by David Lodge
There were rather too many women endeavouring to help Fred in the kitchen, with conflicting views about how the ingredients of the meal should be cooked and served, and several of them were slightly tipsy from the champagne, so that some dishes were overdone and some underdone and I was instructed to start carving the turkey before all the vegetables were ready, and Fred had forgotten, or I forgot (there was disagreement about whose responsibility this had been) to warm the dinner plates in the device we have for this purpose. By the time people were seated there was some danger that the main course would be tepid rather than hot, so I suggested that they should start eating as soon as they were served, but Cecilia asked plaintively if we weren’t going to say grace first, so we had to stop serving ourselves and adopt suitable expressions and postures, while Cecilia closed her eyes and joined her hands and intoned a grace - all except Dad, who had not noticed her intervention and carried on cutting up his dinner. This happens every year: we forget that Cecilia likes to say grace before Christmas lunch, and she deliberately doesn’t remind us until the last minute so that she can make everybody feel chastened or edified or otherwise put in their place.
‘I think it’s a great shame that grace before meals seems to be dying out even among practising Catholics,’ Cecilia declared, as she unfolded her napkin and prepared to eat her dinner.‘My late husband used to say grace before every meal even if there were only the two of us at table.’ I looked at Jim and winked.We had a bet last Christmas predicting how many times during the day Cecilia would use the phrase ‘my late husband’ (it was nine, and I won). The grace gave the food a further opportunity to cool, a fact to which Dad tactlessly adverted by asking if his portion could be warmed up a bit in a frying pan and volunteering to carry out this operation himself. His table manners are an inexhaustible source of amusement, irritation or embarrassment, according to one’s point of view. He doesn’t feel that a dinner plate is equipped for its function unless it has a generous smear of mustard and a small hill of salt on the rim, irrespective of the ingredients of the meal, and it is no use telling him that mustard doesn’t go with turkey or that too much salt is bad for you (though we do, every year). Nor is it any use handing him a salt mill - either he twists it the wrong way, causing it to come apart and scatter crystals of sea salt all over the table, or he labours with increasing impatience to grind out enough minute fragments to make a perceptible heap on the edge of his plate. Fred was so irritated by this procedure on one occasion that she provided him with a half-kilo plastic container of Saxo salt beside his plate at the next meal, but so far from taking the hint, or any offence, he thanked her for the thought. I had remembered to place an old-fashioned cruet with a salt cellar and a pot of prepared mustard within his reach at table today, but forgot that he would also require a slab of white bread, spurning the warm ciabatta rolls provided as being too crusty for his false teeth and contaminated by bits of indigestible olive, and I felt obliged to fetch a slice of white loaf from the kitchen in spite of Fred’s injunction that I should stop fussing and sit down.
And so the day proceeded on its predictable course, through the Christmas pudding and mince pies, the pulling of crackers, the donning of paper hats, the reading out of atrocious riddles (rendered still more atrocious when they had to be repeated in a louder voice for my benefit), and the exchanging of presents, leaving the lounge awash with torn wrapping paper.‘History repeats itself once as tragedy and the second time as farce, but Christmas repeats itself as surfeit,’ I remarked, looking round the drawing room at people in various attitudes of torpor, inebriation, indigestion and boredom, clutching new books they would never read, gadgets they would never use, and items of clothing they would never wear. ‘Speak for yourself, darling,’ Fred said sharply. ‘We enjoy it, anyway. Don’t we Lena?’ She gave her grandchild, who was sitting on her knee, a hug. ‘Yes, grandma,’ Lena said obediently. ‘Granddad’s an Eeyore,’ said Fred. ‘Yes, you’re an Eeyore!’ cried Lena delightedly. Fred has been reading Winnie-the-Pooh to her when baby-sitting. Well, perhaps I am. After all, Eeyore was deaf too. It comes into the story about his birthday party. When Piglet wishes him ‘Many happy returns of the day’, Eeyore asks him to say it again.
