Authors: Joseph O'Neill
Susan considered what I had said then visibly rejected it. That gritty expression settled once more on her face and it came to me where I had seen that look before. She had worn it one day when she had set about unblocking her kitchen sink. I was ready to call the plumber and be done with it, but Susan persisted. She pressed and drove the plunger again and again until finally the plughole yielded up its stubborn contents. She wore that look right now. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when I caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for the bill with a scribbling movement of the hand, Susan firmly said, ‘And we’ll have another bottle of house red, and coffee.’ There was to be no escape.
And then it happened. I was powerless to prevent it, the matter was out of my hands. We had more, lots more, to drink, and soon – well, soon, as they coyly say, one thing led to another. First of all the discussion of what had gone wrong was, to my relief and surprise, abandoned, and instead we reminisced; and of course we reminisced about those moments when things were magical: soon we recalled how we first met, at a friend’s party, and how exciting our courting days had been.
‘At the beginning, every time you rang I felt sick,’ Susan said, blushing. ‘The first time, when I picked up the phone I nearly swooned.’
I smiled, fingering my glass. We had had this conversation before, but it was always nice to hear it again. How many other girls had ever felt faint at the sound of my voice?
‘What about you?’ Susan asked. She allowed herself a grin. ‘How did you feel?’
‘I felt pretty excited, too,’ I said.
‘How excited? How exactly?’
I gave a shy smile and pretended to give the question thought. ‘I felt a knocking in my chest. Thump, thump, thump,’ I said. ‘It was my heart. My heart was jumping all over the place.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said. She was blushing with pleasure. ‘When I picked up the phone to ring you, my ears were pounding too; it was like I was listening to my heart with a stethoscope.’ I poured it on. She loved it when my talk grew lyrical. She revelled in it. ‘I could hardly hear your voice my ears were pounding so much.’
‘Jimmy, I feel dizzy now … Stop, stop it now …’
Of course there was no stopping. We talked about what had attracted us to each other, we hinted lewdly at the sexual times we had enjoyed; and the more we drank, the better it all seemed. All the while I was called on by miniature domestic memories – how daintily pleasing her waking-up routine was (after she wordlessly got out of bed I would hear the click of the kettle, then the rushing of water as she performed her face-wash, the second click of the kettle as the water came to the boil, the splat of the tea-bag in the sink, the padding of bare feet, the groan of the mattress as she rejoined me in bed, and, finally, the small slurp she made sitting up to drink next to my sleeping form), how neatly she piled her jumpers in her cupboard, how thoughtful she had always been to ensure that there was enough hot water for my bath. By the time we had finished the second bottle and had ordered a final carafe, I was beginning to see things in a new light. Susan had a lovely colour, and I was sure that she wore a new pair of glasses. Also, her hair was not quite as lank as I remembered it. Now crinkles ran through it, and although the effect was unattractively artificial, I softened at the thought of her earnestly going to the hairdresser and doing her best to enliven her appearance. Poor Suzy!
Emptying the carafe, nothing was really said. We contented ourselves with playing games with our eyes, fluttering and darting little looks and peeks at one another, exchanging momentary but significant gazes. By now the revenants of our old selves had vacated the table and just the two of us were left, breathing in air sweet with oxygen. We paid the waiter (fifty-fifty, Susan insisted) and went to a nearby pub for a final
drink. There was a crush of customers but we found an unoccupied corner behind a man with a black, breathless dog. When I returned from the bar with the drinks I squeezed myself between Susan and the dog-owner. Her thigh made tingling contact with mine and soon my arm was around her shoulder and she was bunched up against me, nice and close. She said, Oh Jimmy, and we kissed.
