Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I provide this context to explain my surly response to an endearment, and Dad’s surprising reaction to it. Instead of retreating from the territory of intimacy and tenderness where he had spent so little time, even (to all appearance) in his dealings with Sheila, Dad advanced further into it, replying, ‘I was just admiring the lovely curve of your shoulder.’ It has to be said that reflexive charm was part of his armoury, but this didn’t seem an armoured moment.

  If I hadn’t appointed myself caregiver, I would have discounted this aspect of Dad’s character altogether, whether by rights it should be called latent or suppressed. I would have thought such a dreamy response not just uncharacteristic but actively alien to him.

  It seemed possible that the ‘Dad’ I had experienced in my teens and his maturity, a man both driven and driving, had been a long charade, both professional and familial, undertaken between the dreaminess of his own childhood and the undefended state to which he was returning. This was a mask I knew better than the face beneath, which perhaps I wasn’t trusted to see.

  Dad in his prime didn’t want to have needs, preferring to think of himself as the fount of prosperity at which all were nourished. The least endearing aspect of this character trait was the desire to show someone that a present offered to him was in point of fact worthless, whatever trouble had been taken over it. When I was sixteen I bought him a decanter from Heal’s for his birthday, and stood there mortified while he explained that unfortunately the cork stopper would absorb off odours, rendering it for all practical purposes unusable. How would I know? I was a perfect innocent in wine, having at that stage not drunk even a thimbleful.

  In fact my brothers and I had been promised a hundred pounds on our twenty-first birthdays if we abstained till then (and the same sum if we kept away from cigarettes). None of us led virtuous lives for long enough to claim his bounty, though if the threshold had been eighteen I would have cleaned up.

  In 1970s’ conversations I noticed that Dad presented himself as the primordial bottom layer, the massive foundations of the pyramid from which the family tapered to a point, but there was a tremendous feeling of strain there too, not to be acknowledged, as if his mental image was likely to invert at any moment, and then he would feel the whole unstable edifice bearing down on him, driving him into the sand.

  In terms of the day-to-day, in fact weekly, running of the house Dad’s function was ceremonial, and the name of the ceremony was carving the joint.

  At any family meal featuring roast meat, his carving expertise trumped the mere cooking. He claimed rights, royal and retrospective, over the food the moment it entered the dining-room. The holy trinity of implements would be set before his place at the head of the table, fork, knife and steel for sharpening it. He would run the knife against the steel with innocent Sweeney-Todd professionalism, a whetting sound which had the effect on diners of the bell Pavlov rang to set his dogs a-drool.

  The little fanfare of knife-sharpening gestures seemed to have almost the opposite effect on the man who produced them. It relaxed any urgency. This was one of his preferred moments for launching into an anecdote – ‘Have I told you about the time when …?’ or ‘the funny story about …?’ He was confident enough of his raconteur’s gift to announce a story as funny before setting out to make it so.

  He would pause with the honed knife raised above the Mason’s ironstone serving-dish (in the Regency pattern) of turkey, beef or lamb, or even arrested in the eternal moment of carving a slice, while he laid out the background or built up comic tension. Sheila would look anguished and eventually make a muffled plea (‘Bill, please! People are starving – meat now, story later …’) on behalf of group appetite, and then the carving would resume until the next time narrative pulled rank over mere plate-filling.

  While I waited for food, particularly if the story was a familiar one, I would gaze at a strange feature of Mason’s Regency design on the plates, a chimera or portmanteau creature, combining elements of slug and grasshopper in an unattractive new ensemble. Something with a long yellow neck that would scuttle rather than slither or creep, a little Loch Ness Monster skulking at the edges of the Dutch still life. My mixed feelings about family meals were laid down as a queasy extra layer of colouration on that curious transfer.

  It was natural enough that Dad had the skill to disassemble a roast animal, since his father had been a farmer as well as a postmaster. Henry Jones had killed his own livestock and made his own bacon, and in a more direct way than the current Prince of Wales makes biscuits, to be sure. If he delegated those tasks it was because he had more important business to attend to, not because he didn’t know how. Presumably he passed on his carving secrets to his first-born son, but Dad offered no instruction in his turn, either to the first arrival or the after-comers. There was a side of him that wanted us to follow in his footsteps, but the desire to make sure we would never eclipse the big man was also strong.

  Dad’s mother had also had dealings with meat. Dad spoke admiringly of her brawn, not in the metaphorical sense of physical strength but literally the jellied-meat dish she made from a pig’s head.

  In my imagination of the rustic past there are wives who refuse their husbands certain sexual acts or positions, and wives who refuse to make specified items of charcuterie. Brawn would have to be high on the list – the American phrase is ‘head cheese’, translating the French fromage de tête without the recoil you’d expect from a culture that renders offal as ‘variety meats’, as if animal glands and disregarded cuts were putting on some sort of nightmare revue, a butcher’s burlesque show.

  It’s cleaning the head that makes for much of the unpleasantness. Do pigs have the good manners to blow their noses before they’re slaughtered? No they don’t. That job falls to the housewife who feels unable to refuse the marital obligation of brawn.

