by David Lodge
‘I won’t be long,’ Cecilia said to her; and to me, after Fred had left the room: ‘My late husband had very good hearing up to the end of his life. Mine, I must admit, is not what it was.’
‘But you do very well, considering your age,’ I said. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘No, I haven’t had to put up a prayer to St Francis de Sales yet,’ she said with some complacency. ‘You know he’s the patron saint of deaf people?’
I confessed that I didn’t. ‘Was he deaf, then?’ I asked.
‘No, but he catechised a deaf man, so that he could receive Holy Communion. I suppose he invented some kind of sign language. If you were a Catholic, Desmond, you could pray to St Francis de Sales.’ She said this with a slightly mischievous smile. She enjoys having the occasional dig at my godless state.
‘To cure me?’
‘It has been known. But of course it’s not the saints who actually work miracles, you know. That’s a common misunderstanding.’
‘They pass your prayer to God, don’t they?’ I said, remembering the lecture on petitionary prayer.
‘They intercede with God on your behalf,’ Cecilia corrected me.
‘Why go through them when you could pray directly to God?’ I asked.
Cecilia pondered this question for a moment, as if it had never occurred to her before. ‘Perhaps we feel a little shy about bringing our problems directly before God. It feels more comfortable doing it through a saint, or Our Lady.’
‘It makes me think of heaven as being like a Renaissance court,’ I said, ‘with all the saints clustering round the throne of God like courtiers, with petitions in their hands.’
Cecilia smiled. ‘There’s nothing to stop you praying directly to God,’ she said. ‘Our Lord cured many deaf people when he was on this earth.’
‘But they were stone deaf, weren’t they - and dumb too, usually.’
‘You remember your New Testament, then,’ said Cecilia, with an approving nod.
‘I can see that would be a pretty spectacular miracle, making the deaf hear and the dumb speak,’ I said. ‘But hearing impairment is a much less interesting disability. Hardly worth troubling a saint with, let alone the Lord.’
‘You could always pray for patience to bear your cross,’ Cecilia said.
‘Fred just did that,’ I said, ‘but it didn’t seem to work.’ When Cecilia looked puzzled I explained: ‘She said “God give me patience!” but she went to bed instead.’
‘Ah, but it wasn’t a real prayer,’ Cecilia said. ‘Winifred has never regarded patience as a virtue to be cultivated. She was born impatient - the shortest labour of my four.’
This was the most interesting conversation I had ever had with my mother-in-law. In the course of it Dad stirred, levered his long body upright, switched off his radio, and went out of the room without saying anything or glancing in my direction. I presumed he had gone to the toilet, but he didn’t come back, and when I went looking for him I discovered he had gone to bed.
28th December. I took Dad home today. He was in a better mood this morning, having swallowed some of his liquid paraffin last night to good effect. ‘We got a result,’ he told me at breakfast, in a hoarse stage whisper which Cecilia pretended not to hear. He was all packed and ready to leave by ten o’clock. Fred, perhaps feeling a little guilty for being sharp with him yesterday, gave him a food parcel to take home: slices of turkey breast and ham, wedges of cheese, mince pies, apples and oranges, all wrapped separately. He thanked her warmly and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Thanks for everything, my dear,’ he said. ‘Goodbye Celia,’ he said, shaking Cecilia’s hand. ‘Goodbye, Mr Bates,’ she said. ‘Have a safe journey. And a happy New Year to you.’ ‘Yes, happy New Year, Harry,’ Fred chimed in. He grimaced. ‘Oh, well, I won’t be sitting up for it, I can tell you. New Year means nothing to me now. A happy New Week is the most I hope for.’
‘Yes,’ he said reminiscently, as we drove away from the house, ‘New Year’s Eve used to be the one night of the year when everybody in Archer Street would have a gig, no matter if they were one-armed drummers or tone-deaf sax-players, and at double the usual money.You got booked up months ahead for New Year’s Eve. Not any more.’ And he went into a familiar riff on the decline of live dance music. On the motorway he fell silent, and I thought he had dozed off, but he suddenly surprised me by saying: ‘What happened to that man who was at your house last night?’
‘What man, Dad?’ I asked.
