Deaf Sentence (6 page)

While he was still employed himself Desmond was amused and pleased by his wife’s success in her late entrepreneurial career. If there was a slight decline in domestic comforts as a result of her busy life - more prepared food from the supermarket for dinner, an occasional shortage of clean socks and laundered shirts - that was a small price to pay for the satisfaction she obviously derived from it, and his own social life was enlivened by contact with new people and places through association with her. Winifred had presence and confidence, bred in the bone and polished by private education, which had been suppressed by her unhappy first marriage but now revived in her mature years. She became by tacit consent the senior partner in the business, although she and Jakki had invested equal amounts in it, by virtue of her maturer years and social poise: and in due course she became something of a figure in the local community, invited to sit on boards and committees connected with the arts, which in turn generated invitations to private views, first nights, charity concerts, festival openings, and parties and receptions connected with these events, in which Desmond was naturally included. Sometimes he encountered the Vice Chancellor or other senior figures in the University hierarchy on such occasions and observed that they regarded him with a new respect.The VC began to address him by his first name, and to ask after his ‘good lady’ when encountered on campus. They were invited to the occasional private dinner party at the VC’s residence.

His retirement, however, put the whole phenomenon in a different and less agreeable perspective, and shifted the balance of their marriage. His career was over while Winifred’s was steaming ahead, and she now brought considerably more money into the household than he did. Her days were brimming with activity while he struggled to fill his own with routine tasks like shopping, or other errands undertaken more for exercise than need.When he accompanied her to this or that social event he sometimes felt like a royal consort escorting a female monarch, walking a pace or two behind her with his hands joined behind his back, a vague unfocused smile on his face. The social events themselves had become more of an ordeal than a pleasure because of the deterioration of his hearing, and there were times when he thought of refusing to go to them any longer, but when he contemplated the consequences of such a decision the prospect filled him with a kind of terror: more empty hours to fill, sitting alone at home, with a book or the telly. So he clung on grimly to the social-cultural merry-go-round, simulating an interest and enthusiasm he did not really feel.

 

 

 

It’s the sitting alone I dread, not the book and the telly in themselves. Print and television are the only media that I can still truly enjoy - print for obvious reasons, and television because of subtitles and headphones. Going to the theatre, for instance, is fraught with difficulties. Most theatres have infrared systems with headsets available, but they vary a lot in efficiency and even when they work the voices have a thin, distant timbre, as if you are listening to the performance through a telephone on stage that has been left off the hook. It’s usually preferable to sit in the front row and rely on your own hearing aid, but then you risk getting a crick in your neck from holding your chin up at an angle of forty-five degrees for two or three hours, and being sprayed with the actors’ spittle in scenes of high emotion. Also Fred reasonably complains that they always seem to be over-acting when you are sitting that close, so we rarely do. If the dialogue has a lot of unfamiliar dialect or regional accents then it doesn’t matter where you sit or what kind of hearing aid you use: you’ll miss most of the consonants as usual, and the vowels will all be unfamiliar, so you might as well be listening to Hungarian. Theatre-in-the round is equally hopeless. I never did see the point of making actors turn their backs on a substantial section of the audience while they’re speaking, even when my hearing was good, but now it’s like listening to a play through a door which keeps opening and shutting. But the most exasperating thing about going to the theatre, even if the play is in standard English and performed on a proscenium stage, is missing the jokes. I’ll be following the dialogue perfectly well and then suddenly one of the characters says something which makes the audience roar with laughter, but I missed it. The reason being that lines are only funny when they are unexpected as well as relevant, so I can’t anticipate them or infer what was said from the context. This can happen repeatedly all through a play, and is incredibly frustrating: comprehensible but banal exchanges of speech are punctuated by apparently witty and amusing lines which I don’t hear. Sometimes after such an evening I buy the playtext and read it to discover what I missed, thus experiencing the work in two different forms, once as theatre of the absurd and again as well-made play. Occasionally I read the text in advance of going to the theatre: then I get all the jokes, but of course they aren’t funny any more, because I’m expecting them.

