A Dog Called Perth

by Peter Martin

  In those early weeks after Andrew’s arrival, there was one thing in particular that worried us. When we put him on the soft grass to lie, or on the carpet in the living room, and Perth was there, too, how would she treat him? We knew she would never lick him. She would sniff, certainly. But babies wave their arms and legs suddenly, and they crawl about. What if Perth were in a deep sleep on the grass and Andrew silently crept up to her and, as a baby might, placed his head heavily and roughly on hers? Would she just get up and walk away, or would she do what she had done to other nuisance heads in her lifetime? Snap at it.

  I spoke to her about this. Lying on the grass beside her, I put my own head next to hers as she lay there, and pleaded with her to understand that Andrew was tiny and helpless, that when he got older he would be a great friend and companion to her. She needed to be patient. Things would get better.

  “Whatever you do, dogge,” I whispered into her ear, “don’t you snap at him, especially at his face. If you did, it might leave a mark on his face for the rest of his life. I know it’ll be hard if he crawls all over you and mauls you with his arms. But just move away and leave him be. Please, Perth, don’t get angry and impatient at him. Think of me and your mistress.” She was as beautiful as ever, lying there on the grass. And strong. We could only hope that the trust she knew we had in her would be enough to protect Andrew. One thing we knew: we would never separate them. They must learn to live together. On the bed or lawn we would often lie with Perth between Andrew and us, hugging them both, so that she never felt neglected.

  Andrew did maul her many times, and when we saw it happening our hearts missed a beat or two. Most of the time she simply ignored him. She had grudgingly accepted the encroacher, but that was about all.

  Three or four weeks after Andrew’s birth, we did some-thing that changed Perth’s behavior toward him. With Andrew in a backpack strapped on my shoulders, we all climbed up to the Downs. We wanted to let the landscape into his imagination as early as possible. Perhaps as a result he would in some mystical way bond with nature. He would become one of its disciples, free-spirited and bold. Now, many will think this is balderdash, the vain thoughts of proud parents with delusions of grandeur for their child. Others will feel that this was far too early and risky to take an infant up to the windy hills for a hike of several miles. But Andrew loved it, never crying once. Uncharacteristically, Perth stayed with us the whole time. Something happened along the way to change her feelings about the baby. I think it was that Andrew now was in her world. She saw him staring out over the landscape a thousand feet below, his face pink from the cool wind, eyes wide open. She saw him differently, no longer part of the claustrophobic baby world that Appletree Cottage had become for her. He had been liberated. It is worth mentioning that when Andrew grew up you could not keep him off the Downs. He walked the eighty-mile length of them several times. And as soon as he was old enough, he and Perth spent many hours wandering up there together in isolated exploration, year after year.

  From that day on, she loved him. It was to her as if he had become someone real. She stayed with him in the garden, allowed him to climb on her, and played with him. When we carried him down to the river for walks, she lay down next to his bassinet by the sparkling water and watched over him while Cindy and I strolled along the river. Often she climbed into armchairs with him and slept by his side. If we were on the sofa together, she jumped up and took her place between us and him. She never bit him.

  Having made this adjustment so completely and quickly, she had no trouble welcoming Andrew’s sister, Claire, when she was born three years later. In fact, it was while Cindy was having Claire in the maternity hospital in Rustington nearby on the Sussex coast that Perth made another hospital visit. I had just left Cindy and was walking on the pebbly beach with Perth before returning home. I took no notice when Perth turned back to the hospital. Apparently she walked through the front door, turned left into the correct corridor, her nails clicking on the floor rhythmically as she trotted along, and effortlessly found Cindy’s room. Cindy was nursing Claire, so Perth hopped on her bed. With her previous hospital experience, Cindy took it in her stride. The nurses this time were not at all happy when they saw Perth, but it was all as it should have been.

