She turns and walks away, heads for the swings at the farthest end of the green. And the seesaw! And the roundabout! In her head, Sally greets these pieces of playground equipment she normally ignores as if they were her friends, tiny in the distance, waving to her as if to say, “Come over here and hang out with us. You’ll have a much better time.”
It’s good that Avril Mattingley has revealed her true nature; now Sally won’t waste any more time thinking about her. Yes, it’s a setback, but Sally, unlike most people she knows, is good at changing her mind, good at responding to danger signals—which, frankly, Avril might as well have blasted into the vast, low-hanging East Anglian sky from a massive cannon: regrets the existence of her children, doesn’t understand that dogs are people too, happy to declare herself sure about something that demonstrably isn’t the case without asking any questions first, horrendous taste in wallpaper…
Halfway to the swings, Sally hears footsteps behind her. She slows her pace but doesn’t turn. The padding gets louder. Sally doesn’t fear it might be a Gavey; there’s no doubt in her mind that it’s Avril. Which is fine. She will say more unpleasant, inaccurate things, but Sally won’t argue with her. In her mind, Avril Mattingley barely exists anymore. Sally doesn’t need her, or anyone. She’ll go home, get Champ, and set off. She’s got a new plan and thinks it will work.
“Your dog is very cute, right…” The breeze propels Avril’s voice toward her.
Sally turns. If by any chance this is the beginning of an apology…
“ …but he’s just a dog! He’s just a sodding pooch, Sally. He’s not the second coming. A few weeks ago when I bumped into you both outside the church, he jumped up and licked my hand and nearly pulled a button off my shirt, and you were all like, ‘Aww, look, he likes you!’ And my handstankafterward. Like, all the way home it reeked of dog breath.”
Sally tries not to laugh as she remembers what Ree once said: that Swaffham Tilney people are entirely oblivious to their “distance privilege”—that was what she called it. “All the way home,” in this instance, meant less than a minute’s walk. Sally could have hopped on one leg from the church to Avril’s house without any problem at all.
“So, look, I’m sorry if I’m not at my most tactful,” Avril goes on. “I’ve just had the shittiest day. Everything that could have gone wrong has. I was stressed even before I started cooking shepherd’s pie for tea, and then Nick made this massive production of offering to help, as if he ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize or something. I told him to leave a tiny bit of water in the pot with the potatoes, to help make them a bit softer for when I mashed them, but instead he left about a third of the water in, mashed them himself—no milk, no butter, no seasoning—and then just slopped them out all over the meat mixture. Ruined the whole thing. Now I’m going to have to start from scratch, and there’s nothing in the house. So, yes, I apologize for getting a bit impatient with your imaginary problem. I’m suresomething’shappened, and I’m not asking for the details, but come on.” Avril shakes her head. “Turning up and saying the Gaveys are trying to kill Champ?”
“ …would be unacceptable if it weren’t the truth,” says Sally, as if they’re playing a fun game in which her challenge is to complete Avril’s sentences. “Bye, Avril. Order a takeaway.”
Nick, destroyer of shepherd’s pies, was made redundant two months earlier, so perhaps the Mattingleys can’t afford takeaways at the moment. Nor do most of the restaurants that claim to deliver to Swaffham Tilney actually agree to do so when asked. “Sorry, love, we’re up to our ears in orders, and we’ve got three people off sick. It’d take us too long to come out your way.” Sally knows all this; that’s why her comment was the perfect missile to fire at Avril. And her own address is even more unappealing to delivery drivers, being farther from the B1102, and the Lamberts also can’t afford takeaways apart from for birthdays and special occasions, so she doesn’t feel bad. And she remembers someone from the village telling her Nick Mattingley got a full year’s salary as a redundancy payoff, and his job had been highly paid and the best kind of London-ish job too, the sort that never seemed to require him actually to go to London.
“Go fuck yourself, Sally,” says Avril. “Really, just get lost.”
“I am,” Sally tells her and heads off again with a wave.
Where was she going? That’s right: the swings.
No. Home.She remembers her new plan. She must get Champ before she does anything else, get him safely out of the village. But, wait, there’s Corinne Sullivan standing between the swings and the roundabout. Sally didn’t see her at first; the sun was in her eyes, and she only saw what was ahead of her once she stepped into the shade cast by the church’s tower onto the village green, then suddenly everything was fully visible again.
Why does Corinne look like she’s waiting for Sally?
No. Don’t risk it. Stick to the new plan.
Corinne doesn’t appear to be busy or afflicted by shepherd’s pie trauma. She looks…available. To help, maybe.
What if she’s the perfect person?Dangerous Corinne. Ferocious Corinne. Is that true, though? Sally only thinks of her in this way because of her role in the book-club row, and maybe also the weeds, a little bit. Perhaps being ferocious sometimes is okay—necessary, even.
