Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The path has become a ridge of frozen earth where the field has been ploughed right up to the verge of the wood. The daylight is turning blue with cold while Mamie struggles with the leads. One gumboot digs deep in a furrow and the other stabs to keep its hold on the ridge. The dogs snuffle each other and snort steam. They strain towards the wood, and Hamilton is suddenly there — Alice Long’s gamekeeper — coming out of the trees, tall and broad, with his grey moustache and deep-pink face. He looks at Mamie as if to say, ‘Come here.’ The dogs fuss round him, cutting into her gloves.

Mamie says, ‘I’ve got to go that way,’ pointing down towards her home across the field.

‘I’ll see you back at the House,’ he says, and stoops back into the wood, examining the undergrown branches.

Hamilton looks after old Sir Martin when he becomes beyond a woman’s strength.

‘I’m afraid my father is not very well any more.

‘I don’t know how you do it, Miss Long.’

Mamie’s mother says that anybody else but Alice Long would have put the old man away.

Hamilton sees to the boilers that heat the heated wing. He has too much to do to air the dogs regularly.

‘Without Hamilton, I don’t know what we should do. Before your husband left us, we had it easier.’

Mamie has turned away from the wood. She has taken the path to the houses, looking back all the time to see whether Hamilton is following her with his eyes, those eyes that are two poached eggs grown old, looking at her every time he sees her.

She takes the footpath on the main road. The dogs are trotting now. A car passes, and a delivery van from the grocer’s shop in the town. She clutches the leads.

‘Don’t let one of them get run over. Alice Long would be up to ninety-nine.’

She presses, at the sharp bend, into the high white bank which touches again on the wood, while a very big lorry, carrying sacks of coal, creeps fearfully around as if bewaring of the dogs.

Bump on her shoulder, then bump on her cap come the snowballs. The boys are up there on the bank. She turns and looks quickly and sees parts of children ducking out of sight with short, laughing squeals. There are two girls with the boys; she has seen their hair. One of the girls wears the dark-blue convent cap.

‘Connie, come down!’

‘It isn’t Connie,’ Gwen’s voice answers.

Gwen should be at the dancing class. She is learning to do the sword dance with Mamie.

A snowball falls on the road and bursts open. There is no stone inside it. The dogs are yelping now, pelted with snowballs! They are up to ninety-nine, not used to this.

Mamie drags them round the corner and starts to run. The children scramble down after her and catch up. She recognizes them all. She tries to gather up some snow, but it is impossible to make and throw a ball with the leads around her gloves.

‘Where are you going with those dogs?’ says a boy.

‘To the shop, then up to the House.’

‘They look dirty.’

Gwen says, ‘Do you like those dogs?’

‘Not all of them together.’

‘Let them run loose,’ says the other girl. ‘It’s good for them.’

‘No.

‘Come on and play.’

She is scrambling up the bank, while everyone is trying to pull the dogs up by their leads or push them up by their bottoms.

‘Lift them up. You’ll throttle them!’

‘Let go the leads. We’ll take one each.’

‘No.

Up on the bank, Mamie says, ‘I’ll tie them to that tree.’ She refuses to let the leads out of her own hands, but she permits two of the boys to make the knots secure, as they have learned to do in the Scout Cubs.

Then it is boys against girls in a snow fight, with such fast pelting and splutters from drenched faces, such loud shrieks that the dogs’ coughing and whining can scarcely be heard. When it is time to go, Mamie counts the dogs. Then she starts to untie them. The knots are difficult. She calls after one of the boys to come and untie the knots, but he does not look around. Gwen returns; she stands and looks. Mamie is kneeling in the slush, trying.

‘How do you untie these knots?’ All the leads are mixed up in a knotted muddle.

‘I don’t know. What’s their names?’

‘Mitzi, Fritzi, Blitzi, Ritzi, and Kitzy.’

‘Do you know one from the other?’

‘No.’

Mamie bends down with her strong teeth in the leather. She has loosened the first knot. All the knots are coming loose. She gets her woollen gloves on again and starts to wind the leads around her hands. One of them springs from her grasp, and the little dog scuttles away into the wood among the old wet leaves, so that it seems to slither like a snake on its belly with its cord bouncing behind it.

‘Mitzi! Kitzy! Blitzi!’

The dog disappears and the four in hand are excited, anxious to be free and warmed up, too.

‘Catch him, Gwen! Can you see him? Where is it? Mitzi-mitzi-mitzi! Blitzi-blitzi!’

‘I’ve got to go home,’ Gwen says. ‘You shouldn’t have stopped to play.’

Gwen is Sister Monica’s model pupil for punctuality, neatness, and truthfulness. Mamie has no ground to answer Gwen’s reproach as the girl starts to clamber down the bank.

The wood is dark and there is no sound of the dog. Mamie squelches with the four dogs among the leaves and snow lumps. ‘Fritzi-fritzi-fritzi mitzi!’ A bark, a yap, behind her. Again a yap-yap. She turns and finds the dog tied once more to a tree. Hamilton? She peers all around her and sees nobody.

She should be hurrying towards the drive, but she is too tired to hurry. The Lodge gates are still open, although the sky looks late. The lights are on in the Lodge, which has been let to new people from Liverpool for their weekends. They are having a long weekend this time. A young woman comes out to her car as Mamie comes in the gateway with the five dogs.

‘Goodness, you’re wet through!’

‘I got in a snowdrift.’

‘Hurry home then, dear, and get changed.’

Mamie cannot hurry. She is not very well any more, like old Sir Martin. She is not very real any more. The colour of the afternoon seems strange and the sky is banked with snowdrifts. She runs in little spurts only in obedience to the pull of the dogs. But she draws them as tight as she can and plods in the direction of the House. She turns to the right when she reaches the wide steps and the big front doors. Around to the right and into the yard, where Hamilton’s door is. She tries to open his door. It is locked. To pull the bell would require raising her arm, and she is too tired to do so. She tries to knock. The dogs are full of noise and anxiety, are scratching the door to get inside. She looks at them and with difficulty switches those leads in her right hand to her left, winding them round her wrist, since the hand is already full. While she knocks with her free hand at the door, she realizes that she has noticed something. There are only four dogs now. She counts — one, two, three, four. She counts the leads — one, two, three, four. She looks away again and knocks. It has not happened. Nothing has happened. It is not real. She knocks again. Hamilton is coming.

‘Their food’s in there,’ Hamilton says, not looking at the dogs but opening the door that leads from his room to another, more cluttered room. He lets the dogs scuttle in to their food without counting them. He does not remove their leads but throws them on to the floor to trail behind them. Finally, he shuts the inner door on them. He sits down in his chair and looks at Mamie as if to say, ‘Come here.’

‘I’ve got to go home.’

‘You’re wet through. Get dry by the fire a minute. I’ll get you a lift home.

‘No, I’m late.’