Kid Gloves (16 page)

After Dad retired I felt the need to add a new
element to a household that was at risk of becoming little more than the sum of its routines,
unless and until Dad buckled down to that book of reminiscences, those songs, that radio play.
Rachmaninov symphonies weren't enough by themselves to make the flat hum
with purpose.

I arranged to come round every Monday evening and
help with the making of a meal. I had taken an interest in cooking in the sixth form at school,
where Friday afternoons were set aside for non-academic activity under the banner of ‘Guilds'.
Cookery had easily sidelined the other two options, photography and social work (known as ‘old
ladies'). Westminster didn't do too badly by me if it taught me how to make a white sauce as
well as an elegiac couplet.

Normally I made soup and Sheila would put
together a main course, though sometimes we exchanged roles. From Dad's point of view soup was
always the highlight of a meal. In fact soup was the meal. A meal without soup barely qualified
as such. As teenagers we were well used to restaurant meals at which Dad would ask, ‘Soup for
everyone? Five soups?' as if he could imagine no other preference. Possibly he was just
gingering us up to order promptly, rather than overruling our right to whitebait or prawn
cocktail, but in that case he wouldn't have spoken for the lady as well, Sheila who had never
chosen soup in all the time he had known her. Since roughly 1946.

The bargain over Monday dinner, as I explained it
to Dad, was that I would make soup every week on condition that he laid the table. I was
managing him. Perhaps I was trying to show Sheila that this so strongly counter-suggestible man
could be controlled after all. Dad said, rather pitifully, that he didn't know where the cutlery
lived. I pointed out that he had been living in the flat for upwards of thirty-five years, which
should help to narrow the range of the search.

I warned Dad that if ever he left the table
unlaid, I would pour the soup away. He would never see another of my making. Why does this now
sound so insulting? In fact Monday evenings
were generally enjoyable, and
though Dad's laying was often approximate he never failed to make an attempt. One Monday I
accidentally overdid the chilli oil, and Sheila was unable to choke down as much as a mouthful.
Dad finished his bowl, and though his face was very red and his voice oddly hoarse said yes to
another. It was as if soup was self-evidently such a good thing that the question ‘More soup?'
must always meet a Yes. The logic gates swung open irresistibly and there was no possibility of
override.

He didn't like vegetables with a few exceptions
such as beans (green ones and broad ones), but would relish any kind whatever as long as it was
in a soup. He could never explain the depth of his attachment to a liquid first course. It
didn't go back to childhood. He couldn't remember his first exposure but thought it must have
been at a hotel. Soup carried no associations with the mother he had adored or the father he
held up firmly as a model.

Until he died Dad spoke of his mother as the only
perfect human being he had ever known. His voice went into a distinctive constricted register
when he spoke of her. It throbbed with tears withheld. He had been twenty-one when she died and
most sons, even the most devoted, have detected the odd flaw by then, but for Dad flaws were out
of the question. His mourning, which had taken the form of being unable to sleep in the home she
no longer occupied, so that neighbours had to take him in, exceeded the bounds of what was
thought proper and became something of an embarrassment.

It seems terribly obvious that he loathed Gilbert
Harding's emotional devastation when talking about his mother on
Face to Face
not
because it was unfamiliar but because it wasn't. He wanted to share nothing with such a man,
absolutely nothing, and to share the unhealed wound of his mother's death was close to
unbearable.

On the other hand the Dad I
came to know after his retirement had no great love for his own father, and not much affection.
He gave no account of how and why a mother's boy, who had never fully processed her death (to
the extent that death is something we process), should turn himself into a father who cracked
down on any sign of unmanliness. He reproduced for our benefit the character, and the moral
absolutism, of someone he claimed to admire but hadn't actually liked.

It was a theatrical performance, in a way, which
made sense given that as a student he had done so much acting. It was in fact his father who
wouldn't accept the idea of the theatre as a career for him. Dad's theatricality found an
effective outlet in court. Playing his own father backstage, as a role in the family drama, was
a capitulation perhaps subtly edged with revenge, but the rest of us didn't know that.

