Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  17 th November. I had a curious encounter with Colin Butterworth yesterday evening. I went to the new Theology professor’s Inaugural Lecture, more for the sake of a glass or three of wine at the reception afterwards (the Deputy Dean who is responsible for buying the SCR wine has a good palate) than out of interest in ‘The Problem of Petitionary Prayer’, but there is a decent loop system in the main Humanities lecture theatre, so if it turned out to be interesting I could be sure of hearing it. I went on my own because Fred had a meeting, the board of a charity she’s involved in, though she wouldn’t have gone anyway, she said,‘Because I know what a hotbed of atheism that theology department is.’ A slight exaggeration, but it’s true that academic theologians these days tend to be a rather sceptical lot, and profess something called Religious Studies rather than Christianity or any other faith. This chap certainly adopted an attitude of amused detachment from his subject. ‘Petitionary prayer is asking God to do something,’ he explained. ‘When you petition on behalf of others it’s called intercessionary prayer. Roman Catholics have a special form of that which consists of asking the Blessed Virgin or the saints to intercede for you, forwarding your request to God.’ The audience tittered, as they were meant to do. There were, he said, several problems with the idea of petitionary prayer. One was that it usually didn’t work. Another was that in many cases if it worked for you it negated somebody else’s petition - as when two warring nations or two rugby teams prayed to the same God for victory. But the biggest problem of all was the idea of a supreme being who intervened in human history to reward some petitioners and deny others manifestly no less deserving. What was surprising was that religious people were so resourceful in rationalising and reconciling themselves to these disappointments and contradictions that they persisted in petitionary prayer. At this point I recalled the suicide note on the Internet, ‘Please God do something for me and make this my time to go . . .’ and I wondered if the writer, when she came round from her overdose, was grateful or disappointed that her prayer had not been answered, and in the reverie this provoked I lost the gist of the lecture and never discovered if there was a solution to the problem of petitionary prayer.

  The reception in the Senior Common Room afterwards was the usual ordeal by Lombard Reflex. There were several fellow sufferers among the elderly guests whom these occasions tend to attract, and I had some exchanges along the familiar lines of ‘Terribly noisy in here’ - ‘What?’ - ‘I said it’s terribly noisy in here’ - ‘Sorry, can’t hear you, it’s so damned noisy in here . . .’ Then Sylvia Cooper, wife of the former Head of History, engaged me in one of those conversations in which your interlocutor says something that sounds like a quotation from a Dadaist poem, or one of Chomsky’s impossible sentences, and you say ‘What?’ or ‘I beg your pardon?’ and they repeat their words, which make a banal sense the second time round.

  ‘The pastime of the dance went to pot,’ Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, ‘so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows’ in-laws finding they stuttered.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gîte, cowering indoors behind the shutters.’

  ‘Oh, hot, was it?’ I said. ‘That must have been the summer of 2003.’

  ‘Yes, we seared our arses on bits of plate, but soiled my cubism, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We were near Carcasonne. A pretty place, but spoiled by tourism, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah, yes, it’s the same everywhere these days,’ I said sagely.

  ‘But I do mend sherry. Crap and sargasso pained there, you know. There’s a lovely little mum of modern tart.’

  ‘Sherry?’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘Céret, it’s a little town in the foothills of the Pyrenees,’ said Mrs Cooper with a certain impatience.‘Braque and Picasso painted there. I recommend it.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve been there,’ I said hastily. ‘It has a rather nice art gallery.’

  ‘The mum of modern tart.’

  ‘Quite so,’ I said. I looked at my glass. ‘I seem to need a refill. Can I get you one?’