Going to the cinema is no less frustrating, except for foreign films which have subtitles; but there are not many of those which you can’t wait to see, and most will turn up on television eventually. The films which Fred wants to see because everybody is talking about them are nearly all British or American, and I reckon that I miss between fifty and eighty per cent of the dialogue in most of them, because the characters have regional accents (Glaswegian is worst), or the actors drawl and mumble in Method style, or the music and other background noise on the soundtrack overwhelm the words, or a combination of all those things. When we saw
Brokeback Mountain,
for instance, I completely missed the significance of the scene at the end when the cowboy finds his old shirt in the closet of his dead buddy’s bedroom, because I didn’t catch the word ‘shirt’ in his line when they came down from the mountain much earlier in the story and he said he must have left it behind. In fact the other guy had taken it surreptitiously as a sentimental memento of their homosexual idyll on the mountain, as the cowboy realises in the wordless scene when, visiting the parents, he discovers his shirt in the closet. Fred had to explain all this to me in the car on the way home. She often has to explain such things to me on the way home from the theatre or cinema. It’s got to a point where I am reluctant to offer any opinion at all on what we have just seen in case I reveal some ludicrous and humiliating misunderstanding of a basic element of the plot.

I discovered recently that there are occasional performances in local cinemas of new feature films with subtitles for the hearing-impaired, listed on the Internet, but they are put on at very antisocial times, like eleven o’clock on a weekday morning, when Fred is either unable or unwilling to keep me company. I went to see a subtitled Woody Allen movie at such an hour, in an almost deserted multiplex on the outskirts of the city, sitting in the middle of a huge auditorium all on my own, and have not repeated the experiment. An empty cinema has a depressing effect on the viewer: better to wait and see the movie on TV.

Television is the saviour of the deaf. How did they ever manage without it? Most networked programmes, including old films, have subtitles which you can access through Teletext; even live transmissions, like news bulletins, have subtitles, though if you have any hearing at all it’s distracting because the text runs a few seconds behind the speech and often contains grotesque mistakes (like the weather forecast for ‘the aisle of man’ last night). Alternatively you can use headphones, either wired or infrared, which are far more effective than the headsets they lend you at the theatre, and have an independent volume control which means you can turn up the sound without deafening other people watching with you, or watch on your own with the loudspeakers mute. Not that this arrangement is without its social disadvantages. If your partner should wish to share a comment on the programme with you, or to convey some other message, she must wave her hand to attract your attention, and then you must take off the headset and insert your hearing aid to receive the message, and then remove the hearing aid before donning the headphones again.When this procedure is required very frequently both parties are likely to become irritable.

For programmes I’m really interested in I prefer to use both headphones
and
subtitles, on the belt and braces principle, because I still miss occasional words and phrases through the ’phones, and the subtitles don’t always reproduce the speech with total accuracy. Sometimes the subtitles abbreviate the dialogue so as not to lag behind or take up too much space on the screen. I have noticed a curious and interesting phenomenon in this connection: when I watch using both headphones and subtitles together I hear spoken words and phrases which are
missing
from the subtitles, which I’m sure I would not have heard using the headphones alone. Presumably my brain is continuously checking the two channels of communication against each other and, when they don’t match, the word or phrase missing from the subtitle is foregrounded and somehow becomes more audible in consequence. It might be worth writing up for a psycholinguistics journal if I could be bothered. But I can’t.

 

 

 

 

4
^th
November.
This seems to be turning into some kind of journal, or notes for an autobiography, or perhaps just occupational therapy.

I went to London to see Dad yesterday, a duty visit which I make every four weeks or so. If I describe this one in some detail it will serve as a record of most of the others, since the routine seldom varies. It was a long exhausting day. While Mum was alive I often stayed the night with them when academic business took me to London, and I kept up this practice for a few years after she died, but now when I make these trips to see Dad I prefer to return the same day. I leave home early in the morning - with my Senior Citizens railcard I can get a Saver ticket even at peak hours - so as to get to Brickley in time to take Dad out to lunch, then I spend the afternoon with him and leave after tea to catch an evening train back home. He always says, ‘Why don’t you stay the night, son?’ and I always say, ‘No, I can’t, Dad, I’m too busy.’ And he says, ‘I thought you were retired,’ and I say, ‘I’m still doing research,’ and he nods, acquiescent if a little disappointed. Though he argues the toss with me on every other subject, my professional life is a mystery to him which he treats with respectful deference. He never comments on or asks about the inscribed publications I have sent him over the years, but they have an honoured place in the glass-fronted bookcase in the front room, and I have overheard him boasting to total strangers encountered in shops or on buses about his son the professor. So the invocation of my ‘research’ is always a winning card to play when the question of staying overnight comes up. The fact is that I shrink from sleeping in the sagging, lumpy and always slightly damp bed in the back bedroom which was my room as a boy, and sharing the cheerless bathroom and smelly toilet (the linotiled floor reeks of pee because Dad’s aim is not as good as it used to be), and making my breakfast in the cramped kitchenette where everything is covered with a film of grease - the chairs, table, plates, cutlery, cups and saucers, toaster, saucepans, work surfaces, everything - from the daily precipitation of molecules of burned cooking fat. The house has never looked really clean since Mum died thirteen years ago, but it’s gone steeply downhill since Irena, Dad’s Polish home help, got sick and retired, because he won’t have anyone else. The local council tried sending replacements, but he suspected them all of trying to steal his ‘things’ and the money he’s got hidden under the floorboards in various places, and told them not to come back, so eventually the council stopped sending them and he won’t let me find him somebody privately even though I said I’d pay for it.

