Mum wasn’t so certain, since she always suspected deferential manners of insincerity or secret mockery. She seemed to be straining to detect an element of the sardonic in his use of ‘Ma’am’. Had this complicated stranger, perhaps slightly too good to be true, mistaken her for the Queen?
Mothers are apt to be sceptical about a son’s choice of partner. Perhaps she could see nude gym written all over him.
There were less harmonious aspects to his manner. Mike responded to quite small surprises in conversation with the exclamation ‘Jesus!’, a mannerism which drew a flinch and a blink from Dad the first time it happened, and a frown whenever it was repeated.
Mum and Dad weren’t hopelessly provincial. They knew that if a dinner guest cut his food up methodically, then transferred the fork to his right hand for the purpose of conveying nourishment to his mouth, there was no cause for alarm. These were standard American manners, deeply embodied aspects of culture.
Mike, though, may have been slightly thrown by grace before meals said in Welsh. There was the ‘long Welsh grace’, itself very short, and the ‘short Welsh grace’, lasting barely five seconds and in favour when food was late or appetites keen. Mike will have been exposed to strings of exotic sound, timeless Celtic phonemes reaching his eardrums as either ‘Dee olch itty, dirion Da, um der dunneer, rothion ra, row innee er wen ai thlon, ara boo-id sith ger-ein bron. Amen’ or else ‘Ben deeth yan boo-id, oth yew. Amen’. The only bits he could reasonably be expected to join in were those ‘Amens’.
Family meals could be a bit of a minefield — for all of us — and Mike had the disadvantage of not having been issued with a map. For instance, Tim might choose to steer the conversation towards the subject of punk rock, not just to get Dad’s goat but as part of a more multifarious agenda, hinting at the ‘sex pistol’ primed and ready to fire. He enjoyed setting up a complex conversational turbulence, while I tried to steer the talk towards calmer water, or (in emergencies) bailed the bilges frantically and hid my fear of being swamped by the forces I had set in motion.
There was no hiding from Mike that Anglesey in winter bore no resemblance to California at any season. The Irish Sea was not a marine body double for the Pacific, not even if you half-closed your eyes to help it out. The village of Rhosneigr could boast the Premier Garage and the Bali-Hi Fish Bar but was not twinned with San Francisco. What did we have to offer that the Bay Area couldn’t match? Perhaps Barclodiad y Gawres, the ancient monument on the next headland along, towards Aberffraw, a Neolithic burial chamber (technically a cruciform passage grave), if he felt like peering through railings at decorated stones, their zigzags, spirals and chevrons latent in the gloom. The interior was a little more accessible than the holy of holies in Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’, being open two whole days a year. (The name means ‘apronful of the giantess’, though Dad always translated it as ‘breadcrumbs’ instead — but then he admitted that his Welsh got rusty from his conversing in it so little, and he found it mortifying to make mistakes in the hearing of more eloquent users of his mother tongue.) Or we could walk round the Maelog Lake, at least most of the way round, while Mike huddled incredulous in his windbreaker, until brambles and mud made the going too difficult.
Tim and Mike clashed enjoyably over architecture, playing the game of Lloyd Wright / Le Corbusier / Mies van der Rohe, rituals of ranking that can seem to outsiders so much like rounds of rock-paper-scissors.
Mike used a number of Americanisms that I sensed were already obsolescent, calling things not only ‘cute’ but ‘neat’. It was refreshing, even intoxicating, to be told that, say, ‘C-corb’ had designed ‘a bunch of stuff’ that was ‘just gorgeous’. It seems a safe bet that Tim, who didn’t have many people with whom to discuss architecture, found Mike both stimulating and baffling in his lack of intellectual airs.
Mike’s verdict on Tim, meanwhile, was ‘I don’t know whether to fight him or fuck him’, which suggested that the holiday wasn’t a complete failure from his point of view.
Mike’s word for the men he found attractive was ‘Munchkin’, though the beings by that name in The Wizard of Oz weren’t in fact, as I discovered when I saw the film at last, young and beefy. I had imagined a sort of junior league of bodybuilders. In the coffee shops of Cambridge Mike would point out casualties of British self-sabotage, handsome undergraduates hunching in apology for their good looks. America would have encouraged them to revel in their studliness. It wasn’t too late, even now, if they played their cards right.
There were some exceptions to his typecasting — the elderly Einstein sticking out his tongue in a famous photograph somehow qualified as a Munchkin — but I certainly wasn’t a Munchkin, and Tim didn’t come significantly closer to that ideal.
It occurs to me now that Mike, as an admirer of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, may have felt that her deepest intuitions about British life were being confirmed in this welcoming environment laced with threat. In theory my father was the target of the machinations — but would Mike really have been surprised if my elegant, quietly anxious mother had entered the guest bedroom one morning bearing not a cup of tea but a samurai sword, like Honor Klein in A Severed Head (his favourite Murdoch novel, and his favourite moment in it), to banish all obliqueness of dealing and force a resolution of some kind? Perhaps not.
It made sense of a Murdochian sort, the warrior being offered as a sacrificial victim, exposed to danger and enchantment beyond anything the Viet Cong could devise (though his tour of duty pre-dated the worst of the war) by the shores of a bleak sea.
Even without weaponry, Mum can’t have been an entirely relaxing hostess. Part of her concern was to do with whether the two of us were well matched — and if so, whether it even mattered, bearing in mind that Mike was returning in a matter of months to his city and his career, his real life outside the parenthesis of Cambridge. She was also bound to be anticipating the impact on her family of the little piece of psychodrama I had set in motion.
So after I had made my sexual declaration to Dad as best I could (having so little to declare), I told him about Mike. He put on a fair show of neutrality, not exploding at the deceit and immorality involved in smuggling my bit of fluff (a very sturdy bit of fluff, admittedly) into the family home. He played the waiting game, knowing that sooner or later I would have to ask him for his verdict on Mike. I had given him back some power, I suppose, by showing that I cared what he thought.
Eventually he produced his assessment. ‘Small beer,’ he said.
I felt we were making progress here. Who would have thought that Dad was capable of dismissing the same-sex partner of one of his sons with such a light touch? No reference to the Bible or the vileness of physical acts. It was never on the cards that he would say, ‘You two seem to be good together,’ and I wouldn’t have believed him if he had, since it didn’t seem particularly true. But it had to be encouraging that Dad huffed the threat of Mike away like so much thistledown.
As Dad understood homosexuality, there was always an abusive seduction at the root of it. A person of power or glamour cast a spell on an insecure male, then turned fascination into sordid exploitation. In a strange way, the earlier in life this atrocity was perpetrated the better, since then there could be no question of meaningful consent, let alone desire. Ideally, from his point of view, I would have been turned, even sexually assaulted, by a scoutmaster in full make-up. This Vietnam-vet-architect scenario was far less easily rewritten as pathology. Still, if Dad had wanted me to be corrupted over mugs of cocoa round a campfire, he might at least have sent me to Scouts.