The daughters came, big girls with jobs in insurance companies, wardrobes full of bright clothes and twenty-thousand-pound mortgages. They stood over Brenda Case and said she should get out more. She should go to evening classes, they said, join a health club, do a language course, learn upholstery, go jogging, take driving lessons. And Brenda Case sat at the kitchen table and nodded. She quite agreed, it would be a good thing to find a new interest – jogging, upholstery, French; yes, she said, she must pull herself together, and it was indeed up to her in the last resort, they were quite right. When they had gone she drew the sitting-room curtains again and sat on the sofa staring at a magazine they had brought. The magazine was full of recipes the daughters had said she must try; there were huge bright glossy photographs of puddings crested with alpine peaks of cream, of dark glistening casseroles and salads like an artist's palette. The magazine costed each recipe; a four-course dinner for six worked out at £3.89 a head. It also had articles advising her on life insurance, treatment for breast cancer and how to improve her love-making.
John Case became concerned about his wife. She had always been a good housekeeper; now, they began to run out of things. When one evening there was nothing but cold meat and cheese for supper he protested. She said she had not been able to shop because it had rained all day; on rainy days the dog was always outside, waiting for her.
The daughters came again and spoke severely to their mother. They talked to their father separately, in different tones, proposing an autumn holiday in Portugal or the Canaries, a new three-piece for the sitting-room, a musquash coat.
John Case discussed the whole thing with his wife, reasonably. He did this one evening after he had driven the Toyota into the garage, walked over to the front door and found it locked from within. Brenda, opening it, apologised; the dog had been round at the front today, she said, sitting in the middle of the path.
He began by saying lightly that dogs have not been known to stand up on their hind legs and open doors. And in any case, he continued, there is no dog. No dog at all. The dog is something you are imagining. I have asked all the neighbours; nobody has seen a big black dog. Nobody round here owns a big black dog. There is no evidence of a dog. So you must stop going on about this dog because it does not exist. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked, gently. ‘Something must be the matter. Would you like to go away for a holiday? Shall we have the house redecorated?’
Brenda Case listened to him. He was sitting on the sofa, with his back to the window. She sat listening carefully to him and from time to time her eyes strayed from his face to the lawn beyond, in the middle of which the dog sat, its tongue hanging out and its yellow eyes glinting. She said she would go away for a holiday if he wished, and she would be perfectly willing for the house to be redecorated. Her husband talked about travel agents and decorating firms and once he got up and walked over to the window to inspect the condition of the paintwork; the dog, Brenda saw, continued to sit there, its eyes always on her.
They went to Marrakesh for ten days. Men came and turned the kitchen from primrose to eau-de-nil and the hallway from magnolia to parchment. September became October and Brenda Case fetched from the attic a big gnarled walking stick that was a relic of a trip to the Tyrol many years ago; she took this with her every time she went out of the house which nowadays was not often. Inside the house, it was always somewhere near her – its end protruding from under the sofa, or hooked over the arm of her chair.
The daughters shook their tousled heads at their mother, towering over her in their baggy fashionable trousers and their big gay jackets. Ifs not fair on Dad, they said, can't you see that? You've only got one life, they said sternly, and Brenda Case replied that she realised that, she did indeed. Well then … said the daughters, one on each side of her, bigger than her, brighter, louder, always saying what they meant, going straight to the point and no nonsense, competent with income-tax returns and contemptuous of muddle.
When she was alone, Brenda Case kept doors and windows closed at all times. Occasionally, when the dog was not there, she would open the upstairs windows to air the bedrooms and the bathroom; she would stand with the curtains blowing, taking in great gulps and draughts. Downstairs, of course, she could not risk this, because the dog was quite unpredictable; it would be absent all day, and then suddenly there it would be squatting by the fence, or leaning hard up against the patio doors, sprung from nowhere. She would draw the curtains, resigned, or move to another room and endure the knowledge of its presence on the other side of the wall, a few yards away. When it was there she would sit doing nothing, staring straight ahead of her; silent and patient. When it was gone she moved around the house, prepared meals, listened a little to the radio, and sometimes took the old photograph albums from the bottom drawer of the bureau in the sitting-room. In these albums the daughters slowly mutated from swaddled bundles topped with monkey faces and spiky hair to chunky toddlers and then to spindly-limbed little girls in matching pinafores. They played on Cornish beaches or posed on the lawn, holding her hand (that same lawn on which the dog now sat on its hunkers). In the photographs, she looked down at them, smiling, and they gazed up at her or held out objects for her inspection – a flower, a sea-shell. Her husband was also in the photographs; a smaller man than now, it seemed, with a curiously vulnerable look, as though surprised in a moment of privacy. Looking at herself, Brenda saw a pretty young woman who seemed vaguely familiar, like some relative not encountered for many years.
