Staring At The Light

by Fyfield, Frances

  ‘There’s no apartment worth that much,’ she said. The door closed quietly.

  Convenient for my dentist. Certainly the flat would be convenient. Half of her male acquaintance lived within striding distance. There was Mole, a short walk in the other direction; the estate agent, closer; the judge; then Master Ralph of the high court and his service apartment occupied Tuesday through Thursday; one or two more, past and semi-present, a couple of ghosts, but convenience did not dictate the choice, never had, any more than any of the nice men who wanted her near and also wanted her far. Except William. William mattered. William would like it; she and William liked the same things. She wanted to show it to him, tell him how she had fallen in love with that old lady’s chair, the dimensions of the room in which she sat, the things she might have seen and the things she had left. Tell him about how she had forgotten minimalism and about that last tribute to posterity which she had found in the bathroom cupboard when no-one else was looking. The old darling’s dentures, looking for company.

  William found that he took pleasure in the day’s work, as if his fleeting acquaintance with violence the weekend before and the prospect of a stunning new client had acted as a stimulant to energize his eyes and ears, and make him notice things he otherwise ignored. It was the energy of complete distraction; the power, suddenly, to acquire extra vision; he recognized it as mild neurosis. He seemed immune even to irritation. There were dentists of another kind than himself, to whom the human contact was all and the surgery simply a means to it; perhaps he was becoming such a dentist, whose pleasure was all in the kinship with the patient. He was jovial, complimented Tina on a new shade of hair, and then said he preferred the old in case the remark smacked of sexual innuendo, but she seemed to consider any compliment at all a step in the right direction. He wanted to thank her for tidying the glory-hole, something he had noticed mid-morning when he went down there and found it cleaner than he remembered, but instead he debated with her how they should deal with the man in the waiting room who was likely to slide out of the chair at the touch of the needle. It was always the big men who fainted. There had never been a heart-attack yet; the fainters came round; the allergic survived; and this bright morning he was actually noticing the contrast of patients. Miss Mallerson, a busy barrister, flying in to discuss a variety of cosmetic treatment to augment her powerful teeth, demanding grave explanation for the sixth time of the various improving treatments she would never find time to complete. Then the dignified alcoholic restaurateur of uncertain years, as passively proofed against life first thing in the morning as he was late at night, deceptive in his calm, frenetic with misery when anaesthetic, retarded by wine, took longer to work and his raddled face, at the end, looked the same way it had at the start. When Mr John Smith came in for surgery, when, not if, he must ask what he did for a living because it was relevant to the drugs. Was he a boozer? Did he work with tar? Did he smoke?

  He felt like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Do you know why the hatter was mad? he asked Tina. Because of the mercury he used in the making of hats, ha-ha. We don’t use mercury amalgams so much in teeth any more, but they are useful. Californians want them out, you know, quite the worst thing to do, destabilizes the stuff, and it wasn’t the solid form of mercury but the vapour that made the hatter mad. Mid-afternoon, she gazed at him sternly.

  ‘You’d better behave. Say your prayers. There’s a nun in the waiting room. Two of them.’

  The second nun had a severe face and pale blue eyes fit to scan far horizons; the first looked as if she could not speak and required guidance to cross a road. They both sat bolt upright, suspicious of the luxury. The elder admired Cannon’s loaned sketch, enjoying the view of a naked woman stepping out of her bath. The other had turned her back on it.

  ‘Ah,’ said Pauline. ‘Look who’s here, Imelda. The inquisitor’s apprentice.’ She stabbed a finger in the direction of her companion. ‘This one grinds her teeth. What are you going to do about it?’

  Several hours later, when Sarah sat opposite him, he found himself examining her face for familial resemblance to her aunt. It was there, in the brilliant, watchful eyes and the strong chin. Hers, too, might be a gaunt face in her older years. An over-strong face, softened by the cloud of hair. Something had happened to William. Ever since Saturday he had not been able to stop looking at faces. In three days the bruise on his own had faded away to nothing. If Sarah had a child, it would look like her; she should have a child for that reason alone, even if the child looked as she did this evening. Jubilant, secretive, worried.

