Staring At The Light

by Fyfield, Frances

  She had the strange recurring desire to pray. Found that she crossed herself when he wept, warding off the devil. Saying thank you for salvation. Wanting to pray when she crossed the road.

  He had whooped with glee as he levered the desk over the window-ledge and watched it fall, crashing through the branches of the tree. He had screamed with delight as he tossed out the ghastly painted-to-order battle scene with its garish reds and postured figures. He had yelled with rage as he slung the huge silver bird of prey to follow the painting. Then he had sat and wept. He wept often, at the slightest stimulus. Wept in her arms and huddled in corners; wept in the lavatory beyond what he thought was her hearing, when he thought he had wept too much. Now he laughed. He did both in turns.

  She was trying to be patient with him. Filled with lassitude, a strange reaction to promised safety, she was passive rather than patient. The realization that Cannon was the inheritor of a dozen decaying houses was slow to arrive. They had never occupied more than a corner of anyone else’s abode. This felt dispiriting, palatial in a way she disliked – another reason why she was not going to stop him turning it into a barn. The thought of sleeping in sheets Johnnyboy might have used gave her nightmares. She chose the ones still wrapped in their brand new packets; there were many of these from which to choose, as well as brand new towels, bath mats, napkins, cutlery. He had been a man fastidious to the point of mania; there were goods newly wrapped beyond the point of contamination, but when she imagined his fingers touching then, if only in the process of purchase, she shuddered.

  ‘It’s stuck,’ Cannon was muttering. ‘The fucking thing’s stuck. Think I’ll go downstairs and shake that tree.’

  ‘And then it’ll fall on top of you.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  ‘Leave it. It’ll fall one of these days.’

  Such a robust tree, with big careful branches that looked, in their winter state, like a series of frosted feathers fit to make a nest. They did not sleep in Johnny’s bed. That was gone on Christmas Eve. There was another bathroom, too, unused like the room beside it, virtually shrink-wrapped, waiting for the visitor who had never arrived.

  ‘Both of them stuck.’

  ‘Let me look …’

  ‘That silver eagle. And that painting of the mouth. How could he buy that?’

  The silver eagle swayed in the branches like an anxious predator devoted less to hunting than fear of flying. She could almost feel sorry for it. Almost. The torn-up carpet revealed a fine wooden floor. She was hungry; always hungry. Today’s rage of destruction was almost spent. Julie wondered, with a brief moment of dread, swallowed by inertia, how often this might happen, and what, if anything, might provoke it. The question seemed best answered as the occasion arose. She did not want him to cry. She wanted him to look at her without his glance ever sliding away. She wanted him to adopt this glorious south-facing room as his studio and paint her again and again, like Bonnard with his wife. She mourned the Bonnard sketch.

  He sat back in one of the two remaining innocuous armchairs. They had muted rose-coloured fabric, which did not seem to offend him.

  ‘Houses. I might have to go back to being a builder. When they’ve decided if they’re going to charge me.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no and no. You’re a painter. An artist.’

  ‘A good builder’s an artist, too.’

  ‘We’ll just wait a while, shall we? We’ve g-g-g-g-ggot to this by a series of miracles, lovely. You can wait for another.’

  He had found Johnny’s stash of booze and cigarettes – odd that he should keep it. He had never had much time for either, so Cannon said. Unlike his brother, who was not an alcoholic in the making but not a temperate being either, prone to binges. She had lived with those; she could handle them; she loved him; it was simple, if not for the fact that this house had been waiting for him, not for her, stuffed to the gunwales with things they did not need. Fully equipped for the advent of a baby. She was used to her tiny room in a silent place. When her energy returned they would not live here. Let him wreck it.

  ‘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 rep
airs 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 wit
h 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.