Kid Gloves (2 page)

Now that I was in the full flower of
semi-competence, he was tolerant and even appreciative of my playing, though in a rather
codified way. He would wait for the end of the first
piece and then applaud
heartily from wherever he was stationed in the flat, expressing warm approval for a job well
done and a hope that the recital was now over. This hint I understood. My taste in music was not
his.

It seemed to me that an electronic keyboard
would, with its headphone option, enable me to spare Dad any disturbance. I would also be able
to play in the late or early hours if I couldn't sleep. I don't know why I didn't ask Dad if he
minded me using his money for this purpose. He wasn't likely to refuse. Perhaps I wanted to
spice up my virtuous persona with a little high-minded embezzling. What sort of person abuses
his power of attorney to steal from his helpless father? I bought an ex-demonstration Clavinova
from Chappell's, its price reduced by a third but still amounting to a couple of thousand
pounds. It enormously increased my sense of psychological space. It was like having an extra
room built onto the flat, where nobody went but me.

I also had access to the organ in Gray's Inn
Chapel, by triple permission of Dean, Preacher and Organist. The organist, Christopher
Bowers-Broadbent, had actively encouraged me, giving me my only actual piece of advice on how to
manage the instrument, though it sounded like something from an old manual of etiquette for lady
travellers.
Keep your knees together, and don't look down
.

My sleeping quarters were upstairs in a converted
attic. There were small skylights of clouded glass but no windows, and no plumbing. The ceilings
were a lot lower than the ones downstairs, and sometimes I hit my head on the lintels despite my
long familiarity with the spaces. The flat was built after the war to replace what had been
bombed, approximating to the Georgian pattern but making no claim to elegance. My parents had
been the first tenants, moving in at about the time I was born, and they had converted the flat
ahead of
time by installing a spiral staircase to the attic, which would more
normally be accessed from a trap door above the shared landing outside the front door.

My love life wasn't hampered by my new role as
carer. Dad knew my partner, Keith, well enough, though he had never felt it necessary to
remember the name. It certainly wasn't hard to have Keith over for a meal on a Saturday, for
instance, and then to say, ‘Dad, Keith's going home now,' while in fact running him a bath.

Many of Dad's old friends lived nearby. Emlyn
Hooson lived across the landing, Henrietta Wilson was next door at number 5, the formidable
Edith Wellwood lived at number 1 (a building dating from 1695 that had dodged the bombs
responsible for so much damage to the Inn). The Lewises, Esyr and Elizabeth, lived in South
Square a hundred yards or so away. Anything beyond that, the distant purlieus of Raymond and
Verulam Buildings, qualified in Edith's eyes as the ‘suburbs' of Gray's Inn, though she had the
demanding and unstable perspective of the socialist snob, embarrassed that the address given on
her birth certificate was Caledonian Road and painfully conscious of being the poorest resident.
When she had first seen the Gray's Inn in the 1930s, looking down into its gardens from the top
deck of a bus, she had wondered what this place could possibly be. A posh lunatic asylum seemed
to be the likeliest answer, and now she was an inmate of it.

Gray's Inn was a little legal parish, though
increasingly a plutocratic monoculture, much less diverse than it had been in my childhood, when
such bohemians as architects and accountants might have their homes there. Earlier in the
twentieth century it accommodated without apparent effort an even more wayward, literary type of
inhabitant, as exemplified by Edward Marsh and Maurice Baring. Successive Rent Acts have
weakened the position of residents, so that only the longest-established
can
feel themselves secure. Newcomers can hope for nothing better than an assured shorthold tenancy,
and must accept that widows have no right to remain. Even in the late 1990s, Gray's Inn was
mainly deserted at weekends and outside legal term. The flats are mainly on the top floors of
the buildings (the third), with offices on the lower levels. Outside the working week most of
those upper windows were dark.

It felt entirely natural to invite Dad's friends
to dinner since they were my friends too. And not just dinner: a couple of times I took on the
duty, which had been part of my mother's routine, of giving ‘the gentlemen' breakfast on a
Sunday. The gentlemen in question were the Preacher of the Inn, the Revd Roger Holloway, and the
Dean of Chapel, Master (Tony) Butcher. I apologize for a form of words which makes him sound
like a card from a Happy Families pack, but this is correct usage within the Inn when referring
to benchers.

