Comrades
The holiday let cottage I’d chosen stood on the edge of an inlet of a sea loch, with a view towards the Isle of Skye. Across the inlet stood a café, a row of shops and, to the left of them, a small harbour with a pier. From there you could hire a kayak or motor boat, or take a whale sighting trip. To the right of the cottage was a valley with, the guidebook told me, a path leading up to an impressive waterfall and, beyond that, a genuine mountain wilderness.
I’d chosen well. Here was just the place to spend six weeks getting started on my new book. This was to be a biography of a well-known and controversial 20th C. American poet. The commission fee and advance payment were generous, mainly because a literary society named after the poet had agreed to defray all the costs of publication.
The place I needed to work on the book had, of course, to be tranquil, but with a shop and a restaurant sufficiently close for me to walk to. I’d decided not to bring my car, so that there would be no temptation to go on long sight-seeing expeditions. The place also needed to be beautiful, like the one my American poet celebrated in many of his verses. I write best when, at frequent intervals, I can raise my eyes from the page before me to dwell for a time on a seascape or landscape. The north-west coast of Scotland is very different from that of southern California, but they share a beauty that is wide and wild.
It was on the third day after my arrival that I decided to walk to the waterfall, and it was on that morning that I first saw the old man and his old dog. Before the path rises steeply towards the waterfall, it is flat, making its way alongside a stream, then circling a meadow. It was on this flat stretch that I could see the man and his dog walking towards me. Even at a distance, it was clear that each of them walked with difficulty. As I came closer, I could see that, in the dog’s case, this was because he had only three legs. His front left leg was missing below the shoulder. When we were about to pass one another, I guessed from a peculiarly large left shoe the man wore that he, too, might be missing at least part of a leg. As we drew level, I said ‘Good Morning’, but received back only a grunt. The dog, a black labrador with a white muzzle, similarly expressed no interest in me.
As I continued towards the fall, I felt the same mixture of emotions that I often do when I see an old person with an elderly pet. ‘Pathos’ is perhaps the word: a combination of pleasure in the sight of a touching relationship, and sadness in the knowledge that it cannot last long. What, I always asked myself, will happen to the one who remains after the death of the other?
That evening, I went to the pub-restaurant where I’d eaten the two previous evenings, and probably would eat every night of my stay on the coast. I’m no chef. The woman behind the bar who poured me a malt whisky had already told me a fair amount about village life. Tonight I asked her about the old man and the dog. His name, she told me, was Ben, while the dog’s name was Billy – though the locals, without any cruel intention, called him Tripod.
Ben, she explained, never spoke to people, except for the few words he had to utter when buying food and other necessities from the shop. He had lived in the village for thirty years with a succession of dogs, all maimed in some way, like Billy. The woman confirmed that Ben, too, was missing a leg. Someone who’d made enquiries discovered that he had lost his leg, just below the knee, during the Falklands War. A Royal Navy engineer, he had been injured by shrapnel when an Argentinian jet bombed his ship. Billy, it was learned, had been a sniffer dog in Afghanistan, injured not by a bomb, however, but by friendly fire.
Ben and Billy, the barmaid continued, as she poured me a second whisky, had been brought together through an organization called Canine Comrades. In the belief, reasonable enough, that a special bond would form between a person and an animal who had each been injured when in harm’s way, the organization paired human with canine veterans. Billy, the woman said, was the third dog Ben had been with since she’d come to work in the bar ten years ago. Ben, people estimated, was now eighty years old, Billy probably eleven or twelve.
My time in the village soon developed a rhythm. Work for a couple of hours after breakfast, a walk either along a nearby beach or towards the waterfall, lunch in the café by the pier, a rest in the garden of the cottage, either reading a novel or simply looking out to sea, some more work, then off to the pub. Most mornings I encountered Ben and Billy. I never managed, however, to get more than a gruff grunt out of Ben, even when I added ‘A lovely day, isn’t it?’ to my ‘Good morning’. As for Billy, he seemed not to notice me.
Given my lack of communication with them, it is surprising perhaps that I was getting inspiration from the pair of them for my writing. The reason, I think, is that they resembled in some ways my American poet and his dog. Like Ben, the poet was a proverbial grumpy old man – a misanthrope who described himself as an ‘inhumanist’. In one poem, he states that he would rather kill a man than a hawk. And I could easily imagine Billy as the dog whose ghost, in another poem, lovingly observes his former master and friend with whom, sadly, he can no longer run along the shore.
