The Puppy That Came for Christmas (17 page)

I had imagined the clinic would be part of a hospital, but it was in a very large house on a residential street, with just a small, subtle sign. It was near the general hospital and I wondered if perhaps it had been a convalescent hospital in the old days, the sort of place where people went to recover after they'd had a major operation. It was an Edwardian redbrick building with a metal spiral staircase at the back that descended into a small car park.

I arrived much too early and sat in my car, waiting and watching, as other people arrived. About half of the women seemed to be with their partners, who carefully helped them out of the car and into the building as if they were already heavily pregnant. Five minutes before the talk was due to start, I followed them in and was directed to a room with about thirty chairs. I sat at the back. People were well spaced out and weren't talking to or looking at each other. The atmosphere was palpably tense.

The talk began and everyone leaned forward in their plastic chairs, eager for any scraps of hope as the smart, middle-aged lady who managed the clinic told us about the procedures their doctors carried out and the high success rate they achieved. The eggs would be extracted and the embryos would be grown at the clinic; then the procedure to return them to the womb would be conducted there too, the aim being to cause as little stress as possible. She spoke eloquently about the facilities and the advantages they offered.

“Fertility treatment at a larger hospital might mean you don't know which doctor you'll be seen by from week to week. Here we have a small dedicated and professional team. You'll be treated as a valued individual. A member of the family, almost . . .”

There was polite laughter at this.

“And we like nothing better than when one of our clients pops in to show us how well the baby we helped them conceive is doing.”

Then a male doctor gave us some statistics and told us the clinic's statistic for new patients who were under the age of thirty-six was more than double the national average. What about older women? I wanted to know, but I wasn't brave enough to ask.

After the talk we were given a tour of the clinic and shown the laboratory, scanning room, consultant's room and ward. It all looked very new and spotlessly clean, and I was impressed. It was small, but I hoped that small would mean I wouldn't be lost in the system, and they'd pay my tricky case some special attention. By the end of the tour, the atmosphere had thawed: couples were smiling and talking to each other. We were invited to stay for coffee and to ask questions, but I'd heard enough. I was sure this was the clinic for us. The atmosphere had been welcoming and professional, and their procedures seemed to work smoothly for the vast majority of people they treated. All we needed was some private treatment and I'd be pregnant in no time. I tried to book a private consultation for Ian and I there and then but was told I'd need to get some blood tests done at my local hospital first.

I drove home, excited and happy, to tell Ian the good news.

 

The next morning I took my temperature as usual and waited, lying back into my pillow, for the little beeping sound to alert me that the reading was ready. Freddy's familiar tread hit the stairs, and he came into the room and began pawing at the bed. Ian helped him up, turned to the mirror to finish knotting his tie and went downstairs to make some breakfast and bring me a cup of tea before he left for work—he was driving himself.

Freddy was delighted to be on the bed, and scrabbled and snuffled a bit but soon settled down for a cuddle. It was bliss. Warm and in bed, not being obliged to get up. Maybe a baby would come, maybe it wouldn't. Either way, I didn't have to think about it just now. Freddy jumped off the bed and went to investigate as Ian left. I heard the sound of the car driving away as the dog trod carefully down the stairs. He returned soon after and lay on the carpet as I dozed. Ten minutes more, ten minutes more . . . I awoke two hours later, just in time for a hospital appointment to confirm the blood tests I'd had for Dr. Boston, which had shown I could possibly be a suitable candidate for IVF.

 

On the way back from the hospital, I stopped at the local shops for food and then went home. Freddy, whom I'd left shut in the kitchen, was very pleased to see me and hadn't done any damage while I was away, or gone to the toilet indoors. He helped me with the supermarket shopping by carrying one of the bags from the hallway to the kitchen. This was a surprise as I hadn't asked him to, and hadn't even been aware it was in his repertoire; his usual trick with plastic bags was to shred them with his teeth—which I found annoying and frightening in equal measure. This time, though, he took the bag—albeit a light one—in his teeth and gently deposited it with the pile in the kitchen. I was delighted with him and gave him a treat; my little boy was growing up.

The phone rang, and I went to answer it in the living room. When I looked around thirty seconds later, Freddy was lying on the sofa with a pack of raw chicken in his mouth. He hadn't tried to open it but had started ripping the paper off the back. I sighed. Oh, well. Some days it felt like we were taking one step forward and then taking two steps back.

Notwithstanding occasional lapses, Freddy was learning fast. Every day we ticked off another first: first swim in a stream, first oysters and shrimps consumed (at an oyster festival after his first trip on a train), first nap under a classic car (after eating shrimps and oysters). He was also coming on in leaps and bounds at his regular obedience class, led by Frank, and he'd made some great friends there, his favorite being Morris, a Labradoodle, who was even bouncier than he was. He was patient and accommodating, even as a puppy, and always ready to play, so he was naturally popular even with cranky or antisocial dogs.

