Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  It’s been a long, draining day, the only compensation being that Dad duty got me out of some Christmas duties. Marcia helped Fred with the big Christmas shopping mission to Sainsbury’s in the morning, a chore I always detest: the gridlock of overloaded trolleys in the aisles, the long slow-moving queues at the checkouts, everybody behaving more like looters than shoppers, scrabbling for the best produce (last Christmas I actually saw a woman pinch the last box of organic mushrooms in the store from somebody else’s trolley while their back was turned). I was very glad to be spared all that. And I didn’t have to meet Fred’s mother, who came up from her retirement flat in Cheltenham by train, at the station - Fred did so herself, Jakki having generously volunteered to man, or woman, the shop, since she has no family to cater for.

  When Dad and I arrived home at about seven Fred was decorating the big Christmas tree in the lounge, watched and advised by her mother, who was seated in an upright armchair by the fire in the Britannia pose she favours: back straight, head up, knees slightly apart under her full skirt, holding the Daily Telegraph she had brought with her like a shield. There was already a small heap of wrapped presents under the tree. The little crib with carved olive-wood Nativity figures bought in Bethlehem and presented by Fred’s parents years ago was in place on the bookshelves. Carol music filtered from the discreetly placed speakers. It was a pleasant scene, almost as if staged to make an impression. I have to admit that Fred does Christmas very well. But almost at once there was a little friction between us: she asked me if I would help her drape the coloured lights around the tree, and I said I was too tired and couldn’t it wait till tomorrow, so with an impatient sigh she did it herself while I got myself and Dad a drink, and the lights didn’t come on, and Fred got irritable, and in the end I had to lay the flex out on the floor and check that all the fragile little bulbs were screwed tightly into their sockets before I found the culprit which was breaking the circuit. I hope this is not a foretaste of contretemps to come. The trouble is that as soon as there is the slightest disagreement between Fred and me, our respective parents instinctively line up behind their offspring, and so the friction factor is squared. Dad urged me to finish my drink before attending to the lights and Fred’s mother mentioned that her late husband always used to regard the Christmas tree lights as his special responsibility. Mr Fairfax died five years ago.

  Mrs Cecilia Magdalene Fairfax, to give her name in full, is a tall vigorous seventy-seven-year-old widow with an enormous bust which gives me some idea of how Fred might look at the same age if she hadn’t had her breast-reduction operation (she never told her mother about this, pretending that she had ‘dieted’). Cecilia has absolutely nothing in common with Dad and sometimes looks at him with a kind of horrified distaste, like a lady of the manor who finds that the under-gardener has unaccountably been invited into her drawing room by a member of the family and cannot therefore be ejected. He for his part regards her as a ‘stiff old bird’ whom it is his duty to cheer up with quips and anecdotes. He calls her ‘Celia’. When she corrected him once, he said ‘Cecilia’ was one syllable too many for an old man with false teeth. ‘So I call you “Celia” for short. You don’t mind, do you?’ She replied frostily, ‘If you must. But of course they are two quite different names. Cecilia was a virgin martyr of the Early Church. Celia was an ordinary Roman name, a pagan name.’ I think she would really prefer if he called her ‘Mrs Fairfax’. She invariably addresses him as ‘Mr Bates’, in spite of repeated invitations to call him ‘Harry’.

  24th December. The house is filling up. Giles, Fred’s second child, and his wife Nicola arrived this afternoon, with their infant son, Basil, aged nine months, having driven up this afternoon from Hertfordshire in their black BMW 4x4, a huge high vehicle recently acquired in exchange for a Porsche to provide maximum protection for their precious offspring. It has almost opaque tinted windows to foil potential kidnappers, and a sticker on the rear window, ‘Baby On Board’, appealing to the consciences of drivers who might be intent on ramming them from behind. Of Fred’s three children Giles is the most prosperous. Andrew paid for him to attend Downside, and after university he followed his father’s footsteps into the City and a job in a merchant bank. Today he wears the expression of a man who has just been given a very satisfactory Christmas bonus and can barely restrain himself from telling you how much it was. Nicola is a commercial lawyer, but has decided to take four years out of her career to have two babies - the figures are specified precisely, like a balance sheet. One feels sure the babies will balance too, a boy and a girl. She is good-looking in a featureless sort of way, nicely dressed, pleasantly spoken and rather dull.

