Kid Gloves (26 page)

There was never an actual break-up with the
Llansannan side of the family. David had provided some of the money to buy the Anglesey house in
1960, for instance. Naturally he was entitled to stay there himself, though as time went by Dad
began to suspect him of offering use of the house (far from luxurious, but right on the beach)
as a sweetener in some of the business relationships that seemed to him so deeply suspect.

It didn't help that David was a mason. Their
father had been strongly opposed to freemasonry, and Dad saw his joining a lodge as an
opportunistic move and a betrayal of family principle. David for his part thought that Dad
didn't know how business was done in the country. He wasn't necessarily wrong about that, to
judge by the expert-auditor-from-London fiasco. Perhaps David felt that a self-righteous
insistence on going it alone had done their father harm. If the old boy had chosen to be
on
the square
himself, then he could have come through his financial difficulties more
smoothly. Freemasonry wasn't a nest of devils but a harmless social network, no more sinister
than the Garrick Club.

Even now I don't feel comfortable aligning
membership of the Garrick with freemasonry, even though it's perfectly obvious that Dad felt at
least as much for the poached-salmon-and-avocado stripes of the club tie as any mason feels for
the apron and compasses, or the mystic pressure that blossoms inside a routine handshake.

There were little rituals remaining between the
brothers and their families. A turkey or goose raised on one of David's
farms would be put on the train from Denbigh as a Red Star parcel, to arrive at Euston in
time for Christmas or Easter. Then one year the parcel turned out to be a bit whiffy, and after
that the custom lapsed, having lost its justification (immaculate bird) and its ability to
regulate family tension.

The first-born seems to have all the advantages,
but it doesn't need to be so. There was a Jenny Mars some generations back in the family tree,
and David had been given ‘Mars' as his middle name. In his case it was natural and organic
rather than something surgically implanted by deed poll, even if it wasn't technically part of
his surname. There was no reason why David shouldn't add it in hyphenated form to the name of
the family firm. It certainly lent a bit of class and memorability to the side of a lorry.

Still, when in the 1980s David's daughter Jenny
was getting married, the printed invitations included the hyphen for the whole Llansannan branch
of the family. Dad wouldn't have minded that, except that the invitation sent to the London
branch omitted ours. This gave the impression of a calculated snub, since family names are so
deeply rooted in the brain, not subject to the ordinary erosions. But why would David want to
snub him, at the same time as asking him to make a speech at the reception? Sheila advised him
to hold his horses and say nothing. With an effort, he did.

His speech at the reception, held at the Hotel
Seventy Degrees, Colwyn Bay, went down well. Of course public speaking is what barristers and
judges do for a living, and it's no more surprising that they should perform satisfactorily in
social space than it is for the schoolchild's dad who happens to be a professional cricketer to
make a creditable showing at the Fathers' Day match. Dad's approach to the art of the
after-dinner speech was an odd combination of the slapdash and the scrupulous. He would often
not know what he was going
to say when the meal began, and would make notes
on the menu as it progressed, but after the event he would make a record of what jokes he had
told on what occasion, so as to avoid repeating himself if he was asked back after a great
success.

I studied his method of preparation for Jenny's
wedding. Five minutes riffling through the entries on Love and Marriage in his dictionary of
quotations became a robust quarter-hour of jovial showmanship. Any hyphen-based tension between
the brothers melted away in the glow of his performance.

It wasn't long before David's second daughter,
Eleri, got married in her turn. Again Dad was asked to speak, and again the invitation
suppressed our rightful hyphen and paraded the impostor. This time there would be no holding of
horses, and Dad would not be reined in. I remember Sheila hovering in the background while he
made the phone call to his brother, willing him to a moderate statement of grievance. He didn't
do badly, saying he would be happy to speak at Eleri's wedding reception, but only if a new
invitation was issued with his name correctly spelled. David tried some conciliation of an
inflammatory sort by saying, ‘It's a very small thing to get so worked up about, Bill,' and Dad
said, ‘Then you will oblige me in this small matter.'

A hyphen is indeed a small thing, but if David
had really thought so his usage would have been less consistent. He was certainly making a point
of some sort. Hyphens weren't rationed. There was no originary hyphen, primal platinum ingot of
nominal linkage, kept in a vault somewhere (like the ur-kilogram), protected by the sort of
double-key protocol devised for keeping nuclear weapons in safe hands.

The hyphen is the Janus mark, precisely that
sign which both joins and separates.
Undergraduates of my generation learned to produce
emptily suggestive sentences like that by reflex, as we
moved into French
weather in terms of literary theory and criticism. Such formulas are more fertile in the realm
of psychology, where this way of thinking started and where perhaps it should have stayed.
Families are divided by the things they have in common
. That one might actually be
true.

