by Kate Spicer
‘I wish, I wish. I …’ Self-pity billows in my chest, anger simmers in ears, sadness roils in my gut. What did I wish? To leave Charlie? A few years ago my friend Britt had given me one of those indispensable maxims to live by. When she was sick of her husband and mooted divorce, her mother always said, ‘Honey! No point.’ It works a lot better said with gusto and an American accent. ‘You’re just gonna be swapping one asshole for another.’ We love to chorus this to each other. At times like this, it has given me real solace.
Did I wish not to be with this specific guy who put tomatoes in the fridge and liked going to bed early? Or did I want to be free of a dependence on men entirely so that I didn’t have to compromise? I let the snot and saltwater flow. Oh poor me—‘Oh! Ooh. Ah! A flea!’ The little bugger is cruising through the fur on the dog’s side with the entitled arrogance of a Saudi prince burning up his Lambo on the Knightsbridge streets at 3 a.m. ‘You fucker.’ I pincer my fingernails and go in for the kill. And another. I get off the step and down on my haunches and rummage in primate ecstasy. The comb, get the comb! I lurch to the cupboard in the bathroom where we keep the dog’s grooming kit. After a protracted flea-killing spree I realise I don’t want to be unhappy any more.
That miserable bastard upstairs, so flawed, so grumpy, so selfish, so … how dare he; especially with me being so perfect and all I loathe him right now, but Charlie and I are bonded, not by kids, or marriage, but by a dog, one currently with fleas – not to mention the little matter of a cash black hole also known as a mortgage. When, on and off, the love comes back, we’ll be bonded by that too.
I get into bed, thinking how reassuring it is to feel the heaviness of the hairy lump at my feet. I reach down and, through a mixture of coaxing and dragging, get his 21 kilos up the bed and lie spooning him and stroking his silky chest with my face snuggled into the warm biscuity fur at the back of his neck. He lets out a happy puff of air. ‘Mmmn.’
‘You OK?’ I ask Charlie.
There are three possible answers to this: ‘Urgh, fucking hell, I’m going to sleep downstairs,’ accompanied by a thundering flounce out of the bedroom, that’s one. Then there’s a sharp, irritated ‘Mneurgh,’ two.
I get an ‘Mmmmnummnumnumb.’
That’s a yes. That’s good. That’s animal happiness.
Training your dog is an important part of bonding, so we do the odd ten minutes. I teach him paw. Lie down. Stay.
He’s iffy on stay. One morning I see a tall gentleman wearing a Barbour and elephant cords training his two gun dogs by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. They stay even when he turns his back and walks away a considerable distance. He can make one stay while the other fetches. He’s like an air traffic controller of black Labradors. The low morning sun has just burst through the legs of Physical Energy, the statue of a man on a rearing horse, which Wolfy is busying himself pissing on while I watch this posh chap and his hypervigilant Labs.
Rummaging in my pocket, I find a few lint-encrusted bits of kibble, or Woof nuts as Charlie and I call them. Wolfy too, I think, thrilled with determination, will acquire this impressive skill and all the people in the park will wonder at my obedient clever animal.
‘Stay!’ He sits alert and still for a moment, but within a second or two he has discovered an itch. It is all-consuming. His leg is violently attacking the itch at his side and his whole body is engaged in the action. Itch scratched, he immediately bounds forward towards me, thoughts of stay long gone.
I try again.
And again.
Even without the scratching, the maximum distance I can move before he bounds towards me is about six metres. I imagine the six metres between us is a road and flinch at the thought of him plunging through traffic despite my confident ‘Stay!’ command.
After about eight attempts I give up and command him to go ‘Down!’, where I rub his tummy for a bit until his tickle leg starts cycling in reflexive response. Then we just sit. I wonder if people walk past and think, look at that gorgeous dog with that cool-looking woman. There’s a patch of black on the roof of his pink panting mouth, symmetrical and abstract like a Rorschach ink blot. Wolfy, you’re amazing.
We walk on, following the edge of the Long Water, which becomes the Serpentine.
