by David Lodge
Jakki had already switched on the sauna to dry their swimming costumes, and Desmond turned up the thermostat before withdrawing to the bedroom to undress and wrap himself in a bath towel. When he came out Lionel was waiting for him by the glazed patio doors, similarly garbed. Winifred, who was washing up the tea things in the kitchen area, looked at him disapprovingly. ‘I hope you don’t regret this,’ she said. ‘We won’t draw it out,’ he assured her. It was dark outside, and the lights were on in the living room. ‘Pull the curtains together behind us, otherwise we’ll be lit up for the whole of Gladeworld to see us under the douche,’ Lionel said to Jakki.‘And no peeping,’ he added.‘As if we’d be bothered,’ said Jakki. She came to the patio door as they went out. ‘Brr, it’s getting cold. Rather you than me,’ she said, sliding the door shut, and drawing the curtains behind them. There was already a touch of frost in the air. He and Lionel went quickly into the sauna, which was not much bigger than a sentry box, and sat down on their folded towels on the raised bench, haunch to haunch. The sauna was dimly lit by a small bulb in one corner but not so dimly that he could avoid seeing how well endowed Lionel was. He sat with hands on his parted knees, his flaccid organ hanging down like a rubber cosh between his thighs, and began talking, something to do with computer software for accountancy. ‘I’m afraid I can’t follow, Lionel,’ Desmond said. ‘I haven’t got my hearing aid in.’ Lionel nodded and signalled his understanding. Perspiration ran like rivulets down his face and disappeared into a thicket of hair on his chest. ‘This is the real thing, a lot hotter than the spa,’ he shouted into Desmond’s ear. Desmond, who was also sweating profusely, wondered if he had perhaps turned up the thermostat too high. After ten minutes or so, Lionel indicated that he had had enough, and went out into the night, fanning a breath of cold air into the sauna with the door. There was a pause of about ten seconds and then, even without his hearing aid, Desmond heard the splash of water hitting the deck followed a second or two later by a bellow from Lionel as he recovered his breath sufficiently to register the shock. Desmond waited several minutes to allow the tub to refill, and went out himself.
Lionel had gone back indoors and drawn the curtains behind him.The scene was washed by a chilly moonlight.To his right there was a grassy bank which led down to a stream and a pond from which ducks and waterfowl came marauding for food in the mornings, waddling boldly up to the patio door, and on the far side of the pond there was a dark mass of trees and shrubs. Nothing stirred there now, and the neighbouring chalets were screened from his sight. It was a curious sensation, standing naked and alone on the cold, wet boards, directly under the tub, grasping a thick hemp rope in one hand, knowing that one firm jerk would bring several gallons of freezing water down on your defenceless body. It wasn’t like pressing a chromium-plated button in the spa’s multisensory shower, but something much more existential and perverse. It was like committing suicide. The rope and the gibbet-like beam from which the tub was suspended combined to make the act resemble a self-administered hanging. His whole body seemed to cry out: Don’t! But the longer he hesitated the more difficult it became to act. Already he could feel the inner fire stoked up in the core of his body by the sauna beginning to die down. If he didn’t do it now, he would never do it, he would have to creep back indoors, still sticky with perspiration, to the jeers of his companions. Now. Now! One, two, three . . . HEAVE!
It was the weight as much as the temperature of the mass of water that shocked him first, as if a small glacier had shattered on his head, blinding his vision and making him stagger; then the cold enveloped him as if he had fallen through a hole in the Arctic ice, and he sucked it into his lungs and held it there, unable to expel it in the form of a cry for (it seemed) minutes; then, as the ability to breathe returned, he gasped, he yelled, he blasphemed, he hopped from one foot to another, he grabbed his towel and tried in vain to swaddle himself in its folds. Someone drew back the curtain inside the room, light flooded out across the deck, and Jakki’s grinning face appeared behind the glass. He begged her to open the door and, barely preserving his modesty with the towel, stumbled over the lintel into the living room.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘That was brutal.’
