It happened that I was in the Gray’s Inn flat on the day after the trial ended. Commander Wallace Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent William Moody had been convicted, and Dad was jubilant, in a mood to celebrate. He produced his wallet and slid out a ten-pound note. For a moment it looked as if he was about to give me some pocket money, except that I was twenty-two and receiving a small allowance from the Department of Education and Science (I remember that the postal address of my benefactors was Honeypot Lane) to pursue a PhD that I never caught up with.
The ten-pound note wasn’t for me. Instead Dad handed it to Sheila, saying, ‘Darling, I want you to go down to Soho and buy some pornography.’ She looked a little dazed as she took the money.
‘What is it exactly you want me to do, Bill?’ she asked.
‘Go to Soho and buy some pornography.’
‘But why?’
‘Because you won’t be able to get any,’ he told us. Then he took the tenner back and returned it to his wallet. As perhaps Sheila had suspected from the start, if only because the scene was played out in my presence, it was just a piece of theatre. I don’t know if she was surprised that Dad should imagine such a direct connection between a decision in law and the life of the streets, but I certainly was.
Virgo appealed against his conviction, and won. I don’t remember Dad making any comment on this setback, but years later I found an unfamiliar cassette recorder with a tape in it. Might this be the famous memoir, which Dad had found impossibly difficult in the end to get started on, so that he decided that speaking aloud was the solution, with a stenographer typing up the material for him to tidy later? I pressed the Play button. It was Dad’s voice all right, but he was singing rather than speaking, and accompanying himself on the guitar. ‘Virgo — Virgo,’ he crooned, ‘I’ll follow you … just an old sweet song keeps Virgo on my mind.’ He was casting a spell of voodoo justice on the villain who had escaped him, to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’.
Having a master of argument in the family doesn’t necessarily make for a quiet life, particularly if he sees himself not as a user of rhetoric but as someone who speaks his mind. In family arguments Dad was like a professional tennis player who doesn’t even realize how much spin he’s putting on the ball, going for devastating shots even in what is nominally a knock-up. Except that a tennis pro will admit to having a racket in his hand.
It was part of Dad’s constitution that he wanted to win, but I’m not sure he ever realized how much he wanted it. He could be relentless, though he could also be wily in a way that was endlessly frustrating. He could improvise.
This was particularly maddening when I was old enough to feel that I could mount an argument myself on a reasonably sophisticated basis. After I had changed my Cambridge course from Classics to English, a change he reluctantly supported, he asked me at the end of one particular term what I’d been studying. American literature, I told him (an option that hadn’t been on the syllabus for long), with special reference to Melville, Hawthorne, Pynchon and Nabokov. ‘Nabokov?’ he asked. ‘The man who wrote that dirty book Lolita? The one who likes little girls?’
I could see there was no point in arguing that Humbert’s entanglement with Lolita recreated Nabokov’s love affair with America, or that it was an allegory of beauty, or even a novel that refused to address the moral issues it seemed to insist on raising. Dad had watched the last ten minutes of the film and hadn’t read so much as a page, while I knew both book and film fairly well. He might hate to be underprepared in court, but now, somehow, lack of knowledge gave him a crushing advantage.
I made the decision to keep things extra-literary, shifting my ground to face an adversary who wouldn’t be drawn into skirmishes over aesthetics or formal questions but would keep pounding away with the big guns of traditional morality. I pointed out that Mrs Nabokov, Véra, had rescued the manuscript of Lolita when her husband was trying to burn it, and that the book, like all the others he published, was dedicated to her.
Dad answered by reflex. I’d love to have an MRI of his brain at that moment, to see which parts were being used, and (almost more fascinating) which were not. A tiny flare of combative instinct in the limbic system, a few neurones firing in the linguistic cortex. I dare say that was all it took. ‘And I think she’s a wonderful woman …’ he said, leaving a pause long enough for me to wonder if I was losing my wits — did Dad know Véra Nabokov? How had this come about? Had they shared quaffing wine in Gray’s Inn Hall? — before he delivered the judo throw that used my weight against me, ‘… to accept the dedication of a book which proves that her husband really likes little girls.’ Part of the frustration of the moment was my sense that Dad could never have riffed so freely if he was really engaged in a question of morals. He was showing off, he just didn’t know it.
If Dad was a driven athlete in argument, he was also a chess grandmaster. Sometimes, like a resourceful player, he would establish a gambit over the course of several games and then vary it in a way that was completely destabilizing. I had become used to one form of non-apology, which ran along the lines of ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … we must try to get along better.’ This was in theory a no-fault approach to the family peace process, but one which made clear just the same where the faults lay. Then one day, shortly before his retirement, he successfully ambushed me with a variation: ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … you have only so much time to make it up to me.’
Over the years he had changed his spots, from the man who had stood as a Labour candidate after the War, even if he succeeded only in splitting the vote and letting the Tory in. He never actually admitted helping the Tory cause more directly, by voting for Mrs Thatcher in the years when it was possible to do so, but I’d be surprised to learn that he never did.
His support for liberal causes may have started and finished with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965. He certainly hadn’t approved of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalized homosexuality, and by the 1970s had become alarmed by a general culture of permissiveness and the particular anomie of his sons.
In soft cultural terms, as distinct from actual politics, he could boast of having an open mind, or certainly open ears. Dad had been an unlikely but fervent first-generation Beatlemaniac. This was a shared taste in the household, though I have to admit when I first heard ‘She Loves You’ on the car radio in 1962 I thought in my infant élitism that it was a bad joke. Oh dear oh dear, I thought, have we really come to this? I was eight. A little later, when Tim and I were given record tokens by our grandfather (Sheila’s father, the only grandparent we knew) we made highbrow choices of EP, at least partly, I’m sure, to impress each other, with him choosing Finlandia while I cast my vote for Gieseking playing the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. I wonder who won, and how we knew.
Dad worked out the chords of ‘Michelle’ on the guitar, and Sheila acquired the sheet music for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for trying out on the piano. She had the advantage of being able to read music, though from his Chapel childhood Dad was at home with tonic sol-fa notation for hymns, and could with a little effort decode the little grids studded with black dots, like wiring diagrams for transistors, which represented guitar chords in the tablature used for popular sheet music. On songs without a piano part Sheila might find herself relegated to that unglamorous not-quite-instrument made from a comb and pieces of tissue paper.