Staring At The Light Read online

  ‘I’m grateful to you, Sarah,’ she was saying gruffly.

  ‘Why?’ The statement was surprising. Pauline gave thanks for the existence of this niece in her own prayers, but never in public. She accepted Sarah’s donations as no more than the convent’s due; took it as conscience money from a heathen. She never gave thanks for charity, but if it was offered she never missed the chance.

  ‘For your dentist friend, of course. A Christian, for sure. He phoned me to say he was willing to treat any nun virtually for free. We have to pay for materials only, now isn’t that nice? He seemed to know all about Imelda, can’t think how. Is he a Catholic?’

  Julie was looking straight ahead, transfixed by the bare branches of a shrub, conspicuously innocent.

  ‘Hm. I would say his religious orientation is not decided yet,’ Sarah said carefully, hiding her surprise in the palm of her hand and feeling vaguely outmanoeuvred. ‘He may want you entirely for research. The effect of diet on teeth, or something of the kind. After all, few people have a diet which is easier to predict. But I should take the offer. He’s a very good dentist and a kind man, even though he sometimes doesn’t realize it himself. Probably ripe for conversion, too.’

  ‘Of course we take up the offer – we take up any offer like that. I don’t care about his motives. Sister Dominic went the same day he phoned – she raves about him.’

  ‘Everyone does, apart from his wife,’ Sarah said.

  ‘No man is a hero to his butler,’ Pauline said inconsequentially, and rose from the bench where all three had sat. ‘Have a word with me before you go, will you, Sarah? I’ll leave you in peace with your cigarettes. I can’t bear to watch.’

  Julie and Sarah sat in companionable silence, Julie with a piece of mending in her lap. It was a cotton traycloth with embroidery and a frayed hem; it kept her hands busy. Sarah employed hers in the lighting of a cigarette. Each to her own. The sunlight caught Julie’s growing brown hair and made it gleam against her bare face. In the warm light of a mild afternoon she looked almost saintly.

  ‘Cooking and now mending?’ Sarah enquired. ‘Do you also pray? Give you a habit and a rosary and you’d become one of them. Do you think it would suit you?’

  ‘No.’ She let the mending fall, as if it embarrassed her. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘But it has its virtues.’ Her face lit with an impish smile, dispelling the illusion of saintliness. Saints were not renowned for humour, or maybe their jokes were never recorded. ‘Obedience to divine will,’ she said. ‘The belief that all sufferings are temporary and have a purpose. I could do with a bit of that, although I might prefer a belief that everything was pre-ordained. I should love to be able to offer up pain in the belief that it altered the sentence of some soul in purgatory. Turn it into something useful. That would be nice. And I’d like to be able to pray for the baby Cannon wants so much.’ The mending remained untended.

  ‘Some of it must rub off, you know,’ she continued, with the same, hesitant thoughtfulness. ‘Even though I don’t believe it. Because here I am, sewing and cooking, keeping myself busy to avoid going mad. I don’t do it for praise or the greater glory of God, and I know that really I’m a prisoner, but I don’t feel like a prisoner.’

  ‘It’s your decision. You can leave whenever you want.’

  Julie shook her head vigorously. ‘No, I can’t. Where would I go, except to Cannon? And if I went to Cannon, John would find us. You know what I think?’ The mending had fallen on the ground and Julie did not bother to retrieve it. ‘I think John could find Cannon whenever he wants, whatever Cannon does. Not that he’s watching him, but he follows him with his mind. He goes to the places Cannon goes to … He imagines where he is. Do you know this already? Has he told you?’

  ‘Something similar. I don’t believe in telepathy. No evidence, you see. If John Smith knows where his brother is, it’s because he’s sent someone to look. Or gone himself.’ Sarah felt guilty. Day by day, her belief in the ultimate wickedness and the almost supernatural powers of Johnnyboy Smith had been gently eroding.

