The Plague Dogs: A Novel Page 25

  “What a damn shame!” said Digby Driver. “Why the hell should you be blamed? It’s like the old lady and the parrot in the public lavatory—d’you know that one?”

  Nobody knew it, and Mr. Driver obligingly related it to an appreciative audience. It reminded Gerald of one about two miners and a cow, which assisted Mr. Powell to the conclusion that, since nobody at Lawson Park could possibly tell how long he might need to investigate the Dunnerdale dogs and return, it would be a pity to hurry away. He set up three more pints, including one for Mistroochinson; and then insisted on buying a fourth, for Gerald. Nobody ever wants to leave the bar of the Manor.

  The sense of loss and desolation lay over Snitter’s awareness like hill-mist. Rising, here and there, out of this separating mirk, he could discern three or four peaks of certain knowledge, as that his master was dead, that he himself was mad, that men had destroyed the natural world and substituted a wilderness and that although he had now lost again the head which he had briefly found, he still carried in himself the involuntary power to deal death. But from what viewpoint he was regarding these; what the mist-covered land connecting them looked like; their relationship to each other beneath the miasma of confusion and ignorance from which they protruded—in short, where he was—these things remained dark to him. He lay still among the bare hazel branches and leafless elder, but from time to time raised his head to the sky with a howl, cut short as often as Rowf turned upon him, cursing.

  “You can’t expect any sense,” said Snitter petulantly, “from a dog that’s just been dragged outside his own head. If only you’d left me where I was!”

  “Ye’d nivver be here noo, ye’d be in th’ Dark, hinny, ne bother. Them cheps wudda gi’n ye ne chance at aall. Noo bide easy, an’ sort yersel’ oot.” The tod turned to Rowf. “We got te get th’ wee fella back hyem afore neet. He’s bad i’ th’ heed aall reet, ne doot.”

  “But we’ll be seen for sure at this time of day. Isn’t that what you’ve been teaching me all this time? We’ll have to wait till dark.”

  “An’ hoo ye gan te keep his gob shut, marrer?” enquired the tod sardonically. “He’ll be yammerin’ his heed off, an’ fetchin’ aall th’ farmers fer five miles roond. It’s howway wi’ us te Broon Haw, an’ sharp as w’ can shift an’ aall.”

  “In broad daylight?” asked Rowf again.

  “Ah shud say so—unless yer gan te leave him here. We got to get him underground an’ well in-bye an’ aall, where nebody’ll hear him. Howway noo! He’ll manage sure eneuf.”

  “But the river?”

  “Nowt else for’t but swimmin’. There’s ne bridge atween Ulpha an’ yon hoose we wor at.”

  They swam the Duddon under High Kiln Bank, Rowf setting his teeth to the horrible business and sweeping down twenty yards with the swift, bitter current before his paws gripped stones and pulled him out on the further side. They thought themselves unseen, but they were mistaken. Bob Taylor, the most skilful fisherman in the valley, working his way with a wet fly up the reach between Ulpha Church and Hall Dunnerdale Bridge after the running sea trout, caught sight, a hundred and fifty yards upstream, of Snitter’s black-and-white back as he plunged across behind the tod. A minute afterwards, Bob hooked a three-quarter-pounder and thought no more about what he had seen; but it was to recur to him later.

  Ulpha Church

  “But, Stephen, old boy, surely the dogs weren’t in any physical condition to kill sheep and give rise to all this bother?” asked Digby Driver, gripping the handrail and looking back at Mr. Powell over his shoulder as they pussyfooted their way down the breakneck flight of steps that leads into the yard behind the Manor, on their way to the netty, Gents or loo.

  “Well, I don’t know so much about that,” replied Mr. Powell. “One of them was an absolute bastard of a dog—mind you, it’d had enough to make it, poor sod—but there was nobody cared to touch it, not even old Tyson—”

  “Tyson? He’s the man about the place?”

  “Yeah—feeds them, cleans them out an’ all that. I always say he knows more about the work at Lawson Park than anyone else. He deals with all the animals, you see, and it’s his business to know what each one’s being used for and by whom. The rest of us, except for the Director, only know about the projects we’re doing ourselves. No, but that seven-three-two, it really was a dangerous animal—it was always muzzled before it was brought out for tests—”

  “What were the tests?” asked Driver.

