Staring At The Light Read online

  He moved, restless, slightly drunk and becoming more so; he had consumed little food that day, and it was getting dark. He found the darkness a relief. He picked up one of the moulds on the table, counted the teeth. Twenty-eight in this particular head. What if he were simply to remove the disfiguring teeth and create a denture? The creature would endure this better, perhaps; the result would still change his appearance dramatically. William had a fondness for dentures. His National Health practice had featured them strongly, for reasons of budget rather than of fashion, and, ah, Isabella had been right to tread on his principles and insist he migrate to private practice, for the chance to do better, without restrictions … she had been right, without knowing why: dentures slipped, they broke; the mouth changed around them, for all that they served well. There had been dentures brought back for repair that looked as if they had been run over by a train; he remembered the dentures that had been chewed by a mimicking child, dentures chewed by a dog with similar ideas. Suddenly he began to giggle, holding his sides at the thought of a dog running away with a set of teeth, giving them to a bitch by way of courtship – Here, have these; my master clearly thinks they’re delicious.

  William told himself he was probably losing his mind and the loss would not make a difference. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks and he felt exhausted and sober. He rolled back towards the kitchen in search of more drink, dabbed at his face with a paper towel. It took some time to adjust to dentures: would the man be patient with something short of pain? Then he rolled into his surgery and sat on the patients’ chair. Looked suspiciously to his left, expecting the man to be there, a substantial ghost, standing where he had seen him, with tears in his eyes, provoked by the denial of the existence of a brother.

  Only a man then, not a savage beast. Only a man, like himself. And William wished, far and above everything else, for the chance to deal with those teeth, and then write it down for the world to know what he had done, and what could be learned from twins.

  *

  Write it down. Make a list of everything you want. Then look at the list and work out which of those things is less important. Specify at those things until you realize they are not very important at all and can, therefore, be removed from the list. Thus, make the list smaller. Sarah crossed out the word ‘garden’.

  She sat by the fire with another set of estate agents’ particulars, saved as a treat, like a favourite book, to be consumed or dismissed at leisure. This is the stuff of which dreams are made. I tell you, Sarah, you are never satisfied. If you ever get to heaven you’ll say your wings are damp and the harp is out of tune. Pauline’s voice, not accusing, but puzzled about the nature of restlessness.

  She had to think about houses. She had to retreat into this kind of dreaming because if she did not she would think about Cannon and Julie all day and all night. And when they were safe, she would have no life left. She had to think about new homes because it was the best antidote to nagging doubt, and the vision of Julie Smith with her inscrutable face and slightly swollen belly. Concentrate.

  The next flat, when she found it, would be minimalist in style, unlike this one, an overcrowded tribute to the acquisitive habits of recent years. There was this passion for mismatched chairs, which was a particular nuisance: they crept in and out of corners, always making room for another one with a kind of courtesy. There was an additional sofa, purchased purely for the colour of its sun-faded cover, sitting ill at ease with the custom-built, like a poor relation. There was a dining-room table, which dominated its own room, acquired for the splendour of its legs but redundant because she had lost the knack of entertaining. The next flat would have none of those things; these items would have to be found suitable homes, like well-behaved orphans. She was going to have bare wooden floors and walls full of paintings; only the paintings were lifelong friends.

  There had been a psychiatrist lover in here once or twice, who considered that her collection of paintings showed signs of paranoid kleptomania and subversive tendency. There’s no theme to them, he repeated; they say nothing about you at all; they have nothing in common with each other or with you. Definitely like friends, then. It had seemed to disturb him; it didn’t disturb her. It was not a collection. It would seem odder by far to have things distinguished by uniformity, a series of landscapes, for instance, or a series of interiors or abstracts, instead of a jumble nudging each other for space in their diverse frames. The psychiatrist did not seem to notice that there were more portraits than anything else; he might have analysed something sinister in that. Are you lonely, Sarah? Do you have need of inanimate, undemanding company? Do you seek solace in the form of these expressive faces on the wall? Do you talk to them?

