Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  Because she wanted more than anything else to participate in the life that now ran with hers, she forced herself to walk more and more so that she could go farther afield in the garden and watch her darling’s enjoyment there. Unheeding of the almost impossible goal she had set for her arthritic legs, her ambition was to take Bel for a proper country walk one day. Sometimes she ached in every other part of her body as well, but whitefaced with effort, she persevered, and was rewarded in more ways than one, for not only did she begin to feel better physically, but through Bel she made daily contact with the outside world. She had actually been seen at the far end of the orchard talking over the fence — about Bel naturally — to her neighbor. But she was so slow that she decided he must have more from her than this sedate accompaniment; he must have more outdoor pursuits and more interests to keep his mind off himself and overcome these lonely listless periods.

  She planned to buy a ball for a start; he would chase it, retrieve it, she would throw it up in the air and over gates, and he would jump and leap and have all the exercise she could not give him.

  Fortunately she was spared the bending and stretching of these activities. That afternoon, she and Bel had reached the far end of the garden at their customary tortoise pace when suddenly he stopped, his ears pricked, tense and quivering. Then he gathered himself and shot like an arrow down through the hedge, across the small orchard beyond, and leaped at the barred gate to the paddock. He paused there, poised on the top bar, his tail moving in the strange nervous vibration that was his version of the more usual wagging of other dogs. Clinging on with his front paws, his tail moving more rapidly than ever, he looked so like a fluffy hovering dragonfly that Mrs. Tremorne laughed out loud.

  Now she saw the object of his excitement, her neighbor’s donkey, the long retired Fred, who grazed her paddock from time to time — he must have been turned out there again only today. She watched Bel streak across the grass, then slow down to a halt a few feet away, his excitement apparently diminished. However, he sniffed around, examining from every angle, returning with his nose the compliments of the donkey as it gently nudged his head. He crouched, sprang, and dropped lightly on the shaggy back. Fortunately it was not the first time that Fred had felt an unexpected weight there; fifteen years of children had accustomed him to almost anything. Mrs. Tremorne leaned on her cane and reveled in the light-hearted spectacle of Bel, his mouth open, pink tongue lolling as though in laughter, his forepaws so rigid before him that they looked as though they pushed back his head and trunk. Fred moved off slowly, cropping the grass, the small motionless rider still on his back.

  When Mrs. Tremorne called at last Bel came running immediately, his eyes still alight with excitement. She filed away another clue towards the unknown X. After this there was no problem about outdoor interest: if not bound for a session on the wall he would trot off briskly in search of Fred, sometimes pottering around the paddock in his company, sometimes lying close by as the donkey whiled away the long summer afternoons in the shade of the trees, sometimes bounding in a beautifully coordinated arc onto the broad patient back, there to dream with head thrown back, erect and totally still. Yet if Mrs. Tremorne tried to persuade him to repeat this leap to order, he would simply sit before her, looking more and more puzzled the more she exhorted.

  The withdrawn hours became fewer and fewer as the timeless weeks stretched into months within the garden walls, the war intruding only in domestic inconvenience, sporadic sorties to the air-raid shelter, or through the impersonal voices of the BBC bringing news of the disastrous world that lay beyond:

  Today’s official reports from Singapore indicate a grave situation . . . our troops have again had to fall back . . .

  “Dreadful, dreadful,” said Mrs. Tremorne.

  A great sea and air battle is going on in the English Channel . . . Scharnhorst, Gneisenau . . . Prinz Eugen. . . . The cost to us: six Swordfish aircraft are missing . . . twenty bombers . . . sixteen fighters . . .

  “That unspeakable little Hitler —” said Mrs. Tremorne.

  The convoys battled on against the ever multiplying U-boat packs, such a terrible toll exacted that rationing became even more stringent. A strange tinned fish called snoek — popularly supposed to have originated in very old Rhodesian rain barrels — made its appearance on ration points. Whalemeat was expensive but required no points. Succulent slabs of horsemeat destined for British dogs were dyed blue to discourage human consumption. However, “the introduction of soap rationing will reduce the consumption of soap by one-fifth,” declared the nine o’clock news voice. Lord Woolton created his Wartime Pie.