Balancing on three legs, he began to bring his fourth leg very cautiously up to his ear. ‘I did this yesterday,’ he explained, as he fell down for the third time. ‘It’s quite easy. It’s so I can hear better . . . There, that’s done it. Now then, what were you saying?’ He pushed his ear forward with his hoof.
Deafness is always comic.
I had a surprising conversation with Richard before he left. All through the day he had been as politely inscrutable as ever, fending off all enquiries, however subtle or oblique, about his private life. Then just as he was leaving - when he was actually outside the house, and I was walking him to his car, which he’d had to park in the road - we had the most intimate conversation, brief as it was, that we have had in years. We were talking about Anne’s pregnancy, and I said, ‘She looks just like your mother when she was expecting you.’
His response seemed a non sequitur: ‘I suppose that’s why you hate Christmas, is it?’
‘What d’you mean?’ I said.
‘It reminds you of Mum’s death.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Though I was never a great Christmas enthusiast. ’
Maisie died a week after Christmas Day. I cooked Christmas dinner with the help of the children and we ate it sitting round her bed. She managed to swallow a little herself. We all tried hard to be cheerful, but it was not a very festive meal. ‘It’s almost my last memory of her,’ Richard said. ‘Sitting round her bed, with our plates on our knees. Anne and I went off on that skiing holiday just after.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ I said. I had arranged it with some friends, the Ryders, who were taking their teenage children to Austria, thinking the kids deserved a break from the sickroom atmosphere of the house.
‘I didn’t want to go,’ Richard said. ‘I had a feeling that Mum was going to die very soon.’
‘You didn’t say so,’ I said, surprised at this revelation.
‘No, I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t like to say the words.’
We had reached his parked car. He pressed his key ring and the car’s lights blinked and the driver’s door obediently clicked open. ‘There was no reason to think the end would come so quickly,’ I said. ‘We thought you and Anne needed a break.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’ve always regretted that I wasn’t there when Mum died. When Mrs Ryder told us, at the chalet, after you phoned her, when we came in from skiing, Anne burst into tears and howled, and I thought: “I mustn’t do that. It’s all right for Anne to do it, but I mustn’t cry, not now, not in front of other people.” The result was I never did cry over Mum’s death. I tried to later, but I couldn’t. Then I felt bad about that.’
‘I’m sorry, son,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Dad. You meant well.’
He smiled sadly and extended his hand. I shook it. It was a moment when we should have hugged each other, but it is not in our lexicon of body language. The most we could manage was a stronger, longer handshake than usual.
‘’Bye, Dad,’ he said, getting into his car.
‘Goodbye, and thanks for coming.’
He shut the car door and lowered the window. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay for the party tomorrow.’
‘Oh, God - you don’t know how lucky you are!’ I said.
Our emotional moment was over. He laughed, and drove away with a wave of his hand.
14
THE tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man in the rather dashing mustard yellow suede waistcoat, talking animatedly to a bemused-looking middle-aged woman standing near the Christmas tree in the crowded drawing room, has had, he is aware, quite enough to drink at this halfway stage of the party, but cannot stop himself from taking an occasional quick sip from his glass of red wine, quick enough to prevent the lady from interjecting more t
han a couple of words before he resumes his monologue. Her name is Mrs Norfolk, a fact he established several minutes ago by getting her to write it down for him, and he is engaged in explaining to her why the famous line in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, ‘Very flat, Norfolk’, is funny.
‘You remember that Elyot tells his ex-wife Amanda that he met his new wife Sybil at a house party in Norfolk, and Amanda says, “Very flat, Norfolk”, and everybody in the audience laughs. It never fails. But if she’d said, “Norfolk is very flat”, which would be the most logical way to convey the information, it wouldn’t be funny at all. Amanda has given a rhetorical spin to this banal statement of fact by inverting the normal subject-predicate word order, and omitting the finite verb, transforming “Norfolk is very flat” into “Very flat, Norfolk”. This foregrounds the word “flat” both positionally and intonationally.The intonation of “Norfolk is very flat” is almost completely level, whereas when I say, “Very flat, Norfolk”, my voice rises and falls in pitch, peaking on “flat”. And there’s a slight pause, a kind of caesura, after “Very flat”, which creates a tiny moment of suspense for the audience. What, we wonder, will this portentously foregrounded adjectival phrase, “Very flat”, qualify? The answer is a bathos: “Norfolk”. And that’s one reason why the line is funny - as if in spite of Amanda’s efforts to make her remark seem interesting and original, she is defeated by its semantic content. It remains irretrievably, irredeemably, “flat”. Like Norfolk.’