  Only sometimes. She looked at her own list and looked at the particulars.

  Was Cannon making it all up, or was he exaggerating? There was one agent, more amenable than the rest, who seemed to understand that she wanted only as much space as she could get, with the maximum of light, the greatest height of wall, to accommodate the lifelong friends and the added company they were bound to attract. If the friendly estate agent found it odd that she demanded to know, in each case, the identity and address of the vendor of the places he described, he did not say so. None of this current bundle of properties was owned by John Smith; none looked quite right, there were none of his ruined homes; but those she had seen of his were always right. Despite their ruinous state, she had liked them all, felt that tug of excitement which suggested, I could live here, I could fall in love with this. Could a man with a taste for houses really be such a horror? He, too, liked big, tall walls and ceilings half a mile off the floor. It might not be enough to make the man virtuous, but it did make him sympathetic.

  Have nothing to do with him; if you see him, don’t let him see you. No, I cannot ever stay in your flat; he will know where I am.

  She had obeyed, with the obedience of faith, and yet what nonsense it was. John Smith swam like a porpoise and collected houses the way she collected paintings, with a purpose so random it did not bear analysis. What was wrong with communicating with him? Especially after a long conversation with Mrs Matthewson. What strange things they discussed over their Sunday lunches, to be sure. She pushed aside the particulars with their seductive photographs, drew a line through her list and began to draft a note on the same page. Stopped, fetched the fragment of the letter Cannon had given her on the way to the high court on a day that now seemed a long time ago. She would write to John Smith with a dual purpose. Purpose number one, to disobey orders and attempt to meet him on some sort of common ground. Purpose number two, the shameful one, to see from his reply if the writing was the same. She disliked this belated urge to cross-check, but she was sick of being reliant on third-party information. Maybe she wasn’t such a bad lawyer after all.

  ‘… if you keep this up until Christmas, I’ll leave her alone. Promise … But you won’t keep it up. You’ll get careless. You’ll realize what’s good for you …’

  A clumsy, trustworthy hand. An entirely illogical promise. He might succumb to the plea of ghastly flattery, like any other man.

  Dear Mr Smith,

  Please forgive me for troubling you and do not consider you are obliged to reply.

  I am a respected member of staff with your legal firm of Matthewson and Co. We are seeking to create a subdivision devoted to the sale and conversion of prestigious metropolitan properties for purely domestic use by overseas clients. (We already have a commercial division, as you know.) With this in mind, I am writing to enquire if you, as a valued client, would consider reviewing the way your domestic properties are handled in the marketplace, and give me your comments as to how this might be done better. This would assist us greatly in the creation of a service-oriented, experienced team, dedicated to the service of clients in this area.

  Yours, etc., S. Fortune.

  If he replied, he might suggest the meeting. If he replied by hand and the writing wasn’t the same, she was in dead trouble.


  It was so difficult to believe in a mythical beast. All her own ghosts were creatures of her own creation, solidly founded on real human counterparts. She prowled round the paintings. There was nothing of her own that she regarded as an example of excellence, except the stolen one, which would never be quite hers. All the rest had been chosen because she could see they were somehow flawed. Ah, yes, they were friends all right. No-one, at the end of the day, owns anything, and it was probably unwise to trust the bright ideas formed with a bottle of wine at the elbow. Ghosts, mythical monsters and enemies were all scaled down to the size of a glass.

  The armchair over there was too heavy, reminiscent of the parlour of her convent school where she had sat among uncomfortable chairs, waiting for the Reverend Mother to tell her the bad news of her imminent expulsion – for precocity and subversion, for telling other girls the facts of life, for introducing Tampax and raising a petition about the food. She remembered that parlour for a burning sense of injustice and the ice of the atmosphere, marking the onset of scepticism. She got up, stretched, yawned.

