Deaf Sentence (13 page)

It’s a very poignant document, an outpouring of suppressed emotion, a cry wrung from the heart. Sometimes, he says, he would yield to the desire for companionship.

The references to the flute and the shepherd remind me of Philip Larkin, unable to hear the larks singing in the sky when he was walking with Monica Jones in the Shetlands. They also evoke the Pastoral Symphony, which Beethoven composed six years later, a supreme musical evocation of sounds that he himself hadn’t heard for more than a decade. Nor could he hear the music itself when it was performed. I suppose he heard something - but what? A faint distorted version of the score, like a concert heard on a cheap portable radio with a fading battery? Or was he able, by watching the musicians, to recreate in his imagination the full richness of symphonic sound, and hear it inside his head like a modern iPod user? I fear the former is more likely.

What comfort can I draw from these case histories? Not much. Both men happened to be geniuses and found some kind of compensation for their affliction in their art. I’m neither a genius nor an artist. I suppose a linguist who can’t hear what people are saying is more like a deaf musician than a deaf painter, so I can identify more readily with Beethoven than with Goya. But I can’t claim that only my work on discourse analysis has held me back from despair these last twenty years, or that I feel it impossible to leave the world until I have given it my last thoughts on, say, topic-drift and skip-connecting in casual conversation, which I could still do using transcripts of recorded speech. In fact I
have
given the world my last thoughts on those and similar subjects, some time ago. So what will I have to live for, when social and sexual intercourse are effectively at an end too? Let us not enquire further into that question.

 

 

 

 

8
^th
November
. I met Alex Loom yesterday, as arranged. That’s her surname, Loom: it was written beside the bell push for flat 36 outside the entrance to Wharfside Court, the apartment block where she lives. An unusual name, easy to remember, and because it was written down I know I’ve got it right. I’m not so confident about anything else that I gathered in the course of the afternoon, because much of what she told me was surprising and she tends to drop her voice at crucial points in her utterances so that I was never quite sure whether I had understood her correctly. What follows is a tidied up, disambiguated and not altogether reliable record of our conversation.

Like so many industrial cities, ours has collaborated with British Waterways on refurbishing its canals in recent years, to make them attractive and accessible as a leisure amenity: smartening up the towpaths, painting the locks, erecting signposts and lamp standards of retro design, encouraging people to walk, jog and cycle on the paths. There has also been a lot of new property development alongside the canal that zigzags through the city centre in the form of apartments, aimed at the buy-to-rent market. Alex’s flat is in one of the cheaper-looking buildings, a four-storey block in a style Fred calls Lego Postmodern, bright red brick with green plastic features pasted on, overlooking a kind of backwater at the end of which an unsightly scum of half-submerged non-biodegradable garbage has accumulated. It took me quite a while to find it, since the address Alex had given me isn’t in my dog-eared
A-to-Z.
I drove through an area of vacant lots, derelict warehouses and small workshops until I reached the car park behind Wharfside Court. I was surprised by how quiet the place seemed: the traffic of the city centre only half a mile away was just a murmur, and there was nobody about. It was the middle of the afternoon, when most residents would be at work, but the near-silence seemed eerie in the middle of this city of over half a million people; indeed the city itself looked unfamiliar seen from this angle, all its landmarks - the Castle Keep, the Town Hall campanile, the ziggurat Hilton - rearranged, as if it had been turned inside out. It was a cold, clear afternoon, with good visibility. The sun was low, casting long, sharp shadows over the deserted towpaths, like one of Chirico’s spell-bound paintings.

The unnatural quiet, I suddenly realised, was enhanced by the fact that I wasn’t wearing my hearing aid. I prefer to drive without it when I’m on my own because it makes my four-year-old Ford Focus seem as noiseless as a Mercedes. Having inserted the little plastic hearing machines in my ears I pressed the bell for flat 36, and heard Alex’s voice through the crackling of the entryphone: ‘Hi. It’s on the third floor, I’m afraid you’ll have to walk up, the elevator’s out of order.’ I ascended three flights of raw, dusty, untreated concrete stairs, and she was waiting at the open door of her flat when, a little out of breath, I arrived. She was wearing black trousers and a black V-neck sweater, with little make-up, except around her eyes, accentuating their intense blue. It’s like the blue of the Microsoft desktop, luminous but opaque. ‘The elevator is out of order most of the time,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘I keep calling the management company but nothing happens. Come in.’

It’s a small flat: one bedroom, bathroom with loo, and a kitchenette off the living room. She took my overcoat and hung it up in the tiny hall, then ushered me into the living room. It is not much bigger than Dad’s, but lighter and brighter. A laptop was open on a table, its abstract screen-saver pattern restlessly dissolving and re-forming, and there was a shelf unit against one wall holding books, box files and ring-binders. The other walls were decorated with modern reproductions and posters - I recognised a Munch painting of a thin naked adolescent girl sitting on a bed.Two upright chairs, a small sofa, an easy chair, a coffee table, a white two-drawer filing cabinet, a radio/CD player and a small flat-screen TV completed the furniture, most of which looked as if it had come quite recently from Ikea. She smiled and spread her hands. ‘
Chez moi,
’ she said.

I went across to the window, which faced a similar apartment building across the canal backwater. ‘Nice view,’ I said politely. ‘Have you lived here long?’

‘Not very long,’ she said.

‘Did you buy it?’

‘Lord, no!’ She laughed. ‘I rent - but it’s quite cheap. The owners are pretty desperate, there’s a lot on the market. Most of the apartments in this block are unoccupied.’

‘Doesn’t that make you feel rather lonely?’

‘No, I like it. It’s very quiet. Good for writing up my research.’

‘Research into what?’ I asked.

‘Let me make a pot of tea first. Earl Grey or Assam? Or herbal?’

