Deaf Sentence (35 page)

 

 

 

7th January
. I made my usual Sunday evening telephone calls. Dad is now totally confused about his income tax rebate, his savings certificates and his Premium Bonds - they are all hopelessly mixed up in his mind, as is the geography of Great Britain. ‘That letter you sent to the geezer up north, you gave me a rub - you know what I mean by a rub? [he meant a photocopy] - about the competition, well it’s not a competition exactly, but you know what I mean, you buy them at the Post Office, the money multiplies itself over five years . . . I haven’t heard from him lately, I don’t know if I will get something or nothing . . . they’re such a lot of thieving bastards up there in Blackpool, I don’t mean Blackpool, it’s one of those islands off the west coast of Scotland, the Isle of Sheppey or the Isle of Scilly or the Isle of Man . . . I’m going to go through my papers again tonight, see if I can pin them down . . .’

‘I wouldn’t do that Dad,’ I said. ‘Leave it till next time I see you.’ To change the subject I asked him what he had had for his dinner today. ‘A very nice bird,’ he said. ‘You mean a chicken?’ I said. ‘It might have been a very small chicken,’ he said. ‘I got it at the market yesterday.You just point and they give it to you.’ ‘How did you cook it?’ I asked him. ‘I bunged it in the oven, and took it out when it looked cooked. I had mashed potatoes with it, and half a tomato, and some . . . What is it? A green one.’ ‘Cabbage?’ ‘No, not cabbage, it’s like cabbage, but you don’t cook it.’‘Lettuce?’‘No, not lettuce . . . it’s got a hard skin like a crocodile . . .’ ‘Cucumber?’ ‘Yes, that’s it, cucumber, I cut it up, you know, and sprinkle a bit of pepper and salt on it . . .’

I reminded him that he had an appointment to see Dr Simmonds tomorrow, and his tone immediately became melancholy. ‘I think he wants to get me into hospital for an operation,’ he said. ‘No he doesn’t, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s just for a check-up.’ ‘What’s he going to do, then?’ ‘He’ll probably take a blood sample -’ ‘That’s a needle, innit? I hate needles’ ‘- and a urine sample.’ ‘Oh, well, no problem there, I produce one of them every five minutes.’ I thought it was a good sign that he could still crack a joke.

I phoned Anne. She is OK, apart from backache. I told her I was going to Poland, but would be back in plenty of time for the arrival of the baby. ‘Were you thinking of giving a hand with the birth, then, Dad?’ she joked. ‘No, I’ll leave that to Jim,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to be around.’ She was supportive about my trip. ‘It’ll do you good to have a change. I feel you’ve been getting into a bit of a rut lately.’ ‘It’s called rut-irement,’ I said. She groaned. ‘You always loved making terrible puns, didn’t you? And you encouraged us to do the same when we were kids - I remember it used to drive Mum mad.’ ‘It was an educational device,’ I said, ‘to give you a feeling for language.’ ‘Well now you could get a retirement job making up jokes to go in Christmas crackers.’ ‘Thank God we’ve seen the back of all that for another year,’ I said. Fred and I spent this afternoon taking down the Christmas decorations, putting them back in their cardboard boxes for storage in the attic, carrying the moulting Christmas tree through the French windows into the back garden and hoovering up the needles in the drawing room.

I phoned Richard, and got through to him for once, instead of just his answerphone. I told him about the trip to Poland. ‘I expect you’ve been there,’ I said. ‘Yes, I went to a conference at Cracow a few years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s very beautiful - it was hardly damaged at all in the Second World War - just about the only city in Poland that wasn’t. Wonderful churches of every period - Romanesque, Gothic, baroque - it’s an architectural anthology.’ Richard is a cultured scientist, and knows much more about architecture than I do. ‘And of course Auschwitz is quite near,’ he added.

‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes. You should go.’

‘Well, I don’t know if I shall have time . . .’ I said.

‘You shouldn’t miss it,’ he said. ‘Everyone should go if they get the chance.’

I told him about Dad, and said that if he happened to be in London with some time to spare it would be nice if he called at Lime Avenue, especially when I would be away. He said, without great enthusiasm, that he would try. ‘Be sure to phone him first,’ I said, ‘or he might not recognise you. He might not even open the door.’

