Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

By contrast, the Donovan road has side-tracked me into a wilderness. Lost, I think, is the only fair way to describe my present situation, lost amongst alien places.

Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Whereas at night, when I am at home reliving the past year, the world is clear and familiar and real, every morning my office grows increasingly strange. At first, when I began to recount these episodes, I was deeply and organically meshed into my workplace. The ecosystem in operation — the social pyramids, the networks of understandings, the unspoken expectations, the subtle pecking orders, the position I occupied in all of this — I was on intricate terms with. The workload? I took care of that with my eyes closed. But with the passage of the days, a foreignness has introduced itself into my surroundings. I do not know where I am any more. The material placed before me has made less and less sense, until, finally, when I went into work today, the letters melted into hieroglyphs. Now the voices that come through on the telephone are speaking pure mumbo-jumbo. The office furniture seems to have changed, too. Now I am uncomfortable in my chair (my chair, where I have swivelled, slept and worked for years, where my body has indented its very contours!); the nibs on my pens are either too thick or too scratchy; the papers on my desk give off an odd dazzle and it tires my eyes to look at them; even June, my dear June — frankly, I barely understand a word she says to me. Two or three times an hour she strides in to place before me a sheaf of typing for my inspection and waits there, arms folded, foot lightly tapping.

‘That’s fine, June,’ I say. I have gazed at the papers and pretended to check them. ‘That’s just fine. Thank you.’

June says exasperatedly, ‘It’s not. You’ve missed four mistakes,’ she says, pointing them out. ‘Look.’

‘Oh yes,’ I say gratefully. I circle them with my pen. ‘Thank you for spotting those, June; you’re a marvel.’

Of course, June will not buy that. Such compliments cut no ice with her at all and she turns tail and rattles away, her quick step signalling her discontent.

I am assailed by fundamental doubts. My occupation is beginning to strike me as a deeply outlandish mode of activity. What is this? I find myself asking when yet another task presents itself. What on earth am I doing? Advise on the effects of this leasehold? Why should I?

Of course, all of this has not gone unnoticed. Batstone Buckley Williams is a small, delicate organization. Unfitting, boat-rocking behaviour is not often missed. Today, shortly after lunch, the senior partner, Edward Boag, took me aside. It was the first time we have spoken alone since my first day at the firm.

‘Everything all right, Jones?’

The senior partner is now seventy-three years old and hard of hearing, so he speaks at a disconcerting volume.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.

‘Happy with us, are you?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The senior partner nodded. He shouted, ‘We’re happy with you too, Jones. Very happy.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, most happy indeed,’ he said. ‘Most happy.’ He looked at me. ‘Well, carry on then, Jones,’ he said, and ambled off, nodding to himself.

It was a clear warning; even in my befogged state I could see that.

At twenty to eleven I arrived at the registrar’s chambers for the pre-trial review. There was no waiting room and everybody was made to stand about in the tacky, smoky corridor until the usher called them in. The atmosphere was tense. Children were held firmly by the hand and bunched-up little groups were camped in corners, throwing furtive looks over their shoulders and conferring in low tones. It was not easy for the separating spouses to avoid each other: to stay within earshot of the usher you had to remain in the corridor, and everybody in the corridor could see everybody else. A man was looking carefully at the green wall, closely examining its texture as though he was studying a work of art. Another man was cleaning, or wiping, his hands with a handkerchief. They looked clean to me, his hands, but still he kept wiping them. Mostly people were quiet. You could easily pick out the lawyers: they were the jovial ones with the loud voices. Donovan was nowhere to be seen. He was, I guessed, on his way from the airport.

Leaning against a wall, my ear against a gurgling pipe, I lit a cigarette and tried to match up one of the faces in the corridor with Arabella. I had two things to go on. There was the photograph by Donovan’s bed, which revealed only her lovely slender arms outstretched from that disc of straw; and secondly there was the picture that I kept of her in my mind’s wallet. Looking around, I saw that one or two women almost fitted the bill, but what dissuaded me from a positive identification was they lacked what to my mind was Arabella’s central characteristic: beauty. (Yes, I knew, even at this stage, before I had caught so much as a glimpse of her face, that Arabella was beautiful. And not simply beautiful: I also had a hunch about what kind of beauty she would possess. She would have brown-black, glistening hair that fell thickly past her shoulders, a slim, curving figure and serene big eyes. She would not, in fact, be unlike the tennis stars’ girlfriends you see in the guest-box at Wimbledon, the ones in sunglasses perched nervously next to the coach, clapping sweetly whenever their man plays a winner, bravely standing by him when he is knocked out of the championship. Yes, Arabella had taken a very clear shape in my mind.)

None of the women I saw could properly be described as beautiful. One or two of them were desirable, certainly, and not without charms. But none of them possessed the necessary radiance, none of them looked like the heartbreaker I was looking for.

I was on my second cigarette and becoming increasingly flustered (it was eleven o’clock, where was Donovan?) when someone softly tapped my shoulder. There he stood, travel bag in hand, clean-shaven, unhurried and refreshed. His dark hair fell boyishly over his forehead and his smiling face actually glowed. I had not seen him looking better.

The usher called out ‘Number twelve, Donovan’ and a knot of people trooped into the registrar’s small room. There were two rows of desks. Donovan sat at the front and I took my place behind him. As I began snapping open my briefcase a man took a seat alongside Donovan. Philip Hughes, I correctly guessed: I had seen him in the corridor, together with his colleague who now sat behind him, next to me. Like me, she was taking out a notebook to transcribe what was said. As for Arabella, she had not turned up.

The registrar, a woman in her late thirties, emerged from a side door. Then, while intently reading the papers of the case, she listened to Philip Hughes making his application for directions. Then Donovan said his piece simply and unemotionally. He spoke in his usual detached manner, as if he was representing a third party. Instead of referring to himself in the first person singular — instead of simply saying ‘I’ — he spoke of ‘the Respondent’. ‘Madam, the Respondent raises no objection,’ he said, for example. I would not say that the effect was disconcerting, but it did seem a little strange. When he had finished the registrar reflected for a moment. She looked at her papers and gave what she was going to say some thought.

‘I’m deeply troubled by the direction which this case is taking, Mr Donovan,’ she said. ‘Without in any way passing judgment on the course you have chosen to pursue, I must ask whether you are certain in your mind that you want to be contesting this case.’ She looked coldly at me. ‘I take it you have been fully advised as to the perils of your position.’