  “Well, they were something like the tests carried out by Curt Richter at the Johns Hopkins medical school in America—what’s his thing called?—The Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.’ D’you know that?”

  Like a good many young people immersed in specialized work, Mr. Powell tended to forget that others were likely to be unfamiliar with his background material.

  “ ‘Fraid I don’t—not up my street really.”

  They came back into the yard and Mr. Powell, hands in pockets, stopped and leaned against the netty wall.

  “Well, Richter put wild rats and domesticated rats into tanks of water to swim until they drowned; and he found that some of them died very rapidly for no apparent reason. A bloke called Cannon had already suggested that it might be psychogenic—you know, fear, with consequent over-stimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system; accelerated heartbeat, contraction in systole—all that jazz. What Richter established was that it wasn’t fear but hopelessness—over-stimulation of the parasympathetic system, not the sympathicoadrenal. This seven-three-two dog of ours at Lawson Park had been given all sorts of drugs—you know, atropine and the colingerics, and adrenalectomy and thyroidectomy—you name it. But the real thing was that it had been continually immersed, drowned and revived, so that it had built up a terrific resistance, based on the conditioned expectation that it was going to be removed again. It didn’t succumb to the usual psychogenic factors; on the contrary, it was doing fantastic endurance times, very very interesting. They’re funny things, you know, hope and confidence,” said Mr. Powell rather sententiously. “For instance, they’re present a good deal less strongly in dogs that haven’t been domesticated. Wild animals, and therefore by inference primitive men—creatures living in precarious situations—are more susceptible to fear and strain than domesticated animals. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “What about the other dog that escaped?” asked Digby Driver.

  “Well, that wasn’t mine—not involved in any of my programmes: I don’t touch surgery—probably shan’t until I’m established—but if we hadn’t had evidence to the contrary this morning I’d have thought that that dog was unlikely to be alive, let alone to be killing sheep. It had had what you might call a pretty drastic brain operation, to say the least.”

  “What was the object all sublime?” asked Driver, as they made their way through the Manor into the square and got back into his car.

  “Well, that was a sort of psychological thing, too, as I understand it,” replied Mr. Powell. “That was why they needed an adult, thoroughly domesticated dog—they paid quite a bit for it, I believe, to some woman in Dalton.”

  “Why did she part with it, d’you know?”

  “Well, it wasn’t originally hers. Apparently it had belonged to her brother in Barrow, but it had somehow or other brought about his—I’m not sure, but his death, I believe I heard—in an accident with a lorry, so naturally she wasn’t keen on keeping it. That’s an exceptional situation, of course. In the normal way domesticated animals-people’s pets—aren’t easy to come by for this work, as you can well believe. The operation was something quite new—a bit like a leucotomy, but that’s misleading, really. To be perfectly frank, there were innovatory complications that put it a long way beyond me. But the general purpose—and no one’ll be able to say, now, how far it was successful; not in this particular case, anyway—was to bring about a confusion of the subjective and objective in the animal’s mind.”

  “How would that work in practice, then?” asked Digby Driver,
accelerating out of the square and up the hill towards the Coniston road.

  “Well, as I understand it—whoops!” Mr. Powell belched beerily, leaned forward and frowned, seeking an illustrative example. “Er—well, did you ever read a book called Pincher Martin, by a man named Golding? You know, the Lord of the Flies bloke?”

  “I’ve read Lord of the Flies, but I don’t think I know this other book.”

  “Well, the chap in it’s supposed to be dead—drowned at sea; and in the next world, which is a sort of hellish limbo, one of the things he does is to confuse subjective and objective. He thinks he’s still alive and that he’s been washed up on a rock in the Atlantic, but actually it’s an illusion and the rock is only a mental projection—it’s the shape of a back tooth in his own head. The dog that had this operation might have illusions something like that. Suppose it had come to associate—well, let’s say cats with eau de cologne, for instance—then it might be observed to treat some inanimate object—a cardboard box, say—as a cat when it was subjected to the smell of eau de cologne: or conversely, it might see something objective and act as though it was nothing but the equivalent of some thought in its mind—I can’t think what, but you get the general idea.”

  “It must be a fascinating job, yours,” said Driver. “Straight on, do we go here? All the way?”

  “All the way to Coniston. It’s really very good of you.”

  “No, not at all—I’ve got to go there myself, as I said. No, I mean, a fascinating job you have with all these experimental discoveries.”

  “A lot of it’s routine, actually—you know, Fifty L.D. and all that.”

  “Fifty L.D.?”

  “Fifty lethal dose. Say you—or anyone—wants to market a new lipstick or a food additive or something, then we have to forcibly feed quantities of it to a group of animals until we’ve ascertained at what dosage level half of them die within fourteen days.”

  “Whatever for? I mean, suppose the stuff’s not toxic anyway?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You still have to continue forcible feeding until you’ve ascertained Fifty L.D. They may die of internal rupture-osmotic or pH effects—anything. It’s a bore, actually, but that’s partly what we’re there for. All in a good cause, you know. Cosmetics have to be safe, or no one’d buy ‘em.”

  “I suppose there are compensations—not for them but for you, I mean—defence projects and secret stuff—breaking new ground. No, O.K.” added Digby Driver, smiling broadly. “Don’t answer that, as the judges say. I don’t want you to give me anything to pass on to two square-jawed blokes in raincoats on Hampstead Heath.”

  “Oh, Goodner’s the chap for that. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to learn that he’d been one of those very blokes in his time. He’s German by birth. He was working in Germany at the end of the war—for the Germans, I mean. He’s on secret work of some kind right now, that I do know. Something to do with lethal disease, for the Ministry of Defence. They practically lock him up at night—they lock up all his stuff, anyway. And there’s no talking shop to him. I bet he gets paid three times what I do,” added Mr. Powell, in a candid non sequitur.

  “And what sort of leave do they give you?” enquired Digby Driver, who knew exactly how far to go and when to stop. “Where’s this? Oh, Torver, is it? Does it get a bit lonelier before Coniston? Good—I could do with another piss, couldn’t you?”

  “ ‘Accidental death,’ ” said Robert Lindsay. “Ay, well, that’s all he could have found—couldn’t have found owt else, Dennis, could he?”

  “Could have found suicide if he’d had a mind,” said Dennis.

  “Never on the evidence. There were nothing to suggest it. If yon Ephraim chap’s alone and he dies wi’ shot-gun when he’s standing beside his car, he’s entitled to benefit of all the doubt there may be; and there were no evidence at all that he were of suicidal disposition. Nay, Coroner were reet enoof—on available evidence that were accident, Dennis, plain as day.”

  “He never said nowt about dog, though, did he?” said Dennis. “But it were yon bluidy dog browt it about, for all that. It were dog as shot him, tha knaws.”

  “Y’ reckon dog set off gun an’ killed him?”

  “Ay, I do that. It were seen booggerin’ off oop fell like th’ clappers, tha knaws, Bob.”

  “Coroner couldn’t bring that in on evidence either. An’ if he had, it would still be accidental death, wouldn’t it? Dog’s an accident as mooch as light trigger or owt else.”

  “Ay, happen it would, Bob, but if he’d pinned blame fair an’ square on dog, like, then happen police or soomone’d be instroocted to find it at once and shoot it. Way it’s been left now, you an’ me’s no better off than we were at start. You could lose a coople more sheep tonight an’ Ah could lose three next week, and no boogger but us give a damn. Research Station weren’t at inquest—no bluidy fear. Nowt to do wi’ them—and they’ll do nowt, an’ all, without they’re made to, Bob, tha knaws.”

  There was a pause while Robert sucked the top of his stick and considered his next words. Dennis lit a cigarette and pitched the spent match over his dog’s head into the long grass below the wall.

  “Theer’s joost woon lot o’ chaps as could make them stand an’ annser, Dennis,” said Robert at length. “Compel them to answer, like.”

  “Member of Parliament?” asked Dennis. “He’ll do nowt—”

  “Nay, not him. Woon lot o’ chaps; an’ that’s press chaps. Did y’see Loondon Orator yesterday?”

