Deaf Sentence (16 page)

 

 

 

 

16
^th
November
. Alex Loom kept her promise not to phone me, but two days later I got an email from her saying: ‘When are we going to meet to discuss my research?’ I emailed back: ‘I don’t know. As a matter of interest, how did you get my email address?’ She replied: ‘I figured you probably use the University network and have the same form of address as all the other faculty.’ She was right of course. Retired academic staff are allowed to go on using the University network, which gives you access to the Library catalogue and saves paying a commercial service provider for email. She added:‘So when are we going to meet?’ I wrote: ‘I don’t see the point of meeting unless there is something to discuss. Can you send me a chapter?’ She emailed me a copy of her dissertation proposal, all very general and abstract. I emailed back: ‘I need to see something more specific, like a chapter.’ She replied: ‘Nothing I’ve written so far is fit to show you.’ I replied: ‘Well then I’ll wait.’ Since then, silence.

I find myself checking my email more frequently than usual to see if she has responded and feeling slightly disappointed when I see from my inbox that she hasn’t. Her unusual topic seems to have reawakened my appetite for research. I went into the University library today and browsed in the stacks dedicated to linguistics, looking in indexes for references to suicide notes. I didn’t find anything, but I borrowed a couple of books on document analysis which I thought might be relevant. I was shocked to find one of them had several passages marked with a turquoise highlighter pen, not just in the margins but with parallel strokes drawn right through the lines of text from left to right. I pointed out the vandalism at the issue desk. ‘It seems to me extraordinary that anyone educated enough to have access to a university library should do this to a book,’ I said. The librarian grimaced and shrugged. He explained that since students could now check out books themselves on a computer terminal and return them through something like a laundry chute in the entrance hall, there was no way of keeping tabs on how the books were being treated. ‘But you must have a record of all the borrowers of a given book on your computer,’ I said. ‘Can’t you call them all in, one by one, and question them? The vandals might not confess, but they wouldn’t do it again.’ He looked at me as if he thought I was unhinged. Well, perhaps I am a bit, on this subject. To me the treatment of books is a test of civilised behaviour. I admit to making light pencil marks in the margins of a library book occasionally, but I erase them scrupulously as I go through the pages writing up my notes. It enrages me to encounter passages in library books that have been heavily underlined, usually with the aid of a ruler, by a previous borrower evidently under the delusion that this procedure will somehow engrave the words on his or her cerebral cortex, and the offence is of course vastly increased if the writing instrument is a ballpen rather than a pencil. The application of a felt-tip highlighter is a new and particularly flagrant kind of abuse, disfiguring the text with stripes of lurid colour, completely indifferent to the distracting effect on subsequent readers.

The episode threw me into a what-is-the-world-coming-to mood, a state I am increasingly prone to these days, prompted by phenomena like
Big Brother
, four-letter words in the
Guardian,
vibrating penis rings on sale in Boots, binge-drinkers puking in the city centre on Saturday nights, and chemotherapy for cats and dogs. Somehow it is easier to focus one’s anger and despair on these comparatively trivial offences to reason and decency than on the larger threats to civilisation like Islamic terrorism, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, AIDS, the energy crisis and global warming, which seem to be beyond anyone’s ability to control. I don’t think I have ever felt so pessimistic about the future of the human race, even at the height of the Cold War, as I do now, because there are so many possible ways civilisation could come to a catastrophic end, and quite soon. Not in my lifetime probably, but conceivably in the lifetime of Anne’s unborn child.

