He hesitated on the steps, slightly disconcerted by the presence of crowds and, as he moved forward, the strange feeling of recognition he had for the fat man standing to the side of the entrance and talking into a mobile phone, looking oddly like the man he had seen in the street. But there were many fat men, and his memory for faces was poor. Fat men or thin were not excluded from looking at paintings.
There was envy as well as pleasure in seeing the work of professional painters succeeding where he had failed, but it was an old disappointment by now and it was the positive element of the envy and curiosity that had made him the haphazard collector he was. He had collected paintings and drawings ever since he had known he would never be able to make them, and he supposed, as he mounted the steps to the exhibition, that what he collected revealed what he was like, in the way books on shelves were supposed to reveal their owners. William shook his head and climbed two more steps, struck by the implications of this. By their possessions, thus shall you know them. He looked at the people, trying to guess from the colour of a coat what the preferred taste of that person would be.
He knew absolutely nothing about fashion in art. He knew, sometimes, what he liked, and on rarer times what he liked to do. Potter. And he knew, just as he entered the heat of the hall, that he had come to look for something yellow. He also knew a minute of sheer contentment. Two hours before closing simply to look. It was the collector’s version of complete happiness, and he could not imagine how he had ever considered resisting it.
A collector is a person who refuses to engage fully with human life. Sarah had said that, teasing him, explaining herself. William shrugged. He did not care.
Excuse me, excuse me …
All the way round was littered with excuse mes. He was aware at one point of being jostled, heard a rough voice, somehow distinct from the babble, whispering impatiently, I just want to look, just a look, as if something was preventing him. He did not know why all this was quite such a pleasure, apart from the general politeness of the crowd, but he loved harmony in beautiful things; the search for both dignified his life, and he supposed it did the same for others, or why were they here in pursuit of it? Oddly, his pleasure in the occasion was not diminished by all the examples of disharmony and, to his own conservative, pre-modern taste, downright ugliness: the contrast between what he had expected and what he found amused him.
Chaos, Waste, why bring them into your house when you spent your whole life keeping them out? And even here, there was no getting away from teeth. William found himself facing a six foot by six foot depiction of a gaping mouth with Andy Warhol-style Marilyn Monroe lips painted in primary colours and opened wide in a scream. The tongue lay flat and inert; the tonsils were huge. The head of a youth with a woman’s lips. I’d have ’em out if I were you, he told the Mouth silently, feeling lonely in the making of this facile observation. He need not have been alone in this crowd: Sarah had said come with us, and he had dithered. It was the curse of inertia fed by shyness, the constant ambivalence of wanting company and yet wanting to avoid it. Sarah would have made him laugh at these obscene red lips. A child stood next to him, rapt with attention. William glanced at him. Froze.
This boy-child was so like the one of his dreams. Ash-blond hair, falling in a straight cut across his forehead; too young to be captivated by merely visual, immovable things, but significant in his fidgeting concentration, his mouth slightly open. Night after night William dreamed of a boy like this, as thin and pale and beautiful, but when William dreamed of him his dreams envisaged a sickly waif, a boy coughing his heart out from some undiagnosed blockage of the bronchial tubes. No strenuous games for this child, but quiet rooms and coughing fits and anxious parents making him petulant. The child seemed to notice he was being observed, turned on William and grinned with an unselfconscious confidence.
‘Her mouth hasn’t got any fillings, has it?’ he remarked. ‘And that can’t be right, can it?’
William relaxed and actually laughed, louder than the remark demanded. Of course this was not the child of his nightmares: that child would be a teenager now and his sister a young adult, while this precocious boy would still have some of his deciduous teeth and pink cheeks to redeem his pallor. He was simply another blond child, out of context in his surroundings. Relief from his own ridiculous imaginings made William laugh again. ‘Why should she have fillings and who says it’s a she? They could be white fillings.’
The boy considered this. He had a look of intelligence, almost cunning. William found his interest fascinating. ‘Well, she’s quite old, isn’t she? Like my mum. She should have fillings.’
