In the Teeth of Adversity

by Marian Babson

  It was manifestly unfair. I’d never telephoned him outside of office hours during our entire association – which was more than he could say about his treatment of Perkins & Tate.

  “Penny” – he continued to treat us in his accustomed style – “go upstairs and see if Mrs. Zayle would like a cup of tea or anything else – and get it for her if she does.” Penny left the room.

  “And” – he turned to Gerry – “we won’t need you for this. You can wait downstairs.” Before I could stop him, Gerry had gone, too.

  “Now” – Zayle gave me an oily smile – “if you’ll just sit down in the chair and make yourself comfortable ...”

  He had to be joking. I stared at him blankly, wondering if there was any way of getting to him through this obsession he had developed about my teeth. Then I looked again, more closely. There was something odd about Endicott Zayle – odder than usual, I mean. Possibly it was the white surgeon’s cap perched on the top of his head. It was undoubtedly very hygienic, but it gave him an eccentric appearance.

  “Sit down!” There was a fractious note in his voice. “What’s the matter – don’t you like my chair?”

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  His face crumpled, but if he didn’t want to hear the answers, he shouldn’t ask the questions. “Why don’t people like my chair?” He sniffed. “Why don’t people like me?” His eyes were shining suspiciously.

  “Now, now,” I placated, backing a bit farther. “I’m sure they do.”

  “They don’t. Everybody hates us.” He snuffled unpleasantly again. I began to wonder if he’d had a scene with Adele. She might have done another about-face on the subject of returning to him. Something had certainly upset him.

  “No, no, I’m sure –”

  “Don’t try to fool me – I know. We all know,” he added darkly.

  “You do?” I got a bit more distance between us. Not that it did much good. He advanced as I retreated. “All of you, eh?” I wondered if it could still be called schizophrenia when the subject thought he was several people.

  “Dentists and psychiatrists,” he said. “We have the highest suicide rates of any of the professions. And do you know why?”

  “Because everybody hates you?” It slipped out automatically. I closed my mouth and tried to look as though it hadn’t come from me.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You admit it. You see – everyone knows.”

  “I’m sure you’re exaggerating,” I said. “Someone must love you.” Immediately, I wished I hadn’t brought that up. If he followed though on it, I was going to have to admit I couldn’t name one person. His father was off in some remote world of his own; his partner had been betraying him; his wife had planned to elope with his partner; the cards all seemed stacked against him.

  “It isn’t fair,” he said, and even though I’d been thinking that myself, I began to lose sympathy. “It’s the ingratitude of everyone that hurts. Dentists and psychiatrists – who else makes you so comfortable? Who works so hard for you?”

  “You mustn’t brood,” I said. “All professions have their ups and downs. If you think public relations work is easy –”

  “It’s the ingratitude,” he said again, obviously having no time for anyone’s problems other than his own. Unless they were a psychiatrist, that is.

  “Think of it. We provide you with a nice comfortable chair, a cosy couch – and you lie back and hate us. No wonder the suicide rate is so high. We do everything we can for you, and all the time you’re lying there comfortably, we know that down deep you’re hating us.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said. Personally, I was working up quite a good loathing of him from a vertical position. It had never occurred to me before, but if there was one thing I hated more than a dentist, it was a maudlin dentist.

  “You wouldn’t?” He looked unexpectedly hopeful and I was glad he couldn’t read my mind.

  “Not at all.” I didn’t consider it a lie – it was just good PR to keep up your client’s morale.

  “Then” – he looked at me suspiciously – “why won’t you get in my chair?”

  “Actually,” I improvised, “I think I have a cold coming on. My throat feels raw and scratchy. You don’t want to examine me in this condition. I might spread germs all over the place.”

  “You talk as though dentistry were still in the nineteenth century.” He seemed to take it personally. “We sterilize everything before we use it on anyone else.” As though to punctuate his remarks, he stabbed at the steam cabinet and the top flew open with a slight hiss, displaying rows of shining instruments. To my nervous eyes, there seemed to be a faint cloud of steam rising all around them.

