Kid Gloves (20 page)

When he was ill enough to be hospitalized in the
Middlesex, the institution that had given him both his diagnoses, thirty years apart, first
manic depression and then Aids, I would visit him several times a day. He wasn't conscious, but
I hoped to find him alert sooner or later so that he could make a will. Mario hated his mother,
or rather ‘hatred' was his name for the love he felt (he phoned her on a regular basis to keep
her informed of the progress of his loathing). If he died without a will she would inherit as
next of kin, in theory the last thing he wanted.

I had fudged the opportunity of suggesting the
making of a will earlier on. Now it was a priority. I understood perfectly well that his dying
intestate, leaving his property to someone he claimed to hate, was the outcome that most closely
corresponded to his feelings for her, refusal without disconnection. I had to take his stated
wishes at face value, just the same. If he was lucid on one of my visits I would contact a
solicitor through the Trust and see what came of that.

Mario died, without returning to consciousness,
the first time I spent more than a few minutes by his bedside. The nurses weren't expecting
this, and nurses at the Middlesex were knowledgeable and canny. Certainly he seemed to be
recovering from this latest infection. It happened late on a Saturday evening. Flibbertigibbet
that I was, I planned to go on to a bar for some night life after an hour or two by Mario's
bedside.
Of course Mario didn't ‘know I was there', but to absorb the event
in the immediate aftermath I needed to think that he did. He had many friends, but I was the
only person who was at all close to him not to have known him before he was ill. Death was part
of the part I played in his life. In my presence his body seemed to shut up shop with great
efficiency, as if dying was no more than a knack, something like double-declutching (in the days
of gearboxes without synchromesh) or even throwing a frisbee with the proper flick of the wrist
that sends it sailing.

His death seemed expressive of him, and so did
Sheila's, in very different circumstances. It seemed exactly right in terms of her character
that she should die at home, not professionally attended, but while waiting for the transfer to
a hospice that she claimed to want. It was a trait of her generation amplified by temperament
and history to shrink from being any trouble, choosing to tidy herself away among strangers
rather than make demands on her sons. What actually happened was what suited her best, dying at
home, whether or not she had the boldness to say she wanted it.

I struggle to put Dad in this category of
expressive deaths. If he had been able to script his last moments in his prime, then he would
have faded away with a stern smile on his face, benignly absolving, while the three of us told
him how sorry we were never to have lived up to the example he set. That impresario-patriarch
side of his character had died before he did, and perhaps there were less extrovert traits that
had not found much expression in the man we knew.

I made the funeral arrangements with A. France
& Son of Lamb's Conduit Street, just as I had done when Sheila died. The premises were
pleasingly ramshackle, with awkward spaces and varnished partitions. There was none of the
plushness of modern death. It was like an old-fashioned provincial doctor's
surgery, except that the patients weren't bored or anxious. There were framed press
cuttings on the wall, and one of them caught my eye while I was waiting to be attended to. As it
turned out the firm, or its ancestor W. France of Pall Mall, by appointment to His Majesty, had
been the undertakers (‘upholders' was the word used at the time) who made the arrangements for
Nelson in 1805.

This piece of information wouldn't have made the
slightest difference to Sheila, but it would have tickled Dad very much. Nothing could have been
more appropriate for a Navy man like himself than the association with the splendid Horatio, who
made the journey back from Trafalgar in a barrel of rum. Sailors on that voyage of triumphant
melancholy are supposed to have paid their respects by taking nips from the barrel. This must
qualify as the ultimate Nelsonian beverage, grog doubly fortified, spirit infused with a spirit
well over proof, from which they took tots of the great man's essence, helping themselves on the
sly to sippers, gulpers, sandy bottoms of immortality.

Some time had passed after the funeral before it
occurred to me that we hadn't provided our funeral directors with a set of clothes for Dad to
wear in his coffin, and that therefore he must have been kitted out by them in some rudimentary
way from what had gone with him to the hospital, pyjamas or a tracksuit. Utter violation of his
dress code in his prime, the bespoke double-breasted suits with their hint of Cosa Nostra.

