Kid Gloves (19 page)

If I hadn't appointed myself caregiver, I would
have discounted this aspect of Dad's character altogether, whether by rights it should be called
latent or suppressed. I would have thought such a dreamy response not just uncharacteristic but
actively alien to him.

It seemed possible that the ‘Dad' I had
experienced in my teens and his maturity, a man both driven and driving, had been a long
charade, both professional and familial, undertaken between the dreaminess of his own childhood
and the undefended state to which he was returning. This was a mask I knew better than the face
beneath, which perhaps I wasn't trusted to see.

Dad in his prime didn't want to have needs,
preferring to think of himself as the fount of prosperity at which all were nourished. The least
endearing aspect of this character trait was the desire to show someone that a present offered
to him
was in point of fact worthless, whatever trouble had been taken over
it. When I was sixteen I bought him a decanter from Heal's for his birthday, and stood there
mortified while he explained that unfortunately the cork stopper would absorb off odours,
rendering it for all practical purposes unusable. How would I know? I was a perfect innocent in
wine, having at that stage not drunk even a thimbleful.

In fact my brothers and I had been promised a
hundred pounds on our twenty-first birthdays if we abstained till then (and the same sum if we
kept away from cigarettes). None of us led virtuous lives for long enough to claim his bounty,
though if the threshold had been eighteen I would have cleaned up.

In 1970s' conversations I noticed that Dad
presented himself as the primordial bottom layer, the massive foundations of the pyramid from
which the family tapered to a point, but there was a tremendous feeling of strain there too, not
to be acknowledged, as if his mental image was likely to invert at any moment, and then he would
feel the whole unstable edifice bearing down on him, driving him into the sand.

In terms of the day-to-day, in fact weekly,
running of the house Dad's function was ceremonial, and the name of the ceremony was carving the
joint.

At any family meal featuring roast meat, his
carving expertise trumped the mere cooking. He claimed rights, royal and retrospective, over the
food the moment it entered the dining-room. The holy trinity of implements would be set before
his place at the head of the table, fork, knife and steel for sharpening it. He would run the
knife against the steel with innocent Sweeney-Todd professionalism, a whetting sound which had
the effect on diners of the bell Pavlov rang to set his dogs a-drool.

The little fanfare of knife-sharpening gestures
seemed to
have almost the opposite effect on the man who produced them. It
relaxed any urgency. This was one of his preferred moments for launching into an anecdote –
‘Have I told you about the time when …?' or ‘the funny story about …?' He was
confident enough of his raconteur's gift to announce a story as funny before setting out to make
it so.

He would pause with the honed knife raised above
the Mason's ironstone serving-dish (in the Regency pattern) of turkey, beef or lamb, or even
arrested in the eternal moment of carving a slice, while he laid out the background or built up
comic tension. Sheila would look anguished and eventually make a muffled plea (‘Bill, please!
People are starving – meat now, story later …') on behalf of group appetite, and then the
carving would resume until the next time narrative pulled rank over mere plate-filling.

While I waited for food, particularly if the
story was a familiar one, I would gaze at a strange feature of Mason's Regency design on the
plates, a chimera or portmanteau creature, combining elements of slug and grasshopper in an
unattractive new ensemble. Something with a long yellow neck that would scuttle rather than
slither or creep, a little Loch Ness Monster skulking at the edges of the Dutch still life. My
mixed feelings about family meals were laid down as a queasy extra layer of colouration on that
curious transfer.

It was natural enough that Dad had the skill to
disassemble a roast animal, since his father had been a farmer as well as a postmaster. Henry
Jones had killed his own livestock and made his own bacon, and in a more direct way than the
current Prince of Wales makes biscuits, to be sure. If he delegated those tasks it was because
he had more important business to attend to, not because he didn't know how. Presumably he
passed on his carving secrets to his first-born son, but Dad offered no instruction in his turn,
either to the first arrival or
the after-comers. There was a side of him
that wanted us to follow in his footsteps, but the desire to make sure we would never eclipse
the big man was also strong.