The tug-of-war over the hyphen symbolized an
enduring tension. Dad wanted cash and David craved honours. Early on in my first year at
Cambridge I met someone at a party who recognized my name and asked if I had any odd relatives
in North Wales. I couldn't categorically deny it, though I had never thought of David and family
as odd. It turned out that this fellow student had been holidaying with his family in Colwyn Bay
and taking a stroll through the town when they were approached by a jovial man who offered to
show them round. This was David during his term as mayor of Colwyn Bay, volunteering his
services as tour guide. He offered to change into his robes and regalia, complete with chain of
office, if they were wanting to take photographs. He kept them in the back of the car, the
municipal equivalent of a superhero costume, so they were ready to hand when duty called.

Dad had all the advantages in terms of
ceremonial, with galas of pageantry like the State Opening of Parliament handed him on a plate.
David had to improvise, and to take his photo opportunities where he could find them.

Neither brother had a healthy style of life,
though David reached his physical limits first. He had heart troubles in his early seventies.
While he was convalescing after an operation, his wife, Dilys, or the children if they had
charge of him, would leave him in the car while they ran errands, with strict instructions not
to move. When they returned to the car, he had usually disappeared, but all they had to do was
find the nearest pub and then pluck the glass from one hand, ease the cigarillo from between the
fingers of the other.

He died in 1992. Naturally
we attended the funeral, and I think we were all concerned about how Dad would take the death of
his only close relative, not just brother but younger brother. We travelled by train. Dad's
mobility was already poor. I remember we had to change trains at Chester, and that Dad made use
of the lift when we transferred between platforms.

At the reception after the funeral, he gravitated
towards the room where small children were watching videos. There he became entirely absorbed by
the adventures of Pingu, a penguin animated by stop-motion whose tribe all spoke a delightful
Scandinavian-inflected gibberish. Dad became convinced this was Welsh, and that he understood
every word. Often he made such statements half-seriously, then defended them in a spirit of fun,
but play-acting seemed unlikely on such an occasion, and his move away from adult company was
slightly worrying in itself.

We ate in the restaurant car on the train back to
London. As he took the first sip of his drink, Dad said, ‘This is the first time I've enjoyed
myself all day.' As if the whole idea of a family funeral was to put a spring in your step.
There were times when his positivity seemed another name for disconnection.

The standard Welsh attitude to death is the
subject of a joke I have heard told by Rob Brydon, though I expect versions of it go back to the
era of the
Mabinogion
.

Rhys Pugh is dying. Dying. His little old head
lies sunken in the pillow, as if it had been dropped there from a height. Won't eat, won't
drink, barely remembers to breathe. Day after day his wife, Bronwen, holds his scrawny hand,
brushes his scanty hair. Day by day he sinks. Then one day he says, in his little cracked voice,
‘Bron-wen?'

‘Yes, Rhys?'

‘I feel a bit better today. I could eat a bit of
sal-mon.'

Well, Bronwen is made up.
Delighted. She scampers to the kitchen and gets busy with the pots and pans that have seen so
little use of late. Minutes later she brings a bowl, faintly steaming, to Rhys Pugh's bedside.
She raises him from the pillow of his sickness, cradles him tenderly in the crook of her arm.
She lowers a spoonful into his mouth. He mumbles it for a few seconds, raking it back and
forward with the stiff blade of his saurian tongue. Then a look of bewilderment and distress
settles on his superannuated peasant features. ‘Bron-wen?' he asks with a tremble in his
voice.

‘Yes, Rhys?'

‘Bron-wen, I asked for sal-mon. This is not
sal-mon. This is tu-na.'

‘Well, the thing is, my love,' says Bronwen, ‘I
was saving the sal-mon for the funeral.'

That's one account of the national character, by
which the Welsh are perfectly at home with death. It's life that makes them uncomfortable.

Dad wasn't like that. His way of being Welsh was
very different. If there's a spectrum of Celtic moods then he tended towards its volatile end.
Though he saw himself as rock-solid in the consistency of his principles, you could never quite
tell how he would react to anything. The mixture of gravitas and unpredictability made him a
remarkable courtroom animal, but it was less of a winning formula in the domestic settings of
kitchen or sitting-room.

This was something I had to try to anticipate
when I realized, in the late 1970s, that I would have to inform Dad that I belonged to the
category he hated and feared. Yes, the moment of coming out, cardinal rite of passage in gay
life, though of course the term ‘rite of passage' can cover anything from bar mitzvah to
auto-da-fe
.

I had already told Sheila (before I called her
anything but
Mum), not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles
is the rule when looking back at the past, though pink cataracts might be the more accurate
expression, since spectacles can be taken off. Researchers have found ways of correlating
people's wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned to walk
or talk (as recorded by healthcare authorities) against parental boasts of precociousness, or
establishing the true amount given to charity over a given period as opposed to the inflated
claims. So if I'm convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly
self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her road
accident of a few years before, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather
than wished away? I'm afraid that I did. As the years went by she must have been surprised to
realize that my life contained both fun and meaning, intimacy and a moderate level of
self-respect, but then so was I.

