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.

                                                                                    





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Dogs Delight 4 Where's the meat?

While we silently chop and marinate, Mrs Dilkes breathing yet more heavily, I remember the occasion Richard booked a large table in an Indonesian restaurant. 
I close my eyes and I am in the dark downstairs room again.  I can see three of tonight’s guests, Mr Wedge and Mr Rawlings and his son Ryan, at the opposite side of the round lacquer table.  They are stock still, puzzled and hypnotised by the slowly rotating dishes between us.  There are so many, but the party has stripped them of pork, chicken and beef and the remaining offerings are aromatic rice and a different rice with tiny, intensely-flavoured slivers of fish and bowls of heaped vegetables. 

‘Where’s the meat, Richard?’ asks Mr Wedge, laying down his knife and fork.  He is bewildered and a little line appears between his brows so that I pity him.  ‘We can’t eat rice on its own, you know.’

Richard is smiling.       

Mr Wedge owns a fleet of juggernauts painted with gaudy highland landscapes in which he transports Scottish beef south.  (The villagers eat a lot of beef, most of it so rare it is bellowing.)  One of them calls at Black’s on Wednesdays, blocking Main Street and superimposing purple mountains and clever-looking highland cattle on our sombre village centre.  (The local cows are slow and lumbering.)

 
Mr Wedge is large and shiny and capable and hairless, like his juggernauts.  He is an important guest tonight because Richard is buying into a catering business.  I think he likes the idea of a tangible enterprise after so long renting out office space and selling security.  How can anyone sell security?  The purpose of tonight’s party, I imagine, is to consolidate supply lines.  And of course to generate that social energy which is as much Richard’s medium as a vermin-infested lane is Bailey’s.


 I lay down my knife with a clatter and survey the trays of glistening skinned chicken, anointed for the oven, and the vast wedge of ham.  My head feels hot and I close my eyes, leaning against the table for support.  Mrs Dilkes is beside me at once, smiling, offering me a chair and a glass of water, everything forgiven.  She believes I am to have another baby and when I protest she smiles and clucks at me: 

‘You rest, my dear.  I’ll finish everything off here.’    

So I rest.  And happily the doorbell chimes and she bustles out, wiping her bloody hands on her apron, and I can wander into the conservatory where I stare at my reflection in the dark window, forgetting where I am.  I imagine giving birth to another boy like our sons James and Christopher, another stocky toddler with white-blond hair and Richard’s expressions, who will push more toy tractors around the beds of neon-flowering shrubs and clutter the floors with plastic objects in garish primary colours.

Through the window I catch a movement in the shadow of the trees.  Perhaps it is the ghost of the poor labourer, repeating his final trudge in from the cold fields.  I can see his face pushing against the dark window, his eyes looking through me, infinitely sad.  Then the doors bang and Mrs Dilkes returns, blowing and gently moaning, heaving a large cardboard box filled with bottles of champagne.  She does not expect me to help, because of my condition.

I look round the door at the kitchen clock and feel the familiar lurch.  It is time to collect our children.

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Dogs Delight 5 Don't like parties

I am writing in my room, at the desk under the window where I feel most safe.  I hide my journal at the bottom of a drawer, underneath photographs and files, or in this bookcase, behind my poetry books.  Richard will never look there because he doesn’t trust poetry.  He has no aesthetic sense whatsoever, which makes me wonder why he chose me.

The downstairs clock chimes seven and it is nearly dark, but still he is not back.  Mrs Hunt is herding her three pointers back up the street after driving them round the fields in their daily joyless circle.  I suppose I should get ready for the party, but if I lie on the bed in the twilight I can just make out our neighbour, Peter Hopkirk, moving amongst the rusting vans and cars he keeps in his long rectangular garden.  He opens a van door and sits in the driving seat.  After a few minutes I hear the door slam and he is heaving at the bonnet, then propping it open and peering down into the engine. 

His vehicles have no wheels.  They stand in line facing narrow lanes of cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks.  Peter Hopkirk trails regularly up and down the village street in thigh-length wellingtons with sacks of manure and motor oil for his crops. 

I have watched him many times from this window, in sunshine as well as on dull days like today, though it seems to me that when I think of the village the sky and the buildings are always dark and drear, the bricks dull and wet.  

I have this brief time of shadow and silence; but what can I do with it?  It is too short a time to make plans or even to make a decision.  Somehow all my moments are too short and it is a long time since I made any real decision.  Still, this second and this are my own little luxuries.  I don’t have to go downstairs yet, and yet… and yet. 

