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

The play was Terence’s Eunuchus . I imagine female roles were played by girls borrowed from other schools, Westminster being single-sex then. However backward in such matters, I feel sure I would have noticed if the women were boys cross-dressed.

The plot isn’t what anyone, even Frankie Howerd, could call sophisticated. A young man obsessed with a beautiful woman poses as a eunuch so that he can be taken on as part of her domestic staff, presenting no danger because he lacks the wherewithal to take advantage of her. Once alone with his mistress (though offstage) he brandishes the wherewithal and takes advantage. Coming onstage after the act, he’s exhilarated and grins all over his face. Good heavens , I thought — it’s supposed to be fun! This had not been mentioned in the sex talk given by the headmaster of the Under School, Mr Kelly, whose admirably brisk opening words had been ‘The penis is a splendid dual-purpose instrument.’ I recoiled from such frankness. As far as I was concerned, one purpose was more than enough.

I got my sex education where I could. The later novels of Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t normally qualify for instructive status in this area, being so droll and sardonic, but my need for education was great. I read his Breakfast of Champions soon after it came out (which was in 1973, so I was nineteen or so), and was intrigued by one of the crude drawings, the author’s own work, which illustrated an ‘asshole’ — the body part rather than the term of abuse. The drawing was essentially of an asterisk. I asked myself if the anus could possibly look like that, and the answer was that I had no idea. I knew my digestive system ended at a certain point, and I was willing to accept as a technicality of physical life that I possessed an anus, or I would have exploded long ago. But I had no visual information on the subject. Did it seem likely that my anus resembled a piece of punctuation? No it didn’t, but I had no counter-theory with which to contest it.

I’m reminded of the very touching moment in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (perhaps it goes back to Stanislaw Lem’s source novel) when the hero is reunited with his dead wife, Hari, on a space station, thanks to the intervention of the sentient planet below him. They start foreplay, and he tries to take her dress off, going round the back to unfasten it. There’s no zip. There are no buttons. The dress is impossible to take off, just as it was impossible to put on. This new Hari has been made directly out of his memories, and though he remembered the dress he didn’t have a specific memory of the back of the dress and how it fastened. He has to get some scissors to help with the task of undressing her. Tenderly he vandalizes the dress he remembered only as a mystical whole.

At the age of around twenty I lived in a thinly imagined replica of my own body, and the orifice Dad took for granted as the central focus of homosexual desire was like the zip on Hari’s dress. It wasn’t on my map. I had to crouch and use a mirror to inform myself of the accuracy of Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing, showing a little more diligence than Dad did when checking the underside of his Audi estate for explosive devices. It did look rather like an asterisk! I couldn’t have been more surprised if the folds of this unimagined tissue had formed an ampersand or a treble clef.

If Dad ever blamed Mum for the way I had turned out, he was sensible enough to do it out of my hearing. The surprising thing was how little changed. My role as family peacemaker and lightning-rod was intact. It hadn’t been displaced by revelation of my apostasy, and there were still altogether too many late-night conversations started by Dad with the formal opening, ‘I’m very worried about Tim / Matthew …’ Where is he going, what is he doing with his life?

It would fall to me to set out the case for the defence, in front of a presiding judge who would often simply set aside the evidence and give me his ruling on the facts of the case. We were all failing to live up to Dad’s expectations, and logically my own falling short should have secured me some sort of exemption from generational-spokesman duties. I wouldn’t have minded a sick note that excused me from going in to bat for the brotherhood, but I was returning to Gray’s Inn from Cambridge on a regular basis, and the others were based elsewhere, so perhaps it was partly how I paid the rent.

My Cambridge rhythms with Mike altered after Christmas, though not (I don’t think) because of the stresses and strains of his stalking-horse duties. He was starting to work. The Mike Larson I had known in his first term had hardly attended a lecture, spending most of the day with me in coffee shops or cinemas. He claimed that this was his real Cambridge education, and though I take flattery well it may also be that he thought the architecture faculty a little underpowered, compared with what he was used to. Now he buckled down, and mighty were the charrettes. Architecture even gave him an indirect way of describing our relationship. This was the ‘creative use of interstitial space’. The phrase made sense, since he was just passing through Cambridge on his way to a life and a career, though it didn’t make my heart leap.

The subject Mike chose for his dissertation was ‘James Stirling and the Art of Rudeness’. It anatomised Stirling’s famous V-shaped History Faculty building, which Mike saw as a V-sign offered to the university and its traditions. He asked me to help him with spelling and grammar, which I did very happily. It didn’t occur to me that he might be dyslexic, though the way he ran at language was all his own. In those days dyslexia was an all-or-nothing category, and Mike could clearly make his way in the world of the written, though there was still a certain amount that I could tidy up.

By June his money had come through at last. He paid his debts, and even took me and Mum out to dinner and a show, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the Mermaid Theatre.

He had a farewell gift for me too, an inscribed hardback of John Fowles’s Daniel Martin . The inscription compared me to Henry James’s Maria Gostrey and speculated that one day I might try a novel about an Englishman and an American. I have to admit that I didn’t get very far with Daniel Martin . Come to that, I’ve never read The Ambassadors , though I know that Maria Gostrey introduces Lambert Strether to the Louvre and the Comédie Française and is generally a civilizing force.

Another memento he left with me was an item of clothing, which I had always liked on him, a cotton sweater of multicoloured stripes. Just as British body language can seem unmasculine to the American eye, particularly the habit of sitting with the legs crossed and the knees close together, closing up the crotch (a posture known in some US circles as ‘gin and tonic’), so this item of clothing stood out as rather too-too in a society not yet indoctrinated with the dress code known as ‘preppy’. Perhaps Mike left it with me because it had fallen short of the desired effect when he had worn it in Cambridge. A raised eyebrow can do a lot of damage.

In one of our first conversations post-Christmas I had let slip Dad’s verdict on him — the passing comment ( obiter dictum is the technical term, when a judge’s casual remarks, not binding in law, are being referred to) about his being ‘small beer’. Let slip gives the wrong impression. I passed on the information without hesitation, confident that Mike would find Dad’s blindness as comical as I did. It never occurred to me that this well-defended man might want to be approved of, even by people who didn’t matter to him in any real way. He was mortified, and in all the years of intermittent contact since then the phrase has never been properly exorcised.