The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  The horror of that morning on Port Meadow hadn’t faded so much as gradually become absorbed into that catalogue of other horrors that Anna had been forced to accept as her reality. Whether she wanted it to or not, the sun continued to rise and set and life went on. There had been no new murders, the conference she’d helped to plan had been and gone and the feedback so far had been favourable. As the days passed, Anna had felt herself slipping gratefully back into her old routine: going to the gym, spending time with her grandfather, taking Bonnie for walks in Oxford beauty spots, working her way through Nadine’s obsessive-compulsive Post-its.

  From the outside Anna’s life must look oddly middle-aged for someone in her early thirties, but she rarely gave this much thought. Her days were structured so as to leave the maximum energy for her real secret pursuits and minimum room for surprises of any kind.

  And yet here she was, she thought, getting ready to meet a strange American. ‘Sometimes I confuse even myself,’ Anna told her dog as she fastened on the smart blue collar she’d bought so Bonnie would look her best. She had brushed her dog’s coat until it was silky and shining and, though Anna knew she was biased, she thought she looked beautiful. For some reason though her White Shepherd was uncharacte‌ristically restless, going back and forth between her usual favourite spots, immediately rejecting them as unsatisfactory and jumping up again before casting herself down somewhere else with what sounded like a loud huff of impatience. It fleetingly crossed Anna’s mind that Bonnie could actually feel her former owner somewhere in the vicinity, until she noticed that she was doing similar restless pacing. The poor dog was just picking up on her own nerves.

  Anna walked into the park with Bonnie on the dot of nine. Jake had wanted plenty of time for sightseeing before lunch. She’d just spotted a man sitting on a bench, apparently enjoying the early morning sunshine, when Bonnie came to a shocked standstill. Anna saw a quiver run through her like wind through corn. Next minute the White Shepherd ripped the lead out of Anna’s hand as she went hurtling down the path towards the man on the bench. Even before she had reached him, Bonnie started uttering broken sounds, frantic whines and whimpers. The man was suddenly on his feet. Anna heard him say, half laughing, ‘Hush, hush! It’s all right, you crazy puppy. It’s all right.’ Bonnie seemed to be actually levitating now, leaping into the air again and again, so as to be level with the man’s face, letting out little cries and moans of rapture as she tried to lick any part of him she could reach. ‘OK, honey, we’re gonna sit down,’ he told her firmly, ‘before you injure us both.’ Dropping to his haunches on the still-dewy grass, he gathered the dog up into his arms. ‘I know. I know,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve really missed you too, puppy.’ As he soothed her, he smiled apologetically at Anna over Bonnie’s head, and she saw tears shining in his eyes.

  The intensity of Bonnie’s reaction had made introductions redundant as the dog continued to press herself, whimpering, against her former owner. She’s been missing him all this time, Anna thought. She’s had all this grief – this love – inside her all this time. The quiet well-behaved animal that Anna had believed to be Bonnie’s true self had simply been enduring, waiting for her real owner to return.

  ‘Well, as you’ve probably realized, I’m Jake!’ the man said at last when Bonnie had calmed down enough for them to make themselves heard. Jake McCaffrey looked older than in his picture, less sunburned, far more rested and with slightly longer hair. He wore a nut-brown leather jacket over a grey T-shirt and faded blue jeans.

  She gave a nervous laugh. ‘And obviously I’m Anna.’ She was still looking down on him as he sat, apparently oblivious of the wet grass, with his arms wrapped around a now blissful Bonnie. With her head resting on his shoulder, she had her eyes closed as if she was afraid to open them and find it was all a dream.

  ‘It’s very good to meet you, Anna.’ His eyes were tired and faintly wary. He smiled at her, and she saw that his front tooth had a very slight chip. For some reason this tiny imperfection only made him more appealing. Anna distrusted instant attractions and was dismayed to find herself so irrationally drawn to this unknown American. She was also struggling to deal with the obvious bond between Bonnie and Jake. She had understood, in theory, that her dog and this former marine had a shared history, but actually seeing them together made her feel childishly left-out. ‘Tell you what,’ she said coolly, ‘why don’t I leave you to spend some time with Bonnie, and I’ll come by and pick her up later?’

