Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  If there was pathos in the dreams of wealth of a man who by most standards had done well for himself, it was part of a wider pattern of dissatisfaction in the family. Dad and his brother David didn’t exactly feel cheated by each other, but separately they felt that life had cheated them in terms of the distribution of its rewards. The tension between them never came to a rolling boil, hardly even a simmer, but that didn’t mean it was inactive. One cooking method described in Jane Grigson’s book on fish is to heat a whole salmon in a simple stock (the technical term is court-bouillon) until you see the first bubble, then turn off the flame. There is by then more than enough heat in the fish-kettle to penetrate every fibre, until the flesh is ready to fall off the bones. It was in this fashion that the brothers slowly poached in the court-bouillon of sibling rivalry.

  Dad, the older brother, struck out on his own. He went to university, served in the Navy during the War, moved to London and ended up with a title. David wasn’t academic and was expected to stay out of uniform, farming being a reserved occupation. There was no need for him to reinvent himself, and the lilt that Dad had scrubbed from his voice was alive in David’s.

  When their father died, the brothers inherited as many liabilities as assets. My grandfather hadn’t troubled the Inland Revenue with paperwork for many years, and the family firm (farming and distributing farm feeds) was in disarray.

  David’s instinct was to follow the farmer’s code (let the Revenue smoke us out if they can) while Dad’s decision was to come clean and arrange some sort of repayment plan. This was both morally sound and practical. Dad could claim to have saved the business, but not long afterwards he endangered it all over again. Dad had no real knowledge of farming-related business, but he brought down an expert from London with him to give the enterprise a sort of audit. Perhaps it was a way of exerting some older-brotherly authority.

  The firm was earning an annual profit of 5 per cent. The expert observed that it should be making 10. In fact 2 per cent was a respectable figure in that sector and that decade, the 1950s. Dad, though, was impressed by the expert’s verdict, and decided he should sell his share of what he was persuaded was a struggling business. His money would do better elsewhere.

  David had the choice of buying his brother out, which would dangerously stretch his resources, or to lose control of the company. There was another person with a stake in the business, Eddy Batty, originally a refugee from Liverpool, and between them David and Eddy kept the business afloat.

  Not only did the family firm keep its head above water, with one less family member on board, but it prospered remarkably. Soon David was a wealthy man. From then on there was a mild underlying resentment between the brothers, expressing itself in little jibes about status and money. If Dad mentioned going to a royal garden party, David might say, ‘Bill, your car’s looking a bit shabby. Should I buy you a new one?’

  His mismanaged exit from the family business formed no part of Dad’s story about himself, and he would certainly have had a version of his own. Presumably David felt that the older brother had been disloyal, risking family prosperity by selling his own stake. Dad had his own reservations about David’s success, suspecting that sharp practice had played a part in it.

  In particular he seethed when in the 1970s David bought some farms from their aunts Bessie and Minnie for much less than they were worth. According to Dad, Bessie and Minnie had told him, ‘David said it would save us trouble if we let his people do the valuation. Always so thoughtful!’ He almost choked on his ‘whisky sour’. The case of O’Sullivan and Another v. Management Agency and Music Ltd and Others was in the future, but his objections were as obvious as if they had been spelled out as a headnote from a reported legal judgment: Undue Influence – Fiduciary relationship – Sharp Practice within the family clearly constituting Constructive Fraud – Aunts were ‘sitting ducks’.

  Bessie and Minnie, by the time I knew them, lived in Colwyn Bay in no great style. They were cultivated, with their piano stool containing the inevitable ‘Rustle of Spring’ and an arrangement of Delius’s ‘Cuckoo’, but not dazzlingly sophisticated. They had never married and in late life didn’t seem anything but strait-laced, but had perhaps been a little friskier in their youth. They had owned the first Hispano-Suiza in North Wales, and took the car to Paris when they travelled there in the 1920s. They were worldly enough to know that as women of means they might be targeted on this expedition by venal and unscrupulous men, and came up with a novel method of keeping out of harm’s way. They spoke only Welsh during their visit, reasoning that it was safe to ignore the risk of there being a Welsh-speaking gigolo on the prowl in Paris.

  No doubt David was a shrewd businessman and at times even a sharp one, but Dad’s mistrust of his brother’s probity had a slightly mad side to it. He seemed to think that any cash transaction was suspicious in itself, including the gifts David made to his nephews at Christmas and other occasions – as if a farmer’s failure to use a chequebook for every piece of business was proof positive of dishonesty. Uncle David’s wallet fell open very easily, and he was always trying to ply us with cigarettes (John Player Specials, not just in packets of twenty but drums of fifty) and Castella cigars. Not being a smoker was regarded as a poor basis for refusal. Dad always considered David’s open-handedness suspicious, though it was a trait the brothers shared. We who benefited from that incontinent wallet didn’t see it as defective in any way.

  Whatever Dad did with the money from selling his share of the family business, it was unlikely to have prospered. He wasn’t good with money, and if this is a heritable characteristic, then he certainly passed it on to me. Money is a cat that will never curl up in my lap, however devotedly I make kissy sounds to attract it.

