TONGUES OF FLAME
LOVING ROGER
HOME THOUGHTS
FAMILY PLANNING
GOODNESS
CARA MASSIMINA
MIMI’S GHOST
SHEAR
EUROPA
DESTINY
JUDGE SAVAGE
RAPIDS
CLEAVER
DREAMS OF RIVERS AND SEAS
SEX IS FORBIDDEN (FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE SERVER)
PAINTING DEATH
ITALIAN NEIGHBOURS
AN ITALIAN EDUCATION
ADULTERY & OTHER DIVERSIONS
TRANSLATING STYLE
HELL AND BACK
A SEASON WITH VERONA
THE FIGHTER
TEACH US TO SIT STILL
ITALIAN WAYS
WHERE I’M READING FROM
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473523555
Version 1.0
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VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Tim Parks 2016
Tim Parks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2016
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781910701157
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any number of readers will see some resemblance to their lives or the lives of people they know. And perhaps there is indeed some resemblance. But it is coincidental. Thomas and Mary never existed, nor their two children, nor their world in the suburbs of Manchester.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Parks
Title Page
Rings
Bedtimes
Common Friend
Four-Star Breakfast
Brotherly Love
Day and Night
Goat
Promotion
Zoning
Black Tie
Harry
Denial
List
Mrs P
The Wedding Plant
Whereof One Cannot Speak
Bivouac
Vespa
Julie
Money
Tough Choices
Reverend
Blissful Brush
Grandparenthood
Storming the Tower
Winner
Missing
Concrete
Martha and Edward
The Second Mrs P
Shrink
Music
Even Tenderness
Circumambulation
Copyright
This is how Thomas lost his ring. They were on Blackpool beach and wanted to go for a proper swim but they couldn’t do this together because of the children, who couldn’t swim and had anyway already been in the water and just wanted to play round the windbreak. So they decided to take turns. Him first. And because the cold water made his skin shrink a little and made it slippery, he pulled his ring off so that he shouldn’t lose it. He didn’t want to lose it. It was solid gold. He had a long swim, came back, got dressed and asked Mary for the ring but she frowned and said she hadn’t got it. ‘I gave it to you,’ he said. ‘No, you didn’t.’ She thought he must have put it in a pocket. ‘But I’m sure!’ ‘Why are you looking in your pockets, then?’ she smiled.
The ring wasn’t among his clothes. He couldn’t find it. So she thought maybe he had hidden it, somewhere. ‘I would have some memory of having hidden it,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t I?’ Again she laughed. ‘You forget all kinds of things!’ ‘Maybe you forgot I gave it to you,’ he said. She shook her head. Unlike him, she did not forget things. She wasn’t that kind of person. He was the forgetful one, the distracted one.
Thomas searched in the sand, first on the spot where he had changed, then round the poles of the windbreak. If he had hidden it, it would have been right next to something fixed. Mary said the kids had moved the windbreak. Hadn’t he noticed the wind had shifted? Thomas began to feel panicky, because it seemed to him that a wedding ring was important, symbolic, quite apart from the money. ‘I took it off to look after it,’ he protested. ‘Not to lose it.’
He grabbed one of the kids’ spades and began to dig where he thought the windbreak had been. Not there, Mary thought. She wanted to go for her swim now and set off across the sand. ‘Can we help, Daddy?’ the kids asked. Mark crouched down and pushed sand back between his legs like a dog. ‘Stop it!’ Sally screamed. ‘Don’t you remember if I gave it to Mum, or if I hid it?’ Thomas asked them. They didn’t remember anything. By the time his wife came back they had dug up an area of five square yards. ‘My towel is sandy,’ she complained. ‘Things can’t just disappear,’ Thomas protested. Drying herself, she shook her head. ‘Somehow or other you’ve managed to lose it,’ she said.
Later, half a mile down the beach, they saw a man with a metal detector scanning the base of the pier supports. Thomas offered him a reward if he found the ring and they walked back down the beach together. ‘I thought I’d given it to my wife for safe-keeping,’ he explained, ‘but she says I must have hidden it in my clothes. So it’s probably fallen in the sand, though I can’t find it.’ As they walked, the man told him how many rings he’d found with his detector, some of them lost decades ago. And coins. Pocket knives. Even a hand grenade.
When they reached the spot, Thomas wasn’t sure it was the spot. The tide was coming in fast. Everyone else had gone. It all looked different. But almost at once the metal detector beeped. Thomas’s heart twitched. The man unearthed a ring pull from a Coke can. In the end they found half a dozen ring pulls, a self-tapping screw and an old-fashioned tin opener.
