Staring At The Light Page 8

  His receptionist, a young Australian female of whom he was secretly afraid, sat at the outside desk engrossed in conversation with Tina and an ancient rep flourishing a fistful of brochures, who had failed to notice in the waste-bin the similar stack of adverts for new hygiene aids deposited there every morning. William hurried by, baring his own teeth in a semblance of a smile, carrying with him the wax mould from the old man’s teeth, making a brief wave with it. There was a humming from the autoclave, which was sterilizing the implements.

  Past the pictures in the corridor, the coffee machine in the immaculate waiting room, the silk flowers, the greenish carpet and the newly painted walls, through the door, past an old, decrepit dental chair he could not move, and down the stairs. Shabbier with each step, full of crap, the detritus of an old surgery, the residue of the last dentist and his father before him, neither of them, like William himself, ever quite able to throw away anything. There were oxygen supplies; there was the heart defibrillator he had never had to use. There was an outdated sterilizer, kettle-sized for small implements and awaiting repair, an old Hoover, ditto. Three cupboards, one with sundry dried and diet foods and the girls’ supply of tea, coffee, sugar, snack soups, which they made down here; another with stocks of crystallized mouth-wash, throatwash, plaster for making moulds, an old chair or two awaiting rescue, a blanket, looking worn in the light from the window leading on to the dim well of the basement. One of these days he would spring-clean in here. William liked making moulds for crowns. He found it restful.

  He picked up a plastic bowl already scored with the remnants of the last mix, half filled it with water from the single cold tap, which dripped into a sink spattered with white. By the sink was the telltale sign of Tina’s unwashed ashtray, also covered in white dust. He shook the powdered plaster into the bowl, small amounts at a time, swirled the water until all the powder was absorbed, stirred it, picked up the brush and quickly painted the plaster mix inside the impression left by the teeth. Such cunning contours they had, teeny little ridges, grooves and dents: the liquid was refined, but not enough to reach them all. He painted again, added more, wandered round, waiting for it to dry, sighed with sheer pleasure.

  There were rows of models on the table: imprints of jaws with three teeth left; distorted jaws; facsimiles of huge mouths and others of adult mouths so small he could barely insert an instrument. He had once felt a vague envy of a veterinary surgeon invited to treat the totally articulated jaw of a rhino. The conversational requirements would be nil and the teeth accessible with a pickaxe handle; the dentist as carpenter. He came here to fiddle and to dream, to quell the dread of the next hello! and because it was archaic, the whole damn thing, far removed from the gleaming refinement upstairs. And also because it was quiet and draughty and full of souvenirs. He could shut the door on it. His own small flatlet was above the surgery. He liked the sense of occupying this extended fragment of a house but, best, he liked the self-contained peace down here.

  Until he heard the feet on the stairs and Tina, yelling out of more than a need for attention, her shoes clattering on wood, her face flushed. ‘Jeez,’ she said. ‘Disgusting. Get outta here.’

  He didn’t know if she meant the room or the situation downstairs. ‘Got some bloke needs a hospital bleeding all over the furniture … and a friend.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘Hurt.’

  He was a privately paid dentist now, at the front of a big, protective house, only an entryphone to connect him to the street. He did not need to deal with the unruly, the occasional inebriate suddenly aware of pain in his mouth. His duty was to existing patients, not to the rest of the suffering public.

  ‘Your other patient brought him. Sarah.’

  ‘Oh. Bring him through to the back.’

  ‘I can’t stop them, can I?’

  A strange procession came into view at the top of the stairs. The man of the pair sat abruptly in the old dental chair, obviously under the impression that this was the end of the road. He held a folded, blood-soaked tea-towel over his mouth.

  Sarah Fortune was patting his shoulder, beaming anxiously at William. ‘Hallo,’ she said calmly, as if she had not seen him in a while and this was an everyday occurrence. ‘I found this in my office so I thought I’d better bring him here. He won’t let go of me, anyhow.’ The young man was holding the cloth in one hand and using the other to clutch at Sarah’s coat. His face was runnelled with tears. William put his palm to the boy’s forehead. This was still a boy: William regarded thirty as the threshold of the martyrdoms of adulthood and anything below that as boyhood. His hands were ice-cool from the plaster; the skin of the boy’s forehead searingly hot.

