Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  But no one came. She had no idea of the passage of time, for her watch had stopped. She moved some bottles to form a straw nest. Sometimes she fell into an exhausted sleep, sometimes she forced herself to move her arms and legs and stand leaning on the edge of the pit, shouting. Sometimes, lightheaded, she sang, her fingers pressed over her vocal chords to assure herself that sound was indeed coming forth. Thirsty, she remembered the sloe gin; transferring some to a small bottle in total darkness occupied her for a long time. She spilled a lot before she learned the art, but the result — taken strictly medicinally — was very comforting. And the more sips she took, the more it seemed that her hearing was returning; she could even hear occasional sounds of traffic from the road beyond the garden. But they only increased her feeling of a terrible loneliness and desertion — the rest of the world going about its business, uncaring of Alice Tremorne.

  It was in one of these more lonely moments, during her second night if she had known it, that as she leaned against the pit edge, and clenched and unclenched her fingers against their growing stiffness, she suddenly heard an unfamiliar creaking in the immediate timbers. She shone the weak beam of the light in this direction, calling for help in a husky whisper, then suddenly, out of nowhere came the warm wet touch of a tongue on her fingers. Instinctively repelled she jerked her arm back; then as though to reassure her, she heard a soft whining and knew that this was not the repulsive questing of a hopeful rat. Her fingers moved again to touch a muzzle, ears, to be covered again by an eager tongue — it was a dog that had come out of the blackness to her, the only living thing that knew or cared apparently that she still existed.

  Unfamiliar tears of gratitude welled up in Mrs. Tremorne’s eyes. When the pile shifted, and high agonized yelps followed she forgot her own splitting head and aching bones; she longed only to comfort this warm miraculous link with life, to show it by the soft stroking of her fingers how much she cared. From that moment, Mrs. Tremorne determined that if she had to spend another month here, living on gin in total darkness, she would somehow come out of it and see the reality of this small creature that had risked its life to come to her need out of the terrible night.

  It was undoubtedly the same sloe gin that put her there in the first place that brought her out alive again, for it was to be another two days before she was found by the conscientious Janet Carpenter, who had cut short her holiday to come back when she could receive no satisfaction on the telephone, the lines being down. She had arrived only that morning, after traveling for two nightmarishly slow days. She had been unable to find the daily help who had promised so faithfully to look after Mrs. Tremorne. She had vanished without a trace, padlocking her cottage behind her, and for a while Miss Carpenter thought Mrs. Tremorne might have vanished with her, to some safer hideout in the country. She knew that her mistress would not have gone out with friends that evening, as the warden suggested, for the simple reason that she had no friends. No one even liked her sufficiently to ask her out and put up with her overbearing bitterness for an evening. But it never occurred to her to think beyond the house at first; Mrs. Tremorne elsewhere, solo, was unthinkable.

  It was not until after her fruitless investigations that she came out into the garden to survey the wreckage and heard a faint muffled barking. Puzzled, she traced it to the garage. Plainly there was a dog trapped somewhere in that pile; but how to set about getting it out was another matter, for the whole structure above it looked perilous in the extreme. She sniffed the air; it smelled as though some bacchanalian orgy had recently taken place. The cupboard under the stairs hung drunkenly, one hinge on the shelves buckled and a pile of broken bottles covered in white dust lying below. On top was a curiously familiar shape under its coating of dust. Picking her way carefully over, she picked it up: she held Alice Tremorne’s ivory-headed cane, as much a part of her normally as though it were an extension of her left arm. Janet Carpenter turned and ran for the A.R.P. post.

  They uncovered, piece by precarious piece, first the dog, a small white shadow of a dog who bazed blindly up at them from thickly encrusted eyes behind a matted fringe of hair, dusty white save for the contrasting red of a clean licked mangled forepaw, so light that as it was lifted out it seemed there could be nothing but dry bones within the enveloping whiteness. The man who held it was conscious of the sickly smell of infection, the dry hot skin below the coat. Nevertheless, it acknowledged man’s presence by a brief quivering of the end of its tail. He laid it on the floor and they set to again for the urgent, yet frustratingly slow, uncovering of Mrs. Tremorne’s body.

