The details of that evening are a blur, not just because it was a long time ago but because it was a blur at the time. I was in shock. Dad was in shock, of course, but I was in shock too, from having administered one and also from the fact of having kept my nerve. Samson had pulled down the temple and the masonry had bounced off him as if it was no more than blocks of expanded polystyrene. Patriarchal authority, as it turned out, was balsawood under the mahogany veneer. It wouldn’t crush me just yet.
That first night Dad was stricken but not rejecting. When we finally went to bed he said everything would be all right. There was no hug but then he wasn’t a hugger. There was no sense of a hug withheld. His wish of ‘Happy New Year’, returning mine, was subdued but seemed sincere, bearing no trace of satirical aggression, no suggestion that I’d already blighted the twelvemonth to come.
Dad didn’t much go in for New Year’s resolutions, left to himself. If pressed on such occasions, he would say his resolution was to drink more champagne. Franker exchanges with his sons were not something he wished for as such.
I was buffeted by strong currents of vertigo and anticlimax. Tim had described the confrontation in the making as me ‘holding a sex pistol to Dad’s head’ (punk rock had detonated only recently) but I had pulled the trigger and so far there were no casualties. I had made an existential leap, but maybe it was a leap into the void à la Gloucester in King Lear, and over a cliff-edge that existed only in my head. When at last I could pull air back into my flattened lungs, I was all too obviously the same person as I had been before. Less was changed than fear had promised.
Everything would be all right. During the night Dad had second thoughts about this. Under the first impact of the news his concern had been to reassure me, but overnight he had looked at things from other points of view and revised his conclusions.
He brought me tea, an indication in itself that he had slept badly, or at least woken early. He had his pipe between his teeth, an ex-smoker’s stratagem to ward off oral craving. According to Mum he ground his teeth in his sleep, and if he was going to be grinding them during the day it made sense to erode a replaceable object rather than the fretting mechanism itself. In the same way it’s sensible to introduce a pencil between the jaws of an epileptic in spasm. It may be that at this point Dad was torn between the dangers of speaking his mind and the pain of biting his tongue. Overnight he had come up with a number of arguments to prove me wrong. He would argue every step of the way, he would (as lawyers say) ‘put it to me’ that I was mistaken about what I thought I was and wanted.
In normal life Dad didn’t do self-catering. He would indicate his needs by saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea, if you’re making one,’ which sometimes made me seethe with its omission of the word ‘please’ — why had I been encouraged to take manners so seriously as a child when it turned out they were optional? Now he was playing an unaccustomed role by bringing me tea, though he sent a signal, by leaving the bag in the mug, that there were limits to mollycoddling.
As a general thing, the mollycoddling went the other way. Some household tasks would be evenly divided, true. He would attend to the kitchen range and I would clean out the grate and lay a new fire in the sitting-room. But if food was going to pass Dad’s lips it would be me preparing it. At some stage I hoped that Dad would see the irony of warning me against unmasculine behaviour while expecting me to cook and serve his meals. He liked to be waited on, even in small matters like the clicking of tiny saccharine pellets from a dispenser into his tea.
He could muster a reasonable family meal out of tins in an emergency. The menu would start with Baxter’s Royal Game soup, a splendid brown concoction, and move on to a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, actually baked in the shallow circular tin with its appealing, steeply sloped sides, a regular solid easy to describe: a truncated cone, with the missing apex pointing downward. Concentric grooves pressed in the lid left marks on the pale wet surface of the pastry-to-be. Dad’s only creative touch was to anoint the surface with milk, before putting it in the oven, to enhance the crust. Frozen peas to round off the main course, tinned fruit to follow.
When Mum was put out of action by an accident in 1973, Dad bought a Penguin book by Desmond Briggs called Entertaining Single-Handed and briefly raised his game in the kitchen. One simple but spectacular pud was Briggs’s Hot Jamaican Fruit Salad, made with tinned fruit (pears a particular success) and fresh banana further sweetened with brown sugar, then splashed with rum. How did people’s teeth not explode at the impact of so much sugar? Perhaps they did, and dentists rubbed their hands in glee. Briggs suggested putting the dish in a hot oven when you served the main course, so that the potent Caribbean fumes gradually seduced your guests’ senses.
Since that time, Dad had reverted to type. He had relapsed into the proper helplessness. Desmond Briggs gathered dust on the shelf, and his knowledge of kitchen geography reverted to a masculine blank.
In any case kitchen tasks performed during our sexuality summit would drain energy required for the preparation of his case. This was a judge after all, and the case was only closed when he said so. Our few days together turned into a courtroom drama rather than a soap opera, a long cross-examination broken by domestic routines. An actual day in court would be interrupted by lunch, possibly by a conference in chambers. This more free-wheeling inquisition was interrupted by me making Dad coffee or an omelette, maybe pork chops with gravy and carrots.
To an extent he treated me as a hostile witness whose testimony he was determined to discredit, which didn’t necessarily make him aggressive since undisguised aggression is a very limited courtroom tactic. His manner was sometimes almost seductive, and he knew the effectiveness of seeming to agree with the opposing arguments from time to time. But there was also a sense that I was his client, someone to be got off the hook however strong the evidence against him, however stubbornly he incriminated himself. He had campaigned hard over an unsatisfactory grade at Ancient History A-level — he would do a lot more to get my failing papers in heterosexuality sent back for re-marking.
I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to soften the blow. It would have been fatal to say for instance ‘I think I might be gay’, a formula which with its hint of doubt would turn anyone into a lawyer quibbling about exactly what was meant. Dad was in no hurry to accept my verdict on myself, even without equivocation on my part.
One of the first things he said on that New Year’s Day was that my situation was anything but unusual, and I should be initiated into the joys of natural love by an older woman, or by older women plural. This was the first indication he had given that the sexual code he preached, with its embargo on exploration of any sort, admitted any flexibility. He assured me, though, that the older-woman procedure had done the trick for Prince Charles, though several courses of treatment had been needed to make sure the cure was fully rooted.