Jakki said something to him. Lionel, who had exchanged his towel for a bathrobe, and had a glass in one hand, held up the bottle of malt, which had a few amber inches left at the bottom, in the other, and said something which he assumed to be the offer of a drink. ‘No thanks, I’m off the booze today,’ he said. Winifred, who was reading a book, looked up and said something. ‘I’ll go and get my hearing aid,’ he said. He went to the bedroom to insert the hearing aid, and put on a shirt and a pair of trousers while he was about it. He was pleased that Winifred had been present when he declined the whisky. He felt no need of it: already his whole body was beginning to glow and tingle with radiant warmth.
He went back into the living room. Jakki said something. Lionel said something.Winifred said something. He looked blankly at them. ‘I think my batteries must have gone,’ he said. ‘Sorry, won’t be a moment.’ He went back to the bedroom. It was odd that both batteries had once again failed at the same time - perhaps he had bought a bad batch. He inserted new batteries in the hearing instruments and returned to the living room. Winifred said something. Lionel said something. Jakki said something. He still couldn’t hear them. A terrible dread gripped him. He was deaf. Really deaf. Profoundly deaf. The trauma of the mass of cold water suddenly drenching his overheated head must have had some catastrophic effect on the hair cells, or on the part of the cortex that was connected to them, cutting off all communication. He had a mental image of some part of his brain going dark, like a chamber or tunnel where suddenly all the lights go out, for ever. He saw his concern reflected in the anxious, enquiring faces of the others. Winifred said something which he was able to lip-read: ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I’m deaf,’ he said. ‘I mean, really deaf. I can’t hear a thing any of you are saying. It must have been the douche.’ She said something else which he could lip-read: ‘I warned you.’
It was four hours before his fears were relieved, four hours of panic and anxiety such as he hoped never to have to live through again: fiddling frantically with his hearing aid, cleaning it, trying yet more batteries, all to no avail, unable to hear the advice and comments of his wife and friends unless they wrote them down or mouthed the simplest sentences. Jakki suggested that he should go to Gladeworld’s medical centre to which he responded caustically that he didn’t think they would have an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist in residence, and Jakki said she was only trying to help. Lionel rang the main reception desk and they said that the medical centre would be open in the morning but was only staffed by a nursing sister. They thought it would be difficult to get a doctor to see Desmond on NewYear’s Day and suggested the Accident & Emergency department of the hospital in a small industrial town some twenty miles away. Winifred said, or rather wrote, that she didn’t see the point but she would drive him there if he really thought it would do any good, and did so, in stony-faced silence, and drove around the empty streets for some time till she found the hospital, and sat with him for two and a half hours in a waiting room full of people injured or made ill by drugs and drink the night before who had been waiting there all day, until eventually they were seen by a tired young doctor who looked in his ears with a speculum, and wrote out a prescription and gave it to him, and said something. He looked to Winifred for help. She wrote down on her notepad: He said: ‘I think the pharmacy is still open, but if not, some warm olive oil will do.’
He stared at the prescription. ‘What is it?’ he asked the doctor.
The doctor wrote something on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. He read: It’s stuff you put in infants’ ears for glue ear. The heat of the sauna melted the wax in your ears and the sudden deluge of cold water solidified it into a perfect seal.
When they got back to the chalet at about ten-thirty, Jakki and Lionel said the meal at Soi Disant had bee
n surprisingly good.
17
3rd January. There were a lot of abbreviated, unintelligible messages from Dad on the answerphone when we got back from Gladeworld yesterday. He didn’t seem to understand that he was addressing an answering machine, or perhaps he had forgotten how to do so, and began speaking each time before my outgoing message was finished, so that his first sentence or two were not recorded and I could only hear a fragment of what he had said before he became irritably aware that no one was listening and rang off. ‘. . . don’t know what to do with them . . . Hallo? . . . are you there? . . . Hallo? . . . [beep] . . . apart from the old lady, I hear her moving about upstairs, I think it’s her . . . Hallo? . . . Can you hear me? . . . [beep] . . . so what happened to the other house? . . . Do you know? . . . Have you gone dead again? . . . [beep] . . . with all these letters about the tax . . . you know what I mean . . . are you listening? . . . No. Gawdstrewth. [beep].’
