Sitting in a waiting room in anticipation of some mildly humiliating dental procedure, I feel my marbles abandoning me at quite a pace. My expression hardens. I lose my sense of humour, such as it is. My fingers drum on the arm of my chair. I seethe and fume. To no one at all I say out loud: “Isn’t it extraordinary that in the 11 years I have been coming here you’ve never once not kept me waiting?”

I have waiting-room rage.

The atmosphere is of a hastily assembled stage set, the sticks of furniture (claw- footed mahogany items in the main) arranged so haphazardly that they fail to convince as a room. The fire surround is painted to resemble peach-coloured marble. There is crumpled black paper in the grate.

Another 15 minutes pass. I grow crosser and crosser. I compose a bill for my time at the highest rate I’ve ever been paid, which was in a dream once where I had a walk-on part in a blockbuster film as a gun-toting hotshot international lawyer of fierce repute.

I borrow the words of a moralistic American television psychologist and mentally fling them at the dentist-tormentor: “What are you telling yourself that makes you think this behaviour is OK?” Of course, the TV doc says it to drunken, violent fathers and mothers who change their daughters’ schools 17 times in one year, but still. I try to relax, gazing up at the botched paintings on the wall not good enough for the dentist’s private sitting room – I bet he calls it a drawing room. The magazines are from 2003.

I know I should regard the unfilled minutes as a lovely holiday from the hustle and bustle of my normal life. I sincerely long for Doctor Watson’s sensible, tweedy languor. (Is it a pipe I need?) But the time drags to such a degree that I feel new wrinkles sprout and ripen, my middle thicken and spread. Waiting-room minutes are like cat years. If the fellow doesn’t come for me soon, I may be dead. That would learn him!

I open the drawer of the desk in the room, examining specialist medical stationery and things-to-do lists sponsored by a local courier firm. I read a sheet of strict rules for a now-defunct arts club, and some documents from an auction house detailing the failure of an antique bureau to reach its reserve at the sale. A bookcase contains a number of novels that run into four volumes, which isn’t exactly reassuring.

I was taught not to keep other people waiting and I almost never do. I think of a friend of mine who used to be made so anxious by even the idea of lateness in his friends that he liked to meet us under railway station clocks. With that I had no problem. There is no clock in this room.

A saffron-coloured takeaway flyer from a Chinese restaurant, folded in three, catches my eye. I often read descriptions of food to calm me down. But instead of black bean and ginger prawns and Cantonese roast duck I see “Staff Nurse Old Style” and “Staff Nurse New Style”. It’s not a menu I am reading, but a leaflet called “Poems in the Waiting Room”. The two Nurse poems are written by one “William Earnest Henley (1849-1903), Patient of the Royal Infirmary 1873-1875”.

In the poems Henley first analyses the draw of the traditional sort of nurse with “sweet old roses” in “her sunken face” and “thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace”. His conclusion is, “Much is she worth, and even more is made of her ... They say the Chief himself is half-afraid of her”. Moving on, Henley describes his vision of the new breed of nurse: “superbly falls her gown of sober grey”. She is high-minded and virginal and patrician, “Speaks Latin with a right accentuation/And gives at need (as one who understands)/Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.”

I slightly long for either of these women. In fact, I long for them very much. I read the poems again, and the nurses are with me, reassuring, gently mocking, unfailingly unfailing. I hear the regular swishing of their starched cotton gowns. (I’d like one myself.) More time passes. The dentist suddenly appears nervously at the threshold, his face creased with contrition. He had to cater to an emergency. He has been trying all afternoon to make up the time.

“That’s quite all right,” I reassure him obligingly. “Are you a little late? I hadn’t noticed. Please don’t give it another thought.” And I follow him upstairs, ridiculous, exhausted.

susie.boyt@ft.com
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