4

They remained silent for a few minutes, while Miss Green finally composed herself, putting on her spectacles and looking at her face in a handmirror. After this she powdered her nose and chin, making herself no less unattractive. The bones of her wrists were prominent and her hair, done to resemble the fashion, seemed lifeless. Katherine looked at her anxiously.

“Do you feel better now?”

“Yes, a bit.” Miss Green swallowed. “This tooth has always been a trouble.” Her voice had no volume, and sometimes rose to a whine to make itself heard.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Well, there was a time when I didn’t go to a dentist for nearly two years. Then it got very bad, and I had to go, and he filled it so that it was nearly all filling. Then some time ago all the filling came out and it started to hurt. He filled it again, but it went on hurting, so he gave me some stuff to put on it, and that stopped it hurting. But now it’s started again.” She looked at Katherine with weak, self-pitying eyes. “Last night was terrible. I didn’t get to sleep till four, and then I woke up before seven. It was awful. All my face—the whole of my head seemed to be aching.”

“A headache? The one starts the other.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but I do get terrible headaches in any case. And when I’ve got one, I just can’t do anything. Mother knows there’s nothing for it but to keep me in bed with aspirins in hot milk. And very often I’m sick too.”

“But do you have them at work?”

“They don’t come on during the day as a rule. At night sometimes. Most often I wake up with them. Then I don’t go to work, I just stay in bed.”

“Perhaps you should have stayed in bed this morning.”

Miss Green replaced her gloves with a genteel gesture. “Mother did suggest it. But it wasn’t hurting so much when I got up, and it doesn’t do to stay at home too often, does it? Mr. Anstey can be very rude.”

“He gets worse every day. He’s got the manners of a dustman.”

“How funny you should say that,” said Miss Green with a faint giggle, “because his father was only a Corporation workman. They used to live in Gas Street.”

“Is he married? I wouldn’t be his wife.”

“His wife died over five years ago.”

“I’m sorry for her,” said Katherine. “She must have had a dog’s life. He’s so stupid. We don’t get on at all.”

Again Miss Green gave the ghost of a giggle, as if she were watching another person break a rule.

“Of course,” she said, a trifle more animated, “he’s only temporarily in the job at all. Mr. Rylands was the real head, you remember. Or did you never see him?”

“No, I never did.”

“He was a very different kind of person altogether. Young and very well-educated. He had a university degree. But when the war started he had to go into the army, unfortunately.”

“Then they appointed Anstey, did they?”

“Yes, he’d started as a junior assistant as soon as he left school and had been there ever since. He was senior assistant when Mr. Rylands left. I suppose they felt they had to appoint him.”

“I can’t think why.”

“He knows the work, I suppose.”

“Well, perhaps he does. But he doesn’t know how to behave. He shouldn’t have any sort of authority.”

Miss Green looked at her stealthily.

“Have you been having a row with him?” she asked.

“Not so far. Just one of his little lectures, this morning. One day, though, oh, one day——!”

She gazed out of the shelter at the motionless branches: Miss Green studied her for a moment or two. Near at hand a sparrow was pecking for crumbs at a paper bag, and beyond it in the middle distance a tramp was looking into a salvage bin. The traffic circulated under the porticoes of the high buildings, the cars sounding their horns like ships lost at sea. She was glad to see that Miss Green had a little more colour.

“Do you feel well enough to go on now?” she asked, turning back to her.

Miss Green nodded and rose, but as she did so a sombre look came over her face. She put her hand up to her cheek. Katherine hesitated.

“Is it hurting?”

“Yes, it——” Miss Green looked at her fearfully. “I think it’s coming on again.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“Yes, it is. Oh, dear. It must have been the water, drinking.”

Katherine’s heart sank. “Is it bad?”

“Yes, I think so.”

There was a silence. Miss Green pressed harder against her cheek.

Katherine shivered slightly in the cold. “Wouldn’t it be better to go to a dentist straightaway?”

