Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts

She’d only been off work for a few weeks, about the length of Johnny’s summer holiday, and yet something about the wording of the job description made her want to turn her phone off, not ping her CV straight back to Maria.

  ‘. . . you will crave responsibility and empowerment . . .’

  ‘. . . strong strategic vision and a stop-at-nothing attitude to make it happen . . .’

  ‘ . . .you must be someone with tenacity and resilience . . .’

  She looked at Bertie who was reclining on his spoiled-dog leather beanbag, chewing a disgusting pig’s ear: his reward for enduring a pretty rigorous bath. ‘Look at this.’ She waggled the paper. ‘Do they want a brand manager or a gladiator?’

  He regarded her with his tragic eyes, and Natalie dug out her phone and took a photograph of him, to remind herself that that was how mournful he looked when he was warm, damp, eating a pig’s ear, and had her full attention.

  There were too many photos of Bertie already on her phone.

  She turned back to her CV on the laptop. The job was to lead a marketing team for a small organic chocolate brand that had just been bought out by a major food manufacturer. They wanted someone with big corporate experience, but with a delicate touch – something she had, from the organics launches she’d worked on in her last job. On paper, it was perfect, and it was only thirty miles away, outside Birmingham.

  ‘How bad would it be,’ she went on, ‘to tell Maria Purcell that I don’t want to take this chance of a lifetime because I’m trying for a baby? It’s better than going for it, then bailing out on maternity leave, right, Bertie? More honest?’

  She paused, and looked down at Bertie, now rolled onto his back, offering her a view of his speckled ermine tummy. He was a different dog to the creature she’d taken in a few weeks ago. He hadn’t been cowed, like some of the dogs, but there’d been a sadness about him, as if he was trying extra hard to make them love him so they wouldn’t leave. Now when he rolled over, he closed his eyes, knowing a tickle was seconds away.

  How had they lived properly without him?

  Johnny’s reaction wasn’t quite what she’d expected.

  Or rather, Natalie couldn’t quite put her finger on what his reaction was. He seemed keen in some respects – typically proud that she was obviously qualified for what was a pretty high-level job opening, and typically rude about the management jargonese – but at the same time, she got the feeling he was holding something back.

  They were lounging on the sofa after dinner, one at each end with Bertie sprawled across the middle. It was a huge sofa they’d bought as a wedding present, big enough to lie on together to watch television, but not so big that Bill or any of their other single friends at the time would see it as a spare bed.

  ‘So, do you think I should send them my CV?’ she asked.

  ‘Up to you, Nat.’

  ‘I know, but should I?’

  Johnny put the job description down. His face was deliberately blank. ‘It’s a great opportunity. You’ve always wanted to lead a marketing team on your own, it’s a small team in a bigger player, you like chocolate. Sounds like you made it up yourself.’

  ‘I know.’ Natalie pulled her lip. ‘But didn’t we agree I’d take six months out, you know, to calm everything down for the baby?’

  ‘Didn’t we just discover it’s not going to be so simple? And that I’m the one who should be taking time off to get fixed?’

  ‘Don’t say that. You know it’s not like that.’ She nudged his thigh with her socked toe. ‘Anyway, Dr Carthy hasn’t had the second tests back yet, you don’t know what he’s going to say.’

  Johnny gazed at her, mutinously. ‘I think we do.’

  There was no talking to him in this mood, she thought. Overnight, he seemed to have gone from imagining everything would be OK, somehow, to imagining that it was all over.

  ‘Well, maybe I should go for it,’ said Natalie, trying to play devil’s advocate with herself. ‘If it’s going to take a while for us to get into the NHS system, maybe I should build up some maternity-leave entitlement?’ She paused. ‘The salary’s not on there, but she sort of hinted it was more than I was getting before.’

  ‘It’s up to you, Nat.’

  ‘Will you stop saying that?’ She nudged him again, but harder. ‘Johnny, this is serious, we need to talk about this properly. This isn’t my job, this is our future.’

