Die Like a Dog (3 page)

‘No. Judson.'

‘COME IN!'
George Waring looked up from a ledger as the office door opened, then rose in a fluster. ‘Miss Pink! What can I do for you?'

‘You've no telephone?'

‘No public phone. You may use this one.' He indicated the instrument on his desk.

‘You can make the call. Will you ring Mr Judson and tell him there's an Alsatian loose in the Nature Reserve – a large black animal. That is his, isn't it?'

‘It is, ma'am. Did it attack you?' His eyes were shining.

‘No. I saw it in the distance and it was running away from me, probably after a rabbit. Fortunately it didn't see me.'

‘Judson isn't back from town. He took my wife.' He thought better of the wording. ‘He gave her a lift and they're – she's not back. The police ought to be told.' She raised her eyebrows. ‘Those are guard dogs,' he went on. ‘They'd kill a child – or an adult if it comes to that.'

His hand hovered over the receiver but he didn't pick it up.

Miss Pink said meaningly: ‘Then there is no time to lose.'

‘Er – no.' He dialled, talking meanwhile. ‘The trouble is: you've got to have protection these days, or that's what Judson says; so much vandalism, arson, burglaries – why, there's hardly one holiday cottage round here that hasn't been broken into. And it's not all nationalism by any means – oh no, that's only the excuse; some of it's kids certainly, but I maintain – I always have and I always will – that a lot of it is grudge crimes. And they're put down to nationalism – there: number's engaged.' He crashed the receiver back on its rest. ‘Always the same in an emergency, isn't it?'

She strode up the road to its junction with the highway where the public telephone box stood beside the Post Office. She was quite sure that either he'd dialled the wrong number or hadn't given the person the other end time to answer. His gabbled monologue had drowned all sounds on the line. He was afraid of offending Judson. He welcomed trouble but he preferred that someone else should be the instigator.

The Post Office was also a general store. A dumpy woman with mild eyes was behind the counter stacking jars of jam. Yes, she said in astonishment, there
was
a Mrs Judson, and gave Miss Pink the number.

The telephone rang for some time before it was answered by a woman.

‘Mrs Judson? My name is Pink. I'm staying at the Bridge Hotel. I saw a black Alsatian running loose on the Nature Reserve about half an hour ago.'

‘Oh dear. That must be ours, I'm afraid.'

‘I was going to ring the police but there'd be a delay before they could get here, and if you could deal with it yourself –'

‘No, don't call the police. I'll go up there now.'

‘Is it safe? I mean, will the dog attack you?'

‘Of course not; it's never attacked anyone.' As if it had occurred to her that there was always a first time she added hurriedly: ‘At the hotel, you said? I'll get in touch ... Thank you so much – please excuse me –'

The receiver was dropped on its rest. Miss Pink went back to the store. A thin man with a drooping moustache and angry eyes stood beside the dumpy woman. They had the appearance of waiting. She satisfied their curiosity; the more people who knew that there was a savage dog loose, the better. Their heads turned as one and they stared through the shop window at the hanging woods receding into the early evening haze.

‘I knew it,' the man said. ‘I always told you, didn't I? We're going to have a killing in this valley with them dogs –'

‘Ssh!' The woman was tense, her eyes – no longer mild – darting to Miss Pink. ‘He's exaggerating,' she said.

‘I am not exaggerating!'

Miss Pink decided that it was high time to introduce some common sense into this matter of the dogs.

‘Why aren't they kept under restraint?' she asked.

‘Oh, they are –'

‘They get out –' Both spoke at once, and stopped.

‘Have they ever done any harm?' Miss Pink asked.

‘Not yet.' The man was grudging. ‘They will unless –'

‘Sydney!' It was a warning. Suddenly the woman became confiding – wheedling was more like it, Miss Pink thought: ‘We love this valley; the people are so kind ... We're a very small community but not isolated, not inward-looking. A lot happens here, you know: people ask what we find to do in the winter-time but –' she gave a little false laugh, ignoring the man who was glowering at her, ‘– in fact we can't wait for the summer to finish so that we can get down to the business of living – and knowing each other again instead of just making money.'

