when the drip is ¤nally “cut off ” that Henry, supposedly telling a story un-
connected to his family drama, cries out “Father!” So much for the unrelated-
ness of the two narratives.
Indeed, the verbal, imagistic, and acoustic symbiosis of the two “plots” is
worked out with musical precision: they cross in the central sequence of the
play, which is Henry’s dialogue with Ada, and by extension, with Addie.
Jonathan Kalb, in the comment cited above, says Henry and Ada “reminisce
about old times,” but this hardly gives the reader a sense of the hopelessness
and futility that characterizes their exchanges or the epiphany toward which
their desultory conversation moves.
Ada’s vocal entrance follows the snatch of dialogue with Addie, whose
presence, as Henry recalls it, evidently interfered with his need to “talk,” to
tell himself stories. Walking in the ¤elds and holding his child’s hand in what
sounds like a parodic version of such Wordsworth poems as “We Are Seven,”
Henry says, “Run along now, Addie, and look at the lambs.” But when she
says “No papa,” he turns “Violent”: “Go on with you when you’re told and
look at the lambs!” which triggers Addie’s “loud wail” (96). Addie’s world, a
pastoral world of ¤elds, lambs, and the child Jesus, is one the sea-dweller
Henry cannot abide. And it is in this context that Ada is remembered:
Ada, too, conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell
will be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days
when we wished we were dead. [Pause.] Price of margarine ¤fty years
ago. [Pause.] And now. [Pause. With solemn indignation.] Price of blue-
band now! [Pause.] Father! [Pause.]Another water sound—the “small chat to the babbling of Lethe”—that de-
spite its promise to help the narrator forget, cannot counter the ongoing
sound of the sea. Ada and Addie live in the mundane, everyday world where
the price of margarine, or blueband, is the topic of discussion—a world that
was, for a short time, Henry’s own, as his rhyme “Daddy! Addie” (100) sug-
gests. All the odder, then, that when Ada makes her entrance, there is for once
no sound, and further “[No sound as she sits.]” For the radio listener, she is
simply there; she may indeed have been there all along.
The Henry-Ada sequence is not simply ®ashback, for there are many time
periods covered: their ¤rst lovemaking in the “hole,” “Where we did it at last
for the ¤rst time” (101); a moment long ago (is that the same moment?) when,
as Ada recalls, “It was rough, the spray came ®ying over us. [Pause.] Strange
it should have been rough then. [Pause.] And calm now” (98); Henry and
Ada’s parental dealings with their young daughter, who takes music and rid-
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 111