Staring At The Light Page 4

  There was one small alcove to go. He continued with the off-white apple green, humming … droning, since his voice could never hold a tune, any more than his hands could have played a fiddle, or done one of the many things he had once aspired to do. They were pretty hands, his mother had told him, the exact opposite to the way a surgeon’s hands were supposed to be. Splayed, to be honest. Short-fingered with a broad span and no arthritis, every damn finger working with an individual dexterity, capable-looking hands. His were the elegant, long-fingered things of a woman whispering behind a fan. His hands, with a permanent tendency to irritation, fungus, fast-growing nails and a dislike of any chemical, were currently enclosed in gardening gloves with rubber gloves beneath, and it was quite insane for a Wimpole Street dentist, with a practice surely lucrative enough to get someone else to do it, to be painting his own public rooms. The private rooms, both above and below, were ignored; they were beyond aesthetic redemption anyway. Why, then, William, why? he droned. Because you’re an ass; the prosperity is all on the surface and, let’s face it, you have nothing active left to do when everyone has gone home. And you are fascinated by the technique of it … and, besides, everyone else makes such a devil of a mess.

  The doors would have to remain wood-coloured doors. There were too many doors and too many locks. He liked the arrangement. Reception desk by outer door; short corridor to large waiting room; surgery off that, with another damn door opening to reveal not the immediacy of the surgical area and the chair but another little seating area for consultation to the left, out of sight of the door. A non-threatening view.

  He tried to whistle. What emerged was a breathy, piping sound, unrecognizable as the tune that had been going round in his head all day. ‘All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small …’ Such a well-known hymn, coming out of the blue to irritate. As far as his patients were concerned, all things bright and beautiful meant nothing more than teeth.

  He finished and took the paintpots and the brushes into the bathroom, which was beyond the reception room and flanking the surgery. Yes, he had made it nice, this public part of the whole damn thing. What always amazed him was the way the patients always asked permission to use the lavatory when it was clearly marked, not in a dozen languages, perhaps, but quite evident for what it was, and the notion that he would want any of them sitting on his chair with a full bladder was so extraordinary that it made him shake his head. The bathroom, too, was filled with paintings. Perhaps that put them off; in which case, too bad. Pictures stayed.

  On his way out of the bathroom, he detoured into the surgery. White upon white. There was something perfectly appalling about a surgery with no-one in it, like a car park without cars. It had all the impersonality of a laboratory. The chair at lowered level, the machinery on a swing, far out of reach, his chair, with back-rest, crouching beside it, the footpad ready for his feet. No-one there, and yet it all looked alive. Blue and white in here. Nothing superfluous. All of it chemically scrubbed. Cupboards full of equipment, as little on show as possible; no labels. Everything in sterile packages hidden from view, as much for the sake of hygiene as for fear of causing alarm. The place had been made to look like a high-tech kitchen display in a shop window, not exactly inviting, but efficient, at least, with the implied promise that there would never be any mess, spillages, stains, the distinctive burning smell of dentine dust, or failures.

  William sat in his patients’ chair. It was an eccentric habit of his to do this when the place was empty, and made his assistant feel uneasy if she caught him at it first thing in the morning, but he did it often enough. It was important, he told Tina, to keep on reminding himself of what the patient could see from this chair, and whether the view could be improved. There had been a series of soothing pictures on the far wall, limpid watercolour scenes featuring very blue water, until Tina had tartly reminded him that what the patient in the chair watched, as often as not, was the arc-light, until the name of the manufacturer, Siemens, was emblazoned on their eyeballs. She suggested, in her youthful and heartless fashion, that he put goggles on the patients and be done with it. Then they would see nothing and he would not have to bother about the view. No, he told her. That would only have the effect of refining their concentration on what was going on inside their mouths: they needed to see so they would hear less.

  Tina had nodded; she had the benefit of perfect teeth, a child of the fluoride age. But at least, she added, if you put them in goggles, they won’t have to see what they see almost as often as they see the light. Your face, looming over them in a mask. Was it such a bad face? he wondered. Nooo, she had said doubtfully, examining it with those cornflower-blue eyes of hers, which held not a moment of doubt. It isn’t your face would frighten anyone. It’s the height of you. I’d stay sat down, if I were you.

  No respect, that girl. Beanpole, she called him – a slight improvement on the school name, which was Telegraph. Six feet and three inches was not such an unusual height, was it? Inconvenient for canoeing, horse-riding, bicycling, certain team games he had never liked anyway, and quite an advantage among school contemporaries who would otherwise have bullied him, although it imposed the necessity of owning up to any crime because he was always so visible. It had forced him to develop a slouching stoop, which even now he found difficult to correct; nothing more than a slightly lopsided air but, he thought, at fifty plus, he was used to it. Ah, he thought, oh, please, never let me see myself the way other people do. Let us all be spared that.

