windy day

[Note: I’m playing catch-up with these diary entries, so all this happened about a month ago, before the coronavirus outbreak. Hope you’re all well & staying safe x]

Dog, Doped – Mallard vs. Hedgehog – Into the Storm – What Rich People put on their Gates – How to Saw a Log Without Losing Your Fingers – The Military Man & His Scout – A Single Lummoxing Woof – No Harm done – The Aftermath (yet another treat)

Stan has been housebound for two weeks. Not so much slumped in his basket as poured into it like unset dog jelly in a mould. Doped to his eyeballs on indolence and Inflacam. If he had a harmonica – and the fingers to play it – he’d break your heart.

In an effort to cheer him up I go to a pet store to buy him a toy. I end up standing in the pet food aisle with a mallard in one hand and a hedgehog in the other, staring at them, unable to decide. I can’t imagine either of them lasting long, especially the mallard. An elderly woman happens by the aisle at exactly the moment when I squeak them both to see which sounds best. She gives me a severe look, but whether it’s because she thinks this isn’t something a grown man should be doing, squeezing dog toys in public, or whether I’d made her think her pacemaker was misfiring, it’s impossible to say. She shakes her head and hurries on. I toss the mallard in the trolley and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, I’m out of luck with the duck.

‘I think it’s alright to take him out now,’ says Kath. ‘Keep him on the lead, though.’
And she gives me a look as long and disapproving as the woman in the supermarket.
I unhook his lead from the hanger by the door.
‘Come on, then, Stanley Manlington!’
He leaps out of the basket, head-first into the harness, and if I wasn’t quick enough with the door, I would’ve been dragged after him through the dog flap.

Needless to say, it’s windy and raining. The streets are deserted, swept clear by gusts so strong I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cackling, airborne witch peddling past on her bike, a little dog in the basket. I’m glad I don’t, because Stanley would bark and I’m not sure how she’d take it.

We cut through an alley, following the road down until we’re on a long avenue we call Millionaire’s Row, because all the houses are enormous and expensive and set way back, one with an electric gate overlooked by a stone eagle with a cigar in its beak and a clutch of dollars in its claws. Or something. There’s a long, narrow strip of grass to the right of the avenue, which I’m guessing at one time had a whole row of houses of its own, but they demolished them because they were poor people’s houses and obstructed the view. This is a good place to walk Stanley, though, because it leads down to the churchyard with a dramatic view of the downs, and you get plenty of notice of other dogs.

We came here with Adina the other day. She was very clear about how to keep Stan’s focus on us, how to give him the safe space he needs to check out other dogs and learn that they really aren’t such a threat after all.
‘If you really need to keep him distracted, use a longer treat, like this …’
She produced a thin strip of dried meat from the pouch on her belt.
‘Hold it between your fingers like this and feed it to him gradually. That way he’ll be completely locked on to you.’
And she fed it to him, like a plank through a sawmill.

I have that image in mind when I see an elderly man heading our way with a small dog on an extendable lead. The man is hunched over, walking steadily against the wind. He’s wearing a black beret and a long, gabardine coat so squared off at the shoulders he looks like some kind of army vehicle advancing on a half-track. As they get nearer I can see that the dog is a black poodle, scampering around over-excitedly, at risk of being snatched up by the wind and flown at the fullest extent of the lead like a woolly kite. Stanley has noticed them, too. I feed him a treat, which he takes in a sideways fashion, so he can watch the poodle for as long as possible. I keep to my side of the avenue, but the man sees me and starts heading my way. I panic, and fish around in my pockets for a long strip of something. The poodle is scampering towards us, rearing up on the lead, his front legs peddling frantically in the air. I find a strip of treat and try to feed it to Stanley log-style, but he swallows it in one and then releases his bark – so loud and booming even the wind dips. (Professional respect, no doubt).
‘Sorry!’ I yell. ‘He’s not great with other dogs.’
The old man stops and winds in the poodle like a fisherman landing a marlin. He’s got a cheroot in the corner of his mouth, which strikes me as quite an optimistic move, trying to smoke in this weather, but I’m guessing it’s his routine.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ he says. ‘No harm done.’
The poodle is going crazy, but Stanley is strangely quiet, like one of those big naval guns that takes a while to reload.
The old man stuffs the poodle in his pocket (I seem to remember, but I might be wrong about that), and looks up and down the avenue.
‘Looks like we’re the only ones crazy enough to come out in this weather!’ he says.
‘I know!’ I say. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time…’
‘Well – okay, then.’
He gives me a salute, sets the poodle back on its legs, and the two of them carry on.

