Staring At The Light Page 12

  The phone burred again. By this time he was in the waiting room with the fancy sofas and the coffee machine, and the message was muted. He was looking at Cannon’s glorious loan of yesterday. Then found he could not look at it. Hurried upstairs to the flatlet where he lived in his miniature space, so that Isabella could live in relative splendour with some rich paramour, whose name by choice he could not remember, for as long as she kept her nerve and her face. And her teeth. Her teeth.

  He brushed his own. Rigorous attention to detail; like hell. Should have given her disclosing fluid, make her teeth brilliant blue to show where the plaque lingered, tell her a thing or two, get the message across. Those teeth had bitten him, more than once, in a playful bite on the shoulder which hurt like a series of minor pinpricks. Isabella nibbling and saying, More … But … when are you going to earn more money, William? We need more.

  He left the dental floss and the whitening toothpaste, the scolding in his ears, and belted downstairs through the foyer, into the street and the cafe down the road, where he sat and consumed a cappuccino with sugar and a Danish pastry. Sticky on his tongue, fresh as the day, souvenirs of it lodged in the precious spaces between his back teeth. Then he went back to face the morning and Cannon’s loaned painting.

  The sun streamed through the window, the sky was pink with promise, and William wanted to yell with delight. The painting was exquisite and he had the fascinating prospect of another paper to write. Twins and their teeth.

  The flat where Sarah had stayed the night with the man she nicknamed Mr Mole, was small and potentially neat, like the dwelling of one who might have preferred to live, like his fictional counterpart, underneath the riverbank. The potential for neatness lay in Mole’s insistence on the numerous fitted cupboards to maximize space, the state-of-the-art kitchen in miniature and the stark, military nature of his furniture. There were campaign chairs, which could be folded away, a chest that doubled as a table, an expandable suitcase, which could be used as either a wardrobe or a seat. He was as fully equipped to embark on a major expedition at any given time as a nineteenth-century general. The man called Mole woke from a deep and dreamless sleep to find that his place was full of foreign noises. Splashing from the bathroom, which was so close the sound could not be avoided, the flushing of the lavatory and the sound of low, musical singing. It disoriented him for a full minute until he opened his eyes.

  Sarah’s clothes, visible but hardly colourful, hanging not in a cupboard but on the door, the way she did. Sarah’s melodious voice over the rushing of precious hot water and the indentation of her head on his pillow. A different smell to the room. They had talked too much, and he had eaten and drunk too much, was the problem. Had he or hadn’t he? It would clearly be far too insulting to ask. The progress of the day would clarify memory which, so far, extended only to that of an extraordinarily pleasant, over-indulgent evening.

  She had set out cups in the kitchen, pulled out two stools from under the counter, cleared space for them both adjacent to the coffee machine, which dripped, to order, sternly calling him to attention. It was still the middle of the night, as far as he was concerned: Mole’s business rarely began before the end of the morning. Her preparations alarmed him, since it looked as if the scene was set for serious conversation of the life-threatening sort. Maybe she wanted to talk about life, their life, and how it should be further intertwined. Oh, no. He sat heavily and watched the coffee jug fill.

  Supposing she wanted to discuss them? Supposing she wanted to move in with him? She always said how much she loved the place. They were fond of one another; comfortable together once a week or so, and she was used to the making of unilateral decisions. Perhaps this was it: the table was laid for the making of lifestyle commitments. He braced himself against the counter and counted to fifty, slowly. That was usually the length of time it took her to dress. The speed of it always amazed him, in the same way the clothes did. There would be a simple subtraction of a belt or piece of jewellery, and the more festive creature of the night before would emerge soberly clad and ready for work. The kitchen was so small she had to sidle into it and sit carefully, which she did with the maximum of grace. Hangovers appeared an unknown quantity in her life, but not, unfortunately, in his. She was picking a bad moment to tell him how much she loved him.

