Deaf Sentence (11 page)

She was a ‘mature student’ in her late thirties, and looked rather more mature than that. She was tall, big-boned and heavy-breasted, and her wavy dark brown hair was already flecked with grey. She wore gold-rimmed reading glasses which, when they were not perched on the bridge of her nose, reposed on her impressive bosom, suspended from her neck by a thin gold chain. In other ways too she stood out from the student crowd when she arrived in the Department. She was posh - obviously, inescapably, unignorably posh. Her speech was posh, her manners were posh, and her clothes were posh in a curiously old-fashioned way: twin-sets and tweed skirts and leather court shoes. She had the idea when she started the course that you ought to present yourself to professors and lecturers as you would to your doctor or solicitor.The young women students in her first year seminar groups, in their monogrammed tee-shirts, denim miniskirts, striped tights and Doc Martens, stared at her in disbelief, or rolled their eyes at each other as she asked a perfectly formed question in her cut-glass accent. In due course she adopted a more casual style of dress, and blended in better with the habitat, but she could never disguise her accent.

It wasn’t until her second year that he became her tutor (he was a Senior Lecturer at that time). The Department’s system in those privileged days was a weekly tutorial group of two or three students to discuss an essay or other assignment, and the staff also kept office hours when their tutees were free to drop in for advice and counselling. Winifred availed herself of this facility with some frequency, perhaps because she had no close friend among her fellow students, and he soon learned the outline of her life story, which she shaded in with more intimate detail as their relationship ripened. She belonged to an English Catholic family who could trace their descent back to the Norman period and had kept the faith through the penal days of the Reformation - there was a Jesuit martyr somewhere in the record. Her grandmother had been the daughter of a Viscount, but there was no significant wealth or property in the immediate family. Winifred’s father was in the consular service, and she had been brought up in various foreign countries and at an English convent boarding school, insulated from the youth culture of the 1960s. She had not distinguished herself academically and there was no family tradition of sending girls to university, so instead she spent six months at a finishing school in Geneva, followed by a secretarial course at a commercial college in London, in the expectation that she wouldn’t have to earn her living for very long before acquiring a husband.A favourite aunt took Winifred under her wing, as her parents were abroad, and introduced her to eligible Catholic young men, one of whom was an investment adviser called Andrew Holt, Downside and Oxford, with whom, as she said, ‘I imagined I was in love, when really I just wanted to have sex with him, and since I believed then that the only way you could have sex was in marriage, I married him.’ They had their first child, Marcia, within the year, followed fairly rapidly by Giles and Ben. ‘Catholics and birth control, you know,’ she said, grimacing. ‘But after Ben, I went on the pill. And then we came here.’ Andrew’s firm was expanding, and he was offered a promotion if he moved to one of the new branches they were opening in the north of England. They looked for a house near the University because it was convenient for travel to the city centre and not too expensive in those days, before the big property boom: an area of more or less shabby older houses, mostly big Victorian villas built of the grey local stone for the city’s merchants and manufacturers, many of them converted into flats popular with students. The Rectory Road house, with its classic proportions and stucco facade, was more attractive than most of its neighbours, but was dilapidated when they bought it and they couldn’t afford to have it done up properly. Winifred struggled to look after her three young children in a cold damp home with antiquated wiring that was always failing and a husband who was at work all day and late into the evenings.‘Only he wasn’t just working, he was also having an affair with a colleague.’ They tried marriage guidance and patched things up, but soon Andrew strayed again and Winifred finally divorced him. She got the house and some maintenance from the settlement, and supplemented her income for a time by taking postgraduate lodgers. Talking to them gave her a sense of what she had missed by not going to university, so when the children were settled at school she applied for admission as a mature student, a procedure that waived certain matriculation requirements. ‘So here I am - and loving it.’

