Kid Gloves Read Online Free

to the drink of that name.
    Alcohol amplified something Dad also felt in full
sobriety, a sense of disappointment with the way his sons were developing. This was especially
true in the mid-1970s, when we were all coming to the end of our education. Where was our drive,
our ambition? We seemed to be coasting at best. He wasn’t so much disappointed as incredulous.
We seemed to think the world owed us a living!
    There was some truth in this, of course, though
it could hardly be otherwise. Our circumstances were so different fromhis.
He had tunnelled through rock to make his way in the world, while we had been accustomed from an
early age to using the tube, with Chancery Lane station just round the corner from our childhood
home.
    Dad’s ideal was that we would all become lawyers,
which would be following his footsteps in one sense, except that his drive and ambition had
taken him very far from the paths trodden by his farming ancestors. To follow him would be very
different from being like him, would mean in fact that we were very unlike him. The more we were
like him the less we would follow him. All this tangle needs to be kept distinct from the
common-sense awareness that we would most likely never emerge from his shadow and be assumed,
even if we went on to ‘great things’, to have got our start thanks to his eminence. It was
understandable that he wanted us to soar, but how could we do that if we used him as a
launch-pad?
    We confidently diagnosed Dad in the
popular-science terms of the day as a ‘Type A personality’, unable to relax, likely to suffer
from strokes, heart attacks and other forms of stress-related condition, the self-inflicted
wounds of an oppressive character. When he developed a stomach ulcer it seemed to prove us
right, though that particular line of punitive pseudo-medical reasoning has since been
discredited and retired.
    Dad always called sherry ‘sherry wine’ with a
slightly lah-di-dah pronunciation, though I didn’t know what nuance of pretension was being
identified. Sherry wasn’t classified by Dad as a women’s drink – it was associated with the
young man who had saved my parents’ lives in Spain the year after they were married, when they
had got themselves into difficulties swimming. On special occasions we might toast his name.
¡Xavier Cremades!
    When the time came, Sheila organized a retirement
party for him at the Garrick. She decided to serve champagnecocktails, the
only such drink she herself liked. She also decided to do things properly, improving on the
standard catering protocol whereby the drink is topped up with champagne but the other
ingredients (a little brandy, a few drops of angostura, a sugar lump) are not reinforced. On
this special occasion, there would be no mere top-up but the provision (expense be damned) of a
whole new drink.
    Surely she knew she was playing with firewater?
Even the angostura raises the alcohol content. Only the sugar can enter a plea of not guilty,
and even then can be suspected of aiding and abetting by disguising the potency of the drink
with sweetness. Dad had a strong head for alcohol in those days, which is only a way of saying
that it distorted him less on the surface than in the depths. In the second hour of the party a
woman of my generation, known to him since her birth, exercising perhaps unconsciously the
double privilege of good looks and long intimacy, made some mild enquiries about the ideological
assumptions of the judiciary – the sort of thing that might be aired on
Start the Week
without setting the switchboard alight. She asked Bill (as she called him, having graduated to
that intimacy from Uncle Bill) if he thought judges as a group had really taken on board the
recent upheavals in society, such as multiculturalism and the transformed position of women.
    This was never the sort of speculation that Dad
welcomed, but perhaps the champagne cocktails played a part in making him so grandly cold,
coldly grand. He told her