Kid Gloves (29 page)

Well-meaning cultural intervention could not
raise the status of homosexuality in his eyes any more than an anvil could take to the air with
the help of a few party balloons.

Mike had obvious merits as a house guest, from
Mum and Dad's point of view. He didn't stammer noticeably more or less in their company than he
did in mine. It was natural to his generation of Americans to address their seniors as ‘Sir' and
‘Ma'am', forms of speech that would have seemed self-abasing or actively satirical on the lips
of their British equivalents.

That suited Dad, who didn't at all mind being
truckled to. He was even indulgent towards over-truckling, seeing it as a fault in the right
direction, a badge of good-heartedness, not to be penalized. It was under-truckling he didn't
care for, any sort of reverence shortfall.

Mum wasn't so certain, since she always suspected
deferential manners of insincerity or secret mockery. She seemed to be straining to detect an
element of the sardonic in his use of ‘Ma'am'. Had this complicated stranger, perhaps slightly
too good to be true, mistaken her for the Queen?

Mothers are apt to be sceptical about a son's
choice of partner. Perhaps she could see nude gym written all over him.

There were less harmonious aspects to his manner.
Mike responded to quite small surprises in conversation with the exclamation ‘Jesus!', a
mannerism which drew a flinch and a blink from Dad the first time it happened, and a frown
whenever it was repeated.

Mum and Dad weren't hopelessly provincial. They
knew that if a dinner guest cut his food up methodically, then
transferred
the fork to his right hand for the purpose of conveying nourishment to his mouth, there was no
cause for alarm. These were standard American manners, deeply embodied aspects of culture.

Mike, though, may have been slightly thrown by
grace before meals said in Welsh. There was the ‘long Welsh grace', itself very short, and the
‘short Welsh grace', lasting barely five seconds and in favour when food was late or appetites
keen. Mike will have been exposed to strings of exotic sound, timeless Celtic phonemes reaching
his eardrums as either ‘
Dee olch itty, dirion Da, um der dunneer, rothion ra, row innee er
wen ai thlon, ara boo-id sith ger-ein bron. Amen
' or else ‘
Ben deeth yan boo-id, oth
yew. Amen
'. The only bits he could reasonably be expected to join in were those
‘Amens'.

Family meals could be a bit of a minefield – for
all of us – and Mike had the disadvantage of not having been issued with a map. For instance,
Tim might choose to steer the conversation towards the subject of punk rock, not just to get
Dad's goat but as part of a more multifarious agenda, hinting at the ‘sex pistol' primed and
ready to fire. He enjoyed setting up a complex conversational turbulence, while I tried to steer
the talk towards calmer water, or (in emergencies) bailed the bilges frantically and hid my fear
of being swamped by the forces I had set in motion.

There was no hiding from Mike that Anglesey in
winter bore no resemblance to California at any season. The Irish Sea was not a marine body
double for the Pacific, not even if you half-closed your eyes to help it out. The village of
Rhosneigr could boast the Premier Garage and the Bali-Hi Fish Bar but was not twinned with San
Francisco. What did we have to offer that the Bay Area couldn't match? Perhaps Barclodiad y
Gawres, the ancient monument on the next headland along, towards Aberffraw, a Neolithic burial
chamber (technically a cruciform passage grave), if he felt like peering
through railings at decorated stones, their zigzags, spirals and chevrons latent in the
gloom. The interior was a little more accessible than the holy of holies in Kafka's parable
‘Before the Law', being open two whole days a year. (The name means ‘apronful of the giantess',
though Dad always translated it as ‘breadcrumbs' instead – but then he admitted that his Welsh
got rusty from his conversing in it so little, and he found it mortifying to make mistakes in
the hearing of more eloquent users of his mother tongue.) Or we could walk round the Maelog
Lake, at least most of the way round, while Mike huddled incredulous in his windbreaker, until
brambles and mud made the going too difficult.

Tim and Mike clashed enjoyably over architecture,
playing the game of Lloyd Wright / Le Corbusier / Mies van der Rohe, rituals of ranking that can
seem to outsiders so much like rounds of rock-paper-scissors.