‘No, not necessarily so. But there’s nothing realistic about her, is there?’ William went on, conceding the boy’s opinion as to the sex of the mouth only for the sake of conversation. ‘Nothing about the mouth, anyway. Whoever painted this didn’t know much about teeth. She’s got too many of them, for a start. Thirty-six, not thirty-two. And look at that widgy little tongue – it isn’t even alive. How many teeth have you got?’
‘I had twenty. I lost some. I’m getting new ones.’
‘Well, they started to grow as soon as you were born, so you can’t stop ’em.’ He judged the boy to be about ten, canines and premolars erupting gently in his mouth even as he spoke. The boy stood with his own tongue protruding, curled it over his top teeth and ran it round the edges, as if counting his incisors, a task quickly relinquished. ‘My tongue usually feels too big,’ he volunteered.
‘Tongues do,’ William said. ‘And they won’t do what they’re told. Have you noticed? You can tell your tongue to stay still, and it might for a second, but it’s got so many things to do your brain can’t control it. It won’t be ordered; it has to be automatic, disobedient if it wants. After all, it’s got to move around about a litre of spit every day. This tongue looks like a piece of dry bacon. Got no life at all.’
The boy giggled. ‘It doesn’t look as if it would hurt if she bit it, and it does hurt when you do that, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, but not for very long because it gets better very quickly. Everything in your mouth does, because it has such a good blood supply. It’s made to heal super quick. You could stick a pin right through your tongue and be better next day.’
‘Yughh,’ said the boy, his tongue unconsciously licking his pink lips, his eyes still on the painting. ‘Are you a dentist, or what?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gross,’ said the boy, and turned away, bumping into a large adult who stood close behind him, listening. William was unsure whether this remark was an indictment of the painting or of his role in life, but he hoped it was the painting. He watched the child rejoin parents, felt himself blush under their suspicious glance, and felt absurdly cheered by his small encounter. Like a child himself, he pulled a face at the painting of the Mouth and then continued to amble from stand to stand. The child seemed to have given him an excuse to behave badly. The delivering of a little lecture always relieved him and made him feel superior, as if he had done a good deed, and it was always pleasant to be critical of a ridiculously misleading representation.
But the point of a painting, he told himself, was not to be studiedly realistic. He loathed the kind that aped photography or the precision of the architect, because that was not honest: it was not what the eye saw. When you look at a face, Cannon had said, standing in front of the pictures in his waiting room – the existence of which had been the first stage in his trust of the dentist – you don’t see every detail. You see the strongest lines. You record the strongest impressions first, the same way you do when you look at anything. And when you describe one person, or one scene, to another, you will be selective in what you say because you cannot hope to be complete; you can only give your own version. That’s what I try to do; if I can get one off-centre moment of truth, one strong impression, that is all I can do.
Whereas I, William thought, as he wandered round, would become obsessed with the perfection of my technique: I could
not allow myself spontaneity; I have had it trained out of me. I would buy the highest-quality materials, measure my brushstrokes to the millimetre, try to be comprehensive, record what I ought to see and miss the point entirely. I would be like the fussier patient, convinced that the world could see the black spot on a back tooth when she smiled, or the slight crookedness of her left incisor, instead of which no-one would notice at all. Stand three feet back from the mirror: that is what people see; rarely more than that. No-one studies your face the way you do your own. Only a lover.
‘Excuse me, how much is that?’ It irritated him when the prices were not clearly displayed and he had to ask, introducing a certain coyness into the whole exchange. He was aware of someone watching him from behind, probably sizing him up for financial worth, making him feel awkward. Not that he had come here intending to buy; he had come to browse because it was a Saturday – but he wanted to know, all the same. There was nothing here that had quite moved the cockles of his heart yet, but he faced a piece of prettiness, three russet apples in a bowl, looking ripe and ready to eat; a cheerful work of art for a kitchen wall.
