LITMIR.BIZ

      2

      Death of a dog

      It was a dog and it was dead, unquestionably dead. On its side with one ear and half its head missing. A dog blotched with its own dried blood lying dead in a ditch under a thorn hedge. A dog flat on its side as if it had been thrown there, or collapsed over sideways from a savage blow. Its mouth was slightly agape. A long canine fang curved down from a lip drawn in a last snarl, a snarl that should have been of rage or pain, or perhaps just disbelief, a snarl shattered by oblivion. Blood and saliva shone on a slightly protruding tongue hiding the lower teeth as though the dog had died with a heavy exhalation, thrusting the tongue outwards, never to be withdrawn. A glazed eye stared opaquely, unnervingly, a stare of shock and despair and emptiness. Something terrible had happened here and that eye had been its silent witness.

      To a seven-year-old boy who knew dogs and loved a dog, a dog not unlike this powerful, stocky, brown and white bull-terrier-ish mongrel, a boy who knew the bond of trust, the hot muzzle, the velvet ears, the barley-meal breath, who had romped and rolled and held dogs close, it was a catastrophe. The world had lost a dog in wild and terrifying circumstances I could not begin to imagine. My heart convulsed inside my chest and tried to break out through my mouth. I wanted to touch it, to stroke its smooth fur, but I held back. I wanted to cry out, to cry for comprehension of the brute forces that had done this thing, to cry for help and for someone to share with me the intolerable burden of this abruptly shattered life. But no tears came. So I ran.

      I ran the quarter mile across the damp Longbottom meadows and ditches above School Lane; I ran a frantic course, crashing through briars and marshy places, slicing the corners off fields, hurling myself over fences in the most direct route home I could take. I wanted home and to find a grown-up to whom I could pour out this breathless tale of dog destruction.

      I ran round the bottom of the old pond, stagnant with duckweed, past the moorhen’s nest of soggy rushes on a fallen tree. I hurdled over elm branches wind-ripped from high above, on through the orchard’s long grass as high as my waist. I burst through the tangy veil of scent from tall balsam poplars and poured myself over the oak-railed fence into the paddock, hands and trousers smeared and stippled with grey-green algae. Hens scattered in front of me as I dodged through the nettle clumps to the big-boarded gates with the rusty latch. I heaved it wide. Leaping the open drain, I raced through the cobbled stable yard, past the servants’ lavatories and on to the back door of the house.

      Scratched and muddied I burst into the flagstoned scullery, where low stoneware sinks and scrubbed draining boards stood efficiently bare and empty. Nobody there. On into the big kitchen, with its cream Aga range and huge table of bleached pine topped with flaking American cloth. Nobody there either. I yelled for Nellie. No answer. I ran through to the hall, heaving open the heavy green baize door on its stiff spring, down the single stone step and out into the cool, respectful silence of the black and white chequered floor and the deep, ponderous ticking of the hall clock called the Bowler in imitation of its booming chime, which echoed all round the house. Empty. I called out for my sister, my father, for anyone, pealing my seven-year-old voice up the elegantly curving stairs to the landing above and echoing sideways down the corridor to the schoolroom library with its shelves of fusty books. No reply.

      The furled iron ring of the front door latch was heavy and took both hands and gritted teeth to turn. It clanked up and the huge iron-studded oak door swung inward with a startling burst of sun. I ran out onto the crunching yellow gravel, leaving the door wide. Across the paved terrace and past the French windows to the drawing room and on to the ancient yew tree ringed round with its white painted seat, the tree in whose dark and scaly caverns a tawny owl always roosted, the tree that seemed to brood and cast its long shadow across the smoking-room lawn.

      I leapt down the stone steps and over the neatly mown square, past the bronze sundial on its age-lichened stone pedestal and on towards our grandfather’s outer sanctum, his holy of horticultural holies, where we children were strictly forbidden to go – the long, ordered glasshouses, four of them in parallel rows, with their dirty panes and worm-drive roof vents that squealed and juddered open and shut when the handles were cranked. I raced past the green corrugated rain butts in which mosquito larvae wiggled and mice mysteriously drowned, and on into the first long glasshouse with a vine espaliered against the once whitewashed brick wall and the slatted benches running full length under the glass, benches crowded with dozens of terracotta flowerpots of many different sizes. And there, at the very far end, hazy through the giddy intoxication of geraniums, he stood.

      There he was about his passionate horticultural summer affairs in a collarless pin-stripe shirt and a tweed hound’s-tooth check waistcoat with its gold watch chain, his horn-rimmed half-moon spectacles on his nose above a bristly little silver-grey moustache, and his bald head shining. There were his slender six feet six and a half inches, slightly stooped, long sleeves rolled up and his huge hands holding a pair of parrot-beaked secateurs and a woven trug bulging with dead heads and clippings. There he was with his pipe in his teeth, staring down at me over his glasses with eyebrows raised in pretended astonishment. ‘It’s dead,’ I blurted out. ‘And there’s blood everywhere.’ And then I cried.

      My grandfather tossed the secateurs into the trug, placed it carefully on the bench and bent to pick me up. He swept me effortlessly up, up, up and away from the swirling images of blood and death, away from the clutching ache of panic, up and still further up until I too was six feet six and a half inches above the frightening world my exploration had led me into. He held me firmly in his arms and carried me out of the long, airless, stultifying geranium house so unspeakably burdened with sweet and heady scent, out into the sunshine freshness and the birdsong, and back toward the heavy carved oak bench on the edge of the smoking-room lawn.

      He sat down and held me on his knees. ‘Now you must dry your eyes and tell me what is dead.’ His voice was gentle and all-embracing and as deep as a wine cask and as old and wise as Solomon. He drew an acre of silk handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed my tear-salted cheeks. It was soft and springy and smelled of pipe tobacco and bay rum, at that moment the most reassuring incense I could possibly have wished to inhale.

      It was the scent of unassailable authority; of great age and timelessness and security and the source of all well-being and the fount of all knowledge and all hope and all sanctity. It was the aroma that lingered in the long upstairs corridors that led to his bedroom – more forbidden territory we would not have dared encroach – and in the smoking-room lavatory we were not allowed to use but where we had peeped in and seen his silver-backed hairbrushes and a tortoiseshell comb laid out on a marble washstand beneath the gilt mirror. It was the lofty perfume of the olden days, of knights and kings and archbishops, the paternalistic aroma of history and Empire, and, in a peculiar way I could not have begun to describe or explain, it was the scent of love.

      ‘It’s a dog.’ The words choked themselves out. ‘And it’s dead.’ And the tears erupted again, welling into the crumpled silk; the image too stark and the trauma too vivid to be contained in so young a head.

      ‘I think you’d better show me this dog.’

      I held his huge hand as we strode up the mossy slabs of the laurel-lined Broadwalk,

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