Warlight(22)

One evening he entered 13 Ruvigny Gardens carrying a heavy book he had removed with difficulty from a local post office, where it had been chained to the counter. It was a ledger published by the Greyhound Association eager to warn the public of “track spivery,” listing all persons suspected of criminal offences. Besides mug shots—some of them blurry and some of them vain—there was a list of incidents that ranged from forgery to the printing of tote tickets, as well as doping, race fixing, pickpocketing, and even warning of those who “coursed” through crowds with an intent to seduce. The Darter asked Rachel and me to leaf through the three-hundred-page list of criminals and find him there. But of course we could not. “They have absolutely no idea who I am!” he exclaimed proudly.

He was by now sophisticated in his methods of tunnelling under the rules of dog racing. And he once confessed to us somewhat shyly about his first upsetting of the rules. He had thrown a live cat onto the track during a race. The dog he had put his money on—it was his first and last bet—had accidentally bounced off a fence at the first bend. Now a cat had been flung in front of the other dogs, who became so distracted that the only object still continuing the race was the mechanical hare, aided by a two-horsepower motor that ran at 1,500 revs per minute. The race was declared void, the cat disappeared, as did The Darter after getting his original stake back.

None of The Darter’s lady friends ever wished to accompany him on these out-of-town journeys, but never having had a dog in my life I chose to sit in the back with their heat-seeking muzzles reaching over to rest on my shoulder. They were quick, mischievous company for a boy who was a solitary.

—

We reentered the city around dusk, the dogs asleep against one another. Not even the blaze of city lights woke them, not even a crust from one of The Darter’s sandwiches tossed back over his shoulder a half-hour earlier. It turned out The Darter had a dinner engagement he wished to keep, and he persuaded me to take his Morris and return the dogs to the Anderson shelter in Ealing Park Gardens. He would be forever in my debt. I dropped him off at a Tube station to meet a new paramour, the scent of greyhounds still on his clothes. I had no licence, but I had a car. I kept the dogs with me and drove out of the depths of the city towards Mill Hill.

I was to meet Agnes in another of those empty houses, and I rolled the windows down as I arrived to give the dogs air. I walked towards the house, turned and saw them watching me tragically, spectres of disappointment. Agnes opened the door. “One minute,” I said. I ran back and ushered the dogs into the small front garden so they could relieve themselves. I was herding them back into the Morris when she suggested we all come in. Without a pause they rushed past me and leapt into the darkness of the house.

We left the keys at the foot of the front door and followed the excited barking. Once again there was no possibility of turning lights on in the three-storey building. This was the largest house either of us had been in, and it was undamaged. Her brother was moving up in the post-war property world. We heated two cans of soup on the blue circle of gas, then settled in on the second floor so we could watch each other and talk in the spill of a streetlight. We were more at ease now, there was less tension as to what would, could, and should not happen between us. We drank the soup. The dogs rushed into the room and out again. We had not seen each other for a while, and if we hoped our night would be passionate, it would be, but not in the way we expected. I didn’t know enough about Agnes’s past, but as I said, no dog had ever entered the rooms of my childhood, and now in the large semi-dark rooms of this borrowed house, we wrestled them to the ground, their long mouths warm against our bare hearts. We raced from one room to another, avoiding street-lit windows, signalling each other with whistles. One dog was caught simultaneously in both her and my arms. She turned her face up to the ceiling and howled through it to the moon. The dogs like pale anteaters in the half-light. We followed them into distant rooms. We met them coming down the strict narrow darkness of the stairs.

“Where are you?”

“Behind you.”

Car lights filled a window and I saw Agnes naked to the waist with a hound hanging off her hip as she lifted it down to a lower landing, the one we had discovered was nervous of stairs: a sacred moment in my life I carry secure within whatever few memories I hold from that time, filed and labelled in that half-completed way. Agnes, with dog. Unlike other memories it has a location and a date—it was during the last days of that torrid summer—and there is a wish in me to know if that long-ago teenage friend of mine still remembers and thinks of that series of borrowed houses in East London and North London and the three-storey house in Mill Hill where we crashed our bodies into dogs that were in chaotic delight after being restrained for hours in the back seat of a car, now scattering their racing claws like high heels up and down the carpetless stairs. It was as if Agnes and I had given up every desire except to run alongside their high-pitched barking and pointless virility.

We were reduced to being servants, butlers, providing fresh bowls of water that they slurped without grace, or throwing remnants of our stolen sandwiches into the air, so they were leaping high as our heads. They ignored thunder when it came, but when it began to rain they paused and veered towards the large windows and with tilted heads listened to its suggestive clicks. “Let’s stay the night,” she said. And when they curled up to sleep we slept on the floor beside them as if all around us these animals were our longed-for life, our wished-for company, a wild unnecessary essential unforgotten human moment in London during those years. When I woke, a dog’s thin sleeping face was beside me, breathing calmly into mine, busy with its dreams. It heard the change in my waking breath and opened its eyes. Then shifted position and placed its paw on my forehead gently, either as a gesture of careful compassion or superiority. It felt like wisdom. “Where are you from?” I asked it. “What country? Will you tell me?” I turned and saw Agnes standing, already dressed, her hands in her pockets, watching and listening to me.