He snatches a gulp of wine. Mrs Norfolk gapes at him, then seems about to speak. Hastily he prevents her.‘But there’s a double-take effect, because we immediately see another possibility, which is also funny - that “flat Norfolk” is a metonym for boring country-house parties where one meets boring women like Sybil. When, a few lines later, Amanda complains of Elyot’s disrespectful remarks about her new husband, Victor, and says, “At least I have good taste enough to refrain from making cheap gibes at Sybil”, he retorts accusingly, “You said Norfolk was flat.” And she replies, “That was no reflection on her unless she made it flatter.” Either she is being disingenuous, and pretending she didn’t mean that when she said “Very flat, Norfolk”, or - another amusing possibility - Elyot has admitted that he finds Sybil “flat”, i.e., boring, by wrongly accusing Amanda of implying it. In any case, if Elyot had met her somewhere else, in Wales for instance, and Amanda’s line was, “Very hilly, Wales”, it wouldn’t be funny at all. “Wales is very hilly”, “Very hilly, Wales” - there’s no difference in effect, because there is no pun concealed in “hilly”, no metaphorical and referential equivalence, as there is in “flat” . . .’
His wife comes up to them, glares at himself, smiles sweetly at Mrs Norfolk, says something to her and bears her off to the dining room, where he infers, from the aromas of lemon grass, coconut, cardamom and other spices percolating into the drawing room, the buffet lunch is beginning to be served. It would probably be a good idea for him to follow them, and get something to eat to soak up all the wine he has drunk, but by now there will, he knows, be a queue and it would not be polite for the host to jump it. So instead he goes to his study where he has secreted one of the bottles of Savigny-les-Beaune given to him by his son the previous day, and refills his glass. The visual memory of the glare from his wife troubles him slightly. It belongs to a series of frowns and disapproving glances and remarks hissed into his ear (which conveyed as much sense to him as air escaping from a tyre valve) received in the past hour, which he suspects are messages that in her opinion he is either drinking too much or talking too much - probably both. But then the two things are connected: without alcoholic fuel injection he wouldn’t be able to keep up such a steady stream of discourse with such a variety of people. It seems to him that he is doing very well in extremely difficult circumstances.
About twenty minutes before the first guests were due to arrive that morning both of his hearing aid batteries died almost simultaneously, a most unusual occurrence. He was aware that one of them had packed up when he had difficulty understanding something Jakki was saying to him in the kitchen (she had arrived early with a couple of white-aproned Asian caterers bearing stainless steel containers of fragrant curry and rice for the buffet lunch) and before he could find an opportunity, in the bustle of party preparation, to replace it, the other earpiece went dead. Going to the drawer in his study where he keeps all the accessories for his hearing aid he discovered that, contrary to his confident expectation, it contained no spare batteries. Or, to be more precise, there were spare batteries in the drawer, but they were the wrong size for his hearing aid. These tiny discs vary slightly in thickness and diameter according to the type of device they are designed to fit, but the little carousel bubble packs they come in are identical apart from the numerical codes printed on them. He is accustomed to buying six packs at a time, scooping them off the display rack in the chemist’s shop; and when he last made such a purchase he must have omitted to check that all the packs were of the type he required and failed to notice that some careless shop assistant had hung two different types of battery on the same rail, so that while believing he had put thirty-six spare batteries in his drawer, enough to last him well into the New Year, he had in fact deposited only eighteen that were any use to him, the last two of which have just expired.
