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

One of the festivals of Gray’s Inn is the Mulligan Sermon, delivered by a visiting preacher on the same text each year. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ That’s the text. There is a festive lunch afterwards.

It pleases me to think that the originating Mulligan was laying a moderately obvious trap for the good people of Gray’s Inn, in their parish of plenty, when he provided funds by the terms of his will for the preaching of this particular sermon. How long would it take the listeners in their pews, the lunchers in Hall, to realize that he was mocking them for their empty assent to the idea of reaching out to alleviate distress?

Communion in Gray’s Inn Chapel was always a hierarchical event. Benchers and their wives approached to receive the elements in strict order of seniority. Of course there were polite yieldings of precedence, nods and smiles. Nevertheless communicants knelt at the altar rail with their sense of worldly positioning sharpened rather than laid to rest.

James Mulligan, who was the Treasurer of Gray’s Inn in 1896 and provided the endowment for ‘The Mulligan Sermon’, directed that the sermon should concentrate on ‘the interview between Our Lord and the Lawyer, as recorded in the twenty-second chapter of the First Gospel, and at greater length in the tenth chapter of the Third Gospel’. Luke 10:25 does indeed describe ‘a certain lawyer’ standing up and tempting Jesus with trick questions. No lawyer is mentioned in Matthew 22, but the chapter swarms with Pharisees and Sadducees, and perhaps the Sermon really was meant to puncture the institutional smugness it seems to promote.

There was nothing I could do immediately to repay Michael’s family for the way they included me, but a while later I wrote a character sketch of him for the Independent ’s ‘My Hero’ column, and sent a bale of copies of the magazine out to New Zealand. By the standards of public life Michael, dying at twenty-six after years of illness, could lay no claim on an obituary, but I made the most of the opportunity I had to write something loving and to have it printed.

In a small way Michael’s death made a difference to my dealings with my mother. From then on Shee became my regular form of address for her. She seemed to like it, and I didn’t mention the low Channel 4 provenance of the abbreviation. Calling your parents by their first names is a stilted little intimacy, most obviously so when it is a new practice, before it beds down as a reflex, self-consciously undertaken to make clear that you are no longer bound by the contracts of childhood (and who wants to be a pensioner calling a centenarian ‘Mum’?). Calling Sheila ‘Shee’ was a way of keeping alive Michael’s warm teasing, and so of keeping him dimly alive too. One evening, eating out at Joe Allen’s off the Strand, I recognized Sue Johnston, the actress who had played Sheila Grant, and offered her a glass of champagne in recognition of the walk-on part she had played in my halting emotional development.

Dad wouldn’t have enjoyed being ‘Bill’ to his sons, nor was it a style of address that appealed to me. Now that I think about it, I might have enjoyed calling him ‘Lloyd’, the name harking back to remote Denbighshire and a pre-hyphenated innocent, teenager with ukelele.

The conversation about how good I had been to Michael was certainly the low point of our relationship. After that, Dad slowly lost his horror of my sexual identity, though he never got as far as acknowledging a partner of mine. Long before a genuine mild dementia made him forgetful of the lovely Nimat, though she came every day to help him shower, he had perfected a frown of absent puzzlement (who could this be?) to use when not-quite-greeting Keith.

The slow relaxing process may partly have been due to the collapse of two of his arguments. I didn’t seem to be especially held back in terms of career by my sexual preference, though that had only ever been a high-sounding justification for existing prejudice. As for his sorrow on my behalf at my exclusion from the joys of family life, that argument was torpedoed, sent to Davy Jones’s locker without much of a splash, by the arrival of Holly in 1991. My parents saw more of Holly than their other grandchildren, who lived further away. Gray’s Inn Walks were as well suited for children’s play as they had been a generation earlier, even if children were much less a feature of the Inn’s life than they had been, with assured shorthold tenancies being the only option for incomers.

As an Inn child I had resented the ban on dogs in the Walks. Lobbying strongly for a pet, I had overcome the first objection (noise) by finding in my Observer Book of Dogs a breed that didn’t bark but emitted a sort of yodel (the basenji). The basenji came with the bonus of a looped-over tail like a pig’s, only hairy. Then I was brought up short by the impossibility of exercising the proposed animal, which was bred in the Central African bush for the hunt, and possibly not well suited to WC1 anyway, yodelling madly down Chancery Lane in search of eland. As an adult supervising childish play I was grateful for wide stretches of lawn free of fouling, banks that could be rolled down without fear of any contamination worse than grass stains.

It was certainly true that Dad wanted the joys of family life for me, but he also wanted for himself the possibility of a conventional family portrait on the mantlepiece. Our new family grouping looked more standard than it was, and I could hardly blame Dad for setting store by its air of normality. Now he could talk about me in terms that didn’t contest any other information that might be circulating. He could paint a picture that was just as true, however incompatible it seemed with the official version.

Useless to pretend that I didn’t notice, and occasionally exploit, my new status as a man with a baby. I had served some sort of apprenticeship while looking after my nephew, Ebn, when he was little, and had noticed how obliging everyone became at a normally unwelcoming West End gay bar called Brief Encounter when I turned up with a small beaming child strapped to my chest, lamenting that I wasn’t allowed to take him inside, and wondering if anyone would be so kind as to bring me out a Guinness. Child care was certainly good for you, if you were an unspectacular gay man on the street carrying a cheerful baby.

So when Holly was about a year old, and I was queuing to pay at the Brixton Marks & Spencer’s, I wasn’t too shocked to find myself being attentively considered by a man standing by the racks of socks. It seemed unlikely he was having trouble making up his mind between competing products — it’s a dressy man who dithers over socks, and this man was not dressy. It was always possible that he was impersonally pleased to witness solo fathering (still then something of a novelty), seeing it as socially progressive, but that was a risk I was willing to take. I approached him and said, ‘I’m Adam and this is Holly, and we would like your telephone number.’ Written down, this seems as manipulative as any Disney film ever made, but perhaps casting and chemistry improved on the script.

I had also given out my own number. When the man phoned after a day or two, I was much less sure of myself. Sheila had once remarked that she thought she understood the basics of how my world worked, but she didn’t know how I had the nerve to make the first move, something she had never been able to do. It’s true that the first move hasn’t usually been a problem for me. It’s the second move that gives the real trouble. Still, Keith had begun his leisurely transformation from shopper who can’t decide about socks into leading man.

The balance between father and son at this point seemed approximately equal enough to be durable. I was the misguided pervert who had nevertheless been polite enough to reproduce. He was the hectoring brute who had kept his home open to me. As Holly grew, though, Dad seemed to notice that our arrangement, however visually soothing, diverged from the standard pattern. ‘How’s the little family?’ he would always ask, and started to see it as a brave experiment in some way.