A Natural Curiosity (38 page)

She climbs back on to the box, for another look, and this time she sees the noisy young dog. It is still on its feet, unsteady, skinny, limping, but on its feet. It has backed away from the door, and is standing in the centre of the room, howling. Alix taps on the pane of glass. It looks up at her She waves at it. ‘Hang on little dog,’ she says. She climbs down again, and rips at the damp cardboard boxes of Pedigree Chum. There is enough meat here for all these dead and dying tormented creatures. But where is a tin opener? She dare not break into the house to look for one. What has she got in the car? Only her tool kit. She goes and gets her tool kit. She hammers at the tin with the screwdriver and spanner, has slowly made a deep jagged hole before she remembers that Sam’s Swiss Army knife is in the car glove-pocket. She goes back for it, hacks away with it, succeeds in removing most of the lid of one of the tins. She climbs back on to her platform, breaks the glass of the window (it falls, crashing, splintering, and releases foul air) and drops the tin as gently as she can. The survivor dog goes for it, is still strong enough to go for it. Alix starts on another tin. She will throw this in too, she thinks, then go to the village for help.

This is what she thinks, but this is not what happens. For while she is hacking at the second tin, she hears the sound of a car on the gravel. Is she frightened, at eleven thirty on a spring morning, in broad daylight? Well, yes, she is. But she is also very angry. She stands, holding the jagged tin and the Swiss Army knife. Angela’s car rounds the corner, comes to a halt. Angela is alone.

Angela gets out, stares at Alix. And just what do you think you’re doing here?’ she says, her hands on her hips, glowering, her red hair in a blazing crest.

‘And just what do you think you’re doing to these dogs?’ says Alix, standing before the door of the dog house, the dog morgue.

‘That’s my business,’ says Angela. ‘I warned you. I warned you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

The woman is mad, Alix realizes. She has always been mad.

‘Get out of here,’ says Angela.

‘All right, all right,’ says Alix. ‘But only if you feed these dogs. Your dogs are dying. I’ll report you. I’ll get you for this.’

Angela advances upon Alix. Alix brandishes her tin and her knife. Angela continues to advance. A sort of hysterical laughter rises in Alix’s throat, but she backs away from Angela, she cannot help it, she backs away and stands with her back against the door.

‘Get away,’ she says to Angela. In all her mild life she has never before been threatened with violence. ‘Get away, don’t touch me, get away.’

Angela advances. Alix throws the tin at her, not very hard, but at that range she cannot miss, and it hits Angela square in her cream-bloused chest. Angela grabs Alix’s arm, Alix takes a step back, the door of the dog prison opens behind her, and she falls backwards into it on to her bum as Angela pushes her. But now her hesitations are over, she struggles up, gets back to her feet, punches back at Angela, hits out at her with her knife-hand. Angela backs off, she is frightened. ‘Don’t touch me,’ yells Alix, ‘you dreadful woman, you monster woman, you bitch you, don’t touch me, keep away!’

Angela stands back, panting, bleeding, spattered with Pedigree Chum. The door behind Alix swings open, revealing the heap of dying flesh, the swinging head with its great dull white eyes, the staggering survivor dog trembling on its bowed legs. ‘Look,’ yells Alix, pointing at the dog, ‘look what you’ve done! Haven’t you done enough? Look what you’ve done!’

Angela has met her match in the mad-eyed Alix. She looks frightened. Alix knows she has won. Alix is still armed. She brandishes the small knife. She makes towards her car; backing away, taking care not to turn her back on Angela. ‘I’ll get you,’ shouts Angela, as soon as Alix is out of close range. ‘I’ll get you!’

‘No, you won’t,’ yells Alix, in a voice she didn’t know she’d got. ‘I’ve got
you
. You remember that. I’ve got
you.’
She gets into her car, fumbles desperately in her pocket for the car keys, switches on. ‘I’m off to report you now, you sadistic bitch,’ she shouts, through her lowered window, as she violently puts the car into reverse and then swings forward, and scrapes away across the drive.

She accelerates, triumphant, but has to stop, shaking, as she rejoins the road. She pulls in to one side, considers, and as she considers, notices how appallingly she smells. She is covered in dog shit and lumps of Chum and decomposing slime. Dog Matter. The back of her denim skirt, her shoes, her shirt are all filthy. Disgusting. Disgusting. She smells worse than a charnel house. Dog food has always struck her as one of the most disgusting substances on earth, worse even than dog shit, and now she is covered in it. Can she really present herself at the police station looking like this, smelling like this? No, she cannot. She considers her position, switches on, and drives slowly off, away from Hartley Bridge, and onwards, up the dale.

