The Old Dog and the Doorstep

by JP Wright

We jump to the night. Sitting with my back against the steep side of the round-barrow, in absolute darkness, with the rain beginning again and the wind combining with the trees to produce a chorus of ghostly moans, I was regretting my courageous decision to Find Out for Sure. I had on my long coat, the kind that goes straight down to the knees and is divided into sections like a duvet or a caterpillar, that I usually never wear as it makes me look like a tube of toothpaste that has been thoughtlessly squished at both ends, so I could sit without my bum getting wet immediately – but under that only my pj's, and on my feet only slippers. What had I been I thinking of? Something relating to not really admitting what I was going to do, disguising my intentions from others, keeping even myself in the dark until it was too late. The wet was working its way up my pyjama bottoms. It was nearly at my knees now, and some enterprising raindrops had found their way in at the collar and were soaking the neck of my pyjama top.

  How did a well brought-up girl like me (ahem) get into this uncomfortable state? Well – I had an idea about the cake, and the lights down the hill, but I needed to know for sure. Thought, in the light and warmth of my bedroom (which, I decided as a little river of water began to run down my back, I would never leave again) that I needed to know for sure. When, after a decent interval, I had followed Roger back into the house, the party was more-or-less broken up. The Cutter-Plains, reconciled for the night, headed out to the stables; the Tisket-Tasket binary followed their example. The old folk had retired some time before. As soon as Belle had retreated to her room, stopping at intervals on the stairs to check her mobile signal, Mother relaxed from Duchess mode and began whizzing about cleaning and preparing for the next day.

  “You did not clean the table,” she hissed at me as I closed the door against the autumnal chill, “I asked you for one small thing. It would have taken you two minutes.”

  I explained that I had been trying to conduct a physics experiment. “Mother,” I said, “Although it may not seem so to you, my adolescent life is being crushed by demands from all sides that I must fulfil. Between satisfying the needs of my teachers and babysitting my younger sister, I really have no time at all to myself. Is it any wonder that occasionally a minor boon goes un-granted?”

  I may not have actually used those exact words: you will understand that I was concerned not only about the on-rushing Home Ec assessment, but also – and mainly on Mother's behalf – by the mystery that this chapter will unfold. Not to mention that I had in fact been playing the Dutiful Daughter out there by the pond whilst Roger laid her troubles on me. So, I may not have been as clear as I would have liked, but Mother got the message: she took the cloth to wipe the table herself, wearing that look of noble self-sacrifice that had become so familiar over the summer. I followed her into the dining room to ask her advice.

  “So. Do we have cloves, and which one is the bay tree?”

  “If that's all you need, it can wait until tomorrow,” she said unhelpfully, “Go and get the hoover will you there are crumbs all over the floor.”

  By the time I had dragged the old monster out from the cupboard under the stairs, pressed as it was between the apple store and the new fridge, Mother had moved into the drawing room, where she was inspecting the mantle-piece for wine stains. “I need mince, onion, milk, bay, cloves, tomato in tins, tomato purée, thyme. I already have mace,” I told her. “And I think I need melon and parma ham for the starter, and I don't know about the pudding.”

  “Well,” she snorted, rubbing at the wood, “you have the mace. So you're half-way there.” I thought her sarcasm was uncalled-for.

  “I got the mace from Mrs Baker,” I said, “while I was helping her bake scones for your guests.” She said nothing, but polished harder and sharpened her self-sacrificing expression. “While I was looking after your daughter,” I added.

  “You need to organise yourself better,” she shouted over the noise of the hoover as I began to poke it about under the table. “Never mind looking after my daughter (who, by the way, is your sister)” as if I could be held in any way responsible for the bug, “and chasing after my guests. If you had something so important to do, why only mention it now, when I need your cooperation?”

  “I am helping you now,” I shouted back, clattering the chairs for emphasis.

  “If you really want to help, and you want to practice your cooking, you could bake another cake for me, to replace the one ...”

  “Cake is not Italian,” I interrupted, before she had the chance to say something unforgivable. Could she really suspect that I had destroyed the cake? “And I don't need to practice baking cakes, I need to prepare for this one particular meal.”

  “I've been shopping virtually every day this week, trying to get everything together for this weekend. Where was your shopping list yesterday?” she snapped. Of course if I had known how complicated the task was going to be I would have prepared further in advance. The fact is, I had only properly read through the recipe that day – but admitting that would have undermined my argument. Which was … which was?

