Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Daylight suddenly. So sharp it dazzled him. And fresh sea air. Light and air, all a man needed when you got right down to basics. And a faithful friend who wasn’t going to let you go to the great boneyard in the sky without kicking up a hell of a fuss.

‘Leave no man behind, eh?’ Jackson said to the dog as he staggered back to Bella Vista.

Tilly made herself an early morning cup of tea. The nice weather had broken and the rain was lashing against the little window of the kitchen. The clocks said ten past five and although Tilly could no longer feel entirely certain about what that meant, she was pretty sure it was the morning because she could hear Saskia snoring behind her bedroom door. Saskia denied that she snored, she was always muttering about the noise that Tilly made, ‘Gosh, Tilly, you were like an express train in a tunnel last night,’ or (overheard saying to Padma – there, Padma, remembered her name, no problem) ‘I can’t stand it, I’m getting no sleep, you know, it’s like sharing a house with a giant hog.’ Padma saying, ‘Have you tried earplugs, Miss Bligh?’

Cap’n Bligh, yes, sir. Or rather, ‘no, sir’, Tilly supposed, given the mutiny. Did you call a naval captain ‘sir’? Or ‘captain’? HMS Pinafore not much help with that. Would Saskia’s Guards lieutenant know? Military was military after all. What was his name? Saskia was the lieutenant’s woman. Tilly had a small part in that film, a servant of some kind. Lyme Regis, lovely place, the young people were all wild to see Lyme . Her favourite Austen. Persuasion . Her brain was like lace, delicate and full of holes. Or a christening shawl. White wool on black skin. Coddling.

Rupert, that was his name! Like Rupert Bear. She used to love getting those annuals at Christmas. Rupert and his friends. Bill the Badger, Ping-Pong the Pekinese (was that racist in some way?). Couldn’t remember the others. One Boxing Day she had done something that angered Father – who knew what, so many little things made him angry – and he had taken her new Rupert annual and torn the pages out one by one. Oh, dear God, would someone put a stop to all this. The memories, the words. Too many of them.

The lieutenant was arriving tonight, wasn’t he? That would explain the shepherd’s pie that was sitting mysteriously in the middle of the kitchen table.

The rain sounded as if someone was throwing buckets of water against the window. There was a grumble of thunder, like a sound effect. On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard . She had played Miranda in an open-air production. Home Counties somewhere, couldn’t remember much about it, her heart hadn’t been in it the way it should have been because she was in love with Douglas. She’d been stuck in the wilds of Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, some Home Counties shire anyway, while Douglas was in London directing a play. He was fifteen years older than Tilly. She was only twenty, it was a lovely role – such sweet innocence – she hadn’t realized at the time that she would never play it again. She was Prospero now, poor old Tilly, breaking her staff, about to give it all up. The revels were ending. Sticky toffee pudding ending.

Of course, that was the summer that Phoebe stole Douglas. He was directing her in Major Barbara , you see. She was the youngest actress ever to play the role on the London stage. The brightest new star of her generation , critics said. The springboard for her glittering career. Tilly had never understood why Douglas hadn’t cast her in the role, she was just as good an actress as Phoebe, certainly no worse. Too late to ask him now. After that Phoebe got all the juicy roles, of course, Cleopatra, Duchess of Malfi, Nora Helmer.

When Tilly looked again she saw that it wasn’t raining, wasn’t wet outside at all. The rain was inside her head? A tempest in her brain. O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer .

The shepherd’s pie on the table was defrosting beneath its suffocating cling-film. Miniature green trees of broccoli were all chopped and washed in a colander. Tonight’s dinner on the table at six in the morning. Of course, the lieutenant in the Guards was arriving tonight. Saskia was doing her domestic act. She hadn’t actually made the shepherd’s pie, nice man in catering had done it for her. ‘Make it look authentic,’ Saskia had told him, ‘home-made. As if I’m a good cook, but not cordon bleu.’ Silly girl.

In a café with Douglas. Near the British Museum. He bought her a rum baba, her favourite, and then put his hand over hers and said, ‘Sorry, Matilda dearest’ – that was how he spoke, he had been brought up on matinee idols. His mother had been a Bluebell Girl before she had him. (And here was Tilly in Bluebell Cottage. Funny that.) No father in the picture for Douglas, his mother was the racy sort, that kind of background was bound to turn a boy’s head. Inhaled greasepaint with his first breath. Made her terribly sad to think of Douglas as a little baby, he had been so racked at the end, nothing more than a skeleton. Aids, of course. Took off a lot of those poor boys. Tilly’s baby had been a boy. Sluiced away. Black. Black as night. She hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear . First time she played Juliet was at school. An all-girls school, her Romeo was a girl called Eileen. Wonder what happened to Eileen. Could be dead.

There was a shepherd’s pie sitting on the table. It seemed strange. She should pop it in the oven. Vince and his boyfriend were coming round tonight, ‘to cheer her up’. They said they would bring food – had they already brought it? Were they already here? Where? Her brain was doing that swimmy thing again, like a television gone wrong. Maybe she was having little strokes, one after the other, that would explain how the weather had got inside her.

They had made shepherd’s pie in ‘housecraft’ at school. Housecraft classes taught you all the things you would need to run a house, be a good wife-

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Tilly! What are you doing? You’re cooking the fucking shepherd’s pie, it’s fucking six o’clock in the morning. You stupid fucking senile bitch!’

Tilly flapped her hands helplessly in the air. She wanted to say, ‘Don’t shout at me,’ she did so hate being shouted at, made her shrink inside. The great maw of Father’s mouth, the smell of dead fish he carried on his skin. She couldn’t say anything, the words wouldn’t come out properly. Ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar .

They breakfasted on toast and Marmite, sitting at an oak refectory table made by Robert Thompson, the Mouseman. Tracy had read a leaflet and pointed out the Mouseman’s signature to Courtney, the little carved mouse climbing up the table leg. A set of ten matching chairs ringed the table. Courtney crawled around on hands and knees and counted all the mice on the chair legs.

Imagine a life too where you ate your breakfast every morning sitting at an oak table, in a Victorian Gothic house, looking out of a window at a herd of deer. The wand rested next to the Marmite jar. Broken now, Courtney had retained the top half with the star, more like a hatchet than a wand. When she finished her toast Courtney hauled out the faithful pink backpack and arranged her swag on the Mouseman table. After three days of witnessing this ritual Tracy thought she knew the catalogue by heart but every time Courtney seemed to have added something new. The current inventory was: