Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Not now! There’ll be plenty of time for questions later. Can’t you see I’m getting up a good old head of steam?

  There seems to have been something in the nature of the Mars-Jones family that preferred to go the long way round, avoiding the obvious communicative route in favour of letting information filter through indirectly. Might this be characteristic of British families in general? Anglo-Welsh families? Families with three sons in them? Do strings of rhetorical questions advertise a wish to change the subject?

  There was also the possibility that Mum had told him that he couldn’t get out of saying something to me, so that in a moment of assertiveness she was more or less frogmarching him all the way to the receiver. There is always the possibility of this sort of ramification: that it was for her benefit that he was going to say something for my benefit.

  When Dad came on the line I braced myself for evasiveness. I hardly dared think what status he was going to accord Michael’s death, how he would square the circle, in terms of offering condolence without granting approval.

  ‘I just wanted to say,’ he said, ‘that I was sorry to hear about Michael. You’ve been a good friend to him – as you’ve been to so many others …’

  This was worse than anything I could have expected. I could have Dad’s sympathy as long as my lover’s death was reclassified as a negative outcome of social work. Did I go on holiday to Skye with Mario Dubsky? Had I bought a flat to live in with Philip Lloyd-Bostock? It was hard to see that I was being supported, when the underlying message was that I mustn’t expect him to look squarely at me and my life. I could have a pat on the back as long as I let him keep his blinkers on.

  Part of me would have enjoyed getting angry, telling him that this was not just meaningless but cruel. I didn’t have the strength. I couldn’t afford any expenditure of rage at a time when my whole emotional economy was taking a battering.

  I found I couldn’t let it pass either. I spoke, and I contested Dad’s version, but I went the long way round. Doggedly I listed everything that Michael’s family had done to include me, when it must have seemed to them in their agony that I was essentially an outsider, not much more than a passer-by. I was mentioned, for instance, in the death notice they put in the Auckland newspapers. Dad didn’t respond.

  Needling the righteous isn’t a noble sport. Dad made no special claim to virtue, though he took it for granted that God was on his side, and outreach wasn’t really his thing. The only impressive pattern of behaviour he ever referred to in his own rather daunting father was the principled hiring, on the farm and in the post office, of those who had once betrayed trust. Dad’s father (my ‘Taid’) understood that there must be a mechanism running counter to disgrace, or else the traffic is all one way, but Dad was comfortable with a fixed boundary between the clean and the unclean. As a judge, in fact, he tended to process the clean across the border into uncleanness. If there was a return journey possible – rehabilitation or redemption – he didn’t play a part in the process.

  One of the festivals of Gray’s Inn is the Mulligan Sermon, delivered by a visiting preacher on the same text each year. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ That’s the text. There is a festive lunch afterwards.

  It pleases me to think that the originating Mulligan was laying a moderately obvious trap for the good people of Gray’s Inn, in their parish of plenty, when he provided funds by the terms of his will for the preaching of this particular sermon. How long would it take the listeners in their pews, the lunchers in Hall, to realize that he was mocking them for their empty assent to the idea of reaching out to alleviate distress?

  Communion in Gray’s Inn Chapel was always a hierarchical event. Benchers and their wives approached to receive the elements in strict order of seniority. Of course there were polite yieldings of precedence, nods and smiles. Nevertheless communicants knelt at the altar rail with their sense of worldly positioning sharpened rather than laid to rest.

  James Mulligan, who was the Treasurer of Gray’s Inn in 1896 and provided the endowment for ‘The Mulligan Sermon’, directed that the sermon should concentrate on ‘the interview between Our Lord and the Lawyer, as recorded in the twenty-second chapter of the First Gospel, and at greater length in the tenth chapter of the Third Gospel’. Luke 10:25 does indeed describe ‘a certain lawyer’ standing up and tempting Jesus with trick questions. No lawyer is mentioned in Matthew 22, but the chapter swarms with Pharisees and Sadducees, and perhaps the Sermon really was meant to puncture the institutional smugness it seems to promote.

  There was nothing I could do immediately to repay Michael’s family for the way they included me, but a while later I wrote a character sketch of him for the Independent’s ‘My Hero’ column, and sent a bale of copies of the magazine out to New Zealand. By the standards of public life Michael, dying at twenty-six after years of illness, could lay no claim on an obituary, but I made the most of the opportunity I had to write something loving and to have it printed.

  In a small way Michael’s death made a difference to my dealings with my mother. From then on Shee became my regular form of address for her. She seemed to like it, and I didn’t mention the low Channel 4 provenance of the abbreviation. Calling your parents by their first names is a stilted little intimacy, most obviously so when it is a new practice, before it beds down as a reflex, self-consciously undertaken to make clear that you are no longer bound by the contracts of childhood (and who wants to be a pensioner calling a centenarian ‘Mum’?). Calling Sheila ‘Shee’ was a way of keeping alive Michael’s warm teasing, and so of keeping him dimly alive too. One evening, eating out at Joe Allen’s off the Strand, I recognized Sue Johnston, the actress who had played Sheila Grant, and offered her a glass of champagne in recognition of the walk-on part she had played in my halting emotional development.

  Dad wouldn’t have enjoyed being ‘Bill’ to his sons, nor was it a style of address that appealed to me. Now that I think about it, I might have enjoyed calling him ‘Lloyd’, the name harking back to remote Denbighshire and a pre-hyphenated innocent, teenager with ukelele.

  The conversation about how good I had been to Michael was certainly the low point of our relationship. After that, Dad slowly lost his horror of my sexual identity, though he never got as far as acknowledging a partner of mine. Long before a genuine mild dementia made him forgetful of the lovely Nimat, though she came every day to help him shower, he had perfected a frown of absent puzzlement (who could this be?) to use when not-quite-greeting Keith.

  The slow relaxing process may partly have been due to the collapse of two of his arguments. I didn’t seem to be especially held back in terms of career by my sexual preference, though that had only ever been a high-sounding justification for existing prejudice. As for his sorrow on my behalf at my exclusion from the joys of family life, that argument was torpedoed, sent to Davy Jones’s locker without much of a splash, by the arrival of Holly in 1991. My parents saw more of Holly than their other grandchildren, who lived further away. Gray’s Inn Walks were as well suited for children’s play as they had been a generation earlier, even if children were much less a feature of the Inn’s life than they had been, with assured shorthold tenancies being the only option for incomers.

  As an Inn child I had resented the ban on dogs in the Walks. Lobbying strongly for a pet, I had overcome the first objection (noise) by finding in my Observer Book of Dogs a breed that didn’t bark but emitted a sort of yodel (the basenji). The basenji came with the bonus of a looped-over tail like a pig’s, only hairy. Then I was brought up short by the impossibility of exercising the proposed animal, which was bred in the Central African bush for the
hunt, and possibly not well suited to WC1 anyway, yodelling madly down Chancery Lane in search of eland. As an adult supervising childish play I was grateful for wide stretches of lawn free of fouling, banks that could be rolled down without fear of any contamination worse than grass stains.

  It was certainly true that Dad wanted the joys of family life for me, but he also wanted for himself the possibility of a conventional family portrait on the mantlepiece. Our new family grouping looked more standard than it was, and I could hardly blame Dad for setting store by its air of normality. Now he could talk about me in terms that didn’t contest any other information that might be circulating. He could paint a picture that was just as true, however incompatible it seemed with the official version.

  Useless to pretend that I didn’t notice, and occasionally exploit, my new status as a man with a baby. I had served some sort of apprenticeship while looking after my nephew, Ebn, when he was little, and had noticed how obliging everyone became at a normally unwelcoming West End gay bar called Brief Encounter when I turned up with a small beaming child strapped to my chest, lamenting that I wasn’t allowed to take him inside, and wondering if anyone would be so kind as to bring me out a Guinness. Child care was certainly good for you, if you were an unspectacular gay man on the street carrying a cheerful baby.

