Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt

looked down at her desk, remembering. She was embarrassed — yes, that was the exact word — to feel Mike moving into a place that had always been cramped by the exigencies of her parents. She supposed she had loved him, though she had never for a moment doubted that he preferred his wife to her — both in and out of bed — and this certainty had made her morally comfortable, not guilty about his wife, not desirous of supplanting her. Now she thought, watching him telephone, that although she had ancestors, she would not be one, she wasthe end of some genetic string. Was she unnatural not to have wanted him — or someone — more? What she wanted, was the time back. The empty desert and her own young eyes, watching for signs of life, out of a young face in a young body. Her tooth shrilled. Mike put down the phone. “Mr Kestelman will see you right away,” he said. “He’s got another emergency patient there. He’ll manage to help you both as quickly as possible. I’ll order you a cab, Joanna.”
    The dentist’s waiting-room was white and streamlined, somewhere between the modernist and the clinical. Its walls were white and its tables spotless and unscratched white melamine: its lighting came from huge opaque white bowls, suspended or supported on chrome. It was like a time capsule in a science fiction film, colourless, and therefore about equally soothing and alarming. No flowers, not a speck of dust. It was already inhabited by a restless woman when Joanna arrived. The other emergency case. Joanna sat on a white tweed sofa, slung on chrome with leather bands, and put her feet together on an off-white Berber rug. The other woman, sitting opposite, leafed through and again through a heap of glossy magazines. She had pure white hair arranged in curls round her face and in a longer fall to her shoulders: this white had a spun-silk, glossy quality, full of vitality. Her skin was, by contrast, darkish, moist though, not desiccated. She was difficult to put an age to. She wore a puce angora sweater, with a low scoop neckline, embroidered with iridescent bugles and beads: the perceivable edge of her breasts seemed rounded and lively, with a few freckles. She was made up, lavishly but not grotesquely, a fuchsia lipstick to match the angora, huge hoops of violet shadow between black lashes and silver eyebrows. She wore gipsyish hooped earrings, silver, not gold. Joanna put a hand to her own jaw and gave the other an opening.
    “Does it hurt? Does it hurt badly?”
    “Pretty bad.”
    “I’m a coward about pain. Or I used to be, I should say, before things changed. Mr Kestelman thinks I’ve got an abscess. I only came here as a last resort. I’m ashamed, really. I tried healing by other means, but it didn’t work.”
    “Other means?”
    “What you might call faith healing. Spiritual healing. I have the gift. It is a marvellous gift, I don’t know if you know anything about it, I developed it only fairly recently. I’ve achieved extraordinary things, marvellous cures,
mysterious
things, but for some reason I can’t soothe away this pain. Physician, heal thyself, and all that. My theory is, the pain distracts me from the necessary concentration. My husband said I should give conventional medicine a go, it also exists in the world for a reason, and has helped many, don’t you agree, so here I am.’
    “How did you discover you had the gift?” asked Joanna, politely and with some curiosity.
    “It’s a fairly frequent consequence of an NDE. I didn’t know that at the time, naturally. But it turns out, many of those who experience NDEs have these gifts.”
    “NDE?”
    “Near Death Experience. I was clinically dead, and brought back. Really.” She laughed, and Joanna laughed, and both put their hands to their painful faces. “I had a heart attack, two years ago now — you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? — and I was clinically dead, stopped breathing, everything, and then they brought me back.