Staring At The Light (5 page)

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 way 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.

‘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 foolish 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.’

He looked down at his own long hands, saw them still encased in surgical gloves, made a strangled sound of agonized embarrassment,
which emerged as a brief yelp. He clawed at the gloves, the wrong, cheaper kind which gave him an allergic reaction even if
they did afford protection. They tore at the palm as he ripped them off and threw them away into the corner, where they lay
curled on the carpet, looking almost alive. She would pick them up tomorrow, maybe.

‘New dress code for travelling the underground, is it?’ she teased him, pressing his hands round the bowl of a glass. There
were faint bubbles in the wine. He stared at them, fascinated. ‘You must have looked a little … odd. Over-fastidious, perhaps.’

The glass was emptied before he spoke. She had an amazing facility for silence: she seemed able to
maintain either that or ceaseless chatter exactly as the mood demanded. Suddenly he felt a whole lot better, found himself
smiling for no other reason than that image of himself, reading a newspaper on the train with those oh-so-obvious, not quite
fleshcoloured rubber gloves, as if the print would contaminate him, and he could not bear the proximity of other kinds of
dirt, humanity included, for that matter. He laughed because it might have been true.

‘Must’ve thought I was the burglar. Ready to avoid fingerprints. Dressed to kill. Or one of those men who goes round poisoning
rats. Something like that. Give me a hug, will you?’

She did. An almost all-encompassing hug, hands scratching the back of his neck the way he liked. They stayed like that for
some time. He could feel the warmth of her enter his bones, struggled against it; failed. He tried to tell himself she was
amoral, feckless, promiscuous, insincere on that account, untidy, dishonest, disloyal, insensitive, unkind, calculating, and
knew, as he recited to himself this litany of adjectives, that he was really thinking of someone else entirely. Applying to
Sarah those angry descriptions that best suited Isabella was hardly fair, although Sarah
was
amoral in a way he never cared to define and certainly untidy. She was also far more than a fair-weather friend, but still
he had to ask.

‘Are you
sure
there’s nothing I can mend? Do you
like
me at all?’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, removing herself from his lap and fetching the wine. ‘You
are
in a bad way.’

‘No worse than usual. Better for seeing you,’ he added, in an attempt at grace. She did not come to the surgery for treatment
these days. She claimed to enjoy the ambience, which flattered him – although he doubted it was true – even though she had
helped to create it. First, there were the additional pictures, which added something to the waiting areas; she inflamed his
existing enthusiasms for collecting and made him bolder in his choices. Then there was the increased flow of patients. Sarah
recommended him to everyone she knew, and Sarah knew a lot of people. Some of them were strange enough to have crawled out
of very peculiar woodwork, but they were still people with teeth. And, one or two of them, people with whom he could empathize
without quite understanding the process. Especially Cannon. Cannon was nicely mad; both he and Cannon had gremlins. How Sarah
had organized an artist and convict into his surgery was another thing he could never quite fathom. Networking. One day his
life had been normal; the next he found himself spirited into a prison to see a patient, then launched into bureaucratic obfuscation
to get the patient treatment. A client in need, she had explained: Do this for me, William,
please
. You’re the only dentist I know who’s treated people like him before. He needs you. She wouldn’t tell him much about Cannon,
pleading professional confidence, but he never minded that. Cannon’s treatment had been a triumph, and William was profoundly
grateful for the pride it gave him. Oh, for another patient like
Cannon. It might be enough to dispel the dreams of inadequacy.

‘Still haunted, are we?’ she asked gently, sitting away from him to light the cigarette, despite his disapproval. (They are
bad
for your teeth, Sarah darling. They inhibit the circulation and retard healing … accelerate periodontal disease …
bad
for you, wanting to say it, but admiring the precise way she smoked.)

‘Yes,’ he said, sighing. ‘I couldn’t bear another night of the same nightmares. But you told me
not
to mention her name.’

She settled onto the floor by his feet and shook her head. ‘Nothing is absolutely forbidden, you know it isn’t. Break me in
gently. Tell me about the other nightmares first.’

Tell me again, she might have said. William’s nightmares were constants, variations on a few themes with different pictures.
They were the result of the pursuit of perfection and an underlying guilty conscience that would not shift, and although the
recitation of the dreams had lessened considerably in the time she had known him, they saddened and irritated her because
William did not deserve such afflictions. No man of such conscientious kindness deserved them, and that was why she listened.
He did not deserve to remain half in love with his shallow bitch of an ex-wife either. That was a private opinion.