Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

Here I took a hold of myself. Enough, no more dreaming, the time had come for hard achievement. I determined there and then to bring off my Grotius thesis. Whereas previously during my studies I had never quite known what I was doing or why, now my intentions were clear. I would do it, even if it meant taking a sabbatical from Batstone’s. I would write that paper.

That night I quit work early and quickly walked the dark streets to the Middle Temple library. I climbed the winding stairs to the international law section and took out a fistful of periodicals. Then, at a lamplit desk, I hunted down any references to Donovan and any material that had a bearing on his work. There was plenty. By the time the bell rang to signal the library’s closing, I saw that if I was going to catch up on the years of research that I had neglected, it would take many evenings and weekends of homework, not that easy when you are putting in eight or nine pretty tiring hours a day, five days a week. Yet still I found the prospect enticing, and on the underground home, slithering under Waterloo and down beneath the Oval, I was bursting with anticipation. I could not wait to sit down and get on with it.

I got on with it. Where I found the energy I do not know, but for five weeks I was red-hot. I clocked in early at work and concentrated. There was not a moment to lose. No more daydreaming, no more dawdling. I turned those papers over at top speed. I had June on a non-stop merry-go-round of typing, telephoning and running in and out. Not that she minded, not June: she thrived. She was also intrigued. She wanted to know why it was that I burned through the day and smoked out of the office on the dot of five o’clock.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said. ‘Why are you in such a rush?’

‘Rush?’ I did not look up. I continued scribbling at a sheet.

June waited for me to say something else. Then she said, ‘Yes, rush. You’re going flat out. I’ve never seen you like this.’

Again I said nothing. I had a letter to finish. I was a busy man, I had no time to sit around and chew the fat.

Then June said slyly, ‘It’s a woman, isn’t it? You’ve got a woman, haven’t you?’

I looked up and gave her a memorandum and a mysterious smile.

‘I can’t think what you’re talking about,’ I said.

She stepped away with the papers. Then she stopped at the door and turned to speak, the way they do in films for dramatic effect, ‘James, you don’t fool me. I know the look of love when I see it.’

I laughed and went back to work. It was amazing how wrong people could be. Still, if that was what she wanted to think, that was fine by me. It was a perfectly harmless, even handy, illusion. It saved me a lot of explaining. That said, I must admit that nothing would have given me greater pleasure than saying, a modest smile on my face, ‘Actually, if you must know, I’m working on a book. That’s why I have to get away in the evenings. To work on my book.’ (My book! How it chimed; that phrase! My book!) But I knew that the best thing to do was to keep quiet; they would not understand my project at Batstone Buckley Williams. No, I was a man in love. That was my story. I dashed off my work and grabbed my coat as soon as I could because I was a man in love.

When I got home it was more of the same. Pumped up with adrenalin, I worked and I worked. And it worked. Each night I struck gold. Each night some bright new insight would gleam in my notebook. I felt fantastic. Ideas came to me from I do not know where.

That is not all. Sometimes, leaning back from my papers for a minute’s rest, I would close my eyes and see myself as I must have looked to others, a young scholar working through the night, my desk-top an island of light in the dark room. This is what I mean when I say that sometimes it is hard to keep the film world at bay. With everything going according to the script, I stopped watching television. I started watching myself instead. I tuned in to me.

Then Thursday, 9 March 1989, came around. That was the day when I telephoned Butterwells, Donovan’s publishers. I had done just about as much preparation and preliminary studies as I was able to, and the time had arrived to take things a stage further: I needed to read Supranational Law — all of it. So I decided to ring up Butterwells.

I was put through to the publicity department. I thought the voice of the woman who answered was not unfamiliar.

‘Excuse me,’ I said politely, ‘who am I talking to?’

This is Diana Martin,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’

I have always been proud of my ability to remember people, but on this occasion I surpassed myself.

I introduced myself. Then I said, ‘We met, if I’m not mistaken, at the Batstone Buckley Williams Christmas party. You came with Oliver Owen.’ There was a pause, and I added, ‘I was the one behind the bar. The one pouring the drinks. That was me.’

‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly.

I got down to business; I did not want her to think that I was a heavy breather of some sort. I explained that I was doing some scholarship on international law and that I wanted to know the date of publication of Donovan’s new book; also, if it was not asking too much, perhaps it would be possible to have a proof copy?

Diana Martin relaxed. ‘Let me see,’ she said nicely. After a significant interval she spoke again. She sounded in difficulties. ‘Mr Jones, it does not look as though Michael’s book will be published for some while.’

I said, ‘Well, can you give me a rough date? Three months? A year? Ten years?’

She hesitated. ‘I can’t, I’m afraid.’ She stopped again. ‘It’s very hard to say.’ She was trying to be helpful, that was clear from her voice; but she was constrained by something.

‘It’s very important to me,’ I said. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell me? I’ll keep it to myself, if that’s what you’re worried about. Don’t forget,’ I said confidentially, ‘like you I’m a lawyer. I know all about secrets.’

She relented. ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I know. It sounds a bit funny, I know, but Michael destroyed his manuscript. He burned it, it seems. For the time being, at least, he’s abandoned the book.’

‘Burned it?’ I asked. I kept my voice calm. ‘How curious. You mean he actually set it alight?’

‘Well, that’s what he says in his letter. He says that he’s thrown it in the fire.’

‘What date?’ I said. ‘What’s the date on the letter?’

22 February 1989, Diana Martin told me. That was the date.

I thanked her and hung up. I felt strangely calm. I distanced myself from what she had described. So Donovan had burned his manuscript? How interesting, I thought. What an interesting development that was.

Then I sat still for a while, staring ahead of me at the wall where a 1989 calendar hung open. It was a Canadian calendar, and its pages depicted the scenic natural transformations brought on by each fresh month; forests all golden in autumn, horizons of wheat in the summer, that sort of thing. How it got up there, on my wall, was a mystery. June had no doubt hung it up there for decorative purposes, because I had enough gadgets in my office — annuals, almanacs, logbooks — to keep me up to date. That day the calendar displayed a photograph of a curve of snow, a snowfield sparkling under a hard, dark blue sky. Something bothered me about the picture. We were in the month of March; that calendar was not up-to-date, it was showing a winter scene, a January or February scene. So I walked over to the calendar to flip over a sheet, but just as I reached out I saw that it was in fact on the right page: this was a picture of an Ontarian field in March.

I went back towards my desk but I did not sit down. I stayed on my feet, looking out of my window at March in London. It was a fine spring day; as far as the weather went, everything was fine. The shoppers were out, the roads were blocked with black cabs, the workmen were back on their buildings. I could not breathe. My lungs just could not grip the slippery air. The motes, the atoms of oxygen, just slid in and out of my body. I ran out and drank a glass of water. My chest was hurting me; more precisely, my chest was burning me; it was as though something had ignited in there, as though my thorax were ablaze. I gulped down two glasses of water, and then a third. It did not help.