How much Dad took in of what was in front of him, or how little, became clear one Monday night. I was with Keith in the Highbury flat, leaving Matthew to look after Dad in Gray’s Inn. We were watching a Channel 4 documentary on the 1976 Obscene Publications Squad trials, and the judge in the case was getting a certain amount of stick for deficiencies in his running of the case that led in the end to Wallace Virgo’s conviction being overturned.
I took advantage of an advertising break to phone Matthew, worried that he and Dad might also be watching television. They were. Not Channel 4? Channel 4.
Did Dad realize that he was the unnamed judge being referred to? He didn’t, no. He gave every sign of being fascinated by the programme, but fell short of making the personal connection.
I felt relief when perhaps distress should have been the dominant emotion. I certainly didn’t want Dad to be aware that his past professional performance was being criticized, but it would have been better for him to be tuned to another channel rather than watching Channel 4 with empty attention, impervious, looking at his life from outside it.
My brothers and I didn’t find it hard to believe that Dad might have blundered, particularly in a case combining two things about which he had such strong feelings, pornography and police corruption. It seemed obvious to us that he was instinctively an advocate, a judge only by hard work and scruple. It came naturally to him to shape an argument theatrically, not to hold the balance between opposing forces. We imagined him failing to stress the importance of reasonable doubt, when it came to the guilt of a police commander betraying the public trust.
In this particular case, the case of R. v. Virgo, we were wrong, at least according to Matthew’s godfather Munro Davies, not the least of Dad’s devils. Munro can remember even after the lapse of half a century how many days a particular case lasted. The successful appeal against Virgo’s conviction challenged the admissibility of a diary entry. Dad had accepted it as evidence, and now he was being overruled. Nowadays the admissibility of such material is uncontroversial, and in any case there was no damage done by admitting the diary entry in R. v. Virgo, since it was the only direct evidence of guilt. Without it there was no case. Mars-Jones J had exercised the only option that could have put Virgo behind bars.
Even before Dad’s mental presence dwindled to this point, I had come to rely on help, both what was supplied by the council (or the agency subcontracted by it) and by private providers. It might happen that a carer sent by the council on a morning shift was so clearly efficient and likeable that I would hire him or her to work at other times. The agency’s name that sticks with me is Care Alternatives, with its faint double meaning (alternatives to care, as opposed to options for caring), though there was a change of contracts halfway through the year. First-time callers, particularly at weekends, had to be told the location of Gray’s Inn Square in great detail or they were likely to overshoot in strange directions.
One of the morning reliables was Nimat, a Sudanese woman of great beauty. She was tall and poised. The starkness of her haircut emphasized the roundness of her head. She was perhaps in her forties, with a son of about ten, whose father she had left behind with some relief in Sudan. Since then she had found another relationship, in London, but the man in question had been run over and killed. There was a sadness about her, a sadness that didn’t take away from her vitality but was part of it. This vibrant sorrowing may have preceded the events that gave it depth.
When I heard the lift mechanism start its whirring at about eight o’clock, I would go in to Dad and say, ‘It’s our lovely Nimat.’ Usually he said, ‘Who?’ When she came into his room she lowered her head to be near his as she explained who she was and why she had come. Her voice was both husky and cooing. Then he would say, ‘Don’t you have wonderful teeth!’, which would make her smile even more of a world-historical event.
He would follow Nimat down the corridor to the bathroom without her needing to help him with his Zimmer frame. She simply drew him along in the wake of her magnificence.
After his shower he would have a neutral cleanness. Historically the smells he had borne were Vitalis (hair oil), Old Spice (aftershave) and Badedas (Swedish horse-chestnut-based bath essence). A triple chime of naffness, a three-bullet-point suicide note in the language of male grooming. I don’t remember any advertisements for Vitalis, but perhaps they simply said that the product would make your hair look like oiled metal, and as a bonus that its smell would remind your children of the oil they applied to their Triang-Hornby 00 gauge electric toy trains. Old Spice implied a sort of daft sportiness with its footage of surfing and the crypto-fascist pulsations of Carmina Burana. It was Badedas (though the advertising copy stylishly omitted the capital) that was most obviously a strong solution of wish-fulfilment, as much an extract of the male menopause as of the Swedish horse-chestnut.
The campaigns for the product were classy, tending to appear in Sunday colour supplements. The tagline was ‘Things happen after a badedas bath’. What things? Well, a man in black tie might step out of a sports car to the un-surprise of a blonde wrapped only in a towel, surveying from a bathroom window the suavity of her visitor.
This was in the days before women learned to respond to crass sexual implications in advertising, if they ever really have. It seemed obvious that the target market wasn’t female, and it was the male reader who was being offered a vision of steamy Scandinavian nakedness, whether he owned a sports car or not. Women seeing the advert and identifying with the woman in the towel would be likely to respond with social panic rather than arousal, thinking Oh GOD! I thought he said seven-thirty!
At one point in the Aids years (the phrase has some shorthand value, though they’re hardly over) I slipped into a bath behind a friend and held him tight. He was recovering from shingles, and found that pressure on his skin could relieve the agonizing twinges he was experiencing, which are a sign of improvement, of nerve cells regenerating, but feel like anything but. Hugh hadn’t yet had his diagnosis of Aids, and was willing to embrace his shingles as tightly as I was embracing him, as long as he wasn’t in the firing line for anything worse. The bath was a mass of foam produced by bubble bath, and at some stage I recognized the bubble bath as Badedas.
The intimate distress and comfort of the experience was so intense that it stripped all the Dadly associations from the smell of Badedas, overwriting them with tenderness and sorrow. Now both Dad and Hugh are dead, with Hugh dead long before Dad, but it is Hugh who is summoned back in welcomed pain by the smell of those Swedish horse-chestnuts. All the naffness has melted away, and my heart and my nostrils open up.
I didn’t like to delay Dad’s carers with chat when they had other places to go, but I learned a certain amount about Nimat. She lived on Royal College Street in Camden. She had been brought up as a Christian. She had worked in Africa as an air hostess (I think she used that phrase, rather than ‘cabin crew’), though I imagine her height was a disadvantage in those cramped spaces. Her great pleasure on stopovers was to put on her hottest hotpants and make her way to the bar of the hotel where she was staying. There she would order a cocktail and make it last, pacing herself and letting the ice-cubes melt at their leisure. Everyone would know she wasn’t a renegade Muslim displaying herself and drinking poison but simply a Christian enjoying legitimate privileges, relaxing in her own way, though her presence in the bar is unlikely to have been sedative.