with limited success, and you’d have to be in a pretty bad way to even try it. In short, there’s no cure for my kind of deafness, as Hopwood told me twenty years ago.
As soon as he said ‘high-frequency deafness’ I knew it was bad news. ‘So that’s why I’m missing consonants,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, looking impressed. ‘How did you know?’ ‘I’m a linguist,’ I said. ‘Oh, are you? What languages?’ ‘Only the one,’ I said. (It’s a common mistake.) ‘I’m in Linguistics. Applied Linguistics to be exact.’ ‘You understand the problem then?’ he said.
I did. Consonants are voiced at a higher frequency than vowels. I could hear vowels perfectly well - still can. But it’s consonants that we mainly depend on to distinguish one word from another. ‘“Did you say pig or fig?” said the Cat. “I said pig,” replied Alice.’ Maybe the Cheshire Cat was a bit deaf: it wasn’t sure whether Alice had used a bi-labial plosive or a labiodental fricative the first time she pronounced the word, and being a well-brought-upVictorian middle-class little girl she would have spoken very clearly. ‘F’ is called a labiodental fricative because you produce it by bringing your top teeth into contact with your bottom lip and allowing some air to escape between them. It’s also called a continuant because you can continue making the sound as long as you have breath: fffffffffffffffffffffffff . . . though I can’t imagine why you would want to, unless perhaps you started to say ‘Fuck’ and thought better of it. I have a smattering of phonetics, although it’s not my field.
I was at a party a few years ago, not as noisy as the one last night, but bad enough, and I overheard a man enthusing about a book he was reading called Being Deaf. It sounded like just the book for me, a self-help manual I presumed, but I didn’t like to barge into the conversation demanding the bibliographical details. The man was talking to a girl who was looking admiringly into his eyes and nodding eager agreement, and he left the party early (with the girl) before I had an opportunity to speak to him. So the next day I went to Waterstone’s to try and get the book. ‘What was the author’s name?’ the assistant asked. ‘I think it was Grace,’ I said. It turned out to be Crace, Jim Crace, and the book was a novel called Being Dead.
Often only the context allows me to distinguish between ‘deaf’ and ‘death’ or ‘dead’, and sometimes the words seem interchangeable. Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse. ‘To every man upon this earth, / Deaf cometh soon or late,’ Macaulay might have written. But not Dylan Thomas, ‘After the first deaf, there is no other.’ There are lots of others, stages of auricular decay, like a long staircase leading down into the grave.
Down among the deaf men, down among the deaf men,
Down, down, down, down;
Down among the deaf men let him lie!
3
2nd November. An odd thing happened this morning. I was sitting over the remains of my breakfast, in my dressing gown, reading the newspaper. It’s one of the few perks of retirement I really enjoy, the leisurely breakfast, the unhurried perusal of the Guardian over a third cup of tea . . . After that the day tends to drag rather. Fred was bustling in and out of the kitchen, fully dressed, getting ready to go out. She had an early manicure appointment before going to the shop. I had taken in that information because I was wearing my hearing aid. I really prefer not to at breakfast because it amplifies the noise of eating cornflakes and toast inside my head with an effect like dinosaurs crunching bones in Surroundsound, but I bear it, if we get up at the same time, for the sake of matrimonial harmony. Fred was making out a list of things for me to buy at the supermarket when the telephone rang. ‘Answer that, would you, darling?’ she said. She frequently addresses me as ‘darling’, though not necessarily with affection. In fact I don’t know anyone who can utter that term of endearment with so many different tones of hostile implication, including impatience, disapproval, pity, irony, incredulity, despair and boredom.This, though, was a faintly ingratiating ‘darling’.
‘You know it’s for you,’ I sighed, folding the newspaper and getting reluctantly to my