Dogs Delight

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

For God hath made them so.

Divine Songs for Children (1715) ‘Against Quarrelling’, Isaac Watts

Preamble

It is lovely to buy a puppy.  Yet the day we bought Bailey I had a foreboding.

It was a sunny June afternoon, blue and yellow.  My husband was determinedly cheerful but the gears of the jeep kept jamming and his new mustard corduroys were chafing and making him hot. 

The house was up a long shadowy drive and when we parked three labradors ran up to the gate and escorted us to a side door, where Mrs Wellington-Bird was holding a puppy like a sleepy mouse in a teatowel.

‘Sorry about the chaos,’ she boomed.  ‘I’ve had two litters and weeks and weeks of wet-nursing.’  She settled the baby back with its mother, who seemed indifferent, and marched us round to a secure yard where the three advertised puppies were romping.

I sat down on the gravel and after a while they incorporated me in their games, along with the rope and the plastic plant pot, jumping over my knees and chewing the strap of my bag.  Later I discovered that if I had remained standing aloof Mrs Wellington-Bird would not have sold us a puppy at all.  She gave me a sharp look as she poured out three glasses of dilute orange cordial.

‘You don’t realise it, but you’ve been watched,’ she said.  ‘My spies have been reporting back to me on all our new families.  I have to be sure my grandchildren are going to happy homes.’ 

One puppy was pulling hard at the hem of Richard’s cords but still he kept smiling and making conversation.  I sat back and prepared to enjoy the luxury of choosing.

‘Which one shall we have?’ Richard said, managing to transfer the puppy from his trousers to his thumb.  I  could see that it was nipping him sharply.  The puppies were plump and surprisingly big, especially after just seeing the mouse-puppy from the new litter. 

‘Oh, there is no choice, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Wellington-Bird.  ‘Those two are bitches and all the other dogs have been taken.   Not to worry; he seems to have taken to you.’

On the drive back I held the puppy in my lap and it made a rhythmic nuzzling all the way home.  I closed my eyes and the warmth and little movements felt oddly comforting after weeks of wondering how my husband is planning to murder me.  When I opened them I found it had bitten right through the seat belt.  

The story begins with Dogs Delight 1.  Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 
 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-Delight-ebook/dp/B00CA8XZKC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368550507&sr=1-1&keywords=dogs+delight 

Dogs Delight 1 Prison garden

His garden is my prison, dense with laurel and rhododendrons and enclosed by high brick walls.  The magenta vine is smothering the pergola at the end of the new path, so sometimes when I am alone I take out the secateurs and tear at the long tendrils which are thrashing in the wind.  I like doing this because I can imagine I am in control, conjuring up a different garden, blowsy with pale roses and wildflowers, where I will be safe.

David Austin Roses

Two children are peering over the wall gazing at our ‘magic island,’ elbows straining to hold them up because the walls are so high.  They are different to our children.  Beautiful, like fairies.  I follow their gaze to the palm trees which are reflected in the ruffled water of the swimming pool, fronds waving wildly in the October gusts.  The water laps and slaps the concrete edge, spilling out floating yellow leaves from the willows.  The sun loungers are still outside, flanked by tubs of vermilion geraniums and as the wind scrapes a lounger along the terrace I decide I will leave the geraniums outside tonight.  Perhaps then a frost will blast them and all that searing colour will drain away.

The boy and girl scramble down, slim and dark and lissom, laughing and shouting something, not realising I can see them from behind this vine.  The secateurs are open in my hand as I examine the garden in its brash luxury.  The stiff roses, fluorescent and shocking pink, thankfully almost over.  The oversized marble angel with the bird tray in its supplicating hands and heavenward gaze.  The explosion of maples.

Richard chose those maples deliberately for their colour and vigour.  The acid yellow leaves make a Hollywood autumn, as he always says; the blood-crimson ones are unforgivable, a rash.  I blot them out and imagine another garden, in green and white and pastel: my country garden with beech and box and foxgloves where the dark-haired children are chasing each other through the trees and down the paths.  Clumps of native daffodils grow instead of those beasts with orange trumpets, stirring even now beneath the soil to blight my Spring.  
    