One of his favourite memories of his acting days
was playing Hjalmar Ekdal in
The Wild Duck
as a student in Aberystwyth. He felt he
excelled in the part, particularly at the tragic climax when Hjalmar finds his daughter Hedvig
dead. During one evening's performance, even so, he became aware that he was not exercising his
usual casual monopoly on the audience's attention. There seemed to be distraction, even
tittering. He set himself to scale the tragic heights with ever more flair and boldness,
climbing without ropes or oxygen.

What he didn't know was that the distraction was
caused by the actress playing Hedvig. Dad had carried her in and reverently laid her down, but
in such a way that her slip was showing. Hedvig was a Scandinavian lost soul, dead by her own
hand, but she was also a young Welsh woman of the 1930s who didn't think such exposure was at
all the thing. So the corpse's hand inched towards the offending edge of
underwear, and set about tucking it out of sight. The play is much concerned with the
Livslognen
or life-illusion. The actress's
Livslognen
seems to have been that
unrespectability in dress is a fate worse than death.

At this point Dad's
Livslognen
was that
he could reconquer the audience with technique and ardour. At the end of the scene he threw
himself into a rocking-chair, as he did at every performance, but with so much force on this
occasion that the chair fell to pieces under him. The chair abandoned its
Livslognen
of
being furniture.

Dad's only explicit complaint against his own
father was that he never expressed approval, never offered praise. In his own role as father,
Dad set himself to remedy this. Clearly he was less stern than his own father, though we weren't
in a position to make the comparison.

He certainly offered warm words for good academic
results, though it was undermined by his anxiety that praise would go to our heads and lead to
an immediate slacking off. After good exam results he might say that of course every schoolboy
worked hard in an exam term – it was the term after an exam that was the test of the true
student and scholar, as opposed to the diligent mediocrity.

He told us that we could achieve anything we set
our minds to, so how did I hear this as ‘you'll never be good enough'? Blame the babelfish of
adolescence, the cochlear implant that simultaneously translates everything into Desesperanto,
the mother tongue of falling short.

Desesperanto
from a book of Marilyn
Hacker's poetry, too good a coinage to take over, in the manner of Ian Fleming, without an
indication of its provenance.
Babelfish
courtesy of Douglas Adams, come to that, but in
any case too well known to be passed off.

There was one episode of heroic parenting on
Dad's part
during my schooldays, when he did everything possible to reverse
my poor grade in one of my A-levels. The subject was Ancient History, and I had no aptitude for
it, being hopeless at dates. I hadn't actively chosen it as a subject: the only way you could do
Ancient Greek was as part of the whole classics package with Latin and Ancient History. I
enjoyed the languages but could get no grip on the history that underlay them. Dad asked me well
before the exam if I felt properly prepared. I bluffed unhappily, gabbling about Alexander's
campaigns and my mastery of his battle plans, though my deficiencies in three-dimensional
modelling drastically limited my understanding of the geographical aspect of strategy,
Alexander's or anyone else's.

After the exam Dad asked me how it had gone. I
had a sinking feeling, but it was no different from the sinking feeling I'd had the last time he
asked. I talked about Alexander's campaigns and my masterful battle plans until he went
away.

I got a D, which was more of a blow to my pride
than an insult to my knowledge of the subject. Dad didn't reproach me, just asked me how I felt
about the grade. I mimed incredulity, mortification, outrage, dismay, all (I feel sure) to a low
standard of theatrical self-presentation. Dad was upset on my behalf but not reproachful. I felt
I had got off lightly and was glad to hear no more about it, my dismal performance at A-level
Ancient History.

It was a full fifteen years before I found that,
actually, Dad hadn't left it at that. I was rootling through the drawers of his desk, with
permission, looking for my birth certificate (the Passport Office was on strike and I needed
paperwork for a temporary document) when I came across a correspondence between Dad and my
school. Dad was pressing forcefully for my papers to be re-marked, since an injustice had
obviously been done to my keen grasp of the subject. He hadn't kept
copies
of his side of the correspondence but drafts instead, since he wasn't always fluent on paper and
benefited from second thoughts.