  “Terrible, terrible!” said Mrs. Tremorne when he revealed its ingredients.

  But it was only when she was faced with the prospect of one egg per fortnight and an ounce of butter to spread over seven slices of morning toast that the full impact of the war was brought home. She was unable to dismiss the inconvenience any longer; it was clearly here to stay, and for some time. Unable to do anything about the butter, she turned her attention to a long-range solving of the egg problem: they would keep hens. Fortunately Janet showed unexpected enthusiasm for this project. Even more happily, yet another interest was provided for Bel. Six day-old chicks were bought; for the first few days they were reared in the kitchen under a lamp in a box, and under the unwavering gaze of Bel, who appeared to be almost mesmerized by them. When they huddled together under the lamp for a brief sleep he relaxed; when they awoke their cheepings brought him scurrying back. When they were let out they followed him around as though he were a mother hen; and if he lay down they climbed all over him. His retinue persisted even when they were grown birds and had the run of the orchard and, for a while, the garden. They would converge on him from all quarters with hysterical clucking excitement when he appeared, and were greatly frustrated when their wings were clipped and they were no longer able to fly up and perch beside him on the donkey’s back. Mrs. Tremorne was greatly amused by his feathery following until they took to searching him out in the house, perching on windowsills, peering through, gaining access through any open door or window. After she and Bel had woken up one morning to the sound of their triumphant voices outside the bedroom door, they were exiled from the garden.

  Now Bel’s days were full indeed, and by the time a year had passed and the months of the second were marching on, he was indirectly contributing to the war effort as well, for in a combination of patriotism — stirred into activity by the fall of Singapore, where she had once lived — and the effort to arrest the stiffness of her fingers in order to groom him, Mrs. Tremorne had learned to knit. Slowly and painfully she knitted for the Naval Comforts Fund, working her way up through the endless tedium of scarves to balaclavas and mitts, and then the ultimate triumph of socks. When the articles were collected the names and addresses of the knitters were pinned on and sometimes they were dispatched this way. Months later, Mrs. Tremorne received acknowledgment of her labors from two of the recipients, a Wren stationed in Scapa Flow, into whose hands a pair of mitts had found its way, and a Leading Seaman, who might well have been on the Arctic convoy routes, from his description of the cold.

  Mrs. Tremorne was strangely touched by their letters; for the first time she was in personal contact with the war. So touched, that from now on she and Janet saved from their rations of sugar, margarine and dried fruits, and one day two cakes were dispatched.

  She wrote regularly to her protégés, long inconsequential letters totally unrelated to the war: about what was coming up in the garden, the hens, a book she had read — but always the longest paragraphs were about Bel, and Bel’s day-to-day activities. Perhaps her age and infirmity were apparent in her writing, perhaps the youngsters to whom she wrote appreciated this other-worldliness in the midst of service life, or perhaps she was just exceptionally fortunate, but she received many long letters in return, and even from time to time small presents. The one which she particularly treasured was a diagonally sliced sliver of tusk, minutely engr
aved with an endless procession of infinitesimal dogs. She had it set into a brooch and never wore any other.

  If her life had been completely altered by Bel’s coming, so was Janet Carpenter’s, who looked ten years younger — almost within five years of her actual thirty-four. Having looked after her elderly ailing parents until they died, she had been untrained for any job. Unable, because of a slight congenital heart defect, to escape into the more colorful life of the women’s services, she had resigned herself to the gray future of a light-duties companion. Now that Mrs. Tremorne was so occupied, and content to be left in the company of Bel, she had nerved herself to ask if she might join one of the voluntary services, and now slaved most happily two afternoons and two evenings a week in a railway canteen.

