Behaving Badly (7 page)

By now it had gone three, so I settled Herman, and walked over the railway bridge to the tube. I got the train to Embankment, then another to Sloane Square, then strolled down the King’s Road. Daisy had warned me what to expect about Lily Jago. ‘She’s a chronic drama queen,’ she’d said. I knew that Lily was a fanatical animal lover because she’d recently got into trouble for refusing to employ a Korean girl on the basis that she came from a country where they eat dogs. Lily had been taken to a tribunal, the publishers of
Moi!
had been fined, and it had been splashed all over the press. She’d only kept her job because she’d lifted the magazine’s circulation by fifty-six per cent in the previous year.

‘Thank
God
you’re here!’ she breathed as she opened the
front door of her flat in Glebe Place. There were feathers in her hair. ‘It’s been absolute
hell
!’ I went inside, and saw that the avian trail led all the way down the hall to the sitting room. ‘Just
look
what the little monster has done!’

The shih-tzu sat on the sofa, amidst the wreckage of two eviscerated cushions, indignation and distress in her bulgy brown eyes.

‘I came back ten minutes ago to find this, this…devastation!’ Lily wailed. This wasn’t really devastation. I’ve seen houses where the dog has shredded the wallpaper. ‘The little
vandal
! I just don’t know
what
to do!’ I got Lily to calm down, then asked her when the problems had started.

‘A month ago,’ she replied. ‘You see,
Moi!
was taken over,’ she explained, as she lit a cheroot with a trembling hand. ‘And the new proprietor won’t allow animals at work. Not so much as a goldfish!’ she added irritably. She tossed back her head and a twin plume of blue smoke streamed from her elegant nose. ‘So I now have no option but to leave Jennifer at home. But the point
is
she’s not used to it, because for the past two years she’s always come in with me. For a while she was even editing her own section.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. She had a dogs’ beauty problem page. Anyway, she’s obviously missing office life, so I suppose
that’s
why she’s being beastly.’

‘I don’t think that’s it at all.’

‘I think she’s doing it to get back at me,’ said Lily, her eyes narrowing as she drew on the cheroot again. ‘For leaving her on her own.’

I sighed. This, sadly, is a common misconception. ‘Miss Jago,’ I began wearily.

She waved an elegant hand at me. ‘Call me Lily.’

‘Lily,’ I tried again. ‘Let me reassure you that dogs are
quite incapable of forming the abstract concept of “revenge”. This is a classic case of separation anxiety. It’s not that she’s “missing the office”, or “trying to get her own back”. It’s simply that being alone gives her terrible stress.’

‘Well, she does have a walker who comes to take her out at lunchtimes, not least so that she can, you know—’ Lily lowered her voice ‘—
wash her hands
.’

‘Hmm. I see. But, apart from that, she’s on her own for what, three or four hours at a stretch?’ Lily nodded guiltily. ‘Well, that’s quite a long time.’

‘I’ve no choice!’ I stood up. Lily looked alarmed. ‘Christ, you’re not going are you?’

‘No. I’m not. I’d like you to show me your leaving routine. I’d like you to pretend that it’s the morning, and you’re about to go off to work.’

‘You mean, act it out?’

‘Yes. The whole works. Putting on your coat, getting your bag, saying goodbye to Jennifer, and locking the door. Please make it as realistic as you can and pretend that I’m not here.’

She looked at me sceptically. ‘O-kay.’

I followed Lily to the gleaming steel and black granite kitchen where she filled Jennifer’s bowl—it looked like porcelain—with Dogobix. Then, Jennifer following her, grunting, down the long, cream-carpeted hallway, Lily picked up her jacket and bag. Jennifer’s body suddenly stiffened with apprehension.

‘O-kay dar-ling,’ Lily sang. ‘It’s time for Mummy to go to
work
now.’ Jennifer began to whine. ‘No, sweetie,
don’t
cry, Mummy’s
got
to go to work so that she can buy you all sorts of
lovely
things. Like that Gucci collar you want—remember? And that Theo Fennell silver bowl? So I’m just…going
out
…’ Jennifer was racing crazily round Lily’s feet, whimpering and hyperventilating, ‘…for a
lit-tle
while.’ By now Jennifer was
screaming like a banshee as Lily and I backed out through the front door. She turned the key, then bent down and opened the letter-box. ‘Bye-bye, my sweet little darling,’ she called through it, ‘bye-bye, my love,’ then she straightened up. She looked at me, and her face suddenly crumpled like an empty crisp packet. ‘Oh God—I just can’t
bear
it!’ She unlocked the door again, scooped Jennifer up in her arms, and kissed her flattened little face several times. ‘Be a
good
girl, Jennifer. Be a
good
little girl for Mummy, okay?’ Then she put Jennifer down, and left. From inside we could hear outraged howling.

