This is the Life

Alastair Smail

Soon afterwards I began sending off applications to other chambers. The only pupillage I was offered was with an obscure landlord and tenant set, and they made it clear that they doubted very much whether they would be able to take me on at the end of it. It was not me, they said, it was simply a question of space: there were just not enough square feet to go round. It was then that I saw an advertisement inviting applications to Batstone Buckley Williams. I attended a brief interview and they immediately offered me a position. Of course, I gratefully accepted. The Bar had, by then, lost its appeal for me. The senior partner at Batstone’s, Edward Boag, took me aside the first day I arrived. We went into a corner together and he gave me a piece of advice. ‘I want you to forget all the law you’ve ever learned,’ he divulged. ‘We don’t like intellectual pretensions at Batstone Buckley Williams. And let me let you into a secret.’ He looked around in case anyone was listening. ‘This business is all about one thing: meeting deadlines. Lots of them.’

I must make it clear that I do not feel bitter about the experience – not in the slightest. I am very happy here, at Batstone Buckley Williams, and in many ways I am relieved that I never stayed at the Bar – the pressure and the workload are simply too great for my liking. And certainly I have no hard feelings for Donovan. It was not his fault that I was not taken on, he was abroad at the time of the decision. A man cannot be everywhere at once: omnicompetent, yes, but not omnipresent. If I were as busy as Donovan, I too might well overlook such things as tenancy selections, or simply find myself unable to devote myself to them, however much I might wish to.

So I took no pleasure in the news of Donovan’s collapse. I did not rub my hands in glee at his misfortune or count my lucky stars. No, I thought of him with fondness and was anxious about his health. I was also, well, intrigued. The boundary line between my sympathy and my curiosity was, it must be said, a little indistinct.

But when nine o’clock came around and the telephone began ringing and my colleagues started arriving, my thoughts soon turned to other things. A terrible pile of papers awaited my attention and my agenda was awash with appointments, the conferences, meetings and deadlines flowing in waves of bright manuscript across the pages. My secretary, June, notes down my engagements in my diary using an ingenious scheme of red, green and turquoise inks which I have never been able to understand. Her method is so painstaking, though, that I do not have the heart to tell her this. Anyway, I am sure that my diary is a lot more agreeable than it would otherwise be and I am grateful to June for the trouble she goes to. Without her I would be lost, because I can, sometimes, be something of a dreamy, head-in-the-clouds type of man. I have been known to moon away an afternoon revolving in my chair, mulling over nothing in particular, listening to the traffic below my window, the relaxing grumble of engines and the sounds of the klaxons (once I spent a whole afternoon classifying these as toots, beeps, blasts and honks – the toots outnumbered the beeps, but only just).

Other times I take a ladder to my mind’s attic to take a look for anything interesting. I climb up there and rummage around old trunks filled with all kinds of bric-à-brac: I never know for sure what will turn up. For better or worse my head is full of trivia, odds and sods that bear on nothing – the cost of wholly insignificant meals, the names of plumbers no longer in business, the lyrics of bad songs, examination questions on Roman law that I never answered, telephone numbers of women I shall never see again. Some people can simply discard these things like leaky old armchairs or out-of-date suits. Not me. When it comes to the past, I am a real hoarder, salting away every moment I can, even those possessed of only the minutest value, their historicity – the banal fact that they have occurred and will never recur. The difficulty with this is that things stick indiscriminately in my mind; that important things are apt to be lost amongst bagatelles.

All of this does not mean that I am sentimental or prone to nostalgia. On the contrary. I have no wish, on the whole, to turn the clock back, nor do I entertain any notion of the good old days. As far as I am concerned, what is done is done. Admittedly, like everyone else, I do sometimes enjoy reliving certain moments. Sometimes, in a kind of reverse déjà vu, I find in myself the exact feelings and sensations that coursed through me at a particular time, so that for a minute I am, my lurching heart and tingling nerves registering a physiological journey, utterly transported: but that is all.