  To my relief, she declined. Having obtained my refill I moved to the fringes of the throng where I was able to hear the people who came up to me reasonably well. I caught sight of Butterworth and his wife on the other side of the room, chatting to the inaugural lecturer and no doubt lavishing the usual insincere compliments on his performance. Butterworth - tall, athletic, tanned, with a mop of glossy dark curly hair worn long over the collar of his silky black suit - looks the more youthful and handsome of the pair, though I suppose they are both in their early forties. Mrs Butterworth is or used to be a nurse, I remember being told, and was wearing a rather severe uniform-like pinafore dress. She stood in an erect posture and studied the theologian attentively as if she were observing his symptoms and might at any moment whip a thermometer out of her starched blouse and pop it into his mouth. Butterworth’s eyes in contrast were flicking around all the time looking for the next person it would be in his interest to speak to. For a moment his glance met mine but quickly moved on: we were never closely acquainted, and as a retired former colleague I would have nothing to contribute to the furtherance of his career. Then the VC, who had introduced the lecturer, as is the custom at inaugurals, came up to me and asked me how my good lady was and what we had thought of the new play at the Playhouse, having spotted Fred and me at the press night. I hadn’t been able to hear most of it, but managed to bluff my way through the conversation plausibly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Butterworth weaving his way through the crowd towards us as fast as he could manage with a glass of wine in his hand. He greeted me by my first name as if I was his oldest friend and then turned his attention to the VC, who was however almost immediately taken off by the Dean to meet someone else. ‘So how are you enjoying retirement?’ Butterworth said, looking disappointedly at the VC’s retreating back. People still ask me this at parties, as if I retired four months rather than four years ago. ‘Very much,’ I said, not wishing to give him the satisfaction of knowing the truth. ‘How are things with you?’‘Frantically busy,’ he said.‘You’ve no idea how much paperwork we have to deal with these days.You got out at the right time.’ This is another thing former colleagues tend to say to me at parties, darkly implying some equivalence between early retirement and generals being helicoptered out of besieged cities or rats leaving sinking ships. He went on to list all the assessment exercises he was involved in, and all the committees he sat on, and all the grant applications he had to make, and all the articles he had to referee, and all the postgraduate students he had to supervise.‘Yes,’ I said, as he paused for breath. ‘I met one of them the other day.’ He focused his gaze on me for the first time since the VC had left us together. ‘Oh? Who was that?’ ‘Alex Loom,’ I said.

  He gave me a look which I can best describe as wary. ‘How did you meet her?’ he said. I told him it was at a private view at the ARC gallery, without mentioning our subsequent contacts.‘She told me about her research,’ I said (which was true, though I hadn’t heard a word on that occasion). ‘It’s an intriguing subject.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If a little morbid,’ I added. ‘Yes,’ he said. I had never known him so sparing in speech. ‘Getting on well with it, is she?’ I asked innocently. ‘It’s early days,’ he said. ‘She’s still assembling a corpus. She needs more British letters for a balanced sample. Most of the available stuff is American.’ As he talked about the methodological problems he relaxed a little and recovered some of his normal fluency. I pretended to know less than I do about Alex to try and draw him out. Why had she come to England to do research, I asked. ‘She wanted to work with me,’ he said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘And I suppose it’s cheaper than in the States,’ I said.‘Yes,’ he said, reverting to monosyllabic mode. ‘Where did she do her first degree?’ I asked. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘Some liberal arts college in New England, and then a Master�
�s at Cornell.’ ‘Oh, I thought she said Columbia,’ I said. He looked at me warily again. ‘Perhaps it was. I really don’t know a lot about her. She doesn’t come into the University much. Works on her own, keeps to herself, doesn’t mix with the other graduate students.’ ‘An enigma,’ I said smilingly. ‘You could say that,’ he said, looking past me across the room. ‘My wife is signalling to me, I think she wants to go home. Excuse me.’ He moved away.

  He was so obviously reluctant to say anything about Alex which might reveal that his golden touch as a supervisor is failing with her that I wonder whether she hasn’t in fact already dropped a hint that she would like me to take her on in his stead. I watched him go over to his wife and say something which seemed to surprise her, and shortly afterwards they left the party.

