Alligator Playground

A Matter of Teeth

DENIS’S GIRLFRIEND lived a few hundred yards from his dentist, so any onset of dental decay — which seemed to be necessary now that he was in his forties, and call for a long sequence of restorative bridgework — was not unmixed with a feeling of masochistic anticipation that he saw no reason to question. With such a perfect alibi, who cared about the muddy whirlpool of the psyche?

He said to his wife that the dentist’s only disadvantage was in being slow, but a man who took time over such work was none the worse for that. Deception was a murky trade, as he well knew, because hadn’t the British excelled at it in the Second World War?

For the sake of his mouth he sometimes wished Sylvia lived elsewhere but, being English and with the sort of teeth that went with it, he came to accept the situation, if not with complacency, then in the knowledge that there was something to be said for heredity after all. The managing director of a biscuit factory, he was as far from looking the part as possible, so casual in dress it was a wonder, his wife often thought, that the business hadn’t gone bump years ago. But his lackadaisical stance was deceptive, for he got things done, and at the same time swore it had never been his idea to work more than necessary. ‘Things trundle along. We sell. We make a profit. The biscuits are even good. As long as we keep the bank manager at bay — and we’re doing that, believe me.’

Such an attitude, Glenda thought, was the bane of the country, but who was she to complain? Bringing up three children kept her busier than his work seemed to keep him. Complaining was whining, and too many people did that — another thing wrong with the country.

His meeting with Sylvia had been a boon to be taken immediate advantage of. He went alone to the party because Glenda wasn’t feeling well. Hadn’t she known that parties posed the kind of risk that he was in no mood to shirk?

Sylvia had been leaning against a bookcase as he went up the stairs, tall coffee table volumes on the lower shelf exaggerating the shape of her legs. Her face was no less interesting — thin (as was her body) but he noted the lively way she looked at him as he went by, and she thinking that he hadn’t taken in her glance. But he had: she would have to be sharper than that. She was: ‘I knew exactly what was on your mind.’

So his remark about ‘the well-heeled liberals of Hampstead’ drove the other man away. ‘That won’t get you anywhere,’ she said, ‘with so many dishy men around. I’ve never seen so many dishy men at one party.’

The fact that he was disliked on sight may have been what drew her towards him, for he always went to such places dressed in the opposite kind of garb to which he wore at work: a man of small stature, with dark hair, wearing a formal suit but casually knotted silk tie. Even so, he considered himself broad-minded and liberal, though a fatal ability to say the right thing made it difficult to put his views in that coherent braying voice usual at such places. If he succeeded and someone argued against him he reacted with such vehemence that they regarded him as an extremist of the opposite camp. ‘I think socialism’s a wonderful idea, but not when it’s used as a device by the middle classes to keep the workers in their place.’

Such outdated quips sent a shock through Sylvia that was not entirely of dismay. Neither knew what it was about the party that made him decide she was the most fascinating woman there, and her to agree that he was the nth dishy man. He heard her telling someone, as he was meant to, that her husband was at a scientific congress in the States. Maybe there was a full moon, though he couldn’t be bothered to check the almanack.

In the next few days he recalled her to mind many times. The coloured Polaroid shot stamped the fact that she had red hair, wore a grey skirt, and had black stockings. Or would he find they were tights? Her thinnish face was somewhat plain, except for the slight bow of vulnerable curiosity which shaped her lips. A week after the party he telephoned her, and she wondered why he’d waited so long.

When he fixed an appointment at the dentist’s he didn’t know whether to arrange it late in the day so that he could visit her first, or make an appointment early in order to receive some consolation afterwards for any discomfort undergone. Whatever he chose, she made him a mug of coffee, the ritual drink before the run upstairs.

He couldn’t recall such keen pleasure during his other affairs, and wondered if he wasn’t getting randier in his old age, or whether the prospect of the dentist’s drill didn’t act as an aphrodisiac. But maybe it had more to do with her, because she began undressing immediately — the ethnic sack over her head, revealing no bra (she hardly needed one) and the briefest of pants on the bedrail before he reached the third button of his shirt.

Decisions were complicated by her husband, but they managed it well, both agreeing that they did not want to cause pain either to him or to Denis’s wife. ‘What it really means is that we don’t want any pain for ourselves,’ he said.

She stared. ‘I wouldn’t like to be married to you.’

He didn’t care to inform her that the feeling was mutual, left hand planing across her breasts. She only pulled the counterpane back, so that they made love on the blanket, and when afterwards he laid his head beside hers, unable any longer to support his own weight above her, the wool hair texture irritated his recently worked on, or about to be messed about with, tooth. While dressing, he took out a cigarette.

‘Not in the bedroom.’ It was all right downstairs, but even there she didn’t approve, though her husband smoked those vile cigars now and again. She descended first, and he heard the abacus slide of the curtains, not sure what any sharp-eyed neighbour might think. ‘Coffee?’

He sometimes wondered whether or not he was in love with her, but really in love, apart from just loving her. The longer the affair went on the less he seemed to know her, which was strange after having thought, at first sight, that he had taken in everything.

