Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online

it so provoking to be denied. It was dark up there, and tenebrous, though outside it was a bright afternoon. A single bulb lit the gloomy hall. In the waiting room the blinds were down. I stood with my daughters at the vacant reception desk. We waited five minutes, ten. Presently I spoke to someone passing and was told to keep waiting. I could hear voices in other rooms, and footsteps going rapidly to and fro. I realised that something was happening: there was a feeling of drama here, a dark sense of incident in the muffled voices and the deserted desk. I heard the sound of drilling, and then more voices, low and urgent.
    ‘Has he come round?’ someone said.
    ‘He doesn’t want to wake up.’ This was the dentist’s voice.
    ‘Try again.’
    I moved out into the hall and saw through the partly opened door the room the voices were coming from. I could see the dentist’s back: she was wearing a red silk blouse today, tightly cinched at the waist with a belt; and, unusually, trousers over her vertiginous heels. Her yellow hair flowed in serpentine waves over her shoulders. She was bending over the dentist’s chair, in which lay the
unconscious body of a man. Another woman, a nurse I suppose, was there too: through the gap in the door I saw the two women, together, stooped over the man’s body. They shook him and prodded him. They called in his ear. He lay there like a broken toy they had, between them, destroyed; as though, fascinated by their power over him, they had forgotten for a moment his fallibility. I went back to the waiting room, where my daughters still stood. Their faces were uncertain. Along the hall the man had begun to groan, loud and long and terrible groans that filled the gloomy half-darkness of the waiting room.
    ‘I think we should go,’ I said. ‘I think we should come back another time.’
    My daughters looked more uncertain still.
    ‘Why?’ they said.
    Their response surprised me. Could they not see for themselves that things were not right? The man groaned and bellowed down the hall. Was this what a world run by women looked like? A woman, I thought, should be more than a mere impersonator. My daughters’ anxious faces, the groaning man, the deserted reception desk in the shadowy waiting room: in the presence of these things I felt the presence of failure. It was I who had brought them here, who had made the appointment; now I was saying we had to go.
    ‘There’s been a mix-up,’ I said. ‘I was sure the appointment was today but they haven’t got it written down.’
    ‘Oh,’ they said.
    ‘Perhaps we’ll find a different dentist,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this one isn’t very well organised.’
    They looked a little suspicious – after all, I had made much of the proximity of this dentist to our house. What was going on here?
Out in the shadowy hall, we met the dentist herself, hastening from her room. She looked flushed and harried; she had her coat on with the collar turned up. Behind her the man still lay splayed in the chair, groaning dreadfully. The nurse appeared in another doorway.
    ‘Is he all right?’ she said.
    ‘He’ll live,’ said the dentist harshly. ‘He feels a bit sick, that’s all. I’m just going to buy him a can of Coke.’
    She pushed past us, closing her collar around her throat with a flash of red-painted fingernails. I smelled her perfume, heard the jingle of coins in her pocket. She tick-tacked away down the stairs.

COUPLES
    Everywhere people are in couples. On the corner of my road I pass a man and a woman, kissing in the passing traffic. I pass a heavily tattooed couple coming back side by side from the shops, their arms full of purchases, their children in a line behind them like ducklings. I pass a man and a woman with Down’s Syndrome, holding hands. They make it seem so easy, to love.
    The weather is fine for the time of year. In the mornings the sun streams through the windows into the half-empty rooms, like sun falling on a ruin. The timbers