He was the best dentist I ever had. He got you into the chair, turned on the light, tapped around a bit with a thing like a spoon and then, dropping his white-coated arm to his side, told you a story. Several more stories followed in his flat Somerset voice, when he had your mouth jacked up. And then removing the towel and with a final “Rinse that lot out,” he finished with the strangest story of all and let you go. A month or so later the bill came in. Mr Pollfax presents his compliments and across the bottom of it, in his hand, “Be good.” I have never known a dentist like Mr Pollfax.
“Open, my lord,” said Mr Pollfax. “Let’s see what sort of life his lordship has been leading. Still smoking that filthy pipe, I see. I shall have to do some cleaning up.”
He tapped around and then dropped his arm. A look of anxiety came on his face. “Did I tell you that one about the girl who went to the Punch and Judy show? No? Nor the one about the engine-driver who was put on sentry duty in Syria? You’re sure? When did I see you last? What was the last one I told you? That sounds like last April? Lord, you have been letting things go. Well,” said Mr Pollfax, tipping back my head and squirting something on to a tooth, “we’ll have a go at that root at the back. It’s not doing you any good. It was like this. There was a girl sitting on the beach at Barmouth with her young man watching a Punch and Judy show …” (Closer and closer came Mr Pollfax’s head, lower and lower went his voice.)
He took an instrument and began chipping his way through the tooth and the tale.
“Not bad, eh?” he said, stepping back with a sudden shout of laughter.
“Ah,” I mouthed.
“All right, my lord,” said Mr Pollfax, withdrawing the instrument and relapsing into his dead professional manner. “Spit that lot out.”
He began again.
There was just that root, Mr Pollfax was saying. It was no good there. There was nothing else wrong; he’d have it out in a couple of shakes.
“Though, my lord,” he said, “you did grow it about as far back in your throat as you could, didn’t you, trying to make it as difficult as you could for Mr Pollfax? What we’ll do first of all is to give it a dose of something.”
He swivelled the dish of instruments towards me and gave a tilt to the lamp. I remembered that lamp because once the bulb had exploded, sending glass all over the room. It was fortunate, Mr Pollfax said at the time, that it had blown the other way and none of it had hit me, for someone might have brought a case for damages against someone—which reminded him of the story of the honeymoon couple who went to a small hotel in Aberdeen …
“Now,” said Mr Pollfax, dipping things in little pots and coming to me with an injection needle; “open wide, keep dead still. I was reading Freud the other day. There’s a man. Oedipus complex? Ever read about that? Don’t move, don’t breathe, you’ll feel a prick, but for God’s sake don’t jump. I don’t want it to break in your gum. I’ve never had one break yet, touch wood, but they’re thin, and if it broke off you’d be in a nursing home three weeks and Mr Pollfax would be down your throat looking for it. The trouble about these little bits of wire is they move a bit farther into the system every time you swallow.”
“There now,” said Mr Pollfax.
“Feel anything? Feel it prick?” he said. “Fine.”
He went to a cupboard and picked out the instrument of extraction and then stood, working it up and down like a gardener’s secateurs in his hand. He studied my face. He was a clean-shaven man and looked like a priest in his white coat.
“Some of the stories you hear!” exclaimed Mr Pollfax. “And some of the songs. I mean where I come from. ‘The Lot that Lily Lost in the Lottery’—know that one? Is your skin beginning to tingle, do you feel it on the tip of your tongue yet? That’s fine, my lord. I’ll sing it to you.”
Mr Pollfax began to sing. He’d give it another minute, he said, when he’d done with Lily; he’d just give me the chorus of “The Night Uncle’s Waistcoat Caught Fire.”
“Tra la la,” sang Mr Pollfax.
“I bet,” said Mr Pollfax sadistically, “one side of his lordship’s face has gone dead and his tongue feels like a pin cushion.”
“Blah,” I said.
“I think,” he said, “we’ll begin.”
So Mr Pollfax moved round to the side of me, got a grip on my shoulders and began to press on the instrument in my mouth. Pressing and drawing firmly he worked upon the root. Then he paused and increased the pressure. He seemed to be hanging from a crowbar fixed to my jaw. Nothing happened. He withdrew.