Another week of sea and sunshine and all trace of the ring on his wedding finger was gone. The kids continued to dig in the sand, but nothing was found. The same year, towards Christmas, Thomas noticed that Mary was no longer wearing her ring. ‘I thought,’ she explained, ‘that if you weren’t wearing yours there was no point in me wearing mine.’ ‘But I’ve lost mine, I can’t wear it.’ ‘You could have bought a new one,’ she said. She was right, Thomas thought, but he wasn’t sure that that would be the same thing. ‘You didn’t tell me to buy a new one,’ he observed. She asked did he need to be told?
The more Thomas thought about this, the more distressed he felt. Yet at the same time he did not want to buy a new ring. Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before.
This did not happen.
Monday evening, 10.30. Thomas is sitting on the sofa with his laptop reading for work. Mary has been talking to a friend on Skype.
If he is going to work all night, I may as well go to bed, Mary decides and goes upstairs without a word. Thomas joins her at midnight when she is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Tuesday evening, 10.45. Mary decides that their dog Ricky needs a late walk. Thomas, who has been watching a Champions League game in the old playroom, wanders back to the sitting room to find it empty. If she is out with the dog, I may as well go to bed, he decides. Mary joins him at midnight when he is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Wednesday evening, 11.00. Thomas is still out playing billiards with his friend Alan. Mary concludes she may as well turn in and leads her dog Ricky up the stairs to his basket on her side of the bed. ‘Go to sleep now,’ she tells him when he puts his cold nose between the sheets. ‘Bed, Ricky! Bed!’ Thomas joins her at 1.30 when she is sound asleep, face to the wall.
Thursday evening, 9.30. Thomas and Mary are in their sitting room reading, he on the sofa, she at her place at the table. He is reading a novel by Haruki Murakami, she a book about training cocker spaniels. Unusually, their son Mark comes downstairs. It is warmer here, he says, and proceeds to open his computer to watch a film, with headphones. The boy is fourteen. Thomas looks up and says he’d like to watch the film too if that’s okay. Mark tells him he won’t like the film, but Thomas says he’ll give it half an hour if that’s all right. Mark says fine and unplugs the headphones. Thomas asks Mary if she would like to watch the film too. Mary says there’s hardly room for three to watch a film on their son’s laptop. Mark says they could go and watch the film on the TV in the playroom. Mary says it’s too cold in the playroom to sit through a film and decides to take Ricky for a walk. Thomas finds the film dull, stupid and disturbingly violent. It’s nice sitting beside his son but at 10.30 he bails out and goes to bed. Mary joins him at 11.30 when he is not asleep, but pretends he is, face to the wall.
Friday evening, 7.30. Mary has arranged an evening out with her friends from the dog park. She invites Thomas to come. He would enjoy meeting them, she says, and they are eager to meet him. Thomas is not convinced – he doesn’t want to meet her friends from the dog park; it is not his scene he says; he will take Ricky out while she is at the pub. Mary repeats that their son can take the dog out, leaving Thomas free to come to the pub and meet her friends. He repeats that it really isn’t his scene. He has some work to do. In the event he has a long conversation on Skype with an old friend. So as not to have to pretend to be asleep again, something he finds painful, he goes to bed early. Mary joins him at 11.30 and hardly cares whether he is asleep or not, since she has nothing to say to a man who she believes is having an affair.
Saturday evening. Mary says there is a good film on at the local cinema about ten minutes away in the car. She asks their daughter if she would like to go, but she wouldn’t. So she asks Thomas if he would like to go. Thomas asks for some more details about the film, which she provides, and he decides yes he would like to go to see this film, so Thomas and Mary go to the cinema and watch the film which is called We Need To Talk About Kevin and both of them enjoy it up to a point and afterwards they go out to a bar and have a drink and talk for quite a long time about the film and about their children and their relationship with their children, since the film is largely about parents and the terrible mistakes you can make with your children, and both of them feel how pleasant it has been to chat together and what a good decision it was to come out together and see a film. Back home, Mary asks Mark if he took the dog out and Mark says he did, about two hours ago, and Mary says that since they are back much later than she expected she feels the dog should be taken out again for another quick walk and she keeps her coat on. She asks Thomas if he would like to come with her to walk the dog for a few minutes, perhaps just around the block and back, but he says he’d better check his email since there’s an issue with one of his company’s clients in the USA and this is prime time for people emailing from the USA before the end of their working day, and so she goes out alone. As it turns out there is no mail from the USA. Thomas sends a few private emails and text messages and waits, expecting Mary will be back, but after forty minutes she is still out. Thomas is feeling conflicted but now decides he may as well go to bed and is in fact fast asleep when his wife follows him half an hour later. ‘Tom,’ she asks, checking to see if he would perhaps like to talk, but he doesn’t respond, face to the wall, snoring lightly.