If my mind is a store-room full of junk, Donovan’s was something altogether different. Unlike me, who can barely remember the name of a single case, Donovan’s brain housed a huge repository of legal authorities which he could instantly cite; it brimmed like a grain-bin with sweet precedents and nuggets of jurisprudence. He had a party trick where, if you quoted a case to him, he would rattle off the ratio of the decision, the year, the judges and barristers involved and even, if the case was remotely near his field, the page where it appeared in the reports. Everyone used to look on open-mouthed. No one could understand how he managed it. I know that science has uncovered some mnemonic freaks, like the Russian reporter who, with only three minutes’ study, could learn a matrix of something like 50 digits perfectly and years later could still churn out the matrix without error. This man could memorize anything you threw at him: poems in foreign languages, scientific formulae, anything. It made no difference whether the material was presented to him orally or visually or whether he had to speak or write the answers. His trick, I read somewhere, was to associate images with whatever it was he was trying to remember – in the way that you might, in trying to remember a shopping list, visualize a pig in a tree so that you do not forget to buy pork. Donovan’s memory was not, I think, quite as phenomenal as the Russian’s; but where he left the Russian behind was in the use to which he put his memory, the way he subjugated it for his own purposes. Donovan always had his facts carefully marshalled, he never allowed what he knew to get in the way of his thinking. The Russian, by contrast, found that his memory subjugated him; his mental imagery was so vivid that it fouled up his comprehension, so that the meaning of a sentence like ‘I am going to buy pork’ would be lost in a surreal collision of pigs and trees.

What I want to know is this: how is it that, with all his powers of recollection, Donovan could not put a name to my face at the party? I will go further: how is it that he could not even put a face to my face, that he failed even to realize that he should have known my name? The man was a walking reference library. Surely he could have accommodated me in his mind’s chambers? Surely, at the very least, he could have offered me a tenancy in his remembrances?

THREE (#ulink_1f7f676a-ad84-582b-bb28-d081722e6158)

Three weeks after I had read about Donovan’s collapse I was drinking vodka and tomato juice at the Middle Temple bar. I am not a regular there by any means, but if I drop in I can usually find someone to talk to; if not, I am happy to crunch a packet or two of dry roasted peanuts and read the newspaper.

On this occasion I was leafing through the sports pages when I recognized Oliver Owen sitting by himself on the sofa next to mine, looking incongruously splendid on the faded, bashed cushions. It was the first time I had seen him in years. His washed straw hair arced from his forehead in two gorgeous fountains; his parting cut purposefully through his hair, clean as a road in a cornfield, as though it led to some significant destination. Oliver was wearing a charcoal double-breasted suit that had visibly been tailored to accord with his specific instructions. Golden nodules linked the cuffs of his dry-cleaned white shirt and a handkerchief spilled emerald carefully from his breast. I searched my mind for the word that best described him and came up with it – dashing, Oliver looked dashing.

Like me, Oliver was reading a newspaper. I wanted to speak to him. We had been good friends for a couple of years after we had met in pupillage, and it was only circumstances, and not our volition, which had prevented us from seeing each other since then. Even now, I felt, our friendship was not over but merely dormant.

But I stayed where I was; something in me, some ridiculous internal prohibition, prevented me from leaning over and greeting him like the old friend he was. He’s probably got an appointment, I thought, he has the air of someone waiting for another; and did he want to speak to me anyway? Why should he, after all this time? What would we have to say to each other?

‘James?’

‘Oliver,’ I said, putting down my reading. I was delighted.

‘Why don’t you come sit over here?’ Oliver invited. ‘My God, it’s been years. How are you?’

I told him how I was (fine) and asked if he wanted a drink. I went up to the bar and showed Joe two fingers. Two large bloody marys please, Joe.’ While Joe mixed the drinks I unintentionally caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I say unintentionally because, for my peace of mind, I do not look into mirrors unless I have to. Comparing my image with Oliver’s eye-catching reflection, I was reminded that I am a man of almost transparent appearance, a man whose presence you would not quickly register in a public place, and in the mirror my face was struggling to make an impact between the brightly labelled bottles of Cinzano and Smirnoff and Gordon’s gin and Glenfiddich. My pointy and virtually hairless head poked out anonymously, my eyes, nose and mouth small and mistakable. My most distinctive feature, if I am truthful with myself, is a strange one: there is an uncanny symmetry between the tramlines on my forehead and the parallel lines made by my chins on my neck, with the net result that the top half of my head is just about duplicated in the bottom. You could turn a sketch of my head upside down and not notice the difference.

The drinks arrived and Oliver joined me at the counter as I spooned chunks of ice into the drinks. ‘So,’ he said, taking the glass I handed him, ‘what are we up to these days? Still with, er …?’

‘Batstone Buckley Williams,’ I said. ‘Yes. How about you? How’s 6 Essex?’

‘Awful,’ he said. ‘I’m spending far too much time in bloody Hong Kong and Malaysia. I hardly have a moment on home turf any more.’ We paused and drank from our glasses. Oliver looked at us in the mirror. The contrast was embarrassing. ‘You’re looking well, James,’ he said with a smile. He patted my lumpish stomach. ‘But what’s all this? What happened to that sheer wall of rock? Turn round, let’s have a look: dear me, it looks to me like there’s been some kind of landslide.’

