The Error World Read Online Free PDF Page A

crisis. One of his clients had objected to the way he had handled his case. He may have considered some of my father's advice unwise, or he may have just objected to his fees, but he decided to take the case to the Law Society, and my father faced an extended period of agony under the shadow of suspicion before matters were resolved. He may have taken an enforced holiday during the investigation; I certainly remember the aura of ruin over us, although I'm sure this was exaggerated. The early 1970s was still a time when professional shame could be as final as death; it wasn't something easily finessed away by publicists, or something you could 'use' as celebrities do today. As far as I knew, and I have had many confirmations since, his reputation was immaculate. He was a gentleman in all his dealings, never underhand, always scrupulous. The case eventually went away—either dropped or won by my father—and normal life resumed. But the saga almost certainly affected his heart.
    Almost all the memories I have of my father are loving. The only painful one is being hit on by backside with a slipper when I misbehaved. In his eyes I misbehaved often—I think I was always too loud for him, too keen to kick balls inside the house—but I don't think I was beaten more than five times. He really did say 'this hurts me more than it hurts you', but that was just his guilt speaking. My mother hated it when he whacked me, and I think she asked him not to, but it was clearly how he had been brought up, and he thought it had worked well enough for him. What really worked for me was avoiding being hit again by concealing things. Once, when I had broken a small garage window one morning during the school holidays, my mother colluded.
    'What can we do?' I asked, fighting back tears.
    'You could run away!' she said. But instead she called a glazier, paid him in cash, and the putty was still hardening when my dad drove past it to the end of the garage that evening.
    I remember his fondness for cigars, especially during long sessions on the lavatory on Sundays with the papers. I can see myself reading my homework to him in his study on Sunday evenings. I remember him being vaguely disappointed with some of my school reports, and occasionally saying, 'Is this what I spend all that money on?' But he was also very kind and loving. Because I was born when he was forty-one, we didn't have many of the traditional bonding mechanisms. He didn't like music apart from classical ('Really, is that a boy or a girl?'). He didn't like sports apart from golf. We didn't play football in our garden or on Hampstead Heath extension. He did take me to my first Chelsea game, and I recall a midweek evening encounter with Spurs, walking up the steps of the old West Stand at Stamford Bridge to the lush turf and that great/foul smell of cigarettes and burgers and damp coats, and sensing that he was nervous. It wasn't the fear of violence, which was a particular feature of Chelsea games in the early 1970s, it was more of a class thing. I'm not sure my father had been called 'mate' since he left the army. Football was not yet a middle-class pursuit, even in the seated section; this was no place for a Jewish professional from Hamburg, not with the Nuremberg-style arm movements and all that talk of Yids.
    To make up for these shortcomings, he had a habit of taking my brother Jonathan and me on holiday in August by ourselves. One year it was him, the next it was me. The only one that sticks is a very wet week in Bournemouth. It rained incessantly for seven days, and we ran between taxis and cinemas and the pier and our hotel, and once I found an antique shop which sold old stamp magazines. I spent hours studying obsolete prices and rare items. I had bought my Gay Venture album, and spent afternoons putting things in. 'Yes, a Gay Venture indeed to every enthusiast,' the frontispiece proclaimed. 'For there is no more enthralling and exciting hobby than stamp