  The next flat was definitely going to be minimalist. Just like the next life.

  They sat in the parlour, Julie and Cannon, like a pair of awkward guests, each on the edge of a hard chair, knees touching. It was at the front of the convent, adjacent to the main street door, accessed from the body of the building by a gloomy corridor and another locked door. The nuns were passionate about locks, Pauline explained; passionate without being logical, since they always seemed to assume that intruders came from the front rather than behind and they left God himself to take care of the chapel. The existence of locks was the insecurity of women dwelling alone, but still at odds with the vow of for-going personal property. Each owned minor personal possessions in their rooms, no more, but the locked front door, the locked porch, the third lock on the door connecting corridor with residence were by now established precautions, Pauline said, because, once known, the existence of a convent drew the drunk and the lame and the abusive. Led by pragmatism, the sisters took the view that discretion was the better part of valour when it came to charity demanded after dark at an inner-city door. The truly needy would come back in the morning.

  Which all contributed to Pauline’s idea that the parlour should be Julie and Cannon’s trysting place after conventional bedtime, provided they did not linger long or deface the carpet and Julie removed all traces of their presence afterwards. Besides, Pauline had added tartly, this is where we entertain the priests. The smell of a cigarette would not be amiss over the other smell of polish, surely. And the other condition was that should any sister descend upon them, armed with a weapon, they would not retaliate in unseemly fashion and Julie alone would explain, taking responsibility for either her own truths or her own lies.

  Cannon was uncomfortable. The parlour was a sizeable room. He was used to small spaces; he enjoyed the sense of confinement provided by walls he could touch; he hated double-glazing and the consequent lingering of smells; he liked draughts; he was not at home in rooms big enough for the swinging of cats. The only purpose of space was to provide light; this room was large with small windows. The whole damn building was back to front, built north to south, with no regard to the direction of the sun, and even the chapel, the one room that could maximize it, ruined itself by the barrier of the sacristy and the presence of thick stained-glass windows. They seemed to try to make all their public rooms as ugly as the chapel, he complained, although that was not the real complaint. In here, even Julie was a stranger, sitting prim and proper, although their knees touched. There was greater intimacy in the chapel, disdaining God and the presence of plaster saints.

  ‘Hallo there,’ Julie said.

  Ever since he had divorced himself from his brother’s life and his brother’s daily speech, Cannon was easily discomfited by a new environment. There were new nuances to the way he spoke now, but he did not expect his nearest and dearest to have learned a new vocabulary too. Or familiarity with new rooms and ways of being. Sitting opposite him, Julie was suddenly refined, with her skirt pulled down over her knees and a faint southern-Irish lilt somehow caught in her voice as if by accident. They could speak in normal tones and pitch in here, but he missed the urgency of their whispers.

  ‘Lord, what a clutter,’ he was saying, shivering slightly. He looked around himself. He expected the door to open at any minute and a nun to come crashing in with a trayful of tea. Not that he would have objected to such sustenance to augment the half-bottle in his pocket; nor could the nun have objected to the sublime modesty of their positions, sitting so primly and overdressed. The chapel and the parlour were equally chilly, but it seemed intrusive to turn on the electric fire and Julie did not suggest it. The overhead lights were bare and bright, provided by a miniature chandelier with five shiny bulbs, enough to make the contours of their faces hard. She looked yellow in this light; he felt red. The mirror over the mantelpiece made him look flushed and poorly. He always smiled into mirrors, the better to see his teeth. ‘It isn’t so much a clutter’, he said, nodding at the furniture, ‘as a muddle. They’ve tried to cater for all occasions and ended up catering for none. They just don’t know how to create comfort, do they?’

