A Dog's Life

by Paul Bailey

I arrived at Acton Crown Court the following Monday, happily anticipating another week of intense human interest. I was to be disappointed. A major trial was about to begin, the defendants were four black men who were charged with drug-dealing, affray, and grievous bodily harm, as I later discovered. I was among the eighteen who were called into court for the selection of a jury. I can’t recall why, but on that morning I was carrying a copy of the Daily Telegraph, a paper I have written for but seldom read. A solicitor representing the four advised his clients to reject me on the grounds that a Telegraph reader would not be sympathetic to their cause; would be, indeed, downright hostile. I was released from jury service at lunchtime.

  The baseball coach and the man on the tomb causing grave offence to an insomniac public anxious to visit cemeteries while the rest of the populace was sleeping – I think of them both with distant affection, and of how they reminded me of life’s petty misfortunes; of the traps awaiting those of us who can neither curb our tongues nor suppress our sudden, inflammatory desires.

  Jam Today

  The kitchen was mine at last, now that David’s brilliant reign of culinary tyranny was over. We had moved it to the top floor of the house some years earlier, revelling in its spaciousness and the light that flooded in on all but the darkest winter days. David had bought a large gas cooker that resembled in design a small cinema organ. (I half-expected music, rather than gas, to come out of it when the switches were turned on.) It had two temperamental doors that swung open whenever the oven reached a certain level of heat. The doors were ‘fixed’ by a succession of repairmen, who unscrewed them, refitted them, realigned them and even, on one occasion, replaced them. Yet their handiwork was to no permanent avail, since there would continue to be a terrible moment when the doors, having behaved themselves for weeks, decided not to stay closed. David would shout and curse, and an old chair would have to be jammed against the doors, and Circe would let out a single bark and dart downstairs, not wanting to be involved in the drama.

  High drama was an essential feature of David’s cooking. Tension mounted as soon as he approached the stove. Nothing less than complete perfection satisfied him. The recipes that most appealed to him were elaborate, requiring enormous reserves of patience to prepare, and there were times – not too many – when his patience was tried to breaking-point. To stay calm, he often cooked to the accompaniment of The Marriage of Figaro, to Handel’s Messiah and to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. Silence was not to be countenanced, except when he was studying a new, and ever more complicated, dish. In his final months, he created meals for rich customers who sent couriers to collect them. And sometimes, if he was well enough, he went to their houses and businesses to oversee the preparation of the central masterpiece on cookers blessed with unproblematic doors.

  The kitchen became a quiet place in the spring of 1986. My book was finished and already in proof. I was a cook again, and pleased that I could entertain friends with dishes I hadn’t made in an eternity. I discovered recipes that excited me in books by Claudia Roden, Alice Waters and the refreshingly eccentric Patience Gray, whose Honey from a Weed can also be read for its insights into literature, painting and sculpture. David had only ever allowed me to make shepherd’s pie, the ‘comfort food’ he liked best, but now – grieving and lonely – I was free to prepare whatever I desired. The Mexican Garlic Soup in Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook; the Spicy Prawns in Claudia Roden’s A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and the wild concoction of aubergines, onions, tomatoes and herbs Patience Gray chanced upon in a Greek village – these became, and still are, favourites with my cherished friends. They would be joined by the glorious Russian Raspberry Tart from Margaret Costa’s excellent Four Seasons Cookery Book.

  I had time to fill, or perhaps kill, and Circe helped me fill it. Each morning she would propel me to the park, where I frequently had to throw the ball for as much as two hours. She had the sheepdog’s habit of running in a circle, cleverly retrieving the ball from unexpected angles, catching it between her teeth while still in motion. Passers-by would stop to admire and applaud.

  Other dogs achieved exhaustion fairly rapidly, but not Circe. I marvelled at, and was sometimes exasperated by, her unflagging liveliness. She seemed to be willing herself not to get tired. It was only when she flopped on to the grass, panting heavily, that I knew she was ready to go home. Or was she? As soon as we were outside the park she began to draw back on the lead. The beast who had towed me earlier now had to be dragged homewards. This was a double spectacle the neighbours found diverting – that of a man being pulled along the street by an eager dog, and of the same man trying to coax the same, suddenly reluctant, dog into following him.

