Waiting for Doggo (14 page)

‘Everything okay?’

Edie is looking shaken, upset. ‘Yeah.’

Alex is looking drunk and defiant. ‘All good.’

‘No, not good,’ I say. ‘Putting your hands on a woman.’

‘She never had a problem with my hands on her before.’

It’s a horrible line, smug, suggestive, possessive, and I can feel myself squaring up to him.

‘Dan, let it go,’ says Edie.

‘Yeah, Dan, let it go,’ sneers Alex. ‘In fact, why don’t you just fuck off?’

‘Don’t push your luck, you little prick.’

He takes a step back. ‘I’m a black belt in karate.’

‘Hold the front page: small man into martial arts discovered.’

For a worrying moment I think I might have misjudged him, but he knows better than to ruin Jez and Amy’s special day with a dance floor brawl. He spins on his heel and stomps off.

Edie looks aghast. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘What, I should have waited till he slapped you around a bit?’

She hurries off after Alex. As I make for the bar, I find myself squeezing past Barbara. She has obviously witnessed what happened, because she winks at me and says, ‘Now that’s more like it.’

The taxi ride back to her parents’ place is fifteen minutes of frosty silence. Edie only speaks once I’ve paid off the driver and we’ve let ourselves into the kitchen through the back door.

‘Nightcap?’ she asks.

‘Why not?’

I’m in the doghouse, we might as well get it over with, clear the air to spare her parents any tensions tomorrow. She produces a bottle of Armagnac from somewhere and we dump ourselves at the kitchen table.

‘Edie, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s a bit late for sorrys.’

‘They do tend to come after the event,’ I point out.

‘It was nothing I couldn’t deal with. I certainly didn’t need you turning into Rambo.’

‘I didn’t like him manhandling you. I couldn’t help myself.’

She shakes her head. ‘I should never have invited you.’

That hurts. I can feel my hackles rising. ‘Yeah, well we both know why you did.’

‘Do we?’

It came to me suddenly in the taxi just now: I’m the decoy to draw attention away from her and Tristan. There was gossip in the office yesterday about the two of us spending the weekend together.

‘Was it your idea or Tristan’s?’ I ask.

‘Tristan? What’s Tristan got to do with anything?’

It’s a pretty convincing performance, and I take a slow sip of Armagnac, stretching out the silence. ‘Forget it.’

‘No, I want to know what you mean. Tell me what you mean.’

‘I mean, I wasn’t sure about you and him before, but now I am.’

I’m expecting a fight to the death, but she throws in the towel almost immediately, not with words but with a low sigh and eyes that can’t hold mine.

‘I’m not judging you, Edie.’

‘Yeah, that would be a bit rich coming from the bloke who screwed his girlfriend’s sister.’

I’m liable to say something she’ll never forget or forgive me for, so I wait a moment before replying. ‘You can have that one on me if it makes you feel better.’

She hangs her head. ‘No. Christ, what a cow.’

I reach over and squeeze her hand. ‘We don’t have to talk about it now. In fact, I don’t think we should.’

‘What if I want to?’

‘Sleep on it. My head’s all over the shop – family stuff, not this.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

‘No,’ I lie.

We part company in the gloom at the foot of the staircase because I want to check on Doggo in the drawing room.

‘Small man into martial arts discovered,’ she says. I can just make out her smile.

‘Like that, did you?’

‘Not at the time.’ She plants an unexpected kiss on my cheek. ‘Thanks for coming to my defence.’

‘One day I’ll figure you out,’ I say to her back as she heads upstairs.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ she replies from the darkness.

Doggo is slumbering on the sofa in the drawing room. He stirs as I approach.

‘Hey, Doggo, how’s tricks?’ I drop down beside him. I can feel a couple of burrs in the long hair of his ears. They suggest that Elliot and Sibella were true to their word and took him for a long yomp through the countryside. ‘Run you ragged, did they?’

Doggo shadows me as I leave the room, and when I close the door on him he barks, then again, and again. ‘Shhhh,’ I hiss, easing open the door. He barges through the crack into the corridor, wagging his bog brush tail and looking up at me with doleful eyes.

‘You want company? Okay, but just this once.’