‘There was a man in the lounge last night, talking to Celia.’
‘That was me, Dad. I was the only man in the lounge, apart from you.’
‘No, it was another bloke. I didn’t say goodnight to him because I’d forgotten his name. I wanted to apologise to him this morning, but he must have gone.’
This delusion worried me, but I did not press the point.
The journey was not too bad. I had taken the precaution of putting a wide-necked bistro-style wine decanter under the passenger seat for emergencies, but there was no need to use it. We stopped at three service centres on the way at carefully calculated intervals, and got back to Lime Avenue at about three in the afternoon, as the winter daylight was already fading. The house, with all its curtains drawn, seemed dark and cheerless inside, and I felt a spasm of compunction at delivering Dad back to this depressing habitat, even though it was his own choice. The only mitigating factor was that it felt reasonably warm. ‘Gawd, I left the hall radiator on!’ Dad said, putting his hand on it as we came in. ‘I could swear I turned it off.’ In fact he had - turning it on again was the last thing I did before leaving the house. But the kitchen with its greasy oilcloth and chipped Formica, and the dining room with its threadbare carpet and sagging chairs, reminded me of stage sets for early plays by Pinter. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be in that nice clean, bright place we saw yesterday?’ I said.‘With somebody else cooking you a hot meal?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to be home. And I’ve got all that lovely grub your wife gave me.’ We’d bought some milk and bread at one of the motorway services shops, so he was indeed well supplied for the time being. I had a cup of tea with him, and took my leave.
I drove back with the radio on at high volume - Jazz FM in the London area, then Radio Four and Classic FM on the motorway - stopping once for a meal and a short nap in the car, and got back home at about nine-thirty. Fred came out of the drawing room when she heard me in the hall and said something. She didn’t smile. I said, ‘What? Just a minute,’ and put in my hearing aid. She said: ‘Your father’s been on the phone several times. I don’t know what he’s on about, but he sounds upset.’
I went into my study and called Dad. He answered immediately, as if he was sitting next to the phone. ‘Hallo, who’s that?’ he said in a loud angry tone.
‘It’s Desmond, Dad,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What’s the matter? I want to know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dumped here, all on my own. That bloke who drove me down here just buggered off without a word of goodbye.’
‘That bloke was me, Dad,’ I said. ‘And I had a cup tea with you before I left.’
‘What d’you mean, it was you? I’m talking about the bloke who lives up north. He has a huge house with four lavs, and curtains that open and close on their own, like a cinema. And a posh wife, called Fred for some reason, and a horde of relatives. He drove me down here, and hardly said a word the whole way.’
‘That’s me, Dad,’ I said. ‘I live up north and I have a big house and a wife called Fred. It’s short for Winifred. She gave you some turkey and ham to take home.’
‘That’s true,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’ve just had some for my tea.’ His tone was troubled. ‘So it was you.’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the matter with me then?’
‘It’s because you’ve been away for a few days, and now you’re back home, you’re a little bit confused. It’s nothing to worry about.’
But it is.
>
29th December. Cecilia left today. Fred and I took her to the station and put her on the train to Durham. She’s gone to stay with her eldest son and his wife, who live there; she usually spends Christmas with us and New Year with them. So Fred and I are alone at last. I was looking forward to a quiet weekend, apart from a few hours of deafened socialising at a neighbour’s New Year’s Eve party which we always go to, arriving late and sloping off soon after the compulsory kissing and oldlangsyning, but Jakki and Lionel have invited us to join them at a place called Gladeworld. Apparently it’s an up-market holiday camp in a forest, about sixty miles from here. They were planning to spend the New Year holiday there with Lionel’s brother and his wife, but Lionel’s brother is ill in bed with bronchitis and a temperature, so they had to drop out at the last moment, and Jakki asked Fred if we would like to come in their place. Fred relayed Jakki’s description to me: ‘You stay in little chalets scattered among the trees. She says they’re very comfortable, and they’ve booked an executive chalet which is extra-luxurious. En suite bathrooms and so on. You can either cater for yourselves or eat at one of the restaurants. There’s a heated indoor swimming pool under a huge plastic dome with artificial waves and rapids and palm trees, and a spa, and an indoor sports hall and so on. There are no cars: you leave your car in the car park and everybody rents bikes or walks.’
