He threaded his way between the desks to the chair that was not his chair. The boy called Simon gestured with his stumpy finger and Jonathan looked down at the sodden fabric; he had forgotten to do up his flies.
‘Mummy’s boy wet himself!’
Jonathan sat up straight, waiting for Justin to come to claim his seat. He told himself that he could easily survive for a year without eating.
5
Monday, 10 January 2011
Isabel Ramsay was preparing for bed.
She could feel a draught, standing by the sink in the kitchen. She decided that the cleaner had left a window open. The girls got hot vacuuming or polishing and ignoring her advice about wearing layers, opened windows and wasted precious heat. Except her present cleaner was careful, not like her daughters, who left clutter without a thought for others.
She shuffled through to the dining room where there was enough light from the kitchen to see that the curtain on one of the long windows was not properly drawn. That explained it.
The heavy gold brocade was topped with a plain pelmet. The catches on the window sashes had been screwed down years ago, because the balcony, adorned with railings matching the one above, was an ideal place for a burglar to hide. Eleanor had told her this was one of her hideouts; she had spied on dinner parties through the glass because in those days they never pulled the curtains and everything was open for all to see.
A silhouette with wild hair glared at her through the pane. Isabel’s hand fluttered out and she managed to steady herself on a glazing bar. After a while, with slow deliberation she smeared her palm down the glass. She made a mental note of its position and then wiped the damp of the condensation on her skirt. Eleanor should have been in bed hours ago. She flapped the curtain across and blotted out her youngest daughter.
Good, the radiator was off. The cleaners turned it on, flagrantly flouting her assurance that they would soon warm up if they put their backs into it. Her new cleaner was not like that, she reminded herself.
Isabel preferred the dining room in the evening, lit by silver candelabras and flames leaping in the grate: her Queendom. In the chill dawn it was hard-edged and mundane. When she cleaned, Lizzie crashed and banged; sweeping ash on to newspaper and grumbling about her knees, her sciatica or her sister in New Zealand.
Someone had placed a vase of lilies in the fireplace. Not Lizzie, she was dead. Isabel was certain that she had been to her funeral, or was that the Howland woman? Howland, that was her name; it had been eluding her for the last week. Anyway, someone’s suffering was over and they were at peace, just whose suffering Isabel could not at this moment put her finger on. She pictured the lane from the church in Sussex. However, the past got intertwined and she might have been thinking of the bloody village hall thingy. There were no mobile telephones to explain to Mark or the damned police that she was delayed by nonsense. She had assumed that, like the song, she had all the time in the world to put it right. Perhaps after all she had – the days crawled on and on.
Disjointed recollections floated through the old woman’s consciousness like frayed threads while she stooped and pulled the lilies out of the vase by their heads, catching the unwieldy stems on the rim. The vase hit the fender and exploded into tiny pieces over the hearth. She flapped her hands helplessly: it was one of a pair belonging to her husband’s mother. Isabel pushed some of the china with the pointy toe of her Chinese slipper, only Gina would consider it precious.
An identical vase on the mantelpiece still held flowers. The old woman pushed it along the ledge, the lilies smearing the wall in its wake. Toppling off the edge, the vase took the carriage clock with it; the glass on the face made a pretty sprinkling sound above the metallic crash when the brass casing hit the tiled hearth. The clock was a prized possession of the Hanging Judge. Mark, ever his dutiful son, had made it her job to keep it wound. It was face up; the time was right except the second hand was not moving.
Isabel flopped the dying lilies on to the tablecloth, scattering fine powder from their stamens over the fabric. Once upon a time this would have been a disaster.
Someone protected the oval table with a template of felt overlaid with a midnight-blue damask cloth. Isabel could hear Eleanor under there, scribbling away in her notebook; their every word, every action recorded. She steadied herself and the table groaned under her weight. There were too many spectres in the house for her liking; she would talk to the cleaner about it. Wednesdays and Fridays were her days. Friday was Isabel’s favourite day: it was the day Mark sent her flowers when they were courting.