  I was in a state of blank despair on the afternoon I decided to occupy myself by making jam. I went out and bought plums, raisins, blanched almonds and a bottle of dark rum. I cut the plums into halves, and put the stones in a small saucepan, covering them with half-a-pint of water. I boiled the stones for ten minutes, and drained the liquid through a sieve. This I poured over the plums and raisins I had placed in a larger pan. I let the mixture simmer over a low heat. When the fruit had softened, I took the pan off the gas and added the requisite amount of sugar, which I stirred in until it was completely dissolved. I put the pan back on the ring and watched it carefully, stirring at intervals to prevent the jam thickening too quickly or getting burnt. Concentration, of a satisfyingly mindless kind, was necessary. I concentrated on the task I had chosen. I removed the pan from the heat and threw in the finely chopped almonds and four tablespoons of rum. More stirring was needed, and then the glistening jam was ready for the pots I had previously sterilized. I tasted it when it had cooled a little, and realized I was in possession of a new, unanticipated talent. To stave off depression, or to lighten it at least, I had only to go to the stove and perfect my skills as a jam-maker.

  And that’s what I did, and am still doing. I like making jams, jellies and chutneys when the fruit is in season, though there are some you can rustle up at any time in the year – dried apricot, for instance, and the exotic Creole jam, composed of bananas, the juice and zest of two or three limes, a spoonful of cinnamon and a generous measure of rum. The friends and acquaintances who enjoy this tend to be exotic themselves – given to owning parrots or mynah birds, or communing with the Beyond via a number of middle-aged women with suburban addresses that boast names – ‘Rest-a-While’, ‘Magnolia Lodge’ – instead of numbers.

  Once a year, and that once is enough, a friend brings me crab apples and medlars from her garden. The patience called upon to convert these inedible fruits into appetizing jellies is of the superhuman kind, what with straining the liquid through muslin and ensuring that not one precious drop – and every drop is precious –is wasted.

  I seldom eat my own jam, preferring to give it away to the appreciative and to those I wish to thank for acts of kindness. Making it properly affords me enough satisfaction. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’ – it’s strange to look back on that summer afternoon when I found a means to keep grief at bay for an hour or so.

  Clearance

  Edie stood in state in the front room for months after David’s death. Circe, waking from a long sleep, would bark at her, hoping perhaps for some response from the curious individual with no arms, legs or head. Edie’s sizeable bosom did not heave at the sound. She was fixed to her spot, in the bay of the window.

  Edie was David’s tailor’s dummy. Dresses worn by many of the greatest opera singers of the second half of the twentieth century had been put together piece by piece on Edie’s immobile frame. The corset that had given Montserrat Caballé the unexpected bonus of a waist had been moulded and built on Edie.

  How did she come to be called Edie? In 1961, three years before meeting David, I was in the company of the then Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon playing the smallest of small parts, carrying spears and understudying robustly healthy actors. In Richard III, in which I appeared as Lovel, Eric Porter
played Buckingham with guileful authority. Each night in the wings, shortly before his first entrance, he would hitch up his robe and say something outrageous to make us all laugh. A favourite, much-repeated cri de coeur that Eric loved to deliver was the one expressed by a distraught brothel keeper alerting her maid-of-all-work to the prospect of custom: ‘Not a pisspot emptied, not an armpit washed, and the street full of Spanish sailors. Edie!’ Eric would lower his robe and march on to the stage with a retinue of nobles behind him struggling desperately to keep their faces straight.

  So the overwoked ‘Edie’, emptying the pots and supervising the scrubbing of armpits, gave her oft-shrieked name to the dummy. The inanimate Edie was photographed beside me in the autumn of 1986 for a magazine article to coincide with the publication of my novel Gabriel’s Lament. The young photographer, Chris, was amused by her presence in an otherwise conventionally furnished room. The photograph was shown in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery after Chris’s death on the Marchioness, the pleasure boat that sank in the Thames on 20 August 1989.

  Edie was the last of David’s possessions to go. Friends were grateful to receive his sewing machine, the corsets and bodices and an array of leftover fabrics. These were a pleasure to dispense. Only his clothes remained in the wardrobe. For a while I was unable even to touch them.

  Then, one morning, I returned from the park with the dog, and in an automatic daze I filled bags with shirts, jackets, sweaters, trousers, shoes. I carried them to the nearest charity shop, and on reaching home I tore up all the remaining pictures of him. I was staggered at the ease with which I performed what seemed like an act of ruthlessness. I wanted some part of our past to be obliterated.

