Kid Gloves (17 page)

Dad was very attuned, in the manner of his
generation, to the oldest son, who was actively nicknamed ‘son and heir'. By way of compensation
I was dubbed ‘pride and joy', which left only ‘Christmas angel' for Matthew, which didn't seem
very precise (despite his decorativeness) since he was born in mid-November.

I remember Dad once commenting with troubled
admiration about Tim's physical beauties. Troubled because Tim, twenty at this point, wasn't
particularly biddable, far from keen to walk in the paths laid out for him. ‘Tim is very manly,'
he said, ‘very strong, with that heavy growth of beard – he should shave twice a day – and
plenty of hair on his chest already.' At some point in this reverie he must have become aware
that these were not ideal terms in which to discuss Tim in front of his younger brother, who at
eighteen was plump and poorly
groomed. He cast around for a countervailing
compliment. ‘And you …' he said at last, ‘… you have good posture.'

After his retirement, or at least after his
Rachmaninov phase, Dad did less and less. There's a word that seems to describe the state
towards which he gravitated: inanition. It's a word that might appear on a Victorian death
certificate, and it has a technical meaning, to do with starvation. But it also conveys the slow
emptying-out process of Dad's retirement, the physical and mental consequences of doing nothing.
It wasn't that he turned his face to the wall. He turned his face to people when they spoke, he
turned his face to the television, and still I had the sense that he was dying in small
instalments, leaving us with no more than a digesting ghost to attend to.

When Sheila had upbraided him in retirement for
laziness, he pulled together his intellect just long enough to defend his neglect of it: lazy
people have something to do, and do nothing. Idle people have nothing to do, and are doing it.
He was idle and not lazy. Case closed.

Even after Sheila's death he could play the part,
from Holly's point of view, of the benign grandfather in a TV spot for heritage toffee – except
that he might suddenly denounce her for eating the remnants of his brioche, though he had given
gracious permission only minutes before.

Our three generations could watch
The
Simpsons
together very harmoniously. I particularly remember the episode in which John
Waters guest-starred as a ‘collectibles' dealer new in Springfield, who admires Marge's style,
assuming it's knowingly camp. He gains an ascendancy over Bart, to the point where Homer feels
the need to toughen him up with exposure to blue-collar men and manly pursuits. Their first stop
is the Springfield steel works, but it turns out all the employees there are gay. A workman
pushing a vat of molten metal alerts his colleagues to the danger by trilling, ‘Hot stuff coming
through!'
Dry ice starts pumping out when the working day ends so that
disco dancing, on suspended breeze blocks raked by searchlights, can begin without loss of time.
In the next scene Moe the sleazy bartender lists the traditionally gay professions: ‘Where you
bin, Homer? The entire steel industry is gay – yeah, aerospace too, the railroads.' And you know
what else? Broadway.

We laughed tri-generationally at the climactic
scene, in which Waters's character saves the Simpson party from reindeer attack by skilful
deployment of a remote-controlled Santa robot.

There was one last joke tucked away in the
credits, an announcement that the episode was dedicated to the steel workers of America, with
the slogan
Keep Reaching For That Rainbow!
It was a wonderfully unifying half-hour,
even if I couldn't turn to Dad and make a comment about the subversive potential of popular
entertainment, so rarely exploited, any more than I could have that particular discussion with
Holly. Perhaps a sign of my decline rather than his, if I was so far gone in punditry that I now
needed an audience for the most routine aperçu.

How much Dad took in of what was in front of him,
or how little, became clear one Monday night. I was with Keith in the Highbury flat, leaving
Matthew to look after Dad in Gray's Inn. We were watching a Channel 4 documentary on the 1976
Obscene Publications Squad trials, and the judge in the case was getting a certain amount of
stick for deficiencies in his running of the case that led in the end to Wallace Virgo's
conviction being overturned.

I took advantage of an advertising break to phone
Matthew, worried that he and Dad might also be watching television. They were. Not Channel 4?
Channel 4.

Did Dad realize that he was the unnamed judge
being referred to? He didn't, no. He gave every sign of being fascinated by the programme, but
fell short of making the personal connection.