Another special mate of his was called Dodie, a Dalmatian whose breeder I'd met at Frank's obedience classes. She'd been training her as a show dog—which meant Dodie wasn't very good at her “sit” commands, because the shows involve a lot of standing in position rather than sitting—but had decided that she wasn't show material because she had a small overbite. It felt heartless to me to consign an animal to the scrap heap because of a barely noticeable physical imperfection, and I'd seen how Dodie would watch her and do exactly as she asked almost before she'd asked her to do it. Dodie tried so hard to please. So I arranged for a friend of mine, whose elderly Dalmatian had just died, to take Dodie on. That way, Freddy was able to see Dodie at class and play with her down at the river, and both dogs were happy. Whenever Dodie came round, Freddy would let her gobble up any of his chews that she could find, and let her dominate their play together.

The longer he was with us, the more we became enchanted with him and his singular personality. Ian thought of Freddy as “his boy” and was always buying him toys and chews, and took Freddy on many more solo walks than he'd taken Emma.

Toward the end of Emma's time with us she worked out that she could get to the squeaky pad inside her toys if she chewed them enough; once she knew this, none of her toys were safe. Freddy, however, never tried to do this, and although he liked to play tug-tug with his toys, he never deliberately damaged any of them. In fact, he would often put them back into his toy box (a disused dog bed) himself when he had finished playing, and was very concerned whenever I put them through the wash or hung them on the line to dry in the sun. Nor did he like me repairing them with a needle and thread and would take them back from me as soon as he could. It was almost as if he was worrying that I might hurt them.

Freddy was like a young child about his playthings. Once, I'd gone out into the garden to find one of his toys, a spotty dog, balanced cowboy-style astride a small stone elephant that Ian had bought and which was placed in the corner of the garden. I laughed and laughed and laughed, and even phoned Ian to ask if he had put it there. He sounded confused, and obviously had nothing to do with it—he'd been away at work since 5:30 a.m. It was all simply part of Freddy's fun-loving nature, and I wondered whether he'd done it on purpose, to make me giggle. He really was very sensitive to people's moods.

Freddy was absolutely priceless that morning, as I gently, without scolding, took the packet of chicken from his mouth. I put it in the fridge and started to remove the rest of the shopping from my carrier bags. Then I had to stop. I put the tins down and started crying. It all seemed so depressing and futile. I had left the house in such a sleepy daze of optimism, but a few hours in Obstetrics were so much more depressing after being at the IVF clinic, with its clean, efficient promises of success and happiness. I'd been floating on a cloud but came home feeling as if my insides and my emotions had been put through a wringer. I was still so far away from having a baby of my own.

Freddy jumped off the sofa and came through to the kitchen where I was standing, looking imploringly at me with his big brown eyes. He whined and then brought over a toy to me—I can only think to try and cheer me up. When that didn't work, he went to find another. Then another—this time, his favorite, a pink-and-white elephant—that he thought might work better. And, to top it off, a chew for me to gnaw on. I started to laugh and we ended up playing and cuddling. It was impossible to keep on crying when he was trying so hard to get me to stop.

Everyone who has a Helper Dog has stories of how their dog chases the blues away. A sad person often doesn't feel like leaving the house, but a dog eagerly waiting to go out is hard to resist, and a Helper Dog even more so—because after bringing over his lead, shoes will follow and, if they're ignored, a scarf and hat may come next. However, my friend Val told me that her Helper Dog, Saxon, had once sensed that she was going through a very dark time, and somehow knew to stay close and offer support.

“I don't know how he knew,” Val said of Saxon. “But that day, I'd been told my prognosis was much, much worse than I'd initially thought and the pain was unbearable. I kept staring at the pills, thinking about taking just a few too many, and that day he never left my side once. He was right there, looking at me or cuddling into me. I swear he knew what I was thinking of doing, and I couldn't, I just couldn't, do it with him watching me with his big brown eyes. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here. He's everything. I don't know what I'd do if I lost him.”

Freddy grew very quickly and by the time he was sixteen weeks old was a lot larger than the other puppies at our Helper Dogs group, though he still had the long, loose-limbed look of a teenager. Only Queenie, quietly imperious in the corner, was bigger, and now that he deferred to her properly, she accepted his presence as she did any other dog.

In or out of the class, Freddy was very friendly with every dog he met and had the habit, which other dog owners admired, of sitting or lying down when he was off the lead and saw another dog running toward him—a polite way in dog language for a dog to say to another dog that he isn't a threat. But it takes two dogs to have a friendly conversation, and unfortunately for Freddy it didn't always work. One day, on a bright September morning on a walk in a large country park, I saw a man being dragged along in the distance by two very large St. Bernards.

“Come on, Freddy,” I said, and headed toward them.

I wanted Freddy to have the opportunity to meet different types of dogs while he was with us. Socializing dogs with as many different breeds as possible can help stop them from taking against other dogs later in life. Sometimes, however, it's impossible for an owner to know a dog has a problem until a normally calm canine reacts in an extreme way, and although it rarely happens, Helper Dogs are not immune. At one of the Helper Dogs' fêtes, I'd watched a usually placid, fully trained dog, Yoda, suddenly run from his wheelchair-bound owner to bite a boxer, seemingly for no reason at all. Barry, the owner, was mortified and had no idea why Yoda would do such a thing. In this instance, as with all such cases, Helper Dogs worked with Yoda to overcome his aggression toward boxers.