  She giggled softly, but pulled the skirt further over her knees, a trifle defensive. The nuns were her saviours and her hosts: she did not like to hear criticism of them. She was coming to adopt their tastes and their economies with the same ease as her unconscious mimicry of their soft voices. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said vaguely. ‘It’s a room with a dozen purposes. They entertain relatives in here, for tea and coffee, then there’s priests and guests, not very many, then there’s meetings … They let people use it for meetings, so it needs to be big enough for that.’

  ‘All these bloody chairs,’ Cannon muttered, sinking out of his own velour moquette of drab green, so that he sat on the floor with his back against it. That was better: now he was level with Julie’s knees rather than with the rest of the room. It was easier to ignore what he could never fail to notice: the garish religious pictures on the walls, the forest of armchairs, the monumental sideboard, which looked as if it should have contained a battery of wines and spirits. It had all the equipment for a riotous party, except the ambience. Perhaps if they turned out the lights and danced to the bar of the fire, but they were sombre and inhibited.

  ‘They’ll have Christmas decorations in here next week,’ she said wistfully.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cannon said. ‘That’ll really make it perfect.’

  ‘Oh, stoppit, will you? What does it matter what the room looks like? They do their best. Why should they have style, even if they could agree what style was, especially since they don’t care anyway? Stop carping.’

  He touched her knee. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, formally and insincerely. ‘It’s just that when I see you in a room I keep seeing you somewhere else entirely. Somewhere where I’d like you to be. A cottage in the country, with a garden for the baby.’

  ‘And roses round the door?’ she finished for him, a note of irony in her voice, then sat back in her chair, refusing to join him on the floor. She laced her fingers together in her lap. ‘Sarah said she once wanted a cottage like that. With a cat. Then she realized she would hate it. All that silence, all those dead leaves, no cars, no shops. How would you live in the country? You’re a town animal, through and through. The last time you saw a cow was from the window of a train.’

  ‘Well, we’d have to learn, wouldn’t we? You can learn anything …’

  ‘No, you can’t. If Sarah reckoned she couldn’t, nor could we. Sarah’s more adaptable. Now, there’s a woman with style.’ There was an element of jealousy, Cannon realized with a start of surprise. He touched her again, tentatively. There was no response. ‘I wonder if I’ll be here for the New Year,’ she went on, ‘admiring the decorations. Paper chains, tinsel and a crib. Maybe it would be easier if I took to the faith. Swore myself to poverty and chastity. Learned to accept divine will �
�� Gave up hoping for anything different. After all, it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe something.’

  ‘Look, love, it’ll soon be over. Christmas. You’ve forgotten. All over by Christmas.’

  ‘Will it? Will it ever?’

  He was silent, gripped with a sense of dread so acute it seemed to retard breathing. He looked up at her beseechingly, but in this light she looked distant and almost cruel. Immobile, like the statues in the chapel; a woman in the act of becoming an effigy. Angry with him, unable out of long habit to say so. Somehow on the verge of giving up. Something to do with all those books she now read. Challenging him.

  ‘Can I smoke in here?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Yes. Can’t do it any further harm, can it?’

  He lit the cigarette, watched it burn, and after three greedy inhalations tapped the ash into the palm of his hand. There were no ashtrays; it was unthinkable to put the debris in one of three wastepaper bins. They were too clean. He blamed the room for this feeling of alienation. Another fear prevailed. Perhaps Julie and he would never survive in a so-called normal world; perhaps the intensity of the love would wither if it were not clandestine, the way it had always been. Love on the run, first from Johnny’s fury and refusal to meet, then the flurry of hiding from the police, love on bail, love on remand, love from the distance of prison, love like this, after he came out. Love within the framework of something forbidden, defined by Johnny’s contemptuous disbelief in it. Love in a battlefield. She was sick of it; she was changing, just like Johnny said she would. Put her in a room with real chairs, make their contact as normal as possible, and there seemed so little to say; there was no common life between them, nothing to create intimacy, and if she was looking for something in which to believe it meant she no longer believed in him. Nor, perhaps, in Johnnyboy either.