by David Lodge
At about four-thirty the phone on my desk rang. I jumped, and picked it up without first putting in my hearing aid. It was Alex, of course.
‘You didn’t come,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘A pity. It would have been good for both of us.’ She didn’t sound as if she was phoning from her flat, but from a public place: there was a good deal of noise, including music, in the background.
‘I thought you agreed not to phone me at home again,’ I said.
‘Well, that was on condition you helped me with my dissertation, ’ she said. ‘Anyway your wife isn’t at home right now.’
‘How do you know?’ I said.
‘Because I’m looking at her.’
I was seized with a sick sensation of bewilderment and dread. ‘What do you mean?’
She laughed. ‘I’m looking at her through the window . . .’ Her voice faded and my hearing was not good enough to pick up the following words.
‘What? What?’ I said, scrabbling frantically for my hearing-aid pouch. ‘I can’t hear you.’ I stuffed a hearing instrument into my right ear, and her voice became just about audible.
‘I guess the signal is not too good in this place,’ she said.
‘Where are you?’ I said. But I had already guessed.
‘I’m in the Rialto shopping mall, outside Décor,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice shop. I can see your wife inside, showing a customer some beautiful cushions. She’s the tall one in the corduroy pants suit, right? Not the brunette with the short skirt.’
‘What is this all about?’ I said stonily.
‘It’s about your folding umbrella,’ she said. ‘You left it in my flat last week.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s an old one, of no consequence.’
‘Well, I happen to have it with me. I thought I would take the opportunity to return it.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘Are you there?’ Alex said. ‘Did you hear that? I thought I’d go into the shop and introduce myself to your wife and say, “Your husband left this in my apartment last week, would you give it to him?”’
‘Please don’t do that, Alex,’ I said.
‘Why not? She knew you were there that day, didn’t she?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ I said.
‘Ah, then I have you in my power,’ she said, with a giggle.
‘What is it you want?’ I said.
‘I want to continue our discussions. I find them very useful.’
I thought for a moment. ‘All right - but not in your flat,’ I said. To my relief she accepted this condition, and I arranged to meet her in a café I know on the other side of the city. ‘Bring the umbrella,’ I said, before terminating the call.
2nd December. Fred has taken to giving me an occasional smack on the bottom when I’m not expecting it, but if she was hoping to reawaken the passion of the other night, she has been disappointed. I am far too preoccupied with the problem of how to disentangle myself from Alex’s coils to have any appetite for sex. In fact I can hardly suppress an oath of protest when I receive one of these tokens of affection, Fred’s idea of a playful pat being fairly robust. Indeed I wonder whether she isn’t in fact relieving her own frustration by this means. These last couple of days, since that phone call from the Rialto mall, I have been particularly abstracted and more than usually inattentive to what Fred says to me, and she gets understandably exasperated. ‘Have you got your hearing aid in, darling?’ she keeps saying, and when I say yes she raises her eyes heavenwards in mute appeal.
Again and again I resolve to confess the whole story of my involvement with Alex, but again and again my nerve fails me.Why? It’s not as if I have been unfaithful to Fred - I haven’t touched the girl, or even flirted with her. It must be because I’m afraid of looking silly. That’s it. I have been silly. I have let an unscrupulous young woman twist me round the little finger of her flattery. To confess that would make me look smaller in Fred’s eyes, further weaken my status in our marriage. But there is more to it. I know that, if I confess, I must confess everything, otherwise I won’t achieve real peace of mind, that blissful state which Fred claimed she achieved when she became a practising Catholic again and went to confession after a gap of some twenty-five years, a feeling she said was ‘like being spiritually laundered, like having your soul washed, rinsed, spun dry, starched and ironed. Or no - more like being washed in a waterfall and spread out to dry on a sweet-smelling bush in the sunshine.’ But to achieve anything like that enviable state I would have to confess everything, including Alex’s invitation to ‘punish’ her. ‘And did you?’ Fred would ask, and ‘Of course not,’ I would say. But she would know that I had desired to do so. I had committed spanking in my heart. That too is silly, but also shaming. And worse still, she would realise that I had sought to act out my fantasy on her.
