We sit on stacking chairs in an arc around Beth, who faces us with a whiteboard at her side, and the apparatus of a portable loop system (the wire runs along the floor under the chairs and one has to be careful not to trip over it). All the participants - it seems somehow incongruous to call them students - wear hearing aids of various kinds, and some are very deaf indeed. When I tried the loop facility on mine I found it was much too loud, and managed perfectly well without it. Beth’s basic teaching method is to say something silently in lip-speech and if members of the class look puzzled, she writes the problematical words on the whiteboard. Then she repeats the statement with voice. Her own speech is extremely clear but with one or two slightly distorted vowel-sounds that one associates with the profoundly deaf. She told me in the tea break that she lost her hearing completely at the age of nine as the result of a virus infection. She also told me that thirty per cent of English is not lip-readable, a statistic which makes it all the more remarkable how well people like herself cope with their disability, but removed any illusions about lip-reading being a magic bullet for my condition.
It was not only the sense of being a new boy that reminded me of primary school. Beth evidently tries to make the class interesting by enhancing the participants’ general knowledge and testing their wits, as well as improving their lip-reading skills. So she tells us little stories or relates interesting facts about some subject, which she presumably finds in newspapers or magazines or encyclopaedias, alternating lip-speech with voiced speech, sentence by sentence, and then sets us related exercises in a quiz format, which we have to complete in pairs, lip-speaking to each other. This week she began with a brief history of the origin of Thanksgiving Day in America, which was celebrated last week. Her own lip-speaking, as one would expect, is relatively easy to read. She forms the words with lips, teeth and tongue carefully and deliberately, but not artificially, and if you don’t get the sentence the first time, you have a second or third chance, because she repeats it three times to different segments of the arc of students. I have to admit that I learned some things about the
Mayflower
pilgrims that I hadn’t known before, or had forgotten, for instance that there were only 102 of them, and that forty-six died in the first winter, which wasn’t entirely surprising since they landed on the north-east coast of America on December 26
th
, 1620. I just stopped myself from putting up my hand and asking why they hadn’t started their colony in the summer, reflecting that Beth might be irritated at having her demonstration of lip-speaking interrupted by an irrelevant question, or embarrassed by not knowing the answer. In the first year the local Indians helped the Pilgrims with growing crops and hunting and ninety-one of them attended the harvest feast of 1621, which was the origin of the modern Thanksgiving. I didn’t know, or I had forgotten, about the friendly Indians. Later Beth handed round a typewritten quiz about the Pilgrim Fathers, which we had to complete in pairs, collaborating in lip-speech with the person we were sitting next to.
In which century was the firstThanksgiving Day? In which year did the Pilgrim Fathers go to America? Where did they sail from? What was the name of their ship?
And so on. I was paired with a nice but rather timid middle-aged lady called Marjorie who was quite content to let me suggest all the answers and confined herself to nodding agreement and writing them down on the form. Still, she seemed to be able to read my lips. Then Beth went round the circle asking individuals to tell the group in lip-speech the answers they had come up with. Some are better at it than others. Some, perhaps out of shyness, barely move their lips at all. But there was no difficulty in lip-reading them since you could guess what they were going to say. The same was true of a game we played, a kind of simplified ‘Twenty Questions’. Each person was given a card with the name of something round on it, say, an orange, and a list of questions to ask other people about their round objects:
Is it big? Is it small? Is it soft? Is it heavy? Can I touch it? Can I eat it?
etc. I created some consternation by asking a question not on the list,
Is it manufactured?
There was much hilarity when the resulting puzzlement was cleared up. The atmosphere of the class is very good-humoured and supportive. There is a lot of laughter, of a totally innocent kind. At the beginning of another little talk Beth wrote on the board, ‘
An Enormous P
-’, and nobody sniggered or even smiled.The subject turned out to be a giant pumpkin which someone had grown on their allotment.After the talk Beth handed out pictures of it taken from a magazine which we passed round from hand to hand. The analogy with the infants’ class seemed complete when each of us had to think of a nursery rhyme and recite it in lip-speech to the group. I started ‘
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross / To see a fine lady upon a fine horse,’
and then my mind went blank and I couldn’t remember how it went on. More hilarity, as they competed to remind me: ‘
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes / She shall have music wherever she goes.’
