Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  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 He seemed to think that my psychology was robust enough to cope with being superseded when his own books started appearing, but he did worry about how Matthew, whose business was music and recording, would handle the blow to his confidence when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.

  My parents came home from their party in time to overlap with mine. Sheila socialized for a little while, then started making preparations for bed. At first Dad was genial. Then he took offence at an innocent remark made by one of the guests, and told him to leave. I pointed out that he could only logically order out people he had himself invited, and that my guests were welcome until such time as I expelled them – but the mood was no longer festive, and we beat a massed retreat. As I was gathering together the presents I had been given, Dad came up to me and poked me in the chest. I could have dropped the presents and stayed upright, but like a game-show contestant I was determined to hang on to my trophies. I knew there was a sofa behind me and chose to topple backwards onto that.

  This was not the birthday present I would have hoped for from Dad. As we trooped out of the flat and made our way downstairs, Sheila appeared on the landing above us in her nightie, wringing her creamed hands and saying in social agony, ‘It’s all right for you lot – you can leave. I have to live with it.’ She had left the sitting-room for ten minutes, the way people do in films about poltergeists, and the next thing she knew her furniture was arranged on the ceiling. ‘It’ was Dad’s bad behaviour, his short fuse, unless it was actually a wick that drew rage from his glass by capillary action.

  The birthday assault was so out of proportion as not even to be properly upsetting. I decided to make an experiment in apology studies. Better in the circumstances to steer clear of any non-apology, un-apology, anti-apology. If demanding redress from Dad never seemed to work, perhaps I should try a new approach, to see if he was vulnerable from a different angle. The best rhetorical move (against a master of rhetoric) might be to say that I didn’t need an apology. Dad knew the martial arts of argument supremely well, and could turn almost any throw against an opponent, but if I stepped smoothly away he might topple backwards in his turn, from sheer surprise.

  The day after my birthday I went round to Gray’s Inn and explained that I wasn’t expecting an apology. I explained that this was because Dad was a loose cannon when he had drink inside him. If I put him and my friends together in the same space then I had to accept the risk and not bleat when things went wrong.

  I knew from long experience that Dad’s apologies weren’t worth having anyway. In our teenaged years we were incensed by the forms of words that Dad would come up with after family rows. They seemed designed to wind up the tension rather than soothe it in any way. They were strange cocktails of amnesia, shoulder-shrugging and indirect accusation. If I had to name a specific cocktail I’d nominate the boilermaker, with its bright and murky liquor floating in layers. An example might be: Sheila tells me that you were upset by something I said last night … I don’t remember what it was, but all I can say is … you can be very annoying.

  Perhaps this was what is known as professional deformation, as much as individual difficulty with the idea of being at fault. Lawyers will never be in a hurry to admit liability. For them it must always be a last resort. A. P. Herbert makes a semi-serious point along these lines in one of his Misleading Cases. A describes B as lacking even the manners of a pig. B demands an apology. A capitulates to the demand, saying that B does in fact have the manners of a pig. Does this count as an apology or as an aggravation of slander?

  In this case Dad didn’t exactly topple. He was outraged at my patronizing and manipulative manoeuvre, and responded with one of his own. He told me to leave at once, and when I didn’t move
he made to pick up the phone, saying he would call the police and have me thrown out. This was low-grade bluster by his standards, as was the demand that I should surrender my keys and pay no further visits to the parental home. Sheila overruled him the moment he said so. I stayed long enough to establish as a matter of record that I wasn’t being thrown out, then left him to simmer.

  I hoped that my destabilizing tactics would enable Sheila, who didn’t enjoy the rooted place, even the ascendancy, of alcohol in the household, to make some demands of her own. This was a lot to hope for, given that she hated any kind of ‘atmosphere’ and had never made much headway when it came to influencing Dad’s behaviour. The morning of a hangover was one of the few opportunities she was able to turn to her advantage, reinforcing the self-disgust of Dad’s every lurching cell with a little tender chiding. At other times Dad had a blithe resistance to the virtues he had married, something that I’ve seen in other men of his generation.

  For a week or so I paid visits only when she would be alone. Did I wear him down? Not quite. I got a letter that combined different elements of his most characteristic manner: rueful charm and now-look-here-laddie-enough-is-enough. The letter was much closer to an apology than anything I could remember, in speech let alone in writing. It broke precedent in that respect, which is never a step a lawyer takes lightly. In fact precedent was holy to him, but now, unprecedentedly, fault was being admitted.

  The rueful charm emanated from the address given at the top of the page: The Doghouse, Gray’s Inn. The note of enough-is-enough was struck by a passage which made clear that Dad did not accept there was a pattern of behaviour attributable to drink. I could have a specific apology but no general admission. It was a lawyerly way of proceeding after all, an apology ‘without prejudice’, as if he was agreeing to make a payment to an injured party without technically admitting liability. He would accept chastisement as long as he wasn’t expected to abase himself. It was the most favourable settlement I was going to get.

  Dad the widower wasn’t much tempted by alcohol, though he still liked champagne as an idea, essence of spontaneity and celebration. He enjoyed orange juice as part of breakfast, and this was one of the few deeply rooted pleasures that I could continue to administer. Though the kitchen of the flat was relatively short on labour-saving devices we could boast a small electric squeezer, whose ageing engine ground away not very effectively when the halved fruit was pushed down on it, its automatic-reverse mechanism cutting in from time to time with disconcerting abruptness.

