by Beth Morrey
As my steps became more deliberate, Bobby looked up at me inquiringly.
“I’m deciding whether to stay or go,” I told her.
She pulled on her lead, dragging me forward, which seemed like an endorsement. Securing her to the railings outside the hall, I noted with amusement that bringing one’s dog to vote seemed to be something of a tradition among Stoke Newington residents. She sat patiently panting alongside a Border Terrier and a Labradoodle with a REMAIN sticker on her collar. If anything, it reinforced my decision. Carthage must be destroyed.
I went inside and took my voting paper. In the flimsy little booth, I stared at it for a second, letting the question settle, then picked up the pencil on a string and marked my cross. Feeling sated, I posted it in the box, smiling at the clerks as I made my way out to be met by a euphoric Bobby. Her greetings were always excessive, rearing up onto her hind legs, whining in ecstasy and mouthing at my wrists in her joy and relief. To Bobby, everything was black and white. If I left, it was forever; when I came back, it was for good. She worked in a world of absolutes.
That’s what everyone said about picking sides, that it was a stark choice, yes or no. Hang on or let go. But it wasn’t that simple. There were other considerations in play; shades of gray where you didn’t necessarily agree or disagree but instead believed that one side summed up your feelings more than the other. I wanted to give Leo a voice, but more than anything I just wanted things to change, to stop feeling sad and bitter and lonely. That small act of rebellion made me feel I could change course even in the closing seconds of the race. Life in the old dog yet.
So I left the polling station with a spring in my step, despite the increasingly heavy skies. Rather than take Leo the usual flowers, I took my poll card and left it with him as a kind of offering. As I reached home with Bobby, the first fat drops of rain were falling, and we only just made it indoors before the heavens opened. I dried her in the hallway with an old towel and she sat obediently, lifting each paw for me to rub. When I finished I found myself kissing her on the snout, and she returned the favor, licking me on the nose.
It was so dark inside that I had to switch on the lights, once again relishing the artful clutter of my refurbished living room. Dear Sylvie, hopefully her headache was better. I bustled about making tea and replenishing Bobby’s bowl of water, then settled on the sofa for a read while she twitched and snorted on her bed nearby, her jaws a whisker away from the squirrels scurrying through her dreams. We had an early night, lulled by the relentless drum of the rain on the windows, Bobby in her usual place at the foot of my bed.
* * *
—
In the park the next morning, the rain had made way for bright sunshine, the dawn of a new day, though I had to traipse through huge puddles that Bobby lapped at eagerly. Apart from a couple of rather glum nods from fellow dog walkers, we didn’t speak to anyone. Angela texted me on my way back home, suggesting we meet at our café, and craving warmth and chat, I accepted. We met at eleven, when the early morning rush had passed. She was slumped at our usual table, Otis perched on the chair next to her sucking furiously at a milkshake. Hanna came to take my order and I noticed her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Probably boyfriend trouble.
“I can’t believe it,” said Angela, stirring her coffee and twiddling the spoon in her fingers in place of a cigarette. “How could they? Imbeciles. Do they not realize what will happen? The economy in shreds, every racist and bigot in the country coming out of the woodwork, funding down the fucking toilet, it’ll be impossible to travel anywhere, God knows what else. What were they thinking? The mind boggles, I tell you, the mind boggles.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
She stared at me incredulously. “The vote, of course!”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
She leaned across to the next table, grabbed a newspaper and shook the front page in my face. I took it from her and read the headline. The words blurred in front of me, then came into sharp focus. I blinked.
“I can’t believe it.” I kept my head down, still reading so she couldn’t see my expression.
“You’ll see how it all unravels now. All this bollocks about global trade and sovereignty. What a crock of shit.”
