Staring At The Light (34 page)

‘I’m doing all this,’ Cannon said, ‘and then I suppose I’ll wish I had something of him left. Something to remember him by.’

She was very quiet. It was a knack to know when he wanted her to be quiet and when he wanted the intervention of speech. She
was grateful for the lassitude. It made her slow and diplomatic. If in doubt say nothing, or go to sleep.

‘I should go and see Sarah.’

‘Not yet, lovely. You saved her, you know. You don’t
have
to go. Not yet. Besides, I went. I told you I went. I went for both of us. She’s fine, she’s moving house. You went to see
William, I went to see Sarah. I told you she sent her love.’

‘Love? Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘We’ll get her and William to visit when we settle,’ he announced.

‘Yes, yes. Of course we shall.’

Crossing her fingers and saying to herself,
Of course we shan’t. We begin
here.
We begin as if we really began
here,
at this point in our lives
. Our friendships are going to depend on exactly what we create from
now
onwards. Our lives are going to exclude
anyone
and
everyone
who knew us before now.
Every single one
. Clean slate, fresh set of canvases. She wanted the stink of white spirit, ink and oil, and the smell of his righteous rage
when the work was not going right. She would sneak inside his studio and preserve what he did. Someone must. She loved him.
If he went back to prison, it would surely not be for long and the
child would tie him to her. She had earned her spurs. Who would believe the fat man?

He crossed to the window, looked down, cigarette burning with its comforting drift of smoke. She would always see him thus,
free of grief for a moment, letting the laughter light his face, smiling into the dark as she heard the warmth surge into
the radiators with a teeny
click, whoomph
. He began to close the enormous sash window and shut out the dark, looking down as he did so at that stupid silver eagle
caught in the tree, clutching at the branches like a last survivor against the stiffening wind.

‘The lawyers want me to help organize their art collection, did I tell you? Strange people, they are. At least half human.’

‘Come inside,’ she said, ‘you’ll get cold. And don’t worry about the charges. It’ll come to nothing. You’ve the best legal
help. Andrew Whatsit and Matthew-something. The best.’

‘I’d rather Sarah.’

‘She’s a witness, lovey. She can’t do both. And … well, she wasn’t the best lawyer, was she? An amateur compared to these.
They’re the
real
experts.’

The wind shook the branches and the silver eagle crashed to earth with all the aplomb of a sparrow. They watched it land on
the barren January grass, alongside the painting of the mouth.

‘Got a message from William. He says come and see him. You’ve got to take special care of your teeth when you’re having a
baby. So I said you’d go, all right?’

No. No-one who knew us in another life is going to
know us now
. He would not believe it, but that was exactly what was going to happen. She had absolutely no doubt about it. There were
other dentists.

But there was only one husband, who would never know how much he was loved, and only one baby. She would do anything to preserve
them from the past. There was only the future.

‘Perhaps I wouldn’t mind so much if I hadn’t just painted it,’ William quipped to the patient, a man who expressed only the
mildest curiosity concerning the changed décor of the premises of his dental surgeon. The patient accepted without demur the
explanation of a minor gas explosion of a purely domestic nature, ignoring any coincidence between this and a story he might
have read in a newspaper, because it suited him to do so. The dentist’s problems were peripheral to his own toothache and
quiet dread of the drill. Conversation was not what he wanted. William could answer questions about the changed state of his
rooms quite casually once he had decided that a minor gas explosion was really what everyone wanted it to be, marvelling at
the speed of the repairs and blessing his insurance company. There was only the memory of blood on the floor, and the consequent
need for the place to be reconsecrated, as if it were a church.

Cannon’s bomb had avoided the essentials, a straight line of damage removing the window, making the hole in the floor, then
leaving the souvenir fires, which did the greatest harm. A decorative disaster. William was surprised to find that he did
not mourn the destruction
of the pictures in the way he had always imagined he might when he visualized theft or vandalism. Perhaps possessions really
did not matter; perhaps the life in the lost paintings, even Cannon’s piece of beauty, were pieces of borrowed life and never
owned by anyone at all. The bareness of the walls was an excuse to start again, take a different direction; think anew. The
drawing of his hands still occupied the prime position opposite the chair. He hated it there: it was a reminder of what he
had done, and that was why it would remain.

