Kid Gloves (4 page)

My parents came home from their party in time to
overlap with mine. Sheila socialized for a little while, then started making preparations for
bed. At first Dad was genial. Then he took offence at an innocent remark made by one of the
guests, and told him to leave. I pointed out that he could only
logically
order out people he had himself invited, and that my guests were welcome until such time as I
expelled them – but the mood was no longer festive, and we beat a massed retreat. As I was
gathering together the presents I had been given, Dad came up to me and poked me in the chest. I
could have dropped the presents and stayed upright, but like a game-show contestant I was
determined to hang on to my trophies. I knew there was a sofa behind me and chose to topple
backwards onto that.

This was not the birthday present I would have
hoped for from Dad. As we trooped out of the flat and made our way downstairs, Sheila appeared
on the landing above us in her nightie, wringing her creamed hands and saying in social agony,
‘It's all right for you lot – you can leave. I have to live with it.' She had left the
sitting-room for ten minutes, the way people do in films about poltergeists, and the next thing
she knew her furniture was arranged on the ceiling. ‘It' was Dad's bad behaviour, his short
fuse, unless it was actually a wick that drew rage from his glass by capillary action.

The birthday assault was so out of proportion as
not even to be properly upsetting. I decided to make an experiment in apology studies. Better in
the circumstances to steer clear of any non-apology, un-apology, anti-apology. If demanding
redress from Dad never seemed to work, perhaps I should try a new approach, to see if he was
vulnerable from a different angle. The best rhetorical move (against a master of rhetoric) might
be to say that I didn't need an apology. Dad knew the martial arts of argument supremely well,
and could turn almost any throw against an opponent, but if I stepped smoothly away he might
topple backwards in his turn, from sheer surprise.

The day after my birthday I went round to Gray's
Inn and explained that I wasn't expecting an apology. I explained that this was because Dad was
a loose cannon when he had drink
inside him. If I put him and my friends
together in the same space then I had to accept the risk and not bleat when things went
wrong.

I knew from long experience that Dad's apologies
weren't worth having anyway. In our teenaged years we were incensed by the forms of words that
Dad would come up with after family rows. They seemed designed to wind up the tension rather
than soothe it in any way. They were strange cocktails of amnesia, shoulder-shrugging and
indirect accusation. If I had to name a specific cocktail I'd nominate the boilermaker, with its
bright and murky liquor floating in layers. An example might be:
Sheila tells me that you
were upset by something I said last night … I don't remember what it was, but
all I can say is … you can be very annoying.

Perhaps this was what is known as professional
deformation, as much as individual difficulty with the idea of being at fault. Lawyers will
never be in a hurry to admit liability. For them it must always be a last resort. A. P. Herbert
makes a semi-serious point along these lines in one of his
Misleading Cases
. A
describes B as lacking even the manners of a pig. B demands an apology. A capitulates to the
demand, saying that B does in fact have the manners of a pig. Does this count as an apology or
as an aggravation of slander?

In this case Dad didn't exactly topple. He was
outraged at my patronizing and manipulative manoeuvre, and responded with one of his own. He
told me to leave at once, and when I didn't move he made to pick up the phone, saying he would
call the police and have me thrown out. This was low-grade bluster by his standards, as was the
demand that I should surrender my keys and pay no further visits to the parental home. Sheila
overruled him the moment he said so. I stayed long enough to establish as a matter of record
that I wasn't being thrown out, then left him to simmer.

I hoped that my destabilizing
tactics would enable Sheila, who didn't enjoy the rooted place, even the ascendancy, of alcohol
in the household, to make some demands of her own. This was a lot to hope for, given that she
hated any kind of ‘atmosphere' and had never made much headway when it came to influencing Dad's
behaviour. The morning of a hangover was one of the few opportunities she was able to turn to
her advantage, reinforcing the self-disgust of Dad's every lurching cell with a little tender
chiding. At other times Dad had a blithe resistance to the virtues he had married, something
that I've seen in other men of his generation.

For a week or so I paid visits only when she
would be alone. Did I wear him down? Not quite. I got a letter that combined different elements
of his most characteristic manner: rueful charm and now-look-here-laddie-enough-is-enough. The
letter was much closer to an apology than anything I could remember, in speech let alone in
writing. It broke precedent in that respect, which is never a step a lawyer takes lightly. In
fact precedent was holy to him, but now, unprecedentedly, fault was being admitted.

The rueful charm emanated from the address given
at the top of the page:
The Doghouse, Gray's Inn
. The note of enough-is-enough was
struck by a passage which made clear that Dad did not accept there was a pattern of behaviour
attributable to drink. I could have a specific apology but no general admission. It was a
lawyerly way of proceeding after all, an apology ‘without prejudice', as if he was agreeing to
make a payment to an injured party without technically admitting liability. He would accept
chastisement as long as he wasn't expected to abase himself. It was the most favourable
settlement I was going to get.

Dad the widower wasn't much tempted by alcohol,
though he still liked champagne as an idea, essence of spontaneity and
celebration. He enjoyed orange juice as part of breakfast, and this was one of the few
deeply rooted pleasures that I could continue to administer. Though the kitchen of the flat was
relatively short on labour-saving devices we could boast a small electric squeezer, whose ageing
engine ground away not very effectively when the halved fruit was pushed down on it, its
automatic-reverse mechanism cutting in from time to time with disconcerting abruptness.

At a certain point I changed Dad's routine, and
my own, preferring to see Keith on Mondays at the Highbury flat and letting Matthew take charge
of Dad. Shopping on a Monday I saw a wide variety of types of orange on display in a
supermarket, and bought large quantities. I thought it might be fun to have a taste test, to
establish which variety Dad liked best. Matthew was happy to be master of ceremonies for a blind
tasting.