  ‘Well, what if you said no?’ Johnny turned his attention to Bertie’s ears, which Natalie drew the line at cleaning. They got properly waxy and disgusting. He wound a wet wipe round his index finger and began to probe inside the long velvety flaps as Bertie squirmed with pleasure. ‘We could manage for a bit. We’ve got your redundancy money, and my salary. And we don’t go out any more now we’ve got this big lump.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Natalie without much enthusiasm. ‘Weren’t we talking about investing that, though?’

  ‘It’s a time investment, giving you a break,’ said Johnny. ‘Look, we can manage. When you’re on maternity leave we’ll have to budget, anyway. Didn’t you want to have a year off, at least, with the baby? You used to talk about being a full-time mum till he was at school.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about that now.’ Much as she loved Bertie, the routine of being stuck inside with him – not allowed in cafés, or shops, or libraries, or anywhere apart from Pet World – had burst Natalie’s full-time childcare bubble a bit. And she could leave Bertie alone for up to two hours.

  ‘We just have to cut back,’ he said. ‘People do.’

  ‘Johnny, I don’t want us to have a cutting back life.’ Natalie shut her eyes and saw her one chance at a dream job hovering before her eyes and then vanishing, never to be offered again. ‘I’ve always worked, I don’t want to stop working! And if we can’t have kids then I want us to have the best kind of . . .’ She stopped, realising what she’d said. ‘If it’s not going to be easy for us to have kids,’ she corrected herself, ‘then it makes sense for me to earn what I can so we can save up and go private. Jump some queues.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ said Johnny stiffly. ‘Don’t sugarcoat it. I need all the medical help I can get to make you pregnant, so you’ve got to get out there and earn the money to pay for it – because mine isn’t enough. Do you think you could have put that any worse?’

  She reached out for his hands, but he refused to take any notice, instead dropping the waxy wet wipe on the floor and starting on the other ear. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, I want us to be as happy as we can be.’

  ‘And we’re not now.’ His voice was flat. ‘And if we’re not now . . .’

  Natalie didn’t reply immediately because she wasn’t sure what she could say that wouldn’t make it worse. She’d never had to tread on eggshells with Johnny before. It had always been him telling her it wasn’t as bad as she thought.

  ‘This isn’t about money.’ Natalie tried to look into his face, but his head was down. ‘This is about me, and you, and what we actually want . . . Johnny, look at me. We really need to talk about this. How much do you want a baby? Because the conversations are going to get a lot harder than this.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want.’ He stared into the garden that neither of them really knew how to look after. It was the garden that everyone else in their drive filled with trampolines and they’d filled with a ridiculously huge barbecue.

  She took a deep breath and asked the question that had been hovering on her lips for weeks. The first domino in the line.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked, and slowly, to her horror, he shook his head.

  Natalie bit her lip. She knew he wasn’t. She wasn’t – and it was her broodiness that had dragged them into this.

  They sat in silence for a while, and then Johnny said, ‘Have you really thought about what going back to work will mean?’

  ‘Of course,’ she began, but he interrupted.

  ‘It’s so obvious I can’t believe you haven’t said it.’ Without speaking, he
pointed downwards at Bertie’s drowsy head.

  ‘What’s going to happen to him if you go back to work?’ he half-whispered. ‘I can’t take him to school. We can’t leave him here. He’ll have to go back to the rescue. Soon, before he bonds any more with us.’

  She looked up and met his eyes. They were full of tears, and she wasn’t sure they were all for Bertie. Natalie knew Johnny was avoiding the real issue, but suddenly she wasn’t sure any of it could be separated so easily. Bertie was their family now.

  His houndy smell, the hairs she was constantly sweeping up, the snoring on their bed at night seemed to have been part of their house for ever. How could they send him back to the kennels now, believing that he’d let another family down? That he wasn’t loveable? Just when his naughtiness had calmed down into low level mischief.

  Natalie put her hand up to her mouth and tried to make herself think like the business professional she’d been – that she still was. But her heart was breaking, not least because she now found it impossible to separate sad-eyed Bertie and her equally sad-eyed husband.

