Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  Neil, as she and Janet always called him now, had developed an easy relationship with her, never deferring, often blunt, yet always maintaining a balance of diffidence. Her ruthless determination amused him; his stubbornness exasperated and challenged her. Both loved an argument, and they had much to argue about, for both had hard and fast opinions about almost everything. But disagreement always discomforted Bel Ria, and his initial nervous yawnings, heralding his imminent condemnatory departure from the scene, were usually enough to make them agree to differ on the subject. Mrs. Tremorne took to using the diplomatic all embracing “Aye” as well. So did Janet, but teasingly.

  Janet had blossomed, and her refreshing down-to-earth viewpoint, her often hilarious gossiping anecdotes were the perfect foil to his taciturnity. He found time to refurbish an old bicycle discovered rusting in the toolshed for her shopping expeditions, and he found too that she made an excellent apprentice, with a good head for heights. Followed up the ladder by the familiarly nimble paws of a delighted Bel Ria, they spent many hours working companionably on the roof. Once Mrs. Tremorne had got over her fears and realized that her darling was as at home on a ladder as on the staircase, she relaxed and watched progress benignly through her field glasses.

  Sometimes, a formidable opponent, she played chess in the evenings with Neil. Sometimes they read or listened to the wireless; sometimes all three sat knitting or sewing, Bel Ria asleep in their contented midst. But Mrs. Tremorne liked it best when she could persuade Neil to talk about the days of Tertian.

  One evening he brought over a few photographs to show her. The first was of a fair-haired young man, his eyes squinting against a low sun. He stood by a ship’s rail, wearing a duffel coat, a small monkey muffled up in a roll-necked jersey in his arms, and by his feet, looking up at the monkey, was Ria of Tertian, far sturdier then in his thick almost shaggy coat but still recognizably her Bel.

  “Atlantic convoy,” said MacLean. “That was the doctor. He wasn’t long qualified, but I served under none better. He sent me these pictures after I got back here.”

  The second was of a thickset bearded man in tropical uniform, one hand half-raised in salute, newly stepped off a gangway, at his heels a massive bull terrier looking towards the camera with a pleased shark-like smile of recognition.

  “The Captain coming aboard at Gib. with Barkis,” said MacLean. “Himself was the fine gentleman,” he added with such finite simplicity that Alice Tremorne passed swiftly on to the last picture.

  This was of a very tall young seaman with the same little monkey perched on his shoulder, this time wearing a shoulder harness and lead over a white singlet and a pair of absurd white shorts.

  “Lessing and Louis in the Mediterranean,” said MacLean.

  Mrs. Tremorne seemed fascinated by the photograph, looking at it under the light with a magnifying glass. “So tiny and delicate,” she marveled. “Such a little scrap of a thing to have gone through so much —”

  “He was a thrawn wee beast,” said MacLean with some vehemence. “At least with me,” he added with sudden honest insight, “as if he knew I couldn’t abide his capers, but the men were daft about him, and so was Ria for that matter. When Ria didn’t come back after Plymouth, he was aye searching for him on board. For a while he wouldn’t eat, and he was all huddled up and listless, the way sick monkeys are, but it was warm in the Med, and there was plenty of fruit and nuts and the like, and after a while he seemed to forget and settled down.”

  “And where is he now?” asked Mrs. Tremorne.

  “He went with our Ark,” said MacLean, his face expressionless.

  Mrs. Tremorne had not heard properly. “Where did you say?” she repeated.

  MacLean looked across at her. She was looking down at the photograph, her face soft. Ria watched him, his eyes uneasy. “He went with Lessing and the others —” he said gently, “and he’s still with them, still the same.”

  “What a happy ending,” said Mrs. Tremorne with relief.

  “Aye,” said MacLean, and got out the chessboard.

  He thought of Louis again that night, lying awake in the tack room that now looked as neat and snug and shipshape as he could have wished. He had had no affection or sentiment for the animal, but his end had been such a lonely one and its defiant rejection had affected him profoundly.

