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 Some people can simply discard these things like leaky old armchairs or out-of-date suits.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 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