  Claire took to Perth as naturally as Andrew did. Before she was able to walk, she could often be found in Perth’s basket in the kitchen, sharing the space with her. So that often she took on that intoxicating groggy-doggie smell. As soon as she could walk, she took to climbing on Perth’s back for rides in the garden, Perth heaving under her weight uncomplainingly. Tired of those antics, they would then lie down together on the grass beneath our ancient apple tree on an old blanket that I still had from my boyhood at St. George’s College in Argentina. Claire had joined the club.

  18

  I DO WONDER IF PERTH ever thought back much to those dislocating years in America and the bitter months in quarantine, whether images ever flashed upon her inward eye of her innocence in Cazenovia, crashing into Frederick the Saint Bernard, getting mistreated by me at Agnes Roy Camp and running lost and alone in Vermont, being chained up in a dark barn like a common criminal, scrambling through the thickets beside the ocean surf in Florida, grubbily anointing herself with the garbage in Ohio, or being heartbroken that we were leaving her yet again in the summer for another trip to England. It is enough for the reader to know that the years in Appletree Cottage with our growing family passed with a certainty and regularity that she never had across the ocean.

  She grew older, into her teens, without the pains of separation from her family that she had known in America. As the years wore on, her love for Andrew and Claire deepened, and her relationship with them changed as they changed. We were all part of a team, ever changing, and Perth was at the center of it. For Cindy and me she was the living link between our early married life in America without children and our English incarnation in Appletree Cottage with family and far richer lives. For years Perth watched Cindy get on the train regularly for London to study for her postgraduate degree. And she witnessed the excitement as I published a couple of books. In fact, she helped me write them. I spent many hours talking to her about my ideas as she listened alertly, not interrupting, giving me a sense of comfort that whatever readers might think about my writing she at least was behind me. When once I read an unkind review of one of my books in the newspaper, it was she in whom I confided my despair and who restored my spirits. She was just there.

  That was the way it had always been with her, but she had moved into a phase of her life in which she was not only an astounding runner and tireless adventurer in the open air, a disciplined spirit who would not suffer fools gladly, but also a quieter and gentler sympathizer. We all relied on her. Even the village had come to accept her as a colorful local figure. She had become something of a village legend.

  The old Perth, however, still thrived. She often flirted with danger, almost as if she were testing her own invincibility. On a high coastal walk one October along the cliffs of Dorset, for example, when she was fourteen, she could have been blown to bits. The British Army for years had tested land mines in large fields overlooking the sea. The fields were fenced off and loaded with mines. The five of us were walking merrily along on this October morning, enjoying the scenery of sea and cliffs, when suddenly to the right we noticed a sign that read, EXTREME CAUTION: LAND MINES. BRITISH ARMY. At precisely that moment Perth decided to veer off the path. She made for the fence, found a hole in it, and in no time at all was walking among the mines. The field was lush, deceptive. Lurking underneath its inviting greenness was death. For Perth it was fun; for us it was intense panic. Helpless, we stared at her. Claire was only three and had no idea of any danger. Andrew, however, knew better. He went white.

  How could I warn her? If I yelled at her and madly waved my arms, I might provoke her to run all over the place, to her certain destruction. Calmly, I shouted very firmly, “Stay, Perth, stay!” I repeated it. She froze and looke
d back at us, about one hundred feet away. “Good dog, now stay.” She did not move.

  My training sessions with her on East Lake Road in Cazenovia came back to me. Would she obey me now? I then shouted to her with great severity, so that she was under no illusion that we were playing games, “Come HERE, dogge, HERE, HERE!” I had to persuade her to come straight back to us. If she kept to a straight line, there was less chance she would walk on a mine. I held my hand up with my finger pointed down to the ground in front of me. “HERE,” I repeated. I glared at her. Andrew placed his hands over his eyes. She turned and walked slowly back, safely through the hole in the fence. None of us said anything. We took deep breaths and walked on.