My writing had gone so well that summer by the loch that I decided to rent the cottage for the following year. This time, I would be putting the finishing touches to the book I had began to write twelve months earlier. A draft had been sent out for peer review and some of the comments it received were, I thought, worth taking on board. So revisions were in order, and I could think of nowhere better to make them than the place where the book first took shape.
When I set off for the waterfall on the morning after I arrived, I wondered if I would meet Ben and Billy. Indeed, I wondered if they were still alive, especially Billy who, with this one front leg, must be susceptible to arthritis and heart strain. I hoped both of them were alive. I particularly feared encountering just one of them, and then inevitably wondering how the death of the other must have affected him.
But there they were, coming towards me on the path alongside the stream. It was at once evident, though, that they both walked with greater difficulty than the year before. Ben was using two walking sticks instead of one, while Billy was having to walk even more slowly than last year. If I’d expected a sign of recognition from either of them as we drew level, I was to be disappointed. I had to be content with Ben’s familiar grunt and to accept Billy’s indifference.
I received a warmer greeting from the barmaid at the pub, who enthusiastically filled me in on a year of village gossip. When I mentioned that Ben and Billy looked to be struggling, she nodded and explained that Ben had spent time in hospital after a heart attack. Since then, she added, he had refused further medical treatment, being unwilling to spend any more time away from Billy.
The story wasn’t a happy one, but this did not prevent me from feeling a sort of envy of Ben. Clearly, he was a ‘loner’, someone who, if he’d ever had a close relationship with another person – a wife, possibly – had not done so for a very long time. Not so different from me. A veteran of three marriages – all of which ended due to my infidelities – I had now been alone for over ten years. While I had no desire to find another partner, I often experienced a loneliness that, I’m sure, Ben never did. Should I get a dog? One day perhaps, but at present I was doing too much travelling – book promotions, overseas conferences, literary festivals – for that to be feasible.
I encountered Ben and Billy several more times before the end of my weeks at the cottage. Like the year before, those weeks had been productive. I had made the necessary revisions and sent the final draft to my publisher.
I returned to the cottage, for a third time, a year later. Given how smoothly my work had gone on my previous visits, it would have been silly, I decided, to go anywhere else in order to work on my new project. The book on my American poet had been published a few months earlier, and it had received a couple of decent reviews, in the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
If Ben and Billy’s relationship had provided some inspiration for that book, it was the inspiration for my new one. This would be a book on the bond between famous authors and their dogs. I was still drawing up a list of the people and dogs to write about. Lord Byron and his Landseer dog, Boatswain, were of course there, as were Thomas Mann and his German pointer, Bashan, and Virginia Woolf with her spaniel, Pinka. So were quite a few others, but I would need to spend some weeks researching further potential figures to include.
On the first morning of my stay, I took the usual route towards the fall, and at a time that, in past years, I’d met Ben and Billy. But I didn’t see them and suddenly felt depressingly confident that I never would see them again. Unusually – since I’d disciplined myself to avoid alcohol during the day - I went to the pub at lunchtime. The same friendly woman was behind the bar and we greeted each other warmly. After listening to the customary gossip, I asked about Ben and his dog. Were they still alive?
The woman put down the glass she was drying and bent her head towards me, as if about to communicate some secret. No, she answered, they were both dead. It was, she explained, the strangest thing. A couple of hikers on their way to the waterfall had found Ben and Billy by the side of the path where it ran alongside the stream. Ben was sitting, slumped, on an old bench, with Billy curled up at his feet. Neither of them was breathing.
There was no autopsy: Ben, after all, had a serious heart condition. One theory was that he’d died of heart failure on the bench and that Billy, aware that his master and friend was no longer alive, had simply slipped away. On another theory, perhaps it was the other way round. The sight of Billy breathing his last had caused Ben’s heart to stop. Or, as some villagers – and I, too – liked to think: they had both fallen asleep at the same time and faded away, oblivious to each other’s fate.
I’d never previously had much time for the idea, popular among German Romantics, of a ‘beautiful death’ or a ‘Liebestod’. Too sentimental a concept, I’d always thought. But perhaps I’d been wrong. The deaths of these comrades, Ben and Billy, together by the edge of a path where, for years, they had loved to walk would come close to a beautiful way for two lives to end. If so, then even in death, Ben and Billy would again be providing me with inspiration. For I would be writing about people and their dogs whose relationship with each other had been a beautiful friendship.