I called him. ‘Hallo, Dad, we’re back.’
‘Where you been, then?’
‘A place called Gladeworld.’
‘Is that another old people’s home?’
I laughed. ‘No, a kind of holiday camp . . . We went with some friends. I told you we were going.’
‘I’ve been trying to phone you all weekend. I think there’s something wrong with your phone. I kept getting cut off.’
‘It’s an answerphone, Dad. You have to leave your message after the tone.’
‘Oh . . . Well, I’ve got all these letters from this bloke, what’s his name, Moynihan, Mogadon, something like that.’
‘You mean about your tax?’
‘Yeah. He’s up in Scotland, you know, up on the left there, where all the islands are.’
‘Cumbernauld. It’s near Glasgow. Your tax office is there.’
‘That’s right. I’ve got all these letters from him.’
‘I think you’ll find they’re old letters, Dad. It’s about a tax rebate. I dealt with it for you.You should get your money in a few weeks’ time.’
‘Really? How much?’
‘I don’t know exactly. A few hundred pounds.’
‘Cor, that’s the best news I’ve had for a long time. Thanks, son.’
‘What will you do with it?’
‘Put it under the floorboards. Don’t want the tax people to know about it.’
‘Dad, it’s from the tax people. It’s a rebate. You don’t have to pay tax on it.’
‘Oh, well, that’s even better.’
He rang off in good spirits, but about an hour later he phoned again.
‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘What happened to the other house?’
‘What other house, Dad?’
‘The house in Brickley.’
‘That’s where you are, Dad. You’re in Brickley.’
‘Am I? Are you sure?’
‘You’re in Lime Avenue, Brickley. The Barkers live next door.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I saw her through the back garden fence this morning. So what happened to the other house?’
‘What does it look like?’ I said.
‘It’s joined up to all the other houses in the street. It has coloured windows in the front door.’
‘That’s the house in Dulwich you grew up in, Dad.’ I remembered the windows from visits to my grandparents when I was a child - two narrow panes of glass, red and green, and the patches of colour they cast on the tiled floor of the hall when the sun shone through them in the afternoon.
‘Oh, is it? When am I going there?’
‘You’re not going there. It belongs to someone else now, if it hasn’t been demolished.’
‘Oh . . . It’s very quiet here.Apart from her moving about upstairs. I never see her though. Why’s that?’
‘Is it Mum you’re talking about?’
‘No, my mother’s dead. Passed away years ago, in Dulwich.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.
‘You’re getting mixed up, son,’ he said.
I phoned Dad’s GP, Dr Simmonds, and told him I was concerned. He’s a man of few words, and those tend to be discouraging, but he’s conscientious and efficient and he’s been looking after Dad for some twenty-five years. He said he would visit him at home as soon as he could manage it, and call me back.
4th January. Dr Simmonds called today.‘Your father’s mildly demented,’ he said. ‘I’ll set up a mental health assessment, but it will take some time.’
‘Is he capable of living on his own?’
‘Just about,’ Simmonds said.
‘I wanted to move him into a care home up here,’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘No, well, his instinct is right,’ Simmonds said, to my surprise.
‘It was a very nice place.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But old people have a kind of mental map of their home which helps to tell them what to do and when to do it. Plonk them down in a strange place and they completely lose their bearings.’
‘What happens if he gets worse?’
‘Eventually he’d have to go into care. I’d have to section him if necessary.’
‘God!’ I had a vision of Dad being escorted out of his house by men in white coats, Mrs Barker watching from her front doorstep, and waving as the ambulance draws away.
‘It may not come to that,’ Simmonds said. ‘It would improve his present situation if he could have some help in the house. Social services would arrange it.’
‘He won’t let anyone in,’ I said. ‘Anyone he doesn’t know. He’s afraid they’ll steal the money he’s squirrelled away.’