  ‘Johnny can’t imagine my whereabouts because he has no link into my mind the way he does to Cannon’s. But he would know immediately if I went to Cannon. Then he would come and destroy me.’ Julie stood, folded her arms across her chest and walked the few paces the garden allowed. She spoke with quiet certainty. ‘He’d do it out of revenge for me stealing Cannon away, as he sees it, or simply out of hatred and loss. Can you imagine hating anyone so much?’

  Sarah paused. ‘No. Hatred is quite alien to me. So is revenge. If someone hurts me, steals from me, I keep out of their way. Take another path.’

  ‘But you might not if the person who was stolen was the only person you had ever loved. The only person you were capable of loving. The person who made you complete, allowed you to function. You would hate the thief who blinded you, wouldn’t you? The one who cut off your right arm and took it away?’

  ‘I might,’ Sarah conceded. ‘I just doubt if I could sustain it – not sustain it and carry it forward into some act of malice, such as bashing them over the head with a teapot. They say anyone could kill. I don’t believe I could. I might wish someone dead, but that’s totally different. That’s only wishing.’

  She thought of her long-dead husband; the one she had loved with youthful optimism. Wanting him dead when she knew his unfaithfulness; not wanting it at all when it happened. Pauline had helped, then. Said it was God’s will, not her own. In the end only God dictated birth and death. She thought of Charles Tysall’s death and not being able to hasten it or even wanting it.

  It was growing cold, the December sun sinking in the sky, turning Julie’s soft hair into a halo, somehow ignoring her own.

  ‘Well, the game’s nearly over. Two more weeks. We’ve got to believe that. Don’t let Cannon boss you around. Do you want a baby as much as him?’

  ‘I want what he wants. It would be the ultimate message for Johnny, wouldn’t it? And, besides, I’ve always been afraid that if I didn’t conceive Cannon would leave me. I’m not enough all by myself. Noone is. There has to be something more important than either of you.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Sarah did not believe her. Cannon had fascinated her from the first meeting; obligation and fierce defensiveness had grown from that and, at the beginning, his wife was only his wife; a once-clever school dropout who had lost a decade to drugs, pulling herself half-way out when Cannon met her, and now the wife of dreams. Sarah had never before seen such unconditional, determined love. She did not judge or measure it, simply felt the peculiar strength of it; it infected her and almost made her ashamed. She watched him blossom in Julie’s presence; shrivel in prison without her. There was a magic in her potency: she made the unlovable lovable; she was the guardian angel, who chased away the demons. She remembered Julie’s instructions and her terror. Take me away – somewhere secret. Take me away … don’t tell him.

  Who did this to you?

  His brother – take me away. Hide me – he’s coming back.

  She had believed then in the evil of John Smith, although she could not encompass the reasons. Looking at Julie now, diminished by the attentions of this monster but restored to health, she found the belief slipping away, like adolescent faith. She remembered the incredulity of the police. What? She thinks she knows who it is? Why would this man do such a thing? She tried to summon up the hatred she had felt then and found she could not. The monster had no shape. But Cannon lived. Cannon and the bogeyman he might have invented to scare them all.

  The Christian Sabbath was a bad day for reflection.

  William was not going to phone Sarah. He was not going to be dependent on anyone who was so independent of him. He was not going to become introspective either. He was going to go for a walk, like other people did, mull over the week, pretend he was purposeful. Think on his feet, in case it made it easier.

  He did not love her, never pretended he did. He simply thought of her a lot. He found it difficult to make his own kind of romanti
c image out of someone who was, however desirable, so generous with sexual favours and yet so self-contained. He was in the street outside on a dying afternoon, making himself walk away instead of walking towards her, ringing on the doorbell and saying, Yesterday I was punched in the face and it hurts, it jolly well hurts, and you were busy, with a man who coughs.

  He touched the railings outside his premises. Sharp spikes on the top, if he reached to touch them, firm iron railings beneath. He paused, grabbed two of the railings and shook them. They made the slightest movement and all he felt was the sensation of flaking paint against the palms of his hands. The railings outside his building were a series of twins, bent at differing angles, nodding towards one another, identical but separate.