  Edie is now resident in Bloomsbury, where her chest and waist are still giving service. What I have of David, apart from his undying presence, is an exquisite gold neck chain and the Swiss watch he bought for me when he was flush. Daily reminders; lasting gifts.

  The Woman in Whites and the Man with a Mission

  I first noticed the would-be tennis player more than twenty years ago, when the last bloom of youth was beginning to fade from both our faces. She was always immaculately turned out in pristine, pleated, white shorts and a crisply ironed white blouse. Her white socks and running shoes were equally clean, with no traces of turf on them. She carried a racquet, a string bag containing tennis balls, and an elegant leather handbag. She sometimes wore a pink bow in her neat blonde hair.

  She had much to say to herself, of an earnest nature, to judge by the sharpness of her tone and the furrows on her forehead. I often wondered if she had two voices at her command – her own, and that of an unseen partner or contestant. Was this person on the other side of the net, perhaps, or playing alongside her in doubles? Here was a game that seemed to be in perpetual progress, with no foreseeable ending. Or so I fancied, imagining that a real match on a real court had been halted, and could only be resumed, again and again, in her mind. Her outfit might be the equivalent of Miss Havisham’s wedding dress, and her tennis match that famously cancelled marriage ceremony, with its uneaten cake, its absent groom.

  It was with the arrival of Circe that I came to realize that the woman, when kitted out for tennis, saw nothing beyond her immediate vision of the interrupted game. She was oblivious to the dog’s bark of welcome, and strode on, racquet at the ready, muttering darkly in one of her voices. Circe never failed to acknowledge her, and the woman never stopped to stroke, or talk to, the animal whose approval she had gained. How had she gained it? That was another mystery, and not open to supposition, like the aborted singles or doubles. Circe wanted to be her friend, as she didn’t want be be the friend of other men and women whose shows of affection she either ignored or rebuffed. And then, one day, the mystery was instantly solved. It wasn’t the woman’s friendship Circe craved, it was the tantalizing tennis balls in the string bag. I had been a blind fool, not to have seen what was obvious.

  In the last year or so of Circe’s life, I had to change my mind. The woman wore different whites now – white skirt, white blouse, white stockings, white raincoat. It could be that the match had been won in her head, or finally abandoned, for she no longer carried the racquet and the string bag. She was still engaged in frantic conversation with herself, however, and still heedless of Circe’s genial overtures. The dog still wished to be friends.

  Circe had no trouble attracting Mick’s attention. ‘She’s a pretty thing,’ he would say. Mick, like the one-time tennis fan, is Irish, and like her he has been institutionalized. In common with many Irish people in the district, he had been born and raised on a farm, and was used to the company of sheepdogs. He grinned at the eager Circe and patted her gently.

  Mick was once prone to violent fits, and was often taken away and placed in protective care for months at a stretch. That was years ago. For the last decade he has been a model of amiability, because he is happy in his chosen work. He is not paid for it, though courteous passers-by stop and thank him for picking up the litter the unsociable have discarded. Mick can be seen every day of the year at the corner of the road by Starch Green, placing empty packets, tissues, cigarette ends, leaves – and even dog turds, which he wraps in paper – in the bins the sane inhabitants of Hammersmith have overlooked. Mick performs this task with a zeal that deserves to be called missionary, for there is a light in his eyes as he goes up and down, to and fro, keeping his half-mile clean. He usually has a word to say about the weather, and if he talks to himself it is to chide the men and women – and children, mostly – for whom he is tidying up. The shopkeepers and the fellow residents of the council estate where he lives regard him fondly, as indeed they should. He is providing them with a service, after all, in his smiling fashion.

  Geoffrey’s Socks

  Circe was as much in need of exercise at home as she was within the relatively wide open spaces of the park. Throwing a ball for her was neither sensible nor feasible because there were too many objects in the house that could be easily broken. What else was there to hurl down the stairwell? Socks, old socks, was the answer.

  The discarded socks were David’s and mine. They were made of cotton or light wool, and therefore not resistant to Circe’s strong teeth. Her saliva soon rendered them offensive to the touch. Jane Grigson was sitting with me in the kitchen on a fine summer evening a few weeks after David’s death, watching me throw a rolled-up sock over the banister for the ever-scuttling dog. Circe, retrieving it, dropped the soggy toy at Jane’s feet with an abrupt bark that indicated it was her, Jane’s, turn. Jane picked it up, pulled a face registering mild disgust, and said, ‘Next time I come, I’ll bring you some socks that won’t end up like this.’ She slung the sock away from her, and it was quickly brought back, in an even soggier state.

