The Careful Use of Compliments

She signed the letter, slipped it into an envelope, and stuck a stamp on the top right-hand corner. The stamp was simple in its design, almost stark, and bore, as always, the monarch’s head. To what correspondence, she thought, has Your Majesty been made an unwilling party, with your head, and all its gentle authority, attached to all sorts of unhappy and shameful letters—letters of rejection, threatening letters, letters from lawyers, anonymous letters . . . She stopped the list there. Her letter was to the point and dignified, the sort of letter which the Queen herself would undoubtedly write to a prime minister T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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attempting to usurp her authority. No, the letter needed no further justification: it would be posted, received by Dove himself in his obscure headquarters, and, she hoped, duly digested.

Be very careful, Dove, she thought. You may take one step too far. Be very careful when you come to Edinburgh.

She stood up and crossed to the window. She looked outside, at the large rhododendron bush, which was quite still; there were no birds, or so it seemed, no fox lurking below. What if Dove came to Edinburgh and something happened to him?

What then?

Within each of us, she thought, there is evil. It lurks in the deep recesses of the mind, those depths in which the atavistic clutter of our distant past still lodges. We should not delude ourselves that it is not there; it is there, but it is covered, thank heavens, by the veneer of civilisation, of morality. First came the early I, red in tooth and claw, then came Mozart, David Hume, Auden.

With a shock she remembered something—something that she did not like to think about. Auden had once almost killed somebody; had put his hands around the neck of his lover and had been on the point of strangling him, driven to this shocking extreme by jealousy. And then he had written about it, had confessed that he had almost become a murderer. If that could happen to him, to that great, humane intelligence, then how easily could it happen to the rest of us, who are weak, and subject to all the passions of our weakness.

No, Professor Dove; you are in no danger from me. By the time you arrive in Edinburgh I shall have mastered my anger. I shall love you, Professor Dove, as I am commanded to do. Or that is what I hope, most fervently hope.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

E

DON’T TALK TO ME about it,” said Grace the next morning.

“Just don’t talk to me about it!”

Isabel was on the point of agreeing. She did not wish to discuss dentists and would be quite happy not to go into the details of Grace’s dental trauma of the previous day. But then she realised that although Grace said that she did not want to discuss the matter, that is exactly what she intended to do.

“Yes,” said Grace, removing the headscarf she had worn on the journey to work. “The least said about yesterday the better.”

Isabel looked up from The Scotsman crossword. She had been constructing her own clue. Three words: four, five, and nine letters. A plant’s base beside a waterway precedes intervention. Root canal treatment.

“Uncomfortable?”

“Extremely,” said Grace. “He tried to persuade me to have one of those injections, but I said no. He told me that it would be very painful, but I stuck to my guns. I can’t stand that stuff, that . . .”

“Novocaine,” said Isabel. How might one express that in a crossword? Sounds like a new rod with which to beat another until numb? Not a very good clue, but it would have to do.

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“Yes, that stuff,” said Grace. “I can’t bear it, you know. That awful feeling of being all puffed up, as if somebody had just hit you in the jaw. No thank you!”

“But if you don’t—”

Grace cut Isabel off. “I can take pain. I’ve never been one to dodge that. But this was really, really sore. He had to guddle about inside the tooth and it felt as if somebody was putting an electric wire down there. It was terrible.”

They were both silent for a moment, Grace remembering the pain, Isabel thinking about how much pain there was, that life itself floated in a vast sea of pain, numbed here and there for brief moments, but coming back in great waves.

“You see what he had to do,” Grace went on, “was to take out the nerve from the root of the tooth. Can you imagine that?

I kept thinking of it as a long piece of elastic being dragged out of me. Do you remember knicker elastic? Like that.”

“I don’t think nerves are like that,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that you can actually see them. They don’t look like elastic, or wires for that matter.”

Grace stared at her. “Well, what do they look like?” she asked.

“I think they must be tissue of some sort,” said Isabel. “A bit like . . .”

She shrugged. She had never seen a nerve.

“Well, whatever it looked like,” said Grace, “I felt it all right. But now . . . nothing! I can chew on that side and I feel nothing.”

“They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,” said Isabel. “And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them.