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  A Dog’s Life

  A Dog’s Life

  PAUL BAILEY

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2003

  1

  Copyright © Paul Bailey, 2003

  Illustrations © Alice Tait, 2003

  Photograph on p ii © Jane Brown, 2003

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Excerpt from ‘Song for the Rainy Season’ from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop.

  Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfesee. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strous and Giroux,

  LLC. Excerpt from Step Inside Love by Lennon and McCartney. Reprinted by permission of Sony/ATV

  Music Publishing. Poem and excerpt by Geoffrey Grigson. Reprinted by permission of David Higham

  Associates Limited.

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90145–9

  For Deborah Rogers, with love and gratitude

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to express my gratitude to Jeremy Trevathan for suggesting that I write about Circe. I also wish to thank Jane Gregory for her stimulating company in the park, and Michael Gordon, the vet who cared for Circe throughout her life. My salutations to the ever-patient Tony Lacey and to the incomparable Zelda Turner.

  Contents

  After-Life

  Siren

  Dog Days

  Mongrel Goddess

  Mercurial

  Disque Bleu

  Tour de Powys

  Trial by Jury

  Jam Today

  Clearance

  The Woman in Whites and the Man with a Mission

  Geoffrey’s Socks

  Minders

  The Mating Game

  Toby and Jumbo

  Una Vita Nuova

  Giovanna’s Marshal Tito

  Mumm’s the Word

  Crime Passionnel

  A Time in the Hills

  Scrap

  Circe and Cleopatra

  Raskolnikov

  Roman Artichokes

  Poodles in Paradise

  Summer Snows

  Dude

  The Last Morning Walk

  Coda

  After-Life

  Early one evening in September 1990, I picked up the telephone and dialled a familiar number. The time was five past six. A couple of minutes later, I realized why I was getting no response. The friend I was calling had been dead since March.

  I put down the phone and sat in silence for a while. My action had been happily automatic, I understood with dismay. I had forgotten, in my eagerness to communicate with her, that her sufferings were over and that she was lying in the same grave as the man she loved, in a quiet country churchyard. She was at rest and I, it seemed, was the perturbed spirit.

  I had been living alone since the death of my long-term companion in 1986. Except that I wasn’t on my own, in reality, because I had a dog for company. I had acquired her the previous year, in peculiar circumstances that are related in this collection of memories and musings. She enslaved me from the very first moment of seeing her, and as the months went by I began to wonder if I was starting to emulate J. R. Ackerley, that famous late convert to canine charm. I remembered that the poet William Plomer, a close friend of Ackerley and E. M. Forster, had told me how ‘that bloody dog’ had taken possession of Joe to such an extent that he and Forster were loath to visit the flat in Putney Ackerley shared with his adored Queenie. (Queenie is ‘Evie’ in the novel We Think the World of You, and ‘Tulip’ in the memoir My Dog Tulip – the curious little gems he wrote towards the end of his life.) Would my own friends and acquaintances hesitate before coming to see me for fear of being nipped and barked at by the tireless Circe? I hoped not, though some of them found the business of diverting her a bore, and occasionally said so.

  But Circe was not like Queenie in any respect other than beauty. Joe had recognized a kindred, wounded spirit in the bitch he rescued from his lover’s unthinking, working-class parents, whose idea of exercise was to let the creature out in the back yard, which was the size of the proverbial postage stamp. (Some neighbours of mine, the Patels, emigrants from Idi Amin’s Uganda, kept an Alsatian to protect their newspaper and tobacco shop. They had been advised that an unexercised dog would be more ferocious at warding off intruders and burglars than a healthy, contented one. The unnaturally obese animal escaped when the Patels’ children forgot to close the door behind the counter. The dog, sensing freedom, leapt over the display of sweets and chocolate bars, and dashed out of the shop. He must have run for miles, because he was never traced in west London.) Ackerley, like me, had been indifferent to dogs for most of his life. But the sight of the disconsolate, whimpering Queenie, and the feelings of outrage and pity it invoked, was to afford him an inseparable, loving relationship of a kind he had been unable to sustain with a succession of ‘ideal’ youths. Their relationship was so close, in fact, that Queenie’s jealousy of Joe’s friends became uncontainable.

  Circe had known neither cruelty nor negligence when I chanced upon her in 1985. I had no cause to rescue her. It was clear from the outset that she would not be jealous of the people I knew, whom she invariably greeted with a welcoming bark and a briskly wagging tail. She was a flirt until the end of her days, never happier than when a gentle hand was stroking her tummy. Bitches have an embarrassing habit of attaching themselves to human legs in ways that appear sexually provocative, and Circe was just such a bitch. She showed a certain discrimination in her choice of leg, however, giving me reason to wonder why X’s was preferable to Y’s. Her chosen victim would laugh nervously, or blush from the shock of her abandoned advances, or call her a shameless tart while attempting to extricate himself from her passionate clutch.