  He was tired, but not tired enough. He supposed a good night’s sleep in a dentist’s chair was possible, although it was difficult to imagine anyone wanting to try it. People lay in it under sedation happily enough. It was an awful thought, that the only time patients looked serene was when they were deep asleep. Not anaesthetized, but slumbering without memory. It was then that they sometimes made pathetic efforts to co-operate and even to join in any conversation. It was then, instruments allowing, they muttered about their deepest preoccupations.

  William left the chair rapidly, and hit his head lightly on the overhead gantry, which reminded him of one of his first mistakes in the early days of practice. ‘Right, you can get up now,’ he would command gaily, only to have the poor sap stand and hit the equipment, or trip over something else on their grateful way to the door. All exit and entrance paths must remain clear, even if they were not in a straight line, as his were not. If only the patients knew how much trouble he took, maybe they would loathe him less. No, they wouldn’t.

  He had moved to the bathroom. Green paint dripped beneath the tap. ‘All things bright and beautiful … all molars great and small.’ He felt the same thing when he went to the dentist. A defensive fear, as if the man meant him harm and was positively relishing the mere prospect of causing pain, giving him that wary handshake he might have afforded a self-confessed sadist, telling him immediately how much he hated being there, just in case the man did not know – the way his patients did to him ad nauseam. When the causing of pain was unavoidable, it drained him; on those rare occasions, it was excruciating. He dreaded it as much as the patient. It made him sleepless and hyperactive, like now, as he painted the walls green in the hope that it would never happen again. But it would. He could not wish pain on any living thing. Except her, except Isabella, and then it was not so much pain he wished but something else, which made him profoundly ashamed.

  The whiteness of the room, contrasting with the black panes of the night, made him dizzy. It was a bad habit of the time of year to make the light so short and the nights so long. Christmas was beginning to look like a blot on the horizon.

  The flash of the orange silk flowers in the waiting room reminded him. The flash of fireworks and red hair. William picked up the phone, dialled and, when she answered, felt a grin creeping across his face. ‘Sarah! Why aren’t you here?’

  ‘Because I’m here, silly. How are you?’

  ‘A bit low. Nothing too bad. Half-way down the pit, or half-way up, whichever w
ay you look at it.’

  ‘Half-way up, I would. Light at the top. Has that bitch been in again?’

  ‘Nope. She’s due tomorrow.’

  ‘Tell her to get lost.’

  ‘I can’t. I just can’t. You know I can’t. Look, are you busy?’

  ‘Never. Can you come over?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask. With my toothbrush?’

  ‘Behave like a good boy. Yes.’

  ‘Fine. About half an hour? Look … It was you by that bonfire last week, wasn’t it? You and Cannon?’

  There was a long, unembarrassed pause. ‘What bonfire?’

  And that, he supposed, would enter into the file of things they did not talk about.

  2

  ‘Lady in red,’ Sarah yelled along with the radio, turned high to give her the gist of the tune over the sound of the vacuum-cleaner while she improvised the words.

  ‘You’re so perfect tonite … forgive me please … you have no knees, but that’s all right …’ She gulped the first gulp of wine and grimaced as she put it down – there was something odd about the taste. Slowly, she took another glass and polished it with a paper towel. The music was nicely relentless. ‘Love the one you’re with, love the one you’re with,’ she hummed, then stared at the glass. Filthy.

  If she were a good housekeeper, there would be no need for this occasional and frenetic activity. If she were the kind of person who could host a party without looking round in a panic for the exit … if she had enough sense of the future even to take the risk of keeping a cat, she would be calm and collected, as quiet a closer of doors as she was in public. She knew she would never be able to keep a cat: they would have too much in common. Malcolm Matthewson had told her that on the day they had parted. She remembered him with regret. But I would never be catty enough to use my flawed good looks as a passport to a new billet if I was fed up with the old, would I? she hummed. That’s the difference. I’d just go, starve or not. And who would take me in, covered in scars, like a feline with fleas, unsuitable for human devotion even if I were fun enough to stroke for a while? I did love you, Malcolm, but you didn’t like me and, besides, I’m congenitally incapable of living happily in a pair. Leaves no room for other loyalties. Love the one you’re with.

  Find the life that suits. Like whoever you want.

  Enough wine, as always, even if the glasses were dusty. There was rarely enough food. ‘Yesterday!’ she bellowed to the music. ‘I don’t believe …’ She pounced. Yes! A result! Two pound coins under the overturned cushion even before she had thumped it. Life was rich. She was perfectly comfortable living alone with her inexplicable devotions and equally eccentric retinue of lovers. Liking was more important than loving. She seemed to have turned into a bit of a gipsy, encumbered with a small mortgage and very little else, her ambitions lessening with each succeeding year. She wanted the flat with the white walls, and the freedom to be untidy in her life as well as in her own home. How else would she ever find the surprising coins behind the cushions and revel in the enjoyment of strangers?

  Looking upon herself as an outsider, she decided she lived not only in an unconventional moral zone but also in a cultural vacuum. That much was clear from her taste in music. She scarcely knew Beethoven from Bach, and the omission had never yet cost her a sleepless night. She knew Thackeray from Trollope, since reading was a passion, and as for fine arts, she could certainly tell Rembrandt from Renoir and Degas from Van Gogh. He was the one who cut off his ear.

