Deaf Sentence (12 page)

I was baptised in the C of E but didn’t have a religious upbringing. Mum taught me to say my prayers at bedtime when I was a child, and took me to church at Christmas and Easter, but that was about it; Dad claimed - and still does occasionally - to believe in God, but never set foot in a church except for weddings and funerals. I attended a grammar school which went in for religious assemblies and encouraged pupils on the arts side to take Scripture at GCE O-level, and most of what I know about Christianity derives from that education and studying English literature, especially Milton and James Joyce, at university. I envy religious people their belief and at the same time I resent it. Surveys have shown that they have a much better chance of being happy than those whose belief systems are totally secular - and you can understand why. Everyone’s life contains some sadness, suffering and disappointment, and they are much easier to accept if you believe there’s another life to come in which the imperfections and injustices of this one will be made good; it also makes the business of dying itself a much less depressing prospect. That’s why I envy religious believers. There are of course no firm foundations for their belief, but you’re not allowed to point this out without seeming rude, aggressive and disrespectful - without in fact seeming to attack their right to be happy. That’s why I resent religious belief, even among my nearest and dearest - indeed especially among my nearest and dearest, since with them the impossibility of discussing religion dispassionately is most apparent. Fred goes off every Sunday morning to Mass, leaving me behind with the Sunday papers, and comes back ninety minutes later looking virtuously pleased with herself. I might ask her what the sermon was like, and she will say something vague in reply - frankly I doubt whether she listens to it attentively - but I wouldn’t dream of asking her if, for example, she received Communion with unreserved assent to the doctrine of transubstantiation. I don’t think Fred’s faith ever had a strong intellectual basis. It was an effect of upbringing and education and family tradition. The storms of sexuality and an unhappy marriage in early adulthood blew her away from the Catholic faith, and when those subsided she returned to its safe haven. From the few occasions when I have accompanied her to Mass for family reasons I would say it’s pure ritual for her, a ritual of reassurance.

She sits and stands and kneels and sings the hymns and murmurs the responses in a kind of trance, happy to be connected to a general ambience of transcendental faith and hope without needing to enquire closely into the rational basis of it all. And who am I to say she is deluding herself, left alone in the house with my doubts and my deafness and the shallow excitable chatter of the Sunday newspapers?

 

 

 

Marcia and family came round to lunch today, as they often do on a Sunday. Of all our children Fred’s Marcia lives the closest, indeed only a couple of miles away, so we see more of them than of the others. I’m always pleased to see Dauphin Daniel and his older sister Helena - ‘Lena’ as she’s familiarly known. Marcia and her husband Peter I get along with up to a point, but I have a feeling that as a teenager Marcia was the most resistant of Fred’s children to the idea of her mother marrying me - an older man, her teacher, a non-Catholic, with kids of his own - and that she has never quite overcome her early resentment of our union. Indeed, as Fred blossomed and became successful in business, while I shrank into retirement and succumbed to deafness, I suspect I appeared to Marcia more and more as a redundant appendage to the family, an unfortunate liability. As she is the dominant partner in their marriage Peter takes his cues from her and is guarded in his attitude to me. When I hinted as much to Fred one day, she said, ‘Nonsense, Marcia has a great respect for you, and if Peter seems a little “guarded” as you say, it’s because he thinks you must be silently criticising his English all the time because you’re a Professor of Linguistics.’ I laughed at that, because modern linguistics is almost excessively non-prescriptive, but I suppose there might be some truth in it. Peter is from a working-class background, speaks with a perceptible local accent and uses the occasional dialect word. He studied accountancy at what was then the Poly and works in industry, so he is culturally a little undernourished and a bit in awe of the family he has married into. I tried to put him at ease next time I saw him by attacking Lynne Truss’s bestselling book on the apostrophe, but only succeeded in upsetting him - it turned out he is a devout believer in Truss and uses her book as a kind of bible. Oh well . . . They’re an admirable couple in many ways, both with demanding careers, but dedicated to the welfare of their children, making quality time for them in the evenings and at weekends, never as far as I can tell having any quality time to themselves, and I wish I could love them more. That’s no problem with the children, who are beautiful and charming, and at that interesting age when they begin to acquire language with astonishing rapidity, and sometimes make expressive mistakes, if I could only hear them. Today when I complimented Lena on her pretty dress, and she replied that her Mummy had bought it at Marks & Spencer, everybody laughed except me. When I looked puzzled, Fred explained that she had said, ‘Mummy bought it at Marks and Spensive.’ Then I laughed on my own.

 

 

 

 

7
^th
November
. I got up this morning before Fred and was having my breakfast when she came into the kitchen in her dressing gown. She said ‘Good morning, darling,’ and then, going over to the stove, said something else which I didn’t catch because I wasn’t wearing my hearing aid; I took it out last night in the family bathroom, which is my bathroom when there are no family or other guests in the house, before going to bed, and it was still there. I said ‘What?’ and she repeated the utterance, but I still didn’t get it. She was opening and shutting drawers and cupboards as she spoke, which didn’t help. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got my hearing aid in - it’s upstairs.’ She turned to face me and said more loudly what sounded like ‘long stick’. I said, ‘What do you want a long stick for?’ My mind was already considering the possibilities - to recover something that had rolled under the bed? Or fallen down the back of a chest of drawers? She came closer and said, ‘Saucepan. Long-stick saucepan.’ ‘What’s a long-stick saucepan?’ I said. ‘You mean a long-handled saucepan?’ She raised her eyes to the heavens in despair, and went back to the stove. I thought about it for a minute or two, and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean
non-stick
saucepan! It’s in the top right-hand cupboard.’ But I was too late: she was already making her porridge in a stainless steel saucepan which would be much more trouble to clean afterwards. And it was my fault for putting the non-stick one away yesterday in the wrong place.

