Deaf Sentence (30 page)

‘So what do you think of Blydale, Mr Bates?’ Mrs Wilson asked him, when we returned to her office.

‘I think it’s a very nice place,’ he said, and paused to let a pleased smile form on my lips before adding: ‘for old people who haven’t got a home of their own.’

‘Oh, a lot of our residents had very nice homes before they came here,’ she said. ‘But we all get to a point where running a house is too much for us.’

‘Yes, well I haven’t got to that stage, yet,’ he said, and turned to me. ‘Can we go now, son?’

On our way out I apologised to Mrs Wilson for Dad’s churlishness. ‘Don’t worry about it, old folk don’t like to leave their own homes, it’s natural,’ she said. I asked her if I could put Dad’s name on a waiting list. ‘We don’t have a waiting list as such,’ she said. ‘Get in touch again if he changes his mind.Vacancies occur fairly frequently.’

 

 

 

In a way I understood his resistance. Blydale House is a decent place, clean, bright and well run, but I couldn’t look round that lounge without feeling a strong desire to be out of it, and the little bed-sitting room we peered into, though comfortably furnished, seemed more like a cell than a home. However, as I pointed out on the way back to Rectory Road (we stopped at a chemist’s on the way to get liquid paraffin for him and batteries for me), living near us he wouldn’t be trapped in the place all day, he could always hop on a bus and call in and see us.

‘You’d soon get sick of that,’ he said, with disconcerting candour.

He’s right, of course. I feel a guilty relief that he doesn’t want to move into Blydale House immediately. I could sense that Fred and Cecilia shared this feeling when I reported the upshot of our visit, but I’m afraid that all of us, having altruistically done our duty in urging him to move, now accused him of stubborn ingratitude for refusing to do so.

‘You’re only postponing the inevitable, Harry,’ Fred told him. ‘If you don’t move into a home up here, you’ll have to move into one in London.’

‘I don’t see why I’ve got to move at all,’ Dad said sullenly.

‘Because you can’t cope, Dad,’ I said. ‘You’re a danger to yourself in that house. You won’t even wear a panic alarm.’

‘What’s a panic alarm?’

‘You know what it is, I told you. A thing you wear round your neck.’

‘Oh, that. I don’t need that. I might press it by accident and have the police or the fire brigade breaking down my door in the middle of the night.’

‘If you were in supervised accommodation, you wouldn’t need to wear one, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia, who occupies a superior type of apartment for the elderly in Cheltenham. ‘In the flat where I live there’s a button in every room which I can use to summon the Warden.’

Dad now shifted his defence to his favourite ground. ‘Anyway, how much does that place cost?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t remember off-hand,’ I prevaricated. ‘Quite a bit, but you could afford it, and if not we -’

‘It’s two hundred and seventy-five pounds a week, Harry,’ Fred interpolated.

‘
What?’
Dad exclaimed. ‘How am I supposed to find that sort of money?’

‘It’s very simple. You sell your house,’ Fred said. ‘Given London property prices, it would fetch enough to keep you at Blydale for as long as . . .’ Fred hesitated, and Dad completed the sentence for her.

‘As long as I need it, you mean? Which wouldn’t be very long, living up here, I can tell you.Then you would all inherit my money.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry!’ Fred said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I can assure you
I
have no designs on your money, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia. ‘My late husband left me well provided for.’

‘Yes, I bet he did,’ Dad muttered darkly.

Afterwards, when we were on our own, I told Fred I thought she had been hard on Dad, frightening him with the cost of Blydale House.

‘There’s no point in beating about the bush,’ she said. ‘He’s got to face the facts. If he’s taken into a state care home they’ll confiscate his house to pay for it.’

‘You’ve really put him off the idea of moving up here now,’ I said. ‘But perhaps that’s what you intended to do.’

It was a mean thing to say. Why did I say it? I don’t know. Put it down to the curdled spirit of Christmas.

