The Lodger: A Novel (8 page)

They were standing very close now, eye to eye. Dorothy started to say something, but Bertie placed one finger lightly on her lips. He took her hot face between his unsteady hands and kissed her half-open mouth. When he kissed her, she trembled and he held her closer, wanting to kiss her again. But she pulled away and left the room, overwhelmed by the softness of his mouth beneath the scrape of his mustache and the web of tangled emotion it produced.

*   *   *

BEFORE SHE WENT
down for dinner, Dorothy examined herself in the long bedroom mirror. She was revitalized; no longer the ground-down Londoner who had arrived on the Wellses’ doorstep. The removal of tension and fatigue made her face look fresher, emphasizing the softness of its lines. A brisk walk along the beach in the afternoon had brought a healthy flush to her cheeks. The gaslight showed up the gold tints in the coiled mass of her hair and the warm brown depths of her eyes.

She made her way unhurriedly down the wide green staircase. There were raised voices coming from the drawing room. Faintly shocked, she hesitated on the landing, which was lined with bookshelves and decorated by stuffed birds. She didn’t know whether to interrupt or to tiptoe back upstairs.

She could clearly hear Jane saying, “You seek each other’s gaze. You meet her eye, she looks away. You make her feel …
desirable.
”

Dorothy’s breath caught in her throat.

Bertie sounded strident, cross. “This is beneath you, Jane. You know that while you stand over my life, no dalliance of this sort will ever wreck what we share. You are my fastness, my safe place. You are wedded to me—beyond jealousy.”

Jane answered in a low voice. As hard as Dorothy strained, she couldn’t make out her words.

There was silence. Then the sound of muffled sobbing.

When Bertie spoke again, his tone had changed. There was a tenderness in the high voice that made it almost husky. Dorothy was intruding on something so intimate she could hardly bear it. But she couldn’t tear herself away.

“I know I’ve been restless and peevish for the past few months,” he admitted. “When I’m at home for more than a few days at a time, I get into an impatient and claustrophobic state, I can’t help myself. I know how ugly this sounds, forgive me … the crude fact is that I have bodily appetites you are too fragile to meet. I truly love you, but I have this basic need for the thing itself. I must have it when the craving takes me, to release tension and leave my mind clear for work. You and my work are my true obsessions. The sex thing is merely refreshment. Believe me, I have no satisfaction in being enslaved to its tiresome insatiability.” He paused. “I have loved you profoundly from the first moment I met you, and I always shall. You’re my little helper and my dearest mate. You are part of me and you’ve been the making of me. Hush, my dearest love, hush. I can’t bear it when you cry like this.”

There was silence. The stuffed pheasant next to Dorothy stared at her with glassy, accusing eyes. She imagined Bertie had taken Jane into his arms … perhaps he was kissing Jane, as he’d kissed Dorothy two short hours ago—she couldn’t stand it. She was simply “the sex thing,” a passing “refreshment.” He was using her to slake a simple hunger and facilitate his work.

Dorothy’s face was flaming. Nausea and bile rose in her chest so powerfully, she was afraid she might be sick. She crept tremulously upstairs.

She sent a message through the housemaid that she had a headache, and wouldn’t be joining them for dinner. Then she slipped on a coat and quietly left the house.

It was a cool evening. A fine rain was falling, and the rich scent of damp earth rose from the ground. As Dorothy crossed the lawn, she lifted her burning face to receive the rain. Waves of anguish and shame were pouring out of her body, like a smell; the air was thick with it. This pain could not be endured. It would fade with time; it had to. She wished she could wind time forward, or go to sleep and wake up when it had stopped hurting.

She could hear the roar of the sea below her, and wet trees sighing and rustling in the wind. It was almost dark, and the tips of their silhouettes were visible against the sky, but only just. Heavy clouds covered the moon, swallowing everything down into shadow.

She made her way through the rose garden. The red roses were like dark shadows; the white ones resembled pale faces in the dimness, watching her. She passed the vegetable garden and the terraced square, and took the uneven track that led down to the sea. It was getting darker; she had to strain to see where she was going. The path was treacherous, and once or twice she stumbled. The rain soaked through her clothes and hair. She was starting to feel cold and afraid, but she didn’t want to return to the house.

