Kid Gloves (27 page)

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.

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.

Dad had met Prince Charles and liked him, dutiful
Welsh small talk and all. Both parents had attended his investiture in 1969, travelling on the
special train laid on for the event, and buying the scarlet bentwood chairs, designed by Lord
Snowdon, on which they had been seated while the Prince received his insignia, coronet, mantle,
sword, gold ring and gold rod. In fact they had bought an extra chair, to match the number of
their sons, prudently forestalling any future squabble over heirlooms.

It seemed extraordinary to
me that Dad should at short notice turn the heir to the throne into a latent but finally
triumphing heterosexual. According to Dad Prince Charles had lain back and thought of Wales, and
I should follow his example. Of course it wasn't news that Dad had a tendency to tailor reality
to the demands of fantasy. Keeping fantasy in check may have been one of the things that a life
in the law did for him, by requiring him to finesse the facts rather than setting them aside. If
I had suggested any ambiguity about Prince Charles's sexuality before New Year's Day 1978, Dad
would have been outraged.

That was his first gambit, the Princely Parallel.
There were others over the next few days, the Auntly Ambush, the Bisexual Fork, the Bisset
Surprise.

Auntly Ambush. Dad asked me to find his address
book and look up his Aunty Mary's phone number. I was surprised by this sociable impulse. Were
we planning family visits? It hardly seemed the time for that, the air being so strongly charged
with tension.

Aunty Mary, widowed since the 1950s, lived in
Denbigh. It was true that we sometimes saw her over the Christmas holidays. She made mince pies,
and had a little superstition about them. Each mince pie eaten between Christmas Eve and New
Year's Day guaranteed a lucky month, so it was necessary to get through a dozen to be fully
protected, and each mince pie must be paid for with a kiss. Those kisses of hers, bristling and
oddly intent, put me off facial hair for a while.

I asked Dad why he wanted to speak to Aunty Mary.
‘I don't,' he said. ‘You'll be doing the talking. Don't you think you should tell her what
you've told me? She's family, isn't she? She has a right to know.' He started to dial the
number, confident that I wouldn't let him finish the process and make the connection.

I went over to him and pressed down on the prongs
of the
phone, cutting off the call, and stayed there to prevent him from
making another attempt. Dad's Orson Welles side couldn't be kept in check indefinitely. He got
quite a lot of mileage out of using the telephone as a prop in our family theatricals.

According to his script, if I had a duty to tell
him about my sexuality (this was how I had described my situation), then likewise I must inform
the rest of the family, directly. He had chosen Aunty Mary as the most rhetorically effective
figure for this line of argument, someone so far removed by age and long-standing widowhood from
the urges of the body that I would have to explain basic acts from scratch, pouring unwelcome
information into the scandalized funnel of her Welsh-county-town-dwelling,
Congregationalist-sermon-saturated ear. I explained that there was no need to explain myself to
Aunty Mary because she wasn't part of my life, while Dad was. This was true in its way, but
perhaps he was noticing something else. I might be telling him how important a figure he was in
my life, but I was also willing to risk being rejected, which suggested that I could get along
without his approval – so how important was he really? If the family divided into two parts,
widowed great-aunts kept in the dark about private perversions, and powerless patriarchs
presented with deviant lifestyles as facts they had to adjust to, then perhaps Dad had ended up
on the wrong wing.

On 31 December when Dad had tried phoning Mum she
had followed my advice and let it ring. After that, they spoke every day, as was their habit,
usually last thing at night. These conversations were largely ritualized, and amounted
essentially to billing and cooing, or Bill-ing and Sheila-ing perhaps. They seemed to feel the
need for an exchange of endearments before bed when they were separated, as of course they often
were with Dad on circuit. On occasions when I would be
present at Mum's
side of the conversation, I noticed the slight technical difficulties she had with making a
proper kissing sound, since after her accident in 1973 medication tended to make her lips
dry.

Now of course those phone calls had an extra
layer of meaning to them. The Anglesey house wasn't big, and though there was an extension in
the master bedroom I inhibited telephone intimacy whether I wanted to or not. Usually Dad spoke
on the sitting-room phone, without seeking privacy. I imagine Mum had asked lightly, ‘How are
you two getting on?', for Dad to answer with an undertone of weary irony, as he did, ‘We're
having some very interesting discussions. He's full of surprises.'

Over the days of wrangling I hoped that Dad would
at some point acknowledge that in my own way I was standing up to him, something that dominant
personalities are said to admire, though not all the evidence points that way.

Bisexual Fork. One day Dad's rhetoric took a
startling new tack. ‘You're right, Adam,' he said. ‘My generation was brought up with a very
simple sense of these things. When I say I'm heterosexual, I only mean that all my past
experience has been with women. There's nothing to stop me from being attracted to a man
tomorrow. Wouldn't you agree?'

This was so different from his normal patterns of
thought and speech that I was stupefied. Was the sly old thespian going to spring a
coup de
théâtre
on me, revealing that he and his rather mousy clerk Mr Cant had been an item – lo,
these many years! – that he hadn't known how to tell me and was relieved to have someone to
confide in at last?

Not quite. I hesitated.

‘Don't you agree?'

There seemed no way out of it. ‘I suppose so
…'

‘And by the same token, when you say you are
homosexual,
all you mean is that your experience to date has been
homosexual.' He pronounced the word, as was the way with his generation, with a long first
syllable – even with the sounds we produced we showed we were talking about different things.
‘And just as I could have desires for a man, there's nothing to stop you having desires for a
woman tomorrow, isn't that so?' And we were back in Prince Charles territory, contemplating his
experiments in self-cure by rutting.

The Bisset Surprise followed directly on the
Bisexual Fork. Dad told me that he knew for a fact that I responded sexually to women. His
evidence for this was that when we had been watching a Truffaut film in the cinema,
Day for
Night
, I had played with myself whenever Jacqueline Bisset was on the screen.

I remembered that evening, which must have been
in 1972. I had seen the film already and loved it, and thought it had more than enough charm and
humour to qualify as a good choice for a family outing to the cinema. The evening was not a
success, I understood that. Dad was seething in some way, though it took a lot of questioning to
bring his objections to light. It turned out he had thought the film obscene. Obscene? If
anything I thought it was a bit timid, a bit safe. Where was the obscenity? In a gesture made by
one of the actresses, looking down at her actor boyfriend as he went off to the studio in the
morning. He blew her a kiss, and she made a gesture of crossing her hands demurely below her
waist, to signify ‘This is all yours. Yours and no-one else's.'

This gesture, according to Dad, was of a
corrosive and contaminating obscenity, tainting the whole film. He gave me to understand that I
had subjected the party to a measurable dose of corruption by setting up our little visit to
Studio One on Oxford Street.

Now, though, he was asking me to believe that I
had laid aroused hands on myself during the film, and that he hadn't
made a
comment at the time.
Adam, old chap, we all get carried away when there's a lovely lady on
the screen – can't fault your taste, my boy, she's the most delightful creature – but next time
be a bit more discreet, eh? You might give your mother a turn.
An unthinkable scenario. Of
course he wasn't asking me to believe anything of the sort, he was asking himself to believe it.
He was falling short of the standards of his profession, planting evidence in his own memory to
substantiate something he needed to be true. He was tampering with the scene, as if he was one
of those bent coppers he was known for hammering.