44 Scotland Street

Pat reached out and touched him gently on the forearm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t ask him to join us.”

“Well, now we’re stuck,” said Matthew sulkily. “And that dog smells.”

Pat sniffed. There was a slight smell, she had to admit, but it was not entirely unpleasant – rather like strong mushrooms.

Angus Lordie returned now, a glass of whisky in one hand and a half-pint glass of darkish beer in the other. He put the whisky down on the table and then set the glass of beer on the floor next to the dog.

“Cyril drinks,” he explained. “It’s his only bad habit. That, and chasing after lady dogs, which is more of a call of nature than a bad habit. Here we are, Cyril – make it last.”

Pat and Matthew watched in astonishment as Cyril took a few sips of beer and then looked up and gave Pat a further wink.

“Your dog keeps winking at me,” said Pat.

On the Subject of Dogs

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“Yes,” said Angus Lordie, pulling a chair across from a neighbouring table. “Mind if I join you? Thanks so much. Yes, Cyril has an eye for the ladies, don’t you, Cyril?”

86. On the Subject of Dogs

“On the subject of dogs,” said Angus Lordie, taking a sip of his whisky, “I’ve just discovered the most marvellous book. I came across it quite by chance – The Difficulty of Being a Dog. It’s by a French writer, Roger Grenier, who was a publisher apparently. He knew everybody – Camus, Sartre, Yourcenar – all of them, and he had a wonderful dog called Ulysse. The French title was Les Larmes d’Ulysse, The Tears of Ulysses, which was rather better, in my view, than the one they used in English. But there we are. You don’t know it, by any chance?”

Pat shook her head. Was it all that difficult to be a dog? Dogs had a rather pleasant existence, as far as she could make out.

There were miserable dogs, of course: dogs owned by cruel and irresponsible people or dogs who were never taken for walks, but most dogs seemed contented enough, and often seemed rather happier than the humans attached to them.

“It’s a remarkable book,” Angus Lordie continued, glancing down at Cyril, who was inserting his long pink tongue into the glass to get to the dregs of his beer. “It’s full of extraordinary snippets of information. For example, did you know that Descartes thought of dogs as machines? Outrageous. Wouldn’t you agree, Cyril?”

Cyril looked up from his beer glass and stared at Angus Lordie for a few moments. Then he returned to his drink.

“You think that he looked at me because he heard his name,”

mused Angus Lordie. “But then it’s always possible that he looked at me because he heard the name Descartes.”

“Descartes?” said Pat, raising her voice.

244

On the Subject of Dogs

Cyril looked up and winked at her.

“There you are,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril has good taste.

He has a low opinion of Descartes because of his views of animal-machines, and he has a correspondingly high view of Voltaire, who sided with the dogs against Descartes, and also, I might add, of Kant, who disposed of Descartes’ argument like that – pouf!

– in a footnote. Kant said that dogs think in categories, and therefore aren’t machines.” He paused, and looked down at Cyril who looked back up at him, his gold tooth exposed. “Of course it’s typical of the Germans that they should argue in terms of categories of thought, whereas Bentham said that dogs weren’t machines because they were capable of suffering in the same way in which we do. The English are much more down to earth, you know.”

Pat cast a glance at Matthew, who had a glazed expression.

She was not sure what to do. It would not be easy to get rid of Angus Lordie, and yet she could understand how Matthew must feel. He could not compete with the older man, with his easy garrulousness and his tirade of facts about dogs.

She tried to include Matthew in the conversation. “Do you have a dog, Matthew?”

Matthew shook his head. “No dog,’ he muttered.

“No dog?” asked Angus Lordie brightly. “No dog? Poor chap.

I couldn’t live without a dog. I’ve had Cyril here ever since I rescued him from some crofters in Lochboisdale. I happened to be in the pub there and I heard two crofters talking about a dog who was no good with sheep. They were going to put him down the following day, as there was no point in keeping him.

I overheard this, and I offered to take him off their hands. They agreed, and the next day was the beginning of Cyril’s life with me. He’s never looked back.”

Pat wondered about his gold tooth, and asked Angus Lordie how this came about.

“He bit another dog in the tail,” came the explanation. “And his tooth broke off. So I took him to my own dentist, who’s a drinking pal of mine. He was a bit unsure about treating a dog, but eventually agreed and put it in. Not on the National Health, On the Subject of Dogs

245

of course; I paid seventy quid to cover the cost of the gold and what-not. We had to do it at night, when there were no other patients around, as people might have objected to seeing a dog in the dental chair that they had to