  “If you cared, you'd have asked me,” I sobbed, flinging down the hoover and rushing from the room. If I expected her to come after me, I was disappointed: the vacuum recommenced its whooming. Never mind. Now at least Mother knew what I needed. I could have given her the information without the emotional colouring, you say? But a little colour stimulates the memory, and older people need to be kept mentally active. I stalked off along the dark hallway and, before stomping up the back stairs, went through the salon to glance out of the windows of the orangery. A steady drizzle obscured the view – I could see nothing beyond the pale that kept the ghostly sheep from our door. Even so, I popped into Mother's bedroom to check the curtains were closed, before I got myself pyjama'd up and pretended to sleep.

  I lay and listened to the various creaks the house always makes, wood and brick cooling and shrinking, or sucking in damp and swelling, whatever it is that an old house does as it settles down to sleep, like a child or an old crock in cot or armchair, muttering incoherently and making occasional little starts and farts. Meanwhile the bane of my life made her odd night-time movements next door: a dance to shake off the day's rags that leaves them scattered about the room; a certain amount of hopping about half-in and half-out of pj's, then a vigorous horizontal sprint to warm the bedsheets. Finally a two-fisted hammering on the wall and a cry of love and respect for her older sister.

  “Goodnight geek.”

  “Goodnight freak.”

  “Dormez-bien, vache.”

  “Ne morsure pas vous-même, puce.”

  “If you die before you wake … can I have your stuff?”

  “Never.”

  And then, leaping from waking to the darkest unconsciousness in one reckless bound, she is asleep.

  Aside from the ticks and creaks of the house and from the east wing the faint tink-tink-tink of Simon at his work, there was quiet for a little while, which was broken by a stampede of actors. Up our back staircase and on into the attic scampered jolly Lottie; after her panted Sandy. I could imagine his long fingers reaching ahead to goose the silly girl. After them came the steady, heavy steps of Cook. I heard her stop and wheeze a while on the landing. Last, making an uncertain progress, pinging from wall to wall and missing steps, came Butler. He was obviously struggling under a heavy burden, but struggling cheerfully. He stopped on the landing to deliver a few lines of verse – too coarse for us to repeat here my dears – and I thought I heard the soothing sound of sherry splashing into a glass. His strength restored, the stalwart fellow continued his difficult ascent.

  Some time later, Mother came upstairs. I know her routine: she would have removed her pearls and draped them over the little pierrot on her dressing table that I bought in a fit of girlish poor taste a few years ago; her dress would be carefully hung, underwear neatly folded and stacked in the wicker washing basket. Then she would shower, quickly and efficiently: she claims it saves time in the morning, and keeps the bed fresh. I
am not convinced – it is difficult to spring out of bed feeling clean and alert. I need a hard, hot (if I am lucky and the heating is up to pressure) sluice of water in the morning to wash away the night's sticky, sweaty embrace. The shower trickled to a stop, and Mother would, having towelled herself briskly, be standing in front of her mirror, performing a thorough, clinically-detached inspection. She would regard her body with the dispassion of an estate agent or horse trader checking a prospective purchase. “I think it will get through another day, V,” she would say to me, inspecting freckles, checking for lumps. That was when I was younger: the last thing I want to see now is my own Mother's naked body.

  The last step, grooming. Hair, eyebrows, nails. I thought I could just hear the little snicks of the clippers and the shush of the file. Finally, a thick mask of seaweed gloop, or apricot crème, or avocado oil, or whatever else the latest guaranteed, fail-safe age-defying potion du jour might be, and she would slip, cool and clean, between her crisp sheets. The gentlest of snores escaping her big bed told me she was asleep at last.

  I, meanwhile, had prepared not for bed, but for a fearful journey. Inappropriately, in my pj's and slippers. So no-one would know what I was up to – not even me.

  But what was I doing out there, on the far side of the barrow, tucked into the shelter of the cut great-aunt Hettie made, a trench like a square chunk carved out of a cake, watching the wind tear off pieces of cloud and drag them across the sky, feeling the first few drops of a new rain shower? You know I had seen someone in the lodge. When the flea and I had passed it on our way to the village, I had glimpsed someone through the window, I was almost sure. And I thought, I was more-or-less convinced, that there had been a light in the window earlier that evening. I was confident, a little bit, that there was a connection between these sightings and the destruction of the cake that morning. Perhaps if I had not diverted Kitty away from the lodge, or closed Mother's curtains to hide the light, the mystery might have been solved sooner, but I wanted the chance to clear my own name – especially as Mother suspected me now, as well as Kitty. If there really was someone there, I was determined to be the one who discovered him. To be honest, I did not want Mother and Kitty to know: better that I deal with this calmly and rationally.