What to do? It is Boxing Day, there are no shops open in the neighbourhood, and while it is possible that a pharmacy will be open this morning somewhere in the city centre he could well miss the first hour of Fred’s party looking for it, and he has already had a couple of glasses of wine to fortify himself against the imminent social ordeal, so is not sure that it would be prudent for him to drive anyway, and although he could send some other member of his extended family on this errand it is more than likely that the pharmacy, if it exists, will have closed before it is located, since they open for only a few hours in the morning on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and even if still open they will quite possibly refuse to sell batteries because on bank holidays their service is restricted to dispensing medicines. His brain reviews these possible actions and the objections to them with lightning speed, as he stares dismayed at the three packs of useless batteries in the palm of his hand. He drops them into the waste-paper basket. There really is no alternative but to try and get through the party without a hearing aid.
When you can’t hear what people are saying you have two options: you can either keep quiet and nod and murmur and smile, pretending that you are hearing what your interlocutor is saying, throwing in the odd word of agreement, but always in danger of getting the wrong end of the stick, with potentially embarrassing consequences; or alternatively, you can seize the initiative, ignore the normal rules of conversational turn-taking, and talk non-stop on a subject of your own choosing without letting the other person get a word in edge-ways, so that the problem of hearing and understanding what they are saying doesn’t arise. The latter course is the one he has followed for the past hour or so.
It was necessary to find topics on which he could expatiate at length and without having to pause for thought. The method he used was to draw on certain ideas he had long nourished without ever having an opportunity to air them, or which he had thought of only after the opportunity had passed, products of l’esprit de l’escalier, and then to introduce as soon as possible into any conversational encounter whichever of these topics seemed most appropriate. The first guest to whom he applied this strategy was a left-wing playwright whose agit-prop play about the miners’ strike he had seen several years ago at the Playhouse Studio theatre. He had been unable to follow much of the dialogue, which was spoken in thick Geordie dialect, but the sympathies of the play were not in doubt and further confirmed when the entire cast joined in singing ‘The Red Flag’ in the final scene. He took great satisfaction in explaining to the author of this work why the miners’ strike had failed - for a reason unaccountably overlooked by all the numerous commentators on the subject, including the playwright himself. It was not because of the de
termination of the Thatcher government to break the power of the unions, though that was real enough, but because the strike attracted no public support, apart from the affected mining communities, militant trade unionists, and the left-wing intelligentsia who supported all strikes on principle. It attracted no wide support because the British people as a whole had been culturally conditioned to regard mining as the most inhumane and oppressive type of industrial wage slavery, and felt secretly guilty about depending for their energy requirements on men who laboured for most of the hours of daylight in dark, narrow, claustrophobic tunnels miles underground, hacking and cutting at seams of coal, sweating, choking and covered in black grime. The literature they had read which described mines and mining, from school history books about the early industrial revolution, with horrifying illustrations of pregnant women pulling coal trucks along low-roofed tunnels on their hands and knees, to Zola’s Germinal, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, and periodic newspaper reports of fatal mining accidents and disasters, all enforced the same message, that mining was a cruelly oppressive kind of work without which the world would be a better and more civilised place. And although it was understandable that the miners themselves and their families wanted to keep their jobs and feared unemployment, nevertheless this seemed a relatively small-scale and transient problem which could be solved by benevolent social policy (retraining, generous redundancy terms, etc.), rather than by keeping uneconomic mines going merely to provide dangerous, dirty and dehumanising employment for miners.The miners’ strike failed because most of the public felt, either consciously or unconsciously, that if changes in economic conditions and energy supply-and-demand meant that Britain no longer needed most of its coal-mines, it was a matter for rejoicing rather than protest. The playwright, who had beamed with pleasure at the first mention of his play, grew more and more restive as he listened to this lecture, opening his mouth several times in a vain attempt to speak and interrupt its flow, but when he himself could think of nothing more to add he said what a pleasure it had been discussing the man’s play and excused himself on the grounds of having to see to the wine.
