which the animals were a part. In making me see the truth of their existence as on a par with my own within the greater Whole they were exerting a moral power over me which I had never experienced before.
This is not what you feel when you look at an animal in a zoo, even though you might marvel at the size of the giraffe or the intricacy of the markings on a snake. Nor is it what you feel when you take the lid off a tin and allow dried food to rattle down into your big dog’s metal bowl, smiling fondly as he gobbles his supper. You may come near the sensation, though, when you watch your cat unfold its limbs and stretch – and realize that not in any universe could you ever hope to move with such indifferent grace.
I was learning from the cows.
The joy they gave me, in that brief exchange of looks and breaths that crystalline morning, when the brevity of the sunlight, the dew and all our lives, human and animal, made me catch my breath, was something I would never forget. It was as sustainable as J’s method of farming. It set me on a journey. Lolloping Billie and Sam were on it too, but it was Bonnie who would – in a future I could not have then predicted – be the truest companion.
One of my favourite writers is Edith Wharton – she who, in late middle age, would so annoy her friends by the fuss she made over ‘the damned Pekingese’. Her first biographer, Percy Lubbock, wrote: ‘There is always a dog or two about Edith in her home, a small dog of the yapping kind, a still smaller of the fidgeting and whining breed – dogs that had to be called, caressed …’ But writing an autobiography in her seventies Edith Wharton recalled the walk with her father in 1865 (when she was four), down Fifth Avenue in Manhatten, when a friend of her father’s gave her a spitz-type puppy she called Foxy, the first of her cohorts of little dogs. Near the end of her life, after an unhappy marriage but a brilliant career, when many people she loved had died and many dogs too, Wharton located the beginning of her imaginative awareness: ‘The owning of my first dog made me into a conscious, sentient person, fiercely possessive, anxiously watchful, and woke in me that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings, which nothing has ever stilled.’
The first couple of months of 2003 were (as always for J and me) extremely busy. What made us like that – both driving ourselves hard, always taking on extra projects, charity work and so on – and therefore unable to find much peace on our farm? The too-easy psychological answer might be that he was ever striving to emulate a famous father as well as an older brother who was himself a distinguished broadcaster. Yet the Protestant work ethic played an important role, over and above family history. I always thought that the last words of The Woodlanders summed J up, Marty South’s passionate elegy over the grave of her beloved Giles Winterborne: ‘… you was a good man, and did good things!’ Doing good things demands time and energy.
As for me, I was always striving to prove myself (girl from humble background makes good etc.) yet always worrying that I would be found out: the achievement of a distinguished degree, the marriage, the beautiful homes, the successful journalistic career, the careful glamour, the books, the programmes, the immense jollity of the parties we gave – all of it discounted when I was found out to be a fraud. To keep fear and boredom at bay, to prove myself as a multitasking, perfectionist alpha female, I – like so many women – took on too much. I also had to keep up with my husband. Had I not done so over the years of his success as an international reporter, writer and political journalist, I would have gone under. The key to our marriage was the meeting of minds in friendship. For all the flaws (what union does not have them?) I do not know what better can be said.
The pond was thickly iced, with a dusting of snow on top. In January and February 2003 I was struggling with the book of my radio series, Devout Sceptics, re-reading Daniel Deronda (because it was time to), brooding over structural problems in my sixth novel, The Invasion of Sand, taking on the chairmanship of a £2.2 million appeal to build a new children’s theatre in Bath, moving our daughter into her first London flat and supporting her through the intimidating start of her new job at the London Evening Standard and arranging all the detail of a 30-minute programme for Radio 4 to mark the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Kitty and I were writing a joint article for the Daily Mail, J was off to Iraq to interview the Prime Minister amidst ominous rumblings from the United States and in my diary I wrote, ‘The world is such a terrible place at the moment – a cloud over all things.’
Yet amidst all that, the diary also records consolations:
11 January: Bonnie and I return in the frost-bound midnight to the empty farmhouse. Her companionship is so precious to me, so essential now. Who would have thought that I would become so dependent on a little dog?
13 January: It’s good to have J here again – so much cleverer than I could ever be – to sound ideas off. What would I be without him? This afternoon we go to the pet shop with Bonnie for new dog beds and the expedition is fun. We eat sausages, read and doze by the fire.
20 January: … so good to be home again with Bonnie. She represents home now.
2 February: … coming back home to be welcomed by an ecstatic, wriggling little dog.
Bonnie always cheered me, always inspired closeness and took both of us away from work.
The day before our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary was a normal Saturday, and so I listened to my husband on the radio, took the three dogs up through our wood for a walk and felt a great surge of happiness in the still, cold air. It was strange, I thought, to be happy when the news was full of the looming war in Iraq, but the sunlight glittered on a hard frost and I took my little dog to be groomed, and picked her up later, a fresh-smelling shorn lamb. How can one suppress natural joy? It was there every day in Bonnie’s behaviour: the irrepressible nowness of each second, the perpetual readiness for action and adventure, even if that was only chasing a leaf. Each parting would be marked by the reproachful eyes and the drooping tail, even though she had two big dogs to stay with. I would return from shopping, one hour later, to be met with such an effusion of joy, such a frolicsome licking, that there was nothing to do but laugh.
On our anniversary, 23 February, J returned from presenting his usual Sunday television programme and presented me with his gift: a fine, chunky necklace of antique coral, since the thirty-fifth is the coral anniversary. In an imaginative touch he had also entered the bookmakers Joe Coral (for the first ever time) and placed a bet that Liverpool (my home team) would win their next away football match. He handed me the betting slip – and we laughed. That night we went to our favourite restaurant (not the grandest in Bath, but we ate out rarely, preferring to be in our blue and yellow kitchen) and my diary records: ‘We ate well and drank better and talked best of all. Perfection. As I say so often, I am so lucky.’
There it is.
Liverpool did not win.
As I explained in the Introduction, writing a memoir is to offer just a slice of a life, a section of truth – like a sample taken by an archaeologist, full of priceless shards which remain, nevertheless, mere parts, fragments shored against ruin. Sometimes when my dog is snoozing on my knee I trace her ribs with my fingertips, each one in turn, imagining the fragility of her skeleton laid in earth. Yet nowadays the computer can reassemble a whole head from fragments of bone, an image of what once was (a centuries-dead face reconstructed) turning and turning in cyberspace to awe us. So my dog’s DNA will lie for ever in earth and so will mine and therefore the essence of what is true is unassailable.
That is how I feel about that last anniversary.
Whatever went before, and no matter what was to come after, what happened that day and is condensed into those few words, remains The Truth.
Yet in the end only he and I know that truth; therefore what is presented to the world remains as shards.
J
