Free Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess Page B

conveniently next door to my house. Toothache was, I supposed, a kind of luxury to a man of my age. My father had been a dental surgeon; he had lectured his children on the importance of healthy dentition as other men lectured theirs on the importance of getting on in the world and being discreet where they could not be moral. For all that, I had never taken special care of my teeth, yet here I was in my eighty-second year with twenty-six of them, discoloured but sharp and sound, except for this rebellious premolar. I thought that even this might be saved, but I could not risk going to a strange dentist, the waiting room full of aromatic Maltese, in Birkirkara or Valletta. I needed my regular dentist, Dr. Pes, on the Piazza Bologna in Rome. Pes is a Sardinian name, less fitting for a dental surgeon perhaps than a podiatrist. A monied gentleman of my generation naturally kept faith with such tenders of his health, comfort and utilitarian needs as had proved their own faith in the metaphysics of skill and quality. Distance no object. Teeth in Rome, silk shirts in Kuala Lumpur, leather goods in Florence, tea in Mincing Lane. I had to go to Rome, unaccompanied.
           Both the pain and the prospect of travelling for the cure of its cause had come at the right time. I was lonely without Geoffrey, and not even his behaviour at the airport, a final and spectacular performance as it were, could altogether quell my bitter affection. Ali and I took him there in plenty of time for his plane, and this perhaps was a mistake. First he quarrelled with the police who wanted to stamp his passport with an exit chop, shouting that he refused to have anything further of his defiled by the fucking Maltese, and what would they do if he wouldn't have it, shove him in bloody jail? He got away with an undefiled passport but, in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. "New York, dear, and that pissy-arsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna colour, half-Indian half-French, not an ounce of bloody Anglo-Saxon blood, remember." He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. "The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the point of orgasm the pale ectoplasm shrieked 'Coming I'm coming—almost.'"We soon had the bar to ourselves.
           "That's your plane there, Geoffrey."
           "Got to unload the bugger first, haven't they? Too right they have. Time for another ah ah imbibition."
           "Have you got eyerything?"
           "Too right, sport." He slapped and slapped the old Gucci case I had given him as a parting present. "All in here positively aching to be encashed. And all the Pope Buggerlugs twaddle."
           Geoffrey was the last to board the plane. He attempted to give the airport staff a voluble account, highly rhetorical and very loud, of my virtues, summing the vices up in: "Sentimentality and bloody prissiness as well as fucking ingrained hypocrisy, product of a bad bloody period. Apologies, ladies, for that bloody period. No, I don't fucking apologise. Malta is bloody lucky to have great international writer on its sanctimonious soil. And to Malta this." The lip fart he let off was monstrous; at the same time he pronged two devil's horn fingers at the roof. "Up all of yours and the very best of British arseholing luck. Look after Toomey, you bastards." At last he could be seen weaving across the tarmac, while the engine turned over and the ground menials waited to wheel away the steps. He tried to do a kind of staircase dance but was at length persuaded to get aboard. I did not envy either the stewardess or his fellow passengers.
           And then the toothache. As I was here