Dr Simmonds chuckled drily. ‘He’s got a prostate problem too, of course. I made an appointment for him to come to the surgery for a check-up.’
As I expected, I got a call from Dad not long afterwards.
‘Old Simmonds came round today,’ he said.
‘That was nice of him,’ I said.
‘I didn’t ask him to. What’s he after?’
‘He’s not after anything. He’s your doctor. He’s just seeing that you’re all right.’
‘I think he wants to get me into hospital for an operation.’
‘No he doesn’t, Dad.’
‘He’s given me an appointment, next Monday. I don’t think I’ll go.’
‘You must, Dad. It’s just for a check-up.’
‘Yes, that’s what he said. But I know how his mind works, him and his mates at the hospital. They want to experiment on me.’
I spent several minutes trying to persuade Dad that Dr Simmonds had absolutely no motive, professional or financial, for conspiring to force an already overstretched National Health Service to operate on him, at the end of which he said, ‘You believe him, do you?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I said.
‘Then there’s no hope for me on this earth,’ he said dolefully. ‘Harry Bates is all alone.’
I told him not to be silly.Then I offered to come down to London and escort him to the doctor’s, but he reacted angrily: ‘What d’you think I am - a child? I’m perfectly capable of going to the doctor’s on my own.’
‘Well, then, prove it,’ I said. ‘Go.’
‘I’ll see how I feel on Monday,’ he grumbled.‘Anyway, how are you?’
‘All right.’
‘You don’t sound very happy,’ he said.
No, I’m not. With a demented dad and an alienated spouse I have no reason to be. Fred is still pissed off with me for ruining the Gladeworld excursion, which I have written up as a kind of short story, to try and exorcise the humiliation and embarrassment of the experience. I think she would be not speaking to me if it wasn’t for the fact that when she does speak to me I don’t hear what she’s saying half the time. She couldn’t wait to get back to work at Décor, where they’re having a Sale. She leaves the house early in the morning, comes back late in the evening, cooks a perfunctory dinner, or I make one with pre-cooked chilled meals from Marks & Spencer’s; she delive
rs a monologue about what happened in the shop, recounting verbatim what the stroppy customer said to Jakki and what Jakki said to the stroppy customer, and what she herself said to the stroppy customer to calm her down and what she said later to Jakki to calm her down, all so that she doesn’t have to engage in a proper conversation with me, and then she has a bath and goes to bed early. I drink too much wine at dinner, fall asleep in front of the television, wake up feeling too alert to go to bed, and come in here to keep this record of my discontents up to date. The Christmas decorations, which must not be taken down and removed until Epiphany, provide an incongruous backdrop to my gloom as I pad around the silent house during the day, and the weather and the news do what they can to lower my spirits further. Blustery showers discourage going out, though temperatures are unusually high for the first week in January, in further confirmation of global warming. And Saddam Hussein has been hanged in a fashion that makes one of the worst tyrants of all time look dignified, courageous and abused. No, I am not happy.
I recalled an interesting observation about collocations of happy in a book on corpus linguistics I reviewed years ago, and after a short search I found it. In a small corpus of 1.5 million words the most frequent lexical collocates of happy in the three words occurring before and after it were life and make. Not surprising: we all desire a happy life, we all like things which make us happy. The next most common collocates were: entirely, marriage, days, looked, memories, perfectly, sad, spent, felt, father, feel, home. I am struck by how many of them are keywords in my own pursuit of happiness, or lack of it, especially the nouns: marriage, memories, father, home. Of the verbs, feel is obviously the verb most frequently combined with happy, counting feel and felt as one. Predictably the only adjective among the words, apart from happy itself, is its opposite, sad. It surprised me that the most common adverbs qualifying happy in the corpus were entirely and perfectly, rather than, say, ‘fairly’ or ‘reasonably ’. Are we ever entirely, perfectly happy? If so, it’s not for very long.The most interesting word is days. Not day, but days. Larkin has a wonderful poem called ‘Days’, which also contains the word happy.