  Fred’s youngest son, Ben, and his girlfriend Maxine arrived in the middle of the evening, later than expected, delayed not so much by the fog as by a festive lunchtime party at the premises of the TV production company he works for, ‘after which we had to chill out for a few hours in case we got nicked on the motorway’. I have always found Ben the most likeable of Fred’s children: a cheerful, relaxed, extrovert young man who declined his father’s offer to send him to Downside like his brother and opted for a local state school. He works in some capacity on one of those television programmes about buying and selling or swapping or renovating or redecorating houses to which British viewers seem to be addicted, there are so many of them on every channel. He describes the genre dismissively as ‘property porn’, but says it’s a good way to learn the ropes of documentary-making. Maxine, his partner for the past two years, is a TV make-up artist, pretty, leggy and friendly, with an estuary accent and hardly an idea in her head that isn’t connected with TV, fashion and cosmetics. She makes Ben take her to trashy horror films because she wants to see the make-up.The unspoken consensus of Fred’s family is that she is rather common, and Cecilia is painfully divided between a fear that Ben will marry her and a moral disapproval of cohabitation. But Maxine gets on well with Dad, who is rather smitten with her, and has bought her his biggest box of chocolates.

  Fred, her mother, Giles, Ben and Maxine have gone off to Midnight Mass (pronounced ‘maass’ by the Fairfax family) which begins at ten-thirty with a carol service. Ben is not a practising Catholic, Giles only a nominal one, and Maxine doesn’t practise anything except make-up, but they accompany Fred and her mother in a spirit of seasonal solidarity. In the past I have sometimes gone with them, since it is just about the only religious service I positively enjoy, the carol singing bit anyway, but I didn’t like to leave Nicola, who has retired to bed with her baby, responsible for Dad. He has in fact gone to bed too, but last night I found him wandering about on the landing in his pyjamas looking for the bathroom in a dazed and confused state, with an enamel jug in his hand which I had given him to pee in if he was taken short, having somehow got it into his head that he had to empty the jug immediately in the bathroom, due no doubt to the antihistamine tablets which his doctor gives him as sleeping pills - they are safe but fuddle his old brain. I didn’t think Nicola would know what to do if she ran into him on the landing in similar circumstances.

  Tomorrow morning Anne and Jim are driving up from Derbyshire, and Richard from Cambridge, in good time for Christmas dinner, which is really a late lunch. Marcia and Peter and their two children will join us, so it will be a big party. Richard’s presence is a bit of a last-minute surprise. He phoned up this morning to say he’d like to join us, but would have to drive back to Cambridge the same evening. I shall try to persuade him to stay the night.There is too much fog about on the roads - worst of all in the Thames Valley, apparently. Heathrow is immobilised, flights cancelled, travellers sleeping in the terminals.Trains are consequently overcrowded and roads jammed. This mass multi-directional migration in midwinter is insane. All our bedrooms are spoken for, but I can rig up a camp bed for Richard in my study. I haven’t seen him for months.

  25 th December. Another Christmas Day is nearly over. It’s ten past eleven. Richard declined with thanks my offer to make up a bed for him here in my study, an
d has driven off back to Cambridge, so I am able to make some notes on the day before going to bed myself. A lot of people have already retired, exhausted by hours of compulsory festivity and each other’s company: Fred (who has certainly earned a long rest) led the retreat at ten, accompanied by her mother, followed by Giles and Nicola (who said they were woken up by their teething baby last night), and Anne, who needed no excuse, for she looks heavily pregnant - hard to believe that the birth is still two months away. Marcia and Peter went home with their offspring hours ago. At ten-thirty Ben, Maxine and Jim settled down to watch a classic Hollywood film noir on the television. Dad, who slept - and snored - in the drawing room for some time after lunch, with a newspaper over his head, was inconveniently perky this evening. The film was not to his taste, and after a few critical remarks about the depressing effect of the black-and-white photography and the melodramatic style of the acting, designed to persuade the others to switch over to something lighter and brighter, which failed to have the desired effect, he turned his attention to me and began a rambling series of anecdotes about his life as a dance musician. The amount of cigarette smoking going on in the film revived memories of Arthur Lane’s addiction, his trick of pinching out fag ends between his foot-operated cymbals and the famous occasion when he set fire to his bass drum while the band was playing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. ‘And did I ever tell you about Sammy Black’s wig? A lovely trombonist Sammy was, but he wore a terrible wig . . .’ If Maxine had not been otherwise occupied, she might have been an interested auditor, but I had heard all the stories before, several times. I was desperate for some peace and quiet, longing to prise the hearing aids, which I had been wearing all day, out of my hot, sweaty earholes, and to enjoy a spell of silence. So after about a quarter of an hour I pretended that I was going to go to bed, which persuaded Dad that he should go too, and having seen him to his room I bade him goodnight and slunk back downstairs to my study.

