did not sound pleased.
Two days later J arrived home after his Sunday political programme on ITV, arriving at the farm after the two-hour drive from London, glad to be home. As always, Billie and Sam raced to meet his car – and right from the beginning Bonnie raced everywhere with the big dogs, who regarded her with puzzled amusement. With no practice, she became part of the welcome committee. Seeing her, J dropped on his knees in his Italian suit and, as the Labrador and collie pranced around their master, held out his arms to the small dog, who covered his face with licks. That, you see, is the point about true dog lovers – those in touch with the canine spirit. They can retain no sizeist prejudice when they realize that, although the eyes are tiny and the tail is an apology for a silk whisk, the potential for devotion which characterizes proto-dog abounds in the toy. J adored her – and it took just one week of us attempting to put her to bed in the ‘dog room’ with the other dogs and the four cats, one week of hearing her jump out through the dog flap into the darkness rich with smells of foxes, badgers, owls, stoats, rats, before she wangled her way on to our bed. And this is where comfort dogs belong.
Do you believe in signs? I do, for Billie going missing and taking us to the RSPCA home was one such. And less than a month before I first saw my small dog I had met two others, who had fascinated me. For some years I had been presenting a yearly series on BBC Radio 4 called Devout Sceptics, which took the form of a one-to-one interview about faith and doubt, a searching conversation between me and someone well known in fields of literature, politics, science and ideas. In May 2002, with my producer and friend Malcolm Love, I had been in California, to interview Dr Pamela Connolly in Los Angeles, Amy Tan in San Francisco and Isabel Allende in San Rafael. On 24 May we were up early to fly from LAX to San Francisco. Coming in to land I felt that old lifting of the heart with excitement, not just caused by the eternal promise and threat of travel, but because I love the United States and always feel truly myself there.
We took a cab to the Holiday Inn on Van Ness and California, and checked in, but had no time to change, because our appointment with Amy Tan loomed. I was looking forward to the interview; I loved Tan’s novels and anticipated a good conversation about God and destiny. Having looked up our destination, in the smart, leafy Presidio area of the city, Malcolm suggested that on such a fine morning it would be good to walk there. I agreed, but neither of us remembered that San Francisco is up hill and down dale – with the result that when we arrived at the address I was flustered and sweaty, which state seemed to increase as Tan’s PA showed us into the huge, elegant condominium, furnished thickly with oriental furniture and fine objets which made you afraid to move. There was a crescendo of yapping from one corner; at the sight of us two miniature Yorkshire terriers created a tiny commotion behind a 10-inch barrier which penned them in. I gaped at the dogs – at that time, the smallest I had ever met. But they made me feel better, for when Amy Tan herself glided into the room, astonishingly beautiful in green pleated silk and soft leather ankle boots, I was able to disguise my discomfiture at being less than elegant by fussing over her pets. This much I knew – all people like to have their pets fussed over.
What I did not realize was that Bubba and Lilly were far more than dogs to Amy. We settled down for the interview and Malcolm fitted out microphones, noting with approval how quiet the condo was, the acoustic deadened by thick carpets, drapes and all that furniture. The little Yorkies nestled on her lap and Tan’s slim fingers played with their ears as Malcolm took a sound level. Then he stopped.
‘Er … Amy … I’m picking up noise from the dogs.’
‘Oh really? Doing what?’
‘Licking your hands – and snuffling. Er … do you think they could wait in another room while we do this?’
There was one of those moments of silence when the temperature drops a fraction and you know, as an interviewer, that this faux pas could spoil things. I caught the corner of Malcolm’s gaze, knowing how much he (a man of great sensitivity, especially to women) wished he could recall the impertinent suggestion.
Then Amy Tan said coolly, ‘The dogs have to stay. The dogs are essential.’
‘Of course they are!’ I cried.
Malcolm backtracked. ‘Yes, I absolutely understand … Uh … but maybe they don’t have to lick your hands?’
Pause.
‘Sure.’
The novelist kept her hands out of reach of her pets’ pink tongues, and the dogs settled down to sleep amidst the folds of her green silk, except for the occasional moment when I would intercept a beady gaze asking me what the hell I was doing there. Or perhaps sourcing that slight odour of perspiration. They yapped once during the next hour, but the interview was going so well by then it didn’t matter. And when it was over Tan (more relaxed now) told me how she hates to travel in Europe since she can’t take her dogs, how she loathes being in hotel rooms alone and how she dreads the thought of anything happening to her beloved pets. Her words intensified my impression of fragility wrapped in self-contained eccentricity.
As Malcolm and I walked to the restaurant she had recommended for lunch, I delivered myself – solemnly and with a certain degree of patronizing pity – of the opinion that those ‘teacup’ Yorkies were surrogate children for Amy Tan and her husband, Louis. Oh, statement of the obvious! What did I know? In the same way, years before when we were young, I had found some pathos in the fact that J’s elderly aunts, who lived together, posted birthday cards to each other signed from their toy poodles, Lavinia and Amanda-Jane. Later I would shake my head in disbelief on reading, in a magazine profile, that the novelist Jilly Cooper kept a picture of her dead mongrel in a locket. I was smug in my refusal to acknowledge true value in that level of affection for an animal. How fitting it was that hubris would arrive on my horizon shaped as a small dog.
Malcolm was to tease me a few weeks later, when he was editing out those yaps and one or two small dog breaths for the finished programme, and I had already fallen in love with Bonnie. He laughed that the day in San Francisco had turned me into an aspirational copycat who realized that real literary ladies must have dogs. I huffed and puffed at the joke against myself – still resisting the notion that I could be perceived as one of those women with a handbag dog.
What matters is how profoundly I’ve come to understand what it meant to Amy Tan to have those comforting dogs on her lap as talismans and as inspiration. And now it is I who, with no irony, describe myself as my dog’s ‘Mummy’. She is as necessary to me now as Amy Tan’s two were to her, and just as restricting of the impulse to travel, or even go to restaurants. I send cards from her and expect them back. Just three weeks after the encounter with Amy Tan and her dogs my diary entry reads, ‘I adore Bonnie. She has transformed everything.’
But even then I could not have known that the real transformation would be a work in progress. The dog would make me take myself less seriously – changing me into a foolish woman who would later buy a cushion saying ‘Dogs Leave Paw Prints on your Heart’ in Minnesota; a petit point of a Maltese in Portland, Maine, as well as a lobster-patterned macintosh, lead and collar set; a Navajo jacket and turquoise suede collar and lead complete with silver conchos in Santa Fe; a pink outfit in Brussels; a red set in Cape Town; cool Harley-Davidson accessories in Rapid City, South Dakota; ‘bling’ sparkles from a shop in Nice; and more. Not to mention purple mock-croc from an internet site for her bridesmaid’s outfit … but that was much later. Small-dog madness, I was to discover, is a worldwide phenomenon.
I concentrate on the trivial deliberately. These are necessarily small steps towards the big jump into that unknown which Bonnie brought with her but which was to drag me, too, into a pit of unknowing.
Smallness, I began to discover, fills some people with an irrational hatred, when they see a chihuahua, a Pekinese, a Yorkshire
