Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3) Read online

  DOGHOUSE

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1989

  Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1989 by Macmillan London Limited.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  Beth, usually the most deferential and retiring of company, had been laying down the law for some minutes without visibly drawing breath. She was now winding up to her peroration. ‘Is it a turd? Is it a brain?’ she demanded rhetorically, pointing an accusing finger at me. ‘No. It’s Blooperman! You,’ she added firmly, ‘are an idiot.’

  Isobel Kitts, my only other partner, raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Isobel took a pride in never watching television and she had probably never heard of Superman. Secretly, I had thought Beth’s multiple pun quite witty, although I would never have admitted it. Isobel was merely puzzled.

  Beth was my kennelmaid. I could, I suppose, have sacked her from that post on the spot. But she was by then also my fiancée and the third partner in the business and I had no desire to displace her from any one of those three positions. She was the one bright spot in a rather grisly world and she did nearly all of the hard work for a salary which, while never generous, seemed to have lapsed altogether with the change to her status. So I kept a check on my tongue, which sometimes gets beyond my control and develops a cutting edge.

  ‘I know it,’ I said mildly. I had pulled up a chair and was huddled against the kitchen boiler, letting the delicious warmth of it soothe away the chill.

  Isobel looked up again from the accounts which she had spread over the kitchen table and scowled at me over her unsuitably pink-framed spectacles. ‘So you bloody well should, John,’ she said. ‘If you have to go off your rocker, do it where we can keep an eye on you.’

  Isobel was a strong-minded woman and as her age must almost have equalled Beth’s and mine added together – although she would never have forgiven either of us had we dared to remind her of the fact – she was rather a mother figure in the business. She lived a couple of miles away with Henry, her elderly husband; but the pair seemed to spend far more time at Three Oaks Kennels than they did at their home.

  There was a very small element of justice in their complaints. I had awoken that morning, suddenly and completely and with a sense of wellbeing such as I had not known since my days in the army. Some sort of combined celebration and test seemed to be called for. I had thought of waking Beth for an essay at lovemaking – I omitted to mention that she was also my mistress – but a protracted illness had left my performance in that regard less than reliable. A grumpy word would have guaranteed failure, upsetting Beth, humiliating me and spoiling what was shaping up to be one of the better days.

  Instead, I had slipped quietly out of bed, dressed in the dark and left a note of explanation on the kitchen table. A drive of half an hour and a five minute walk had brought me to a well-remembered reed-bank on the River Tay, and I had been in place in time to hear the geese talking before they began to take off on their dawn flight to the feeding grounds. The sight and sound of the skeins coming off the water in the light of a scarlet dawn would have been reward enough. It was the scene which I had missed most of all during my illness.

  My return home was greeted by two enraged ladies loudly competing with each other to list the greater number of my follies.

  Although the London School of Tropical Medicine had pronounced my blood clear at last of the parasite which had been enfeebling me for years, and although even the damage to my organs was slowly reversing, I might have remembered that I was still seriously underweight. The chill of a winter’s dawn seemed to have penetrated deeper than my bones and into my very soul, and my two guardians were unanimous in prophesying horrid relapses in my state of health.

  But even that piece of idiocy took second place, slightly ahead of the ruination of my clothes by Tay mud and on a par with the rashness of venturing onto a tidal foreshore without telling anybody where I was going so that, at the very least, they could have instituted a search for my body if I had been swept away. The greatest sin of all had been to take Samson with me.

  On my return, still high on the euphoria of a perfect outing, I had exhibited my prize of a handsome greylag goose. I should have left it at that but, through chattering teeth, I had rashly gone on to praise Samson, who had taken the plunge into icy water and pursued the stricken goose out of sight, swept upstream on the flood tide, to struggle back an hour later along the shore with the weight of the now dead goose balanced high in his jaws.

  At that point my health had been relegated from first concern to comparative insignificance. If I had to jeopardise my recovery, they asked, was it also necessary to risk Samson?

  ‘He’s the best dog we’ve got in water,’ I pointed out.

  ‘He is also the prop and mainstay of the business,’ Isobel retorted.

  If that was an exaggeration, there was at least a degree of truth in it. I had been invalided out of the army with no assets except a modest pension, two well-pedigreed springer spaniel bitches and a knack of training dogs. After several years of occasionally successful competition in field trials (which had enhanced the selling price of litters considerably) I had been coaxed into setting up a more professional breeding and training kennels for springer spaniels, with Isobel as partner. Beth had come as a later but valuable addition.

  Abercraig Samson was our prime stud dog. His elevation to the title of Field Trials Champion had contributed substantially to our modest success. Our practice of offering generous discounts to field trials competitors whom we regarded as skilled trainers and handlers had proved a wise investment. His progeny were figuring regularly in lists of awards and creating a steady demand for puppies and trained dogs and for his services at stud.

  ‘He’s getting on in years,’ Isobel finished. ‘You’ve probably killed him.’