‘It sounds ghastly,’ I said.
‘Well I think it sounds rather fun,’ said Fred. ‘It’s enormously popular - Jakki says you have to book up months ahead. It’s very nice of her and Lionel to think of asking us.’
‘Would we be paying for ourselves?’ I asked.
‘Well of course we’d pay our share.’
I asked her how much, and she named a sum which I thought rather steep. ‘So really we’d be doing them a favour, or Lionel’s brother a favour, rather than the other way round?’ I said.
Fred dismissed this comment with a contemptuous toss of the head. ‘You’re always complaining about how you hate New Year’s Eve, almost as much as you hate Christmas - well, here’s your chance to get away for it, do something different,’ she said. ‘A little exercise, some fresh air, a lot of relaxation. It would do us both good.’
‘Cooped up with Jakki and Lionel for three days?’
‘Jakki is my friend, and Lionel is perfectly pleasant. And we don’t have to do everything together all the time. And it’s only two full days. And anyway,’ Fred concluded, ‘if you won’t go, I’ll go on my own.’
I could see I would have to give in, because I couldn’t risk having a third row with Fred in the same week. I eased the way with a joke.
‘How do you know they aren’t planning one of their theme nights? Wife-Swapping Night, say. With car keys in a bowl and porn videos on the television.’
Fred hooted with laughter. ‘Do you fancy Jakki, darling?’
‘Absolutely not!’
‘Nor I Lionel. Anyway, there wouldn’t be many car keys to choose from. You might draw me.’
‘Or Lionel,’ I said.
She chuckled. ‘You’ll come, then?’
‘I suppose I’d better,’ I said, ‘or they might propose a Troilism Night.’
‘Good, I’ll tell Jakki you agreed - but not why.’ She went off in good humour to phone Jakki.
You might draw me. The phrase lingered suggestively in my mind, provoking the thought that Gladeworld could assist the healing of relations between us. We haven’t made love since the spanking episode a few weeks ago. Much as I dislike vigorous exercise as a rule, and especially swimming in chlorinated indoor pools, I have to admit that you get a sense of relaxed well-being afterwards that is conducive to sex. And the certainty that Jakki and Lionel would be at it like monkeys in the next bedroom might have an aphrodisiac effect. Though I wouldn’t of course admit it, I am quite looking forward to the weekend.
16
Deaf in the Afternoon
GLADEWORLD. What a strange phenomenon. Like a negative image of a place with properties, such as confinement and induced pain, that you would normally regard as being themselves negative, which has the curious effect of turning them into positives, or so it seems from the contented looks of the inhabitants. A benevolent concentration camp. A benign prison. A happy hell. It is a square mile or two in area, with a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire around the circumference, and a single entrance like a military checkpoint, with a barrier that is raised and lowered as the internees arrive in their cars, have their documents scrutinised by uniformed security guards, and are admitted. Inside the compound, several thousand men, women and children live in one-storey huts, much smaller than the homes they have come from, cunningly distributed among the trees to produce an illusion of privacy. They wear a kind of prison uniform: track suits, shorts, trainers and, in the rain, kagools. They spend their days toiling up and down, backwards and forwards, on foot or on bicycles, along the macadamed roads and paths connecting their huts to various assembly points: for example, a supermarket where you shop, as you shop at home, but less conveniently, because the produce is inferior, and the prices are higher, and you must carry your heavy shopping bags back to your hut because cars are confined to the car park; for example, a large sports hall where, for an additional charge, not negligible, you can play under artificial light and in artificial air various sports (tennis, badminton, squash, racquet ball, billiards, snooker, table tennis, etc.), watched critically by a ring of fellow internees waiting for your allotted time to end and their own to begin; and, most exemplary of all, the Tropical Waterworld, a huge geodesic plastic dome enclosing, in a heated, humid atmosphere, a complex of swimming pools and water features of various shapes and sizes: labyrinthine channels and tunnels with powerful pump-driven currents, steeply angled chutes, spiralling tubular slides, and white-water rapids sculpted in fibreglass, which begin at the very top of the structure in the open air and descend with increasing force and speed, at first outside and then inside the wall of the dome, to end precipitously in a deep pool at the bottom. Although theoretically dedicated to swimming, the place is designed to prevent one from swimming more than a few strokes in any direction.The main pool is randomly shaped with no way of ascertaining which dimension is its length and which its breadth, so people swim in all directions and keep bumping into each other, and every now and again an invisible machine creates a heavy swell in which they cannot swim at all but only bob up and down like survivors of an air crash in the sea waiting for rescue, except that they shriek with pleasure rather than fear.