  In those desperate moments after Tertian had been hit, there was naturally no time to think of Louis. Helplessly out of commission, Tertian was a sitting target. The decision was taken to abandon ship, then sink her themselves. Their sister ship, Trumpeter, now moving in alongside, was an even more vital target with her decks already crammed with Tiercel’s survivors, and every minute counted. In the last moments, all hands had turned to in searching out the wounded.

  One of the last to leave, scrambling over the wreckage, the coxswain saw a flicker of movement among it, and Louis leaped onto the rail ahead. The coxswain grabbed as he passed but Louis struggled and bit and fought free to swarm up a stay out of reach.

  Trumpeter stood off and trained her guns, while on her packed decks the small company of Tertian’s survivors were the silent shocked spectators. Close to MacLean, the quartermaster watching through binoculars spotted Louis just before the first salvo. High on the wireless mast that still remained miraculously straight and intact, he clung to a stay, his yellow duster trailing from one paw. His head was turned in the direction of Trumpeter. The guns thundered.

  He was glad now that he had substituted the satisfactory ambiguity to Alice Tremorne, for he had not realized until he saw her with the photograph that she had such a vulnerable core. Why burden her with something that had tormented him enough in the sick feverish activity of his mind for weeks afterwards, when twisting restlessly in the hot unreality of the long hospital nights, there had been plenty of time to think, to try and equate his obsession over the manner of death of one capuchin monkey with the deaths of so many fine men.

  Thinking back to that time from the serenity of his mind tonight, it was as though he saw it in perspective for the first time and was able to understand at last: Louis had been the only alien, the only one out of his element against that background. Loss of life was an accepted gamble that men took when they went to war. But no animal went to war: caught up in man’s lethal affairs, they were an irreconcilable aberration.

  He suddenly recalled the soldier’s ravings about bears and horses and rabbits — the “innocents” he had called them. The innocents? Fanciful talk he would have said then — ravings indeed, but now? All he knew now was that nothing could ever be the same again; he could never return to the laboratory after the war — there would be too many Louises and Rias and Hyacinthes there to remind him.

  He slept, absolved, the little ghost of Louis laid to rest at last, along with all the other animals that had passed through his hands, as innocent now as they.

  Early in the morning, as though to rid his conscience entirely of the last thing that remained on it, he wrote a long letter to Donald Sinclair, his first communication since that stark telegram from Plymouth. He ended it:

  . . . so that you must tell me what you would like done for I am not easy in my mind to bide this way when it is your right. I should have written long before. Mind you I do not speak for Mrs. Tremorne — after all this time she thinks of the dog as hers — and in a way this is so — if it was not for her this letter would not need to be written. She has been willing enough to let him be with me this half and half way, but only because she would do anything for him and it seems to be his own decision. He is a strange dog.

  I will hope to hear from you soon. In the meantime I will try and make him stay here when my leave is up for finding his own way between D’port and here is too risky with the traffic. And too long, as I am thinking now that he is nearer eleven than ten.

  He addressed and sealed the envelope, then stamped it resolutely. He would post it now, before breakfast, before he had any second thoughts. . . . There was a faint scratch at the door; Bel Ria
had arrived, unusually early, in time to accompany him. He limped more noticeably than usual on their way to the postbox, sometimes going on three legs.

  It would rain before the afternoon, said Alice Tremorne sagely — her own aching joints had foretold this as well this morning. She was halfway down the stairs when she made her pronouncement, making difficult progress. Near the bottom she stumbled and nearly fell. She waved Neil imperiously aside when he went forward to take her arm, but he took it anyway and to divert her fumings as he helped her across the hall to the windowseat, he told of his decision to leave Bel Ria when his leave ended. The news was not received with the pleasure he had expected. He could feel her arm beneath his become suddenly rigid, and for a moment she seemed quite stunned.

  “Does that mean that . . . that you are going away, going back to sea?” she said at last, and far from sounding exultant, she sounded almost fearful.

