Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

EXTRACTION

The day my husband moved his possessions out of our house I had toothache. It was raining, and all morning the door to the street stood open. The wet air gusted in and the dim hall lay like an opened tomb in the grey daylight. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands over my mouth, like a mime artist pantomiming dismay.

The dentist recommended extraction: the X-ray photograph showed that the tooth was beyond repair. Theoretically, he said, it ought to be possible, but the idiosyncracies of the case were what counted here. The crooked shape of the root made it inaccessible to the long, fine instruments that would kill the nerves. They, the instruments, could not turn corners. And the root, as the X-ray showed, had grown at a right angle to itself halfway down.

Why had it assumed that shape? It was difficult to know, the dentist said. It may have been bent by the pressure of other forces, but there appeared to be an aspect of fate to it too, the response of its own nature to the available conditions. To an extent it had simply chosen to go in that direction. One could not entirely blame the positioning of the other teeth, the spatial properties of the jaw, the condition of the gums; no, the tooth itself would have to answer for its doomed character. It had been in some ineluctable sense wayward, and now it had put itself beyond reach. A straighter root, however diseased, could have been redeemed. Superficially the condition of this one was not so bad, but form is destiny; form, not content, that which is shaped and therefore shapes its own fate.

While the X-ray was taken the dentist and the nurses stepped back, as one, reflexively turning away and crossing their arms over their chests. Their soft-shod feet were noiseless as they withdrew in this synchronised gesture of self-protection: in their white overalls they stood like acolytes at the ceremony of blood. The dentist, a tall and broad-shouldered Greek, wore beneath his overall a richly patterned floor-length robe. The wan nurses were silent as they moved dimly among the white and chrome cabinets at the back of the room, forever recessed, like figures in the background of a painting. Was the pain more or less constant, he asked, or were there still phases of normality in which one could do and think of other things? Had we reached the point of crisis where our only experience was the experience of suffering, where our only need, our only desire was the desire to end it? It is terrible to desire the end of something, the absence of something: desire should belong to life, to presence and not absence. One should be careful not to live in this inverted state too long; nor, he said, should one pull out a tooth unless it is absolutely necessary. Had we, then, reached the moment at which extraction had become impossible to defer any longer?

It could be said, yes, that the pain no longer had any intermissions. It used to be possible to escape from it at night, in sleep, but lately it had found out that hiding place too and had broken it down, like an invader breaking down the door of an ill-defended fortress. The ease with which the door came down was a crisis in itself: how fragile, how insubstantial normality was proved to be once pain came to disturb it! Pain is strong and huge and relentless, and ‘normality’ — that was the word he used, wasn’t it? — normality is the fine balance life achieves in the absence of disruption, is the blank register of events and their aftermath, slowly re-stitching and repairing itself, as the surface of a pool gradually becalms itself after a pebble has been thrown in. Normality is capable of resisting nothing and can outlive almost anything. Pain, on the other hand, can destroy whatever it has a mind to. Pain is the bomb that falls, and normality the grass that grows, at length, over the crater. To resist pain one must be as strong as pain, must make of oneself a kind of human bomb-shelter.

The extraction will leave a sizable declivity — a crater of sorts — behind it. It is a molar, centrally placed on the lower right jaw: a large tooth of great practical and personal significance whose disappearance nonetheless will be surprisingly unnoticeable from outside. It will not, of course, grow back. The intimate world of the mouth will suffer irreversible loss. In time, if sufficient resources and effort of will can be found, a simulacrum may be fitted; until then, the other teeth will have to do the work of compensating for the absence. Different modes of eating and chewing might evolve to remove strain from the area; curiously enough, the mirroring molar on the left-hand side is also missing. This is not, then, the first such experience of loss. A major tooth has already decayed and been extracted from this mouth, a history which obviously makes things harder. The current extraction is a darker business because of it. And the question of blame, always so delicate where it is in the nature of things to break down, is altered by this new piece of evidence. It’s beginning to look like carelessness, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. For a tooth, properly looked after, ought to be able to last a lifetime.

