Kid Gloves (3 page)

And is tail hair so much better as wig material
than mane (which would seem to grow in smaller quantities)? Does that account for the difference
in price? If you ask these supplementary questions, and are alone in the shop, and have happened
on the right sales assistant, you may be told: ‘To put it bluntly, sir, we need to wash the shit
out of it.'

After the gin-and-bitter-lemon years, in the
1970s, Dad took to drinking whisky and ginger ale, which he described as a ‘whisky sour' though
it bears no real relation to the drink of that name.

Alcohol amplified something Dad also felt in full
sobriety, a sense of disappointment with the way his sons were developing. This was especially
true in the mid-1970s, when we were all coming to the end of our education. Where was our drive,
our ambition? We seemed to be coasting at best. He wasn't so much disappointed as incredulous.
We seemed to think the world owed us a living!

There was some truth in this, of course, though
it could hardly be otherwise. Our circumstances were so different from
his.
He had tunnelled through rock to make his way in the world, while we had been accustomed from an
early age to using the tube, with Chancery Lane station just round the corner from our childhood
home.

Dad's ideal was that we would all become lawyers,
which would be following his footsteps in one sense, except that his drive and ambition had
taken him very far from the paths trodden by his farming ancestors. To follow him would be very
different from being like him, would mean in fact that we were very unlike him. The more we were
like him the less we would follow him. All this tangle needs to be kept distinct from the
common-sense awareness that we would most likely never emerge from his shadow and be assumed,
even if we went on to ‘great things', to have got our start thanks to his eminence. It was
understandable that he wanted us to soar, but how could we do that if we used him as a
launch-pad?

We confidently diagnosed Dad in the
popular-science terms of the day as a ‘Type A personality', unable to relax, likely to suffer
from strokes, heart attacks and other forms of stress-related condition, the self-inflicted
wounds of an oppressive character. When he developed a stomach ulcer it seemed to prove us
right, though that particular line of punitive pseudo-medical reasoning has since been
discredited and retired.

Dad always called sherry ‘sherry wine' with a
slightly lah-di-dah pronunciation, though I didn't know what nuance of pretension was being
identified. Sherry wasn't classified by Dad as a women's drink – it was associated with the
young man who had saved my parents' lives in Spain the year after they were married, when they
had got themselves into difficulties swimming. On special occasions we might toast his name.
¡Xavier Cremades!

When the time came, Sheila organized a retirement
party for him at the Garrick. She decided to serve champagne
cocktails, the
only such drink she herself liked. She also decided to do things properly, improving on the
standard catering protocol whereby the drink is topped up with champagne but the other
ingredients (a little brandy, a few drops of angostura, a sugar lump) are not reinforced. On
this special occasion, there would be no mere top-up but the provision (expense be damned) of a
whole new drink.

Surely she knew she was playing with firewater?
Even the angostura raises the alcohol content. Only the sugar can enter a plea of not guilty,
and even then can be suspected of aiding and abetting by disguising the potency of the drink
with sweetness. Dad had a strong head for alcohol in those days, which is only a way of saying
that it distorted him less on the surface than in the depths. In the second hour of the party a
woman of my generation, known to him since her birth, exercising perhaps unconsciously the
double privilege of good looks and long intimacy, made some mild enquiries about the ideological
assumptions of the judiciary – the sort of thing that might be aired on
Start the Week
without setting the switchboard alight. She asked Bill (as she called him, having graduated to
that intimacy from Uncle Bill) if he thought judges as a group had really taken on board the
recent upheavals in society, such as multiculturalism and the transformed position of women.

This was never the sort of speculation that Dad
welcomed, but perhaps the champagne cocktails played a part in making him so grandly cold,
coldly grand. He told her that she had spoiled his party and must leave immediately. She was
horrified and did what she could to make amends, saying that casting any sort of shadow on his
special day had been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given
offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right,
combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from
the New, which gave Dad's verdict its austere force. ‘That,' he said, ‘is something you
will have to live with for the rest of your life.'

This was a dismal own goal, to send a guest away,
taking all the shine off the occasion, and a warning that some of Dad's less appealing behaviour
patterns were still some way from retirement.

There were times after he retired when Dad would
have to be helped the two hundred yards home from Hall, more or less to the point of being
carried by Inn staff or fellow benchers. This was hideously embarrassing, for my mother having
to receive this stumbling procession of dignitaries, for me if I happened to run into them as
they tried to negotiate the steps outside number 3 Gray's Inn Square, but it was nowhere as bad
as it might have been if he had felt any shame himself. Hangdog wasn't his style, or it wasn't
until the next morning. He was serene, as if this was the way he always came home, or as if
these nice fellows had wanted to give him a treat and he hadn't liked to say no. The whole
charade made it surprisingly easy to play along.

Sometimes he would remain roughly vertical until
he reached the bedroom, then topple slowly sideways without distress to the floor, perhaps
pulling some bedclothes with him in what was more a slide than a fall, a controlled descent with
a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph
Richardson.

Moderation didn't come naturally to Dad, and
self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life Dad went to a
luxurious health farm, his favoured being called Champneys, to lose a few pounds. The regime
also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of self-denial could be redeemed if
he happened to coincide with a woman who shared his taste and talent for flirting. Flirtation
without possibility made the hours speed by. Age didn't disqualify such
compatible women, but nor certainly did youth. The word he used of them was ‘sparklers'.

Flirtation as he practised it wasn't any sort of
rehearsal for infidelity but a formal vocal display, lyrical rather than heroic, little Wigmore
Hall recitals rather than opera house
tours de force
. When a woman friend of mine paid
a visit to the Gray's Inn flat, Dad called her ‘darling'. My mother was only marginally piqued,
but decided to patrol the marital perimeter by asking sweetly, ‘If Frances is Darling, what then
am I?'