At that moment I was presented with an opportunity to extricate myself from my predicament (I say predicament because, although I was at an advanced stage of intoxication, it was plain to me that the situation was running away from me, and that unless I acted decisively it would leave me behind completely). Excusing myself, I walked carefully and unsteadily to the gents. My head was filled with a fog as I laboured to think of what to do next. Relieving myself, I clumsily tried to identify and weigh up the elements due for consideration. On the one hand I felt a strong desire, an imperative, for a sexual encounter. I recognized that it was not often that such a chance came my way. On the other hand, I knew what disappointment and mayhem this type of encounter would in all probability lead to, given my inebriation and the problematical background to the situation. I looked at myself in the mirror above the urinal and was drunkenly struck by the strangeness of my face: whose visage was that? Mine? Was I inseparable from those eyes and chins? That nose – did I carry it around all day? How on earth did the air that I sucked through it fuel my body? What extraordinary mechanisms I housed! How miraculous everything was! Then, washing my hands, another factor entered my deliberations: I felt sorry for Susan. It is true, I did; my heart went out to her. She had made such an effort this evening, and if anyone deserved a little romantic success, a little happiness, it was her. I splashed cold water on my cheeks and neck and placed my face in the hot jet of air expelled by the drying machine on the wall. It would be uncharitable, I decided, to refuse her advances.
Susan was waiting for me outside, her handbag crossed
over her torso to deter snatchers. She had removed her glasses and was looking, as far as I was able to tell, joyous. At once I hailed a cab and we tumbled together into its dark, comfortable interior.
‘Stockwell,’ I said to the driver.
A delicious tension held sway between us. Things were acutely understood but left unsaid. We briefly regarded one other with meaningful eyes then sat back to enjoy the ride, swaddled in our overcoats, our hands in our pockets. I always like a late journey home in a safe and roomy black cab on such nights, dark nights sweet and melting as black gâteau, with me in the back luxuriating in the voluptuous swings and curves taken by the big taxi. After ten minutes we rolled up to my front door and I said to Susan, Come on, and unloaded her from the taxi. She said, Just for a coffee then, I really must go. Heavy-legged, we made our way into the flat. Susan fell on to the sofa while I made coffee, spilling sugar and coffee grains on to the work surface. Susan rather uncharacteristically turned on the television and began toying with the buttons on the remote control, zipping between channels and colouring the faces tomato-red then black-and-white. I brought in the mugs of coffee and she said, ‘My God, look at that.’
On the screen a match was about to take place between two huge Japanese wrestlers called The Fog and The Sea Slug. They were limbering up. Taking their time, they wandered formidably around, preparing themselves. For whole minutes they threw salt around the ring, rubbed their palms together, slapped their thighs and squatted in mid-air with legs spread, then they straightened and turned their backs on each other to face the crowd, their fat arms and buttocks tremoring. It was spectacular, and we drank in silence, watching. With a final adjustment of their bellybands and a shake of their limbs, the wrestlers crouched down eyeball to eyeball, two great banks of flesh. They leaped at each other. It was over in seconds. The Sea Slug, the smaller man, used the momentum of The Fog against him and simply pushed him out of the ring. That was it. All of that concentration and build-up had come almost to
nothing. A glancing collision of bodies, a movement of feet and a push. That was all it amounted to.
If I had had my wits about me I would have learned from the wrestlers. I would have called for a mini-cab or made up the spare bed. I did neither. And so, shortly after we had turned off the television, Susan and I found ourselves in a ring of bedsheets, momentarily clinched and shuddering.
I slept badly. Susan was making a wheezing sound and the bed was unpleasantly warm. I itched below the knee, then behind my ear, then at the back of my neck. What would she say in the morning? What demands would she make? I rolled over to the edge of my half of the bed. I needed space to breathe. Again I scratched myself, this time on the left calf muscle. The air was thickening; somewhere automobiles were accelerating in the night.
When I awoke, at nine o’clock, a great surprise awaited me. Susan had gone. I went to the note-pad by the telephone where she used to leave notes – nothing there.
What did I think? I thought, Phew.
Like a sailor at sea I have certain routines which I invariably follow: one routine for the morning, another for the evening and another for bedtime. During the week these are mainly a matter of time and motion, designed to remove the pain of constantly having to make decisions and to allow me the luxury of a restfully blank mind. On Sundays I have a routine I treasure so much that it has become a ritual. I lie in until about ten o’clock, then I slip on the first trousers, socks and shirt that come to hand, nip across the road for the newspaper, nip back, undress and climb back into bed, read the sports pages, go to the kitchen and, after some bran flakes in semi-skimmed milk, cook myself sausages, scrambled eggs and toast, wash that down with a grapefruit juice and sugared coffee, finish the newspapers cover to cover, run myself a bath, lie in the water for half an hour, get out and fall asleep in front of the afternoon film.