‘Eight hundred pounds.’ No, he would buy a supply of apples. He moved on, warm, surrounded by enthusiasm, content to look, but dizzy with looking, then backtracked to see what he might have missed. An argument at a stall: someone returning for a painting that had been stolen; raised voices. Disharmony; ugliness. It drove him back round the hall; back to the Mouth, out of sheer curiosity to see if someone had actually purchased it, and out of perverse fascination to see if anyone would love what he had detested.
Someone did. A red sticker in the corner of its garish pink frame; a gallery girl self-importantly writing out an address on the back of a cheque; a man standing by, shuffling on a coat and ready to leave, until he turned back to survey the painting one more time, and grinned. For the second time in the afternoon, William thought his heart would stop.
The man who stood with his eyes fixed on the Teeth was very still. He seemed so rooted to the ground on large feet that he could have been one of the sculptures: no-one stood so still with a smile on the face; a smile meant some sort of animation; William thought he might have touched and prodded him without any response. He was not a large man, smaller in stature than the picture, and the top of his head was only level with William’s shoulder, but there was a quality of massiveness about him as if his bones were heavy. Both feet pointed forward with military precision; the features were dark and harshly handsome, marred by the smile: full lips drawn back revealing brown, uneven teeth.
The teeth marred the face worse than a scar. They marred it for a stranger – a friend would cease to comment, the brown teeth would be accepted as part of the whole – and on first sight, even to William’s experienced eyes, they made the man look like an imbecile. A cretin with dirty habits, the discoloration suggesting without subtlety that the rest of him was unclean, even though the skin of his jaw hung soft and shiny from shaving, the shirt was immaculate pink and the hair shone black with health. Efforts were made to compensate for these teeth; the neatness was vulgar and aggressive. The impression of the man would be entirely different if only his mouth was shut. William closed his eyes briefly, waited for the other impression to emerge. It would not. He felt a wave of violent pity, mixed with intense excitement, like someone coming home. The face meant little to him; only a pleasurable recognition of someone sweetly familiar, confused by lack of identification and almost greeted without thinking. It was the teeth that made him want to say, Excuse me … Tetracycline-damaged teeth, the very image of Cannon’s before treatment. A vision of a man out of prison, smiling at him fearfully.
They were crowded together in the small space of the exhibitor’s stand; too small for a painting that belonged on larger walls. William did not pause to wonder why a man with such frightful teeth should want to buy a dreadful picture designed to shock with its totally awful and misleading delineation of perfect dentine in a ludicrously overcrowded mouth; he thought of that later, and instead, in that second, found himself looking round in expectation of the blond boy, who somehow belonged in this scene. That was his only hesitation. Apart from patting the pockets of his jacket to find where he kept his business cards. The man had turned his back again, consulted a watch, business done, anxious to be gone, unconscious of William or anyone else.
There was nothing William could say, or think to say, even though his curiosity was overpowering. He skipped to the front of the solid body to find the man still smiling and staring in a fixed basilisk stare towards the dreadfully perfect, plumped-up lips of the Marilyn Monroe tooth model. What could he say now? Can I look at your teeth? My word, what interesting choppers! Where did you get them? All sorts of inanities bubbled up from his throat, and instead he bowed from his great height, unable to resist a second look, and proffered his card. It was something he did when he was too shy to announce his own name.
There was no movement. William could feel his own blush rise across his face like the warm lick of heat from an oven. The eyes moved. They looked like the liquid eyes of a puppy. Cannon’s eyes, but alive with surprise and a furious fear.
William was still holding out the card as the man backed away. The white rectangle looked as pathetic as a stale sandwich; he could feel the man’s shock and outrage, but he could not withdraw his hand. He had to stoop to be level with the man’s face. Then a blow landed on the left side of his jaw, deflected by the slight embarrassed turning of his head, but still a memorable blow. He fell to his knees, felt his hands clutch the serge of trousers, feel the twin pillars of a pair of legs. The blow paralysed; he remained in his attitude of prayer; the legs removed themselves and the mist cleared. Some semblance of dignity made him adjust to sit back on his buttocks, cross his own long legs in front and prop his elbows on his knees with his head held between his hands. This way he was abject without being servile. The voices around him seemed to come from another country; a foreign sound which, after a full and endless half minute, he recognized as whispering laughter.
