Kid Gloves Read online

  Adam Mars-Jones

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  KID GLOVES

  Contents

  Kid Gloves

  Follow Penguin

  For Ebn, Chloe, Holly and Ella

  Guy Holborn was kind enough to send me a transcript of the appeal hearing in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others. Jill Evans gently pointed out that my ignorance of the law was greater even than I knew.

  Parts of this book have appeared in different form in the London Review of Books.

  This may be a memoir of my father but I didn’t set out to write one, more of an account of a particular time, though necessarily having shreds and slabs of the man scattered across it. I informally moved in with my parents while my mother was dying of lung cancer, something she did with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month. After she was dead, in January 1998, it made sense for me to stay in place to look after the survivor.

  My father had been casually described by medical authority as demented, though not officially diagnosed. He was likely to lose his bearings if he had to adjust to a new environment. In fact this was never really something I considered. As an under-employed freelance I had time to spare. Dad had a good pension and his rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn Square was low, thanks to the oligarchic machinery of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. As a retired High Court judge, ex-Treasurer and bencher his status in its rankings was high. There was money to pay for a certain amount of care, so that I could continue to be present from Tuesday to Friday at the school gates in Dulwich Village when my daughter Holly, six, finished her proto-academic day.

  I didn’t feel I had a duty to look after Dad, or if I did I preferred to hide it behind a more libertarian formula. I had a right to look after him. I had first dibs, I could play bagsie. It wasn’t that I was bounden, merely entitled. My brothers might play a part, but Tim (the older) lived in Gloucestershire and was tied to Dad mainly by the bonds of rejection – a phrase I found in Richard Sennett’s book Authority and tried to persuade Tim was a productive way of describing his experience. Matthew (the younger), though based in North London, had a fuller workload than I did. I was free to look after Dad and no-one could override my claim. If I was going to end up doing it anyway, it was sensible to surround myself with the most selfish possible arguments. Then I could never make out I had somehow been railroaded into filial duty.

  Dad’s mental state seemed, to us laymen, closer to withdrawal than any lamentable state of confusion, delusion, vacancy. He could follow conversations without taking an active part, in the time-honoured, head-swivelling fashion of the tennis spectator, happy to watch the interplay with no presumptuous thought of raising a racket himself.

  There had been a time when he would smash back everything that came over the net towards him, but he must have forgotten it. Dad had retired as a judge at seventy-five, and in the five years-plus since then he had done nothing remotely active, unless you count listening to Rachmaninov’s symphonies. He was a half-serious Celtic fundamentalist who would adopt anyone or anything he admired into the ranks of the faithful, and even lugubrious Rachmaninov (described by Stravinsky as a six-and-a-half-foot scowl, and hardly an obvious candidate for recruitment to the ranks of undersized charmers) could be made over as an honorary Welshman.

  Dad wasn’t professionally Welsh, if that means any sort of caricature, but he was serious about his Welshness. His English intonation was standard, perhaps modelled on the radio voices he heard in his childhood, before regionalism was a virtue rather than an obstacle to progress. It’s true that he deviated from the received pronunciation to say ‘sandwich’ as ‘sangwidge’, making it sound like ‘language’, but that was his only deformation of spoken English. When he spoke Welsh, though, there was an extra vitality detectable, almost a roguishness, as if the character that expressed itself in his first language was less thoroughly moralized than the public figure and even the family man.

  Welsh people were better – or maybe they just had better names. Osian Ellis the harpist. Caradoc Evans the writer. William Mathias the composer. Clough Williams-Ellis the architect of Portmeirion. Kyffin Williams the painter (rhymes with Puffin). Every sound was firmly enunciated by Welsh speakers, taken care of at both ends, launched and landed.

  Welsh tongues held on to every part of the word, even in the case of a straightforward place name like Bangor, separating the syllables but somehow leaving the g on both sides of the chasm, rolling the final r. Welsh speakers didn’t positively give it two stressed syllables, they just couldn’t bear to cheat either part of the emphasis that was its birthright. It was as if the natives, unable to defeat the saesneg invader on his own appropriated turf, him with his second homes and his gleaming Range Rovers, became interior emigrants, finding a refuge in the living rock of the language, and clung to every craggy inch.

  Even when speaking English Welsh speakers pronounced words lingeringly. Dad remembered a preacher from his youth whose version of the word ‘phenomenon’ was like a four-gun salute. ‘A cow in a field,’ he said, ‘is not a phe-no-men-on, and nor is the moon in the sky. But when the cow jumps over the moon … that is a phe-no-men-on.’

  In retirement Dad could seem vague because his attention tended to be de-centred. His hearing was very acute, and even his vision (despite alleged macular degeneration) could be disconcertingly sharp, picking out window-cleaners at work on the far side of Gray’s Inn Square when he wasn’t near the window himself.

