Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

19

Debbie was ill with something and had to see the vet. The vet was called Mr Swift and I liked the name. My sister added him to the list, though in all the worry about Debbie we didn’t go through the pros and cons properly, but my sister insisted he was probably a good candidate, being Oxbridge-educated and on a vet’s salary. She really had started factoring the economics in by then, which added to the excitement somehow.

And though we were sorry for Debbie, we were amazed at how quickly after Mr Oliphant another possible expert helmsman had appeared. When you think of all the months with no one decent.

It turned out that Debbie had a suspected blockage. This was diagnosed because she kept being sick and trying to be sick and seemed lethargic. I didn’t know exactly what a suspected blockage was, only that it was uncertain but might be somewhere between bad and very bad indeed.

Mr Swift was kind to us and said although it might be bad, it also might not be (not realizing that the word ‘might’ meant might and might not) and he said that we mustn’t blame ourselves. I hadn’t blamed myself until he said that, and I felt I had to clear the matter up. I asked him why he thought we might blame ourselves. ‘What I mean is, you mustn’t feel it’s your fault that Debbie might have eaten something that may have caused a blockage,’ he explained.

‘We don’t blame ourselves,’ I said, upset and wanting this cleared up in case of a fatality, and imagining going around with the weight of possibly, though probably not, being to blame.

‘What I mean is that Labradors are greedy beggars and they eat all sorts of nasty things, and that can cause this kind of thing. And you mustn’t think it’s your fault,’ he went on.

Mr Swift gave Debbie a dose of something and stroked her throat to make her swallow and told us to watch her very carefully. A couple of hours later there was a pile of used teabags on the lawn all in a sort of grassy foam. We’d forgotten to watch her, but agreed that this could have been Debbie’s suspected blockage.

Our mother telephoned Mr Swift the vet and he dropped by that evening and looked at the teabags, which we’d left on the lawn where they’d been passed. He poked them with a slim stick and agreed with our supposition. ‘These look as though they’ve been partially ingested,’ he said, meaning that Debbie had eaten them and shat them out again.

He congratulated Debbie – who’d gone pretty much back to normal – with a vigorous neck rub, and had a drink with our mother in her sitting room and didn’t leave until after we’d gone to bed and then they probably had sex – definitely, if I believed my sister, who said she’d heard evidence including Mr Swift groaning and saying, ‘This is unbelievable.’

My sister kept me awake wondering what Mr Swift could have considered unbelievable.

‘Do you think he means the sex is unbelievable,’ she asked, ‘or the fact of them having sex?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Is it it – or the idea of it?’ she wondered.

She was always wondering things like that now since starting at secondary school and doing a project on Knowledge. And since doing this course she seemed to be going backwards and always wondering and pondering on things that she’d have taken in her stride before.

‘What would it be for you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, for me, the idea of it. But that’s just me,’ she said, ‘I’m quite philosophical.’

Debbie had a series of trips to the vet’s surgery after that. She had her dewclaws clipped and her various checks and even had her teeth cleaned. Our mother seemed very happy and bought us two rabbits called Benjamin and Bertie and they had a few trips to the vet too.

One day our mother called Mr Swift to see one of the ponies but she forgot which one was supposed to have a problem, so we had to make something up on the spot. My sister – being the imaginative one – said she’d seen Sacha limping. Mr Swift asked her to trot him along the path and felt down his pasterns, then he came in for a cup of coffee and our mother slapped him round the face and he roared off in his Volvo.

We questioned our mother and she said things were extremely bad but gave no details. She wasn’t referring to Sacha’s leg – we knew that much.

From time to time that dreadful Farmer Turner, who’d shot the cow that was stuck in the plough, would yell at us from his mud-caked Land Rover and say Debbie had been near his ewe field. Debbie did have a tendency to roam the village but we couldn’t imagine she’d be a sheep-worrier. She was such a lovely dog. Farmer Turner would say, ‘That black bitcha yours as bin up near my top field an’ I’m warning you if I see her set foot in that field I’ll shooter no questions ast.’

