Spiderweb

  The policeman had patrolled both house and garden. She agreed with him that there was no indication of any break-in.

  ‘And you’re quite certain that the dog was shut in before you went out?’ he said.

  Stella hesitated – a small but perhaps betraying hesitation, which occurred not so much because she was in any doubt but because, if asked a question, she was in the habit of giving it due consideration. She saw at once in the policeman’s face that he felt this whole matter to be a touch unsound. He closed his notebook, switched on his mobile phone and listened to a few seconds of unintelligible crackling. He was already moving on to the next local difficulty.

  ‘It’s conceivable that I forgot to bolt the French windows. But they certainly weren’t left open.’

  ‘I do advise you to lock up securely in future. Window locks would be a good thing, and a mortice on the front door. We’ll be in touch if anything’s heard of the dog. You could put an ad in the paper, someone may have spotted him …’

  She saw him out, watched the police car turn towards the main road. Then she went and scoured the area again. Up the mineral line, right to the top. Nothing. The road, she thought. Undoubtedly. Picked off in the traffic. Poor little beggar. Oh, shit … She had already toured the lane, asking if anyone had seen the dog, and drawn a blank with each enquiry. There was no one around at the Hiscox place.

  She would not have believed that you could feel so stricken. About an animal, for heaven’s sake. The silence in the cottage, that evening. The void where there should have been that small, insistent presence. At one point she found her eyes welling with tears and was astonished. It came to her that there was an entire dimension of human emotion of which she had been ignorant. People were going through this on all sides and one had never realized. Cats, dogs, budgerigars, hamsters, heaven knows what. All leaving a bleak space in someone’s life, triggering this disproportionate, lunatic response in otherwise balanced and reasonable adult women. And men, one must suppose.

  She searched the fields again, walked again up the mineral line. She drove back and forth along the main road, looking fearfully for some dark bundle on the verge.

  ‘But it’ll just come back, won’t it?’ said Judith. ‘Isn’t that what dogs do? One’s always reading about it in the tabloid press. People move house and the family pooch miraculously navigates a hundred miles down the MI to the old place. That’s cats? Well, I don’t know about either, I must admit, and I’m sorry you’re so cut up about it, but I mean, you’d only had it a few months … Sorry, sorry – no, I can see I don’t understand, so I’d better shut up. I’m sure it’ll reappear. Well, two days isn’t that long …‘

  ‘You’ve advertised in the local paper?’ said Richard. ‘And a notice in the shop … right. Was it pedigree? I mean, would anyone want to steal it? Definitely not … well, that’s all to the good, I imagine. Look, it may well turn up yet. Six days … Oh, I see. Look, I was calling in fact to say, should I come over to fix the mower? Well, no, I can see that under the circumstances your thoughts have not centred on grass-cutting, but life has to go on, I suppose. Oh dear, I didn’t mean to sound brisk … No, we never had a dog. Any day this week I could do … Friday afternoon. Maybe you’ll have had good news by then, who knows …‘

  The boys were in their room when the policeman came to the bungalow. It was quite early in the morning. She was getting breakfast – their father was in the kitchen too. They saw the police car from the window, saw the man get out, come up the path. Heard the knock. He’d come about the fires. Must have. He was in the kitchen now – they could hear voices. They went into the passage, quietly, and stood stock still behind the door, listening, their guts creeping. And then they heard her say, ‘What dog? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The boys understood now and their stomachs went back to normal. It was about the stupid dog – the woman’s dog – and that didn’t matter, at least not so much. They’d just say they didn’t know anything about it, like she was.

  The policeman said the dog had been reported missing and now someone walking up the mineral line had found its body. Another dog found it, sniffing around. Dog was shot, said the policeman. Dog belonging to the lady at Vine Cottage. Making enquiries. List at the station showed gun licence in the name of T. G. Hiscox.

  She let fly. That really got up her nose. A policeman walking in like that. We don’t know anything about any dog. What’s it got to do with us if the dog got shot up on the mineral line? Plenty of people shooting around here, aren’t there?