Outside the dentist’s windows is a sky of brilliant blue. Yesterday’s rain has been succeeded by an outpouring of confident spring sunshine, as unseasonally hot as the other was preternaturally cold and dark. The dentist’s room is balmy and bright; the sun sparkles on the steel instruments. The whole place is somewhat decrepit, the narrow building in its higgledy-piggledy street all crooked angles and canting floors, its partition walls and flimsy ceilings thickly muffled in bumpy off-white paper, its beech-patterned beige vinyl rising and falling thinly over the uneven boards. In the reception area there is a small fishtank with electric-green plastic ferns and a bubbling pirate ship sitting on a gravel bed; there are posters of diseased mouths, of infected gums, of the blackened stumps of rotted teeth. The dentist strides superbly around these improvised spaces in his patterned robe, as cheerful and dignified as his visitors are pensive and cowed. His teeth are strong and white and straight, and perhaps for this reason his smile is irrepressible. It lives on the surface, always reappearing, like something buoyant in water: it can’t be sunk. It looks, almost, unnatural. It is hard to know whether it represents good fortune — luck — or diligence and hard work. He appears to be happy, but has he always been like that? His partner in the dental practice has teeth as grey as tombstones in an overcrowded graveyard, and a canny, comprehending face; his overall is shabby and creased. From these appearances it might be deduced that one man has the knowledge of failure and the other does not. But how can one really tell? And is it better to be at the mercy of someone who understands pain or who has managed thus far to avoid it?

The dentist rummages in his tray of instruments; the nurses draw close. He leans forward, a dark shape against the bright window. The sunlit room is silent and there rises a kind of aural transparency through which a deeper background of sound emerges, intricately embroidered like an ocean bed seen through clear water: the sound of passing cars outside, of dogs barking and the distant keening of gulls, of fragments of conversation from the pavements below and music playing somewhere, of phones ringing, pots and pans clattering in a faraway restaurant kitchen, babies crying, workmen faintly hammering, of footsteps, of people breathing, and beneath it all a kind of pulse, the very heartbeat and hydraulics of the day. The dentist has a pair of pliers in his hand. Their factuality amid this impalpable veil of sound is unmistakable. They are simple and heavy and black. He wields them, drawing closer. He enters the mouth and with the arms of the pliers lays a ferocious metallic grip on the tooth. Every process has been passed through, except this one. First there was the long process of decay itself, brewing day after day in the darkness of the root; then the birth of pain, a seed that grew and branched, seeking out consciousness, awareness, like a plant seeks light and thereby blots it out; then the negotiations, consciousness negotiating with pain, trying to pacify and mollify it, to control and contain it, to dull it and hence live with it; then crisis, decision, action, a date and time decided on at which extraction would occur and the situation be brought to an end. But the contact of steel with human flesh has a reality of its own. It is happening: things are being changed, having been unable to change themselves.

The dentist wrenches and wrenches amid the soft tissues. His intervention seems allied somehow with death, yet it belongs to life, for its purpose is to liberate the sufferer from the cause of suffering. Its purpose is to separate what will not naturally separate itself. But it is cold and hard, insensate, brutal. It is called violence: people are forever trying to find alternatives to it, but they seldom work.

The dentist speaks.

‘More force is required,’ he says.

The nurse hands him a chisel. He positions it on the edge of the jaw and places the flat tip between the tooth and the gum. He pushes down, straining so hard that his smile becomes a grimace. Presently he stands to improve his leverage. He uses both hands; he stands on tiptoe, bearing down with shaking arms. The tooth resists and resists, and when at last it gives way it does so too easily, so that the chisel spends its force upwards, hitting the teeth above. They take the blow, these innocent teeth, rocking in their moorings; they loosen, but they stay where they are. The dentist holds up the bloody tooth between his trembling fingers. He is beaming again, though with less intensity. A little consternation threads his brow. Violence is so unwieldy, so difficult to control. There is collateral damage; the fine mesh of life is torn. He has caused unnecessary pain, and trauma to the other teeth. He feels bad about it. He is surprised.

‘I didn’t expect it to come out like that,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Please don’t worry,’ I say, with difficulty. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘I will pack the wound with dressings,’ he says. ‘You need to change them every two hours. The bleeding should stop by tomorrow but you won’t be able to eat normally for a while. Soft things, that’s all. And cold will feel more pleasant.’ He smiles, happy again. ‘Make sure you buy yourself a big ice cream on the way home.’

