This is the Life Read online

  JOSEPH O’NEILL

  This is the Life

  DEDICATION

  To my mother and to my father,

  and to their mothers

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ONE

  The other day I was queueing up at the bank. The man in front of me, a man in black leather trousers and jacket, had long fair hair which was tied together below the shoulders with ribbon. The hair looked as though it had not been washed for several years, and its strands were so intertwined, so caked with adhesive, that it had solidified. It was impossible to tell which hair was which, or where it came from or led to. The filaments started pretty distinctly, each springing cleanly from the scalp; but once they reached ear level, where they melled, they became indistinguishable from each other and lost in a blur. I stepped back slightly in the queue. It was not a mane that I wanted to get too close to.

  I mention the incident because the events I am about to relate are ravelled in my mind like those hairs. Their meanings are twisted and tied together in unfamiliar knots that will not easily undo – at the moment, at the start of this undertaking, I feel like a blindfolded man fingering at running bowlines, marling hitches, sheepshanks and cuckold’s necks. This is partly due to my own entanglement in what I am preparing to describe, and the cock-eyed viewpoint that results from such a snarled involvement. Spectators, after all, see more of a play than its players.

  What I am aiming to do is run a comb through the matted locks of my memory, run through the facts one more time as I remember them in the hope that, in doing so, as the threads separate and disentangle, a pattern of sorts will emerge. When I say pattern, I do not mean a swirling motif of significations: I mean a straightforward, ordinary picture of what happened. I am not a philosopher or someone looking for ultimate truths or breathtaking revelations. What I am after is something I can get by with, so that I am able to get on with my life in the way that I am used to: because at the moment I am having difficulty getting on with anything. At work I sit listlessly at my desk, toying with a pair of scissors, snipping meaningless shapes in the air, unable to concentrate. June, my secretary, has never seen me like this before. She suspects that I am lovesick and brings me steaming cups of tea at regular intervals.

  ‘Thank you, June, but I’ve just had one,’ I say. I raise my hands. ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  She will not be deterred. ‘Drink, it will do you good,’ she says, bossily pointing at the cup. ‘Come on now.’ She stands there, arms folded, watching me. I drink.

  ‘Thank you, June. That’s a lot better,’ I say weakly. When she has gone I return my gaze to my work. Again the print fuzzes over and once more my eyelids weigh kilograms. Again, after leafing through a few pages, I am exhausted and have absorbed nothing.

  I will not dwell further on these symptoms, which anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize. The important thing to note is that never before have I been afflicted in this way. The experience is, for me, unprecedented, and therefore doubly alarming – I, who am so happy in my work, struck down like this!

  I must without delay go back to Friday, 9 September 1988 – the day, you could say, when I first began to be hauled from my element and enmeshed by Donovan’s quickly unspooling life.

  That Friday I travelled to work on the underground. As usual I was reading a newspaper as the carriage hurtled through the tunnels towards the Embankment. Just before we reached my stop (we were slowing down under the riverbed) I read the following piece in a column of ecological chit-chat:

  As anxiety grows over the planet’s dwindling ozone layer, attention has centred on the case of the European Commission v. The United Kingdom. The argument in the European Court concerns the alleged failure of the government to implement EC directives restricting the use of carbonfluorochlorides (CFCs), substances which, it is thought, damage the ozone layer. The resolution of the dispute has been delayed by an unforeseen snag. Yesterday counsel for the government, Michael Donovan QC, suffered a collapse when he rose to address the court. Proceedings have been adjourned for a replacement for Mr Donovan to be instructed.

  Michael Donovan: the name jumped at me from the page. Donovan, collapsed?

  Before I had time to consider the matter further the tube clanked into the station, a booming voice warned Mind the gap and I had to fold up my newspaper and alight. On my way to work – on the escalator up to the surface, on the gradient past Charing Cross Station up to the Strand and during the three minutes of walking after that – I gave some thought to Michael Donovan for the first time in years: probably two, maybe even three years. Our lives had diverged, and for a long time now we had moved in different circles. That said, there had remained the occasional intersection. I had, naturally enough, seen his name from time to time in the newspapers and in the law reports, and once, years ago now, I had glimpsed him at a function, something which caused me a certain amount of discomfort. Socially, I am unskilful, and one of the consequences that flow from this is that a drinks party usually finds me in a corner listening, reluctantly but inescapably, to a person whose conversation I find uninteresting. A second consequence is that I am filled with uncertainty when it comes to greeting demi-or semi-acquaintances. The degree of warmth or recognition called for by the encounter eludes me completely – is a handshake and a brief conversation necessary, or will a raised, friendly eyebrow suffice? The matter is aggravated if, like Donovan, my acquaintance is more senior than me. Should I, the lesser of the two, humbly make the first move? Or would that not be a little presumptuous?

