‘It’s so unfair!’
She’d exhibited the same reaction when a redundant piece of furniture was taken from the house, to be replaced by something better, more beautiful and more useful: the kitchen sofa with its tatty brown William Morris loose cover full of holes, with springs beginning to worm their way through the seat, to one’s occasional acute discomfort. It had to go, and Suzy found something prettier, less dated and more comfortable to take its place.
On the day it arrived, the delivery men agreed, for a tenner, to take the old one away. They grabbed an arm on each side, and hoisted it up to be transported out the back door, through the garden, and into their lorry at the back of the lane. But they hadn’t reckoned on Lucy, who burst into tears, screaming ‘No! No!’ and clung first to the sofa, and when that became precarious, to the leg of one of the removal men.
Her outrage had two distinct and equally felt components. First, she was used to her sofa, she had grown up with it. It was part of her world, yet another best. But more profoundly and oddly, her feelings were actually for the thing in itself, as Kant put it. The poor sofa would be devastated to be taken away.
She was the last of the animists. At the supermarket she searched through the tinned vegetables to find those with dents in them, and made sure that Suzy purchased them – otherwise no one else would, ‘and they’d be sad’.
‘It’s so unfair!’ she howled.
I detached her from the man’s leg and held her in my arms, screaming, as the funeral procession of the sofa wended its way down the garden path. The gate opened, and it was gone.
Lucy stopped crying and sat on the new sofa, sucking the little rag of cloth that she carried with her at that age. She looked pensive, and settled down into the undoubtedly more comfortable new surroundings. ‘Can I watch Sesame Street?’ she asked.
Milly’s death, little as I regretted it, was both sudden and shocking. Most days, after school, Jenny and her mother, accompanied by their new mutt, went for a walk in the local park, a play on the swings, and a choc-ice at the café. An intelligent and biddable little creature, in no time Milly was let off the leash and able to sniff about at her leisure. She was far too gregarious, and needy, to wander very far, but liked making the acquaintance of the other dogs, large or small, young or old, male or female. And one day she chose the wrong dog.
You couldn’t have seen it coming, I gathered. The wrong ’un was not a Spikedog with a Spikeman, swaggering bundles of danger, from whom you needed to avert your eyes and move to safer ground. Onlookers later described it as medium-sized, with curly dishevelled brown hair. It was over in a moment. Milly approached her assailant in her usually friendly manner and, for whatever reason – perhaps she nipped it, or just pissed it off by being small and friendly – in an instant Milly’s head and shoulders were clutched between the dog’s jaws, being tossed about, both of them making frightful noises. Within a few seconds the Shih Tzu was thrown back onto the grass, broken and bleeding, howling, then silent.
I had no wish to imagine the ensuing drama, though it was hard not to. The problem was how to tell Lucy, in some suitably restrained, edited and untraumatising manner. Milly’d been attacked by another dog in the park. She was in the doggy hospital and was very poorly.
‘But Milly wouldn’t fight with anybody! Milly loves other dogs! Milly loves everybody!’
‘Maybe the other dog started it, I don’t know.’
‘Poor Milly! I want to go and see her!’
‘I’m afraid we can’t. She’s not allowed any visitors.’
‘But she’s going to come back soon, isn’t she?’
‘We’ll have to see.’
But there was nothing to be done. Sometime the next morning, Milly, on the vet’s unambiguous advice, was put out of her misery.
Lucy took the news badly. ‘Why didn’t the doctor fix her?’ she asked tearfully.
‘She was too poorly to fix, darling. She lived for a little while, but she was never going to get better, and was in a lot of pain. So they thought it kindest to put her to sleep.’
‘Sleep?’
‘She’s in Heaven now. That’ll be lovely for her, won’t it? With all the other doggie angels?’
There was a very long pause. ‘You mean they killed her?’
‘No, darling, I don’t. I mean they ended her suffering, because there was no way she was going to get better. That is a kind thing to do.’
‘But I need to see her again!’
‘I know, love.’ Suzy picked her up, resisting, for a wriggling desperate cuddle. ‘So do I.’
‘You don’t! You’re lying! You hated Milly!’
Anyone with sufficient emotional or narrative sense might have seen it coming. I am living alone by both choice and necessity, but in spite of my many talents for both self-indulgence and self-deception, I continue to need another voice, if only to project mine against, another visage, if only to register what I have to say.
In my enforced isolation is an accompanying solipsism: it is intermittently enjoyable, being the only person in the world, like God, free to torment the odd dog. But, not to put too fine a point on it, and I resist even writing these words, I was getting lonely.
I do not want the company of Bronya, but I have come, appallingly, to need it. A bit, perhaps a little bit. This is more than surprising to me, I feel abashed by it. Bronya? Like many Eastern Europeans, she is both blunt and insensitive to a degree that, to an English sensibility, is shocking and easily mistaken for crassness. I can be rude to her, dismissive, angry, domineering. Equally, her approaches to me are not so much tactless – which somehow suggests someone who, knowing what tact is, eschews it like a Yorkshireman – but utterly without consideration of how her words might sound to someone who isn’t similarly disabled by having come from Sofia.
Bronya is abrasive without knowing it. She has no sense of humour, is as capable of irony as an armadillo, takes everything literally. Lightness of touch? Not even with the dusters. I am surprised that the paintwork on the ceilings survives her attempts to clear the cobwebs. Should I point out these manifold truths, she would not know what I was talking about.
I feel invaded and bruised by her company, but she is all that I have. And, to be fair, she is also bright, hardworking, cheerful, inquisitive and anxious to learn. When she wormed out of me that I had been a teacher – of literature! – she wouldn’t let go of it. She was apparently well read in the classics of Bulgarian literature, and reeled off a list of -ovs and -ics, none of whom I had heard of.
‘I want to read books,’ she said, ‘improve English. Who is good writer?’
‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said, holding my hand to my ear, and making my voice louder. ‘Bad day for hearing. Not getting you at all.’
‘Want to read! You tell me books!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘you’re not getting through to me at all,’ and left her to my ironing.
Suzy had history with cleaners. She’d collected them over the years, bonding with one after another, though they frequently disappeared without notice or trace. You can’t count on cleaners. Not in London anyway. I think she was unconsciously nostalgic for country servants, like bleached ayahs, but instead all she got were unreliable refugees from old countries. She enquired of agency after agency for robust Indians or sturdy Bangladeshis – even Pakistanis at a pinch – but they were never on offer. Presumably most of them were employed by the NHS. They probably run the damn thing by now.