  He might comment on something on the radio that no-one else was listening to, which could give an impression of disconnection. A couple of years earlier, when he had been mildly feverish with a kidney infection, I had slept in his room for a couple of nights so as to help with the management of the pee bottle in the long watches of the night. Once I was drifting off to sleep, with the World Service dimly on the radio in the background. The programme was about mountain climbing. I was woken by his voice softly calling out to me. ‘Adam?’

  ‘Yes Dad, what is it?’

  ‘Have you ever worn … crampons?’

  If I hadn’t made the connection with what was on the radio, I would have thought he was away with the fairies, not up on the peaks with the alpinists of the airwaves.

  It hadn’t even seemed certain that he’d be able to take in the fact of Mum’s death. His routine the morning after she had died was standard, with a carer arranged by the council helping him along the corridor to the bathroom, but from that moment on the day’s routine would be taken apart. I had the feeling, hearing the splash of water in the bathroom and the chatty coaxing, that he was being prepared for execution.

  I didn’t know what I would do if at some point he asked, ‘Where’s Sheila?’ once he’d been told. Would I have to keep on breaking the news, or would it be better to come up with a story about her being out shopping – away on holiday, even – and hope he wouldn’t ask again?

  In fact, once he was installed in his bedroom chair and the carer had left, he took in the information fully and cleanly. He said, ‘Oh God,’ but then after a deep intake of breath turned the exclamation into the beginning of a hymn, singing, ‘Our help in ages past, our hope in years to come.’ He wept and I held his hand. He never lost sight of the fact of her death, never deluded himself. When, weeks later, I apologized for the fact that he had been given no warning, he seemed surprised, as if it was the most natura
l thing in the world for his wife of fifty years to slip away without a word.

  Sheila had said that she didn’t want him to know what was happening. I had just finished telling her that her dying belonged to her and that she shouldn’t consider anyone else’s wishes, so I could hardly overrule this decision even though I disagreed with it. She said that she could cope with everything except the thought of his life without her, and so we kept him in the dark.

  They had stopped sharing a bed when he came home after his stay in hospital with the kidney infection, and his lack of mobility meant that they wouldn’t run into each other. They would each call out, ‘Good morning, darling,’ when the carer was helping him along the corridor to the bathroom. Sheila did her dying only a few yards away from him, but towards the end their connection had dwindled to this ritual exchange. She had uncoupled the marital train and left her husband behind in a siding.

  Her last public appearance had been on my birthday, in late October. We had gone to the ENO to see Janáček’s From The House Of The Dead. It’s an uplifting piece of work, if you like your uplift very bleak indeed. My taste rather than hers, though she seemed to enjoy the evening. Her illness hadn’t shown itself, still wore the mask of health. She had a cough, but nothing out of the way in a late-October audience. In fact her discreet style of coughing, never disrupting the music, was more like the stylized enactment of symptoms the heroine gives on stage, in an opera of a lusher type, to give formal notice that she is mortally ill. Sheila, on the other hand, had enough energy to walk most of the way home, up St Martin’s Lane and then Monmouth Street to where we intersected with the bus routes running along New Oxford Street in the direction of our homes.

  Dad took in the fact of Sheila’s death cleanly, but didn’t ask for details. He may not have realized that her body was still in the flat at the time. When the undertakers came to collect it later in the day there was a potentially awkward moment. His bedroom (not the marital bedroom but what had once been his study) lay immediately inside the flat’s front door, and it wasn’t usual for his door to be closed. But it wasn’t too artificial a piece of behaviour for me to slip into his room and distract him with chat, keeping the door closed behind me, while the undertaker’s men passed in through the hall and then back out with their load.

  Dad’s days were more or less the same before and after his widowering (if that word exists). After his assisted shower he would be based in his room for the morning, with the radio on. Towards lunchtime he would move to the sitting-room and watch television. There was a convention in force that Dad was strongly interested in the news, a fan of rugby no matter who was playing and involved almost on a cellular level when a Welsh squad was on the pitch, but in practice the gaze he turned on the screen was neutral, if not slightly mystified.

  I could leave Dad on his own for a couple of hours with a clear conscience, long enough to go to the gym or meet a friend for coffee. I’d tell him when I’d be back, and he was never anxious. I don’t know that he actually remembered when I’d be back on such occasions, or even who it was that would be returning. Dad’s egotism was deep, though not cold, and he didn’t need an acute short-term memory to know that he was Sir William Mars-Jones, and therefore the sort of person who would in the natural order of things be looked after. It would never have occurred to him that he might be restricting my life, and this was as it should be. If family history had played out differently and I had been looking after my mother, things would have been much more difficult, although her personality was much more open and tender, in fact for that very reason. She would have worried obsessively that there were other things I would rather be doing, actually should be doing, and would automatically have characterized herself as a burden. Dad could never be a burden, in his own mind, which was a factor in allowing him not to be one. He didn’t obsessively enter other people’s thoughts.

  It’s part of my psychology, not perhaps the deepest part but part of what I work up and perform, to take things in my stride, to make out that nothing slows me down or drags me off course. I tell people that as long as I have ten minutes to myself at some stage, the day feels as if it belongs to me, and saying so makes it more likely. Nevertheless there are hazards to behaving in this way. Like any other policy of believing your own publicity, it can invite the collapse it refuses to consider.