The letters from the school shifted in tone from
warm and concerned to politely exasperated. Finally my housemaster reported that he had talked
to all my teachers and that though a C might have been hoped for a D was not a grade that
misrepresented my standard of work. Dad replied that if he was being asked to choose between the
versions offered by the school and by his son, he would of course choose his son's. It was a
magnificent crusade against injustice, spoiled only by the fact that no injustice had been done,
since I had misled him at every point.

I was so astonished by this find that I'm not
sure I found time to be moved. It had never occurred to me that Dad might be, as he claimed to
be, a resource. I had seen him only as an authority to be placated and bought off.

It was the same with the Maundy money, the
specially minted silver coins distributed by the sovereign that were sometimes given as prizes
at the school. Theoretically the recipients of Maundy money are destitute, and the giving of the
alms symbolically recapitulates Christ's washing of his disciples' feet at the Last Supper, but
I don't imagine the headmaster of Westminster dressed himself up in foul rags and put himself in
the Queen's path to importune her for Prize Day wherewithal. The school was founded by the first
Elizabeth and no doubt royal links survive.

It happened that my little bursts of academic
excellence failed to coincide with the times when Maundy money circulated in its eccentric
fashion (the number of coins distributed each year, for instance, corresponds to the age of the
sovereign). Did I hanker after this archaic accolade? I don't remember.

Whether Dad actively went shopping, or whether an
item
in a jeweller's or antique-shop window caught his eye (there were a
number of such shops in and around Chancery Lane), he found and acquired for me a complete set
of Maundy money in a little case. The largest coin, the fourpence, was smaller than the sixpence
that was then the smallest and most beloved piece of ‘silver' money. I don't remember whose
royal head endorsed my Maundy set – proof in itself that I didn't really connect with Dad's
present. I must have it stowed away somewhere, but I don't know when I last set eyes on it.

I thought Dad had completely missed the point, by
going to a shop to give money for something that couldn't be bought, though it was money itself.
I didn't want to own Maundy money, only to win it. What it came down to was that Dad was
cheating. I didn't see in his present what he wanted me to see, his proud face reflected in that
row of tiny worn brownish graduated metal discs.

The correspondence about my poor grade at A-level
in Ancient History, though, was a message that caught up with me in good time. It wasn't ancient
history, it could count perhaps as early modern. A cache of letters is the classic posthumous
find, particularly when it reveals an unknown aspect of the dead person. I was in a luckier
position, with a wider range of options than mere grieving wonder. I wanted to tell Dad how much
I appreciated his futile rearguard action against my well-deserved D grade, and I was prepared
to take the time to do it well. I wanted to communicate in his style rather than mine. I felt I
had a pretty good idea of the terrain of Dad's character by this time, better certainly than I
had ever understood any of Alexander's battles. Emotionalism wasn't the way Dad did things,
although he was on good terms with anger and its happy property of clearing the air, setting all
dials to zero.

The ideal setting was the dinner table, with
distinguished
colleagues and friends present, all glasses charged. What he
liked about roles was exactly what other people dislike: the way they fix relations. He
preferred formal occasions to intimate ones and a staged portrait to anything a snapshot might
reveal. In such a setting all I needed to do was relate what had happened as an anecdote,
playing up the comedy, and end up by toasting his valour.

There was an opportunity before too long. I think
it worked. It seemed to go well. The trouble with doing something in someone else's style rather
than your own is that you can't really expect the other person to notice. Dad wasn't likely to
charge over afterwards to give me the full bear-hug with eye-leaks, saluting my consideration in
playing ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' in his preferred key. He seemed gratified, he raised his
glass with great willing, but this he often did, and perhaps I'm imagining the underlying
message of ‘See? Was that so hard? Let's have a lot more of that from now on …' A
revisiting of
you have only so much time to make things up to me
.