Roger Holloway was a man whose faith co-existed
with a formidable worldliness – while living in Hong Kong in the 1980s he had appeared every day
on each of the colony's two television channels, in the morning contributing the equivalent of
Thought for the Day
, presenting a claret-tasting programme on the other channel in the
evenings. There can't be many preachers who have used Lady Diana Cooper as an authority for a
point of doctrine (the impossibility of repentance as an act of will), quoting her as saying
that when she met her Maker she would only be able to say, ‘Dear God, I'm sorry I'm not sorry.'

Roger claimed to have a list of names that were
guaranteed to kick-start Dad's dormant desire to hold the floor. The one I remember is ‘Goronwy
Rees' (not a name I knew). Accusations of Cold War-era betrayal and double-dealing would follow.
A Welshman who turned his coat was not to be forgiven, even if there was no proof of his
treachery. I can't say I ever tried
my luck with this Open Sesame. I
accepted the new Dad, who was so different from the old one that any flashback would be jarring.
He became exasperated from time to time but there were no outbursts.

Dad didn't seem to have religious faith so much
as religious confidence. Every morning he woke with the expectation of having fine things shown
to him by life or its executive officers. It seemed obvious that God would turn out to (i) exist
and (ii) put in a good word. Round His omnipresent neck he might wear a Garrick Club tie.

It was strange to see Dad take so little interest
in food after Sheila's death, and even in drink. Gray's Inn was, and perhaps is, very male
socially, certainly at the higher levels. Students eat a certain number of dinners in the Hall,
while benchers like Dad are well looked after at table. The cellars of the Inn are grandly
stocked. When I made arrangements for a reception after Sheila's funeral service in the Chapel,
it was proposed that we serve the Inn's ‘quaffing wine'. I agreed to this without asking for
more detail, though it would have been interesting to know how many grades there were below
this, and how many above.

There's a gesture people make in social settings
like weddings where drink flows freely, and glasses are discreetly topped up without an enquiry,
so as not to interrupt conversation. The gesture involves placing the hand palm down over the
glass, symbolically blocking access to the vessel. It's not an elaborate gesture, not a
difficult thing to get right, but I never saw Dad make it.

Dad's background in Congregationalist
Denbighshire was teetotalitarian – his own father drank only one alcoholic drink in his life,
and that was (fair play) a glass of champagne at Dad's wedding reception. I imagine him choking
it down as if it was sparkling rat poison. The early prohibition left traces: not having
a taste for beer, Dad rather disapproved of pubs, but had no objection to
drinking at home or on classier premises.

He had joined the RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve) before the War and served on a number of ships, having particularly fond memories of
HMS
Euryalus
. The custom of ‘splicing the mainbrace', the distribution of a tot of rum
daily, was still in force. This Nelsonian beverage was not just a ritualized perk but a form of
currency. Favours could be secured or acknowledged by pledging all or part of one's tot.

The smallest possible subdivision of the ration
was ‘sippers'. When you were taking sippers, everyone would be watching your Adam's apple to
make sure it didn't move. The spirit was admitted to the mouth by a subtle suction amounting to
osmosis. A larger share was ‘gulpers'. When it came to gulpers the Adam's apple was allowed a
single movement. When the whole tot was being offered up, the cry was ‘Sandy bottoms!'.

Not much remained in Dad's vocabulary of naval
lingo, though he did hang on to the expression ‘belay the last pipe', used to indicate that an
order has been countermanded. I absorbed it unthinkingly, so that it has become my normal way of
saying ‘Forget what I just said' or ‘Ignore my last e-mail' – but then I have to explain what
the phrase means, and its advantages as a piece of shorthand disappear.

It doesn't seem likely that Dad got another of
his standard phrases – ‘Rally buffaloes!' – from his time at sea. It was the very unwelcome
phrase he used in our teenage years to tell us to get out of bed.

