Chapter 10

Eleanor’s stomach was huge and hot like an oven when Va Va hugged her. She was going to have a baby. She needed to rest, Patrick said, but she never seemed to lie down. She was always in some room Va Va had not noticed before, hanging up curtains, sneezing as she dusted the mantelpiece.

Too young for school, Brodie and Va Va stayed outside exploring their domain. They lay flat on the lawn gazing up at the limitless sky. It throbbed high above and they watched, trying never to blink as tiny birds flew up and up, faint dots on pale paper vanishing into a cloud.

Rory Francis was born before Va Va and Brodie had conquered the whole garden. They hardly noticed his advent. They had discovered a series of tiny streams in murky scrubland and had hunted out a moss-green crocodile, his jaws wide and gnarled. They planned to tame him and put him in the barns.

The new baby, sweetly scented and interestingly soft when poked, was nice enough, but not as exciting as the crocodile. Also he was not a girl. Va Va pretended he was. ‘She’s a little girl actually,’ she crisply informed visitors.

Eleanor left Va Va and Brodie to their own devices; she made a holster out of an Indian scarf, tied the baby over her shoulder and continued to put the house straight. To swaddle Rory from black November skies she sang to him, a song about sailing down the Nile in a felucca. He became Flook and was never called Rory again.

In February Eleanor sent Patrick to meet a train. Out of the guard’s van emerged his birthday present. A puppy. A Dobermann puppy who had travelled from Cornwall curled up in a washing-basket. Eleanor had found him in Exchange & Mart and saved up her family allowance, increased by the advent of Flook, to purchase him. Patrick’s imagination failed him. ‘He must be called Dobe,’ he said. ‘There is no other name for this remarkable hound.’ He was enormously proud of Dobe’s pedigree, and hung the certificate on the wall in the garage so that he could admire it while mending his car.

Patrick did not believe in discipline for dogs or children, and Dobe agreed. A sleek lunatic in black and tan, he lolled his tongue insolently when chastised. He never learned to sit or stay, or to walk at heel. He roamed the fields and lanes for miles around Mildney, returning home to slump, groaning, into Patrick’s favourite armchair. Patrick exercised him by driving the Mercedes round a three-mile block while Dobe ran beside the front wheel.

Eleanor climbed the stairs, Flook under one arm, a pile of clean washing cradled in the other. A thunderbolt of puppy hit her half-way up. It was Dobe in pursuit of a cat. She groped for the banister, and let go one of the soft white bundles to prevent herself from toppling. Va Va watched as the mound bounced slowly down the stairs. Outraged wails from the stone floor revealed that Flook was alive.

‘Oh Christ. I thought it was the clothes.’ Eleanor’s voice was sharp with anguish. Flook, red and wriggling on the flagstones, was fine; his tightly bound shawl had given him a safe landing. Va Va stroked his head and looked at Eleanor, tears starting in her eyes when she saw them in her mother’s.