Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  ‘All right,’ I said, my curiosity now thoroughly aroused.

  ‘Last summer term, not long after I started supervising her, and before I realised what an unstable character she was, I did a very foolish thing. I got into . . . er . . . an inappropriate relationship with her.’

  ‘You mean a sexual relationship?’ I asked.

  ‘Ex-President Clinton would say not,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘But I think the Grievances subcommittee of the Staff-Student Relations Board would take a different view. As would my wife.’

  The story as he told it was a familiar one, of a charismatic, intellectually dazzling professor seduced by an admiring and attractive young student who had something to gain from the relationship. ‘It was wrong of me, of course,’ he said, ‘but she made all the running, and it wasn’t as if I was taking advantage of some innocent undergraduate. She’s twenty-seven after all. She’s a mature adult - at least I thought she was. And at the time things weren’t going too well between Frances and me . . .’ He took the cigarette pack out of his pocket with an automatic gesture, remembered my objection, and put it back. ‘I first crossed the line when she gave me a kiss at the end of a supervision, and I kissed her back instead of telling her not to. The next time it was a longer kiss, with some stroking and groping, and so it went on. It was very exciting, because when she came for a supervision we both knew how it would end, with an almost wordless snog by the door before she went out, and because it was so risky. One day she knelt down and unzipped my trousers and sucked me off, with the door unlocked and people walking up and down the corridor outside. She would do pretty well anything except proper sex. Even when I started going to her flat - she has a flat in one of those new buildings on the canal - she wouldn’t do penetrative sex. She liked to be spanked. That was when I began to get worried about what I was getting into. And to be honest I was fed up with never having a proper fuck. I was glad when summer vacation started and we went - Frances and I - to our place in Spain for a couple of months. When we came back I told Alex the sex had to stop. I apologised, I blamed myself, I didn’t accuse her of anything, but she wasn’t happy. I thought of trying to transfer her to another supervisor, but I was afraid she might shop me.Which in fact is what she’s threatening to do now, if I don’t get her the tutoring job.’

  So that was why he had come to see me in such a hurry. ‘I wrote her the best reference I could manage without perjuring myself,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t argue her case when we had a meeting about the appointment this morning. She’s perceived as an enigmatic character and she hasn’t produced any evidence of competence in linguistics. She was the first candidate to be eliminated.The job will be offered to someone else, as she will soon discover.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked, though I had a pretty good idea.

  ‘I was hoping you could persuade her not to make a complaint against me. I know she likes you, respects you. She always speaks very warmly of you. I think she would listen to you.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and fell silent, thinking.

  ‘You might well ask, “Why should I?”’ he said.

  ‘The question does occur,’ I said.

  ‘You hardly know me, you don’t owe me anything, you probably disapprove of what I’ve done -’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

  ‘But this could destroy me, you know. Not just my career, but my marriage, my family . . . Frances would be shattered. And I have two teenage daughters, thirteen and fifteen. Imagine what their lives will be like if this ever becomes public.’

  ‘Do you really think Alex would make a formal complaint?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have told you all this otherwise.’

  ‘Why would anyone believe her, since she’s such a compulsive fantasist?’ I said.

  He grimaced. ‘She’s got tissues with my DNA on them, or so she says. She certainly had plenty of opportunities to obtain them.’ He must have caught an expression of distaste on my face, for he said, ‘I’m sorry to burden you with this sleazy tale, but I’d be incredibly grateful if you would speak to her. As soon as possible.’

  I said I would see what I could do.

  9th January. I met Alex by arrangement at Pam’s Pantry this afternoon. This time she was waiting for me, sitting in the same seat at the back of the café where I had sat before, nursing a cup of coffee in her hands. The place was almost empty. I bought myself a latte at the counter and joined her. She looked even paler than usual, and her blonde hair was lank and lifeless. Perhaps it was her period, but more likely it was the stress of the dangerous game she was playing. I came straight to the point, and summarised what Butterworth had told me about their relationship, without going into the sexual details. She listened impassively, and then said: ‘I didn’t know you and Colin were buddies.’

