Helen Cresswell - The Bagthorpe Saga - Absolute Zero

He held the biscuit aloft halfway between Jack and Zero.

“Up. Sit up. Beg. Good boy – boys, rather.”

Jack accordingly crouched on his legs and held his hands drooping forward in imitation of front paws.

“Good boy !” exclaimed Uncle Parker. He patted Jack on the head and held out the biscuit. Jack opened his mouth and Uncle Parker pushed the half digestive into it. It nearly choked him. He looked sideways to see that Zero was looking distinctly interested. For one thing, his eyes were fixed soulfully on the piece of biscuit still protruding from Jack’s mouth, and for another, he was doing a kind of stamping movement with his front paws alternately, like a racehorse impatient to be loosed.

“Look!” The exclamation came out with a shower of crumbs. “Look at his paws!”

Uncle Parker nodded.

“We’re on the right track. All we’ve got to do now is keep on reinforcing the message. How hungry are you?”

“Not terribly,” Jack told him. “You could break the biscuits in quarters instead of halves. They’ll last longer that way.”

The training session continued. It was going well. Uncle Parker and Jack became increasingly pleased with themselves and increasingly entertained by Zero’s efforts to raise himself with his front paws up. He had very big, furry paws – pudding-footed, Mr Bagthorpe called him – and he did not seem to have much control over them. Once or twice he toppled over sideways within an ace of success and rolled about growling with annoyance.

“I wish we’d got a camera,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen anything so funny.” He then added immediately, for the benefit of Zero’s ears, “And it’s jolly good the way he’s catching on. You’re nearly there, old chap. Good old boy. Good boy.”

He was the only Bagthorpe who ever praised Zero and he had to do a lot of it to keep his confidence and his ears up.

Had Jack known it, a camera was in the offing. It was going to be used at any moment, just as soon as Rosie could stop stuffing her fists into her mouth to keep herself from giggling out loud, and use her hands to operate the camera instead.

Rosie was behind a hawthorn bush not six feet from where the training was taking place. The reason why she was there was because she was out to get some shots for a Competition entitled “Me and My Pet”. At first she had passed it over, because she did not have a pet. She was too busy with her maths and violin and Portraits and swimming (which were the four main Strings to her Bow) to have time for a pet. She had then, however, thought of Jack and Zero. She turned back to the Competition and discovered that what was really wanted was something unusual.

One of the most unusual things Rosie had ever heard of (she had, to her intense annoyance, missed actually seeing it) was Jack on all fours with a stick in his mouth to show Zero how to Fetch. She had afterwards begged him to repeat the performance so that she could photograph it with her new camera. Rosie had a passion for keeping records of things so strong that it could almost have been classed as a fifth String to her Bow. She had even offered Jack her spare pocket calculator to pose like this, but he always refused point-blank.

“You do it,” he told her, “and I’ll photograph you doing it.”

“No,” she said. “I’d look silly.”

“There you are, then. Anyway, it wasn’t silly, even if it looked it. It was a Serious Scientific Experiment, and it worked.”

Rosie was now poised ready to take a shot – more than one, if possible – of the present Serious Scientific Experiment, which was funnier, definitely, than the first could possibly have been. A 16mm movie camera complete with tripod, screen and projector, were as good as in the bag.

“Hold up half a digestive this time,” she heard Jack tell Uncle Parker. “He’s about there. I’m sure he is. They’re one of his favourites.”

Uncle Parker took the biscuit and poised it between the pair of them.

“Up!” he commanded. “Sit up! Beg!”

Jack went through his usual motions, turned his head sideways and saw that Zero too, though rocking alarmingly, was up, tongue dangling, eyes fixed on the digestive.

No one heard the click of Rosie’s shutter because of Zero’s panting. Solemnly Uncle Parker placed the biscuit in Zero’s jaws.

“Good boy ,” he said, and Jack scrambled up and began patting Zero so vigorously that he spluttered crumbs. Behind her bush, Rosie secretly thanked them all.

“Oh, it worked, it worked!” Jack cried. “Oh thanks, Uncle Parker! I’d never’ve done it without you. Oh, wait till the rest of them see!”

Uncle Parker was looking more thoughtful than jubilant.

“Interesting…” he murmured.

He was thinking of Daisy, who needed training as much as Zero did – probably more. He was wondering whether he could adopt this kind of technique to deal with her and make her less of a public nuisance. It was true that she did not light fires any more, but Mr Bagthorpe had not been far short of the mark when he had suggested that she was now poisoning people. She was, among other things, going into the pantry and mixing all kinds of things together, like cocoa and gravy salt, for instance, and salt and sugar, and marmalade and chutney. The Parkers and their friends had been getting some truly horrible gastronomic shocks of late.

Aunt Celia did not take this very seriously, partly because she was a vegetarian and lived mainly on lettuce, carrots, wheatgerm and fresh orange juice. She said that it showed signs of creativity, Daisy’s mixing ingredients together.

“It is one of the early signs of creative genius,” she said, in an unusually long sentence for her, “to Reconcile the Seemingly Disparate.”

Uncle Parker did not dispute this. For one thing, he never argued with his wife because he thought she was perfect. Also, she had a very highly strung temperament and must not be crossed. He had put a padlock on the pantry door, however, saying that if Daisy were as creative as all that, she would find other Disparate objects to Reconcile.

The trouble was, she had. Daisy had embarked on a career of Reconciling the Seemingly Disparate that was shortly to drive the Bagthorpe household to the edge of their endurance while the Parkers were in the Caribbean. Anybody else would have gone right over the edge.

Meanwhile, Uncle Parker made a mental note to try the Zero technique on his daughter on his return, and dismissed the matter from his mind.

“I think we ought to do it again, once or twice,” Jack said. “Just to make absolutely sure he’s got it.”

Rosie, behind her hawthorn, hugged herself and wound her film on. All in all, she got five shots of the repeat beggings. As it turned out, her film and the supply of biscuits ran out together. She remained under cover while Uncle Parker and Jack sauntered over the meadow back towards the house.

Zero followed, his ears at an unusually jaunty angle. Perhaps he had a deep, canine intuition that before long he was going to be the most famous, most photographed, most sought-after dog in England, if not indeed the world.

Better still, he was about to show Mr Bagthorpe who was Zero and who was not.