  It was unveiled at last. Stretched out neatly on a bed of straw, her head pillowed on a flat square of empty bottles, her hands folded tidily on her chest under her sable cape, her stockinged feet together, Mrs. Tremorne lay. The string of pearls on the massive shelf of her bosom moved up and down with peaceful regularity. Even as they gazed upon her, the slack lower jaw dropped another fraction, she hiccuped gently, and then a loud imperious snore fell upon their astonished ears.

  She was taken to hospital, where — almost incredibly for a seventy-six-year-old semi-invalid — no damage other than a bruising which discolored almost her entire body had been found, and now it was a matter of time and rest only.

  The overworked nursing staff hoped fervently that the time with them would be brief, for she was a despotic bell-ringer of a patient. The first thing she had asked for when she recovered from her monumental but merciful hangover was the dog, her rescuer, in whom, as she declared, had lain her salvation. Miss Carpenter, hovering dutifully by the bed, was bidden to find out about this canine hero forthwith. What did it look like? It was just a dog, a small dog, Miss Carpenter said, remembering with aversion the limp, dirty, blood-stained bundle, but adding only that it appeared to have a shortish tail and longish ears. Mrs. Tremorne regarded her with scorn.

  “It was a miracle,” she said, her words still somewhat slurred. “I held its paw and strength flowed out, poshitively flowed out . . .” Her glazed eyes glared from the pillow, challenging anyone to dispute the source of the miracle-working flow, and Miss Carpenter left to track it down.

  She was able to report next day that one of the rescue team had taken the dog home with him, and his wife was looking after it; its eyes were open, the wound on the paw was clean, but possibly there were internal injuries or severe shock for the animal seemed to have lost the will to live — it simply lay in a box without stirring, and was kept going only by the efforts of the woman with spoonfuls of warm milk laced with precious whiskey.

  She must be suitably rewarded, and a vet must be called immediately, commanded Mrs. Tremorne — two, three vets if necessary. A taxi must be summoned so that the dog could be installed at The Cedars straightaway. Carpenter must go forth and — here was her alligator bag — set the machinery in motion; a dog basket, the best, to be bought; leads, brushes, bones and tempting dog delicacies — dogs liked liver, she knew; fetch then, quantities of liver . . .

  Liver was very hard to get nowadays, offered Miss Carpenter apologetically. “Tell Hobbs the Butcher I wish liver,” said Mrs. Tremorne, weakly but majestically. The Butcher’s shop had received a direct hit, Carpenter had heard. “What has that to do with Hobbs obtaining liver?” inquired Mrs. Tremorne in genuine surprise.

  It was useless explaining; no one tried. The war to Alice Tremorne was simply an interlude of personal inconvenience. Miss Carpenter departed dispiritedly into the ruins of the shopping center.

  “Good dog, good little doggie,” mumbled Alice Tremorne, drifting off again. “Did it hurt then? Poor little doggie . . . never mind . . . Alice is here . . .”

  Chapter 11

  IF MIRACULOUS STRENGTH had flowed out of the dog’s paw to Alice Tremorne, now the procedure was reversed and strength flowed back through every means that the hand dipping into its alligator bag could provide. The little dog entered a new stage of his life that held everything a solicitous parent might give its child, a life of extreme contrast to all he h
ad ever known in its quiet stability and ordained pattern of day following upon day. By the time Mrs. Tremorne was allowed home to her well-aired bed, still stiff and sore, he was installed in a basket (the best) in her bedroom, his coat brushed to gleaming point, his hair tied back from his eyes with a red ribbon, and combed to a silken length that would have sent MacLean rushing in shame for scissors. The hair around his delicate hocks had been shaved to match the area around the injured paw, over which a baby’s blue bootee was drawn to hold the dressing in place. He hopped on three legs, and several times a day Miss Carpenter, mouth buttoned into a thin line, clipped a leash onto the lightest and finest of red leather collars and took her charge for an airing in the garden. After the first day of Mrs. Tremorne’s homecoming she no longer returned him to the basket, but lifted him — her lips by now almost invisible — into the fastness of Mrs. Tremorne’s bed, who then drew her pink silk eiderdown tenderly over.