  For a moment he looked thrown, then he firmly shook his head. ‘I liked our original plan better. For one thing, Bonnie can’t show me the sights. For another, I’ve booked us a table for lunch, and from what I remember of this puppy’s table manners I don’t think they’d go down too well at the Black Bear!’

  Anna was surprised into a laugh. ‘She is a really messy eater,’ she agreed.

  Jake didn’t smile a great deal, but when he did it lit up his face. ‘Does she still do that thing where she walks away from her bowl with her mouth full and casually dumps it wherever?’

  She nodded. ‘One time she spat drooled-on kibble into one of my grandfather’s new shoes. He adores her, luckily, and we managed to clean the shoes, but …’ She left the sentence dangling.

  ‘Your grandfather never felt quite the same about them?’ Jake suggested.

  ‘Not really, no!’

  Jake got to his feet. ‘What do you say we give this puppy a walk before we take the tour?’ Now that he was standing beside her, she saw that he was a couple of inches taller than she’d thought. His eyes were a clear warm blue. His face had the slightly crumpled look of someone suffering from jet lag.

  ‘I think Bonnie would appreciate that,’ she said.

  It was still early for an Oxford Sunday morning, and apart from the occasional jogger or dog walker, they had the peaceful space almost to themselves. The leaves were starting to change colour now, and though most of them were still on the trees there were drifts of fallen leaves scattered across the park. They set off strolling along one of the walks. Calmer now, Bonnie trotted between them, occasionally glancing up to reassure herself that Jake was still there.

  ‘What is it that makes the air here smell so good?’ Jake asked abruptly. ‘It’s kind of spicy, almost.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘I don’t know. This is just how autumn in England smells.’

  ‘I guess it’s like the smell of springtime where I come from,’ he said. ‘I could break it down into honeysuckle, night flowering jasmine, river mud, but really it just smells like Carolina in the spring.’

  As they walked, Jake began to explain the circumstances in which he’d had Bonnie shipped over to the UK. He’d been due to leave the military a few months after he’d finished his tour of duty in Afghanistan, but then ended up being sent to join an emergency relief team in the Philippines. ‘I didn’t want to just leave her there with the guys with the risk that they might abandon her. I didn’t have a place to go back to, unfortunately, so I couldn’t send her home.’

  Jake didn’t expand on this mysterious homelessness. Maybe he was divorced and his parents were dead, or maybe they were the kind of people he preferred not to associate with. ‘Mimi was the nearest thing I had to a relative,’ he said. ‘So I wrote and asked her if she’d take care of Bonnie until I knew where I was going to be living. But then …’

  ‘Then she died,’ Anna said.

  He nodded. ‘Exactly a year to the day after her husband had a massive coronary. She fell in love with him when he was working in South Carolina – that’s where I’m from – and followed him back to Oxford. She was a wonderful woman, so full of life. I thought – well, I hoped she still had years left. After some real hard times, she’d finally found some happiness.’

  A jogger went pounding past. Jake’s eyes followed the gradually diminishing figure until it was out of sight, but Anna sensed that he was really seeing Mimi, who was not apparently a real relative, but a sufficiently significant person in Jake’s life that he had shi
pped his beloved dog thousands of miles to live with her.

  ‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know how Bonnie came to end up in a rescue shelter,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

  He gave her his wry grin. ‘I don’t feel so bad now seeing how things turned out.’

  ‘So you’ve explained how Bonnie ended up in Oxford,’ Anna said. ‘But I don’t know how she came to live with you.’

  ‘I found her,’ he said simply, ‘guarding the body of a little Afghan kid. A little boy. Couldn’t have been more than five or six.’

  It was an unseasonably warm sunny morning, but Anna felt herself go cold.

