Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  If it wasn’t trauma, and it isn’t genetic, the most likely cause of my deafness is some childhood illness, a virus or ear infection which irreparably damaged the hair cells. I did suffer from earache when I was a toddler, Mum told me later. ‘You had mastoids,’ she said - an ugly, sinister word I thought at the time, and still more now. And there were no antibiotics in the early Forties. The cause of my deafness is of academic interest, anyway (interesting that ‘academic’ should have that meaning of ‘useless’), because it’s incurable. Hopwood told me that. ‘There’s no cure,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The condition will get worse - but very gradually.You’ll also experience some loss of volume at all frequencies as you get older.’ ‘Eventually, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll be stone deaf ?’ ‘Not stone deaf,’ he said, frowning slightly as if this were a newly minted and excessively emotive metaphor. ‘In theory you could suffer up to ninety per cent hearing loss, but you’ll be lucky if you live that long. I wouldn’t worry about it. Get yourself a hearing aid. You’ll find it makes a great difference.’

  I got my first hearing aid from the National Health Service, a rather clumsy device in two pieces, one about the size of a tangerine segment that fitted behind the ear, containing the microphone, amplifier, battery and controls, with a little transparent plastic tube attached which conveyed the sound to the other bit, a custom-made transparent plastic mould seated in the ear. Putting it all in place was tedious, and it was fairly visible unless you grew your hair very long over the ears, which would have been easy in the Sixties, but looked a bit eccentric by the mid-Eighties. Also if you wear glasses, as I do, the space behind your ear gets rather congested. The arm of the spectacles can squeeze the plastic tube so that the sound is cut off, or removing your glasses can inadvertently remove your hearing aid. Once I whipped off my spectacles in the street to put on a pair of prescription sunglasses and sent my hearing aid flying into the road, where it was run over by a Parcelforce van. The National Health Service would have replaced it, but I decided to go private and get one of the in-the-ear type, then something of a novelty, which are miracles of electronic micro-engineering, all the components being contained in a moulded earpiece not much bigger than an earplug. But you can still have misadventures with these, because they’re so small. A year or two ago when Fred was driving the car I took out an earpiece to change the battery and dropped it down between the seat and the door. We were on a motorway so Fred couldn’t stop. I groped for the earpiece under my seat and felt my fingers touch it but somehow I managed to push it through a small hole in the metal tracks on which the seat slides backwards and forwards and it disappeared into a cavity under the floor. I took the car into the service centre the next day and they had to remove the whole seat and part of the floor to recover it from the chassis. The man behind the counter in Reception was grinning from ear to ear as he gave me the bill and, sealed in a transparent sachet, the little plastic earpiece with a mechanic’s oily fingerprint on it. ‘This job was a first for us,’ he said. It cost me eighty-five pounds, but I had no option since each hearing instrument costs over a thousand. I use two, now, one in each ear. In the past I only needed one. My relationship with hearing aids has been a steady escalation of cost and technical refinement.

  The first in-the-ear one I bought had a fiddly volume control like a tiny studded wheel which you twisted with the tip of your forefinger, as if trying to insert a screw into your head, but they got more and more sophisticated over the years, and my latest one is digital, has three programs (for quiet conditions, noisy conditions and loop), adjusts itself automatically on the first two, or can be manually adjusted with a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond). Unfortunately the technology seems to have hit a ceiling and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a great improvement in the near future. I read a report in a newspaper a year or two ago which gave me a spasm of hope, about people having their hearing restored by new techniques of surgical implants, but when I asked my GP about this treatment he told me that it only worked with a different type of deafness from mine, otosclerosis, where one of the bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations to the inner ear becomes fixed, and can be artificially replaced. He asked around and discovered that experimental work is being done with implants in the inner ear, but with limited success, and you’d have to be in a pretty bad way to even try it. In short, there’s no cure for my kind of deafness, as Hopwood told me twenty years ago.

