Retired Professor of Lingustics Desmond Bates is going deaf. It's a bother for his wife who has an enviably successful new career and is too busy to be endlessly repeating herself. Roles are reversed with his aging father, who resents his son's attempts to help him. And then there's Alex, a student whom Desmond has agreed to help after a typical misunderstanding at a party. But her increasingly bizarre requests cannot all be blamed on his defective hearing. So much for growing old gracefully...

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‘Who was that young blonde you were deep in conversation with?’ Fred asked me in the car on the way home. She was driving because she hadn’t had much to drink and I had had quite a lot.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘She told me her name, twice in fact, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The noise…’

‘It’s all the concrete – it makes the sound reverberate.’

‘I thought she might be one of your customers.’

‘No. I’ve never seen her before. What did you think of the exhibition?’

‘Drab. Boring. Anybody with a digital camera could take those pictures. But why bother?’

‘I thought they had a kind of interesting…sadness.’

That is a condensed account of our conversation, which actually went something like this:

‘Who was that young woman you were deep in conversation with?’

‘What?’

‘You were deep in conversation with a young blonde.’

‘ I didn’t see Ron. Was he there?’

‘Not Ron. The blonde woman you were talking to, who was she?’

‘Oh. I’ve no idea. She told me her name, twice in fact, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The noise…’

‘It’s all the concrete.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the heating, in fact it’s always too bloody hot for my liking.’

‘No,concrete. The walls, the floor. It makes the sound reverberate.’

‘Oh…’

(Pause.)

‘What did you think of the exhibition?’

‘I thought she might be one of your customers.’

‘Who?’

‘The young blonde woman.’

‘Oh. No, I’ve never seen her before. What did you think of the exhibition?’

‘What?’

‘The exhibition – what did you think?’

‘Drab. Boring. Anybody with a digital camera could take those pictures.’

‘I thought they had a kind of interesting…sadness.’

‘Can badness be interesting?’

‘Sadness, an interesting sadness. Are you wearing your hearing aid, darling?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘It doesn’t seem to be working very well.’

She was absolutely right. I tapped the earpiece in my right ear with my fingernail and got a dull dead sound. The battery had packed up and I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know at what point in the evening it happened. Maybe that was why I didn’t hear what the blonde woman was saying, though I don’t think so. I think it must have happened when I went to the Gents, which was after she left. It was quiet in there and I wouldn’t have registered the loss of volume, or I would have attributed it to the quietness of the Gents compared to the cacophony in the gallery, and when I went back to the party I didn’t even attempt to have a conversation with anybody but pretended to be interested in the pictures, which were in fact not at all interesting, for their sadness or badness or any other quality, but merely banal.

‘My battery’s packed up,’ I said. ‘Shall I put a new one in? It’s a bit tricky in the dark.’

‘No, don’t bother,’ Fred said, as she often does these days. She’ll come into my study, for instance, when I’m working on the computer, without wearing my hearing aid because it turns the soothing mutter of the keyboard into an intrusive clatter as loud as an old-fashioned upright Remington, and she’ll say something to me which I don’t hear, and I have to make a split second choice between either halting the conversation while I scrabble for my hearing aid pouch and insert the earpieces or trying to wing it without them, and usually I try to wing it, and a dialogue follows something like:

Fred: Murr murr murr

Me: What?

Fred: Murr murr murr

Me: (playing for time) Uh huh.

Fred: Murr murr murr.

Me: ( making a guess at the content of the message) All right.

Fred: (surprised) What?

Me: What did you say?

Fred: Why did you say ‘All right’ if you didn’t hear what I said?

Me: Let me get my hearing aid.

Fred: No, don’t bother. It’s not important.