Sunday evenings Thomas has always taken one or both his children out for a burger or even to a restaurant, depending on their choice, and since his daughter is home today he takes the two of them out to a burger bar. He asks his wife and the children ask their mother whether she would like to come, but she says no, she doesn’t really want to come and have a burger, they are so fattening; the children then suggest that in that case she could have a salad, why not?, and she says there is no point in going out to pay for a salad that she could perfectly well have at home, so they say let’s go to a restaurant then, maybe Indian or Japanese, but she says no you go, she doesn’t want to go out to eat, and so Thomas takes his son and daughter out to the burger bar where they chat and joke very merrily eating burgers and drinking Coke, and after-wards Thomas persuades them to go to a pub as well so that he can have a beer and the children discuss music and boyfriends and girlfriends and how not to get fat despite eating burgers and drinking Coke, and Mark who is four years younger than his sister worries about school and Sally who has left home now worries about university and they all have a good time laughing at some of the other people in the pub, one of whom has an offensively loud voice, and in the end they return home around 10.30. Given the early hour, Thomas is surprised to find that Mary has already retired to bed. He sits at his computer to look at email while his children go to the playroom to sit in the cold with a sleeping bag on their laps and watch a horror film, and he smiles on hearing them giggling down there and decides to go to bed, where he finds that his wife is not sleeping with her face to the wall but reading a book.
Thomas is taken aback. ‘Coinciding bedtimes,’ she laughs, and there is something of a challenge in her voice. ‘A miracle,’ Thomas agrees and he takes off his clothes but for pants and T-shirt and lies down beside her. Propped up on a pillow, she continues to read with the light of the bedside lamp. Thomas lies on his side, face towards her, watching. The air between them is tense. Thomas feels his wife is a good-looking woman. She is aware of the pressure of his eyes on her. ‘How can you go on reading so many books about dogs?’ he finally asks. ‘They’re fascinating,’ she replies at once. ‘Absolutely fascinating. Aren’t you, Ricky?’ she addresses the dog, which is dozing in its basket and raises a silky ear. ‘Speaking of which,’ she suddenly says, ‘he probably needs a last pee. Poor thing.’ And she climbs out of bed and pulls on her jeans. Thomas watches. He feels he should protest, but doesn’t. Perhaps she is waiting for him to protest, but if she is, she doesn’t make it clear. ‘Do you really think he needs to go out again?’ Thomas eventually asks, but it’s too late, the dog is now racing round and round the room in inane canine excitement and she is saying, ‘Come on. Come on, darling!’ And she disappears through the door and downstairs.
Thomas lies on his back. He has had a nice evening with his children but now he feels drained and lost. He wonders, should he wait up for his wife and confront her, but in the end it is only a passing thought. Surely it’s she who should confront him. These thoughts are discouraging and eventually he rolls over towards the wall and falls asleep. Finding him in that position forty minutes later, Mary sheds a tear or two before falling asleep herself. Another week has gone by. In the playroom the two children are wondering whether there’s anything they can do about their parents.
Thomas and Mary do not have friends in common, though they do sometimes have people to dinner. For example, they had their daughter’s boyfriend’s parents over recently and served them fish. Unfortunately, it turned out that the one thing the mother never ate, in fact absolutely couldn’t eat, was fish. It was a shame because on the rare occasions when she does cook dinner for guests, Mary does it in style and here she had prepared a truly wonderful dish of salmon trout, as well as fish soup and some fishy hors d’oeuvres.
‘You don’t eat fish? Oh, for heaven’s sake! If only I’d known!’
While the others sat down at the table and raised a glass or two, Mary rushed back into the kitchen to prepare an equally elaborate meal without fish for her daughter’s boyfriend’s mother. Thomas knew Mary wouldn’t mind doing this because in the end Mary doesn’t like to spend too much time sitting at table with other people. Often she eats alone. But she does like a chance to show off her cooking skills and generosity. So actually this was a rather successful evening for Mary. Thomas held the fort conversationally, Mary cooked, then cleaned. All well.
This wasn’t always the case. If Thomas’s mother came to stay, for example, particularly if she came at Easter or Christmas, the older woman would fuss around trying to help. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mum! Sit down,’ Mary would say. ‘Take it easy when you’re on holiday.’ And the younger woman set to work. Thomas would have liked to do some cooking himself, with Mary or with his mother or alone, but Mary’s kitchen was Mary’s kitchen. As the (elaborate) lunch was served, there would be a little tension around the table. Why? There just was. Almost the only thing that could be said was how good the food was. And again it was. Beyond that, an abyss. Mary served, running back and forth from kitchen to sitting room, because they ate at the big table in the sitting room when there were guests. Just occasionally she sat a moment or two before springing up again. The children wolfed the food down and hurried off to their computers. Often for hours on end each separate member of the family was in his or her separate room with his or her computer. Then there was peace.