  This was so patently false that I could ignore it. Samson, towelled into a fluffy ball, was sprawled against the stove at my feet, steaming gently and obviously very pleased with himself. It does wonders for a field trials dog to be reminded occasionally that there is a real and engrossing world outside of the tight discipline of competitions and picking-up.

  ‘If he gets crippled with rheumatism, he’ll be too stiff to mount a bitch,’ Beth added.

  This also was false. Samson was the randiest dog in the business and with an extraordinary power over the opposite sex. During my long convalescence I had often envied him. His mongrel by-blows could be recognised for several miles around. We tried to keep him in confinement, more because of his value than for the sake of the local bitch-owners, but Samson could detect a bitch in season at a thousand yards despite all the Amplex and Antimate in the world, and when he had caught the scent it would have taken a Chubb safe to restrain him. He had once sired a litter while confined in the boot of a small car with a bitch who was only beginning to come into season. I strongly suspected that at least part of his hour adrift had been spent in serving the bitches of Balmerino or even Inchture.

  ‘All right,’ I said. Even to myself, I sounded petulant. ‘So I went mad for a morning. It may never happen again. But just for once, I wanted to do something I wanted to do.’

  Beth looked at me sharply. Garbled sentences had been a symptom which had preceded the
occasional blackout during the worst of my illness. Then she decided that I was trying to say something. ‘Yes, but what?’ she asked.

  ‘What I mean is that for years now – literally years – I’ve been leading a sensible life, watching my diet, wrapping up warmly, subjecting myself to medical indignities and never doing a damn thing just for the hell of it in case it gave me a setback. Isobel does the handling in competition—’

  ‘You’re welcome to take it over again,’ Isobel said.

  That stopped me with a jerk. We had most of an intensive winter’s programme of competition ahead of us, because the buyer in search of a pup or a trained dog looks for a winning strain before he parts with his gold. This, after all, is his only guarantee of sound, working stock with innate ability. Isobel had taken over the handling because my health had not been up to the job. She had continued because she was temperamentally better suited to it. She had the knack of staying calm and thinking her way out of a crisis when I might have been shouting and whistling my way towards relegation.

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘You two do all the real work. Mostly, I just do the training. It’s like being a schoolmaster, eternally handing down the same old lessons and correcting the same old faults.’

  ‘Without your training,’ Isobel said, ‘we’d never win a prize. We’d be lucky to sell a pup for a price which would cover our costs.’

  ‘And besides,’ Beth said unhappily, ‘you love it. You know you do.’ She was trying hard to understand. There were real tears in her brown eyes.

  ‘All right, so I do, usually. But, even accepting that as a fact, don’t you think that you could get fed up of eating strawberries and ice cream to the music of Mozart, if you had to do it day in and day out?’ Beth nodded uncertainly. ‘Just for once I woke up feeling on top of the world. I wanted to go out with a dog and do something real, the sort of thing the dog’s meant for, instead of going on for ever teaching him the tricks of his future trade. I wanted . . .’ I paused and tried to order my jumbled thoughts. ‘I wanted to do something, anything, which wouldn’t bore me out of my skull. I know that sounds bad and it isn’t how I feel all the time, but it’s how I felt this morning. Can’t you understand? I think I’ve got it out of my system now,’ I finished.

  Beth and Isobel regarded me in silence. It was doubtful whether they did understand. A woman often copes with monotony better than a man; and she has no instinct to gather meat.

  ‘You need a holiday,’ Isobel said. It was her panacea, but not always a practicable one.

  ‘At the end of the season—’ I began.

  ‘That’s nearly three months away. We’ll have to see what we can arrange.’

  Beth and Isobel made eye contact. I knew that they were already mutely conspiring to arrange my life for me, and that I would be helpless under the weight of so much cloying femininity.

  ‘I must go,’ Beth said suddenly. ‘Dogs don’t look after themselves. And pups have to be fed.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ I said.

  Beth shook her head so that her dark hair danced. ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘I’m going to run you a hot bath and you can go back to bed for the rest of the morning.’

  ‘While I put the little beggars through their paces,’ Isobel said. She began to gather up her papers.

  ‘You’ll feel better by lunchtime,’ Beth said firmly. It was an order.

  I wanted to rebel and say that no, I bloody well wouldn’t feel better by lunchtime if I didn’t want to. But my lost sleep was beginning to overtake me. I followed her upstairs like a well-trained pup.

  *

  The fact that Beth and Isobel were, in principle, absolutely right would only have added to my irritation – if I had been awake to think about it. But I fell into a bottomless pool of sleep for two full hours. I plunged so deep that even memory seemed to be wiped clean. When Beth awoke me with a mug of soup at lunchtime, I surfaced in a room which looked familiar and yet strange. I had to think hard for a while to orient myself and remember that Beth, when she moved in with me, had imported some touches of colour which changed the room just as her own colour had changed my life. It was still a bare room, oddly shaped by being tucked into the roof with a dormer for its window, and its redecoration was somewhere near the tail-end of our list of priorities, but a new pair of curtains, some ornaments and a collage of flower pictures on the wardrobe doors had both humanised it and made it into alien territory.

