It’s true, though, in its way, that he trained me. He made me something I wasn’t before, not lovable (cuddly toy) but love-able. Capable of responding without reservations.
In the last section that we filmed he describes Henderson, the Auckland suburb where he grew up: the orchards, the primary school, the mountain range. When Beverley can’t see the mountains, rain is on the way and it’s time to get the washing in off the line. He falls peaceably silent. The camera, going for an arty effect far beyond my actual competence as a video operator, focusses on the slow bounce of his foot in its bedsock.
In 1989 people thought of the world as being well connected by its media, but the time difference between London and Auckland made phone calls impractical, and we relied on the postal service almost as much as people had in the nineteenth century. To start with I wrote letters, but Michael talked me into trying his own preferred medium, the tape cassette. Thrifty and unsentimental, he would listen to my voice on a tape, then record over it and send it back. His style was loose and free-ranging — he might go on chatting to me while blood was being taken, then say afterwards that the stocky male nurse who had done the procedure was ‘very you’. There came a time when he had radiotherapy on a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion in his mouth, which made his beard fall out in a geometrically square patch. He sent me a photograph of the damage, perhaps to prepare me in the event of our seeing each other before it could grow back, though he always discouraged me from making the trip, saying he only wanted to see me if he could show me around and have some fun himself. Perhaps he just sent me the mortifying photo because, unsentimental again, he had to deal with it, so why shouldn’t I?
When Michael’s family phoned me at the beginning of May to say that he was dying, there were still a couple of his tapes in the post. It was too much for me to listen to them when they arrived, and I never have, which feels like the right decision. I like the feeling that there are unexplored bits of Michael left over, which I could in theory dip into at any time, and so I will never run out.
The most painful moment in my whole relationship with Dad came the day after Michael’s death. Mum phoned me in Highbury to express her condolences. Then she pronounced a formula I had always hated, without being able to find an effective way to expose it in all its awfulness.
Dad would like a word.
It wasn’t quite that a grown man was using his wife as a switchboard operator, to place a call for him. That would just be inconsiderate and patronizing. It was so much worse: he was using her as an unacknowledged warm-up act, to guarantee a reception he couldn’t rely on without her help.
Oi, mate! Earn your own intimacy. Intimacy is not transferable. No piggyback, no hitch-hiking. On your bike, your honour. There’s no Plus One.
Question: how is it different for a son to use his mother as a conduit of information to the patriarch (‘Oh by the way, Mae West is Dead comes out next week, there will probably be some reviews’, ‘Mario died last night, while I was there. I’m fine’) and for a father to use his wife to establish contact with a son without being expected to beg …?
Not now! There’ll be plenty of time for questions later. Can’t you see I’m getting up a good old head of steam?
There seems to have been something in the nature of the Mars-Jones family that preferred to go the long way round, avoiding the obvious communicative route in favour of letting information filter through indirectly. Might this be characteristic of British families in general? Anglo-Welsh families? Families with three sons in them? Do strings of rhetorical questions advertise a wish to change the subject?
There was also the possibility that Mum had told him that he couldn’t get out of saying something to me, so that in a moment of assertiveness she was more or less frogmarching him all the way to the receiver. There is always the possibility of this sort of ramification: that it was for her benefit that he was going to say something for my benefit.
When Dad came on the line I braced myself for evasiveness. I hardly dared think what status he was going to accord Michael’s death, how he would square the circle, in terms of offering condolence without granting approval.
‘I just wanted to say,’ he said, ‘that I was sorry to hear about Michael. You’ve been a good friend to him — as you’ve been to so many others …’
This was worse than anything I could have expected. I could have Dad’s sympathy as long as my lover’s death was reclassified as a negative outcome of social work. Did I go on holiday to Skye with Mario Dubsky? Had I bought a flat to live in with Philip Lloyd-Bostock? It was hard to see that I was being supported, when the underlying message was that I mustn’t expect him to look squarely at me and my life. I could have a pat on the back as long as I let him keep his blinkers on.
Part of me would have enjoyed getting angry, telling him that this was not just meaningless but cruel. I didn’t have the strength. I couldn’t afford any expenditure of rage at a time when my whole emotional economy was taking a battering.
I found I couldn’t let it pass either. I spoke, and I contested Dad’s version, but I went the long way round. Doggedly I listed everything that Michael’s family had done to include me, when it must have seemed to them in their agony that I was essentially an outsider, not much more than a passer-by. I was mentioned, for instance, in the death notice they put in the Auckland newspapers. Dad didn’t respond.
Needling the righteous isn’t a noble sport. Dad made no special claim to virtue, though he took it for granted that God was on his side, and outreach wasn’t really his thing. The only impressive pattern of behaviour he ever referred to in his own rather daunting father was the principled hiring, on the farm and in the post office, of those who had once betrayed trust. Dad’s father (my ‘Taid’) understood that there must be a mechanism running counter to disgrace, or else the traffic is all one way, but Dad was comfortable with a fixed boundary between the clean and the unclean. As a judge, in fact, he tended to process the clean across the border into uncleanness. If there was a return journey possible — rehabilitation or redemption — he didn’t play a part in the process.
One of the festivals of Gray’s Inn is the Mulligan Sermon, delivered by a visiting preacher on the same text each year. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ That’s the text. There is a festive lunch afterwards.
It pleases me to think that the originating Mulligan was laying a moderately obvious trap for the good people of Gray’s Inn, in their parish of plenty, when he provided funds by the terms of his will for the preaching of this particular sermon. How long would it take the listeners in their pews, the lunchers in Hall, to realize that he was mocking them for their empty assent to the idea of reaching out to alleviate distress?
Communion in Gray’s Inn Chapel was always a hierarchical event. Benchers and their wives approached to receive the elements in strict order of seniority. Of course there were polite yieldings of precedence, nods and smiles. Nevertheless communicants knelt at the altar rail with their sense of worldly positioning sharpened rather than laid to rest.
James Mulligan, who was the Treasurer of Gray’s Inn in 1896 and provided the endowment for ‘The Mulligan Sermon’, directed that the sermon should concentrate on ‘the interview between Our Lord and the Lawyer, as recorded in the twenty-second chapter of the First Gospel, and at greater length in the tenth chapter of the Third Gospel’. Luke 10:25 does indeed describe ‘a certain lawyer’ standing up and tempting Jesus with trick questions. No lawyer is mentioned in Matthew 22, but the chapter swarms with Pharisees and Sadducees, and perhaps the Sermon really was meant to puncture the institutional smugness it seems to promote.