‘I can’t believe you could think that, let alone say it,’ Fred said. ‘I’ve always made your father welcome here, even if I do find the constant bulletins on the state of his bladder and his bowels rather trying. I know Mother does.’

‘I think I’d better take him back to London tomorrow,’ I said.

‘All right, if you wish,’ Fred said. ‘But please don’t pretend that I’m driving him away.’

When I suggested to Dad that it might be a good idea to take him back to London tomorrow, when the traffic on the M1 was likely to be fairly light, halfway between Christmas and New Year, he agreed without argument. ‘Whatever you say, son. Whatever suits you.’ There was an air of martyrdom about him for the rest of the day, as if he felt he was being victimised but was not going to complain. Perhaps he had picked up vibrations of the ill-feeling between me and Fred, and intuited that he was part of it. Altogether it was an edgy and uncomfortable evening. After dinner, which he ate in silence, he declined my offer to fix him up with my headphones so he could watch the TV without disturbing us (we all wanted to read), and instead chose to listen to his little transistor radio through an earpiece, reclining in an armchair with his eyes closed.

‘Can’t you stop him doing that?’ Fred said to me irritably, looking up from her book.

‘Doing what?’ I said.

She sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh of course, you can’t hear it. Can
you
hear it, Mother?’

Cecilia, who was reading our
Guardian,
and comparing it pre-judicially to the
Telegraph
from time to time, said, ‘Hear what, dear?’

‘God give me patience! Am I the only person in this house with normal hearing?’ Fred exclaimed.‘There’s a faint tinny sound leaking from that radio. It’s driving me mad.’

‘It’s leaking from his ear, he’s probably got the volume too high,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him to turn it down.’

‘No, don’t bother, I’m sure to go on hearing it,’ she said. ‘I’ll read in bed. You can look after him and Mother until they’re ready to go too.’

‘I won’t be long,’ Cecilia said to her; and to me, after Fred had left the room: ‘My late husband had very good hearing up to the end of his life. Mine, I must admit, is not what it was.’

‘But you do very well, considering your age,’ I said. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘No, I haven’t had to put up a prayer to St Francis de Sales yet,’ she said with some complacency. ‘You know he’s the patron saint of deaf people?’

I confessed that I didn’t. ‘Was he deaf, then?’ I asked.

‘No, but he catechised a deaf man, so that he could receive Holy Communion. I suppose he invented some kind of sign language. If you were a Catholic, Desmond, you could pray to St Francis de Sales.’ She said this with a slightly mischievous smile. She enjoys having the occasional dig at my godless state.

‘To cure me?’

‘It has been known. But of course it’s not the saints who actually work miracles, you know. That’s a common misunderstanding.’

‘They pass your prayer to God, don’t they?’ I said, remembering the lecture on petitionary prayer.

‘They
intercede
with God on your behalf,’ Cecilia corrected me.

‘Why go through them when you could pray directly to God?’ I asked.

Cecilia pondered this question for a moment, as if it had never occurred to her before. ‘Perhaps we feel a little shy about bringing our problems directly before God. It feels more comfortable doing it through a saint, or Our Lady.’

‘It makes me think of heaven as being like a Renaissance court,’ I said, ‘with all the saints clustering round the throne of God like courtiers, with petitions in their hands.’

Cecilia smiled. ‘There’s nothing to stop you praying directly to God,’ she said. ‘Our Lord cured many deaf people when he was on this earth.’

‘But they were stone deaf, weren’t they - and dumb too, usually.’

‘You remember your New Testament, then,’ said Cecilia, with an approving nod.

‘I can see that would be a pretty spectacular miracle, making the deaf hear and the dumb speak,’ I said. ‘But hearing impairment is a much less interesting disability. Hardly worth troubling a saint with, let alone the Lord.’

‘You could always pray for patience to bear your cross,’ Cecilia said.

‘Fred just did that,’ I said, ‘but it didn’t seem to work.’ When Cecilia looked puzzled I explained: ‘She said “
God give me patience!
” but she went to bed instead.’

