This is the Life (6 page)

‘No,’ I said, standing up, thinking, Yes there is, there’s a lot else.

‘Good. James, you’ve been very helpful.’ Donovan began putting on his coat and scarf.

Feeling that a little bit of small talk might be appropriate at this juncture, I asked, ‘How are you feeling? I hear you’ve been unwell recently.’

‘Have I?’ He buttoned his navy blue coat. ‘Oh, yes – that. Yes, I’m a lot better now, thank you, how about you?’

‘Fine, fine. Couldn’t be better.’

‘Just look at that rain,’ Donovan said.

When Donovan left I walked over to the window and watched him hail a taxi. It was four o’clock and already the headlamps shone from the cars. The sky was brown, the rain brilliant under the street lights and, suddenly, everything had become palpable and atmospheric. This was the thing about Donovan – a brightness followed him around, a clarity, it was as if the man moved with Klieg lights tracked down on him …

Arabella Donovan was a nice name. Arabella Donovan, I said to myself; it was almost a supernatural name, you could call a spangled mermaid Arabella Donovan. That peachy voice on Donovan’s answering machine, that must have been Arabella’s voice. I went back to my desk and looked at her photocopied signature on the Petition. It looked a functional signature to me. The letters were printed clearly and regularly. There was no indulgence about the signature, no squiggles or sequins. It was a little disappointing. It seemed a waste of such a nice name. June – June would have done the name justice with her turquoise ink and her fancy, wavy manuscript.

How on earth had Donovan allowed Arabella to slip through his fingers? And what had made Arabella leave someone as eligible as Donovan? What had happened?

I turned once more to the salient points of the Petition. Paragraph I said that the Donovans had married on 5 July 1981. Paragraph 4 said that there were no children born to the Petitioner during the said marriage or at any time. Paragraph 6
revealed that the Petitioner had quit the marital home on 14 July 1988, and at Paragraph 8 it was alleged that Donovan had behaved in such a way that Arabella could not reasonably be expected to live with him. Then I looked again at the Particulars of this allegation.

The Respondent has throughout the marriage treated the Petitioner cruelly and/or unreasonably by inter alia

(a) persistently degrading the Petitioner by his conduct so as to make her feel worthless and/or by

(b) injuriously neglecting the Petitioner by according unreasonable priority to other matters inter alia his occupation and/or by taking no or no sufficient interest in the Petitioner’s welfare and/or by

(c) persistently maintaining prolonged and unreasonable absences from the marital home.

I had my doubts about the logic of the pleading and the vague language it employed, but I could guess at the gist of Arabella’s complaint. Donovan, she said, was a cruel and neglectful husband. That was what it boiled down to.

I regained my seat. On balance, Donovan was right to feel he had a case. The pleadings did not specify the form of the degradation from which Arabella was supposed to have suffered, nor (apart from the matter of the excessive hours he put into his work) were examples given of any maltreatment. Allowing for the customary emotive exaggeration of Petitions, no tangible or damaging misconduct was immediately revealed. There was no suggestion of infidelity or physical violence or of something you could get your hands on, like alcohol or drug abuse, and there was generally an unconvincing amount of huffing and puffing in the pleading; in general, the tactic is to make your case as precise, and therefore as strong, as possible, thereby strengthening your hand for out-of-court negotiations. In this case, the only thing revealed was that Donovan had devoted too much time to his work, hardly the most malevolent of transgressions.

But that was where my understanding screeched to a halt. I rely on information, not intuition. Ferreting out facts from clients, a matter of technique and persistence, I am usually good at. Dates, events, examples, these are things I happily manage. In this case, however, I hardly knew any facts at all. Donovan had disallowed my interrogations, and I was forced to fall back on guesswork: and when it came to sensing the unsaid, to divining what lay beneath the surface, I was weak. I am not, it must be said, greatly interested by those parts of a personality known as the depths. I am happy to take people at face value, with the result that sensitivity to concealed thoughts and emotions is not my strong point. I am a magpie in this respect, drawn towards trinkets and sparklers – more attracted to a person’s superficies, with its gaudy bijouterie of individual traits, than to his or her ‘deeper’ self. Underneath the make-up and knick-knacks, I must confess, I tend to find people wearisome and monotonous, burdened as they are with the same luggage of troubles. And as a solicitor, of course, faced as I am every day with personal problems, I must keep a certain distance. It would not do to become involved.