17
^th
November.
I had a curious encounter with Colin Butterworth yesterday evening. I went to the new Theology professor’s Inaugural Lecture, more for the sake of a glass or three of wine at the reception afterwards (the Deputy Dean who is responsible for buying the SCR wine has a good palate) than out of interest in ‘The Problem of Petitionary Prayer’, but there is a decent loop system in the main Humanities lecture theatre, so if it turned out to be interesting I could be sure of hearing it. I went on my own because Fred had a meeting, the board of a charity she’s involved in, though she wouldn’t have gone anyway, she said,‘Because I know what a hotbed of atheism that theology department is.’ A slight exaggeration, but it’s true that academic theologians these days tend to be a rather sceptical lot, and profess something called Religious Studies rather than Christianity or any other faith. This chap certainly adopted an attitude of amused detachment from his subject. ‘Petitionary prayer is asking God to do something,’ he explained. ‘When you petition on behalf of others it’s called intercessionary prayer. Roman Catholics have a special form of that which consists of asking the Blessed Virgin or the saints to intercede for
you
, forwarding your request to God.’ The audience tittered, as they were meant to do. There were, he said, several problems with the idea of petitionary prayer. One was that it usually didn’t work. Another was that in many cases if it worked for you it negated somebody else’s petition - as when two warring nations or two rugby teams prayed to the same God for victory. But the biggest problem of all was the idea of a supreme being who intervened in human history to reward some petitioners and deny others manifestly no less deserving. What was surprising was that religious people were so resourceful in rationalising and reconciling themselves to these disappointments and contradictions that they persisted in petitionary prayer. At this point I recalled the suicide note on the Internet, ‘
Please God do something for me and make this my time to go . . .’
and I wondered if the writer, when she came round from her overdose, was grateful or disappointed that her prayer had not been answered, and in the reverie this provoked I lost the gist of the lecture and never discovered if there was a solution to the problem of petitionary prayer.

The reception in the Senior Common Room afterwards was the usual ordeal by Lombard Reflex. There were several fellow sufferers among the elderly guests whom these occasions tend to attract, and I had some exchanges along the familiar lines of
‘Terribly noisy in here’ - ‘What?’ - ‘I said it’s terribly noisy in here’ - ‘Sorry, can’t hear you, it’s so damned noisy in here . . .’
Then Sylvia Cooper, wife of the former Head of History, engaged me in one of those conversations in which your interlocutor says something that sounds like a quotation from a Dadaist poem, or one of Chomsky’s impossible sentences, and you say ‘What?’ or ‘I beg your pardon?’ and they repeat their words, which make a banal sense the second time round.

‘The pastime of the dance went to pot,’ Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, ‘so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows’ in-laws finding they stuttered.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gîte, cowering indoors behind the shutters.’

‘Oh, hot, was it?’ I said. ‘That must have been the summer of 2003.’

‘Yes, we seared our arses on bits of plate, but soiled my cubism, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We were near Carcasonne. A pretty place, but spoiled by tourism, I’m afraid.’

‘Ah, yes, it’s the same everywhere these days,’ I said sagely.

‘But I do mend sherry. Crap and sargasso pained there, you know. There’s a lovely little mum of modern tart.’

‘Sherry?’ I said hesitantly.

‘Céret, it’s a little town in the foothills of the Pyrenees,’ said Mrs Cooper with a certain impatience.‘Braque and Picasso painted there. I recommend it.’

‘Oh yes, I’ve been there,’ I said hastily. ‘It has a rather nice art gallery.’

‘The mum of modern tart.’

‘Quite so,’ I said. I looked at my glass. ‘I seem to need a refill. Can I get you one?’