But enough of dinner guests! We were talking about friends in common. Had Thomas and Mary ever had friends in common?
In the distant past, for example?
Well, acquaintances certainly. Joey, who had introduced them, was one. Thomas had been passing through the college bar when he spied Joey at a table with a group of girls. This was Durham twenty-five years ago. Joey lived across the corridor from Thomas in graduate accommodation. Afterwards, Thomas asked Joey for Mary’s phone number but Joey objected that Mary was his girlfriend. Later the same evening Mary phoned Thomas and when he asked how she had got his number, she said from Joey. ‘Your boyfriend,’ Thomas observed. ‘Not at all,’ she insisted. ‘What an idea!’ After which, so far as he could recall, they had never really met Joey as a threesome, or even in a group, ever again. Though sometimes Mary met Joey on her own and sometimes Thomas met Joey on his own and on those occasions everybody got on fine. Joey never seemed to resent their having become a couple. Go figure.
Otherwise, at the time of their first meeting, Mary had two friends of her own, Patty and Liz, old school friends from Glasgow with whom she would let her hair down and giggle. But she and Thomas didn’t go out together with them, or not more than once or twice. Or maybe three times. That is, at the beginning they did have a meal or two together but there was something that didn’t gel. Perhaps Mary felt that Thomas was paying Patty a bit too much attention. Patty had quite a figure. Perhaps Thomas felt that the three of them made too much giggly fun of him. They pulled his leg non-stop. Thomas could be prickly. Perhaps Patty and Liz felt it was time to find boyfriends of their own rather than having to watch Mary prancing round with hers. But when they did get boyfriends, going out in foursomes or sixsomes didn’t really work, either. Liz’s man was much older and seemed bored. He was pushing fifty. Patty’s boyfriend was sensitive and felt criticised. He was an ambitious young engineer. Sure enough, later, in bed with Thomas, Mary did criticise him. She criticised both men. Her friends had chosen badly, she thought. Thomas joined in and criticised too. Not just the men but the women. He wanted to cut those giggly friends of hers down to size. They had a field day. In fact a lot of Mary and Thomas’s being together seemed to have to do with criticising the acquaintances they had in common, which is maybe why those acquaintances never quite became friends in common. After they left Durham, Mary never found friends like Patty and Liz again, never again had the kind of friends you could really let your hair down with. That must count for something.
Others who never really became friends in common, or only very briefly, were his old pals from the church youth club in Bristol where they lived for a year or so in the early stages of their marriage. Nigel and Jenny and Timothy and Kate were both established couples before Mary met them. Thomas had been friends with Jenny in the one couple and with Timothy in the other. Not really close friends. Just friendly. So the common friends thing seemed possible because Mary need hardly fear that these were friends against her; they hadn’t, as it were, lost Thomas to her, as perhaps Patty and Liz had lost Mary to Thomas, and at the same time Thomas didn’t need to worry that Mary would gang up with them to make fun of him. They just weren’t the kind to make fun. But perhaps because Mary and Thomas always criticised these people, indeed any people they met, something queered the air. Not that they criticised them to their faces. Only when they were alone. All the same, something must have come across. Nigel was pompous and Jenny such a ditherer and Timothy was also a ditherer, though in a different way, whereas Kate was ferociously bossy, and Nigel and Jenny’s kitchen was such a mess and they always cooked too much in a sloppy kind of way, though never enough meat (one chicken for six!), and Kate’s kitchen – because clearly Timothy had no say in it – was not exactly squalid, but mean somehow, and her cooking drearily austere in an army-rations, cold-bedroom kind of way, and Timothy would keep the wine bottle on the floor by his leg of the table, so you could never help yourself. What was odd about it was that Thomas and Mary really loved these friends and really, genuinely loved spending evenings with them, when they did. It just wasn’t very often.
Another odd thing was that Thomas and Mary never imagined that the others might be criticising them. Or maybe they assumed that all couples criticise other couples and so hardly cared. Perhaps they were right. Once, years later, they managed a Cornish holiday together with Timothy and Kate at a time when both couples had two small kids, toddlers, perhaps because they hoped that company might relieve the growing tension between them – between Thomas and Mary, that is – but since it didn’t, they never repeated the experiment. The problem with a foursome was agreeing on the shopping and cooking and eating out. Timothy never wanted to eat out despite having the biggest salary of all of them. And he baulked at buying good wine. Mary thought Kate too strict with her children. She wouldn’t go to them if they cried in bed. It was madness. Also Thomas tried to confide in Timothy about his marriage problems and even about the girl in Accounts he was growing fond of but Timothy didn’t want to go there. He really didn’t. Perhaps in the end both these couples, Nigel and Jenny, Timothy and Kate, had started to steer a little clear of Thomas and Mary because they sensed their relationship was getting a bit rocky, they feared contamination. Yet in both cases, long after the foursomes ended, they were always happy to see Thomas on his own or Mary on her own. That was odd. And having made those now-solitary visits, Thomas and Mary, or rather Thomas or Mary, whichever it had been, would always bring back enough info on these old friends to go on with their previous criticisms, which now more than ever seemed the only glue that held Thomas and Mary together. Nigel was pomposity itself. Timothy let Kate walk all over him. Everybody but Thomas and Mary had got it wrong, it seemed.