I watch them go, then look down at Stanley.
‘Oh Stanley!’ I say.
He looks up at me, blinking innocently in the rain.

I shrug. Pass him another treat.

military man

I’d been to Mrs Lustig before, about nine months ago.

It had been a wild, raw day in November then, bitter squalls of rain, and such violent gusts of wind it was a job to hold on to the car door when I opened it. I’d struggled to find her house, tucked away in one of those streets whose numbers seem to run completely at random, tailing off down alleyways and cut-throughs, jumping back again, in such an idiosyncratic way even the postman I stopped to ask had to think hard for a minute. That wasn’t the end of it, though. When finally I’d walked up the cluttered path to the front door and knocked, and then waited, and then rung the bell, and waited, and got no reply, and rung the landline on my mobile, and heard it ringing deep inside, and still had no answer, I’d decided to go round the back to check she wasn’t on the floor or something. First of all I’d had to get past a large camellia in a large metal container that had been blown over in the wind. It was a struggle to pick it up, and then I had to try all kinds of things to brace it against the wall – a wheelie bin, an old iron patio chair, a crate of recycling. When eventually I’d made it round to the little back garden, pressed my nose up against the window and shaded it with my hand, I’d got quite a shock. There was Mrs Lustig, sitting staring out at me from a high-backed chair, frowning a little, maybe, but otherwise making no move or sign for me to come in or go away. I’d waved and smiled, knocked on the window, held up my badge, pointed to it, but she’d carried on sitting and staring out at me without appearing to have seen me at all. So I’d gone back round to the front (stopping to right the camellia which had blown over again), and tried the handle on the front door. It was open, so calling ahead to identify myself, I’d stepped inside. And everything had been fine, and that was that.

This visit is already so much easier. A warm, still day, for one thing. And because I know where I’m going this time, I drive straight there. And when I pull up there’s a space out front just exactly the right size for my little car. I find that Mrs Lustig’s front path has been tidied, the camellia has been chained up, and then, exactly as described in the referral, I find a keysafe behind it, discreetly fixed to the wall.
I retrieve the key and let myself in.
‘Hello? Mrs Lustig?’

The interior of the house is the same, though. Hundreds of books neatly lined up in ancient bookcases, ceramic dishes and bronze dogs displayed in alcoves, oil paintings in gilded frames, everything suspended in the same dusty, honey coloured light that streams in through the stained glass panels above me.

Mrs Lustig is sitting in the same high-backed chair, just as passively as before, her eyes as lucent and blue as the Delft vase on the table behind her. Someone has filled it with fresh-cut roses. Her daughter, I’d guess.
‘Hello!’ I say.
‘Hello,’ she echoes.
As I settle in to the consultation I mention that this is the second time I’ve been here. That last time the weather was terrible. I’d wrestled with the camellia, tried and failed to set it right again.
‘Camellia?’ she says, uncertainly, as if I’d just described an angel I’d found on the patio.
‘I’m glad it’s fixed to the wall now.’
‘Well – yes!’
‘So.’

Mrs Lustig’s condition has robbed her of so much, but still there’s something so beautifully poised and modulated about her, something so fine about the face, that when I ask her what she used to do for a living before she retired, I’m not surprised when she says quite slowly and firmly: ‘I was an actress.’
‘How lovely!’ I say. And then: ‘Did you have a favourite role?’
‘No!’ she says.
‘Oh! Well – I’m sure they all had their thing.’
‘Yes!’
I carry on writing for a bit, then I can’t resist trying a different angle.
‘Was it difficult, being an actress?’ I ask her. ‘I mean – I’ve always imagined it must be quite a precarious business, chasing the work, going to auditions. The uncertainty of it all.’
‘No!’ she says again, and smiles so broadly and so warmly, it’s as good as if we’d chatted about it for hours.

Later on, back in the car, my curiosity piqued, I look her up on imdb.com. A black and white picture immediately comes up of a radiantly beautiful woman in her twenties, and then on from the picture, hundreds of links to films and TV shows, glitzy shots in restaurants, paparazzi snaps on yachts and nightclubs, newspaper articles, gossip columns. A cover on Picture Post.
And I hear myself asking her that question, sounding so gauche it makes me wince: Was it difficult, being an actress?
But then her simple answer – stripped of her ability to elaborate, perhaps, but still suffused with the joy of it all: No!