  Went the day well? It could have been worse, I suppose, but it didn’t pass without some squalls and squabbles, conflicts and complaints. Dad woke early, came downstairs to make himself a cup of tea, and set off the burglar alarm. I had gone to bed and to sleep before the others came back from Midnight Mass, and Fred set the alarm on the assumption that I had reminded Dad about it, whereas I thought we had agreed not to set the alarm with a houseful of guests and to rely on locking and bolting the external doors - a misunderstanding no doubt caused by my hearing problem. I didn’t hear the alarm go off for the same reason, and was woken from an early-morning doze by Fred’s elbow in my ribs and a grunted command to do something. I found Dad at the bottom of the stairs, in his dressing gown and slippers, with a hand cupped to his ear and a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Hallo, son,’ he said. ‘Can you hear a funny noise?’

  I de-activated the alarm, and phoned the security company to tell them it was a false one. ‘Have a nice day,’ said the man who took my call, when he had taken down the details. ‘Well, it hasn’t been an auspicious start,’ I said. He laughed uncertainly. I don’t think he was sure what ‘auspicious’ meant. I expect he was feeling sorry for himself at being on duty on Christmas Day, but I imagined him sitting all alone in a quiet, warm office, with a book and a portable radio to hand, and only the occasional telephone call to disturb his peace, and I envied him.

  I made Dad some tea in the kitchen and gave him a digestive biscuit with it. ‘Ain’t you having breakfast, then?’ he said, inspecting the biscuit with a disappointed expression. ‘It’s too early,’ I said. He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Blimey! A quarter to six! Is that all it is?’ He hadn’t got his teeth in so he dipped the biscuit in the tea before mumbling it between his gums. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ I said. ‘What will you do?’ ‘I suppose I could take half a pill,’ he said. ‘Get another couple of hours’ kip.’ I encouraged him in this plan, and escorted him upstairs. I crept into our bedroom and into bed. Fred muttered something which I didn’t hear but assumed was an accusing question about the alarm and Dad.‘Don’t let’s talk about it now,’ I said, snuggling up to her, not from any tender or amorous impulse but simply for animal warmth. I find it’s the best way to get off to sleep again when I wake early. It worked, but it didn’t seem very long before she got up herself and went downstairs to prepare the turkey and put it in the oven. It’s an enormous bird, and she believes in slow cooking.

  As the morning passed the smell of the roasting turkey filled the kitchen and seeped out into the dining room and front hall and could be faintly sniffed even in my study. ‘Mmm! What a delicious smell,’ the newly arriving members of the family party exclaimed as they took off their coats and shed their burdens of wrapped presents, though personally I find it falls only just short of faintly nauseous on the olfactory scale. Still, the morning was all right, on the whole. Dad slept till gone nine, which meant I was able to read yesterday’s paper over my breakfast before I had to make his and sit with him while he ate it in his dressing gown, and there was just time to get him upstairs and out of sight to wash and dress before people started to arrive. Anne and Jim were the first. I was glad to see that she looked well. Jim looked as he always looks, genial but detached, slightly spaced out, though he assured me once that he never smokes grass before lunch. Although he was only a child in the Sixties, he looks and acts like a fossilised relic of that era, wearing his hair shoulder length, dressing always in denim, and sporting one of those long straggly moustaches that were popular on the West Coast during the Summer of Love. Cecilia can hardly bring herself to look at him without flinching. He and Anne have been together for eight years now. I must admit that he wouldn’t have been my first choice as a partner for my daughter, and I sometimes feel he is living off her rather than supporting her, but she seems happy with the relationship, so I keep my doubts to myself.

  I took Anne into my study and asked her how she was. ‘Fine, just a bit of backache,’ she said.

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘Kicking. He’s fine.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a he?’

  ‘I had a scan. I knew you’d be pleased.’ She could tell by my expression.

  ‘Well, you know . . . My first grandchild. Perhaps the only one. Not much sign of Richard producing any progeny . . . and I don’t suppose you’ll risk having another at your age, will you?’

  ‘Well, we’ll see how this one goes,’ she said.