  As she had predicted, I felt better. I was both amused and irked to admit that she could order my mood to change.

  While I sipped and waited for the soup to cool, Beth perched on the side of the bed and stared at me solemnly, as though I had suddenly grown another head. She was in her middle to late twenties but she still looked about fifteen. Partly it was the long legged, small busted, coltish build of her, but she also had the small nose, large eyes and lovely complexion of the pubescent girl. She kept a copy of her birth certificate in her handbag alongside her driving licence, for the benefit of disbelieving policemen and barmen.

  ‘Your old goose is hanging in the feed store,’ she said. ‘Remind me in a few days and I’ll pluck and dress it and pop it into the freezer. You’re not just bored with me, are you?’ she asked without any change of tone. ‘Because, if you are, I’ll go away.’

  I put out my spare hand and she took it shyly. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I love you to bits. If you went away, I’d kill myself.’

  ‘Really?’ She seemed uncertain whether to be pleased at the compliment or horrified at the idea.

  ‘Truly,’ I said. ‘But suddenly this morning I felt as if I’d done nothing for years except cosset my health and be a passenger in my own business. And physically I had all my energy back, with compound interest. Try to imagine what it was like, to wake up suddenly with an unfamiliar feeling and then to realise that it was the sensation of feeling fit again. Can you?’

  Beth wrinkled her brow for a moment and then shook her head.

  ‘I wanted to do something mildly adventurous for a change. It’s the wrong time of year for hang-gliding and I couldn’t spare the time to explore the Amazon, so I went wildfowling. And, what’s more, I enjoyed it and I feel better for it. Big deal!’

  Beth hesitated, uncertain which of my arguments to demolish first. ‘You aren’t a passenger,’ she said at last. ‘You mustn’t think like that. Isobel does the handling because she doesn’t get as het up as you do. You do most of the training because you have the patience and you seem to know how a dog’s mind works. And all I do is shovel food into one end of them and clean up what comes out of the other.’

  ‘And balance their diets and bathe and brush them and nurse them when they’re ill, search them for ticks, weed the garden, do the housework and look after me like a mother hen. And chauffeur Isobel to and from the trials,’ I added. Isobel was usually a sober and worthy citizen but she had a habit of celebrating a good result, sometimes far beyond the limits set by the breathalyser.

  ‘I’ll do less, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘The place would grind to a halt.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Beth said, both gratified and reassured. ‘You’re just stale. You need a break.’

  I decided to give up. Arguing with women can be as profitless as trying to pump up a burst tyre. Anyway, she was probably right. ‘If you say so,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been talking with Isobel – and don’t look up at the ceiling in that fed-up way,’ she added sternly. ‘Isobel says that she and Henry could look after the place for a few days if we wanted to go away this weekend. There aren’t any trials on.’

  ‘I ought to be sharpening Gargany up for the Novice Stake the weekend after,’ I said weakly. I had put down strong roots at Three Oaks but, all the same, the prospect of a period of escape, and of having Beth to myself without the chaperonage of a pack of spaniels, was attractive. ‘Where would we go?’

  Beth stopped meeting my eye. ‘I thought that we might go and collect my dog,’ s
he said in a small voice.

  I blinked at her. Something seemed to have slipped out of gear. ‘What dog?’

  ‘Yes. I only heard yesterday. I was waiting for a good chance to tell you.’ Which was a less than satisfactory answer. I drank my soup and waited for her to go on.

  ‘You remember about my uncle?’

  ‘The one who was killed in an accident? You went to his funeral the other week?’

  ‘I never had more than the one uncle. And you know my cousin, Edgar?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I said. I had bumped into Edgar Lawrence at occasional gundog trials – a thin and rather intense man who worked near Glasgow and who bred and trained Labradors in his spare time in a haphazard, semi-professional way. He had talent and had had some successes, but there seemed to be something in his temperament which would always prevent him from reaching the top. ‘Is he the son?’

  ‘Edgar’s the son of my mother’s sister,’ she explained. ‘Uncle George and Hattie never had any children. You’d have liked my uncle. He was a wildlife artist living at Tarbet – the one on Loch Lomond,’ she explained carefully, ‘not Tarbert, Loch Fyne, or any of the others.’

  She was beginning to wake echoes in my mind. ‘Not George Muir?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never knew he was your uncle,’ I said. ‘I saw that he was killed in an accident, but you never said much about him and I never connected the two. I know his work. His wildlife paintings were good. I don’t know a hell of a lot about art, but he seemed to be able to catch the attitude of a bird or an animal just the way I’ve seen it in the wild. He did dogs as well – or even better. I was hoping to get him to do a portrait of Samson, one of these days, if we got rich while the old chap – Samson, I mean – was still on the go.’

  ‘Uncle George left me a picture,’ Beth said.

  This sounded more and more interesting. An original by George Muir was just what the sitting room needed. ‘What of?’ I asked.