  My grandmother did her duty, but there’s no evidence she enjoyed it. Perhaps women weren’t expected to, and it was only another thing men wanted.

  Involvement in the processing of meat is a distinctive variety of carnal knowledge. Close contact with meat drags us down into the meat we are. A woman whose father is a pork butcher, who attracts a man’s attention by slinging a bull’s pizzle at him, will not be appealing to his higher nature. Isn’t that the great lesson of Jude the Obscure? Yet Dad’s mother was still the angel in the house as far as he was concerned, however many pigs’ heads she rendered down.

  In marital by-play Dad would sometimes suggest that Sheila make him up a lovely crock of brawn, in the same jovial spirit as he would suggest, every time her birthday loomed, that a brush-and-crumb tray would make the ideal present, fulfilment of any woman’s dreams. She was too defensive about what she perceived as her weaknesses as a housewife to ignore him or banter back. If ever he paid a visit to the village of his birth, staying with his brother, he would rhapsodize about being woken at seven-thirty by the joyful song of Dilys’s hoover, and Sheila smiled grimly.

  Carving was an activity that he carried on with for some time after he had retired from other occupations, but at Christmas 1998 Matthew was deputed to wield the knife. If he made an imperfect job of it he certainly managed better than I could have done, while Dad looked on in neutral wonder.

  If Christmas 1998 was a rather perfunctory festival, with Dad so evidently depleted, then Christmas 1997 had been almost too festive, with a mood of exhilaration that edged into hysteria. Sheila had received her terminal lung cancer diagnosis at the beginning of December and was bizarrely full of energy, busily signing off on her life, tying up loose ends. After lunch she led the three women who were more or less her daughters-in-
law (there had been no marriages) into her bedroom to choose things they might like from wardrobe or jewellery-box. She set a brisk pace towards the grave, and the rest of us were made breathless by trying to keep up – except of course for Dad, who hadn’t been told there was anything wrong.

  Sheila seemed almost disappointed that Matthew’s partner, Angela, didn’t jump for joy at the offer of a sage-green leather coat from the 1960s, though everyone agreed that it would look well on her. Matthew had brought along a digital camera to film the get-together, not so much on his own account as to provide some sort of record for his baby daughter, Ella, who wouldn’t otherwise have memories of her grandmother.

  Sheila’s only worry was about where she would go after death, not a theological matter but a question of storage. Her final destination wasn’t in doubt – she wanted her ashes interred in Llansannan, Dad’s birthplace, next to his ashes when they arrived there. But where was she to go until then? It seemed silly to be planted in terrain where she had no independent sense of rootedness, twiddling her immaterial thumbs while she waited for company.

  To me these seemed abstruse considerations. If you imagined your ashes as sentient, it was hard to think of a place where they were likely to be happy, but if you didn’t, how could it matter where they were stowed? Even so I realized that I was missing the point. Sheila was temperamentally a worrier, and not all worries can be taken away, least of all from those who have put in the hours, but perhaps this one could. ‘I could look after you here, if you like.’

  ‘Here? Where exactly?’

  ‘Upstairs. In the top of a cupboard. Would that be all right, do you think?’

  It turned out that this little piece of symbolic hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind. After she had died, early in the new year, I had no feeling that she had moved to the top of an upstairs cupboard, but in other ways my feelings took an unexpected turn. After the elevated mood that accompanied her last weeks, I had expected a comedown and a grief proportional to my love and liking, but nothing similar happened. Instead there was a stable sense that she had died in character, with nothing left undone or unexpressed, and that I had made a satisfactory job of helping to make that possible. She seemed absent without being missing, and mourning was beside the point. It didn’t match anything I felt.

  Dad had been going steadily downhill while in my care, but I managed not to notice. I suppose friends who hadn’t seen him for a while were in a better position to notice. The obvious comparison, with its kitsch symmetry between early and late life, first and last steps, would be with parents being too close to observe developmental spurts in their children which are very clear to outsiders – but there are other examples of the outsider having a privileged view. Friends who meet you after a gap will notice that you’ve lost a few pounds, and say you look marvellous, or that you’ve gained a few stone, and say you look well.

  I was slow to acknowledge that Dad was fading. He seemed to have been fading for a long time, and there seemed no necessary end to that fading. There’s an element of that old philosophical conundrum, Zeno’s Paradox. Dad had to cover half the distance to death, and then half of that, and half again. Logically he would never get there, and perhaps that’s what people feel about their parents in particular.

  If I was partly in denial, I may have also been hiding from the possibility of exhaustion. By convincing myself I was in for the long term, I could guard against the running out of filial energy, never a very dependable fuel. How long would it be before I was resenting Dad for taking up my time, my hand trembling with suppressed violence as I stirred the thickening agent into his tea?