In general Dad imposed himself on company by
force of personality rather than brute quickness of wit. His preferred style was the polished
story (‘Did I ever tell you about the time …?'), not the dazzling improvisation. It helped
that from his perch among the higher ranks of a hierarchical profession he didn't often meet the
Challenge Direct. But now he had to exert steady pressure on the charm pedal if he was to
accelerate safely out of danger. ‘Sheila is Darling One,' he said, ‘Frances is Darling Two.'
This formula not only smoothed any ruffled wifely feathers but passed into currency. If Frances
was visiting, or if Dad answered the phone to her, he would greet her as Darling Two, and be
rewarded, as we all hoped to be, by her throaty smoker's laugh.

In the absence of sparklers Champneys could be a
bit of a martyrdom, forcing his thoughts inward. Once I received a postcard from him at that
address, saying: ‘No sparklers here this time. You have always been a rewarding son.' The lack
of a logical connection only added to the touchingness of the message. Except when in exile from
bibulous normality, this was a vein of intimate introspection that he preferred to leave
alone.

From quite early on in his career, perhaps even
before he became a judge, Dad had told us about how he was looking
forward
to retirement, to all the things he would set his hand to when he only had the time, although he
undertook hobbies (such as painting in oils or french-polishing) only in brief unrestful spasms.
As a family we had once built a Mirror dinghy, and this was a hobby he organized and delegated.
The Mirror dinghy was a kit, though of a full-sized craft, a flat-pack yacht, ordered through
the
Daily Mirror
. There were red sails to match the
Mirror
's masthead, though
I'm not sure I had seen the newspaper then (ours was a
Times
and
Express
household). We were all dragooned into doing some of the work in the garage of our holiday
house, attaching the prefabricated pieces to each other with twists of copper wire before
waterproofing the seams (caulking them, even, in an amateurish way) with a strong-smelling resin
paste. His actual hobby wasn't building a boat, more being the clerk of works, project manager
of a small family boat-building business.

After about a week of supervised labour it was
time to join the assembled parts into something close to the finished shape, except that it
turned out we had been making, with our different teams working on different sides of the
garage, two starboard sides instead of mirrored twins. Our Mirror dinghy failed the mirror test.
The two halves might snuggle up to each other, nestling together like spoons, but they would
never mate. We had proved the advertisers wrong when they had claimed the instructions to be
foolproof.

Dad paid a local handyman to unbodge our bodging
and put the dinghy together properly, though it would probably have been cheaper to buy another
kit and make two port sides this time. Then we could have had the beginning of a fleet. But the
holiday was already almost over, and there was a factor of humiliation involved. It can never
feel good to hire a third party to do your DIY. The finished dinghy – finished by other hands –
was seaworthy and serviceable but never quite smelled
of success, and that
was perhaps Dad's real addiction, the resinous perfume he needed to have in his nostrils.

Still, he was positive that there would be
memoirs and radio plays, there would be songs – he was handy with a guitar, not practising much
but reliably energized by an audience.

Even after I had been published he was confident
he would put me in the shade. He had no doubt that he would be able to blast his own work over
the makeshift crossbar of my slight success as effortlessly as Barry John converting a try in
front of roaring crowds. He seemed to think that my psychology was robust enough to cope with
being superseded when his own books started appearing, but he did worry about how Matthew, whose
business was music and recording, would handle the blow to his confidence when Dad's first
single stormed all the way to Number One.

If he had doubts he kept them to himself. Anxiety
wasn't for public consumption, and if he worried then he did it on his own time. Yet he held on
tight to his job and didn't retire before he had to, in 1990, at seventy-five. Not so long
before, retirement had been something for judges to choose for themselves without an imposed
schedule, but that system too had its drawbacks, and even Lord Denning, influential Master of
the Rolls and Dad's hero as a prose stylist, was immortal a little too long.

Dad continued to work part-time after technically
retiring, presiding over the elaborate arguments of a litigant-in-person named Petch, who was
suing his employers in the civil service. Amateurs in court require careful steering. They're
likely to be long-winded, often nervous, sometimes even truculent, and they aren't attuned, the
way professional counsel are, to shifts in a judge's body language, the little signals meaning
that a line of argument is finding favour or should instantly be abandoned. Dad was patient and
generous with such solo pilots
of litigation, though his brother judges
tended to have less respect for their erratic though predictable manoeuvres.

He always called them that, his brother judges,
often adding the name, ‘my brother Elwyn' for instance, as if this was a blood relation.
Mightily he was teased by his sons for this, as they pretended to believe these were new
discoveries on the Mars-Jones family tree, a job lot of stuffy uncles emerging from the
woodwork.

In the case of Petch, though, the proceedings
meandered on to the point where Dad lost confidence in his ability to pull everything together
with a lucid summing-up. He lost some sleep over that. Then the case was finally settled before
he was called upon to give judgment. He was probably as pleased as the plaintiff.

In retirement Dad was presumably not under as
much stress as he was used to, but he could still come up with the odd explosion, so perhaps
stress wasn't a factor in the first place. One detonation was on a birthday of mine, which I had
decided to have in the Gray's Inn flat. This was a calculated risk, and it might seem as if I
was asking for trouble, but there were reasons: a family friend had embarked on her travels but
cut them short after dysentery, and was recovering in the flat – I didn't want her to miss out
on the event. My parents were out that evening themselves, so there seemed no reason not to
celebrate demurely on the premises. In the end the convalescing friend went home to Brighton,
though by then the arrangements had been made, so she missed an event that turned out to be
memorable.