Thomasina

The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth as Mrs Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilst she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting in her heart. “The customers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s not there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning: “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”

“Yes, yes, Mrs Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”

Mrs Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red moustache and beard.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be selfish if poor Rabbie is suffering …”

Mr MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.

Life without Rabbie – the once cold nose pressing against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full – but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said: “You would be very gentle with him –”

MacDhui sighed with impatient relief: “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He rose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs Laggan.”

“Very well, then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”

The vet had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.

The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying you for your services—”

“Two shillings, then.”

She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin on to his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his greying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.

Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of an obese woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly greys and looks as though the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.

When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting-room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Rev. Peddie recognised the symptoms at once, got up and went to her, crying: “Oh, dear – don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the doorstep?”

Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “The doctor said it would be better if he were to be put away just now. Why must the ones we love always go while we are remaining behind? Och, it will not be the same any more without Rabbie. But I’m thinking I’ll be following him soon and it will be all for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do you remember how Rabbie would be blocking the door, and all the gentry would be raising up their knees to pass over him?”

It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr Peddie had one of those awful moments to which he was prone when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the misery of the widow Laggan.

For to Mr Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness, nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator were a perpetual joy to him and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man and beast as well as the great and marvellous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.

And yet, human being that he was, he felt the panic when his God seemed to turn His back upon the likes of the widow Laggan and his own warm heart was riven with pity for her plight.

There stood a weeping fat woman dabbing at her eyes with a small cloth, the tears straggling unevenly over the curves of her cheek and her triple chins quaking and jouncing. And in a moment she would walk out of there and begin to die.

Peddie felt the strong push of the impulse to rush into the surgery of Mr MacDhui crying: “Stop, Andrew! Don’t kill the animal. Let it live out its time. Who are you who hate him to play God?” but he resisted it. What right had he to interfere? MacDhui knew his business, and veterinary surgeons, just as doctors, frequently had to make decisions and break news that was painful to people, except that to the former was sometimes given the additional mercy of destruction to save pain and suffering.

Mrs Laggan said once more, speaking as though to herself: “Twill no be the same wi’out Rabbie,” and went out. Mr MacDhui’s beard came in through the door again and he stood there a moment regarding them all truculently as though experiencing some remnant of the scene that had just taken place and the sympathy engendered for the old woman.

He asked: “Who’s next?” and his countenance took on an even greater expression of distaste when the Glasgow builder’s wife with the Yorkshire terrier half arose irresolutely from the hard, waiting-room chair and the dog gave a shrill yelp of terror.

A small voice said: “Please, sir, could you spare a moment?”

Someone remarked: “It’s little Geordie McNabb, the draper’s boy.”

Geordie was eight. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt and the kerchief of the Scout Wolf Cubs. He had a round, solemn face with dark hair and eyes and a curiously Chinesey cast of countenance. In his grubby hands he clasped a box and in the box palpitatingly reposed his good deed for that day. MacDhui strode over to him overpoweringly, overtoweringly, looming over him like a red Magog, thrusting his bristling beard nearly into the box as he boomed: “Well, lad, what is it you want?”

Geordie stood his ground bravely. Patently, inside the box there was a green frog with heaving sides. The boy explained: “There’s something wrong with his foot. And he cannot hop. I found him by the side of the lochan. He was trying very hard to hop but he couldn’t at all. Will you make him better, please, so that he can be hopping again?”

The waves of old bitterness had a way of rolling up inside Andrew MacDhui at the oddest and most ill-timed moments, causing him to do and say things that he did not mean to at all. Here he was in his waiting-room full of clients and it suddenly came over him as he stood bent over and looking down into the box – “Doctor to a frog with a broken leg, that’s what you are, my great, fine fellow—”

And thereupon the old angers and regrets returned to plague and irritate him. Had there been justice in the world, all of these people in the room, yes, and the child too, would have been there to consult him about ailing hearts, or lungs or throats or livers, aches and pains and mysterious cramps, sicknesses and diseases, which he would combat for them and put to rights. And there they were instead with their pampered, snuffling, mewing and whining little pets kept for their own flattery’s sake or because they had been too lazy or selfish to bring into the world a child on whom to lavish their affection.

The ailing Yorkie was quite near to him and MacDhui, his nostrils already flaring with disgust of himself and all humanity, caught a whiff of the perfume with which his mistress had scented him. He therefore replied to Geordie McNabb out of the black cloud of anger enveloping him: “I have no time for such foolishness. Cannot you see that I am busy with a room full of people? Go put the frog back by the pond again and leave it be. Off with you now.”

Into the dark, round eyes of Geordie came that expression reserved to children who have been hurt by and disappointed in their grown-ups. “But he’s sick,” he said, “he’s not well. Will he not die?”

MacDhui, not less unkindly this time, steered the child towards the door and gave him a farewell pat on the behind. “Off you go, boy. Put it back where you found it. Nature will look after it. Now, then, if you like, Mrs Sanderson –”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_096147a1-053b-57d5-9803-2a4749bcdad5)

If it is family you go by, then you will certainly be impressed with mine, for I am a relative of that Jennie – Jennie Baldrin of Glasgow – about whose life and times and adventures in London, aboard ship and elsewhere, a whole book has been written and published.

