Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog (14 page)

  'It's time for Snuffle to say goodbye to all his friends,' announced Veronique, preparing to let loose the dogs which, behind the thin walls that separated us, were baying for our blood.

  'A little lunch?' She dropped the question into the conversation with a barely disguised subtext of emotional blackmail – did we want to deny Snuffle the opportunity to say a final farewell to his family? My face is not good at hiding emotions and only a sharp kick from Tanya restored a faux grin to my face.

  'Of course we'll stay.'

  And so rather than munching on sea urchins and watching the waves roll in, we ate mixed leaves and dry cheese, trying to ignore the overwhelming odour of horse manure. A crisp glass of Cassis winking in the sunshine was replaced with a stained coffee mug filled with tap water. Instead of enjoying the warmth of a blow heater on a sheltered seaside terrace, we endured icy blasts that swept down the slopes of the surrounding hills.

  Elodie began to cry but Veronique was oblivious to our discomfort, opening another file from her office. This one contained rosettes and pictures from various dog shows.

  'Here's his father in Monaco,' she said, pushing a photo under our noses, 'and in Barcelona,' another photo arrived, 'and Nice.'

  We did our best to appear interested, but one photo of a dog show looked very much like another. I couldn't avoid noticing that Snuffle, who was supposed to be saying his tearful goodbyes, spent the whole lunch playing with a football. Still, Veronique was doing her best to make it feel like a wake, telling us how Snuffle was the last of the litter to depart and how because of his adorable character, boundless good looks and charm he held a special place in her heart.

  Finally at the end of an interminable lunch, during which Veronique appeared determined to enter the
Guinness
World Records
book for slow eating, it was time to go. With Elodie still in tears, Veronique led me over to her in-house shop. There were three items on my list – a dog cushion, some food, and some bowls – and with Tanya strapping Elodie into the car I was determined to be quick.

  Here's the list of items I came out with half an hour later:

• 1 lead

• 1 comb

• 1 tick twister

• 1 bone chew

• 1 waste bag holder

• 2 waste bag refills

• 1 dog seat belt

• 1 Christmas bone chew

• 1 plastic crab toy

• 1 plastic Dalmatian toy

• 1 plastic blue ball

• 1 can of hairspray

• 1 bottle of Oh My Dog shampoo

• 1 dental snack

• 10 chews

• 1 vet bed

• 1 dog house

• 1 exercise harness

At each stage Veronique made me feel I would be betraying Snuffle unless, for example, I bought the very latest chew toy for him to rip apart. There were no farewell gifts from Veronique. Instead, she sat and methodically added up the cost of the whole ridiculous list. A staggering 300 euros. More prolonged goodbyes followed and Veronique walked alongside our car as we bumped away, practically kissing the windscreen.

  Two and half hours after we first arrived, we had a dog, and neither of us could quite believe it. His dark eyes were deep and trusting and he trembled on Tanya's lap as we got onto the motorway. He was quite cute really, even if he did have shaven legs, and we couldn't possibly blame him for his lovesick owner. Next week it would be December, and the first of the season's truffles would begin arriving.

  Now all we had to do was train our dog.

A
sk anybody: having a puppy is a nightmare. They wee, they poo, they bark, they bite, they hurtle around the house like pinballs. And all this goes on for nearly a year. Yet for the first glorious forty-eight hours we thought all the scare stories had been made up. Snuffle did very little but sleep and eat and he happened to be outside when he needed to wee or poo. Looking after Elodie was far more demanding and sleep depriving than caring for our shaven-legged friend. The new member of our family could not have been less trouble.

  Then things changed. Snuffle recovered from the trauma of leaving his mother, regained his strength, and decided to treat each corner of our house as his personal toilet. Veronique, as it turned out, had sold us everything Snuffle could ever need but had omitted to consider our requirements. Hence, we had a puppy with a million and one toys but no cage with which to house-train him.

  Desperately we manufactured temporary solutions from toddler playpens but Snuffle invariably escaped and by the time we finally bought a cage a week later, our little puppy was not so malleable. He'd been granted his freedom and he wasn't about to give it up. Advice on the Internet stated that caging puppies was kind and the best way of introducing them to life with humans. Young dogs rarely barked for more than ten minutes when caged, said the website, and yet we endured hour upon hour of an enraged Snuffle.

  Driven crazy by the noise we binned the cage and instead kept him on the lead at all times. Wherever we went, Snuffle went. This was fine when Tanya and I were together, but the moment one of us left the house, the balance of power shifted dramatically in Snuffle's favour. Changing a nappy while restraining a dog determined to sniff, lick and yes, even eat the faeces, is a difficult trick to master. Snuffle's nose was almost a thousand times more powerful than ours, and the pack member he associated as his immediate contemporary, Elodie, was busily leaving her scent all over the house. Quite naturally Snuffle simply followed her lead and deposited his own markers.

  Meanwhile sleep deprivation began to set in. At night Elodie, teething, screamed and woke the dog. Snuffle in turn barked and fidgeted and demanded to be let outside. A typical night would see Tanya pacing inside with Elodie, while I walked up and down in the garden waiting for Snuffle to empty his bowels. Elodie falling asleep and Snuffle finally obliging didn't often occur at the same time, and so, as we desperately tried to claw our way back to sleep, one or other of our babies inevitably woke the other, and the whole process started again.

  After two weeks Tanya and I were so tired we were arguing incessantly with each other. Smug dog owners said that the reason Snuffle was behaving so badly was because he had yet to identify a new head of his pack. Doing my best to right this situation, and on the basis of advice in a dog book, I started growling at Snuffle. The noise I made was deep and guttural and alarming enough to make Elodie toddle away. If Snuffle did an inadvertent pee on the sofa I would bear my fangs and snarl like a geriatric hunting hound.