He came round into fuller consciousness with a growing sensation of pain without damage. Looked up, to find someone stepping over his knees with the careful respect owed to a drunk in a place where he might be sick. There he was, with his head propped in his hands, in artistic reverence.
The man and the painting had gone. In the middle of the crowd, William was left entirely alone to his eccentric appreciation of the subtle implications of an artfully contrived blank white wall.
Sarah propped the picture against the mantelpiece. It seemed to bring light into the room, carried within itself the promise of happiness, captured the feeling of sun on the skin, the first pleasurable sip of perfect evening. She could see herself on the balcony overlooking the ocean, alone and yet complete in a minute of sensual perfection. Then, looking closer, she identified with the figure in the sea, swimming around endlessly without purpose or direction, lost in the moment. She shivered, as if some creature had walked across her grave. The bottle of wine was half empty. The wine alone could not conjure up the smells and scents of the scene in the stolen picture; only colour could do that.
Alone on Saturday night, but there was never anything maudlin about such a regular occasion, except when she sat as she sat now and contemplated the new depths of corruption that had made her collude in theft. I didn’t have any choice. Oh, yes, heard that one before. There was always a choice in someone stealing a painting. This one already felt like a necessity of life; if she moved it, it would leave a space. But a painting was not edible: no-one actually starved for lack of paper and canvas; there was no excuse. No, she told herself, I had no choice because if I had taken it back immediately it would be obvious that Cannon had stolen it and Cannon’s low profile was a bit of a priority. She recognized, as she formulated these words to an audience, that this was specious rubbish. She was inventive enough to have taken the painting back after she had got rid of Cannon, explaining away the theft as a piece of mentally defective de
linquency by a friend driven mad by the heat. They wouldn’t have cared – they wouldn’t care if she did it tomorrow, but she knew she wasn’t going to do it tomorrow either. It was already too late.
Why was she keeping it, then? Because it had been stolen for her? As if Cannon were flattering her with his boldness, earning his spurs and presenting them to a favoured lady? Crap. Yes, there was an element of flattery in his having stolen the painting for her rather than himself, but it was also, in its way, deeply insulting. The presumption that she would be flattered rather than shocked to receive a stolen gift she would never be able to show; the presumption that this was commonplace and therefore perfectly fine; the presumption of corruption. It’s not so bad being kissed; you might get used to it. She felt a prickle on her skin that she wanted to scratch. I am hardly one for such moral dilemmas, she told herself. I sleep with two or three different men in any given week; they give me things and provide me with information; I give them affection and I don’t think that makes me corrupt in the way this does.
The mirror in the hall was dusty; it was always dusty and she never knew why. Dust comes from skin, someone had told her; whenever you move, you shed and create it, then wipe it away. She stroked words in the dust. CORRUPT. Then she wrote DUPED and ended the D with a scrawl.
Sarah Fortune regarded Saturday night as sacrosanct, by accident and by design. Saturday night alone was a sort of statement about how she lived, breathed, plotted, planned and survived with more than a modicum of laughter. Saturday night was reassessment time, Sunday committed to glorious indolence before the circus began all over again. Until, that was, this extra element intruded. Corruption. She wiped the mirror clean with the sleeve of her sweater.
She had believed in Cannon; she had turned her life into a series of wheels for Cannon; she had championed him, defended him and given him her faith. Why? Because there was no-one else; because he had talent; because he and his wife were worth it, according to her own code. She made her own evaluations carefully and did not doubt them. Between them that pair had an enormous capacity for happiness and fulfilment. She did not care if he made fortunes for thieves and dishonest builders; she did not care what he had done in the past, which made it entirely inconsistent that she should feel such revulsion for the act of theft that had implicated her now.
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