What she needs is a telephone box, but there are not so many telephone boxes in Upper Hartdale. The next village is Ossbury, will there be a box there, will it be empty, will she be able to use it unobtrusively? There is, it is, and she can. She has planned her statement. 999, she rings. Why waste time? Police, she says she wants. She says she wants to report an incident at Hartley Court. An assault. She rings off, and does not give her name. Then she drives on. She is a criminal. A self-confessed criminal. She had committed Bodily Harm. Maybe even Grievous Bodily Harm.

As she winds on, up the dale, stinking, the beauty of her position becomes clear to her. Angela cannot report her, as Angela does not want anybody to know where she is or who she is, and Alix is the only person who knows these things. Angela will have to suffer the dog food and the wound in silence. She will have to make up some story about her assailant. If Alix wishes to confess, that will be Alix’s choice. And meanwhile, Alix will get on to the RSPCA, and get Angela locked up for maltreating the Colonel’s dogs. It seems a satisfactory revenge. And if the Colonel and the Doctor have other secrets, well, that is their problem. Somehow Alix knows they have.

Alix the criminal feels light of heart. She has done a good deed. Maybe she has rescued the last tottering dog. And she has vindicated her theory about Paul Whitmore. He had been mothered by a mad woman, a fury, a harpy, a gorgon. He had been tormented, like the dogs, in a punishment block, with bloody treats hanging out of reach over his head. Poor Paul was exonerated. Angela is the guilty one. The finger points at Angela.

But now, she will have to get rid of this smell. She cannot stand it any longer. The moist warm sunny air aggravates the mingled odours. She will find water, and wash herself clean.

The road is mounting, now, away from the bed of the valley. She takes a small unsignposted turning, down to the right; it is little more than a cart track. She hopes it will lead her back to the river. And it does, or would, but it peters out by a five-barred gate tied up with orange-pink plastic string. Alix parks the car, and gets out, and leans on the gate. Yes, there will be the water, down beyond that curve, where the track leads onwards. She thinks she can hear it.

She examines herself, gingerly. Her clothes have had it. They are irrecoverable. She will have to throw them away. Has she got anything else to wear? In the back of the car are, as so often, Sam’s swimming things, a damp stewed bundle in a plastic bag. The towel will be useful, but his trunks not. She rummages under the rubbish and finds a providential package destined for Oxfam or the Spastics. Hopefully, she opens it, and discovers that it contains the never-worn Maltese lace blouse rejected by Liz at the time of the Pink Party, and a long black slinky sequined evening skirt from
c. 1969
. She gazes at them in admiration. She is glad to have found a good use for the Maltese blouse, to be able to give the slinky skirt its last airing, its final fling. She puts them in the plastic bag with Sam’s damp chlorine-perfumed towel, and climbs over the gate and sets off down the track towards what she hopes will be the water.

It is high noon, and the air shimmers. There is a little copse to one side, moorland to the other. Over the moorland, a black and white bird plays, tumbles and shrieks. The ground is dry yet spongy. There are purple, white and yellow flowers at her feet. The track winds down, and yes, she hears the sound of water, and there is the river, tumbling, flowing, sparkling, brown, vivid. It will be cold, she knows, but not
that
cold, to one who learned to swim in the cold waters of the North Sea. There is even a little beach for her, a brown mud beach, and a pool in the river’s bend. She struggles out of her soiled garments, and stands there, naked, gazing upstream, her feet sinking into the mud. She sees a vivid flash of blue. A kingfisher. Her heart leaps with delight. She knows she is peculiarly blessed. The bank is spangled with wind flowers, their seven-petalled faces like mystic day-stars. Alder and oak in tiny bud lean over the water.

The water is cold, but she braves it. She splashes, immerses herself limb by limb, rolls in it, cleanses herself. Weeds tumble past her, she thinks she sees a fish. She rises, dripping, newly baptized, and clambers to the bank, and dries herself. She sits there, on Sam’s towel, in the sun. She gazes at the trees, at the flowing water, at a branch bending low over the water, a branch of rubbed, smooth dark wood. A much used branch. The sacred grove, the sacred pool. It is an old friendly place. Others swim here. Here they hang their garments, while they swim.