Her foot caught on a twisted root lying across the path. She lost her balance and the ground came rushing up to meet her …

Dorothy lay convulsed against the cold slimy stone. There was searing pain in her left knee. A sticky ooze of blood was spreading beneath her stockings.

She was freezing, but she didn’t want to move. She was maddened by shame and pain; tormented by the hurt she’d caused Jane. Without Bertie’s interest illuminating her life, she was nothing.

She couldn’t stand being alone with the stabbing needles of her thoughts. There was no reprieve from them, except in madness; a swiftly enfolding, redeeming madness that would obliterate awareness. She welcomed the idea. The line between sanity and madness seemed pitifully puny: both states harboring the same impulses; the difference lying merely in the mind’s power to exert a restraining signal … She couldn’t struggle any longer. If she could only see her mother again, if she could spend a few minutes with her, she would willingly sacrifice the rest of her life …

Tears came. She wept for a long time, silently, there on the path.

After she’d cried herself out completely, she felt calmer. A strange, icy numbness descended on her, as though she was on another planet and the air was lighter. She stumbled to her feet. Her clothes were wet and muddy, with sodden bits of grass and leaves sticking to them. Clumsily, she brushed herself down. Her knee was still bleeding. She shambled slowly back toward the house.

Seven

Her taste of bliss was over before she’d even had a chance to grow accustomed to it. An annihilating torpor threatened to engulf Dorothy; a strange, frightening state. She lay on her bed, rigid. All the good things, all the hope seemed to have drained from the world. It was terrifying to feel the meaning seeping out of everything, leaving only blankness in its wake. It was like dying; like being buried alive.

Her face was contorted with the effort of holding back tears. She raised her throbbing head from the pillow and glanced around her attic room. It had lost its charm; become nothing but a confined space in which she waited for the next visit to the Wellses. And now there would be no more visits.

A bout of weeping seized her then: hard, dry sobs. She was surprised by how much crying hurt. She wondered wretchedly who she could talk to, whose company might ease this withering pain.

Benjamin had finally found other lodgings and moved out, leaving her relieved, but with a gaping sense of loss. She thought about the other boarders and her various London friends. No one was quite right.

Mrs. Baker. She pictured the landlady’s kind weary face; she seemed at that moment very like Dorothy’s mother. I’ll go and find her, Dorothy thought. I couldn’t possibly confide in her. Bertie is a married man; she would be shocked to the core; her good opinion of me smashed. But she is real; just being in her presence is a comfort. She knows that everyone is alone, and the hustle and noise people make is just a front to try to hide their loneliness and fear.

*   *   *

DOROTHY OPENED THE
drawing room door. At first sight, the room seemed deserted; the gas was turned frugally low. But in the dimness, she could just make out two figures: a man balanced on the arm of the sofa, and someone sitting close beside him. They remained silent and motionless as she approached; they must be newly arrived boarders, shy of introducing themselves, perhaps. She walked over to the table next to the fireplace and poured a glass of water from the jug standing on it. The jug was almost empty; a thin trickle leaked into her glass, petering out before it was an inch full.

“Would you like a drink, Miss Richardson?”

It was Mr. Cundy.

“Oh yes, I would,” she answered awkwardly, glancing at the woman on the sofa. She found herself gazing into the eyes of Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker wearing a low cut silk blouse and a blue velvet choker around her neck!

Mrs. Baker was neither annoyed nor pleased to see her. She seemed caught up in some private reverie and Mr. Cundy carried on the conversation, telling Dorothy about the benefits of keeping well hydrated. Dorothy thanked him absentmindedly, still focused on Mrs. Baker’s uncharacteristic indifference to her surroundings; her strange air of being utterly absorbed by some internal preoccupation.

Mr. Cundy fell silent. Dorothy studied them both, surprised by how similar their expressions were as they gazed back at her. They looked benevolent, tolerant, almost patronizing. Flickering behind their eyes was some kind of shared joke, from which she was excluded.

She had been a bumbling idiot, crashing in, oblivious. They had probably been discussing Mrs. Baker’s struggles with the house. Mrs. Baker had confided in him, and he was advising her on how to make it more profitable. Dorothy had rushed in interrupting them; entirely wrapped up in her own problems. Mrs. Baker had been right not to welcome her. Yet without Mr. Cundy there, Dorothy was sure she would have been her usual warm receptive self.