To my relief, she declined. Having obtained my refill I moved to the fringes of the throng where I was able to hear the people who came up to me reasonably well. I caught sight of Butterworth and his wife on the other side of the room, chatting to the inaugural lecturer and no doubt lavishing the usual insincere compliments on his performance. Butterworth - tall, athletic, tanned, with a mop of glossy dark curly hair worn long over the collar of his silky black suit - looks the more youthful and handsome of the pair, though I suppose they are both in their early forties. Mrs Butterworth is or used to be a nurse, I remember being told, and was wearing a rather severe uniform-like pinafore dress. She stood in an erect posture and studied the theologian attentively as if she were observing his symptoms and might at any moment whip a thermometer out of her starched blouse and pop it into his mouth. Butterworth’s eyes in contrast were flicking around all the time looking for the next person it would be in his interest to speak to. For a moment his glance met mine but quickly moved on: we were never closely acquainted, and as a retired former colleague I would have nothing to contribute to the furtherance of his career. Then the VC, who had introduced the lecturer, as is the custom at inaugurals, came up to me and asked me how my good lady was and what we had thought of the new play at the Playhouse, having spotted Fred and me at the press night. I hadn’t been able to hear most of it, but managed to bluff my way through the conversation plausibly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Butterworth weaving his way through the crowd towards us as fast as he could manage with a glass of wine in his hand. He greeted me by my first name as if I was his oldest friend and then turned his attention to the VC, who was however almost immediately taken off by the Dean to meet someone else. ‘So how are you enjoying retirement?’ Butterworth said, looking disappointedly at the VC’s retreating back. People still ask me this at parties, as if I retired four months rather than four years ago. ‘Very much,’ I said, not wishing to give him the satisfaction of knowing the truth. ‘How are things with you?’‘Frantically busy,’ he said.‘You’ve no idea how much paperwork we have to deal with these days.You got out at the right time.’ This is another thing former colleagues tend to say to me at parties, darkly implying some equivalence between early retirement and generals being helicoptered out of besieged cities or rats leaving sinking ships. He went on to list all the assessment exercises he was involved in, and all the committees he sat on, and all the grant applications he had to make, and all the articles he had to referee, and all the postgraduate students he had to supervise.‘Yes,’ I said, as he paused for breath. ‘I met one of them the other day.’ He focused his gaze on me for the first time since the VC had left us together. ‘Oh? Who was that?’ ‘Alex Loom,’ I said.

He gave me a look which I can best describe as wary. ‘How did you meet her?’ he said. I told him it was at a private view at the ARC gallery, without mentioning our subsequent contacts.‘She told me about her research,’ I said (which was true, though I hadn’t heard a word on that occasion). ‘It’s an intriguing subject.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If a little morbid,’ I added. ‘Yes,’ he said. I had never known him so sparing in speech. ‘Getting on well with it, is she?’ I asked innocently. ‘It’s early days,’ he said. ‘She’s still assembling a corpus. She needs more British letters for a balanced sample. Most of the available stuff is American.’ As he talked about the methodological problems he relaxed a little and recovered some of his normal fluency. I pretended to know less than I do about Alex to try and draw him out. Why had she come to England to do research, I asked. ‘She wanted to work with me,’ he said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘And I suppose it’s cheaper than in the States,’ I said.‘Yes,’ he said, reverting to monosyllabic mode. ‘Where did she do her first degree?’ I asked. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘Some liberal arts college in New England, and then a Master’s at Cornell.’ ‘Oh, I thought she said Columbia,’ I said. He looked at me warily again. ‘Perhaps it was. I really don’t know a lot about her. She doesn’t come into the University much. Works on her own, keeps to herself, doesn’t mix with the other graduate students.’ ‘An enigma,’ I said smilingly. ‘You could say that,’ he said, looking past me across the room. ‘My wife is signalling to me, I think she wants to go home. Excuse me.’ He moved away.

He was so obviously reluctant to say anything about Alex which might reveal that his golden touch as a supervisor is failing with her that I wonder whether she hasn’t in fact already dropped a hint that she would like me to take her on in his stead. I watched him go over to his wife and say something which seemed to surprise her, and shortly afterwards they left the party.

I felt pleased with myself for having discomposed the normally smooth and self-satisfied Butterworth, and consequently drank rather too many glasses of the SCR Beaujolais. I left my car in the campus car park and walked home, arriving there in a still somewhat inebriated state, which turned into an amorous state when I discovered Fred in her bathroom having a soak in the big claw-footed bathtub, looking like a rosy Bonnard nude, her blunt nipples just breaking the surface of the water, her pubic hair moving like seaweed beneath it. I undressed and got in behind her, and soaped her fine new breasts as she lay back with her head on my shoulder, and told her about the lecture and the people I had spoken to (except Butterworth) and she told me about her meeting. Afterwards we went to bed, both naked and I with a quite promising erection, but I fell asleep in middle of our first embrace, so abruptly that I wasn’t aware of feeling drowsy before I passed out. I woke in the small hours, cold because I had no pyjamas on, with Fred sleeping soundly beside me, swathed in one of her all-enveloping winter nightdresses. She made a dry comment at breakfast this morning, about my having had too much to drink the night before, but did not complain about my falling prematurely asleep, which was sporting of her.