Mike used a number of Americanisms that I sensed
were already obsolescent, calling things not only ‘cute' but ‘neat'. It was refreshing, even
intoxicating, to be told that, say, ‘C-corb' had designed ‘a bunch of stuff' that was ‘just
gorgeous'. It seems a safe bet that Tim, who didn't have many people with whom to discuss
architecture, found Mike both stimulating and baffling in his lack of intellectual airs.

Mike's verdict on Tim, meanwhile, was ‘I don't
know whether to fight him or fuck him', which suggested that the holiday wasn't a complete
failure from his point of view.

Mike's word for the men he found attractive was
‘Munchkin', though the beings by that name in
The Wizard of Oz
weren't in fact, as I
discovered when I saw the film at last, young and beefy. I had imagined a sort of junior league
of bodybuilders. In the coffee shops of Cambridge Mike would point out casualties of British
self-sabotage, handsome undergraduates hunching in apology for their good looks. America would
have
encouraged them to revel in their studliness. It wasn't too late, even
now, if they played their cards right.

There were some exceptions to his typecasting –
the elderly Einstein sticking out his tongue in a famous photograph somehow qualified as a
Munchkin – but I certainly wasn't a Munchkin, and Tim didn't come significantly closer to that
ideal.

It occurs to me now that Mike, as an admirer of
Iris Murdoch's fiction, may have felt that her deepest intuitions about British life were being
confirmed in this welcoming environment laced with threat. In theory my father was the target of
the machinations – but would Mike really have been surprised if my elegant, quietly anxious
mother had entered the guest bedroom one morning bearing not a cup of tea but a samurai sword,
like Honor Klein in
A Severed Head
(his favourite Murdoch novel, and his favourite
moment in it), to banish all obliqueness of dealing and force a resolution of some kind? Perhaps
not.

It made sense of a Murdochian sort, the warrior
being offered as a sacrificial victim, exposed to danger and enchantment beyond anything the
Viet Cong could devise (though his tour of duty pre-dated the worst of the war) by the shores of
a bleak sea.

Even without weaponry, Mum can't have been an
entirely relaxing hostess. Part of her concern was to do with whether the two of us were well
matched – and if so, whether it even mattered, bearing in mind that Mike was returning in a
matter of months to his city and his career, his real life outside the parenthesis of Cambridge.
She was also bound to be anticipating the impact on her family of the little piece of
psychodrama I had set in motion.

So after I had made my sexual declaration to Dad
as best I could (having so little to declare), I told him about Mike. He
put on a fair show of neutrality, not exploding at the deceit and immorality involved in
smuggling my bit of fluff (a very sturdy bit of fluff, admittedly) into the family home. He
played the waiting game, knowing that sooner or later I would have to ask him for his verdict on
Mike. I had given him back some power, I suppose, by showing that I cared what he thought.

Eventually he produced his assessment. ‘Small
beer,' he said.

I felt we were making progress here. Who would
have thought that Dad was capable of dismissing the same-sex partner of one of his sons with
such a light touch? No reference to the Bible or the vileness of physical acts. It was never on
the cards that he would say, ‘You two seem to be good together,' and I wouldn't have believed
him if he had, since it didn't seem particularly true. But it had to be encouraging that Dad
huffed the threat of Mike away like so much thistledown.

As Dad understood homosexuality, there was always
an abusive seduction at the root of it. A person of power or glamour cast a spell on an insecure
male, then turned fascination into sordid exploitation. In a strange way, the earlier in life
this atrocity was perpetrated the better, since then there could be no question of meaningful
consent, let alone desire. Ideally, from his point of view, I would have been turned, even
sexually assaulted, by a scoutmaster in full make-up. This Vietnam-vet-architect scenario was
far less easily rewritten as pathology. Still, if Dad had wanted me to be corrupted over mugs of
cocoa round a campfire, he might at least have sent me to Scouts.

