Some wine was kept upstairs, on the attic level where I lived. Under the concrete roof the temperature was far from constant. In summer it could become so hot that sleeping on the flat roof became an attractive option, while in winter it sometimes happened, thanks to the skylight’s ventilator being rusted open, that snow fell on my bed. These conditions don’t suit wine over any length of time, and none of the bottles that Dad had kept up there turned out to be fit for drinking, and barely for cooking purposes. There was a melancholy gap between label and contents, not to be bridged by the palate, hardly even by the imagination.
Since the spiral staircase to the attic level had been installed at Dad’s expense before the family moved in (he told us when we were children that it had come from a submarine), it made sense that we would have a right, perhaps even a duty, to take it with us when we left. A brief look told us that this plan was impracticable, a pity since it had such a strong visual appeal, almost in terms of conceptual art, to leave the alienated domestic space pulsing with absence.
Moving out of Gray’s Inn didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the premises. There had been no ASBO element in the Inn’s legal victory. I stayed in contact with residents I’d known from childhood, most of whom tactfully treated my article for The Times as an aberration that need not be mentioned. It seemed natural now to think of the plutocratic enclave as their present home rather than my past one. Seeing fresh paintwork on the nameboard of number 3 at street level was slightly shocking at first, but as I continued to visit no. 5 (bringing fresh sprats from Peckham Market for Lady Henry Wilson’s Sunday lunch) and no. 1 (delivering to Edith Wellwood pans of the egg custard that constituted almost her only food) I soon got used to it. I found I could use the Inn as a short cut to other destinations without feeling I was venturing onto ground that was either sentimentally charged or forbidden.
Digging my heels in and refusing to leave a flat to which I had no legal right seemed to do the trick in psychological terms. When I was finally turfed out I was able to leave the past behind and walk away clean. Eviction has some modest merit as an agent of emotional resolution. It doesn’t come cheap, though, and I’m sure there are thriftier ways of breaking the spell of the past. I’d urge others in my position to shop around.
Sometimes there were direct reminders of my dead people, tiny resurrections. One day I took a watch-chain to have a new swivel fitted, which seems a fantastically fogeyish errand, though my excuse for preferring a pocket watch is that I’m allergic to metal and would get a wrist rash if I wore a watch there. (Now that mobile phones have replaced watches this excuse seems very thin, but habits have a habit of becoming entrenched.) I took the chain to Sanford’s the jeweller, located in 3 Holborn Bars, that little remnant of London before the Great Fire. The row of shops has been made over any number of times but is historically grounded by the fact that you step down into them, down to the old street level. The past has subsided and resists the hydraulic imagination that would pump it up to the level where we live.
Sanford’s is a family firm, though recent (established only in the 1920s) compared to the Tudor building that contains it. Its near neighbour was the tobacconist’s where Dad would pick up his cigarettes, John Brumfit’s, though subsequently rebranded Shervingtons, since the new owners couldn’t afford the fee demanded to keep the name and the illusion of continuity in business. An old building attracts businesses keen to benefit from the ennoblement of association, but there comes a point when the clustering of parvenu enterprises exhausts the stock of transferable grandeur, and then the transaction goes into reverse. Then it’s the building itself that seems fake, discredited. Even without an actual wand emporium the edifice takes on a Harry Potter tinge, and the skew-whiff angles and planes of 3 Holborn Bars come to look as if they had been worked up, sketch after sketch, by a production designer with set builders by the hundred on his payroll, ready to lay the required square footage of prefabricated cobbles at a moment’s notice.
Already there seemed something hopeless about the sign on Shervingtons’ door. Thank You for Smoking — a slogan that was meant to sound jauntily defiant seemed to carry an undertone of forlorn pleading.
Jewellers’ shops in films starring Catherine Deneuve or Audrey Hepburn are palatial premises, but a jeweller’s can also be snug, cosy, like a jewel box — or shoe box — in its own right. That’s the style of Sanford Bros (the ‘Bros’ in much smaller lettering on the shopfront, as if added later at the insistence of an affronted sibling). It’s an unfussy establishment the size of a country-house pantry, holding itself a little apart from the concentration of competing trade in Hatton Garden. This is a jeweller’s shop where the word ‘bling’ has never been spoken.
When the man serving in Sanford’s asked for my name he seemed to hesitate for a moment before writing it down on the docket. In such a small room our interaction necessarily seemed social, and the hesitation an invitation to something more than small talk. I asked if the name rang a bell. He thought for a moment, then he asked, ‘Was your father a stout man?’ I said that he would have rejected the word, but that the waistbands of his trousers sometimes led stressful lives. Why did he ask, though?
‘This is going back a bit,’ he said.
It was when he was a teenager, manning the shop on Saturdays. Between us we worked out that it must have been in the early mid-1960s. This chap had come in to buy a pair of earrings or something, and he had three boys with him.
I had no memory of the event, but the occasion wasn’t hard to reconstruct. Dad had forgotten Sheila’s birthday, or their wedding anniversary, until the day itself (or the day before) and was doing what men in those days were expected to do, slipping into the nearest shop to spend his way out of trouble.
The man assigned the boys places to stand — one, two, three — in Indian file, and they took up their marks, not as if this was a drill they were used to, but as if their Dad was in a good mood and it was fun to go along with him. Then the man raised his finger and wagged it, saying with pretended sternness, ‘Don’t steal.’
That’s all, the most fragile piece of drollery imaginable, based on the presumed unlikeliness of our misbehaving and the small scale of the shop, but it had stayed with the Saturday boy for a third of a century. It helps that the name is distinctive in the first place, and Dad’s professional success had the side effect of refreshing casual memory with regular mentions in the newspapers, but still Dad had an ability (not continuously detectable by his family) to charge small events with charm and presence. I could just about think myself back into the line-up, looking at Matthew’s curly hair from behind, sensing behind me the incipient resentful curl in Tim’s upper lip, but of course I’m just making it up.