  This new policy worked in a way. Certainly, Snuffle began to fear my displeasure, and so instead of peeing in front of me, he picked his moments, waited until I was distracted and sneaked off to a corner of the house. Meanwhile, all the growling began to have a debilitating effect on me. Naturally I was a happy person – in fact, my nickname from university was Smiley – but the new, growling me, was miserable. And yet it was the only training tip that worked, and so I continued to growl and snarl my way angrily through days.

  However, when instead of 'Mama' or 'Dada' Elodie's first words came out as a deep and guttural growl, I realised something was wrong.

  'She's becoming like those children raised by wild dogs,' pleaded Tanya.

  Yet once I stopped growling I lost the small semblance of control I'd begun to exert. I'd devoted hours to walking around outside in the freezing night air, so that my dog had every opportunity to be a good boy. I'd rewarded him liberally with small pieces of cheese, patted and praised him throughout the day and still that most basic of skills – house-training – was beyond our
chien
. Most people achieved in seven days what still eluded me after a month of ownership. What hope was there of us ever achieving the synchronicity of mind and movement necessary to find truffles?

  The sense of despair was heightened by the small size of our farmhouse apartment. When we'd first rented the place, we were a young childless couple. The open-plan living area, with kitchen, dining room and sitting room all crammed in a 30-metre-square space, had echoed the urban flats we were used to, as had the small bedrooms which fed off a narrow corridor. When Elodie arrived we'd had to reorganise our lifestyle but ultimately we'd achieved a balance, where I could work undisturbed and, when needed, Tanya and I could find space from each other.

  The addition of Snuffle destroyed this balance. One of us always had to be in the room to check that he wasn't pushing Elodie over, and that Elodie, with her prods and pokes, wasn't inciting him to bite. By early December, with the cold weather returning and all of us cooped up inside the flat, Tanya and I began to suffer from an acute sense of claustrophobia. We had to get out, and yet with the onset of winter there was nowhere to go. Instead, our days were filled with barking, and screaming and rowing. In-between the shouting, the only thing we could agree on was that we should never, ever, have got a dog.

  It's hard to place precisely when my throat began to seize up. I remember feeling tight-chested at the breeder's in Cassis. At the time I dismissed it as a combination of the horses and the sheer number of dogs. On the way home in the car I was still wheezing slightly but the spasms passed. For the next week there was nothing and I relaxed, but ever so gradually the symptoms reappeared and I noticed that the more Snuffle misbehaved, the more I wheezed. My self-diagnosis was that these attacks were not allergy related, but rather psychosomatic. Although I felt terrible at the thought of having to find a new home for Snuffle, subconsciously the allergy reappearing gave me the perfect excuse.

  At least somebody was pleased by the new addition to our household: Delphine. The bag full of designer clothes she'd purchased on Elodie's arrival appeared a mere trifle when compared with the daily gifts for Snuffle. In a way, I could understand her fascination. Our new
chien
was the son of champions, he pranced rather than walked and his demeanour, the way he carried his head, his general comportment, all spoke of an inbred elegance. Next to Tanya he seemed a naturally chic accessory; next to me he looked ridiculous. By mistake we'd purchased one of the rarest and therefore most desirable companion dogs in the world.

  And like an expensive motor car our little pooch took some maintaining. Veronique had raised him on a diet of poached free-range chicken fillets, and Snuffle refused to eat anything else. When I substituted battery-reared meat he went on hunger strike for two days, became thin and lethargic, and refused to move until his nose told him all was right with his chicken again. The hypoallergenic non-fur-drop nature of the breed meant that daily grooming was necessary to remove all the twigs, insects and burs he picked up. If his toilette wasn't carried out on time then Snuffle began to bark, with the yelps picking up in volume until he got the attention he felt he deserved. I'd always dismissed people who said that dogs, just like humans, had complex and involved personalities but now I agreed. Snuffle, I decided, was a prima-donna princess who, if human, would live in a Manhattan penthouse apartment and run some kind of bitchy blog about celebrity mores.

  Even so, despite everything, and almost against my best wishes, I began to like him. Perhaps it was a certain admiration for his determination to reorder our lives to suit his, or perhaps it was his undeniable need for love and companionship. In any event my hostility was gradually worn down and I developed, if not a love, then certainly a sense of fondness for Snuffle. As these feelings developed so my breathing eased. The fur grew back on his legs and the sight of our little black ball playing so gently with Elodie was heart-warming to watch. If she pulled his hair, stamped on his feet, or stuck her fingers in his eyes, Snuffle reacted in the most mild-mannered way, retreating to his den, before minutes later returning to play again.

  All these positive developments in my relationship with Snuffle nearly dissipated just days before Christmas when I dropped into the vet for Snuffle to be microchipped and have his rabies jab administered. Our arrival in the waiting room generated the type of hysteria usually reserved for teenage pop stars. Snuffle was mobbed by humans and dogs alike.

  'Isn't he beautiful?'

  'What breed is he?'

  'Look at the paws!'

  'Oh, I could take him home now.'

  During my first few visits I'd found this type of response hard to understand; however, in the dog world Snuffle was something of a rarity. One old lady explained that the breed had nearly been wiped out during World War Two and only now had petit chien lion numbers started to recover. I'd begun to take pride in the admiration in which he was held. I'd even given him a special brush-up for this visit to the vet's.