I had registered a faint shock at hearing her refer to Dad as ‘Lloyd’, his name in the family when he was growing up, discarded in favour of ‘Bill’ for his post-war life at the Bar. In a strictly limited sense her attachment to my father was deeper than my mother’s, by dint of going further into the past, reaching back to a simpler, more dreamy form of life, with luxury cars and offices of state lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery, his for the picking off.
At the end of our phone conversation Esmé mentioned that she sometimes came up to town. Would I care to join her one day for tea at the Ritz? I would, with pleasure.
Tea never came about. Perhaps I should have called 1471 and made a note of Esmé’s number (risking the discovery that she had withheld it), though I’m not sure I would have wanted to bother her.
It must have been a habit of Dad’s in those days to personalize the instruments he played. The guitar he took with him on active service ended up inscribed with the names of any number of shipmates. At the end of the War he took it to a shop on Denmark Street, hoping to get a good price, since many of the friends whose names it bore had attained high rank in the service. He was disappointed to be told that he had virtually destroyed its market value.
The ukelele seems a rather flighty instrument on which to inscribe the name of a beloved when there is a more high-toned one available. The guitar is the serenader’s weapon of choice, after all – but perhaps Dad’s guitar was already rather crowded out, like a teenager’s plaster cast, with the names of his messmates. Even if there was room physically I can see that there might be a social qualm. Dad might be reluctant to make a nice well-brought-up girl consort, even on the bodywork of a guitar, with rough male company, a contingent from below decks. Better to be the admiral aboard a ukelele than share the bridge of a guitar.
The best that Denmark Street could do for Dad was to accept the reverently vandalized guitar in part-exchange for another instrument. Dad dug deep into the pockets of his demob suit and forked out sixty pounds (excluding the exchange value of the inscribed guitar) for the Gibson L4, beautiful to look at as well as to play, lacquered and already a vintage item (made in 1928), subsequently an heirloom inherited by Matthew, the guitarist among the brothers, while Tim took away the Monington & Weston, also lacquered but less precious, and I made off with the contraband Clavinova.
I stayed on in the Gray’s Inn flat, negotiating with the Inn with a view to being given a tenancy. Dad had paid very little for the flat, both because he moved in under an earlier, more smiling Rent Act and because he was one of the Inn’s eminences. I was under the impression that I was a member of Gray’s Inn because Dad had paid £50 to make me one, just before the minimum requirement for being a student member was raised from a rather basic level (though I think you had to have a Latin O-level). I was entitled to eat lunch in Hall, that grand canteen where the Comedy of Errors was first performed, though I can’t say I exercised the privilege much.
I would pay a lot more than Dad had, the Inn wouldn’t have to renovate the flat and would benefit from an uninterrupted income stream. Those were the advantages I could argue. What was in it for me? Sentimental continuity and an ample flat in central London with views of the Walks and the Square. Could I afford it? No.
In fantasy I was already drafting advertisements to run in the New York Review of Books, offering academics on their summer vacations the use of an ample flat in central London with views of the Walks and the Square, a stone’s throw from a Hall steeped in associations with the Bard, equally convenient for the British Museum, British Library and West End theatre. I would keep afloat by renting out my flat in Highbury, then make a mint with this illegal scheme from July to September, retreating to my own little nest in the eaves (peeing into a bucket, presumably) but descending cheerfully to make breakfast – other meals by arrangement – hoping all the while that the CCTV cameras in the Square, or the Inn staff supposed to be monitoring them, would turn a blind eye to the unauthorized traffic.
Keith meanwhile was producing low-key variations on a theme of common sense, saying that the Gray’s Inn flat was fine but a little unreal. There was nothing wrong with my premises in Highbury.
At first the Inn seemed to have no objection to my staying on, at a greatly increased rent and with no more than a shorthold assured tenancy (that abominable innovation of the Thatcher years), and then it did. I wasn’t a possible tenant. But I’m a member of the Inn, I said. You’re a student member, they said. Yes, I said, I’m a student member. Apparently my little entitlement was meaningless in real terms. I felt like a novice financial trader shouting for shares on the floor of the Stock Exchange, waving what turns out to be a Timothy Whites voucher with an expiry date in 1964.
For some reason I felt it necessary to insist on being expelled, though physical eviction (bailiffs, weeping children) wasn’t called for in the end. I understood that in a legal showdown an institution almost entirely composed of lawyers was unlikely to lose – but like many people who have written journalism, I had an exaggerated notion of the power I could wield. Surely if I hinted that I was writing a piece for The Times about the Inn’s inhospitability to someone who had actually been born there, though its own hypocritical motto was Domus, the Latin for a home, the benchers would fall over themselves to make peace on my terms?
Let’s assume that they were terrified, but nerved themselves to calling my bluff. They may have felt that, as a true son of the Inn at heart, I wouldn’t go nuclear with the warhead of a bittersweet and implicitly scolding family reminiscence.
I seem to be portraying myself as someone who dealt with his parents’ deaths comparatively coolly, but had a bit of a tantrum when called upon to leave the pleasant premises they had never owned. That’s not how I see it, obviously, but it was easier to hold the fact of their deaths steady when I was moving through the familiar spaces they had occupied.
