The Lost Dog

by Michelle de Kretser

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish a book on Henry James and the Uncanny when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine, tied with firm knots. Tom's lonely childhood in India taught him to tie knots but not to hold on...The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. The narrative spans ten days while Tom searches for his dog... and loops back in time to take the reader on a breathtaking journey into glittering worlds far beyond the present tragedy, from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom's scratchy, unbearably poignant relationship with his ailing mother to the unanswered puzzles in Nelly's past - her husband also disappeared in the bush. And the reader fears for Tom as well as for the dog.

Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, here is a haunting, layered work that vividly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, it illuminates the collision of the wild and the civilised, modernity and the past, home and exile. The Lost Dog is a mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage of time. It is a book of wonders: a gripping contemporary novel which examines the weight of history as well as different ways of trying to grasp the world

Release date: April 28, 2008

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

Tuesday

Afterward, Tom would remember paddocks stroked with light. He would remember the spotted trunks of gum trees, the dog arching past to sniff along the fence.

He cleaned his teeth at the tap on the water tank. The house in the bush had no running water, no electricity. It was only sporadically inhabited and had grown grimy with neglect. But Tom, spitting into the luxuriant weeds by the tap that November morning, thought, Light, air, space, silence. The Benedictine luxuries.

He placed his toothpaste and brush on a log at the foot of the steps; and later forgot where he had left them. Night would send him blundering about a room where his flashlight swung across the wall, and what he could find and what he needed were not the same thing.

On the kitchen table, beside Tom’s laptop, was the printout of his book, Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Uncanny. He remembered the elation he had felt the previous evening, drafting the final paragraph; the impression that he had nailed it all down at last. It was to this end that he had rented Nelly Zhang’s house for four days, days in which he had written fluently and with conviction, to his surprise, because he was in the habit of proceeding hesitantly, and the book had been years in the making.

He owed this small triumph to Nelly, who had said, “It’s what you need. No distractions, and you won’t have to worry about kennels.”

This evidence of her concern had moved Tom. At the same time, he thought, She wants the money. The web of their relations was shot through with these ambivalences, shade and bright twined with such cunning that their pattern never settled.

His jacket hung on the back of a chair. He put it on, then paused: shuffled pages, squared off the stack of paper, touched what he had accomplished. James’s dictum caught his eye: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete.

When Tom called, raising his voice, the dog went on nosing through leaves and damp grass. It was their last morning there; the territory was no longer new. Yet whenever the dog was allowed outside, he would race to the far end of the yard and start working his way along the fence. Instinct, deepened over centuries, compelled him to check boundaries, drew him to the edges of knowledge.

Afterward, Tom would remember the dog ignoring him and the spurt of impatience he had felt. The dog had to be walked and the house packed up before the long drive back to the city. He was keen to get moving while the weather held. So he didn’t pat the dog’s soft head when he strode to the fence and reached for him.

The dog was standing still, one forepaw raised, listening.

Tea-colored puddles sprawled on the track. A cockatoo flying up from a sapling dislodged a rhinestone spray. It was a wet spring even in the city, and in these green hills, it rained and rained.

The dog’s paw-pads were shining jet. He sniffed, and sneezed, and plunged into dithering grass. A twenty-foot rope kept him from farmland and forest while affording him greater freedom than his lead.

The man picking his way through rutted mud at the other end of the rope disliked the cold. Tom Loxley had spent two-thirds of his life in a cool southern city. But his childhood had been measured in monsoons, and the first windows he knew had contained the Arabian Sea. Free hand shoved deep in his pocket, he held himself tight against the morning.

Light rubbed itself over the paddocks. It struck silver from the cockatoo and splintered the windshield of a toy truck threading up the mountain where trees went down to steel. But what Tom took from the scene was the thrust and weight of leaves, the season’s green upswinging. Over time, his eye had grown accustomed to the bleached pigments of the continent where he had made his life. But love takes shape before we know it. On a damp, plumed coast in India, Tom’s first encounter with landscape had been dense with leaves. A faultless place for him would always be a green one.

He glanced back at Nelly’s house. Afterward, he would remember his sense that everything — the pepper tree by the gate, the sloping driveway, the broad blue sky itself — was holding its breath, gathered to the moment. The impression was forceful, but Tom’s thoughts were busy with Nelly as he had once seen her: astride a sunny wall in the suburb where they both lived, a striped cat pouring himself through her arms.

In the corner of his eye, something blurred. At the same time, the rope skidded through his fingers. His head snapped around to see gray fur moving fast, and the dog in pursuit, the end to which sinew and nerve and tissue had always been building.

Tom swooped for the rope and clawed at air. On the hillside above the track, the dog was swallowed by leaves.