Goaded by her thwarted desire for comfort, she hurled herself against the barrier of their unstated alliance. “I see I’ve barged in on a private conversation.”

“Not at all, young lady,” said Mrs. Baker tartly, sitting very upright on the sofa. “We weren’t talking about anything in particular.”

“It looks to me like you’re in the middle of something,” insisted Dorothy mulishly.

Mr. Cundy regarded her with calm satisfaction. There was something different about him, a quiet assurance. “Not at all,” he said mildly. “I was only explaining to Mrs. Baker the theory of natural selection.”

They wanted her to go away. They wanted to be left alone to continue their discussion without interruption. She lingered for a short while, making graceless small talk. When she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she excused herself and left the room.

*   *   *

AFTER THE FIRST
shock passed, Dorothy found she couldn’t stand being alone with the shameful echoes of her aborted love affair. As a result, she worked late at the dental practice whenever she could. She welcomed busy days: long sittings, where appointments overran and she had to stay in Mr. Badcock’s room, clearing and cleansing instruments with the patient in the chair, knowing that her other duties were piling up elsewhere.

She liked the brief moments of forgetfulness that came with throwing herself into her work. She did her best to assist Mr. Badcock as quietly and as expertly as possible, trying to make the patient forget there was a third person in the room.

It was tedious and slightly repugnant work. She cleared away the soiled instruments and scoured them with a solution so harsh it wrinkled her fingertips and split her skin. Afterward, the instruments had to be polished and repolished, a precise, fiddly, attention-consuming task. Yet the grind of being continually on her feet for the endless clearances and cleansings brought a strange relief. Her sense of her usefulness to Mr. Badcock was balm. She helped him with a new deftness and ease. Even the most difficult of his patients seemed manageable: the lady who vomited if an instrument touched the back of her throat, the retired doctor who went berserk under anaesthetic and sometimes tore Mr. Badcock’s clothes.

She admired Mr. Badcock for his skill and his gentleness. Unlike other dentists, he was utterly sensitive to the needs of his patients. He never forgot there was a person in the chair before him, rather than a disembodied set of teeth and gums, as he went on endlessly performing root dressings and repairing crowns and tapping in fillings. He inspired trust; patients submitted willingly to being treated by him. But none of them knew that it was slowly wearing him down …

“I don’t think that will bother you any longer,” he would say, with a final sweep of his spatula, removing the absorbents and handing them to Dorothy. “Why don’t you have a rinse? We’ll make an appointment for next week.” And the patient was himself again, getting up eagerly from the chair, free of pain and fear and the chilling knowledge that however strong the spirit, the body falls apart sooner or later.

Mr. Badcock, tall and thin, smiled his gentle grey-eyed smile behind the wire-framed glasses. His pallor and the lines around his eyes seemed deeper every day … his patients did not know how they sucked him dry.

One rainy evening at twenty past six, Mr. Badcock switched off the lights around the chair. The room looked cold and clinical in the dimness.

“Haven’t you finished yet?”

“No,” said Dorothy, without looking up from her pile of correspondence. “I must get these letters off and update the patients’ charts and the appointment book.” There were also the bottles of chloroform and carbolic in the cupboards to tidy and replenish; the boxes of gold and tin fillings to sort through; serviettes and clamps and saliva tubes to prepare for tomorrow’s appointments … anything to avoid being alone within the four lifeless walls of her room.

“Why don’t you leave the rest until tomorrow?”

“It’s not late.”

“All right then, as you wish. I’ll say good night.”

“Good night,” murmured Dorothy. “See you in the morning.”

The front door clicked softly shut on Mr. Badcock.

The rain had stopped and the building was eerily quiet. The fire was nearly out; the room was growing chilly. Dorothy paused from her letter writing and took a deep breath of iodoform-laced air.
Assume a contented air and eventually you will feel contented in spite of yourself
, she intoned under her breath.
If you can’t have what you like, you must like what you have
. Perhaps if she said it enough times, it would come true. Her gaze slid away from the broken dentures lying on her heavy oak desk and fell onto the small aspidistra in the corner … its dusty lackluster leaves depressed her unutterably.