This was a dismal own goal, to send a guest away, taking all the shine off the occasion, and a warning that some of Dad’s less appealing behaviour patterns were still some way from retirement.
There were times after he retired when Dad would have to be helped the two hundred yards home from Hall, more or less to the point of being carried by Inn staff or fellow benchers. This was hideously embarrassing, for my mother having to receive this stumbling procession of dignitaries, for me if I happened to run into them as they tried to negotiate the steps outside number 3 Gray’s Inn Square, but it was nowhere as bad as it might have been if he had felt any shame himself. Hangdog wasn’t his style, or it wasn’t until the next morning. He was serene, as if this was the way he always came home, or as if these nice fellows had wanted to give him a treat and he hadn’t liked to say no. The whole charade made it surprisingly easy to play along.
Sometimes he would remain roughly vertical until he reached the bedroom, then topple slowly sideways without distress to the floor, perhaps pulling some bedclothes with him in what was more a slide than a fall, a controlled descent with a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson.
Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life Dad went to a luxurious health farm, his favoured being called Champneys, to lose a few pounds. The regime also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of self-denial could be redeemed if he happened to coincide with a woman who shared his taste and talent for flirting. Flirtation without possibility made the hours speed by. Age didn’t disqualify such compatible women, but nor certainly did youth. The word he used of them was ‘sparklers’.
Flirtation as he practised it wasn’t any sort of rehearsal for infidelity but a formal vocal display, lyrical rather than heroic, little Wigmore Hall recitals rather than opera house tours de force. When a woman friend of mine paid a visit to the Gray’s Inn flat, Dad called her ‘darling’. My mother was only marginally piqued, but decided to patrol the marital perimeter by asking sweetly, ‘If Frances is Darling, what then am I?’
In general Dad imposed himself on company by force of personality rather than brute quickness of wit. His preferred style was the polished story (‘Did I ever tell you about the time …?’), not the dazzling improvisation. It helped that from his perch among the higher ranks of a hierarchical profession he didn’t often meet the Challenge Direct. But now he had to exert steady pressure on the charm pedal if he was to accelerate safely out of danger. ‘Sheila is Darling One,’ he said, ‘Frances is Darling Two.’ This formula not only smoothed any ruffled wifely feathers but passed into currency. If Frances was visiting, or if Dad answered the phone to her, he would greet her as Darling Two, and be rewarded, as we all hoped to be, by her throaty smoker’s laugh.
In the absence of sparklers Champneys could be a bit of a martyrdom, forcing his thoughts inward. Once I received a postcard from him at that address, saying: ‘No sparklers here this time. You have always been a rewarding son.’ The lack of a logical connection only added to the touchingness of the message. Except when in exile from bibulous normality, this was a vein of intimate introspection that he preferred to leave alone.
From quite early on in his career, perhaps even before he became a judge, Dad had told us about how he was looking forward to retirement, to all the things he would set his hand to when he only had the time, although he undertook hobbies (such as painting in oils or french-polishing) only in brief unrestful spasms. As a family we had once built a Mirror dinghy, and this was a hobby he organized and delegated. The Mirror dinghy was a kit, though of a full-sized craft, a flat-pack yacht, ordered through the Daily Mirror. There were red sails to match the Mirror’s masthead, though I’m not sure I had seen the newspaper then (ours was a Times and Express household). We were all dragooned into doing some of the work in the garage of our holiday house, attaching the prefabricated pieces to each other with twists of copper wire before waterproofing the seams (caulking them, even, in an amateurish way) with a strong-smelling resin paste. His actual hobby wasn’t building a boat, more being the clerk of works, project manager of a small family boat-building business.
After about a week of supervised labour it was time to join the assembled parts into something close to the finished shape, except that it turned out we had been making, with our different teams working on different sides of the garage, two starboard sides instead of mirrored twins. Our Mirror dinghy failed the mirror test. The two halves might snuggle up to each other, nestling together like spoons, but they would never mate. We had proved the advertisers wrong when they had claimed the instructions to be foolproof.
Dad paid a local handyman to unbodge our bodging and put the dinghy together properly, though it would probably have been cheaper to buy another kit and make two port sides this time. Then we could have had the beginning of a fleet. But the holiday was already almost over, and there was a factor of humiliation involved. It can never feel good to hire a third party to do your DIY. The finished dinghy — finished by other hands — was seaworthy and serviceable but never quite smelled of success, and that was perhaps Dad’s real addiction, the resinous perfume he needed to have in his nostrils.
Still, he was positive that there would be memoirs and radio plays, there would be songs — he was handy with a guitar, not practising much but reliably energized by an audience.
Even after I had been published he was confident he would put me in the shade. He had no doubt that he would be able to blast his own work over the makeshift crossbar of my slight success as effortlessly as Barry John converting a try in front of roaring crowds. He seemed to think that my psychology was robust enough to cope with being superseded when his own books started appearing, but he did worry about how Matthew, whose business was music and recording, would handle the blow to his confidence when Dad’s first single stormed all the way to Number One.
If he had doubts he kept them to himself. Anxiety wasn’t for public consumption, and if he worried then he did it on his own time. Yet he held on tight to his job and didn’t retire before he had to, in 1990, at seventy-five. Not so long before, retirement had been something for judges to choose for themselves without an imposed schedule, but that system too had its drawbacks, and even Lord Denning, influential Master of the Rolls and Dad’s hero as a prose stylist, was immortal a little too long.
Dad continued to work part-time after technically retiring, presiding over the elaborate arguments of a litigant-in-person named Petch, who was suing his employers in the civil service. Amateurs in court require careful steering. They’re likely to be long-winded, often nervous, sometimes even truculent, and they aren’t attuned, the way professional counsel are, to shifts in a judge’s body language, the little signals meaning that a line of argument is finding favour or should instantly be abandoned. Dad was patient and generous with such solo pilots of litigation, though his brother judges tended to have less respect for their erratic though predictable manoeuvres.