Of course! What a dunce I was. There were two things which were interesting about this exercise: one that the poetic rhythm helped to make people’s lip-speaking more decipherable, and secondly that even if you failed with the opening lines you would recognise the rhyme sooner or later, because it was familiar. The first point is not much use in ordinary conversation, and the second merely illustrates a general rule that the more predictable a message is, the easier it will be to receive it in an incomplete form.
Fred quizzed me eagerly about the class when she got home that evening. I made her laugh with my description of the proceedings, especially my failure with the nursery rhyme, but she looked disappointed when I said I thought the exercises were of limited usefulness because they were loaded in favour of the addressee. ‘You are going on with it, though?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’ll carry on for a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it a chance.’ ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s the spirit, darling.’ The fact is that in a curious way I quite enjoyed being back in the infants’ class.
1
st
December.
Today was the day Alex had appointed for her ‘punishment’. I became increasingly nervous as the hour of three o’clock approached. I was alone in the house, and paced restlessly from room to room, glancing at the clocks in each of them. I had decided that the best response to her bizarre proposal was to ignore it, but now that seemed like a mistake. She had asked me to reply only if I wanted to change the day, so she might easily have interpreted my silence as agreement. I imagined her preparing the flat, closing the blinds in the living room, setting up the red table lamp in the corner, then stripping her lower limbs and bending over the table with her face resting on a cushion, waiting for my ring on the entryphone - no, I revised the scenario, she wouldn’t bend over the table until she had heard my ring and admitted me to the building, but she would be naked from the waist down, ready to take up her position at the table at once. So now she might be pacing anxiously like me, but half-naked, or sitting on the sofa with her bare knees together, like the adolescent nude in the Munch picture, waiting, wondering if I would come. Perhaps she would go to the window, prise the louvres of the blind apart, and peer down to see if I was coming along the towpath. How long would she wait after the hour of three before she realised I wasn’t coming, and got fully dressed again? How foolish would she feel? How angry? What would she do next?
At about four-thirty the phone on my desk rang. I jumped, and picked it up without first putting in my hearing aid. It was Alex, of course.
‘You didn’t come,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘A pity. It would have been good for both of us.’ She didn’t sound as if she was phoning from her flat, but from a public place: there was a good deal of noise, including music, in the background.
‘I thought you agreed not to phone me at home again,’ I said.
‘Well, that was on condition you helped me with my dissertation, ’ she said. ‘Anyway your wife isn’t at home right now.’
‘How do you know?’ I said.
‘Because I’m looking at her.’
I was seized with a sick sensation of bewilderment and dread. ‘What do you mean?’
She laughed. ‘I’m looking at her through the window . . .’ Her voice faded and my hearing was not good enough to pick up the following words.
‘What? What?’ I said, scrabbling frantically for my hearing-aid pouch. ‘I can’t hear you.’ I stuffed a hearing instrument into my right ear, and her voice became just about audible.
‘I guess the signal is not too good in this place,’ she said.
‘Where are you?’ I said. But I had already guessed.
‘I’m in the Rialto shopping mall, outside
Décor
,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice shop. I can see your wife inside, showing a customer some beautiful cushions. She’s the tall one in the corduroy pants suit, right? Not the brunette with the short skirt.’
‘What is this all about?’ I said stonily.
‘It’s about your folding umbrella,’ she said. ‘You left it in my flat last week.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s an old one, of no consequence.’
‘Well, I happen to have it with me. I thought I would take the opportunity to return it.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘Are you there?’ Alex said. ‘Did you hear that? I thought I’d go into the shop and introduce myself to your wife and say, “Your husband left this in my apartment last week, would you give it to him?”’
‘Please don’t do that, Alex,’ I said.
‘Why not? She knew you were there that day, didn’t she?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ I said.
‘Ah, then I have you in my power,’ she said, with a giggle.
‘What is it you want?’ I said.
‘I want to continue our discussions. I find them very useful.’
