Thomas loved the Labrador passionately, and Barton loved him. The two were almost inseparable. When Thomas wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island, he never imagined himself alone. Barton was there to keep him company, protecting him from the wild animals that tried to attack their camp after the sun went down. If Thomas was a Knight of the Round Table dressed in the helmet and breastplate that Jane Martin had given him for his tenth birthday, then Barton would be his black charger dressed up for the tournament in one of Lady Robinson’s most beautiful silk handkerchiefs.
Time passed and Barton grew older. He could no longer always catch the sticks that Thomas threw out into the waves. The dog would stand at the water’s edge looking puzzled as the tide took his prize away, and his sleek black tail that had always crashed from side to side with the joy of being alive now hung still. Thomas put his arm around Barton’s warm neck and went to tell his mother.
The vet in Flyte listened to Barton’s heart and shook his head a fraction.
‘There’s a murmur. Give him these tablets and don’t let him strain himself. He’s an old boy now, Thomas. Nearly ninety in our years.’
Nearly ninety? Barton wasn’t ninety. He was three years younger than Thomas. ‘But dogs don’t live that long, darling,’ said Anne in the car on the way home. ‘We must enjoy them while we can.’
Two months later Barton could not get up the stairs. Thomas picked up the old dog and carried him up to his room. He slept on the bed all night but toward dawn he began to whimper and Thomas fetched his mother.
In the morning Barton was no better, and they called the vet.
‘It’s not fair to Barton to make him carry on,’ said Anne to her son. ‘He’s hurting inside, Tom. You can see that.’
‘But I don’t want him to die,’ cried Thomas with his pyjama-clad arm wrapped around the old dog’s neck.
Barton looked up at his master and tried to get to his feet, but the effort was too much and he laid his head down on the floor again.
‘He’s trusting us. Trusting us to help him. You have to understand that, Tom.’ And Thomas did. Love worked both ways.
He kissed the dog and held his paw while the vet prepared the injection. And then it was all over in an instant. It was something that Thomas never forgot: the thinness of the line between life and death.
He and his mother buried Barton in the garden under the old elm tree that stood by the north gate so that Thomas could see the grave from his bedroom window. They held hands and said a prayer thanking God for Barton’s life, and the next day Thomas made a wooden cross with Barton’s name and dates and dug it deep into the soil.
Anne had thought of buying a puppy before Barton died so that Thomas would have another dog already there when Barton was gone. However, she ended up not doing so. It wouldn’t have been fair to the old dog to see a puppy rushing about as he lost his strength and couldn’t compete for Thomas’s attention.
Anne took care also to allow her son enough time to properly mourn his friend. Thomas and she would pick the wildflowers that grew on the edges of the marsh and bring them back to lay on Barton’s grave, but Anne soon came to realize that these walks were only making things worse. Thomas would forget what had happened and look up expecting to see Barton bounding towards him across the dunes, only to realize that the Labrador was gone for good and nothing would bring him back.
After two weeks, Anne decided that it was time to act. Breakfast was over, and Thomas was sitting on the front step watching the early sun make patterns on the hall carpet as it shone down through the yew trees. A paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe lay face up beside him, but in truth he hadn’t read anything since Barton’s death. The sea was quiet, and as Thomas looked down over the lawn to the front gate and the houses beyond the road, he felt an enormous desolation settling over the world. There seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do.
The voice of his mother calling to him from the top of the stairs startled him out of his lethargy.
‘Come on, Tom, we need to get packed.’
‘Packed. Why?’
‘Because we’re going to London. This afternoon. Everything’s arranged.’
‘London. Why are we going to London?’
‘For a holiday, Tom. For a change of scenery. To put some colour in your cheeks so you stop walking around looking like the Carmouth Ghost.’
‘I don’t look like the Carmouth Ghost. She was a woman who killed her husband with a steak knife, and I’m a—’
‘You’re a fourteen-year-old who’s been having a terrible time and doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
‘But, Mum, you hate London. You know you do. That’s what you always say to Dad when he wants you to go up there for one of his political things.’
‘I’m not going up there for them. I’m going to London to spend time with you.’
‘And Dad?’
‘Yes, of course. He’s promised to take time out to be with us. He knows you’re having a bad time at the moment. That’s why he wrote you that letter.’
‘Not exactly a letter. Five lines. “I was sorry to hear about Barton. Here’s ten pounds. Buy yourself something at the shop.”’
‘He’s very busy, darling. He meant well.’
‘No, he didn’t. If he cared, he’d have come down here last weekend.’
‘He couldn’t. There was a conference he had to go to. You know that.’
‘I know that he doesn’t care about me. Or you. That’s what I know.’
‘That’s not true, Thomas.’
‘It is true. Spending all his time with Greta. Green-eyed Greta.’
‘She’s his personal assistant, Tom. And the fact that she’s got green eyes has got nothing to do with it. She’s very good at her job, and we must try to like her for your father’s sake.’
‘Everything is for his sake. Nothing is for ours,’ said Thomas, becoming visibly angry. He kicked his book to one side and went and stood at the top of the steps leading down to the drive.
Behind him he felt his mother approaching, but he did not turn his head even when she came to stand beside him. He fought to hold back the tears that were starting in his eyes and bunched his hands into hard fists.
Anne worried for her son as she stood beside him between the yews. He was so rigid and unbending as he fought to control emotions of anger and grief that threatened to overwhelm him. She thought of the old beech tree by the south gate broken by the great storm in January when the fisherman drowned in the bay. It had been too rigid, unlike the yews that swayed in the wind.
Peter had been here that night. With Greta. Driving Gracie Marsh down to the harbour. Anne didn’t like Greta. She had formed that opinion long before her son had found the woman trying on her clothes. She had seen Greta watching everyone, insinuating herself into their lives, but Anne had held her peace because Greta had done nothing wrong and it was clear that Peter needed her so much for his work.
Anne could tell that Greta had changed her accent, and she felt that the girl was watching her in order to imitate her. Sometimes it almost seemed as if Greta was trying to become her.
‘She’s not one of us,’ she had once caught herself saying to her husband in an unguarded moment, but she had accepted his retaliatory accusation of snobbery as just. Forgiveness was part of the code of manners by which Anne lived her life, and she had forced herself