Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  This was something I had to try to anticipate when I realized, in the late 1970s, that I would have to inform Dad that I belonged to the category he hated and feared. Yes, the moment of coming out, cardinal rite of passage in gay life, though of course the term ‘rite of passage’ can cover anything from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fe.

  I had already told Sheila (before I called her anything but Mum), not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when looking back at the past, though pink cataracts might be the more accurate expression, since spectacles can be taken off. Researchers have found ways of correlating people’s wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned to walk or talk (as recorded by healthcare authorities) against parental boasts of precociousness, or establishing the true amount given to charity over a given period as opposed to the inflated claims. So if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her road accident of a few years before, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid that I did. As the years went by she must have been surprised to realize that my life contained both fun and meaning, intimacy and a moderate level of self-respect, but then so was I.

  It was strangely hard, talking to Sheila, to take the robustly defiant party line in the face of a reaction that contained no criticism. An instant response of sorrowing sympathy gave me emotional cues that I wasn’t able to overrule.

  Between us, though, we laid to rest the rather tepid fantasy of my heterosexual future, in which I would be an academic living in a big house outside Cambridge with a grand piano and a family. In this wishful prospect the piano seemed more solid than the shadowy children and a wife who was hardly even a shadow. The whole fantasy depended on the proposition that an academic was a sort of vibrant neuter, and professor the apotheosis of eunuch. The family idea derived from my fondness for children, which was real but didn’t ne-cessarily indicate a baby-making fire in my loins. I was on easier terms with people significantly older or younger than me. Until I had learned how to have a sex life, so as to be able to approach men with the possibility of desire and women without the possibility of misunderstanding, it was people more or less my own age who presented the problems.

  Finally Mum asked the question mothers nerve themselves to ask: Would this life make me happy? I said that it would, but I couldn’t avoid a vocal wobble and an implication of martyrdom.

  The role of martyr was one that I adopted early and relinquished late. I can blame the family dynamic for that, if I put in enough work. Tim was only twenty months old when I was born, and as I grew steadily more eager to grasp he didn’t automatically become more eager to loosen his grip on what he held. Sharing anything was an artificial and imposed piece of behaviour. It wasn’t likely to survive the withdrawal of parental oversight. Sensibly Tim would snatch the disputed object back. In these circumstances, lacking the physical resources to grab and keep what I wanted, I learned to pretend not to want it, to play the role of the sort of self-sacrificing person who gives things up willingly, in the interests of a larger harmony. It was true that I still didn’t get what I wanted but I had the great joy of knowing that Mama (her earliest name) was pleased with me for being such a good boy.

  None of this creaking character armour would be in play, luckily, when I confronted Dad with what he least wanted to hear.

  It was a big scene in the making, and that was just what I didn’t want made. Dad’s thespian side was strongly developed, mine nipped in the bud for that very reason. To some extent over the years I had observed Dad’s behaviour and learned to modify its excesses. It was sometimes possible to resist the theatricalization that was Dad’s normal response to crisis, to de-dramatize conflict. For instance, if he ordered the three of us out of the house during Christmas lunch after some blow-up at table, a certain amount of de-escalation could be managed as long as we stayed put.

  The inventive act was not to push back your chair and throw down your napkin but to peel a tangerine or to reach for the nutcracker, to wait a while and then ask Dad why he was so fond of Kentish cobnuts when they were so fiddly, so hard to get out of their shells.

  Breaking off the conversation marooned us in our roles. Refusing the script as he wrote it would guarantee at the least a new configuration of conflict, and might lead to novelties all round.

  What I needed to do, on the brink of my rite of passage, was to shape the event so as to bring something small and truthful out of Dad, taking him away from reflexes and set attitudes. I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called upon to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name) in some warhorse of the repertory.

  The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of my being able to damp down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect, too. Dad wouldn’t have to consider putting on a show of consistency with his previously expressed attitudes, for the benefit of anyone else.

  I would need Dad to myself for several days, which by this stage in the evolution of family life wasn’t a natural state of affairs. The tail end of the Christmas holiday in Anglesey offered the obvious opportunity. It wasn’t difficult to persuade my brothers to be reunited with their girlfriends rather than remain fused to the family group. My mother agreed to head back to London early. I don’t remember what pretext we gave for this piece of behaviour, which could legitimately have struck Dad as odd if he had been in a mood to suspect any sort of ambush. Accomplished lying isn’t much of a family characteristic, though it’s hard to be quite sure, since it’s the other sort that gets found out.

  I strongly suggested to Mum (she wasn’t ‘Sheila’ then) that she didn’t answer the phone on New Year’s Eve. This was a sensible precaution, since I was trying to release Dad’s rage and sorrow in a controlled explosion, far away from other people. I wanted to minimize the possibility of collateral damage.