  On and on. And the policeman backing off now, he wanted out. And then their father came into it. We don’t know anything about anyone’s sodding dog. Anything gets shot around our place it’s the bloody pigeons, that’s all. That’s what the gun’s for, isn’t it? What’s the fact that I’ve got a gun have to do with this dog getting shot?

  The policeman seemed to feel the same, apparently, because he asked to check the gun licence and then went off.

  The boys came into the kitchen. They were both thinking that they’d keep quiet, that would be the best thing. Just keep their heads down and there’d be no aggro.

  Their father sat down and went back to his breakfast. That was that, far as he was concerned. But she was looking at them. Looking in a way they didn’t like.

  ‘You know anything about that dog?‘

  They stood there, mouths slammed shut. Michael shrugged. Say nothing and they’d be OK. It would be something else they knew about and no one else.

  She went out of the room. Into the office. Came back, at once, and they saw in her face that she knew. How could she? Neither of them spoke. They thought it, and she saw them thinking.

  ‘Because you put it back the wrong way round, you stupid little gits. I can see someone’s had it out.’

  Now their father had banged down his knife and fork. They hit the wall, both of them. Who said you could use that gun? Fucking idiots. How dare you? What the hell did you think you were doing?

  They still weren’t going to say. But there was no point now. No one was going to believe them, whatever they said. Might as well not bother. Except Peter did. ‘We was going to get you some pigeons, that’s all. We never saw the stupid dog. Got nothing to do with us. We went out after pigeons.’

  ‘Shut up!’ She got in front of him, had him pinned up against the table. ‘Shut up, you! Just shut up, shut up, shut up!’ Her face was inches from his, her staring eyes, the smell of her breath. ‘Who asked you to go after pigeons? Since when do you decide what’s done around here?’ Her voice screeching in his ears. They’d been hearing that voice since before they could remember, since before they could understand what she was saying. Shut up. Do this. Do that. Stupid little beggars.

  Their father said, ‘You’d better get lost before I belt the pair of you.’

  She stepped away from Peter suddenly. Went from raging to ice cold in one moment, like she could. ‘That’s right. Get lost and stay lost, then we wouldn’t have you round our necks. Put the kettle on, Ted, I want some more tea.’

  They went. They got on the bikes and rode away. They’d go to Minehead, to the amusement arcades and she’d never bloody know, would she? Then they remembered they hadn’t got any money. So they rode up and down the road for a long time and then they went and sat in a field and eventually it was beginning to get dark so they went home. Their parents were watching television. They didn’t look up. ‘You again,’ she said. And the boys went upstairs. They hadn’t had anything to eat all day but it didn’t seem to matter.

  ‘Have you any idea who could be responsible?’ said Richard.

  Stella shrugged. ‘Someone let him out, it would seem, and then … I must have left the french windows unlocked.’

  ‘Was anything taken?‘

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing at all, so far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Would the dog have attacked the intruder – tried to see him off?‘

  ‘Inconceivable. He welcomed one and all.’

 
‘I remember.’ Both now recalled Richard repelling Bracken’s fawning approaches with irritation. ‘In that case,’ Richard went on, ’the shooting of the dog would seem to have been the prime intention.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Surely no one from round about …’

  ‘There are a couple of boys,’ said Stella reluctantly. ‘Sons of the people at the agricultural contractors. The parents are civil enough, but the lads are distinctly surly. Conceivably it was them. But we shall never know and I don’t intend to pursue the matter.’

  ‘How very unpleasant. I’m so sorry.’

  He was, Stella could see. Quite toppled from his usual brisk application to the matter in hand. He put his tool-kit down on the kitchen table and stood looking at her. Then he reached out and held her upper arm for a moment, a gesture that she found unsettling rather than consolatory.

  ‘It is. But I’m coming to terms with it. I mourn poor Bracken and remind myself that I’ve observed plenty of this kind of thing.’

  ‘But not as a participant.’

  ‘True. A new perspective.’

  ‘How did you deal with hostility in Nile villages and wherever?’

  ‘Diplomatically. One was trained to expect it under certain circumstances and react with tact and restraint.’