I wish Richard hadn’t told me about Auschwitz. It has cast a kind of cloud over the prospect of my trip. I’ve read about it, of course. I know about the glass cases full of shoes and hair, the gas chambers and the ovens . . . but I’m not sure I want to see them. There’s something wrong, it seems to me, about making the site of such appalling atrocities into a museum, a tourist attraction. I’ve read enough about the Holocaust - Primo Levi’s books, other memoirs, histories of the Third Reich - to convince me that the systematic cold-blooded murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis was a deed of unprecedented evil. I don’t know what visiting a kind of heritage site, with turnstiles and guides and coach parties, which I presume Auschwitz is like today, could usefully add. But perhaps I’m being lazy and cowardly.There was an implication that it is a kind of duty, a moral obligation, in Richard’s ‘should’: ‘
You should go . . . Everyone should go, if they get the chance.
’This is almost certainly the last opportunity I shall have in my life, so I suppose I will have to go, if only to be able to hold up my head in the presence of my son when I get back. I’ve looked at the itinerary Simon sent me and there seems to be a free afternoon in Cracow on my last day, but it’s not the climax to my trip I envisaged when I agreed to it.

 

 

 

8
^th
January
. I was going through my lecture notes and seminar papers this morning, sorting out material that I might use for my trip to Poland, and rather enjoying being focused on a purposeful intellectual task once again, when I was interrupted by a phone call from Colin Butterworth. ‘I’d be very much obliged if I could see you some time today,’ he said. He sounded tense and wound up. I told him I was rather busy and explained why - I was rather pleased to have the opportunity to let him know that I wasn’t altogether an academic has-been - but he said the matter was urgent. He was willing to come round to my house if that would be more convenient, at any time that would suit me, but the sooner the better. I asked him if it was about Alex, and he said it was but he would rather not elaborate on the phone. I invited him to call on me in the afternoon, any time after two.

He arrived on the dot at two o’clock. He had never been in our house before, and made some complimentary remarks about it as I led him into my study. I said Fred was mainly responsible for the internal decor. He seemed relieved to learn that she was out. I sat him down in the armchair and took the desk chair myself, moving it near to him to be sure that I heard what he had to say. He was dressed in his usual smart-casual style, but there was dandruff on the shoulders of his suede jacket and he had not shaved well. His eyes looked tired. He took out a pack of cigarettes and asked if I would mind if he smoked. I said I would.

‘You’re quite right, it’s a filthy habit. I’ve kicked it several times, but when I’m stressed . . . Frances is furious with me.’ He put the cigarettes back in his pocket. ‘I gather you’re still seeing a good deal of Alex Loom,’ he said. ‘Quite a friend of the family, she tells me.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said. ‘She came to a party here on Boxing Day. She was supposed to be going home for Christmas, as you probably know, her father sent her the money for the fare, but she was fogged in at Heathrow and gave up.’

Butterworth looked surprised. ‘Is that what she told you - about her father?’ When I confirmed it, he said: ‘Her father committed suicide when she was thirteen.’

I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly, and asked him to repeat this astonishing piece of information.

‘That’s what she told me - who knows if it’s true? She says that was why she got interested in suicide notes. Her father didn’t leave one, you see. She’s trying to discover why he killed himself by reading other people’s. At least, that was one therapist’s theory.’

‘She told me she got interested in the subject through a boyfriend who was doing psychological research on suicide,’ I said. ‘The one who wrote that article.’

‘Yes, well, he may or may not have been her boyfriend . . . Anyway, that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. She’s applied for a tutorial assistantship we’ve advertised internally, because Hetty Rimmer is off sick with ME. It’s out of the question, of course. We couldn’t possibly let Alex loose on a lot of undergraduates, and anyway there are several more deserving candidates. The trouble is, she doesn’t see it that way, and she’s convinced the job is in my gift. Well, perhaps once upon a time it would have been, but there are procedures now . . .’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I must ask you to treat this conversation as strictly confidential.’

