WE’RE BUSY AT the flower shop. We’re selling tulips and daffodils and baskets of flimsy narcissi that have an elusive, polleny fragrance—the sort of flowers that people buy on impulse, especially on a day like today, with a soft, bright sky and birdsong and a breeze that smells of growing things. It’s good to be so busy, to distract me from my sense of hurt.
I see Lavinia look at me, her glance intent, bright, curious—a look that’s like a question. When the shop is briefly empty, I tell her about Karen.
“Oh, Grace, poor you. How difficult,” she says. “But friendships between mothers do have their ups and downs. Children can drive a wedge between you.”
“Yes. I guess so.”
I can’t tell her how I really feel, this sense I have that the life I’ve known—the festivals and birthdays with the other mothers and children, and the coffees in Karen’s kitchen, and all the safe, involving rituals of life with a little child—that all this is slipping away from me.
“But I’m sure you two will work it out,” says Lavinia. “I mean, you’ve been friends for ages. You must have a solid connection there.”
I feel comforted for a moment. I remind myself it wasn’t me that Karen was rejecting, it was all because of Sylvie. But then I remember her face when she said, I’m just not sure that we should carry on. That hard, closed look.
In the afternoon I have my dental appointment. My tooth is hurting again, and I know it will need to come out. I leave for the dentist at half past two. The early brightness has clouded over, and now the sky has a smeared look, like a dirty windowpane. There isn’t much traffic, and I get there early. I sit beside the fish tank in the antiseptic smell and riffle through the magazines, looking for the Twickenham Post that had the article. It isn’t there, of course. They wouldn’t keep out-of-date newspapers. I feel a relief that’s tinged with disappointment.
The dentist gives me a lot of anesthetic, and chats to me as it starts to take effect. He has a litany of complaints—the state of public transport, the rubbish in the streets. Everything is deteriorating. His voice is mournful, but his eyes shine. He relishes this kind of conversation. I reply with increasing difficulty.
Then he takes an implement that looks like a pair of pliers and starts to tug at my tooth. I have to open my mouth very wide—the tooth is right at the back. I feel he’s going to split me, that my mouth won’t stretch so far. He pulls hard. I can hear his strenuous breathing. Nothing happens.
He shakes his head.
“Your tooth doesn’t want to leave you,” he says.
He takes a different implement. I don’t feel anything, I’m totally anesthetized, but I hear a sound of splintering and cracking in my mouth. He pulls out a bit of my tooth—I can see it in his pliers, a bloody, mangled thing—and then another and another. He puts them in a paper dish. I think briefly how, in places where magic is practiced, people can put a spell on you if they have a piece of your body—a hair, a nail, a piece of broken tooth. My mouth is full of blood, which has a harsh taste, like iron.
“So what are your plans for the rest of the day, Ms. Reynolds?”
I rinse with the green antiseptic, bloodying the swirl of water in the small white sink.
“Just going back to work,” I say.
“You really ought to take some time off, put your feet up,” he says.
“I’ll be all right,” I tell him.
“Well, don’t overdo it, okay? An extraction can be quite a shock to the system.”
I assure him I won’t overdo it, and I go to pay.
“And how’s your little one?” asks the receptionist.
I have a startling, random impulse to burst into tears all over her and tell her all my troubles. I push the urge away.
“Oh, Sylvie’s fine,” I tell her, as I always do.
When I get to my car, I realize that just as the dentist predicted, I have a shaken feeling. The jab is wearing off already, leaving an ache in my jaw, a presaging of pain. I glance at myself in the rearview mirror. I look appalling. My lips have a lining of vampirish blood red, and the anesthetic has changed the shape of my face. My lips at the left of my mouth don’t quite meet, and one of my eyelids is sagging. It’s how I will look when I’m old.
