Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  I rang the doorbell, and then when that had no effect, used the door knocker, banging hard four times. Dad is hard of hearing - not as deaf as I am, but as he won’t use a hearing aid he is, for practical purposes, just as deaf as me, indeed rather more so. Five years ago, after a long and exhausting series of arguments, I finally persuaded him to be tested and fitted with an NHS hearing aid, but he complained that it was uncomfortable and fiddly, and the batteries kept packing up, and it whistled. He soon stopped wearing it. Living alone, he didn’t have much incentive to persevere. He listens to the television through headphones since the neighbours on the other side of the party wall complained of the volume coming through the speakers, and he has a telephone with a specially loud ring and a flashing light. But he often misses calls by tradesmen because he doesn’t hear the knocker, and if he hadn’t been expecting me I might have waited a long time for him to open the front door. The first sign that he was about to do so was that a curtain behind the round frosted-glass window in the door was drawn aside. This is a thick felt full-length curtain which he rigged up himself to keep the draughts out and the warmth in during the winter months. He keeps most of the other curtains in the house drawn or partially drawn for the same reason, adding a sepulchral gloom to the general seediness of the interior. The door opened. An elderly man dressed like a tramp smiled at me.

  ‘Hallo, son,’ he said. ‘You made it, then.’ He stood aside to admit me, then poked his head out of the door to look suspiciously up and down the road, as if he feared I might have been tailed by criminals bent on armed robbery, before shutting it and drawing the curtain. ‘How was the journey?’ he said, as I took off my overcoat and hung it on the coat rack by the door.

  ‘All right. The train was on time for once,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ This word occurs very frequently in our dialogues.

  ‘The train was on time,’ I shouted.

  ‘There’s no need to shout,’ he said, and led me along the passage into what we always called the dining room, presumably the estate agent’s designation, though it was and still is the living room, and a very small one, about thirteen feet square, I would guess. It’s at the back of the house, next to the kitchenette. The front room or ‘lounge’ is a little bigger, but was rarely occupied in my childhood except on high days and holidays, especially in winter because of the bother of lighting a second fire. The dining room did, it is true, contain the table where we ate most of our meals, and a sideboard, but it also contained two easy chairs and a bureau desk and a radiogram and in due course a television, and it was there that we mainly lived as a family. In those days Dad used the front room to practise on the saxophone and clarinet. He was scrupulous about doing an hour’s practice every day, in the late morning, to keep his fingering supple and accurate, playing over and over again what sounded to me like fragmentary scales and phrases with no continuous melody. It was maddening to listen to and I wonder if that wasn’t one reason why I never seriously tried to learn an instrument myself when I was young - there seemed to be no pleasure in it. It was a revelation when I first heard him on the bandstand, playing a proper solo on the tenor sax. Later I got interested in jazz through listening to his records and had fantasies of playing the trumpet like Harry James or Dizzy Gillespie but I was on an academic track at school by then, aimed towards university with loads of homework, and not sufficiently motivated to give up any of my meagre spare time to music lessons, so I never learned to play an instrument, and now that I have plenty of time to spare it’s too late because hearing impairment has taken most of the pleasure out of music for me.

  For Dad too, I think. He doesn’t play any more of course, he sold his instruments some years ago - his teeth have gone and he has arthritis in his fingers - and he doesn’t listen to music as much as he used to. The turntable and the cassette player of his music centre are broken and he won’t replace it or have it mended. When I offered to buy him a new system with a CD player last Christmas he flew into one of his irrational fits of temper: ‘Are you mad? What would I want with a CD player? You think I want to waste my money buying a lot of CDs, and they cost a fortune, a complete take-on if you ask me, when I’ve got a marvellous set of records like those?’ (Making a sweeping gesture towards the shelf that holds his modest collection of LPs.) I said, all right, I would get him a hi-fi with a turntable, and he said, ‘Where would I put it? I don’t have room for any more clobber,’ and I said you can put it where the music centre is now, and he said, ‘What? You mean get rid of my music centre? I paid a hundred quid for that.’ And I said, but it doesn’t work, Dad, and he said, ‘The radio works,’ though in fact he never uses that radio, because he can’t turn up the volume loud enough without annoying the neighbours. He has one in the kitchen which he plays so loud it rattles the crockery, and a smaller portable which he listens to in the dining room or in bed through a pair of lightweight earphones, mostly to talk radio. He might try Classic FM occasionally but gone are the days when he would sit down and listen to a whole symphony or concerto by one of his favourite composers, Elgar, Rachmaninov, Delius - late Romantic stuff, no Mozart or Beethoven for him (‘can’t stand the bloody Germans, too heavy’) - recording it on to a cassette for future use, an economy which gave him great satisfaction. Modern jazz no longer seems to interest him, though he does like nostalgic radio programmes about the big swing bands of the Forties, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Electric guitar-based rock and pop music he despises, needless to say, and always has done since it put an end to the dance-band business, though he made an exception of the Beatles. They were real musicians, he would say. ‘Clever tunes and songs you can understand, with proper rhymes.’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was his favourite.

