Bev Shaw hides her face, blows her nose. It's nothing. I keep enough lethal for bad cases, but we can't force the owners. It's their animal, they like to slaughter in their own way. What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!'
Lethal: the name of a drug? He would not put it beyond the drug companies. Sudden darkness, from the waters of Lethe. 'Perhaps he understands more than you guess,' he says. To his own surprise, he is trying to comfort her. 'Perhaps he has already been through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all. There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don't have to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat. They are born prepared.'
'Do you think so?' she says. 'I'm not sure. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.'
Things are beginning to fall into place. He has a first inkling of the task this ugly little woman has set herself This bleak building is a place not of healing - her doctoring is too amateurish for that - but of last resort. He recalls the story of-who was it? St Hubert? - who gave refuge to a deer that clattered into his chapel, panting and distraught, fleeing the huntsmen's dogs. Bev Shaw, not a veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa's suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word. He spends all afternoon in the surgery, helping as far as he is able. When the last of the day's cases has been dealt with, Bev Shaw shows him around the yard. In the avian cage there is only one bird, a young fish-eagle with a splinted wing. For the rest there are dogs: not Lucy's well-groomed thoroughbreds but a mob of scrawny mongrels filling two pens to bursting point, barking, yapping, whining, leaping with excitement.
He helps her pour out dry food and fill the water-troughs. They empty two ten-kilogram bags.
'How do you pay for this stuff?' he asks.
'We get it wholesale. We hold public collections. We get donations. We offer a free neutering service, and get a grant for that.'
'Who does the neutering?
'Dr Oosthuizen, our vet. But he comes in only one afternoon a week.'
He is watching the dogs eat. It surprises him how little fighting there is. The small, the weak hold back, accepting their lot, waiting their turn.
'The trouble is, there are just too many of them,' says Bev Shaw. 'They don't understand it, of course, and we have no way of telling them. Too many by our standards, not by theirs. They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don't think it's a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier. Cats the same.'
'And rats.'
'And rats. Which reminds me: check yourself for fleas when you get home.'
One of the dogs, replete, eyes shining with wellbeing, sniffs his fingers through the mesh, licks them.
'They are very egalitarian, aren't they,' he remarks. 'No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another's backside.' He squats, allows the dog to smell his face, his breath. It has what he thinks of as an intelligent look, though it is probably nothing of the kind. 'Are they all going to die?'
'Those that no one wants. We'll put them down.'
'And you are the one who does the job.'
'Yes.'
'You don't mind?'
'I do mind. I mind deeply. I wouldn't want someone doing it for me who didn't mind. Would you?'
He is silent. Then: 'Do you know why my daughter sent me to you?'
'She told me you were in trouble.'
'Not just in trouble. In what I suppose one would call disgrace.' He watches her closely. She seems uncomfortable; but perhaps he is imagining it.
'Knowing that, do you still have a use for me?' he says.
'If you are prepared . . .' She opens her hands, presses them together, opens them again. She does not know what to say, and he does not help her.
He has stayed with his daughter only for brief periods before. Now he is sharing her house, her life. He has to be careful not to allow old habits to creep back, the habits of a parent: putting the toilet roll on the spool, switching off lights, chasing the cat off the sofa. Practise for old age, he admonishes himself. Practise fitting in. Practise for the old folks' home.
He pretends he is tired and, after supper, withdraws to his room, where faintly the sounds come to him of Lucy leading her own life: drawers opening and shutting, the radio, the murmur of a telephone conversation. Is she calling Johannesburg, speaking to Helen? Is his presence here keeping the two of them apart? Would they dare to share a bed while he was in the house? If the bed creaked in the night, would they be embarrassed? Embarrassed enough to stop? But what does he know about what women do together? Maybe women do not need to make beds creak. And what does he know about these two in particular, Lucy and Helen? Perhaps they sleep together merely as children do, cuddling, touching, giggling, reliving girlhood - sisters more than lovers. Sharing a bed, sharing a bathtub, baking gingerbread cookies, trying on each other's clothes. Sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight. The truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman, and a plain one at that. Yet would he be any happier if the lover were a man? What does he really want for Lucy? Not that she should be forever a child, forever innocent, forever his - certainly not that. But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more - it cannot be helped - toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. No wonder, in fairy-stories, queens try to hound their daughters to their death!
He sighs. Poor Lucy! Poor daughters! What a destiny, what a burden to bear! And sons: they too must have their tribulations, though he knows less about that.
He wishes he could sleep. But he is cold, and not sleepy at all.