She dresses herself, struggling into the Maltese blouse and the sequined skirt (she has put on a little weight since the 1960s, not as much as Liz, but a little) and bundles her old stuff into the bag. She will throw the bag away when she reaches civilization and its rubbish bins. She flings Sam’s towel nonchalantly round her shoulders, and sticks a glossy kingcup behind her ear. Then she strides barefoot back up the track, toward her car.

Somebody is waiting for her. An old man leans on the gate, as he has leant for centuries. His face is gnarled and wrinkled. He is dark and small of stature, as his people were and are. He smiles at tall Alix, as she approaches up the track. His smile is broad, knowing, capacious, unsurprised. Ceremoniously, he unties the pink plastic string for her, and ceremoniously he swings open the gate for her. He holds it as she passes through.

‘Thank you,’ she says, in her foreign tongue, bowing her head slightly in gratitude. He says nothing, but he continues to smile. Their eyes meet. Her heart overflows. It is one of the most satisfactory, one of the most benign encounters of her life.

Brian was surprised and slightly disturbed by Alix’s insistence upon revenge. She told him all now, belatedly: told him that evening, as she stirred the cheese sauce. She told him that she had already rung the RSPCA and reported Angela. This time she had given her name. ‘They said they’d go at once,’ said Alix. ‘I hope they give her a good long sentence.’

‘No you don’t,’ said Brian. ‘And anyway, people don’t get put in prison for ill-treating dogs.’

‘Don’t they?’ said Alix, tossing her hair out of her eyes, and stirring busily as the sauce thickened. ‘Don’t they? Well, they should.’

‘Now, you don’t think that,’ said Brian.

‘You should have seen those dogs,’ said Alix.

After a while, Alix calms down and agrees that Angela is clearly off her rocker and therefore not responsible. But that doesn’t mean that Alix wasn’t right to get in the RSPCA.

‘Look,’ said Alix, ‘what else can I get her for?’

‘You don’t have to
get
her at all.’

‘Yes, I do. I owe it to Paul.’

Brian hopes that this story is near its end. He has had enough of it. He does not like the new vindictive note in Alix’s voice, the new glitter in her eye. He encourages her to describe, once more, Angela’s attack upon Alix, Alix’s retaliation.

‘Look,’ said Alix, ‘I don’t care what I did to her. She’ll never dare bring a charge against me. She’s in no position to.’

Brian has some vague idea that once an assault has been reported to the police, there is no way of a charge not being brought. He hopes he has got this wrong. But anyway, Alix is indifferent to this prospect. In a way, she might even relish it.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Alix, pouring the cheese sauce on to leeks and hard-boiled eggs and looking noisily for the paprika, ‘I wouldn’t at all mind appearing in the dock to explain precisely why I threw that tin at Angela Whitmore. I think I’d be able to make a few points to the general public. Don’t you?’

Brian looked uncomfortable, and patted Alix’s shoulder in a placating manner. He could only hope that Angela was as keen to hush things up as a normal person might be. But with two mad women, one of them sniffing martyrdom and casting herself as an apologist for murder, and the other a dog-torturer, clearly way beyond the call of reason, who could tell what to expect? Angela ought to put self-preservation first. But people don’t always do what they ought, do they?

Shirley Harper is staying with Marcia Campbell in Marcia’s London flat. She likes it much better at Marcia’s than she ever liked it at Liz’s. It is more her scale. It is more like home. She sits on Marcia’s comfortable settee, her feet tucked up beneath her, and looks around approvingly. There are many reassuring features. Marcia has the same brass wall brackets as Shirley, she has the same John Lewis trolley, and the same Habitat coffee mugs. In the bathroom, miraculously, she even has the same green and ivory lotus wallpaper, with matching curtains. Shirley has commented on these coincidences, and Marcia has smiled and nodded, as though there is nothing surprising about them at all. Marcia does not comment on the fact that Liz’s house also has echoes of her own. Marcia and Liz, Marcia had observed, seem to share a penchant for cut glass. Shirley does not like cut glass.

Marcia Campbell, sister
ex machina
, sits knitting a complicated pullover with a pattern of small red, grey and blue checks. As she has explained to Shirley, a lot of actresses knit, some of them rather well. It’s the hanging around, the waiting, says Marcia. One has to do something.