12
4th December. Christmas, how I hate it. Not only it, but the thought of it, which is forced into one’s consciousness earlier and earlier every year. For weeks a whole aisle of Sainsbury’s has been dedicated to Christmas decorations, Christmas wrapping paper, Christmas crackers, Christmas napkins, plaster Santas, plastic reindeer, and gifts of hideous design and doubtful utility, mostly manufactured in non-Christian China. Now the newspapers and their glossy magazine supplements are so full of ideas for presents, parties, punch, and leering advice to men about buying lingerie for their womenfolk, that you can hardly find anything worth reading. Illumination addicts compete to festoon the facades and front gardens of their suburban houses with the most elaborate displays of blinking coloured lights and animated Christmas icons, causing collisions of rubber-necking motorists. Restaurants offer special Christmas menus throughout December, as if one plate of turkey with all the trimmings per year wasn’t quite enough. Even the sex-aid emails strike a seasonal note: one received this morning was illustrated with a drawing of a blonde bimbo wearing only stockings and high-heeled boots, her arms and legs wrapped round a snowman, and the caption: ‘Our Cialis made him hot in fifteen minutes!’ Unsafe sex for a snowman, surely?
What can explain this blight of creeping Christmas? When I was a child Christmas Day and Boxing Day were holidays and then life went back to normal, but now Christmas extends seamlessly into the New Year, an even more pointless festivity, so the whole country is effectively paralysed for at least ten days, stupefied by too much drink, dyspeptic from too much food, broke from expenditure on useless gifts, bored and irritable from being cooped up at home with tiresome relatives and fractious children, and square-eyed from watching old films on television. It is the very worst time of the year to have an extended enforced holiday, when the weather is at its most dismal and the hours of daylight are most restricted. Scrooge is my hero - the unregenerate Scrooge of Part One of A Christmas Carol, that is. ‘Bah, humbug!’ How right he was. What a pity he had a change of heart.
I feel a bit better for having got that out of my system. Fred is a true Christmas devotee and gets annoyed if I moan about it. Of course it has a genuine religious significance for her, but it’s also good for business, so now she embraces it with both arms. Then she likes bringing the family, or families, together, and the fact that we invariably get on each other’s nerves after a few hours doesn’t seem to bother her, or rather it does bother her but she has a knack of deleting the unpleasantness from her memory well before the next Christmas comes round.
7th December. I couldn’t get away from Christmas even at the lip-reading class. This afternoon Beth handed out questions on a piece of paper which we had to ask each other and answer without voice: Have you started your Christmas shopping? Do you get up early on Christmas morning? Do you visit family and friends at Christmas? What present would you like to receive this Christmas? Do you have a turkey for Christmas dinner? etc. Then she read without voice a magazine article about the biggest Christmas pudding in the world, and handed round pictures of this gross and repulsive object. In the tea break Marjorie reminded us that we should put our names down on a list
if we wanted to join the Christmas lunch party at the end of term. She left the list on a table and I carefully avoided going anywhere near it.
Fortunately it wasn’t all Christmas. We had an exercise in small groups involving homophenes - the deafie’s equivalent to homophones, words which look alike on the lips but have a different meaning, like mark, park and bark, or white, right and quite, rewire and require. We had to make up sentences using one of these words and lip-speak them to the group. I made up a sentence using all the words in two sets, ‘Quite right, the white room requires rewiring,’ which of course nobody could lip-read, and there was much protesting laughter when they gave up and I said it with voice. I was justly punished for showing off in this fashion by the next exercise, a quiz, to be completed in pairs, called Animal Crackers, which was a list of words with letters missing which themselves spelled out the name of an animal. Thus the solution to Ball - - - ing was Ballbearing, Bl - - t - - was Blotter, and Pu- i - - was pumice. It reminded me of puzzles in the comics which I read as a very young child, but I found the exercise surprisingly difficult, while Gladys, the elderly lady I was paired with, was an absolute wizard at it, and guessed nearly all of them before I did. She told me she is eighty-six.
