The Governess and Other Stories (3 page)

“Limpley,” my husband began, “I thought of you yesterday evening when I read a maxim in an old book saying that no one should wish for too much, we should wish for only a single thing. And I thought to myself—what would our good neighbour, for instance, wish for if an angel or a good fairy or some other kindly being were to ask him—Limpley, what do you really want in life? I will grant you just one wish.”

Limpley looked baffled. He was enjoying the joke, but he did not take it seriously. He still had an uneasy feeling that there was something ominous behind this solemn opening.

“Come along, Limpley, think of me as your good fairy,” said my husband reassuringly, seeing him so much at a loss. “Don’t you have anything to wish for at all?”

Half-in-earnest, half-laughing, Limpley scratched his short red hair.

“Well, not really,” he finally confessed. “I have everything I could want, my house, my wife, my good safe job, my …” I noticed that he was going to say ‘my dog’, but at the last moment he felt it was out of place. “Yes, I really have all I could wish for.”

“So there’s nothing for the angel or the fairy to grant you?”

Limpley was getting more cheerful by the minute. He was delighted to be offered the chance to tell us, straight out, how extremely happy he was. “No … not really.”

“What a pity,” said my husband. “What a pity you can’t think of anything.” And he fell silent.

Limpley was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable under my husband’s searching gaze. He clearly thought he ought to apologise.

“Well, one can always do with a little more money, of course … maybe a promotion at work … but as I said, I’m content … I really don’t know what else I could wish for.”

“So the poor angel,” said my husband, pretending to shake his head sadly, “has to leave his mission unaccomplished because Mr Limpley has nothing to wish for. Well, fortunately the kind angel didn’t go straight away again, but had a word with Mrs Limpley first, and he seems to have had better luck with her.”

Limpley was taken aback. The poor man looked almost simple-minded, sitting there with his watery eyes staring and his mouth half-open. But he pulled himself together and said with slight irritation, for he didn’t see how anyone who belonged to him not be perfectly happy, “My wife? What can
she
have to wish for?”

“Well—perhaps something better than a dog to look after.”

Now Limpley understood. He was thunderstruck. Instinctively he opened his eyes so wide in happy surprise that you could see the whites instead of the pupils. All at once he jumped up and ran out, forgetting his coat and without a word of apology to us, storming off to his wife’s room like a man demented.

We both laughed. But we were not surprised; it was just what we would have expected of our famously impetuous neighbour.

Someone else, however,
was
surprised. Someone who was lounging on the sofa idly, eyes half-open and blinking, waiting for the homage that his master owed him, or that he thought his master owed him—the well-groomed and autocratic Ponto. But what on earth had happened? The man went rushing past him without a word of greeting or flattery, on into the bedroom, and he heard laughter and weeping and talk and sobs, going on and on, and no one bothered about him, Ponto, who by right and custom received the first loving greeting. An hour passed by. The maid brought him his bowl of food. Ponto scornfully left it untouched. He was used to being begged and urged to eat until he was hand-fed. He growled angrily at the maid. They’d soon find out he wasn’t to be fobbed off with indifference like that! But in their excitement his humans never even noticed that he had turned down his dinner that evening. He was forgotten, and forgotten he remained. Limpley was talking on and on to his wife, never stopping, bombarding her with concern and advice, lavishing caresses on her. In the first flush of his delight he had no eyes for Ponto, and the arrogant animal was too proud to remind his master of his existence by intruding. He crouched in a corner and waited. This could only be a misunderstanding, a single if inexcusable oversight. But he waited in vain. Even next morning, when the countless admonitions Limpley kept giving his wife to take it easy and spare herself almost made him miss his bus, he raced out of the house and past Ponto without a word to the dog.