  She proved to be an unexpectedly amusing raconteuse, and brought back a breath of outside life each time as she regaled Mrs. Tremorne with her various encounters over the coffee urns. Mrs. Tremorne, eager to expand her Bel audience, encouraged her to invite lonely or stranded young service men and women back to The Cedars.

  At Christmas, by now well-launched into undercounter or behind-haystack deals, she procured a magnificent turkey, wine, and even crackers, and eight young people sat down to an unforgettable dinner. Afterwards, one of them produced a pennywhistle, another a concertina, and they sang carols. Then, as though to put the final seal of pleasure on this happiest of days, Bel judged his moment and rose to perform his solemn little dance to the music.

  It had been some time since he had expressed himself this way to Mrs. Tremorne, and as she watched him circle now with nodding head and outstretched paws, she saw that his eyes sought hers with the same strange intensity of those first weeks. At that moment, with a sudden jealous stab of helplessness, as though she had somehow failed him, she knew without doubt that this was only a part of a presentation: it should go on, but it could not for something was missing, and she could not provide it. Everything else in his life she could provide, but not this release that belonged to someone else.

  She did not speak of this to Janet; if she had become such an absurd old woman that she was jealous of a ghost, then it was better to keep it to herself. She comforted herself in bed that night by thinking of all his ways that belonged only to her, that had no part of any other life but The Cedars; how he brought her stick, carried up the morning newspaper, retrieved a fallen ball of wool, searched out the sites of cunningly concealed eggs — and a dozen examples that had sprung from her alone. She felt his reassuring warmth at the end of the bed. He was hers. She was just about to fall asleep when she realized that she herself had taught him none of these tricks: all had evolved from Bel himself.

  Chapter 12

  INTO THIS HAPPY little Eden one day, nearly two years after Bel’s arrival, came a stranger. He walked up the path and rang the bell, and when Janet came to the door he asked to see Mrs. Tremorne. He was in naval uniform, small and slight, his firmly compressed mouth giving a severity to the finely drawn, almost ascetic face. She asked him to come in, thinking that one of Mrs. Tremorne’s pen friends might have materialized.

  He stood in the hall, turning his cap around in his hands, yet not apparently in any nervousness for he had an air of restrained excitement, and his deeply set dark blue eyes were everywhere.

  “What name?” asked Janet.

  “Neil MacLean,” he said, then added in a soft lilting accent, “but Mistress Tremorne will not be acquaint with it. I have been trying to trace a dog that was lost in Plymouth in 1941, and I had heard from a nurse at the hospital here that . . .” His voice trailed off: it was too long an explanation to give now, and he looked at Janet expectantly.

  She could feel the blood drain out of her face and a terrible feeling of disaster closing in. In the ten seconds that she stood silently staring at MacLean, a hundred thoughts leaped in her mind — hide Bel, deny his existence, tell this man that Mrs. Tremorne was dying upstairs and couldn’t be disturbed, pretend that she was a deaf mute — no she couldn’t do that, she had already spoken — pray that the floor would give way under him so that he could be locked forever in the cellar with his questions about a dog that had been lost in Plymouth . . . Oh, no, oh, no . . . cried Janet’s very soul, seeing the grim vista of a future that held no Bel, life as it had been before . . .

  And even as she stared at his puzzled face — for he was beginning to wonder if this strange mute woman was going to throw a fit or something — Mrs. Tremorne’s voice floated down the stairs. “If that was the laundry,” she said, “tell them that we are now missing two pillowcases.”

  Janet found her voice. “It is a Mr. MacLean, wanting to see you about a dog,” she called up.

  Mrs. Tremorne was rather deaf nowadays. “God?” she said, very puzzled, for Mr. Vane, the vicar, did not usually announce himself so baldly.

  “Dog,” shouted Janet, almost wringing her hands. “MacLean . . .”

  Mrs. Tremorne looked down and saw the dark blue uniform with some relief. She decided that he must be one of Bel’s garden wall acquaintances. “Come along up, Mr. McVane,” she said pleasantly.

