Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

‘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 scribbling 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?