  ‘Now, listen, Mole,’ she said. ‘Answer me this one. It’s extremely important. Supposing you have a person …’

  ‘Yes?’ he said, holding his breath. ‘This person …?’

  She poured the coffee and he waited, tremulously.

  ‘Supposing a person has a budget to buy paintings for a corporation. You know, a showy-offy collection to impress people without losing any money at the same time. Now, where would this person start?’

  He was nonplussed, but rallied quickly. ‘This person could have all my stock for a start. I can’t wait to get rid of it.’

  ‘Thank you for that, but no. I think the subject matter has to be … rather more domestic, if you see what I mean. Suitable for a very broad base of taste or non-taste. You see, the corporation doesn’t know what it wants. It thinks it does, but it doesn’t.’

  ‘And what about the person in charge of the collecting? What does she want?’

  Sarah sipped the coffee as if it was the only coffee she would ever drink, savouring it for a lifetime. ‘The person wants an excuse to display the work of unknown, or virtually unknown, unfashionable artists who could do with a chance. Not money, necessarily; the encouragement of being seen. Let the rich actually feed the poor, in other words. The other instinct of this person is to trash the whole thing. Get them a collection which is comic, or laughable. A mimic of pretension.’

  ‘Then it really would be state-of-the-art,’ Mole said, relieved and thoroughly warmed to the topic. ‘What’s required is a theme. Then you can get away with anything. And you must go to the big exhibition on Saturday. A must. Has everything.’

  ‘A theme?’

  ‘Oh, whatever you like. Historical. Geographic. The sky, sunsets, sunrises, the sea, English landscape, Africa. Or you could make it conceptual. Poetry in motion, love and war, men at work, women at work, the movement of the seasons, friendship. Captivity …’

  ‘Captivity,’ Sarah echoed. ‘“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mole said. He was looking round himself at the smallness of his kitchen and, at one remove, the dimensions of his really rather satisfying life. Sarah was on her feet, planting a kiss on the top of his head, the whole of her a sudden flurry of movement.

  ‘Thank you,’ she was saying. ‘Where’s my coat?’

  A green coat, to go with a sanguine temperament that did not believe in bad luck and always brought the opposite. He watched it whisk away past the paintings of battles, gathering dust on the hem as it went into the sunshine it seemed to have evoked. The careless, almost joyful slam of the door and the sight of her striding through the courtyard, fixing her in his mind. Mole was not sure if he should feel irritation or sheer relief.

  Instead, on the whole, he felt absurdly disappointed.

  Racing down Piccadilly for the bus that would take her back to the prison of work, Sarah remembered Sister Pauline’s slower steps and all her many admonitions. My darling Pauline, she told herself, you should not worry about my morals. Men who really want good women will always find them; and, as for sexual licence in the current men of my acquaintance, they are almost invariably too tired.

  I must account for my time, my time, my time … I need my job. Everyone on this bus needed their job. I was out doing research for the art collection … Oh, what an excuse Matthewson had given her. Don’t forget the exhibition. Take Cannon. Put it on the time sheet.

  Accountability simply requires inventive words on paper to explain the hours spent. The bus rolled through London, half full of people who still looked surprised by sleep. Sarah loved the winter in these early stages when the cold was a stimulant, the sunshine a catalyst and the
re was an explosion of seasonal hats and scarves, far more effective than the Christmas decorations. The bus was so much more convivial than the underground: chat was allowed although by no means mandatory, and there was always the view. She sat upstairs towards the front, wondered why she ever bothered with the lonely back seats of taxis. Central London: last night’s playground, full of those plodding and rushing to work, drawing them in like a vacuum cleaner only to spit them out again in the evening. The bus snarled at the traffic in Holborn, where the tall buildings of the city began to close in, blocking the sun. Top-deck people were reactive to the weather, kings and queens of the road for twenty minutes at a time, able to peer into office windows with a degree of impertinence they might never have exhibited to their suburban neighbours; it gave her the urge to pull faces. There was a young man with beautiful coiffed dark hair sitting immediately in front of her, staring ahead, his shoulders hunched in misery, his newspaper ignored. Sarah wanted to touch his hair, to see if it was real and as soft as it looked, tell him how nice it was and somehow convey the fact that the day could not possibly be as bad as he seemed to anticipate. He reminded her of Malcolm Matthewson, the most consistent of the lovers. Today would be a good day; she had decided it. There was nothing simplistic about the Fortune philosophy, such as it was. It was the very cutting edge of pragmatism.