  ‘So how are you?’ I said when we were seated in the two easy chairs each side of the hearth, where one bar of an electric fire was switched on. Although I forced him to let me pay for central heating to be installed at the time of Mum’s last illness he has never taken to it; he keeps the radiators turned off in the house most of the time for economy’s sake, and uses an electric fire in the dining room because he doesn’t really feel warm unless he can see an orange glow and feel his shins getting scorched as he used to with a coal fire.

  ‘What?’ he said. I’m sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he’s got in the habit of saying ‘what?’ automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes.

  ‘How have you been?’ I said, more loudly.

  He grimaced. ‘Not too good. Never get a proper night’s sleep these days.’

  ‘You should get a new mattress,’ I said. This was a familiar topic, and the conversation took a well-trodden path, which went something like this, with much repetition and shouting:

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my mattress.’

  ‘I’ll pay for it, Dad.’

  ‘It’s not a question of paying for it. I’ve got plenty of money.’

  ‘You would sleep much better on a firm mattress.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the mattress. It’s because of my . . . how’s your father. What d’you call it?’ He glanced down at his groin.

  ‘Prostate.’

  ‘That’s it. I was up four times last night.’

  ‘Have you been to the doctor about it?’

  ‘Old Simmonds? Oh yes. He says there’s an operation you can have. I said no thanks very much.’

  ‘Well, I don’t blame you, Dad.’ I essayed a joke: ‘I believe it can affect your sex life.’ But he didn’t hear and I didn’t feel like repeating it.

  ‘He gave me some tablets,’ he said.‘I suppose they’re sort of astringent. You know, to shrink the . . . whatsit. They don’t seem to make much difference.’ He shook his head gloomily. Then as usual he found a thought with which to cheer himself up: ‘Mind you, I can’t grumble. Eric for instance, he had it the other way.’ Eric was a second cousin who died several years ago. ‘He couldn’t go at all. They had to rush him to hospital. Put a th
ing up his . . .’ He mimed the insertion of a catheter with a wincing expression. Then after a pause, he said mildly: ‘No, I’ll get a new mattress one day. There’s no hurry.’

  I could no longer restrain myself from commenting on his clothes. ‘I hope you’re going to change before we go out.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to change!’ he said crossly. ‘You don’t think I’d go out in these, do you?’ In truth I didn’t, but it irritates me when he dresses like a down-and-out at home, perhaps because there’s such a clear family resemblance between us. It’s as if he’s presenting to me a mocking effigy of myself. We’re both tall, bony, with high, stooped shoulders, and lined, long-jawed faces, so looking at him dressed like a guy on Bonfire Night is like seeing myself in dire straits twenty-odd years from now. He was wearing a pair of filthy high-waisted trousers, made of checked tweed so thick, and so stiff with dirt and stains of various kinds, that I imagined he stood them upright in the corner of his bedroom when he took them off, a soiled beige cardigan with holes in the sleeves at each elbow, and a frayed plaid shirt with the top two buttons missing, revealing his scrawny Adam’s apple and a crescent of yellowish undervest. With the possible exception of the undervest these clothes were not, I knew, worn-out items that he had long had in his possession, but fairly recent acquisitions scavenged from charity shops and jumble sales. On his feet he wore a pair of shabby carpet slippers trodden down at the heel.

  ‘Well, I wonder why you wear them at all,’ I said.‘Anybody would think you haven’t got any decent clothes.’ I knew that upstairs he had two wardrobes full of respectable clothes in good condition.

  ‘What’s the point of my dressing up when I’m indoors?’ he said indignantly.‘I don’t see anybody here from one day’s end to another.’

  This was a covert appeal for pity, and not without effect, but I felt obliged to continue on the offensive. ‘You knew you were going to see me this morning,’ I said.

  ‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve been doing jobs.’

  ‘What kind of jobs?’

  ‘Cleaning the stove.’

  ‘How are you getting on with it?’

  The electric cooker is a new acquisition, though not a new appliance. I had offered to buy him a new one but typically he insisted on getting a reconditioned cooker from a shop up the road, the kind that has white goods displayed outside on the pavement with handpainted placards boasting bargain prices. It was certainly cheap, but there was no manual with it, and I wasn’t able to get him one since the manufacturers have discontinued the model, so he has been struggling to master the controls ever since. The operation of the oven in particular has been a problem, sometimes resulting in the food being burned and sometimes not cooked at all.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, with a shifty sort of grin. ‘I’ve nearly got it beat.’ Since he can blame nobody but himself for the purchase of this unsuitable cooker he has personified it as a cunning adversary which has somehow intruded itself into his house and against which he must pit his wits. ‘But just when I think I’ve got it sorted it comes up with another little wrinkle,’ he said. ‘It turns out that the grill doesn’t work if you close the flap.’