Doggo sleeps. I don’t. I lie there on my back, feeling the weight of him through the duvet, pressing against my thigh. He must find it as reassuring as I do, because when I move my leg, he shifts to maintain contact. It occurs to me that maybe he was used to this – sleeping on the bed of his last owner – and it’s taken him until now to feel comfortable enough with me to demand the same. He twitches, gives a little whinny, dreaming. Of what? His former life?

It’s odd that I haven’t stopped to think about it before. What do I really know about his past? Only what Clara told me, that he wasn’t a stray, that he came from a good home, a happy home. This makes sense. There’s nothing cringing, fearful or damaged about him. He’s not a needy dog, one of those irritating creatures that shiver with the anticipation of receiving even the slightest attention. Yes, he’s happy to be petted but just as happy to fire you a sharp look when he’s had enough. I respect him for that. He’s his own man, self-possessed but never to the point of arrogance, aware of his intelligence but not quick to flaunt it, and he’s sweetly deluded about the figure he cuts in the world. If I had to pick a character from literature to compare him to, it would be Hercule Poirot.

Hercule
. Finally! A fitting name for the little fellow. The French form, mind, not the English one. Hercules summons up images of the Greek hero and his twelve labours, with their feats of courage and strength – two characteristics I don’t immediately associate with Doggo.
Hercule
. Yes. But still not quite as good as Doggo.

I lay my hand on him as softly as I can so as not to wake him. The heat and the slow, hypnotic rise and fall of his ribcage carry me quickly off to the same place he has gone.

W
E EAT BREAKFAST
in blinding sunshine on the back terrace. It’s exhausting, not just the spread, but the conversation, which is diverse, lively, even argumentative. Elliot tosses out stories from the Sunday papers and everyone is expected to react to them. Another drone strike in northern Pakistan has obliterated a bunch of innocents. What do we think about drones? Is the war against the Taliban really a war? What defines a just war? Is there even such a thing? What are we to make of man’s inhumanity to man?

‘And beast,’ says Sibella, a vegetarian, although she doesn’t seem to have a problem with the rest of us piling into the platter of bacon, sausages and black pudding.

More coffee is made. The conversation turns to me. Not quite an interrogation, but close. I don’t know why I do it – I mean, I hardly know these people – yet out it pops: Grandpa’s line to me in the nursing home, my mother’s stiff rebuttal, then the cryptic voicemail from her on my phone last night.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ is Edie’s verdict.

Sibella frowns. ‘Poor you.’

I shrug, trying to make light of it. ‘It’s not so bad. You don’t know my father.’

‘Neither do you, it seems,’ says Elliot.

‘Papa!’

‘I’m just trying to inject a bit of levity.’

At the bottom of the garden is a rickety bench with its back to a brick wall trained with an ancient rose on the point of flowering, loaded with fat buds. My eye takes in all the details, forensically, like a detective visiting a crime scene for the first time. This is the spot where the world as I know it is about to change for ever, and it’s good to have Doggo sitting beside me on the bench.

Nigel answers after several rings. ‘Hold on a tick, old boy, she’s right here,’ he says in his faux-patrician drawl. I can tell they’re outside, probably by the pool, cooking themselves to a crisp under a Spanish sun.

‘Danny. Finally. You got my message?’

‘Sorry, my phone was off, I was at a wedding.’

She wants to know whose wedding, and where exactly in the Chilterns I am, and whether this means there’s something brewing between Edie and me. Her questions don’t have the ring of an awkward preamble, of someone steeling herself to raise the real and rather sticky item on the agenda. She sounds genuinely curious, chatty, and in the end I’m the one to remind her: ‘Mum, you said it was important.’

‘Oh. Yes. It is. I can’t find my birthday diary and I know Alice’s is coming up soon. Emma will kill me if I forget it again.’

I don’t reply.

‘Danny, are you there?’

‘You sounded upset.’

‘Upset?’

‘In your message. Like you’d been crying.’

It turns out she had been, having just received news that an old friend of hers had lost her battle with breast cancer. ‘You remember Pat Connelly.’ Vaguely. I see a wide face and a cascade of dark curls from my childhood. ‘I’m waiting to hear when the funeral is. Maybe we can have lunch when I’m over for it.’

‘Sure. Sure.’

‘I’m touched by your enthusiasm,’ she jokes.