  Being an attentive son could co-exist with some low-level posing. While my mother was dying I had once needed to take an oxygen tank to University College Hospital for refilling. Such things are heavy, unwieldy, whether empty or full. I couldn’t imagine taking one onto a bus, but it would be awkward lifting one into a taxi. In the end it seemed simpler to walk to the hospital, only about a mile away. It was a rational decision, but I couldn’t help being aware of the figure I cut, reminiscent of the beefy man in a Guinness advert from my childhood, shouldering a girder. Now while ministering to Dad’s needs I got a certain small kick out of parking my fat motorbike outside John Bell & Croyden on Wigmore Street and striding in wearing full leather for a bumper box of incontinence pads. Posing can be a defensible strategy, a way of skating on the surface when you suspect that it won’t be possible to return from lower down.

  Dad was admitted to hospital early in the new year, and died of pneumonia on the 10th of January. It happened while he was being turned by the nurses, with no family member present, though Tim was visiting and I was on my way. A discreet exit, and a common pattern, as if the person dying was tiptoeing away from the body with the minimum of fuss, though of course the assisted movement of being turned in bed may be enough to give the software of shutdown its prompt.

  There’s a famous study that shows that death rates among the terminally ill go up after family festivals (Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Passover), as if people could somehow hang on for a celebratory event and then stop the struggle, choosing in some limited way their moment to die. I say ‘famous study’, but I can’t find it anywhere on the Internet, which is a pretty strong indication that it doesn’t exist. It’s not exactly proving a negative to any elevated standard, but it’s a good rule of thumb: if you can find something on the Net it may or may not be true, but if you can’t find it then it isn’t. So perhaps I made it up or have garbled some quite different piece of research.

  Even so, the first time someone died in my presence I had a sense of intention. This was the artist Mario Dubsky, who was the first person with Aids I was assigned to ‘buddy’ as a volunteer for the Terrence Higgins Trust. The year was 1985, early days for the Trust’s buddying initiative, so that a handful of us did our best to meet the basic needs of sick people spread out across London. In his teens Mario had been diagnosed as manic depressive, and couldn’t be described as an easy person, but then he would have disliked the very idea of easiness, in people or anything else. In theory he was very self-absorbed, but he also had a marked ability to stand outside himself. I remember once, when he was bringing up with great difficulty small quantities of yellow liquid into a bowl, that he looked up at me and said, ‘This must be very hard for you.’

  When he was ill enough to be hospitalized in the Middlesex, the institution that had given him both his diagnoses, thirty years apart, first manic depression and then Aids, I would visit him several times a day. He wasn’t conscious, but I hoped to find him alert sooner or later so that he could make a will. Mario hated his mother, or rather ‘hatred’ was his name for the love he felt (he phoned her on a regular basis to keep her informed of the progress of his loathing). If he died without a will she would inherit as next of kin, in theory the last thing he wanted.

  I had fudged the opportunity of suggesting the making of a will earlier on. Now it was a priority. I understood perfectly well that his dying intestate, leaving his property to someone he claimed to hate, was the outcome that most closely corresponded to his feelings for her, refusal without disconnection. I had to take his stated wishes at face value, just the same. If he was lucid on one of my visits I would contact a solicitor through the Trust and see what came of that.

  Mario died, without returning to consciousness, the first time I spent more than a few minutes by his bedside. The nurses weren’t expecting this, and nurses at the Middlesex were knowledgeable and canny. Certainly he seemed to be recovering from this latest infection. It happened late on a Saturday evening. Flibbertigibbet that I was, I planned t
o go on to a bar for some night life after an hour or two by Mario’s bedside. Of course Mario didn’t ‘know I was there’, but to absorb the event in the immediate aftermath I needed to think that he did. He had many friends, but I was the only person who was at all close to him not to have known him before he was ill. Death was part of the part I played in his life. In my presence his body seemed to shut up shop with great efficiency, as if dying was no more than a knack, something like double-declutching (in the days of gearboxes without synchromesh) or even throwing a frisbee with the proper flick of the wrist that sends it sailing.

  His death seemed expressive of him, and so did Sheila’s, in very different circumstances. It seemed exactly right in terms of her character that she should die at home, not professionally attended, but while waiting for the transfer to a hospice that she claimed to want. It was a trait of her generation amplified by temperament and history to shrink from being any trouble, choosing to tidy herself away among strangers rather than make demands on her sons. What actually happened was what suited her best, dying at home, whether or not she had the boldness to say she wanted it.

  I struggle to put Dad in this category of expressive deaths. If he had been able to script his last moments in his prime, then he would have faded away with a stern smile on his face, benignly absolving, while the three of us told him how sorry we were never to have lived up to the example he set. That impresario-patriarch side of his character had died before he did, and perhaps there were less extrovert traits that had not found much expression in the man we knew.

  I made the funeral arrangements with A. France & Son of Lamb’s Conduit Street, just as I had done when Sheila died. The premises were pleasingly ramshackle, with awkward spaces and varnished partitions. There was none of the plushness of modern death. It was like an old-fashioned provincial doctor’s surgery, except that the patients weren’t bored or anxious. There were framed press cuttings on the wall, and one of them caught my eye while I was waiting to be attended to. As it turned out the firm, or its ancestor W. France of Pall Mall, by appointment to His Majesty, had been the undertakers (‘upholders’ was the word used at the time) who made the arrangements for Nelson in 1805.