Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

I panicked. Fire! I felt like shouting. Fire! I lost my head. I felt like ringing up the fire brigade to go to Colford Square on the double, to send up a ladder to the study window and aim their hoses at the pile of papers smouldering in the hearth. Maybe something could be salvaged, a few brown-rimmed, heat-curled pages, a few scorched-off sentences, even. Maybe …

I rubbed my face. Why? Why? Why should Donovan do this, why should he commit this arson? It was horrific: a masterpiece of jurisprudence and political philosophy rubbed out, reduced to ashes. It was a catastrophe, a disaster. I could not understand what had led him to commit this folly. And the actual gesture of incinerating the manuscript — that was far too theatrical a thing for Donovan to do. Desperately I reviewed the previous six months, checking and rechecking his actions, his words. Not a clue. There was not a single reason that I could find to explain what had happened. What had I missed? What had I missed?

Then I saw a glimmer of hope: the disc, the software which stored the book: perhaps that was still in existence. Yes; he would hardly have burned the disc; or would he? And maybe this phrase he had used about throwing the book on the fire — maybe that was just a figure of speech?

I stopped thinking about it. Disc or no disc, figure of speech or not, it made no difference. I saw that. What mattered was that the book was not coming out. And that was the matter.

There followed a period of waiting. I set about my work in the usual fashion and waited. Precisely what I was waiting for I did not know; but I lived in the expectation that something would come along, that eventually some beam of light would stray in my direction. In the event, nothing happened, nothing became clearer — if anything, things became more obscure. No new facts turned up. My firm received a cheque from Donovan for my services — there was no accompanying note — but that was not what I had in mind. I was just waiting for things to turn around, as per usual. Then one day it dawned on me, not dramatically but in a dull, tired way, that nothing was going to turn around. That was it. There was no more to come. The End, as they say in films, had been reached; somewhere, in a scene I had not witnessed, the cowboy had ridden off into the sunset.

This was in April. I stored away the Donovan v. Donovan file in my office and, at home, made a package of my abortive thesis and put it back where I had found it, in an old box in the attic.

Unfortunately, not everything ended there. For a while I went about my work with reasonable efficiency, but then, as I have said, things took a turn for the worse. First of all, lethargy crept in. All day I would trudge around the office in a state of exhaustion and apathy, struggling to fight off sleep at my desk. Then, in the evening, when I returned to my flat, I would be restless. I would sit down on the sofa to read and end up by throwing down the book or newspaper in irritation; television became unwatchable, and the nights — the nights became an ordeal of insomnia. Insomnia! What an affliction! In the middle of the night I would look over the edge of my bed at my radio-dock and calculate with horror that, even if I fell asleep immediately , I would get at most three hours’ sleep. For feverish hours I smouldered in my bed until, at last, I heard the birds singing outside and saw the curtain lighten with the dawn. And while I steamed under my duvet, my imagination, too, would start overheating. In my terrible half-sleep, vague fantasies and wild notions would take hold of my fuming brain, exhausting and distressing reveries populated by Donovan and Mr Donovan, by Arabella and Susan and Oliver Owen. And so it went on, this awful pattern of sleepless nights and listless days.

It did not take me long to work out something about what was going on: I may be uncomprehending but I am not stupid. I knew what the trouble was — Donovan. I had tried to forget about him, to put the whole thing behind me, but I had been unable to. I thought that time would clarify, I thought that time would heal. But I was wrong, time did nothing of the sort. Time stood still, time took time off, so that weeks later nothing had moved on, and I was still asking myself, Why had Donovan burned the book? What had led him to it? Arabella? His father? His divorce? Something else? Something had gone on, something big — but what? What had gone on?

I could not work it out. I had clues to work on, I had strands — I had Donovan’s breakdown, his break-up, his journal, the introduction to his new book, I had my researches, I had Donovan senior, I had the sudden divorce — but they had me tied up in knots. My leads led me nowhere. And there was something else: surely it could not end this way? What about all that momentum I had discerned, that inexorable drama? What had happened to that? Was it all to come to this — to nothing?

No, I decided. It was impossible that the Donovan adventure could just dematerialize. I had missed what had really happened, somewhere along the line I had missed a trick. And it was at that point that I decided to straighten things out once and for all, that I picked up my pen and embarked on this narrative. I would set it all out clearly, I determined. I would replay it. That would be enough — was not description supposed to be revelation? — to pick out whatever it was that I had missed. That should do it, I thought.

So, here I am then. It is 9 July 1989, and I have done what I set out to do. I have looked back on the last year and related everything there was to it. All the facts of the matter have been set out and now, at last, I am in a position to understand what has been going on. Now all I have to do is read carefully what I have written and, if everything goes according to plan, hey presto — all, or at least enough, will be revealed.

I read everything that I had written, every word; and then I read it again, carefully, like a lawyer, satisfying myself that nothing had escaped me. I read the small print and I read between the lines. Then I closed my eyes, sat back in my chair, and waited. I waited for revelations, dénouements, clarifications, answers.

Nothing happened.

Imagine watching a film on television, a thriller maybe, something which really has you riveted to your sofa. The final reel is approaching, and the action is on the point of that tangy resolution you get in the best films. Out of the blue, your screen goes snowy. So you follow your usual routine: you bang the television, you check the aerial, you fine-tune the channel. You do everything you have always done. Then excitedly you resume your position on the sofa — there is still time to catch the ending — and hit the on button. More snow.

Imagine the fury that you feel at that fraudulent moment: that is how I felt. Cheated. All that writing, all that time off work, all for nothing.

I smoked an angry cigarette. Then I resolutely got to my feet. The time had come for action. If answers were not going to surface, then I would have to retrieve them myself. I knew how to get at them, with that sharp little screwdriver of a query, Why? It was time to go into the geneses, rationales and determinants of what had happened, to look at causes, not effects. It was time to open up the television.

Then, almost as soon as I had made that determination, I became discouraged. There was no point in fooling myself any further, this why business was clearly not my strength. My knowledge of psychology and the inward workings of humans was on a par with my knowledge of television interiors, and the mysteries of the Donovan story loomed before me like an electronic thicket of encoders, circuits and image orthicons. I was out of my depth. Why Donovan had married Arabella, why she had left him, why he had suddenly acceded to the divorce — I passed on those questions. Donovan’s dumbstruck collapse in court — what was I supposed to do about that, look it up in medical text-books? Look under a for aphony? What about the last time I saw him, on the golf course, the time he wept: who did I call in on that one? Why he burned his book? How should I know? Why should I know?