How could this have happened? Sheila's
arrangements the year before had been taken care of more scrupulously, but then the
circumstances had been different. She had died in the flat, with her clothes to hand, and it had
been an obvious priority to make sure she was turned out as she might have wanted. It seems
extraordinary that France & Son could have made no enquiry about our wishes, but
extraordinary too that I didn't think of it.

How did I imagine that Dad
was going to be fitly costumed for the event? That Messrs France would sneak into the Gray's Inn
flat and make their own selection of mobster suit and club tie (the Garrick, please God)? How
else except through my agency was Dad to be properly treated, at any stage after I had
volunteered to take care of him? The fact is, he was my prisoner, as he is on this page, with no
redress against caricature or cheap insight.

It's perfectly possible that a discussion about
clothes took place, one that passed through one of my brothers (or both), or even one that I was
part of but don't remember. In that case my fretting over the possibility of his going to the
flames improperly kitted out is the same sort of mental tic as not being able to sleep for worry
that the alarm hasn't been set or the gas turned off.

Was there a part of me that wanted Dad to be
unsuitably dressed in the coffin? Feelings about parents are such primal things that it's safer
to assume you harbour any and every disreputable emotion rather than give yourself a clean bill
of health. The Oedipal agenda doesn't lay itself out neatly, in the style of a PowerPoint
presentation. My first book,
Lantern Lecture
, for instance, is almost entirely made up
of insults to father-figures, something I managed not to notice for years.

The first-written piece was a fantasia in which
the Queen contracted rabies from an infected corgi (the origin of the illness being a bat blown
off course). Obviously the Queen is a mother-figure, except that her position of supreme
authority makes her an honorary man, and Dad was not just a judge but one of Her Majesty's
Judges. The title story was a commemorative character sketch of one of Dad's friends, Philip
Yorke, the last squire of Erddig near Wrexham, and someone with about as much authority as the
Milky Bar Kid. The withheld warmth of the story makes clear that I was choosing him
as preferable to the father I actually had, a sort of antidote to the
patriarchal poison. The fact that it was of course Dad who introduced me to Philip adds to the
ungraciousness. In the final piece of the book, ‘Bathpool Park', I returned to the patricidal
fray but this time managed to do without the Queen getting in the way. The story analysed the
operations of Dad's court in the case of
R. v. Donald
Neilson
and tried to
show that it, and he, had missed the point. At the time of writing I thought of each piece as an
exercise in a given genre, whether satire, elegy or analytical journalism, and so it is, but the
impulse of antagonism is consistent across the group.

There were a few procedural hiccups before
Lantern Lecture
was published, but it wasn't Dad who made difficulties. Faber
submitted the typescript to his old instructing solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck for a professional
opinion about its vulnerability to legal action.

The advice he gave was clear. Author and
publisher would equally be open to charges of seditious libel. A stay in the Tower of London was
not out of the question. Established authors on the Faber list were likely to express their
distaste by changing publishers.

(Note to younger readers: treatment of the royal
family was very kid-gloved in those days, a time that pre-dates even the decorous lampooning, as
it seems now, of
Spitting Image
.)

Carter-Ruck was an old friend of Dad's, it's
true, but I don't think his opinion was a put-up job. Nobody ever said Dad backed down from a
fight unless he was clearly going to lose it, and if he wanted the book squelched all he had to
do was withhold his permission from the part of the book that couldn't be published against his
wishes, ‘Bathpool Park'. I had taken the precaution of showing Dad ‘Hoosh-mi', the satirical
fantasy about the Queen, only after he had rubber-stamped ‘Bathpool Park', which was good
tactics or
sneaky dealing according to taste. When he read the more
obviously problematic text, he praised it uneasily, adding, ‘But we're in trouble!' First person
plural, not second person singular. His attitude was troubled support rather than alarm, though
of course he might have had second thoughts about having given his blessing to another part of
the book. An instinct of solidarity doesn't necessarily have staying power.