  William felt a touch lopsided, because of the bruise to his face, and a trifle brave, because he did not really care about the bruise and was faintly proud about the means by which he had acquired it. He hit me, he repeated to himself wonderingly. Now, why did he do that? I have never in my life done anything which would justify a gratuitous blow, so why did he hit me? Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with me; I’ve never been important enough to hit. Isabella probably wanted to hit me all the time. His shoes were heavy, striking the pavement hard, click, clack; he could not dawdle. That man did not like you: you made reference to his teeth by staring at them and you almost accused him of having a brother; you might have offended him. As someone who by dint of his trade invaded the privacy of others all the time, William was philosophical about it. Every day of his working life he committed some kind of assault or was forced into statements that might cause offence. Passing the other set of railings, three doors down, he remembered the Arab princess who had arrived with her retinue and departed in disgust as soon as her translator informed her that all her teeth needed was cleaning. Swish. Down the stairs like a rush of curtains, flurrying with outrage.

  He walked, expecting any minute that someone would come out from behind these serried sets of railings and hit him again. He felt like a bouncy rubber ball. A touch of violence had enlivened him; made him excitable. What made a man violent? William was not sure, but felt he ought to understand it; he had the feeling that Sarah would understand it completely. He had often wondered about the scars on her body; little white marks that in no way diminished her attraction, on her back, her chest, her arms. Flying glass from a car crash, she had explained, and he had not questioned: she was sensitive on the point. Scars on her back, from a car crash, teeny little scars rather than lacerations? He doubted it, but it was really none of his business. He would not ask a patient, How did you get that wart on your finger? and he really did not know how to ask intimate questions of a lover. He did not have a great deal of practice.

  His hands were cold from his daft, unconscious touching of the railings, something he did whenever he left the building, greeting them, checking up on the continuity of his life. As long as the railings remained where they were, his life would remain as stable as it was. The railings belonged to another era; their variety amazed him. There were tall railings and short railings, railings with sharp, pointed, fleur-de-lis tops; there were sooty black railings tapering to elegant points, guarding the basements he passed, all built to repel rioters and prevent them climbing through the windows and now incorporated as part of the fabric. Dug up in the First World War to provide metal for armaments, replaced because they belonged. They comforted him, these railings. A burglar, breaking into his premises in a misguided search for drugs, had once snagged his shirt on the way out and there had been small compensation in that.

  He walked briskly, making himself look at things. Perhaps he liked the railings so much because they were at eye-level, saved him looking up and noticing anything else, such as the sky and the enormity of his surroundings. Wide streets, lined with red-brick buildings, severely beautiful, designed for a stylish life. This is where Edwardian heroines might have alighted from carriages, tripped up steps to the wide front doors, rung the bell, or sent the footman to give a card, where Elizabeth Barrett was At Home to Mr Browning in a first-floor living room, the better to command a view of the street, houses fit for the distinguished to receive suitors and accommodate servants in basement and attic. He could see them now, polishing the brass bells and whitening the steps.

  No shops were allowed in Wimpole Street and Harley Street, only these gracious frontages to suites of offices and medical practices. The same sort of people came to these streets now, for different purposes, deposited from chauffeur-driven cars and taxis to pay munificent bills for private health to charlatans, profiteers and a host of decent and honourable practitioners. William supposed there was not a street in central London that did not have that kind of mix, whatever the trade.

  It was Sarah, really, who had made him interested in people, the view from the window rather than the view with his back to it; Sarah who had instilled this habit of walking. She was easy to please, he found on their first acquaintance – ‘Come on, let’s walk, discuss your case, have something to eat, oh, look at that’. She had never wanted courtship, only communication. She seemed so honest, so open.

  He crossed the road and smiled vaguely at the cyclist he had not seen, the collision averted. A scowl was returned.

  But there was, of course, this strict economy with the truth in all their dealings; a mutual, unspoken agreement not to go beyond the confines of what was volunteered. Thus he did not ask her about the scars, and she refused the details of what Cannon had done; he did not go behind the scenes of what she told him. It was similar with Cannon himself: mutual affection of a surprising kind, which did not yet permit an exchange of confidences. William was worried that he should inspire such reserve in his few friends – maybe he was not trustworthy – but he knew more about Cannon, he felt, than anyone, because Cannon had mumbled and chattered in his Diconal dreams. Johnnyboy, Johnnyboy, dirty fangs, Johnnyboy.