John Case realised that nothing had been changed by Marrakesh and redecorating. He tried putting the walking stick back up in the attic; his wife brought it down again. If he opened the patio doors she would simply close them as soon as he had left the room. Sometimes he saw her looking over his shoulder into the garden with an expression on her face that chilled him. He asked her, one day, what she thought the dog would do if it got into the house; she was silent for a moment and then said quietly she supposed it would eat her.
He said he could not understand, he simply did not understand, what could be wrong. It was not, he said, as though they had a thing to worry about. He gently pointed out that she wanted for nothing. It's not that we have to count the pennies any more, he said, not like in the old days.
‘When we were young,’ said Brenda Case. ‘When the girls were babies.’
‘Right. It's not like that now, is it?’ He indicated the 24-inch colour TV set, the video, the stereo, the microwave oven, the English Rose fitted kitchen, the bathroom with separate shower. He reminded her of the BUPA membership, the index-linked pension, the shares and dividends. Brenda agreed that it was not, it most certainly was not.
The daughters came with their boyfriends, nicely spoken confident young men in very clean shirts, who talked to Brenda of their work in firms selling computers and Japanese cameras while the girls took John into the garden and discussed their mother.
The thing is, she's becoming agoraphobic,’
‘She thinks she sees this black dog,’ said John Case.
‘We know,’ said the eldest daughter. ‘But that, frankly, is neither here nor there. It's a mechanism, simply. A ploy. Like children do. One has to get to the root of it, that's the thing.’
‘It's her age,’ said the youngest.
‘Of course it's her age,’ snorted the eldest. ‘But it's also her. She was always inclined to be negative, but this is ridiculous.’
‘Negative?’ said John Case. He tried to remember his wife – his wives – who – one of whom – he could see inside the house, beyond the glass of the patio window, looking out at him from between two young men he barely knew. The reflections of his daughters, his strapping prosperous daughters, were superimposed upon their mother, so that she looked at him through the cerise and orange and yellow of their clothes.
‘Negative. A worrier. Look on the bright side, I say, but that's not Mum, is it?’
‘I wouldn't have said …’ he began.
‘She's unmotivated,’ said the young
est. ‘That's the real trouble. No job, no nothing. It's a generation problem, too.’
‘I'm trying …’ their father began.
‘We know, Dad, we know. But the thing is, she needs help. This isn't something you can handle all on your own. She'll have to see someone.’
‘No way,’ said the youngest, ‘will we get Mum into therapy.’
‘Dad can take her to the surgery,’ said the eldest. ‘For starters.’
The doctor – the new doctor, there was always a new doctor – was about the same age as her daughters, Brenda Case saw. Once upon a time doctors had been older men, fatherly and reliable. This one was good-looking, in the manner of men in knitting-pattern photographs. He sat looking at her, quite kindly, and she told him how she was feeling. In so far as this was possible.
When she had finished he tapped a pencil on his desk. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I see.’ And then he went on, ‘There doesn't seem to be any very specific trouble, does there, Mrs Case?’
She agreed.
‘How do you think you would define it yourself?’
She thought. At last she said that she supposed there was nothing wrong with her that wasn't wrong with – well, everyone.
‘Quite,’ said the doctor busily, writing now on his pad. ‘That's the sensible way to look at things. So I'm giving you this … Three a day … Come back and see me in two weeks.’
When she had come out John Case asked to see the doctor for a moment. He explained that he was worried about his wife. The doctor nodded sympathetically. John told the doctor about the black dog, apologetically, and the doctor looked reflective for a moment and then said, ‘Your wife is fifty-four.’
John Case agreed. She was indeed fifty-four.
‘Exactly,’ said the doctor. ‘So I think we can take it that with some care and understanding these difficulties will … disappear. I've given her something,’ he said, confidently; John Case smiled back. That was that.
‘It will go away,’ said John Case to his wife, firmly. He was not entirely sure what he meant, but it did not do, he felt sure, to be irresolute. She looked at him without expression.
Brenda Case swallowed each day the pills that the doctor had given her. She believed in medicines and doctors, had always found that aspirin cured a headache and used to frequent the surgery with the girls when they were small. She was prepared for a miracle. For the first few days it did seem to her just possible that the dog was growing a little smaller but after a week she realised that it was not. She continued to take the pills and when at the end of a fortnight she told the doctor that there was no change he said that these things took time, one had to be patient. She looked at him, this young man in his swivel chair on the other side of a cluttered desk, and knew that whatever was to be done would not be done by him, or by cheerful yellow pills like children's sweets.
The daughters came, to inspect and admonish. She said that yes, she had seen the doctor again, and yes, she was feeling rather more … herself. She showed them the new sewing-machine with many extra attachments that she had not used and when they left she watched them go down the front path to their cars, swinging their bags and shouting at each other, and saw the dog step aside for them, wagging its tail. When they had gone she opened the door again and stood there for a few minutes, looking at it, and the dog, five yards away, looked back, not moving.
