‘I have a toothache.’ The nurse half-smiled, as though she were still waiting for the day when someone would come in and say, ‘My feet hurt.’ She stood up into the professional sunlight. ‘Come right in,’ she said. ‘We won’t make you wait.’

There was sunlight on the headrest of the dentist’s chair, on the round white table, on the drill bending its smooth chromium head. The dentist smiled with the same tolerance as the nurse; perhaps all human ailments were contained in the teeth, and he could fix them if people would only come to him in time. The nurse said smoothly, ‘I’ll get her file, doctor. We thought we’d better bring her right in.’

She felt, while they were taking an X-ray, that there was nothing in her head to stop the malicious eye of the camera, as though the camera would look through her and photograph the nails in the wall next to her, or the dentist’s cuff buttons, or the small thin bones of the dentist’s instruments; the dentist said, ‘Extraction,’ regretfully to the nurse, and the nurse said, ‘Yes, doctor, I’ll call them right away.’

Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle, and only as such was she of interest to the dentist and the nurse, only as the bearer of her tooth was she worth their immediate and practised attention. The dentist handed her a slip of paper with the picture of a full set of teeth drawn on it; her living tooth was checked with a black mark, and across the top of the paper was written ‘Lower molar; extraction.’

‘Take this slip,’ the dentist said, ‘and go right up to the address on this card; it’s a surgeon dentist. They’ll take care of you there.’

‘What will they do?’ she said. Not the question she wanted to ask, not: What about me? or, How far down do the roots go?

‘They’ll take that tooth out,’ the dentist said testily, turning away. ‘Should have been done years ago.’

I’ve stayed too long, she thought, he’s tired of my tooth. She got up out of the dentist’s chair and said, ‘Thank you. Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye,’ the dentist said. At the last minute he smiled at her, showing her his full white teeth, all in perfect control.

‘Are you all right? Does it bother you too much?’ the nurse asked.

‘I’m all right.’

‘I can give you some codeine tablets,’ the nurse said. ‘We’d rather you didn’t take anything right now, of course, but I think I could let you have them if the tooth is really bad.’