Thanks to Susan’s timely departure, my Sunday morning was still intact, and as usual at midday I sprinkled some fragrancer in the bathtub and turned on the hot water tap. Minutes later, I slid, my heels squeaking against the plastic surface, into a stinging, fumy bath.
The water smelled of apples. Gradually, deliriously, I immersed the top half of my body until I lay neck-deep and buoyant. My knees surfaced like snowy islands. Beneath the taps appeared the archipelagos of my toes. I was in a state of bliss. My pores opened, my neck muscles relaxed, my eyes closed. Purified, utterly released from the night before, I
began lazily contemplating what to do with my afternoon; and I remembered my copy of the Introduction to
Supranational Law.
I would read it when I finished bathing, I decided, instead of watching a film. Then I slithered further down the slope of the tub, took a gulp of air and submersed the whole of my head, my cheeks ballooned, bubbles streaming and popping from my nose …
Later, wet-headed in my dressing-gown, imprinting the carpet with my bare feet, I lit the imitation coal-fire in my sitting room and made myself comfortable in front of it. The morning was overcast and this had darkened the flat, so the blue flames licked warmly around the dark, fake rocks. As well as the print-out, I had brought out a chunky file of cuttings and clippings and, seeing them spread out on the floor for the first time in a long time, suddenly found myself back in 1974. As I have said, I am not prone to nostalgia, but sometimes, without wishing it, you simply find yourself in the past, you find that you are back there whether you like it or not. This is what happened to me that Sunday. Looking at those notes sledded me straight into another time.
I was a student at university and I dreamed of becoming an international lawyer. It happened in my second year. One afternoon in autumn, when I had nothing better to do, I had opened a law book – a second-hand copy of Donovan’s
International Law.
Idly, uninterestedly, I began looking over the first paragraphs. Before I knew what had happened my fingers had turned thirty pages; and to my astonishment (until then I had detested every law book I had ever had the misfortune to pick up), I wanted to read on.
And I did read on. I had no choice, I was hooked. Usually when I read a law book I would stop after a few sentences, gasping for relief from the airless prose. Donovan’s prose, on the other hand, was remarkably spacious – his writing brought the subject to life, rather like those aerators that pump oxygen into dead, Ashless rivers. Inspired, I tried to read every word that he had written – his articles, book reviews,
pamphlets, everything. I read his doctoral thesis,
The Community of Nations
(Butterwells, 1967), I read
The Law of Space
(Butterwells, 1969), and his first edition of
Essays on Space Law
(Donovan, Ed., Butterwells, 1973). Then, the better to understand his work, I scoured everything to do with public international law that I could lay my hands on. I harassed the librarians with remote references, took out dusty books which had not been touched in years, spent hours perched on the library step-ladder going through the contents of obscure shelves. Very soon I realized that Donovan, young though he was (he was only just thirty!) was ludicrously superior to his colleagues. While they lumbered towards tentative and uninteresting perspectives, Donovan explored the field playfully and effortlessly, never neglecting, as others did for lack of scholarship and intellectual capacity, the complex political dimensions of the subject. Late at night in my room, thanks to him, I was animated by difficult, heady questions – what was the true nature of international law? How satisfactory were the voluntarist mechanisms of enforcement? What regimes should operate in contiguous zones?
And, head on my pillow, I was also visited by dreams, by futures. I would join Donovan’s chambers and become the junior he could rely on, his trusty number two. I would ride on the coat-tails of his practice and at the same time I would write for the learned journals. Maybe, if I was lucky, some university teaching would fall my way: maybe one day Donovan would not be able to attend a lecture and would ask me to take his place! I saw myself at the podium in the theatre, the students copiously writing down my every word as I strode confidently up and down, my eyes regarding the ceiling, my hands behind my back, my speech unhesitating, wise and humorous. That was how Donovan’s lectures in Cambridge must be, I imagined. Then an idea occurred to me: why not go to Cambridge and see him? What was to stop me? So I telephoned the law faculty there. They were very helpful. Indeed, the woman whom I spoke to sounded positively elated at my inquiry.