Hanna brought over my coffee and I thanked her, pushing aside the paper. People tended to overdramatize, so all this talk of recession and deporting foreigners would no doubt come to nothing. I busied myself adding milk to my coffee and nibbling the little almond biscuit they served with it, realizing it never occurred to Angela to think I had voted anything but the same way as her, the same way as everyone we knew. I resolved that she must never know what had happened in that voting booth, how far I’d strayed. Like other unmentionable things, it must be rolled up, stuffed away and forgotten.
We made our way to the playground, Angela still grumbling as I helped Otis collect twigs to make a bird’s nest. I watched Bobby trotting back and forth, tail waving as she sniffed and frolicked here and there. I’d grown used to her company on these walks, used to the other company we found as a result. In the few short months she’d been with me, I’d talked to more people here than in the fifty years before. The realization shamed me, just as the headlines had earlier.
I watched Otis on the swings, kicking his legs to propel himself higher and higher, and I wondered what opportunities would be lost as a consequence of that vote, what chances would be denied him, what he would miss out on. Maybe it would be fine, maybe it would be a disaster, maybe something in between. Whatever the outcome I’d have to live with it, and my part in it. Just another cross for me to bear.
Chapter 24
June gave way to July and the sun scorched the grass in the park until it withered and yellowed. Bobby wilted, spending her days flopped in the hallway where the tiled floor was cooler. Her fur was so thick, I considered taking her to the groomer’s to get it clipped, but when I suggested the idea to Angela she was horrified.
“She’s like Samson, it’ll take away her strength!” she said, clapping her hands over Bobby’s pricked-up ears. But there was no doubt she felt the heat, and I took to walking her earlier in the morning to escape the worst of the sun’s rays. I rather liked ambling around the park on our own before anyone else arrived and took possession. The beginning of a summer’s day bristled with possibility, and unlike Bobby, I relished the heat seeping through my veins, firing up my cylinders—I didn’t feel quite so stiff and old in summer.
Mel came to visit one Saturday, her first time back to the house since our fight, and we were both surprised to find that we enjoyed each other’s company, even in the very same room where we’d rowed so viciously the year before. After lunch, we went to take flowers to Leo together, which although a sober event, at least felt companionable. On the way back, she broke the somber silence brought on by the visit.
“I miss him.”
I stared at the huge gnarled trees that lined the broad avenue we were walking along. “I miss him too.”
“Sometimes I talk to him as if he’s still there. As if he’s going to say, ‘Buck up, hedgehog! Onwards!’”
I tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sob. “Did you . . .” I was going to ask if she got my letter, but all of a sudden it felt like too much. “Did you go to look at that place on Eltisley Avenue?”
Mel and Octavia were thinking of buying a bigger flat, as they had too many books, but they couldn’t decide between one near Midsummer Common and another closer to Newnham. She outlined the benefits of both, then mentioned she was worried about her research funding being cut as a result of “Brexit.” Like Angela, she never questioned my own role in it all. I didn’t tell her, not being so stupid as to knock down the wobbly bridges we were building, but did suggest that Leo might have voted differently if he’d been able to.
Mel stared at me in astonishment. “Of course he wouldn’t have voted to
leave! The very idea!”
“But . . .” I wanted to make my case without giving myself away. “He always used to moan about Brussels bureaucrats . . .”
Mel snorted. “Yes, and he also used to moan about Disraeli’s crappy novels but that didn’t stop him thinking he was a genius.”
It compounded my shame to think I’d voted to give Leo a voice and ascribed him the wrong one. Every day brought a new story to add to my overloaded conscience. Angela told me that Hanna the waitress had returned home one day after work to find that someone had daubed POLES GO HOME across her door. The economy was in free fall, everyone said, the pound losing so much value that it would soon be worth about as much as the sticks Bobby brought me on our walks. What would happen to my pension? Money was tight enough as it was, every day brought more bills for me to ignore, and the other day I’d had a phone call from Horace Simmonds, our bank manager. He was an old friend of Leo’s, so I placated him with some halfhearted assurances. I knew I shouldn’t ignore it but it felt like too big an issue to deal with—easier to roll it up and stash it away. I couldn’t tell Mel any of it—she’d start up again about me downsizing—so instead suggested we take the dog for a stroll.