She scrabbled at the tablecloth and hauled it off. It was heavier than she expected and she tottered backwards. Beneath was a walnut surface mapped with blobs of wax, scratches and ringed with wine-glass stains. The table sat fifteen but there were only ten high-backed chairs. Isabel lowered herself into a carver at one end. The wine was rich red in the candle flame. Around the room her guests’ complexions were suffused with bonhomie, summer skin tanned and glowing. They watched her raise a glass to her lips in silent toast before they drank. Mark was on his fifth Scotch. That tousled hair keeping him boyish, he reached too close to fill a girl’s glass. Deep bass exclamations and guffaws of laughter spliced with women’s flittering interjections fell silent when Isabel signalled for a hush to find out if anyone wanted more to eat or drink.
The night is young.
She floated on a desultory tide of sexual appreciation, tossing her head to deliver perfect smoke rings to the ceiling, her skin alive to the knowledge that more than one pair of eyes glittered with desire for her.
The draught stiffened her bones and the clink of cutlery and glass faded to stillness. Isabel Ramsay stared uncomprehending at empty chairs, the denuded table and broken china strewn over the floorboards.
She drew her shawl around her. Gina said she should wear thick cardigans; really meaning she was too old for bare shoulders. Gina had always been old. The door of the Viennese wall clock had swung open and struggling to her feet she slammed it shut, lacking the courage to rip it off the wall. The fastening was bent and it opened again when the mechanism struck the quarter with a whirr. Gina warned her that unless it was fixed it would lose value; the girl price-tagged everything.
The shaft of light from the hall eclipsed for a moment.
She caught her foot on the bundled tablecloth on her way to the kitchen for her water. The tobacco smoke was fainter. If she told her children, they would take action: sack the cleaner; call the police; bring up the question of shunting her to a home.
She mounted the stairs, the ache at the base of her skull now focused on one place like an accusing finger; she dipped her head in a fruitless effort to avoid the prodding sensation. In each hand she clasped a tumbler of water, the last two glasses from a wedding present of eight. Soon they too would be gone. Gina reprimanded her for not holding on to the banister, more bothered about the Waterford crystal than her mother’s safety. As an incomplete set, the glasses had no resale value, Isabel told her daughter; she didn’t tell Gina about her falls. Last week Isabel had stumbled on to the landing throwing wine in a spray over the carpet; the stain was still there. She would add it to the cleaning list.
Eleanor said all the kids avoided the fifth stair when they crept in from parties. Isabel had never noticed that it creaked. Eleanor had remarked in her particular way that ‘Dad knew’.
Isabel caught her foot in a tear in the carpet. It had been laid in the spring of 1968. Gina wanted to sort out a replacement; Jon could get Axminster at trade price. Mark or someone had refused. Mark probably, keen to accept nothing from his son-in-law.
Falling was nothing to do with age, Isabel told the children, it could happen to any of you.
When she reached the top landing, the lights went out. Power cut. Another one. She had to depend on light slanting in from the windows to find her bedside table and avoid spilling water on the plastic radio from Gina and Jon. She forgot and switched on the anglepoise, and then left it; at
least she would know when the electricity came on.
Mark’s bedside cabinet needed sorting: she moved his spectacles case and in the poor light shifted his ever-growing pile of books for space to put his glass. The smell of beeswax reminded her to talk to the cleaner about something.
The bells struck ten or eleven or twelve, she had lost count, she told Hall or whatever he called himself. She shuffled to the window wrapping her shawl around her and peered down.
Unlike many London squares, the park opposite belonged to the council. The land had been purchased in 1915 to stop a proposed development of houses. When the Ramsays moved to St Peter’s Square in 1957, a team of keepers based in a hut at one end had tended the plants and bushes and swept up leaves and litter. They also kept an eye on unattended children. Now the upkeep of the lawns and paths was outsourced to a private company and residents added plants of their choosing to immaculate beds. The keepers’ hut, its windows and door sealed with metal panels, had lost definition beneath a chaos of graffiti.
The lone call of a song thrush in the horse-chestnut tree was amplified in the darkness.