In fact Dad derailed the format with his response
to the first sample. He gave it 10 out of 10, making it unlikely that even the most gifted
statistician could extract meaningful information from his subsequent scores. In any case he
gave full marks to all the other juices he was offered.

Had he detected the patronizing
children's-activity-time element in the evening planned for him? I'd actually like to think so,
though I imagine he was just in an appreciative mood. Maybe he enjoyed seeing two sons in one
day, even if his pet name for Matthew in this period was Nogood Boyo, a Dylan Thomas reference
which Matthew took in good part but which nettled me on his behalf.

During this late phase of his life the drink
which meant most to him, more even than orange juice, was buttermilk, a taste from his childhood
which could be catered to by visiting any large branch of Sainsbury's. Despite his sweet tooth
in other areas he would drink it as it was, straight from the glass.

In his Denbighshire
childhood, on his way to school, he would dip his finger into the milk churn waiting for
collection at the side of the road. His finger would break into the creamiest layer of the top
of the milk, and convey its unique flavour to his mouth. This was a taste that was beyond
Sainsbury's power to reproduce – Taste the Difference 1920s Denbighshire Farm Top-of-the-Milk
Fresh from the Churn – even at the chain's largest and most cosmopolitan branches.

A book came out that year called
The Justice
Game
, by Geoffrey Robertson, with a very favourable mention of Dad. Sir William Mars-Jones
was offered as proof (though this was the only example given) of the argument that civil rights
and press freedom are safe in the hands of the judiciary, on the basis of his handling of the
ABC trial of the late 1970s, in which two journalists and their source were charged under the
Official Secrets Act.

Dad was still living at the heart of the legal
community, and sometimes colleagues would call in on him. I left Robertson's book on display by
Dad's chair, having inscribed it
For Dad on Father's Day 1998 / see pages 128–32, whenever
you need a lift
. The idea was that distinguished legal visitors would pick up the volume
and be led to the relevant passage by this inscription, though of course they might resort
directly to the index, in search most urgently of their own names and then their host's. Dad had
never been uncomfortable with applause, and now he could receive the book's accolade any number
of times, with a wondering pleasure that could never go stale. I imagined him after a visitor
had left, ringing like a lightly struck bell with the reverberation of recent praise, unsure
whether he had really only dreamed it.

When we were children Dad would tell us that the
noblest profession was the preacher's, the second noblest the teacher's and third the lawyer's.
I don't know why doctors didn't get a look in, but it was obviously important for Dad's chosen
profession to make the top three. When someone once quoted the maxim
‘suffer any injustice rather than go to law' in his hearing, he was greatly offended. This
cynical notion struck at the roots of his vocation. Perhaps he realized, as I have only just
done, that it was a worldly paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 6:7 – ‘Now therefore there is utterly a
fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do
ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?' In his capacity as preacher St Paul might have
the luxury of pulling rank over teachers and lawyers, but he could certainly be a pain in the
neck.

As Dad explained it to his young family, it was
his job to decide who was telling the truth. This sounds rather more like the jury's job, but
Dad always held on to the idea of a necessary connection between law and the truth of things. He
would never have agreed that a barrister is someone who wins arguments for a living, though that
might be an outsider's way of putting it.

There were trophies from successful cases on
display in the Gray's Inn flat which fascinated me as a child, since they occupied an
intermediate state between toy and self-sufficient adult object. One was a model of the internal
workings of a steam locomotive's engine, made of wood in muted shades of green, yellow and red.
There was a sheet of perspex over the assembly, but a wheel on the side could be turned to
demonstrate the action of the piston. Children's toys of the period, the late 1950s or early
'60s, didn't do a great deal, but they could do a bit more than that, and this object was
somehow more precious than a toy although less satisfying.

It was of course an exhibit from a case of Dad's,
used by him in court to demonstrate how a careless train driver, leaving the cab and for some
reason venturing onto the rails, could be run over by a locomotive he had confidently assumed
was
stationary and would remain so. I don't know who it was that retained
Dad's services, possibly an individual railway line or else the British Transport Commission –
the National Railways Board if it was after 1962. Presumably, too, Dad had been hired to argue
against compensation, or at least to limit it.

As a sensitive child (is there any other kind?) I
should by rights have been haunted by the image of this terrible event, with its resonance of
the heartless rhymes I found so hard to get out of my head (
Lucy met a train / the train met
Lucy / the rails were juicy / the juice was Lucy
).

In those days my sympathies went most readily to
animals or to suffering mothers. In any case sorrow reached me most reliably through books. I
haunted the Holborn Public Library and soon graduated from the children's shelves in the
basement to the adult holdings. My mind wanted to grow up as soon as possible, though there were
areas of experience that I shrank from.

The nearest bookshop to Gray's Inn was Her
Majesty's Stationery Office on High Holborn, whose stock in trade puzzled me since it contained
nothing remotely readable. Her Majesty's interests seemed very specialized. I was determined to
find something worthy of my book token just the same, and eventually found a small volume with
an enticing cover, illustrated with colourful birds. There were no pictures inside, but that was
a challenge I was used to. It wasn't easy to become emotionally involved with a book about
Scottish game bird populations, statistically analysed, but I managed to break my heart over the
inexorable decline of
Tetrao urogallus urogallus
, the capercaillie.

Precociously reading a Balzac novel (I was
perhaps thirteen by this stage), I came across a passage where the hero borrowed his mother's
life savings so as to launch himself in the world. I couldn't bear to read any further, knowing
that he was going
to ruin her. I could imagine nothing worse. A steam
locomotive would have weighed lightly on me compared to the dreadfulness of impoverishing a
mother.