Oh no. Help. Now Corinne is walking toward her. Sally has no way of knowing if Corinne is also a “just a dog” person. Even if she wouldn’t come out and say it, especially not as dismissively as Avril had, might it be her underlying belief that dogs aren’t every bit as important and valuable as humans? If she met Lorna from Sally’s work, who’s on her fourth round of IVF, might Corinne nod and think nothing of it if Lorna were to say, “It’s just so disgustingly insensitive to suggest to someone who’s having trouble conceiving that they should settle for getting a dog instead?”
To be fair, Sally made sympathetic noises when Lorna said that very thing to her once, after being lobbied by her sister-in-law to get a pug and embrace being itshoomum(Sally hated that word;motherormumwas the correct term, and there was no need to qualify it). Later, Sally berated herself for not being brave enough to be the enormous and game-changing help to Lorna that she might have been. The truth was—and if Sally could change minds in this world about one thing and one thing only, this would be it—being the parent of a dog is exactly the same and every bit as meaningful and amazing as being a parent of humans. Sally can’t bear to think thatmillions of infertile women don’t know this and are missing out as a result. There’s no need to adopt, traipse around orphanages, hire surrogates, pay egg donors…
How mad all of that seems to Sally, who knows the truth: Once you’ve got a dog, you’ve got a child. You really have—in every possible, wonderful way. You’ve got a canine child who feels absolutely like your flesh and blood even though he or she belongs to a different species.
Before the Lamberts got Furbert, Sally wouldn’t have believed this was possible, so she suspects Lorna from work is unlikely to be persuadable. It would be widely regarded as a shocking and cruel thing to tell someone in Lorna’s situation, which is why Sally didn’t. She told her child-free-by-choice sister, Vicky, though, in a WhatsApp message. Vicky’s response was to send three of Sally’s own sentences back to her inside double quote marks, followed by two laughing emojis. Presumably she’d picked what was, in her opinion, the most risible part of Sally’s original message. Instead of sending back an indignant “You often express opinions that I disagree with, yet I have never—not once—responded to you in such a rude, sneery way,” Sally pretended she didn’t understand Vicky’s mockery. “I don’t understand what that means,” she replied. Vicky messaged back: “Having a dog is definitelynotthe same as having a baby,” as if no arguments or evidence needed to be provided to support that position.
You just need to be willing and able to withstand the pain of losing them, thinks Sally, and the way to do that is to understand that you never really will. Not their soul. That always stays with you—still part of your life, even when they’ve gone up to DogHeaven. Vicky would probably have sent four laughing emojis in response to that. Sally ought to have known that Vicky couldn’t be made to care about dogs—that much was clear from the Facebook business, which Sally has decided never to think about again.No, I’m not thinking about it now; I’m thinking about my not-thinking-about-it policy. It’s different.
Corinne is getting closer, and Sally’s eyes fill with tears as she contemplates all the people who don’t and wouldn’t care about poor Champy’s predicament, imagining that Corinne will very likely turn out to be one of them. She remembers the time her mum, thinking that all she was doing was praising Champ’s calm and friendly temperament, said, “It’s so nice to be able to come to your house and not get chewed to bits every time I stand up to go to the loo.” What she meant was that it was “so nice” that Furbert wasn’t there anymore.
After getting attacked by another dog on a walk in Cambridge city center when he was six months old, poor old Furbs had remained anxious about any sudden movements for the rest of his life, bless him, and couldn’t always control his defensive impulses. (This was how Sally thought of it. Other people described it differently, using the wordsbite,bitey,bit, andbitten, words that Sally made sure to avoid, just as she’d avoided her sister, Vicky, for nearly three months after she’d said, “You want to be careful, Sal. One day, Furbert will go for someone who won’t just be polite and say, ‘Oh, it’s fine, think nothing of it.’ One day he might get reported to the police.” Sally had realized, at that moment, that there was a very fine line between a helpful warning and a threat designed to terrify.)
She complained bitterly to Mark after her mum made that “It’sso nice…” comment: “I should have said, ‘Yeah, and it’s fantastic being able to come to your place without getting emotionally blackmailed by a power-crazed narcissist, now that Dad’s dead.’”
Mark’s eyes widened. “That would have been terrible, Sal.Your mum would have been devastated. Never, ever say it, or anything like it.”
Sally didn’t and doesn’t intend to. Nevertheless, she was left with the impression on that occasion, as on so many others—really, the world has been bombarding her with it for as long as she can remember—that everyone else’s feelings are supposed to matter far more than Sally Lambert’s. Immediately, another incident sprang to mind: her hen weekend, and the toddler who was in the swimming pool during the no-children time one day. His parents gazed at him joyfully as he yelped and whacked the surface of the water with his hands over and over, as if this should have delighted all present. “I might say something,” Sally whispered to her six hens, all of whom looked instantly wary. Oonagh said, “Oh, come on, Sal. Don’t be that person.”
And she never has been. Evidently, she isn’t allowed to be. Except maybe that needs to change now, given the threat to Champ’s life. Maybe, to save him, she will have to become That Person—the one who expects fair treatment and appropriate consideration for herself and her family and who objects when she doesn’t get it.
“Sally?” Corinne puts a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