Nightmares jumbled into long, weird narratives and recriminations. What
else
could he have done? The girl-child with the missing teeth, the boy with the amalgam stuck in his lungs frolicked into his
dreams along with John Smith, smiling with an empty mouth, and Sarah, who had never told him anything. If
only
she had told him about Cannon’s twin none of this would have happened. But, then, why should she infect him with dangerous
knowledge? Guilt was so much worse when there was no-one to blame.

‘Right, all finished. Don’t eat anything hot or solid for the rest of the day.’ The patient scuttled away; a face forgotten.

He was trying to remember if he had actually received a message from Sarah not to contact her, or whether it had simply been
a friendly directive from a police officer that it was better they should not for fear of each contaminating the story of
the other, he supposed. No collusion. The yearning to see her, numbed in the beginning by the appalling knowledge of the exquisite
pain he had caused, however careful
he had been in its infliction, grew in intensity, not only every day but every minute of every day. Seeing Pauline had been
a pale substitute.

There was so
much
requiring explanation, irking him, the relevant nudging at the irrelevant, elusive memory getting in the way. Such as Cannon’s
Diconal murmurs. Remembering the day he had asked conversationally in a line of chat during that one-minute interval between
the needle in the arm and the onset of oblivion, not really expecting a reply,
Do you have any children, Mr Smith
?

The ramblings that had followed in his sleep.
No kids, not yet. Tried for a year. Think I’m firing blanks
. William thought of Cannon with intense affection and not a little envy, tinged with regret for a bizarre friendship suspended
into a dim, fading promise.

He sat in the reception room on one of two borrowed chairs, looking at the fresh plaster of the walls waiting for paint. God
was good all the same, Pauline had said. If Cannon had not known there was a beloved child on the way, he might have died
of grief for Johnnyboy. He quite understood that Cannon would not come back.

A patient had cancelled. The afternoon was young, the decorators due tomorrow, and he was profoundly tired. He was never going
to bother locking his doors again; there was no point. He would open his practice to the street.

Isabella crossed the room, heels loud on the paper temporarily covering the floor, sat next to him, waiting
with the impatience of one arriving for an appointment promised twice, postponed and now arrived. She had been sympathetic
to an annotated version of his disasters learned from a headline, which had been swallowed the next day by a greater headline
about a different kind of bomb in the City and a suspected resurgence of Islamic terrorism, William’s face and his name easily
forgotten. He had refused offers of solace and help, but now, finally, here she was, looking at the bare walls like a person
hungry to weave a spell on it with wallpaper and swagged curtains to cover the cracks, beautifully, informally dressed, not
quite in command of her agitation, but trying. They did not even greet one another.

She came straight to the point. ‘William, you look awful. You need someone to take care of you. I told you I was wrong about
everything. Can I come back?
Please
.’

Visions of a comfortable nest, food on the table, sofas long enough for lounging. A flat somewhere replete with tasteful design.
Wonderful coffee in the morning, beef cooked to perfection, Sunday lunches with friends. Clean sheets, no domestic decisions;
the hum of an efficient washing-machine, fine china and fragrant flowers. A dozen irritating tasks per day, supermarket included,
abdicated to her efficiency. An organized life. Always a sufficiency of bread, eggs, milk; the daily newspaper of choice.

A brittle body to hold in bed. Magazines, not books. No pictures; no nakedness as they grow older. Conversation of
absolutely mind-numbing banality
.

‘Have your gums been bleeding?’

She gasped, looked on the verge of outrage, then lowered her fine eyes to the hands clasped in her lap. ‘Yes. Nothing odd
about that, is there? I mean, what has it got to do with—?’

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘You must go to a dentist as soon as you can.’

