One Dog and His Boy

8 The Cottage by the Sea

“There’s a postcard from Hal,” said Alec Fenton, coming into the cottage and stamping the mud off his boots. It was only a few steps to the shore where he kept his dinghy but it had rained in the night and the path easily turned to mud.

His wife, Marnie, who was kneading bread at the kitchen table, wiped her hands and smiled with pleasure. “Let’s have a look, then.”

It was a long time since they had been to London to visit Hal’s parents, but they thought the world of their grandson.

Marnie read the card over her husband’s shoulder.

“Well, that is good news! He’s got a dog all for himself! I always said that was what Hal needed.”

Alec nodded. “Growing up in that museum – it’s no life for a boy.”

He looked out of the cottage window. The tide was out, and the sand stretched in a golden curve to the water’s edge. It was a quiet day and the islands were distinct: the big island, Farra, where the monks had lived in medieval times, the smaller low-lying island where their neighbour grazed his sheep, and the rocky outcrop where the seals came to breed. A cormorant dived from a rock and came up with a fish in his beak. The gulls circled. Alec’s own boat, the Peggotty, was pulled up on the shore, ready for the evening’s fishing.

“It looks as though Albina’s seen the light,” said Marnie, “if she’s let him have a dog. Maybe we were hasty, thinking ill of her.”

The visit that they had paid to Albina and their son had been such a wretched business that they had never gone back. They had been made to feel like the crudest peasants. Albina had raised her eyebrows when she saw their luggage, and said “Really?” in a surprised voice when they said they’d prefer to sleep together in the one room rather than have the separate rooms she offered them.

“We’ve been together for thirty-five years,” Alec had said. “We’ve no call to change now.”

She had looked pained when Marnie went to the kitchen to thank the maid for the nice meal she had cooked, and pointed out that the maid was paid to do the cooking.

And their own son, Donald, had hardly been there. He was endlessly flying about, and driving about, and when he was at home he had things dangling from his ear the whole time so that he could talk to Moscow or New York instead of the people in the room.

Donald had been a nice, ordinary little boy. He’d helped his father with the lobster pots, and worked in the fields, and they had hoped he would take over the land and the boat when the time came.

But after he’d got a scholarship to a posh boarding school, Donald had changed. He’d made remarks about the cottage, how shabby it was, and how small, and asked why they didn’t get a proper car instead of the wheezing old truck they used for everything – and he’d gone off to make his fortune in the south.

And he had made it all right. If living in a house where the bath taps glittered so much that they gave you a headache, the food looked as though it was waiting to be photographed for a magazine and there wasn’t a living thing in sight was what he wanted, he’d made it all right.

But Hal … Hal was different. He was the most loving, funny little boy. He and Marnie would have gathered him up and taken him away on the spot if they’d been allowed to. Even then they’d seen how lonely the little fellow was.

But now he’d be better. There was nothing like a dog for company. They only had their old Labrador now but they couldn’t imagine life without a dog.

“Let’s write him a letter and ask him if he can’t come up to visit us and show us Fleck. Albina must have changed if she’s let him have a dog. If Donald’s too busy to bring him, there might be someone coming north and we could meet him.”

So they wrote a letter to Hal, not just a postcard. It said they hoped he could come now he was older, and bring his dog. They said it wasn’t a difficult journey. If he could get a train as far as Berwick they would meet him, and after that it was only half an hour’s drive in the truck.

Hal got this letter on the day he went off with his mother to buy the clothes for boarding school.