  ‘We’re not,’ I said.

  ‘But men stick together in these situations, don’t they?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t like Colin Butterworth, never have. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if he were publicly reprimanded, or had to resign. I think he behaved quite improperly towards you, even if you initiated the affair.’ I noted that she didn’t deny this. ‘But if you make an official complaint, he won’t be the only one to suffer. His wife and children will too. He has two teenage daughters. You could break up a family - and for what? It won’t get you the job. The job will be given to somebody else.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she said sharply.

  ‘Butterworth told me.’

  Alex swivelled her head and addressed the wall. ‘Asshole,’ she hissed.

  ‘Believe me, there was no way he could have got you appointed, even if he tried. So you see there’s no point in your shopping him. You would come in for some very unpleasant questioning - he’d have a lawyer, provided by the UCU - and he will accuse you of trying to blackmail him. Which you did. You would be disgraced too, and expelled from the University.’

  ‘There’s nothing in writing,’ she said, turning her head to face me again across the table. ‘I could deny it. It would be his word against mine.’

  ‘But your word isn’t very reliable, is it, Alex?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she said.

  ‘You told Fred that your father sent you an air ticket to go home at Christmas.You told Butterworth that your father committed suicide when you were thirteen. Which is the truth?’

  Alex looked down and stirred her coffee, though it was cold and the cup half-empty, and murmured something through a limp curtain of hair.

  I leaned forward across the table. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘My daddy did kill himself,’ she said.

  I said I was sorry to hear it, but didn’t understand why she had made up the story about the air ticket. She said she had been sitting around with some of the English Language postgrads after a seminar and people had been talking about going home for Christmas and when somebody asked her what she was doing she instantly made up a story about going back to the States to spend Christmas with her folks, because she didn’t want to admit that she would be spending it alone in her flat. ‘I do that sometimes,’ she said. ‘I make up a story, or I tell a lie, or I play a trick, on the spur of the moment. I can’t help myself. It’s not as if I cared about being alone for Christmas. I have no folks. My mother died of cancer five years ago, my grandparents are dead, apart from one who has Alzheimer’s . . . I’m estranged from my sister. I have no home to go to in the States. But I didn’t want to be pitied or patronised, so I made up this idyll about going back to my family for Christmas, it was like an old Saturday Evening Post cover. I figured nobody would know I was holed up in my apartment with a stack of TV dinners.’ When she received Fred’s invitation to our party she desperately wished she could accept, but she had to keep up the pretence that she was going back to America for the holiday. ‘I thought it would be nice if my daddy sent me the money for the flight,’ she said. ‘Since I was inventing an idyll, I thought I might as wel
l make the most of it. So I put that in my letter to Winifred. It seemed to make it more believable. Then when Christmas came, and I saw all these people fogged in at Heathrow, I thought I had the perfect excuse to go to your party after all.’

  ‘You mean you made up all those stories about the hell of Heathrow from watching the TV news?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she said. ‘I read the newspapers too.’

  ‘You know, you ought to put your talent for invention to better use,’ I said. ‘You should try writing fiction.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I will one day,’ she said.

  I asked her why she had given Butterworth and me two different explanations of how she got interested in suicide notes. ‘They’re not incompatible, they’re both true in different ways,’ she said. ‘It was the guy at Columbia who first gave me the idea of doing linguistic research on suicide notes. But of course I had a psychological motive too. It always bugged me that Daddy didn’t leave a note.We never knew why he did it. We weren’t aware that he was depressed. We never found any motive, like he’d done something terrible and was afraid of being found out, or that he’d been diagnosed with some dreadful disease, nothing like that, nothing at all. He just went out in a rowboat in a lake near home one evening and shot himself with a hunting rifle.’

  ‘Perhaps it was an accident,’ I said.

  ‘He had the barrel in his mouth,’ she said, ‘and he used his toe to pull the trigger.’

