Kid Gloves (24 page)

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.

Except that Dad never mentioned it, and I never
heard the anecdote from family friends, many of whom were lawyers. It's not so salacious an
anecdote as to be impossible, revealing nothing more disreputable than roguishness, so perhaps
his prudish side led him to be discreet by the time he had children, children whom he wanted
brought up in the belief that a wedding night was an encounter between two trembling virgins. Or
perhaps the story has been misattributed. It sometimes happens that an anecdote becomes detached
from its original subject, and either melts away or migrates towards a new owner, someone deemed
to be larger than life.

In the case of another story I can immediately
declare its falsity, though its source is an ex-registrar of Westminster County Court who knew
Dad at the relevant period. If Dad had appeared as an extra in the film of
Thunderball
,
thanks to
the intervention of a grateful Kevin McClory, if it had even been
mentioned as a possibility, over one drink or twenty, we would have heard all about it.

There were times in his lifetime when Dad's
exporting of his vitality seemed actively preposterous. I remember returning to the Gray's Inn
flat one evening in my teens when a small parental drinks party was breaking up. I used the
stairs, slowing down as I heard the social hubbub above me on the third floor, so that I hung
back instead of showing myself and joining the group of half-a-dozen guests gathered on the
landing, putting on their coats.

Dad was presiding over the dissolution of the
party. He pressed the button to summon the lift and then pinched his nose with his fingers to
give his voice a grating Tannoy quality. Oh my God, I thought, he's not going to do that old
routine, surely! The lift-operator routine, so embarrassing, predictable and out of date. ‘Third
floor, going down …' he intoned. ‘Ladies' lingerie, hats and gloves …' Was he going
to find some new twist to freshen up the whole cringe-making performance? No he wasn't. He
didn't need to. Still holding his nose, he bent his knees so as to give a poor impression of
someone sinking out of sight … and everyone copied his stance, laughing helplessly.
Sophisticated grown-ups seemed to be entirely under his spell, though admittedly with alcoholic
help.

I might have been watching footage of some
strange cult. Dad was some sort of hypnotist, and his audience was well and truly under. It was
like the children's game of ‘Simon says', except that Dad was Simon, and so he didn't need to
say ‘Simon says' to get his way. He just said things, and people surrendered all resistance.

How do I measure up to Dad? I'm a taller make of
man than he was, so wearing his trousers would be out of the
question even
if I had them taken in. Any shirt of his would leave my wrists to dangle, but I keep his
singlets of sea island cotton (‘Sunspel for Austin Reed') in circulation, and for quite a time
wore his Japanese Burberry knock-off fawn raincoat, which was almost long enough in the
arms.

The splendid Preacher of Gray's Inn, Roger
Holloway, was about the same height and build as Dad (though trimmer) so it was to him I offered
first refusal on his clothes. I've really only seen agitated clergymen jumping up and down
wearing nothing but their underclothes in Ben Travers farces, but Roger was powered by wild joy
rather than panic as a succession of velvet smoking jackets came to light. It turned out also
that some ceremonial items of judicial wear were indistinguishable from what clerics are
supposed to wear on similar occasions. Perhaps some buttons needed to be altered, but from that
day forward Roger didn't need to visit Westminster, in the run-up to gala events, to pester
minor canons of a suitable size for their finery.

Dad's cheap-looking wardrobe wasn't itself a
coveted piece of furniture, and even desirable items like the dining-table went off to auction –
in Yorkshire, since we had been advised that larger pieces sold better there.

The little utility chest of drawers, though, from
the bedroom I shared with Tim (where the comic that showed me the instructively tender men
lurked) now sits immediately next to the desk where I write, as if it had followed me patiently
around with its message of reassurance, wagging its tail, waiting for this moment of
acknowledgement. Its bottom drawer no longer contains anything that might challenge the
patriarchy.

In fact the chest, as well as its cargo of not
quite Gatsby-grade underwear, is now the home of miscellaneous patriarchal souvenirs, such as a
pair of white kid gloves trimmed with
gold braid. These are relics of the
old assize system – it was traditional in various towns to present a judge with such gloves when
there were no criminal cases needing to be heard, symbolizing and celebrating the innocence of
the populace. Dad received three pairs in his early years as a judge, before the assize system
was replaced. I wore my pair in public just the once, at a party with an eighteenth-century
theme on Coldharbour Lane, teamed with a loose white shirt, aiming for a dilute Byronic effect.
It felt exhilaratingly unwise to be dressed so fancily on a street where you could get into
enough trouble wearing clothes of the current epoch.

There's also a gleaming cigar box lined in green
felt, with a dedication inside: ‘To
Mr William L. Mars-Jones, Q.C.
In appreciation of
the preservation of my stainless character.
Swansea Assizes July, 1958
.' Stainless
steel, of course, though the effect is slightly undermined by the message merely being typed on
a piece of paper and stuck inside the lid of the box. This was from a client who was charged
with stealing scrap metal and then trying to sell it back to the people from whom he had stolen
it, accused of both law-breaking and idiocy. Considering the way he had been delivered from
disgrace, the client might have stumped up for silver, if not platinum, and suppressed the
little joke – except that, as Dad tended not to mention, he didn't work for free.