Home: as a child I loved my grandmother’s house, a semi-detached Edwardian villa in a Hertfordshire suburb with mullioned windows on whose sills china shepherdesses stood, and King Charles spaniels with enamelled waterfalls of porcelain hair. In the gas-scented kitchen my grandmother served shepherd’s pie with frozen peas; I was put to bed in the little room upstairs whose window looked out on the rectangle of front garden with its laid redbrick path and gate, and beneath the faded pink candlewick bedspread and thick stiff sheets succumbed to the force of these sights and smells and textures which, though not human, seemed to define humanness. Touching the ornaments in my grandmother’s sitting room, from whose windows could be seen the long, sloping back lawn that led down to the railway line, I felt visible; the smell of the room where she and my grandfather slept in their mahogany bed, of the cold narrow lavatory, of the small pantry where the constituents of her plain English cooking dwelled, were so distinct that they made me distinct too, just as in the garden the dark foliage of the perennial shrubs made it possible to see the filigree spiders’ webs spun across their empty spaces. My mother grew up in that house: her amniotic atmosphere was there too in the potent rooms, as it was in my own consciousness, ineradicable.

As an adolescent I went to stay once with my grandmother alone; I ate in the linoleum-floored kitchen, sat amongst the ornaments in the sitting room, slept under the candlewick bedspread in the little room that seemed somewhat shrunken now, solidified, its reality and my own no longer intertwined. I could not, try as I might, feel like the child I once was. During those hours the whole merging of human and non-human came unravelled, for it became clear to me that the human history these rooms embodied could never be retrieved and released back into the world. A few years later the house was sold: other people live there now. In the compact little cottage to which my grandmother moved, a handful of the familiar objects are still exhibited, a trace of the familiar smell still remains; like a footprint in the sand after the tide has washed over it, her impression is being gradually erased.

In a box in an upstairs room of my house lie the deeds of the building, dating its successive transfers in ownership back to its construction in 1832. A sea captain had first bought the land from a farmer, one of several parcels of green hillside running down to the sea which together would form the basis of a sloping Regency terrace. The land is specified as having been pasture for grazing cattle: at the bottom of the hill the shingle beach shelves into the water, a straight and simple coastline at which the large ocean often seems to wait, as though lacking a means of intercourse with the land that bounds it. Fifty or sixty miles along, in Dorset, the relationship between the two is more dramatic, and dramatised, the limestone sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the pressing, insistent water, which is forever harassing and caressing its rocky mate, half predator and half lover. The resistant rock bears the marks of these attentions, either acquiescent or violated, it’s hard to tell. Its beauty and its deformity are its destiny, an interface lacking from the flat shoreline here, with its placidly frigid geology. Here the broad blank sea has no choice but to become reflective, as though it is not living but dreaming; sometimes utterly still, a shimmering unconscious shield of light, at others upset, blindly thrashing and roiling, unable to vent itself on anything tangible and real. There is nothing here for it to destroy, to affect: in the morning, after a storm, the beach will sometimes be littered with a great quantity of something particular, as though this is what has plagued its unconscious — hundreds of dead starfish, for instance, and once, mile after mile of sawn pine planks. These occasional expectorations, so unnatural and strange, seem to signify a certain malaise, a sickness that I interpret as frustration. I imagine the cattle grazing here once, slumbrous too, beside the comatose sea; imagine the land swept by unimpeded waves of shadow and light, by great gauzy veils of rain, by winds roaming unconstricted over the openness, and by darkness, by dark nights of wind and rain, the sea tossing and fretful, the rain hurling itself out of the sky, the wind raving up the bare hill and away among the black shapes of the Downs, and nowhere to shelter, no front door to close against the night.

In the big upstairs room whose windows go all the way down to the floor there are two enormous, ornate gilt hooks mysteriously screwed into the high ceiling. One day, coming out of the house, I met an old woman standing outside on the pavement looking up at these windows. She told me that when she was younger she lived in this road and often used to stand where she was now, listening to the sound of singing that came out of them. It was the lady who owned the house then who was singing: she was an opera singer, and she lived here with a man who played a stringed instrument, a lute or perhaps a guitar, or maybe it was a mandolin. She it was who put the hooks into the ceiling: she hung her hammock from them and would sit at one end, singing, with her man at the other accompanying her, both of them swinging in the breezes from the open windows. At the time this image pierced me with a feeling that was almost pain, for that room was my bedroom and I often lay and looked at those hooks, seeing something in the enigma of them to which I could never give an exact name; in their golden extravagance and lack of usefulness they tantalised me and reproached me at the same time, for though I didn’t know what they were for I knew some force had put them there whose nature I both recognised and denied. These mysterious objects, these ferocious opulent hooks, expressed its terror and its beauty; they were, I felt sure, the opposite of a gutless adornment. Other people, seeing them, would sometimes betray something of my own alarm, as though these were the golden claws of an angry deity we had forgotten to placate. And they had fastened on my room, these claws, to remind me of something I didn’t seem to know or couldn’t remember, something to do with happiness, and with the power of the unknown to undo the known. What are they for? people would ask, gazing at them quizzically. And I would always answer that I didn’t know.