“The Great Flood begins,” said Mr Pollfax putting a tube in my mouth and taking another weapon from the tray.
The operation began again. Mr Pollfax now seemed to hang and swing on the crowbar. It was not successful.
“Dug himself in, has he?” muttered Mr Pollfax. He had a look at his instruments. “You can spit, my lord,” he said.
Mr Pollfax now seized me with great determination, hung, swung, pressed and tugged with increased energy.
“It’s no good you thinking you’re going to stay in,” said Mr Pollfax in mid-air, muttering to the root. But the instrument slipped and a piece of tooth broke off as he spoke.
“So that’s the game is it?” said Mr Pollfax withdrawing. “Good rinse, my lord, while Mr Pollfax considers the position.”
He was breathing hard.
Oh well, he said, there were more ways than one of killing a cat. He’d get the drill on it. There were two Jews standing outside Buckingham Palace when a policeman came by, he said, coming at me with the drill which made a whistling noise like a fishing line as he drew it through. The tube gurgled in my mouth. I was looking, as I always did at Mr Pollfax’s, at the cowls busily twirling on the chimneys opposite. Wind or no wind these cowls always seemed to be twirling round. Two metal cowls on two yellow chimneys. I always remember them.
“Spit, my lord,” said Mr Pollfax, changing to a coarser drill. “Sorry old man, if it slipped, but Mr Pollfax is not to be beaten.”
The drill whirred again, skidding and whining; the cowls twirled on the chimneys, Mr Pollfax’s knuckles were on my nose. What he was trying to do, he said, was to get a purchase.
Mr Pollfax’s movements got quicker. He hung up the drill, he tapped impatiently on the tray, looking for something. He came at me with something like a button-hook. He got it in. He levered like a signal man changing points.
“I’m just digging,” he said. Another piece of tooth broke off.
Mr Pollfax started when he heard it go and drew back.
“Mr Pollfax in a dilemma,” he said.
Well, he’d try the other side. Down came the drill again. There were beads of sweat on his brow. His breath was shorter.
“You see,” exclaimed Mr Pollfax suddenly and loudly, looking angrily up at his clock. “I’m fighting against time. Keep that head this way, hold the mouth. That’s right. Sorry, my lord, I’ve got to bash you about, but time’s against me.”
“Why, damn this root,” said Mr Pollfax, hanging up again. “It’s wearing out my drill. We’ll have to saw. Mr Pollfax is up against it.”
His face was red now, he was gasping and his eyes were glittering. A troubled and emotional look came over Mr Pollfax’s face.
“I’ve been up against it in my time,” exclaimed Mr Pollfax forcefully between his teeth. “You heard me mention the Oedipus complex to you?”
“Blah,” I managed.
“I started well by ruining my father. I took every penny he had. That’s a good start, isn’t it?” he said, speaking very rapidly. “Then I got married. Perfectly happy marriage, but I went and bust it up. I went off with a French girl and her husband shot at us out in the car one day. I was with that girl eighteen months and she broke her back in a railway accident and I sat with her six months watching her die. Six ruddy months. I’ve been through it. Then my mother died and my father was going to marry again, a girl young enough to be his daughter. I went up and took that girl off him, ran off to Hungary with her,
married her and we’ve got seven children. Perfect happiness at last. I’ve been through the mill,” said Mr Pollfax, relaxing his chin and shining a torch down my mouth, “but I’ve come out in the end.”
“A good rinse, my noble lord,” said Mr Pollfax.
“The oldest’s fourteen,” he said, getting the saw. “Clever girl. Very clever with her hands.”
He seized me again. Did I feel anything? Well, thank God for that, said Mr Pollfax. Here we’d been forty minutes with this damned root.
“And I bet you’re thinking why didn’t Lord Pollfax let sleeping dogs lie, like the telephone operator said. Did I tell you that one about the telephone operator? That gum of yours is going to be sore.”
He was standing legs apart, chin trembling, eyes blinking, hacking with the button-hook, like a wrestler putting on a headlock.
“Mr Pollfax with his back against the wall,” he said, between his teeth.