  Strangers, beguiled by the dog at my side, stopped to talk to her and, sometimes, to me. The strangest of these lonely, garrulous folk was Marjorie, who lived nearby with a bedraggled black mongrel, ignored by Circe, and a changing selection of cats. I could never quite place her accent, with its faint hint of Eastern Europe. Marjorie’s chatter was concerned with the injustices meted out to the likes of us by Those in Authority. As she grew angrier, she tossed her head back and I was granted a view of her snarling, discoloured teeth. Animals, bless them, were better than human beings, she maintained, and much more trustworthy. I nodded agreement.

  Following the death of my companion, David, Marjorie felt compelled to offer me sympathy and c
ommiseration. Except that she had our names confused, in spite of my quiet and firm efforts to correct her. ‘You must be missing Paul, David,’ she’d say, and I would respond ‘I’m Paul. It’s David who’s dead.’ Our meetings turned into a tiny comedy for me, thanks to her inevitable ‘Paul’s in heaven, bless him’ and ‘Paul’s happier out of it’ and ‘You look happy today, David, like the cat who’s got the cream’ and an uncountable number of similar remarks.

  She continued to address me as David, and I gave up insisting on my identity. Five years after the real David’s death, I wrote a poem about my dual existence. I gave it the title ‘After-Life’:

  Marjorie thinks I’m you, not me.

  She calls me by your name. I’ve stopped

  Correcting her. Some might say

  I’ve given up the ghost.

  Marjorie knows that one of us is dead.

  She asks how long it is since I passed on.

  ‘Five years,’ I answer. She tells me I’m

  At rest now, with the saints and angels.

  Marjorie dotes on animals. She believes

  They’re silent witnesses for God, spying

  On our behaviour. Their once-dumb tongues

  Speak in that heaven I’ve gone to.

  Marjorie’s mad. Marjorie smells. Marjorie’s

  Best avoided. I only meet her when

  I’m turning corners. Then I hear

  You’re looking well, considering; and young.

  Marjorie moved out of the district, though she appears occasionally – dogless now – to do a little shopping and chat to old acquaintances. She walks with a stick, and is shabbier than ever, her hair like an unruly bird’s nest. I was on my way to Hammersmith Hospital on a November afternoon in 2002 when I saw a familiar figure in a tatty overcoat shuffling towards me. ‘Hullo, David,’ I heard. I was not myself again, for the first time in ages. I told her where I was heading, and that I had to keep an appointment with the chief cardiologist. She suddenly clutched my arm with her free hand. ‘Don’t go there,’ she advised. ‘They’ll murder you in there, like they tried to murder me. I wouldn’t go there, David. Be very careful. I want to die when God sees fit, not when they do.’

  I freed myself from her grip, insisting that I didn’t want to be late.

  ‘Take my advice, David. Be careful. Your heart belongs to you, not them.’

  ‘After-Life’ was published in The Times Literary Supplement in September 1991. Some weeks later, in Rome, I was flicking through La Repubblica when I noticed my name and two lines from the poem. The author of the piece seemed to think that I’m a devout Roman Catholic and a devotee of St Francis of Assisi. Marjorie’s belief that animals are ‘silent witnesses for God, spying/On our behaviour’ was now attributed to me. I was Paul, to be sure, but I was also Marjorie, the scruffy mystic.

  *

  Thanks to Circe, I made the acquaintance of Jane Gregory and her dog, a pretty piebald mongrel named Liquorice. She and Liquorice became best friends, but they occasionally fell out with each other, as best friends do. It was wonderful to watch Liquorice bounding across the grass to greet her, and delightful to see them swimming together in the small pond in the Conservation Area of Ravenscourt Park. They would flop into the sometimes stagnant water when the heat was too much for them, emerging sodden and dripping. Jane and I backed away as they vigorously shook themselves dry.

  Jane is a successful literary agent, who represents the kind of authors I seldom read. She is red-haired, and of a fiery disposition. I trembled with fear on those occasions when she marched over to a brutish-looking individual with a large Alsatian or a Staffordshire bull terrier, trumpeting ‘I have a spare bag if you need it.’ The dog was invariably shitting on the open grass, where children played and grown-ups sunbathed. The offender would often accept the bag Jane was holding out to him with varying degrees of reluctant or embarrassed gratitude. She waited until he had picked up the turds, pointing to those he had missed or overlooked. ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ she’d say when the spot was relatively clean again. ‘Don’t forget to bring your own bags next time.’

  There was one spring day, not to be forgotten, when the sky turned green for a few moments. We looked up to see a flock of parakeets, and wondered if we were experiencing an optical illusion of a particularly unusual kind. But no, they were definitely parakeets, as their squawking reminded us. Where had they come from? Not far, probably. I learned in due course that a pair of these exotic creatures, male and female, had flown out of captivity as long ago as the 1920s. They had built their nest in the grounds of Chiswick House, the exquisite folly modelled on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda at Vicenza by the third Earl of Burlington between 1725 and 1729. Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay and Handel were among its earliest visitors. The discriminating birds had chosen this beautiful setting in which to breed. Their descendants must have migrated during the cold, foggy London winters, since it’s impossible to imagine them surviving otherwise. Anyway, there they were, en route to Chiswick, perhaps – a free, happy, voluble family.

