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 6 Plain Jane Eyre

I jump up and snatch something from my wardrobe: something unsuitable, because after joshing the boys, allowing them to jump up at him like large puppies, Richard tells me to change.
‘Can’t you please make an effort, just for once?  Haven’t you got anything decent…something like Olivia wears?’  Olivia is the partner of a property developer who is often on his guest list.  I couldn’t wear her moulded satin and velvet. 

   ‘But Olivia is a different shape.’

   You don’t have a shape, says a voice inside my head.  You dress like a shapeless waif.

Richard strides out with his whisky glass to choose a fat sleek tie in an expensive shade.  He is tying it in the reticent luxury of his dressing room and the boys are pulling at the silky ends, but they don’t make him angry or impatient.  They are chortling and shrieking with delight because he is home and he is stamping and roaring and chasing them from room to room while I stare into the dressing table mirror and dab my lips and cheeks into life. 

I can see his reflection in the glass, the fair vampire who is consuming me, standing there in shadow with the light from the landing just catching his hair.  He doesn’t say anything about coming home this afternoon, about the argument with Martin Bent.  

Already from the hall I can hear Olivia’s high confident voice:  ‘Richard!  Lovely to see you!’  Then something in a lower register that I cannot make out.  Perhaps they are arranging to meet in a few days’ time, at the little bistro he likes in town.  They will sit at Richard’s favourite table and talk about tonight’s party, about my ineptitude as a hostess; and they will laugh.  The whole evening will be noisy and empty, ‘Full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’  What shall I do all night?

   I shall stand by the door and welcome the guests and they will speak to me for a minute or two, out of politeness, then move on to speak animatedly to each other.  Of course Olivia will be very pleasant, but we will have nothing to say to each other. Their banter will not include me, the conversation won’t interest me and occasionally Richard will glance across, exasperated, because I am standing gauche and alone by the sofa. 

People will laugh too loudly and drink too much and admire the ugly painting his mother bought for my birthday.  At dinner I will sit between Mr Wedge and Mr Rawlings, fetch them the whisky bottle, hold out the plate of unseasonal asparagus, shiny with lemon and butter.  Mr Wedge will look at me questioningly.  He can manage it if there is plenty meat to help it down.

And I will reassure him.

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Dogs delight 7 Party games

I am safe upstairs again.  I can still hear the party: the clinking of glasses and the voices, Richard’s shouts and the inevitable response of loud laughter.

  
The sight of so many mouths opening and closing above the salvers of pork and ham made me queasy and I can still see Richard’s face reproaching me as I say I have a migraine and am going to bed. 

In the blessed darkness of my room I imagine Olivia throwing back her head as she laughs, velvet straining against her solid curves and Richard refilling her glass with dark red wine.  But everyone responds to Richard.  He is like the director of a film, turning his flattering camera on them so they all perform for him. 

  
The night is turning cold.  The summer house window is banging in the wind again, but then nights in the village are never peaceful.  Looking out I see the ragged silhouette of the old tramp crossing the street, flitting from one lighted window to another like a moth; and actually he is looking for a light.  One summer night when I was reading downstairs late he thrust his bearded face against the window, pointing at his unlit stub of cigarette; but I was too frightened to give him a match. 

It is comfortable to be alone in the dark, nestling in my blankets without responsibilities.  Someone has put on riotous music: Richard’s guests never seem to want to go home….  Hail begins beating against the window as at last I am falling asleep and I remember that the geraniums are still outside by the icy pool, their vermilion petals drooping, falling. 

Perhaps I have made a decision of a sort, so I smile into my pillow.

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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 9 Black Art

She knew me when I was a student, and I was confident and independent then.  We studied painting and History of Art together and I even began selling my own paintings and pastels, just as she did.  But in the last summer someone found me a temporary job, with a caterer, and it was through Rachael that I met Richard.
     

When I first saw him he was standing by a long table loaded with entirely black food and drink.  Fat black grapes and caviar and Guinness and cakes smothered in black fondant icing and dotted with glistening black cherries.  Rachael was working at an art gallery.  She had arranged the black feast to publicise an exhibition of dark tonal paintings and photographs, the works of a depressed artist the gallery was promoting then. I remember the exhibition was called Black Art. 