All this was a very long time ago. Hard to believe it happened, really. Now, after the move to Manchester and his promotion to a seriously prestigious job, Thomas has had just one close friend for a decade and more, but Mary doesn’t want to see him. Thomas knows that Mary thinks Alan is her enemy. Actually, this isn’t true. If anything, Alan worries for her and is also a little frightened of her. But there you go, the idea of the three of them getting together for drinks or dinner or just a pleasant evening in front of the TV is unimaginable. Thomas would be thinking that Mary would be thinking that Alan knew all kinds of secrets that Thomas wasn’t telling her. And he does. Thomas and Alan play tennis together, drink beers and talk women. Occasionally they offer alibis for each other. It’s on this questionable ‘relief’ that Thomas and Mary’s marriage seems largely to depend these days. Imagine if they spent an evening together and all that came out. Not that Mary doesn’t know, because in a way perhaps she does, but it’s important that nothing be said. A common friend could be fatal.
Meantime Mary has got into a habit of making friends with people who are younger than her or somewhat weaker character-wise or simply at a different level. Subaltern is the word that sometimes comes to Thomas’s mind as he observes the development of this phenomenon. Who are these people? A cleaning lady, their younger child’s swimming instructor, the wife of a client Mary does some freelancing for, a girl she has met at her Pilates course. None are people you would ever invite to dinner or who would ever invite you to dinner. Mary sees them for coffee, or does aerobics with them or goes for walks with them. Often she helps them in some way. Almost as if they were children. They’re grateful. Often she gives them gifts. She’s a generous person. But Thomas has almost nothing to do with them, they don’t interest him at all and he can now more or less predict the moment when Mary too will suddenly stop seeing them. That’s how it is. For a while Mary will be extremely friendly and generous with these people, then lose interest, rather abruptly, perhaps even complaining that she has been exploited. Perhaps she has. Thomas has given up trying to understand. He has reached the point where he feels they both need help. They need to be saved from themselves, from whatever poison it is that makes their married life so hard. But looked at another way, everything chugs along much as it always has, he with his one close friend, she with her many shadowy, unobtrusive friends, one after the other.
Until she got the dog. And this, you might say – the dog, I mean – was really the first friend Thomas and Mary had ever had in common. Though it didn’t start that way.
One day Mary announced she had decided to get a dog. Apparently Thomas didn’t need to be consulted on this. In fact, he didn’t object. Anything that kept Mary happy, he explained to Alan, was fine by him, left him with more time for tennis, or an amorous adventure perhaps, or simply the Champions League. The Champions League and a couple of bottles of Beck’s was not a bad way to kill an evening. This was the sort of thing Thomas would say to Alan. But on another level he was furious. He didn’t want the dog at all.
Mary wanted a dog because she had never had one. That was sufficient reason. She hadn’t got a dog earlier because she didn’t believe in having dogs around small children. Dogs carried diseases. But Mark was in his teens now. So it was time for a dog. After long navigation on the Web Mary identified a cocker spaniel breeder with a newborn litter. In Devon. A month later Thomas was asked to drive her and their son the two hundred and fifty miles down there to choose a pup. Thomas tended to be dutiful about these matters, to earn himself his freedoms elsewhere. Anyone seeing them together that evening at the restaurant of the small hotel where they stayed would have wondered what on earth could keep this couple together when their son left home. The answer would be Ricky.
Things might have gone differently if Mary had chosen the pup she wanted. Sitting in a farmhouse kitchen watching half a dozen animals fall over each other, she was immediately attracted to the most combative, the most lively, the one flouncing about and nipping its brothers and sisters at the heels and behind the ears, first to the food and water bowls, confrontational, loud, in command, looking for trouble. The breeder pointed instead to a fluffy creature half asleep in the pack. Brought out for examination, this puppy licked Mark’s fingers with lazy affection. The other dog was too much of a handful for a first-time owner, the breeder thought. Mary asked for half an hour’s time out to think it over, and in the farmyard expressed her opinion that the breeder was trying to cheat them of the best dog and sell them a lemon. Mark said, ‘Mum, you’re amazing.’ Thomas thought the breeder lady was simply trying to be helpful. ‘That other monster will tear up the carpets, and pull down the curtains and dig under the roses.’ On the drive home the sleepy pup was christened: Ricky.