  “Nothing of the kind,” he said, surprised. “I’ll be at Devonport for a while yet, I hope. It just seemed that with the winter coming on it would be easier for him.” He felt her relax. She sat down, but before she turned her head away he saw to his embarrassment that she had tears in her eyes. “Mind you, Mistress Tremorne,” he went on severely, “that doesn’t mean any fancy work with the clippers and ribbons and the like the moment I’ve gone — there’s plenty to be done yet outside so I’ll be backwards and forwards to keep an eye on him.”

  “But perhaps he won’t stay once you’ve gone through that gate,” said Mrs. Tremorne worriedly. A few drops of rain splashed on the window, and she recovered herself. “You see,” she said triumphantly, “it’s going to pour!” Then, with sudden Machiavellian cunning, she went on: “Why don’t you take Janet to the pictures this afternoon for a start? To get him used to the idea that you will come back?”

  “The pictures? In the afternoon?” he said, so obviously horrified at such decadence that she laughed.

  “Goodbye Mr. Chips is hardly an orgy. Bel and I will have a nice afternoon pampering ourselves in front of the fire. Why don’t you go?”

  “Why not? Why not indeed?” he said with sudden reckless decision. “I might do just that —”

  Mrs. Tremorne watched them go. Bel Ria made no attempt to follow. “How nice,” she said as she settled down for a cosy chat with him on her lap. “How nice it would be — I could bring my bedroom downstairs, which would be much easier for us, wouldn’t it? — and they could have the whole of the upstairs, and then we could all be together! Wouldn’t that be lovely, my darling?” Bel Ria regarded her with enthusiastic interest. After a while they both had a little nap.

  When she woke up she confided another thought: “The coach house would make a wonderful surgery, wouldn’t it?” Bel Ria looked at her inquiringly. “I mean if he went back and finished his veterinary degree one day — did you know he only had a year to go?” He stirred his tail agreeably. The rain drummed on the windows. It was very peaceful. They had another little nap.

  Bel Ria seemed reassured when he saw that Neil’s work clothes remained in the tack room on the day of his departure. Janet held him at the gate, subdued but unprotesting as she waved his paw cheerfully in farewell. Then he followed her quite happily to find Fred and the morning’s egg harvest.

  Donald Sinclair’s reply, awaiting at the barracks, was movingly warm and percipient:

  . . . besides, I have no “right” as you said in your letter — it is between you and Mrs. Tremorne, for the dog has belonged to both of you over these years, and he was with me for less than 24 hours. It was a queer time too, the more I think about it — if the dog had never found me in that ditch in France everything would have been different. And his real owner might still be alive. That woman risked everything for me, and in the end the only way I could repay her at all was to see that her dog was cared for — and that was where you came in.

  I hope that one day we will meet and have a good yarn about those days — perhaps next year when I expect to come south for a week or so . . .

  There was a P.S. “Re-reading your letter I think that you have answered it yourself already! I think that she would be well content with your decision.”

  Neil handed the letter to Mrs. Tremorne on his next visit without comment.

  When she had finished reading she was silent for a long time.

  “So it was a woman,” she said slowly at last. “The one he really belonged to, I mean —” When she spoke again, she sounded almost sad. “I think I always knew that he never really belonged to either of us, he’s just a part of both of us. Look at him —” she went on, glancing across the room to where Bel Ria lay in a patch of sunlight, “you see, he isn’t the shaggy Ria of your photographs, or the almost-poodle Bel of mine. He’s Bel Ria and he became that between us.”

  MacLean could only nod. She looked at the letter again then handed it back. “Strange — how he found people, first Sinclair, and then me. But not you —”

  He put the letter back in his pocket with an air of finality. “Perhaps he found me out instead —” he said briskly. “And now, I’ve only got until six, so there’s just time to get another coat of paint on before the light goes.” Clearly the matter was closed.

  Seconds before he had uttered the words, the seemingly fast asleep Bel Ria had risen, stretched, and made for the door where he now stood looking back expectantly, his tail stirring slowly.