Miss Pink, aware that her stare had become fixed, looked at the man to see if he would argue the point.

‘Summer gets a bit heated,' he said inanely.

It was a pathetic bit of by-play to make her stop asking questions about Alsatians, but the woman had rather more wit than her husband. There was a sound of tyres on gravel and a boy propped a bicycle against the window and stepped into the shop. At sight of Miss Pink he paused and the excitement in his face faded. Suddenly he was dull, oafish, and Miss Pink's mind sharpened.

‘Don't prop your bike against the glass, Dewi,' the woman said, long-suffering.

‘You've been told a dozen times.' The man showed a flicker of temper.

‘Sorry, Dad.'

The boy slouched outside. There was a gentle sigh from behind the counter. Miss Pink indicated a poster in fluorescent red in the window.

‘Do you think this show will be worth going to?'

‘Why, yes.' The woman's eyes shone. ‘She came here; that's a girl: M. Seale. She put the poster up herself. She's travelled all over the world. She's a rock climber. She lives in a tent! Can you imagine that – just like a gypsy? Although she lives in America most of the time – in California.'

‘You don't know that,' the man said. ‘You've only got her word for it.'

His wife ignored him. She was staring at the mountains above their forested plinth across the valley.

‘She said women have more sense of adventure than men,' she said softly.

He gave a guffaw of angry laughter and Miss Pink turned in some embarrassment to find the oafish boy in the doorway, his head cocked like a blackbird's, a wry smile on his lips. But even as she turned, his jaw dropped and he asked dozily: ‘Tea ready, Mam?'

The lecture hall was a small wooden building boasting the bare necessities: a few tubular steel chairs, a power point, and dark curtains that only just met in the middle. Despite the postmistress's contention that everything happened in this valley, the community must have been starved of live entertainment for they had turned out in force; about seventy of them, Miss Pink calculated, but then she noticed a tattered hair style in orange and lime and realised that Seale had attracted some visitors too.

Richard Judson was across the aisle from her and he introduced his wife, a large, plain woman upon whom the name of Pink appeared to make no impression. No one said anything about dogs. She couldn't see the Warings; no doubt they were occupied at the Bridge, although their cook was present, a woman so far only glimpsed through a doorway as she shouted at a diminutive coloured man: ‘Sour cream, yer daft bugger;
sour
cream!'

Miss Pink recalled the name: Lucy Banks. She had turned in her seat to chat with Noreen Owen, the woman at the Post Office. Mrs Owen and her companions looked somewhat self-conscious at being the focus of Lucy Banks's attention but they had little choice unless they moved.

The cook was quite elderly but very well preserved, with raven hair coiled massively and held in place by
diamanté
combs. A deep tan was set off by a low-cut frock like a green skin and she had a throaty Lancashire accent in which, at this moment, she was telling everyone within a twenty-foot radius how to stuff guinea fowl.

There was an eruption of scuffling and furious cries from a tangle of small boys in the front row, subsiding momentarily as Handel Evans – in grey flannels and a blazer with an insignia on the breast pocket – walked down the aisle and paced the front like a Guards corporal. Seale, who had been twitching curtains into place, turned, collected eyes, and moved in front of the big screen.

‘Good evening,' she said. ‘And thank you for coming.'

There was a burst of giggles from the front row. She said, in a cool, clear voice that carried to the farthest corner: ‘One more sound from you and I'll bash your heads together.'

There was a concerted gasp and a sigh, perhaps of pleasure. ‘There's no introduction,' Seale went on. ‘I can't talk, I let the pictures do that. No questions while the show's on, please, but you can ask as many as you like at the end. Okay? Lights!'

She was walking to the side where her automatic control would be. The screen lit up and the room lights went out. Someone had been briefed beforehand. Miss Pink wondered who that could be – or was the girl not alone? Then she saw what was on the screen and her eyes widened. It had been deliberately out of focus, she thought. Very clever.