Her abrasive, almost nonchalant manner enthralled him, and he sometimes found it hard to decide what else did. She was cool enough while making love, even when she came. ‘Please,’ he said.

‘Sugar?’

‘Do you love me?’ he couldn’t help asking.

A lithe grey cat jumped on the table to get closer to the caged bird. She put it gently down, sprayed coffee powder in his mug. ‘Of course.’

‘Put in two, then. And more coffee.’

The liquid blackened. ‘When’s your next appointment?’

‘I’ll phone you later.’ The cat tried again to get at the birdcage, dug its razor-points into his thigh and, he thought, fetched blood. He threw it off. ‘When does hubbie come back?’

‘Tomorrow, but only for a few days. And next week he goes to Japan.’

He closed the garden gate, thinking she ought to put some oil on the hinges, and walked down the street, far too old a campaigner to have left the car close to the house. A man, bearing the heavy duty briefcase that doubled for luggage and saved endless waits at airport carousels, passed him, and Denis recognised the click of the latch. He was a large bear-like man, going home after a week’s work, to the comforts he had no doubt dreamed about from the moment of leaving.

He sweated so much at the assumption that her husband had seen him coming out that the thumping toothache was forgotten even as far as the dentist’s chair.

When he phoned to inform her about his next appointment a man answered, and Denis made the elementary mistake of placing the handset down instead of asking for someone he knew couldn’t live there. The gaffe bothered him, but the following day Sylvia came on as usual. Even so, he was unnerved by a situation in which the husband returned a day before he said he would.

Glenda and Denis had often joked about having affairs, but she had been too busy, too tired all the time, too proud perhaps. She couldn’t be bothered, had never got the hots to the extent of action, and in any case had the sort of luck that any handsome man who stopped on the motorway to help her change a wheel after a puncture would die of a heart attack from the effort. And Denis said he had the kind of luck that if he helped a beautiful woman by the roadside he would die from a massive cardiac arrest at forgetting to ask for her telephone number.

Their sixteen-year-old son Jonathan came in from school, for some reason even scruffier than usual. ‘Glenda, I saw Dad this afternoon sitting in a car with a woman. I waved, but he didn’t see me. I was on the bus.’

‘It’s not surprising, then, is it?’ She felt the sort of palpitations as on discovering when she and Denis first met that they had birthdays in the same month.

‘Who do you think it was?’

‘Something to do with work, I suppose.’

Denis was home later than normal. ‘I saw you in the car this afternoon,’ she said, ‘with a woman.’

He laughed. ‘I wish you had,’ and opened his briefcase to show his appointments book. ‘I was in St Albans, looking at that new site. The traffic was atrocious. But I had to do it today because I must get my teeth seen to tomorrow.’

He wanted to ask what she had been doing in Swiss Cottage, but couldn’t, poor man. She’d got him there. But if he really had been in St Albans, and she wouldn’t put it past Jonathan to try mixing them up, since he’d been in a very bolshie mood this last six months, then she had as much as admitted to being where she didn’t normally go. And she refused to make up a reason, in spite of that little boy pleading act which Denis put on.

Everything comes to those who don’t make accusations, if they live long enough. So she hoped, arranging things into their relevant racks in the kitchen, just back from buying bagels and black bread, vegetables and fish, hopelessly overstocking in the last few weeks.

She opened and closed the refrigerator, always finding other items on the table. Yesterday his dentist telephoned to say that his next appointment had to be put off, which enraged him because he had kept a whole morning clear for it. He was more distracted than ever, a state which seemed to be catching. Perhaps the biscuit trade was going downhill. ‘Not likely,’ he said, with what she could only think of as a sly smile. ‘If it was we’d put in more sugar, jack the price up a penny, and snuff ten grammes off the weight. If you can’t shift biscuits in England, where can you?’

Coming back from a visit to her mother’s she saw him in the call box on the corner. Funny place to be, with a functioning, telephone at home. ‘I tried,’ he said when she mentioned it, ‘but the dialling tone seemed dead.’

She held the flimsy bit of plastic to her ear. ‘It’s all right now.’

When the engineer came he could find nothing wrong, and looked at her as if she was ready for the funny farm. Lying in bed that night — Denis wasn’t snoring for a change — it was as if she could actually hear the full white moon, rustling, perhaps moving, trying to talk to her.

Denis had taken the green Volvo from the drive, as was his right. Her dented Mini at the kerb was ten years old, but except for a little rust around the left headlamp it was the best runabout she’d ever had, always refusing to let him buy her a Golf or a Peugeot.

She waited nearly a minute to get onto the main road, didn’t know what she was doing, impelled by something over which she had no control but which in no way upset her. Curious as to where the mood would lead, she knew it was to do with Denis, but whether she wanted to meet him by accident, or trap him by design — well, she didn’t know that, either.

Traffic was more fluid beyond Hampstead, ponds at the hilltop shimmering against the sky. In one way, to be blind was to be lucky, but today was different, as she parked between the trees a couple of hundred yards before the dentist’s.

It takes all sorts to make a fool. She mulled on his lies, knowing him the worst kind of all, because he was finally a coward. Unable to believe his words, you could only rely on your eyes, which she regarded as unjust.

