Staring At The Light (19 page)

‘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 romantic 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
.