  ‘I met your aunt,’ he announced. ‘We had an extraordinary conversation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah drily, the dryness hiding the pride, the surprise and the repeated sense of being outmanoeuvred. ‘She’s unique and amazing. Should my ears have been burning?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes. Yes. She’s enormously proud of you.’

  ‘Well, strike me down, Lord. First I knew.’

  He touched her hand, found himself looking at her as if he had never seen her before. Yes, she was definitely worried as well as happy and, in the same way he had been throughout the day, he was talkative to the point of giddiness. Various subjects would remain on the incommunicable list, Cannon’s twin for a start, but how beautiful she was; what a series of colours. Pauline’s eyes had faded with age; those of her niece were intensely blue, full of welcome mischief, and her mouth soft and desirable. If there had not been so much to say, he would simply have sat and stared at her.

  ‘Your aunt refused a free check-up. She said she would save it for her martyrdom.’

  ‘I think I told you before,’ Sarah said, ‘my aunt used to tell me tales of the martyrs. She considered the best way to get children interested in the faith, was blood and guts. Mention of martyrs was probably her opening gambit. She never really stops.’ She sipped her wine. ‘Anyway, you look remarkably cheerful on it. I was worried about you at the weekend. Cannon was shivering in front of my fire when you phoned on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh, was he?’ He had forgotten about that and it was no longer important, that brief moment of jealousy, followed now by a moment of relief. Cannon could linger in Sarah’s house for as long as he liked since he was not a lover, and he did not want to discuss Cannon or have her discuss him either, not when he had such delicate plans for his long-lost brother, although, at the moment, on the third glass of wine, they seemed the stuff of sheer imagination. Cannon and Cannon’s brother: that was his challenge; his only. Besides, the man had not yet made an appointment. The fingerprints on his glass seemed to proliferate.

  Do you like me? Your aunt liked me.

  ‘She asked me to Sunday lunch,’ he said.

  For all of the familiar ease, there was something troubling about this conversation. Sarah could feel all the strings controlling her very secret life becoming entangled. There was Cannon, the loose Cannon, bringing the poisoned chalice of his friendship to William, giving him to guard a golden sketch of a painting that would not gladden William’s heart if he knew either the value or the history. Cannon made people keep secrets: he was a manipulator, bringing the nuns to William’s door, making all these friendships and connections into spider threads, lacing them together in a web, with a predator at the centre, waiting patiently. She felt the same chill of fear she had felt when she had known that John Smith was on the other side of Matthewson’s door; an unaccountable, unquantifiable fear; a kind of toothache.

  Perhaps she should explain; tell the story as she knew it right from the start; tell him how Cannon was the harbinger of bad news unless he was also an absolute liar. Tell him … but telling him would surely dent the shell of his innocence. She had no business sharing her responsibilities; he had not volunteered for that. So she lit the sixth cigarette and watched him watching. Regarded the frank gaze of admiration in his eyes. Almost love. She did not want to relinquish that; not yet, if ever at all. He was quite odd enough for her to love.

  ‘Did you buy anything a
t the exhibition?’ he asked, jumping topics with accustomed ease.

  ‘No.’ Another stab of conscience; a vision of that stolen canvas; a reminder that she could lose that look of liking so easily.

  ‘Nor I,’ William said cheerfully. ‘I didn’t join you, but at least I went. Thought it was a load of rubbish, mainly.’ They were both being evasive and finding it all too easy.

  ‘Any more bad dreams?’

  ‘I think they’re being temporarily displaced by new challenges. Shall we eat? I’ve been talking too much. I don’t listen to you.’

  The bubble of her news had been blown away and no longer seemed as important. ‘I’ve fallen in love,’ she said, watching his face fall, enjoying the expression. ‘With an apartment. The person who lived in it left her dentures behind. Do you think I’ll need them?’

  She looked at him smiling at her, and felt unaccountably lonely. Felt, in the pit of her stomach, the same airtight bubble of despair. Ah, William, I cannot trust you to like me. Nor anyone else either. I must put my trust into bricks and mortar. There was nothing else to trust. And, as if he knew about the slippage of faith, Cannon had not phoned again today.