They had to be very discreet in managing their relationship until they were sure they wanted to make it public, and it involved a good deal of subterfuge at first, which intensified the excitement and gratification of the affair. For him it was like coming back to life again after being encased in ice in a state of suspended animation. He would never forget the ecstasy of their first weekend away together, at a country house hotel, under cover of alibis ingeniously contrived to deceive both sets of children. He was nervous about having sex again after such a long interval, but Winifred made it easy. She had - and continued to have - an uncomplicated attitude to sex, regarding it, he sometimes thought, as a healthy and exhilarating kind of exercise, comparable to horse-riding or body-surfing. She enjoyed it, but she could do without it for long periods without feeling greatly deprived. ‘How lovely,’ she sighed after they made love for the first time. ‘I’d forgotten how nice it is.’ Maisie in contrast had become anxious if they didn’t make love regularly, fearing his affection was cooling, but she was sexually timid, perhaps the effect of her Scottish Presbyterian background. The early years of their marriage had been a time when respectable married couples everywhere were eagerly learning how to enhance the joy of sex from the manual of that name and similar sources, and Maisie gamely attempted some of the postural variations he proposed; but he could see that her heart wasn’t in it and after a while they reverted to more conventional conjugal embraces. She had an unconquerable aversion to oral sex in any form. It was therefore a delightful surprise when on their third time in bed together Winifred treated his penis as if it were a particularly delicious stick of seaside rock. ‘Do you like that?’ she said, lifting her tousled head. ‘Very much,’ he said. ‘Andrew taught me how to,’ she said, ‘but he wouldn’t reciprocate, the rotter.’ ‘I will,’ he said.

It was on that weekend that she mentioned that her nickname at boarding school was ‘Fred’, and he adopted it as a kind of code name in notes and diary entries for the duration of their clandestine affair. He had never much liked the names Winifred or Winnie, and it became his pet name for her. They waited till their various children had done whatever exams they were doing that summer before breaking it to them that they were getting married. By that time the children had guessed that their parents were seriously involved and accepted the union with resignation and in some cases approval. They were less pleased about sharing a home, but in due course their departures to various colleges and careers solved the problem. He and Winifred were married quietly in the long vacation and she resumed her studies the following term. After discussion with the Dean it was agreed that to avoid any suspicion of favouritism Winifred should not take any course with him in her third year, and that he would withdraw from the Finals examiners’ meeting when her degree result was under discussion. She got a 2.1, which wasn’t as commonplace as it later became, did a part-time MA over two years in late nineteenth-century Art History, and started a desultory PhD on Art Nouveau and the Viennese Secession, which she abandoned when
Décor
began to consume her time and energies.

They were married in a registry office because Fred was still married to Andrew in the eyes of the Catholic Church. This didn’t bother her at the time, though it upset her parents. She had pretty well lost her faith as a result of the turmoil of her first marriage, blaming the indoctrination of her upbringing and education for her impetuous and ill-considered choice of a spouse and for the stress of having too many babies in too short a time. They agreed not to try having any children of their own: it would have been risky at her age - she was thirty-eight when they married - and they felt they had already brought enough children into the world. The early years of their marriage were therefore like a prolonged and passionate honeymoon, in which they rediscovered erotic pleasure without the distractions and interruptions of caring for babies and infants that had followed their first nuptials. The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength.

Inevitably, with the passing of years, his vigour began to decline, Fred grew stout and less seductive, and like most couples they settled into a more sedate routine of love-making which he assumed would gradually taper off into a serenely chaste old age for both of them. But Winifred acquired her rejuvenating new career and new look, while he grew older and deafer and subject to occasional erectile dysfunction. He had not thought anything of the eight-year age gap between them when they married, but it began to prey on his mind. They were not quite January and May - more like March and April; but that small difference seemed more significant as he grew older, especially as Fred actually began to look younger. She was always understanding and good-humoured if intercourse petered out, as one might say, without a climax. There were, as she observed, other ways of giving and receiving sexual pleasure, and she was up for most of them, but to him they were only foreplay. He tried Viagra on the advice of his GP, which had the desired effect, but it caused an allergic reaction and he had to give it up. So he relied on very careful planning for sex these days, involving abstinence from alcohol beforehand, an invigorating shower rather than a soak in a hot bath, and fine tuning of the heating and lighting in the bedroom, before proposing an early retirement to bed. But these preparations did not always work. Sex had become an object of anxious rather than pleasurable anticipation, and his peace of mind was not helped by the daily penetration of his computer firewall by spam advertisingViagra, Cialis, and quack herbal remedies promising enhanced virility.‘
Impress your girl with prolonged hardness, plentiful explosions and increased duration. Boost your manhood to astonishing levels . . . Everything a real man would ever need . . . Hello my friend! You have a unique chance to forget this distress forever . . . Extra-Time is the unmatched comprehensive non-hormonal solution . . . Did she ever tell you your size is insufficient? No? Maybe she was just being polite? Just imagine your new happy life with more size, more adoration from females and more self-assurance. Come in here . . .
’

