24
L owell is waiting outside by his big old estate car. The boot has almost nothing in it at all.
Janey’s boot contains her unused yoga mat, her unused gym kit, her unused swimming costume – basically anything she might need if she felt a fit of emergency exercise come on, which it hasn’t yet – a torch, a first-aid kit despite the fact that the car spends nine hours a day parked outside a hospital, some cereal she keeps forgetting to take out, four pens, three charging cables, two of which aren’t working but she can never figure out which ones, and a bulk-buy of loo roll that she keeps there because there genuinely isn’t enough room to store it in the tiny house, particularly as Essie has filled the bathroom full of her incredibly expensive La Roche-Posay products.
Inside the car are either a hundred and seventy-five pairs of cheap sunglasses, or zero pairs. There is no in-between.
‘You ready?’ says Lowell. He is, she notices suddenly, wearing his gardening trousers.
‘Are those your only trousers?’ she asks, before cursing the fact that a side-effect of the menopause appears to be blurting out the first thing in her head. She can’t avoid the fact, though, that’s she a bit disappointed. She’s gone to an awful lot of effort.
Sure enough, he looks completely nonplussed.
‘No,’ he says mildly. ‘But I thought to pick up puppies, perhaps I wouldn’t wear my best trousers.’
‘It’s just, those are the only trousers I’ve ever seen you wear,’ says Janey, trying to make things better but not necessarily succeeding.
‘Well, yes. One night I was cycling, one day I was gardening, and now I’m picking up...’
He looks down. The old cords were once bottle-green but are now wearing through with softness and age.
‘You’re right,’ he says, sounding surprised. ‘I live in a muddy country. I probably need more than one pair of working trousers.’
Janey smiles. ‘Is everything else in your house, like, morning suits and stuff? Fancy architect clothes? Strangely shaped metal glasses?’
He smiles. ‘No, I don’t really like having too much stuff.’
‘Except in your garden.’
‘Oh, gardens are different,’ he says, warmth in his voice.
‘Is this why you don’t own your own bicycle?’
‘ . . . or a second pair of trousers. Yes, I think we can agree I’ve taken it too far.’
Janey wonders what is in his house.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re about to very much maximalise on dogs.’
He nods. ‘I am. Shall we?’
‘We should probably take something to cart the dogs in – have you got a bucket?’
‘A dog bucket?? Is that a thing?’
‘I think any kind of bucket will do.’
*
The cottages are deserted – Essie and Dwight are choosing bathroom fixtures.
Janey briefly wonders if there is anything going on – they seem to be spending a lot of time together – but dismisses it immediately.
Connor has such lovely manners and is just so perfect for Essie; they make a lovely couple.
Unsophisticated roughneck Dwight is not her type at all.
Wee Jim is outside, and grunts at them and continues what he is doing, which appears to be something with a hammer and a sink.
Janey cannot imagine the circumstances under which it makes sense to take a hammer to a sink, but doesn’t mention it.
Once they open the door, however, it’s a different matter.
Instantly there is a paddle of excited paws rampaging on the floor above them, and an excited woof from Felicity.
By the time they climb up the stairs, having found a bucket in an unplumbed bathroom downstairs, one of the pups has already managed to squirm its way around the barrier and is tentatively making its way down.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ says Janey, at once. ‘Into the bucket with you.’
She can’t believe how much they’ve all grown.
Every day they seem to leap ahead. No wonder Felicity looks utterly exhausted.
Their hair is getting long and straggly already.
About half have Felicity’s pointed floppy wolfhound ears, flat against their tiny heads, and about half have proper Jock Westie ears, perfect triangles popping out of their skulls.
They’re all a combination of grey and white but already it is becoming obvious that they are going to be the most curious mixture of shape and sizes: there are sturdy bodies with long giraffe legs, and Bute has a long furry torso with tiny legs and a big arse which makes her look like a hairy sausage dog.
Freuchie is pretty, a perfect white Westie that has been blown up like an air bed, but Argyll also has an underbite, as her huge wolfhound snoot doesn’t quite match her small Westie skull.
Janey loves them all.
‘You are the most gorgeous things I have ever seen.’
Felicity has bounded over towards Lowell, who is cuddling her and, Janey notices curiously, turning his head away.
‘I’m sorry, old girl,’ she hears him murmur. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought it was for the best.’
‘Did you not want to give her away?’
‘I didn’t,’ he says shortly.
But Felicity is a forgiving sort of animal – in fact, she’s a very easygoing girl all round, as a few people have observed before – and is burrowing into his armpit and making tiny pleased noises and rubbing her huge muzzle against his face in the manner of someone very in love with him.
Much to Janey’s surprise, eventually Lowell gives in and, despite being a large man, simply lies down and stretches on the dirty floor, whereupon Felicity leaps in delight – this is obviously an old game – and jumps up and down across him, sticking her nose into his neck and tickling him, while he giggles uncontrollably.
Janey can’t stop smiling; it’s very unexpected.
She feels a jolt immediately, seeing him lie down like that, free, relaxed.
She is almost tempted to lie down next to him, but doesn’t, of course.
She wonders what he would do if she did.
His great head is laughing, and naturally the puppies note that something is going on and join in, a great many-pawed mass of hair and noses, hopping all over him, sniffing, and occasionally giving him daring little nips.
Janey watches him, feeling . . . she can’t help it: in that moment, on that dusty floor, she finds him incredibly attractive.
She can’t stop staring. She wants to, absolutely wants to clamber on him like one of the pups.
‘Okay, okay, enough of that!’ he shouts eventually, and she blushes, feeling as if he’s talking to her. Still laughing, he is sitting up and carefully brushing the pups off. ‘Felicity, I beg your forgiveness and mercy, will that do?’