  I think it was that same year, in late November in East Sussex, that she almost met her Maker on another stretch of coastline, Beachy Head. We had never been there before, though my father used to speak fondly of it to me when I was a boy in America. It is an open stretch of Downland, windswept and wild, several hundred feet above some sheer cliffs that fall vertically right down to the sea—a treacherous stretch of coastline with unpredictable currents, where over the centuries sailors have been blown ashore and perished on the rocks. The springy turf of the Downs sweeps above, a great place for running at full throttle.

  We knew nothing of the configurations of this landscape until we got there, and then it was almost too late. The five of us set off marching across the open turf toward the sea. When we got close enough, I could see that there was no fence or barrier to mark where the earth stopped and the void beyond began. Nothing to warn the unsuspecting. I thought of the blind and suicidal Gloucester in Shakespeare’s terrible tragedy King Lear, in legendary medieval England, who asks his son to lead him across the wasteland to the edge of a steep cliff above the crashing sea. Once there he plans to fall to his certain destruction. His son leads him instead to a harmless bit of land where he falls over without injury. Then I caught sight of Perth racing recklessly for the edge, totally unaware that in a few yards she was bound to launch herself into the abyss. Another, more tragic, literary incident suddenly made me shudder, the one from Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd in which Gabriel Oak’s sheepdog, possessed by some primeval urge, herds every one of his flock straight off a Dorset cliff and onto the rocks a couple of hundred feet below.

  At the speed Perth was nearing the edge I was sure she was doomed. Nonetheless, I sprinted toward the sea, yelling to her to stop, to stay, to come back. With the wind gusting she could not hear. There was nothing I could do but watch helplessly. Perhaps she had her own primeval instincts, though, because with only a few feet to go, she dug her nails in the turf and pushed with all her strength to veer off to the right. She came to a stop with her body stretched along the edge. When I ran up, she was still there, panting, looking down at the foaming sea below where the majestic lighthouse flashed its lights in warning to the reckless.

  Occasionally, it was her turn to panic. Early one July morning at about seven o’clock, Andrew and I decided to take a pre-breakfast walk to the meadow, on the way down to the river. He was four. Perth came with us. We did this often together during that summer. It was a lovely still morning with a heavy dew on the grass. We walked through the “kissing gate” into the meadow, shutting it carefully behind us with that characteristic click of the latch. There, spread out near the gate in front of us, lazily munching on the wet grass, were ten or so of Barbara Stapeley’s lovely brown Guernsey cows. Barbara owned a small dairy farm at the bottom of Bury Hollow, a stone’s throw down the hill from Appletree Cottage. Andrew loved her cows because of their kind-looking eyes. We stopped to rub some of their heads. As we were walking by, I noticed that one of my shoelaces was loose, so I stopped and leaned down to tie it. I made too tempting a target for one of the cows, I guess, who while I was bent over jumped at the opportunity to mount me from behind. I could not imagine what she had in mind. Raising herself on her hind legs, she landed on my back. Under her weight I fell heavily to the ground underneath her. Andrew saw it all and screamed. He thought he had lost his dad. Perth flew at the cow, howling ferociously. It was one of those times when she only made matters worse, for she terrified the cow and all her friends into a stampede. Mercifully, the hoofs of the overly friendly one on top of me barely missed my head as she leapt away. I struggled to my feet, unhurt.

  19

  EXCEPT FOR FREQUENT INCIDENTS like these, the years passed peacefully and Perth grew to a great age. She never became fat, nor did she stop scouting the countryside, but she did slow down. Her muscles got a bit smaller. Her coat still shone, but her blackness turned grayish and the brown along her muzzle became flecked with white. At sixteen, her eyes were as good as ever, although her hearing very gradually declined. She may have been old, but she was nobody’s fool. People knew well enough not to take liberties with her, especially not to try to pick her up or, as always, put their heads down to hers. Appletree Cottage had been the scene of four or five awkward moments when guests had been on the receiving end of a fast tooth of hers. Many more had been snapped at and escaped without a wound. Barbara Stapeley, one of Perth’s more understanding friends, called her “Fang.” A bit ridiculous, one might think, since Perth was then the venerable age of sixteen. But perhaps not?

