Dad had met Prince Charles and liked him, dutiful Welsh small talk and all. Both parents had attended his investiture in 1969, travelling on the special train laid on for the event, and buying the scarlet bentwood chairs, designed by Lord Snowdon, on which they had been seated while the Prince received his insignia, coronet, mantle, sword, gold ring and gold rod. In fact they had bought an extra chair, to match the number of their sons, prudently forestalling any future squabble over heirlooms.
It seemed extraordinary to me that Dad should at short notice turn the heir to the throne into a latent but finally triumphing heterosexual. According to Dad Prince Charles had lain back and thought of Wales, and I should follow his example. Of course it wasn’t news that Dad had a tendency to tailor reality to the demands of fantasy. Keeping fantasy in check may have been one of the things that a life in the law did for him, by requiring him to finesse the facts rather than setting them aside. If I had suggested any ambiguity about Prince Charles’s sexuality before New Year’s Day 1978, Dad would have been outraged.
That was his first gambit, the Princely Parallel. There were others over the next few days, the Auntly Ambush, the Bisexual Fork, the Bisset Surprise.
Auntly Ambush. Dad asked me to find his address book and look up his Aunty Mary’s phone number. I was surprised by this sociable impulse. Were we planning family visits? It hardly seemed the time for that, the air being so strongly charged with tension.
Aunty Mary, widowed since the 1950s, lived in Denbigh. It was true that we sometimes saw her over the Christmas holidays. She made mince pies, and had a little superstition about them. Each mince pie eaten between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day guaranteed a lucky month, so it was necessary to get through a dozen to be fully protected, and each mince pie must be paid for with a kiss. Those kisses of hers, bristling and oddly intent, put me off facial hair for a while.
I asked Dad why he wanted to speak to Aunty Mary. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll be doing the talking. Don’t you think you should tell her what you’ve told me? She’s family, isn’t she? She has a right to know.’ He started to dial the number, confident that I wouldn’t let him finish the process and make the connection.
I went over to him and pressed down on the prongs of the phone, cutting off the call, and stayed there to prevent him from making another attempt. Dad’s Orson Welles side couldn’t be kept in check indefinitely. He got quite a lot of mileage out of using the telephone as a prop in our family theatricals.
According to his script, if I had a duty to tell him about my sexuality (this was how I had described my situation), then likewise I must inform the rest of the family, directly. He had chosen Aunty Mary as the most rhetorically effective figure for this line of argument, someone so far removed by age and long-standing widowhood from the urges of the body that I would have to explain basic acts from scratch, pouring unwelcome information into the scandalized funnel of her Welsh-county-town-dwelling, Congregationalist-sermon-saturated ear. I explained that there was no need to explain myself to Aunty Mary because she wasn’t part of my life, while Dad was. This was true in its way, but perhaps he was noticing something else. I might be telling him how important a figure he was in my life, but I was also willing to risk being rejected, which suggested that I could get along without his approval — so how important was he really? If the family divided into two parts, widowed great-aunts kept in the dark about private perversions, and powerless patriarchs presented with deviant lifestyles as facts they had to adjust to, then perhaps Dad had ended up on the wrong wing.
On 31 December when Dad had tried phoning Mum she had followed my advice and let it ring. After that, they spoke every day, as was their habit, usually last thing at night. These conversations were largely ritualized, and amounted essentially to billing and cooing, or Bill-ing and Sheila-ing perhaps. They seemed to feel the need for an exchange of endearments before bed when they were separated, as of course they often were with Dad on circuit. On occasions when I would be present at Mum’s side of the conversation, I noticed the slight technical difficulties she had with making a proper kissing sound, since after her accident in 1973 medication tended to make her lips dry.
Now of course those phone calls had an extra layer of meaning to them. The Anglesey house wasn’t big, and though there was an extension in the master bedroom I inhibited telephone intimacy whether I wanted to or not. Usually Dad spoke on the sitting-room phone, without seeking privacy. I imagine Mum had asked lightly, ‘How are you two getting on?’, for Dad to answer with an undertone of weary irony, as he did, ‘We’re having some very interesting discussions. He’s full of surprises.’
Over the days of wrangling I hoped that Dad would at some point acknowledge that in my own way I was standing up to him, something that dominant personalities are said to admire, though not all the evidence points that way.
Bisexual Fork. One day Dad’s rhetoric took a startling new tack. ‘You’re right, Adam,’ he said. ‘My generation was brought up with a very simple sense of these things. When I say I’m heterosexual, I only mean that all my past experience has been with women. There’s nothing to stop me from being attracted to a man tomorrow. Wouldn’t you agree?’
This was so different from his normal patterns of thought and speech that I was stupefied. Was the sly old thespian going to spring a coup de théâtre on me, revealing that he and his rather mousy clerk Mr Cant had been an item — lo, these many years! — that he hadn’t known how to tell me and was relieved to have someone to confide in at last?
Not quite. I hesitated.
‘Don’t you agree?’
There seemed no way out of it. ‘I suppose so …’
‘And by the same token, when you say you are homosexual, all you mean is that your experience to date has been homosexual.’ He pronounced the word, as was the way with his generation, with a long first syllable — even with the sounds we produced we showed we were talking about different things. ‘And just as I could have desires for a man, there’s nothing to stop you having desires for a woman tomorrow, isn’t that so?’ And we were back in Prince Charles territory, contemplating his experiments in self-cure by rutting.
The Bisset Surprise followed directly on the Bisexual Fork. Dad told me that he knew for a fact that I responded sexually to women. His evidence for this was that when we had been watching a Truffaut film in the cinema, Day for Night, I had played with myself whenever Jacqueline Bisset was on the screen.
I remembered that evening, which must have been in 1972. I had seen the film already and loved it, and thought it had more than enough charm and humour to qualify as a good choice for a family outing to the cinema. The evening was not a success, I understood that. Dad was seething in some way, though it took a lot of questioning to bring his objections to light. It turned out he had thought the film obscene. Obscene? If anything I thought it was a bit timid, a bit safe. Where was the obscenity? In a gesture made by one of the actresses, looking down at her actor boyfriend as he went off to the studio in the morning. He blew her a kiss, and she made a gesture of crossing her hands demurely below her waist, to signify ‘This is all yours. Yours and no-one else’s.’
This gesture, according to Dad, was of a corrosive and contaminating obscenity, tainting the whole film. He gave me to understand that I had subjected the party to a measurable dose of corruption by setting up our little visit to Studio One on Oxford Street.
Now, though, he was asking me to believe that I had laid aroused hands on myself during the film, and that he hadn’t made a comment at the time. Adam, old chap, we all get carried away when there’s a lovely lady on the screen — can’t fault your taste, my boy, she’s the most delightful creature — but next time be a bit more discreet, eh? You might give your mother a turn. An unthinkable scenario. Of course he wasn’t asking me to believe anything of the sort, he was asking himself to believe it. He was falling short of the standards of his profession, planting evidence in his own memory to substantiate something he needed to be true. He was tampering with the scene, as if he was one of those bent coppers he was known for hammering.