The next day she took the shopping trolley and set off for the shops. As she opened the front gate she saw the dog come out from the shadow of the fence but she did not turn back. She continued down the street, although she could feel it behind her, keeping its distance. She spoke in a friendly way to a couple of neighbours, did her shopping and returned to the house, and all the while the dog was there, twenty paces off. As she walked to the front door she could hear the click of its claws on the pavement and had to steel herself so hard not to turn round that when she got inside she was bathed in sweat and shaking all over. When her husband came home that evening he thought her in a funny mood; she asked for a glass of sherry and later she suggested they put a record on instead of watching TV – West Side Story or another of those shows they went to years ago.
He was surprised at the change in her. She began to go out daily, and although in the evenings she often appeared to be exhausted, as though she had been climbing mountains instead of walking suburban streets, she was curiously calm. Admittedly, she had not appeared agitated before, but her stillness had not been natural; now, he sensed a difference. When the daughters telephoned he reported their mother's condition and listened to their complacent comments; that stuff usually did the trick, they said, all the medics were using it nowadays, they'd always known Mum would be O.K. soon. But when he put the telephone down and returned to his wife in the sitting-room he found himself looking at her uncomfortably. There was an alertness about her that worried him; later, he thought he heard something outside and went to look. He could see nothing at either the front or the back and his wife continued to read a magazine. When he sat down again she looked across at him with a faint smile.
She had started by meeting its eyes, its yellow eyes. And thus she had learned that she could stop it, halt its patient shadowing of her, leave it sitting on the pavement or the garden path. She began to leave the front door ajar, to open the patio window. She could not say what would happen next, knew only that this was inevitable. She no longer sweated or shook; she did not glance behind her when she was outside, and within she hummed to herself as she moved from room to room.
John Case, returning home on an autumn evening, stepped out of the car and saw light streaming through the open front door. He thought he heard his wife speaking to someone in the house. When he came into the kitchen, though, she was alone. He said, The front door was open,’ and she replied that she must have left it so by mistake. She was busy with a saucepan at the stove and in the corner of the room, her husband saw, was a large dog basket towards which her glance occasionally strayed.
He made no comment. He went back into the hall, hung up his coat and was startled suddenly by his own face, caught unawares in the mirror by the hatstand and seeming like someone else's – that of a man both older and more burdened than he knew himself to be. He stood staring at it for a few moments and then took a step back towards the kitchen. He could hear the gentle chunking sound of his wife's wooden spoon stirring something in the saucepan and then, he thought, the creak of wicker-work.
He turned sharply and went into the sitting-room. He crossed to the window and looked out. He saw the lawn, blackish in the dusk, disappearing into darkness. He switched on the outside lights and flooded it all with an artificial glow – the grass, the little flight of steps up to the patio and the flower-bed at the top of them, from which he had tidied away the spent summer annuals at the weekend. The bare earth was marked all over, he now saw, with what appeared to be animal footprints, and as he stood gazing it seemed to him that he heard the pad of paws on the carpet behind him. He stood for a long while before at last he turned round.
Table of Contents
Nothing Missing but the Samovar
The Voice of God in Adelaide Terrace
Interpreting the Past
Servants Talk About People: Gentlefolk Discuss Things
Help
Miss Carlton and the Pop Concert
Revenant as Typewriter
Next Term, We'll Mash You
At the Pitt-Rivers
Nice People
A World of Her Own
Presents of Fish and Game
A Clean Death
Party
Corruption
Venice, Now and Then
Grow Old Along With Me, the Best Is Yet To Be
The Darkness Out There
The Pill-Box
Customers
Yellow Trains
‘The Ghost of a Flea’
The Art of Biography
What the Eye Doesn't See
The Emasculation of Ted Roper
A Lon
g Night at Abu Simbel
Bus-Stop
Clara's Day
The French Exchange
The Dream Merchant
Pack of Cards
The Crimean Hotel
A Dream of Fair Women
Black Dog
Table of Contents
Nothing Missing but the Samovar
The Voice of God in Adelaide Terrace
Interpreting the Past
Servants Talk About People: Gentlefolk Discuss Things
Help
Miss Carlton and the Pop Concert
Revenant as Typewriter
Next Term, We'll Mash You
At the Pitt-Rivers
Nice People
A World of Her Own
Presents of Fish and Game
A Clean Death
Party
Corruption
Venice, Now and Then
Grow Old Along With Me, the Best Is Yet To Be
The Darkness Out There
The Pill-Box
Customers
Yellow Trains
‘The Ghost of a Flea’
The Art of Biography
What the Eye Doesn't See
The Emasculation of Ted Roper
A Long Night at Abu Simbel
Bus-Stop
Clara's Day
The French Exchange
The Dream Merchant
Pack of Cards
The Crimean Hotel
A Dream of Fair Women
Black Dog
Penelope Lively, Pack of Cards
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