Dad's mother had also had dealings with meat. Dad
spoke admiringly of her brawn, not in the metaphorical sense of physical strength but literally
the jellied-meat dish she made from a pig's head.

In my imagination of the rustic past there are
wives who refuse their husbands certain sexual acts or positions, and wives who refuse to make
specified items of charcuterie. Brawn would have to be high on the list – the American phrase is
‘head cheese', translating the French
fromage de tête
without the recoil you'd expect
from a culture that renders offal as ‘variety meats', as if animal glands and disregarded cuts
were putting on some sort of nightmare revue, a butcher's burlesque show.

It's cleaning the head that makes for much of the
unpleasantness. Do pigs have the good manners to blow their noses before they're slaughtered? No
they don't. That job falls to the housewife who feels unable to refuse the marital obligation of
brawn.

My grandmother did her duty, but there's no
evidence she enjoyed it. Perhaps women weren't expected to, and it was only another thing men
wanted.

Involvement in the processing of meat is a
distinctive variety of carnal knowledge. Close contact with meat drags us down into the meat we
are. A woman whose father is a pork butcher, who attracts a man's attention by slinging a bull's
pizzle at him, will not be appealing to his higher nature. Isn't that the great lesson of
Jude the Obscure
? Yet Dad's mother was still the angel in the house as far as he was
concerned, however many pigs' heads she rendered down.

In marital by-play Dad would sometimes suggest
that Sheila make him up a lovely crock of brawn, in the same jovial spirit
as he would suggest, every time her birthday loomed, that a brush-and-crumb tray would make
the ideal present, fulfilment of any woman's dreams. She was too defensive about what she
perceived as her weaknesses as a housewife to ignore him or banter back. If ever he paid a visit
to the village of his birth, staying with his brother, he would rhapsodize about being woken at
seven-thirty by the joyful song of Dilys's hoover, and Sheila smiled grimly.

Carving was an activity that he carried on with
for some time after he had retired from other occupations, but at Christmas 1998 Matthew was
deputed to wield the knife. If he made an imperfect job of it he certainly managed better than I
could have done, while Dad looked on in neutral wonder.

If Christmas 1998 was a rather perfunctory
festival, with Dad so evidently depleted, then Christmas 1997 had been almost too festive, with
a mood of exhilaration that edged into hysteria. Sheila had received her terminal lung cancer
diagnosis at the beginning of December and was bizarrely full of energy, busily signing off on
her life, tying up loose ends. After lunch she led the three women who were more or less her
daughters-in-law (there had been no marriages) into her bedroom to choose things they might like
from wardrobe or jewellery-box. She set a brisk pace towards the grave, and the rest of us were
made breathless by trying to keep up – except of course for Dad, who hadn't been told there was
anything wrong.

Sheila seemed almost disappointed that Matthew's
partner, Angela, didn't jump for joy at the offer of a sage-green leather coat from the 1960s,
though everyone agreed that it would look well on her. Matthew had brought along a digital
camera to film the get-together, not so much on his own account as to provide some sort of
record for his baby daughter, Ella, who wouldn't otherwise have memories of her grandmother.

Sheila's only worry was
about where she would go after death, not a theological matter but a question of storage. Her
final destination wasn't in doubt – she wanted her ashes interred in Llansannan, Dad's
birthplace, next to his ashes when they arrived there. But where was she to go until then? It
seemed silly to be planted in terrain where she had no independent sense of rootedness,
twiddling her immaterial thumbs while she waited for company.

To me these seemed abstruse considerations. If
you imagined your ashes as sentient, it was hard to think of a place where they were likely to
be happy, but if you didn't, how could it matter where they were stowed? Even so I realized that
I was missing the point. Sheila was temperamentally a worrier, and not all worries can be taken
away, least of all from those who have put in the hours, but perhaps this one could. ‘I could
look after you here, if you like.'

‘Here? Where exactly?'

‘Upstairs. In the top of a cupboard. Would that
be all right, do you think?'

