Black Dogs (7 page)

‘It might have been a week later Bernard came home and met my parents, and I’m almost certain that was the time he knocked a full teapot over the Wilton. Apart from that he was a success, perfectly appropriate – public school, Cambridge, a nice shy way of talking to
his elders. So we began a double life. We were the darling young couple who gladdened all hearts by engaging to be married as soon as the war was over. At the same time, we continued what we had started. There were unused rooms in Senate House and other government buildings. Bernard was clever at getting hold of keys. In summer, there were the beech woods around Amersham. It was an addiction, a madness, a secret life. We were taking precautions, by then, but quite honestly by that time I couldn’t have cared less.

‘Whenever we talked about the world beyond ourselves, we talked about communism. It was our other obsession. We decided to forgive the Party its stupidity at the beginning of the war, and to join as soon as there was peace and we had left our jobs. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, the way forward, we agreed on everything. A fine union of bodies and minds! We’d founded a private utopia, and it was only a matter of time before the nations of the world followed our example. These were the months that shaped us. Behind all our frustration over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days. Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other. Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible – and soon there was only interruption. And in the end time did run out, but the memories are still there, accusing us, and we still can’t let each other alone.

‘One thing I learned that morning after the dolmen was that I had courage, physical courage, and that I could stand alone. That’s a significant discovery for a woman, or it was in my day. Perhaps it was a fateful discovery too, a disastrous one. I’m not so sure now I
should
have stood alone. The rest is harder to tell, especially to a sceptic like yourself.’

I was about to protest, but she waved me down.

‘I’m going to say it again anyway. I’m getting tired. You’ll have to go soon. And I want to go over the dream again too. I want to be sure you’ve got that right.’

She hesitated, gathering strength for the one last talking bout of the afternoon.

‘I know that everyone thinks I’ve made too much of it – a young girl frightened by a couple of dogs on a country path. But you wait until you come to make sense of your life. You’ll either find you’re too old and lazy to make the attempt, or you’ll do what I’ve done, single out a certain event, find in something ordinary and explicable a means of expressing what might otherwise be lost to you – a conflict, a change of heart, a new understanding. I’m not saying these animals were anything other than what they appeared to be. Despite what Bernard says, I don’t actually believe they were Satan’s familiars, Hell Hounds or omens from God, or whatever he tells people I believe. But there is a side of the story he doesn’t care to emphasise. Next time you see him, get him to tell you what the Maire of St Maurice told us about those dogs. He’ll remember. It was a long afternoon on the terrace of the Hôtel des Tilleuls. I haven’t mythologised these animals. I’ve made use of them. They set me free. I discovered something.’

She pushed her hand out across the sheet towards me. I could not quite bring myself to stretch out my own hand and take hers. Some journalistic impulse, some queer notion of neutrality prevented me. As she talked on, and I continued to transcribe in the dashing arabesques of my shorthand, I felt myself to be weightless, empty-headed, suspended in my uncertainty between two points, the banal and the profound; I did not know which I was hearing. Embarrassed, I hunched over my writing so that I did not have to meet her eye.

‘I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it’s nothing new, and it’s not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different language to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power. That’s how religions are. In the end though it hardly matters how you describe it once the essential truth has been grasped – that we have within us an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness ...’

I had heard this before, in one form or another, from a spiritually inclined headmaster, a dissident vicar, an old girlfriend returning from India, from Californian professionals, and dazed hippies. She saw me shifting in my seat, but she pressed on.

‘Call it God, or the spirit of love, or the Atman or the Christ or the laws of nature. What I saw that day, and on many days since, was a halo of coloured light around my body. But the appearance is irrelevant. What matters is to make the connection with this centre, this inner being, and then extend and deepen it. Then carry it outwards, to others. The healing power of love ...’

The memory of what happened next still pains me. I could not help myself, my discomfort was simply too intense. I could not bear to hear any more. Perhaps the years of my loneliness were the culture that nourished my scepticism, my protection against those clarion calls to love, to improve, to yield up the defensible core of selfhood and see it dissolve in the warm milk of universal love and goodness. It is the kind of talk that makes me blush. I wince for those who speak this way. I don’t see it, I don’t believe it.

Mumbling an excuse about leg-cramp, I got to my
feet, but too quickly. My chair tipped backwards and smacked against the cupboard with a loud crack. I was the one who was startled. She was watching me, slightly amused, as I began to apologise for the interruption.

She said, ‘I know. The words are tired, and so am I. Another time it would be better if I could show you what I mean. Another time ...’ She did not have the strength to move against my disbelief. The afternoon was at an end.

I was trying again to apologise for my rudeness, and she spoke over me. Her tone was light enough, but it could well have been that she was offended.

‘Would you mind rinsing out those teacups before you go. Thank you Jeremy.’

As I stood at the washbasin with my back to her, I heard her sigh as she settled deeper into the bed. Outside, the branches were still shaking in the wind. I felt a momentary pleasure that I would be rejoining the world, letting the westerly wind blow me back to London, into my present, out of her past. While I dried the cups and saucers and returned them to the shelf I tried to frame a better apology for my rude behaviour. The soul, an after-life, a universe filled with meaning: it was the very comfort this glad-hearted believing gave that pained me; conviction and self-interest were too tightly entwined. How could I tell her that? When I turned back towards her, her eyes were closed and her breathing was in its shallow rhythm.

But she was not yet asleep. As I was gathering up my bag from near her bed she murmured without opening her eyes, ‘I wanted to go over the dream again.’