  It was that year that I was offered a Visiting Associate Professorship at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for nine months. It sounded stimulating. Claire had not yet set foot in America. Andrew had been to Florida once to see his grandmother, but only as a toddler. On top of that, Cindy and I wanted to get back to the States for a few months. It was nine years since we had left it. But what would we do with Perth? Here we were again, trying to figure out the eternal problem.

  A kennel was out. We looked around for friends without children whom we thought might like to have a beagle for nine months. It was too risky to place Perth in a house with children who did not know how to behave with her. One midsummer evening at dinner as Cindy and I turned the problem over in our minds, I had an idea.

  “What about Alistair and Stella Shaw on Church Lane? They’re young and sensible, with no kids or complications of that sort. They might like to have Perth around for a few months. I saw him stroking her the other day.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Cindy replied. “She teaches at the local school, so she gets home early every day. Perth could even visit her at the school. It’s only across the lane from where they live.”

  “What does Alistair do?”

  “He works in a local vineyard near Arundel.”

  “Perfect. Perth could keep them company there, too. She’d love running in and out of the grapevines.”

  Alistair Shaw, a handsome and slender young man in his mid-twenties who sported a generous and stylish mustache, was a chef on weekends, but at the vineyard his job was to keep the vines trimmed and properly tied to the wooden supports. The vineyard, nestled in some gentle vales halfway up the southern slopes of the Downs, was well known for its white wine. Alistair and Stella were a simple, hard-working couple. Their house was one of those tiny semi-detached dwellings built between the wars, with a functional garden in the back just large enough for a table, chairs and some vegetables. I had always liked them.

  We walked down to see them the next day. We put the idea to them and were amazed when they jumped at it.

  “Oh, we’d love to have Perth,” Stella piped up. “Perth is so sweet. We’ve so much wanted a dog. How old is she?” All eyes turned to Perth for a moment in silence. She was sitting on the carpet looking at me, her ears perked up and alert. She understood what was going on, but seemed untroubled.

  “Believe it or not, she’s sixteen,” I answered.

  “Really!” said Alistair. “She’s in great shape. I see her running around all over the place. She could come with me to the vineyard, as long as she doesn’t eat the grapes off the vines!” He laughed.

  That remark made me a little uncomfortable. I thought of the strawberries in the Huntington Gardens in Californ
ia and of a journey years ago that Cindy, Perth and I made by car from Boston to St. Andrews in New Brunswick, Canada, when Perth was five. Somewhere in Canada on a lonely road our Rover broke down, and while we were trying to coax it to start Perth had quietly rummaged around in the bushes on the roadside. She had discovered some blueberry bushes and was methodically and gingerly picking the succulent berries off them. She must have eaten dozens by the time we noticed her. Her mouth was stained blue and her breath smelled wonderfully fruity. She looked quite pleased with herself. It was not a great leap of the imagination to see her devouring a large portion of Alistair’s crop of white Sussex grapes. But I said nothing.

  “You can let her run loose,” I said. “You don’t have to bother walking her anywhere.”

  The Shaws were so enthusiastic that it was agreed on the spot we would have a trial run. Beginning the next day they would take Perth for a week, and if they still wanted her after that, so be it. I told them I’d bring down the basket in which she slept, along with a few cans of food. There was nothing else she needed. Before leaving, I stressed one thing.

  “You’ve got to remember one very important thing. You’ll love Perth. She’s an amazing dog. But don’t try to take food away from her, or come up to her from behind and attempt to pick her up. She doesn’t like to be picked up, especially by surprise. Remember, her hearing is not what it used to be. Most important of all, don’t put your head down to hers. She doesn’t like it, okay?”