It is too early to tell how far these classes will improve my ability to use lip-reading in real conversations, and I doubt whether it could ever help me much in situations where there is a low level of redundancy and predictability in the flow of information. Nevertheless I find the class a soothing and refreshing interlude in the week, a welcome suspension of the troubled introspection for which retirement gives so much scope, and a distraction from the anxieties of my personal life at the moment. Above all, it is wonderfully relaxing to be in a social environment where you don’t have to feel in the least foolish or worried or apologetic about being deaf.
8th December. I met Alex today as arranged, at Pam’s Pantry, a café near the main campus of our second university, the former Poly. There used to be a second-hand bookshop next door, in which I browsed occasionally before the Internet made it redundant. The café is a stripped-pine and home-made carrot cake type of place, busy in the lunch hour, but quiet in mid-afternoon, and it doesn’t have any piped music. I haven’t been there for a long time and didn’t recognise the bored-looking young woman behind the counter. I arrived early, got myself a cup of tea, and sat down at the back of the room with a view of the door. There weren’t many other customers: a couple holding hands and a whispered conversation, and a few solitary young people who looked like students reading text messages on their phones or listening to their iPods.When Alex came in she did not look round or catch my eye, but went straight to the counter and ordered a coffee - a latte, I deduced from the server’s movements at the coffee machine.This took some little time, during which Alex kept her back turned to me. She was dressed in black as usual, a shiny black quilted nylon coat over black trousers and boots, with a long red knitted scarf wound round her neck, trapping her pale blonde hair. Then, with the cup and saucer in one hand, and a capacious handbag in the other, she went through an elaborate mime of looking around, hesitating about where to sit, then catching sight of me, and giving a surprised smile of recognition before coming over to say, in a loud voice, ‘Hi! May I join you?’ The other occupants of the café, who had taken no notice of either of us till this moment, looked up. I realised she was teasing me by this unnecessary and in fact counterproductive pretence that we had met by chance. She unwound her scarf, shrugged off her coat and sat down opposite me. She took my folding umbrella out of her bag and laid it on the seat of an unoccupied chair beside our table. ‘Don’t pick it up now,’ she said, in a lower voice, as I made a move to do so. ‘When we’re through, I’ll go out first and leave it there. You stay for a few minutes and then just casually pick it up when you leave.’
‘You’ve been reading too many spy stories,’ I said.
She smiled in acknowledgement of the source of this bit of business, and stirred her latte. ‘Have you forgiven me, Desmond? For the library book and all?’
‘It’s not for me to forgive,’ I said. ‘It’s for the Librarian.’
‘You want me to go and confess to the Librarian? Then they’ll banish me from the Library! Probably from the University. Probably from the country! I’ll be forcibly repatriated, like an asylum seeker caught shoplifting.’ There was a mischievous gleam in her bright blue eyes.
‘What is it you want from me, Alex?’ I said. I was tiring of this badinage.
‘Right now, it’s a suicide note.’
I asked what she meant. She said there had been a psychology research experiment years ago, in America, mixing up genuine suicide notes with what were called ‘pseudicide’ notes composed by friends and family of the research team, and asking a class of graduate students to distinguish the genuine ones from the fakes.‘They scored a surprisingly high success rate. It turned out to be a useful way of identifying the stylistic features of real suicide notes. I want to repeat the same experiment, so I’m asking everybody I know, which isn’t an awful lot of people here in England.’
‘You want me to write a suicide note -’
‘Yeah, make it as realistic as you can.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
I hesitated. I recalled as she spoke that there was a murder case some years ago in which a man had tricked his wife into writing a suicide note and then killed her. I could hardly cite this as a reason for refusing to cooperate, and I didn’t seriously suspect her of any murderous intention, but I was sure it would be extremely unwise to put such a potentially compromising document into her irresponsible hands. I quickly invented another reason to decline: ‘For the same reason I wouldn’t use that website where you enter all your personal details and a computer program calculates the day you will die.’
She looked taken aback. ‘You mean, you’re afraid it might come true?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Have you been tempted to commit suicide, then? Why?’ She had dropped the tone of badinage. Her blue eyes were intently focused on me, waiting for my answer.
