his countenance to express both thoughtful reflection and sympathy, hoping that one or the other will seem appropriate, or at least not grotesquely inappropriate, to whatever she has been saying. It seems to satisfy her, anyway, and she begins speaking again. He doesn’t resume his former posture: there really is no point in aiming his right earpiece to receive her speech when the party babble is pouring into the left one, and if he should try to cover his left ear with his hand it would only produce a feedback howl from his hearing aid as well as an eccentric-looking posture. What to do now? What to say when she pauses again? It is far too late to confess, ‘Look, sorry, I haven’t heard a word you’ve said to me for the last ten minutes’ (a quarter of an hour it might be by now). ‘I’m deaf, you see, can’t hear a thing in this din.’ She would reasonably wonder why he hadn’t said so before, why he let her go on talking, nodding and murmuring as if he understood her. She would be annoyed, embarrassed, offended, and he doesn’t wish to appear rude. She might be one of his wife’s customers, for one thing, and for another she seems rather nice, a young woman maybe in her late twenties with bright blue eyes, a pale smooth complexion, shoulder-length flaxen hair centre-parted and straight-cut, and a naturally shapely figure - he can tell from the shadowy separation of her breasts just visible at the unbuttoned opening of her blouse that they are not artificially enhanced by silicone, or thrust forward and upward by underwiring, but have the trembling plasticity of real unfettered flesh, with a faint surface transparency of the skin like good porcelain - and he doesn’t wish to make a bad impression on a comely young woman who has taken the trouble to talk to an old fart like himself even if it is a random encounter unlikely ever to be repeated.
She pauses again in her monologue and looks expectantly at him. ‘Very interesting,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’ Playing for time, waiting to see if this will do, he puts his wine glass to his lips, only to discover that it is empty and that he has to tip it up into an almost vertical position and hold it there for some seconds in order to make the dregs of Chilean Chardonnay trickle down into his throat. The woman watches with curiosity as if she thinks he is going to perform some kind of trick, balancing the glass on his nose for instance. Her own glass of white wine is almost full, she has not taken even a sip from it since she started talking to him, so he cannot suggest they get themselves refills from the bar, while to go off on his own to recharge his glass, or to propose that she accompany him on this errand, seem equally discourteous options. Fortunately she seems to appreciate his plight - not his real plight, his total ignorance of what she has been saying, but his need for another drink - and smiling she says something with a gesture at his empty glass which he is fairly confident of interpreting as encouragement to go and get himself a refill. ‘I think perhaps I will,’ he says, ‘Can I get you another?’ Stupid question, what would she do with two glasses of white wine, one in each hand? And she is obviously not the kind of person who would eagerly gulp down one drink while you fetched her another. But she smiles again (a nice smile, disclosing a row of small even white teeth), declines with a shake of her head, and then to his dismay asks a question. He can tell it is a question by the rising intonation and the slight widening of her blue eyes and arching of her eyebrows, and it evidently demands an answer. ‘Yes,’ he says, taking a chance; and as she seems pleased he boldly adds: ‘Absolutely.’ She asks another question to which he also replies in the affirmative, and then, rather to his surprise, extends her hand. Evidently she is leaving the party. ‘Very nice to have met you,’ he says, taking the hand and shaking it. It is cool and slightly damp to the touch. ‘What did you say your name was - I’m afraid with all this noise I didn’t quite catch it.’ She pronounces her name again but