At the beginning Ricky seems more likely to end the foundering marriage than save it. With little left to do for the children, and having long since wound down her freelance work, Mary gives the animal all her attention. She buys toys and treats and grooming products. She reads books. The dog must sleep outside. They buy a kennel. The dog must be allowed to stick his nose in the earth; they need a pen in the back garden. Thomas spends a whole weekend building a pen but as soon as Ricky is in it he yips and howls and scratches until he is let out, then sticks his nose in the earth of the flowerbeds. The flowerbeds are Thomas’s domain. He loves flowers and bushes and pruning clippers and compost. Ricky destroys the flowerbeds.
Another book now says that young dogs get lonely if obliged to sleep alone, so from this point on the dog must sleep indoors. However, there is the problem of the burglar alarm; the dog can’t be left on the ground floor, where the alarm has its sensors. Consequently, the dog basket is placed on the landing outside the bathroom and a child-proof gate is dug out of storage to block the stairs so that Ricky can’t go down and trip the alarm. To get to the bathroom two or three times a night Thomas has to step over the dog, which wakes up and licks his heels, or pads in to watch him peeing.
How tiring all this is, Thomas thinks. He hadn’t wanted a dog at all. He is not in control of the expensive house a lifetime of work has bought. Both his wife and his adolescent son are entirely absorbed in an escalating competition for the affection of a mere animal. But at least Ricky is a handsome creature and happy as Larry. His waggy cheerfulness is infectious. Mary takes him out morning, afternoon and evening. She discovers new paths in the countryside around their house. She discovers new, ever-unobtrusive friends at the dog park on the nearby estate. In fact, she is soon queen of the dog park community. She regales Thomas with stories of other dog owners and the sacrifices they make for their pets. The stories are interesting. People who keep dogs are actually more humane than people who don’t; of that Mary is convinced. Thomas appreciates that he falls into the category of people who don’t. On cold days she takes flasks of tea to the park. She stays out for hours. On warm evenings a bottle of wine. She can’t pick up Mark from school or take him to karate because she is out with the dog. She is taking Ricky to ‘agility’ lessons. In a town twenty miles away. She is taking him to the vet. She can’t miss her appointment with the vet just to take Thomas to the airport. Thomas takes a taxi. It seems to him the dog is already agile enough, healthy enough. When they go to a café together on Sunday mornings Mary buys a bun, she who never eats buns, and feeds it to Ricky. Not to Mark or to Thomas, who is very partial to cakes. The dog licks the sweet crumbs off her fingers. She picks up his shit in the road outside. Mark rolls around with Ricky on the carpet. Mother and son argue over hygiene. Now the dog takes to whining on the landing at night with the result that Mark allows the creature into his room. Ricky sleeps on his bed; but then Mary decides that Ricky should sleep in their bedroom, her and Thomas’s room, not Mark’s – it’s not good for a boy to have a dog on his bed. Thomas tries to put his foot down and object; the dog’s nervous padding back and forth from basket to bed, or rather to Mary’s fingers trailing invitingly over the edge of the bed, makes it hard for him to get to sleep, and just when he does he’s woken by a warm tongue licking his nose. When he complains Mary laughs and it’s the same laugh she used to laugh with Patty and Liz, a mocking laugh, Thomas thinks. So Thomas goes downstairs to sleep in what used to be his daughter’s room. Mary doesn’t seem to mind. It is the end of any pretence of married business as usual. Is it the beginning of the end?
From time to time Thomas takes the dog out. Either Mary has some other appointment she can’t miss or she has to visit her sick mother up north. She is away for a few days. Ricky is intelligent and obeys Thomas more readily than he obeys Mary or Mark. It’s true Mary has taught Ricky to do a few tricks, give you a paw to shake, touch his nose on your hand, roll over on his back and wave his legs in the air, that kind of clownish, exhibitionist thing. But when it comes to sitting still, or coming when his name is called, he actually responds better to Thomas. It’s been a while since Thomas was able to command anyone. Even his girlfriends tend to run the show. It’s a pleasure.
‘Here Ricky!’
Since Thomas absolutely refuses to pick up dog shit – he’s too squeamish – he walks the dog in the country, which after all begins about a hundred yards from their house on the outskirts of Pendlebury. Doing so, he realises how much he likes to walk in the country. It’s been a while. He’s reminded of his childhood when there was always a dog around. He likes weather, landscape, any weather, the smell of the soil, the drizzle on the leaves, sunshine on stone. He likes life. Ricky hares off but eventually returns when he’s called. Thomas watches him. The dog lives through his nose. He is entirely connected with the soil and the breeze. He is part of life, of everything. Now he’s pushing into a thicket after a hedgehog. Thomas stands and watches. In a tangle of branches the dog is yelping at the balled-up hedgehog. Both animals are absolutely in the here and now, one excited, one terrified. Both happier, Thomas shakes his head, than a man who feels trapped and can’t make up his mind. A coward.