To me it seems more likely that Carter-Ruck was
acting unilaterally, convinced that Dad would be embarrassed by the book and doing what he could
to help. Or perhaps he sincerely believed the book was a bombshell and a call for republicans to
take up arms.

This wasn't the general reaction. Faber took the
sensible step of taking a second opinion, this time from John Mortimer, a lawyer of a different
stripe. Having defended the editors of
Oz
on obscenity charges, he was unlikely to
panic over my little squib about the Queen. Mortimer's opinion was that it was in thoroughly bad
taste, as was more or less required by the genre of satire, but far from actionable.

Dad can hardly have avoided coinciding with John
Mortimer at the Garrick Club, but had mixed feelings about him. On the one hand Mortimer was the
best-known example of the lawyer-turned-writer, even if he had started early, while Dad's
creativity was waiting for the ripeness of retirement. Dad would certainly have approved of my
borrowing the title of Mortimer's play
A Voyage Round My Father
to serve as subtitle
here, carrying the suggestion of a personality so large that only chartered shipping could get a
proper view, even if his real admiration was for an earlier play,
The Dock Brief
. Dad
responded with sentimental fullness, and no identification whatever, to Mortimer's central
character of a washed-up barrister given a last chance of glory. On the other hand, John
Mortimer consistently aligned himself with opposition to censorship, and
disputed the corrupting effects of pornography. Hadn't he said, in court, that if
pornography really had the power to corrupt then the Old Bailey would be chugging to the sound
of massed vibrators by now, considering how much smut their Lordships had seen in their time?
Well, apparently not, since I can find no evidence for such a statement, though it was one of my
favourite quotations for many years. There's no search engine as powerful as wishful thinking.

When
Lantern Lecture
came out, Faber
were hoping that Hatchards of Piccadilly, booksellers by appointment to Her Majesty, would
refuse to stock it, so as to provide a starting-point for some whipped-up indignation in the
press. Unfortunately they denied us that publicity coup, ordering twelve copies rather than
their usual six, a favourable verdict but overall a disappointment.

In the pages of the book I had given Dad an
invaluable hostage for use in future disagreements. From then on, if ever we were getting testy
with each other he would announce, ‘I'm not going to take that from a son who described me in
print as “wizened”!' and we would each hare off in search of a copy of the book. When the text
of ‘Bathpool Park' was consulted I would make my case that its reference to the judge's
expression, as caught by the press photographers, being one of ‘wizened disapproval' when he
emerges onto a bright street after a day in a dark courtroom was a very different thing from
saying he was actually wizened in the general run of things and under standard lighting
conditions. Dad would grumble and be soothed.

In writing about the dead it's not possible to
give them the last word, except in the most artificial, self-admiring way. There can't be a
power struggle – the writer, the survivor, has all the power. You can try not to use it, or to
use it responsibly, but the real gulf isn't between the various ways of using the power
you have, it's between having the power and not. If, for instance, I want to
mention a couple of occasions on which I humiliated Dad in his powerlessness, reproaching him
for lapses he couldn't help, being brusque and even sarcastic, I humiliate him all over again.
Yet, given that I have written about my mother, there is no neutral position. Not to write about
him, having written about her, implies a statement in itself, either that he's not worthy of my
attention or that I can't find a way to do it.

Writing about Sheila was different. I wrote about
her in her lifetime, with her consent and power of veto. I was surprised that she didn't
exercise that power, since I had included many potentially embarrassing details. Sheila was
happy to attend the Virago party launching
Sons and Mothers
, the book for which the
piece had been commissioned, and seemed to have a sense almost of ownership about what I had
written.
It's funny
, she said,
I want to turn the page over and see what happens
next, although I know what happens next and on the whole I didn't enjoy it when it actually
happened.
‘Are there any more reviews of our book?' she would say, and stick them in a
clippings file. Since my contribution was much the longest in the book it was likely to be
singled out for special praise or condemnation. I particularly enjoyed reading one review aloud
to her, which suggested that she had never taught me how to shut up.