When we arrived back at the house we found Angela waiting for us at the gate with Otis and a black bin bag. Remembering the bag that Sylvie brought me, I thought of the dog bed in my living room, coated in a layer of hairs, reeking of Bobby’s sour old sock stench, a smell I was gradually learning to live with. Once again she was drooping in the heat. As we drew nearer, Angela put her hand in the bag and pulled out something blue and plastic, which she shook in our faces triumphantly.
“Got a hose?” she asked, grinning. It was a children’s paddling pool.
We took it to the lawn in the back garden, and Angela began blowing it up while Mel got the hose out of the shed. It was only a small pool, with three plastic rings, but seeing it there reminded me of summers when the children were small and I used to set up a sprinkler for them, watching them shriek with delight as they ran backward and forward. I was touched by the recollection, an oasis in the desert, as I had a depressing tendency to think of those years as endlessly miserable and exhausting. Like dwelling on a single criticism in a sea of gushing compliments, I recalled my failures rather than my triumphs, and for every sprinkler snapshot there seemed to be a whole album of snappy early starts rearing up to rebuke me. We had some lovely times, Mel, Alistair and I. I just had to work a bit harder to remember them.
Once the pool was inflated, Mel filled it up while Angela helped Otis put on his swimming trunks as he hopped from one foot to the other in excitement. Bobby circled the pool, tail wagging warily, and then sat watching and panting as Otis put his toe in the water. It took him about ten minutes of dipping and screeching to finally immerse himself, but then he was off, splashing and shouting, skinny little body glistening in the sunshine. We drank the Pimm’s and lemonade Mel had brought with her, and sat on Sylvie’s green-flowered cushions, watching him enjoy himself. After about an hour he started to get cold, so I fetched a towel and he sat on his mother’s lap, snug as a bug in a rug, while we idly chatted and Bobby lay with tongue lolling.
Eventually we went indoors to find some shade, Mel exclaiming over my new living room and admiring the portrait of her grandfather William Jameson, and Angela persuading her to stay for a takeaway. They went off to find the menu, and after putting the kettle on, I went back outside intending to use the paddling pool water to give my plants a much-needed drink. But as I stepped out the back door I was brought up short by the sight that greeted me.
Every now and again, some inner demon in Bobby’s brain would unleash a brief but intense frenzy. Sylvie called it the “funny five minutes.” We’d observed it on a few occasions in the park, when she’d sniffed something interesting, met a dog she particularly liked, or simply when the mood took her. It didn’t happen often, but when it did it was monumental. She would race around in a furry whirlwind, barking on every about-face, carving up the ground with her claws, a tangle of limbs and teeth, until she’d exhausted herself, and then she’d flop down, eyes rolling, looking to be congratulated on her performance.
Now the paddling pool had instigated a full-fledged session. In and out of the pool she jumped, splashing with abandon, leaping out to shake herself and race around the garden. Then back in for another demented dip, out for a shake, race round the lawn, and repeat. As it went on, the spectacle became more and more amusing, and I started to giggle. Angela, Otis and Mel joined me at the back door and soon we were all laughing helplessly, wiping tears and splashes from our faces as Bobby’s antics drenched us as well as her. Finally she skidded to a halt in front of us, panting vigorously, the wet fur plastered to her body making her look half her usual size.
“She’s mental,” said Otis admiringly as Bobby stood for one last shake and settled down to dry in the early-evening sun.
Bobby’s deranged romp had depleted the pool but there was still enough for me to give my roses a good soak while we waited for the takeaway to be delivered. Wandering amidst my flowers, I watched Bobby’s crinkling fur and spread-eagled paws twitching, and felt envious of her ability to let herself go like that. She was such an avid, simple creature; she had no secrets, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to apologize for—she just let it all hang out.