  ‘Nat,’ Johnny began, ‘I’ve been thinking, and . . .’

  The front doorbell rang, and immediately Bertie sprang from his slumber, threw his head back and howled.

  ‘What?’ Natalie said, over the howling.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Johnny swung his legs off the sofa, but Natalie caught his arm.

  ‘It does. That can wait. What were you going to say?’

  Johnny shook his head. Bertie was sniffing the air now, as if he could identify the visitor through brick walls and the front door.

  If it was someone from school or a charity collector Johnny would be there all night. Johnny was a polite chatter, whereas Natalie wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Natalie, and went through to the hall.

  When she opened the door, to her surprise she saw Rachel standing there with Gem at her side.

  ‘Hi.’ Rachel swept the thick black fringe out of her eyes, to reveal a tense expression that set Natalie on edge. ‘Can I pop in for a moment? Is this a bad time?’

  Natalie shook her head, trying to make her face seem normal. She really hoped Rachel hadn’t come round to confide something pregnancy-related to her. That would be . . . She pushed away the shudder.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. Come on in.’ She opened the door further. Bertie didn’t rush out to sniff Gem as he normally would. Instead he lurked behind Natalie’s legs, like a shy toddler.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Bertie,’ said Natalie, slightly embarrassed. ‘It’s Rachel. Sorry, Rachel.’

  She stepped back to let her in, and Rachel and Gem went through to the kitchen, where Johnny was standing by the kettle, now beginning to boil.

  ‘Have a seat,’ said Natalie, getting out the biscuit tin. Bertie slunk into his kitchen beanbag and regarded Gem with suspicious eyes. ‘So! Is it about the Open Day?’

  Rachel sank onto a chair and looked between the pair of them. She put her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ she said. ‘I’ve had an enquiry from the website, about Bertie. Well, several, actually.’ She tried a sad smile. ‘He’s a very popular dog – I put his profile on the internet two nights ago, and he’s had more responses than any of the others.’

  Natalie couldn’t speak. Her hands gripped the biscuit tin.

  ‘I’ve been in touch with everyone who’s emailed,’ Rachel went on. ‘I wanted to check they were genuine before I told you, and I managed to weed out a couple of them with some Basset hound horror stories. I told them about him drooling on your laptop, and the food pinching.’ Her eyes turned sad. ‘But there’s a couple with two other rescue Bassets who are pretty serious about adopting him. Big fields, company all day, plenty to sniff.’

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ said Johnny, in a hollow voice.

  ‘I know. Anyway, they’re going to come along to the dog show and meet him. I put them off until then, to be honest, so you’d have time to think about it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Natalie, and her voice choked. She couldn’t bear to look at him in his basket; she knew he was looking their way and listening. The eyes would be unbearable.

  ‘I know you two love Bertie, but I couldn’t say no.’ Rachel looked wretched. ‘I mean, if you’re going to be going back to work, he’ll be on his own.’ She paused. ‘You are going to go back to work, aren’t you?’

  Natalie bit her lip, wondering what the best thing to say was, just as Johnny blurted out, ‘We don’t know yet.’

  She swung her head to look at him.

  ‘Well, we don’t, do we?’ he repeated.

  Rachel looked between the two of them, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, did I get it wrong? I thought you were on sabbatical, Natalie. Has that changed?’ She added a hopeful flick of her eyebrows, and Natalie knew what she meant: was she pregnant?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Natalie. ‘Everything seems to be changing right now.’

  The kettle finally finished boiling and Johnny made some tea, which filled the awkward silence.

  ‘Milk? Sugar? Biscuit?’ he asked, and Rachel murmured in reply.

  So that’s why the English are so addicted to tea-making, thought Natalie, bleakly. It fills in the need for hard answers. There was so much going on in her head that she couldn’t work out which was most important: a baby, this job, Johnny, Bertie, peace of mind, her career – which was supposed to take priority?

  Could she go back to a twelve-hour day, where she’d have to work at full stretch for the first year to establish herself, knowing that she’d have to take time off to go through fertility treatment? Did she have the right to delay their fertility treatment for the sake of her career, knowing it would only get harder? What would that do to Johnny in the meantime?

