CHAPTER 11
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The spaniel finds me before I find him.
He comes up out of the ditch at the fourth bend of the drive with his ears inside out and his whole back end swinging, and he puts both wet front feet on my knees before I've finished getting down to gravel level.
His belly is soaked and cold. Higher up along his ribs he's warm and gritty, and he smells like a dog who has been standing in water for a while, thinking it over.
I get both hands into his coat and leave them there.
“You,” I tell him, “are the single best thing that has happened on this drive in six years, and I want you to understand that I'm not exaggerating to be polite.”
He takes that as permission to lean, so he leans, and forty pounds of elderly happiness comes to rest against my thigh. Sunday morning, sixty degrees, the light coming flat down the limes.
Both my sleeves are wet to the elbow. My left forearm aches where the cold gets into the scar, and I stay down there anyway, longer than anybody needs to.
Then I remember that a loose dog on this drive is a loose dog on somebody's property, and I stand up.
“You live somewhere down that hill,” I say, “so let's go and be sensible about it before anyone notices you.”
He walks me down. He knows the route better than I do, which tells me something I file and don't look at yet.
Marguerite Ferris is already at the bars on the far side in a gardening coat the color of wet slate, silver bob flattened on one side, holding a lead with nothing on the end of it.
“Oh, there you are, you absolute disgrace,” she says. “I've been up and down Fernhollow twice calling your name like a woman losing her mind in public.”
“He was in the ditch at the fourth bend and he's extremely proud of it,” I say. “I'd have brought him down sooner, but we stopped for a conversation.”
“He does that. He gets one hand on him and he decides he lives with you now.” She hooks the lead over her wrist. “Can you open this thing, or is it one of its days?”
“It's one of its days.” The gate opens for a truck and it doesn't open for me, and I've stopped saying that sentence out loud where the house can hear it. “So we're going to have to do this the undignified way.”
“Post him through, then. He's been posted through worse gaps than that, and he's fatter now than he was for any of them.”
The bars are wide enough for a dignified spaniel. This one has to be compressed slightly at the middle and encouraged, and he goes through with his back feet still running, and Marguerite gets him under the front legs on her side and hauls.
“There's a smell on him,” she says, “that I'd honestly rather not identify until I've had lunch.”
“Ditch water and something older. I'd let him dry outside if you've got the patience for it.”
“I've got seventy-one years of patience and none of it is for him.” She stands, and settles him, and looks up the gravel past me at the roofline. “He's been coming up here for years, you know. Delphine used to give him the ends of things.”
The house came furnished. She never lived here. I've been told that twice, in that order, in that voice.
I keep my face where it is. It's the only thing on this property I still own outright.
“I'll watch for him,” I say. “If he turns up again I'll walk him down.”
“Come and see the dahlias before the frost gets them. They're the only thing I've done right all year.” She lifts his lead like a small salute and goes off down Fernhollow with him wallowing beside her.
I walk back up the drive with a name in my mouth and my hands smelling of wet dog, and I don't hurry, because hurrying is a thing the house can see.
Julian is home on a Sunday, in the great room, in the chair by the south glass with a journal open on his knee. He doesn't look up.
“You had a long chat at the gate yesterday,” he says.
Twenty minutes at the outside, and every one of them on the wrong side of the bars, and not a syllable of it inside these walls. He didn't come in and I didn't go out. He told me the truck opens the gate and I don't, and I told him about the study door, and that was the whole of it.
“He was doing a check,” I say.
“On a Saturday, without a work order.” He turns a page with two fingers, unhurried.
“I looked, because I wondered whether I'd authorised something and forgotten, and I hadn't.
He's a nice man, Evelyn. I want to be clear that I mean that.
I've met him twice and I liked him both times and I'd have him in this house.
He's also on a service contract that pays him a flat monthly whether he drives up this hill or not, which means every hour he spends at our gate is an hour he has chosen to give away for nothing.
That isn't sinister. It's just worth noticing, the way you'd notice a beam carrying more than it was drawn to carry.”
He's used my word for it. He does that sometimes, and he does it well, and it always lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
“He walked the fence line and then he stood there and talked about his dog for a while,” I say. “It wasn't a summit.”
“I'm sure it wasn't.” He smiles at the page.
“While I've got you — and I hate this next part, so I'm going to say it once and then never again — the insurer sent the endorsement through last month and I signed it without reading all of it, which was lazy of me and I've been paying for it in small ways ever since.
There's a clause in there about uncontrolled animals on the property.
If something with four legs is loose on our gravel and a car comes up at any speed, we're the ones holding it.
The owner isn't. It doesn't matter whose dog it is, and it doesn't matter that everybody on this hill has known everybody for forty years. The policy has no section for neighbourliness. I asked. I asked twice, because the first answer annoyed me.”
