‘Get down!’ shouted Adam, lunging for their collars. He kicked one of the dogs and its skinny, unresisting legs skated over the floor.
A woman’s voice drifted in from the hall.
‘What on earth were Nell and Daisy doing locked up?’ she said. ‘I found them out in the stable — I couldn’t believe my eyes!’
Adam held both dogs by their collars and they strained madly at his arms, barking, their clawed feet skating and scratching over the flagstones.
‘What are you doing?’ said Audrey, appearing in the doorway. ‘Let them go, Adam! You look like that man at the gates of hell.’
‘I can’t,’ puffed Adam. ‘They keep going for Vivian.’
‘They just went mad,’ said Lisa.
‘I don’t like them!’ wailed Janie.
‘What do you mean, they keep going for her? They’re just a pair of silly old girls. Aren’t you? You’re just a pair of silly old girls. You don’t go for people. No, not like the hounds of hell. Not like the horrid hounds from hell.’
Audrey had advanced into the room and was caressing the dogs’ slobbering muzzles as she spoke. They made high-pitched mewling sounds. She was wearing a close-fitting brown coat made of some kind of skin or pelt. Her slim, shapely legs were bare. On her feet she wore narrow, high-heeled boots of the same brown, hairy material as the coat. I became aware of her scent, which was moving in a body over the room. It was a heady smell composed of numerous elements — perfume, face powder, soap, leather, a smell of varnish — and their notes sounded on me randomly and repeatedly.
‘Do you like my new coat?’ she said girlishly, whirling round to face us all. ‘I got it in London last week. It’s pony. Don’t you think it’s divine? The boots were made to match. They cost the earth! But I had to have them, didn’t I? The pony has to have her little hooves shod.’
‘Was it really a pony?’ said Janie to her mother. Her expression was perturbed.
‘God, it’s fantastic,’ said Laura enthusiastically, stroking Audrey’s arm.
‘Was it really?’ said Janie.
‘It’s absolutely lovely,’ said Lisa. Her tone was uncharacteristically professorial. She looked slightly stiff beneath Janie’s scrutiny.
‘I’m going to put the dogs back out in the yard,’ said Adam.
‘I love clothes,’ said Laura, ‘but I never buy them any more. Look.’ She lifted her shirt cheerfully to reveal the zip of her skirt peeled open to accommodate her white, fleshy middle. ‘I can’t do anything up.’
‘There isn’t another baby in there, is there?’ pouted Audrey.
‘Don’t!’ shrieked Laura.
‘No more babies,’ said Audrey, shaking her manicured finger.
‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ said Laura delightedly.
‘I met one of yours outside — he wanted to show me how to use his crossbow. It’s rather fun, isn’t it? I shot my bolt straight into a tree and imagined all sorts of people it might be. He was very gentlemanly when I showed him my new boots, and he climbed up and got it himself, gorgeous boy.’
‘Roger would divorce me if I had any more,’ said Laura.
‘I made Paul get his tubes tied after Brendon,’ said Audrey. ‘He protested mightily. Oh, how the lord and master protested. He said it was the death of possibility. I said to him, darling, we’ve got three lumping great possibilities already. How much more possibility do you want? I said, if I have any more possibilities I’ll have to start wearing support tights and girdles. That galvanised him, I’m telling you.’
It was difficult to get a sense of Audrey’s face, submerged as it was beneath a meticulous mask of make-up. Two pencil lines described the surprised arc of her brows. Her eyelashes stood out in great curving black fronds which fanned up and down when she blinked. It was in her mouth, a red, wrinkled, oily delta of lipstick, that her age declared itself. Her eyes glittered erratically beneath the black fronds. She had retained, I saw, the tousled hairstyle of her earlier era, although today it looked slightly askew, as though it had been thrown at her head and nearly missed. I wondered whether she had had a facelift. The skin of her face had a boiled appearance, and there was about her generally an air of frantic uplift, of a bodily effort to ascend as though from some sinking substance in which her feet were mired. Caris was looking at her mother with her arms folded and the same strange, lilting smile on her face that she had worn earlier. Brendon remained at the kitchen table, but he had pushed back his chair and was holding his arms and legs slightly out to the sides, as though someone had just placed their hands on his chest and shoved him forcefully backwards. Adam still gripped the straining dogs by their collars.
‘I’m just going to put them out,’ he said again.
‘You’ll have to shut them back in the stable,’ said Vivian, who remained as though for defence behind the upended chair. ‘Right in, do you see, otherwise they get out through the gate.’
‘What are they saying?’ said Audrey, looking about her with gracious incredulity.
‘I’m putting the dogs back in the stable.’
‘Why on earth are you doing that?’
‘They’ve got a bit wild with dad away.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Audrey. ‘Come and see mummy, darlings. Don’t listen to what those horrid people say about you.’
‘They bark at Vivian.’
‘They bark at me,’ said Caris, still smiling.
Audrey looked around the room in distress. Her garlanded eyes met mine.
‘Perhaps you can tell me what they’re talking about,’ she said sweetly. ‘They’re talking about locking up animals, aren’t they?’
‘If you’re going out I’ll go out with you,’ said Laura to Adam, edging towards the door with the baby in her arms. ‘I’m just going to run down to Doniford.’
‘Do you know Paul?’ said Audrey, to me. ‘He’s very fond of these old girls. I don’t think he’d like them being locked up, do you?’
‘They’re only dogs,’ said Vivian quaveringly. ‘They’re not children. It’s not as though we’re talking about locking up children.’
‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ gasped Audrey comically. ‘Are you suggesting something, Vivian darling, about my reputation as a mother? Because from what Caris tells me you’ve got some history of your own in that department!’
‘I was just saying that they’re only dogs,’ Vivian said.
‘I always think you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog,’ said Audrey, to all of us. ‘Particularly men. I like a man who gives a dog a good tousling. I can’t stand it when you see a man sort of cross his legs. And the ones who claim to be allergic are the worst.’
‘I’m the one that feeds them, you know,’ said Vivian. ‘I’m the one that looks after them.’
‘Is this dogs or children, darling? I suppose you’d say it was both. The feeding hangs heavy in both cases. Still, locking them up is a little extreme. I don’t think I went down that road, even in my worst moments.’
‘They should have gone to kennels,’ said Adam. He had an uncomfortable expression on his face, as though he were slowly being suffocated by his own body.
‘I always thought that about all of you,’ Audrey said. ‘I remember there used to be a sign on the way down to Doniford that said “Cat Hotel”. Every time I passed it I used to wonder whether they’d make an exception.’
‘That isn’t actually all that funny,’ said Caris.
‘It might not seem funny to you,’ said Audrey. ‘I think people don’t really develop a sense of humour until they have children,’ she added, to me. ‘It’s hard to take things quite so seriously once you’ve wiped a few bottoms. Mine seem to think that I don’t know about their bottoms. Perhaps it’d be better if I didn’t. There’s a point at which one’s information becomes obsolete — it’s terribly bad for the brain. I often look at women my age and think that they’re just slated for extinction, like the dinosaurs.’