  Natalie couldn’t stop herself: she turned her head and saw Bertie gazing at her from his basket. Her heart melted at the simple trust in his eyes and she felt torn between her responsibilities.

  It’s about making him happy, she reminded herself. These new owners are going to love him just as much as we are. I shouldn’t give up my career for the sake of a dog I’ve only had for a few weeks.

  But as she turned back to Rachel, a little voice in the back of Natalie’s head muttered that it wasn’t just Bertie she was getting upset about. It was something much bigger even than that.

  24

  Rachel knew she should have been making a pregnancy calendar, as recommended by the enthusiastic young midwife, but instead she found herself marking off the time by dogs rehomed, and new dogs brought in. It took her mind off all the things that could possibly be going wrong inside her, according to the internet, and also made her feel she was doing something useful with her time.

  Between the day she called Val and the date they’d fixed for the ‘meet the parents’ dinner, she and Megan rehomed two of the Staffies, Treacle the chocolate Labrador, and Oskar the abandoned dachshund George had brought in.

  In fact the little dachshund got the best home of the lot. He was too nervous to be put in a run with the other dogs so Rachel let him live in a big open crate by the office desk, where he’d always have company. The first time he saw Freda stomp in wearing her short red wellies, he’d scuttled in terror under a chair, but something in her voice obviously instinctively calmed him. By the time Freda tied on her scarf at the end of her shift, ready to drag Ted away from the café, Oskar had moved his hiding place to beneath her desk, where he observed her with his beady eyes, twinkling out from under his bushy eyebrows.

  ‘Freda,’ said Rachel. ‘You know I don’t make these sort of saddo dog comments very often, but I think I see a match here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’ Freda began, but Rachel sensed a sort of glow around her face when she looked at Oskar’s grizzly beard. And she could see Oskar glowing too. As if they already knew each other.

  ‘Won’t you think about fostering him, at least?’ she went on, filled with a sudden n
eed to put them together. ‘He’s his own man, like Pippin was, but he’s happy to nap with you, and he’ll keep you safe from all sorts. I think you’d make a lovely trio, you, Oskar and Ted. Ted can get some fresh air instead of slaving over a hot grill all day.’

  ‘You tell Ted that.’ Freda watched as Oskar sniffed her leg. His scabs were starting to clear up, thanks to the ointment Megan was diligently applying twice a day. ‘Ted reckons if he retires, that’ll be it. He’ll just turn up his toes and leave some poor dog without a daddy. Not me, mind you,’ she added. ‘The poor dog. Doesn’t want it to end up somewhere like this.’

  Megan patted Freda’s arm. ‘George thinks Oskar’s about ten already, and I reckon you’ve all got at least another five years in you. In fact, you know what George said to me? He said I should be running special retirement matching – one golden oldie with another.’

  She nodded as Freda looked delightedly outraged. ‘He said that? He called me a golden oldie? The cheek of him!’

  ‘But, will you?’ Rachel realised she was holding her breath just watching Oskar and Freda check each other out, seeing the smile form on Freda’s face, and the confidence grow in Oskar. Suddenly she knew exactly why Dot had given up everything to do this. Matching one lonely person with one lonely dog was like creating your own happy ending out of real sadness.

  ‘I’ll speak to Ted,’ said Freda, but Rachel knew from the motherly smile that she’d be telling her husband, not asking his opinion.

  Megan cast a quick look in Rachel’s direction and raised her thumbs under the desk, mouthing, ‘Yay!’ Rachel grinned back. It was a good feeling. It was the best thing she’d done for a long time.

  ‘How about a cup of tea?’ said Freda. ‘I make it exactly tea time.’

  Rachel checked her watch; it was three-thirty, although Freda worked on snack hours. ‘Listen, you’ll have to excuse me. My parents are coming tonight to stay this weekend, and I’ve promised to cook dinner.’

  ‘But I thought we were going to go through the list of people to call about the sponsorship?’