Fred sat down at the kitchen table, propped up the
Guardian
tabloid section against the marmalade jar, and began to read with silent concentration. I had intended to mention casually over breakfast that I would be meeting Alex this afternoon. I had a little speech prepared: ‘
Yes, d’you remember the young woman I was talking to at the ARC show last week? The blonde one? It was so noisy that I literally didn’t hear a word she said, but it seems she’s doing research of some kind, with a linguistics angle I presume, because apparently I agreed to give her some advice about it. She phoned to complain because I hadn’t turned up for our appointment, though I haven’t the faintest memory of making one. Embarrassing really. I more or less had to agree to meet her . . .
’ But because of the contretemps over the non-stick saucepan it seemed an unpropitious moment to make this announcement, and I let it pass. I will have to tell Fred about the meeting after it has happened, when it will be far more difficult to explain.

 

 

 

‘My mother’s deafness is very trifling you see - just nothing at all. By only raising my voice, and saying anything two or three times over, she is sure to hear; but then she is used to my voice,’
says Miss Bates in
Emma
. How subtly Jane Austen hints at the politely disguised frustration and irritation of the company at having to bear the repetition of every banal remark in louder and louder tones for the benefit of old Mrs Bates. I must be in a worse state than my fictional name-sake, because I’m used to Fred’s voice, but I still can’t hear what she’s saying without a hearing aid.

Is there anything to be said in favour of deafness? Any saving grace? Any enhancement of the other senses? I don’t think so - not in my case anyway. Maybe in Goya’s. I read a book about Goya which said it was his deafness that made him into a major artist. Until he was in his mid-forties he was a competent but conventional painter of no great originality; then he contracted some mysterious paralytic illness which deprived him of sight, speech and hearing for several weeks. When he recovered he was stone deaf, and remained so for the rest of his life. All his greatest work belongs to the deaf period of his life: the Caprices, the Disasters of War, the Proverbs, the Black Paintings. All the dark, nightmarish ones. This critic said it was as if his deafness had lifted a veil: when he looked at human behaviour undistracted by the babble of speech he saw it for what it was, violent, malicious, cynical and mad, like a dumb-show in a lunatic asylum. I saw the Black Paintings some years ago, when I was in Madrid on a British Council lecture tour, and went back to the Prado twice for another look. Goya painted them as murals for his house in the country - the local people called it La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man - slapping the paint straight on to the plaster, but later they were lifted off the walls and transferred on to canvas. Now they’re in the Prado,
Saturn Devouring His Children, The Witches’ Sabbath, Fight With Clubs
and the rest, predominantly black in pigment as well as subject matter. But the one that always has the most spectators lingering in front of it, intrigued and puzzled, is lighter in colour tone than the others. It’s known as the
Dog Overwhelmed By Sand
(none of these titles was Goya’s). It might be a modern Abstract Expressionist painting, composed of three great planes of predominantly brownish colour, two vertical and one horizontal, if it wasn’t for the head of a little black dog at the bottom of the picture, painted almost in cartoon style, buried up to its neck in what might be sand, looking upwards pathetically and apprehensively at a descending mass of more of the same stuff. There are lots of theories about what the picture means, like the End of the Enlightenment, or the Advent of Modernity, but I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness, deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suffocation.

Did Goya, I wonder, think he owed his greatness as an artist to his deafness? Was he grateful for the illness which deprived him of his hearing? Somehow I doubt it. But it must have crossed his mind that he was fortunate to have lost that sense rather than sight. In practical terms deafness is no handicap at all to a painter, in fact it could even be an advantage, an aid to concentration - not having to make conversation with your sitters for instance. Whereas for a musician it’s the worst thing that could happen to you. Beethoven is the great example. I read a book about him too, Thayer’s
Life
- I have a kind of morbid interest in the great deafies of the past. I was surprised to discover how young he was when he became deaf, only twenty-eight. He caught a chill which developed into a serious illness, not quite as severe as Goya’s, but it left him with impaired hearing, hair-cell damage probably, which steadily worsened for the rest of his life. When he first became aware of it, he was chiefly known as a virtuoso musician and conductor, careers that were obviously impossible to pursue with hearing loss, and that was why from then onwards he concentrated exclusively on composing. So I suppose you could argue that deafness was responsible for his greatness as an artist too, like Goya’s, but Beethoven certainly didn’t look at it in that way, as a blessing in disguise. He was distraught when he realised he was losing his hearing, searched frantically for cures (none of which worked of course), and was afflicted with spells of deep depression, cursing his Maker and sometimes contemplating suicide. He swore to secrecy those of his friends in whom he confided his plight, fearing that he would lose all professional credibility if it became widely known. And for a long time he was surprisingly successful in concealing it, partly by avoiding society, and partly by feigning absent-mindedness when he failed to hear something said to him. But as all deafies know, these strategies have a certain cost: they make the subject seem withdrawn, unsociable, curmudgeonly. Six years after he began to go deaf, when he had given up hope of a cure, Beethoven wrote a letter, addressed to his two brothers, but in a way to everybody who knew him, evidently designed to be read after his death, explaining the ‘secret cause’ of his off-putting temperament and manner. It’s known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, because he wrote it in a little village of that name outside Vienna to which he had withdrawn for six months of solitary rest on the advice of his doctor. I copied it from Thayer, and have it on file. It begins like this: