Kid Gloves Read Online Free Page B

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 lookingforward
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 smelledof 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