  The first part of my mission went smoothly. I slippered my way downstairs, paused in the kitchen, zipped on my coat and then slid out, through the salon to the chilly orangery. I stepped over snoring Marcus, whose breath had steamed up the windows, and out onto the grass. As early as that, I began to regret my slippers. The croquet lawn is somewhat neglected these days.

  I had intended to creep along to the path over the stile and travel in the shadow of the wood, but the wind had begun to moan in the trees and anyway it was as dark as hell and no-one would be able to see me in my black tube-coat. Which, by the way, was making walking difficult through the long grass. The fence took a slipper from me as I tried to climb it, and dropped it into the darkness. By the time I found it again, I had nettle stings on both hands and the slipper was sodden. Better than nothing though, in case of thistles. I had to give up on the fence – unclimbable in my long coat and I dared not take it off to risk being spotted in my pink pyjamas. I had planned, if caught roaming about the house, to feign sleep-walking, but out here it would be a hard sell. So back to plan A: I trudged along the fence, closer and closer to the moaning, creaking trees, until I reached the stile. Even that was a challenge. The old wood was damp and slippery and my hands were getting cold.

  Just as I reached the turning where the path sent a branch off into the wood – the same sunny, summer path which only a few hours earlier I had walked so blithely with the bug scuttling at my side – a gust of wind dragged a louder groan from the trees. I heard a knocking somewhere in the wood. Too clear, too rhythmic surely to be just the wind in the branches. A sharp crack, which in daytime would have had me looking sharply about for falling branches, set me running in the dark. I set off away from the wood, stumbling over tussocks; swerving around clumps of sleeping sheep too astonished at the sudden appearance of this panting, dark shape to do more than blink at me; falling more than once. I wished then that there was a light in the lodge, lights in the house, that the moon had not been so completely eclipsed by clouds. People looking out would have seen a long, swaying black tube, legs working madly from the knee down, slippers slipping. I must have looked like a cartoon. I would not have minded being seen like that, even spoiling my mission, if it meant that there was a light I could look back at to know that I was not alone in the universe. There is nowhere darker than a field at night. Even this field I had known and wandered through all my life was suddenly unfamiliar, endless and unfriendly. There was a slope I had never noticed in day-time. The ground was rougher. The driveway, which surely I should have reached by now, seemed to have been ploughed over and planted with nettles. Just as I was beginning to wonder who – or what – I was running from, and realising that I should take care not to run into the fence that kept the sheep off the drive, I found that I had veered south and reached the ha-ha instead. I found it with a little help from gravity and Newton, who would no doubt have admired the parabola I described as I fell into it.

  If you think that a ditch full of nettles sounds like fun, think again. Perhaps it was a mercy that I went in sideways, rolling when the ground suddenly was not there any more under my right foot. At least my ridiculous tube of a coat protected me a little. I hit the bottom with a splat that did at least get some response from the nearby sheep, who scattered in their idiot way, running blindly in all directions, crashing into clumps of grass and one-another. The undignified fools! I had time to listen to their panicked bleating die down while I waved my arms and legs like an up-turned turtle, hoping some hitherto undiscovered bye-law of physics would come to my aid. No such luck. Eventually I had to roll over, put my hands in the nettles and push myself up. The crushed plants were ferocious. Stings upon stings, and more as I grabbed at the vegetation to haul myself up the other side of the ditch. Another gang of sheep greeted me there, blinking in a 'what am I doing answering the door at this time of night?' sort of way, wondering what the fuss had been about and gazing curiously across at their neighbours, who had by then dismissed the whole thing as a bad dream and settled down to sleep again.