He stops to drink from the water when we reach Hyde Park, at the bank opposite the Henry Moore sculpture while I crouch, waiting.
It’s still early. Perhaps I’ll go for a swim.
We amble on under the Serpentine Bridge, where the poet Shelley’s pregnant wife, Harriet Westbrook, jumped to her death 200 years ago. Two weeks later Shelley married the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the woman credited with being the first published feminist. Whenever I swim in the Serpentine, I always think of Harriet; picture her standing there in her long dress. She would have been miserable.
If only human relationships were as easy as the ones we have with animals.
At first when I brought Wolfy to the Serpentine he would howl and bark as he sat on the pontoon over the lake watching me swim two short laps. A couple of months on, we have found a little routine.
‘OK Woofs, you STAY. Stay!’ I say as I drop into the water. As I swim off I turn on my back and look at him and hold up my hand and say in a low voice, ‘You stay!’
Thus instructed, he sits on the pontoon and watches me swim off. I look back every few minutes and he’s sat there still, watching – or occasionally wandering off to find a friendly Serpentine club member to stroke him, but still staying nearby. It’s not warm enough for him today, but in hot weather he’ll potter off to the shallows, enter the water and keep trying to spot me. He’ll wade around drinking the murky black water and watching. Sometimes, he plops his bum in to cool.
However ludicrous my attempts to ape the gun-dog chap training his black Labs in Kensington Gardens, Wolfy is trained fine enough for our purposes. We don’t go shooting snipe or woodcock. I just want to go for a swim sometimes. After 15 minutes he’s asking where I am in a thin, howl that travels just enough for me to hear it the water. He’s not distressed, he’s ready for me to come back now and I do. I swim back and when he sees me he runs excitedly to the exit ramp and paddles in up to the point where his deep ribs touch the water. He’s got a spiky wet patch of fur between his ears where the swimmers leaving the water have put their hands out for a soggy-pawed scruffle of his head.
Once I’ve hauled myself out he springs off his four paws like a lamb, bucking his rear end in excitement. Barefoot and in my swimming costume, I run alongside him the length of the tarmac beside the lido, 100 metres of dodging huge heaps of waterfowl shite and him leaping in circles and doing loony runs up the bank onto the grass before he shoots back to jump on two kangaroo back legs until he is level with my eyes.
‘Welcome back. It’s so good to see you!’
‘You too.’
We both sit in the sun and look out over the water. I close my eyes, breathing sunlight and morning through my pores. Wolfy lies under the bench and rests his chin on his crossed paws. This is happiness. This is it.
Today, many very rich people move among us in Notting Hill. Of them there is a breed – the rich man’s wife – and they do a lot of Pilates, hire personal trainers, get regular blow-dries and in August they leave en masse for the Mediterranean for at least a month. We normals get to watch this on Instagram. I know a few of them, and I am an occasional visitor to their world. Sometimes, Wolfy comes with me.
Meet Claudia.
Clauds lives ‘up on the hill’ on the edge of the W11 postcode closest to Notting Hill Gate. She tells me that one of her sons is nagging her to get a dog. She says she doesn’t like dogs personally – ‘can’t see the point of them’ – but that her son is beginning to wear her down. I suggest he comes and picks up poo on a walk with me; perhaps that will put him off. I collect Alfie from the big house on the hill and we drive back down to where Charlie and I live in Notting Dale, which, as the name would suggest, is very much not the hill. En route to the Scru
bs I point out a few famous people’s houses. David Cameron and Marcus Mumford he’s heard of, less so Michael Gove and Damon Albarn.
The Dale is where I live, I say, gesturing towards our back door that is also our front door, and this, I say as we drive on down Treadgold Street, is where the poor people live. Granted, it’s not as if it was Victorian London, when the whole area was a fetid and disease-ridden slum, but I say ‘poor’ to emphasise the privilege that he clearly takes for granted.
‘Have you read any Dickens?’
He mumbles something about school and the GCSE syllabus.
‘Dickens wrote about London in the nineteenth century, when it was poor, like poor, poor. Third world poor. People lived crammed into filthy slums that simply defy understanding today unless you’ve been to some of the sadder places in Africa. Charles Dickens is more interesting if you read it like documentary rather than homework.’