  ‘He’ll only say that he collided with a tree,’ Sarah said helpfully and incredulously. ‘Maybe a lovers’ tiff. And he won’t go to hospital.’

  Gently, William prised away the tea-cloth. It was decorated with yellow roses, now red. He murmured to the young man as if he were a child, ‘There there, there there,’ thinking, as he uncovered the teeth and curled back the blood-filled lower lip, to see the cut, that this was exactly the playground injury he might have expected to see in a child who had run hard and crashed into a wall; the sort of injury incurred when there was no time to flinch and exactly the kind his three-year-old patient might acquire soon.

  ‘Accident and emergency,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Neuuuuugh!’ The boy began to thrash in the chair, turning his head back and forth, pulling on the coat he still held in his hand. At least he hadn’t broken his jaw: it was only teeth and shock. Only.

  They moved him to the surgery proper. William noticed the filthy mark of a bloody palm on the fresh paint of the walls en route. He sighed. ‘What’s his name? What does he do?’

  ‘Andrew. Not the most promising lawyer. Brawler, by the looks of things.’ She smoothed the lank hair away from Andrew’s forehead, smiled at him reassuringly, the smile negating the lack of compliment in the softly spoken words. She doesn’t even like him, William thought. Why doesn’t she ever walk away?

  ‘Look in his wallet. Any prescriptions, notes about medication, stuff like that?’

  ‘Nope. Mid-twenties, belongs to a squash club. Fit as a flea. Gay. If you do the wrong thing, I’ll make sure he doesn’t sue you.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  Don’t pass the needle over the face. This one needed restraint, he did not belong here – and when William tried to get inside that mouth the boy vomited. One of those. Make him comfortable; sedate him; calm him. That will be all for now. A lot of fresh blood on the shirt … How had she got him here without stopping the traffic? He felt a guilty relief that he was still wearing gloves. He also felt a brief surge of irritation against Sarah Fortune – her, outside, making arrangements on his phone, doing it again. Creating mayhem. Bringing the unpredictable off the streets and into his life. How did she do it? Why? What had he done to deserve it, with his quiet life? The boy’s eyes were wide with fright. William touched him gently. There, there, there.

  William Dalrymple was afraid of the dentist himself. It gave him a terrible empathy, and There, there, there, was all he could ever say.

  It was eleven in the morning. Sarah should be elsewhere, profitably – or at least accountably – employed. She did not want to think about what frightened version of the truth she had been told. Don’t tell anyone, don’t tell, I’ll lose my job … please. If he did not tell her more, she was not going to insist as a condition of helping him. Help was not a conditional thing. She did not need to know which frustrated loner had punched Andrew in the mouth. It did not matter.

  Sarah walked with the speed of a racer, crossing Oxford Street and diving into Bond Street, tripping past shops in her low-heeled shoes, not pausing to stare. Reaching the far end of galleries, arcades of pictures, thinking of Andrew and her own alibi. Outwardly cool, almost languid. She had to account for this time. Staring into windows, Agnew Galleries, Bond Street galleries. There was something alien and arrogant about
the galleries in Bond Street and St James’s, which defied the casual visitor to enter. Even from the outside evidence of heavy glass doors, security systems refined into elegance, the absence of prices, the hushed, church-like atmosphere, they seemed designed to intimidate all but the initiated, while inside there would be the supercilious glance of some slender gallery girl, designed to repel the provincial plod who did not belong. She could see herself wiping her shoes on the doormat as a preliminary to flight: this was not where she could come to shop for art. On the way back, she paused in front of a sober display of old-master flower paintings, glowing with priceless splendour, and thought she would prefer the flowers themselves. Why does it have to be art, Ernest? Why can’t we collect plants? Or rare vegetables?

