‘I’ve double-booked myself,’ Caspar told Poppy when she took a mug of tea up to him in his studio.
He had been on another painting bender, working through the night to finish a huge canvas in oils commissioned by a wealthy Italian banker. Cold sunlight streamed through the skylights, highlighting the thin layer of dust on the room’s surfaces. The smell of oil paints, linseed, and turpentine hovered in the air. Caspar took the Batman mug from Poppy, promptly covering it with cadmium yellow paint. His white sweatshirt was streaked with Venetian red.
‘You look as if you’ve been shot.’ Poppy unwrapped a Mars bar for him so he wouldn’t get paint on that too.
‘Probably will be.’ He nodded at the door, which served as his diary. The haphazard assortment of scribbled notes pinned to it was escalating out of control. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Babette for lunch. She’s introducing me to some journalist who might be interested in doing a piece on me for GQ. I’d forgotten I was meant to go with Jules to her best friend’s wedding. She’s expecting me to pick her up at one o’clock. She’ll go ape.’
‘Make that triple-booked,’ said Poppy. ‘Kate rang five minutes ago. She said to remind you about meeting her at one thirty.’ Caspar looked blank. ‘The preview at the Merrydew Gallery. You promised to take her.’
‘Damn.’
‘At least she won’t go ape,’ Poppy reassured him.
‘No, just cry.’
‘So who’ll it be? Who’s the lucky winner?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
Caspar began cleaning the worst of the paint off his hands. Poppy wandered over to the door to take a closer look at the pinned-up notes.
‘B. McCloud,’ she read, peering at the dreadful writing in green felt tip. ‘Is that Bella McCloud the opera singer?’
He pulled a face. ‘Ugly old trout wants her portrait done. At least she’s keeping her clothes on. First sitting’s next week.’
‘Not next week. Two o’clock this afternoon.’
‘You’re having me on.’ Caspar looked up. Poppy showed him the note. He winced. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘What it is to be popular,’ she mocked. There was a smudge of blue paint below Caspar’s left ear, nestling in the groove between his jawbone and neck. She took the spirit-soaked cloth from him and carefully rubbed it off. Those were the kind of tucked-away smudges Caspar was likely to miss.
He looked down at her, watching the expression of intense concentration on her face. When she had disposed of the smear she spotted another, this time hidden just beneath the hairline behind his ear.
Caspar said, ‘It’s midday. You aren’t supposed to be here either. What happened, did Jake sack you again?’
There. Poppy had finished. Now, whichever of Caspar’s girlfriends saw him this afternoon, they could safely nuzzle his neck without risking a mouthful of cobalt blue paint.
‘For once, no. I’ve got a dentist’s appointment.’
Poppy tried to sound grown-up and unconcerned. Only wimps were frightened of the dentist.
She just wished she hadn’t had that toffee-chewing contest with Marlene last week.
And she wished dental surgeries didn’t have to smell so… dentisty.
‘Scared?’
‘Scared? Me? Nooo.’
The trouble with Caspar, Poppy thought with frustration, was nothing got past him. He was brilliant at reading faces.
‘So if you aren’t scared,’ he persisted with evident amusement, ‘what are you?’
She may as well admit it.
‘Um… more like pant-wettingly petrified.’
Downstairs the phone began to ring.
‘That’ll be for you,’ said Poppy. ‘One of your dates.’
‘In that case, better not answer it.’
‘You must. What if it’s Bella McCloud?’
‘All the more reason.’ Just to be on the safe side, Caspar hung onto Poppy’s wrist until the ringing had stopped. ‘What time’s this appointment of yours?’
‘One o’clock. Why?’
‘Okay. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘Where?’ Poppy was confused.
‘Don’t say I never take you anywhere.’ His grey eyes regarded her solemnly. ‘We’re going to the dentist.’
The office was off the Bayswater Road, across the park. Since Caspar’s car’s tire had been clamped and the sun was shining, they decided to walk.
‘You can’t come in with me,’ Poppy protested. ‘I’d really look like a hopeless case.’
‘I’m not staying out here,’ said Caspar. The waiting room was heaving with kids flinging Licorice Allsorts at each other. He pointed to a group photograph up on the wall of the staff at the practice. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t mind meeting your dentist.’
Poppy’s dentist didn’t look like a dentist, she looked more like Joanna Lumley. Her tawny-blonde hair was swept back in a severely elegant chignon. Her white coat fell open to reveal a dark blue Lycra dress as tight as a bandage, and she had the best pair of pale-stockinged knees Caspar had seen in years. She reminded him, he decided happily, of one of those beautiful Russian scientists in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., ice-cool on the outside but when you whipped off their glasses and let down their hair…
Poppy’s wisdom tooth wasn’t only badly cracked, she soon learned, it was growing diagonally and pushing her other teeth out of line. Her heart sinking, she heard the ominous pronouncement: ‘You’ll be far better off with it out.’