  Dad’s reflex and survival instinct was not to absorb unwelcome information and emotional disturbance but to re-export it immediately in a new direction. He would start a fight externally in preference to experiencing his own conflicts. How glib that sounds! And psychobabble had barely been invented in those days. But I knew that left to himself, he would pick up the phone, ventilate some anger in Mum’s direction (you let them walk all over you, and this is what happens!) and then feel much better, leaving her struggling to recover the shreds of her poise.

  There was already an interpretation of family history in place, available to Dad in times of crisis, according to which he had stuck to principle and refused to ‘buy his sons’ love’, while she had capitulated at every stage and never made a stand against permissiveness. This wasn’t always the way he saw things, but it was the version of events that emerged under stress.

  Even at the time I understood that this cover story was a result of pained disappointment not just in his sons but in himself. Not only were we turning out very different from the go-getting brood he had so confidently anticipated, but he had somehow managed to reproduce the atmosphere of his own young manhood, with a father-figure reluctantly obeyed but not much liked. He had wanted to be our friend, and to break the pattern, but had no idea how to realize this new approach to family. Much easier to blame Mum for her tenderness than acknowledge that his own, proudly disguised, had been ignored.

  Mum in her moods of frustration sometimes said she felt like ‘kicking hell out of a dwarf’,
not in reality revealing an impulse towards discriminatory abuse but conveying that she felt like the final recipient of a long line of tensions passed on in distorted form, and wished she could discharge them in her turn to someone with even less status. When she wasn’t able to be Dad’s comforter and strong support she was likely to be cast in the more oppressive role of scapegoat-in-waiting.

  This pattern was available, hallowed by use, and it wasn’t likely that Dad, under great emotional pressure, would fail to blame her in the case of a warping for which mothers are traditionally held responsible. When sons turn out not to be the marrying kind, fathers can play cherchez la femme with a vengeance.

  So I recommended to Mum that she phone relatively early in the evening to exchange New Year messages, and not answer the phone after, say, ten o’clock. This was a married couple who spoke on the phone every day when separated, though they had no special ritual for the end of the year. They hadn’t needed one – I imagine this was the first New Year’s Eve they had spent apart since 1947. There’s a risk of overplaying the psychodrama here, and portraying myself as the son who seeks to divide his parents so as to have his mother all to himself (as in accounts of ‘The Psychology of The Homosexual’, orthodox though very passé), but I admit that I didn’t hesitate to impede a ritual communication that was likely to turn nasty under the special circumstances prevailing.

  New Year’s Eve is a good time for a family confrontation since there’s never anything worth watching on television, and if you’re very lucky alcoholic bonhomie will carry the day.

  The deadline was midnight. I wanted 1977 to be the last year I saw a hypocrite’s face in the mirror, and there were only minutes left of it. I ushered in the new era of frankness by turning off the television and topping up Dad’s wine glass. The era of the ‘whisky sour’ was over – he had been told when diagnosed with his stomach ulcer that he must give up spirits. Then at last it was time for ‘Dad … There’s something I need to tell you.’

  That’s the formula for this ceremonial event, though perhaps I should give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that I introduced some slight variation – ‘There’s something you need to know’, or something of the sort. There’s not a lot of room available for improvisation. The coming-out speech is a relatively unvarying form because the event has only two parts, a clearing of the throat to demand attention (hear ye! hear ye!) and then a simple phrase that can’t be taken back (I’m gay). After that, as it seems to the person making the declaration, the fixed points disappear. All clocks return to zero hour and the speakers have new voices issued to them, voices that stray so far from any previous conversation that they might as well be talking in tongues. They might say anything at all.

  The details of that evening are a blur, not just because it was a long time ago but because it was a blur at the time. I was in shock. Dad was in shock, of course, but I was in shock too, from having administered one and also from the fact of having kept my nerve. Samson had pulled down the temple and the masonry had bounced off him as if it was no more than blocks of expanded polystyrene. Patriarchal authority, as it turned out, was balsawood under the mahogany veneer. It wouldn’t crush me just yet.

  That first night Dad was stricken but not rejecting. When we finally went to bed he said everything would be all right. There was no hug but then he wasn’t a hugger. There was no sense of a hug withheld. His wish of ‘Happy New Year’, returning mine, was subdued but seemed sincere, bearing no trace of satirical aggression, no suggestion that I’d already blighted the twelvemonth to come.

  Dad didn’t much go in for New Year’s resolutions, left to himself. If pressed on such occasions, he would say his resolution was to drink more champagne. Franker exchanges with his sons were not something he wished for as such.

  I was buffeted by strong currents of vertigo and anticlimax. Tim had described the confrontation in the making as me ‘holding a sex pistol to Dad’s head’ (punk rock had detonated only recently) but I had pulled the trigger and so far there were no casualties. I had made an existential leap, but maybe it was a leap into the void à la Gloucester in King Lear, and over a cliff-edge that existed only in my head. When at last I could pull air back into my flattened lungs, I was all too obviously the same person as I had been before. Less was changed than fear had promised.