There's also a grey jewellery box (covered with a
material vaguely mimicking either velvet or suede) containing another of Dad's treasures,
swathed in cotton wool although the object in question isn't actually delicate. It looks like a
bookmark, about two inches wide, four and a half long, and it's made of silver. There's a dove
engraved on it, flying downward with a scroll and ribbon in its beak. This is Sheikh Yamani's
Christmas card from 1984. The message in flowery script runs, ‘Ahmad Zaki Yamani / Wishes you a
Merry Christmas and a Happy
New Year', then an engraved imitation of the
sheikh's signature in English script, and finally ‘25 December 1984'. The em-phasis on the date
of Christmas seems excessive and awkward, as if the sender thought it might vary from year to
year. On the other side is engraved a calendar for 1985.

This is clearly an object
de luxe
,
though I'm not clear about how it's supposed to provoke admiring comment. Actually used as a
bookmark? It's a bit bulky for that. On a mantlepiece with the other cards? An elaborate but
more conventional Christmas card would do the job better. As a desk-top accessory and
talking-point? You might say, ‘Shall we make it April the second? According to Sheikh Yamani
it's a Tuesday …' Leaving it open for your companion to say, ‘I think you mean the day
before …', not believing you until the card has been handed across, with a show of
reluctance (he's a close personal friend), and its full three-and-a-bit ounces weighed in the
palm of the hand. Perhaps not even then.

Three-and-a-bit ounces! To put it in context, if
this was luncheon meat, it would make a substantial portion for one.

As for why Dad was on the receiving end of a
silver Christmas card from the Saudi oil minister, I have no idea. If he had been involved in
international trade negotiations, I'm sure he would have said. He showed off this mega-trinket
at the time, but was mysterious about why he had been sent it. He may have been as much in the
dark as anyone else.

It's possible that Sheikh Yamani simply
carpet-bombed the pages of
Who's Who
with his seasonal greetings. I wonder how many of
the recipients responded in kind. It can't quite have been the usual
oh-God-they've-sent-us-one-we-have-to-send-them-one mid-December flurry. If there wasn't a
return address as such, there was always the Saudi embassy. I imagine various failed attempts at
striking the right note, with drafts beginning ‘Dear Sheikh' and ‘Dear Ahmad' following each
other into the waste-paper basket. Conversation, perhaps, about whether it
wouldn't really be more sensitive, more reciprocal, to send an Eid greeting (either Eid al-Fitr
or Eid al-Adha) at the appropriate time instead, perhaps with a photograph of the family, even
some of the children's artwork, crayon sketch or potato-print. A bit pushy, maybe?

Silver Christmas card, kid gloves, cigar box. Not
a bad haul from the trolley-dash of clearing the parental flat.

There are other less exotic relics in my keeping,
mainly books. The non-legal books in the Gray's Inn flat were either leather-bound and
gold-tooled trophies (
A Child's Garden of Verses
,
Thy Servant a Dog
) that we
sons were given as children, or novels belonging to Sheila, either in Book Society editions or
The World's Classics imprint, with its pleasing solid though dinky format. I remember being
shocked at the age of twelve or so by Kipling's brutal realism in
Thy Servant a Dog
. ‘I
found a Badness. I rolled in it. I liked it.' – was there no limit to the filthiness of print?
It seemed astonishing that such obscenity was felt suitable for leather covers, and put in the
hands of children.

The book titles that most tantalized me in
Sheila's library took the form of phrases, like Audrey Erskine Lindop's
The Singer Not the
Song
(made into a famously campy film, with Dirk Bogarde very much leather-bound in the
trouser department and verging on the gold-tooled) or Enid Bagnold's
The Loved and
Envied
, both of which I read in due course. The World's Classics books, though they sat
very satisfyingly in the hand, were heavier going,
Lark Rise to Candleford
,
Esther
Waters
,
New Grub Street
. I don't think I finished any of them.

Dad wasn't a novel reader (if you except
The
Godfather
), saying that he did too much reading in his work to enjoy it as a leisure
activity, which is a perfectly reasonable attitude although it's a distinction that wouldn't
actually occur to a book-lover.

His taste in reading matter
off-duty ran to financial guides and investment magazines, some of them standard news-stand fare
and some of them verging on the cabbalistic. I took just one of them from his bookshelves when
we cleared the Gray's Inn flat. It's called
The Campione Report
, written by Dr W. G.
Hill, JD, and published by Scope Books in 1989. I've only just now looked at it. As far as I can
see, it might just as well be called
Protocols of the Elders of Mammon
.

The Campione Report
announces sternly
that it ‘may
not
be reproduced or copied in any way' and is ‘for use of
original buyer only'. Dad's is ‘confidential registered copy' no. 748. There's a disclaimer on
an inside page: ‘Whilst reliable sources have been sought out in compiling this book, neither
the author, publisher nor distributor can accept any liability for the accuracy of its contents
nor for the consequence of any reliance placed upon it.'