Change the soundtrack, substitute screams and howls for laughter and badinage, put a red filter on the lens to give a fiery glow to the spectacle, and you would think you were in some modern version of Dante’s Inferno, or the hells depicted by medieval painters. These half-naked crowds tossed in the turbulent waves, or hurtling down the spiralling semi-transparent tubes at terrifying velocity, or tumbled arse over elbow through the rapids, choked with water, blinded by spume, spun round in whirlpools, dragged backwards by undertow, entangled with each other’s limbs, bruised and battered by impact with the fibreglass walls, to be at last tipped into a boiling pit at the bottom, irresistibly recall those antique images of the damned, condemned to endless repetition of their punishment. For as soon as they splash down at the bottom of the rapids, or are spat out from the ends of the spiralling tubes, and clamber out of the water, drenched and dazed, the Gladeworlders obediently mount the stairs that wind upwards between the artificial rocks and join the long lines of people queuing at the upper levels for the tubular slides, or plunge into the steaming open-air pool that leads to the rapids, to endure the terror and the pain all over again.
Desmond expounded this analogy to Fred, Jakki and Lionel, at the end of their first full day. It was New Year’s Eve and they had decided to cook their own dinner in their ‘villa’, as the two-bedroomed chalet was rather grandly called, because the only eating place inside Gladeworld which looked remotely promising was fully booked, and so, almost certai
nly, was every restaurant in the neighbourhood - ‘even if the security guards at the entrance would let us out for a few hours,’ Desmond had remarked, when the arrangements for the meal were under discussion. ‘Of course they’d let us out,’ said Jakki, whose sense of irony was not highly developed. ‘Take no notice of him,’ said Winifred. ‘It’s just his way.’ In spite of this advice Jakki reacted with the same literal-minded antagonism to his metaphorical description of the Tropical Waterworld. ‘Terror and pain?’ she said, frowning at him. ‘I don’t know what you mean.You can see how much everybody is enjoying themselves.’
‘It’s a joke, love,’ said Lionel. ‘Desmond’s only joking. Do you know,’ he went on, ‘this place has ninety-five per cent occupancy all year round? Ninety-five per cent. They must be doing something right.’
‘Well, I think it’s marvellous for families,’ said Fred. ‘I’m going to recommend it to Marcia and Peter. I’m sure the children would love it.’
‘Of course you’ve got to be an active sort of person to get the best out of it,’ said Jakki. She and Lionel had been out jogging before breakfast and cycling on their rented bikes in the woods before lunch; Desmond and Winifred had volunteered to do the shopping for dinner, and walking the mile or so from their chalet to the supermarket and back again, burdened with bulging plastic bags, had been quite enough strenuous exercise, as far as Desmond was concerned anyway. The afternoon had been designated a time for relaxation in the Tropical Waterworld. He thought he had never been in a less relaxing place in his life than the Tropical Waterworld, beginning with its changing area, a slimy-floored maze of cubicles each with two doors, one leading to the pool and one to the entrance/exit, that locked and opened simultaneously by a simple mechanism which it took him twenty minutes to work out, and lined with lockers that on the insertion of a one-pound coin would allow the key to be turned and extracted, attached to a rubber band which you wore round your wrist or ankle. On returning to the changing area rather earlier than his companions, having left his glasses and hearing aid safe in the locker, he was unable to read the number imprinted on his rubber band, and when he asked passing bathers to read it for him he was unable to hear their replies, so eventually he handed his key to a small child who led him like a helpless imbecile to his locker and opened it for him.
