The Village Vet (23 page)

‘I won’t let her go to auction,’ Libby says in a hollow voice. ‘There’s no way.’

‘We might not have a choice.’ Suddenly, I feel weary because Libby’s right. Selling Dolly would be a travesty. It goes against everything we do at the Sanctuary. We can’t let it happen, but what can we do? ‘I will do my utmost to prevent her being sold on,’ I continue, ‘but she can’t stay here for ever. There’ll be other ponies.’

‘Dolly’s special,’ Libby says.

‘All our rescues are special,’ I counter. ‘You know the best thing you can do is to keep working with her so she learns to trust humans again. That will give her the best chance of finding a good home.’ I’ve had mixed feelings about Dolly throughout her time with us, but I’d love to see her happily settled, not just for her sake, but for Libby’s too.

I put the ads that Libby and I have composed in the Lonely Hearts section in the
Chronicle
, and Ally writes a piece with Buster and Tia’s photos in there too.

Buster is doing well. He hasn’t growled at anyone since the incident with Libby. All he wants now is somebody to love him, and I do everything I can to give him a chance. I keep the details on his kennel updated, and when I show visitors around the kennels I always stop and spend time beside him, talking about his virtues: how he loves to walk in the copse (on the lead, because he refuses to come to call); how he adores sleeping on your feet on the bed at night, something that will be of great benefit on cold winter nights (some visitors like this, whereas some don’t); how he can pick out the word ‘biscuit’ in ordinary conversation (and drools on the carpet in response); and how he picks up his bowl when he wants feeding. I try to convey the right blend of canine intelligence and cuteness to appeal to as many people as possible, but he gets no offers. Neither does Tia.

It’s a Monday morning in early July. I didn’t use to like Mondays when I was in practice. Either I was exhausted from working with the duty vet or I’d been out clubbing with Katie over the weekend, and inevitably Monday was our busiest day as clients had waited to bring their pets during the working week rather than disturb the vet, or in some cases to avoid paying the out-of-hours fees, which they didn’t understand were not related to the time of their emergency appointment but were on a sliding scale, depending on how much they annoyed the vet. Actually, there was only one vet who was particularly irritated by clients ringing to demand to see him just when he was about
to
eat, his bad temper inversely proportional to the level of sugar in his blood.

It’s different here at the Sanctuary. I’m on my own, which is great, except for when I get that sense that someone is watching me. It’s become a regular occurrence every third or fourth night, and I’m grateful for Buster’s presence. The other thing I love about being here is that I’m the boss. There is no one telling me what to do and when to do it, except – I smile to myself – the baby birds. They are still pretty demanding, tweeting all the time, a bit like Katie, who has discovered the joys of Twitter, following hundreds of celebrities as though she knows them personally. I wish I had the time, but if I did, I wouldn’t waste it.

It’s a warm, sunny day, so I find some outdoor tasks that need doing: I empty and scrub Dolly’s trough clean of algae and snails and refill it with fresh water, leaving the hose to run while I hammer a couple of nails into the fence by the gate where Dolly has pushed through to nibble the longer grass on the other side. When I turn back to the trough, Dolly has picked up the end of the hose between her teeth and is nodding her head up and down, spraying water everywhere.

‘Dolly!’ Laughing, I walk across to take the hose back. She drops it and flicks her heels up at me. ‘You are a strange pony,’ I say lightly, noting the shine on her coat, the flesh that’s covering her ribs and pelvis, and the size of her belly. ‘When will you realise that we’re on your side?’

My mobile rings as I stick the end of the hose back in the trough. It’s Maz, asking if we can take in a stray cat. I tell her that Jack will collect it from the surgery tomorrow and update her on Teddy, who turned out to be harbouring the feline immunodeficiency virus in
his
body, which explains why he’s prone to other infections. It also makes him more difficult to rehome, as he has to go as a single indoor cat. Wendy texts immediately after I’ve finished speaking with Maz, saying she’ll be over to do the baby bird rounds at lunchtime and walk the dogs, and at the same time a car turns up with another animal needing a home.

