If Dad ever blamed Mum for the way I had turned out, he was sensible enough to do it out of my hearing. The surprising thing was how little changed. My role as family peacemaker and lightning-rod was intact. It hadn’t been displaced by revelation of my apostasy, and there were still altogether too many late-night conversations started by Dad with the formal opening, ‘I’m very worried about Tim / Matthew …’ Where is he going, what is he doing with his life?
It would fall to me to set out the case for the defence, in front of a presiding judge who would often simply set aside the evidence and give me his ruling on the facts of the case. We were all failing to live up to Dad’s expectations, and logically my own falling short should have secured me some sort of exemption from generational-spokesman duties. I wouldn’t have minded a sick note that excused me from going in to bat for the brotherhood, but I was returning to Gray’s Inn from Cambridge on a regular basis, and the others were based elsewhere, so perhaps it was partly how I paid the rent.
My Cambridge rhythms with Mike altered after Christmas, though not (I don’t think) because of the stresses and strains of his stalking-horse duties. He was starting to work. The Mike Larson I had known in his first term had hardly attended a lecture, spending most of the day with me in coffee shops or cinemas. He claimed that this was his real Cambridge education, and though I take flattery well it may also be that he thought the architecture faculty a little underpowered, compared with what he was used to. Now he buckled down, and mighty were the charrettes. Architecture even gave him an indirect way of describing our relationship. This was the ‘creative use of interstitial space’. The phrase made sense, since he was just passing through Cambridge on his way to a life and a career, though it didn’t make my heart leap.
The subject Mike chose for his dissertation was ‘James Stirling and the Art of Rudeness’. It anatomised Stirling’s famous V-shaped History Faculty building, which Mike saw as a V-sign offered to the university and its traditions. He asked me to help him with spelling and grammar, which I did very happily. It didn’t occur to me that he might be dyslexic, though the way he ran at language was all his own. In those days dyslexia was an all-or-nothing category, and Mike could clearly make his way in the world of the written, though there was still a certain amount that I could tidy up.
By June his money had come through at last. He paid his debts, and even took me and Mum out to dinner and a show, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the Mermaid Theatre.
He had a farewell gift for me too, an inscribed hardback of John Fowles’s Daniel Martin. The inscription compared me to Henry James’s Maria Gostrey and speculated that one day I might try a novel about an Englishman and an American. I have to admit that I didn’t get very far with Daniel Martin. Come to that, I’ve never read The Ambassadors, though I know that Maria Gostrey introduces Lambert Strether to the Louvre and the Comédie Française and is generally a civilizing force.
Another memento he left with me was an item of clothing, which I had always liked on him, a cotton sweater of multicoloured stripes. Just as British body language can seem unmasculine to the American eye, particularly the habit of sitting with the legs crossed and the knees close together, closing up the crotch (a posture known in some US circles as ‘gin and tonic’), so this item of clothing stood out as rather too-too in a society not yet indoctrinated with the dress code known as ‘preppy’. Perhaps Mike left it with me because it had fallen short of the desired effect when he had worn it in Cambridge. A raised eyebrow can do a lot of damage.
In one of our first conversations post-Christmas I had let slip Dad’s verdict on him — the passing comment (obiter dictum is the technical term, when a judge’s casual remarks, not binding in law, are being referred to) about his being ‘small beer’. Let slip gives the wrong impression. I passed on the information without hesitation, confident that Mike would find Dad’s blindness as comical as I did. It never occurred to me that this well-defended man might want to be approved of, even by people who didn’t matter to him in any real way. He was mortified, and in all the years of intermittent contact since then the phrase has never been properly exorcised.
By this time I had decided that spending time in America would do me good. I applied for a Harkness Fellowship, a sort of contraflow Rhodes scholarship enabling British students to attach themselves to American academic institutions. The protocol was for applicants to approach their university of choice directly to arrange possible admission, and the obvious place to go was the University of Virginia, where Alderman Library had a major collection of Faulkneriana, Faulkner being the subject of my supposed PhD.
Geography is hardly my strong suit, but I realized that Virginia was not close to California and to Mike. Obviously I hoped to see him again. I also felt that exposure to a more energetic set of manners would be good for me.
The Harkness selectors turned me down, I imagine because my proposal was rather feeble. American Literature was a paper I had done well on at Cambridge (where it had only recently been introduced), perhaps because it was a literature, at least in the nineteenth century, unconfident about its relationship with the English canon. As a refugee from Classics, lacking an English A-level, I shared that unconfidence. Faulkner was not by a long chalk my favourite American writer, but at least his output wasn’t conclusively ranked, as Melville’s and Hawthorne’s were, with Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter making their other work seem inconsequential. There was work to be done. How was I to know that at the time more American PhDs were undertaken on Faulkner than on Shakespeare?
My acceptance letter from U. Va arrived weeks after my rejection from Harkness. I showed it to Dad in a spirit of wry amusement, but he told me I should take it up anyway. He would supplement the little stipend I was given by the Department of Education and Science. I tried to make clear that this acceptance was not the accolade he assumed, what with American universities being businesses in a way alien to our domestic assumptions, but he repeated his offer. And I accepted it.
I don’t think for a moment that he was treating me as a remittance man, to use the traditional word for the unrespectable family member who is paid to keep a suitable distance from those he might embarrass. I was a functional part of the Gray’s Inn household, someone he could rely on to be cheerful company for Mum while he was away on circuit, as he so often was.
Virginia was the first place where I was able to present myself as gay from the outset. Charlottesville was symmetrically Anglophilic and homophobic (Alcoholic Beverages Commission statutes made it illegal for gay people and other prohibited groups to be served alcohol), so some people had a silly prejudice in my favour and others had a silly prejudice against me. I made women friends, which was intoxicating, and much easier with any ambiguity dispelled. I involved myself in the Gay Student Union but didn’t have a sex life to speak of. Gay students tended to drive to D.C. at the weekend for their pleasures, and the bicycle was my only means of transport. There was an underworld, but I didn’t explore it. I remember a graduate student saying, after the sauna at the University gym was destroyed in a fire, that on the whole he would rather that the Parthenon had fallen down. I knew nothing of that.