Candles flicker in the window of the cottage opposite, where the couple who moved in two months ago are having another sort of evening.  He draws the curtains close, enclosing the candlelight.  I wish it were me on the sofa waiting for him, a glass of red wine in my hand.  A dustbin lid bangs and a fox barks.

 Then the gate thuds and the garage door rises with the rumble I dread every evening.  Across the landing James and Christopher are thumping among building sets and parts of robots and a barricade of Lego bricks.  The reds and yellows are jarring, the bricks never arranged in any way pleasing to the eye.  Sometimes I move them around into nicer shapes. 
A light flicks on and from downstairs comes the banging of doors and Richard’s voice.

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Dogs Delight 8 My best friend

   ‘You know you will have to change things eventually, so why don’t you start today?’
 

   My friend Rachael is kneeling on her window seat, looking out at people passing along the High Street in Laxley, the small town nearest the village.  She is wearing a cashmere shawl and a flowing smock because she thinks she may be pregnant again.  Today the breeze is fresh and the sun is out and I am in Rachael’s pretty yellow living room, looking for advice. 

  
Rachael is working on another complicated tapestry.  ‘Life is about making mistakes,’ she says, threading her needle with primrose silk and looking out on to the street.  But Rachael doesn’t believe in making mistakes herself.  I know that she is savouring my dilemma, as she delicately draws her needle in and out.

  
I have told her almost everything.  She even knows about the beautiful dream children from the garden over the wall.  Sometimes, in my room upstairs, I draw the garden as I want it to be.  I replace the conifers with an orchard underplanted with wild flowers, and often I add the two dark little figures.  I draw their faces from memory, pale sensitive faces against their long dark hair.  Rachael says they are ghost children, visiting from my future.  Once she did a tarot reading for me and she saw the children clearly, in the cards. 

She wants me to leave Richard because she knows how he has changed me and how he is limiting my possibilities.  But she doesn’t know that I am in danger.

  
‘He isn’t good for you.  You need to take responsibility for your own life and move on….  Fulfil yourself!’  It is easy for Rachael to say.

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Dogs Delight 10 Just like Clarissa

A lorry rattles by and Rachael looks up, interrupting my reverie by insisting that I start to change my life.  She has stopped playing with her tapestry, which is of a bearded satyr in an antique garden, perhaps a garden in Pompeii, and props it against the sofa for me to admire.  The satyr looks like Peter Hopkirk, who sometimes stands by his hedge surveying his cabbages and vans with the same lascivious expression.  I make an effort to return to the present, to the perfect room with the pastel Indian carpet, the satyr with his horns newly stitched, Rachael still lecturing me:

   
‘You really cannot go on feeling trapped and dissatisfied all the time.  You’re going to have to begin to find your own way out of it all.’

   
I imagine Rachael takes her opinions and conversation straight out of the glossy magazines she has arranged in three neat and equal piles on the glass shelf of the display table.  But still, she is right.  I do have to find my way out.  Out of the house, out of the marriage, up and over the high garden walls and right out of the village.  But the village is a prison, a large dark open prison with people watching everywhere.  Like Karen Bride, the tree warden, who strides up Blackthorn Lane counting the chestnuts and noting down diseased branches in her green notebook with what looks like satisfaction.  She probably writes things down about me too. And Rachael doesn’t understand the real difficulty.

I am sure Richard knows what I hope to do.  He watches me when I am looking at people who are different to us: people laughing together, for instance, content with their partners and their children.  One evening I drank too much wine and I told him very firmly that I want to leave.  Leave him, leave the house, leave our children.  And I saw his face change: the usual sardonic expression give way to a sudden fierce outrage and as his eyes held mine I saw something cold stirring in their blue-grey depths. He made a movement with his arm, as if he was holding a sword, and I heard a voice saying, ‘I will have you killed if you leave me.’  

I was cold and trembling.  Richard has some burly frightening men working for him, security men I suppose.  They wear leather jackets or very smart suits and one of them appeared in court once, though the charge didn’t seem to stick.  I am afraid, because although my husband cannot need me he wants to possess me.  I am the mother of his children, and though I have no sophistication and very few social skills I suppose I have an academic quality, something I must pass on to his sons.