  ‘An IED went off in the street. Improvised Explosive Device,’ he explained, though Anna had guessed the explosive part. ‘Left a bunch of innocent Afghanis dead, including this little kid. Lord knows how Bonnie came to be with them. She wasn’t much more than a puppy, skinny as a rail and jumping with fleas. She’d been hurt in the blast – that’s how she got those little scars. She was scared witless. Her eyes kept rolling up, showing the whites. But when we tried to get close, her lip peeled right back and she let out this evil growl like she was going to rip all our throats out if we even laid a finger on that kid. It was getting to be a bit of a situation, starting to get dark, weeping relatives wanting to take the bodies for burial, and Bonnie here snarling and baring her teeth.’

  It was hard to believe Jake was talking about the same Bonnie. Anna had never even heard Bonnie growl. Then her heart gave a lurch, and she thought, But I’ve seen her track down a dead woman. She had to clear her throat before she asked, ‘How did you get her away in the end?’

  He shot her his crooked smile. ‘Chicken sandwiches. She was half starved, and she was just a pup. It took a while, but me and the guys managed to coax her away in the end.’ He looked down at Bonnie, as if comparing the feral, flea-ridden pup he had rescued with the beautiful adult dog walking composedly now at his side.

  ‘Does that happen often – soldiers just adopting stray dogs?’ She was thinking of the photograph of Jake and Bonnie as exhausted comrades in arms.

  ‘More often than you’d think. Men far from home, jumpy, despised and detested by the people they thought they’d come to save. Having a dog helps you feel like an OK human once in a while. I remember when we got back to our base, and I’m lying on my cot, thinking of all those bodies, and that poor little kid, and I’m like, well, at least we saved the damn dog!’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘I don’t know how this got so deep so fast, but I could really do with a strong cup of coffee about now!’

  Anna didn’t know how they’d got so deep either. ‘Luckily, in this town you’re never too far away from a cup of good coffee,’ she told him.

  They walked down Parks Road into Broad Street. As they passed Blackwell’s, Anna caught a glimpse of the window display in which copies of The Boy in the Blue Shirt had been arranged in piles along with other hotly promoted new books.

  They stopped at a cafe that had tables set out on the pavement. When they were seated with their coffee he said, ‘Before you take me on your grand tour, I just want to get something out of the way, so there aren’t any misunderstandings.’

  Some protective instinct told Anna that this ‘something’ had to concern the White Shepherd now lying under their table in her alert sphinx pose. Did he want to take Bonnie back to the States? She set down her cup harder than she’d meant. ‘OK.’

  Jake took a breath. ‘I just want to make it crystal clear that I haven’t come here to kidnap your dog.’ He shot her a cautious grin. ‘I’m not even looking for joint custody. I’m just glad to see Bonnie so happy and healthy.’ Hearing herself talked about, Bonnie came to lean against Jake, and he stroked her absent-mindedly, as he must have done so many times before.

  Jake’s startlingly direct statement of his position left Anna open-mouthed. She’d had no intention of giving Bonnie up, yet his generosity took away her breath. Looking at her dog, now shamelessly soliciting for Jake’s affection, she said guiltily, ‘But she loves you so much.’

  Jake didn’t deny it. He just nodded. ‘And I love her. And we’ve been through some major stuff together. But anybody can see she’s your dog now. A city-dwelling, cafe-visiting dog,’ he said teasingly to Bonnie. Tilting her head to one side, she fixed him with perplexed but adoring brown eyes that said, I have no idea what you’re saying, mysterious human, but I will follow you through FIRE.

  He turned to Anna. ‘So are we all square? I didn’t want to just leave it all hanging and spoil our day together.’

  She managed a tight nod. Once she was fairly sure she wasn’t going to embarrass them both by bursting into tears, she said, swallowing, ‘Thank you for saying that. And now, if you’ve finished your coffee, I think we should get started before the sun brings out too many tourists.’

  She had planned a simple circular tour starting with the Sheldonian Theatre and the Bodleian library. Jake was blown away by the Bodleian and stood admiring its ancient entrance blazoned with coats of arms from various Oxford colleges until she asked slightly impatiently if he wanted to take a photo. He shook his head. ‘I was just thinking of all that incredible know-ledge inside. You can almost feel it. The Bodleian is the oldest library in Europe, right?’

  ‘Yes, I think it probably is,’ she said doubtfully, hoping he wouldn’t ask her for too many facts and figures that she couldn’t supply. Then she brightened, remembering something her grandfather had told her. ‘I do know that all new Oxford undergraduates still have to take a vow before they’re allowed to use it.’

