How stupid of me. When we climbed up the Duke of York’s Steps again all the breath went out of me. He said, standing in that old place, “I’m glad we did this. I won’t forget that we did this.” Two sandwiches in the park! I didn’t dare say anything foolish. He hailed a cab at the corner of Pall Mall and kissed me before stepping into it. I watched it weave its way, its black roof glinting, up Lower Regent Street. And fifteen minutes later Simon, who I think was vaguely on the lookout, would have seen me return and shut my office door behind me in the way that people shut even office doors when they want to cry.
But, look, he’s still here, isn’t he? How absurd of me. Your dad’s still here.
And he can still talk, as you know, in a special way about snails. As he can talk about all kinds of creepy-crawlies and barely considered life forms, as if passing on some marvellous secret. His business these days may be, so to speak, the whole range of available products, but he can still do a good pitch on the little individual item.
You know not to yawn when your dad talks about snails. A look comes into his eye. You know not to push the mollusc jokes. What you don’t know is that there came a time, after we’d moved to Davenport Road, when your dad announced to me that he had to go one last time to the labs at Imperial. He had to make one last visit. He didn’t elaborate, and I should have guessed perhaps. But he told me afterwards. He said he’d gone there personally to exterminate his remaining working stock of snails. He said he wanted to do it himself, efficiently and “humanely”—a strange word to use about snails. He hadn’t wanted to leave it to “some technician.”
10
BUT COME BACK to when he was twenty-one, and to another visit. To one day in May when I stood with your father outside the front door of number seven Napier Street, Kensington, waiting for my father to open it.
I’d never seen your dad look so scared. He was quaking in his Chelsea boots. Ever since I’d told him, in that unfortunately timed way, that my father was a High Court judge, your dad was convinced that his moment of judgement must come. On that May afternoon he was about to be condemned.
No amount of soft-pedalling on my part would reassure him: it’s a wonder I got him to that doorstep. In the Queen’s Bench Division they didn’t sentence criminals — not that your dad was one — or send anyone to the gallows. Not that, by 1966, anyone was sent to the gallows. Though it’s a rather chilly historical fact that not so long before, they still were. And an even chillier fact which I don’t like to dwell on and didn’t like to dwell on then, that if my father had chosen criminal law he might, for a brief period at least of his judge’s career, have been one of those who sent them there. How far we’ve come since before you were born.
In any case, as I tried to persuade your father, my father was a complete sweetie, a lamb. He wore lambs-wool cardigans from Harrods. He was not Judge Jeffreys. You’d never even guess he was a judge. But none of this washed with your dad, it even gave him more cause to quake. A sweetie — yes, of course he’d be, with his own daughter. Your dad knew the situation well enough by then: that my father was about to divorce his wayward wife. Which left this mutually devoted and clinging household of two, father and daughter. The more fondly I spoke of my father, the more Mike was sure he was going to be Mr. Interloper, Mr. Rival. My dad was going to cut him dead.
Pity your poor father, if it makes sense to pity retrospectively, standing outside my father’s front door. Picture him then, when you look at him tomorrow. He really had nothing to fear. And if only he’d known his real moment of judgement was to come much later in life.
It was useless to explain to him that the Kensington situation was not as simple as it seemed. My father was not quite the wronged and wounded party, taking his only comfort in me, meanwhile seething with unvented spite. He was magnanimously — or soft-headedly — anxious that the divorce shouldn’t be punitively framed. Fiona was still the mother of his only child (and knew how to milk his better nature). There’d still been the good years. I remember them. The three of us outside “Craiginish Croft” waiting idiotically for the time-release shutter (the photo’s in that box): Dougie, Fifi and Paulie, as we called ourselves then, like a litter of puppies. My mother stood to get a good deal more than most lawyers — not acting for a judge — would have advised. She’d get Craiginish, for a start. If I hadn’t, that spring, been busy tumbling into bed and into love with your father, I might have argued more fiercely with my poor daddy about that.
Then again, there was the potentially ruinous factor of Margaret Gould, my stepmother-to-be, already staking her place. He had to be very careful this didn’t give Fiona grounds for extracting even more. I’d already begun to hate Margaret—that interloper. So couldn’t I understand your dad’s qualms? I’d already begun the unbecoming process of outlawing my own mother. Perhaps it’s me you should really be judging tomorrow.
It would have been better, in some ways, if my father had actually gone out and, in a spirit of reckless and conspicuous revenge, “picked up” Margaret. But he was sixty-six and it might have wrecked his judge’s career. Judges don’t “go out,” they don’t “pick up.” And judges, perhaps by definition, should be fair to all parties and free from all vindictiveness. In any case, that wouldn’t have been him. He had “picked up” Margaret, but in his normal, helpless, passive-but-effective way, like a burr that had stuck insistently to one of his cardigans. A sweetie and a softie: though I couldn’t convince your father, going through agonies, outside his front door.
The door was a glossy, implacable, judgemental black, the standard livery of Kensington, but that didn’t help your dad. It stood at the top of steps inside a porch supported by two glossy white pillars. On one of them would have been a large, finely serifed black “7.”
Adding to your dad’s unease, I can’t deny it, was the sudden palpable tang of wealth in his nostrils. At Sussex there was the general levelling of student existence. Now he was the boy from Orpington, about to be put in his place by a Kensington your-lordship. Not that he’d minded, I’d noticed, having a “bird” (don’t laugh, it was the word then) from just up from the King’s Road. Those Chelsea boots he was quaking in were the genuine article, in the sense that we’d bought them, in the King’s Road, not so very long before.
Before your Grandpa Dougie’s divorce the wealth was probably at its peak. From then on the depredations began. But, more and more, I think my father somehow, strangely, connived in them: not depredations so much as some gradual, stumbling process of divestment. He was sixty-six, even then. He would marry again twice, and both failed experiments. It was as if he was really, circuitously but slyly, working his way back to being an unencumbered bachelor, a bachelor of law, though, now, of course, a judge. Whatever else might be taken from him, no one could take from him those robes and authority of office.
It’s not just snails who need those shells, Mikey.
And whether or not those depredations were part of some weird plan, I can’t deny that your dad and I helped significantly to deplete the stock. In 1970, when Mike and I married, my father effectively bought us a house. His argument then, when I rather weakly protested, was that it would be so much less for Margaret “to get her hands on” (things were already approaching that stage), an argument that was hard to resist, setting aside the more basic one of gift horses and mouths. But like most of my father’s kindhearted impulses, this wedding gift of a house — or the money to buy one with — caused all sorts of ructions and tensions.