Could it?
I paced to the window and back. Karen looked at her watch, then at me. She raised her eyebrows.
'I'll take her home,' I said.
'Can I go to the toilet?' Viola asked. I was repelled by her silly tone, furious. We waited while she used the lavatory. She came out. She had redone her makeup. I saw Karen coldly noting this. Viola grinned cheerfully and said, 'Right then.'
I saw Karen's angry face at the window as we walked down the drive.
I asked for Viola's address and drove there. I waited for her to get out but she stared at her hands and said, 'When your father was talking about you he said, "I bet my son doesn't like trouble. I bet he likes everything nice and polite, but I'm trouble and you've walked into it." That was when I got frightened.'
I laughed angrily. 'Now who's got trouble,' I said.
'He said, "I bet no one at his work knows about me. What can you and I do about that?" '
I remembered something. When he was being marched past he pushed back his hair with his fingers. A nervous gesture, despairing. I have the same thick black hair. I have the same mannerism. It steadies my hands.
'I feel sorry for him,' she said in a treacly voice.
I was afraid then. She'd invaded my life at its most painful centre. She'd been let loose in it.
I reached across, pushed open the door and told her to go.
I drove home.
Karen and I went to bed and lay close together, talking for a long time.
***
My secretary helped us move Viola on to another job. The police charged my father with indecent assault. Indecent? A single kiss is enough, the senior sergeant told me. It was a way of getting him out of the taxis. He promised to make sure Viola fronted up at court as a witness. As far as I know, she kept the whole thing secret. She never told a soul.
I only heard from her again once. A few months after my father was banned from the cabs, just before he took too many pills one night and died, Viola rang me at home. We had guests for dinner. I took the phone out of the room. I controlled my trembling hands. She sounded as if she'd nerved herself up. She said, 'You could look back on this, after a long time . . .'
I wanted to shout at her, I have a life. A whole life. And you . . .
She was still talking. I cut her off. 'You've got a lifetime of opportunities ahead of you,' I said.
'Opportunity?' she said. 'That's what I meant. You could ask, that night, who wanted what from whom?'
I started to walk back towards the dining room.
'I can't talk to you,' I said.
plane sailing
Plane sailing: The art of determining a ship's position on the theory that she is moving on a plane.
I gave my baby the middle name Max after his father. He already has a son called Max. Max junior. My son is Matthew Max Grace. He never sleeps.
Well, he does sleep, but in restless snatches. He tosses and turns and makes loud snuffling noises, then wakes with a loud wail. He has never slept through a whole night. People warned me about this. They said it would be hard bringing up a child on my own. They urged me to consider it carefully. They must have been mad if they thought I wouldn't do it.
When I first took Matthew home from hospital I had to go to the supermarket, and I went to pieces in the aisles. I wanted to hang on to a shelf, crying. I thought I would fall, that the floor was lurching under my feet. I got through it. I made it home with my shopping, then I stayed in the house for two days, recovering. I've always been independent, reasonably cool under fire. Interesting to find that a trip to the supermarket could be harrowing, terrifying, defeating.
A month later, when I was walking along Upland Road pushing Matthew in his pram, I saw a ship in the sky over Mt Hobson. It was three-masted, gold, with glittering rigging, like a picture in a child's storybook. It hung in the air, sails rippling, banners flying, and the air around it glowed, pearly white. I watched it sail over the edge of the mountain, disappearing into the blue distance, the shimmer of the sky.
I went for a check-up with the obstetrician, Dr Lampton. I didn't tell him about the ship specifically, but I mentioned that I'd had very little sleep. I said something about the edges of reality getting a bit blurred. He gave me a long, cool, assessing look. Then he asked me some careful questions about my mood.
'I'm happy,' I told him. And it was true.
When I think back to how it was before . . . I was in love with Max but he had a wife and two sons, Max junior and Charles, and a big house, and a settled family life, and although I knew this when I began having an affair with him, I still hoped that he would leave it all for me. He wasn't getting on well with his wife. He suspected she was seeing someone — there was a man hanging round, and he was hurt by this, although he said, 'Of course I don't find her sexually attractive any more.' He was tall, handsome, elegant, beautifully dressed; he had a habit that I found irresistible of coming out with shocking statements in his patrician King's School drawl, and I longed to take him to my stolid, timid mother's house in Penrose, just so he could horrify her with some dreadful, languid dismissal: 'What a bastard so-and-so is, just a bastard.'