  “But you –” I said quickly. “You don’t want to catch my cold. It would be terrible for you. And I’d feel so guilty –”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” he said quite cheerfully. He turned and pulled something from a drawer. “Now then” – he turned back, a gauze surgical mask covering his nose and chin – “you can’t do me any harm. Just get into that chair and we’ll take a look at what’s troubling you.”

  He could do that by looking in a mirror. The surgical mask did nothing to reassure me; it gave him a sinister, dehumanized appearance. The beady little eyes glaring at me over the top seemed to be losing what patience they had.

  “Come, come,” he said, “get into the chair. We don’t have all day, you know. Other patients will be arriving for their appointments.”

  It was a hopeful thought, but the door remained firmly closed. Where was Penny? Where was Gerry? Why had they deserted me like this? I took another step backward and stumbled over something. It was the step of the chair.

  “That’s right. Upsy-daisy.” He caught my arm and hurled me into the chair.

  “Well.” Since I no longer seemed to have a choice, I capitulated, but I was going down fighting. “Just a checkup, remember? Just my six-monthly checkup. Ha-ha. I’m a bit overdue for it, I’m afraid.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He whipped a white bib around my neck and tied it with unnecessary vigour. “You needn’t be afraid. We’ll find the tooth that’s bothering you. Open wide …”

  “Now look –” I said. “Yeee-ow!”

  “Aha.” He surfaced triumphantly, waving the needle-pointed probe. “I knew we’d find it.” The tip of the probe was dulled with red – my blood.

  “You never got anywhere near a tooth,” I protested. “You jabbed that thing into my gum.”

  “That’s just your imagination,” he soothed. “It just felt to you as though I did.”

  “You did,” I said stubbornly.

  “No – no. All in your mind. It’s all psychological, you know. Dentistry and psychiatry are closely allied. That’s why people are so deeply afraid of the dentist. They fear having a tooth pulled. It’s a manifestation of the castration complex. And women can have it, too, you know.”

  “Umm,” I said. I thought of riposting with the other popular theory: that people become dentists, surgeons, etc., as a means of sublimating their sadistic tendencies. On second thought, I decided not to go into that right now. Like the dying Irishman who refused to renounce the Devil and all his works, I felt “I’m not in a position to antagonize anyone at a time like this.”

  “Oh, it’s very common you know. Very common. You’d be surprised –”

  “Ummm,” I said again. The thought of a psychological discussion with Zayle held no allure for me. I tried to look as though I’d never heard of Jung or Adler. And if he dragged Freud into it, I’d say I’d gone off him since his last recipe exploded in the oven.

  “Now, then ...” He’d been fiddling with something just beyond my range of vision, and now he moved back into view. He still held the probe in one hand. With the other, he was pulling forward the drilling equipment.

  “Now ...” He leaned into my mouth again. “Let me get a fix on that tooth and we’ll ...”

  I pressed back into the chair, trying to burrow my way out through the ba
ck as he put a hand that seemed to have at least twelve fingers into my mouth and followed it with that deadly sharp probe again.

  I fought for breath and suddenly I got too much of it. His breath. Through the surgical mask and all. I told myself it couldn’t be true and sniffed wildly. There was no doubt about it.

  A lot of things which had been confusing me about this whole situation became clear. No wonder the conversation was so odd, his fixation on my tooth so pronounced. In his condition, it was scarcely surprising that he had forgotten my agonizing molar was just a cover story we had cooked up between us.

  Our eminent Harley Street dental surgeon was drunk as a skunk.

  “I see it!” he crowed. “Now, just stay right there –” He pulled the drill down into position and prepared to move in.

  “Wait a minute!” I protested wildly. “Wait a minute – can’t we talk this over?”

  “Talk?” He drew back slightly. “Talk what over?”

  I was in no mood for social niceties. “You’ve been drinking!” I accused.