  Cannon had no illusions about the durability of bricks and cement. A home was not a castle. No Belfast boy growing up in the seventies could ever think that. Stones and wood became fragments, like bones; a home was a flimsy thing, flung down on to the ground out of spite, out of a liking for the insurance money, or for an unscrupulous builder like Daddy to have the chance to put it up again. The bomb was simply another form of blackmail, like a threatening letter, easily deployed.

  Cannon wanted his wife and child to have a home with thick walls and a serious front door to foster the sensation of safety, but he himself had no such illusions of permanence. He knew how soon a building could be destroyed if no-one watched. That rumble of destruction, that cycle of wanton damage and noisy renewal was the music of his childhood. All he really cared about in a room was the quality of light. Or its absence. Whether it had pictures on the walls. Otherwise it would all come to dust. The interior was not important unless it surprised him somehow into noticing, and it had to be beautiful or outstandingly ugly to do that – like the convent or the prison at one extreme, but all the same he liked it here. William’s ambience; the smell of him, perhaps. It was a very strange sensation for Cannon to have friends. He wondered if he would ever quite get used to it. Being around William’s things gave him a quiet, intense pleasure, which was nevertheless tinged with the guilt of trespass. He tried to tell himself that if he had asked William for a billet for this second night, William would have said yes, but he knew that this avoided the issue because he had not asked for fear of a no, and a no would have prejudiced something as precious as it was fragile. Cannon had scant talent for friendship. Johnnyboy had seen to that. When me and Julie have a house, William, will you come and see us? Julie would like you. I like you. Be god-daddy to a baby, will you?

  Besides, he had always liked mess, the stage in the construction of a thing, painting, building, when it was a mess. That was when it was full of promise, long before the disappointment was clear in the vast difference between what was envisaged and what finally emerged. Mess was the thing he liked in here, even though he had tidied a little. William would not notice, surely: the room seemed so little used. William told him so, all that long time ago when he had let Cannon explore. A glory-hole. Dentists are hoarders: they throw away nothing except ideas.

  He felt guiltier, too, watching William go out in the evening dark before he himself got in. Guilty about relying on the fact that, although William had a nice eye for a painting, he was not really an observant man, let alone streetwise. He simply did not expect violation, as Cannon did, all the time. He didn’t see life as a series of booby-traps. There were sets of teeth, mounted on a card, like buttons. He found those in a cupboard, grey with dust. There were the dental moulds on the table, looking as if they kept one another company. Yes, he liked it here. He could sleep in this battered chair, eat his sandwich in peace, drink water from the tap, look around and feel peculiarly safe, and if his hands itched with the idleness he would sit on them. Enforced contemplation. Use the nail-file left by Tina to file his nails. Nothing wrong with doing nothing until the early hours of the morning, although it seemed a long time in prospect. After an hour, the guilt got to him again: he had only wanted a sympathetic, private place to do nothing but think, but his dedication to furious thought about what he should do next, other than play out the waiting game, was simply creating confusion. Feeling guiltier still, he began to wander.

  That William was out for the evening and the night was something of which he was fairly certain. He had not looked like a man popping out on an errand: he had looked like someone washed and dressed, carrying a bag, locking up with care. Dear William. Cannon found there was no toothbrush in the bathroom, the old rogue, out for the duration. His kitchen was empty of food; if he had to eat, he would not be eating here. Cannon’s deductions made him feel cunning and, at the same time, treacherous. Privacy was not something he had ever been able to value much, but he knew that other people did.

  A small, neat bedsitting room William had, featureless in style. A functional kitchen, again with no other mark of individuality apart from the colour of it, as if he saved his efforts for the bits of his domain other people saw. Or as if he was on the brink of moving on and did not care. All that mattered here were the waiting room, the entrance hall, which was the first thing they saw, and the surgery, where they would recline in various states of anxiety until they got up, looking at nothing except the light. He remembered looking at the light until his eyes closed; remembered William’s kindly face even better and his hands most of all. You could judge a man by his hands. He drifted into the waiting room, noticing how the blinds were drawn, another sign of William’s absence for the evening, a fact to be celebrated and also deplored. Cannon half wished he would come back through the door, whistling. He decided he could risk raising the blind.