“That's a lot of trouble over a dog.”
“It's a lot of trouble over a driveway a quarter of a mile long with four blind bends on it.” He closes the journal on his finger, which is as close as he comes to raising his voice.
“I know exactly how this sounds coming out of my mouth on a Sunday.
It sounds like a man being tedious about paperwork while somebody has a nice morning.
But you were in a car in June, and I have read that report more times than is good for me, and I'm not doing that twice.
I'd rather be tedious. I'd rather you thought I was tedious for years.”
He says it warmly. He means it. That's the part nobody would believe if I ever got to say it out loud.
I push once, because I've decided to push once a day and I haven't spent today's yet.
“Have you got that copy for me yet? The full file, not the summary sheet.”
“It's coming. These things take a fortnight.” He opens the journal again and turns a page.
Four things I've asked him for since I came home. Four answers with numbers in them, and none of the numbers has ever been today.
I put that away somewhere with a lid on it. I'm finished asking this man for things.
“What do you want for dinner?” he says. “There's the lamb, or I can do the peppers you said you liked in June, though I've always suspected you only said that to be kind about the peppers.”
“Anything but the fish.”
“Anything but the fish,” he agrees, delighted, and writes it in the margin of his journal like a man taking an order in a restaurant he owns.
The van comes up at fourteen minutes past two.
It's white and clean and it doesn't hurry on the bends.
Two men get out in matching polo shirts, navy, with a logo stitched over the left side of the chest in thread the same color as the cloth.
At twenty feet I can't read it. I walk down to fifteen feet, and then to ten, and it stays a small raised shape that means nothing, and I stop trying because a woman squinting at a man's chest is a story he'll tell later.
The older one has a clipboard with an actual form on it, carbon-backed, two colors.
“Afternoon. Are you the householder?”
“I live here. Can you tell me what the crate is for?”
“Animal control's not us, love.” He says it kindly, the way you'd correct a tourist. “We're the collection. It's an insurance thing — somebody's dog on somebody's drive. There's a call logged and an address and a form, and that's about the whole of my morning, if I'm honest.”
“Whose insurance, though? Because nobody in this house made a call about a dog.”
“Couldn't tell you. We get the job, we get the address, we get the form signed.” He clicks his pen twice. “He'll be at the boarding kennels out past Route 12 by four. Owner rings the number on the card, pays what's owed, collects. Happens more than you'd think.”
The younger one has already found him at the top of the paddock fence, where an old dog goes when he's been shouted at once in his life and remembers it. There's no chasing. He crouches and puts a hand out and talks nonsense, and the dog comes to him because dogs do.
The crate door is spring-loaded. It goes over with a flat metallic clap in the open air of the drive, and the sound bounces off the west wing and comes back a half second later, and that is the loudest thing that happens all day.
Marguerite arrives on foot at the gate about ninety seconds after that. She can't get in. She stands outside the bars with both hands on them, in the exact place I stood yesterday, at the exact height, and neither of us says a word about it.
Julian comes down the drive with his coat on.
“Marguerite. I'm so sorry.” He gets both her hands. “I heard about this eleven minutes ago and I've already made two phone calls that achieved nothing at all, which is humiliating, because it's my drive and my endorsement and my name on the policy that started it.”
“He's fourteen.”
“I know he is. I know.” He doesn't let go of her hands.
“The service is on this card, and the number under it is a direct line, not a switchboard, and the man who answers it is reasonable.
Whatever it costs — the release fee, the boarding, the vet check they'll insist on before they hand him over — send every bit of it to me.
Send it as a bill, not as a favour, so you don't have to be gracious about it.
I'd have carried him down this hill myself if anyone had rung me first, and I'd have complained about my back the entire way.”
She takes the card. Of course she takes it. She'd take it from anybody who'd said that in that voice.
I stand where I am with my hands at my sides and I don't go to her, because if I go to her she'll be kind to me, and I can't carry kindness in front of him today.
This is a proof load. You put the load on the structure to find out what it carries, and you don't do it because you dislike the structure. You do it because you need the number.
He has shown me, inside six hours, exactly what it costs to be a person who talks to me through a gate.
So I won't send word down the hill. I won't have a message reach a man in a gray truck, because a message would tell this house that he matters, and the price of mattering here has been on the gravel all afternoon in a wire box.
The safest thing I can do for him is nothing, and nothing is the only currency I've got left.
There's one word for what this afternoon was, and it's going in the ledger under the registration in block capitals, and the word is demonstration.
“It's a liability matter,” he says, watching the van go down the drive. “Someone's animal, loose, at night. Imagine if it had been a child.”
Upstairs I write down the registration and the time and what color the shirts were, and my hand doesn't shake once. I sit and look at it for a long while. It has never been this steady.