  ‘Unlike real life,’ said Richard.

  ‘Oh, the anthropologist has to rise above that. Which is probably why we’re unfit for it when it comes to the crunch.’ Glib, thought Stella. Flip. Somehow he provokes me to be like this.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be,’ he said. ‘More to the point, why do you imagine these youths picked on you, if it was them?’

  ‘Heaven knows.’ She wanted suddenly to be rid of the matter. ‘Just that I am in the line of fire, I imagine, or rather Bracken was. No doubt they have problems of their own. Anyway … enough of them.’

  ‘Right.’ He picked up the tool-kit. ‘Just let me say, though, that I do think you should perhaps think of further security.’

  ‘Handgun under the pillow? An arms race?’

  ‘Window locks. An alarm system, possibly.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Please do.’

  She watched him dismantle the mower. His concern caught her in some deep, unsuspected, vulnerable place. Those who travel alone do not often experience the concern of others.

  No one nags them to take care, no one awaits them with anxiety – or reproach. Stella had thought herself indifferent. Just occasionally, a doubt flickered.

  He crouched beside the machine – a spare man still, carefully fending off a paunch. You would have thought him younger, until his face in profile showed that slippage around the jowls, his bare arms displayed those ropy veins, the mottled skin. She couldn’t remember with any clarity what he had been like when he and Nadine were married – there was just a dim impression of some sharper, smaller version of the man before her now. It is not true that people diminish with age – it is those earlier remembered selves who are in some way pared down, depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old photographs.

  And here they were now, washed together. All because long ago Nadine joined a political association for young Conservatives: ‘No, of course I’m not one, I’m not anything in particular, am I? But someone told me it’s where you meet men, and frankly London is a desert as far as I can see, unless you’re going to sit in espresso bars and trawl, and we’re used to better than that, aren’t we?’ Nadine had left Oxford without any promising attachment. She was working in a desultory way as an assistant in a West End bookshop, where she received her friends and reconsidered strategy. She was twenty-three and starting to panic. The political association was nicely opportune. ‘And, believe it or not, I think I’ve already met someone. The very first time I went to one of their dos. He’s called Richard and he’s at the Home Office, and he’s definitely interesting. He’s taking me to Covent Garden next week.’

  And thus begins a lifetime in tandem, thought Stella. Extraordinary process, pair bonding. Quite as arbitrary, really, among humans as among animals. Simply a question of who happens to hove into view when the moment is ripe.

  ‘I bet you didn’t know I nearly had an official role at your wedding,’ she said to Richard.

  ‘He’ll do fine,’ says Nadine. She is different, tipped from girl to young woman. She is plump and creamy. The big green-gold eyes and long lashes and that satisfied pussy-cat look to her. You expect whiskers and folded velvet paws, claws sheathed.

  ‘Love again?’ says Stella.

  ‘Of course.’ But that is crisply laid aside and Nadine is off at once on a rundown of the wedding dress, the guest list, the reception at a country house hotel. ‘Richard’s got two little nieces who’ll make sweet bridesmaids. I don’t suppose you’d care to be matron of honour?‘

  ‘Well …’

  ‘OK – I’ll let you off.’

  And in the event Stella did not even attend the wedding, because the chance arose to do field-work on a project in Cardiff with a posse of other graduate students, and thus while Nadine was parading down the aisle on Richard’s arm, Stella was in Tiger Bay interrogating Lascar seamen. She was so heady with this first taste of professional fresh air – out there amid the real thing instead of stuck at a library desk – that she almost forgot to send the statutory telegram. Besides, she sensed that they were already spinning inexorably apart. She had inspected Nadine’s wedding present list with bewilderment. Denby ovenware? Pyrex dishes? Coffee percolator? Travel rug? The revelation of such freight filled her with dismay. If this was the requisite accompaniment to marriage, then no thank you. In Cardiff she had a brief but charged affair with the director of the project, the stereotype charismatic older man – an appropriate and illuminating rite of passage, she felt. Nadine sent a honeymoon postcard from Majorca, hinting complacently at suspected morning sickness.