Poppy lay back in the chair, palms sweating, and marveled at Caspar’s idea of keeping her company.
The dentist—‘Please, call me Lisa’—was spending so much time flashing her flawless smile in his direction, it was a miracle she hadn’t taken out the wrong tooth. Unable to speak, what with the numbness and the mouthful of metal clamps and suction pumps, all Poppy could do was listen to the pair of them chatting each other up. When the thirty minutes of torture were over, the dumpy dental nurse gave Poppy a beaker of pink water and a funnel to spit into. Lisa gave Caspar her business card and scribbled her home number—in case of emergencies—on the back.
Poppy’s frozen mouth had turned to rubber. She could no longer spit, only dribble pathetically into the gurgling silver funnel. Ribbons of blood-stained saliva dangled from her chin.
That’s it, no toffees ever again, she thought exhaustedly.
It was also definitely the last time she let Caspar come along to give her so-called moral support.
‘Don’t forget, I’ll be expecting to hear from you,’ Lisa told Caspar with a dazzling white grin. ‘Oh, ’bye,’ she added to Poppy as an afterthought.
‘Thankth a lot,’ mumbled Poppy when they were out of the building.
‘No problem.’ Caspar was blithely unaware of his crime. ‘How d’you feel, still a bit shaky? You’ve got blood on your shirt,’ he pointed out, to be helpful. ‘Come on, we’ll get a cab home.’
‘No, I want to walk,’ Poppy said to punish him. Caspar never walked anywhere if he could help it.
‘Are you sure?’ A fresh stream of dribble was sliding out of the corner of Poppy’s mouth. One side of her jaw had already puffed up. She was beginning to look like a gerbil.
Stubbornly Poppy nodded. They set off up the road.
‘Tho? Are you going to thee her?’
Slow to translate, Caspar frowned. ‘Who?’
‘My dentitht!’
‘Oh… well, could do. Seems a shame not to.’ He shrugged good-naturedly. ‘It’d have its advantages, you’d never run short of dental floss.’
‘Huh.’
‘And she’s a dab hand with a drill,’ Caspar mused. ‘I bet she’s brilliant at putting up shelves.’
If not at putting up much of a fight, Poppy thought sourly. Somehow she had expected better of a dentist. It was almost undignified, like witnessing the Queen bopping along to the Spice Girls.
‘Come on, cheer up.’ Caspar took her arm as they crossed the road, heading for the park. ‘It’s over now. Look on the bright side; you’ll never have to have that tooth out again.’
‘Don’t you have enough women to worry about already?’ Poppy refused to join in. She wasn’t in the mood. To punish him some more, she quickened her step. ‘I mean, do you need to add another one to your litht?’
‘Who says I worry about them?’ Caspar grinned. ‘I’m not worried. The more the merrier.’
‘That ith tho immature,’ snapped Poppy. She dragged another handful of tissues out of her jacket pocket and mopped irritably at her chin. The tissues came away crimson; all this stomping like a soldier on a route march had brought the bleeding on again. And she might not be able to feel it, but she knew her left cheek was swollen. She must look completely mad.
‘I don’t know why you’re in such a stinking mood,’ said Caspar.
Poppy didn’t know either. She didn’t reply, striding on across the grass instead. When she tried chewing her lip it felt disgusting, like a car tire. Behind her she heard Caspar’s far more leisurely footsteps and the brief crackle of a sweet wrapper.
Go on, I hope both your front teeth fall out, thought Poppy vengefully. That would put the frighteners on his precious harem. That should do the trick.
The sun had disappeared behind a bank of ominous grey cloud. A cold wind whistled across the park. As Poppy tugged the flimsy bloodstained collar of her denim shirt up around her ears, fat raindrops began to fall.
To her even greater annoyance, she’d been so set on striding grumpily ahead at a rate of knots that she hadn’t thought where she was going. Now, having veered left instead of right, they were closer to the boat houses on the bank of the Serpentine than to the bridge leading across it.
‘Where are we going?’ protested Caspar. ‘This is miles out of our way.’
Poppy hoped he was freezing. She hoped he was hating every minute. It was a comforting thought.
‘My feet are starting to ache,’ Caspar complained behind her.
Without bothering to look round, Poppy murmured, ‘Good.’