There is a more convenient dentist, in fact. Her practice is much closer to my house. This dentist is glamorous, with blonde waved hair and a slender, buxom figure like a fifties film star. Sometimes I see her slim calves disappearing up the grimy stairwell to the building, hear the rapid tick-tack of her high-heeled shoes. She wears little tailored outfits in beautiful colours, primrose and magenta, scarlet and pistachio green. She has a slightly distressed look about her as she comes and goes; an air of apprehension haunts her rosebud expression, like the film star in the suspenseful phase of the drama. Will the mystery resolve itself? Will the impossible become possible? Will our heroine win the day? In the mornings the road is full of rubbish, of litter the maritime winds blow across the pavements, of broken bottles and discarded food the seagulls tug from the plastic bags left out for the binmen. The dentist picks her way through it, the collar of her coat turned up, like a tragic starlet in a Paris backstreet.

I went to her practice once, made an appointment and climbed the narrow stairs to the first floor with my daughters. We needed to register with a dentist, and though it looked like we were simply following the promptings of fate in coming here, some secret vanity made me want the exotic dentist for her own sake, for like the golden hooks in my bedroom ceiling she represented my own forsaken sense of glamour, was another manifestation of the deity who found it so provoking to be denied. It was dark up there, and tenebrous, though outside it was a bright afternoon. A single bulb lit the gloomy hall. In the waiting room the blinds were down. I stood with my daughters at the vacant reception desk. We waited five minutes, ten. Presently I spoke to someone passing and was told to keep waiting. I could hear voices in other rooms, and footsteps going rapidly to and fro. I realised that something was happening: there was a feeling of drama here, a dark sense of incident in the muffled voices and the deserted desk. I heard the sound of drilling, and then more voices, low and urgent.

‘Has he come round?’ someone said.

‘He doesn’t want to wake up.’ This was the dentist’s voice.

‘Try again.’

I moved out into the hall and saw through the partly opened door the room the voices were coming from. I could see the dentist’s back: she was wearing a red silk blouse today, tightly cinched at the waist with a belt; and, unusually, trousers over her vertiginous heels. Her yellow hair flowed in serpentine waves over her shoulders. She was bending over the dentist’s chair, in which lay the unconscious body of a man. Another woman, a nurse I suppose, was there too: through the gap in the door I saw the two women, together, stooped over the man’s body. They shook him and prodded him. They called in his ear. He lay there like a broken toy they had, between them, destroyed; as though, fascinated by their power over him, they had forgotten for a moment his fallibility. I went back to the waiting room, where my daughters still stood. Their faces were uncertain. Along the hall the man had begun to groan, loud and long and terrible groans that filled the gloomy half-darkness of the waiting room.

‘I think we should go,’ I said. ‘I think we should come back another time.’

My daughters looked more uncertain still.

‘Why?’ they said.

Their response surprised me. Could they not see for themselves that things were not right? The man groaned and bellowed down the hall. Was this what a world run by women looked like? A woman, I thought, should be more than a mere impersonator. My daughters’ anxious faces, the groaning man, the deserted reception desk in the shadowy waiting room: in the presence of these things I felt the presence of failure. It was I who had brought them here, who had made the appointment; now I was saying we had to go.

‘There’s been a mix-up,’ I said. ‘I was sure the appointment was today but they haven’t got it written down.’

‘Oh,’ they said.

‘Perhaps we’ll find a different dentist,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this one isn’t very well organised.’

They looked a little suspicious — after all, I had made much of the proximity of this dentist to our house. What was going on here? Out in the shadowy hall, we met the dentist herself, hastening from her room. She looked flushed and harried; she had her coat on with the collar turned up. Behind her the man still lay splayed in the chair, groaning dreadfully. The nurse appeared in another doorway.

‘Is he all right?’ she said.

‘He’ll live,’ said the dentist harshly. ‘He feels a bit sick, that’s all. I’m just going to buy him a can of Coke.’

She pushed past us, closing her collar around her throat with a flash of red-painted fingernails. I smelled her perfume, heard the jingle of coins in her pocket. She tick-tacked away down the stairs.