We are Edinburgh on one side of my family, several of my forbears not only having been employed at the University in the usual capacity of hunters, but one or two are said to have contributed to scientific knowledge and advance. We are Glasgow on the other, the Jennie Baldrin side.

Jennie was my great-aunt and she was most distinguished and Egyptian-looking with a small, rather narrow head, long muzzle, slanting eyes and good-sized, rounded, well-upstanding ears, and in this I am said to resemble her closely, though, of course, our colouring is quite different. I mention this with excusable pride since it shows that we trace our ancestry back to the days when people had the good sense to recognise us as gods.

That false gods are worshipped today – well, more’s the pity, for in Egypt, in the old days when members of our family were venerated in temples, times were better and people, by and large, seemed happier. That, however, is neither here nor there and does not concern what I have to tell. Yet, if you know that once you were a god, no matter how long ago – well, it is bound to show somewhat in your demeanour.

Nor does Jennie play any part at all in what is to follow, except that I suppose I inherited something of her independence, courage and poise, not to mention elegance, and I brought in her name only as a possible point of interest to you should you happen to be familiar with her story.

I too have had a most curious adventure and experience, one of the most interesting and marvellous things that ever happened, at least that part which concerns myself.

I will not keep you in suspense. It has to do with a murder.

But what makes this story different from any you ever read is that the one who is murdered is – ME.

The name I bear, Thomasina, came about through one of those ridiculous and inexcusable errors committed by so many people who attempt to determine our sex when we are very young. I was originally christened Thomas when I came to live at the home of the MacDhuis in Glasgow to be the pet of Mary Ruadh, then aged three. When the error became obvious the name was simply feminised to Thomasina by Mrs McKenzie, our housekeeper, whether I liked it or not and without so much as a by your leave.

I do not know why people are quite so stupid at determining our sex when we are young. The difference is easy enough to see if you will just look instead of guess, and take a little trouble, for with boys, things are apart, and with girls they are near together, and that’s the rule, no matter how small they might be.

Mr Andrew MacDhui might have told at a glance, no doubt, since he was a veterinary surgeon. But he was a most queer man to follow the profession of doctor to animals, since he had little love for and no sentimental interest in them whatsoever, and hence never paid the slightest attention to me from the moment I came into the house, which I cannot say disturbed me. The disregard was mutual.

We lived in a large, rather gloomy house in Dunearn Street, which Mr MacDhui had inherited from his father, who was also a veterinary, when he died. The two lower floors were given over to the offices, surgery and animal hospital, and we lived on the two upper ones, Mr MacDhui, his wife and Mary Ruadh. They all had red hair. I have too, or rather ginger-coloured with a white blaze on my chest. But what people really seem to find irresistible about me is that I have four white feet, and the very tip of my tail is white to match. I am quite used to receiving compliments upon my looks and bearing.

Although I was then only six months old myself, I remember Mary Ruadh’s mother, Anne. She was beautiful and her hair was the colour of copper pots by the fireside. She was very gay and always singing about the house, which made it less dark and gloomy, even on rainy days. She was forever cuddling and spoiling Mary Ruadh and they would often spend time “giving one another whispers”, which was a kind of love-making. It was not an unhappy household in spite of Mr MacDhui. But it did not last long, for soon after I came Mrs MacDhui contracted a disease from a parrot that was being kept in the hospital and died.

That was a bad time for me, I can tell you, and if it had not been for Mrs McKenzie I do not know what would have happened to me, for Mr MacDhui half went out of his mind, they said, and it certainly sounded like it, the manner in which he raged and carried on, and the love he had had for his wife he now transferred to his daughter, and half frightened her to death with it, and me too, I can assure you. He kept staying away from home and would not go near his animal hospital for days on end and things were getting in a bad state when he received a visit from an old friend of his from the country, a minister by the name of Mr Peddie, and after that things got a little better and soon we had a great change.

It seems that Mr Peddie and Mr MacDhui had known one another when they were both students at Edinburgh University – they might even have known some of my family there – and Mr Peddie told Mr MacDhui that there was a practice for sale in the town where he lived and advised him to go there.

So, Mr MacDhui sold out his practice in Glasgow and the house on Dunearn Street where he was brought up and we all moved to Inveranoch on the west bank of Loch Fyne in Argyll where my tragedy happened to me.

Mary Ruadh then was six years old, going on for seven, and we lived in the last house but one near the end of Argyll Lane. Our next-door neighbour was Mr MacDhui’s friend, Mr Angus Peddie, the minister, who kept a most disgusting pug dog by the name of Fin. Ugh!

Our house was really two houses, one next the other but separated and they were of white-washed stone with slate roofs; they were rather long and narrow; two storeys high, with tall chimneys at each end on which there was usually perched a seagull. In one of these we lived and in the adjoining one was the office, waiting-room, surgery and hospital of Mr MacDhui. But, of course, we never went there for Mary Ruadh was forbidden to do so. After what had happened in Glasgow, Mr MacDhui had sworn he would never again have sick animals in the place where he lived.