  ‘Indeed I knew,’ said Richard. ‘Nadine was most put out. You were to have been got up in apricot velvet, to complement the bridesmaids.’ He rose. ‘There, that’s fixed now, I hope.’

  ‘Fancy your remembering. The apricot velvet, I mean.’

  ‘It was a heightened time. Details tend to stick in the mind. I remember thinking that the colour would be becoming – with your hair. And in the end you weren’t there at all. May I use your kitchen sink? My hands are filthy.’

  ‘Of course. No, I wasn’t, was I?’ She had heard him with surprise. I thought he didn’t much like me, back then. Disapproved slightly. Found me rackety, uncongenial. ‘I was serving my apprenticeship in Cardiff docks. The apricot velvet is news to me. I rather let Nadine down, didn’t I? We were already off in different directions, I suppose. Nadine always knew what she wanted and I never did. Just took what came up. Or failed to, as the case may be …’

  She followed him into the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry you’ve got in such a mess – there’s a nail-brush on the side there. And thanks. I am grateful, even if I don’t sound it. Grass cutting has never been a central concern. Indeed, I can’t believe I’ve come to this.’

  ‘In that sense you’ve led a sheltered life. It’s routine for me, as a long-term householder. But I sympathize. Perhaps …’

  ‘In fact,’ she said, ’there’s a lot that’s giving pause for thought at the moment. Here am I, having put down roots for the first time ever, and supposedly a connoisseur or community life, unable to identify a community or even establish cordial relations with my neighbours. Oh, I dare say it’s partly that this dog business has unnerved me. I’ll make us some coffee, shall I?‘

  ‘Yes, please. So far as community goes, I can’t say that I …’ ‘Oh, but you do. Beavering away for local societies. Attending church. You’ve slotted in. I can’t manage that particular slot. And the rest are largely inaccessible by virtue of age or occupation – the farming layer, the arts and crafts enclave, the landed gentry. I can’t see myself striking up an accord with the Rotarians or the Golf Club. The truth is that this place is a web, a
network, it has many dimensions. The communities I know about are integrated. Concrete. They have a shape, a structure. Archetypes. Museum pieces, indeed, I suppose. No milk? Nor sugar either, right … The fact is, I’m an expert on systems that no longer exist. Even Tiger Bay back in the fifties was something of an entity. As for my Orkney island … But down here what we have is a cauldron, a late-twentieth-century melting pot. All sorts of mutually exclusive groups co-existing after a fashion. And I’m in there with the rest of them. In fact what I’m really wittering on about is myself, I think. Quite as alienated in my way as anyone else. Just as I always have been. On the outside looking in.’

  Richard considered. ‘That is what you were trained to do.’ ‘There you are, then. Unfit for real life. Or at least for any of the versions of life going on around me here. So the question is …’

  He cut in. ‘Does it matter?‘

  ‘Probably not,’ she said after a moment. ‘It requires a process of adjusting expectations. Or adjusting – period. Learning to keep still.’

  I suppose that’s it, she thought. I have been expecting to move on, all this time. Treating this as yet another perch, from which to investigate and observe. I have not taken root at all. Tweaking at the hedge, cutting the grass – ritual gestures only. Acquisition of a dog … But it is the fate of the poor dog that would appear to have thrown me.

  She felt entirely dispirited. The house seemed to squat on top of her, its cargo of furnishings hemmed her in. Richard was talking and she hardly heard him. He was proposing a visit to the north Devon coast. Therapy, I suppose, she thought. I have become an object of charity. Lawnmower repairs and restorative excursions. No, no …

  ’ … and possibly the walk to the Valley of the Rocks, if we felt sufficiently energetic.’

  She thanked him. What a nice idea, she said. Maybe in a week or two. I have to tidy up that article I was working on. Let’s talk … And thank you. She saw him into his car, stood for the polite farewell. He lowered the window. ‘I came with the intention – ’ he avoided her eye, fiddled with the ignition key – ‘anyway, it was inappropriate. The dog – I can see that has been distressing. I shall be in touch, Stella. Very shortly.’