There had been vague but brilliant blues and pinks, and shapes soft as coloured mists. The scene resolved to a vast stretch of sea, a vertical buttress of rosy rock and Seale, poised on the edge of nothing, turned towards them, gesturing. ‘I was explaining,' came her laconic voice, ‘that this was not the best place for a picture.'

A black wall superseded the blinding sea but the water was still there, sparking diamonds hundreds of feet below. Near the top of the wall a high sun picked out points like a floodlight and there she was again, illuminated, brown as a nut in a white bikini, arched backward in the act of surmounting an overhang. The rope was the palest thread, scarcely visible in the gloom below. ‘Cornwall,' she said. A pin would have been heard to drop.

The show lasted an hour. In bed that night it occurred to Miss Pink that Seale must be the poorest speaker in the business. The pictures seemed merely to elicit her remarks, as if she, like the audience, stared at each new situation and said the first thing that came to mind. The cool words dropped into a rapt stillness. ‘I wasn't too happy at that point,' or, as angry clouds came boiling over a knife-edge of ice on the Matterhorn: ‘That was hairy. The ice was rotten too. It was over a thousand feet to the glacier.'
Flash.
A pattern of crevasses as in an aerial view, gaping blue and green like the jaws of putrid cadavers. Miss Pink's brain cut in: it wasn't the right glacier, but another, more appropriate in the context. There was more craft to this show than was apparent to the layman.

Flick
– and the screen was clumped with the fringed bells of soldanella: pale mauve, blooming in the snow.

They winged round the Dolomites like eagles, looking down through thin air to matchstick trees beyond – too far beyond the following party: bright crash hats a couple of hundred feet below. They stared across a chasm to a sheer tower with minute figures clinging to the rock. They zoomed in on the leader but although they could now see his boots and hands, even the telephoto lens failed to bring up the holds.
Click
– and it was the same man, the same position but in profile with the cliff dropping out of the picture: exposure without end.

They were transported to the Himalayas where Annapurna was a fluted triangle of pink ice in the dawn, to the Andes and the terrible soft snow of a southern face. Avalanches were explained most casually, and avalanches came rolling towards them so that Miss Pink thought she heard the rumble and cringed in anticipation of the blast.

And then they were in California, and the remarks became a dreamy commentary as Seale – and they – lived for an indeterminate period in a world of pale and soaring walls, of domes and spires and monstrous overhangs, and knew the shameless arrogance of looking straight down three thousand feet to a mortal world below. They lived with giants: brown, near-naked men with headbands like Indians, bearded and pale-eyed. They inhabited a dream world, everybody's dream world.

‘What did you think of it?'

Seale had come out on the inn's terrace to discover Miss Pink alone on a garden seat.

‘I don't know. I'm still enjoying the sensation of having done climbs which I could never have done in a million years.'

‘You must have seen hundreds of pretty slides.'

‘I have, but yours aren't pretty. How do you produce a collection like that?'

Seale shrugged. ‘I mix with good climbers, good photographers. We exchange slides. I take pictures of people on parallel routes and vice versa. As you see, it works.'

There was a step on the terrace. Judson had followed her. He stood in front of them like a schoolboy.

‘What can I bring you, ladies? It should be champagne.'

But it was brandy. ‘Not much difference in cost,' Seale commented when he'd gone back to the bar. ‘Not overloaded with money either, to judge from his fences. It's I who should be buying the drinks; I made a packet tonight.'

‘You deserve every penny of it,' Miss Pink said fervently. ‘They were bowled over.'

‘Well, nothing happens here, does it? I mean, the highlight of the past decade was the cook here peppering the barman with popgun pellets and Judson buying a couple of guard dogs. The incidents,' she added mischievously, ‘were not related.'

‘The cook!'

‘Took the barman home with her one night and he misunderstood the situation, went back a second night, was thrown out, so he got drunk and made another attempt. She took a shotgun to him.'

‘Did she do any damage?'

‘He was running too fast. I think the hospital dug a few pellets out of his backside. He didn't bring a charge. She'd already spread the word round that it was attempted rape. Everyone knew the truth but George Waring didn't want any bother at the pub, and the cook doesn't give a hoot for her reputation. The barman left.'