  So when Holly was about a year old, and I was queuing to pay at the Brixton Marks & Spencer’s, I wasn’t too shocked to find myself being attentively considered by a man standing by the racks of socks. It seemed unlikely he was having trouble making up his mind between competing products – it’s a dressy man who dithers over socks, and this man was not dressy. It was always possible that he was impersonally pleased to witness solo fathering (still then something of a novelty), seeing it as socially progressive, but that was a risk I was willing to take. I approached him and said, ‘I’m Adam and this is Holly, and we would like your telephone number.’ Written down, this seems as manipulative as any Disney film ever made, but perhaps casting and chemistry improved on the script.

  I had also given out my own number. When the man phoned after a day or two, I was much less sure of myself. Sheila had once remarked that she thought she understood the basics of how my world worked, but she didn’t know how I had the nerve to make the first move, something she had never been able to do. It’s true that the first move hasn’t usually been a problem for me. It’s the second move that gives the real trouble. Still, Keith had begun his leisurely transformation from shopper who can’t decide about socks into leading man.

  The balance between father and son at this point seemed approximately equal enough to be durable. I was the misguided pervert who had nevertheless been polite enough to reproduce. He was the hectoring brute who had kept his home open to me. As Holly grew, though, Dad seemed to notice that our arrangement, however visually soothing, diverged from the standard pattern. ‘How’s the little family?’ he would always ask, and started to see it as a brave experiment in some way.

  This was welcome but unduly flattering, at least as it applied to me. Brave for Holly’s mother, Lisa, to trust an arrangement that though not necessarily ramshackle, and as full of good intentions as any other, lacked any formal or informal guarantees. Not so brave for a man to sign up to fatherhood on something like a freelance basis, with an enviable freedom to pick and choose. Not sharing a roof with my daughter, I experienced a minimum of disturbed nights.

  Dad’s change of heart, so long delayed, went further. Seeing me with Holly, he said he regretted his own failure to touch his children when they were small, blaming it on a foolish fear of homosexuality, the terror of breeding sissies. It was unheard of for him to own up to a fault no-one had even accused him of. It seemed entirely genuine, but somehow genuine in the wrong way and thereby deeply fishy. I thought about it a moment and told him that he had touched us often but in his own style, which was horseplay rather than tenderness as such.

  He would hold our hands when we were small, facing us, and encourage us to walk up his legs, then he would flip us over and return us fizzing to the ground. He didn’t do hugs but he did aeroplanes. Mum didn’t do aeroplanes.

  I wonder where it had come from, Dad’s little moment of artificial apology? By this stage he didn’t stray much from the flat, otherwise I might suspect him of dropping in to a men’s support group, though I don’t know where he would have found such a thing. Holborn Central Library, perhaps? Or at the Mary Ward Centre in Queen Square? Over towards Bloomsbury any cultic practice might find a home. Or perhaps he had been watching some tearful family drama on the box, one long orgy of confrontations and breakthroughs, and I should be blaming television.

  I was more at home with the Dad who only gave ground when he knew he was about to lose, who tracked the shift of an argument on a pre-verbal, almost olfactory level. Every now and then Dad would sniff the wind and realize he was about to be defeated in argument, and then he immediately stood down his troops. In the aftermath you could have a relatively low-key conversation.

  In family conflict these moments felt like breakthroughs, but it was never possible to tap back into that mood of truce without going through a fresh round of exhausting confrontations. I remember that in about 1980 Dad gave me a hard time about the ridiculous baggy jeans I was wearing. What a stupid waste of cloth! I had nothing to fall back on but appeals to their fashionability, a poor line of defence since it reproduced his line of attack (you’re only wearing them because you’ve been brainwashed).