Do I really believe that of him?  Well I think I must, because everything my husband wants seems to come to him.  And lately he is distant and angry with me.  I am the only one who can see that he hypnotises everyone and I am trapped inside the high garden walls with the palm trees by the cold pool and the gaudy roses with their long thorns and the phormium.  Trapped with a man I heard arguing with Martin Bent; and Martin Bent has disappeared, or at least I haven’t seen him since the day of the party.  I am imprisoned like poor Clarissa until I can find a secret way out, perhaps with a vista of a green-and-pastel garden and different, dark-haired children playing hide-and-seek among the trees.

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Dogs Delight 20 Tall dark and strange

There is one stranger in the church tonight, a tall dark newcomer with whom I share a moment of recognition. 

  Surely I would remember if I had seen him before!

As we are leaving the Reverend Newsome offers us each a long thin hand and we look questions at each other, all three.  The stranger has a shadowed sensitive face I already know, the facsimile of the engraving of Byron at the front of my Romantic Poetry book.  Can this be the impressively fast answer to my prayer?  But before we can speak there is a bustling behind us.  The regulars, dour cast of the village pantomime, are assiduous in wishing us goodbye and it seems to me that by the force of this farewell they are underlining their role as hosts at Saint Agnes’.  We are the guests, the stranger and I; prodigal children.  Remember, an inward voice is prompting them, the Father loves the prodigal son.  And so we are ostentatiously provided with service sheets and hymn books by the goodly folk; watched over and nodded at and nudged when we lose our place.  This welcome ensures that we leave somehow embarrassed and will not soon return.  When I look back up the path the stranger is not there. 

A cold breeze is getting up as I saunter reluctantly home, lifting and scattering the piles of dirty leaves.  The skulking smoker has gone and the notices about gun clubs and the WI’s threatened Oklahoma gleam in the yellow light of the street lamp. 

Bailey greets me in the hall, lowers his head slowly and ejects a mouldering starling on to the carpet.

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Dogs Delight 21 Red sauce

It is the morning after Evensong and also after the curry.  Richard is swallowing the indigestion remedies he keeps in a cupboard in the kitchen, next to his range of red hot sauces: Thai and West Indian, Chinese chilli, and the newest bottle, the contents vermilion as the geraniums before they withered, with its label, ‘Insanity Sauce’: a jolly gift from a friend.  Ranked behind are more red sauces with names like Steaming Momma and Texan Big Bastard. 
I am sitting in the garden in a fine rain, huddled in my coat and considering my options as the marble angel sneers at the ugly line of conifers against the dull sky.  I am conjuring up a favourite image of Richard as a vampire waiting for me behind the end conifer, a line of red sauce dribbling from his mouth.  Evensong at St Agnes’ has not dispelled my fears or put me in possession of myself, so as a distraction from thoughts of my husband I make some bullet points:

·      Holiday 

·      Painting 

·      Visit

   …I suppose I could just go away for a while, to think, as they say.  I could explain to Richard that I must go, that it will benefit all of us: perhaps to somewhere with a high winding cliff path and raging seas where I could walk with my cold face taut against the spray, collar up and my hair windswept.  The seas must be raging at this time of year. 

   Perhaps I won’t tell Richard; or anyone.

   Shall I go on a retreat?  Or just catch a train somewhere?

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Dogs Delight 26 Village colour

He and the slatternly Mrs Stokes have a silent son who dyes ferrets: pink, usually, but red and green at Christmas. 

But he does it in a perfunctory way, as though there is nothing better to do and certainly not with an appropriate sense of joy. 

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Dogs Delight 27 In solitary

Striding through the damp fields behind the pig farm I pass a broken lorry, the cab tilted sideways into the nettles, which I imagine which must be an
enticing object for Peter Hopkirk, causing him a lot of envy and agitation.  


Over the fence I see Brunt has another pig in solitary confinement. 

‘I puts any naughty pig in a field by hisself,’ he once told me sibilantly, through stubby brown teeth. 

The sinning pig is eating, unconcerned, and the rest of the herd are making their low contented grunting as they listen to a Chopin Prelude in their long broken shed, patched here and there with squares of asbestos.  The muck-encrusted radio dimly visible on a sill is permanently tuned to Radio Three.  Maybe the dial is stuck, or more likely Brunt doesn’t know how to change stations.

 

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Dogs Delight 28 Retriever

Despite wading through several fields until my boots are mud-heavy I can find no trace of Bailey and turn for home wondering whether Mrs Hunt has locked him in the Hound Pen again or Stokes has accidentally shot him. 

But when I reach the Lone Gelding car park I turn and see a movement by a distant hedgerow and Bailey races towards me with his long easy lope.  He is waving his tail wildly and gladly and in his mouth there is a hand.

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