Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must say that I expected it all along. I could see it coming a mile off.’

I really did not know what to say to this.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’

‘Well, the ball’s been in your court for about six weeks now,’ Hughes said, ‘and I think it’s time we heard from you.’

‘What about?’ I said.

‘The money,’ Hughes said. ‘The fifty thousand.’

I asked Hughes what he was talking about.

The settlement, he told me. The settlement fee. The case had been settled, he said. Don’t say I had forgotten? The case had been settled back in December, the 9th of December to be precise. That was when Donovan had accepted his offer, when he had signed the agreement. Surely I remembered now?

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I remember. Yes, of course. The settlement. The fifty thousand.’

Donovan was no longer fighting the divorce. He had given up the ghost. Behind my back.

‘Mr Donovan’s in Brazil,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Hughes said. ‘But the agreement specified payment of the first instalment within thirty days. Thirty days elapsed a week ago, Mr. Jones.’

I told Hughes that I would look into it and hung up. The divorce was on. The trial was off.

Why had I not been told? Why was I always the last to find out? I was the solicitor, for God’s sake. I should have been the first to know. Nothing should have been agreed without my say-so.

June came in. ‘Mr Lexden-Page to see you,’ she said. ‘It’s about this morning’s hearing.’

‘What? Ah yes.’ I remembered. The pre-trial review of Lexden-Page v. Westminster C.C. was scheduled for eleven o’clock. ‘Yes, I’ll see him, June,’ I said.

In he came. In came Lexden-Page. He was, as usual, bristling with anger.

‘Come on, Jones,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a move on. We’re going to be late.’

We took a taxi to Westminster County Court, and ten minutes later we were seated around the registrar’s table. Not unpredictably, the Council was trying to strike out the action on the grounds that it was frivolous and vexatious. I could think of little to say to this. At best our damages amounted to a pound or two, and it would plainly be a waste of court time to pursue this amount in this particular case. To make matters worse, Lexden-Page refused to settle for any amount. He wanted his day in court.

I said, ‘I see the force of my friend’s arguments.’ I paused. Lexden-Page glared at me. I said, my voice lacking conviction, ‘But this case does not simply revolve around a scuffed shoe and a stubbed toe. It involves an important principle.’ I looked at my papers, trying to think just what that principle might be. The registrar and my opponent regarded me with curiosity. ‘This may be a frivolous matter for the Council, with its millions of pounds of resources, but for the Plaintiff, an ordinary citizen, it goes to the very heart of his liberty as a pedestrian. This case also goes to the root of the responsibilities which the Council bears towards its rate-payers and towards visitors to its borough. These are not matters to be brushed aside. The Plaintiff has a substantial complaint which must be heard.’ The registrar and my opponent looked at each other in mild amazement. I leaned over to Lexden-Page. ‘Anything else?’ I whispered. ‘Anything else you want me to say?’

‘Say it as if you mean it, damn you,’ he said furiously.

The registrar struck out the claim. Lexden-Page began spluttering and reddening. Once outside, he found his voice.

‘I’m appealing,’ he said. ‘This isn’t going to end here. I’ll take this to the highest court in the land. It’s an outrage. It’s a scandal. And you,’ he said to me, losing his voice half-way through the accusation, ‘you … I want a new solicitor. I want someone who …’ He could not continue. He was choked up with emotions.

‘Mr Lexden-Page,’ I said. ‘You’re upset now. That’s understandable. Why don’t we talk this over at some other time, when we’ve regained our objectivity. Go home now and phone me tomorrow to make an appointment. How does that sound to you?’

I put my protesting client into a taxi and hailed another one for myself. As we groaned away from the kerb I forgot all about the morning’s hearing and began thinking about Donovan, about his sudden consent to the divorce. It had me in two minds.

It made sense and yet it did not make sense. On the one hand he was quite right not to contest the case. On that hand he had seen reason, he had seen that there was little to be gained from fighting the divorce. There were two possible explanations for his change of tack: either he had foreseen all along that he would probably not manage to dissuade Arabella and had planned this last-minute concession; or he had understood, for the first time (maybe when his letters had been returned), that his marriage was irretrievably lost, that nothing he could do would bring Arabella back: thus prompting his sudden decision to settle.

Looked at in this way, the case fell into place. There was nothing superficially baffling about it, there was nothing that could not be fitted into the picture. It left one or two question marks — the episode on the golf course, for example — but nothing that could not be explained away or dismissed as irrelevant. On the face of it, then, the settlement made sense, it was susceptible to a consistent analysis. But, in another, more profound way, it did not make sense. That was what bothered me in the taxi back to the office.

The arithmetic of events was unconvincing. In the equation you had Donovan’s determination to fight the divorce, plus his conviction that Arabella would not be able to prove her contentions, plus his father’s deep anxiety to save the marriage, plus Donovan’s great skill as a litigator, plus the relative weakness of Arabella’s case; even given certain minuses (the distress of the trial, the question as to whether Arabella was really worth it, the generous terms offered by Arabella) these elements did not, by my calculation, equal to a settlement. Which meant that either the settlement was a ruse of some kind or, more likely, that there was a factor, an x , which still had not been revealed to me. But what could that be? What did the x stand for?

I will briefly go into this question, because it may be important. A while back I videotaped a magic show on the television. It was an old-fashioned show. There was a man in chains in a water-tank, there was a man in a top hat sliding blades and saws through a leggy girl lying flat-out in a box. That was the kind of show it was. The performer who really interested me, though, was a magician. After spending a few minutes flapping handkerchiefs into doves, he performed a trick — a simple, unspectacular trick, but all the more intriguing for that — which really got to me: he put his palm to the camera and produced card after card in his hand from thin air. How had he done it? To this day I do not know. I replayed the scene twenty times in slow motion and twenty times I drew a blank. It was not because of my eyesight that I did not see what was going on; no, it was a question of angles. The magician had ensured, in a cunning, subtle way, that certain of our (the viewers’) lines of vision were blocked: so that no matter how hard or how often we looked, we would see only one part of what was happening, the trick part. Something like that was going on in the Donovan case, or at least that was the impression I received — an impression that I was seeing only a portion of the action; that something was going on behind the scenes.

So what? it might reasonably be said. We cannot know everything, and since when do our lives tie up like shoe-laces, into bows? You learn to live with loose ends. You have to, otherwise you go crazy.