I don’t feel able to drive yet. I turn on the radio, waiting to feel stronger. I sit and listen to Dido and watch the pavements and all the people who pass. A woman with her hair scraped back who’s pushing a child in a buggy: she has violet smudges of tiredness under her eyes. A young man talking on his cell phone. I have the window open an inch, I hear him as he passes, hear the threat in his voice. “However you want to look at it, however you want to see it from your point of view, that’s fine by me. All right? All right?” An elderly woman with toothless gums and lots of lavish lipstick, and two sallow boys in hoodies who have a hungry, restless air and nothing much to do.
And then I see them walking briskly along the opposite pavement: Claudia, Charlie, Maud. Shit. I slither down in my seat so I’m completely hidden.
The children are in school uniform, their crisp gray blazers edged with dark green braid. I remember that their school is just around the corner. Claudia’s BMW is parked almost level with me on the other side of the road. As I watch, they come to their car, and she opens the trunk and they dump their things inside—the satchels, sports bags, lacrosse stick. Maud gives Charlie a playful punch, and he trips and grabs at her blazer; their faces fizz with laughter. I’m close enough to see them clearly, their gestures and expressions. There’s so much of Dominic in them. Maud has his easy assurance and his coloring; Charlie, like Sylvie, has his candid smile. Claudia turns to face them both. She’s scolding them, annoyance pulsing over her face. She has a tight, sleek calf-length skirt and high-heeled reptile-skin shoes.
I stare at her over the steering wheel, feeling the complicated emotions she always stirs up in me. I think how, when I was with him, I’d sometimes smell her perfume on him—a woman’s scent, distinct from his cologne, a spring smell, fresh as bluebells, a scent I might have chosen. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we’re rather similar, for once she was in love with him, and maybe she loved him for the things I do—his certainty, the solid feel of his body. All the old envy surges through me, envy of that whole silken texture of her life, and of all the things she can give her children that Sylvie will never have—the expensive schools with harpsichord lessons and velvet playing fields. I would like to be her, to have all these things, and to lie every night with Dominic beside me.
They get in the car, and Claudia drives away. I sit up in my seat again, I fold my arms on the steering wheel and rest my head on my arms. I wish I hadn’t seen her. It feels unlucky, today of all days, with my whole life unraveling. I feel that I’ve been cursed, as though this is deliberate, planned, and someone has stolen my broken tooth and is weaving a dark enchantment to entrap me. My jealousy sears through me, threatens to overwhelm me. I don’t know how long I sit there held in its hot, unrelenting grip. It might be just a few moments, it might be a very long time. I don’t know.
It’s the smallest thing that moves me on—the sun coming out from behind a cloud and shining through the windshield, its warmth falling full on my face. I’m grateful for the sudden heat: I raise my face to the sun. And the words that form inside me seem to come from nowhere—or not from within me, anyway. They whisper themselves through me, like a prayer. Help me. I murmur the words to myself, then speak them aloud in the quiet of my car, as though I am speaking to someone. Knowing I can’t stay here in this bitter, comfortless place, always looking behind me, longing for what I can’t have, for what I have no right to, wanting the past given back to me. Please please help me.
Perhaps it’s just a need to take action, any action, to imprint my will on the hostile pattern of things. But almost without thinking, I find myself scrabbling in my bag for my phone.
“Lavinia. I’m feeling ghastly. I think I’ll have to go to bed. I’m so sorry.”
“Of course, Grace. Was it awful?”
“Pretty much.”
“You take care of yourself, now. You just hunker down and watch some mindless television. Dentists are evil. Don’t get me on the subject . . .”
I start up the car, do a three-point turn in the road, crashing the gears and holding up the traffic. A lorry driver rages that I am a stupid fucking cow. I ignore him. There’s a small, sane, tentative voice inside me that murmurs that I’m behaving oddly and really not myself at all, that I’m disinhibited after the shock of the extraction and perhaps I shouldn’t go rushing into anything. I pay the voice no attention. I drive fast, up the hill, away from home.