My mother is an elegant woman.
She is always immaculate, never a hair out of place.
And never, ever flustered - until .......
I hear the front door bang open, sounds of very heavy breathing and then the unmistakable sound of gin bottle clicking against glass. The fizz as the tonic hit the contents seemed unusually short.
I peer cautiously round the corner ‘Mummy?’
She turns with more than a gimlet of inhumanity in her eyes.
‘That dog’ she says with a quaver ‘is impossible’.
I stare at Basset.
He has acquired a thick veneer of mud and he stares back at me with that confused and slightly put-upon look I have come to love.
I look back at my mother and flinch away from the heartlessness of her glare.
If the leaves in her hair are anything to go by it would seem she has had an argument with some shrubbery.
And lost.
Badly.
Her blouse is torn and, even more horrifying, she has only one shoe.
She, my elegant mother, has also acquired a coating of mud.
I back away.
‘So, ummm, how was the walk?’
‘Lovely darling, marvelous! Just thought I would go up the hill to the newsagents buy the paper and then walk back. You know, just a little 5 minute walk. With Basset.’
I think for a second, I can’t imagine what could have happened in such a short distance.
Only an event of apocalyptic magnitude could have resulted in my mother’s dishevelled appearance and, more specifically, the annihilation of all vestiges of dignity.
The confusion must have showed on my face. Her glass smacked down on the table. No time for the ice either, I noted.
‘We took the scenic route back.’
Uhhhh oh!
We have to follow a rambling loop to get to the shop. This loop skirts the spontaneously overgrown garden belonging to Mrs Perkins whose advancing years have seen an equally relentless reduction in her mental capacity.
Mrs Perkins’ garden fence has also followed a similar decline in capability so that her garden now sprawls lazily over all the pavements that edge it. Some, who are a great deal more heroic than intelligent, have been known to short-cut through her jungle but, since none of them have been seen again, most choose the legitimate path.
There was a grimaced slurp of the clear liquid.
‘There was a cat.’
But her voice had cracked and so she stopped......
Now Basset has a passionate and compulsive interest in all things feline.
I have patiently and firmly tried to persuade him that it is not his calling and certainly not his very reason for existence to chase each and every cat, whether real or imaginary, within his self-proclaimed domain.
Never-the-less, Basset can still be seen to twitch when the word ‘cat’ is mentioned. Even when the ‘c’ word is masked as in catfish or caterpillar or even .... catastrophe.
In addition, Basset harbours a deep, in-bred and abiding fantasy that he is a svelte and sylvan spirit of incomparable agility. He is convinced that, but for an unfathomable quirk of fate, he is as near to being the canine equivalent of Darcey Bussell as is possible.
So the toxic combination of his feline obsession, his over-heated Giselle fantasy and his fighting fit weight of nearly 85lbs meant that my mother never stood a chance.
Not a hope.
Not even a glimmer of deliverance from the inevitable.
‘So you went through old Perkins’ garden?’
I tried to sound cheery and as if I do ‘that’ route too, sometimes.
But I wouldn’t.
I’d rather grate my own eyeballs with a heavy rasp than trek through Mrs Perkins triffid populated botanic nightmare without a troop of Ghurkhas to hand.
‘I hear it’s a bit marshy in places and a bit too closely planted these days…’ My voice trails away.
My mother sits, gracefully crossing her legs, an effect not enhanced by the rude attendance of her bare and muddy foot.
‘I thought I could hold him’ (big mistake – let Basset run has always been my philosophy).
‘We entered near the roses.’ Oh dear, the highest part of the garden, and it is all treacherously downhill from there; mostly through the decayed and broken remnants of what had once been the finest water feature in the county.
‘I think I lost my shoe within the first few yards and then realized that I couldn’t free the lead’.
She has that faraway look you see in the glazed eyes of stoic war veterans when recalling months, nay years, in damp and fetid trenches.
‘The rest is something of a frozen blur of horror… we were moving so quickly and yet so slowly. I did try to anchor myself amongst the hydrangeas bordering that disgusting lake but we ripped the entire bank clean from the ground just before he slipped his lead.‘
She pauses. Another deep slurp....
‘By the time Basset had run out of steam we were almost onto the lower pavement – I only just managed to crawl home. And that, him .....he was pawing at the door to be let in by the time I got back.’
Basset, clearly understanding that he was being referred to in a somewhat negative vein, panted loudly twice then collapsed into low-profile mode. This is where Basset is certain beyond all reasonable doubt that not a single ounce of his chunky 85lbs shows above the flat expanse of what was a pure, off-white carpet runner until that specific moment.
Horribly, I felt a giggle burbling up from way down deep inside.
That would not go down well.
‘I’ll run a bath then, shall I?’
She looked up and I got my first smile ‘Oh, thank you, darling. That would be lovely!’
‘Actually, I meant for Basset.’
I ran from the room before a hail of cushions.
Bless her!
Because, until then, I had completely failed to notice the intimacy of the liaison between the level of my mother’s dignity and the expansiveness of her humour.
However, this may go just a little way towards explaining why my father, renowned for his phenomenal mental and physical strength when breaking and training the wildest of horses, had resorted to excavating an underground bunker for himself at the bottom of our garden.
A refuge from which we are all excluded, including Basset, together with a wide and often exotic variety of animals owned, acquired, given, sheltered, fostered and invariably loved by all in our household.
But they are for another time.........

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