Love in a Mist

by Sarah Harrison

  I hesitated. The truth was that where easy companionship was concerned the dog had almost succeeded in replacing my father.

  ‘Hmm?’ He cocked his head on one side; the dog did the same.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I didn’t know if he was being serious. Sometimes he behaved like another, older, child. Poker-faced, I put on the lead. Before we got to the gate, my father held out his hand.

  ‘May I?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘May I hold the lead?’

  He could never have guessed how much I did not want to relinquish that little loop of leather. But in the interests of peace, I did.

  Seconds later, peace was over and my dog was dead.

  The woman cried and cried as if she wanted us to feel sorry for her for what had happened. I just wanted her to go away. Sobbing, she helped my father scoop up Towser in a rug and put him in the back of our car to take to the vet while I looked on stony-faced, petrified by shock and grief. My father’s face was white and he kept saying little single words, with lots of breaths in between: ‘There … right … OK … now … there …’ When he’d slammed the boot he asked the woman if she wanted a cup of tea or ‘something stronger’, but she just flapped her hands at him as if that were ridiculous, which it was. My father went inside and got a pen and notepad, and when he came out they had a huddled conversation and he wrote things down and tore off a page and gave it to her. We watched her drive away, with Towser lying dead in the boot just feet away. My father turned to me.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Pet. Pet …?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Why did I say that? This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me and I was dismissing it as if it were no more than a broken cup.

  ‘He just jerked away from me at the very moment … She was right, there was nothing she could do, poor woman.’

  Poor woman!

  ‘We should take him to the vet.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘He’s dead.’

  My father’s face twisted in a strange, miserable way. ‘Not quite, I don’t think …’

  I knew that any second I was going to cry and wouldn’t be able to stop. My whole body – my head, my stomach, my arms and legs – was full of a heaving grey sadness, the very worst thing I’d ever felt, uncontainable and that would go on forever.

  ‘Anyway,’ said my father. He came towards me, he was going to put his arm round me and kiss me, I couldn’t bear that. ‘Pet …?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘All right, but …’ He put his hands in his pockets and glanced wretchedly towards the car. ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘No.’ It seemed to be the only word I could say. Deny it. Say it isn’t so. Refuse.

  ‘Right.’ Then he added, as I knew he would, ‘I’ll phone Zinny.’

  He went into the house, and stood in the hall with the door open, dialling firmly. I stayed outside, near the car; near my dog. I could tell the moment Zinny answered, because he turned his back and took a couple of steps away, and his hand went up to his face. The conversation seemed to go on for ages, minutes. How long could it take to explain what had happened? When finally he returned the handset and came back, he looked rather better for having shared the trouble.

  ‘She’ll be here in a few minutes.’ We stood awkwardly. ‘Why don’t we go inside?’

  I shook my head. By admitting that we could wait a few minutes he was conceding that Towser was dead. I knew it anyway, but there was something feeble about his earlier pretence, and this acceptance.

  ‘Anyway, I could do with some tea.’

  He went back in, and I continued to stand there. My legs felt locked, like a couple of sticks. I couldn’t have sat down even if I wanted to. I was like a soldier on duty, showing respect. In a moment my father came back with his mug, and sat down on the wooden bench below the verandah. The slats were bleached and flaky, they would scratch my bare summer legs. I think he felt bad about sitting, he sat hunched forward with his forearms on his knees, gazing down into the mug. After a moment he put the mug down on the grass and morosely fished out his cigarettes. I was bitterly glad he was stressed.

  We didn’t talk any more, and my father had finished the cigarette and thrown the stub into the hedge by the time we heard the harsh roar of a car coming down the road at speed. As he got up he didn’t even notice that he’d knocked the mug on to the ground, but it was empty and didn’t break.

  Zinny swung across and pulled up by the wall.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said as she walked towards me. And then again, ‘Oh dear, oh dear …’ over my head, over her firm, light embrace. She was looking at my father, wondering how on earth they were going to deal with this.

  She released me, but placed a firm hand on my shoulder, taking charge.

  ‘You get going,’ she said to my father. She glanced down at me. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean yes, you’re sure.’ I nodded. She knew very well what I meant. ‘Go on, Nico.’

  He came over and opened the car door. As he started the engine my leaping, fluttering heart felt as though it were in my head. I hadn’t touched my dog since I’d put the lead on him, and now he was going to be taken away – soiled, broken and cold – to be disposed of by a stranger.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Zinny, smoothing the back of my hair. I didn’t answer, and I felt her gesture with her other hand, telling my father to hurry up. The car backed out into the road, turned, moved off. Was gone.

  Zinny steered me inside and sat down on the sofa next to me. The pain was beginning to stir in earnest now; I wouldn’t be able to contain it much longer. Even so it was harder to escape from Zinny, such was her dominion over me.

  ‘What an awful thing to happen,’ she said. ‘Awful.’

  She took my hand in both of hers – her long, perfectly manicured fingers enfolded my little paw. She wore a silver bracelet on her right wrist, but no rings except a wedding ring, and that was the thinnest, plainest ring imaginable, and always looked a little loose.

  Now she sighed. ‘And we never found out where he belonged.’