“Mr Pollfax making a last-minute stand,” he hissed.
“On the burning deck!” he gasped.
“Whence,” he added, “all but he had fled.”
“Spit,” he said. “And now let’s have another look.” He wiped his brow. “Don’t say anything. Keep dead still. For God’s sake don’t let it hear you. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, pray silence for Mr Pollfax. It’s coming, it isn’t. No, it isn’t. It is. It is. There,” he cried, holding a fragment in his fingers.
He stood gravely to attention.
“And his chief beside,
Smiling the boy fell dead,”
said Mr Pollfax. “A good and final spit, my lord and prince.”
(1945)
THINGS AS THEY ARE
Two middle-class women were talking at half past eleven in the morning in the empty bar of a suburban public house in a decaying district. It was a thundery and smoky morning in the summer and the traffic fumes did not rise from the street.
“Please, Frederick,” said Mrs Forster, a rentier who spoke in a small, scented Edwardian voice. “Two more large gins. What were you saying, Margaret?”
“The heat last night, Jill. I tossed and I turned. I couldn’t sleep—and when I can’t sleep I scratch,” said Margaret in her wronged voice. She was a barmaid and this was her day off.
Mrs Forster drank and nodded.
“I think,” said Margaret, “I mean I don’t mean anything rude, but I had a flea.”
Mrs Forster put her grey head a little on one side and nodded again graciously under a flowered hat, like royalty.
“A flea, dear?” she said fondly.
Margaret’s square mouth buckled after her next drink and her eyes seemed to be clambering frantically, like a pair of blatant prisoners behind her heavy glasses. Envy, wrong, accusation, were her life. Her black hair looked as though it had once belonged to an employer.
“I mean,” she began to shout against her will, and Frederick, the elderly barman, moved away from her. “I mean I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t mentioned it.”
Mrs Forster raised her beautiful arms doubtfully and touched her grey hair at the back and she smiled again.
“I mean when you mentioned that you had one yesterday you said,” said Margaret.
“Oh,” said Mrs Forster, too polite to differ.
“Yes, dear, don’t you remember, we were in here—I mean, Frederick! Were we in here yesterday morning, Frederick, Mrs Forster and me …”
Frederick stood upright, handsome, old, and stupid.
“He’s deaf, the fool, that’s why he left the stage,” Margaret said, glaring at him, knowing that he heard. “Jill, yesterday? Try and remember. You came in for a Guinness. I was having a small port, I mean, or were you on gin?”
“Oh, gin,” said Mrs Forster in her shocked, soft, distinguished way, recognising a word.
“That was it, then,” said Margaret, shaking an iron chin up and down four times. “It might have hopped.”
“Hopped,” nodded Mrs Forster pleasantly.
“I mean, fleas hop, I don’t mean anything vulgar.” Margaret spread her hard, long bare arms and knocked her glass. “Distances,” she said. “From one place to another place. A flea travels. From here, at this end of the bar, I don’t say to the end, but along or across, I mean it could.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Forster with agreeable interest.
“Or from a person. I mean, a flea might jump on you—or on me, it might jump from someone else, and then off that person, it depends if they are with someone. It might come off a bus or a tram.” Margaret’s long arms described these movements and then she brought them back to her lap. “It was a large one,” she said. “A brute.”
“Oh, large?” said Mrs Forster sympathetically.
“Not large—I mean it must have been large, I could tell by the bites, I know a small flea, I mean we all do—don’t mind my mentioning it—I had big bites all up my leg,” said Margaret, stretching out a long, strong leg. Seeing no bites there, she pulled her tight serge skirt up with annoyance over her knee and up her thigh until, halted by the sight of her suspender, she looked angrily at Frederick and furtively at Mrs Forster and pulled her skirt down and held it down.
“Big as pennies, horrible pink lumps, red, Jill,” argued Margaret. “I couldn’t sleep. Scratching doesn’t make it any better. It wasn’t a London flea, that I know, Jill. I know a London flea, I mean you know a London flea, an ordinary one, small beastly things, I hate them, but this must have been some great black foreign brute. Indian! Frederick! You’ve seen one of those things?”