  I find that I am straying from my point, which was that I was not entirely happy bumping into Donovan. This is not surprising (that I have strayed, I mean), because I have never undertaken this kind of enterprise before. Although, due to my training and occupation, I am an adept chronologist, I am not a natural recounter. If, at some gathering, I am casually relating some inconsequentiality or other, and I notice that a silence has descended around me and that suddenly I have an audience, almost invariably I freeze up and forget the point of what it is I am saying and it all ends badly, in blushes.

  As I was saying, I did not relish it when Michael Donovan crossed my path (more precisely, when I crossed his path – Donovan was the man with the path; me, I have not done it my way, I have gone the way of others). Walking into the building where my office is situated, waiting with a cluster of others for the elevator to descend to the ground floor, I painfully recalled the last time I had spoken to him.

  The encounter had taken place seven years before, in 1981, at a party in the Temple. To put myself at ease (it was one of those burdensome gatherings filled with partial acquaintances and characterized by a lot of hesitant eye contact) I had drunk quite a few flutes of champagne. Suitably uninhibited, I spotted Donovan talking to a group of people and felt no trepidation about approaching him, even though it had been some time since we had last met.

  The group he was with was bunched into a tight phalanx of suits, and I had difficulty in joining them. I hovered around the perimeter of shoulders for a while, waiting for a chink to appear in the ranks, and just as I was beg
inning to feel a little foolish one of the suits drifted off and I was able to slip in. I remember chipping into the general conversation with the odd well-received remark and gradually I gained the confidence to speak to Donovan personally when a lull came in the talk.

  ‘Well, Michael,’ I said, ‘how are things?’

  Everyone looked at me. Everyone stopped what they were doing.

  Donovan said, ‘Very well, er –. How are you?’ He gave me a blank, though not unfriendly, look. Then he smiled politely. ‘How’s the, er, work getting on?’

  It was obvious to me, and to everyone else, that he did not have a clue who I was, or what I did – in fact, he looked at me as though he had never met me in his life! Now, although I never forget a name myself, I can well understand that a person like Donovan, a big fish, has better things to do than remember all the small fry he has ever met, the plankton of casual acquaintances. He has other things on his mind, he has global problems to crack, issues that affect all of humankind. But forgetting me – this was truly extraordinary. I was small fry, yes, I would be the last to deny it – but I was also his former pupil! Only three years previously I had spent six months tête-à-tête with him, locked in collaboration, my side by his side. It was a time of extreme proximity and affiliation. For six months I carried his papers and tidied his room, for six months I researched his opinions, made his coffee, drafted his pleadings and operated his telephone. For half a year I was an indispensable, if extricable, part of his practice – if not his right hand, or even his fingers and ears, then his shoe-laces, his cuff-links. He had counted on me, and in my humble way, I had counted for something.

  Since that time my appearance had stayed roughly the same. Admittedly, my hair had thinned somewhat and my face had accrued more flesh – but it was not as if I had grown a moustache or dramatically changed my accent. I had, moreover, dropped him a note from time to time to keep him up to date on my progress. (How stupid of me! I cringed at the memory of those letters, their earnestly informative, self-important tone …) How, in all these circumstances, could it be that I, or something about me – my voice, my manner, the way I looked – rang no bells?

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘fine.’

  There followed an unhappy, a miserable, hesitation. We both looked about the room, brimming with chortling lawyers, to avoid one another’s eyes. The other members of the group exchanged glances. I felt ridiculous. Although, as a rule, I am more than content with who and what I am, the incident was nevertheless an unhappy reminder of my unimportance in the legal world. The moral was clear: Donovan was out of my league now. I had no business talking to him. I swallowed wretchedly at my glass. It was empty. When I looked up I sensed that everyone was waiting for me to say something, and I noticed Donovan’s eyes were flickering around the room, searching for a getaway. I decided to act, it was time to put an end to this torture.

  ‘Well, it’s nice seeing you again,’ I said, and clumsily wandered off at the wrong moment, just as Donovan opened his mouth to reply. I turned round to repair my error but it was too late. Along with the others he had turned his back and doubtless had already purged the incident from his mind.

  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.

  TWO

  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 – 58
3 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.’