  ‘No, with the flap closed it becomes a second oven,’ I said. ‘I told you that, Dad.’

  ‘It’s no use telling me things at my age, you have to write them down,’ he said.

  ‘All right, I’ll write down a few basic instructions for you,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go and get changed?’

  While he was upstairs I went into the kitchen to make a few notes about the cooker. It was in an appalling state, like the whole room, coated with grease, inside and out, which he had made a few ineffectual attempts to scrape off. There were circular scorch marks on the Formica work surface next to it, left by saucepans that must have been nearly red hot when he put them down, and a great plume of soot was imprinted on the wall above the hotplates where a pan of cooking fat had obviously caught fire. I opened the fridge and found it full of bits of food, cooked and uncooked, wrapped in greaseproof paper and tin foil, the more unwholesome of which I disposed of in the dustbin outside the back door. An awful feeling of hopelessness and helplessness enveloped me. It is obvious that Dad can’t go on living on his own indefinitely, that sooner or later he is going to either set fire to himself or poison himself. But he will never leave the house willingly - and, in any case, where would he go?

  When he came downstairs he was transformed, wearing a heather-coloured Harris tweed jacket, grey worsted trousers and a clean striped shirt with a tie. There was a food stain on the lapel of the jacket, but, I told myself, you can’t have everything. On his feet were a pair of polished brown brogues. His thin grey hair was combed back neatly from his forehead.‘Very nice,’ I said approvingly, scraping the congealed food off the jacket with my fingernail on the pretext of feeling the cloth.

  ‘You can’t get material like that now,’ he said. ‘Cost me five quid in Burtons. That was a lot of money then.’

  ‘Where d’you want to have lunch?’ I said.

  ‘The usual,’ he said.

  ‘You wouldn’t like a change?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  The usual is the cafeteria in the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. Suggesting a change was just a token gesture: I’ve given up trying to persuade him to go elsewhere. Most of the restaurants in the neighbourhood are Indian or Chinese which he ‘wouldn’t touch with a bargepole’. I managed to lure him into an Italian trattoria once but the prices on the menu shocked him, and he claimed to dislike the taste of garlic and olive oil in the food. He looked sour and unhappy throughout the meal and I didn’t repeat the experiment. Pubs he regards as places for drinking beer, which he has given up because he believes it exacerbates his prostate condition, not somewhere to go for a hot dinner, which he wouldn’t enjoy anyway, surrounded by people enviably quaffing pints. So by a process of elimination we have ended up going regularly to Sainsbury’s.

  ‘OK, I’ll ring up and reserve a table,’ I said, but that was another quip he didn’t hear and I didn’t repeat.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll ring for a minicab.’

  There was a time when he would have bitterly opposed this extravagance, but of late he has grudgingly allowed me to pay for a cab on the outward journey on the understanding that we return by bus. As usual he said, ‘Have a glass of sherry first?’ and as usual I accepted. I don’t like his cheap syrupy sweet sherry, but the Sainsbury’s cafeteria is not licensed and I need a shot of alcohol to get me through the lunch. When we’d had the sherry I called the local minicab office and they said it would be five minutes, at which point Dad decided, typically, that he had to go to the loo again before he went out. I took the opportunity to sneak a second glass of sherry, in fact a small tumbler of the stuff, while he was upstairs but, as I feared, the minicab honked to announce its arrival outside the house before he had got his hat and coat on. Then he couldn’t find his keys to lock up the house. The minicab honked impatiently again. I looked out and saw that it was blocking the narrow channel between the rows of parked cars and was holding up the progress of another vehicle. I went out and asked the driver to go round the block and come back in two minutes. He muttered something I didn’t catch and drove off at speed. I was by no means confident we would see him again. I went back into the hall, where Dad was frantically going through the pockets of various coats and jackets hanging in the hall. ‘Don’t you have a hook in the kitchen where you keep them?’ I said.

  ‘They’re not there.’

  I went into the kitchen and found the keys on the hook. ‘Here you are,’ I said, giving them to him.

  His face lit up with relief. ‘Thank Gawd for that. Where were they?’

  ‘On the hook in the kitchen. Come on, let’s go.’

  The cab driver was back, scowling from the window of his beaten-up red Honda, and I hurried Dad into the back of the car. We took off with a screech of tyres, rolling and sliding on the slippery vinyl sea
t.

  ‘I could swear I looked at that hook and they weren’t there,’ Dad said.

  ‘Never mind, Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Did I turn off the electric fire?’ he wondered.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, though I couldn’t remember whether he had or not. I couldn’t face telling the driver to go back. And if the house burned down, I reflected darkly, that might solve the problem of how to get Dad out of it.