Male bonding had hardly begun to work its magic
on the culture in those early days of 1978, and a father–son sojourn had an artificial,
self-conscious feel even when there were urgent matters of sexual dissidence to be thrashed out.
In the aftermath of all those disputes over princes, great-aunts and
actresses we were probably both relieved when it was time to go back to London, with a more
or less satisfactory deadlock in place. In the car Dad expressed a lowered tension by sucking –
then wolfishly crunching – Tunes, his preferred courtroom lozenge and vocal lubricant, rather
than the gnawed twin stems of his disused pipe.

It's standard practice when dealing with people
implacably opposed to homosexuality to propose that they are themselves in denial. It always
seems a cheap manoeuvre, not just cheap but dull, to insist that homophobes are sitting on top
of a volcano of disavowed desire. If Dad had a man-loving component it was easily bought off,
with male social company (endlessly on tap in Gray's Inn) and the ritual worship given to Welsh
rugby players, colossal of thigh.

Dad summed up the whole of homosexual life with
the phrase ‘wallowing in faeces', and I wonder what made him think in those terms – what made
his disgust take that particular form. I'm not saying Dad had more knowledge of anal intercourse
than I did, but he can't have had less, since I had none.

With Mike I was embarrassed about my defective
sexual experience, almost as embarrassed as I was of never having seen
The Wizard of
Oz
. I lived in my body very approximately. Sensuality was one more thing I experienced
mainly through books.

My childish body was strangely tuned. I remember
soothing myself to sleep (aged four? five?) by playing with my right nipple, an action that
transmitted a high feathery tickling to the roof of my mouth, referred pleasure like referred
pain, experienced in a different place from where it was generated. This was the high-water mark
of my self-awareness before latency dragged me back down into the dark.

As for my awareness of other bodies, I had known
from an
early age that I was different from my brothers. This wasn't
existential angst but statement of fact. They made wee-wee from a different thing. They did a
stream but I did a spray and sometimes I felt sore. My part was different from theirs, looked
different,
was
different. (How I made the comparison I don't exactly remember, but
bathtime was the obvious opportunity for playing spot-the-difference.) When I was transfixed by
an infantile erection aged six or seven I went down on my knees, my plump and dimpled knees, to
give thanks to the God who had clearly intervened with a miracle to correct the anomaly, but my
willy looked no different afterwards.

Our parents hadn't had a policy about
circumcision but asked for professional advice as each son was born. The experts at the Welbeck
Nursing Home, where we were all brought into being, gave their opinion. A ‘snip' was felt to be
necessary for Tim and then for Matthew, but not for me. No thought had been given to the
possibility that a cavalier among roundheads (to use a jaunty slang I know only from books)
might feel disagreeably set apart.

Technically I was intact while they had been
wounded, but being the odd man out has in itself some of the quality of a wound. Then persistent
infections of the foreskin showed that medical advice wasn't infallible, and I was circumcised
at the age of eight or nine. I got a proper wound of my own, and riding my bicycle was something
of a penance for a time. Memory tells me that it was actually a sort of tractor-tricycle with a
bucket seat and satisfying deep treads on the tyres, but I'm hoping memory has got it wrong.
Poorly co-ordinated or not, I was old enough to be riding a bike and a bike it shall be.

A year or two later I learned the facts of life
from a Latin play – a statement that makes me seem even more the tragic casualty of an expensive
education than I feel the evidence supports. Westminster School had a tradition (recent, I dare
say, and probably emulating another school) of putting on a Latin play in
the original, not every year but at regular intervals, usually with one gimmicky touch, such as
a character arriving in a car – a Mini driven through the Abbey cloisters. When I was still at
the Under School, and so perhaps eleven or twelve, I attended a performance. The transition
between the Under School and what we called the Great School was smooth. In Latin lessons at the
Under School, Mr Young (pink and white colouring, wet of lip, Bill Haley cowlick innocent of any
pop-culture reference) would wince at blunders and say, ‘Don't let Mr Moylan catch you doing
that.' In turn Mr Moylan, when he took over (a being without moisture, fastidious, invariably
making a dog-leg across Little Dean's Yard to avoid exposing his leather soles to the
wear-factor of gravel), would say, ‘I hate to think what Mr Young would say about that.'