He smoked cigarettes, and though I begged him not to (I'm a dentist — 'You don't want to get oral cancer, darling,' I said) I found this habit endearing too, his fierce disregard for niceties and pieties, his refusal to care what other people thought.
I liked being seen out with him; even, I'm ashamed to say, liked the throbbing, ostentatious racket of his Porsche Turbo. We'd been an ordinary, middle-income family — my father was a clerk, my mother worked in a shop — and I was excited by Max's wealth and glamour. It wasn't that I was materialistic. It was just that he was rather . . . sensational. I loved him. I suppose I always will. I can't say it without tears. I go into Matthew's bedroom and look down at his face. His eyes move while he sleeps. Sometimes he half opens them and looks from side to side, wildly, under his lids, like a crazy little animal. He gnashes furiously on his dummy, plugged in to his dreams.
I was so in love with Max that I spied on his family. It was summer. They lounged out by the pool. I could hear the boys shouting and fighting. I watched Max's wife cooking dinner. I'd go cold at work the next day, imagining the embarrassment if I'd been caught. But still I'd end up driving towards his house. One night he rang my mobile when I was two houses down from his. He wanted to come to my place. I had to race to my car and drive home before he got there. When we were in bed a bit later I kept laughing. He said primly that I sounded hysterical. Then he propped his head on his hand and told me he'd been talking to his wife. He was going to rent a townhouse. They'd agreed to separate.
I hid a rush of tears. I chattered excitedly. What about? I suppose — how pathetic — I started making plans. He left, moody and preoccupied. I was full of hot sympathy. I glowed. Poor Max, how hard it would be for him, starting all over again. I wondered what would be a decent period of time before I could move into the townhouse too. I saw myself being kind, nobly considerate, when his poor wife came to drop off the boys . . .
Soon after he'd moved to his new place, I got tired of waiting for him to call. I went there. He'd been ironing his shirts. He threw himself down on the bed, tired, surly, unwelcoming. He gestured at the ironing, 'Want to do them for me?'
I hesitated. I said I would. He watched me from the bed, his expression cold and mocking; he was forcing me into a parody of what he knew I wanted: domestic bliss. I was upset, chilled. Later I rang him. Then the tears, recriminations. His coldness. Did I — I cringe to think of it now — did I appeal, plead? He turned evasive, hanging up, leaving his phone off the hook. There were a few more unsatisfactory meetings until he finally came clean. He said he had met someone new. He was seeing someone else.
After he told me I walked home to my flat. There's a kind of horror in finding out you're not loved. Imagine discovering that someone you love wants to kill you. It feels like that, doesn't it, the end of an affair? He doesn't care if he never sees
you again, doesn't care if you live or die. I remember how the world turned, in an instant, into a dark, pitiless place. I discovered that I minded living by myself. I heard noises in the night and was afraid.
During my check-up, when I told Dr Lampton I was happy, I was remembering the moment when I realised I was pregnant. To be left alone, grieving, and then to find there was something that wasn't lost! Everything broken, in pieces, and then I discovered . . . Oh my child, my treasure. Out of the ruins. I say these ridiculous, half-joking things to myself, out of happiness. My treasure, my precious jewel.
Okay, his father was a bastard, but he was a classy one. I'm sure my son will be devilishly handsome.
***
When Matthew was seven months old I needed money to pay the mortgage, and I didn't want to lose my place in the city dental practice, which had been filled until then by a locum. My mother was retired, and offered to look after Matthew during the day. He was healthy, thriving, radiant — and nocturnal. The district nurse gave me a book on infant sleep problems. I read: 'Only a tiny percentage of children will not respond to these techniques.' My son (his perverse father's child) belonged to that small, rugged group. He slept slightly longer stretches, that was all. And then the loud wail, the rattling at the bars of the cot, the stunned roll out of bed, the glazed, blundering hours when all options — ignoring, soothing, feeding — were exhausted. Watching the sun come up, sitting on his bedroom floor. Black silhouettes on the ridge of Mt Hobson. A finger of sun moving across the floor.