‘And this is what you do every morning?’ I said to her.

‘Yes.’

‘Now show me how you come home.’

‘Okay.’ Lily unlocked the front door, and rushed in, her arms wide open.

‘Darling, here I am again—Mummy’s
ba-ck
!’ Jennifer, though by now clearly confused, responded with an ecstatic grunt. ‘Did you miss me, darling?’ Lily crooned as she picked her up and cuddled her. ‘
Did
you? Well I
really
missed you too. I
love
my lickle baby Jennifer, and I don’t like leaving her, do I, my darling? No, no, no—I
don’t
!’

She put the dog down.

‘That’s how I do it.’

‘Hmm.’

We went back into the sitting room and I explained what she was doing wrong—that she was making such a huge thing of leaving and returning that she was working Jennifer up into a frenzy. ‘You’ve got to be cooler about it all,’ I advised her. ‘Be quite off-hand. In the mornings, don’t go in for these long, drawn-out departures—you make it all so much more traumatic than it has to be, and that gets her in a terrible state.’ I advised her to vary her leaving routine, and to leave
her on her own at other times, unexpectedly. ‘Just pop out without telling her,’ I said.

‘Without
telling
her?’ repeated Lily incredulously.

‘Yes. Then come back, as casual as you like. That way she’ll get used to you coming and going and she won’t panic, which means she won’t be destructive. And when you come home in the evenings, be warm to her, of course, but not too delirious—after all, you’ve only been to work, not round the world. You’re making far too much of it all, so you’re giving her massive psychological stress.’

‘Oh,’ said Lily slowly. ‘Right.’ I glanced at the mantelpiece, which was white with invitations.

‘Do you leave her on her own in the evenings—when you go to parties, for example?’

‘No, she always comes along.’

‘I see.’ She got down an invitation and handed it to me. It was for a reception at the French Embassy. In the top left-hand corner, it read, ‘
Miss Lily Jago and Miss Jennifer Aniston
.’

‘Jennifer’s extremely popular,’ said Lily proudly. ‘We go
everywhere
together. They even let her in at The Ivy, which is more than can be said for Geri Halliwell’s shih-tzu.’

‘So she’s never really been left alone at all before now, day or night?’

‘No. Never,’ Lily replied.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I have another suggestion. You could, if you were to follow my advice, gradually get Jennifer more used to being on her own, but given the over-attachment problem that she has—that you both have actually—I think it would take a long time. So a better solution, in my view, would be to get a puppy, to keep her company.’

Lily stared at me as though I were mad. ‘A
puppy
?’ she echoed. ‘You mean, another
dog
?’ I nodded. ‘Another Jennifer?’ I nodded again. She suddenly beamed. ‘What a
brilliant
idea! Would you like that, darling?’ she said, lifting the dog onto her lap. She adjusted the diamanté barrette in Jennifer’s floor-length blonde hair. ‘Would you like a sweet little puppy to play with?’ Jennifer grunted. ‘A little fwendy-wendy? You
would
? She says yes!’ she informed me happily. ‘Well, Mummy’s going to
find
you one. That’s a superb idea,’ she said. ‘Quite brilliant. I’d
never
have thought of that. You’re a genius, Miranda. In fact, you’re such a genius I’m going to do a feature on you in
Moi!
’

‘Oh!’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘I’m going to send my best feature writer, India Carr, to interview you—have I got your card?—yes, here it is—and I’ll hire a top photographer to take some really nice pics. What shall I call it? “Barking Mad”—no—“Miss Behaviour”! Yes!! “Miss Behaviour”! How about that?’

I knew that Lily wouldn’t really do an interview with me—she was just being effusive—but when I got back I found that the
Camden New Journal
had phoned to say that yes, they would like to run a piece. I was pleased—some local publicity would be good.

‘How long will the article be?’ I asked the reporter, Tim, the following morning, as he got his notebook out of his bag. He looked about eighteen but was probably twenty-five.

‘About a thousand words—that’s nearly a page—I write them up in quite a light-hearted way. The peg is the opening of your practice—“Pet Shrink Comes to Primrose Hill”—and I’ll plug
Animal Crackers
as well.’