Mark’s arm encircled her. Isabel shifted. He lifted her breast, as if testing its weight. Like a television programme she was not enjoying, Isabel snapped off the picture.
Footsteps came from the church, a chock-chock on the pavement accompanied by a lighter pattering; Isabel tapped her feet in their twinkling slippers in time to the sound and hurriedly smoothed down her hair, flattening a hand over her stomach. Her cotton shawl emphasized bony shoulder blades and a tall spare frame on which a linen skirt exposed still shapely calves and ankles.
The village hall shindig was crammed in to make way for the big day; so much that was petty and pointless had repercussions. What’s more, the bloody place went to rack and ruin; it was all a waste.
A woman with a pushchair and a boy clutching its handle scurried into the pool of lamplight and out again. The lights of other houses winked through the swaying branches. Isabel rubbed her mouth ruminatively: when there was a power cut, surely everything went out?
She batted Mark’s pillow to make an indentation for his head. She held his latest paperback up to the orange lamplight and squinted at the title: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Mark abhorred fiction and stuck to the truth. She fanned the pages and a shape floated on to the duvet. Patting about on the fabric she found a half-smoked cigarette and sniffed it. The smell made her happy for a fraction of time. She tried to slip the stub back in the book but gave up and climbed into bed, letting it drop to the floor.
Isabel lay on her back, her body so slight that the bed appeared empty. Although she told her cleaner that she was a light sleeper, she did not stir when, some time later, the fifth stair creaked.
6
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
A telephone rang from somewhere beyond the waiting room. Stella skimmed the Daily Mail she had taken from the pile of newspapers and brochures on the smoked-glass table, pondering how the old-fashioned bell was at odds with the modern techniques of dentistry boasted of in the glossy marketing.
It was her phone. She rummaged for it in her rucksack and hastened to the conservatory at the end of the waiting room.
‘Stella, are you there?’
‘Speaking.’
‘No, I mean are you at the dentist?’ It was Jackie, her personal assistant.
‘Yes I’m here,’ she hissed into the handset, stirring toothbrushes displayed in a cane basket on the window sill that resembled the gift sets with soap and baubles of bubble bath nestling in straw she received every Christmas from clients who saw no irony in giving soap to a cleaning company.
‘You’ll feel better.’ With less conviction Jackie added: ‘Good luck.’
At nine that morning Jackie had found Stella at her desk dosed with painkillers that had not masked the hammering in her jaw and, without consulting her, sourced a dentist online and booked the first appointment of the day.
Stella had not divulged her fear of the whining drill, the scraping of metal on ivory and the electric shocks of exposed nerves. Or her revulsion of latex-coated fingers poking around her mouth; never would she admit to feelings or failings.
The pain had started when she got home from her visit to the office last night. On top of Terry’s death, toothache was the last straw; she had ignored it, replied to her emails and designed and priced an oven-cleaning package. The throbbing increased and she decided to stipulate to the undertakers that the funeral would be basic: no cars, no flowers, no music. No mourners.
In the morning Jackie handed her the address of the surgery on a Clean Slate compliment slip and, snatching the keys for a spare van, gave Stella twenty minutes to get to Kew.
Stella had no intention of going; she would pretend Mrs Ramsay had called and asked her to come a day early. Yet obeying the satnav’s peremptory directions and driving along untypically clear roads to ‘reach her destination’ – a tree-lined street of detached Edwardian villas off the South Circular – she had arrived with five minutes to spare and a pain that was robbing her of her senses.
She had slotted the van into a tight space outside the surgery, crunched over a gravel sweep, circumventing a huge four-by-four car to steps between plinths, each supporting a stone eagle with outspread wings. A brass plaque on one, smeared with dried polish, read: ‘Dr S. A. I. Challoner. Dentist’. Nursing her jaw, Stella had pushed open one of two studded doors and gone inside.
She returned to her seat and took refuge in the newspaper.
Her phone rang again: Paul had called her at home and so far today had sent five texts. She switched off the handset.
‘You must be Stella.’