On a summer evening he lies down in a field and closes his eyes. Ricky comes to lick his face. The dog seems contemplative, a little troubled. His master has never lain down on the grass before. Eventually the animal settles beside Thomas and puts his head over Thomas’s ankle. The fur under his throat is luxuriously silky. It has to be said, Mary keeps her pet clean. The dog pants a little and whines. ‘What do you think of Mary, in the end?’ Thomas asks Ricky. His eyes are still closed. The dog wriggles, probably scanning the horizon for movement, scenting the air. ‘She has so many good qualities, don’t you think? We have done so much together.’ The dog is still, but very present. Thomas can feel a hum of life through the warm fur. ‘I don’t love her any more,’ he announces. The dog listens. ‘We drive each other crazy.’
Suddenly, Rickly leaps up to dash at something in the distance. His claws scratch Thomas’s ankle. Thomas sits up abruptly to inspect the damage. The dog is streaking along a hedge; there’s a wonderful golden brown purpose about him darting through dusty green. Thomas shakes his head. When Ricky comes back he grabs the dog by the ears and looks him in the eyes. The animal’s panting is like laughter. His breath is friendly and foul. The eyes are quizzical, optimistic. ‘What am I going to do?’ Thomas demands. ‘Tell me what to do, Ricky.’ The dog lets out a bark and shakes his head free, shakes his fur as if coming out of water, but then comes back to put his wet nose on his master’s neck.
‘You’re a trophy dog,’ Thomas accuses him. ‘My wife’s trophy dog. To replace me. To tell me she prefers a younger dog these days.’
Ricky smiles. He knows.
‘What’s she thinking, Ricky? Come on now, she’s your friend. I bet she talks to you. Does she want me to leave? What does Mary really want?’
The dog sits and pants. Thomas gets up to walk home.
‘It’s childish sleeping elsewhere just because of the dog,’ Mary says some days later. ‘In the end you like him as much as we do. It’s just an excuse.’
Thomas doesn’t answer. He stays in what was once his daughter’s room. But he feels the pull of going back to his old bed, their bed. To be precise, he feels the pull of pretending all is well. Now when he doesn’t go up the final flight of stairs to their room the dog comes back down and scratches at his door. Thomas won’t open. In their separate rooms he can hear both Mary and Mark laughing. It’s that laughter.
Or perhaps it’s my problem, he thinks.
Sometimes Mary stays out at the dog park till eleven and even later with her young dog and unobtrusive friends. Ricky looks exhausted when he gets home. He crashes. Sometimes Mark goes with his mother, but mostly the boy is busy at his computer.
‘Mum does seem to overdo it with the dog,’ Thomas remarks.
‘Ricky’s a faithful companion,’ Mark says drily. Thomas watches him. How much does the boy know? Why has the dog become so important in their lives?
Eighteen months after they brought the pup home, Thomas is half asleep when Mary shouts. ‘He’s poisoned. He’s dying!’
She had taken the dog out late on a stretch of land at the bottom of the hill. Ricky ate something there; now back home he has started to vomit. He is in convulsions. Mark rushes from his room. It’s Sunday after midnight. Thomas drags himself out of bed and climbs the flight of stairs to the marital bedroom. Ricky has his four legs splayed wide, shaking violently. With no plan Thomas grabs the dog and starts downstairs. ‘Check on the Net for an emergency vet!’ he shouts to his son. As he passes the boy’s room, Mark sees the dog twisting and turning violently in his father’s arms.
‘He’s going to die,’ the boy starts to yell wildly. ‘Ricky’s going to die!’
The dog is fully grown now and flings himself back and forth in Thomas’s arms. He arches his head back with surprising power.
‘Find where there’s a vet,’ Thomas tells Mark. ‘Doing night duty.’
Downstairs, he’s forgotten the alarm and it goes off. Woo woo woo woo.
He leaves his wife to fix it and struggles out through the back door to get the animal some air but the dog wrenches himself free and is on the ground, yelping, pawing. Thomas gets down on the grass and puts his hands in the animal’s mouth, to see if there’s anything in there, or maybe to make the creature vomit, if he can. The dog writhes and bites. He’s taken some skin off Thomas’s hand. It’s impossible to see anything, with all the saliva and fur in the half dark. Thomas becomes aware of sobs behind him. His son is standing at the back door in blue pyjamas shaking his head furiously: ‘He’s going to die, he’s going to die. It’s horrible!’
‘I told you to get on the Net!’
Woo woo woo, goes the alarm.
Mark is beside himself. Who would have thought the dog was so important to him? Thomas leaves the animal and grabs his son’s shoulders, shakes him hard.