‘Would you also mention my puppy parties?’

He laughed. ‘Sure—but what are they? I don’t have a dog.’

‘They’re a kind of canine kindergarten,’ I explained. ‘They’re very important for socializing young dogs so that they don’t have behavioural problems in later life.’

‘Cool,’ he said, as he took the top off his pen. ‘Puppy…parties,’ he muttered as he scribbled in his pad. ‘Are they by invitation only?’ he asked with a straight face.

‘Sort of. I mean, their mums and dads have to book.’

‘So it’s RSVP then. And is it Bring a Bottle?’

‘No,’ I said with a smile.

‘Dress code?’

‘Casual. But collars will be worn.’

‘Time and venue?’

‘Seven p.m., every Wednesday, here. Fifteen pounds p.p.’

‘That’s per puppy?’

‘Correct. Carriages at nine. They start next week and I’ve still got a few empty spaces.’

His pen flew across the page in a longhand/shorthand hybrid. ‘Few…empty…spaces. That’s great.’ Then he asked me for some personal background. So I told him, briefly, about growing up in Brighton, then mentioned my five years at Bristol and explained why I’d given up being a vet.

‘But it wasn’t simply the stress,’ I went on. ‘Being a vet means that you’re usually mending just one bit of the animal—you’re prescribing, or doing surgery, or setting bones. But as a behaviourist you’re working with the
whole
animal, which I find more interesting, because it means trying to fathom their minds.’

‘And are you Jungian or Freudian?’ he asked with a smirk.

I laughed. ‘Neither.’

‘Seriously though,’ he said, ‘do animals really need psychiatrists? Isn’t it just a bit of a fad for indulgent pet-owners? Like having aromatherapy for your Persian cat, for example, or having your dog’s kennel feng-shuied?’

‘Animal behaviourism is a new area, that’s true,’ I replied. ‘But it isn’t a passing fashion—it’s here to stay; because we now know that developing greater insight into animal
psychology means having well-balanced pets. They don’t “misbehave” or behave “inappropriately”, because they’re happy—and they’re happy because they’re understood.’ I then told him the story of how I’d got Herman. ‘Did you know that in the West the biggest cause of death in young dogs isn’t accidents or illness,’ I went on; ‘it’s euthanasia due to behavioural problems. I find that incredibly sad. Because the fact is that so many of these behavioural problems would be completely preventable if only people knew what made their pets tick.’

‘What are the most common problems you see?’

‘Aggression, separation distress, fears and phobias, obsessive behaviour, attention-seeking…’

‘And what about the animals?’

I laughed. ‘Actually you’re not that far off, because all too often it isn’t the animal’s behaviour which has to change, it’s the human’s, though people don’t usually like hearing that.’

‘And have you always been “animal crackers”?’ he smiled.

I shrugged. ‘Well, yes… I suppose I have.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Well, I don’t really know. I mean, lots of people adore animals, don’t they, and find them interesting, so I guess I’m simply one of them.’ Tim’s mobile phone suddenly rang, and as he stepped outside to take the call I realized that what I’d said wasn’t the whole truth. I think the real reason why I became so interested in animals was because it used to distract me from my parents’ rows. They argued a lot, so I gradually built up my own little menagerie to take my mind off the stress. I had a stray tortoiseshell called Misty, two rabbits, Ping and Pong, and Pandora, a guinea pig. I had a hamster and then two gerbils which kept having babies which, to my horror, they would sometimes eat. I also had about thirty stick insects, which I used to feed the neighbours’ privet to,
and a number of baby birds which I’d nudged back to life. I once worked out that, including the humans, there were 207 legs in our house.

Mum and Dad thought I was obsessed, but they let me get on with it. Sometimes they’d try to recruit me to their cause. ‘Your mum…’ my father would mutter sadly, shaking his head. ‘Your
father
…’ my mum would fume. But I didn’t want to know. At night I’d lie in my bed, stiff as a plank, eyes wide open, listening to them griping downstairs. It was always about one subject—golf—a sport which Dad loved with a burning passion and which Mum loathed—she still does. Dad had taken it up not long after they’d married and, within three years, had become exceptionally good. He was even encouraged to turn professional, but Mum didn’t want to know. She said he should stick with accountancy—but he wasn’t having it. Eventually, they split up. Then, within a year of their divorce, she met and married Hugh, a landscape architect, and, pretty quickly, had three more kids.