‘Ah, but it wasn’t a real prayer,’ Cecilia said. ‘Winifred has never regarded patience as a virtue to be cultivated. She was born impatient - the shortest labour of my four.’

This was the most interesting conversation I had ever had with my mother-in-law. In the course of it Dad stirred, levered his long body upright, switched off his radio, and went out of the room without saying anything or glancing in my direction. I presumed he had gone to the toilet, but he didn’t come back, and when I went looking for him I discovered he had gone to bed.

 

 

 

28
^th
December
. I took Dad home today. He was in a better mood this morning, having swallowed some of his liquid paraffin last night to good effect. ‘We got a result,’ he told me at breakfast, in a hoarse stage whisper which Cecilia pretended not to hear. He was all packed and ready to leave by ten o’clock. Fred, perhaps feeling a little guilty for being sharp with him yesterday, gave him a food parcel to take home: slices of turkey breast and ham, wedges of cheese, mince pies, apples and oranges, all wrapped separately. He thanked her warmly and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Thanks for everything, my dear,’ he said. ‘Goodbye Celia,’ he said, shaking Cecilia’s hand. ‘Goodbye, Mr Bates,’ she said. ‘Have a safe journey. And a happy New Year to you.’ ‘Yes, happy New Year, Harry,’ Fred chimed in. He grimaced. ‘Oh, well, I won’t be sitting up for it, I can tell you. New Year means nothing to me now. A happy New Week is the most I hope for.’

‘Yes,’ he said reminiscently, as we drove away from the house, ‘New Year’s Eve used to be the one night of the year when everybody in Archer Street would have a gig, no matter if they were one-armed drummers or tone-deaf sax-players, and at double the usual money.You got booked up months ahead for New Year’s Eve. Not any more.’ And he went into a familiar riff on the decline of live dance music. On the motorway he fell silent, and I thought he had dozed off, but he suddenly surprised me by saying: ‘What happened to that man who was at your house last night?’

‘What man, Dad?’ I asked.

‘There was a man in the lounge last night, talking to Celia.’

‘That was me, Dad. I was the only man in the lounge, apart from you.’

‘No, it was another bloke. I didn’t say goodnight to him because I’d forgotten his name. I wanted to apologise to him this morning, but he must have gone.’

This delusion worried me, but I did not press the point.

The journey was not too bad. I had taken the precaution of putting a wide-necked bistro-style wine decanter under the passenger seat for emergencies, but there was no need to use it. We stopped at three service centres on the way at carefully calculated intervals, and got back to Lime Avenue at about three in the afternoon, as the winter daylight was already fading. The house, with all its curtains drawn, seemed dark and cheerless inside, and I felt a spasm of compunction at delivering Dad back to this depressing habitat, even though it was his own choice. The only mitigating factor was that it felt reasonably warm. ‘Gawd, I left the hall radiator on!’ Dad said, putting his hand on it as we came in. ‘I could swear I turned it off.’ In fact he had - turning it on again was the last thing I did before leaving the house. But the kitchen with its greasy oilcloth and chipped Formica, and the dining room with its threadbare carpet and sagging chairs, reminded me of stage sets for early plays by Pinter. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be in that nice clean, bright place we saw yesterday?’ I said.‘With somebody else cooking you a hot meal?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to be home. And I’ve got all that lovely grub your wife gave me.’ We’d bought some milk and bread at one of the motorway services shops, so he was indeed well supplied for the time being. I had a cup of tea with him, and took my leave.

I drove back with the radio on at high volume - Jazz FM in the London area, then Radio Four and Classic FM on the motorway - stopping once for a meal and a short nap in the car, and got back home at about nine-thirty. Fred came out of the drawing room when she heard me in the hall and said something. She didn’t smile. I said, ‘What? Just a minute,’ and put in my hearing aid. She said: ‘Your father’s been on the phone several times. I don’t know what he’s on about, but he sounds upset.’