  Everything would be all right. During the night Dad had second thoughts about this. Under the first impact of the news his concern had been to reassure me, but overnight he had looked at things from other points of view and revised his conclusions.

  He brought me tea, an indication in itself that he had slept badly, or at least woken early. He had his pipe between his teeth, an ex-smoker’s stratagem to ward off oral craving. According to Mum he ground his teeth in his sleep, and if he was going to be grinding them during the day it made sense to erode a replaceable object rather than the fretting mechanism itself. In the same way it’s sensible to introduce a pencil between the jaws of an epileptic in spasm. It may be that at this point Dad was torn between the dangers of speaking his mind and the pain of biting his tongue. Overnight he had come up with a number of arguments to prove me wrong. He would argue every step of the way, he would (as lawyers say) ‘put it to me’ that I was mistaken about what I thought I was and wanted.

  In normal life Dad didn’t do self-catering. He would indicate his needs by saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea, if you’re making one,’ which sometimes made me seethe with its omission of the word ‘please’ – why had I been encouraged to take manners so seriously as a child when it turned out they were optional? Now he was playing an unaccustomed role by bringing me tea, though he sent a signal, by leaving the bag in the mug, that there were limits to mollycoddling.

  As a general thing, the mollycoddling went the other way. Some household tasks would be evenly divided, true. He would attend to the kitchen range and I would clean out the grate and lay a new fire in the sitting-room. But if food was going to pass Dad’s lips it would be me preparing it. At some stage I hoped that Dad would see the irony of warning me against unmasculine behaviour while expecting me to cook and serve his meals. He liked to be waited on, even in small matters like the clicking of tiny saccharine pellets from a dispenser into his tea.

  He could muster a reasonable family meal out of tins in an emergency. The menu would start with Baxter’s Royal Game soup, a splendid brown concoction, and move on to a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, actually baked in the shallow circular tin with its appealing, steeply sloped sides, a regular solid easy to describe: a truncated cone, with the missing apex pointing downward. Concentric grooves pressed in the lid left marks on the pale wet surface of the pastry-to-be. Dad’s only creative touch was to anoint the surface with milk, before putting it in the oven, to enhance the crust. Frozen peas to round off the main course, tinned fruit to follow.

  When Mum was put out of action by an accident in 1973, Dad bought a Penguin book by Desmond Briggs called Entertaining Single-Handed and briefly raised his game in the kitchen. One simple but spectacular pud was Briggs’s Hot Jamaican Fruit Salad, made with tinned fruit (pears a particular success) and fresh banana further sweetened with brown sugar, then splashed with rum. How did people’s teeth not explode at the impact of so much sugar? Perhaps they did, and dentists rubbed their hands in glee. Briggs suggested putting the dish in a hot oven when you served the main course, so that the potent Caribbean fumes gradually seduced your guests’ senses.

  Since that time, Dad had reverted to type. He had relapsed into the proper helplessness. Desmond Briggs gathered dust on the shelf, and his knowledge of kitchen geography reverted to a masculine blank.
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  In any case kitchen tasks performed during our sexuality summit would drain energy required for the preparation of his case. This was a judge after all, and the case was only closed when he said so. Our few days together turned into a courtroom drama rather than a soap opera, a long cross-examination broken by domestic routines. An actual day in court would be interrupted by lunch, possibly by a conference in chambers. This more free-wheeling inquisition was interrupted by me making Dad coffee or an omelette, maybe pork chops with gravy and carrots.

  To an extent he treated me as a hostile witness whose testimony he was determined to discredit, which didn’t necessarily make him aggressive since undisguised aggression is a very limited courtroom tactic. His manner was sometimes almost seductive, and he knew the effectiveness of seeming to agree with the opposing arguments from time to time. But there was also a sense that I was his client, someone to be got off the hook however strong the evidence against him, however stubbornly he incriminated himself. He had campaigned hard over an unsatisfactory grade at Ancient History A-level – he would do a lot more to get my failing papers in heterosexuality sent back for re-marking.

  I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to soften the blow. It would have been fatal to say for instance ‘I think I might be gay’, a formula which with its hint of doubt would turn anyone into a lawyer quibbling about exactly what was meant. Dad was in no hurry to accept my verdict on myself, even without equivocation on my part.

  One of the first things he said on that New Year’s Day was that my situation was anything but unusual, and I should be initiated into the joys of natural love by an older woman, or by older women plural. This was the first indication he had given that the sexual code he preached, with its embargo on exploration of any sort, admitted any flexibility. He assured me, though, that the older-woman procedure had done the trick for Prince Charles, though several courses of treatment had been needed to make sure the cure was fully rooted.