  MacLean followed her into the small upstairs room that Alice Tremorne used nowadays so that she could watch Bel in the garden or down in the paddock with a pair of field glasses, and where this morning she had been writing to her “children.” She hobbled across the room on swollen feet and sat down, motioning MacLean to a seat opposite. By the arm of her chair was a small table on which lay her knitting and some photographs of Bel by a half-finished letter.

  MacLean sat on the extreme edge of the chair, his face dour at the prospect of recounting the long chain of bygone fact and recent coincidence that had brought him here.

  Mrs. Tremorne smiled at him. “You must be one of Bel’s friends?” she said.

  “I am not acquaint with the name,” said MacLean. “As I was telling yon woman at the door, it was about a dog that was thought to have been killed during the blitz in 1941 —” he paused, suddenly so aware of a current of hostility in this room that he looked around, almost expecting to find someone else, for there was no change of expression in the pale wrinkled face opposite.

  “How sad,” said Mrs. Tremorne. “So many poor animals then —” Carefully she tidied the photographs into the letter, then took up her knitting and turned her hooded gaze on MacLean. She nodded with gracious sympathy. “A terrible time. We had no dustbins emptied or any electricity for a week, and my garage was hit.”

  “Indeed, now,” he said, as graciously, but determined to get on with the business in hand. “It was at the end of February, and it’s a long story, but I heard in a roundabout way that you had acquired a dog then, one that had found you when you were buried under your house —”

  “Garage,” said Mrs. Tremorne. “It used to be the coach house and . . .”

  “Buried under your garage —”

  “In the pit—”

  “Buried in the pit of your garage that used to be a coach house,” amended MacLean, softly and patiently. Their eyes met, and he continued hurriedly, “and I thought from what I heard that it might well have been Ria —”

  “Ria?” said Mrs. Tremorne, her stumbling fingers dropping a stitch.

  “That was the name I gave him for I never knew his real one. He was brought aboard our destroyer off St. Nazaire with one of the survivors from the Lancastria. The man was badly wounded, and I kept the dog for him. There was a monkey too. Then I left the dog in Plymouth, and —”

  “Monkey?” said Mrs. Tremorne, stalling for time, time to climb out of this bottomless pit that had so suddenly yawned before her.

  He nodded, his eyes on her hands. He had lost his initial excitement, and felt only wary and ill at ease now, uncertain how to confront her, uncertain even of any right. “It was called Louis, after . . .” His voice trailed off lamely. The room was very still, only the clicking needles. Her move now. . . .

  Mrs. Tremorne, outwardly contained, inwardly surging with a fierce determination, and entirely
untroubled by conscience, decided that strategic attack was the best defense. “The best remedy against an ill man is much ground between,” she remembered. Very well; she would set those limits now.

  “And what did this dog of yours look like, my man?” she said, and the voice broke the silence with such icy deliberate condescension that MacLean’s own soft voice when he answered held a tone that the one time Ria could have interpreted for Alice Tremorne if he had been there, and would have laid his ears back in trepidation.

  “Ria was not very big,” he said. “Dark gray, with quite a thick coat, and his tail had been docked. He wasn’t any breed, mind you, a terrier type, but you couldn’t mistake him for his eyes — very large and bright they were. And he was the cleverest wee beast I ever came across —” Despite himself, his face had softened as he talked. “In fact,” he confided in a sudden earnest rush, leaning forward in the chair, “when I heard that this dog had saved someone’s life, I said that will be him for sure, that will be Ria, for he had the great courage.” MacLean stopped, astonished at his loquacity.

  “What a wonderful dog he must have been!” said Alice Tremorne with masterly earnestness. “How I wish I could say the same about mine! Like so many of these overbred small poodles nowadays my darling is very timid and highly strung.”

  “Poodle?” said MacLean.

  “Poodle,” said Mrs. Tremorne firmly. “You see, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time.”

  Now or never. He must take this formidable old cow by the horns: “I would like to see him,” he said.