Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  At this point Dad’s Livslognen was that he could reconquer the audience with technique and ardour. At the end of the scene he threw himself into a rocking-chair, as he did at every performance, but with so much force on this occasion that the chair fell to pieces under him. The chair abandoned its Livslognen of being furniture.

  Dad’s only explicit complaint against his own father was that he never expressed approval, never offered praise. In his own role as father, Dad set himself to remedy this. Clearly he was less stern than his own father, though we weren’t in a position to make the comparison.

  He certainly offered warm words for good academic results, though it was undermined by his anxiety that praise would go to our heads and lead to an immediate slacking off. After good exam results he might say that of course every schoolboy worked hard in an exam term – it was the term after an exam that was the test of the true student and scholar, as opposed to the diligent mediocrity.

  He told us that we could achieve anything we set our minds to, so how did I hear this as ‘you’ll never be good enough’? Blame the babelfish of adolescence, the cochlear implant that simultaneously translates everything into Desesperanto, the mother tongue of falling short.

  Desesperanto from a book of Marilyn Hacker’s poetry, too good a coinage to take over, in the manner of Ian Fleming, without an indication of its provenance. Babelfish courtesy of Douglas Adams, come to that, but in any case too well known to be passed off.

  There was one episode of heroic parenting on Dad’s part during my schooldays, when he did everything possible to reverse my poor grade in one of my A-levels. The subject was Ancient History, and I had no aptitude for it, being hopeless at dates. I hadn’t actively chosen it as a subject: the only way you could do Ancient Greek was as part of the whole classics package with Latin and Ancient History. I enjoyed the languages but could get no grip on the history that underlay them. Dad asked me well before the exam if I felt properly prepared. I bluffed unhappily, gabbling about Alexander’s campaigns and my mastery of his battle plans, though my deficiencies in three-dimensional modelling drastically limited my understanding of the geographical aspect of strategy, Alexander’s or anyone else’s.

  After the exam Dad asked me how it had gone. I had a sinking feeling, but it was no different from the sinking feeling I’d had the last time he asked. I talked about Alexander’s campaigns and my masterful battle plans until he went away.

  I got a D, which was more of a blow to my pride than an insult to my knowledge of the subject. Dad didn’t reproach me, just asked me how I felt about the grade. I mimed incredulity, mortification, outrage, dismay, all (I feel sure) to a low standard of theatrical self-presentation. Dad was upset on my behalf but not reproachful. I felt I had got off lightly and was glad to hear no more about it, my dismal performance at A-level Ancient History.

  It was a full fifteen years before I found that, actually, Dad hadn’t left it at that. I was rootling through the drawers of his desk, with permission, looking for my birth certificate (the Passport Office was on strike and I needed paperwork for a temporary document) when I came across a correspondence between Dad and my school. Dad was pressing forcefully for my papers to be re-marked, since an injustice had obviously been done to my keen grasp of the subject. He hadn’t kept copies of his side of the correspondence but drafts instead, since he wasn’t always fluent on paper and benefited from second thoughts.

  The letters from the school shifted in tone from warm and concerned to politely exasperated. Finally my housemaster reported that he had talked to all my teachers and that though a C might have been hoped for a D was not a grade that misrepresented my standard of work. Dad replied that if he was being asked to choose between the versions offered by the school and by his son, he would of course choose his son’s. It was a magnificent crusade against injustice, spoiled only by the fact that no injustice had been done, since I had misled him at every point.

  I was so astonished by this find that I’m not sure I found time to be moved. It had never occurred to me that Dad might be, as he claimed to be, a resource. I had seen him only as an authority to be placated and bought off.

  It was the same with the Maundy money, the specially minted silver coins distributed by the sovereign that were sometimes given as prizes at the school. Theoretically the recipients of Maundy money are destitute, and the giving of the alms symbolically recapitulates Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, but I don’t imagine the headmaster of Westminster dressed himself up in foul rags and put himself in the Queen’s path to importune her for Prize Day wherewithal. The school was founded by the first Elizabeth and no doubt royal links survive.

  It happened that my little bursts of academic excellence failed to coincide with the times when Maundy money circulated in its eccentric fashion (the number of coins distributed each year, for instance, corresponds to the age of the sovereign). Did I hanker after this archaic accolade? I don’t remember.

  Whether Dad actively went shopping, or whether an item in a jeweller’s or antique-shop window caught his eye (there were a number of such shops in and around Chancery Lane), he found and acquired for me a complete set of Maundy money in a little case. The largest coin, the fourpence, was smaller than the sixpence that was then the smallest and most beloved piece of ‘silver’ money. I don’t remember whose royal head endorsed my Maundy set – proof in itself that I didn’t really connect with Dad’s present. I must have it stowed away somewhere, but I don’t know when I last set eyes on it.

  I thought Dad had completely missed the point, by going to a shop to give money for something that couldn’t be bought, though it was money itself. I didn’t want to own Maundy money, only to win it. What it came down to was that Dad was cheating. I didn’t see in his present what he wanted me to see, his proud face reflected in that row of tiny worn brownish graduated metal discs.

