Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

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 him 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.)