The Remorseful Day

Chapter seven

Disabilities, like many sad concomitants of life, are often cloaked in euphemism. Thus it is that the “blind” and the “impotent” and the “deaf” are happily no longer amongst us. Instead, in their respective clinics, we know our fellow outpatients as those affected by impaired vision; as victims of chronic erectile dysfunction; as citizens with a serious hearing impediment. The individual members of such groups, however, know perfectly well what their troubles are. And in the latter category, they tend to prefer the monosyllabic “deaf,” although they realize that there are varying degrees of deafness; realize that some are very deaf indeed.

Like Simon Harrison.

He had been a six-year-old (it was 1978) attending a village school in Gloucestershire when an inexplicably localized outbreak of meningitis had given cause for most serious concern in the immediate vicinity. And in particular to two families there: to the Palmer family in High Street, whose only daughter had tragically died; and to the Harrison family in Church Lane, whose son had slowly recovered in hospital after three weeks of intensive care, but with irreversible long-term deafness: twenty-five percent residual hearing in the left ear; and almost nothing in the right.

Thereafter, for Simon, social and academic progress had been seriously curtailed and compromised: like an athlete being timed for the hundred-meters sprint over sand dunes wearing army boots; like a pupil, with thick wadges of cotton-wool in each ear, seeking to follow instructions vouchsafed by a tutor from behind a thickly paneled door.

Oh God! Being deaf was such a dispiriting business.

But Simon was a fighter, and he’d tried hard to make the best of things. Tried so hard to master the skills of lip reading; to learn the complementary language of “signing” with movements of fingers and hands; to present a wholly bogus facial expression of comprehension in the company of others; above all, to come to terms with the fact that silence, for those who are deaf, is not merely an absence of noise, but is a wholly passive silence, in which the potential vibrancy of active silence can never again be appreciated. Deafness is not the brief pregnant silence on the radio when the listener awaits the Greenwich time-signal; deafness is a radio set that is defunct, its batteries dead and nonrenewable.

Few people in Simon’s life had understood such things; and in his early teens, when the audiographical readings had begun to dip even more alarmingly, fewer and fewer people had been overly sympathetic.

Except his mother, perhaps.

And the reason for such lack of interest in the boy had not been difficult to fathom. He was an unattractive, skinny-limbed lad, with rather protuberant ears, and a whiny, nasal manner of enunciating his words, as though his disability were not so much one of hearing as one of speaking.

Yet it would be an exaggeration to portray the young Harrison as a hapless adolescent, so often mishearing, so often misunderstood. His school fellows were not a gang of unmitigated bullies; nor were his teachers an uncaring crew. No. It was just that no one seemed to like him much; certainly no one seemed to love him.

Except his mother, perhaps.

But Simon did have some residual hearing, as we have seen; and the powerful hearing aids he wore were themselves far more valuable than any sympathy the world could ever offer. And when, after many a struggle, he left school with two A-level certificates (a C in English and a D in History) he very soon had a job.

Still had a job.

In the early 1990s, Oxfordshire’s potential facilities for business and industry had attracted many leading national and international companies. During those years, for example, the county could boast the largest concentration of printing and publishing companies outside the metropolis; and it was to one of these, the Daedalus Press in North Oxford, that on leaving school Simon had applied for the post of apprentice proofreader. And had been successful, principally (let it be admitted) because of the employers’ legal obligation to appoint a small percentage of semidisabled applicants. Yet the “apprentice” appellation was very soon to be deleted from Simon’s job description, for he was proving to be surprisingly and encouragingly competent: accurate, careful, neat — a fair combination of qualities required in a proofreader. And with any luck (so it was thought) experience would gradually bring with it that needful extra dimension of tedious pedanticism.

On the morning of Friday, July 17, he found on his desk a photocopied extract from some unspecified tabloid which some unspecified colleague had left, and which he read through with keen attention; then read through a second time, with less interest in its content, it appeared, than in its form, since his proofreading pen applied itself at five points in the article.

Chief Inspector Morse had not as yet encountered Simon Harrison, but he would have been reasonably impressed by the proofreader’s competence. Only reasonably, of course, since he himself was a man who somewhere, somehow, had acquired the aforementioned dimension of “tedious pedanticism,” and would have made three further amendments. And, of course, would have corrected that gross anachronism, since historical accuracy had engaged him from the age of ten, when he had taken it upon himself to memorize the sequence of the American presidents, and the dates of the kings and queens of England.