Stella looked up from an article about the curse of the Kennedy dynasty to see a resurrected Ted Kennedy: a middle-aged man with ebullient greying hair in a pristine white coat, piercing blue eyes and a smile of perfect teeth. He spoke as if her presence was a happy discovery and put out his hand. Stella rose.
‘I am Ivan.’ He kept her hand for the right amount of time in a grip that was firm but did not crush.
When he gently shut the door to his surgery, all extraneous noise ceased.
The richly decorated room reminded Stella of the sitting rooms of many of her clients. Floor-to-ceiling shelving of hardback books: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Homer and Trollope were – she was gratified to see – in alphabetical order. The opulent décor of rich ochres: yellow, terracotta, deep oranges contrasted with the midnight blue of Mrs Ramsay’s tablecloth. All this demoted the harsh white dental equipment to ornamental rather than the main activity of the room. Stella’s dread diminished and she waved at the bookshelf indicating Wuthering Heights.
‘Good story.’ She dared risk no more; she had only skimmed it at school.
‘Don’t you love it?’ Dr Challoner was examining his instruments, laying them out on a long marble-topped table with lion-paw legs.
‘I wouldn’t go that… Yes, I do.’
‘It was my wife’s favourite too.’
This stopped Stella from adding that she’d been annoyed by all the bad weather and had given up before the end. As Dr Challoner guided her to the chair, she kept to herself that she did not see the point of fiction and, lying back, became aware of the faint notes of a piano.
Although Stella knew little about classical music, she recognized it. Mrs Ramsay had put it on every day; the music was depressing and Stella thought it could not be good for her. Mrs Ramsay said the music came from the walls, which was the sort of illogical remark that had led Stella to suspect she was going mad. On her last visit, Mrs Ramsay, behaving as if in the scene she was describing, had rhapsodized over some bird – ‘Don’t look up, you will blind yourself’ – hovering above the ruins of a village and had cautioned: ‘Sssssh! See the children playing. Keep an eye on what they are doing.’
Stella had been compelled to reply that she could not see anyone. Mrs Ramsay had pointed out that the top of the cistern needed a wipe, which it did n
ot.
Stella had taken over Mrs Ramsay’s cleaning two years ago when one of her staff was frightened by the old lady pretending to be a celebrity at an opening ceremony and forcing her to hold up a length of parcel tape that she snipped with a pair of pinking shears.
Mr Challoner clipped a plastic bib into place around Stella’s neck and adjusted wrap-around sunglasses on her nose. He elevated her into position and Stella allowed herself to relax.
As he stood over her, a lock of his hair slid over eyebrows so defined Stella wondered whether he plucked them. She could not identify his aftershave: a mix of musk and incense cut with juniper berries and spicy pepper and calculated that veins criss-crossing the backs of his hands put him in his mid-fifties while his translucent complexion and prominent cheekbones made him seem younger.
‘My nurse is off sick. It is she who runs this tight ship, so do bear with me.’ He snapped on surgical gloves with a magician’s flourish.
‘I like this music.’ Stella regretted speaking. It opened possibilities of a discussion in which she would have nothing to say.
‘When my son was small this was his favourite, he made my wife play it every bedtime. One gets sentimental once they grow up. If music had been more accessible in Proust’s time, he might have experienced it as a vehicle of transcendence instead of a morsel of sponge cake.’ He gave a quick smile.
Stella opened wide to avoid responding and her jaw clicked the way Terry’s did; her calm evaporated.
‘I’m transported to his bedroom, tidying his toys, reading Beatrix Potter or some such to him. Raise your hand at any time during the procedure if you want to rest and rinse. Creeping out, I would have to stop and gaze at him, his face deceptively angelic in the glow of the nightlight, he hated the dark.’ Dr Challoner appeared distracted; then he shrugged and picked up a sickle probe from his tray.
Stella imagined a father who read his child stories, held her hand in the street and sat her on his knee to ask about her day at school. Bright light warmed her face when Mr Challoner repositioned the lamp; she closed her eyes.
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