When he came out he walked, nonchalant and unaware, up the avenue, and took the first turning right. She was proud of her skill in following without being seen, as if excelling at a new kind of sport. His overconfidence was a great help, as was the fact that they had the same sign of the zodiac. Being finally alerted, more clues fell into place than she could ignore.

The house was on a curve, easily recognisable as the one he had gone into, though having to lag behind she couldn’t see who had opened the door. Not that there was any need.

Jinking back onto the main road, a lorry screamed its horn, its enormous fender missing her by inches. The sign of the zodiac now gave her the decisiveness that only he had so far made use of — if you believed in that sort of thing. Inconvenient to be killed at such a time, but a miss was as good as a mile. The Town Hall wasn’t far, a matter of minutes to get the names of the people who lived in the house. Easy enough then to find the telephone number.

‘How was the traffic today?’

‘Exhausting.’

‘You poor darling. I think you need a holiday. You’re working too hard.’ She knew everything, but said nothing, not out of mercy or fear, or even inanition, but because she sensed things would end worse for him if she let it go on. Merely to say something would be no guarantee that he would stop the affair. ‘Go to the dentist today?’

‘Just to have them cleaned.’

‘Isn’t that the end of it?’

‘Two more sessions. There’ll be one next week, and another the week after.’

No need to make her call from the public box. Bound to be out of order should she try. If a woman answered she could press the trap down, but at a man’s voice she would say what she had rehearsed a dozen times. What, however, was that? Easy to forget, but no doubt instinct would push her through. She felt a sense of purpose and excitement, though Denis couldn’t notice how good she was getting at the game, which diminished it somewhat. When he emptied his briefcase she looked into the diary for his next dental appointment.

‘Good morning. You don’t know me, but your wife is very familiar with my husband, has been for some time. I think he’ll be calling next Tuesday, at either nine or half-past ten. No, I can’t say, I’m afraid. But you might see him.’

It was the only way to end it without Denis knowing that she had done so, by accident, as it were, the husband putting a stop to it if he was half a man, or to his wife if he wasn’t.

The moment she put the telephone down she imagined the man so enraged at catching them ‘at it’ that he punched Denis’s face and so ruined his bridgework that he needed another twelve months in the chair. In which case — she fell back laughing — he might be forced to change his dentist. Jonathan, scared by her hilarity, looked up from his homework. Well, it was too late now. All she had to do was wait for him to walk in holding his jaw together. She ran upstairs crying, shouting through her tears to Jonathan that he could get his own bloody tea.

‘Menopause,’ he scoffed, moving across the kitchen.

Nothing happened. She couldn’t understand it. Denis went on being his own smiling self, even had the gall to say he needed a few extra appointments at the dentist’s. There was nothing left but to sling the whole weighty emotional dossier into his face when he walked in the door. Break his bridgework on that. Impossible to love him, though she felt a vibrant liveliness in the last few days, so that last night it had been better in bed than for years, as if both sensed something about each other that they were discovering for the first time, which alone should have made him wary.

The doorbell sounded, someone selling things perhaps, a shape visible through the glass. Well, she could always scream, but opened the door. It wasn’t raining, so she needn’t ask him in.

‘You don’t know me, but we’ve spoken on the phone. Or you did, anyway.’

Tall and well-built, he almost obscured the lilac bush, wore a light overcoat, forty or fifty, she couldn’t say, sparse fair hair and rather large features, lips indicating an attractive sense of humour, pale blue eyes spreading curiosity all through her. ‘Come in, then.’

He carried a large briefcase, as if going on a trip, or returning from one. ‘Do you mind if I take my coat off?’

She didn’t.

‘I wanted to see what kind of a person you were.’

Weakness wasn’t from shock. She moved into the kitchen, and he followed, so she could only say: ‘Coffee?’

His fundamental insolence seemed based on justifiable self-esteem. ‘Any brandy? I’ve just come off the plane.’ He lit a thin cigar. ‘I followed your husband after he left my house last week, and found where you lived.’

She sat facing, hands over the coffee steam, glad that he had. ‘A couple of schemers, aren’t we?’

‘Better the evil you know than the one you don’t.’

He looked the ideal family man, and she asked; ‘Aren’t you afraid of going off the rails?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I never go off the rails. I only change lines! I thought it would be more interesting to make your acquaintance than to spoil theirs. Everything has its price.’

‘Really?’ She blushed, which meant more than she liked to own, was more pleasant than it ought to be, but she thought she would get used to it, as he put a hand on hers.

‘Your wife will wonder where you are, though.’

‘The plane was delayed. It often is. Or she’s too busy to wonder, don’t you think? Ever since you called I’ve been thinking about you. It was your voice. So unhurried in what you were telling me. You must have known it was dynamite.’

‘I suppose I did.’ She actually laughed — carefree. She hadn’t thought anything about him when they talked on the phone, but maybe that had done it. It was all for herself, for the first time in her life, and such single-mindedness had obviously drawn him.

‘I could tell you were beautiful and attractive — and wonderfully intelligent.’ He was like a blanket, but a warm blanket whose warp and weft knew everything about her when he put his arms over her shoulders and she went close.