Together, though, together with my father, it was possible to put up two hundred feet of bookshelves in my study. I measured the room, drew up the plans and, together, my father and I bought, transported and varnished the wood which was transformed into two hundred feet of shelving. My father did most of the measuring, a lot of the sawing and all the drilling. He made some mistakes in the measuring or the spirit-levelling and consequently some of the shelves were about an inch out of horizontal. He couldn’t account for it and I could see how it hurt and mystified him, that discrepancy. There was no explaining it, except to say he was losing it, losing his eye, his accuracy. To compensate he built some special wooden wedges so that the shelves ended up inch-perfect.
I’m looking at them now, those shelves which will probably turn out to be my father’s last great piece of DIY. At some time in the future — the hypothetical future, the one that will never come to pass because I hope to God I never have a child — my son will expect me to put up shelves for him. It is a biological law: the father builds shelves for his children. What I wonder, though, is where this ability to put up shelves is going to come from. When I was young I was always struck by the large manliness of my father’s hands. When, I asked myself, would my hands become like his? For the poet Michael Hofmann it started to happen in his late twenties:
By now, it is almost my father’s arm,
a man’s arm, that lifts the cigarettes to my mouth. .
Hofmann’s father was a writer so it is not surprising that the arm of his poet son should have turned out the same way. But for me, I think, it is never going to happen. My father’s hands and all the skills — drilling, sawing, building — that culminated in them have been left behind. From now on my hands will write the cheques that pay the kitchen-fitters, men with hands like my father’s, to build the things that he — like Lawrence — could make for himself and his son. It is not just a class you leave, it’s your biology too. Or maybe that’s not quite true.
‘The photograph of father came today. It’s very nice: I see a good deal of myself in it.’ That was in January 1925, four months after Lawrence’s father had died. A few days ago my mother gave me a photograph of my father when he was in his mid-twenties. He is dressed in tennis whites, a blazer draped over his shoulders, racket in one hand. Only the blurred council house in the background — where his sister, my auntie Joan, still lives — insists that this is not an image from the long afternoon of the English leisured class. His hair — already thinning — is slicked back. Give or take a few years and details of fashion he looks as I do now: the same long legs, the same thin wrists, the same eyes and mouth. For the first time, I see myself in a picture of my father.
A few weeks earlier, to use up the last frames of her film, Laura took some pictures of me after I had finished playing tennis. My back was aching, I was dehydrated — we had drunk too much red wine the night before — but I was surprised, when the pictures came back from the lab, by just how terrible I looked. Something of that weariness made me look like my father as he does now, in his seventies. For the first time I saw my father in a picture of myself.
The reciprocal relation of these photos — mirror-images, reflecting each other back across a generational divide of almost forty years — is not accidental. It is a visual preparation for my father’s inevitable death: there will come a time when it is only my genes that will continue the work of the camera in preserving his likeness. Looking at that picture of my father in his tennis whites, I realised how that skill, that instinctive ability to hit a ball in motion, to get the hang of sports, is still there, in my hands, in my arms.
They gave me pause, those photos, made me wonder what other traits I had inherited. One night I was woken by the sound of the people next door getting back late, by the key scraping in their lock. Lying in bed, suddenly awake, I realised that another part of my character could now be firmly identified as a permanent trait. I have always woken up easily but it is only now that I can collate the evidence of the years into the simple verdict: I am a light sleeper. Like my father. When I lived at home the slightest noise was always enough to rouse him. Light sleeping, for him, was always a kind of domestic vigilance, a way of being alert to any possible intrusion into his home and family: a way of looking after my mother and me. A light sleeper himself, he took great pains to avoid waking the rest of us when he got up in the semidarkness to go to work; like him I open doors quietly and walk lightly across rooms.
These habits were acquired as if by accident; others, like paying debts promptly, scrupulously, were conscientiously instilled. It may be of no interest to anyone — and this entire book, I suspect, is of no interest to anyone — but it so happens that I am very good at paying my debts. You can tell, just by looking at me. I have an honest face, apparently. Grocers never refuse when I ask if I can owe them for milk or vegetables and quite often they tell me it is because I have an honest face. It is one of the things grocers pride themselves on, judging character by appearance. If they have the knack for picking out the best vegetables at markets then they can pick out customers who can owe them money for their under-ripe melons and rotten apples. Shopkeepers were happy to extend Lawrence credit, I imagine, since he was always scrupulous about paying his debts. Maybe this shared quality is why I like reading what are ostensibly his dullest letters, the ones in which he settles accounts, reckons up what he owes. ‘I owe you some money,’ he wrote to Bertrand Russell. ‘We got those frescoes for 3 guineas. That is, your share, 31/6. Therefore I owe you 8/6. I will send it you, I won’t forget.’ I love that ‘I won’t forget’, and I love it when he urged Barbara Low to ‘remind Frieda that she pays you for the cake etc. I shall be so angry with her if she forgets it, as she is too likely to’. Three weeks later he wrote again: ‘Of course Frieda never paid you for the cake and sweets so I send on here the 10/-.’
The corollary of this scrupulousness was, needless to say, a tendency towards niggardliness. He complains that his sister Emily ‘can’t help feeling that ninepence is exactly half as good again as sixpence. If I wearily protest that ninepence is nothing to me unless it’s ninepence worth of life, she just looks at me as if I’d said nothing. How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with eternal price lists.’ That’s as may be but she can hardly have been more obsessed with prices than her brother. Some of his best letters are nothing but price lists. Others are long, itemised whinges about how much things are costing, how he is being overcharged, how the exchange rate is working to his disadvantage (especially in Italy), how he has to pay duty on books sent through the post, how he is being cheated by government officials, shopkeepers, hoteliers and porters. As a travel book Sea and Sardinia is way ahead of its time: it anticipates the era of mass tourism when the chief conviction of all English holiday-makers is that they are being fleeced at every turn, when the strongest memory of the Sistine Chapel will be the stunning price of the choc-ices on sale outside. Lawrence is in a strop about money for the duration of his Sardinia trip but at one point his irritation erupts in molten anger.