  “Drinking?” He drew himself up huffily, and now that I was concentrating on him rather than on his waiting instruments, I could notice a distinct sway.

  “Drinking!”

  “Are you suggesting” – he squinted down at me, seeming to have some difficulty in focusing – “simply because I may have had a drink or two to brace myself while I waited for my dear wife to be restored to me, that I’m incapable?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Furtively, I braced my feet against the footrest of the chair and gripped the arms, trying to lever myself into a more upright position. I was at a distinct disadvantage with him looming over me like that.

  “You meant it.” His sense of grievance, never very far away, was rising to the fore again. “I’ll have you know I’m a dentist! I –” It did not reassure me that, at this point, he attempted to strike his chest and missed, delivering a glancing blow to his left shoulder. “I could do this job blindfolded!”

  In the circles I move in, I’ve heard artists and writers declare they can work as well drunk as they can sober, and it never occurred to me to dispute them. It didn’t seem to matter all that much. The worst that could happen would be that they’d whack hell out of a piece of canvas or a few sheets of paper, and in the cold, grey light of morning, they could chuck the whole thing away if the results didn’t please them.

  But this was my mouth Zayle was proposing to head into with a supersonic drill. I edged forward in the chair, preparing to bolt.

  “Why don’t we go and have a cup of coffee?” I suggested cagily, realizing as I did so that this was why Penny hadn’t come back. She wasn’t to know that we had got our signals crossed.

  I knew now what she had meant when she had insisted that one of us ought to “see” Zayle – “see to him,” she should have said. And she was tactfully staying out of the way, imagining that this was what I was doing. By this time, she was trustingly supposing me to have poured several cups of black coffee down his gullet, and perhaps even have shoved his head under a cold-water tap – or into his spittoon.

  I immediately wished I hadn’t thought of that.

  “I’m dying for a cup of coffee.” And that wasn’t a happy phrasing, either. I struggled forward in the chair, my feet seeking the floor.

  “That tooth needs taking care of!” He did something sneaky with the foot pedal and the chair tilted backward throwing me onto a horizontal plane. Zayle loomed over me, a white-masked face swimming above my eyes. “Plenty of time for coffee later.”

  Coffee for one? It sounded too much like it. I wriggled over to one side of the chair. I had never liked the dentist’s office, but until recently I had never been so painfully aware of all the death traps lurking in it. The anaesthetic, the spittoon – even those rolls of cotton which had been used to plug the waste pipe could just as easily have been rammed down an open throat. The potentialities of the probes didn’t bear thinking about – nor did that drill being pulled down into position. Three thousand revolutions per minute, being aimed at my back molar by that unsteady hand. His squinting eyes made me suspect he might be seeing two of me, and God knew how many molars.

  “Stay still, damn you,” he muttered. “How can I work with you twisting around like an eel?” I heard the motor rev up as he fitted a burred drill head into the holder and checked to see that it was secure.

  It was a time for desperate measures, and as his stubby fingers probed into my mouth just ahead of the drill, I took them. My teeth clamped over those fingers – if he couldn’t get them out, he couldn’t get the drill in.

  As it happened, he nearly dropped the drill. His scream, I was surprised to note, was nearly as soprano as his wife’s. “You bit me!” He wrenched his fingers away. “You bit me!”

  “Sorry about that,” I said feebly. “Reflex action, you know.” He didn’t look as though he believed me.

  “You deliberately bit me!” he said. You’d think a dentist would be used to that sort of thing, but it seemed to be preying on his mind. “You hate me!”

  “No, no.” Smiling ingratiatingly, I tried to get out of the chair while he was still brooding.

  I didn’t make it. He did something with his foot again and the chair tilted and swerved as though it had some diabolic life of its own. They were both in league against me.

  “Well, let me tell you.” He slammed me against the back of the chair with the flat of one hand. The other hand held a madly whirring drill. “I hate you lousy rotten patients, too!”

  As he moved in, I was torn between closing my eyes and hoping the Lord that looked after fools, children, and drunkards would fit me in somewhere amongst them, or keeping my eyes wide open and fighting to the last ditch.

