In This Dark House by Louise Kehoe

Author:Louise Kehoe [Kehoe, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55705-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

“The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” Mama used to say when trying to console me or reassure me that troubled times would pass. Of course, she meant the quotation to be taken strictly metaphorically, and would have been horrified to think that she had contributed to the emergence of a spiritual streak in her daughter. Nevertheless it has always been a source of amazement to me how help often seems to turn up just when it is needed most.

Not long after the batterer disappeared an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a while called to tell me she was throwing a party, and wanted me to come. I hated parties and always had, but she was a good friend and I wanted to see her. She and I had shared a flat together while I was a dental student, and she had stayed on at the flat after I’d left and gone to London to start working as a dentist. I probably wouldn’t know anyone else at the party, I thought, and I’d have to drive halfway across England on a bleak November night to get there, braving fog and black ice, too, very likely; but it would be fun to see her again, and besides, I’d promised to go and I couldn’t back out.

When I got there it was exactly as I feared. I knew no one except the hostess, my old roommate, and she was far too busy to spend much time talking to me. I decided to stay a polite bare minimum of time and then quietly disappear, but just as I was easing my way upstairs to rescue my coat from under a mountain of others, someone tapped me very gently on the shoulder and said, “Are you the dentist?” I turned and found myself looking up at a tall man with the kindest and most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen — and some of the worst teeth. His name, he said, was Len, and he’d been told by our hostess that I was a dentist. He wondered whether I could recommend a good dentist in London, which was where he lived. He hadn’t been to the dentist in years, and needed someone to help sort out his accumulated dental troubles — “the rot of ages” was how he put it, and made me chortle with laughter. He was leaving England soon, he said, emigrating to Canada, and had to get his teeth sorted out before he left. I was surprised to feel a sharp twinge of regret when he mentioned his imminent departure, and I was suddenly acutely aware that something extremely significant — and something entirely outside my control — was happening.

I was right. Len did go to Canada, his dentition carefully delivered from the rot of ages by my own hand. But two weeks later he came back. He couldn’t stand leaving me, he said; could we please get married? And so we did. Shorn lamb that I was, the soft May wind had come to warm me and to keep me safe from harm.

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