  The correspondence about my poor grade at A-level in Ancient History, though, was a message that caught up with me in good time. It wasn’t ancient history, it could count perhaps as early modern. A cache of letters is the classic posthumous find, particularly when it reveals an unknown aspect of the dead person. I was in a luckier position, with a wider range of options than mere grieving wonder. I wanted to tell Dad how much I appreciated his futile rearguard action against my well-deserved D grade, and I was prepared to take the time to do it well. I wanted to communicate in his style rather than mine. I felt I had a pretty good idea of the terrain of Dad’s character by this time, better certainly than I had ever understood any of Alexander’s battles. Emotionalism wasn’t the way Dad did things, although he was on good terms with anger and its happy property of clearing the air, setting all dials to zero.

  The ideal setting was the dinner table, with distinguished colleagues and friends present, all glasses charged. What he liked about roles was exactly what other people dislike: the way they fix relations. He preferred formal occasions to intimate ones and a staged portrait to anything a snapshot might reveal. In such a setting all I needed to do was relate what had happened as an anecdote, playing up the comedy, and end up by toasting his valour.

  There was an opportunity before too long. I think it worked. It seemed to go well. The trouble with doing something in someone else’s style rather than your own is that you can’t really expect the other person to notice. Dad wasn’t likely to charge over afterwards to give me the full bear-hug with eye-leaks, saluting my consideration in playing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ in his preferred key. He seemed gratified, he raised his glass with great willing, but this he often did, and perhaps I’m imagining the underly
ing message of ‘See? Was that so hard? Let’s have a lot more of that from now on …’ A revisiting of you have only so much time to make things up to me.

  Dad was very attuned, in the manner of his generation, to the oldest son, who was actively nicknamed ‘son and heir’. By way of compensation I was dubbed ‘pride and joy’, which left only ‘Christmas angel’ for Matthew, which didn’t seem very precise (despite his decorativeness) since he was born in mid-November.

  I remember Dad once commenting with troubled admiration about Tim’s physical beauties. Troubled because Tim, twenty at this point, wasn’t particularly biddable, far from keen to walk in the paths laid out for him. ‘Tim is very manly,’ he said, ‘very strong, with that heavy growth of beard – he should shave twice a day – and plenty of hair on his chest already.’ At some point in this reverie he must have become aware that these were not ideal terms in which to discuss Tim in front of his younger brother, who at eighteen was plump and poorly groomed. He cast around for a countervailing compliment. ‘And you …’ he said at last, ‘… you have good posture.’

  After his retirement, or at least after his Rachmaninov phase, Dad did less and less. There’s a word that seems to describe the state towards which he gravitated: inanition. It’s a word that might appear on a Victorian death certificate, and it has a technical meaning, to do with starvation. But it also conveys the slow emptying-out process of Dad’s retirement, the physical and mental consequences of doing nothing. It wasn’t that he turned his face to the wall. He turned his face to people when they spoke, he turned his face to the television, and still I had the sense that he was dying in small instalments, leaving us with no more than a digesting ghost to attend to.

  When Sheila had upbraided him in retirement for laziness, he pulled together his intellect just long enough to defend his neglect of it: lazy people have something to do, and do nothing. Idle people have nothing to do, and are doing it. He was idle and not lazy. Case closed.

  Even after Sheila’s death he could play the part, from Holly’s point of view, of the benign grandfather in a TV spot for heritage toffee – except that he might suddenly denounce her for eating the remnants of his brioche, though he had given gracious permission only minutes before.

  Our three generations could watch The Simpsons together very harmoniously. I particularly remember the episode in which John Waters guest-starred as a ‘collectibles’ dealer new in Springfield, who admires Marge’s style, assuming it’s knowingly camp. He gains an ascendancy over Bart, to the point where Homer feels the need to toughen him up with exposure to blue-collar men and manly pursuits. Their first stop is the Springfield steel works, but it turns out all the employees there are gay. A workman pushing a vat of molten metal alerts his colleagues to the danger by trilling, ‘Hot stuff coming through!’ Dry ice starts pumping out when the working day ends so that disco dancing, on suspended breeze blocks raked by searchlights, can begin without loss of time. In the next scene Moe the sleazy bartender lists the traditionally gay professions: ‘Where you bin, Homer? The entire steel industry is gay – yeah, aerospace too, the railroads.’ And you know what else? Broadway.

  We laughed tri-generationally at the climactic scene, in which Waters’s character saves the Simpson party from reindeer attack by skilful deployment of a remote-controlled Santa robot.

  There was one last joke tucked away in the credits, an announcement that the episode was dedicated to the steel workers of America, with the slogan Keep Reaching For That Rainbow! It was a wonderfully unifying half-hour, even if I couldn’t turn to Dad and make a comment about the subversive potential of popular entertainment, so rarely exploited, any more than I could have that particular discussion with Holly. Perhaps a sign of my decline rather than his, if I was so far gone in punditry that I now needed an audience for the most routine aperçu.