It was strangely hard, talking to Sheila, to take
the robustly defiant party line in the face of a reaction that contained no criticism. An
instant response of sorrowing sympathy gave me emotional cues that I wasn't able to
overrule.

Between us, though, we laid to rest the rather
tepid fantasy of my heterosexual future, in which I would be an academic living in a big house
outside Cambridge with a grand piano and a family. In this wishful prospect the piano seemed
more solid than the shadowy children and a wife who was hardly even a shadow. The whole fantasy
depended on the proposition that an academic was a sort of vibrant neuter, and professor the
apotheosis of eunuch. The family idea derived from my fondness for children, which was real but
didn't ne-cessarily indicate a baby-making fire in my loins. I was on easier terms with people
significantly older or younger than me. Until I had learned how to have a sex life, so as to be
able
to approach men with the possibility of desire and women without the
possibility of misunderstanding, it was people more or less my own age who presented the
problems.

Finally Mum asked the question mothers nerve
themselves to ask: Would this life make me happy? I said that it would, but I couldn't avoid a
vocal wobble and an implication of martyrdom.

The role of martyr was one that I adopted early
and relinquished late. I can blame the family dynamic for that, if I put in enough work. Tim was
only twenty months old when I was born, and as I grew steadily more eager to grasp he didn't
automatically become more eager to loosen his grip on what he held. Sharing anything was an
artificial and imposed piece of behaviour. It wasn't likely to survive the withdrawal of
parental oversight. Sensibly Tim would snatch the disputed object back. In these circumstances,
lacking the physical resources to grab and keep what I wanted, I learned to pretend not to want
it, to play the role of the sort of self-sacrificing person who gives things up willingly, in
the interests of a larger harmony. It was true that I still didn't get what I wanted but I had
the great joy of knowing that Mama (her earliest name) was pleased with me for being such a good
boy.

None of this creaking character armour would be
in play, luckily, when I confronted Dad with what he least wanted to hear.

It was a big scene in the making, and that was
just what I didn't want made. Dad's thespian side was strongly developed, mine nipped in the bud
for that very reason. To some extent over the years I had observed Dad's behaviour and learned
to modify its excesses. It was sometimes possible to resist the theatricalization that was Dad's
normal response to crisis, to de-dramatize conflict. For instance, if he ordered the three of us
out of the house during Christmas lunch after some blow-up
at table, a
certain amount of de-escalation could be managed as long as we stayed put.

The inventive act was not to push back your chair
and throw down your napkin but to peel a tangerine or to reach for the nutcracker, to wait a
while and then ask Dad why he was so fond of Kentish cobnuts when they were so fiddly, so hard
to get out of their shells.

Breaking off the conversation marooned us in our
roles. Refusing the script as he wrote it would guarantee at the least a new configuration of
conflict, and might lead to novelties all round.

What I needed to do, on the brink of my rite of
passage, was to shape the event so as to bring something small and truthful out of Dad, taking
him away from reflexes and set attitudes. I needed to change the character of his performance by
restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called upon to direct Orson Welles or Donald
Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name) in some warhorse of the repertory.

The obvious priority was getting rid of any
possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of my
being able to damp down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect, too. Dad wouldn't have
to consider putting on a show of consistency with his previously expressed attitudes, for the
benefit of anyone else.

I would need Dad to myself for several days,
which by this stage in the evolution of family life wasn't a natural state of affairs. The tail
end of the Christmas holiday in Anglesey offered the obvious opportunity. It wasn't difficult to
persuade my brothers to be reunited with their girlfriends rather than remain fused to the
family group. My mother agreed to head back to London early. I don't remember what pretext we
gave for this piece of behaviour, which could legitimately have struck Dad as odd if he had been
in a mood to suspect any
sort of ambush. Accomplished lying isn't much of a
family characteristic, though it's hard to be quite sure, since it's the other sort that gets
found out.

I strongly suggested to Mum (she wasn't ‘Sheila'
then) that she didn't answer the phone on New Year's Eve. This was a sensible precaution, since
I was trying to release Dad's rage and sorrow in a controlled explosion, far away from other
people. I wanted to minimize the possibility of collateral damage.

Dad's reflex and survival instinct was not to
absorb unwelcome information and emotional disturbance but to re-export it immediately in a new
direction. He would start a fight externally in preference to experiencing his own conflicts.
How glib that sounds! And psychobabble had barely been invented in those days. But I knew that
left to himself, he would pick up the phone, ventilate some anger in Mum's direction (you let
them walk all over you, and this is what happens!) and then feel much better, leaving her
struggling to recover the shreds of her poise.