  There was nothing in these streets of excellence that she wanted, and nothing she wanted anyone else to want. She had once thought there were things she needed in environs such as these, in the days when she had yearned for the beautiful clothes and the intoxicating power of money, just as Andrew Mitchum did now, so she should empathize, and she did. But there are no short-cuts, Andrew, there never are; and it’s never enough, don’t you know yet? John Smith can buy what he wants, and what has it done for him? Will you please look at the clients, Andrew, before you want what you think they have?

  By the time she was half-way back to William’s surgery, the swift walk had accelerated and the mind had gone back into overdrive. Poor little boy. Juddering and weeping in her room that morning, spitting out words, exhorting her to secrecy about nothing. Well, she excelled at secrecy. He was safe in that regard, and so, she thought with guilty relief, was Cannon.

  There was a dress in a window, on a single elegantly stately mannequin. High neck, closefitting sleeves, a moulded sheath of scarlet wool crêpe with a broad belt in the same colour. She stopped and stared. Gorgeous: dramatic, striking. Now that would perk up Master Ralph in the high-court gloom. She was almost in there, tearing it off the model to try it on, until she saw the reflection of her hair in the glass. Some women could get away with a mix of auburn and scarlet but she was probably not one of them. She moved on, thinking that she had left her yearning fingerprints and the slight blur from her nose on the window, and that it did indeed help to be frivolous. Better to be haunted by a dress than by blood.

  When she returned, Andrew was in the back, dozing on the old dental chair, cleaner than he had been and supplied with one of William’s shirts, she noticed, with a flush of gratitude. National Health practice had made William difficult to surprise. The door to the surgery was closed; she could hear the drill. With a vacant grin that merely suggested forbearance, the receptionist saw them off the premises to a taxi. Not much I could do, said William’s note, except stabilize his condition. When is someone going to do that for you? Explanations, please, in unmarked envelope to my address.

  When she had delivered Andrew into the arms of his flatmate with a sheaf of prescriptions and instructions, she went back to work, armed with a set of spurious excuses for his absence (road accident) just as he had requested, plus another set for her own. She took the stairs two at a time, feeling only vaguely guilty about all the lies, thinking that the note she had left for William was a shade inadequate. Thank you, dear. That’s your good deed for the day. Now you can be horrible to Isabella.

  Isabella did not simply enter the surgery, she floated in like a dream, a star demanding modest acknowledgement, flashing a smile that was supposed to make them faint, and had roughly the desired effect. They became like hotel staff with a celebrity, Let me take your coat, madam, please, the faithful greeting a guru of no known faith. Her entrance was, in all senses, ridiculous, but charming since she never could or would forget a name. ‘Hallo, Tina, how nice you look. What a lovely day outside.’ Her musical voice flowed on with a stream of social burble punctuated by sallies of laughter. There was a cry of indignation when she saw the colour of the walls, but remarks on any changes over the last two months were not criticism as such, simply an implication of sartorial superiority. William’s estranged wife always told them where she had come from, where she was going next, enveloped the girls in an infective intimacy that seemed to subsist between visits, until William appeared. In that few minutes’ interval, she would have asked about his welfare, shared a sweet little joke or two at his expense, united them against him, made them wonder how he could live without her shrewd beauty, shake their heads at the very idea of this failed marriage, which could never have been, by any stretch of the imagination, the fault of Isabella. Nothing was ever Isabella’s fault, and yet he could not prevent that treacherous leap of heart when he saw her, or that racing-pulse guilt, which was related to nothing he could define. Not jealousy and no longer quite the same as desire, but a feeling of powerlessness all the same. She reduced him to a state of juvenile dependency; he became a person, suddenly, with no real will of his own. A look from her had always been able to dictate his mood. Isabella had made him what he was, driven him on with a whip, revealed him as inadequate and dull. She was the princess: he the lucky courtier.