“Oh no. I’d sooner go home.”

“But it would be just as bad at home.”

“Yes, I know, but——”

“I should go to a dentist now,” said Katherine. Miss Green did not answer, but looked so miserable that Katherine made up her mind to put an end to it for her. “Really I should. Then it would all be over.”

“I daren’t,” Miss Green said brokenly.

“But you wouldn’t have any more pain. Then you could go home. You’d have the whole week-end to get over it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Miss Green, dryly tearful. “It would hurt so.”

“You could have gas.”

“It’s so expensive.”

“But you wouldn’t feel a thing. It would be over before you knew it.”

“This is much worse than it was before,” gasped Miss Green in a kind of sob. “I’m——”

She turned away, hiding her face. Katherine realized that she was in no state of mind to make decisions, and determined to act.

“I’ll tell you what. There’s a dentist near where I live, only three minutes away. In Merion Street. We’ll go there.”

“Oh, no!—who is he? I want my own dentist.”

“Where does he live?”

“In the next street from us. I’d better go home——”

“It would be much better to get it over first. You can’t stand any more of this. Come along now—you won’t feel anything.”

“But what’s he like? Have you tried him?” cried Miss Green, shrinking as if asked to jump from a window into a sheet sixty feet below.

“It’ll be all right. Really it will.” Katherine pulled Miss Green’s arm: the girl resisted a little, then finally gave way. “It’ll be much the best thing. Don’t be afraid.”

So Miss Green, looking dazed at the pain rooted in her head, allowed herself to be led across the snow and across the street, avoiding the traffic, and a brewer’s wagon drawn by two dray-horses that tossed plumes of breath into the cold air amid a jingling of medallions. Merion Street was a narrow connection between one of the streets leading from this square and Bank Street, where they had been going. On one side of it were dark offices, the premises of an oculist, a chemist’s shop. On the other were the back entrances to some large stores, and the warehouse of a wine and spirit merchant. The two of them passed un-remarked along the wide pavements, for everyone out that day seemed contracted by the cold, having no attention to spare for others. A warm breath came from the swing doors of a club just before they turned into the narrow entrance of Merion Street, which bore its name high up on the wall in elaborate and out-moded letters.

“It’s just along here,” said Katherine. They reached an entrance with a plate bearing the name of A. G. Talmadge. Miss Green looked apprehensively up the dark steps, like a dog knowing it has been brought to be destroyed.

“I think——” she began, in a whisper. “Is this it?”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Katherine, wishing that in some way she could put more strength into Miss Green’s thin body. Her wristwatch said five to eleven. They mounted the steps, and climbed the stairs to the first landing.

There was a sour smell here, as if the floors swabbed by the cleaner were never properly dry, and the woodwork was varnished a dark brown. The landing should have been lit by an inaccessible window, but this had been painted over with streaky black paint, and they had difficulty in seeing more than the outlines of things: the banisters, a bucket of sand on the linoleum. Then they noticed a small board directing them into a poky corridor. They could hardly see. There were four doors in this corridor, with glass upper panels: two of them were blank. The others said “waiting room” and “surgery”.

Katherine tried the first one. It was locked.

“Perhaps,” said Miss Green, whispering, “there’s nobody here.”

“Surely there must be,” said Katherine. She was somewhat puzzled.

Then a shadow rose slowly up against the glass panels of the surgery door, and hung there for a moment, making the passage even more obscure. It was broad and humped, as if bent in thought. They watched it silently. At last the door began to open, and a man stood on the threshold, his hand groping in his jacket pocket. He looked at them, fingers still busy.

In the darkness of the corridor they could see that he was a youngish man, but he had about him no youthful qualities. He wore spectacles and had pale blue eyes. His arms and shoulders were powerful, and he was dressed in a pale green sports coat buttoned closely and looking too small, and tubular flannel trousers. He half-resembled an idiot boy whose body had developed at the expense of his mind.