Birdsong and eucalyptus air.

A lean white dog, rust-splotched, springing up a bank.

Things Tom Loxley would remember.

It had begun, seven months earlier, with a painting.

April becalmed in hazy, slanted light. Tom clipped on the dog’s lead, and they left his flat to walk in streets where houses were packed like wheat. Windows were turning yellow. Dahlias showed off like sunsets. On an autumn evening in the city, Tom looked sideways at other people’s lives.

At a gallery he hadn’t entered in the four years since his wife left, long sash windows had been pushed up; there were smokers on the terraces with glasses in their hands. Tom tied the dog to the garden side of the ornate iron railings and went up the steps.

A group show: four young artists. Their friends and relatives were congratulatory and numerous in the two rooms on the ground floor. Tom drank cold wine and looked at paintings. They seemed unremarkable, but he knew enough to know he couldn’t tell.

From the street it had seemed that there were fewer people upstairs. He had his glass refilled by a pierced girl with ruffles of hair parted low on the side, and started up the stairs. But something made him glance back. She was looking up at him, her face gleaming and amused; and he realized, with a little lurch of perception, that she was a boy.

The second-floor room that ran the width of the building contained work unrelated to the exhibition below. A well-fleshed man stood in front of a painting, blocking it from view.

“Eddie’s still channeling Peter, it seems.” He had a thin, carrying voice. A dark boy standing beside him snickered.

On the short wall opposite the door was an almost abstract landscape at which Tom looked for four or five minutes, a long time. Then he went out onto the balcony and saw a couple leaving the gallery stop to fondle the dog’s floppy ears. The word Beefmaster passed on the side of a van.

When Tom stepped back through the floor-length window, the large man was in the center of the room. More people had attached themselves to his group. He gazed out over their heads; his face was round and turnip-white. The pallor made his eyes, which were very dark, appear hollow. He murmured as Tom passed. There was a small explosion of laughter.

Tom gulped wine in front of the picture opposite the door. His scalp hummed. He thought, I am the wrong kind of thing. He thought, I don’t belong here. The adverb having a wide application.

By an act of will, he directed his attention to the landscape in front of him. His formal training in Art History was limited to two undergraduate years. They had left him a vocabulary, formal strategies for thinking about images. He believed himself to possess a set of basic analytical tools for operating upon a work of art.

Faced with this picture, he thought only, How beautiful. And relived, at once, the frustration that had edged his youthful efforts, shadowing the pleasure he took in looking at art. Pictures belong to the world of things. They cannot be contained in language. Tom was still susceptible to their immanent hostility. It had persuaded him, as a student, to concentrate on literature. There he was at home in the medium. For all their shifting play, narratives did not exceed his grasp. He paid them the tribute of lucid investigation, and they unfolded before him.

An English voice said, “Isn’t it completely wonderful?”

A milky woman with crimson pigtails was smiling down at him. “I was sure it was you.” She went up on her toes; she was wearing beaded mesh slippers. Up and down she went again, holding out her hand.

The rocking was a boon. It identified a party in the summer; a long woman rising and falling. “We met at Esther’s, didn’t we?” Tom took her cool, boneless fingers. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember . . . ?”

“Imogen Halliday. But everyone just says ‘Mogs.’”

Mogs was wearing a kimono fashioned from what might have been burlap, slashed here and there to show a silky green undergarment. She said, “How is Esther? I’ve been simply swamped.”

“I’ve been out of touch myself.”

Two years earlier, Tom Loxley and Esther Kade had been deputed by their respective university departments, Textual Studies and Art History, to attend a weekend conference on Multimedia and Interactive Teaching Strategies. Under the circumstances, alcohol and sex had seemed no more than survival mechanisms. Later both regretted the affair, which outlived the conference by only an awkward encounter or two. But Esther now felt obliged to invite Tom to her parties to show there were no hard feelings; for the same reason, he felt obliged to go.

Interactive strategies, he thought.

“Isn’t life mad? But I adore working here.” Mogs swayed above him, waving a hand on which a green jewel shone.

Christ, thought Tom. It’s real.

Mogs was, in her own way, catching.

“I was looking at you: you were transfixed. Isn’t she a marvel?” The slippers rose and fell. “Nelly Zhang,” said Mogs’s soft English voice.

Tom nodded. He had read the name, which meant nothing to him, on the list he had picked up at the door. And noted that the picture was not for sale.

“Carson’s known her forever. Since before . . . you know, everything. She’s over there with him, actually. In the black . . . tunic, I think you’d say.”

Tom turned his head and saw a woman in a loose, dark dress that fell to midcalf. Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon.

