This is the Life (24 page)

So the next time I gave the case my full consideration was 25 January 1989. I received, out of the blue, a fax from Donovan. He was still in Rio de Janeiro. The fax said:
James, as you probably have gathered I am consenting to the petition. Participate in any consent proceedings on February 2nd. Instruct junior counsel. Copy of settlement agreement attached. M.D.

So. On 2 February consent proceedings would take place. The judge would be asked by Arabella to pronounce a decree nisi, and we would not oppose the application. It was cut-and-dried stuff. I glanced at the settlement: nothing noteworthy,
the payment of a lump sum in three instalments. From a legal point of view the case was no longer special. From now on it was simply a matter of administration.

The morning of 2 February was freezing cold. The wind scorched my head as I tramped down the Strand and by the time I reached the court my ears were bright red and hurting. I met up with the counsel I had instructed, a young woman called Rebecca Gibbons, and we wandered over to speak to Philip Hughes and his counsel, a Mr Brooke Sulman. Hughes handed me a copy of an affidavit sworn by Arabella wherein she detailed what she had suffered at the hands of Donovan. It was an unusually bland statement which could have been made by anyone. It added little to the Petition. Arabella complained of loneliness, lack of communication between herself and Donovan, his indifference (an example was given of a time when he had gone away for two months without so much as telephoning her) and so forth. It was a terribly ordinary affidavit which made terribly ordinary points. An uninformed reader would have never been able to guess at the dramatic subtext, that history was moving through those stilted paragraphs.

The judge pronounced the decree nisi in record time.

The marriage was as good as dead. In six weeks Arabella would apply for a decree absolute and that would be that. One stamp from the court office and no more Mr and Mrs Donovan.

When I arrived back at the office I made a little scene of blowing my hands and stamping my feet. By the time I sat down at my desk I had a cup of steaming coffee and a digestive biscuit waiting for me. Whenever June sees me come in shivering in my overcoat with my red ears, she always puts the kettle on and brings me a boiling brew. There,’ she says. ‘Drink that. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘June,’ I say. ‘You shouldn’t. That’s not your job. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is. You shouldn’t, June,’ I say.

I pick up my cup happily and June purses her lips and looks all business. I feel her standing there as my eyes dip down to my cup. Her shoulder leans against the jamb and she is regarding me, making sure that all is well, that there is nothing she can do for me. My June. My summer month. I would be lost without her.

(I wonder what she is doing now? The poor thing probably spends her days deflecting inquiries from irate clients, cancelling meetings, securing time extensions, re-distributing my work. If anyone will clear up the mess I have left behind, it is June. She will know that I am in some kind of trouble. She will have recognized the symptoms. All the same, I feel guilty at having burdened her with the consequences of my actions. I must remember to get her some kind of present when all of this is over, some token of my appreciation.)

When I came back from court and sat back with my coffee, I pushed at my iron desk with my feet and swung around to look up at the sky. Seeing nothing but the sky makes me contemplative, and on this occasion I began meditating upon the consequences of Donovan’s divorce. By now I had become used to the idea and had overcome my dismay at not having been consulted; and although the sudden and mysterious end to the matter still left me uneasy, I had pushed all of that aside. I had also got over the feeling of anti-climax mixed, it must be said, with regret. I knew that the end of the case did not mean the end of me and Donovan. Quite the contrary. Now we were only just at the beginning. Now our futures looked more closely bound than ever.

Let me explain. It came to me, sipping my coffee that morning, that the divorce would benefit Donovan. Now his time would be his, from now on he would be free to finish
Supranational Law
in peace. And the more I thought about that book, the more excited I became. If ever a book was made for its time, this was it. The frazzled world was crying out for a jurisprudence to cope with the environmental crisis, it was crying out for someone to step into the breach. Donovan
would be that someone. In
Supranational Law
he would supply that jurisprudence. When the historians of the next century came to look at the factors that turned around the present crisis, they would dwell long and hard on the name of Michael Donovan. They might even (my God, if only this were true! If only!) feel compelled to read
Michael Donovan: An Appreciation
, by James Jones.

Yes, gazing up at that white, foggy sky, I saw the situation growing rosier by the minute. When Donovan’s
Supranational Law
, with its brand new regime for the critical resources of the planet, came to fruition, then the parallels I had drawn with Hugo Grotius would become irresistible. My thesis would take off. Just as Grotius provided the much-needed concept of the High Seas in
Mare Liberum
back in the seventeenth century, a concept which lasts to this day, so Donovan would provide its modern-day equivalent. It was all so neat, it all fell so spookily into place, that I sprang to my feet, shivering. Yes, I was destined for greater things! There could be no more doubt about it, not now, not after everything that had happened: Donovan was heading for the history books and so, on his coat-tails, was I. My pupillage with Donovan at 6 Essex, my years of research thereafter (only made possible, it dawned on me, by my failure at the Bar), our reunion through his divorce, my uncanny discovery of his manuscript, all of these pointed to one thing: Donovan and Jones were in this together. The two of them were going places.

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.