  I have no other technique. In my case, lack of financial sense is straightforward, almost one-dimensional. Dad’s was more complex, since he had delusions of flair. He thought that wealth was a dog that would come running if he blew the right whistle, and even if he couldn’t hear the summoning blast himself he was confident it would get an answer sooner or later, and then he’d be hard put to keep the muddy paws of riches off his suit. Judges are not poorly paid, but it’s a free country and anyone is allowed to flirt with debt.

  Dad reminisced mistily about the far-off days when judges were paid huge sums as a matter of public policy. The idea was to defend justice by making its administrators so wealthy that no-one could afford to bribe them.

  Dad would never have thought of himself as a gambler, and everyone agrees ‘speculator’ has a rather nicer sound. In fact he did gamble in a homely way, putting moderate sums on horses and feeding one-armed bandits in the hope of making them sick. It was only with the horses that he had any sort of form, racking up some decent wins and no significant losses. When we sons were below drinking age he would treat us, on an Anglesey Saturday, to a trip to the Plas Club, where there was a slot machine. He would stake us to a few sixpences, but though a jackpot would have transformed our finances rather more than his the gambling fever didn’t take with us. Dad was the one who always wanted one more pull, and his ears would strain as we were driving off to catch the crash of the jackpot that was rightfully his. A club was also the only place he could legally get a drink on a Sunday in a dry county, but I don’t think that was the strongest attraction.

  There was never an actual break-up with the Llansannan side of the family. David had provided some of the money to buy the Anglesey house in 1960, for instance. Naturally he was entitled to stay there himself, though as time went by Dad began to suspect him of offering use of the house (far from luxurious, but right on the beach) as a sweet
ener in some of the business relationships that seemed to him so deeply suspect.

  It didn’t help that David was a mason. Their father had been strongly opposed to freemasonry, and Dad saw his joining a lodge as an opportunistic move and a betrayal of family principle. David for his part thought that Dad didn’t know how business was done in the country. He wasn’t necessarily wrong about that, to judge by the expert-auditor-from-London fiasco. Perhaps David felt that a self-righteous insistence on going it alone had done their father harm. If the old boy had chosen to be on the square himself, then he could have come through his financial difficulties more smoothly. Freemasonry wasn’t a nest of devils but a harmless social network, no more sinister than the Garrick Club.

  Even now I don’t feel comfortable aligning membership of the Garrick with freemasonry, even though it’s perfectly obvious that Dad felt at least as much for the poached-salmon-and-avocado stripes of the club tie as any mason feels for the apron and compasses, or the mystic pressure that blossoms inside a routine handshake.

  There were little rituals remaining between the brothers and their families. A turkey or goose raised on one of David’s farms would be put on the train from Denbigh as a Red Star parcel, to arrive at Euston in time for Christmas or Easter. Then one year the parcel turned out to be a bit whiffy, and after that the custom lapsed, having lost its justification (immaculate bird) and its ability to regulate family tension.

  The first-born seems to have all the advantages, but it doesn’t need to be so. There was a Jenny Mars some generations back in the family tree, and David had been given ‘Mars’ as his middle name. In his case it was natural and organic rather than something surgically implanted by deed poll, even if it wasn’t technically part of his surname. There was no reason why David shouldn’t add it in hyphenated form to the name of the family firm. It certainly lent a bit of class and memorability to the side of a lorry.

  Still, when in the 1980s David’s daughter Jenny was getting married, the printed invitations included the hyphen for the whole Llansannan branch of the family. Dad wouldn’t have minded that, except that the invitation sent to the London branch omitted ours. This gave the impression of a calculated snub, since family names are so deeply rooted in the brain, not subject to the ordinary erosions. But why would David want to snub him, at the same time as asking him to make a speech at the reception? Sheila advised him to hold his horses and say nothing. With an effort, he did.

  His speech at the reception, held at the Hotel Seventy Degrees, Colwyn Bay, went down well. Of course public speaking is what barristers and judges do for a living, and it’s no more surprising that they should perform satisfactorily in social space than it is for the schoolchild’s dad who happens to be a professional cricketer to make a creditable showing at the Fathers’ Day match. Dad’s approach to the art of the after-dinner speech was an odd combination of the slapdash and the scrupulous. He would often not know what he was going to say when the meal began, and would make notes on the menu as it progressed, but after the event he would make a record of what jokes he had told on what occasion, so as to avoid repeating himself if he was asked back after a great success.

  I studied his method of preparation for Jenny’s wedding. Five minutes riffling through the entries on Love and Marriage in his dictionary of quotations became a robust quarter-hour of jovial showmanship. Any hyphen-based tension between the brothers melted away in the glow of his performance.

  It wasn’t long before David’s second daughter, Eleri, got married in her turn. Again Dad was asked to speak, and again the invitation suppressed our rightful hyphen and paraded the impostor. This time there would be no holding of horses, and Dad would not be reined in. I remember Sheila hovering in the background while he made the phone call to his brother, willing him to a moderate statement of grievance. He didn’t do badly, saying he would be happy to speak at Eleri’s wedding reception, but only if a new invitation was issued with his name correctly spelled. David tried some conciliation of an inflammatory sort by saying, ‘It’s a very small thing to get so worked up about, Bill,’ and Dad said, ‘Then you will oblige me in this small matter.’