The nurse told me 'leave him to cry'. My neighbours held out for a fortnight before they began to complain. They went so far as to insinuate that I was ill-treating my boy. How he screamed, left to himself. As though he were being torn away from the world.
At work I took things slowly, stopping often to double-check. What was it I told nice Dr Lampton — that the edges of reality sometimes got a bit blurred? I never lost my grip; it was just that my dreams sometimes entered reality and ran alongside, so that I might see some light, bubbly, surreal thing at the edge of a perfectly prosaic scene and blink, and secretly watch it, as it glided slowly away . . .
People have recurring dreams in which their teeth fall out. They're meant to have a particular meaning, although I've forgotten what for the moment. Anyway, I was the dreamer who pulled out people's teeth. I hope I don't sound cavalier. I believe I was perfectly competent. To try to explain that strange time, my dreamtime: I felt I was living on the junction between two different planes, the sleeping and the waking, and at odd moments I could see into both. I kept all this to myself. God. Of course I did.
It was summer again, long hot days, the city emptier than usual. It was a good time to go back to work, there was a relaxed, holiday mood among the secretaries and hygienists, who gathered at the front desk to chatter about their sunburn and their boyfriends; the upstairs consulting rooms were hot in the afternoons as the sun angled in, and I got away as soon as I could after work so I could take Matthew and my mother to the waterfront for a late swim. At the beach I relaxed, and the afternoon turned drowsily, pleasantly incoherent. My mother eating an icecream. My son's hands patting the surface of the water. The dazzle off the sea. Sounds muted in the mellow air, cloud shadows on Rangitoto Island.
One day at midday, storm clouds moved over the city. There was something bruised and greenish about the sunlight before it dimmed and disappeared. The dark was surprising. It was hot. The secretaries had been whispering about the next patient I was to see: Scott Roysmith, the newsreader. Our practice was near the TV studio, and we saw a lot of their staff, but Roysmith hadn't been in before.
For a moment that morning, I'd been surprised he'd booked himself in with me. Why surprised? Because I gave him such a terrible time every night. I was irritated by his mannerisms. Watching the TV news I'd often startled Matthew by giving Roysmith strident tellings-off. He was obviously clever but there was something naïve about him. He could be perky or melodramatically pompous; most often he was excessively cosy and cute. Yes, cute. He had a combination of blink and smile that said: What an ingratiating chap I am; I am unassailable in my charm. His flirting, his over-egging, was unnecessary. Stop hamming it up, I wanted to tell him. Please, play it straight!
Night after night I'd snapped and nagged at Roysmith, and now here he came, bounding up the stairs, full of beans, open-faced, holding out his hand to shake mine.
'Goodness me! The sky's looking peculiar! Great to meet you,' he said, or 'exclaimed'. His hair bristled with the humidity. I felt a little snag of sympathy for him. His hair was over-large; it sat on top of his head like a brown turban. Beneath it, the bridge of his teeth was too narrow for his mouth. He glanced away, smiling. His hand was slightly damp. Probably he hated seeing the dentist.
I invited him to sit. 'What can we do for you today?'
He settled himself, made some adjustment of his face before he answered. He held the edges of the armchair. How strange it must be to have been previewed, to be reviewed, by the people you meet. I saw myself two nights ago, hurling a cushion at his face.
He said in his soft drawl, 'I've had a woonderful chap I've always gone to.'
I looked at the form he'd filled in. 'Yes. Mr Dumbleton.'
'He's over Ponsonby way. Do you know him? Dentist . . . artist, fisherman, raconteur. Just a great bloke. We got on like a hoouuse on fire, for yeeeears.'
I nodded. He shifted on his seat, leaned forward. 'But he's had enough. He wants to retire. He's going to write novels. Marvellous! And I thought, Bugger. I'll have to find myself another dentist!'
I thought, because of his job, he thinks I think I know him. So he doesn't try to break the ice; instead he tries to 'be himself ', so that I will 'recognise' him.
