Kid Gloves Read Free Page B

excelled in authority and gravitas. The expert witness called by Dad gave evidence
that the accused did indeed suffer from Ménière’s disease, and could not therefore be expected
to walk a straight line. The Crown’s counterpart testified that he did not in fact suffer from
the disease. His inability to walk a straight line amounted only to a confession by the legs
that unlawful quantities of alcohol had been admitted to the mouth.
    The verdict went in favour of Tweedledum, with
Dad’s client acquitted. His driving licence was safe – but then it was officially rescinded, on
the basis that his severe Ménière’s disease rendered him unfit to drive. This was the aspect of
the story I liked best, the irony of the trump card turninginto the joker.
The law is not mocked! Except that Dad’s client asked if there was a mechanism for getting his
licence back. Yes there was – but he would need to get a medical expert to certify that he
didn’t have Ménière’s disease. A phone call to Tweedledee, and Dad’s client was on his way to
the swift reissue of a driving licence. The law is mocked on a regular basis, perhaps most
heartily by those who make a living from it.
    In his free-drinking social circle Dad rarely
came up against abstainers, but the parents of Peter Rundell, a schoolfriend of mine when I was
ten or eleven, turned out to be fierce advocates of Moral Rearmament. Dad learned this at an
evening event that turned out to be governed by the statutes of Prohibition. The discovery gave
him a hunted look, and his small talk was unusually small. Though the deprivation hit Dad hard I
didn’t much care how adults carried on, and I even enjoyed being the Rundells’ guest at plays
put on at the Westminster Theatre, then a stronghold of Moral Rearmament. I was theatrically
naive, but sophisticated enough, even so, to feel uneasy when we in the audience were issued
with white sticks during the interval of a play called
Blindsight
. I tapped my way
across the lobby with my eyes shut, making broad gestures with my free hand, hoping it would
close round an ice cream.
    Dad the raconteur, in full flow at the
dinner-table, was a very different creature from Dad the solemn upholder of his profession,
though he was always confident of his own consistency. I don’t think he noticed that the view of
the law as an amoral game, which he could pass on with such relish while telling a story such as
the one about the alleged Ménière’s disease, was the same one that he so violently objected to
in the event that other people advanced it and he wasn’t in the mood to laugh along.
    When he was a beginner at the
Bar Dad was able to acquire a wig second-hand, and so was spared the effort of ageing a new one,
by dusting it with ash or soaking it in tea. Heavy smokers have an inbuilt advantage when it
comes to achieving the yellow tint desired, but the effect isn’t immediate.
    Those who go shopping for barristers’ wigs in
long-established shops on or near Chancery Lane, such as Ede & Ravenscroft or Stanley Ley,
are offered two tiers of quality, but they aren’t all that far apart. They don’t correspond to
the economy and luxury own-brand lines in a supermarket, since the price differential is hardly
more than 10 per cent. If you ask what the difference is, you’ll be told that although both are
made from horsehair, the more expensive ones are made from the tail hair, the marginally
thriftier ones from the mane.
    And is tail hair so much better as wig material
than mane (which would seem to grow in smaller quantities)? Does that account for the difference
in price? If you ask these supplementary questions, and are alone in the shop, and have happened
on the right sales assistant, you may be told: ‘To put it bluntly, sir, we need to wash the shit
out of it.’
    After the gin-and-bitter-lemon years, in the
1970s, Dad took to drinking whisky and ginger ale, which he described as a ‘whisky sour’ though
it bears no real relation