The ukelele seems a rather flighty instrument on which to inscribe the name of a beloved when there is a more high-toned one available. The guitar is the serenader’s weapon of choice, after all — but perhaps Dad’s guitar was already rather crowded out, like a teenager’s plaster cast, with the names of his messmates. Even if there was room physically I can see that there might be a social qualm. Dad might be reluctant to make a nice well-brought-up girl consort, even on the bodywork of a guitar, with rough male company, a contingent from below decks. Better to be the admiral aboard a ukelele than share the bridge of a guitar.
The best that Denmark Street could do for Dad was to accept the reverently vandalized guitar in part-exchange for another instrument. Dad dug deep into the pockets of his demob suit and forked out sixty pounds (excluding the exchange value of the inscribed guitar) for the Gibson L4, beautiful to look at as well as to play, lacquered and already a vintage item (made in 1928), subsequently an heirloom inherited by Matthew, the guitarist among the brothers, while Tim took away the Monington & Weston, also lacquered but less precious, and I made off with the contraband Clavinova.
I stayed on in the Gray’s Inn flat, negotiating with the Inn with a view to being given a tenancy. Dad had paid very little for the flat, both because he moved in under an earlier, more smiling Rent Act and because he was one of the Inn’s eminences. I was under the impression that I was a member of Gray’s Inn because Dad had paid £50 to make me one, just before the minimum requirement for being a student member was raised from a rather basic level (though I think you had to have a Latin O-level). I was entitled to eat lunch in Hall, that grand canteen where the Comedy of Errors was first performed, though I can’t say I exercised the privilege much.
I would pay a lot more than Dad had, the Inn wouldn’t have to renovate the flat and would benefit from an uninterrupted income stream. Those were the advantages I could argue. What was in it for me? Sentimental continuity and an ample flat in central London with views of the Walks and the Square. Could I afford it? No.
In fantasy I was already drafting advertisements to run in the New York Review of Books, offering academics on their summer vacations the use of an ample flat in central London with views of the Walks and the Square, a stone’s throw from a Hall steeped in associations with the Bard, equally convenient for the British Museum, British Library and West End theatre. I would keep afloat by renting out my flat in Highbury, then make a mint with this illegal scheme from July to September, retreating to my own little nest in the eaves (peeing into a bucket, presumably) but descending cheerfully to make breakfast — other meals by arrangement — hoping all the while that the CCTV cameras in the Square, or the Inn staff supposed to be monitoring them, would turn a blind eye to the unauthorized traffic.
Keith meanwhile was producing low-key variations on a theme of common sense, saying that the Gray’s Inn flat was fine but a little unreal. There was nothing wrong with my premises in Highbury.
At first the Inn seemed to have no objection to my staying on, at a greatly increased rent and with no more than a shorthold assured tenancy (that abominable innovation of the Thatcher years), and then it did. I wasn’t a possible tenant. But I’m a member of the Inn, I said. You’re a student member, they said. Yes, I said, I’m a student member. Apparently my little entitlement was meaningless in real terms. I felt like a novice financial trader shouting for shares on the floor of the Stock Exchange, waving what turns out to be a Timothy Whites voucher with an expiry date in 1964.
For some reason I felt it necessary to insist on being expelled, though physical eviction (bailiffs, weeping children) wasn’t called for in the end. I understood that in a legal showdown an institution almost entirely composed of lawyers was unlikely to lose — but like many people who have written journalism, I had an exaggerated notion of the power I could wield. Surely if I hinted that I was writing a piece for The Times about the Inn’s inhospitability to someone who had actually been born there, though its own hypocritical motto was Domus, the Latin for a home, the benchers would fall over themselves to make peace on my terms?
Let’s assume that they were terrified, but nerved themselves to calling my bluff. They may have felt that, as a true son of the Inn at heart, I wouldn’t go nuclear with the warhead of a bittersweet and implicitly scolding family reminiscence.
I seem to be portraying myself as someone who dealt with his parents’ deaths comparatively coolly, but had a bit of a tantrum when called upon to leave the pleasant premises they had never owned. That’s not how I see it, obviously, but it was easier to hold the fact of their deaths steady when I was moving through the familiar spaces they had occupied.
Still, I had almost eighteen months to adjust, a six-month period of grace granted by the Inn and then a year of illegal occupation. There would have been some sort of hearing, but I was making out that Gray’s Inn had always been my main home, with the Highbury flat serving essentially as a work space or office, and it became clear that telephone records would not substantiate this notion. Like Ian Fleming before me, I realized that it was better to cave in than be disgraced.
As a true son of the Inn, but one who had inherited some of the bloodymindedness of the law itself, I wanted to do what I could in the way of collateral damage, and duly wrote for The Times a nostalgic article incorporating sardonic sideswipes at the Inn’s hypocrisy. I thought it would be cowardly to publish such a thing after the event, much more satisfactory if it appeared while I was still in residence. Peeking out of the curtains on to the Square that Saturday morning, I expected to see benchers flat on their backs, pole-axed by my righteous rhetoric, stiff arms raised to hold the paper open in front of their sightless eyes — if not actually vaporized by the blast, leaving only white shadows on the pavement.
One of the luxuries of the flat was the amount of storage space available on the attic floor where I had been based. The sloping walls of the side-attics had provided ideal repositories over the years for black plastic bin-bags containing unsorted papers, clumps of bank statements cheek by jowl with letters from Iris Murdoch and Jeanette Winterson. All of these now had to be sorted through prior to disposal.
My brothers and I managed to divide up our parents’ effects without tension or disagreement. There were various farewells to our childhood home (though Tim as the eldest might possibly have memories of a previous flat across the Square, at number 12). I remember an evening when we watched a video of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, which my brothers hadn’t seen, in shared rapture, the vinegary nastiness of the satire intensified in some indefinable way by our planetary affinity. When we were children Dad had told us as a matter of fact that we were from Mars, and presumably enjoyed the moment during a visit to the Planetarium when I called out, ‘That’s ours!’ as the guide singled out Mars with his torch, whose cutout projected a glowing arrow shape onto the velvety dome above our heads.
A slight divergence in fraternal temperament showed up on the last night of all, when one brother intentionally smashed a glass in the fireplace, to signify defiant Russian largeness of soul, and another brother fetched a broom to sweep it up. The fireplace had been a functioning one until the Clean Air Act, and had subsequently been fitted with an upmarket simulation. In the common spaces outside the flats were substantial coal bunkers with locks and immensely heavy wooden lids. Though the flats were only built in 1954, the indispensability of coal was unquestioned, built into the fixtures. When there was no more coal for our bunker to hold, except in the form of stubbornly persisting dust, it came into its own as miscellaneous external storage space. Dad installed wine racks inside it, into which I would often be called upon to transfer bottles after the delivery man from Oddbins in High Holborn had called. While Sheila had favoured everyday whites and an unfussy cava called Segura Viudas (though ‘Sigourney Weaver’ rolled off the tongue more reliably, particularly after a couple of glasses), Dad liked the prestige of a grape variety or a region and would ask guests if they fancied a glass of Sancerre. In Indian restaurants he would ask if they had ‘such a thing as a Muscat de Beaumes de Venise’, articulating with exaggerated clarity as if taking the hard work out of lip-reading for the benefit of someone deaf.