Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Rupert exchanged a quick glance with Gloria; he hoped that she would have worked out that this was their only option. He was Teddy and she was …

“She mentioned it,” he said.

“I’m almost done,” said Errol. “Finishing touches. He’s in London, you know.”

“Who?”

“The yeti. He’s dictating the last chapter.”

Rupert was silent.

“Yes,” said Errol, gesturing behind him in the direction of the bedrooms. “He’d sleep through an earthquake, though, so we won’t have woken him up.”

This is absurd, thought Rupert. Utterly absurd. This man is completely deluded, and I’m stuck here, masquerading as somebody called Teddy, with Gloria, who doesn’t even know what her name is meant to be. I shouldn’t have done this. Don’t go there, as the expression has it. Well, I did, and now I’m there.

Freddie de la Hay – Pimlico Terrier, cohabitee of William French and now a temporary member of MI6’s establishment – had been baffled when William suddenly handed him over to a completely unknown woman in St James’s Park. Such a thing had never happened to him before, or at least not that he could remember. Dogs remember places and people, and scents; they have no sense of the sequence in which these are experienced, nor of the time that separates the present from the past. Heathrow Airport, where Freddie had once been employed as a sniffer dog, was there somewhere in his memory – a place of noise and movement and strange smells – but it was vague and unlocated, not much different from a half-remembered dream. Then there had been exile to his first domestic home in north London, a period of coldness and fear, as he was groomed for his role as an eco-dog: the carrot snacks rather than bones; the biodegradable dog blanket; the arbitrary, harshly enforced prohibition on chasing cats and squirrels. It had been rather like being Stalin’s dog, not that Freddie would have made the analogy – or any analogy at all for that matter.

Since then, there was William, who had brought colour and fun back into Freddie’s life, and had been rewarded with the dog’s total and unconditional affection. But now William was abruptly no longer there, and already Freddie missed him as a Finnish sun-worshipper must miss the sun in winter; a warm presence had become a cold absence, and he did not understand why it should be so. Had he done something? Had he misbehaved in such a way as to merit this exclusion, this casting into darkness?

Freddie’s relationship with William was, in traditional terms, that of dog and master. In traditional terms …

“You shouldn’t call yourself Freddie’s master, old man,” William’s twenty-eight-year-old son Eddie had once remarked. “Master is very yesterday.”

William stared. He wanted to tell Eddie that the term “old man” was itself very yesterday, but he was not sure that it was. Pejorative names for parents were, he thought, very today. He had heard parents being described as wrinklies, olds and ’rents, all of which he thought unflattering at the very least.

“Owner?” he wondered.

Eddie shook a finger. “Nope. Owner’s very yesterday too. It implies that you own him.”

“Which I do,” William pointed out mildly.

Eddie laughed. “You’re not very switched on, Dad. Lots of people don’t like that.”

William had been puzzled. Why could he not own a dog? If he could sell Freddie de la Hay (which of course he would never do, but it was possible) then surely he must own him. When he next took Freddie to the vet for injections, he had asked her about it.

“Can I call myself Freddie’s owner?”

The vet sighed. “It’s a bit of a minefield,” she said. “We get people coming in here who insist on being called their dog’s companion. Sometimes they call themselves the animal’s guardian or carer. There are quite a lot of dog carers in certain parts of London. Islington, for example. I don’t mind, really. The idea is that the pet – oops, can’t say that – that the animal has rights, has its own existence that humans shouldn’t seek to control.” She paused, slipping the needle of the syringe under Freddie’s skin. “I have no problems with that. I think that we should respect an animal’s right to have a decent life.”

“It used to be called kindness,” said William. He agreed with what the vet said; there was so much suffering in the world – a great sea of it – and it washed around the feet of animals as much as it did around humans. We should not add to it.

The vet withdrew the needle and patted Freddie on the head. “Exactly. Everyone should be kind to animals. I can’t disagree on that score. There you are, Freddie. That’s you.”

As William walked back to Corduroy Mansions with Freddie de la Hay after the visit to the vet, he reflected on their conversation. He did not see why he should not call himself Freddie’s owner, and would continue to use the term, whatever Eddie had to say on the subject. Eddie was not one to preach on this issue anyway; he had been prepared to involve Freddie in a dogfight of all things, and he had no experience of keeping an animal. And William was not so sure that those who described themselves as the companions of dogs were necessarily kinder towards their animals than those who described themselves as a dog’s master.

A dog’s master … What about cats? Of course nobody could tell a cat what to do, and so the term master was inappropriate. Cats have staff, as the saying went. Perhaps cats kept us, and it was they who should be described as the masters.

At home, over a cup of tea with Marcia, who had dropped in on her way back from an engagement serving sandwiches to the British Egyptian Board of Commerce, William raised the question of cats and ownership.

“Ha!” said Marcia. “Have you been reading about that advice thingy?”

“What advice thingy?”

“I think they call it the Code of Practice for Cat Owners. The government brought it out recently.”

“Our government?” asked William incredulously.

“Yes, believe it or not. They said that all cat owners should follow the Code’s advice. It talks about providing your cat with intellectual stimulation and so on.”

At first William found it hard to believe, but Marcia didn’t appear to be making the story up. “I laughed and laughed,” she said. “I actually read it because my aunt has cats and she was very worried about whether she was going to be prosecuted for something or other. So I agreed to read it.”

“And you reassured your aunt?”

“Yes,” said Marcia. “But I kept something from her. She’s ancient and rather vulnerable. So I didn’t tell her this. It says at the beginning, ‘It is your responsibility to read the complete code of practice to fully understand your cat’s welfare.’ Those are the exact words. So if you’re a cat owner and you haven’t read the Code, the government considers you to be in breach of your duty.”

William was silent. He was utterly appalled. This was not Stalin’s Russia, this was England. And there was another thing. “To fully understand your cat’s welfare …” Not only were the people behind this Code breathtakingly interventionist and condescending, bossy indeed … they also split their infinitives.

The darkness into which Freddie de la Hay found himself cast when taken from William in St James’s Park proved to be metaphorical rather than real. Led away by the pretty woman with whom William had enjoyed a brief conversation, the Pimlico Terrier was bundled into a car that had been prowling along the edge of the park. Thereafter they took a drive to Notting Hill, to a small flat off Kensington Park Road. This flat was by no means dark; large windows in all four of its rooms admitted both morning and afternoon light, and on each of the window-ledges there stood a well-tended box of brightly coloured flowers – pansies, trailing aubretia, rare summer-flowering crocuses. The walls were painted a uniform white and the exposed timber floors stained a natural pine shade, and the overall effect was one of a pleasant lightness and airiness.