  “Nay, Ah niver did. Ah were back late from Preston—”

  “Well, they’re sending reporter chap oop from Loondon—special reporter, they said, to coover t’ whole story, like, an’ get to t’bottom of it. It were Ephraim’s death started them off. Chap called Driver-ay. Real smart chap, be all accounts—real ‘andy fella.”

  “Ay, but wheer’s he at? No good to us without he’s here, is he?”

  “Coniston police were over to Dawson girls this morning, tha knaws,” said Robert.

  “Git awaay?”

  “Ay, they were that—an’ fella from Research Station were wi’ them. Two dogs with green collars were into Dawson girls’ doostbins int’ early morning. Phyllis got one on ‘em shut int’ shed an’ she phoned police, but dog were awaay owt of back-eend draain before this yoong research fella could grab it. Ay, weel, if police are that mooch interested, Dennis, tha knaws, and tha tells ‘em tha’s got soomthing tha wants t’ say to yon Driver chap, they’ll tell thee wheer he’s at.”

  “Ah’ve got a whole bluidy lot Ah’m gann’t to say to him,” said Dennis.

  The morning turned still and fine, with high-sailing, diaphanous clouds barely masking the sun’s warmth in their swift passage across its face. The heather was snug as a dog-blanket. Rowf lay basking on the summit of Caw, warming his shaggy coat until the last moisture of Duddon had dried out of it. A few yards below, among a tumble of rocks, Snitter and the tod were playing and tussling like puppies over a bone long picked clean, the tod pausing every now and then to scent the wind and look east and west down the empty slopes below.

  “What’s up wi’ ye noo, marrer?” it remarked, as Snitter suddenly dropped the bone and remained gazing westward with cocked ears and head lifted to the wind. “Ye’re not hevvin’ one o’ yer bad torns agen? Aall this aboot ‘inside yer head’—where else wad ye be, ye fond wee fyeul?”

  “No, I’m all right, tod. Rowf! I say, Rowf!”

  “Aargh! He’ll take ne notice, he’s still dryin’ hissel’ oot. What’s gan on, then? Can ye see owt doon belaa?”

  “Far off, tod. Look—the dark blue. It’s not the sky. It’s like a great gash between the sky and the land. They’ve cut the top of the hills open, I suppose, but why does the blood spill out blue?”

  “Mebbies yer still a bit aglee wi’ yon shed carry-on. Which way ye lukkin’?”

  “Out there, between the hills.”

  Ten miles away, through the clear, sunny air, between and beyond the distant tops o
f Hesk Fell and Whitfell to the west, a still, indigo line lay all along the horizon.

  “Yon? Yon’s th’ sea. Did ye not knaa?” As Snitter stared, the tod added, “Well, it’s ne pig’s arse, fer a start.”

  “No, I suppose not. What is the sea? Is it a place? Is that what we can smell licking the wind like a wet tongue?”

  “Ay—th’ salt an’ th’ weeds. It’s aall watter there—watter, an’ forbye a sea-mist noo an’ agen.”

  “Then we couldn’t live there? It looks—it looks—I don’t know-peaceful. Could we go and live there?”

  “Wad ye seek feathers on a goat?” replied the tod shortly, and forthwith crept up through the rocks to where Rowf had woken and begun snapping at flies in the sun.

  Snitter remained staring at the patch of far-off blue. Water-could it really be water, that tranquil stain along the foot of the sky? Firm it seemed, smooth and unmoving between the crests of the hills on either side; but further off than they, deeper, deep within the cleft, a long way beyond and within.

  It could be put back, I suppose, thought Snitter, musingly. It shouldn’t have been cut open like that, but it’s all still there—funny, I thought it wasn’t. It could be closed up again and then I’d be all right, I suppose. Only it’s such an awfully long way off. If only I could have stayed inside my head this morning, I might have been able to decide how to get there—how to reach it. But whoever would have thought it was all still there?

  He closed his eyes and the salty wind, fitful and mischievous, tugged at the grass and whispered in a half-heard song, while faint scents, breaking like waves, came and went between his nostrils and ears.

  “We are the brains the whitecoats stole.

  And you the victim of the theft.

  Yet here the wound might be made whole,

  The sense restored and healed the cleft.