‘All right,’ I said, my curiosity now thoroughly aroused.

‘Last summer term, not long after I started supervising her, and before I realised what an unstable character she was, I did a very foolish thing. I got into . . . er . . . an inappropriate relationship with her.’

‘You mean a sexual relationship?’ I asked.

‘Ex-President Clinton would say not,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘But I think the Grievances subcommittee of the Staff-Student Relations Board would take a different view. As would my wife.’

The story as he told it was a familiar one, of a charismatic, intellectually dazzling professor seduced by an admiring and attractive young student who had something to gain from the relationship. ‘It was wrong of me, of course,’ he said, ‘but she made all the running, and it wasn’t as if I was taking advantage of some innocent undergraduate. She’s twenty-seven after all. She’s a mature adult - at least I thought she was. And at the time things weren’t going too well between Frances and me . . .’ He took the cigarette pack out of his pocket with an automatic gesture, remembered my objection, and put it back. ‘I first crossed the line when she gave me a kiss at the end of a supervision, and I kissed her back instead of telling her not to. The next time it was a longer kiss, with some stroking and groping, and so it went on. It was very exciting, because when she came for a supervision we both knew how it would end, with an almost wordless snog by the door before she went out, and because it was so risky. One day she knelt down and unzipped my trousers and sucked me off, with the door unlocked and people walking up and down the corridor outside. She would do pretty well anything except proper sex. Even when I started going to her flat - she has a flat in one of those new buildings on the canal - she wouldn’t do penetrative sex. She liked to be spanked. That was when I began to get worried about what I was getting into. And to be honest I was fed up with never having a proper fuck. I was glad when summer vacation started and we went - Frances and I - to our place in Spain for a couple of months. When we came back I told Alex the sex had to stop. I apologised, I blamed myself, I didn’t accuse her of anything, but she wasn’t happy. I thought of trying to transfer her to another supervisor, but I was afraid she might shop me.Which in fact is what she’s threatening to do now, if I don’t get her the tutoring job.’

So that was why he had come to see me in such a hurry. ‘I wrote her the best reference I could manage without perjuring myself,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t argue her case when we had a meeting about the appointment this morning. She’s perceived as an enigmatic character and she hasn’t produced any evidence of competence in linguistics. She was the first candidate to be eliminated.The job will be offered to someone else, as she will soon discover.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked, though I had a pretty good idea.

‘I was hoping you could persuade her not to make a complaint against me. I know she likes you, respects you. She always speaks very warmly of you. I think she would listen to you.’

‘I see,’ I said, and fell silent, thinking.

‘You might well ask, “
Why should I?
”’ he said.

‘The question does occur,’ I said.

‘You hardly know me, you don’t owe me anything, you probably disapprove of what I’ve done -’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

‘But this could destroy me, you know. Not just my career, but my marriage, my family . . . Frances would be shattered. And I have two teenage daughters, thirteen and fifteen. Imagine what their lives will be like if this ever becomes public.’

‘Do you really think Alex would make a formal complaint?’

‘I wouldn’t have told you all this otherwise.’

‘Why would anyone believe her, since she’s such a compulsive fantasist?’ I said.

He grimaced. ‘She’s got tissues with my DNA on them, or so she says. She certainly had plenty of opportunities to obtain them.’ He must have caught an expression of distaste on my face, for he said, ‘I’m sorry to burden you with this sleazy tale, but I’d be incredibly grateful if you would speak to her. As soon as possible.’

I said I would see what I could do.

 

 

 

9
^th
January
. I met Alex by arrangement at Pam’s Pantry this afternoon. This time she was waiting for me, sitting in the same seat at the back of the café where I had sat before, nursing a cup of coffee in her hands. The place was almost empty. I bought myself a latte at the counter and joined her. She looked even paler than usual, and her blonde hair was lank and lifeless. Perhaps it was her period, but more likely it was the stress of the dangerous game she was playing. I came straight to the point, and summarised what Butterworth had told me about their relationship, without going into the sexual details. She listened impassively, and then said: ‘I didn’t know you and Colin were buddies.’

‘We’re not,’ I said.

‘But men stick together in these situations, don’t they?’