  Neither of us heard the surgery door open. “Oh, sorry.” Inspector Rennolds stood in the doorway. “I wanted to speak to you. I didn’t realize you were busy. I’ll come back later –”

  Chapter 12

  “Eh?” Zayle turned away to peer muzzily at the figure hovering in the doorway.

  “No, no.” While his attention was distracted, I lunged from the chair. “I’ll come now. Always glad to do my duty as a citizen.” He hadn’t said which of us he wanted to speak to, so I was going to claim the honour before Zayle could.

  “Besides, I have something to tell you.” I made the doorway in a standing broad jump and grabbing his arm, whirled him about and gained the safety of the corridor. “Vital information to impart,”

  I babbled. “Delay might be fatal. Let’s have a talk right now.”

  He was still gazing over his shoulder at Zayle in a puzzled way as I dragged him up the stairs. As I shut the living room door, I saw that he was now looking at me with the same puzzled gaze. There was suspicion in his look, as well, for which I couldn’t blame him. I had never voluntarily sought an interview with him before. I doubt if many people had.

  “Well.” I let go of his arm and gave him a placating smile. “This is better.” I suspected that was even more of a lie than I intended. It was better than the dental chair, but it was beginning to feel like out of the frying pan into the fire.

  “What” – I took the initiative – “did you want to see me about?”

  “I didn’t.” His steady gaze was unnerving. “I wanted to talk to the dentist.”

  “Oh, well, in that case –” I started for the door. “I’ll clear out of your way and let you get on with it.” I almost made it. I had my hand on the doorknob when his hand fell on my shoulder and turned me back.

  “You said you had something to tell me,” he reminded me. “ ‘Vital information to impart.’ ”

  “Oh, that.” I winced at the direct quotation. “On second thought –”

  “Why don’t we sit down and talk it over.” He moved me inexorably away from the door. “Perhaps you’ll have a third thought.”

  I couldn’t say he actually pushed, but I found myself floundering on the sofa while he took the straight chair opposite. “All right,” he sa
id, “begin.”

  Begin. I rummaged wildly through my store-cupboard of guilty knowledge – which was uncomfortably crowded – for some fairly innocuous piece of information I could toss to him. There wasn’t much. I decided to opt for the obvious and give him something he might already have noticed for himself.

  “Endicott Zayle,” I said. “I thought I ought to talk to you about him. I mean, I’ve known him for some time, and you’ve never seen him before?” I waited for his affirmative nod, then continued, “There’s something wrong about him lately. Odd, I mean. He hasn’t been himself. He keeps getting these strange ideas and can’t be talked out of them –” I stopped. Rennolds had leaned back, a pained expression on his face.

  “I see,” he said. “So that’s it. You’re working up to a ‘detained at the Queen’s pleasure.’ I might have known it.”

  He stopped me cold with that one. After a moment, I got my mouth closed again, but still couldn’t think of anything to say. I needn’t have bothered. He was in full spate and quite bitter about it all.

  “You’re planning to bring in the psychiatrists to prove it all goes back to an unhappy childhood; then you’ll get the trendies, who’ll moan about cruel treatment and police brutality. And then there’ll be the bleeding hearts, who think he ought to be given a medal because he only knocked off a couple of people who irritated him instead of running amok down Regent Street with a machine gun during rush hour. After that, you’ll parade the do-gooders to claim –”

  “He didn’t do it.” I found my voice at last. “My client is innocent.”

  That stopped him cold. “All the indications point to Endicott Zayle,” he said almost irritably.

  “He didn’t do it.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded firm and convincing. It almost stilled the little quiver of doubt deep within me. Almost.

  “You think so?” He stared at me reflectively for a moment, then moved suddenly. I didn’t know what was coming, but tried not to flinch. He reached out and snatched the forgotten white bib from around my neck and tossed it onto the coffee table between us. “That’s been distracting me,” he said in not quite apology.