There’s no doubt that Ponto was an intelligent animal, but this sudden change was more than he could understand. I happened to be standing at the window when Limpley got on the bus, and I saw how, as soon as he had disappeared inside it, Ponto very slowly—I might almost say thoughtfully—slunk out of the house and watched the vehicle as it drove away. He waited there without moving for half-an-hour, obviously hoping that his master would come back and make up for the attention he had forgotten to pay him the evening before. He did not rush about playing, but only went round and round the house all day slowly, as if deep in thought. Perhaps—who knows how and to what extent sequences of thought can form in an animal mind?—he was brooding on whether he himself had done something clumsy to earn the incomprehensible withdrawal of the favours he was used to. Towards evening, about halfan-hour before Limpley usually came home, he became visibly nervous and kept patrolling the fence with his ears back, keeping an eye open to spot the bus in good time. But of course he wasn’t going to show how impatiently he had been waiting; as soon as the bus came into view at its usual hour he hurried back into the living room, lay down on the sofa as usual and waited.

Once again, however, he waited in vain. Once again Limpley hurried past him. And so it went on day after day. Now and then Limpley noticed him, gave him a fleeting, “Oh, there you are, Ponto,” and patted him in passing. But it was only an indifferent, casual pat. There was no more flattering, servile attention, there were no more caresses, no games, no walks, nothing, nothing, nothing. Limpley, that fundamentally kindly man, can hardly be blamed for this painful indifference, for he now had no thought in his head but to look after his wife. When he came home from work he accompanied her wherever she went, taking her for walks of just the right length, supporting her with his arm in case she took a hasty or incautious step; he watched over her diet, and made the maid give him a precise report on every hour of her day. Late at night, when she had gone to bed, he came round to our house almost daily to ask me, as a woman of experience, for advice and reassurance; he was already buying equipment in the big department stores for the coming baby. And he did all this in a state of uninterrupted busy excitement. His own personal life came nowhere; sometimes he forgot to shave for two days on end, and sometimes he was late at the office because the constant stream of advice he gave his wife had made him miss the bus. So it was not malice or unfaithfulness if he neglected to take Ponto for walks or pay him attention; only the confusion of a passionate man with an almost monomaniac disposition concentrating all his senses, thoughts and feelings on a single object. But if human beings, in spite of their ability to think logically of the past and the future, are hardly capable of accepting a slight inflicted on them without bearing resentment, how can a dumb animal take it calmly? Ponto was more and more nervous and agitated as the weeks went by. His self-esteem could not tolerate being overlooked and downgraded in importance, when he was the real master of this house. It would have been sensible of him to adopt a pleading, flattering attitude to Limpley, who would then surely have been aware of his dereliction of duty. But Ponto was too proud to crawl to anyone. It was not he but his master who was to make the first approach. So the dog tried all kinds of ruses to draw attention to himself. In the third week he suddenly began limping, dragging his left hind leg as if he had gone lame. In normal circumstances, Limpley would have examined him at once in affectionate alarm, to see if he had a thorn in his paw. He would anxiously have phoned the vet, he would have got up three or four times in the night to see how the dog was doing. Now, however, neither he nor anyone else in the house took the slightest notice of Ponto’s pathetically assumed limp, and the embittered dog had no alternative but to put up with it. A couple of weeks later he tried again, this time going on hunger strike. For two days he made the sacrifice of leaving his food untouched. But no one worried about his lack of appetite, whereas usually, if he failed to lick the last morsel out of his bowl in one of his tyrannical moods, the attentive Limpley would fetch him special dog biscuits or a slice of sausage. Finally animal hunger was too much for Ponto, and he secretly and guiltily ate all his food with little enjoyment. Another time he tried to attract attention by hiding for a day. He had prudently taken up quarters in the disused henhouse, where he would be able to listen with satisfaction to anxious cries of “Ponto! Ponto, where are you?” But no one called him, no one noticed his absence or felt worried. His masterful spirit caved in. He had been set aside, humiliated, forgotten, and he didn’t even know why.