This made Farmer Turner our sworn enemy. We couldn’t imagine how, once upon a time, we’d considered him perfect and my sister remarked that that was the thing about love. He was a liar and a dog-shooter and he was fat and we used to hear his distinctive voice booming out of the Bull’s Head of an evening saying aggressive things and laughing. I imagined him leaning back on a stool and I used to wish he’d fall off it. We three all worried constantly when Debbie was out – that she might accidentally end up near the ewe field and that Farmer Turner would shoot her. Our sensible mother said if we were that bothered, why didn’t we ever shut the fucking gate.

He never did shoot Debbie, as such, but one day someone ran her over, picked up her injured body and chucked her into the ditch by the road and we put it down to him. It was almost a relief to have it over and done with.

A woman called Doris who always wore ill-fitting slippers shuffled up to us as we played. She was always shuffling around near our house and we used to laugh, carefully, at her snail’s pace. She’d have been quite sprightly without the slippers – she had to shuffle to keep them on. Doris was the woman who, like Mr Nesbit, had apparently lived in one of the cottages that previously made up our house and apparently been evicted by force from it. She had a moustache above her wobbly top lip and you could tell from the dark hairs that her pale blue eyes had once been brown.

When she reached us that day we realized she wanted to tell us something, so we stopped playing and listened to her whispery voice. She’d seen a stricken dog in a ditch. ‘It looks like your’n,’ she whispered and lifted a wobbly arm, and added, ‘By the paddock there, in that ditch runs along the road, someun’s hit’n an flung it in, I reckon.’

We pelted, me already crying, and my sister planning ahead with every stride. We got to the ditch and there was Debbie half submerged, sides heaving and wet and her eyes looking frightened and pleased to see us all at once. My sister was down there beside Debbie in an instant, lifting her face out of the water and shouting instructions.

‘Lizzie, go get Mum. Send her here in the car. You ring ahead to the vet, Mr Swift, the number’s in the book under S for Swift,’ she said.

‘Jack, you go with her now and you get a big towel and come straight back, quick as you can, Jack, all right?’

We watched my sister wiping Debbie’s face with her sleeve. ‘Go on, hurry!’

As I ran I planned how I’d word it. Our mother needed things simple and clear. I needed to avoid any ambiguity or irrationality – our mother loved to ask penetrating questions to undermine authority and upset assumption. But there was no time for that.

I stood in front of her. She was scribbling in a Silvine spiral-bound notebook. I saw the word ‘imperative’, which cheered me and jumped off the page and into my mouth.

‘Mum, Debbie is seriously injured. It’s imperative we get her to the vet,’ I said.

Through the window I saw Little Jack running along, tripping himself up on a huge sand-coloured towel – the largest (the so-called ‘bath sheet’) of a set of top-quality Christy’s Soft Sensations that our mother had bought from Fenwick’s of Leicester to replace those lost when a crate had gone missing with some of our linens on the day we moved and the lorry brought the tree bough down and cracked the listed arch and so on.

‘She is very injured in the paddock ditch,’ I told our mother.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘I don’t know, but it looks bad,’ I said. ‘We need to get her to Mr Swift.’

‘No. Not Mr Swift, I am not going to him,’ said our mother, staring at me as if I’d said something outrageous.

‘But Mr Swift is our usual vet,’ I said, ‘he knows Debbie, he saw the teabags on the lawn – remember?’

‘I am not going to Mr Swift,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to find an alternative.’

I leafed desperately through the phone book and scanned down the list of veterinary surgeons (surprised at the spelling of veterinary) and came to a Mr Nightingale in Longston.

‘Mr Nightingale in Longston?’ I checked with our mother.

‘Another bird,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’

‘24 The Parade, Longston.’

She closed her book. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t I ring ahead?’ I said.