  Those baggy jeans had always been controversial items. When I was wearing them on East Main Street in Charlottesville, Virginia, an elderly black stranger did a double-take and then shouted after me, ‘You’re wearing girl pants!’, divining a transgressive element in my style statement of which I was unaware. His tone was pure astonishment rather than hostility.

  Dad, then, was not my first critic. Luckily I remembered seeing a photograph of him as a young man walking jauntily along the front at Colwyn Bay with his aunts Bessie and Minnie, and wearing a pair of trousers so wide they could have given shelter to a pack of hunting dogs under their hems. He wore them with a tight jacket and a tie tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. With a little delving in his study I unearthed this incriminating image.

  Now I couldn’t wait for him to slander my jeans again, and to produce the evidence of double standards. But there must have been a change in my body chemistry, a pheromone that made him realize I had somehow acquired a trump card. He wouldn’t be drawn into repeating his indictment of my dress sense. I could have worn those baggy jeans to a funeral and still he would have said nothing, somehow knowing that I had the goods on him. Suddenly he was unprovokable, and when I lost patience and drew the photo out of its envelope at last it wasn’t any sort of ambush but a meeting of old friends. He reminisced fondly about the thirty-six-inch bottoms of those Oxford bags, and after that my baggy jeans were exempted from stricture. Of course they continued to look ridiculous, but that had never been the linch-pin of the argument.

  When I had been expelled from the Inn, and more to the point after I had written my article for The Times denouncing the hypocrisy of the governing body, I had guaranteed my status as persona non grata, high on the list of the Inn’s Least Wanted. I might visit family friends still living there, but it would have been silly to expect an actual welcome. Nevertheless an invitation came from the Treasurer, the next year, to dine as his guest in Hall. The new Treasurer was Tony Butcher, who as the Dean of the Chapel had been one of the three polite Cerberoid heads guarding the organ from molestation by unauthorized fingers and feet. He was also someone whom I had invited to breakfast once or twice
after the early communion I didn’t attend.

  Breakfast was being repaid, with interest, in the form of dinner, and this was a personal rather than an institutional gesture. It wasn’t quite a matter of the Inn saying, in effect, just because we chucked you out doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Nor was my accepting the invitation a way of saying: just because I told you to fuck off in print, making hay with the hypocrisy of your homey Domus motto, it doesn’t mean I won’t come to eat your food and drink your wine.

  The motto on the Gray’s Inn badge is actually Integra Lex Aequi Custos Rectique Magistra Non Habet Affectus Sed Causas Gubernat but that’s a bit of a mouthful, particularly late on in a bibulous evening, and Domus is the standard, very self-congratulatory toast. Yes, badge, not coat of arms. The Inn only lays claim to a badge, or else Bluemantle Pursuivant would be after them for misprision of blazonry.

  The revelation of that evening in Gray’s Inn was the drink. Normally when I’m nervous in company I abstain from alcohol, but on this occasion I was too nervous to stick to that decision. There was champagne before the meal, or a good imitation, then white wine, Sauternes, red wine and port. After the meal, in one of the Combination Rooms, there was brandy or champagne again for those who preferred it. By this time most of the benchers were developing a distinct lean to one side or the other, some supporting themselves on the furniture.

  I don’t remember a great deal of the evening myself. If we drank a toast to ‘Domus’ I hope that at the least I made a face. Another guest was Stanley Prothero, a family friend of Dad’s generation, who was invited at least partly, I feel sure, to give me a familiar face to talk to. Stanley had been one of the guests at my parents’ golden wedding celebration in 1997, held at Browns restaurant on St Martin’s Lane. It’s a chain that specializes in refurbishing grand premises, and this particular branch had been the home of Westminster County Court, over which Stanley had presided for many years as Registrar. He seemed entirely unfazed by the way his workplace had been turned into a sort of theme park, with courtrooms for hire and all the appropriate regalia provided. I wondered how Dad would cope with reality-melt on a similar scale, but Protheros are built to last.