  Her apartment was full of pictures. She would say, glibly, that this was another result of the vacuum of the soul or possibly the avoidance of any other decision about interior design, and because things hung on walls were less likely to get broken. The mirror had been an exception, and she did not think about the mirror.

  Except sometimes. The old mirror had been smashed by Charles Tysall, a man in pursuit of perfection, disgusted to find it did not exist in her. He had broken the mirror into tiny pieces and forced her to lie among the shards. Life had begun after surviving that: she had never since experienced the luxury of hatred – not even for him when she encountered him again, pathetic creature he had been by then. Neither did she pursue perfection, but delighted in its non-existence. She was in love with flaws.

  As it was, the two large rooms and the smaller bedroom had enough pictures to furnish a gallery, provided the owner had taste as varied as hers. Paintings were acquired with zest and compulsion, sometimes in unusual places, some thrust upon her in payment of a debt, some purchased out of pity; and on the basis of this highly random selection, which spread into her office, Ernest Matthewson had come to the conclusion that she was artistic. He should have known also that, although her eye was good, she never bought anything for investment and she was hardly discriminating about anything. Not a fussy person. Unlike the patient of William’s who had brought them into contact in the first place. William, another back-door client, introduced on the recommendation of a friend and all because of a girl with porcelain veneers who was suing him because, infuriatingly, the veneered teeth glowed a different shade of white in certain nightclub lights. Sarah had settled that case fairly rapidly by the simple expedient of finding the plaintiff and getting her drunk enough to confess a life history of similar legal pursuits featuring plastic surgeons and hairdressers. Ruthless, perhaps, but vanity was not, in Sarah’s view, a matter for litigation. It was a matter for you and your mirror. Meeting William had been timely. She hadn’t had her teeth checked for years before that, and she liked William.

  She crossed the living room to the open french windows, and looked out across the green from the tiny balcony. This was the best feature of the place she was seeking to leave – with a degree of regret, even though movement and upheaval came naturally. It was a nice flat, but it was not home; it never could be home after that broken mirror; she felt like an alien in it and the urge to find home had become a mission. You had to take a robust view of interior decoration when you had seen your walls spattered with your own blood; you covered the new paint with pictures to remind you of other vistas and other lives. Or you did if you were frivolous, she told herself, repeating one of Matthewson’s favourite accusations, echoed by his son. Deeply frivolous, she told him. Dedicated to it; life is far too short to be taken seriously. All those pictures on the walls, though. When she took them down, the place would look as if someone had been round with a machine-gun.

  The dark was soft and damp. Across the narrow stretch of grass, she could see and hear the noise of the road. A figure moved between the shrubs. She wanted to shout a warning. It was dangerous out there. So dangerous there was no longer any point in being afraid. Not for herself anyway. Not any more. She had become fearless ever since all her fears for herself had become transferable into fear for others. She owed Charles Tysall that liberation. He had thrown her a kind of death, but it was he who had died; she was alive.

  ‘William,’ she called. ‘Don’t just stand there. Do something. Come in from the cold.’

  He knew what he would find. Warmth. Pictures and a fire, handsome objects frayed at the edges as if they had all been rescued or recycled rather than purchased new. Always something broken, as if she could never quite preserve anything fragile in its entirety; always something so old it would no longer function without brute force. A lamp that required dismantling to change the bulb; a door with a non-turning handle in pieces; a tap in need of a washer. William was not sure if she failed to notice these things or attempted to mend and repair with such haphazard abandon that the task could never be complete. It was a contrast to all of the many abodes he had ever shared with Isabella; he was not entirely sure he liked it and he knew, with slight satisfaction, that Isabella would hate it. Things should function. Always assemble your tools before you start, he scolded. Make sure you have what you need. Look: it’s easy. Do as I do. Before the patient arrives, I have a tray of equipment ready, sterilized and waiting. You don’t have a single tool that works.

  A foolis
h little lecture, because he did not really want Sarah to be proficient in that way. There was nothing he liked better than fixing things and, in any event, his ability to do so was an essential part of their understated relationship. It was payment in kind for what she offered; so much so that, if there was absolutely nothing for him to do in her house, he felt profoundly disappointed. He owed her rather more than a discount on treatment and the proper instruction on the maintenance of her near-perfect teeth. He owed her stimulus, interest, sexual affection … a number of irreplaceable things that had enriched the latest months of his life. William disliked the sensation of being in debt, and it was one of many reasons why he always had to put his foot in it. Insist on redefining what they had, if not every time, often enough. Especially if there really was absolutely nothing to do to ease him through his first moments of awkwardness.

  ‘You’ve got paint in your hair,’ she said crisply, as soon as she saw him at the door.

  ‘I was painting the waiting room. I’m in excellent painting form. I could do the kitchen in, oh, under an hour … I could—’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘But it needs doing.’

  ‘That’, she said flatly, ‘has nothing to do with anything. Sit down and have a drink, will you please? And take off those gloves.’