Inside the house, his wife turns the alarm off, which makes Mark’s voice even louder.
‘Ricky’s dead, Dad, he’s dead, he’s dead!’
Thomas slaps the boy across the face. ‘Check the fucking Net! Now. Emergency veterinary services. Postcode. Go!’
Mary arrives on the scene. Thomas is on his knees trying to calm the dog which is retching and tossing its head from side to side. They are on the back lawn with the light from the kitchen window coming through the branches of the apple tree. The dog rolls its eyes. They are yellow. It spasms and is rigidly still, fiercely still. His wife is weeping. ‘He was so good, he didn’t deserve this, he was so good. Such a good doggie. He really didn’t. He didn’t.’
‘Get the car out of the garage. Get a blanket.’
‘He was so good, he didn’t deserve this.’
On the lawn, Thomas looks at the dog lying still and rigid. Is it dead? He crouches beside it, turns it on its back and puts his ear to its chest. The heart is beating fast. There’s such a doggie smell. Not entirely unhappy with the situation, Thomas hurries into the house and finds his son at the screen. He has an address.
The boy is calmer now. He looks at his father differently. ‘Is he going to die?’ His voice trembles.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Thomas says and hurries to his room to get some shoes. The address is the other side of Salford.
Thomas drives fast and efficiently. The dog is convulsing on the back seat, wrapped in a blanket now. His wife is beside it, crying, endlessly repeating what a good dog he was. ‘Don’t die, Ricky. Don’t die. Please don’t die.’ This is mad, Thomas is thinking. As if the animal were a child. He’s on the point of bursting out laughing. Am I acting to save the dog, he wonders, or to show my wife and son who counts in this family when there’s an emergency? There is no traffic and the car races through the streets entirely ignoring warnings of electronic speed controls. The address corresponds to a door in a block of flats between two shops. They have to ring the bell twice before a window lights up, then the door buzzes open.
The vet is a tired young Indian in his thirties. He pulls on a white coat, injects the dog with a tranquilliser, lays him on a table and starts to set up a drip. As he works, shaving away fur, tying an elastic cord round a leg, Mary talks on and on about what a remarkable dog Ricky is, how playful, how good tempered. If only he hadn’t picked up whatever was left on the path. Who would do such a thing, leaving poisoned food where there were dogs!
Thomas is struck by the intensity of his wife’s emotional investment in the creature. How much love she has to give! But not to Thomas. ‘He always greets me so warmly when I come home,’ she is explaining, as if the vet could be remotely interested. ‘Always happy to see me.’ She is crying. She brushes tears from her eyes and blows her nose. ‘He’s such a beautiful person.’ The vet is ignoring her completely as he pushes a needle into the dog’s leg and sets the speed of the drip. Thomas understands that what she is saying is that he, Thomas, never greets her in this way, that he and she are never really happy to see each other. Talking to the vet, she is addressing him. Suddenly he is overcome by a deep sympathetic sadness for her. For himself too. He will never be allowed to experience the love she gives the dog. Or her unobtrusive friends, for that matter. He will never be able to show her the affection he gives to his girlfriends. He wishes he could. He really does. But he can’t. For some reason it’s impossible. On the table their common friend Ricky twitches. He’s still alive. Bubbles rise in the drip bag. The vet frowns and pulls off his gloves.
‘That’s it. We’ll know tomorrow. Call around midday.’
Mary begins to press him. ‘Will he survive? Do you have any idea what he ate?’
The vet shakes his head. ‘If he’s alive in the morning, he’ll probably live,’ he says.
Approaching home, towards three, Mary puts a hand on Thomas’s wrist and says quickly, ‘Thanks, Tom. You were fantastic.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ he says. After reassuring Mark that Ricky is still in with a chance, Thomas hesitates on the landing, then climbs the stairs to the marital bedroom. It’s a mistake but one he feels he has to make. In the night, getting up to pee, he wonders if it wouldn’t have been better if the animal had died. Better for their relationship, for the end of their relationship. When Thomas brings the dog home two days later, Mary throws a party and invites her friends from the dog park. She serves them assiduously. She has cooked all kinds of treats. No one seems to notice Thomas. Mark rolls around with Ricky on the lawn. The dog appears to have forgotten everything. Soon his son and his wife too will have forgotten how it was that night, Thomas thinks, how hysterical they were and how efficient he was, when it counted. Going upstairs to the marital bedroom, he finds his wife is letting Ricky lick her eyes. ‘Oh, come and give him a hug,’ she beckons her husband. ‘He wants you to admit you love him, don’t you, Ricky?’
‘You’ll gobble up that boy for breakfast and spit him out before lunch.’
This was the burden of what Mary’s mother told her daughter the day she was introduced to Thomas. Mrs Keir, from Glasgow, was famous for her way with words.