  Jane kept her promise. She arrived bearing gifts, as was her generous custom – Yarg, a delicious new cheese from Cornwall; green figs, just about to ripen; a bottle of balsamic vinegar. And then she produced the treat for Circe, who was smiling at her, tail wagging. From out of her bag came two pairs of her husband’s socks, one red, one blue. They were sturdy, countryman’s socks, of the kind that go with stout shoes or boots. They had been lovingly darned, I saw. It would take an excess of salivating to make them limp.

  ‘There are more where those came from.’

  And there were. Geoffrey Grigson’s chilblain-proof socks became Circe’s household toys. They were a mouthful for her. Guests were invited to share in her untiring fun. Some visitors, it has to be noted, were happier with this diversion than others. Circe was perplexed when the proffered sock was ignored, her bewilderment giving way to irritation. She barked and barked, and had to be banished from the kitchen with a stern ‘Enough’. I would put the sock out of sight and out of reach and she would sulk in the front room until it was time to play again.

  In the summer of 1975, I wrote a review for the New Statesman of a book by Geoffrey Grigson called Britain Observed. The literary editor allotted me 1,200 words, which meant that
I had the long-coveted opportunity of being able to put his career into some kind of balanced perspective. It was an honour and duty to do so since Geoffrey had the reputation then – as, alas, he has now – of being little more than a scurrilous and intemperate critic. People remembered his dislike and disapproval of Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and a host of tin-eared academics, whilst forgetting or overlooking the substantial fact that in his thirties and forties he ‘rescued’ those extraordinary English geniuses John Clare, Samuel Palmer, William Barnes and George Crabbe from near-oblivion. He published the early poems of W. H. Auden in his pioneering magazine New Verse, and discovered the very young Gavin Ewart, whose ‘Phallus in Wonderland’ and ‘Miss Twye’ he was delighted to print. Britain Observed proved ideal as a vehicle for expressing my considered opinion that Geoffrey Grigson, with whom I was unacquainted, is essentially a celebrator, for in its pages he praises not only Cézanne and Pissarro – ‘the greatest and humblest of landscape painters’ – but such modest, and genuine, talents as Walter Greaves, who painted views of the Thames at Chelsea, the tragic William James Blacklock, dead at forty-two, whose beautiful Catbells and Causey Pike is reproduced, and Wenceslas Hollar, represented by his marvellous etching of the East Side of London in 1647, simple in essence yet vividly suggestive of overcrowded city life. The book is subtitled The Landscape Through Artists’ Eyes, and it’s typical of Grigson’s eclecticism and respect for the undervalued that of those sixty-odd artists a good third of them are still unknown to the public at large.

  The received, or safe, opinion was anathema to him. He was always his own man with his own mind. It seemed appropriate that I should come to praise him in the New Statesman, because it was in that educative journal that I first encountered his criticism, along with that of V. S. Pritchett and D. J. Enright, in the late 1950s. The back half of the Statesman was required reading in the 1960s, when Grigson was a regular reviewer. He flourished under the editorship of Karl Miller, just as he had flourished under that of J. R. Ackerley on the Listener – both men earning his lasting regard for allowing him to write ‘without fear or favour’ (the words are Ackerley’s.) It was from those idiosyncratic reviews – elegantly phrased and pithily argued – that I learned about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s exquisite poems of everyday madness and despair in small-town America and the Icelandic Journals of William Morris, which makes even the bleakest landscape interesting. Grigson was one of my educators, at a time in my life when I was attempting to free myself of the burden of wanting to succeed as a classical actor. I read his criticism, and then the works he praised. And every so often, I glanced at those books that he alone held up to ridicule, such as Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn, in which characters ‘cast roguish glances’ at each other, ‘converse’ rather than talk, and say things like ‘I’ll be bound!’ and ‘Effingham, she is destroyed’. His review of the inescapable Anthony Burgess’s collection Urgent Copy: Literary Studies caused its author lasting resentment. Grigson began his accurate and funny piece by quoting Burgess to the effect that writing books ‘engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence’. Grigson’s comment on this boast in disguise was, simply, ‘Not in everyone. And not all of them, I hope, in Mr Burgess.’