There was already an interpretation of family
history in place, available to Dad in times of crisis, according to which he had stuck to
principle and refused to ‘buy his sons' love', while she had capitulated at every stage and
never made a stand against permissiveness. This wasn't always the way he saw things, but it was
the version of events that emerged under stress.

Even at the time I understood that this cover
story was a result of pained disappointment not just in his sons but in himself. Not only were
we turning out very different from the go-getting brood he had so confidently anticipated, but
he had somehow managed to reproduce the atmosphere of his own young manhood, with a
father-figure reluctantly obeyed but not much liked. He had wanted to be our friend,
and to break the pattern, but had no idea how to realize this new approach to
family. Much easier to blame Mum for her tenderness than acknowledge that his own, proudly
disguised, had been ignored.

Mum in her moods of frustration sometimes said
she felt like ‘kicking hell out of a dwarf', not in reality revealing an impulse towards
discriminatory abuse but conveying that she felt like the final recipient of a long line of
tensions passed on in distorted form, and wished she could discharge them in her turn to someone
with even less status. When she wasn't able to be Dad's comforter and strong support she was
likely to be cast in the more oppressive role of scapegoat-in-waiting.

This pattern was available, hallowed by use, and
it wasn't likely that Dad, under great emotional pressure, would fail to blame her in the case
of a warping for which mothers are traditionally held responsible. When sons turn out not to be
the marrying kind, fathers can play
cherchez la femme
with a vengeance.

So I recommended to Mum that she phone relatively
early in the evening to exchange New Year messages, and not answer the phone after, say, ten
o'clock. This was a married couple who spoke on the phone every day when separated, though they
had no special ritual for the end of the year. They hadn't needed one – I imagine this was the
first New Year's Eve they had spent apart since 1947. There's a risk of overplaying the
psychodrama here, and portraying myself as the son who seeks to divide his parents so as to have
his mother all to himself (as in accounts of ‘The Psychology of The Homosexual', orthodox though
very
passé
), but I admit that I didn't hesitate to impede a ritual communication that
was likely to turn nasty under the special circumstances prevailing.

New Year's Eve is a good time for a family
confrontation
since there's never anything worth watching on television,
and if you're very lucky alcoholic bonhomie will carry the day.

The deadline was midnight. I wanted 1977 to be
the last year I saw a hypocrite's face in the mirror, and there were only minutes left of it. I
ushered in the new era of frankness by turning off the television and topping up Dad's wine
glass. The era of the ‘whisky sour' was over – he had been told when diagnosed with his stomach
ulcer that he must give up spirits. Then at last it was time for ‘Dad … There's something
I need to tell you.'

That's the formula for this ceremonial event,
though perhaps I should give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that I introduced some
slight variation – ‘There's something you need to know', or something of the sort. There's not a
lot of room available for improvisation. The coming-out speech is a relatively unvarying form
because the event has only two parts, a clearing of the throat to demand attention (hear ye!
hear ye!) and then a simple phrase that can't be taken back (I'm gay). After that, as it seems
to the person making the declaration, the fixed points disappear. All clocks return to zero hour
and the speakers have new voices issued to them, voices that stray so far from any previous
conversation that they might as well be talking in tongues. They might say anything at all.

The details of that evening are a blur, not just
because it was a long time ago but because it was a blur at the time. I was in shock. Dad was in
shock, of course, but I was in shock too, from having administered one and also from the fact of
having kept my nerve. Samson had pulled down the temple and the masonry had bounced off him as
if it was no more than blocks of expanded polystyrene. Patriarchal authority, as it turned out,
was balsawood under the mahogany veneer. It wouldn't crush me just yet.

That first night Dad was
stricken but not rejecting. When we finally went to bed he said everything would be all right.
There was no hug but then he wasn't a hugger. There was no sense of a hug withheld. His wish of
‘Happy New Year', returning mine, was subdued but seemed sincere, bearing no trace of satirical
aggression, no suggestion that I'd already blighted the twelvemonth to come.

Dad didn't much go in for New Year's resolutions,
left to himself. If pressed on such occasions, he would say his resolution was to drink more
champagne. Franker exchanges with his sons were not something he wished for as such.

I was buffeted by strong currents of vertigo and
anticlimax. Tim had described the confrontation in the making as me ‘holding a sex pistol to
Dad's head' (punk rock had detonated only recently) but I had pulled the trigger and so far
there were no casualties. I had made an existential leap, but maybe it was a leap into the void
à la
Gloucester in
King Lear
, and over a cliff-edge that existed only in my
head. When at last I could pull air back into my flattened lungs, I was all too obviously the
same person as I had been before. Less was changed than fear had promised.