  On the other hand, I gave up remarkably little. There was for instance a piano in the flat, an upright Monington & Weston, lacquered in a Chinese style, which my parents had seen on the pavement outside a music shop and decided they had to have. This was the instrument I had learned on, and Dad had learned to blot out the sounds I made in my earliest, most ham-fisted years. I remember him inspecting the sheet music, when I was about thirteen, and asking politely what the marking ‘pp’ meant. ‘It means very quiet indeed,’ I explained. ‘Fancy that,’ he said neutrally, but I was slow to take the hint. I was having a Debussy phase at the time, but the Cathédrale Engloutie from his first book of Preludes wasn’t going to stay submerged for long while I was on hand to pump it up.

  Now that I was in the full flower of semi-competence, he was tolerant and even appreciative of my playing, though in a rather codified way. He would wait for the end of the first piece and then applaud heartily from wherever he was stationed in the flat, expressing warm approval for a job well done and a hope that the recital was now over. This hint I understood. My taste in music was not his.

  It seemed to me that an electronic keyboard would, with its headphone option, enable me to spare Dad any disturbance. I would also be able to play in the late or early hours if I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know why I didn’t ask Dad if he minded me using his money for this purpose. He wasn’t likely to refuse. Perhaps I wanted to spice up my virtuous persona with a little high-minded embezzling. What sort of person abuses his power of attorney to steal from his helpless father? I bought an ex-demonstration Clavinova from Chappell’s, its price reduced by a third but still amounting to a couple of thousand pounds. It enormously increased my sense of psychological space. It was like having an extra room built onto the flat, where nobody went but me.

  I also had access to the organ in Gray’s Inn Chapel, by triple permission of Dean, Preacher and Organist. The organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, had actively encouraged me, giving me my only actual piece of advice on how to manage the instrument, though it sounded like something from an old manual of etiquette for lady travellers. Keep your knees together, and don’t look down.

  My sleeping quarters were upstairs in a converted attic. There were small skylights of clouded glass but no windows, and no plumbing. The ceilings were a lot lower than the ones downstairs, and sometimes I hit my head on the lintels despite my long familiarity with the spaces. The flat was built after the war to replace what had been bombed, approximating to the Georgian pattern but making no claim to elegance. My parents had been the first tenants, moving in at about the time I was born, and they had converted the flat ahead of time by installing a spiral staircase to the attic, which would more normally be accessed from a trap door above the shared landing outside the front door.

  My love life wasn’t hampered by my new role as carer. Dad knew my partner, Keith, well enough, though he had never felt it necessary to remember the name. It certainly wasn’t hard to have Keith over for a meal on a Saturday, for instance, and then to say, ‘Dad, Keith’s going home now,’ while in fact running him a bath.

  Many of Dad’s old friends lived nearby. Emlyn Hooson lived across the landing, Henrietta Wilson was next door at number 5, the formidable Edith Wellwood lived at number 1 (a building dating from 1695 that had dodged the bom
bs responsible for so much damage to the Inn). The Lewises, Esyr and Elizabeth, lived in South Square a hundred yards or so away. Anything beyond that, the distant purlieus of Raymond and Verulam Buildings, qualified in Edith’s eyes as the ‘suburbs’ of Gray’s Inn, though she had the demanding and unstable perspective of the socialist snob, embarrassed that the address given on her birth certificate was Caledonian Road and painfully conscious of being the poorest resident. When she had first seen the Gray’s Inn in the 1930s, looking down into its gardens from the top deck of a bus, she had wondered what this place could possibly be. A posh lunatic asylum seemed to be the likeliest answer, and now she was an inmate of it.

  Gray’s Inn was a little legal parish, though increasingly a plutocratic monoculture, much less diverse than it had been in my childhood, when such bohemians as architects and accountants might have their homes there. Earlier in the twentieth century it accommodated without apparent effort an even more wayward, literary type of inhabitant, as exemplified by Edward Marsh and Maurice Baring. Successive Rent Acts have weakened the position of residents, so that only the longest-established can feel themselves secure. Newcomers can hope for nothing better than an assured shorthold tenancy, and must accept that widows have no right to remain. Even in the late 1990s, Gray’s Inn was mainly deserted at weekends and outside legal term. The flats are mainly on the top floors of the buildings (the third), with offices on the lower levels. Outside the working week most of those upper windows were dark.

  It felt entirely natural to invite Dad’s friends to dinner since they were my friends too. And not just dinner: a couple of times I took on the duty, which had been part of my mother’s routine, of giving ‘the gentlemen’ breakfast on a Sunday. The gentlemen in question were the Preacher of the Inn, the Revd Roger Holloway, and the Dean of Chapel, Master (Tony) Butcher. I apologize for a form of words which makes him sound like a card from a Happy Families pack, but this is correct usage within the Inn when referring to benchers.