22
I t is, inevitably, Smokey who is first to wriggle himself under the makeshift barrier at the top of the stairs, trying to find his mum when Essie has taken Felicity out for a slow wander and a bit of me time – something Felicity seems to revel in.
Although she fulfils the internet definition of being a good mother, in that she hasn’t tried to eat any of the pups, she is clearly over the whole situation, and sometimes swipes the pups away from her with a gentle paw.
They are getting huge and feisty, apart from Argyll, who is clearly the runt, and getting good at finding their way to the milk bowl.
Essie is completely entranced, particularly with Bute, who can only walk with a Marilyn Monroe bustle.
Freuchie remains the snow-white beauty, and almost certainly the only one they could easily sell.
Essie cannot bear to think about selling the pups.
‘Hello, baby girl,’ she whispers to Bute, stroking the hound’s pointy ears even though wolfhounds were meant to have floppy ears. Freuchie aside, these dogs are not going to be bonnie by any standards. But Essie is madly in love with them all regardless. ‘Hello, my sweetest girl,’ she whispers.
Bute snuffles and eeps, tiny tongue creeping in and out.
‘How odd: I’m the first thing you’ve ever seen,’ says Essie, amazed, as Bute snuffles into her for a warm cuddle; the sky is clear but the day is cold.
Essie sits with her for a while, feeling calm, as she hears Dwight arrive downstairs with Wee Jim, who is six foot eight and as wide as a barn.
‘Christ,’ Essie had whispered to Dwight the first time she’d seen him.
‘How many raw chickens do you think we’ll have to feed him? This will really eat into our budget.’
Most of his available energy goes on walking and standing up without the blood rushing to his head, as far as Essie can tell, because he speaks as little as possible at all times, mostly by grunting.
He also has the best-looking girlfriend Essie has ever seen.
She hadn’t even realised women like this existed in Carso; she makes Shelby look plain.
‘Hi, guys,’ she says. ‘Hey, look, Bute’s eyes are open.’
Dwight sniffs. ‘Smokey’s have been open for days. Got to start training you up as a fighter, Smokey,’ he says, cuffing the wee dog playfully as it stumbles towards him.
‘Don’t you dare!’ says Essie.
‘As a guard dog!’ says Dwight. ‘In case someone tries to attack us.’
‘Who’s going to attack Wee Jim?’ asks Essie in consternation.
‘Ugh,’ agrees Jim.
‘Aye, well,’ says Dwight, his hand instinctively caressing the tiny creature. ‘We need a proper guard dog. Like Felicity.’
‘Yes, but he might end up looking like his dad,’ points out Essie. ‘Those Jocks couldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘No chance. Right, what are we doing?’
‘You’re seeing what’s under the old wallpaper. Stripping it.’
‘Who put you in charge?’
‘What were you going to do?’
‘Slap some paint on.’
‘There’s six layers of wallpaper on there! And you have to plaster. Oh, and I have boiler news.’
‘What boiler news?’
‘There isn’t one. Did you check anything about these properties before you took them on?’
‘There’s no boiler?’
‘Nope. An immersion heater, and a kettle.’
Dwight sucks his teeth in. ‘This sounds expensive.’
‘Yes, not costing things is very expensive.’
‘I think we’ll start with wallpaper.’
‘Urgks,’ says Wee Jim.
‘We’ve just been to the bakers, Jim,’ says Dwight, looking weary.
‘URGKS!’
‘Be right back,’ says Dwight, looking rather haunted.
Essie hears a noise at the bottom of the stairs and realises that Janey is coming up. ‘Hey?’ she says, scrambling to her feet. She is still holding Bute.
‘Don’t you get too attached to . . . ah,’ says Janey. ‘Am I thinking it’s too late?’
‘How’s Johnson?’ says Essie.
‘Ach, it’s a long road,’ says Janey. ‘But thanks for asking. And we have all had to promise to give up salt in everything, and it’s making me cranky.’ She looks down. ‘Goodness, the pups have their eyes open!’
Indeed, her arrival has stirred them up and they have hopped out of their cardboard box and are pootling around her as close as they could get. Smokey even nips the toe of her sandal.
‘Ow! Oh, lord.’
‘What?’
‘Well, look at them. We can’t keep them in a cardboard box any more.’
Essie shrugs. ‘No. And the boys will need to get in here to work anyway. The dogs can’t be here while they’re sanding.’
‘Are you working here too?’ says Janey with a grin, but Essie immediately takes it as a slight that she isn’t working at all.
‘No,’ she says fiercely.
‘Okay, just wondered. Goodness,’ she says, as one of the pups does a massive pee on the floor.
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Essie, ‘and the guys will have to strip that floor.’ She pats Bute. ‘It might be time to get Daddy involved.’
‘Custody disputes,’ says Janey. ‘Great. Love ’em.’
‘He’s got a big garden,’ says Essie.
Wee Jim comes up the stairs with a full bag of sausage rolls, whereupon the tiny dogs start yipping. He gives some to Smokey and the rest of them go bananas.
‘You wean them on Weetabix, not pasties,’ says Janey.
‘We have to move them,’ says Essie.
‘Has he even been in to see them?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘A dog-hater.’
‘A dog-hater with a big garden,’ says Essie.
‘Yeah, maybe he doesn’t want dogs digging anything up,’ says Janey, and Essie makes a confused face. ‘I’ll go and see him.’
