Kid Gloves (35 page)

When I had been expelled from the Inn, and more
to the point after I had written my article for
The
Times
denouncing the hypocrisy of the governing body, I had guaranteed my status as
persona non grata
, high on the list of the Inn's Least Wanted. I might visit family
friends still living there, but it would have been silly to expect an actual welcome.
Nevertheless an invitation came from the Treasurer, the next year, to dine as his guest in Hall.
The new Treasurer was Tony Butcher, who as the Dean of the Chapel had been one of the three
polite Cerberoid heads guarding the organ from molestation by unauthorized fingers and feet. He
was also someone whom I had invited to breakfast once or twice after the early communion I
didn't attend.

Breakfast was being repaid, with interest, in the
form of dinner, and this was a personal rather than an institutional gesture. It wasn't quite a
matter of the Inn saying, in effect, just because we chucked you out doesn't mean we can't be
friends. Nor was my accepting the invitation a way of saying: just because I told you to fuck
off in print, making hay with the hypocrisy of your homey
Domus
motto, it doesn't mean
I won't come to eat your food and drink your wine.

The motto on the Gray's Inn badge is actually
Integra Lex Aequi Custos Rectique Magistra Non Habet Affectus Sed Causas Gubernat
but
that's a bit of a mouthful, particularly late on in a bibulous evening, and
Domus
is
the standard, very self-congratulatory toast. Yes, badge, not coat of arms. The Inn only lays
claim to a badge, or else Bluemantle Pursuivant would be after them for misprision of
blazonry.

The revelation of that evening in Gray's Inn was
the drink. Normally when I'm nervous in company I abstain from alcohol, but on this occasion I
was too nervous to stick to that
decision. There was champagne before the
meal, or a good imitation, then white wine, Sauternes, red wine and port. After the meal, in one
of the Combination Rooms, there was brandy or champagne again for those who preferred it. By
this time most of the benchers were developing a distinct lean to one side or the other, some
supporting themselves on the furniture.

I don't remember a great deal of the evening
myself. If we drank a toast to ‘
Domus
' I hope that at the least I made a face. Another
guest was Stanley Prothero, a family friend of Dad's generation, who was invited at least
partly, I feel sure, to give me a familiar face to talk to. Stanley had been one of the guests
at my parents' golden wedding celebration in 1997, held at Browns restaurant on St Martin's
Lane. It's a chain that specializes in refurbishing grand premises, and this particular branch
had been the home of Westminster County Court, over which Stanley had presided for many years as
Registrar. He seemed entirely unfazed by the way his workplace had been turned into a sort of
theme park, with courtrooms for hire and all the appropriate regalia provided. I wondered how
Dad would cope with reality-melt on a similar scale, but Protheros are built to last.

Stanley's brother Arthur (born 1905) was also
present at that golden wedding celebration, spryly taking photographs of the gathering, bending
his knees to capture the shot he wanted. Those knees seemed unaware that they were entitled to
go on strike, after ninety-odd years of work. They're the knees everyone wants to have, the ones
with the extended warranty. At dinner in Gray's Inn Hall I asked after Arthur, and Stanley put
on a bit of a show, entertaining the company with one of his brother's moments in the
spotlight.

Solicitors like Arthur, being backroom boys,
don't normally become well-known by association with famous cases, as barristers do, but Arthur
gained some notoriety when he
represented the accused in the Towpath
Murders in 1953. Arthur had been paid out of public funds, and the case, though apparently
open-and-shut, took up a lot of court time. The junior barrister he instructed (Peter Rawlinson)
interviewed a police officer with what at the time amounted to great and sustained hostility,
strongly implying that the confession obtained from Alfred Charles Whiteway was a work of
fiction. There were no bent coppers in the national awareness, so hammering them could hardly be
seen as a virtuous activity. Whiteway was convicted and hanged, but Arthur didn't take it
personally (perhaps another difference between solicitors and barristers), describing Whiteway
as an ideal client, regretting only that they worked together just the once.

