Staring At The Light (9 page)

‘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 round 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.’