to hear from those I do want to hear, and that my hearing impairment is not the kind that can be rectified by implants, but an incurable condition that will gradually get worse, ‘the only uncertainty,’ as I concluded on this occasion,‘being whether I shall be totally deaf before I’m totally dead, or vice versa.’
Lionel said: ‘Have you tried learning to lip-read?’ I had to admit that it had never occurred to me - I associate lip-reading exclusively with the profoundly deaf, especially people in public life, and think of it as an almost miraculous skill which must have been acquired over many years from childhood onwards. ‘I had a client once, a lady, who got deaf in later life like you, and she used to go to lip-reading classes,’ said Lionel. ‘She said they were a lot of help.’ ‘What a brilliant idea, darling!’ said Fred, squeezing my hand and beaming gratefully at Lionel. ‘Well, I suppose I do lip-read to some extent, unconsciously,’ I said. ‘I mean, I can always hear what Fred is saying much better when I’m looking at her face to face.’ ‘Yes, but that’s not the same, Des,’ Jakki said. (I have never invited her to call me ‘Des’, but she does anyway. She also calls Lionel ‘Lie’, but he doesn’t seem to mind.) ‘It’s not the same as learning to do it.’ Her rubbery lower lip protruded as she pronounced the participle, and it crossed my mind that watching Jakki’s lip movements might be more distracting than helpful. Fred asked where the class was held, and Lionel said he would find out. Unfortunately the old lady in question had died a couple of years ago but he was still in touch with her son. It was definitely somewhere local. ‘That sounds marvellous, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before,’ Fred said. ‘Lie is a fund of information,’ Jakki said smugly. ‘Well, it’s certainly a thought,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’ll have to look into it.’
‘You might have sounded a bit more enthusiastic, darling,’ Fred said to me as she was driving us home.
‘Well, I need to know more about this class, what’s entailed, who’s running it,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea anyway. It’s a bit late in the day to go back to sitting in a classroom.’
‘Maybe you could have private lessons,’ Fred said.
‘Yes, maybe,’ I said. ‘But that would be expensive.’
‘Expensive! My God! If it worked, it would be worth a hundred pounds a lesson. More.’
She spoke with such feeling that she omitted to interject her customary ‘darling’. I was a little affronted and said nothing. ‘You took practically no part in the conversation this evening until Lionel dragged you into it,’ Fred continued. ‘I know it was very noisy in there, but it sometimes seems to me that you’ve almost given up wanting to hear what other people are saying - deafness is a convenient excuse to switch off and follow your own train of thought.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘It’s the bane of my life.’ ‘Well, then, why don’t you see if lip-reading would help?’
I was cornered. I did not relish the thought of being a student again, and had little confidence in my ability to learn lip-reading at my time of life, but I realised I would have to give it a try or be accused of selfish indifference to the impact of my infirmity on Fred and others. And I wonder uncomfortably whether there isn’t some truth in what she says. Could there be a Deaf Instinct, analogous to Freud’s Death Instinct? An unconscious longing for torpor, silence and solitude underlying and contradicting the normal human desire for companionship and intercourse? Am I half in love with easeful deaf?
This afternoon Alex Loom at last emailed me a specimen chapter. A short one, but quite promising. It’s about paragraph breaks in suicide notes. She makes a distinction between ‘depressive’ and ‘reactive’ suicides, the former being triggered by subjective feelings of disappointment, failure, frustration etc., and the latter triggered by objective circumstances, like terminal illness, bankruptcy, public disgrace etc., her theory being that short paragraphs are more frequent in the former type of suicide note than the latter (this assertion itself needs more statistical evidence) because there is less of a cohesive flow to the writer’s thoughts; rather, the depressive note is composed in a series of what she calls ‘emotive spurts’, which may have no connection with each other and even be mutually contradictory,