Going back to that rainy, brown-skied dusk, I stood up and switched on another light to combat the entering darkness. Doubts began to beset me. My situation was not ideal. Donovan was a personal acquaintance and this might cloud my judgment and hamper my conduct of the case. Should I not advise him to seek another solicitor? Moreover, things were rolling along just fine at work. I was busy but not too busy. Donovan would be a demanding client, and the time I would spend thinking about the case would not, I knew, be translated into efficient profits. Was it necessary for me to involve myself?

Of course, even as I asked myself these questions I knew that there was no question about it. It is ridiculous, I know, and shameful, but I was flattered by his attentions. His proximity elevated and enlivened me. This was, of course, a
weakness on my part – but what can I say? Faced with Donovan, my normal instincts went haywire. Like one of those Turkish beach turtles that mistake the glow of cafeterias for the luminous sea, I was completely disoriented by him.

After that, I did not see Donovan for a while. He was back at work. This meant it was just about impossible to contact him, which was inconvenient for me. I had Arabella’s solicitor, a rather abrupt man from the firm of Duggan & Turnbull called Philip Hughes, breathing down my neck. He had rung several times to make tentative approaches, and each time, in accordance with my instructions, I refused his advances. He was becoming impatient. On 31 October 1988, he telephoned me again.

‘Mr Hughes, as I’ve said, I’m afraid I am unable to discuss any questions of settlement. I have had no instructions in that connection from Mr Donovan.’

‘Well, I suggest you get some instructions,’ Hughes said. ‘Pick up the phone and get some instructions.’

‘I can’t do that, I’m afraid. Mr Donovan is abroad at the moment and I have no way of getting in touch with him. He’s a very busy man,’ I said. ‘He travels all the time. He could be anywhere.’

Philip Hughes sounded exasperated. ‘Frankly, I don’t care if he’s in Timbuctoo. Just leave him a message. Tell him,’ he said in different tone of voice, ‘I have a proposition that may interest him.’

I said nothing.

Philip Hughes said carefully, ‘Why don’t I just tell you what we have in mind? What could be lost by that?’

‘I doubt very much that any proposition for settlement
would interest Mr Donovan if it involved him accepting the dissolution of his marriage.’

‘You’re certain about that?’

‘Mr Donovan does not believe that his marriage has irretrievably broken down. He thinks that his marriage could be saved.’

Philip Hughes changed the tone of his voice again. This time he spoke in a man-to-man, off-the-record, you-know-it-makes-sense tone of voice. ‘Mr Jones,’ he said. ‘Look. Let’s be sensible. There is no way – and, let me be absolutely clear, by that I mean
no way
– that Mrs Donovan will go back to Mr Donovan. Frankly, she’s had enough. As far as she is concerned, her marriage is dead and buried. She never wants to lay eyes on her husband again. That is a fact that won’t go away. I know it, now you know it.’ Philip Hughes drew breath. ‘The point is, I would also like Mr Donovan to know it. I want you to make it plain to him that there will be no second bite of the cherry. Frankly, it’s
finito la musica.
It’s over between him and his wife.’

I could see how Hughes was thinking: I’ve got Donovan all worked out, he was saying to himself. At the moment he’s having difficulty in accepting what is happening to him. He’s denying reality, and that’s understandable, even inevitable – after all, he’s a human being, it’s a normal reaction to a major blow. But, Hughes was thinking, Donovan’s also a lawyer. He’s a reasonable man. Once the truth – that Arabella was gone for ever – sinks in, he’ll quickly see that further resistance would be irrational, that at best it would achieve nothing but a painful and expensive delay of the inevitable. Once he realizes he’s surrounded, he’ll strike a bargain and come out with his hands up in the air. The key, Hughes was saying to himself, was to get Donovan to appreciate one thing – Arabella wasn’t coming back.