I chose Assam, and she went into the little kitchenette, which opened off the living room without a dividing door. I sat down in the easy chair, but I did not feel at ease. It crossed my mind for some reason that nobody knew I was here. She said something in which I seemed to hear the word ‘suicide’. I jumped to my feet and took a step towards the kitchenette. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

She came out of the kitchenette with the tea things on a tray. ‘Suicide notes,’ she said, putting the tray down on the coffee table. As she stooped over the table the neckline of her sweater gaped and I glimpsed the shadowy division of her breasts, as I had at the gallery. ‘That’s my PhD topic. A stylistic analysis of suicide notes.’

I was about to ask how she got interested in the subject, but stopped myself in case I would be trespassing on sensitive personal territory. She noticed my hesitation, and laughed. ‘I can see you’re wondering why I chose such a morbid subject. Everybody does. I was dating this clinical psychologist at Columbia a while back and he was doing a content-analysis of suicide notes for purposes of risk assessment, comparing notes by successful and unsuccessful suicideattempters. He’d acquired a small corpus and I thought it would be interesting to analyse them stylistically, you know? Like, are they a genre? Do people under such extreme stress fall back on rhetorical formulae? Or does their desperation make them transcend the normal limits of their expressive skills?’

‘How can you tell,’ I said, ‘without getting hold of other writings by these unfortunate people?’

‘You can’t, of course, except from internal evidence - every now and then you get a sentence that rises expressively way above the rest of the discourse. But that’s only one aspect of my dissertation.’

I asked her where she was doing the PhD, and was surprised to learn that she is a postgraduate student in our English Department, being supervised by Colin Butterworth.

‘Why in England, rather than America?’ I asked.‘You
are
American, I take it?’ Her accent was not strongly marked by any drawl or twang, but it was unmistakable.

‘Right. When Bush was re-elected I felt I just had to get out of the country. I’d been working for the Kerry campaign for months and I was
so
depressed . . .’

‘You were a volunteer?’ I asked.

‘No, I was paid. I’d been thinking of working in government actually, but I decided to go back to school, try for an academic career. I like England, I spent some time here when I was a kid - my dad had a job at the Embassy in London. And doing a PhD here costs a whole lot less than in the States. I didn’t realise when I applied that’s because they don’t teach you anything.’ She laughed as I showed my surprise at this judgement. ‘I mean there are no courses, no exams, just the dissertation, which you’re expected to do on your own, with an occasional meeting with your supervisor.’>

‘Surely there’s a research seminar of some kind?’ I said.

‘You mean where people get to talk about what they’re working on, and everyone else is terribly polite and supportive and asks easy questions? Yeah, we have that,’ she said drily. ‘Fortunately I like working on my own. The system suits me fine, or it would do if the supervisions were any good.’

‘You don’t get on with Professor Butterworth?’ I asked. I began to understand why she had not wanted to meet me on the campus.

‘That’s an understatement,’ she said.‘I read an article by him about the effect of email on epistolary style which made me think he would be a good person to work with, that’s why I applied to come here, but he’s really been no help at all.’

‘He probably just doesn’t have enough time,’ I said. ‘He’s probably too busy attending meetings, and preparing budgets, and making staff assessments, and doing all the other things that professors have to do nowadays instead of thinking.’

‘Maybe, but he’s not very smart either,’ Alex said.

I could not suppress a faint smile of complicity in this judgement. I have always thought Butterworth’s reputation is somewhat inflated, owing more to his instinct for trendy subjects, and his popularity with the media as a pundit on contemporary linguistic usage, than to original scholarship. But I was disconcerted by her next remark.

‘That’s why I want you to supervise me.’ She said that she had been reading a lot of my work lately and been very impressed by it. ‘I’d read some things before, of course, way back, when I was doing my Master’s at Columbia, but when I found out you actually taught here till recently, I was really excited . . . I’ve read everything by you in the Library. I think you’re just the adviser I need.’

‘But I’m retired,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But I’ve heard that some retired faculty go on supervising graduate students.’

‘Those would be students they were supervising before they retired,’ I explained.‘They’re just seeing them through to the completion of their dissertations. But one can’t take on new students after full retirement.’

‘Can’t one?’ she said, with a little pouting smile. ‘Can’t he make a special arrangement?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘Putting aside the question of whether I were willing -’

‘Are you, in principle?’ she interposed.

‘Putting that aside, it would be incredibly insulting to Professor Butterworth if I were hauled out of retirement to take over one of his research students. He would never agree to it. And the University would never wear it. It’s just not on, I’m afraid.’

I was glad to have this well-founded reason for declining her request, because otherwise I might have been a little bit tempted by it. The idea of getting involved in some research again, applying my knowledge and expertise to this rather bizarre but undoubtedly interesting topic, and meeting this obviously intelligent and articulate and, let us be honest, very personable young woman on a regular basis to discuss it, was not unattractive. But experience has taught me that postgraduate supervision can be a complex and worrying business: you easily find yourself becoming somehow responsible for the student’s achievement, self-esteem, destiny, and it goes on for years. It was a good thing that I didn’t even have to weigh up the pros and cons in this case before saying no.

‘Oh. I’m very disappointed,’ she said disconsolately.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I drained a cup of tea that had gone cold, and glanced at my watch. ‘Perhaps I should be going.’

‘Oh, no, please don’t go,’ she said. ‘Have some more tea.’ She refilled my cup.

‘Tell me a bit more about your research,’ I said. ‘Where do you get your raw data from?’

‘Oh, there are anthologies. And the Internet is useful. I’ll show you.’ She got up and took down a large lever-arch file from the shelves. ‘This is my corpus to date. It’s all on my hard disk, of course, but I keep this as a kind of scrap book to browse through occasionally. ’