“Good morning,” she said. “We——”

“If you’re looking for me,” he said, disregarding her, in a slow, flat voice that sounded as if his tongue was too large for his mouth, “I don’t work on Saturday mornings.”

“Oh—but my friend here——”

The man did not answer. Lowering his head, he took a Yale key from his pocket and opened one of the nameless doors. When he was in, he pushed it nearly shut, so that they could not see what was inside. They heard something close, and water running.

So they waited in the half-darkness, Miss Green changing her hold on her handbag every thirty seconds. She cast a glance towards the stairs, but there was nobody about. The whole building seemed deserted.

When he came out again, he looked dispassionately at them.

“What’s the matter?”

“My friend has a——”

It was harsh, a protracted bark. She realized he was slightly deaf.

“My friend has a bad tooth that ought to come out.”

The dentist ran his hands through his pockets, took out a bunch of keys, worked the separate Yale key onto the ring, and slid them back into his trouser-pocket.

“I don’t work on a Saturday,” he said gratingly. “My assistant isn’t here. She doesn’t come on Saturdays.”

There was a short silence. There was no noise of traffic: only a very faraway sound of typewriters.

He moved suddenly. “Which of you is it?”

“My friend.” Katherine pointed.

He inspected her with lowered head.

“Are you in pain?”

Miss Green nodded dumbly.

“It’s very bad,” said Katherine desperately.

The dentist searched through all his pockets, this time without finding anything. After a pause he turned his back on them.

They followed him into the surgery. He indicated that Katherine should sit on a little straight-backed chair against the wall, next to an unlit gas fire. Miss Green drifted uncertainly towards the professional chair that was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Though Katherine wanted to support her, something kept them from speaking to each other: the very atmosphere separated them, surrounding Miss Green and placing her beyond any assistance. She was committed now. Katherine told herself it was all for the best.

The surgery was as dingy as the passage outside, with the same sticky-looking, brown wainscoting. The carpet was red, blue, and green, the wallpaper dusty yellow. The chair faced the windows, the lower halves of which were boarded over, and the crooked shape of the drill hung high up by a cluster of frosted-glass lights.

These the dentist switched on.

“Will you sit in the chair?”

Miss Green sat with her back to Katherine, nervously smoothing back a strand of hair: she shifted her shoulders once or twice. Still holding her handbag, she carefully aligned her feet on the iron foot-rest. Then cautiously, almost suspiciously, she let her head lean back against the leather pads.

The dentist went over to her and took her handbag away. “We don’t want that,” he said, as if in a remote corner of his brain he thought he was being funny. Then he came towards Katherine and lit the small gas fire at her feet with a bang. He had put on his white coat.

“Now which tooth is giving pain?”

“At the back—here——” Miss Green made inarticulate noises, a finger to her mouth. It seemed she had to tense her whole body to make her voice audible at all. The dentist bent over her, thrusting a mirror into her mouth, polishing it and looking again. Then he swung a little circular tray nearer his reach: on it, long, pointed instruments were laid out on a rack. Taking one, he bent over her, his own mouth slightly open. The elbows of his white coat were dirty.

At length he announced: “There’s a lot of filling in it,” going across the room to a small cabinet of flat drawers. He returned with two tiny bits of metal rolling in his palm, and pulled down the drill, which had been folded high and remote, till it elongated like an insect’s leg. He began fitting a head into the drill.

Miss Green spoke up in her taut, trembling voice:

“Are you going to——”

He flicked on the drill with his foot and bent over her, knowing she had spoken.

“You aren’t going to fill it, are you?”

“Fill it? No.”

The noise of the drill was insidious, a slack noise. There was a knot in the belt where it had broken and been mended again, and the knot ran round the short, endless course, silhouetted against the window.

Miss Green whimpered as he began drilling. It seemed her nerve had broken at the first touch of the revolving drill-head, that she now had no restraint and was crying whether she was hurt or not. Her little, half-smothered noises hardly sounded human at all: Katherine leaned forward, aware that though she could hear them the dentist could not.

There was a faint cracking, and the dentist stopped the drill to fit in another head: Katherine could see the size of it even from where she sat. The small gas-fire was burning her legs, but she did not move them away.

The drilling started again, and the little quavering moans. This time there was a definite crackling sound, quite audible. One of Miss Green’s feet lifted a second from the iron foot-rest, then was jammed back again as quickly.

“Will you wash your mouth out,” he said, ceasing. With a push he sent the drill back to its former position, like the sketched-in shape of a hooded bird watching the scene. Miss Green bent over the bowl, a glass of water at her lips, not at all as she had drunk at the fountain. As she spat out the fragments of the filling she slobbered ludicrously, and was instantly self-conscious, trying to break the hanging thread by feeble spitting movements, searching for the handkerchief that was in her bag, and at last clumsily catching it away with her hand. Katherine quickly crossed to her and put her own handkerchief in her lap. She took it blindly.

In the meantime the dentist was busy in a corner with a hypodermic syringe. Miss Green was watching him, and when she had collected herself sufficiently, asked

“Are you going to take it out?”

“If you are going to take it out, I want gas.”

Her voice sounded on the edge of tears. The dentist advanced a few steps.

“Gas?” he said in his flat voice. The sleeves of his white coat did not quite cover the cuffs of his jacket.

“Yes, I want gas.”

“I can’t give you gas.”

A short silence.

“I can’t give it you. My assistant isn’t here, she doesn’t come on Saturdays. I can’t give you gas without an assistant.”

“But I want gas.”

“I must have gas.”

“I can’t give you gas.” He stood looking down at her, holding the syringe. “My assistant isn’t here. I am not allowed to administer total anaesthetic without an assistant present.”

He sounded as if he were speaking into a telephone.

“But I can’t——”

“An ordinary injection will do as well,” he said, not heeding, “The pain——”

“But——”

Miss Green’s voice broke in a sob. With the filling of her tooth broken down, she sounded near hysterics, as if she might scream. Quickly Katherine said:

“But surely you could?”

He turned, head dropped, to face this new attack.

“Surely you could give her gas. Dentists often do, on their own.”

Her own voice sounded unnatural, raised to penetrate his deafness. He said slowly and bad-temperedly:

“Pardon me, but they do not. If——”

“They——”

“No ordinary dentist is allowed to administer total anaesthetic, without a qualified nurse or doctor in attendance,” he said loudly.

“But surely it doesn’t need two people,” she argued, striking from a new quarter. “Surely you could do it.”

“A local anaesthetic is all I can give,” he repeated crossly, turning from side to side as if at bay.

“But why? What are they afraid of?”

He would not answer.

“There is no danger of heart failure, or that sort of thing. No danger at all. My friend has had gas before——”

He was silent, turning the syringe irritably in his hands. Miss Green was collapsed in the chair, seeming to pay no attention. The tap in the bowl clucked occasionally.

“There is really no danger at all. She has had gas before. But she is very sensitive—an injection might—that is, she might faint or——”

Whether she was speaking the truth or not she did not know. But she wanted desperately to move him, to make some contact. As it was, she could not even be sure he heard what she was saying.

“Well, I have told you the law, that is the law I have to obey,” he said, refusing to add any more to the argument. Curiously, he had not grown more human during the exchange: once more the image of arrested development occurred to her as he stood outlined against the window. She had no idea what he might say or do next.

“But we never imagined there would be any trouble,” she said, refusing to let the matter drop but carefully keeping her voice below any tone that might offend him.

“It’s the law—the law of this country,” he snapped. She took heart at this insult, knowing it to be a sign of defeat.

“But what are we to do? Surely, now you have started —now you have got so far——”

“I can’t waste any more time,” he grunted. He turned on Miss Green. “You have had gas before?”

She gave an almost inaudible assent. There was a silence.

Suddenly he put down the syringe and said: “All right, will you come into the other room.” His anger—if his semi-articulate abruptness had been anger—had sunk out of sight without being dissolved or forgotten: as he collected a few instruments together and led the way he was breathing through his mouth. As they followed, Katherine’s triumph suddenly flagged. They passed through the blank doorway that had remained locked, and found themselves in a small, permanently blacked-out room, dingier than the first. A dentist’s chair stood in the middle of the floor, with a washbowl and a few appliances, but there was no drill. In a disused rack on the wall were half a dozen old instruments, rusty and disused: in one corner were the long gas cylinders on a trolley. He gave this an impatient tug so that it rolled up silently behind the chair, and shut the door.

Miss Green took less kindly to this room than to the last. She stood by the chair, lifting her hands and dropping them; when he gestured that she should sit down, she balanced on the edge of the seat, and had to manoeuvre herself into the proper position by degrees. Most of the time she kept her eyes shut. The dentist filled a glass with water and dropped a tablet into it, which sank furiously to the bottom. There was no chair in here for Katherine to sit on, and she backed up against the wall.

He had finished his preparations, and turned towards Miss Green.

“You had better take your glasses off, and your necklace.”

Uncertainly her hands crept to the back of her neck, unfastening a thin gold chain which drew into sight a small cross. This and the spectacles he laid aside.

“Now lie back, rest your head back, and fold your hands.”

“Fold your hands.”

He put a roll of cotton wool in her mouth, then propped her jaws open with a sort of rubber gag. Unhooking the small, cupped, rubber mask, he twisted a small wheel slowly with his left hand. The needle on a dial gave a spasmodic flicker. “Breathe in through this,” he said. Her eyes flew to it. It hid her mouth and nose. “Breathe in slowly. That’s right. Keep on breathing in.” There was a hush, that might have been the tiny sibilance of the gas. The dentist’s voice continued, thick and expressionless. He did not remove the mask. It was impossible to tell whether Miss Green was conscious or not, but the gas seemed to be going on for many stretching minutes. The needle on the dial kept moving unsteadily. Katherine wished he would turn it off.

Yet when he suddenly hooked the mask back onto the trolley, and reached into the open mouth with forceps, gripping the tooth horizontally, she felt an upswerve of terror lest the girl should still be half-conscious but unable to move or speak. Her head stirred as he first pulled, and he put his free hand on her forehead, rumpling her hair, before giving another dragging wrench in the other direction. Katherine could almost feel the pain exploding beneath the anaesthetic, and nerved herself against a shriek. It seemed impossible for the girl to feel nothing. As the dentist levered and wrenched again, the muscles in his wrist moved, and as he withdrew the forceps she thought he had failed until she saw the long root in their grip, bright with blood. He dropped it in a silver casket, then tweaked out the wet and bloodstained roll of cotton wool, and removed the rubber gag.

These he put aside and stood watching her.

Katherine watched her too. Without her spectacles her face looked young, perhaps twelve years old, and quite peaceful: there was no hint in it of petulance or distress. She did not look at all the same: this was the face she had once had, but now had nearly outgrown, a face she would have soon quite outdistanced, that perhaps only her parents would remember. Her hands were still folded, as in prayer or death. She did not come round. The dentist picked up the golden cross, which swung to and fro in the electric light so that it flashed. The water in the glass had quietened to a deep crimson; Katherine found that step by step she had moved right up to the very arm of the chair.

The voice of the dentist broke the silence.

“It’s all over,” he said.

Miss Green’s eyes were open, expressionlessly.

“It’s all over,” he repeated. “It’s all right now. Would you wash your mouth round.”

Slowly her hands began unclasping. She sat up, slowly, grasping for the arms of the chair. Her mouth seemed to move in a smile, or to speak, and a sudden thin stream of blood ran down her chin.