   ‘This is Richard,’ Rachael said.  ‘He seems to be interested in the catering, so I thought he’d better talk to you.’ 

   Richard doesn’t drink Guinness so he was holding a large glass of Cahors, the darkest wine we could find.  He looked affluent and sleek, with fair hair which glistened against the black drapes and gloomy paintings and he looked unreal: a blond Bacchus, or a smiling vampire.  He said he sometimes bought pictures and was once involved in catering.  I didn’t hear a warning voice.

   ‘A black feast!  I think I could be interested in something like this soon.  For a funeral.’ And he grinned at me.

   ‘Really?’

   ‘It would be original, anyway.’

   ‘May I ask whose funeral?’

   ‘Oh, a friend’s.’  And he smiled again, as if it were funny.

   I drank my Coke and smiled back, because he seemed to expect it, but I thought planning a funeral in advance was in bad taste.  Yet when he took me out to dinner I found him beguiling, because I was eager and impressionable then.  He did mention someone who was unwell, but not anyone close to death.  Perhaps it was a joke; but Richard believes in long-term planning.

   I don’t paint any more.  Sometimes I pull open the drawers of the chest where I keep my old art things.  I take out my long oil brushes and run the bristles along my fingers, the coarse and the fine.  The easel I never use is folded away in a corner by the window.

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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 11 Perfect life

Rachael can read my mind.  She says she believes the ghost children are watching me, willing me to act, my beautiful boy and girl.


  Rachael already has three daughters.  The baby is asleep as usual and the older two are at a nursery.  She has named them for the Three Graces: Agiaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia.  It is typical of Rachael’s well-ordered life that once she began this naming no son appeared to disrupt it.  I imagine myself seated in a bright calm room like this, working at a tapestry of a garden, with three graceful daughters kneeling around me.  It is a beautiful picture and for a moment I imagine myself painting it.  It is a long time since I picked up a paintbrush.  It is a long time since I felt that rush of joy before the first brushstroke: everything possible.   

with three graceful daughters kneeling around me.  It is a beautiful picture and for a moment I imagine myself painting it.  It is a long time since I felt that rush of But Rachael is saying that I must do something practical.  I must take a first small step and begin to find a way through my dark walls.  ‘Baby    steps,’ she says.  And now she pulls her shawl closely around her and turns back to her needle and her silks and secret thoughts of pregnancy. 

   
My way of planning any task is the bookish one: I find a work of reference and look up subjects in the index.  I am logical and practical, sometimes.  So I finish my scented tea, kiss Rachael at the door and walk round the corner, to the library. 

Dogs Delight 12 No books

My task is far harder than I imagined. 

In the last few months the library has changed immensely.  There is now a large U-shaped reception desk in the middle, with two librarians working at screens behind it.  The old photocopier has gone and at the far end of the room is a whole new computer suite, where three boys are clicking dementedly through websites.  The boys remind me of my sons stabbing impatiently at their computer games, which Richard and his mother interpret as a mark of their intelligence.  The new bookshelves are arranged in very wide aisles.  These improvements mean there are far fewer books.

Where do I begin? 

I imagine myself asking one of the librarians to help me find a book which will tell me how to leave my family.  After she has stared and controlled her expression she will probably direct me to the new self-help section along the back wall.  I wander slowly along it, but the books are about advancement at work or how to lose a stammer or create creative children.

I pass by Crime and the serried large-type Romances and the Quick Selection.  All these books depress me: we are living in a new Dark Age.  The real books are going, disappearing into archives, just as the old knowledge retreated to dusty shelves in monasteries which kept the small light burning, an oil brazier beneath a gothic window.  I cannot find any real books, except for a few novels which do not speak to me.  And whole sections of the shelving are adapted for music and film.

Health and Fitness; Cookery; Religion.  I move away, then step back.  I pick up a book by C S Lewis* and open it and read: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’  

* Christian Reflections

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Dogs Delight 13 Why did we move here?

                                                        

The village is famous for its very tall filigree church spire, pointing fastidiously to heaven.  You can see it from far and near from many directions in the countryside around.