  Chapter 14

  THE QUESTION OF POSSESSION had been dispelled and was never to be revived. Bel Ria was left to himself as the humans in his life became increasingly possessed by their own intertwining lives, but so gradually did this detachment come about over the following year that it went unremarked. The extended solitude on the wall, the longer withdrawals into sleep in their company were taken for a natural quietude in his undisputed security.

  Only occasionally now did he search their faces to interpret some shadow of expression, or sit alertly with his head turning from one to another as they spoke. It was as though he had mastered their communication and that there was nothing further to learn. Yet in other ways he appeared to have drawn closer, for the deeply ingrained need of his character and training to give of himself drove him to become even more prescient to their actions or wishes. Almost before an idea had been formed — such as going out for a walk or wondering where he was — he would appear with eager questioning eyes, as though he had already received the summons and waited only to learn their requirements of him. Always minutes before Neil’s or Janet’s arrival he would be watching from the window or the wall, and the enthusiasm of his greeting grew more demanding.

  He performed his day-to-day tricks for Mrs. Tremorne more insistently, prolonging the sessions whenever possible, even adding to them. But the impulse to bestow his dance seldom overtook him now, for he was no longer rewarded with her pleasure, only frustrated by her concern. It had seemed to her that he had become over-intense and anxious then, and sometimes he even panted as though the performance exacted too great an effort, and because of this, sympathetically attributing it to his rheumatism in the injured paw, she tried to avoid it altogether.

  Even Neil, returning after a long period of absence in the spring of 1944, noticed no change other than a muzzle more grayed than he remembered, although this lack of awareness was hardly surprising that day as his mind’s eye was almost fully occupied with more pressing affairs. He had been posted to a Combined Operations base on the south coast and had come back on an unexpected forty-eight-hour leave.

  Bel Ria had anticipated his coming from his post on the wall since early morning, and had shadowed him from the moment he had turned in at the gate, but after the first greeting it was Janet who received all the attention from then on, for within half an hour of his arrival she and Neil had become engaged.

  Janet had made only one proviso: that Alice Tremorne should always be their responsibility, no matter what. Neil seemed only surprised that she would bother to mention this.

  “But I’ve never thought other than that
I’d be taking on the pair of you,” he said. “Do you want me to propose to her as well?”

  “It won’t always be easy,” Janet warned. “You don’t know what it was like before. Bel Ria can’t live forever, and when he’s gone she’ll be lost for something to lavish her love and attention on. You’re sure you want to take it on? And please, no ‘aye’ for an answer this time.”

  At his feet Bel Ria looked up. Neil’s mind suddenly went back to the same discomforting intensity in the inflamed eyes of a small black oil-reeking dog by the head of a stretcher, awaiting his answer then as now.

  “There will be bairns to take his place one day,” he said abruptly. “And yes, I was never surer of anything.”

  He bent down to pat Bel Ria and then, to Janet’s amazement, picked him up and held him in his arms. Bel Ria managed to look so awkward and embarrassed by this departure from custom that he put him down after a moment.

  “I’ve never seen you do that before,” she said.

  “I was just seeing what it felt like,” he said sheepishly.

  Everything would go on just the same, they agreed as they walked back to the house, until Neil was demobbed and would get his gratuity — perhaps even a grant as well — to finish off the year for a veterinary degree. And in the meantime, as Mrs. Tremorne’s bedroom had been moved downstairs to the dining room, perhaps they would be able to use part of the upstairs as their own quarters. And . . .

  From the window Alice Tremorne saw them coming, Bel Ria running ahead, the three beings who filled her life. She sat back in her chair with a deep sigh of content. Bel Ria had not been alone in his precognition. He arrived now, well ahead of the others, and displaced the Times in her lap. She hugged him tightly, and then in her excitement dabbed her eyes with one of his ears instead of her handkerchief. “At last — I was beginning to think we’d have to do it for him!” she said. He scratched the ear absently, then examined his paw as though he had never seen it before, so she went on with his answer: “So nice — so exactly right!”