  These kind of nerves, subtly different from any other kind, made him falsely jovial, shouting an avuncular hello!, accompanying it with a swift peck on the cheek, just to show how amicable, natural, friendly and civilized a relationship with one’s ex-wife could be, three years down the line; everything still hunkydory and bitterness a dirty word. Never a mention of how she had rendered him so completely … impotent, then and now; the very smell of her enough to make him shrivel with the shame of failure. At least she knew he was a good dentist; everyone said so.

  He led her round the corner to the chair; she settled herself with the ease of familiarity and laced her fingers together over her flat stomach, her legs crossed at the ankle, while she winked at Tina to her left. William adjusted his mask, reached the light to the right angle.

  ‘Do you have to wear that thing, darling? I’m not infectious, you know.’

  ‘Of course not, but I might be.’ He laughed immoderately.

  Tina looked at him strangely. ‘Do you need me?’

  ‘No.’ She left the room, slightly miffed. William hummed as he began to examine Isabella’s teeth. It was the one point in time when the balance of power was reversed and he could feel this perverse, guilty enjoyment. In this context alone, she trusted him: she had given herself no choice and, in this moment, all her vanity was revealed. Her eyes stared upwards vacantly, the interlaced fingers were more tightly interwoven and one foot moved slightly, as if remembering a long-forgotten dance. He could see the lines around the eyes and the mouth, wonder at which stage in her life she would try plastic surgery. She wouldn’t, because it hurt and because Isabella’s mirror would always be allowed to tell her lies. She would not accept age: she would simply fail to see it. And on the back of that stray thought came another vexed question to self: How on earth could he be, or ever have been, in the control of a woman so utterly self-obsessed that she would deny any inconvenient fact? She could eradicate knowledge like killing weeds. She was superb for the lack of any self-critical faculty. She was monstrously stupid and he was still in awe of her.

  ‘All right?’

  A crinkling of the eyes and a very slight nod, managing even now that shade of amused contempt.

  I could really hurt you, William thought grimly. I could say there were caries in this back tooth, inject you not near the nerve but into it; make you scream. Go through a vein, give you a lovely haematoma; invent a treatment; take out a tooth, try to leave half behind, abscess, swelling, pain and more pain. He could not have done it any more than he could have hit her. What he was doing was probably worse.

  ‘We did X-rays last time, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said shortly.

  ‘And everything’s fine, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Do the gums ever bleed?’

  ‘My gums? Bleed? Whatever for?’

  They bled when he probed. Deep pockets rou
nd the upper palatal and lower lingual teeth, more than six millimetres, significant recession of the bone at the back. To admit to bleeding would be an admission of imperfection, another inconvenient fact: she would not believe the significance. The whitest teeth are not necessarily the strongest. She had teeth that gleamed white in her professionally bleached smile, her care going into what showed; the rest, to use a non-dental phrase, grimy, especially the distal and mesial surfaces. There was more time spent on the care of the face. He remembered the rigorous beauty routines before bed. Perfection was hard to achieve: there were priorities.

  Just you wait, William told himself. Just you wait.

  She could not be less than perfect and she would always be so stupid … and yet the profile, turned to him in a practised way, moved him unbearably. Vanity and ambition made her so vulnerable; criticism, however phrased, would make her shrill, and even the most conservative of constructive suggestions about any aspect of her appearance would make her flush with fury. You must clean your teeth rigorously would make her feel a slut. You have subacute periodontal disease and, while plaque may be simply a feature of the mouth, to you it is fatal would sound like yet another lecture. Why say it? She would not hear it. There was little joy in this dereliction of duty, although it also gave him a slight satisfaction.

  ‘Issy, there’s something …’ He stopped, arrested by her expectant stare, her constant, amused waiting for the dreaded moment of some personal revelation, some statement of continued desire. He realized, as his voice trailed away, that he was standing with his feet turned inward, hands clasped, body bent into an anxious and graceless stance, reminiscent of himself at five years old, the little boy again, making a desperate plea for the lavatory.

  ‘Yes?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Must go, darling. Lovely to see you.’