  A hyphen is indeed a small thing, but if David had really thought so his usage would have been less consistent. He was certainly making a point of some sort. Hyphens weren’t rationed. There was no originary hyphen, primal platinum ingot of nominal linkage, kept in a vault somewhere (like the ur-kilogram), protected by the sort of double-key protocol devised for keeping nuclear weapons in safe hands.

  The hyphen is the Janus mark, precisely that sign which both joins and separates. Undergraduates of my generation learned to produce emptily suggestive sentences like that by reflex, as we moved into French weather in terms of literary theory and criticism. Such formulas are more fertile in the realm of psychology, where this way of thinking started and where perhaps it should have stayed. Families are divided by the things they have in common. That one might actually be true.

  The tug-of-war over the hyphen symbolized an enduring tension. Dad wanted cash and David craved honours. Early on in my first year at Cambridge I met someone at a party who recognized my name and asked if I had any odd relatives in North Wales. I couldn’t categorically deny it, though I had never thought of David and family as odd. It turned out that this fellow student had been holidaying with his family in Colwyn Bay and taking a stroll through the town when they were approached by a jovial man who offered to show them round. This was David during his term as mayor of Colwyn Bay, volunteering his services as tour guide. He offered to change into his robes and regalia, complete with chain of office, if they were wanting to take photographs. He kept them in the back of the car, the municipal equivalent of a superhero costume, so they were ready to hand when duty called.

  Dad had all the advantages in terms of ceremonial, with galas of pageantry like the State Opening of Parliament handed him on a plate. David had to improvise, and to take his photo opportunities where he could find them.

  Neither brother had a healthy style of life, though David reached his physical limits first. He had heart troubles in his early seventies. While he was convalescing after an operation, his wife, Dilys, or the children if they had charge of him, would leave him in the car while they ran errands, with strict instructions not to move. When they returned to the car, he had usually disappeared, but all they had to do was find the nearest pub and then pluck the glass from one hand, ease the cigarillo from between the fingers of the other.

  He died in 1992. Naturally we attended the funeral, and I think we were all concerned about how Dad would take the death of his only close relative, not just brother but younger brother. We travelled by train. Dad’s mobility was already poor. I remember we had to change trains at Chester, and that Dad made use of the lift when we transferred between platforms.

  At the reception after the funeral, he gravitated towards the room where small children were watching videos. There he became entirely absorbed by the adventures of Pingu, a penguin animated by stop-motion whose tribe all spoke a delightful Scandinavian-inflected gibberish. Dad became convinced this was Welsh, and that he understood every word. Often he made such statements half-seriously, then defended them in a spirit of fun, but play-acting seemed unlikely on such an occasion, and his move away from adult company was slightly worrying in itself.

  We ate in the restaurant car on the train back to London. As he took the first sip of his drink, Dad said, ‘This is the first time I’ve enjoyed myself all day.’ As if the whole idea of a family funeral was to put a spring in your step. There were times when his positivity seemed another name for disconnection.

  The
standard Welsh attitude to death is the subject of a joke I have heard told by Rob Brydon, though I expect versions of it go back to the era of the Mabinogion.

  Rhys Pugh is dying. Dying. His little old head lies sunken in the pillow, as if it had been dropped there from a height. Won’t eat, won’t drink, barely remembers to breathe. Day after day his wife, Bronwen, holds his scrawny hand, brushes his scanty hair. Day by day he sinks. Then one day he says, in his little cracked voice, ‘Bron-wen?’

  ‘Yes, Rhys?’

  ‘I feel a bit better today. I could eat a bit of sal-mon.’

  Well, Bronwen is made up. Delighted. She scampers to the kitchen and gets busy with the pots and pans that have seen so little use of late. Minutes later she brings a bowl, faintly steaming, to Rhys Pugh’s bedside. She raises him from the pillow of his sickness, cradles him tenderly in the crook of her arm. She lowers a spoonful into his mouth. He mumbles it for a few seconds, raking it back and forward with the stiff blade of his saurian tongue. Then a look of bewilderment and distress settles on his superannuated peasant features. ‘Bron-wen?’ he asks with a tremble in his voice.

  ‘Yes, Rhys?’

  ‘Bron-wen, I asked for sal-mon. This is not sal-mon. This is tu-na.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, my love,’ says Bronwen, ‘I was saving the sal-mon for the funeral.’

  That’s one account of the national character, by which the Welsh are perfectly at home with death. It’s life that makes them uncomfortable.

  Dad wasn’t like that. His way of being Welsh was very different. If there’s a spectrum of Celtic moods then he tended towards its volatile end. Though he saw himself as rock-solid in the consistency of his principles, you could never quite tell how he would react to anything. The mixture of gravitas and unpredictability made him a remarkable courtroom animal, but it was less of a winning formula in the domestic settings of kitchen or sitting-room.