  She looked very like her mother at that moment, when Maisie was carrying Anne herself, except that Maisie used to wear tent-like smocks, whereas Anne follows the modern fashion for flaunting her swollen belly, sheathed in a tight-fitting top above matching trousers. The fluffy ginger hair, the round face, the hesitant smile, and the two vertical worry lines in the middle of the forehead, were just the same. It was always said that Anne took after her mother, whereas Richard was more like me.

  ‘And how are you, Dad?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, all right. Getting deafer and deafer.’

  ‘You seem to be managing all right.’

  ‘It’s quiet in here.’

  ‘And what about Rick? Is he coming today?’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming.’ The doorbell chimed at that moment. ‘That might be him,’ I said.

  But it was Marcia and Peter and their children. It’s a cliché, of course, that children are an essential ingredient of any celebration of Christmas, but like most clichés it is true. Adults, even sour and cynical ones like me, can at least for a while see Christmas through their innocent eyes and recover some sense of the wonder and excitement we experienced ourselves long ago. Lena entered the house with a beatific smile on her face which shone like a reflected sunbeam on everything and everybody that she encountered, while Christmas had made Daniel more solemn and dignified than ever, though there was a visionary gleam in his eye. ‘So what did Father Christmas bring you, Dauphin Daniel?’ I asked him, crouching down to bring myself to his level. ‘Father Christmas bringed Daniel an icicle,’ he said. ‘An icicle? That doesn’t sound like
much of a present,’ I said. ‘A tricycle, Desmond,’ Marcia said, and everybody around us laughed. One thing we deafies can do at a party is give people a few laughs with our mistakes, and I did not begrudge them this one. Daniel, however, didn’t laugh, but turned his wide eyes on the grinning grown-up faces with a puzzled and faintly disapproving air. ‘And it’s “brought”, not “bringed”, Daniel,’ his mother added. ‘Father Christmas brought you a tricycle.’ Being a teacher (though of maths not English), Marcia thinks it her duty to correct her children at every opportunity. Of course Daniel’s mistake was perfectly logical and shows that he has already mastered the way to form the past tense of regular English verbs. You’ve got to grasp the rules before you learn the exceptions.

  There was a discussion, which almost turned into an argument, about whether presents should be exchanged before or after lunch, and in the end a compromise was reached whereby each person should open one present immediately (to assuage the impatience of little Lena in particular) and the rest would be opened after lunch, when Fred and others engaged in the preparation of the meal would be more at leisure. Then it was time for drinks - champagne and Buck’s fizz, Giles having brought a case of Bollinger as a house-gift (an index of the size of his Christmas bonus) - which put everybody in a good mood, as the first drink of the day usually does.

  Richard arrived at this juncture, somehow managing to get into the house without ringing the bell, and sidling into the drawing room so unobtrusively that I didn’t notice him until Fred pointed him out to me. He was standing just inside the door, examining a painting on the wall like a guest at a party who didn’t know anybody. I beckoned him over to the sideboard where I was dispensing the drinks. ‘Richard! Happy Christmas!’ I said, pouring him a glass of champagne. ‘Same to you, Dad,’ he said. He held the glass critically up to the light, sniffed the exploding bubbles, sipped and nodded approvingly. ‘Nice temperature,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a couple of bottles of Savigny-les-Beaune, premier cru,’ he went on. ‘They’re in the hall. I shouldn’t open them at lunch - they won’t be appreciated. ’ He was dressed exactly as I used to dress forty years ago, in a tweed sports jacket and grey flannels, a discreetly checked shirt and a plain dark tie. He was the only man in the room wearing a tie - even I was wearing an open-necked sports shirt, and a rather dashing suede waistcoat that Fred gave me last Christmas, in honour of the occasion. I noticed his hair was getting thin - something he must inherit from Maisie’s father, who was already quite bald at our wedding. ‘So how are you?’ I said. ‘Fine, fine.’ ‘How is low-temperature physics?’ He smiled. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He tried to explain it to me once.The object apparently is to get the temperature of substances down to a point as near as possible to absolute zero, which makes particles behave in odd and interesting ways. I remember him saying: ‘You have to identify the energy within a given substance and then devise a way of removing it.’ It seemed to me a strange and obsessive sort of quest, a kind of reverse alchemy. We chatted for a while about his drive up. Little Lena tugged my sleeve. ‘Grandma says will you check the table,’ she said. I went into the dining room where Fred and I had constructed an irregularly shaped surface around which thirteen adults and two children could be seated by joining our extended dining table to a card table, and covering them with overlapping cloths. I checked the glasses and the cutlery, and opened some bottles of wine to breathe.