  ‘A vow? Seriously?’

  ‘At the start of every Michaelmas term. They used to have to say it in Latin, but these days they’re allowed to use English.’

  ‘What do they have to vow?’

  Anna could see Jake wasn’t sure if he should believe her. ‘You have to swear not to take volumes out of the library or damage them or anything else belonging to the library. Oh, and you mustn’t bring into the library “or kindle therein any fire or flame”,’ she finished with a grin.

  Jake looked as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. ‘Taking flames into a library! What kind of library user would do that? Attila the Hun, maybe!’ He looked genuinely horrified.

  ‘I suppose they just want to impress on them the preciousness of books and learning.’

  He gave her a sideways look. ‘Is that fancy Oxford type talk for “scare the living shit out of them”?’

  ‘Basically,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘I feel like we could be in medieval Italy,’ he said later as they stood in Catte Street, looking up at the bridge popularly known as the Bridge of Sighs and which connected the two halves of Hertford College.

  ‘You seem extremely interested in history,’ she said.

  Jake must have caught the note of surprise in her voice, but he didn’t seem offended. ‘You have to remember I’ve spent a lot of time in war-torn countries where almost everything ancient has been blown to bits. But in Europe past times feel so close. Just standing here, it feels like you could easily slip into another time and see William Shakespeare getting wasted in a bar or whatever.’ He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know if William Shakespeare was ever in Oxford, but I like to think of him just round the corner in a bar.’ He sighed. ‘Mimi was always on at me to go to college.’

  ‘But you didn’t want to?’

  ‘Left home the bare minute I was legally allowed,’ he said, ‘and joined the Marines, like a lot of tough kids from the south.’ He saw her expression. ‘You didn’t think I was a tough kid?’

  She shook her head, not knowing how to answer.

  He gave a short laugh. ‘I guess time has mellowed me some then. I’d have been a helluva lot worse if Mimi hadn’t taken me on. She knocked a few of my rough edges off, luckily, or I probably wouldn’t be the civilized person you see today—’ He broke off. ‘Catte Street?’ he said, glancing back at the sign. ‘That’s not named after actual c
ats?’

  ‘No, it really is!’ she said, catching his enthusiasm, ‘because I happen to know that at one point they changed the name from Kattestreete to Mousecatchers’ Lane!’

  He broke into a delighted smile. ‘You’re kidding! Mousecatchers’ Lane?’ He stretched out his arms and sang out, ‘I LOVE this city.’

  They stopped to admire the Radcliffe Camera, now a reading room belonging to the Bodleian, and went from there into the High. ‘Would you like to see the college where I work?’ she asked impulsively.

  She took him into the Porters’ Lodge, where Mr Boswell was gruffly charmed by Bonnie and agreed to look after her for a few minutes while they walked around the college grounds.

  ‘He seriously has to wear that hat and suit to come to work?’ Jake whispered as they went through the arch into the gardens.

  ‘All the college porters do,’ she explained.

  ‘And nobody laughs?’

  She smilingly shook her head. ‘I suppose I grew up here so I forget how weird Oxford must seem to outsiders.’

  ‘You haven’t ever lived anywhere else?’

  She gave him her neutral smile. ‘I’ve lived in several places. Look, if you stand here you can see my office!’

  Jake dutifully admired the poky little upstairs window then wandered back along the deserted cloisters looking up at the creeper covered walls. ‘We are still in the twenty-first century, right?’ he asked her, half-laughing at himself. ‘I mean, we’re standing just a few yards from a busy street, and it’s like the modern world has just – gone!’

  ‘I think you might be suffering history overload,’ she said, laughing. ‘What time did you book lunch for?’

  He pulled out his phone. ‘I get so jet-lagged with all this air travel I have to put everything in here. Twelve thirty.’

  ‘I’ll drive us,’ said Anna, who always preferred driving to being driven. ‘My car is just parked on St Giles.’ She saw his amused look. ‘It makes more sense for me to drive,’ she pointed out. ‘That way you can admire the scenery.’