I pulled my waistcoat down over the bulge and shrugged. ‘You’re looking well too,’ I said.

‘Who, me?’ Oliver inspected his image in disbelief. ‘I’ve aged, James, aged. Look at me, ‘I’m a wreck. It’s marriage, it wears you down. You married?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Two kids, house in Putney,’ Oliver said with intentional banality. ‘Yes, you’ve guessed it: dog, school fees coming up. After a while, the statistics start to catch up with you. Amazing how it just happens, isn’t it?’

For a moment I feared the talk would turn in detail to the question of educating the children, a subject I am rarely anxious to pursue. It was time to change the direction of the conversation. Happily, something came to mind.

‘What’s all this I read about Michael collapsing? Is he all right?’

Oliver laughed. ‘Collapse? Where did you read that? Collapse isn’t how I would describe it.’

‘Oh?’

‘Do you want to know what really happened? It’s not a bad story, I suppose.’ Oliver paused as he shaped the anecdote in his mind. He was still a gregarious man, a natural for company. ‘OK, here it is. Michael’s in big trouble. For twelve days he has to listen to Laurence Bowen putting the European Commission’s dreary little case that we’re not complying with their regulations about the ozone layer. Can you think of anything more boring than refrigerators and their relationship with the stratosphere? No, neither can I. Day after day, detail after boring bloody detail. Each day, each minute even, is a struggle with sleep, with madness.’ Oliver swallowed some more bloody mary, pleased with his phraseology. ‘Anyway, by the time it’s poor old Michael’s turn to say something, his case is about as intact as the ozone layer. Those points made by Bowen have been eating away at his ground like bloody CFCs. In short,’ Oliver summarized, ‘the UK’s in big, big shit. We need a bloody miracle. The only consolation for the government is that if anyone can do it, it’s Michael. All eyes turn to him as he stands up. What’s he going to say? everybody’s asking. How’s he going to play it?’ Oliver stopped. He saw my expression and grinned.

‘And?’ I said eagerly. ‘Go on.’

‘Only if you get me another,’ Oliver said. ‘Same again please.’

Smiling, I ordered two more of the same. Oliver had not changed.

‘Go on,’ I said, when I got back. ‘Get on with it. Michael stands up to reply: what does he say?’

Oliver grinned again. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Not a squeak. All they get is a leaden, ungolden silence. He moves his lips and waggles his tongue but not a word comes out. Not a syllable. He’s speechless, he’s mouthing like a bloody goldfish.’

‘You’re joking,’ I said encouragingly. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

Oliver laughed. ‘James, I swear to God, it’s like something out of Harold Pinter. Michael’s just standing there shuffling his papers, completely dumbstruck.’

I shook my head. ‘Michael? Lost for words? I don’t believe it.’

‘He’s not lost for words,’ Oliver corrected me, ‘he’s lost for a voice. You can imagine it: the judges are looking at each other, baffled as hell. They’ve never seen anything like it in their bloody lives. “Professor Donovan, is there anything the matter?” Donovan points at his throat. “Usher, fetch the professor a glass of water.” Enter water bearer. Donovan drinks. He opens his mouth to speak: still nothing. My God, you can imagine the embarrassment all round.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, they adjourned of course. Sent everybody home. What else could they do?’

‘Well, how strange,’ I said. ‘What an odd thing to happen. It sounds quite serious, actually. What was it, do we know? You don’t just conk out for no reason.’

Oliver saw some blemish in the sheen of his left shoe and awkwardly rubbed the toecap on his trousers. You could tell that he was right-footed. ‘James, sometimes I despair at your naivety,’ he said with an exaggerated casualness. He looked up from his shining feet and gazed straight into my eyes, without expression.

I gasped. ‘You don’t mean … Are you saying that Michael …?’

Oliver leaned forward to murmur. ‘I’m not saying anything, James, ‘I’m saying nothing at all. But let me put it this way: the government is not exactly prejudiced by the adjournment, is it? All that extra time to reconsider the points against it? Handy, I’d call it.’

This was typical Oliver, scurrilous, slanderous and entertaining.

‘That I don’t believe,’ I said. ‘Michael would never stoop to such a thing.’

Oliver leaned his back against the bar, looking to see who was around. He raised his faint eyebrows at a passing friend and turned his face towards me once more. ‘You believe what you want to, James.’ Then a thought seemed to strike him. ‘How about another?’ He gestured at Joe.