‘Did you not swap numbers? Are you, like, one hundred?’
‘We just forgot,’ says Janey, refusing to mention that actually Lowell had offered to give her his number and she hadn’t had her glasses on and had been too vain to pull them out as her nice ones were in her handbag and all that was in her other bag were the 1970s serial killer ones she’d bought in an emergency one day at a petrol station, and she really didn’t want him to see her in those, so she’d faked taking down his telephone number, assuming she’d get hold of it later, then completely forgetting to do that.
‘You’re right, he’s got plenty of space in his garden. I’ll talk to him. You coming?’
Dwight has taken his shirt off to shovel crap out of the kitchen into the big black bin outside.
Goodness, thinks Janey. Wee Dwight. It feels rather indecent to be looking at someone she knew as a boy, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped Essie.
He isn’t large, but he is wiry, and his muscles are firm and incredibly well defined.
He’s brown from being outdoors; a thin trickle of sweat is running down his hairless chest.
‘I’ll just go myself,’ says Janey, but Essie hasn’t heard a word she just said.
*
In fact Janey finds Lowell outside too, in the beautiful scruffy wildflower garden.
His early azaleas are out and they are big and red and glorious.
He isn’t topless, though. Janey finds herself wondering idly what that would be like.
The opposite of Dwight, probably. But broad; she likes that in a man.
Colin’s shoulders had sloped. She’d kidded herself he had other qualities.
She wonders if Lowell is hairy, considering how much hair he has on his head.
She likes a hairy chest, even though Essie thinks they are an offence against all that is holy, like all of her generation.
Hmm. She tries to find something neutral to say that won’t betray what’s on her mind.
‘Nice azaleas,’ says Janey, just as he stands up, wearing a rather tattered old straw hat and says, ‘What?’ and she wishes she hadn’t.
‘Oh, hello,’ he says, blinking slightly and rubbing his hands on a very old holey gardening jumper. Possible ex-rugby player, although his eyes both point in the same direction, so possibly not.
He mistakes Janey’s distracted imaginings for disapproval. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m wearing gardening clothes.’
‘You should see what some people turn up to my surgery in,’ says Janey, truthfully. ‘So. We have to talk about . . . ’
‘Oh, my God, the dogs. Of course. Sorry. I meant to get down and check on them and then . . . work . . . and . . . ’
He doesn’t sound terribly convincing and they both know it.
‘Well,’ he says, looking around his lovely wild garden.
It isn’t, Janey is realising, the mess she’d thought when she first approached it.
In fact it has been allowed to grow in its own distinct order: flowers, rows of vegetables, with ratcheted green leaves; some strawberry plants under nets.
The field beyond the grey stone rear of the house has been left to run as a wild meadow, and Janey can see deer cropping away at the end of it.
‘Wow,’ she says.
‘I know, aren’t they beautiful?’ says Lowell, following her gaze towards the deer. ‘They’ll come and eat fruit out of your hand.’
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘You do know I’m Alasdair Munroe’s mother?’
His eyebrows rise. ‘I was not aware of that, no. The deer-killer.’
‘Culler,’ says Janey. ‘There’s a difference.’
A young stag bucks around the green grass, revelling, Janey thinks, in simply being alive on such a beautiful day; in being able to tear around so fast and jump so high. It feels like nothing but joy.
‘Well, anyway,’ says Janey, ‘we have different animal problems to talk about. I need to move the pups over here.’
Lowell stretches out his back, then nods.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘This is all my fault.’ He looks around his garden. ‘Well, I should probably say goodbye to all this. They’ll ruin it, won’t they?’
‘No!’ says Janey. ‘The deer would; they’d eat everything. Dogs don’t like fruit. You can make a run on the lawn for the pups.’
‘Won’t they dig a lot of holes?’
‘They’re babies. They’ll just roll about,’ Janey says, hoping this is true. ‘But they can’t stay in the cottages any more. They’re about to start eating real food, which means they’re about to start to poo.’
‘How many of them are there again?’
‘Six puppies plus Felicity.’
‘Pooing in my garden?’
‘Um, yes,’ says Janey. ‘That’s why you should probably have a run.’
He straightens up, unhappily.
‘Is this what you do for a job?’ says Janey.
‘Oh! No, I’m an architect. Semi-retired now; they call me in when—’
‘Their domes fall off?’
‘Ha. Not exactly.’
‘Do you do the twiddly bits?’
‘I don’t really like twiddly bits,’ he says, looking serious.
‘No, that’s the problem: you all just like big, horrible blocks, don’t you?’ says Janey.
Lowell takes on the slightly fixed expression of a man who has spent a lot of time listening to people’s ill-informed views on modern architecture, and Janey spots it and shuts up.
His own house, the old schoolhouse, she can’t help noticing, is Arts and Crafts.
It’s completely covered in twiddly bits.
‘Well?’ she says. ‘Can you pick them up?’
‘Put seven dogs in my car?’ he says frowning. ‘I’m not sure. Not by myself.’
There’s a brief pause. Then he says, quite casually, ‘Can you help?’
Janey nods, suddenly feeling nervous. ‘I get back from work around six tomorrow?’
‘Perfect,’ he says immediately. ‘I’ll see you then.’ And he smiles, and looks slightly embarrassed in a way, she thinks, that you wouldn’t be, surely, if you were only discussing a car. Or would you?