It turned out that this little piece of symbolic
hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind. After she had died, early in the new year, I
had no feeling that she had moved to the top of an upstairs cupboard, but in other ways my
feelings took an unexpected turn. After the elevated mood that accompanied her last weeks, I had
expected a comedown and a grief proportional to my love and liking, but nothing similar
happened. Instead there was a stable sense that she had died in character, with nothing left
undone or unexpressed, and that I had made a satisfactory job of helping to make that possible.
She seemed absent without being missing, and mourning was beside the point. It didn't match
anything I felt.

Dad had been going steadily downhill while in my
care, but I managed not to notice. I suppose friends who hadn't seen
him
for a while were in a better position to notice. The obvious comparison, with its kitsch
symmetry between early and late life, first and last steps, would be with parents being too
close to observe developmental spurts in their children which are very clear to outsiders – but
there are other examples of the outsider having a privileged view. Friends who meet you after a
gap will notice that you've lost a few pounds, and say you look marvellous, or that you've
gained a few stone, and say you look well.

I was slow to acknowledge that Dad was fading. He
seemed to have been fading for a long time, and there seemed no necessary end to that fading.
There's an element of that old philosophical conundrum, Zeno's Paradox. Dad had to cover half
the distance to death, and then half of that, and half again. Logically he would never get
there, and perhaps that's what people feel about their parents in particular.

If I was partly in denial, I may have also been
hiding from the possibility of exhaustion. By convincing myself I was in for the long term, I
could guard against the running out of filial energy, never a very dependable fuel. How long
would it be before I was resenting Dad for taking up my time, my hand trembling with suppressed
violence as I stirred the thickening agent into his tea?

Being an attentive son could co-exist with some
low-level posing. While my mother was dying I had once needed to take an oxygen tank to
University College Hospital for refilling. Such things are heavy, unwieldy, whether empty or
full. I couldn't imagine taking one onto a bus, but it would be awkward lifting one into a taxi.
In the end it seemed simpler to walk to the hospital, only about a mile away. It was a rational
decision, but I couldn't help being aware of the figure I cut, reminiscent of the beefy man in a
Guinness advert from my childhood, shouldering a girder. Now while ministering to
Dad's needs I got a certain small kick out of parking my fat motorbike
outside John Bell & Croyden on Wigmore Street and striding in wearing full leather for a
bumper box of incontinence pads. Posing can be a defensible strategy, a way of skating on the
surface when you suspect that it won't be possible to return from lower down.

Dad was admitted to hospital early in the new
year, and died of pneumonia on the 10th of January. It happened while he was being turned by the
nurses, with no family member present, though Tim was visiting and I was on my way. A discreet
exit, and a common pattern, as if the person dying was tiptoeing away from the body with the
minimum of fuss, though of course the assisted movement of being turned in bed may be enough to
give the software of shutdown its prompt.

There's a famous study that shows that death
rates among the terminally ill go up after family festivals (Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter,
Passover), as if people could somehow hang on for a celebratory event and then stop the
struggle, choosing in some limited way their moment to die. I say ‘famous study', but I can't
find it anywhere on the Internet, which is a pretty strong indication that it doesn't exist.
It's not exactly proving a negative to any elevated standard, but it's a good rule of thumb: if
you can find something on the Net it may or may not be true, but if you can't find it then it
isn't. So perhaps I made it up or have garbled some quite different piece of research.

Even so, the first time someone died in my
presence I had a sense of intention. This was the artist Mario Dubsky, who was the first person
with Aids I was assigned to ‘buddy' as a volunteer for the Terrence Higgins Trust. The year was
1985, early days for the Trust's buddying initiative, so that a handful of us did our best to
meet the basic needs of sick people
spread out across London. In his teens
Mario had been diagnosed as manic depressive, and couldn't be described as an easy person, but
then he would have disliked the very idea of easiness, in people or anything else. In theory he
was very self-absorbed, but he also had a marked ability to stand outside himself. I remember
once, when he was bringing up with great difficulty small quantities of yellow liquid into a
bowl, that he looked up at me and said, ‘This must be very hard for you.'