  At first he had hardly stirred, lying with dull apathetic eyes that were wide open yet seemed to focus on nothing. When they closed and he slept briefly, his body twitched convulsively, and then Mrs. Tremorne would reach out to pat and talk the reassuring baby talk that she had never used in her life but which seemed to come naturally to her now, until he lay quiet again. As the days passed, his tail gradually stirred more and more, his eyes cleared and focused, his ears rose fractionally — until one day she woke from a light sleep to find him lightly brushing her arm with one paw, his eyes beaming with interest. Yet another indomitable little dog had risen from the ashes.

  Now to find a name for him. It seemed to Alice Tremorne that if she tried enough words she might run into a chance combination of vowels that would sound near enough to the dog’s ears. Propped up against her pillows, her anonymous audience’s eyes fixed upon her with unwavering attention, she started off by running through all the fictional or traditional canine names that she could remember: Rover, Fido, Blackie, Spot, Kim. . . . She sent Carpenter down to the library: Garm, Argus, Owd Bob, Beautiful Joe, Luath, Beowulf, Greyfriars Bobby. . . . She ran through name after name but none met with any recognition. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John . . . she persevered; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . She was about to dip into the telephone book when she remembered John Peel and his hounds.

  “Yes, I ken John Peel, and Ruby too! / And Ranter and Rover . . .” she trailed off; no, it wasn’t Rover, it was . . . Raver? Ringworm? She started off at the beginning again, hoping to get carried along unconsciously: “Do ye ken John Peel, / Wi’ his coat so gay,” she sang determinedly, only to get stuck again at Ranter. It was very irritating to one who prided herself on her memory.

  She was still at it when Miss Carpenter arrived to take the dog out, and when commanded to make a duet she outran Mrs. Tremorne convincingly: “Ranter and Ringwood, / Bellman and True!” she continued in a surprisingly sweet soprano.

  It was irritating to be bested; but as Mrs. Tremorne repeated the new names, suddenly the ears before her rose and flickered and the round eyes lit up in seeming recognition. She repeated the names, and this time the dog jumped off the bed and sat quivering expectantly, his eyes never leaving her face. It was Bellman that excited him, but she soon found that the first half of the word had the same effect: “Bell!” she said, “Bell—good Bell!” and each time she spoke, the dog’s tail wagged more furiously.

  “You see,” she said triumphantly, “that’s his name — Bell! Time for walkies then, my darling Bell —” She gazed down dotingly.

  In glum silence, Carpenter clipped on the lead. Then, almost unheard of, she produced an opinion of her own. “I think Bell’s a silly name for a dog,” she said. “It sounds like a girl one way or a chime the other.” She sniffed.

  Mrs. Tremorne was not used to mutiny, but she quelled it now with cunning ease: “Neither the feminine or the ding-dong,” she said with lofty dismissal, “but Bel, who — as I am sure you will remember — was the god of heaven and earth in Babylonian mythology.”

  Many years addiction to the Times crossword had paid off. Bel he became, despite Carpenter sniffs, the sound of the name near enough to the one to which he had responded for so many years before he became Ria.

  Measure for measure, he returned the love and care lavished on him, and all his uninhibited affection and natural gaiety, so long denied, returned. He filled out to an attractive alert healthiness, becoming in the process the closest thing to a poodle to which the united efforts of his mistress and a kennel maid skilled in the art could clip and comb him, the dark curls of the outer coat stripping down to a pale, almost lavender, gray. The mutilation of his toes left him with a permanent slight limp but did not seem to inconvenience him at all.

  The gardener, the milkman, the postman, every tradesman who came to the door — in fact, any human who entered the house or garden — was greeted with enthusiastic interest, and if it were not immediately returned he would stand on his hind legs to draw attention to the oversight.

