The Puppy That Came for Christmas (16 page)

“This is one exercise where the youngest dogs usually do much better than the older ones,” he said. “Meg, why don't you demonstrate for us with Freddy?”

I took Freddy to the start of the line of cones, and when Jamie nodded at me, I started weaving quickly in and out of the cones. Freddy was right there behind me. He took no notice of the other dogs or all the people at the fête, sticking close to my ankle all the way along.

When I came to the end of the cones, I told him to sit and he immediately did so, as the crowd of onlookers clapped.

“What a good boy you are,” I said, and gave him a treat.

“See if he can wait,” Jamie said.

“Wait,” I said to Freddy, and held up my hand, palm facing him, to show him exactly what I meant.

Puppies, like the toddlers they are, find it very difficult to wait. Their sense of time, and in particular their perception of how long they've been waiting, is at odds with that of the adults around them.

Freddy was still only twelve weeks old, and I thought he might find it very difficult, particularly because of the distractions of the people, dogs and the new environment all around him.

“Wait,” I repeated, and started to walk backward through the cones, still holding up my hand. Freddy's eyes never left me once. I reached the end of the row.

“Come, Freddy!” I said in an excited happy voice, and crouched down, holding my hands out to him. He ran to me as fast as he could.

“Sit,” I whispered. And he sat and looked up at me. As proud of himself as could be. He knew he'd done well.

“What a good boy,” I said, crouching down to give him a cuddle and a treat. “Very, very clever!”

He was a talented little puppy; it was plain to see for everyone at the fête, but Jamie in particular was impressed.

 

Back at home, Eliana and Freddy played together with some of Freddy's many toys. She seemed to have no fear of him now and once or twice even gave him a kiss—which Susan and Graham didn't seem to think was a good idea. Freddy somehow seemed to realize that he needed to take extra care around Eliana and was very gentle. The day might have been overwhelming and tiring for them both, but Freddy was already showing that he liked to look after people, and Eliana had become much more confident in the presence of another miniature being—and not just with Freddy but with everyone.

I caught Ian watching the two of them together and smiled at him. Maybe it was time for us to investigate the possibility of IVF further. We'd been so busy with losing Emma and gaining Freddy that it had taken a backseat.

Every day Ian had a two-hour journey on the train and tube to get to work, starting at 5 a.m. Then, in the evenings, he turned around and tubed and trained it home again. Usually, I'd drop him off and pick him up at the station, which some days was quite a stretch; whenever I suggested to him, though, that I might not do it, he'd tell me how important that extra ten minutes with me were to him, how it brightened up the dark grim mornings . . . so how could I refuse?

One night the week after Eliana, Susan and Graham had left, Ian phoned sounding exhausted. He'd had a nightmare of a journey—all delays and diversions—and had ended up at a small, isolated station. One of the many things I loved about him was his calmness in emergency situations. One night when we'd first started going out, we were so busy mooning at each other and staring into each other's eyes that the bag containing his work computer was stolen. This was a disaster because there was sensitive information on the laptop, and he'd had to phone his U.S. office immediately to explain the security breach. He'd dealt with each portion of the emergency with a calmness I'd never be able to achieve, leaving me full of admiration; so if he was at the end of his tether, he must have been exhausted after another long day of work and travel.

“Don't worry, I'll find the station,” I said as he tried to explain to me the route I should take to get there.

I pulled some shoes on and grabbed the car keys. Freddy had been sitting at my feet while I worked on the sofa, but at the sound of the phone, he had begun prowling around the room looking for computer wires to chew on—his latest obsession—and currently appeared to be considering urinating in what had become his favorite corner of the room. He was too little to leave by himself for any length of time, but there was a problem taking him with me: I didn't have a car harness for him as I'd passed on Emma's, along with her princess bolster seat and all of her many other possessions, to Helper Dogs, and I was loath to put him in his crate that he hated so much. A rebellious puppy “accident” wouldn't make anybody's evening less stressful. Nevertheless, he had to come. Other puppy parents put their dogs in the front footwell on the passenger's side of their car when they were traveling, so I decided to try that. At first he sat quite still and it seemed that it might work, but as soon as I got onto the busy bypass he decided he wasn't going to sit still anymore and started clambering about and yapping.

“Calm down, Freddy. Stay still.” I tried to soothe him, but his Helper Dogs obedience seemed temporarily to have deserted him; he wasn't at all frightened, just increasingly excited, and I was having a job keeping my eyes on him and also on the road.

“STAY STILL!” I barked, and Freddy, without paying me a blind bit of notice, stamped on the button that changed the car from automatic to manual transmission. At forty miles per hour on the dual carriageway the engine revs soared as the transmission struggled to cope. Quickly, fearing he'd kill us both if I didn't do something, I pulled over, screeched to a halt on the gravelly border and, kissing his nose as he didn't know he was doing anything wrong, very regretfully put him in the boot of the hatchback. I drove the remaining distance to the station both as fast as I could (to shorten the ordeal for him) and as slow as possible, terrified that he'd be injured because of not being strapped in.

I pulled into the small station car park and drew up in front of Ian's huddled figure. I pecked him on the cheek and ran around to open the back of the car. Freddy bounced into my arms. I hugged him to me; I'd never been more relieved.

“I'm sorry,” I said. Sorry for being so stupid. It wasn't his fault he'd put us in danger.

Ian had been sheltering under an awning from the autumnal winds for over an hour and was very pleased to see us. He was exhausted from the terrible train journey, but Freddy soon cheered him up.