Richard’s garden is a room where we entertain, so the design is ambitious and the flowers must make an impression, unlike the anemones and aconites that I plant under the trees.  My small bulbs are lost amid his banks of orange hyacinths, the bold hanging baskets in royal blue and scarlet which make the backdrop to his energetic parties.  The parties are just like Richard, full of a furious energy which overwhelms me so that I am not myself.  Sometimes, at night, I imagine I am lying out here in the cold pool.  I imagine my skin becoming icy white and blue, my arm stretched out like Ophelia’s among the geranium petals and willow leaves, and in the morning Richard will search for me everywhere.  
But he will never find me.  
 
Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 
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Dogs Delight 2 Bark and bite

 

A blunt nose pushes against my knee: Bailey is back, demanding his dinner. 

Richard bought him the same week he bought his tattersal shirts and his hiking sticks, the week we moved into the village. 

Bailey has been missing all afternoon, searching for chicken carcasses in the insalubrious lane by the Old Chapel, with its dilapidated hen houses and rank elder smell; or perhaps he was visiting the pig farm, where he has his own place by the boiler in the long outhouse. 

                                                                             

Brunt the pig farmer likes to relate how Bailey lies there warming his flanks alongside the swine.  I can imagine Brunt lying between them on his back in his greasy boiler suit, smoking Embassies with his eyes shut.  I saw him earlier, when I took Bailey for a walk and he pointed across the field: 

‘Cows is lined up along the hedge.  Promises rain coming, Missus.’   

Bailey grins up at me, his muzzle barred with mud and for the hundredth time I wish that he were a spaniel or a lap dog, because then he would be more of a comfort.  He would stay at my side when we go for walks and curl himself around me on the rug in front of the fire. 

But Bailey is self-sufficient.  He takes himself to the Lone Gelding, the depressing village pub, where he stands up on his hind legs at the bar, lapping beer from his own ashtray and befriending anyone who happens to come in.  I know that the regulars buy him packets of pork scratchings which he can open by himself and when there is a darts match he is in his pomp, escorting the home side as they slowly circle the snooker table, throw their arrows and resume their place in line.  He is not a loyal dog.
I am still pulling at the heavy creeper when I hear the tearing of gravel on the drive and heavy braking and the late sun picks out Richard’s jeep parked by the corner of the house.  The children skip down the path and disappear and I hide behind the pergola, heart beating, listening for the banging of doors in the house as Richard searches for me.  He doesn’t come out into the garden. 

Minutes go by, then suddenly I hear the most violent shouting and swearing: someone arguing with him. 

….It sounds like Martin Bent, who fitted the warped windows in our summer house two months ago.  Bent swears again, obscenely, and throws down something metallic like shears and I hear the slamming of the gate: the expensive slam of substantial oak.  I suppose he must have been passing as Richard turned in at the gate and decided to demand payment for a bad job. 

Now there is silence except for the snap of my secataurs and the sunbeds stirring on the York stone.  The kitchen door slams to, the gate opens and the jeep bounds away down Main Street.  I am shivering, still hearing echoes of those deep threatening voices.


I must go indoors soon, to start on the meat.  Tonight we are holding a party for Richard’s business associates and suppliers and Mrs Dilkes says she cannot cope with the meat alone.  But still I keep on pulling and cutting the long red stems as the sun goes down and the garden darkens, the wind gets up and leaves fall fast from the willow. 

Rain is falling on the white seats and the angel stares through it with holy resignation as I hack away at the large leaves like open hands, until I am cold and my coat is damp.  I imagine Brunt grinning at the downpour from his outhouse window, gratified by this prompt fulfilment of his prophecy. 

As I hurry down the path the angel is staring fiercely at the clouds, without hope, and I wonder again whether the salvage firm Richard used really did find it in a cemetery, as he told me.