  As soon as he said ‘high-frequency deafness’ I knew it was bad news. ‘So that’s why I’m missing consonants,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, looking impressed. ‘How did you know?’ ‘I’m a linguist,’ I said. ‘Oh, are you? What languages?’ ‘Only the one,’ I said. (It’s a common mistake.) ‘I’m in Linguistics. Applied Linguistics to be exact.’ ‘You understand the problem then?’ he said.

  I did. Consonants are voiced at a higher frequency than vowels. I could hear vowels perfectly well - still can. But it’s consonants that we mainly depend on to distinguish one word from another. ‘“Did you say pig or fig?” said the Cat. “I said pig,” replied Alice.’ Maybe the Cheshire Cat was a bit deaf: it wasn’t sure whether Alice had used a bi-labial plosive or a labiodental fricative the first time she pronounced the word, and being a well-brought-upVictorian middle-class little girl she would have spoken very clearly. ‘F’ is called a labiodental fricative because you produce it by bringing your top teeth into contact with your bottom lip and allowing some air to escape between them. It’s also called a continuant because you can continue making the sound as long as you have breath: fffffffffffffffffffffffff . . . though I can’t imagine why you would want to, unless perhaps you started to say ‘Fuck’ and thought better of it. I have a smattering of phonetics, although it’s not my field.

  I was at a party a few years ago, not as noisy as the one last night, but bad enough, and I overheard a man enthusing about a book he was reading called Being Deaf. It sounded like just the book for me, a self-help manual I presumed, but I didn’t like to barge into the conversation demanding the bibliographical details. The man was talking to a girl who was looking admiringly into his eyes and nodding eager agreement, and he left the party early (with the girl) before I had an opportunity to speak to him. So the next day I went to Waterstone’s to try and get the book. ‘What was the author’s name?’ the assistant asked. ‘I think it was Grace,’ I said. It turned out to be Crace, Jim Crace, and the book was a novel called Being Dead.

  Often only the context allows me to distinguish between ‘deaf’ and ‘death’ or ‘dead’, and sometimes the words seem interchangeable. Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse. ‘To every man upon this earth, / Deaf cometh soon or late,’ Macaulay might have written. But not Dylan Thomas, ‘After the first deaf, there is no other.’ There are lots of others, stages of auricular decay, like a long staircase leading down into the grave.

  Down among the deaf men, down among the deaf men,

  Down, down, down, down;

  Down among the deaf men let him lie!

  3

  2nd November. An odd thing happened this morning. I was sitting over the remains of my breakfast, in my dressing gown, reading the newspaper. It’s one of the few perks of retirement I really enjoy, the leisurely breakfast, the unhurried perusal of the Guardian over a third cup of tea . . . After that the day tends to drag rather. Fred was bustling in and out of the kitchen, fully dressed, getting ready to go out. She had an early manicure appointment before going to the shop. I had taken in that information because I was wearing my hearing aid. I really prefer not to at breakfast because it amplifies the noise of eating cornflakes and toast inside my head with an effect like dinosaurs crunching bones in Surroundsound, but I bear it, if we get up at the same time, for the sake of matrimonial harmony. Fred was making out a list of things for me to buy at the supermarket when the telephone rang. ‘Answer that, would you, darling?’ she said. She frequently add
resses me as ‘darling’, though not necessarily with affection. In fact I don’t know anyone who can utter that term of endearment with so many different tones of hostile implication, including impatience, disapproval, pity, irony, incredulity, despair and boredom.This, though, was a faintly ingratiating ‘darling’.

  ‘You know it’s for you,’ I sighed, folding the newspaper and getting reluctantly to my feet. I was in the middle of a rather interesting if depressing article about the ageing populations of the developed world, who combine increased life expectancy due to advances in medicine with a diminishing capacity to enjoy it because of physical and mental deterioration. ‘Nobody phones me at this hour of the day,’ I said.Very few people phone me at any hour, actually, since I retired.