The woman who brings it introduces herself as Yvonne, and she works with Libby at the Co-op. I show her through to reception, where she teases apart the torn tissue in the bottom of a washing-up bowl to reveal the tiniest baby bird with a yellow beak, fluffy down, and stubby wing and tail feathers with stripes that are just beginning to show.

Although my head is saying, Oh no, not another one, my heart is melting.

‘It’s a house martin,’ Yvonne explains, saving me the potential embarrassment of having to take a guess. ‘The parents built a nest high in the eaves of the house. I came home with the shopping to find the nest on the patio and this little creature lying dead, or so I thought. He was cold and wet, but when I picked him up, he moved. I thought he was going to die anyway and I thought about asking my son to, you know, help him along, but I couldn’t do it, so I put him in a box on the boiler and within half an hour he was cheeping for food.

‘My son went on the internet to find out what to feed him, my daughter picked up mealworms and cat food from the pet shop on her way home from the stables, and we took turns feeding him every one to two hours during the day from about six in the morning until nine at night. I hope we did the right thing.’

‘It looks like you’ve done a great job. I wouldn’t
normally
have expected one this young to survive such trauma. It’s going to be a while before he’s strong enough to fly.’ I pick him up to check him over, at which his head bobs up on the end of his scrawny neck, his beak open wide.

‘That’s why I’ve brought him to you,’ Yvonne goes on. ‘He’s constantly hungry. I thought he was cute at first, but he’s taken over my life. When I went to work after on Friday, I took him with me because I was worried he’d starve. My boss gave me an ultimatum, and that’s when I realised I couldn’t be his foster mum any longer.’

‘I know exactly where you’re coming from,’ I say, with a rueful smile. ‘We have several babies here already: a couple of blue tits that are ready for release, blackbirds, sparrows and a robin, so he won’t be on his own. No sooner have we finished feeding them, they want feeding again.’

Yvonne smiles back. ‘I hope you have plenty of help.’

‘We’re always looking for volunteers,’ I say hopefully.

‘It isn’t for me. I like to do my bit for the Brownies – I’m Tawny Owl for the local pack.’

It was worth a try, I think, as I pop the bird back into the bowl where it crawls back beneath the tissue. So far, everyone I’ve asked has turned me down.

‘There’s plenty of it because I didn’t want him to hurt himself on the journey,’ Yvonne says.

I fill in what I can of an admissions form and ask her to sign the house martin over.

‘You can write his name in the box. He’s called Vlad, after Keschko, the fighter. We called him that because he won’t give up, although there was a moment when
I
wished he would,’ she adds with good humour. ‘I’ve driven twenty miles to bring him here, that’s a forty-mile round trip, I’ve been feeding the’ – she swears lightly – ‘thing for four days and I’ve been under his spell the whole time. He’s the first thing I think about when I wake, and the last when I go to sleep … If I go to sleep,’ she amends. ‘I’ve been worrying about him all night, wondering if he’ll still be alive in the morning. I thought having a baby was bad enough, but having a chick is so much more time-consuming, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know – I’ve no experience of babies.’ I feel a pang of regret at being a single woman with no immediate prospect of a steady boyfriend, let alone a baby, when Yvonne goes on to thank me and asks if she can keep in touch to see if Vlad makes it. I give her a card with a note of the bird’s admission code.

During my morning walk with Buster, I call Katie for a chat. She has five minutes between facials.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could come over for an hour or so tonight to give me a hand. It’s just that as soon as I’ve done one round of baby bird feeding, they’re ready for the next meal. Please, Katie. I’ll pick up a pizza and a bottle of wine from the Co-op.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m out tonight,’ she says. ‘Before you ask, it isn’t a date. I’m meeting a friend for a drink.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘One of the girls from the salon; she’s been having a tough time with the boss. He’s harassing her and I’ve told her she doesn’t have to put up with it. She wants to talk through her options.’