General laughter. One of the occasions when a
lawyer mocking the system that has filled his pockets gets an appreciative hearing from his
fellows. Did I contribute a chestnut of my own to the game of anecdote-conkers, by trotting out
the old story of Dad's client with Ménière's disease? It seems horribly likely.

If Dad and I can't help tracing the alteration of
attitudes to sexuality, exhibits in a museum of social history, then the same is true of the
Prothero family. Chief Inspector John Prothero of Scotland Yard, the father of Arthur and
Stanley, was the only witness to be called in the successful 1928 prosecution of
The Well of
Loneliness
for obscenity, after a typically temperate campaign against the book by the
Sunday Express
, whose editor recommended that healthy boys and girls be given prussic
acid – cyanide – rather than be allowed to read it. The Chief Inspector testified that the very
theme of the novel was offensive, since it dealt with physical passion, a passion that was
described by the presiding magistrate as abnormal. There was no need to establish any culpable
explicitness of expression for the book to be condemned (and destroyed). Theme did the trick
unaided.

Chief Inspector Prothero's
marked-up copy of the book was inherited by Arthur, but not the accompanying attitudes. Arthur
agreed to represent Peter Wildeblood in a landmark case of 1954, a time when a bargepole's
length was the minimum recommended distance between a reputable solicitor and a sexual scandal.
Wildeblood was accused (with two others) of inciting young men to commit indecent acts, and was
one of the first to acknowledge his homosexuality in public. He remarks in his memoir
Against the Law
the ‘there is some truth in the saying that a man's best friend is his
solicitor' – Arthur was concerned that his client was feeling the cold (it was March), and lent
him a pair of long johns to make sure he didn't shiver in the witness box. He served time
just the same.

I wish I could discover what happened to that
marked-up copy of
The Well of Loneliness
. Stanley doesn't know. The British Library
would receive a treasure like that with tears of joy.

I've attended social occasions where drink has
flowed freely, but nothing to compare with Gray's Inn Hall in terms of the efficient delivery of
alcohol. It was a revelation of what Dad's social life must have been like, not every night of
the week, to be sure, but fairly often. When drink was so plentiful, when it took sustained
effort to beat back the tides, sobriety became merely quixotic, a pose and a false economy.

I made the decision to keep close watch on my
glass, to be sure that I noticed any sly replenishment. No-one came near, yet the next time I
looked the level of wine in my glass had definitely risen. I began to see that Gray's Inn
catering was run on a sort of Harry Potter system, dispensing with human agency. Our glasses
were table-top Artesian wells, so that wine bubbled up through enchanted channels in the stems
of our glasses every time we set them down.

As I lurched towards the 19 bus that would take
me back
to Highbury, I was sure that I would wake up with the mother and
father of hangovers. Or the Lord Chief Justice, with a severe sentence to pass on my lack of
self-control. I woke fresh as a daisy, unaccountably reprieved from the hangover I had earned
with honest toil. It certainly seemed that the cellar-masters of Gray's Inn were wizards of
alcoholic immunity. They knew how to conjure congeners into cancelling themselves out, if
congeners even exist. If only they'd been able to make the breakthrough in time for Dad to glide
through those mornings when his unconfrontational wife told him some home truths.

The slow upheaval in Dad's thinking about sexual
orientation made me feel that our intensive Anglesey session, Prince Charles, Jacqueline Bisset,
old Aunty Mary Cobley and all, had been productive, sowing the seeds of enlightenment however
long it took them to sprout. Then of course Dad had to go too far. Towards the end of his life
he started being grieved by discrimination against gay people, shaking his head over the sheer
unfairness of individuals being penalized for a harmless variation they hadn't even chosen.