  I felt pleased with myself for having discomposed the normally smooth and self-satisfied Butterworth, and consequently drank rather too many glasses of the SCR Beaujolais. I left my car in the campus car park and walked home, arriving there in a still somewhat inebriated state, which turned into an amorous state when I discovered Fred in her bathroom having a soak in the big claw-footed bathtub, looking like a rosy Bonnard nude, her blunt nipples just breaking the surface of the water, her pubic hair moving like seaweed beneath it. I undressed and got in behind her, and soaped her fine new breasts as she lay back with her head on my shoulder, and told her about the lecture and the people I had spoken to (except Butterworth) and she told me about her meeting. Afterwards we went to bed, both naked and I with a quite promising erection, but I fell asleep in middle of our first embrace, so abruptly that I wasn’t aware of feeling drowsy before I passed out. I woke in the small hours, cold because I had no pyjamas on, with Fred sleeping soundly beside me, swathed in one of her all-enveloping winter nightdresses. She made a dry comment at breakfast this morning, about my having had too much to drink the night before, but did not complain about my falling prematurely asleep, which was sporting of her.

  18th November. In my inbox this morning: The longest most intense orgasms of your life - Rock hard erections - Erections like steel - Ejaculate like a porn star - Multiple orgasms - Cum again and again - SPUR-M is The Newest and The Safest Way of Pharmacy - 100% Natural and No Side Effects - World Wide shipping within 24 hours. I don’t understand how most of these spam messages reach me because they don’t have the correct surname in the addressee box, only the correct initials, like ‘D.S. Jones’, ‘D.S. Ford’, D.S. Bellwether’ and, my favourite, ‘D.S. Human’. Today’s was addressed to ‘D.S. Limp’.

  19th November. A slightly deranged outpouring from Dad when I phoned him today, complaining that he hasn’t had any Premium Bond wins for six months. He holds several thousand pounds’ worth. I’m pretty sure he would obtain a better return from a good building society account, but he gets much more fun out of Premium Bonds. It always gives him a kick when a warrant for fifty pounds turns up in the post, sometimes two at once, but apparently he has been going through a barren period.‘Six months! What a liberty!’ I explain to him what he seems to have forgotten, that it is a lottery, and there is no guarantee how often you will win a prize, or indeed that you will ever win a prize, only that you never lose your stake. ‘It’s done by a computer program designed to produce random numbers.’ ‘You mean Ernie?’ he said. ‘I know all about that. But you don’t think those blokes up in . . . wherever it is, up north somewhere, Blackpool, d’you think they can’t make the computer pick whatever numbers they like?’ ‘Why would they do that?’ I said. ‘They’re not allowed to hold Premium Bonds themselves.’ ‘No, but what about their relatives? Their mates?’ ‘Dad, if the system was corrupt I think it would have been discovered by now.’ ‘I’m not saying they feed their family’s numbers into the machine, they’re too fly to do that. But they can favour certain areas.’ ‘Areas?’ He had lost me for a moment. ‘Yes, areas, areas,’ he said impatiently. ‘The places where the bonds were bought. They know which numbers come from where. They can reduce the odds for people they know. I bet you more people win prizes in Blackpool than anywhere else in the country.’ There was a kind of crazy logic to his speculations, and I was impressed by the amount of thought he had given to the subject. ‘I don’t think so, Dad,’ I said. ‘Well, I do, and I’m going to write and complain,’ he said. ‘OK, Dad,’ I said. It is something to keep his brain exercised, I suppose.

  I have started to collect brochures of care homes in our section of the city, getting addresses from the Yellow Pages and the Social Services. A depressing task. I shall have to make a shortlist and look at them myself before Dad comes up for Christmas. I haven’t dared to broach the subject with him on the phone. Perhaps I will next time I go down to London - there will be one more day-trip before then. Not only will he strenuously resist the idea of leaving his house - the idea of moving to what he calls, with a kind of intonational shiver, ‘the North’ will make it doubly upsetting. His England is London and the south-east: the great metropolis, the seaside towns of the south coast with their piers and promenades, and a nice bit of country in between, nothing wilder than the South Downs. His wartime postings to East Anglia and the Shetlands he saw as exile, almost to another country. When he comes to stay with us he finds everything beyond our leafy suburban street strange and rather threatening: the different colour of the buses, the broad ‘A’s and cryptic contractions of the local dialect, the grids of grimy terraced houses surrounding huge carcasses of abandoned mills waiting for demolition or conversion. The surrounding country, much admired for its sweeping moors, rushing rivers and picturesque ruined abbeys, holds no charms for him. Show him a fine panorama of peaks and valleys and his comment is likely to be, ‘Nowhere to get a cup of tea round here, is there?’