  A minute earlier, in my flight from the nameless and probably non-existent threat in the wood, I would have greeted any light like the sun in springtime; now, I dropped to the floor at the edge of the ha-ha, careless of the sheep flicking their tails at me as they trotted disdainfully away. A weak yellow beam picked out their damp backs. A beam that shone from the window of the lodge. I had fled an imaginary terror to fall almost into the lap of something real: someone was in there after all, where no-one had any business being. Had I just planned to march up and knock on the door? Could I summon the imperial spirit that had emboldened me in the wood that afternoon, or borrow some of Mother's duchess? After a humiliating retreat from the moaning wood, a roll in the ditch, an assault by nettles and a snubbing by the stupid sheep, I could not have faced a mirror, let alone a trespasser with ulterior motives. The torch faded and flickered and then vanished, so I risked walking rather than roll all the way. I found the drive, crunched across it, cursing the gravel, and rounded the barrow to great aunt Hettie's cut. The plan was to use this familiar shelter to gather myself, summon the courage of the Tickham women, gird my loins (or at any rate, tighten the sash of my pyjamas), before striding out to face destiny. Funny how an ancient burial mound seems so much less like an encouraging spot when it is dark and raining and the wind and trees are mourning the dead together. Amazing how, baffled on three sides, the wind and rain still managed to get to me; to blow in my face and down the back of my neck at once, and to find a way up my coat at the same time. The clouds were hurrying across the sky too fast to keep up a steady downpour, but each threw down a drenching load as it passed over, and the wind whipped up moisture from the long grass to keep me refreshed between showers.
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  There is a hedgerow between the barrow and the lane, mostly brambles but with some feral apples, a couple of spindly oaks, and some beech in amongst. When they began knocking their branches like a wight tapping on the door of his tomb, and rustling their leaves like the cloaks of antique kings, I found that cowardice was as useful a tool as anger or hauteur to get me up again and back across the driveway to the lodge. At least I had a good idea what I might find there: in the dark earth against my back was a threat no longer human. I held my breath, checked there was no torchlight, shuffled across the gravel and past the door of the lodge, and threw myself down under the window that faced the slope up to the house: the source of the light, the dusty glass behind which the torch-shiner had stood earlier that day – if that had not been after all my imagination, a reflected chestnut branch and a square of blue sky. I was more than certain that it was not, as between my panting breaths and the rushes of blood in my ears I could hear footsteps within. Three steps, a sigh, a turn, and three steps back. The pattern seemed familiar. A dim yellow light shone from the window again, barely strong enough to reach the ground – but enough to illuminate the shadow that crossed and re-crossed it.

  From my nervous position I could see – could have seen, if the light had been on – Mother's bedroom window. Nothing glimmered up there in the darkness, so she must be obliviously asleep, not alert to the threat at her gateway. More worryingly, not alert to the threat to her heroic elder daughter. Spurred on by another sharp shower, I turned and began to slide myself up the wall, planning to peer in at the window.

  Not surprising Mother was snoring: she had been up and at it since dawn, and this was the end of a long series of busy days. I could have been more helpful, perhaps you think? But she gives one so little chance. Do you think she would really have let me bake a cake – a cake for her precious guests? She would not have been able to resist helping my help, and pretty soon she would have been up to her elbows in it, flour on her nose and enjoying herself so much she would have completely forgotten her daughter was even there. And then she throws in that martyr face. The form book requires that Father must be a fool or a bastard. If he was a fool – a fool to leave or a fool to have stayed so long? Based on overheard muttered conversations and phone calls between great aunts, second cousins and other aged relatives (my whole summer was a suffocating moth-ball of innuendo) 'feckless' seemed to be le mot juste. Hints of failed investments were consistent with the fool hypothesis, but I just could not help overhearing rumours of unsuitable women, which would definitely swing things towards bastard. So whence Mother's 'no-one else can do it' attitude? I remember plenty of instances of Father's foolishness precipitating a rapid intervention, a quick swipe of the cleaning cloth, a rapid burst of apologetic French, even a call to the consulate on one skiing trip. Plenty of opportunity for the martyr's mask to be worn. But perhaps he had adopted a cunning strategy: the Tickham women having finally begun to develop defences against the cads, bounders and dilettantes who had beset them throughout history, that race had evolved a camouflage. Could it be that the fool concealed a bastard?

  Just as I peeped above the sill the shadow crossed the window again. I dropped like a terrified stone. The footsteps did not pause, but instead of a sigh I thought I heard a grim chuckle before the turn. I waited where I was. Yes – there was definitely a pause this time at the window under which I crouched. For a moment I thought I did see a light up at the house, but by the time I had wiped the rain from my eyes, it was gone. There was a cough from inside the lodge, then an expectant silence: no more pacing, but a listening alertness.

  If I lurched to my feet and started running, even supposing I unzipped my coat and let myself get the rest of soaked through, would I even get as far as the drive? Or if I went straight for the house, between the chestnuts and up the wood-shadowed path, would I even reach the dodgy log bridge? I doubted it. And so humiliating in front of you all, my friends. Better the confrontation.

  The door creaked open, and the torchlight flickered on the ground, just bright enough to show a large pair of tatty brogues rounding the corner. I stood, my back pressed to the wall. The light showed my muddy slippers, and slid up the rain-shiny black coat, before dazzling my eyes. I heard the brogues shuffle closer, and a voice,

  “V?”

  “Hi dad.”

  Chapter 11