have to go.’) I thanked Mr Donovan for the game. Given his forthcoming nature I expected him to reveal what had been said between him and his son on the course, but he said nothing on that subject. Perhaps their exchanges had been insignificant, after all. Perhaps they had talked about golf or the weather in Ireland. (Such were the handicaps I laboured under; so often I simply had no way of telling what was taking place, even before my own eyes.)

  We had a beer together in silence. Then I felt obliged to voice a complaint. I said that it was unsatisfactory that I had not been told that Michael would be coming. I told him it had prejudiced our relationship. Michael would now suspect, however wrongly, that inappropriate communications had taken place between us. I wanted to know why this little meeting had been set up, I said.

  ‘What?’ Then Fergus Donovan caught up with what I had said. Last night, he explained tiredly, he had, for once, got through to his son, and he had asked him to play with us. He couldn’t see anything wrong with that. As for all this stuff about prejudice, he did not know what I was talking about.

  I was about to argue my point of view when I saw that Fergus Donovan was distressed about something. He was shaking his head and muttering something to himself. Now I felt ashamed about my niggardly outburst. This was an old man who had travelled a long way to see his son, to lend him a helping hand. Judging by what had happened that day, it looked as though there were communication problems between the two. Donovan, it looked like, was not giving much away to his father. Judging by his early exit after the golf, he was not giving him much of his time, either. And then, of course, there had been the spectacle of his son weeping. No wonder Fergus Donovan was upset.

  I offered the old man a beer, but he declined. As we said goodbye he handed me my six pounds’ winnings which Donovan had forgotten to pay. ‘I’ll not have it said that the Donovans don’t pay their debts,’ he said.

  I think it is worth mentioning what happened next. I left the golf course wrapped up, enseamed, in thought. I was not dwelling on anything in particular, just giving myself over to deep, unspecific contemplation of the morning’s goings-on. Donovan’s breakdown, if I can call it that, had really unsettled me; and just as out on the course I had had trouble believing my eyes, now I found it difficult to trust my recollection. Had I really seen Donovan cry? Was it possible – Professor Michael Donovan QC? In tears?

  My disbelief was fairly understandable. I had never, until that day, seen Donovan show any vulnerability at all – I had never seen him be anything other than himself. This sudden, extreme jump in his identity – from top lawyer to weeping golfer – was too much for me to accept. But accept it I did (I was forced to, I could not very well reject the evidence of my own eyes), and in the car I turned my mind over to a deep analysis of what had happened. It was, I am afraid, a typically fruitless exercise. The memories, theories and figurings all cancelled each other out so that my intense preoccupation came to naught. A cartoonist would have suspended a blank, cloudy bubble over me and linked it to my head with a chain of snowballs.

  The caption following after that would show me staring around from behind my steering wheel with a baffled frown on my face and three exclamation marks and a question mark in the thought-bubble: because the next thing I knew I was driving around in side streets, tower blocks everywhere, lost.

  I snapped out of my reverie. I had driven in completely the wrong direction: instead of going south, I had gone north. The discovery shook me up. What was going on here? How could such a thing happen? Panicking slightly, I quickly switched in to a thick flow of traffic and came on to a main road. Then I put my foot down. I speeded, I urgently needed to get back, and not long afterwards I was crossing the river over Battersea Bridge, as good as home.

  FOURTEEN

  I am afraid that I allowed the afternoon’s goings-on to affect me unduly, because when I finally pulled up in front of my house I came to the conclusion that enough was enough. Sweating, sticky, smelling of my car’s smoky interior, I decided that the time had come to get to the bottom of things. There was a word, a blunt, pocket-sized word, that I could no longer get around: why?

  This is not, I should say, a question I often ask myself, certainly not in relation to the behaviour of my fellow men and women. Rarely will you catch me looking into whys and wherefores. As I see it, either you know something or you do not. If a mystery arises, you bide your time, because time, in my experience, clarifies. If the mystery persists, take care of it with a robust presumption. Choose a reasonable analysis and stick to it. Only if, for some reason, the presumption is not enough, should Why? be considered, and then only as a last resort. This approach is, I think, a sound one. Not only is Why? generally an unproductive and inefficient interrogation, but most of the time, you will find, it is positively counterproductive – it actually sets you back. Why? Because once the word makes one appearance it makes thousands more, it proliferates and consumes everything before it: start asking why and you start sliding down a slippery slope, suddenly everywhere you look things cry out for explication, elucidation and unravelment. What I am saying is this: ask why and you ask for trouble.

  This is what happened to me on the night of the golf game. Three hours after I had decided to crack the day’s mysteries I was to be found sitting at my desk, a scratch pad in front of me and biro in hand. I was smoking a cigarette and I was nonplussed. The Donovan affair did not add up. I mean this almost literally. I had written down the principal elements of the case and, like a corny sleuth sweating over clues to a murder, I had placed plus signs between them and an equals symbol at the end – an equals symbol that was followed by Donovan cries on golf course? For a long time I sat there regarding the question mark, darkening and thickening it by superimposing it with still more question marks. Why had Donovan cried on the golf course?

  My sinuses ached as I racked my brains. No luck. No matter how I figured it, I drew a blank. The equation – Arabella leaves Donovan + Donovan silent in court + Donovan’s journals + Donovan fighting the divorce + me + Arabella’s ansaphone message + Fergus Donovan + Donovan’s new book – led me precisely nowhere, because each element, each addendum, was itself a mystery. Why had Arabella left Donovan? Why had Donovan broken down? Why was I so interested? And so it went on, one why leading to another. It was not that I sought a mathematical solution, because plainly the actions of human beings are never going to work out t
hat way. They are never going to be susceptible to infinitesimal calculus, trigonometry or arithmetic. The answers to the problems are never to be found, like they were at school, by flipping to the back of the text-book. Nevertheless, a certain amount of computation must be involved. Things must eventually tot up; not to the nth decimal point, of course not, but roughly, give or take a few digits. But with Donovan nothing worked out. So many things remained irredeemably and tantalizingly obscure that, rather petulantly, I crumpled up the paper and threw it across the room.

  I lit another cigarette and tried to clear my head. I tried to stand back and look at things from a distance, to gain a fresh perspective – maybe that was all that was needed, maybe the case was like one of those trick close-ups of everyday objects: you turn the page upside-down, hold the snapshot away from you and squint, and suddenly the strange, blurred image is transformed into the corner of a Hoover. Maybe everything would suddenly focus into unmistakable familiarity.

  I got nowhere. The fact of the matter was that I was no longer involved in the case, I was completely embroiled in it. Whereas in other cases unresolved puzzles were a matter of complete indifference, in Donovan v. Donovan they fretted and nagged at me. Edgily, in a state of excitement, I paced about my room and rubbed my chin. What tormented me was that I knew that, just around the corner, all sorts of answers and discoveries awaited me. Tantalized and impatient, I wanted to fast-forward the action, to skip out the middle bits and get to the end, to the fireworks. It is not that I anticipated the kind of finale you get in adventure movies, with detonations and sizzling cars. But I did know that the answers, when they reached me, would not be run-of-the-mill: I knew that something out of the ordinary was going on, something big. And I could not wait to find out.