Still, I had almost eighteen months to adjust, a six-month period of grace granted by the Inn and then a year of illegal occupation. There would have been some sort of hearing, but I was making out that Gray’s Inn had always been my main home, with the Highbury flat serving essentially as a work space or office, and it became clear that telephone records would not substantiate this notion. Like Ian Fleming before me, I realized that it was better to cave in than be disgraced.
As a true son of the Inn, but one who had inherited some of the bloodymindedness of the law itself, I wanted to do what I could in the way of collateral damage, and duly wrote for The Times a nostalgic article incorporating sardonic sideswipes at the Inn’s hypocrisy. I thought it would be cowardly to publish such a thing after the event, much more satisfactory if it appeared while I was still in residence. Peeking out of the curtains on to the Square that Saturday morning, I expected to see benchers flat on their backs, pole-axed by my righteous rhetoric, stiff arms raised to hold the paper open in front of their sightless eyes – if not actually vaporized by the blast, leaving only white shadows on the pavement.
One of the luxuries of the flat was the amount of storage space available on the attic floor where I had been based. The sloping walls of the side-attics had provided ideal repositories over the years for black plastic bin-bags containing unsorted papers, clumps of bank statements cheek by jowl with letters from Iris Murdoch and Jeanette Winterson. All of these now had to be sorted through prior to disposal.
My brothers and I managed to divide up our parents’ effects without tension or disagreement. There were various farewells to our childhood home (though Tim as the eldest might possibly have memories of a previous flat across the Square, at number 12). I remember
an evening when we watched a video of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, which my brothers hadn’t seen, in shared rapture, the vinegary nastiness of the satire intensified in some indefinable way by our planetary affinity. When we were children Dad had told us as a matter of fact that we were from Mars, and presumably enjoyed the moment during a visit to the Planetarium when I called out, ‘That’s ours!’ as the guide singled out Mars with his torch, whose cutout projected a glowing arrow shape onto the velvety dome above our heads.
A slight divergence in fraternal temperament showed up on the last night of all, when one brother intentionally smashed a glass in the fireplace, to signify defiant Russian largeness of soul, and another brother fetched a broom to sweep it up. The fireplace had been a functioning one until the Clean Air Act, and had subsequently been fitted with an upmarket simulation. In the common spaces outside the flats were substantial coal bunkers with locks and immensely heavy wooden lids. Though the flats were only built in 1954, the indispensability of coal was unquestioned, built into the fixtures. When there was no more coal for our bunker to hold, except in the form of stubbornly persisting dust, it came into its own as miscellaneous external storage space. Dad installed wine racks inside it, into which I would often be called upon to transfer bottles after the delivery man from Oddbins in High Holborn had called. While Sheila had favoured everyday whites and an unfussy cava called Segura Viudas (though ‘Sigourney Weaver’ rolled off the tongue more reliably, particularly after a couple of glasses), Dad liked the prestige of a grape variety or a region and would ask guests if they fancied a glass of Sancerre. In Indian restaurants he would ask if they had ‘such a thing as a Muscat de Beaumes de Venise’, articulating with exaggerated clarity as if taking the hard work out of lip-reading for the benefit of someone deaf.
Some wine was kept upstairs, on the attic level where I lived. Under the concrete roof the temperature was far from constant. In summer it could become so hot that sleeping on the flat roof became an attractive option, while in winter it sometimes happened, thanks to the skylight’s ventilator being rusted open, that snow fell on my bed. These conditions don’t suit wine over any length of time, and none of the bottles that Dad had kept up there turned out to be fit for drinking, and barely for cooking purposes. There was a melancholy gap between label and contents, not to be bridged by the palate, hardly even by the imagination.
Since the spiral staircase to the attic level had been installed at Dad’s expense before the family moved in (he told us when we were children that it had come from a submarine), it made sense that we would have a right, perhaps even a duty, to take it with us when we left. A brief look told us that this plan was impracticable, a pity since it had such a strong visual appeal, almost in terms of conceptual art, to leave the alienated domestic space pulsing with absence.
Moving out of Gray’s Inn didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the premises. There had been no ASBO element in the Inn’s legal victory. I stayed in contact with residents I’d known from childhood, most of whom tactfully treated my article for The Times as an aberration that need not be mentioned. It seemed natural now to think of the plutocratic enclave as their present home rather than my past one. Seeing fresh paintwork on the nameboard of number 3 at street level was slightly shocking at first, but as I continued to visit no. 5 (bringing fresh sprats from Peckham Market for Lady Henry Wilson’s Sunday lunch) and no. 1 (delivering to Edith Wellwood pans of the egg custard that constituted almost her only food) I soon got used to it. I found I could use the Inn as a short cut to other destinations without feeling I was venturing onto ground that was either sentimentally charged or forbidden.
Digging my heels in and refusing to leave a flat to which I had no legal right seemed to do the trick in psychological terms. When I was finally turfed out I was able to leave the past behind and walk away clean. Eviction has some modest merit as an agent of emotional resolution. It doesn’t come cheap, though, and I’m sure there are thriftier ways of breaking the spell of the past. I’d urge others in my position to shop around.