‘Oh, okay.’ I smile to myself. ‘You’re becoming quite the Good Samaritan.’

‘I could come over for a couple of hours this afternoon, if that’s any use to you. It’s my half-day.’

‘That would be great, thanks. I’ve got to pop out for some more dog food sometime, but I’ll make sure I’m back before three.’

I feed all the baby birds and go out in the van with a shopping list: cat food and litter, dog food, mealworms, diet food for Tia, more disinfectant – Talyton Animal Rescue should have shares in that – and pony nuts and a net of carrots for Dolly. I pick up everything we need in Overdown Farmers before I start driving back through town and down onto the bridge over the river, where I catch sight of a man in waders, thigh-deep in the water below, his blond hair gleaming in the sun. It’s Jack.

On impulse, I turn left onto the gravel just past the end of the bridge, stopping the van beside the Land Rover that Jack’s parked there. I jump out and cross the Green, stopping on the riverbank. Jack is standing with his back to me, stripped to a navy vest, bracing himself against the power of the river, a swan hook in one hand, his other hand guiding a swan towards the reeds at the edge. The swan, an adult, is clearly sick, paddling weakly against the current with its head held low over its back a couple of metres beyond him and just out of reach, while a couple of dog walkers watch from the new bridge, the footbridge a little way downstream.

Jack wades into deeper water, following the swan. It begins to drift back slowly towards him, at which he reaches out with the hook. Although it appears defeated, the swan has plenty of fight left in it. It stretches its neck and flaps its wings, sending up glittering splashes as it struggles away, settling back on the water, tantalisingly out of reach once more.

Jack waits before making a second attempt and a third. On the fourth, he manages with a practised swing of the hook to catch the swan’s neck when it tries to fly up again, hissing with annoyance and fear. This time, Jack draws the swan in close until he can reach over and use his hands to catch its neck, then grasp it across its body to restrain its wings, before lifting it from the water and tucking it under his arm to bring it safely across to the bank to the applause of the dog walkers.

‘Well caught, Jack,’ I call.

He looks up and smiles, and my heart lurches as he strides up the bank in thigh-length waders. I try to avert my eyes from this stirring sight – I hadn’t realised that waders could be quite so … compelling. I focus on the swan instead, a big bird with crisp white feathers, apart from those on its head that have been stained a reddish-brown by the iron deposits at the bottom of the river.

‘Hi there, Tess,’ Jack says, the muscles in his arms rippling while he tries to keep the swan under control.

‘What a gorgeous creature,’ I say.

‘Do you mean me or the bird?’

I glance up at Jack’s face. He’s grinning broadly, so I think he’s joking, but I blush anyway. I can’t help myself. Like the swan, Jack is gorgeous, inside and out.

‘You’ve turned up at just the right time,’ he says. ‘I could do with a hand getting this young lad into the bag. It’s along here somewhere – I’ve paddled further than I realised.’

‘How do you know it’s a lad?’ I ask, over the sound of the swan’s continued hissing and snorting. It might be a mute swan by name, but it’s far from that by nature. It is able to communicate its feelings all too well.

‘I’ve been watching a pair of swans down here. This is their first year together and the pen, the female, is sitting on some eggs on a nest downstream from here. This is the cob. You can tell from the size of the basal knob, the black swelling on the upper bill that stretches up to the forehead. It’s bigger in males than females.’

I walk along the bank to collect the bag and pick up Jack’s keys and wallet before I help him wrap the swan.

‘That’s got it,’ Jack says at last, as I finish fastening the straps on the bag around the swan’s body, distracted by the sensations of being so close to him – Jack, that is, not the swan. His scent, an aphrodisiac combination of aftershave and the outdoors, tempered with the earthy smell of river water, fills my nostrils, and the sound of his voice close to my ear, and the occasional touch of his skin against mine as our arms come into contact while restraining the swan, makes my pulse beat faster and sends my imagination into overdrive.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I say. ‘I mean with the swan. I’m talking about the swan.’

I’m aware that Jack is looking at me, one eyebrow raised.