  The glow from outside lit the picture in the centre of the wall – as if it needed light, containing so much of its own. The painting he had loaned was its own complete world. There was Bonnard, not quite at his best, sketching his wife as she got out of the bath, the way he had sketched her a hundred times, beautifully fleshed but delicate. Fastidious in her toilet, pink and gold in skin, captured in the glow of his constant fascination, the little brown dog in the corner. A deliciously clean, gorgeously familiar body, totally unselfconscious either of the gaze or the desire of a husband, the gloss of familiarity suggesting husband, rather than mere lover, content to be exactly as she was. To Cannon, it told the whole story of a life he himself wanted to live. Painting his wife, again and again and again, making love in the bright light of the day with every brushstroke. Feeling the weight of her arm round his neck, the touch of her breast on his bare arm. Julie in sunlight for ever.

  They had seen it together. Could you ever love me like that? she had asked. As if she could not know that he already did.

  He lowered his gaze, and wanted to weep. Johnnyboy could never even look at a picture like this; it had been bought with Johnnyboy’s money and it could never, ever be returned. Johnnyboy would slice it into ribbons rather than own it. It represented connubial happiness; a vignette of fulfilment. Johnny would not want to know about Bonnard’s life.

  He moved to the other side of the room, viewing from a distance, aching with longing, suddenly tired. He did not want the chair in the basement room; he wanted a bed and the luxury of dreaming his way into oblivion. A state of nothing in which he would wake in a sun-filled room with her by his side; watch her go to her bath and know she would come back. Let him know before she left the house.

  A bed. A bath. But he could not sleep on William’s bed or use William’s bath, not without asking. He could use the basement room, because it seemed to him that such a room belonged to nobody and everybody. The sight of the clean coverlet on William’s modest bed
made him feel ever more the intruder; he stared at it, saying to himself, I am sick of always being in a place where I must not leave traces. Sick of it. Sick of reliance on kindness.

  Madame Bonnard might not have been kind for all he knew, but she was there. Go, get out, go. Out through the basement window. No. He felt safe here. He had felt peculiarly safe here from the very first visit. Dear William had no idea what he had done, overturning the fears of a lifetime. Dear William had no idea of what he was like. He did make a person feel safe. Although not safe enough to take the liberty of sleeping in his bed without prior permission. Not when he was contaminating his life enough already.

  William would not miss a piece of stale cheese from the kitchen fridge. No-one downstairs would miss one of those six lemons past their sell-by date. And he would, one day, share a little of Bonnard’s experience. He would leave his mark on the world without his mark being some destroyed building in a street, looking like a gap in a row of front teeth and an invitation to misery first, and the profit of a stranger second. There was a taste of salt on his tongue from the cheese, which stuck to his teeth. Leave no traces, sit on the stairs. He had washed in the junk room in cold water, still felt dirty. Finished chewing. Stopped with a terrible, weary sense of fear, mouth open.

  Nobody hears what goes on in your mouth except you, William said. What is loud to you and visible to you is inaudible and invisible to anyone else, unless you happen to grind your teeth, a sound with a certain resonance. He loved to lecture, did William. Cannon was on the last set of the stairs, which turned a corner into the waiting-room, part of which he could see. He was absolutely sure he had never turned on a light – who needed a light to look at the Bonnard painting? There was one now. Cannon detested any kind of God, but he thought of the nuns and prayed. You bastard, God, will you ever give me a night’s sleep? Will you ever give me a moment’s grace of feeling safe? I sold explosives to thieves; I was never big-time enough for terrorists; please, God, don’t stop my heart, not yet, please. I am safe here. We only have to get to Christmas. Johnny would never ever be here. He could never even look at my wife’s face. He would never come inside the premises of a fucking dentist. Tell me I’m wrong.