  20th November. I had an email from Alex Loom today: ‘Still working on that chapter, but here’s something to amuse you while you’re waiting.’ She gave the address of a website called The Suicide Note: AWriter’s Guide. I’ve read it through several times, and I’m completely unable to make up my mind about it. Is it a serious document, or a sick joke? Or a cunning device to put off potential suicides? It certainly exerts a horrible fascination.

  The first thing you must decide is what method to use. Are you going to type your note on a typewriter or a computer? Or are you going to write it out by hand? A handwritten note is more personal, and will therefore have a greater emotional effect on your readers. But if you compose it on a computer you will be able to read it through and edit it. After all, this is the last thing you will ever say, it is your final statement to your family, friends, and the world. It may be read out in the coroner’s court, and quoted in the media. It may even end up in an anthology of suicide notes! So you want to make it as clear and unambiguous as you can.You might consider composing your note on a computer and then copying out the final draft by hand to give it that personal touch. But don’t make the note too polished. Switch off your computer’s spellchecker and grammarchecker. A few mistakes in your letter will give it an effect of urgency and authenticity.

  I felt the cold touch of the uncanny as I read that last sentence: it was as if the writer had hacked into my journal entry of a few days ago and stolen my observation about the effective artlessness of that girl’s suicide note.

  Give yourself plenty of time to write your note. Don’t leave it till the last minute, when the pills or whatever are already doing their work. You may panic and forget all the things you meant to say.You may lose consciousness before you have finished the note. It’s best to start writing a day or two before you actually kill yourself. Sleep on it, and read it through the next morning, like professional writers do.You will see all kinds of ways to improve it.

  Here I began to wonder if the author of this document was sadistic-ally teasing the poor desperate creatures who might have lighted on his website while searching the Internet for sympathy and succour under ‘Suicide’, or whether by treating the whole business in such a cool matter-of-fact way he was aiming to shock them into understanding
the finality of death and perhaps rejecting it as a solution to their problems. Or was it simply a tasteless parody of writer’s manuals?

  It’s best to write your letter in the first person. Referring to yourself in the third person will seem affected and insincere. Avoid literary quotations for the same reason.Write in your own voice, using vocabulary that comes naturally to you. Don’t search a dictionary or thesaurus for a more impressive-sounding word than the one you first thought of. At the same time, avoid clichés like ‘I can’t take any more’, ‘My life is not worth living’, ‘I want to end it all’ etc. They have been used so many times before that they have lost all their expressive effect, and your readers will become bored and lose interest.

  The author of the ‘guide’ had obviously studied a lot of suicide notes, and was familiar with some of their characteristic strategies and pitfalls.

  You may express a wish for the kind of funeral you would like, but don’t make it too extravagant (e.g., kilted bagpipers playing a lament over your grave) or your relatives will resent the trouble and expense you put them to . . . Don’t give instructions or reminders to your partner like, ‘Remember your raincoat is at the dry cleaner’s and will be ready for collection on Thursday.’ You may think this makes you sound like a thoughtful, unselfish person, but your partner will see it as a ploy to make them feel bad, and others will think you were stupid to be thinking about such trivial matters instead of concentrating on the business at hand . . . Make sure you leave your note in a prominent place where it is sure to be found, otherwise you will have wasted your time writing it; but don’t mail it, in case you take longer to kill yourself than you planned, in which case you might be prevented.