I can’t bring myself to tell the others the truth. They’ll think I’m a paranoiac (am I?), or worse – a fantasist. I go for the big fudge, not quite a lie. ‘She’s flying over soon. She wants to have lunch with me.’

‘That’s all she said?’ asks Sibella, her eyes boring into me.

‘Yes.’

‘No sense of whether you’re right or not?’

‘Sib, leave the poor boy alone,’ says Elliot. ‘Can’t you see he doesn’t want to talk about it.’

‘He was happy enough to talk about it before.’

Edie skewers her mother with a look. Sibella lets it go, but I can tell she smells a rat.

I told Edie to sleep on it, and she has. The subject of Tristan is now off limits. We’re well on our way back to London when I finally broach it.

‘What’s to say? It is what it is.’

‘Edie, he’s married.’

‘Unhappily married. And you said you wouldn’t judge me.’

‘I’m not judging you, I’m just …’ I can’t find the word.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Worried, I suppose.’

‘You don’t have to be.’

And that’s that – end of conversation.

I
T’S GOOD TO
have Ralph back at the helm. Yes, there’s something vaguely ridiculous about him, a whiff of Captain Jack Sparrow, but at least he commands respect, unlike Tristan, who demands it. Tristan is right in my sights now. It was never exactly possible to ignore him before, but I was able to push him to the periphery. No longer, not since I got the confirmation about him and Edie. I can tell he’s not happy about having to play second fiddle once more; it’s written in his eyes when Ralph is briefing us all on the Vargo account.

The Vargo is the new hatchback from … well, it’s anybody’s guess; we’re not allowed to know just which of the Big Three French carmakers is responsible for it. The invitation to pitch for the TV ad has come via a brand and marketing consultancy whose client wishes the competing agencies to approach the matter without any preconceptions, with nothing but the merits of the vehicle itself to work with. There is only one problem: said merits are encased within the Vargo, a vehicle that’s best described as wilfully ugly – a snub-nosed, boxy affair that flies in the face of current trends in automotive design. Yes, it’s got great fuel economy and a whole bunch of gadgets as standard, but it’s an aberration, an ungainly lump of metal for the conveyance of passengers from A to B.

‘Who would want to buy it?’ asks Ralph.

‘Who indeed?’ says Tristan.

‘Some dipstick with more money than sense,’ suggests Megan.

There are eleven of us around the conference table: the three creative teams, Patrick, a couple of other account executives (Damien and Lotty), plus Ralph and Tristan. A TV commercial for a new vehicle launch would be a big feather in the cap of a small agency like ours, but Tristan thinks we should leave it well alone. He’s convinced the Vargo is doomed, not just to failure but ridicule. Do we really want to be associated with it?

‘Defeatist crap!’ scoffs Ralph. ‘Anyone can sell the new BMW 5 Series – that’s just following tracks in the snow. But the person who finds a market for this piece of shit, well, that’s how lasting reputations are built. Damn it, we’ll still be dining out on it in our nursing homes if we pull it off.’

There’s a nervous edge to the chuckle that ripples round the table, because Tristan has a face like thunder. ‘“If” being the operative word. I still think it’s a poisoned chalice.’

‘Objection duly noted,’ says Ralph. ‘I want you all on it. Answers on a postcard by Wednesday week, please.’

Tristan’s public dressing-down is a source of amused discussion once we’re all gathered round the pool table back in the creative department. I find myself sympathising with him, chiefly for Edie’s sake, because it can’t be easy to hear the man you’re sleeping with being vilified with such casual relish by your colleagues. Later, when we’re alone in our office, Edie tells me she doesn’t need me fighting Tristan’s corner, even if she can’t.

I don’t appreciate my good intentions being trashed. ‘How about you tell me what to say and I’ll say it?’

‘Or you could just say what you really think.’

‘You don’t want to hear what I really think.’

The truth is, and despite what I told her before, I
do
judge her. Not morally, more on grounds of taste.

‘You only see one face,’ says Edie.

‘How many does he have?’

‘Screw you, Dan.’

Doggo barks suddenly from the sofa, as if sensing the tension and calling us both to order. We glance at him, look at each other and smile. It’s good to have an excuse to put the sour exchange behind us.

‘Maybe you’ll change your mind about him after your lunch tomorrow.’