Sometimes there were direct reminders of my dead people, tiny resurrections. One day I took a watch-chain to have a new swivel fitted, which seems a fantastically fogeyish errand, though my excuse for preferring a pocket watch is that I’m allergic to metal and would get a wrist rash if I wore a watch there. (Now that mobile phones have replaced watches this excuse seems very thin, but habits have a habit of becoming entrenched.) I took the chain to Sanford’s the jeweller, located in 3 Holborn Bars, that little remnant of London before the Great Fire. The row of shops has been made over any number of times but is historically grounded by the fact that you step down into them, down to the old street level. The past has subsided and resists the hydraulic imagination that would pump it up to the level where we live.
Sanford’s is a family firm, though recent (established only in the 1920s) compared to the Tudor building that contains it. Its near neighbour was the tobacconist’s where Dad would pick up his cigarettes, John Brumfit’s, though subsequently rebranded Shervingtons, since the new owners couldn’t afford the fee demanded to keep the name and the illusion of continuity in business. An old building attracts businesses keen to benefit from the ennoblement of association, but there comes a point when the clustering of parvenu enterprises exhausts the stock of transferable grandeur, and then the transaction goes into reverse. Then it’s the building itself that seems fake, discredited. Even without an actual wand emporium the edifice takes on a Harry Potter tinge, and the skew-whiff angles and planes of 3 Holborn Bars come to look as if they had been worked up, sketch after sketch, by a production designer with set builders by the hundred on his payroll, ready to lay the required square footage of prefabricated cobbles at a moment’s notice.
Already there seemed something hopeless about the sign on Shervingtons’ door. Thank You for Smoking – a slogan that was meant to sound jauntily defiant seemed to carry an undertone of forlorn pleading.
Jewellers’ shops in films starring Catherine Deneuve or Audrey Hepburn are palatial premises, but a jeweller’s can also be snug, cosy, like a jewel box – or shoe box – in its own right. That’s the style of Sanford Bros (the ‘Bros’ in much smaller lettering on the shopfront, as if added later at the insistence of an affronted sibling). It’s an unfussy establishment the size of a country-house pantry, holding itself a little apart from the concentration of competing trade in Hatton Garden. This is a jeweller’s shop where the word ‘bling’ has never been spoken.
When the man serving in Sanford’s asked for my name he seemed to hesitate for a moment before writing it down on the docket. In such a small room our interaction necessarily seemed social, and the hesitation an invitation to something more than small talk. I asked if the name rang a bell. He thought for a moment, then he asked, ‘Was your father a stout man?’ I said that he would have rejected the word, but that the waistbands of his trousers sometimes led stressful lives. Why did he ask, though?
‘This is going back a bit,’ he said.
It was when he was a teenager, manning the shop on Saturdays. Between us we worked out that it must have been in the early mid-1960s. This chap had come in to buy a pair of earrings or something, and he had three boys with him.
I had no memory of the event, but the occasion wasn’t hard to reconstruct. Dad had forgotten Sheila’s birthday, or their wedding anniversary, until the day itself (or the day before) and was doing what men in those days were expected to do, slipping into the nearest shop to spend his way out of trouble.
The man assigned the boys places to stand – one, two, three – in Indian file, and they took up their marks, not
as if this was a drill they were used to, but as if their Dad was in a good mood and it was fun to go along with him. Then the man raised his finger and wagged it, saying with pretended sternness, ‘Don’t steal.’
That’s all, the most fragile piece of drollery imaginable, based on the presumed unlikeliness of our misbehaving and the small scale of the shop, but it had stayed with the Saturday boy for a third of a century. It helps that the name is distinctive in the first place, and Dad’s professional success had the side effect of refreshing casual memory with regular mentions in the newspapers, but still Dad had an ability (not continuously detectable by his family) to charge small events with charm and presence. I could just about think myself back into the line-up, looking at Matthew’s curly hair from behind, sensing behind me the incipient resentful curl in Tim’s upper lip, but of course I’m just making it up.
There have been a couple of other occasions when I’ve been told an anecdote about Dad since his death, without being in a position to confirm its authenticity, as I could in the case of the Sanford Bros Saturday boy. A quantity surveyor who had learned the basics of Building Contract Law from Dad’s lectures at Brixton School of Building in the late 1940s told me that he was popular with his students, unpopular with other members of staff, who complained about the gales of laughter emerging from his classroom. One of the funny stories that caused the trouble concerned the court-martial of an officer who had been intercepted more or less naked, chasing a woman in a similar state through the public spaces of Shepheard’s Hotel. The disciplinary authorities had trouble deciding exactly what the charge should be, and settled on his being improperly dressed. Dad, defending, combed through the King’s Regulations and found that there was an exemption in place for sporting activities – you counted as properly dressed if you were appropriately dressed for the sport you were pursuing. Not a defence that would pass muster for a moment nowadays, but supposedly that was the argument Dad pursued and his client reaped the benefit.
Kid Gloves Page 18