It was in my notebook, the short, unvarying, pre-sleep dream that had haunted her for forty years: two dogs are running down a path into the Gorge. The larger leaves a trail of blood, easily visible on the white stones. June
knows that the mayor of a nearby village has not sent out his men to track the animals down. They descend into the shadow cast by the high cliffs, down into the thickets, and up the other side. She sees them again, across the Gorge, heading into the mountains, and even though they are going far away from her, this is the moment of terror that jolts her; she knows they will return.

I reassured her. ‘I’ve got it down.’

‘You need to remember that it comes when I’m still half-awake. I actually
see
them, Jeremy.’

‘I won’t forget.’

She nodded, eyes still closed. ‘Can you see yourself out?’

It was almost a joke, an enfeebled irony. I leaned over her and kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear, ‘I think I can manage.’ Then I went quietly across her room and stepped out into the corridor, on to the swirling red and yellow carpet, thinking, as I always did when I left her, that this would be the last time.

And it was.

She died four weeks later, ‘peacefully in her sleep’, so said the senior nurse who phoned Jenny with the news. We did not believe it had been that way, but neither did we want to doubt.

She was buried in the churchyard of the village near Chestnut Reach. We drove down with our children and two of our nephews, and we took Bernard. It was an uncomfortable journey. The day was hot, it was cramped in the car, and there were road works and heavy traffic on the motorway. Bernard sat in the front, silent all the way. Sometimes he put his hands over his face for a second or two. Mostly he stared ahead. He did not seem to be crying. Jenny sat in the back with the baby on her lap. At her side
the children discussed the death. We sat listening helplessly, unable to steer the conversation away. Alexander, our four-year-old, was aghast that we were planning to put his granny, of whom he was very fond, in a wooden box and lower her into a hole in the ground and cover her with earth.

‘She doesn’t like that,’ he said confidently.

Harry, his seven-year-old cousin, had the facts. ‘She’s dead, stupid. Stone cold dead. She doesn’t know anything about it.’

‘When is she coming back?’

‘Never. You don’t come back when you’re dead.’

‘But when
is
she?’

‘Never ever ever ever. She’s in heaven, stupid.’

‘When is she coming back? Grandad? When is she, Grandad?’

It was a relief that in such a remote place the crowd was so large. Along the road from the Norman church dozens of cars were tilted at angles on the grass verges. The air above their hot roofs rippled. I was only just beginning to attend funerals regularly, so far exclusively secular affairs for three friends who had died of
AIDS
. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. I was watching Bernard. He stood on the vicar’s right, hands straight down at his sides, staring forward, as he had in the car, keeping himself well under control.

After the service I saw him detach himself from June’s old friends and wander off among the headstones, stopping here and there to read one, and go towards a yew tree. He stood in its shade, resting his elbows on the graveyard wall.
I was going towards him to say the few clumsy sentences I had half-prepared when I heard him call June’s name over the wall. I went closer and saw he was sobbing. He leaned his long thin body forwards, then straightened again. Up and down he bobbed in the shade as he cried. I turned away, guilty at my intrusion, and hurried back, passing two men filling in the grave, to catch up with the chattering crowd, its sadness fading in the summery air as it wound its way out of the graveyard, along the road, past the parked cars, towards the entrance to a field of unmowed grass in the centre of which stood a creamy marquee, its sides rolled up for the heat. Behind me, dry earth and stones chinked against the sextons’ shovels. Ahead, this was how June must have imagined it: children playing in and out of the guy ropes, waiters in starched white jackets serving drinks from behind trestles draped in sheets and, already, the first of the guests, a young couple, lolling on the green.

A
LITTLE MORE
than two years later, six-thirty on a November morning, I woke to discover Jenny in the bed beside me. She had been away ten days in Strasbourg and Brussels and had returned late in the night. We rolled into a sleepy embrace. Minor reunions like this are one of the more exquisite domestic pleasures. She felt both familiar and novel – how easily one gets used to sleeping alone. Her eyes were closed and she half-smiled as she fitted her cheek into the space below my collar bone that seemed to have formed itself over the years to her shape. We had at most an hour, probably less, before the children woke to discover her – all the more of a thrill for them because I had been vague about her return in case she did not make the last plane. I reached down and squeezed her buttocks. Her hand moved lightly across my belly. I felt for the homely bump at the base of her pinkie where a sixth finger was amputated shortly after her birth. As many fingers, her mother used to say, as an insect has legs. Some minutes later that may have been interrupted by a brief doze, we began the companionable love-making that is the privilege and compromise of married life.

We were just waking to the urgency of our pleasure, and stirring more vigorously on each other’s behalf, when
the phone on the bedside table rang. We should have remembered to unplug it. We exchanged a look. In silence we agreed that it was still early enough for a phone call to be unusual, perhaps an emergency.

Sally was the most likely caller. She had come to live with us twice, and the strain on family life had been too great for us to keep her. Several years before, at the age of twenty-one, she had married a man who had beaten her and left her with a child. Two years later, Sally had been found unfit, too violent, to care for her little boy who was now with foster parents. She had beaten the alcoholism after years, only to make a second disastrous marriage. She now lived in a hostel in Manchester. Her mother, Jean, was dead, and Sally counted on us for affection and support. She never asked for money. I could never rid myself of the idea that her unhappy life was my responsibility.

Jenny was on her back, so I was the one who leaned across. But it was not Sally, it was Bernard, already half way through a sentence. He was not talking, he was jabbering. I could hear excited commentary behind him which gave way to a police siren. I tried to interrupt, calling out his name. The first intelligible thing I heard him say was ‘Jeremy, are you listening? Are you still there?’