                                                                                    





Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 
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Dogs Delight 18 Lads' curry night

 

   A few days later I finally do attend Evensong; but I am not proud of my motivation: I am escaping Richard’s mother, Marjorie, who is occupying the sitting room and indulging her grandsons. 

   ‘Richard said you were going out tonight,’ she remarks, pulling a magazine with a multi-coloured cover from her tank of a handbag.  It is a misunderstanding: only Richard has gone out, on what he calls a ‘lads’ curry night,’ because I said I didn’t want to go anywhere with him.  Marjorie says it is a pity I haven’t gone out.  Though she provides a jolly commentary on the boys’ every action she has little to say to me, and few opinions about me either.  The only one I can remember Richard reporting back is that I ‘read too many books.’  Tonight she planned to be alone with James and Christopher, for Marjorie is a grandmother who properly worships.  Sometimes I can see her almost feeding on their attributes, devouring them as they play and eat and fight.

   I watch her now delighting in each inconsequential action: the unwrapping of the chocolate she has brought, the chubby greedy smiles, the jostling then the pushing and the shouts.  I remember my dark reticent children flitting about the shadows of the garden, indifferent to chocolate.  Marjorie’s smile implies that this snatching and greed are marks of masculine vigour, boding well for the family line.  She glances at me and smiles fatly and faintly, dismissive, as at a failing patient when the bell rings and visiting time is over.

   The evening bell is tolling, voicing the habitual village melancholy, but tonight it tolls for me.  The night is quiet, the air unmoving and I slip out of the back door like a guilty servant, trailing my long mouse-coloured scarf.  The only soul abroad is a man in a thornproof with a woollen hat pulled well down, smoking over the notices in the Post Office window.  He is a surly man, a crony of Peter Hopkirk who is supposed to shoot blackbirds for his supper. 

   It is difficult to say what I am hoping for but when I arrive at the church I find Hilary Green, a villager who goes about weeding the countryside.  She is wearing a man’s cap and muffler, gabbling to herself and pulling up nettles by the lych-gate.  Her hands are red with nettle stings and crazed with scratches and grime.  It's hard not to stare.

   A small man in a bad suit is waiting in the shadow of the monumental door.  He is the butcher’s assistant, charged with making the famous oversized village sausages and guarding the secret of their special ingredient, which Richard swears is paraffin.  He smiles self-consciously as he hands me a service sheet and hymn book and I am ashamed that I notice the suit doesn’t move when he does.  The headmistress in her best sage tweeds and Mr Dilkes, who is a churchwarden, both unnerve me by the cold force of their welcome.  Mr Dilkes, who has gout, is leaning on a stout stick with a stoat’s head handle.  At the organ old Jacob Hopkirk is playing something unfathomable in a minor key.  He stares into space, distracted and a little demented.  Probably he is thinking about climbing the tower again.
  

Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 
 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-Delight-ebook/dp/B00CA8XZKC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368550507&sr=1-1&keywords=dogs+delight

Dogs Delight 34 Witch

Instead they showed the postmistress, who claims to be a witch, her eyes looking at each other, her long face in close-up under the black shawl:

‘We’re not a tight-knit community,’ she proclaims aggressively.  ‘Witches face a lot of prejudice in backward places like this.  I expect people will be pointing fingers at me.’

‘Only if they can find them,’ said Richard as the witch was pushed aside by Mrs Hunt leaning into the microphone and barking, ‘A lot of fuss.  Labradors are bound to retrieve things left lying around.  It’s their instinct.’

                                         

Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-Delight-ebook/dp/B00CA8XZKC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368550507&sr=1-1&keywords=dogs+delight

Dogs Delight: The Plot

Save me!  My husband is planning to kill me!  No one understands me except for my labrador and now he's involved in a police investigation after finding something absolutely horrific out in the fields. 
They'll find me out there next and then you'll be sorry....  Though probably you won't care.
I should be with someone sensitive; someone you would appreciate me.
...Like Byron...
Or Keats.

                               

                                                                             











Dogs Delight is now available on Kindle at 

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-Delight-ebook/dp/B00CA8XZKC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368550507&sr=1-1&keywords=dogs+delight