  That was it, the right phrase: cutting edge; state of the art; interface. She began to rehearse the outline of the initial report on her ill-chosen task of amassing paintings with the firm’s money. Consultants suggest that the cutting edge of art-investment theory indicates that the collection should have thematic unity, each work to interface with another to create organic harmony … That should do it. Keep them at bay for a while. There were other things to do: look at houses; keep Cannon on cue until Christmas; keep Julie hidden; keep all the secrets and hope he was right.

  I must account for my time. But there was no Matthewson lurking inside his door, waiting for her explanation. No bloodstained, weeping boy in her office either, explaining his hurt and the need for silence, because he, too, needed his job. The door was closed, the route to non-accountability clear, but she paused to listen. There was a murmuring of voices, an undertone of irritation in the blurred words, until she heard Ernest raise his. Far too early for Ernest to do this: bad for his ulcer. ‘I am only a consultant,’ he was saying, portentously and conveniently loud for an eavesdropper. Big talk: that should get them on the run; that was really talking dirty and laying down the law. She supposed she had better explain the nature of the consultant in her consultancy document on the collection; listened a while to pick up a useful phrase. And then, still at the foot of the stairs, still listening, wondering if more of the estate agents’ particulars had arrived, she felt a tremor of hesitation and a desire to run away. An appalling sense of responsibility, which was tantamount to terror. She ran up the stairs and slammed the door.

  Johnnyboy Smith was in that room, talking with Cannon’s distinctive voice. Don’t go near him, Cannon said. Don’t ever let him see you.

  ‘I don’t care a shit about fucking consultants, if you’ll pardon my French,’ John Smith was saying to Ernest Matthewson in a pleasant brogue, which did not make him easier on the eye. All jowls and hair from four feet away. He wore a highly coloured Hermès tie, predominantly red, which looked, around that pink neck, like a cheap ribbon wound round a birthday cake, with the obvious difference that Johnnyboy would never be sweet to eat, what with that broad, short body and the way he muttered to hide his vowels, or maybe his teeth. Wait till he told Mrs Matthewson about those teeth.

  ‘I know all about this consultant stuff,’ Mr Smith was saying. ‘You consultants only use broad brushstrokes, right? The … the minutiae are left to others. I mean, the fucking details.’ Ernest could only nod.

  ‘I hate lawyers,’ Smith said, without any degree of real recrimination. ‘MPs, they’re all lawyers. Guy Fawkes had it right. And what’s a lawyer anyway? Just a man who oils wheels so the wheels can turn round. So what’s a consultant wheel-oiler?’

  ‘I take an overview of what your requirements are,’ Ernest said, looking earnest and bending forward to lessen the distance between him and this menace while in fact he wanted to increase it. ‘In the absence of your designated lawyer, for some time, I gather, following his car accident …’

  ‘His what? Oh, I see, yeah.’

  The accent was false: Ernest knew it, but could not pinpoint it, and continued earnestly, looking at the eyes of the man rather than his teeth, ‘… then I shall isolate one or two people who can replicate what your own designated lawyer did.’ There was a hollow laugh. ‘I’ve looked at the files. My word, what a lot of them, ha ha! Property slow-moving, eh? Well, well, well, winter’s here. Personally, speaking as a consultant, mind, I think you could maximize your investment and avoid tax rather better than you do, which means specialist skills which we can easily provide …’

  J. Smith took advantage of Ernest’s confidential stance and leaned forward himself, so their noses almost touched. Ernest remembered, just in time, not to recoil from that mouth.