  The streets were wonderfully quiet on Sundays. Cars passing en route to somewhere else, stopping dutifully at lights with none of the weekday impatience; empty parking bays, allowing him to see the buildings and delight in them. Turning a corner into Marylebone High Street, the wind caught his face and the bruise stung. He felt an enormous affection for his own environment and, thinking of Cannon, a surge of excitement. Ahead of him, two Arab men walked arm in arm.

  He had always wanted a brother, had created, as a child, an imaginary companion to offset his own single-child status. When that companion died of natural causes, although William had created an elaborate accident on a mountainside to explain his absence, he had mourned him. Cannon had an estranged brother; that much William knew. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that this man with the similar teeth and oh-so-similar eyes was that brother. Maybe, he, William, could engineer a reunion? Rubbish, but he liked the idea, and it would be a fitting addendum to his paper on the teeth of twins; a double whammy; the coup of a lifetime. A service to humanity, better than merely professional, and it would make his paper remembered. As well as make him proud. He was wistful at the mere thought.

  He could go back to the exhibition and find out who had bought the Mouth. Or wait. Or tell himself, as he turned back for home, suddenly reluctant to reach it, that it was sheer imagination that had led him to yesterday’s assumption that the man who had hit him was Cannon’s twin. William stopped, and stared at a massive front door of mahogany, polished to such a shine that he could see in it a blurred reflection of himself. Vainly he struggled to recall the features of the man who had hit him, but the face itself blurred into a strange photofit. All he could remember was the teeth. He reached his own front door, looked at it as if it had nothing to do with him, realizing at the same time how he had forgotten that part of the reason for the walk had been to buy milk and eggs. His cold, soft, well-tended hands were uncomfortably free. There were some things that were bound to be forgotten: toilet rolls, letters, the most tedious of necessities.

  What was wrong with phoning Sarah? Why did he so often cut off
his nose to spite his face? Because of the other men, who left him free of any obligation for her? He didn’t care about that, most of the time. He hated admitting need, that was all; told himself, as he noticed how the door seemed oddly askew, that he was becoming old and strange.

  The keypad worked, the big front door opening with surprising speed when it was usually slow, buzzing at him like an angry bee. He did not think of it at the time as he mounted the stairs to his third floor. He thought, That foyer might once have been a ballroom before they put in a lift. I wonder who danced there? And the same feeling of mild euphoria made him add, Bugger the eggs and milk, bugger everybody. I’ll have beans and toast for supper and a bottle of wine.

  It was deserted at the weekend. Five specialist dental suites and a penthouse suite above his own. Quiet as the proverbial grave. Thick carpets, which Isabella had chosen and the communal expense of which he heartily resented, muffling his steps to his own front door. Sarah also forgets the eggs and the milk.

  The door to his suite was open, which did not particularly surprise him. William automatically assumed that any omission was due to his own negligence; he tended to apologize as soon as he opened his mouth. It was the presence of his dental records, released from their cabinet and spread, systematically, over the floor, that made him realize that this was not his fault any more than it was accidental. A large man sat on the floor by his records, leafing through them with every appearance of disinterest. He was expressionless, like a Buddha, grossly fat and unperturbed. William had a confused memory of a similar figure patrolling the street the morning before, the one who looked as if he had lost his dog.

  It was so much warmer here than outside that his eyes began to water and the bruise to throb. He nodded at the man on the floor, as if to a casual acquaintance whose name he could not recall. He had the strange feeling of returning to an appointment he could not remember having made: the man looked as if he belonged, as of right. The nod was returned. William had a sudden vision of officialdom. VAT men? The Dental Practice Board investigating a complaint? On a Sunday? It all seemed extremely silent and legitimate. He walked into his surgery, heart thudding.