‘I’m gradually losing my hearing,’ I said.‘There’s no cure. Eventually I’ll be stone deaf. It’s very depressing.’
‘Gee, yeah, I can imagine but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘I never came across a case where somebody killed themselves because of deafness,’ she said.
‘Beethoven came near,’ I said.
‘But he didn’t.’
‘No. He still had all that marvellous music inside him which he wanted to get down on paper. I don’t have any marvellous music inside me. I don’t have any marvellous anything.’ I was almost persuaded by my own story, moved by the pathos of my imagined plight. Alex anyway was convinced.
‘Hey,’ she said, putting her hand over mine on the table. ‘Sure you do.’ Her fingers were cool and soft, like Dad’s. I was startled, but did not remove my hand. She wore a sapphire ring on her middle finger which seemed to reflect her eyes. ‘You have a lot of knowledge, Desmond, which you can share with people like me,’ she said, in a lighter tone, withdrawing her hand.
We talked for a while about my past research - or rather I talked. She was charming and receptive, and I have to admit that I enjoyed her company, forgetting the embarrassment and worry she had caused me in the past few weeks. I bought her another cup of coffee and myself another tea, with two portions of carrot cake. But when I glanced at my watch and said I had to be going she reverted to the mood of her entrance, and said with a conspiratorial smirk, ‘I’ll leave first. Don’t forget your umbrella,’ reviving the memory of her email prescribing her ‘punishment’, and its sequel. Neither of us had mentioned that episode, and it was as if by not registering my disapproval I had acquired some virtual complicity in it. I smiled feebly and stayed obediently in my seat as she gathered up her bag and her scarf and did up her coat. ‘Thanks for the coffee and cake,’ she said. ‘And
if you change your mind about the suicide note -’
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘Well . . . I’ll be in touch.’
About what, I wondered. I had come to the café with the intention of bringing our relationship to an end once and for all, and failed again. I watched her make her way between the tables to the door, and to my dismay she paused briefly to greet a young man sitting on his own with a laptop open on the table, who looked up as she passed. Absorbed in our conversation, I hadn’t noticed him come into the café. After Alex had gone out he glanced across at me, and I stared him down. I wondered if he had been observing us, and whether he had entered the café in time to see Alex cover my hand with hers.
Tonight, after writing up our meeting, I began idly drafting a pseudicide note - not with any intention of offering it to Alex, but as a stylistic exercise. It was addressed to Fred of course, but just deciding on the form of address was difficult. Fred or Winifred? Dearest or Darling? In the end I decided on Dearest Winifred, the intimacy of the epithet balancing the formality of the full first name, which seemed more appropriate to the occasion than ‘Fred’. Imagining what had brought me to the point of preferring extinction to the continuation of consciousness was easier, for I had already thought of it in conversation with Alex: a drastic acceleration of hearing loss, leading to almost total deafness. Everything I suffered now - frustration, humiliation, isolation - multiplied exponentially. Barely able to hear anything. At cross purposes in every conversational exchange. In the home a silent, withdrawn, unresponsive companion at the best of times; a surly, self-pitying misery at the worst. A damper on every party, a dud at every dinner table. A grandfather unable to communicate with his growing grandchildren, in the presence of whose blank looks and idiotic misunderstandings they must strive to stifle their giggles. It’s not a life worth living, I would tell Winifred - My deafness is a drag on you and the rest of the family, and an inescapable, irremediable grief to me. So I’m going to put an end to it. Please don’t feel bad about it, my darling, it’s not your fault, and you mustn’t blame yourself; no one could have been more kind and understanding. But everyone’s patience has its limits, and I have reached mine. But as I drafted the note its insincerity showed in every word, even in punctuation marks (did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?). I don’t really believe Fred would show such saintly forbearance as it implied, nor would I expect her to. And depressing as the state I had conjured up for myself might be, it wouldn’t be utterly unbearable. There would still be some pleasures left, and no pain. I could have written a convincing note based on the premise of a painful terminal illness, but just thinking of it stirred up distressing memories of Maisie. I abandoned the exercise.