 

 

 

It occurs to me that if this were a novel anyone reading it would probably think:‘Ah-hah, poor old Desmond obviously hasn’t realised that Winifred has a lover, and all the slimming and cosmetic surgery was for
his
benefit, and that with the connivance of Jakki she regularly slips away from the shop for afternoons of adultery, while keeping the old man happy at home with an occasional blow-job.’ But I’m quite sure that isn’t the case. Putting aside my intuitive trust in her fidelity, the beautifying process more or less coincided with Fred’s return to religious observance, a development I deplore on intellectual grounds but which I feel is some kind of guarantee that I am not being cuckolded. It seemed to start when Marcia got married, with a nuptial mass, and Fred couldn’t go to Communion along with her mother and other members of her family without, as she said ‘giving scandal’. Before that she used to go to Mass occasionally on her own when she felt the urge, especially when we were on holiday in Catholic countries, but I assumed it was just a wistfully nostalgic self-indulgence. After Marcia’s wedding, however, she began to brood on her marital status and decided to apply for a Church annulment of her marriage to Andrew, on the grounds that they were both too emotionally and psychologically immature at the time to understand what marriage entailed. It seemed to me that the same might be said of at least fifty per cent of people who marry young, including Maisie and myself, but I didn’t say so, because I could see that restoring her good standing in the Church mattered a great deal to Fred.The process took a long time, entailing interviews by clerics with her mother and siblings to confirm that she had been emotionally and psychologically immature at the time of her marriage. The family of course was happy to cooperate. Andrew, remarried and no longer a practising Catholic, was initially reluctant to admit to his youthful immaturity, but he agreed for the sake of maintaining good relations with his children by Fred, and eventually the annulment was granted. I wondered how the children really felt about it, and questioned Fred on this point. Didn’t the annulment make them illegitimate? She said no, legitimacy was a civil legal concept. As far as the law was concerned she and Andrew were truly married and their offspring legitimate, but in the eyes of God they hadn’t been married even though they thought they were, and everybody else including the priest who married them thought they were, because a fundamental requirement for a valid marriage had not been met. I teased her a little: ‘So really Andrew didn’t commit adultery when he had it off with those other women, because he wasn’t really married?’ ‘Of course he committed adultery, ’ Fred said testily. ‘That’s why I divorced him. Don’t be silly darling.’ ‘Adultery in the eyes of the law, perhaps, but what about in the eyes of God?’ I said. ‘Him too,’ Fred said, with a steely look in her eyes. I didn’t argue the point any further. It seemed obvious to me that the annulment process, which has recently become much more liberal and accessible than in the past, when only people rich and powerful enough to pull strings in the Vatican could get one, is a device for getting round the Catholic Church’s historic opposition to divorce without appearing to contradict it, but since the effect is humane I wasn’t going to make an issue of it. I even agreed to go through a form of marriage service at Fred’s parish church - a quiet, private ceremony, with only Marcia and her husband present as witnesses - though I felt a bit foolish making the vows we had inserted into our registry office wedding all over again. ‘Do you feel any different?’ I asked Fred afterwards. ‘Yes, of course, darling,’ she said. ‘You mean, you didn’t really feel we were married before?’ I said. ‘No, of course not - I mean, yes, of course I did. It’s just that now I feel . . . right. At peace.’