I provide this context to explain my surly response to an endearment, and Dad’s surprising reaction to it. Instead of retreating from the territory of intimacy and tenderness where he had spent so little time, even (to all appearance) in his dealings with Sheila, Dad advanced further into it, replying, ‘I was just admiring the lovely curve of your shoulder.’ It has to be said that reflexive charm was part of his armoury, but this didn’t seem an armoured moment.
If I hadn’t appointed myself caregiver, I would have discounted this aspect of Dad’s character altogether, whether by rights it should be called latent or suppressed. I would have thought such a dreamy response not just uncharacteristic but actively alien to him.
It seemed possible that the ‘Dad’ I had experienced in my teens and his maturity, a man both driven and driving, had been a long charade, both professional and familial, undertaken between the dreaminess of his own childhood and the undefended state to which he was returning. This was a mask I knew better than the face beneath, which perhaps I wasn’t trusted to see.
Dad in his prime didn’t want to have needs, preferring to think of himself as the fount of prosperity at which all were nourished. The least endearing aspect of this character trait was the desire to show someone that a present offered to him was in point of fact worthless, whatever trouble had been taken over it. When I was sixteen I bought him a decanter from Heal’s for his birthday, and stood there mortified while he explained that unfortunately the cork stopper would absorb off odours, rendering it for all practical purposes unusable. How would I know? I was a perfect innocent in wine, having at that stage not drunk even a thimbleful.
In fact my brothers and I had been promised a hundred pounds on our twenty-first birthdays if we abstained till then (and the same sum if we kept away from cigarettes). None of us led virtuous lives for long enough to claim his bounty, though if the threshold had been eighteen I would have cleaned up.
In 1970s’ conversations I noticed that Dad presented himself as the primordial bottom layer, the massive foundations of the pyramid from which the family tapered to a point, but there was a tremendous feeling of strain there too, not to be acknowledged, as if his mental image was likely to invert at any moment, and then he would feel the whole unstable edifice bearing down on him, driving him into the sand.
In terms of the day-to-day, in fact weekly, running of the house Dad’s function was ceremonial, and the name of the ceremony was carving the joint.
At any family meal featuring roast meat, his carving expertise trumped the mere cooking. He claimed rights, royal and retrospective, over the food the moment it entered the dining-room. The holy trinity of implements would be set before his place at the head of the table, fork, knife and steel for sharpening it. He would run the knife against the steel with innocent Sweeney-Todd professionalism, a whetting sound which had the effect on diners of the bell Pavlov rang to set his dogs a-drool.
The little fanfare of knife-sharpening gestures seemed to have almost the opposite effect on the man who produced them. It relaxed any urgency. This was one of his preferred moments for launching into an anecdote — ‘Have I told you about the time when …?’ or ‘the funny story about …?’ He was confident enough of his raconteur’s gift to announce a story as funny before setting out to make it so.
He would pause with the honed knife raised above the Mason’s ironstone serving-dish (in the Regency pattern) of turkey, beef or lamb, or even arrested in the eternal moment of carving a slice, while he laid out the background or built up comic tension. Sheila would look anguished and eventually make a muffled plea (‘Bill, please! People are starving — meat now, story later …’) on behalf of group appetite, and then the carving would resume until the next time narrative pulled rank over mere plate-filling.
While I waited for food, particularly if the story was a familiar one, I would gaze at a strange feature of Mason’s Regency design on the plates, a chimera or portmanteau creature, combining elements of slug and grasshopper in an unattractive new ensemble. Something with a long yellow neck that would scuttle rather than slither or creep, a little Loch Ness Monster skulking at the edges of the Dutch still life. My mixed feelings about family meals were laid down as a queasy extra layer of colouration on that curious transfer.
It was natural enough that Dad had the skill to disassemble a roast animal, since his father had been a farmer as well as a postmaster. Henry Jones had killed his own livestock and made his own bacon, and in a more direct way than the current Prince of Wales makes biscuits, to be sure. If he delegated those tasks it was because he had more important business to attend to, not because he didn’t know how. Presumably he passed on his carving secrets to his first-born son, but Dad offered no instruction in his turn, either to the first arrival or the after-comers. There was a side of him that wanted us to follow in his footsteps, but the desire to make sure we would never eclipse the big man was also strong.
Dad’s mother had also had dealings with meat. Dad spoke admiringly of her brawn, not in the metaphorical sense of physical strength but literally the jellied-meat dish she made from a pig’s head.
In my imagination of the rustic past there are wives who refuse their husbands certain sexual acts or positions, and wives who refuse to make specified items of charcuterie. Brawn would have to be high on the list — the American phrase is ‘head cheese’, translating the French fromage de tête without the recoil you’d expect from a culture that renders offal as ‘variety meats’, as if animal glands and disregarded cuts were putting on some sort of nightmare revue, a butcher’s burlesque show.
It’s cleaning the head that makes for much of the unpleasantness. Do pigs have the good manners to blow their noses before they’re slaughtered? No they don’t. That job falls to the housewife who feels unable to refuse the marital obligation of brawn.
My grandmother did her duty, but there’s no evidence she enjoyed it. Perhaps women weren’t expected to, and it was only another thing men wanted.
Involvement in the processing of meat is a distinctive variety of carnal knowledge. Close contact with meat drags us down into the meat we are. A woman whose father is a pork butcher, who attracts a man’s attention by slinging a bull’s pizzle at him, will not be appealing to his higher nature. Isn’t that the great lesson of Jude the Obscure? Yet Dad’s mother was still the angel in the house as far as he was concerned, however many pigs’ heads she rendered down.
In marital by-play Dad would sometimes suggest that Sheila make him up a lovely crock of brawn, in the same jovial spirit as he would suggest, every time her birthday loomed, that a brush-and-crumb tray would make the ideal present, fulfilment of any woman’s dreams. She was too defensive about what she perceived as her weaknesses as a housewife to ignore him or banter back. If ever he paid a visit to the village of his birth, staying with his brother, he would rhapsodize about being woken at seven-thirty by the joyful song of Dilys’s hoover, and Sheila smiled grimly.
Carving was an activity that he carried on with for some time after he had retired from other occupations, but at Christmas 1998 Matthew was deputed to wield the knife. If he made an imperfect job of it he certainly managed better than I could have done, while Dad looked on in neutral wonder.
If Christmas 1998 was a rather perfunctory festival, with Dad so evidently depleted, then Christmas 1997 had been almost too festive, with a mood of exhilaration that edged into hysteria. Sheila had received her terminal lung cancer diagnosis at the beginning of December and was bizarrely full of energy, busily signing off on her life, tying up loose ends. After lunch she led the three women who were more or less her daughters-in-law (there had been no marriages) into her bedroom to choose things they might like from wardrobe or jewellery-box. She set a brisk pace towards the grave, and the rest of us were made breathless by trying to keep up — except of course for Dad, who hadn’t been told there was anything wrong.