‘Never ring ahead,’ she said.

Then she and I arrived at the ditch and saw Debbie wrapped in the sand-coloured Soft Sensation bath sheet and my sister sitting in three inches of ditch water talking into Debbie’s bedraggled ear.

Our mother clambered down into the ditch. ‘Oh baby,’ she said to Debbie, ‘what have you been up to?’

And she took the sand-coloured bundle softly on to the shelves of her arms. I offered my arm down to pull my sister up. Then we all helped our mother out of the ditch.

‘OK, Princess Debbie Reynolds,’ said our mother, using Debbie’s official kennel name, ‘let’s get you to 25 The Parade, Longston.’

I didn’t correct her, because it was the thought that counted.

My sister sat in the back seat next to Little Jack with Debbie across her lap, and I sat in the front but was turned facing them all the way.

‘Have you seen the injury?’ our mother asked.

‘There’s a lot of blood on her left side and I think she’s a bit crushed. It might be her ribs.’ My sister’s voice let her down then and Little Jack began to cry. My sister questioned our mother’s route.

‘Why are you going through Hilfield?’

‘Mr Swift isn’t available today, we’re seeing a Mr Starling,’ she said.

‘Nightingale,’ I corrected.

Soon we were there at 24 The Parade. I held the door open and our mother carried Debbie in.

‘We need to see Mr Starling – it’s an emergency, I think she’s been hit by a car,’ said our mother to the veterinary receptionist.

‘Mr Nightingale,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ said the girl. ‘Come this way.’ Our mother followed the girl and placed Debbie in a shallow container on a table and stroked her nose.

‘It’s actually Mr Swift in surgery today. I’ll get him right away.’

Our mother swore under her breath.

The nurse heard and looked sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, he’s a wonderful veterinarian.’

Mr Swift was very caring and nice and made no sign of acknowledging the unbelievable thing that had passed between himself and our mother. And our mother held up well too. He wanted some time with Debbie and asked us to wait in the waiting area. We waited. We were too sad to pick up a magazine, but I read an article over a woman’s shoulder in which a milkman is crushed to death by his own float and yet an eight-stone woman is imbued with power and lifts a truck off her young son. It seemed terribly unfair (on the milkman). After about fifteen minutes Mr Swift appeared at the door of the surgery.

‘Mrs Vogel, would you …?’ and he gestured her to enter the treatment room.

We followed her.

Mr Swift wondered whether it might be best for us to wait in the waiting area but our mother said Debbie was our dog and if we were big enough to have a dog, we were big enough to hear whatever he had to say.

‘Debbie’s injuries are serious and complex and, as you suggest, most likely the result of a road accident. She’s suffered trauma to her chest and left hind leg.’

‘Can you save her?’ our mother asked.

‘I can try. The leg looks straightforward and the ribs should mend with rest, but there’s something else. Has she been in water?’ Mr Swift asked.

‘Yes, she was found in a shallow ditch,’ our mother said.

‘Hmm, thought so. Her breathing suggests the early stages of pneumonia,’ he said, ‘and that complicates matters a bit.’

‘Can you save her?’ our mother said.

‘I can try, if you want me to,’ he said. ‘The other option is to put her to sleep.’

‘What’s best for Debbie?’ our mother said.

‘It’s hard to know, but I would like to try and save your dog,’ said the vet.

‘Very well,’ said our mother.

And then we spoke about various treatments, operations and so forth and we went home leaving Debbie there at 24 The Parade in a critical condition.

That evening my sister and I glued ourselves to the telly. And Little Jack wrote a mature letter, which made us very proud. He even asked how to spell ‘definitely’.

Dear person who ran over our dog,

You are a cruel person. First you ran our dog over, then you chucked her into a ditch to die. Or maybe you thought she was already dead. I would like to run you over. I would not chuck you in a ditch because you are too fat to lift. So I would just keep running you over until I knew that you were definitely dead. Everyone in this house hates you. And I bet we’re not the only ones. I feel sorry for your kids and dog.