  Soon, even the reluctant Miss Carpenter, who had lived only for retirement one day with an undemanding canary, fell under his spell. She no longer looked so haunted, for now that Mrs. Tremorne had an all-engrossing interest, the spotlight of attention had shifted, and an atmosphere of almost cozy warmth gradually permeated the normally gloomy house with their mutual absorption. Suddenly one day she became Janet. Bel loved her, and more and more she enjoyed his company and the interest he brought to her formerly solitary walks. But undoubtedly the one who received his full devotion was the one whom he had found himself, his own human bounty, Mrs. Tremorne.

  He seemed to be completely content in his role of the perfect companion to her; a dog who had quickly learned to interpret yet another vocabulary, who roused no antagonism in other dogs, whose presence did not raise the hair or flatten the ears of cats, friendly with all worlds; a perfect dog, obedient, fastidiously clean, with faultless manners, even towards food, for at first he would eat nothing, however tempting, unless she were eating too. To all appearances a dog for old ladies to pamper, who could fit right into a gentle purposeless life as though he had known no other; a chameleon little dog. Yet there were times when Mrs. Tremorne felt that it was like living with some kind of ghostly X, the unknown quantity — who and whatever had formed his life before he came to her. There was a certain excitement in finding new clues towards the solving, but mostly they only tantalized further with fragmentary glimpses of an unshared world.

  There were times when he lay for hours on top of the garden wall, watching the world that passed below as though he were waiting to recognize some familiar form. Watching him herself, Mrs. Tremorne gradually discovered the pattern of his interests: the clip-clop of a horse-drawn milk van or coal cart always brought the most eager attention; servicemen, and sailors in particular, always aroused attention; children were accorded only a flicker of interest, passing dogs no more than a polite ritual acknowledgement. But this knowledge only added up to the questionable composite of an equestrian bachelor sailor for a former owner, and was not much help. He made many friends among the regular passersby. They would stop and have a word with him, and he would receive their attentions with dignified polite interest, but he would never jump down off the security of his garden wall. He also made an excellent early warning system, for minutes before the sirens wailed to the approaching throb of German raiders, he had abandoned the wall to make for the furthermost corner of the shelter under the kitchen stairs. A bonfire one day in the garden terrified him into this refuge as well.

  There were the occasional times too when he lay listless and unresponsive, his eyes infinitely sad and faraway. One afternoon, eerily, he had sat up suddenly, thrown his head back and howled, a high haunting sound that had rung in Mrs. Tremorne’s ears for days afterwards, unable to gauge at the depths from which such sorrow must find outlet. Sometimes she found herself almost willing him to speak, to tell her what he was so obviously imploring her to do on those occasions when he would sit before her or crouch at the top of the stairs,
tense, searching her eyes, straining every nerve to get his message across as to the part she must play in some ritual. . . . “Darling Bel, what is it?” she would implore. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Sit up!” and “salute” and “catch” had been translated into immediate action, and she had discovered that he would toss and catch biscuits balanced on his nose, but whatever other time-honored canine trick command she gave — speak, say please, roll over, jump — a puzzled shadow only would flit over his eyes, and it seemed as though she would never find the key words that would unlock any further response. But as the bond between them grew, his quivering need to communicate became stronger.

  One day he rose to his hind legs in a bid to keep her attention longer. She took his forepaws. The wireless was playing Irish jigs, and she laughed down at him, moving his paws in time to the music. “Come on, my darling,” she said, “dance with me —” She moved three stiff close steps to the right, and then to the left, and he followed her. “One, two, three,” sang Mrs. Tremorne to her eager little partner, “and a one, two, three —” Breathless, she let his paws go, but to her astonishment he circled on, nodding his head and pawing the air in a quaint little dance.

  Her reaction, of course, was one of unmitigated admiration and enchantment as she clapped her hands — and relief too, for it was as though some barrier had been broken down. Her pleasure was so patent that thereafter he volunteered this performance from time to time; but only, she noticed, when the need to communicate or demonstrate affection to her became so overwhelming that he had no other recourse, a unique bestowal of himself. A barrier had indeed been broken down but she could never know how strong and deeply entrenched it had been.