Kid Gloves (23 page)

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.