I know why I’m using the word poor. I know a rather regal yoga teacher who lives on the Lancaster West Estate. Poor isn’t really an accurate descriptor of many people living there. I’m just being a snide wanker. Alfie looks silently out of the window with curiosity. The person I am really talking to is his mother.
‘Where is my house?’ he asks, confused.
‘It’s about three streets up there.’
The streets where his parents live have no covered Muslim ladies on them, no black people. It’s as homogenous up there as it is not down here in the Dale. There is no pavement traffic there aside from the odd builder or swishy-ponytailed girl walking with a yoga mat. Their street has a little car with a man and an Alsatian in it, which patrols the streets at night. It’s different up on the hill.
‘You know, dogs are a big responsibility Alfie. They rely on you for everything, they need to be walked, fed, training is a chore and it takes time. A lot of people think dogs are like toys but they have a soul like humans, they deserve a good life. Your parents don’t really want a dog, do they?’
‘No, Mum says she’s too busy but that if I promise to look after it, then “maybe”.’
I take my killjoy responsibilities very seriously. ‘You have to pick up all their poo if you’re in London. All the poo. That could be eight hundred poos a year if you include a busy day. When you can’t be bothered to do all this stuff, or when you’re at school, who would look after the dog, Alfie?’
‘Mum says Ernie will care for him.’ Ernie is their housekeeper Perla’s boyfriend, and works as their chauffeur and handyman. ‘Ernie says he loves dogs. Ernie says he is brilliant with dogs.’
An ability to delegate domestic tasks is one of the reasons the rich stay rich. They have time to ensure they remain rich and thin and pretty and socially connected. They live longer because they don’t have to pick up underpants, socks or dog shit.
Man, I would love to delegate all that stuff, all the administrative gumpf, like bill-paying and permit-buying, all the blow-drying of hair, and the maintenance of fitness. I don’t even like washing my own face. I’m well up for delegating all the boring stuff. But the delegation of loving and caring for a dog seems to me more like a sacrifice than a godsend. ‘I don’t understand why people have dogs if they don’t want to spend time with them.’
Alfie isn’t into walking and he drags along behind me in a teenaged torpor. After the brief flurry of chat in the car, extracting conversation is hard work and I am starting to resent the imposition of this privileged child on my precious Saturday afternoon dog walk. He does not pick up any shit because the dog extrudes his choco gifts miles off in the long grass and sometimes you gotta let these things go, though it rather negates my assertion about picking up all the poo.
When we get back to the big white house on the hill his baby sister greets the dog and scurries off with her little hand round his collar, scolding, petting and mauling in quick succession. ‘Give me his lead, I am going to take him for a walk in the garden.’ She instructs me to do her bidding in the tyrannical way of the four-year-old.
I hand her the lead. Everyone talks about how sweet it is and gets their phones out, the angelic, delicate little blond girl in the designer dress dragging my big shaggy dog along by his neck. This is what cockerpoos were bred for, this is what Wiggles was designed for, not my mellow, regal hound. The child performs for the camera, alive to the attention and ranks of iPhones pointing at her. ‘Hey, don’t pull hard,’ I say. ‘How would you like it if someone dragged you along like that round your neck?’
The little girl is shocked. She stares at me for a heartbeat and then starts wailing, the tears squirting sideways from her gorgeous saucer eyes. Mummy runs to her. ‘Sorry Clauds,’ I say. ‘She was being a bit rough.’
Claudia concentrates on equanimity, she is polished and educated, though not so much that she threatens her husband’s intellect, she is the consummate hostess. She is never rude. She is always poised, with fragrant, glossy, bouncy brown hair that seems to give off a golden iridescence under her home’s subtle and flattering uplighting. She is what men dream of, I know they do, however much they protest they like tough women, weathered women, feisty women, Claudia is the perfect wife. Her protective maternal instinct is clearly at odds with me scolding her child but her charm and manners override that and she reassures her daughter who recovers and returns to Wolfy and is stroking him briskly back and forth on his fur. I try to keep a steady gentleness in my voice this time.