  At a certain point I changed Dad’s routine, and my own, preferring to see Keith on Mondays at the Highbury flat and letting Matthew take charge of Dad. Shopping on a Monday I saw a wide variety of types of orange on display in a supermarket, and bought large quantities. I thought it might be fun to have a taste test, to establish which variety Dad liked best. Matthew was happy to be master of ceremonies for a blind tasting.

  In fact Dad derailed the format with his response to the first sample. He gave it 10 out of 10, making it unlikely that even the most gifted statistician could extract meaningful information from his subsequent scores. In any case he gave full marks to all the other juices he was offered.

  Had he detected the patronizing children’s-activity-time element in the evening planned for him? I’d actually like to think so, though I imagine he was just in an appreciative mood. Maybe he enjoyed seeing two sons in one day, even if his pet name for Matthew in this period was Nogood Boyo, a Dylan Thomas reference which Matthew took in good part but which nettled me on his behalf.

  During this late phase of his life the drink which meant most to him, more even than orange juice, was buttermilk, a taste from his childhood which could be catered to by visiting any large branch of Sainsbury’s. Despite his sweet tooth in other areas he would drink it as it was, straight from the glass.

  In his Denbighshire childhood, on his way to school, he would dip his finger into the milk churn waiting for collection at the side of the road. His finger would break into the creamiest layer of the top of the milk, and convey its unique flavour to his mouth. This was a taste that was beyond Sainsbury’s power to reproduce – Taste the Difference 1920s Denbighshire Farm Top-of-the-Milk Fresh from the Churn – even at the chain’s largest and most cosmopolitan branches.

  A book came out that year called The Justice Game, by Geoffrey Robertson, with a very favourable mention of Dad. Sir William Mars-Jones was offered as proof (though this was the only example given) of the argument that civil rights and press freedom are safe in the hands of the judiciary, on the basis of his handling of the ABC trial of the late 1970s, in which two journalists and their source were charged under the Official Secrets Act.

  Dad was still living at the heart of the legal community, and sometimes colleagues would call in on him. I left Robertson’s book on display by Dad’s chair, having inscribed it For Dad on Father’s Day 1998 / see pages 128–32, whenever you need a lift. The idea was that distinguished legal visitors would pick up the volume and be led to the relevant passage by this inscription, though of course they might resort directly to the index, in search most urgently of their own names and then their host’s. Dad had never been uncomfortable with applause, and now he could receive the book’s accolade any number of times, with a wondering pleasure that could never go stale. I imagined him after a visitor had left, ringing like a lightly struck bell with the reverberation of recent praise, unsure whether he had really only dreamed it.

  When we were children Dad would tell us that the noblest profession was the preacher’s, the second noblest the teacher’s and third the lawyer’s. I don’t know why doctors didn’t get a look in, but it was obviously important for Dad’s chosen profession to make the top three. When someone once quoted the maxim ‘suffer any injustice rather than go to law’ in his hearing, he was greatly offended. This cynical notion struck at the roots of his vocation. Perhaps he realized, as I have only just done, that it was a worldly paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 6:7 – ‘Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?’ In his capacity as preacher St Paul might have the luxury of pulling rank over teachers and lawyers, but he could certainly be a pain in the neck.

  As Dad explained it to his young family, it was his job to decide who was telling the truth. This sounds rather more like the jury’s job, but Dad always held on to the idea of a necessary connection between law and the truth of things. He would never have agreed that a barrister is someone who wins arguments for a living, though that might be an outsider’s way of putting it.

  There were trophies from successful cases on display in the Gray’s Inn flat which fascinated me as a child, since they occupied an intermediate state between toy and self-sufficient adult object. One was a model of the internal workings of a steam locomotive’s engine, made of wood in muted shades of green, yellow and red. There was a sheet of perspex over the assembly, but a wheel on the side could be turned to demonstrate the action of the piston. Children’s toys of the period, the late 1950s or early ’60s, didn’t do a great deal, but they could do a bit more than that, and this object was somehow more precious than a toy although less satisfying.

  It was of course an exhibit from a case of Dad’s, used by him in court to demonstrate how a careless train driver, leaving the cab and for some reason venturing onto the rails, could be run over by a locomotive he had confidently assumed was stationary and would remain so. I don’t know who it was that retained Dad’s services, possibly an individual railway line or else the British Transport Commission – the
National Railways Board if it was after 1962. Presumably, too, Dad had been hired to argue against compensation, or at least to limit it.

  As a sensitive child (is there any other kind?) I should by rights have been haunted by the image of this terrible event, with its resonance of the heartless rhymes I found so hard to get out of my head (Lucy met a train / the train met Lucy / the rails were juicy / the juice was Lucy).

  In those days my sympathies went most readily to animals or to suffering mothers. In any case sorrow reached me most reliably through books. I haunted the Holborn Public Library and soon graduated from the children’s shelves in the basement to the adult holdings. My mind wanted to grow up as soon as possible, though there were areas of experience that I shrank from.

  The nearest bookshop to Gray’s Inn was Her Majesty’s Stationery Office on High Holborn, whose stock in trade puzzled me since it contained nothing remotely readable. Her Majesty’s interests seemed very specialized. I was determined to find something worthy of my book token just the same, and eventually found a small volume with an enticing cover, illustrated with colourful birds. There were no pictures inside, but that was a challenge I was used to. It wasn’t easy to become emotionally involved with a book about Scottish game bird populations, statistically analysed, but I managed to break my heart over the inexorable decline of Tetrao urogallus urogallus, the capercaillie.