  ‘If it’s Jakki, tell her I’m busy. And remind her I’ll be late because I’m getting my nails done,’ Fred said, frowning over her list. Jakki is Fred’s business partner and one of the many things about her that irritate me is her propensity to make unnecessary phone calls. Another is the way she spells her name.

  I lifted the wall-mounted phone off its cradle and put it to my ear, immediately producing a howl of feedback. I always forget that ordinary phones produce that effect if you’re wearing a hearing aid, or else I forget I’m wearing a hearing aid when I pick up an ordinary phone. Which was the case this morning? I forget. I prised the earpiece out of my right ear and dropped it in my haste, exclaiming ‘Fuck!’ as it hit the vinyl-tiled floor. The last time I did that the hearing instrument was a write-off. My insurance policy covered it, but if I make another thousand-pound claim the company might refuse to renew it. Fortunately it seemed that no damage had been done on this occasion: the device whistled in the palm of my hand as I picked it up, indicating that it was still working. I switched it off, slipped it into my dressing-gown pocket and put the phone to my empty ear. I was conscious of Fred observing me impatiently like the teacher of a chronically clumsy infant pupil. ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  ‘Is that how you usually answer the phone?’ said a faint female voice. ‘“Fuck”, and then “hallo”?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I dropped my - I dropped something just as I picked up the . . . Is that Jakki?’

  ‘No, it’s . . .’

  I didn’t catch the name. ‘I’m sorry - who?’

  She said something that sounded like ‘Axe’.

  I said: ‘Look, this phone’s no good, I’ll go into my study. Hang on.’ I have a phone in my study specially designed for the deaf. You can use it while wearing a hearing aid in the loop mode, and you can increase the volume if necessary. I replaced the kitchen phone on its cradle and made for the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ Fred asked.

  ‘I don’t know - not Jakki.’

  ‘You’ve cut them off anyway, darling.’ (This was a faintly sarcastic ‘darling’.)

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ I have explained this before to Fred - that both parties have to put their phones down to break the connection - but she doesn’t believe me.

  ‘Well, if it’s for me and it’s urgent you can get me on my mobile,’ Fred said. ‘I simply must go this minute. I’ll leave the list here on the worktop.’ She added something about melons which I didn’t catch because I had only one earpiece in place and was nearly out of the kitchen, with my back to her. I hoped it wasn’t important.

  I sat down at my desk, inserted my right earpiece, set it in the loop mode and picked up the phone. ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d cut me off,’ said the voice. It was still faint, so I turned up the volume.

  ‘No. Sorry about all the confusion. I have a hearing problem, it makes phones difficult. I’m afraid I didn’t get your name.’

  ‘It’s Alex. We met at the ARC gallery the other evening.’ She spoke with a perceptible transatlantic accent.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember.’

  ‘But you didn’t remember our appointment.’

  ‘What appointment?’ I said, with an internal flutter of panic.

  ‘You were going to give me some advice about my research.’

  ‘Was I? Where? When?’

  ‘Don’t you remember anything?’ she said, with understandable asperity.

  ‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t hear much. It was frightfully noisy, that room, it’s all the concrete, and as I said, I have a hearing problem . . .’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. It must seem very rude of me but . . .’

  ‘All right, I forgive you. When shall we meet then? Tomorrow?’

  I said I couldn’t meet her tomorrow because I was going to London to see my father, and then it would be the weekend, and she was tied up on Monday so eventually we agreed on the following Tuesday afternoon, at three.

  ‘The same place?’ she said.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The ARC gallery café,’ she said.

  ‘It’s rather noisy,’ I said. ‘The tiled floor and those Formica-topped tables . . . What about the University? The Senior Common Room in the -’

  ‘No, I don’t want to meet you at the University,’ she said emphatically. ‘If you want somewhere quiet, I have an apartment just minutes away from the ARC.’

  As I wondered and hesitated about this proposal, she gave me the address, and I wrote it down.

  ‘What is your research about?’ I said.

  ‘You really do have a hearing problem, don’t you? I’ll tell you again on Tuesday,’ she said, and terminated the call.