“We'll stop at the pet store on the way home and get him a harness,” he said.

Ian drove the car home while I had Freddy on my lap. Freddy soon fell fast asleep after his adventure, and Ian and I took the time alone to talk about IVF once more. Seeing Eliana, and how happy Graham and Susan were, had made us both realize we'd still like to have a child of our own. Since their visit, I'd started to look into the practicalities again and had landed once more upon the clinic I'd found a few months previously, in Billingsford.

“I think this could be the answer,” I said. “Susan got pregnant with three embryos once when she had IVF. Of course they didn't . . . they didn't survive.”

It must have been about five years ago that Susan had rung, from her mum and dad's, where she'd been staying, to tell me the news.

“They've put me on complete bed rest so all I can do is lie here and watch TV. But there's three—three!”

A week later Susan wasn't pregnant anymore. In more than ten years of trying it was the first and only time she ever became pregnant.

“They're having an open evening next week,” I said.

There was the problem of the puppy, of course, and also that Ian wouldn't get home from work until just before it started, so we agreed that he'd stay and take care of the pooch while I went along.

 

The next morning, I booked my place for the open evening at the fertility clinic and then put Freddy's tiny Helper Dogs jacket on him and drove the short journey to the supermarket, using the new harness that Ian had bought on the way home from the station.

The idea of taking Freddy to the supermarket was to habituate him to new places, noises, smells and people, and to give him a first experience of one of the environments where he'd be expected to work. The little Helper Dogs coat he was wearing clearly said on the side “Helper Dog in Training” along with “Please do not disturb me as I am working.” Some of the stricter puppy parents would tell passersby not even to stroke the puppy while it was working, but I found that impossible to do—and nobody we met could keep their hands off Freddy. At thirteen weeks old, he was utterly and totally adorable. His fur hadn't really settled down, as some puppies' did, and he looked, when freshly showered, as if he'd been through the tumble dryer or received an electric shock. He was always more than happy to let people stroke him and cuddle him.

I hadn't been able to forbid anyone to stroke Emma either, all too aware that, especially for children, it may be their first experience of stroking a puppy—and that a Helper Dog, with its sweet temperament and smart jacket, was a good dog to trust. Often, too, I'd meet people who were grieving a lost dog, and they'd want to stroke, chat and reminisce for hours. Walking around town with a Helper Dog pup always made me half an hour late for any appointment—and I was rarely on time to begin with. I'd found with Emma that shopping with a Helper Dog was trying when you needed to get everything done quickly, and with Freddy you could measure the time it took on a sundial. People couldn't resist coming to say hello and made a beeline for him down the aisles. Some even forgot about their own shopping entirely and followed us around the aisles. As he was still a very little boy, all the attention quickly got too exhausting for him. So much so that he lay down to nap in the middle of the supermarket.

“Ahhh, isn't he sweet,” people said as they maneuvered their shopping trolleys around him, prostrate plum in the center of the aisle.

I was worried that someone might bump into him accidentally, so I abandoned my shopping plans—who needed food anyway?—and left my basket and carried him toward the exit. As I was about to leave, I saw the row of shopping trolleys and realized that here was the perfect solution. I popped Freddy into one of the smaller trolleys and went back to my basket, rescued the items and resumed shopping. Now he could take a nap, people could pet him and I could buy some food.

Freddy's trolley arrangement went really well and we became a regular attraction. One day we arrived at the store to find a mum and her two young sons standing outside. The boys pounced on Freddy as soon as we got there, while their mum sheepishly explained that, while they never used to want to come shopping, once they'd heard about the little dog in the trolley they'd become desperate to see him. We'd become part of local life: it reminded me of what one of the Helper Dog partners had said to me at the fête.

“I used to be too frightened to go to the shops. My joints dislocate really easily—just bending down to pick a tin off a low shelf can make my shoulder dislocate. I don't know if you've ever had a shoulder dislocation, but it isn't exactly a walk in the park,” Mark had said. He was a man of about thirty-five who'd been given a Labrador called Tilly the year before.

“Then I got Tilly and everything changed. No one used to talk to me before, but now people want to chat to me all the time. Till is like my social bridge. Plus she loves going shopping! My life is a million times better because of her. She even hands over my wallet and helps put the shopping in my shopping bag. Since I've had her I haven't had a single dislocation—she's always there when I need her and she never lets me down.”

 

Freddy rode around the supermarket for weeks, until one day we were stopped by one of the staff, a young, inexperienced man, who ran over and said that unfortunately the store had received some complaints about hygiene. I explained that he was a trainee Helper Dog and therefore allowed in the shop, to which the boy said that coming in was fine, but he wasn't allowed in the trolley.

I was furious. Which spiteful person had complained?

He was very apologetic, and really only a kid who must have drawn the short straw among his colleagues to tell me the bad news—I knew that Freddy was popular with all the checkout staff. But rules were rules, so I swept Freddy up and left the supermarket vowing never to go back.

Freddy found the regular market in the square, with its variety of smells, far more interesting, and, really, I reflected, he'd been so good at being in the supermarket anyway that there was no need to go back until he was a qualified Helper Dog, and far too big for any trolley.

I was driving along the motorway on my way to the IVF clinic's open evening and thinking of Susan and Graham. They'd gone to endless fertility clinics and endured years on different regimes of pills, injections and alcohol-free living while they were trying for their own baby, before they adopted Eliana. I said a silent prayer in the hope that it wouldn't take so many years of trying, before giving up, for me to get pregnant.