  It was in a restaurant in a small town in Wiltshire that Jane Grigson introduced me to Jeremy Round, the first food writer and restaurant critic for the then fledgling newspaper, the Independent. I liked him instantly, because he talked as he wrote – with wit and verve and a sense of mischief. I was amused, as were many others, by the aptness of his name. His girth was Falstaffian, and became even more so during our sadly brief friendship. He addressed me as ‘Doll’ on that first encounter, and ‘Doll’ I remained.

  He came to my flat with his partner – another Jeremy, whom he had met when they were students at Hull University. The two Jeremys were disconcerted to find out on arrival that I shared my life with an energetic dog. She welcomed them with a frenzy of barking. I had to assure them that the deafening racket was her way of demonstrating that they were acceptable to her – as, indeed, was true. Jeremy Trevathan was happier to be a sock-thrower than was Jeremy Round, who quickly tired of the game.

  At the time, I was writing a monthly restaurant column for the Daily Telegraph, and the three of us often ate at the same places. I recall a Sunday spent in Worcester, where we dined in a newly opened bistro, staffed by enthusiastic teenagers. The boy who waited on us was bright-eyed and pink-cheeked. Halfway through the meal, Jeremy Round signalled him over to the table. ‘Could we have another bottle of water, darling?’ he asked, whereupon the pink cheeks reddened. The boy ran down the stairs to the bar. We heard sniggers from below. He was standing in the middle of a group of boys and girls pointing up at Jeremy and exclaiming, ‘That man called me “darling”. That man called me “darling”.’ Jeremy beamed.

  At the end of dinner, Jeremy insisted on paying the bill. He handed the waiter a credit card, and when the youth returned with the chit, Jeremy put a couple of ten-pound notes on the plate with the words ‘That’s for you, darling.’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ Darling spluttered. A phalanx of grinning waiters and waitresses watched as we left the premises.

  On a hot summer morning, Jeremy and I drove to a town in Sussex to investigate a new restaurant. The car’s roof was down, and we were enjoying the sunshine. There were roadworks in progress along several stretches of the route. Many of the labourers were stripped to the waist, and we eyed them appreciatively. Whenever the lights turned green Jeremy waved to the men, calling out, ‘Goodbye, boys’. Some waved back, and one shouted ‘Saucy’ after us.

  There were no leftovers when Jeremy came to dinner. It was an honour and pleasure to cook for him. I don’t think I have ever met anyone with an appetite to match his. He wasn’t a glutton, for his was a discerning palate. He knew exactly what he was eating, down to the minutest ingredient.

  He exuded optimism, a sense that life was a series of exciting surprises, each one to be savoured to the full. He was restless when I knew him, anxious to be on the move. He often talked of the years he had spent in Turkey. He had learnt Turkish and mastered the cuisine. Now, in 1989, he was tired of Englan
d and bored at the prospect of being condemned to write solely about food. It was his intention to move to America, to drive across the entire continent, to make his name there. He had ambitions to be a poet and, perhaps, a novelist. He made this announcement for the future early in the year. Jeremy Trevathan would accompany him, share the adventure. I was saddened at the thought of losing such lively, entertaining company.

  Along with a hundred others, I was to be saddened more seriously in August. I had been invited to attend a congress for food writers in Hong Kong, but declined for reasons of work. Jeremy went, and then travelled on to Macao. It was there that he died, in a hotel bathroom, of a brain haemorrhage. He had enjoyed his meal that evening. His last known words were: ‘What time’s breakfast?’ His body was found in the morning, and the news relayed to his editor at the Independent in London. His parents, on a caravan holiday in France, were difficult to contact, and it was some days before they heard of their terrible loss. Jeremy was thirty-two.

  Jeremy Trevathan flew to Macao to identify his friend, and to bring him back to England.

  Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David were among the admirers who paid generous and heartfelt tributes to him. Elizabeth, with whom I was now friends, was especially devastated. She had always fought against the idea of having a biography written about her, but she changed her mind after reading, and subsequently meeting, Jeremy. Over lunch one day, she more or less appointed him her official biographer, taking pains to stress the reservations she had on the subject of biographical writing. That book would have been the greatest challenge yet for the young Jeremy, who was prepared to meet it. The cantankerous Elizabeth died in 1992, and two biographies – the first lively, but fanciful and inaccurate; the second worthily accurate but dull – have been published already. I can record with confidence that she would have loathed them.

  Jeremy Round is the author of a solitary work. The Independent Cook is typically quirky and idiosyncratic, containing recipes from Turkey, the American South and North Africa, as well as France, Italy and Britain. He would have gone on to write even better books.