  Is this the truth? I really have no idea, though I pretended to believe it, because it would have been incredibly hurtful not to. On the whole I am inclined to believe that it is true. Such a traumatic event in childhood would explain a lot about Alex’s behaviour besides her obsession with suicide notes: her fantasising, her attraction to older men, her pleasure in manipulating them and making them suffer. It would also explain the rather callous, even contemptuous, tone of her remarks on the subject of suicide, and her comments about the Writer’s Guide website, whether it was her own work or not. It’s obvious that as a teenager she loved her father but was deeply angry with him for his deed, and still is. ‘How could he do that to us?’ she said.‘Killing himself, without a word of explanation. Leaving us to wonder for ever why he did it, whether it was our fault in some way we couldn’t guess. It meant we could never have closure. Never.’ I think her psychological motive for research into suicide notes is more to relieve anger than to solve an enigma.

  When I got home I called Butterworth and told him that I had spoken to Alex and I was pretty sure she would not proceed with a complaint. I could have been more positive, but didn’t feel inclined to let him off too lightly, or too quickly, from the pangs of apprehension. In any case, he was hugely relieved and effusively grateful for this much reassurance.

  11th January. In the fraught circumstances of my life at present, the lip-reading class is a haven of peace and innocent distraction. The new term started today. We began with a session about the January Sales. Beth handed us slips of paper on which was written a sentence, ‘I bought . . . in the January Sales’, and we had to fill in the nominal group (though of course she didn’t call it that) and lip-speak it to the others. I said I had bought some shirts at the January Sales, which made me wish I had, I could do with some new ones for my trip to Poland. Beryl said she had bought something none of us could lip-read. It turned out to be a Chinese carpet. It was the ‘Chinese’ which threw us. If it had been ‘Persian carpet’, I think we would have got it, but ‘Chinese carpet’ is not a familiar phrase or concept - though everything in the shops is made in China these days, including Persian carpets probably.

  Then we had a session on New Year’s Eve, but fortunately were not asked how we celebrated it. Beth went through the requirements for First Footing, without voice, and then with voice. The man who crosses the threshold first after midnight must be tall and well-built, mustn’t be lame or have a squint, must carry a piece of coal, a piece of bread, and a bottle of whisky, but not a knife, must not be flat-footed or have eyebrows that meet in the middle, must not wear black or speak until he has put the bread on the table, the coal on the fire and given the whisky to the head of the house, after which he says ‘Happy New Year’ and exits by the back door. It seems that he doesn’t have to be able to hear anything said to him, so I would qualify.

  Then we had a quiz on applications of the words Scot, Scotch, Scottish, which we had to try and answer by lip-speaking with a partner. I had Gladys as a partner again. I think she tries to sit next to me because she knows I’m well-educated and she’s very competitive - so keen to be the first to complete the quiz that she often forgot to speak to me without voice. The clues were pretty easy: An egg encased in sausage meat . . . A famous explorer . . . A game played

  by children . . . One that foxed everybody was A customary tax. I pretended I didn’t know the answer: ‘a scot’. Nothing to do with Scotland of course - it’s Old English, now obsolete, though it survives in the expression ‘scot-free’.

  After the tea break we had the talk about hearing dogs from Trevor, a deaf man who has one. He brought it with him, a winning Jack Russell called Patch who sat at his feet and seemed to follow the talk, which it had no doubt heard many times, since Trevor goes around the country addressing groups like ours on behalf of the organisation which trains these animals. It costs £5,000 to train a dog because it takes a long time and a lot of patience. They learn to recognise and distinguish the sounds of an owner’s alarm clock, cooker timer, telephone, smoke alarm and fire alarm. On hearing a sound they identify its source, then attract the owner’s attention by pawing them and lead them to it. If it’s the smoke alarm or the fire alarm they paw and then drop to the floor, signalling danger. Hearing dogs seldom bark for obvious reasons, though Trevor has been told Patch sometimes barks in his sleep. He carries a passport and ID for Patch stating that the dog is legally allowed into restaurants and food stores, though he says he has been refused entry on occasion. Would a shop or a restaurant refuse a blind person’s guide dog? I doubt it.

