Adam Mars-Jones - Kid Gloves - A Voyage Round My Father

Our relationship meant different things to us, which usually means that the relationship doesn’t actually exist. If two people have divergent ideas about the part they play in each other’s lives then they are in two asymmetrical relationships rather than a single one. They overlap in a space they don’t share. The axioms of an emotional logic are not held in common.

There was plenty of goodwill involved, though, and I hope Mike didn’t regard the responsibility of presenting himself to the family as my partner to be oppressive. There was a Christmas meal planned by his Cambridge housemates, but perhaps he enjoyed having made other connections and being in demand. They might be insular but he was not.

I was helping him out financially, too, till he could get money matters arranged, since at that time it wasn’t easy for non-citizens to set up bank accounts. Obviously he was good for his debts, but he may have felt that he was in some way defraying the imaginary interest on my little loans by accepting the role of designated boyfriend in the family drama. A walk-on who might well be booed, but with luck only after he had left the stage. Mike would be back in Cambridge by the time Dad read the small print in the programme (‘and introducing Mike Larson as the surprise love interest …’).

This was the man in my corner when I entered the ring to slug it out with Dad. Positive images and role models, though, didn’t really do the trick in his case. When liberal commentators set out to break the link between homosexuality and degradation the laugh was on them, really. The link was too strong in his mind, not to be casually broken. When Penelope Gilliatt, John Schlesinger and Peter Finch (with help from Glenda Jackson, Murray Head and let’s not forget Bessie Love as the answering service lady) got together to make Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1971, showing how ordinary, not to mention unthreatening and pitiable, the life of a gay doctor in London really was — and this was years after Ronald Waterhouse had tried to tell Dad that he had a bee in his bonnet on precisely this subject — well, really they might just as well not have bothered. Dad missed the point without even trying. He was shocked by the film (as he told me while we were driving round the equestrian statue by Holborn Viaduct) and its sordid load of prejudice. The nastiness he detected lay in the film’s suggestion that a Jewish doctor could be a homosexual. This was plain anti-Semitism, as he saw it, possibly also a libel on the standing of the medical profession, though it was the religious slur that preoccupied him.

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.