Chapter 7 #2
Dad wasn’t against this suggestion, though he thought it unlikely that Mum would get away with changing the name of a three-hundred-year-old cottage in Swaffham Tilney without incurring some wrath from certain quarters.
Mum said she didn’t care, and in the end she was lucky: saved by Corinne Sullivan, who was rumored to be the village’s wealthiest resident.
Corinne did two things that grabbed everyone’s attention at around the same time that Mum and Dad bought Shukes: First, she mentioned and defended her philanthropy policy to the wrong people, and then she let weeds grow high against her garden wall and made no effort to remove them.
(As if that weren’t enough on the notoriety-creating front, Corinne later contributed to a third happening—the book-club debacle—that really stole the show and meant that suddenly neighbors who had previously been friendly to one another were pretending not to see each other on the street and in the village pub in order to avoid contentious clashes.)
Anyway, it was thanks to Corinne hogging all the village disapproval that Mum knew she was in the clear with regard to Shukes’s name; I heard her saying so to Champ, and also that she’d have been ready to stand firm if she’d had to, because Shoe Cottage was definitely the name he was meant to have, once he became a Lambert.
One night, soon after Mum and Dad had exchanged contracts on our new house, the Hayloft, I heard Mum say to Champ: “I’ll never say I’m sorry we bought Shukes, because I’ve loved him so, so much and I always will.
But, honestly? If I’d known Granddad was going to die only two months after we moved here, I’d have thought, ‘No, wait. Don’t buy a house with only a front garden and no enclosed back garden, however much you love it—because now you can get a dog, and this kind of garden arrangement isn’t safe for a dog. ’”
By “Granddad,” Mum meant her own dad—Champ’s non-furry granddad. Correctly or not, Mum believed having a dog was impossible while he was alive. My view on that is: It would very much have depended on that dog’s temperament and trainability.
“And then I’d never have fallen in love with Shukes because we wouldn’t have gone to view him,” Mum went on while Champ licked his front paw. “We’d have prioritized dog suitability over everything else. Poor Furbert—he never got to have his ideal garden the way you will, Champy.”
I thought to myself, Oh, for Ricky’s sake!
(I mostly say Ricky instead of God now. It started to feel right after I’d been doing “Praise Ricky, Thank Ricky” every day for a few months.) For Ricky’s sake, Mum, I fumed silently, why don’t you question some of your wildly incorrect underlying assumptions once in a while?
Here’s what I know: There is nothing unsuitable for dogs about Shukes.
His garden is stunning, with the added interest that comes from being able to watch people walking past and coming in and out of their houses.
You wouldn’t believe some of the conversations and fights I’ve overheard in that front garden over the years.
What if dogs actually prefer the excitement of some human drama to a boringly serene, enclosed back garden where you hear no neighborly gossip at all?
Mum ought to have realized she was being silly, because she’d had not one but two dogs since she’d lived at Shukes, neither of whom had suffered a single unfortunate consequence or unpleasant moment as a result of not always being able to be outside exactly whenever they wanted to be.
Spending some time inside the house is fine sometimes too.
A mixture of out and in is perfect for any and every dog.
Which means there was no problem that needed solving when Mum decided Shukes had to go on the market.
I waited for someone to point this out to her, but no one did.
It was insane; we all accepted without question that the home we loved, was, in Mum’s words, “obviously not ideal from a doggy point of view.”
No one said, “You’re overreacting because Furbert died—but that’s silly because he didn’t die as a result of getting stolen from our garden, did he?
Or of a broken heart, because one day he fancied going outside and was told he couldn’t.
He died, specifically, because a litter dropper (“ground vandals,” Mum calls them) dropped a peach stone on the pavement outside the church instead of putting it in a bin, and Furbert ate it, and it pierced his intestine and gave him sepsis. ”
No one said any of that, or pointed out that there was no good reason to move house.
And yes, I could have, but I chose not to.
I’m glad now that I didn’t, because as it turned out, there was a very good reason Shukes had to be put up for sale.
There was the reason of the Gaveys. Whatever you want to call the force that steers all our lives, it knew that Lesley Gavey was about to decide that she wanted to move to Swaffham Tilney, and it knew what we—or rather Mum and Dad, as the homeowners—needed to do in order to help that move along, so that the war between the Lamberts and the Gaveys could begin.