The pool was still half-full, lapping gently at the sides after my onslaughts with the watering can, so I slipped off my sandals and stepped into it. Silken coolness between my toes, I gazed down at the abiding blue swilling around my weathered feet. I wanted to wash away my sins, shed them like an old skin and step out refreshed and unblemished, a clean slate. As if shuffling round a paddling pool, recently vacated by a mad mongrel, could achieve that. I could already see the dog hairs gathering round my ankles.
One of my earliest memories was my mother taking me to the Parliament Hill Lido when I was tiny. I remember watching her swimming in the pool, dark hair swarming behind her. She whipped round and swam back toward me, then held her arms out of the water. “Milly! Come!” I was standing on the side in a little knitted costume that itched at the shoulders and the water would stop the itch, but I couldn’t jump because there was a spider in the way. At least, it wasn’t a spider, just a crack on the pool’s side tile, but it might have been a spider. It might. I couldn’t get past it, just in case it moved and then it was a spider. So I just stood there, desperate to take the plunge but stuck at the side. Eventually my mother couldn’t resist floating away.
Bobby huffed herself onto her haunches and wandered over to look at a fly scrabbling on the surface. I noticed earlier that she seemed very fond of Melanie, who took every opportunity to fuss over her and tell her she was beautiful. Surprised to find myself feeling a little jealous, I pulled one of her ears and sighed. “She reminds me of things I’ve done wrong.” I thought of our argument, the guilt that made my rage all the more encompassing. Rage that had now dissipated, but still hung in the air like static. Despite the fact that Mel and I had brokered a kind of unspoken peace, I preferred not to think of that day; if I could ignore it for long enough, maybe the lack of thought would make it fade like an old photo.
“Mum, what on earth are you doing?” It was Mel at the back door with a loaded paper bag in one hand and a popadam in the other. I hastily got out of the pool and shuffled back into my sandals.
“Just trying it out,” I said, taking the popadam off her and sliding past. Shaking her head, she followed me inside, a still-damp Bobby squeezing through between us. I’d have to save my funny five minutes for another day.
Chapter 25
Lancaster Villas
Kensington W8
21 September 1942
My dearest Will,
I had a letter from Sibyl the other day. I was surprised because you know she is not one for lengthy epistles or indeed any form of communication for that matter. Too busy with her chickens. Anywa
y, she wrote to say that Henry & Milly are doing very well, they are at school up there and enjoying the countryside by all accounts. Best of all Sibby included a note from Milly herself! I can’t bring myself to send it to you in case it gets lost so the following is inscribed verbatim:
Dare Mama
I lov you. Ar room is hiy. Ther ar sheep.
Milly
Isn’t that fine! I’m so glad Sibby didn’t try to correct any of it, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much. There was also a picture, which I think may have been one of the sheep. I won’t try to re-create it here.
Things are pretty much the same in London. Father has stopped going down to the cellar during the raids. Says he’ll either die or he won’t and going downstairs won’t make a difference. Mother has started sewing again, always a bad sign.
With the children (and you) away I am glad to have my work. The ambulances make pretty heavy driving, but I am getting used to them. My usual hours are six at night till eight in the morning. We have to go out as soon as the bombs start dropping, otherwise there is no one left to save. At first it was daunting but nowadays we’re usually too busy to notice. The other night a bomb hit a theater in Tottenham Court Road. The show was packed with soldiers home on leave—many of the casualties were in uniform. They’d been laid out in the road with a rug over them, and we had to check if they were all dead so we knew whether to take them to hospital or the mortuary.
I found one chap who was alive among them and held his hand for a while as I waited for him to pass. He said, “Tell Elsie I love her,” and I said I would. We loaded him and the others up and drove them to the mortuary, but they wouldn’t take them without a doctor’s certificate. So we had bodies in the car but nowhere to put them. In the end we had to leave them in a back street. None of us liked it but what could we do? There were others who still had a chance and we had to help them.