'Do you have a particular problem?' I asked.
'Well, I've got a bit of a dodgy old tooth back there. I think I might have a hole. Two, actually.'
'How long have you being seeing Dumbleton — Mr Dumbleton?'
'Six years.'
I glanced at Rowan, my assistant. I hoped Bryce Dumbleton's novels were better than his dentistry.
I explained what I would do: examination, X-rays and so on.
'Goodness gracious me, it's humid!' he said. The sky had got darker. There was a rumble of thunder, the air crumpling. Rowan, a tall, slim Indian woman, came forward to prepare him.
'Lovely to meet you,' he said. I caught her flustered little tremor of nervousness — his fame — also his look of faint humiliation as he was pushed back, swathed, cranked to horizontal in the chair. Patients, feeling helpless, stare at Rowan's beautiful hands, at her pretty necklace, as if everything very near has become intensely important. When I lean over them they close their eyes, open them, laugh, look around for Rowan, but she has gone, withdrawing silently behind the screen, where she sits at her computer, ready to appear when I need her.
I adjusted him, and the light. I looked in. There was a lot of plaque — so much so that his gums had receded in places. He had a couple of other issues, things that should have been taken care of earlier. (What a hack that Dumbleton was.) I told him I would take X-rays. I leaned over him, my arm around the head that appeared every night in my sitting room. I said, 'Open, wider, now bite gently down,' and the mouth that was so familiar with its jawing and joking bit down, and opened, and I shone my light in there, picked, probed, scraped, prepared him for another X-ray, and the sky outside seemed to swell in the square of window and become astonishingly black. There was a boom of thunder, abrupt, close, and he started, his head against my arm, and laughed, and tried to say something, 'Goodness . . .' and I said, dreamily, holding him steady, my eye on that glossy black square of glass, 'Don't.'
'Ug?' he asked. I had his jaw clamped between my fingers.
'Don't say anything.'
He looked at me.
'Just now,' I added, holding him.
He nodded. Co-operative.
'Less is more,' I murmured.
His eyes flicked up. Rolled
around. He wrinkled his nose.
Lightning flashed. There was another roll of thunder. We watched the rain, light at first, then big heavy drops, hissing past the window. I thought, how I love the rain, the warm, blind, melancholy.
He tried to speak again. 'No,' I said. I held him gently for three more seconds. We were very close. Then I let him go.
'What do you mean "less is more"?' He cleared his throat and spoke thickly.
'Oh, I don't know. It's true, though, don't you think?'
He lay back, puzzled but obedient.
'And bite gently down.'
His hair was stiff, spiked up at the front with a hint of widow's peak. He looked like a hedgehog. I smiled. He moved. I held him, let him go.
I said I would give him a quick clean, then we would look at his X-rays on the computer. 'Do you have sensitive teeth?' I asked, turning to my tools.
'Not that I know of,' he said gamely.
The storm had a kind of weight; it seemed to be right over the building: thunder followed lightning in quick succession, paper flew up into the air and whirled around and floated down. From the street below came the mournful swishing and tooting of stop-start cars.
'Auckland rain,' I said, and silenced his reply by inserting my instrument, the one with the most powerful head, into his mouth, and working it along a section of his lower front teeth. He strained away from it, more sensitive than he'd let on. Those neglected gums. I stopped. 'Too rough?' I changed the head. 'Try this.' He nodded and settled against my arm.
I looked down at his face. I did my best not to hurt him, but he flinched and his forehead was sweaty. I mopped it with a paper towel. I let him rinse and spit. Bloody water swirled into the plughole. Thunder cracked, the sound echoing in the deep spaces between the buildings. He put up his hand; his many tiny reflections slid across the rounded silver surfaces of the instruments. I hummed as I worked. Quiet humming, the buzz of the machine. I moved his big, boyish head this way and that. He was calming down. But a corresponding hum started, began high-pitched then droned lower and slower; we looked at each other and heard the machinery dying, the instruments letting out a last whine of exhausted momentum. The device went silent in my hand. The lights flickered, the neon tubes buzzed, and blinked off.
Opportunity Page 9