  When I went back into the kitchen, Fred had gone. I brought the kettle to the boil, freshened the teapot, poured another cup and picked up the Guardian again, but I couldn’t get back into the article about ageing, or into anything else. Marshall McLuhan said somewhere (McLuhan, how that dates me!) that we don’t read newspapers in an orderly systematic way, like a book, we scan them, our eyes skipping from one column to another and back again, but mine were twitching all over the place, and my hands turned the pages restlessly until I found myself staring at the back page, a full-page ad for cheap broadband, without any memory of what had preceded it. The call had disturbed me, for several reasons. It was completely unexpected; and that I had apparently made an appointment to meet this woman to discuss her research without the slightest awareness of doing so was not only deeply embarrassing but also a depressing index of the extent of my deafness. What kind of research could it be - something to do with linguistics, presumably. But how did she know that was my field? I didn’t recall telling her. I didn’t even recall telling her my name, though I suppose I must have done so, since she found my telephone number. We are in the book and there is only one ‘Bates D.S., Prof.’ in it.

  I was conscious that Fred had left the house without knowing the identity of the caller, and I am conscious now, as I write this late at night in my study, that she still doesn’t know. If she had asked me on her return home this afternoon I would have told her of course, but she didn’t. She asked me if I had remembered to get a Galia melon. I said, ‘No, I got cantaloupe instead, they were two for the price of one.’ That was my excuse, thought up on the spur of the moment, pretending that I overrode her instruction for reasons of economy, when in fact I hadn’t heard the instruction, which had been, I inferred, ‘Only get a melon if they have Galias.’ She said: ‘We don’t need two melons, darling, we’ll never eat them before one goes bad, especially cantaloupes.’ She had evidently forgotten all about the call in the morning, and in the ill-humour that followed this little dispute over melons I didn’t feel like reminding her, or telling her who it was from. In fact, I knew who was calling as soon as I heard the voice on the phone say a name that sounded like ‘Axe’, but when Fred said, ‘Who is it?’ as I made for my study to take the call I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Why was that? Because I wasn’t in fact absolutely sure? Or because I wanted to find out why ‘Axe’ was phoning, and have a little time to think about it, before telling Fred? Well, I’ve had all day to think about it and I still haven’t told Fred. It see
ms to me that I have somehow compromised myself by agreeing to go to the woman’s flat - not that I suppose she has amorous designs on me, I have no illusions on that score - but whatever favour she intends to ask will be more difficult to refuse in her own home than on neutral, public ground, and the ARC café is probably not all that noisy in mid-afternoon. I would have phoned her to change the venue back again if I knew her number - but I don’t, nor do I have any way of discovering it. I tried dialling 1471, but ‘The caller has withheld the number.’

  Apart from that unsettling little episode it’s been an ordinary sort of retirement day. I did the shopping at Sainsbury’s in the morning. When I’d unpacked the bags and put away the food I had my lunch (Covent Garden asparagus soup, bread and cheese with salad, and an apple) and listened to The World at One on Radio Four. I can only listen to the kitchen radio when I’m alone in the house because I have to have the volume turned up so high. Then I sat down in the lounge with the G2 section of the Guardian, habitually reserved for this time, and fell asleep over it for half an hour, as I usually do. Then I walked into the University for the exercise, and checked my mailbox in the Arts Faculty office, which contained a publisher’s catalogue, an invitation to an Inaugural Lecture by a new professor in Theology,‘The Problem of Petitionary Prayer’, and an appeal from a charity raising money for earthquake relief. I had a cup of tea in the common room and read last week’s TLS, glancing up every time the swing doors creaked open, but nobody whom I recognised came in. It was the middle of the afternoon, when most people would be teaching or in meetings. There were just a few retired codgers like myself dotted round the room, slumped in armchairs, looking with mute resentment over their newspapers and magazines at a group of secretaries and technicians chatting and laughing in one corner. In the past they wouldn’t have been allowed in here, but the passage of time has eroded the old caste distinctions of academic life.