‘Mr Hughes,’ I said, ‘I will tell him that as soon as I am able to. I must say, however, that I have my doubts about whether that will change anything. Mr Donovan’s views are very firmly held.’

‘Well, yes, they would be, wouldn’t they?’ Philip Hughes said slyly.

I told him that I would do what I could, and we hung up. Then I did what I could: I rang up Donovan’s chambers and left a message with Rodney, his clerk, to telephone me. Trying to contact Donovan directly would almost certainly be futile: I was not exaggerating when I told Hughes that Donovan was a busy man, and hard to track down. For a start, Donovan did not put any time aside for time off. While his colleagues, even the busiest amongst them, were indulging in hours of leisure, Donovan was pushing himself to the limits of his energies. One minute he was in The Hague, appearing at the Peace Palace, the next he was in the Gulf, arbitrating a dispute. Then, before you could blink, he was on his way to a conference on the Law of the Sea in Stockholm to deliver a lecture on the problems of delimiting fishing zones along indented coastlines. He was an adviser to United Nations legal committees on the pacification of space and the resolution of border disputes. He was always working. Any moment to spare – say he had been delayed at an airport, or a free evening had accidentally fallen his way – was not spent catching his breath or kicking his heels: he would use the time to update his textbook (
International Law
), which was famously the most lucid and original work of its kind, or to write an article or case commentary. His academic activities did not end there: let us not forget, he had to squeeze the obligations of his professorship into his schedule. Like an opera star he was booked up for years at a time. So getting in touch with Donovan was not just a question of picking up the phone and asking for an extension number. You had to plan in advance, you had to be patient.

And you had to be important. The other thing to bear in mind, before you asked Donovan to drop what he was doing and listen to what you had to tell him, was that your message had better be urgent. I did not think that what Hughes had to say was significant enough for me to bother Donovan with it. His minutes were like rubies, they were so precious, and
misappropriating his time, or wastefully burning up his golden joules of energy, almost amounted to a species of theft. Sometimes, when I spoke to him, I felt dizzy at the thought that the time he was consecrating to me he could otherwise charge out at a rate of thousands of dollars an hour – sometimes, in my excitement and immaturity, I would feel strangely
enriched
, as if his gratis words represented some kind of windfall.

So I left a message for Donovan with Rodney.

Four days later, on the Friday, I received a reply. The telephone rang in the office and the voice of Rodney was put through to me.

‘Hallo, sir.’ Rodney still called me sir – it was a throwback to the days when I was a pupil barrister in his chambers, and the ironic deference he had shown me then. ‘How are you? I’ve got a message for you from Mr Donovan.’

‘Yes?’

Rodney hesitated. ‘He says you’re to meet him at his house tomorrow night. He says it’s to do with some private litigation he’s engaged in that you will be familiar with.’

I could not believe my ears. ‘Rodney, did I hear you correctly? He wants to confer with me at his house? On a Saturday?’

Rodney did not say anything.

I felt like saying, Rodney, I know that Mr Donovan is a busy man, but I’m afraid some alternative appointment will have to be made. I mean, it is most unsatisfactory, meeting a client at his house, and at such short notice, and at the weekend to boot. It’s just not on, I felt like saying.

I said, ‘That’s not particularly convenient, I’m afraid.’

Rodney still said nothing. He just cleared his throat.

‘Look in your diary,’ I said, ‘there must be another date. There must be some way to accommodate both of us.’

‘You see, that’s just it, sir. Mr Donovan flies back from Strasbourg tomorrow and leaves for Geneva first thing Sunday morning. Saturday night is the only time he is able to put aside.’

‘How long is he staying in Geneva?’

‘He’s down for two weeks, sir. Solid.’

‘You see, at the moment,’ I said, hoping my annoyance would tell in my voice, ‘I’m otherwise engaged.’ I hesitated. ‘If it is really urgent, Mr Donovan could always telephone me.’