  I wanted to scream: Here! He belonged here! Instead I carefully withdrew my hand and rubbed it over my eyes, not because I was crying, but to stop myself.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when Nico called.’ She seemed to be talking to herself now. ‘That woman must have been driving far too fast. They do go too fast along here, they don’t think. It should be a forty.’

  She was turning the conversation into something else: a question of bad driving, of culpability, when who cared? When beautiful, bouncy, loving Towser was dead, and gone, never to return, carted off in the boot like rubbish for the dump.

  I stood up. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

  ‘Are you?’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘Why not stay down here with me, and when Daddy gets back—’

  But I was already on my way. I heard her sigh again as I left. When the bedroom door was closed behind me I grabbed my pillow and sat on the floor with my face buried in it, husbanding the storm, keeping my grief close, all to myself.

  They were worried about me, and I don’t blame them. An hour later my father returned and I heard their lowered voices in the hall, then a pause (in my mind’s eye I could see Zinny pointing up the stairs), before the living-room door closed, and the voices became only the merest murmur. I didn’t catch any of what they said then, and I didn’t want to.

  Later in life I heard, and agreed with, the view that some events and occasions provide us with an excuse to cry; a reason to feel sorrow for ourselves, and to express that sorrow freely. I may have felt a little queasy, on the occasion of Diana’s death, at the sickly smell rising off that sea of rotting flowers in Kensington Gardens, the clumsily expressed declarations of undying love for ‘the people’s princess’, the incontinent weeping and embracing … but I recognized and understood it. Here was a shocking, technicolour national tragedy with built-in beauty, and we b
uttoned-up Brits were going to make the most of it, not just through sentimentality, but because we all had something to cry about – some regret, or guilt, or loss, or remorse, some loss or failing – and now we could. I did. I was dry-eyed until I saw the princes walking like soldiers behind their mother’s coffin, and then the tears came and didn’t stop.

  A lot of people will tell you that the death of a dog brings a particularly sharp pain, that they wept more over the passing of their pet than their parent. Perhaps this is because the loss of a dog is simpler, less complicated; the dog is ‘ours’ in a way even the closest relative can never be. There is less to process; the dog is with us, and then it’s not. And in my case I was still in the honeymoon period. But looking back there was no doubt I was also grieving for myself; mourning those ill-defined, unnameable things I didn’t have and which I was just beginning to see through the mist.

  A little later my father came up and tapped on my door. I didn’t answer but the door opened and a hand appeared holding a plate with a sandwich and a carton of juice on it, and then his head appeared a bit above that.

  ‘Hey, Floss. Brought you some supper. Egg mayonnaise, think you could manage a mouthful?’

  By this time I was lying on the bed, hugging the pillow. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll leave it here, unless of course you’d like to come down and have supper with us.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He put the plate on the bedside table and perched on the edge of the mattress, his hands on his knees.

  ‘The vet was awfully nice. He’ll look after him.’

  I nodded. I didn’t even want to think about what that might involve.

  ‘Have a go, won’t you? Do you good, make you feel better …’ He looked at me for a moment, then slapped his knees and got up. ‘We’re just going to have something ourselves, then I’ll come up again.’

  He went out, leaving the door slightly ajar.

  It was Zinny who came up later, and encouraged me to undress, clean my teeth and get under the covers. As she popped a kiss on my cheek she said, ‘It’ll all seem better in the morning.’

  I might have forgiven her that, which was a typically stupid grown-up thing to say. But I couldn’t sleep, and later I heard them go out on the verandah as they often did after supper, leaving the house door open. I crept out and sat on the stairs. My father was smoking – he must have been upset for Zinny to allow that in front of her, even outside. I was glad about that, glad someone else was just a little sad.

  ‘Oh!’ Zinny leaned her head on the back of her chair and put her hands over her eyes, ‘What a perfectly ghastly day …’

  My father said, ‘I do feel bad about my part in it.’

  ‘Don’t.’ Zinny raised her head again and picked up her glass. ‘From everything you’ve told me it couldn’t have been avoided.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Really, Nico.’

  ‘No.’ He had wanted to be persuaded, and now I could tell he was. ‘Actually you’re right.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else.’ Zinny’s voice lifted and became lighter as if she had decided that the time for restraint was over. ‘Horrible though it was, it may be a blessing in disguise.’

  There followed a pause. Then my father said in the same easily persuaded tone he’d used before: ‘Hate to say it, but I agree.’

  They say eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, so maybe I deserved it. But I think it would have hurt me less if I had caught them criticizing me. Instead, their self-satisfied, treacherous sneakiness was about Towser, who’d done no-one any harm and had now been dealt with by the kind vet – got out of the way before any tricky decisions had to be made. They’d been relieved of those, and oh! Were they relieved. The atmosphere out there on the softly lit verandah had become almost festive because another awkward problem (the first being me) had gone from their lives.

  That was the moment I truly realized that my parents had never – nor would they ever – care half as much for me as they did for each other.

  FIVE

  The memories wouldn’t have affected me so much if I hadn’t been there on my own. I wouldn’t have been able to indulge in them and wallow in self-pity. I hadn’t shed a tear since the night of Towser’s death more than a decade ago. Now, I let rip.