  How much Dad took in of what was in front of him, or how little, became clear one Monday night. I was with Keith in the Highbury flat, leaving Matthew to look after Dad in Gray’s Inn. We were watching a Channel 4 documentary on the 1976 Obscene Publications Squad trials, and the judge in the case was getting a certain amount of stick for deficiencies in his running of the case that led in the end to Wallace Virgo’s conviction being overturned.

  I took advantage of an advertising break to phone Matthew, worried that he and Dad might also be watching television. They were. Not Channel 4? Channel 4.

  Did Dad realize that he was the unnamed judge being referred to? He didn’t, no. He gave every sign of being fascinated by the programme, but fell short of making the personal connection.

  I felt relief when perhaps distress should have been the dominant emotion. I certainly didn’t want Dad to be aware that his past professional performance was being criticized, but it would have been better for him to be tuned to another channel rather than watching Channel 4 with empty attention, impervious, looking at his life from outside it.

  My brothers and I didn’t find it hard to believe that Dad might have blundered, particularly in a case combining two things about which he had such strong feelings, pornography and police corruption. It seemed obvious to us that he was instinctively an advocate, a judge only by hard work and scruple. It came naturally to him to shape an argument theatrically, not to hold the balance between opposing forces. We imagined him failing to stress the importance of reasonable doubt, when it came to the guilt of a police commander betraying the public trust.

  In this particular case, the case of R. v. Virgo, we were wrong, at least according to Matthew’s godfather Munro Davies, not the least of Dad’s devils. Munro can remember even after the lapse of half a century how many days a particular case lasted. The successful appeal against Virgo’s conviction challenged the admissibility of a diary entry. Dad had accepted it as evidence, and now he was being overruled. Nowadays the admissibility of such material is uncontroversial, and in any case there was no damage done by admitting the diary entry in R. v. Virgo, since it was the only direct evidence of guilt. Without it there was no case. Mars-Jones J had exercised the only option that could have put Virgo behind bars.

  Even before Dad’s mental presence dwindled to this point, I had come to rely on help, both what was supplied by the council (or the agency subcontracted by it) and by private providers. It might happen that a carer sent by the council on a morning shift was so clearly efficient and likeable that I would hire him or her to work at other times. The agency’s name that sticks with me is Care Alternatives, with its faint double meaning (alternatives to care, as opposed to options for caring), though there was a change of contracts halfway through the year. First-time callers, particularly at weekends, had to be told the location of Gray’s Inn Square in great detail or they were likely to overshoot in strange directions.

  One of the morning reliables was Nimat, a Sudanese woman of great beauty. She was tall and poised. The starkness of her haircut emphasized the roundness of her head. She was perhaps in her forties, with a son of about ten, whose father she had left behind with some relief in Sudan. Since then she had found another relationship, in London, but the man in question had been run over and killed. There was a sadness about her, a sadness that didn’t take away from her vitality but was part of it. This vibrant sorrowing may have preceded the events that gave it depth.

  When I heard the lift mechanism start its whirring at about eight o’clock, I would go in to Dad and say, ‘It’s our lovely Nimat.’ Usually he said, ‘Who?’ When she came into his room she lowered her head to be near his as she explained who she was and why she had come. Her voice was both husky and cooing. Then he would say, ‘Don’t you have wonderful tee
th!’, which would make her smile even more of a world-historical event.

  He would follow Nimat down the corridor to the bathroom without her needing to help him with his Zimmer frame. She simply drew him along in the wake of her magnificence.

  After his shower he would have a neutral cleanness. Historically the smells he had borne were Vitalis (hair oil), Old Spice (aftershave) and Badedas (Swedish horse-chestnut-based bath essence). A triple chime of naffness, a three-bullet-point suicide note in the language of male grooming. I don’t remember any advertisements for Vitalis, but perhaps they simply said that the product would make your hair look like oiled metal, and as a bonus that its smell would remind your children of the oil they applied to their Triang-Hornby 00 gauge electric toy trains. Old Spice implied a sort of daft sportiness with its footage of surfing and the crypto-fascist pulsations of Carmina Burana. It was Badedas (though the advertising copy stylishly omitted the capital) that was most obviously a strong solution of wish-fulfilment, as much an extract of the male menopause as of the Swedish horse-chestnut.

  The campaigns for the product were classy, tending to appear in Sunday colour supplements. The tagline was ‘Things happen after a badedas bath’. What things? Well, a man in black tie might step out of a sports car to the un-surprise of a blonde wrapped only in a towel, surveying from a bathroom window the suavity of her visitor.

  This was in the days before women learned to respond to crass sexual implications in advertising, if they ever really have. It seemed obvious that the target market wasn’t female, and it was the male reader who was being offered a vision of steamy Scandinavian nakedness, whether he owned a sports car or not. Women seeing the advert and identifying with the woman in the towel would be likely to respond with social panic rather than arousal, thinking Oh GOD! I thought he said seven-thirty!