I felt relief when perhaps
distress should have been the dominant emotion. I certainly didn't want Dad to be aware that his
past professional performance was being criticized, but it would have been better for him to be
tuned to another channel rather than watching Channel 4 with empty attention, impervious,
looking at his life from outside it.

My brothers and I didn't find it hard to believe
that Dad might have blundered, particularly in a case combining two things about which he had
such strong feelings, pornography and police corruption. It seemed obvious to us that he was
instinctively an advocate, a judge only by hard work and scruple. It came naturally to him to
shape an argument theatrically, not to hold the balance between opposing forces. We imagined him
failing to stress the importance of reasonable doubt, when it came to the guilt of a police
commander betraying the public trust.

In this particular case, the case of
R. v.
Virgo
, we were wrong, at least according to Matthew's godfather Munro Davies, not the
least of Dad's devils. Munro can remember even after the lapse of half a century how many days a
particular case lasted. The successful appeal against Virgo's conviction challenged the
admissibility of a diary entry. Dad had accepted it as evidence, and now he was being overruled.
Nowadays the admissibility of such material is uncontroversial, and in any case there was no
damage done by admitting the diary entry in
R. v. Virgo
, since it was the only direct
evidence of guilt. Without it there was no case. Mars-Jones J had exercised the only option that
could have put Virgo behind bars.

Even before Dad's mental presence dwindled to
this point, I had come to rely on help, both what was supplied by the council (or the agency
subcontracted by it) and by private providers. It might happen that a carer sent by the council
on a morning shift was so clearly efficient and likeable that I would
hire
him or her to work at other times. The agency's name that sticks with me is Care Alternatives,
with its faint double meaning (alternatives to care, as opposed to options for caring), though
there was a change of contracts halfway through the year. First-time callers, particularly at
weekends, had to be told the location of Gray's Inn Square in great detail or they were likely
to overshoot in strange directions.

One of the morning reliables was Nimat, a
Sudanese woman of great beauty. She was tall and poised. The starkness of her haircut emphasized
the roundness of her head. She was perhaps in her forties, with a son of about ten, whose father
she had left behind with some relief in Sudan. Since then she had found another relationship, in
London, but the man in question had been run over and killed. There was a sadness about her, a
sadness that didn't take away from her vitality but was part of it. This vibrant sorrowing may
have preceded the events that gave it depth.

When I heard the lift mechanism start its
whirring at about eight o'clock, I would go in to Dad and say, ‘It's our lovely Nimat.' Usually
he said, ‘Who?' When she came into his room she lowered her head to be near his as she explained
who she was and why she had come. Her voice was both husky and cooing. Then he would say, ‘Don't
you have wonderful teeth!', which would make her smile even more of a world-historical
event.

He would follow Nimat down the corridor to the
bathroom without her needing to help him with his Zimmer frame. She simply drew him along in the
wake of her magnificence.

After his shower he would have a neutral
cleanness. Historically the smells he had borne were Vitalis (hair oil), Old Spice (aftershave)
and Badedas (Swedish horse-chestnut-based bath essence). A triple chime of naffness, a
three-bullet-point suicide note in the language of male grooming. I don't remember any
advertisements for Vitalis, but perhaps they simply said that the product
would make your hair look like oiled metal, and as a bonus that its smell would remind your
children of the oil they applied to their Triang-Hornby 00 gauge electric toy trains. Old Spice
implied a sort of daft sportiness with its footage of surfing and the crypto-fascist pulsations
of
Carmina Burana
. It was Badedas (though the advertising copy stylishly omitted the
capital) that was most obviously a strong solution of wish-fulfilment, as much an extract of the
male menopause as of the Swedish horse-chestnut.

The campaigns for the product were classy,
tending to appear in Sunday colour supplements. The tagline was ‘Things happen after a badedas
bath'. What things? Well, a man in black tie might step out of a sports car to the un-surprise
of a blonde wrapped only in a towel, surveying from a bathroom window the suavity of her
visitor.