‘I think you’re forgiven,’ smiles Janey. She can’t help herself: it’s the first time she’s seen him smile, properly. ‘Okay, now we’ve got everyone wildly overexcited, shall we try and get them to sit nice and calmly in a bucket in a car?’
‘Felicity’s good in the car,’ avers Lowell.
Janey looks at him. ‘Why didn’t you come before? She’s so obviously your dog.’
His face falls. ‘Well, I’ve been away. And she wasn’t . . . isn’t my dog. Not really. She’s my daughter’s. I just felt . . . ’
He breaks off. This is clearly a very difficult subject.
‘Have you even told her there are puppies here? I couldn’t have kept Essie from it for love nor money.’
‘Yes, she’s . . . hopefully she’s coming up for Easter.’
He doesn’t seem to want to elaborate, so Janey doesn’t say anything more and they busy themselves.
She pops the small shaggy bundle – Smokey, as it happens – into the bucket, which, naturally, he immediately tips over.
They are so much bigger than she was anticipating.
They find another bucket among the building materials and stick half in each, which works a little better.
There is some growling from Smokey’s bucket, and Janey predicts, correctly, that he is causing trouble, but they somehow manage to get them downstairs.
It has been a brisk, clear type of a day, and all over Carso sheets are out on lines flapping in the breeze, tumble-drying being so expensive and frankly entirely unnecessary when you live on the north coast of Scotland where the two tides meet.
And with evening they are beginning to shake off the deep black troughs of long winter nights, when the light starts to trickle away as early as two-thirty in the afternoon, and you often take much pleasure in hunkering down in the cold, the dark, fires lit, heavy curtains pulled, with a book and a cheese scone and a cup of tea big enough to swim in.
Now, spring is appearing – very, very tentatively, it must be said, shy and demure, a nervous maiden, as she often is in this part of the world, easily cowed and sent scurrying home by an Easter blizzard, May sleet sometimes indistinguishable from petals.
Janey sits in the back as Lowell drives as carefully as if they have real babies back there.
Felicity rides shotgun, occasionally raising her great wolf head to check what’s going on over in the back seat beyond the netting.
Janey cradles each bucket and finds she is speaking in a soft crooning voice to the pups, telling them it’ll be okay, very much in the same way she talks to infants in her clinic when they are dealing with the unexpected sensations of waking up to a frightening, unfamiliar hearing world for the first time.
‘Are you alright back there?’ says Lowell, who cannot deny rather enjoying listening to her gentle voice. He doesn’t hear a lot of gentle voices.
‘It’s nice,’ she says experimentally. ‘To try new things.’
They both feel the cold breeze when they get back to the old schoolhouse. Lowell looks at her, faintly alarmed. They look at the chicken wire run he has built. It’s not unimpressive. He has filled the kennel with blankets.
‘After all,’ offers Janey, ‘puppies have been growing up in the wild for thousands of years.’
‘Yeah,’ says Lowell.
‘Like when they try and sell you tooth chews for your dog and stuff. Dogs have been kind of alright without toothbrushes for a zillion years, like, literally up until the invention of marketing departments?’
But she has no conviction in her voice; she doesn’t believe it and neither, she can tell, does he.
‘You must have a laundry in there,’ she says. She’s a little nosy to see inside the house – she has already checked, and if it was ever on the house-moving apps it isn’t any more, which makes her crazy. She considers it very rude not to list your house and let other people have a peek at it.
She thinks it will almost certainly look like a bachelor pad, and not a cool one either: socks on drying racks; miserable ready meals in the fridge; a well-worn armchair in front of the fire that has a bum shape impressed into it, and a mark where the sweaty back of his head goes; remote control in easy reach.
She’s seen a few, from being asked out – rarely, but from time to time.
And going because that’s what you’re meant to do, isn’t it?
Then listening at some length to a man insist that he is absolutely over his ex, that cow, for two hours, not have people demur when you offer to split the bill and then .
. . well. The divorced man’s flat. It’s generally a terrible disappointment.
Would make up for the fact that she rather likes the way he drives; not fast, not aggressively, but with a certain control.
Men would be amazed, thinks Janey, if they knew how much being a good driver is the most incredible turn-on for women.
‘Well, yes,’ Lowell says, as they stare into the squirming, fuzzy, adorable bundles in the buckets. ‘It’s where I make stuff clean?’
‘Have you got a boot room?’
‘I don’t, but I can’t imagine shutting puppies in with shoes is best practice anyway.’ He sighs. ‘This is my fault. I let Felicity out of my sight, and some wee Westie Jock parachuted down on to her.’
‘I assumed he got lowered on, like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible .’
Lowell grins. ‘I wonder if that’s how Tom Cruise does it in real life.’
They both laugh.
‘Okay, fine. I submit. My life, which was already pretty grim, is now going to be made rather more . . . ’
Janey picks up one of the wee girl dogs. Lowell stops in his tracks as the tiny thing, grey and white, long eyelashes, tentatively wags her tiny nub of a tail and experimentally puts out her tongue to lick her hand.
‘Oh, lord,’ he says, his voice changing completely, and for the first time, it seems to Janey, he sees the dogs as dogs, rather than a problem for him to solve. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Which one is this one?’
‘Argyll,’ says Janey, examining her. ‘She’s going to be huge. Wolfhound body, and shrunken Westie head, like a cut and shunt.’
Lowell frowns. ‘I think she’s perfect.’
He holds the little pup gently in the palm of his large hand, while she carries on licking and making pleased noises.
‘Alright,’ he says, picking up another bucket with the other hand. Felicity bounds around his legs, wagging wholeheartedly, sniffing around the garden, relieving herself joyfully on a plant-pot and generally looking absolutely delighted after her many adventures in the big city.
Janey picks up her bucket full of dogs and follows him in, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.