‘Can you stroke him like this?’ I ask in a ‘let’s play’ kind of way, forcedly cheerful like a kids’ TV presenter. I run my hand steadily in one direction along his back.
‘Ze dog is just ze dog,’ says a German man, younger than me, but with that ageing conservative dress of Euro money. He is wearing a white cashmere polo neck and a blue blazer and is standing by the wall of glass that is magnificent and functionally Claudia’s back door (she also has a front door, a basement entrance and a side door; if you have a ladder, the large balcony outside the bedroom also has a wide concertina door into the house). Ze German is holding a glass of red wine and looking, very much, down upon me. ‘You pay too much attention to the dog, it is not good for the dog. The dog is the servant of man, man is not the servant of the animal.
‘People are far too sentimental about animals, and especially the dogs and horses. If you would eat a pig, then you should be prepared to eat a dog, they are of a similar intelligence after all.’
‘Sorry, I am not clear why you are saying this to me. Clearly I have no intention of eating my dog. I love my dog.’
‘We noticed,’ he says. ‘Very sweet.’
Claudia comes over. ‘Ah, you have met Gunther,’ she says, ‘our in-house controversialist.’ She pulls a face, but still looks exquisite. ‘Is that even a word?’
He’s an old friend of her husband Jim’s apparently, ‘from Cambridge. ‘Rich List,’ she mumbles through a cheeky smile, for my ears only. Oh of course you are, you patronising cunt, I think. ‘Hello.’ I beam a warm smile and move to shake his hand as he comes in for a two-cheek continental air-kiss. Awkward.
‘Und who is this guardian of the species canis?’ He snorts, not rudely, more flirtatiously, but still very patronising.
‘Oh I’m so sorry. This is Kate and she is staying for dinner, aren’t you?’
I hadn’t been invited and I don’t want to stay; I’m dressed for a dog walk in old sneakers and cut-off shorts. Clauds had answered the door in Altuzarra pool platforms and an Isabel Marant playsuit; the legs are worked on and smooth, her hair is salon fresh and expertly loose and undone and she smells so compelling and fragrant. I feel scruffy, hairy and heavy compared to all the honed females here.
I can feel my own snobbery setting in, driven by a complicated combination of simple envy and a compensatory British ability to feel absolute disgust at ostentatious displays of wealth.
Speaking of which, Jim rattles a bottle of white burgundy in its ice bucket. ‘Corton-Charlemagne, Katie …?’ I let the Katie go, given I plan to go hard on his alcohol; he pulls o
ut a green bottle with a yellowing label wrapped at the neck in a white napkin. ‘Or there’s a Côte-Rôtie, or’ – he cranes his neck at another ice bucket – ‘Is there some Dom open?’
The wine whore in me is desperate to stay and guzzle all the wines I can’t afford, as is the nosy parker who wants to ogle their life; the rest of me wants to leave, as does the dog, now sleeping with one eye open as far under the table as possible away from small people and Gunthers. I call Charlie and see if he has plans. ‘Do what you want,’ he says grumpily. ‘I’m going to bed.’
That settles it.
We’re staying, Woofs. I send him a telepathic message. He senses this and on cue slinks from under the table and into one of the many deserted reception rooms around us on the hunt for a place to bed in for a few hours. That’ll do. He hops on the grey leather centrepiece sofa. Much more comfy. He starts to go about the bum-licking, toenail-chewing rigmarole of settling himself.
Gunther moves from the correct treatment of dogs to the winnings of female tennis stars. A decibel or two above the rest of us, he polemicises, ‘It’s entirely correct they should be paid less. Their matches attract a smaller audience. It’s simple supply and demand. What have all you feminists got to say about that?’ He beams. ‘Eh?’
It’s an actual challenge, not just blowhard rhetoric, and I so desperately want to argue with him, but I only want to argue if I can win. I’ve got into spats with too many of these characters before who are clever and often have photographic memories and a drilled-in logic and skill for bullying debate, learned at the schools where they also learned Latin and to recite huge tracts of Romantic poetry.