From,

Jack Vogel

The next morning we rang the veterinary surgery at eight on the dot and heard the news that Debbie had pulled through and had even wagged her tail at the nurse. We heard just how much against the odds it had been and we all cried and our mother said, ‘Let’s all promise to be better.’ Which none of us really understood then. But I do now.

Debbie made a slow recovery and was always a bit wonky after that, and one eye bulged a bit and she didn’t live as long as she might have had she not been chucked in that ditch, but she survived and that was the main thing. Debbie surviving against the odds that time was a real boost to morale, as things like that can be, unless they’re a downer, and we felt quite blessed.

And just to round it off, Farmer Turner came round and produced the letter that Little Jack had posted through his door on the morning after the accident.

‘I didn’t hit your bitch. If I wanted ’er dead, she’d be dead. I don’t want ’er dead. I’d prefer you keep ’er safe on yer own property and the reason she’s not dead is because I ant seen ’er in the ewe field. But I will shoot ’er if I see ’er there and that’s all I can say.’

So we weren’t so sure after all that it was Farmer Turner who ran Debbie over. In fact we thought it must’ve been a real accident and that maybe Debbie toppled into the ditch herself and that made us feel better too. And Debbie didn’t roam quite so much after that, anyway. She preferred to stay on our property. Maybe she understood what the farmer said. And we added him to the list again but only briefly, saying we didn’t want anyone who wore a vest and had a gun.

We wrote to Mr Swift, the vet, thanking him for saving Debbie’s life. Our mother was keen that we should and she was quite particular about the wording (‘You were most sensitive’). I felt it unnecessary – he was just doing his job after all. None of us thought to write and thank Doris the whiskery old lady in the slippers who had saved Debbie’s life just as much as the vet had, but that’s the way the world is (vets being thanked and old ladies being forgotten) and who knows if she’d have liked that kind of thing.

I don’t know what became of the Christy’s Soft Sensation bath sheet. My sister said she thought the nurse would have taken it home as a perk of the job, it being so luxurious and almost brand-new.

Writing about the Debbie situation reminds me how good our mother was when bad things happened. It always came as a surprise, her being so rubbish at the ordinary everyday things. She was especially good when really bad things happened or people died, not so much the practical stuff but the other often-neglected stuff such as actually going to see the bereaved. Crucially, she knew not to run away or to pretend it hadn’t happened. She knew that you should immerse yourself in it.

When her granny choked to death on a Lucky Black Cat pendant made from Whitby jet that had fallen into some rice pudding, she flung herself at her mother and showered love upon her. And even though she disliked both her mother and the granny, she was there at Kilmington pouring Scotch on the rocks, lighting two cigarettes at a time and saying what a good eye Granny had had for scarves. When the husband of a family friend suddenly just died for no reason one night and didn’t come down to breakfast, she zoomed over there in the car and said things about the deceased that no one else would even think of saying. He was so kind. He was such a considerate driver. He had such a sensitivity for Beethoven, and other things that seemed far-fetched, but the friend didn’t mind because the person had died and needed bolstering.

Sadly, though, when her own father ceased upon the midnight with no pain, her goodness in a tragedy failed her. She was like a useless little pebble on a riverbed. She hadn’t been expecting the death and had some bad feelings about it. She got it into her head that her mother and the family doctor had been a bit hasty in the helping. It was a shame because she’d always been the person who knew how to behave and how to make the bereaved feel better, but suddenly there she was saying the very worst things and reminding her family what a menace she was. My sister and I tried to steer her into normality – e.g., ‘Come on, Mum, don’t say stuff like that’ – but she shook herself free metaphorically and raged down the telephone, ‘If he was so fucking ill, why didn’t you telephone me to come and say my farewells?’ and her mother had said, ‘I thought you’d be too drunk.’