This was in the days before women learned to
respond to crass sexual implications in advertising, if they ever really have. It seemed obvious
that the target market wasn't female, and it was the male reader who was being offered a vision
of steamy Scandinavian nakedness, whether he owned a sports car or not. Women seeing the advert
and identifying with the woman in the towel would be likely to respond with social panic rather
than arousal, thinking
Oh GOD! I thought he said seven-thirty!

At one point in the Aids years (the phrase has
some shorthand value, though they're hardly over) I slipped into a bath behind a friend and held
him tight. He was recovering from shingles, and found that pressure on his skin could relieve
the agonizing twinges he was experiencing, which are a sign of improvement, of nerve cells
regenerating, but feel like anything but. Hugh hadn't yet had his diagnosis of Aids, and was
willing to embrace his shingles as tightly as I was embracing him, as long as he wasn't in the
firing line for anything worse. The
bath was a mass of foam produced by
bubble bath, and at some stage I recognized the bubble bath as Badedas.

The intimate distress and comfort of the
experience was so intense that it stripped all the Dadly associations from the smell of Badedas,
overwriting them with tenderness and sorrow. Now both Dad and Hugh are dead, with Hugh dead long
before Dad, but it is Hugh who is summoned back in welcomed pain by the smell of those Swedish
horse-chestnuts. All the naffness has melted away, and my heart and my nostrils open up.

I didn't like to delay Dad's carers with chat
when they had other places to go, but I learned a certain amount about Nimat. She lived on Royal
College Street in Camden. She had been brought up as a Christian. She had worked in Africa as an
air hostess (I think she used that phrase, rather than ‘cabin crew'), though I imagine her
height was a disadvantage in those cramped spaces. Her great pleasure on stopovers was to put on
her hottest hotpants and make her way to the bar of the hotel where she was staying. There she
would order a cocktail and make it last, pacing herself and letting the ice-cubes melt at their
leisure. Everyone would know she wasn't a renegade Muslim displaying herself and drinking poison
but simply a Christian enjoying legitimate privileges, relaxing in her own way, though her
presence in the bar is unlikely to have been sedative.

Another morning helper was Damon, a slight,
softly spoken man in his early twenties. He would shuffle off his boots the moment he entered
the flat, as if he had spent time in Japan. In the corridor to the bathroom he had no wafting
powers to compare with Nimat's, but he spoke gently to Dad and persuaded him to co-operate
pretty well. Most days he seemed not to have another job to go to, and I would happily squeeze
oranges for him and brew coffee of quality.

One morning over the coffee and orange juice
Damon asked
me if I had noticed his speech impediment. It was a strange
thing to ask, because yes, I had in fact noticed that he had a speech impediment, but only on
the very day he had asked the question. Before then there had been no detectable lack of
fluency.

He explained that on previous days he had been
choosing his words carefully to avoid problem consonants, vigilantly manning the points (in
effect) so as to send his sentences along stretches of track where there was nothing blocking
the line. From today, though, he was putting into practice the principles of a radical
speech-therapy method.

It seemed odd that the immediate effect of speech
therapy was to impair the fluency of speech, but it didn't seem helpful to point this out. I
hoped it would work for him.

Over the next week or two the radical approach to
speech therapy acquired a name – this was The McGuire Programme. Part of the technique seemed to
be a matter of mastering the art of ‘costal breathing' and part of it was clearly psychological.
The system sounded so American that I was surprised to learn that the David McGuire who devised
it was a Briton, a semi-professional tennis player who had drawn on his knowledge of sport for
both aspects of the programme, the physical and psychological.

Damon was set targets for some exercises, such as
‘VS with walk-away'. VS is Voluntary Stuttering, and Voluntary Stuttering with walk-away meant
that he should approach a stranger and initiate a conversation, but exaggerate his stuttering to
the point where the other person, yes, walked away. He was supposed to achieve this, say, five
times between one group meeting and the next. There was also the electronic equivalent, VS with
hang-up I suppose, in which he would act out a similar level of blocked speech on the phone
until the stranger on the other end of the line hung up. I remember Damon saying
that to save money he would call free helplines. He didn't need to have a
question prepared for the relevant product or service because he wouldn't be getting beyond the
first syllable anyway.