It was Howard who got the dog. He came back from his mother’s with it tucked into his jacket.
‘Flossie had her puppies,’ he said.
Howard specialises in this sort of thing. He is never more sure-footed than when embarking on what is easy to do and difficult to undo. He specialises in commitment. The dog is a Jack Russell. He is small and firm and vigorous, with a coarse white coat and bright, staring eyes. They call him Skittle.
Claudia likes having a new life in the house. The puppy has to be fed at night, like a baby, and he leaves little pools of golden urine all over the floor. Her sister Juliet tells her to keep Skittle close to her at this early stage. Claudia carries him around in her arms when the children are at school.
One day, sitting stroking him on her lap while she reads the paper, Claudia looks down at Skittle’s body. He is prone with pleasure: his hairy muzzle is flung back and his sinuous loins are quivering. Suddenly Claudia is repelled. There is something unsavoury in the dog’s excitement, in his pink trembling groin. She puts him on the floor. He frets at her legs, raking her calves with his sharp little claws.
‘No!’ she says, grasping him firmly around the middle. ‘Don’t scratch – no!’
She places him a few feet away. He writhes in her hands. When she lets him go he scrabbles frantically towards her and gets up on his hind legs again, putting his claws in her flesh. She spanks him with the flat of her hand. He cowers, contorting his narrow body, gazing at her with his orb-like, fanatical eyes.
It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings. Claudia puts the covers on the outdoor furniture. She gathers the apples where they lie rotting around the tree. Everything is poised between readiness and decay. She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and crying out when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaws snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room.
Howard gets home at half past seven. He wears an air of expectation, of excitement, though for him the day is nearing its conclusion – Howard is usually asleep by half past ten. Claudia sometimes wonders what his excitement signifies. He is like someone eagerly awaiting dessert, the main courses behind him. Sweet though they are, these are the rituals of conclusion. He discards his coat and briefcase in the hall, finds the children and roughhouses them with his big bear’s body, drinks two glasses of wine one after the other standing by the kitchen counters; after which he is red-faced, blissful-looking, rubbing his eyes with his shirt tails hanging out.
‘It’s been the loveliest weather,’ Claudia says wistfully. ‘I was thinking what a shame it is we can’t go away this weekend.’
Howard blinks. ‘What are you saying, Claude? You’re telling me something but I don’t know what it is.’
‘Just that we could have gone to Scotland, or to that place in Derbyshire your brother told us about. There hasn’t been such a lovely autumn for years.’
Howard leafs through the letters on the kitchen table, looking at them over the tops of his glasses. ‘Well, I’m going to Scotland,’ he says, abstractedly. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll be back last thing Sunday.’
‘But we can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘We can’t take the dog.’
Claudia notices the smallest hesitation before Howard replies.
‘Of course we can take the dog. We just chuck him in the back of the car with a bowl of water.’
‘We’re not driving all the way to Scotland, just for the weekend. We’d have to fly, or go by train.’
‘We’ll do the other one, then. Derbyshire. Where’s Derbyshire? It can’t be that bloody far away. What’s the name of this place? Let’s phone Tom and ask him. They can come too – we’ll all go together.’ Howard is now standing by the telephone with the receiver in his hand. ‘What’s his number?’
Claudia finds the number. It is Howard’s speciality – commitment. She has grown accustomed to it, going with Howard into the future like a boat breasting choppy waters, the sensation of uplift just ahead, the momentary resistance and the breaking through. She is dependent on it – she was from the start. Years ago they stood on the beach at Mothecombe, watching a family play cricket on the sand at the end of the summer’s day. Howard was enchanted by the sight, the children calling and laughing in the pink light.
‘Let’s get on with it Claude,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, sunset on his face. ‘I don’t want to fuck about. I want the lot. I want a cricket team of our own.’
They had only known each other three weeks.
Thomas and Tonie can’t come to Derbyshire. Howard tries Leo, who agrees to meet them there with Susie and the children.
‘What about those people in Bath – the Mattisons?’
‘The Morrisons,’ Claudia says.
‘We haven’t seen them for bloody years.’