I thought for a moment. ‘All right - but not in your flat,’ I said. To my relief she accepted this condition, and I arranged to meet her in a café I know on the other side of the city. ‘Bring the umbrella,’ I said, before terminating the call.
2
nd
December.
Fred has taken to giving me an occasional smack on the bottom when I’m not expecting it, but if she was hoping to reawaken the passion of the other night, she has been disappointed. I am far too preoccupied with the problem of how to disentangle myself from Alex’s coils to have any appetite for sex. In fact I can hardly suppress an oath of protest when I receive one of these tokens of affection, Fred’s idea of a playful pat being fairly robust. Indeed I wonder whether she isn’t in fact relieving her own frustration by this means. These last couple of days, since that phone call from the Rialto mall, I have been particularly abstracted and more than usually inattentive to what Fred says to me, and she gets understandably exasperated. ‘Have you got your hearing aid in, darling?’ she keeps saying, and when I say yes she raises her eyes heavenwards in mute appeal.
Again and again I resolve to confess the whole story of my involvement with Alex, but again and again my nerve fails me.Why? It’s not as if I have been unfaithful to Fred - I haven’t touched the girl, or even flirted with her. It must be because I’m afraid of looking silly. That’s it. I have been silly. I have let an unscrupulous young woman twist me round the little finger of her flattery. To confess that would make me look smaller in Fred’s eyes, further weaken my status in our marriage. But there is more to it. I know that, if I confess, I must confess everything, otherwise I won’t achieve real peace of mind, that blissful state which Fred claimed she achieved when she became a practising Catholic again and went to confession after a gap of some twenty-five years, a feeling she said was ‘like being spiritually laundered, like having your soul washed, rinsed, spun dry, starched and ironed. Or no - more like being washed in a waterfall and spread out to dry on a sweet-smelling bush in the sunshine.’ But to achieve anything like that enviable state I would have to confess everything, including Alex’s invitation to ‘punish’ her. ‘And did you?’ Fred would ask, and ‘Of course not,’ I would say. But she would know that I had desired to do so. I had committed spanking in my heart. That too is silly, but also shaming. And worse still, she would realise that I had sought to act out my fantasy on her.
12
4
th
December
. Christmas, how I hate it. Not only it, but the thought of it, which is forced into one’s consciousness earlier and earlier every year. For weeks a whole aisle of Sainsbury’s has been dedicated to Christmas decorations, Christmas wrapping paper, Christmas crackers, Christmas napkins, plaster Santas, plastic reindeer, and gifts of hideous design and doubtful utility, mostly manufactured in non-Christian China. Now the newspapers and their glossy magazine supplements are so full of ideas for presents, parties, punch, and leering advice to men about buying lingerie for their womenfolk, that you can hardly find anything worth reading. Illumination addicts compete to festoon the facades and front gardens of their suburban houses with the most elaborate displays of blinking coloured lights and animated Christmas icons, causing collisions of rubber-necking motorists. Restaurants offer special Christmas menus throughout December, as if one plate of turkey with all the trimmings per year wasn’t quite enough. Even the sex-aid emails strike a seasonal note: one received this morning was illustrated with a drawing of a blonde bimbo wearing only stockings and high-heeled boots, her arms and legs wrapped round a snowman, and the caption: ‘
Our Cialis made him hot in fifteen minutes!
’ Unsafe sex for a snowman, surely?
What can explain this blight of creeping Christmas? When I was a child Christmas Day and Boxing Day were holidays and then life went back to normal, but now Christmas extends seamlessly into the New Year, an even more pointless festivity, so the whole country is effectively paralysed for at least ten days, stupefied by too much drink, dyspeptic from too much food, broke from expenditure on useless gifts, bored and irritable from being cooped up at home with tiresome relatives and fractious children, and square-eyed from watching old films on television. It is the very worst time of the year to have an extended enforced holiday, when the weather is at its most dismal and the hours of daylight are most restricted. Scrooge is my hero - the unregenerate Scrooge of Part One of
A Christmas Carol
, that is. ‘Bah, humbug!’ How right he was. What a pity he had a change of heart.