Since this could, I feared, be the answer to my little mystery, and since I could not skulk about here any longer without apparent purpose, I stopped, put my hands on my hips, looked about me and tutted.
‘Where has he got to?’ I said in what I hoped was a carrying-enough voice to reach the cottage in case anyone was watching and listening but not ludicrously stagy.
‘Here, boy!’ I shouted, the stable lad having assured me that he would come only to his name and nothing else. ‘Here, doggy-dog! Come to heel. Oh, blast it all to heaven, what did he say the name was?’
So it went on. I strode about around the back shouting for Scamp, for Laddie, for Jock, standing still ostensibly listening for him but really looking about for anything there was to see: something hastily buried, or a hole where something had been hastily dug up, footprints – not that that dry forest floor could reasonably be expected to yield these, or anything at all. Eventually, grudgingly deciding that the privy was the answer after all, I gave up and called for Nipper. He did not appear. I called louder, but still there was no sign of him. Then with all thought of detecting forgotten, I began to shout in earnest. How awful if I should have lost him! He really was an excellent little animal and the stable lad could hardly have said no to me when I asked. If he had gone off for good, I should never forgive myself.
‘Nipper? Ni-ppaaar… Nipper!’ I shouted, trying a variety of intonations in case he was as particular as all that. I rounded the cottages on the far side, and saw him at last. Being a dog, he was of course rolling with abandon in the fresh horse droppings from Mr Faichen’s hearse.
‘Nipper!’ I exclaimed. ‘You little beast. Get up this minute!’
With a final snort, Nipper rolled over and sprang to his feet, trotting towards me with his tongue out in a happy grin.
‘Shocking behaviour,’ I told him, but one could not be cross with him really. For one thing Bunty would have done exactly the same, and for another I should have seen it coming. ‘I must say, though,’ I went on, ‘even if one has to expect that sort of behaviour from you, I think it’s a bit much for an undertaker to come round all solemn and respectful and then leave it behind him, don’t you?’ Of course, as soon as I had had this thought tongue-in-cheek, simply to make conversation with the dog, I immediately had it for real. What is more, Mrs Dudgeon might well feel the same and if the neighbours were all out then there was no chance of one of them coming to clear the mess before she could be offended by it. Only one course of action was open to me.
‘What a glamorous life I do lead,’ I said to myself, as I reattached the string to Nipper’s collar and went around the side of the cottage to get a coal shovel.
Nipper, trotting along quite happily on a slack string as I made my way to the midden heap moments later, looked scrupulously uninterested in the contents of the brimming shovel, as though I might concern myself with such matters but they were far beneath his notice. I had almost got there, breathing through my mouth and trying not to think of what my disgusting sons said about this method of dealing with bad smells (‘But if you breathe through your mouth you’re eating it’), when I realized that I could have simply scraped it off the lane into the verge, and that it was the clearest sign yet of how the drip-drip-drip of Hugh’s propaganda on the subject of ‘compost’ as he calls it was warping my brain that it never occurred to me to do anything but put it where it would do such bucolic good, even if that meant I had to carry the stuff a hundred yards at arm’s length as though I was in some revolting new take on a pancake race.
I was cross, then – with Hugh for corrupting me, with my sons for their crudity, and with Nipper – by the time I got there and emptied the shovel on to the heap but my temper faded into sadness as I looked in and saw there, spread all over the top, the burrs from Robert Dudgeon’s suit, some of them still with white scraps of his undergarment clinging to them. They must have been the last thing Mrs Dudgeon wanted ever to see again when she returned home a widow on Friday evening, but I supposed they had to be dealt with somehow. I even thought for a moment of digging around a bit with my shovel and trying to cover them, but there were limits. The smell and the bluebottles were not easily to be ignored, so I contented myself with scraping the shovel clean and rehanging it on its nail then setting off into the woods to take Nipper home.
We did not make very good progress. Before we were even properly under the trees Nipper gave a sudden yelp and started to the side, bumping into my legs and knocking me off balance. I dropped to my knees at once and, when I did, I saw immediately what was the problem. There was a bottle, cracked in two, lying on the rough grass. A whisky bottle no less – its label was still fresh and clearly legible: Royal Highlanders single malted Scotch Whisky. I sat back on my heels and took Nipper’s paws one by one in my hands squeezing gently, until I found the tender one.
‘Poor old thing,’ I said. ‘And poor old me having to take you back to your master with a cut paw and covered in horse dung, too. My name will be mud around the stables tonight.’ I sacrificed my handkerchief (another one), using it to wipe out the cut – it was not much more than a scratch really – and then turning it to the fresh side and tying up the paw to keep it clean on the way home.
‘What kind of fool would throw a bottle away like that when they know there’s a houseful of children nearby?’ I asked Nipper, trying to keep his mind off what I was doing to him. When I stood up, however, I saw that there was a more innocent explanation at least than that. The bottle might easily have tumbled off the rubbish heap at the cottage of the red-haired children and rolled down, cracking through on its way, for there were countless other whisky bottles there; Vat 69 bottles for the most part and I wondered if the man of the house worked in the bottling hall and purloined them in the way I had heard so much about. Or no, I realized, living here, he must work for Cadwallader in some capacity and must simply spend his wages on them. My sympathy for the mother of the red terrors continued to rise, as I imagined him draining bottles, sticking the corks back in – one was still stuck in the top half of this one – and then tossing them out into the garden with never a thought for his little ones’ bare feet as they scampered at play. Well, clearly I could not just leave this broken one where it was, and I was damned if I was going to rootle about in the rubbish to put it safely out of harm’s way, nor dig a hole here in full view of the cottage windows, in case anyone should come back and see me, so I simply picked up the two halves, gingerly avoiding the jagged ends and trying not to breathe in the fumes, and set off on my way.
‘I’ll get rid of it somewhere,’ I told Nipper, ‘but first things first. We need to get you home and have that cut cleaned out. In fact, a head-to-toe bath wouldn’t do you any harm, and if I have to administer it myself as punishment for being such a poor nanny, then I’ll take it on the chin.’
At times in the past, I have wondered whether there is something to that belief that we are all but pawns being moved around to make sport for the gods, and I was just about to wonder it again. If asked to pick who I would least like to encounter just at that moment, walking along carrying a broken whisky bottle, leading a dog on a string, he liberally coated in horse dung and with one paw tied up in a grubby hanky and I slightly besmirched with some of the same horse dung, at least on my hands where I had grabbed his paws to doctor him, and with dirty knees from grovelling on the ground while I did so, and with no handkerchief to remedy any of it… if asked who I would least like to meet in this state the people I glimpsed through the trees on course to bump right into me would certainly be amongst the top few.