Kid Gloves (34 page)

‘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.