  And later, after he had gone, Ernest wondered what all the fuss had been about. The man was only a client; a good client admittedly, but not the best or the most powerful; there was no need for anyone to kiss his feet. God help anyone who had to kiss any other part of his anatomy, Ernest muttered fastidiously. More tales from the battle-front to tell Mrs Matthewson, though. What he could not understand was why everyone was so afraid of the man. There was nothing fearsome about him at all. Watching him making his flat-footed way out of the room was not like watching a warrior of the commercial world. It was like watching a sad clown. He wanted Sarah to see it, called for her but she did not answer the phone. He wanted to gossip, but it would have to wait until he got home. Darling, he would tell his wife, such breath, such teeth. A peasant. You should have seen him.

  It was not the power of rendering the patient so helpless and speechless – with the rubberized insertion that isolated the tooth and covered the throat to protect them from the debris and the accidental swallowing of one of the tiny brushes he used to dig out the pulp – that made William take a secret pleasure in root-canal work. The patients hated it, and he sincerely, if sometimes irritably, regretted that, but it had the sole purpose of relieving pain, permanently, and it was the cleverness of the instruments and their current variety, the prospect of surprise and the tension it generated in himself that kept him going. Locate the canal; establish the working length. Enlarge it gently to the point where the file starts to bind. Straight files used in a large to small sequence with a reaming motion, the rotary action preparing the canal into a round cross-section in this anterior tooth; the minimum of pressure. Watch out for danger zones, weakness in the cavity, weakness in the instruments. Remove the pulp with infinite care, an ultra-precise form of spring-cleaning, leaving nothing behind to infect, working slowly, mostly by hand and wishing, for once, they were smaller. Avoid the nightmare of a broken instrument, lodged in the dentine and impossible to remove; the discovery of an extra canal, a canal so twisted in shape it made the original estimate of the treatment time entirely false and the patient would begin to fret. The omnipresence of grave discomfort, the dentist’s most euphemistic word, made speed imperative, while the precision required dictated the exact opposite.

  There should not be such satisfaction in rendering a tooth dead while keeping a patient sentient throughout, but there was. William preferred them awake in the interests of greater co-operation. And if he regarded it selfishly, the level of relief was so much more palpable if the patient had known what was going on. It was a horrible fact that their consciousness refined his own concentration and improved his technique. He was actually pleased with himself.

  The perfection of the notes would have to wait. There was an arrangement to see Sarah. He did not want to tell her about Cannon’s painting: he was shy of it and did not quite know what to do about it apart from admir
e, and wonder, as he had all day, about the motives. It was Sarah who was so clever on the human motive; he, who was so dense, wanted to work it out for himself.

  It was she who had brought Cannon into his life, but that did not mean that she owned every aspect of the relationship that followed, nor any more of himself than he chose to give. Where was she when she did not see him once a week, more or less? He did not ask, he guessed. He referred his own dilemmas to her and told her stories; revelled in her intelligent interest. He wondered if he bored her, and decided he did not. It was a strange middle ground of intimacy, which was close enough for the exquisite comfort it provided, with no merging of identity. It was, he realized with a shock, the only relationship he had ever had with a woman that was based on mutual respect.

  Would it be different if I were more curious? he asked himself. Would it? If I loved her? If she really trusted me and I really trusted her? Is love the same thing as this big gulp of infuriating pleasure when I see her coming towards me? I must work on technique for living. There’s something I’m doing wrong.

  Let’s walk somewhere, he had said. They met between their two places of work at Hyde Park Corner and walked the well-lit circle of the park, popular on the evening of a dry, bright day: joggers, cyclists, a floodlit football game, walkers and strolling lovers. At Speakers’ Corner, a lonely figure stood on a box and shouted global warnings at passers-by, convinced of some major truth, blind to the fact that he had missed the meeting of true minds.