the newspapers too.’
‘You know, you ought to put your talent for invention to better use,’ I said. ‘You should try writing fiction.’
She smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I will one day,’ she said.
I asked her why she had given Butterworth and me two different explanations of how she got interested in suicide notes. ‘They’re not incompatible, they’re both true in different ways,’ she said. ‘It was the guy at Columbia who first gave me the idea of doing linguistic research on suicide notes. But of course I had a psychological motive too. It always bugged me that Daddy didn’t leave a note.We never knew why he did it. We weren’t aware that he was depressed. We never found any motive, like he’d done something terrible and was afraid of being found out, or that he’d been diagnosed with some dreadful disease, nothing like that, nothing at all. He just went out in a rowboat in a lake near home one evening and shot himself with a hunting rifle.’
‘Perhaps it was an accident,’ I said.
‘He had the barrel in his mouth,’ she said, ‘and he used his toe to pull the trigger.’
Is this the truth? I really have no idea, though I pretended to believe it, because it would have been incredibly hurtful not to. On the whole I am inclined to believe that it is true. Such a traumatic event in childhood would explain a lot about Alex’s behaviour besides her obsession with suicide notes: her fantasising, her attraction to older men, her pleasure in manipulating them and making them suffer. It would also explain the rather callous, even contemptuous, tone of her remarks on the subject of suicide, and her comments about the Writer’s Guide website, whether it was her own work or not. It’s obvious that as a teenager she loved her father but was deeply angry with him for his deed, and still is. ‘How could he do that to us?’ she said.‘Killing himself, without a word of explanation. Leaving us to wonder for ever why he did it, whether it was our fault in some way we couldn’t guess. It meant we could never have closure. Never.’ I think her psychological motive for research into suicide notes is more to relieve anger than to solve an enigma.
When I got home I called Butterworth and told him that I had spoken to Alex and I was pretty sure she would not proceed with a complaint. I could have been more positive, but didn’t feel inclined to let him off too lightly, or too quickly, from the pangs of apprehension. In any case, he was hugely relieved and effusively grateful for this much reassurance.
11th January. In the fraught circumstances of my life at present, the lip-reading class is a haven of peace and innocent distraction. The new term started today. We began with a session about the January Sales. Beth handed us slips of paper on which was written a sentence, ‘I bought . . . in the January Sales’, and we had to fill in the nominal group (though of course she didn’t call it that) and lip-speak it to the others. I said I had bought some shirts at the January Sales, which made me wish I had, I could do with some new ones for my trip to Poland. Beryl said she had bought something none of us could lip-read. It turned out to be a Chinese carpet. It was the ‘Chinese’ which threw us. If it had been ‘Persian carpet’, I think we would have got it, but ‘Chinese carpet’ is not a familiar phrase or concept - though everything in the shops is made in China these days, including Persian carpets probably.
Then we had a session on New Year’s Eve, but fortunately were not asked how we celebrated it. Beth went through the requirements for First Footing, without voice, and then with voice. The man who crosses the threshold first after midnight must be tall and well-built, mustn’t be lame or have a squint, must carry a piece of coal, a piece of bread, and a bottle of whisky, but not a knife, must not be flat-footed or have eyebrows that meet in the middle, must not wear black or speak until he has put the bread on the table, the coal on the fire and given the whisky to the head of the house, after which he says ‘Happy New Year’ and exits by the back door. It seems that he doesn’t have to