‘Sell them, give them to charity, whatever you like. You could take a few bits of furniture that you’re attached to.’
‘Oh, thanks very much!’
I pause for a moment, thinking that I am handling the conversation badly, getting drawn into trivial side issues and antagonising the old man at the same time. ‘I’m worried about you, Dad,’ I say. ‘You might have an accident one day.’
‘What kind of accident?’ he demands.
‘You’ve had some accidents in the kitchen lately, haven’t you? Things burning, I mean.’ His sulky silence is a confession of guilt. ‘You’re not as fit as you used to be.You might fall down the stairs.’
‘How did you know about that?’ he says.
I pounce: ‘You mean you have fallen down the stairs? When?’
He looks away shiftily. ‘The other day. It was dark. I thought I was at the bottom, but there was one more step.’
‘That’s because you won’t keep the light on in the hall,’ I say. ‘It’s a false economy.’
‘I didn’t hurt myself, just a bit of a bruise on my hip.’
‘You could’ve hurt yourself badly. Suppose you’d broken your hip - you wouldn’t have been able to get to the phone.’
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ he whimpers. ‘It’s as bad as watching Casualty, listening to you.’ He has an aversion to hospital soaps. I remember him saying once,‘The people who watch Casualty must want their flesh crept.’
‘I’m only trying to be realistic, Dad,’ I say. ‘You’re getting to the point where you can’t look after yourself safely any more. Now’s the time to move into sheltered accommodation, before it’s too late. All I ask is that you have a look at this place, when you come up to stay with us at Christmas.’
He shook his head again. ‘Well, I’ll look, son, to please you. But I’m not moving anywhere. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself up north.’
‘It’s not that far north, Dad.’
‘It’s all the same to me. I can’t understand people in your shops when they speak to me. I don’t know the bus routes. I wouldn’t be able to go to Greenwich in the summer and watch the big ships on the river at high tide. And she wouldn’t come there.’ He pushes the brochure across the tabletop towards me. I don’t need to ask whom he meant by ‘she’.
‘All right, Dad,’ I say with a sigh. ‘We’ll drop the subject for now. But think about it.’
When we get up to leave a middle-aged woman at a nearby table smiles at me sympathetically, and as we pass she says, ‘They can be very stubborn at that age, can’t they?’ I notice people at other tables looking at us with interest and amusement, and realise that Dad and I have been talking at the tops of our voices. Leaving the cafeteria feels like walking off a stage.
30th November. I had my first lip-reading class today. The experience evoked dim memories of my first day at primary school, which I joined halfway through the school year because of illness: there was the same sense of being a new boy, uncertain and self-conscious, in a group that was already bonded and familiar with the routine. As Bethany Brooks had intimated in advance, most of the participants, about fifteen of them in all, have been coming regularly for years. They are mostly women, middle-aged or elderly. Bethany herself, known as ‘Beth’, is a buxom, motherly lady of about fifty, I would say, with fluffy white hair, and a round, rosy-cheeked face, who looks like a farmer’s wife in a child’s reading book. She introduced me to the group as ‘Desmond’, and they all smiled and nodded. Everyone is addressed by their first names. ‘Desmond is a retired teacher,’ she said. That was how I had described myself in our correspondence, not wishing to pull rank as a Professor of Linguistics. It was a wise move.
We sit on stacking chairs in an arc around Beth, who faces us with a whiteboard at her side, and the apparatus of a portable loop system (the wire runs along the floor under the chairs and one has to be careful not to trip over it). All the participants - it seems somehow incongruous to call them students - wear hearing aids of various kinds, and some are very deaf indeed. When I tried the loop facility on mine I found it was much too loud, and managed perfectly well without