   Now that I am thinking spiritually, along the complex and evanescent lines suggested by C S Lewis, I feel drawn to Evensong whenever I see the spire or hear the church bells ringing.  They ring very often.  In fact, the bellringers practise the whole of Monday and Wednesday and Friday evening which makes Richard swear and ask why in heaven’s name we moved here.  (Naturally they perform for a very long time on Sundays.)  On the other days he forgets about it: Richard doesn’t bear a grudge.  Whenever there is a funeral, which is more often than is respectable, the great bell Vengeance tolls for most of the day.  Returning from shopping in Laxley or wandering back to the village along a public footpath, I am transfixed by St Agnes’ spire hovering over the fields.  On each sighting, from every angle, the summons is more insistent. 

The spire definitely has a hold over the villagers.  The cardboard signs by roadside plant stalls and on garden gates leading to jumble sales invariably read ‘Tower Preservation Fund’ in uneven capitals.  I have heard that a newcomer was ostracised for holding a raffle for Save The Children.  And the tower is famous for its beckoning.  It beckons people from various high points across the county, and daily beckons villagers to a closer acquaintance, despite the quality of the vicar. 

Mrs Dilkes often stands staring at the improbable finger.  She told me that Peter Hopkirk’s father Jacob once climbed it for a dare and refused to climb back down.  Mrs Dilkes says she was quite a girl, which I can hardly imagine, to look at her; but she remembers old Jacob Hopkirk frozen in fear, looking down on the upturned faces of the cheering villagers.  It did not end happily. 

A builder who was afraid of heights kindly climbed the tower to join Jacob on the ledge and found himself equally pinioned by fear against the crenellations.  After a while the builder engaged the crowd with a brief  attempt at a descent, during which he dislocated one or two elbows. The two men remained transfixed for hours underneath the famous sneering gargoyle and a relay of beer from the Lone Gelding kept the crowd’s spirits high until the fire brigade was called and arrived with an entertaining extra-extending appliance.  The builder told the Laxley Gazette that the gargoyle sneered at him the whole time.  Some people call the spire unlucky.

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Dogs Delight 14 Country walks

There are more disturbing aspects to St Agnes’. 

The most fervent section of the congregation is a group I have christened the Apostles: bearded men with cowed wives and children who are a little too close to the Old Testament. 

On Sundays and other days too the men stride up the hill to church with a fierce and unflagging devotion, their families straggling along behind them.  Sometimes, watching from the window seat as they march up and down, I imagine them singing the Priests’ Chorus to Isis and Osiris: the swelling sound fills the room and swirls out into the street.  But actually they are silent marchers, staring straight ahead, hardly acknowledging even each other.  

Yesterday Richard took me to a showroom in Laxley to collect his new four by four, which is naturally larger and has more and stronger tubular steel bars across its front than the old one.  Richard is easily pleased and considers this a holiday: recompense for working long hours all week because his partner Dominic is off work with a mystery virus.  While he was negotiating his discount and attachments I stood at the showroom window looking out at our purchase, parked to advantage in the sunny courtyard and making a grimace of animosity at the world.  I glanced wonderingly at Richard’s pleased profile as he drove it snarling home and then out of the window, where the village church was looming between two large stands of trees.  The dizzying spire seemed to call out to me more insistently than ever.

I feel no desire to join the Apostles, nor any other part of the unpromising congregation, though I did read somewhere that in a church you must expect to find sinners and not angels, because it is only sinners who feel the need for atonement.

It appears over the hill when I am out with Bailey and leave Covert Lane to cross the fields.  I do this hoping to avoid certain dog walkers, and walkers generally: it is very difficult to get away from people in the countryside. 

There is a man called Gates who stalks the fields with binoculars, tractor-spotting, whom you are liable to find in the remotest places.  Sometimes when I see someone coming I hide behind a hedge, tugging Bailey by his straining collar so that we are not seen.  Even bridle paths are unsafe, for there is always the chance of meeting Pamela Jolie on her vicious and enormously high horse, Saracen.  When I cannot avoid a meeting on a narrow pathway I have to press my back against the hawthorn hedge, flinching as the high brown flanks pass by.  ‘I can’t trust him not to kick, you know,’ calls out Pamela Jolie, airily cracking her whip.  I know for a fact that Saracen bit Mr Dilkes on the shoulder while he was admiring a Cumberland sausage in Black’s window last week. 

                                                                                      

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