  Trevor implied that he is single, and on reflection, if you had a spouse or live-in partner you wouldn’t really need a hearing dog. Obviously the companionship of Patch is as important to him as its practical assistance. It is pleasant to think of this network of clever dogs and dedicated trainers and grateful owners, from which all parties both take and give something valuable, quietly accomplishing its mission, day after day, year after year, unknown to the majority of the population.

  15th January. I haven’t had time to keep up this journal for the past week - I’ve been too busy preparing for my Polish trip, which begins the day after tomorrow.When I looked over my unpublished papers and lectures none of them looked entirely satisfactory as they stood, so I have spent a lot of time revising three of them and bringing them up to date.

  Yesterday there was worrying news about Anne. She’s had some bleeding, so they’ve taken her into the maternity hospital for observation and rest. I spoke to her on the phone, and she said it was just a precautionary measure. There’s nothing wrong with the baby, but they want to avoid a premature birth. Still, one can’t help worrying.

  I left it late to tell Dad about my trip - deliberately, because I knew it would upset him, and the less time he has to brood on it the better. ‘Poland? Poland? What in Gawd’s name d’you want to go there for? All the Poles are desperate to come over here, from what I read in my paper. I never heard anything good about Poland. Anyway, I thought you’d given up that lark.’ I explained the circumstances and said, with more enthusiasm than I really feel at present, that I was looking forward to the trip. ‘Well, rather you than me, mate,’ he said. ‘How are you getting there - flying? Not on a Polish plane I hope.’ ‘No, British Airways,’ I said, though in fact I shall be coming back from Cracow by LOT. I’m flying from Heathrow on an early morning flight, and have booked into an airport hotel for the night before, so I will go down to London tomorrow, and make a detour to visit Dad on my way. This seemed to placa
te him.

  18

  18th February. I haven’t written anything here for the past four weeks, because I’ve been away from my PC most of the time, and when I was at home I was either too preoccupied or too tired to bring this journal up to date. While I was in Poland I made handwritten notes on my tour but I can’t be bothered now to transcribe my impressions of Warsaw, Lodz and Cracow, or of my encounters with Polish academics and their students. These topics seem of trivial interest in the light of what happened at the very end of my visit, and subsequently back in England, which is what I’m going to recall now. Of the tour, it’s enough to say that my talks were well received and I coped with my hearing problem reasonably well - it was more difficult in informal social situations like restaurants and receptions than at the lectures and seminars. Most of the Poles I met spoke good English, though sometimes with disconcerting accents, like Estuary or Brooklyn, depending on where or from whom they had learned it. I ate a lot of meat and game and sausage and drank too much wine and beer and vodka. The Poles and the British Council between them worked me hard and I was beginning to tire by the time I got to Cracow.

  The city is as beautiful as everybody says, but I didn’t have much time to appreciate it, being kept busy at the Jagellonian University and the British Council Centre. I did manage to see the inside of St Mary’s Church, with its astonishing carved and painted high altar, and the outside of the Cloth Hall, and Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in the Czartoryski Museum, and a few other famous sights, but I had reserved my one free afternoon for the visit to Auschwitz. That was my first mistake, because in January the site closes at three, a fact I discovered belatedly in my guidebook on the way there. Nobody in Cracow pointed this out to me when I said I was going to Auschwitz on my last afternoon. Or more likely somebody did tell me and I pretended I had heard them but I didn’t. I was left very much to myself for this excursion. There were plenty of volunteers to show me the sights of Cracow, but nobody offered to accompany me to Auschwitz. Not surprising, I suppose: if you’ve been there once you probably wouldn’t want to go again. But I wondered how many of the Poles I met had in fact visited it themselves. When I told them I was going they nodded politely and changed the subject. I got the impression that it was a bit of an embarrassment to them, living in this lovely old civilised city so close to a place whose name is a metonym for genocide. It has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, but it’s not one that Poland wants to claim as part of its heritage, even though a lot of Poles died there.