  When I eventually calmed down I took a bottle of beer from the fridge and went out to the verandah. The day was overcast, the sea flat. There were no cars in the lay-by: Saturday was often quiet as the holidaymakers changed over. I decided to go down to the beach. I didn’t use the beach at Lyme much – one end was always so busy and the other was the fossil-hunters’ territory.

  I left the empty bottle on the verandah table and went upstairs, where I dug an old swimming costume out of the chest of drawers in my room and put it on under my long cotton dress. There was always a pile of scratchy beach towels in the airing cupboard. I rolled one up round my house key and set off.

  The sea may have been calm, but it was breathtakingly cold. The icy line of the surface moved up my body in a shock wave, leaving everything below it numb until I acclimatized and began swimming. I went straight out for fifty yards, then turned and swam parallel to the shore in the direction of Salting. I was a strong swimmer, and having learnt in the sea it held no fears for me. In docile, civilized Salting there was a wicked west–east current of which unsuspecting swimmers often fell foul, and where the river bustled out between the crab rocks and the beach you were advised not to try crossing at high tide. But here in our steep, round bay the sea formed a kind of lagoon, and was by and large good-natured. After five minutes I felt better. The air, the exercise, the cold salty pressure of the water, the different view of the land – they all helped to restore a sense of perspective. I kept going back and forth for about half an hour, doing twenty strokes crawl, fifty breaststroke, until I was thoroughly in the zone, and felt as if I could have swum to France. That was the point at which I turned back towards the beach: experience showed that this sensation was rapidly followed by tiredness, and I was some way out. When I finally emerged, trudging through the shallows, I could feel that peculiar sensation of airy weightlessness after the hug of the water.

  There was no-one about, but a habit of modesty made me careful as I wriggled out of my cozzie and tugged my dress back over my head with the aid of laborious towel-work. My father was a great one for what he called the ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ school of changing – whipping his trunks off and his shorts on with what amounted to sleight of hand – but I had neither his speed nor his chutzpah. Now that I was dry my thin cotton dress made me completely warm. I spread the towel on the sand and sat down with my skirt wrapped over my knees. I faced away from the sea, and could just hear the tiny spit of its edge advancing and retreating behind me, like the game grandmother’s footsteps.

  From here I could see only the top half of our house and the effect was rather like a boat on the horizon, with the rough lip of the cliff forming the wake, and the smooth spread of the green cliff top like a huge wave looming over it from behind. Again I realized how isolated the house was – and how isolated we were in it, cut adrift, floating in space.

  It was as I sat there, relaxed after my swim, contemplating the house, that I remembered something I hadn’t thought of for twenty years. And no, I didn’t just remember; I experienced it – felt the heat of the summer night, the weight of that hand on mine, saw the freckles, the nails …

  Had my parents believed me? Had they even known something that I didn’t? Their air of breezy certainty had succeeded in persuading me it was a dream, or that I had imagined it. There had been an oddness about that night that was not all to do with me. But at that age, before their fall from grace with Towser, I had been, like all children, only too willing to believe them. For a week or so I’d resisted going to bed and once there had difficulty going to sleep, but that wore off and I never experienced anything like it again. So the memory faded, and was consigned to whatever mental box room contain
s those moments too powerful to discard but too unpleasant to revisit.

  Now, though, I had been ambushed by that long-ago happening – ambushed and shocked. The memory was so vivid that I felt vulnerable sitting on the sand, and got to my feet. The top of our house peeped over the cliff at me. I could see the slope of the roof, the chimney, and the single dormer window over the stairs where Zinny sometimes put a candle ‘to warn the sailors’ – an uncharacteristic gesture of whimsy.

  Carrying my shoes and towel I set off towards the walkway with a steady, measured pace though I still felt shaky. At the top I wiped the soles of my feet on the grass and put my shoes on. My empty beer bottle still stood defiantly on the verandah.

  I unlocked the door, leaving it open behind me. Draping the towel over the newel post I went up the stairs and into my room. The window was still securely closed, but now I opened it and leaned out. There was the paved area where I used to sit, and beyond it the low wall, matching the one at the front of the house, made up of beach pebbles set in concrete. I lifted the window latch off its housing and pushed it back flat against the wall. I hitched up my skirt and with very little difficulty got one leg over the windowsill, swung the other round, and lowered myself on to the narrow patio. With my hands behind my back against the parapet I faced the way I’d come. Here was another angle on the house, the two large bedroom windows glaring at waist height, with the small bathroom window like a frown line in between them.

  To my left was the spare room, dull and plain, always empty. Even as a child I’d wondered what – and who – it was for, since no-one ever came to stay. We had no friends or relations that I knew of. My parents’ social circle was a mystery, and on those rare occasions when Alice stayed overnight, she’d top and tail in my bed with me. About twice a year Mrs March went in to ‘do a whizz-round’, an exercise that took all of five minutes.

  I had hardly ever been into the spare room: there was no reason to. But now, in my capacity as a spy in my own house, I was overcome with curiosity to see it from this new angle. With one hand on the parapet I moved along and looked in.