The staple adult drink that I remember from my
childhood was gin and bitter lemon. No-one has been able to explain to me the vogue for this
mixer, with a taste both caustic and insipid. Was tonic water rationed in some way?

Sometimes I wonder how anyone of that generation
got home safe after a party, at a time when refusing an alcoholic
drink was
bad manners and the breathalyser didn't exist. Of course the roads were emptier then.

One of Dad's early cases, and one of his
favourite anecdotes, involved a charge of drink-driving from that ancient time, the period in a
barrister's early professional life when he borrows briefs from his fellows in chambers in
advance of a conference with a client, piling them up on his desk to give the necessary
impression of a thriving practice.

Dad's client had been charged on the basis of his
poor performance walking a straight line. This was the period's low-tech guide to intoxication,
a white line drawn on the floor at police stations. Urine tests? Blood tests? Not relevant to
the story as he told it.

The client's defence was that he suffered from
Ménière's disease, a problem of the inner ear which affects hearing and balance. His was a
severe case, making it impossible for him to walk a straight line. Dad marshalled an expert
witness to testify to his medical condition. The Crown did the same. The outcome of the case
depended, as it so often does, on which of these carried more weight, whether Tweedledum or
Tweedledee excelled in authority and gravitas. The expert witness called by Dad gave evidence
that the accused did indeed suffer from Ménière's disease, and could not therefore be expected
to walk a straight line. The Crown's counterpart testified that he did not in fact suffer from
the disease. His inability to walk a straight line amounted only to a confession by the legs
that unlawful quantities of alcohol had been admitted to the mouth.

The verdict went in favour of Tweedledum, with
Dad's client acquitted. His driving licence was safe – but then it was officially rescinded, on
the basis that his severe Ménière's disease rendered him unfit to drive. This was the aspect of
the story I liked best, the irony of the trump card turning
into the joker.
The law is not mocked! Except that Dad's client asked if there was a mechanism for getting his
licence back. Yes there was – but he would need to get a medical expert to certify that he
didn't have Ménière's disease. A phone call to Tweedledee, and Dad's client was on his way to
the swift reissue of a driving licence. The law is mocked on a regular basis, perhaps most
heartily by those who make a living from it.

In his free-drinking social circle Dad rarely
came up against abstainers, but the parents of Peter Rundell, a schoolfriend of mine when I was
ten or eleven, turned out to be fierce advocates of Moral Rearmament. Dad learned this at an
evening event that turned out to be governed by the statutes of Prohibition. The discovery gave
him a hunted look, and his small talk was unusually small. Though the deprivation hit Dad hard I
didn't much care how adults carried on, and I even enjoyed being the Rundells' guest at plays
put on at the Westminster Theatre, then a stronghold of Moral Rearmament. I was theatrically
naive, but sophisticated enough, even so, to feel uneasy when we in the audience were issued
with white sticks during the interval of a play called
Blindsight
. I tapped my way
across the lobby with my eyes shut, making broad gestures with my free hand, hoping it would
close round an ice cream.

Dad the raconteur, in full flow at the
dinner-table, was a very different creature from Dad the solemn upholder of his profession,
though he was always confident of his own consistency. I don't think he noticed that the view of
the law as an amoral game, which he could pass on with such relish while telling a story such as
the one about the alleged Ménière's disease, was the same one that he so violently objected to
in the event that other people advanced it and he wasn't in the mood to laugh along.

When he was a beginner at the
Bar Dad was able to acquire a wig second-hand, and so was spared the effort of ageing a new one,
by dusting it with ash or soaking it in tea. Heavy smokers have an inbuilt advantage when it
comes to achieving the yellow tint desired, but the effect isn't immediate.

Those who go shopping for barristers' wigs in
long-established shops on or near Chancery Lane, such as Ede & Ravenscroft or Stanley Ley,
are offered two tiers of quality, but they aren't all that far apart. They don't correspond to
the economy and luxury own-brand lines in a supermarket, since the price differential is hardly
more than 10 per cent. If you ask what the difference is, you'll be told that although both are
made from horsehair, the more expensive ones are made from the tail hair, the marginally
thriftier ones from the mane.