‘
William
! Did you hear me? I want to come back. I’ve been so unhappy … I know I could make you happy. I did before, didn’t I?’

There was no answer to that. Except to say,
yes
, you did, and
no
, you didn’t. She would cling to the power he had given her. Given her willingly, foolishly, completely, so that he could
not even blame her for wielding it. Or failing to believe it had ended. It was never a question of her releasing him from
the spell; it was he who had to dispel his own illusions.

‘You can’t come back,’ he said loudly. ‘Because I love someone else. I’ve loved her for a long time.’

There was a new kind of silence after Isabella had left and he remained where he was, sitting in the chair and looking at
the empty wall. Not crossing to the window to watch her go across the street. A free, uncluttered silence, as if there was
one less thing buzzing round in his head and the traffic outside had ceased out of sheer respect for his sudden clarity of
mind. All he could feel was relief. At least now he knew, and even if the knowledge came too late, it was still of a joyful
kind. He closed his eyes, and thought briefly of what colour he should have for the walls. Remembered he had chosen
the total anonymity of white and thought, I can do better than that. The outer door creaked again. Someone stood by the desk,
just out of sight. He thought, with mild frustration, She’s come back … I’ll have to say it all again. Leave me alone. He
squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his fists, felt tired.

‘Mr Dalrymple? You haven’t changed. Remember us?’

He opened his eyes. A trio. One large mother and two golden teenagers, all smiling as if posed for a camera.

‘Mr Dalrymple … we’ve been looking for you for years. Moved away, you know how it is? Couldn’t find you, lost your card. Then
I saw your name in the paper, and thought,
There
he is. So I brought them back to re-enlist. You remember my children, don’t you? Are you all right, Mr Dalrymple?’

The girl, flashing fine symmetrical teeth, no gaps, her face as pretty as her early promise had suggested; the boy, bored,
tall, healthy, with the build of an athlete and cheeks like rosy apples, looking like a youth who might have accidents, but
never illnesses.

‘Never had a single problem since you sorted them out,’ the mother said proudly, as if this was solely his achievement and
nothing to do with their inheritance. ‘So we came back.’

I took out the
right
teeth for that pretty little girl. If that boy Adrian had ever swallowed amalgam, it did not hurt him.

He recognized a moment of profound happiness, which was similar to standing under a hot shower and
sluicing off the stickiness of the day. He struggled to his feet, hand outstretched with not a tremor in it. ‘I’m very pleased
to see you. Of course I remember you. Very well indeed. Shall we make an appointment?’

The second dentist, a professor organized by the investigators, had told her that there would be no long-term damage. He must
be a man with steady hands, he told her, able to think as he worked; an excellent and creative surgeon. Sarah tried to distract
herself with the reflection that this was the only time she would be examined by a professor without paying for it. Holes
in bones are nothing more than holes in bones; they heal, he said. Everything in the mouth heals, even with infection, and
you have none of that. Tell me, what did he use? How long did this
procedure
take? Purely scientific interest, you understand. What happened to you is of far less importance than
how
it was done.

That was the way it was: they all had the mindset of engineers exploring either a problem or the history of it. She found
it difficult to be pleased that someone so admired dear William’s skill. Then, with the looming of the terrible empty week
between Christmas and New Year, a time when in previous years she would have lain deliciously low with a crate of wine, she
hated his skill; forgot she had encouraged him to use it; forgot she had, in one sense, volunteered, and that
yes
, she had understood what he was doing and why, forgot everything but dull, residual pain, a sense of violation, night sweats
and nightmares. The
knowledge of being nothing but an
it
. A piece of flesh vandalized for a purpose. She had hated him then.

When the second dentist asked her to open her mouth, she could not do it at first. Whimpered and refused, her tongue pushing
at clenched teeth. The touch of his instruments and the closeness of his scrutiny were little kisses of horror. Even his hand,
powerful, broad and dry, shaking her own on leaving, had felt like a claw. Better the devil you know, with hands like a pianist.