Frederick went with a small business of finger-flicking to the curtains at the back of the bar, peeped through as if for his cue. All bars were empty.
“Never,” he said contemptuously when he came back, and turning his back on the ladies, hummed at the shelves of bottles.
“It’s easy,” Margaret began to shout once more, swallowing her gin, shouting at her legs, which kept slipping off the rail of the stool and enraged her by jerking her body, “I mean, for them to travel. They get on ships. I mean those ships have been in the tropics, I don’t say India necessarily, it might be in Egypt or Jamaica, a flea could hop off a native onto some sailor in the docks.”
“You mean, dear, it came up from the docks by bus,” said Mrs Forster. “You caught it on a bus?”
“No, Jill,” said Margaret. “I mean some sailor brought it up.”
“Sailor,” murmured Mrs Forster, going pale.
“Ted,” said Margaret, accusing. “From Calcutta. Ted could have brought it off his ship.”
Mrs Forster’s head became fixed and still. She gazed mistily at Margaret and swayed. She finished her drink and steadied herself by looking into the bottom of the glass and waited for two more drops to come. Then she raised her small chin and trembled. She held a cigarette at the end of her thumb and her finger as if it were a stick of crayon and she were writing a message in blue smoke on the air. Her eyes closed sleepily, her lips sucked, pouted, and two tears rolled down her cheeks. She opened her large handbag and from the mess of letters, bills, money, keys, purses, and powder inside she took a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.
“Ah!” said Margaret, trying to get her arm to Mrs Forster, but failing to reach her because her foot slipped on the rail again, so that she kicked herself. “Ah, Jill! I only mentioned it, I didn’t mean anything, I mean when you said you had one, I said to myself: ‘That’s it, it’s an Indian. Ted’s brought it out of the ship’s hold.’ I didn’t mean to bring up Ted, Jill. There’s nothing funny about it, sailors do.”
Mrs Forster’s cheeks and neck fattened amorously as she mewed and quietly cried and held her handkerchief tight.
“Here,” said Margaret, mastering her. “Chin-chin, Jill, drink up, it will do you good. Don’t cry. Here, you’ve finished it. Frederick, two more,” she said, sliding towards Mrs Forster and resting one breast on the bar.
Mrs Forster straightened herself with dignity and stopped crying.
“He broke my heart,”
said Mrs Forster, panting. “I always found one in the bed after his leave was over.”
“He couldn’t help it,” said Margaret.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs Forster.
“It’s the life sailors live,” said Margaret. “And don’t you forget, are you listening, Jill? Listen to me. Look at me and listen. You’re among friends, Jill. He’s gone, Jill, like you might say, out of your life.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Forster, nodding again, repeating a lesson. “Out of my life.”
“And good riddance, too, Jill.”
“Riddance,” murmured Mrs Forster.
“Jill,” shouted Margaret. “You’ve got a warm heart, that’s what it is, as warm as Venus. I could never marry again after what I’ve been through, not whatever you paid me, not however much money it was you gave me, but you’re not like me, your heart is too warm. You’re too trusting.”
“Trusting,” Mrs Forster repeated softly, squeezing her eyelids.
“I tell you what it was,” Margaret said. “You were in love, Jill,” said Margaret, greedy in the mouth. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, dear.”
“That’s what I said. It was love. You loved him and you married him.”
Margaret pulled herself up the bar and sat upright, looking with surprise at the breast that had rested there. She looked at her glass, she looked at Mrs Forster’s; she picked up the glass and put it down. “It was a beautiful dream, Jill, you had your beautiful dream and I say this from the bottom of my heart, I hope you will have a beautiful memory.”
“Two months,” sighed Mrs Forster, and her eyes opened amorously in a grey glister and then sleepily half closed.
“But now, Jill, it’s over. You’ve woke up, woken up. I mean, you’re seeing things as they are.”
The silence seemed to the two ladies to stand in a lump between them. Margaret looked into her empty glass again. Frederick lit a cigarette he had made, and his powdered face split up into twitches as he took the first draw and then put the cigarette economically on the counter. He went through his repertory of small coughs and then, raising his statesman-like head, he listened to the traffic passing and hummed.
The Pritchett Century Page 35