I think I was the first to notice the change that came over the dog in those weeks. He lost weight, and his bearing was different. Instead of strutting briskly with his hindquarters proudly raised in the old way, he slunk about as if he had been whipped, and his coat, once carefully brushed every day, lost its silky gloss. When you met him he bowed his head so that you couldn’t see his eyes and hurried past. But although he had been miserably humiliated, his old pride was not yet entirely broken; he still felt ashamed to face the rest of us, and his only outlet for his fury was to attack those baskets of washing. Within a week he pushed no less than three of them into the canal to make it clear, through his violence, that he was still around and he demanded respect. But even that was no good, and the only effect was that the laundry maids threatened to beat him. All his cunning ruses were in vain—leaving his food, limping, pretending to go missing, assiduously looking for his master—and he racked his brain inside that square, heavy head—something mysterious that he didn’t understand must have happened that day. After it, the house and everyone in it had changed, and the despairing Ponto realised that he was powerless in the face of whatever had happened or was still happening. There could be no doubt about it—someone, some strange and ill-disposed power was against him. He, Ponto, had an enemy. An enemy who was stronger than he was, and this enemy was invisible and out of his reach. So the enemy, that cunning, evil, cowardly adversary who had taken away all his authority in the household, couldn’t be seized, torn to pieces, bitten until his bones cracked. No sniffing at doorways helped him, no alert watchfulness, no lying in wait with ears pricked, no brooding—his enemy, that thief, that devil, was and remained invisible. In those weeks Ponto kept pacing along the garden fence like a dog deranged, trying to find some trace of his diabolical, unseen enemy.

All that his alert senses did pick up was the fact that preparations of some kind were being made in the house; he didn’t understand them, but they must be to do with his arch-enemy. Worst of all, there was suddenly an elderly lady staying there—Mrs Limpley’s mother—who slept at night on the dining-room sofa where Ponto used to lounge at his ease if his comfortably upholstered basket didn’t seem luxurious enough. And then again, all kinds of things kept being delivered to the house—what for?—bedclothes, packages, the doorbell was ringing all the time. Several times a black-clad man with glasses turned up smelling of something horrible, stinking of harsh, inhuman tinctures. The door to the mistress of the house’s bedroom was always opening and closing, and there was constant whispering behind it, or sometimes the two ladies would sit together snipping and clicking their sewing things. What did it all mean, and why was he, Ponto, shut out and deprived of his rights? All his brooding finally brought a vacant, almost glazed look to the dog’s eyes. What distinguishes an animal’s mind from human understanding, after all, is that the animal lives exclusively in the past and the present, and is unable to imagine the future or speculate on what may happen. And here, the dumb animal felt in torments of despair, something was going on that meant him ill, and yet he couldn’t defend himself or fight back.

It was six months in all before the proud, masterful, Ponto, exhausted by his futile struggle, humbly capitulated, and oddly enough I was the one to whom he surrendered. I had been sitting in the garden one fine summer evening while my husband played patience indoors, and suddenly I felt the light, hesitant touch of something warm on my knee. It was Ponto, his pride broken. He had not been in our garden for a year-and-a-half, but now, in his distress, he was seeking refuge with me. Perhaps, in those weeks when everyone else was neglecting him, I had spoken to him or patted him in passing, so that he thought of me in this last moment of despair, and I shall never forget the urgent, pleading expression in his eyes as he looked up at me. The glance of an animal in great need can be a more penetrating, I might even say a more speaking look than the glance of a human being, for we put most of our feelings and thoughts into the words with which we communicate, while an animal, incapable of speech, expresses feelings only with its eyes. I have never seen perplexity more touchingly and desperately expressed than I did in that indescribable look from Ponto as he pawed gently at the hem of my skirt, begging. Much moved, I realised that he was saying, “Please tell me what my master and the rest of them have against me. What horrible thing are they planning to do to me in that house? Help me, tell me what to do.” I really had no idea what to do myself in view of that pleading look. Instinctively I patted him and murmured under my breath, “Poor Ponto, your time is over. You’ll have to get used to it, just as we all have to get used to things we don’t like.” Ponto pricked up his ears when I spoke to him, and the folds of skin on his brow moved painfully, as if he were trying to guess what my words meant. Then he scraped his paw impatiently on the ground. It was an urgent, restless gesture, meaning something like, “I don’t understand you! Explain! Help me!” But I knew there was nothing I could do for him. He must have sensed, deep down, that I had no comfort to offer. He stood up quietly and disappeared as soundlessly as he had come, without looking back.