He rings the Morrisons. They too agree to come to Derbyshire. It is nearly ten o’clock. Howard, bleary-eyed, eats his dinner on the phone, shovelling it up with his fork. He rings the hotel. Claudia remembers that she hasn’t put Martha to bed. She hurries upstairs. Lottie and Lewis are watching television. Martha is reading in her room. She looks very small, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Claudia wonders if her growth is being stunted. Someone told her this could happen if a child didn’t get enough sleep.
Downstairs Howard is still on the phone. He puts his hand over the receiver when he sees Claudia.
‘They don’t take dogs,’ he says.
*
Skittle gets into the bedroom and savages Claudia’s shoes, her silk dressing gown, the old Gucci handbag she had as an art student in London, before Howard took possession of her with his plans. It is this last piece of vandalism that smites her heart. It is as though there were nothing else left from that time, nothing to hold it off from extinction but the once-familiarity of that object in worn rust-coloured suede. Now it is mauled beyond recognition. She raises it above her head, about to throw it at him. He is cringing beneath the bed, a shred of silk trailing from his jaw. His crazy eyes stare at her out of the shadows. He is delinquent: he is, she sees, beyond the reach of punishment. She puts the bag in the dustbin.
All day Skittle whines and scratches at the door, begging to be let in or out. She takes him for walks, dragging him by the lead along Laurier Drive. He is maddened by the whirling piles of yellow leaves, by the springing birds, by plastic bags that occasionally swim like phantoms across the pavements in the breeze. He flinches whenever she speaks, emitting nervous squirts of urine. When he runs his body is so bowed and contorted that he goes diagonally, scuttling like a crab. He stands in the middle of the room, barking at nothing. Juliet gives Claudia the name of a pet psychiatrist.
‘He hates me,’ Claudia says. ‘Also, I think there’s something wrong with him. He isn’t like a normal dog. I see other people with their dogs. He isn’t like them.’
‘A dog is like a child,’ Juliet says. Juliet has no children.
‘I just told you, this dog isn’t even like a dog.’
‘I did wonder at the wisdom of your taking on something else, when you’ve got so much already. I didn’t like to say anything.’
‘Howard brought him home. It wasn’t up to me.’
‘Why do you always say that? He wouldn’t do it if you didn’t let him. It’s the same with your painting. It’s always other people stopping you doing it. It’s never you.’
Claudia has noticed the way a childless woman will defend the man. She will side against the mother, for her sympathies haven’t yet been transformed. Claudia remembers, when Lottie was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.
The pet psychiatrist phones Claudia several times a day.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Outside. In the garden.’
There is a steady thumping at the back door. It is Skittle hurling himself against it. Claudia has watched him do it, watched him take a little run and then fling himself at the wood. It startles her, for she often has the impulse to pick Skittle up and throw him, dash him against an unyielding surface. The way he looks is exactly as she had imagined it.
‘How would you describe his behaviour, Claudia?’
‘Angry. He wants to come in.’
‘Why don’t you let him in? What would happen?’
Claudia sighs. ‘He’d be just as desperate to be let out again.’
The psychiatrist suggests that she leave the door open. This improves things, though it makes the house cold. At the weekend Howard buys a catflap and fits it to the back door. The children sit there all afternoon, teaching Skittle to jump through it. He is small enough to fit, but his sense of its physical impossibility is difficult to overcome. He has proved the door is solid: how can it have changed its properties? Lewis and Martha sit one either side of the flap, passing and re-passing Skittle through the hole.
‘I should think that’s quite therapeutic,’ Claudia says to Howard.
Later she hears a shriek from downstairs.
‘Watch this,’ Lewis says calmly, when Claudia appears.
‘He did it! He did it!’ Martha cries.
They put Skittle out in the garden and close the door. Lewis kneels by the flap and then claps his hands twice. There is a pause, before Skittle comes flying through like a torpedo.
‘Extraordinary,’ Claudia says, laughing, while Skittle tears wildly around the kitchen, making mad arabesques in the air.
The feeling of letting go, of surrender: it warms her veins like a tranquiliser, spreading its numb bliss. She has blunted the sharp end of life this way. She fades out, her doubt and pain and anxiety left hollow like a casing, like a shell on a beach. She is used to it, to leaving hollowed-out things behind her. They lie scattered in her past, questions to which the answers were never found. What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? And the most important, the most unanswerable: if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?