I was exasperated. There's a difference between
revising your attitudes and rewriting history. How could he be shocked by dilute expressions of
a prejudice that had once been his most heart-felt credo? He was cheating by granting himself an
amnesty, even a retrospective amnesia, and obliterating one of the strongest convictions he had
ever had, now that it no longer suited him. If pressed, I could come up with more flattering
descriptions than ‘cheating' of Dad's ideological Great Leap Forward, but to say that he was
refusing his own complexity seems to overshoot the target in the other direction.

One of the plays performed most successfully at
my school had been N. F. Simpson's farce
One Way Pendulum
, which struck me as the
funniest thing I had ever seen. I'm sure the mockery
of legal language and
process, Dad's moral and professional world, was part of what made
One Way Pendulum
such a hit with me. In the course of a surrealistic courtroom scene, Simpson's Judge says:
‘… you remained loyal to your masochism just so long as it suited you … The moment
it was no longer useful to you you abandoned it without the slightest compunction. I can find no
possible shred of excuse for behaviour of this kind …'

That was how I felt about Dad's reformed
attitudes of the 1990s, with ‘homophobia' standing in for ‘masochism'. Dad was being disloyal to
his perversion. It wasn't like being lucky enough to skip a hangover after a binge. He had been
addicted to those toxins for half a century and more, yet that side of his personality and his
history could apparently just fall away.

Horror of homosexuality was an integral part of
his identity as a small-town Congregationalist, born in Wales near the beginning of the First
World War. It was as much part of his heritage as the leek and the harp, no more optional than
bara-brith and
How Green Was My Valley
. It deserved better than to be thrown over when
fashions changed. Doesn't seasoned bigotry have a proper and permanent claim to make on the
bigoted party? It has built up rights over time, so it can be made redundant (with agreed
compensation) but not just melt away without a word said on either side.

Barnacles don't just slip off the hull. They have
to be chipped away at, and Dad's personality barnacles certainly clung, keeping themselves glued
in place year after year. Actual barnacles have things called cement glands. I don't know what
Dad used instead.

And then they were gone, and everything had been
sanded down around and repainted where they had been, to leave a vessel spick and span,
seaworthy for another pattern of tides.

It's possible that what I
really wanted was not an encounter between Dad and his complexity but a soap-opera resolution
between the two of us, with him begging to be forgiven for his blindness. That's not something I
can rule out, however often I state as a fact that closure is for bin-bags not for people. It's
even true that Dad had made some progress with his apology technique since my teenage years. He
had learned that it was possible to own up to a fault almost without being put under pressure.
Admitting to an imperfection could be a strong rhetorical move.

Making an apology needn't be like walking the
plank. It might be more like a rope bridge. The moment of vulnerability could be cut short, and
Dad find himself safe on the other side. Admission of weakness might even be redefined as the
key to strength.

One example was what he said when I got a good
degree in English, after dropping Classics against his advice. ‘Well, boy,' he said, ‘you were
right and I was wrong …' – rope bridge, dangerously teetering – ‘… and I hope I'm a
big enough man to admit it when I've made a mistake.' Back on solid personality rock.

So he could certainly have found a way to turn
his change of attitude into a virtue. ‘Well, boy,' he might have said, ‘your poor old Dad may
have been saddled with a lot of backward ideas by the time and place he was brought up, but
no-one can say he didn't struggle against his conditioning. How many men of my generation have
come so far from where they started?' That might have been a good thing to hear, but I'd have
settled for him remembering Keith's name once in a while. Or perhaps I should just shut up and
agree to receive what was on offer. Perhaps it was perverse to be refusing of him at a time when
he was finally, and in his own fashion, accepting of me, the ‘me' that he had found so hard to
live with.

Of the two carers who made
things easier for Dad in the last stretch of his life, it was Nimat I would have liked to see
again, but though we had a couple of phone conversations neither of us suggested a meeting. She
had stopped working for the care agency and was studying for a qualification in social work.

I had more extensive dealings with Bamie, though
he didn't contact me directly. It was a solicitor who phoned to ask if I would testify on his
behalf in court. Why? What was the matter? He was up on a charge, and my testimony could make a
difference to the verdict.