 

 

 

The best part of the day was the journey to London. My train was on time, I found a seat in the Quiet Coach, removed my hearing aid, and settled down with the
Guardian
and a new biography of Hardy. Whether and when to wear your hearing aid on a journey by public transport, if you’re travelling alone and don’t have to make conversation with anybody, is a complex question. Obviously you need to wear it to buy your ticket and hear possible change-of-platform announcements at the station, but it’s tempting to take it out once you’re on the train, though you will then not be able to hear information delivered over the PA system by the train manager, such as why it has been stationary beside a field for ten minutes, or possibly more important messages, such as a signal failure which has halted all trains travelling in and out of King’s Cross for an indefinite period; and you may have confused exchanges with the catering staff when they come round with the refreshment trolley, about milk and sugar in your tea or the contents of sandwiches. Of course I could leave the hearing aid in place but switched off until needed, in which case the earpieces would act like earplugs, but if they’re not serving their real purpose I find I become acutely aware of and irritated by the intrusive presence of these little plastic pellets lodged in my head, a sensation I can’t stand for very long before plucking them out. So usually I remove my hearing aid as soon I’ve found a seat and the train moves out of the station. The only advantage of being deaf is that one is, as it were, naturally insulated from a lot of irritating or unpleasant environmental noise (which becomes even more irritating and unpleasant when amplified by a hearing aid) and one might as well make the most of it. Removing the hearing aid on the train is like a magical instant upgrade from Standard to First Class: the metallic rattle and grind of the wheels on the track is reduced to a faint rhythmical clickety-click and the voices of your fellow passengers are muted to a soothing murmur.

Only mobile phones retain their power to annoy even the hearing-impaired traveller, both by their ringtones and by the peculiarly irritating staccato rhythm that characterises one side of an indistinctly overheard telephone conversation, which is why I always try to get a seat in the Quiet Coach where these devices are prohibited. But it’s surprising how many people either ignore or don’t see the notices to this effect, and proceed to make and receive calls while seated right under a window sticker saying, ‘
Quiet Coach. Please refrain from using mobile phones
’, and it often falls to me to point this out to offenders since most of my fellow passengers cravenly restrict themselves to disapproving looks, to which the mobile-phone user, mentally focused on his or her distant interlocutor, is of course oblivious. I don’t welcome this task, since it disturbs the tranquillity which I hoped to achieve by removing my hearing aid; in fact I sometimes replace it in order to be equipped if necessary for an argument. A certain amount of adrenalin has to flood the system in order to act, and to decide how and when - do you intervene as soon as the phone is in use, or wait till the call is finished, or interrupt in the middle if it seems to be going on for an inordinately long time? I now have a sentence prepared for these occasions, ‘
Excuse me, but did you know this is a Quiet Coach?
’ uttered in a polite and confidential tone, with a finger pointing helpfully to the window sticker, but the responses from the addressees vary considerably. Some, usually women, simper and smile and nod, and extend a placatory hand, as if admitting they are at fault but craving indulgence, while blithely continuing their telephonic conversation; others, evidently genuinely unaware that they are in a Quiet Coach, and indeed unable to get their heads round the very concept of a Quiet Coach, a place where a man’s inalienable right to have loud private conversations in public might be forfeited, stare at you with incomprehension until the truth sinks in, and then say something uncomplimentary about you to their interlocutor, and sulkily terminate the call or take themselves off to the next carriage with an air of persecution. One man, who was drunk, threatened to punch my fucking nose through my fucking face and out the other fucking side. Fortunately he fell asleep before attempting this rearrangement of my features.