“Really exciting. A painting. An early work, of course. She was barely out of art school. From Carson’s own collection. Such a privilege just to see it now that Nelly only shows photographs of her work.”

Mogs was all right. But Tom wished she would go away. He wanted to be left alone with the picture.

Outside the gallery, a spotlight fell across a strip of grass where Nelly Zhang squatted, scratching the dog’s chest.

“Hail, dog,” she said. “You speckled beast.” She peered at his name tag. Her sooty fringe made an almost shocking line against her powdered skin.

The dog wagged his tail. His good looks habitually elicited caresses, tidbits. Experience had taught him confidence in his ability to charm.

Nelly stood up. Tom was not a tall man, but her head was scarcely higher than his shoulder.

She said, “Lovely dog.”

He remembered that his wife used to refer to the dog as a chick magnet.

Nelly was lighting a thin cigarette. The pungency of cloves and behind it — Tom’s sense of smell was acute — a bodily aroma.

The dog tilted his spotted muzzle and sniffed. Tom bent to untie his leash.

“That looks professional.”

“Just a quick-release tie.”

“A man who knows his knots. So much rarer than one who knows the ropes.”

He didn’t say, I was lonely growing up.

He didn’t say, String is cheap.

BUT IT MIGHT HAVE BEGUN long, long before that evening in Carson Posner’s gallery. It might have been historical.

War took an Englishman called Arthur Loxley to the East and in time returned him with two medals and a shattered knee to ruined Coventry. His mother had been killed in the first raid; to his father he had never had much to say. A trio of sisters inspected him as if their free trial period might expire and leave them stuck with him forever. At some point each took him aside to ask what he had brought her from the Orient. Their blue eyes glittered with the understanding that the world had been made safe for the business of acquisition.

He was twenty-six, and his knee ached all through the winter. But the map was still stained pink. Pink people could move about it as they pleased, could rule a line on it and bring nations into being. Arthur returned to India, where that kind of thing was causing a commotion. He paid no attention to it, having had his fill of history. What he was after, then and for the rest of his life, was a bolt-hole, with drink thrown in. There was also the memory of a twenty-four-hour leave he had spent in the whorehouses of Bombay. A Javanese half-caste with spongy golden thighs was instructing him in the art of cunnilingus when boots thundered past in the street and a Glaswegian voice bellowed that Rangoon had fallen. Thereafter, news of defeat would always induce in him a mild erotic stir.

Having drifted down the Malabar Coast, he fetched up in Mangalore, where he was taken on as an inventory clerk by Mr. Ashok Lal, an exporter of cashew nuts with a godown in the port. When Arthur looked up from his ledger, boats rocked on green water.

He rediscovered, with gratitude, the room India granted to casual human theater. It was there, on every street: in garlanded Ganesh affixed to a radiator grille, in a scabby, naked toddler with liquid jewels at his nostrils, in the man who, possessing no legs, propelled himself on a wheeled plank, advancing on Arthur with a terrible smile. It was not that Arthur idealized the place, for he was a kind man and the daily spectacle was often cruel. But he relished the friendly attention paid here to comedy and tragedy alike, a willingness to be entertained, amused, horrified, that he recognized as a form of thanksgiving for the faceted world.

And so, from modest pleasures, Arthur fashioned a happy life. The locally distilled whiskey was cheap, the beer cheaper. He ate deviled prawns every Sunday. Once a month he visited a former maharani who had a house with turquoise shutters in the shadow of the cathedral, and five exquisitely skilled girls.

An Indian who had been with the firm for eighteen months was promoted over Arthur, whose congratulations were sincere. He was as indifferent to distinctions of race as to his own advancement. He drank steadily, sometimes fabulously, but always arrived at his desk sober.

Contentment, being rare, never fails to attract attention. Arthur Loxley, with his veined cheeks and drunkard’s careful gait, was increasingly in the thoughts of a beautiful woman. Iris de Souza’s father had informed her at the age of six that she was to marry an Englishman, and neither of them had ever lost sight of that goal. Iris’s skin was fair, her face ravishing; many a pretty Eurasian was let down by toothpick legs, but Iris’s calves were shapely. Her mother, a handsome crow, had had the good sense to die young. Her father . . . But it would take a separate volume to explore the intricate self-loathing of this man, who despised in others the inadequacies that crawled in his own murk. He was an umbrella, tightly furled. Springing open, he might gouge flesh from your fingers. His rages were unpredictable and inconsistent. Iris acquired early the important female attribute of fear.

Fear, crouched always like an imp under her ribs, leaped out on her thirty-third birthday. She remained in front of the mirror, fingering the treacherous silver thread coiling through her hair. She could still pass for twenty-four, but that was hardly the point.

Next door the Ho baby was crying.

It was the war, thought Iris, the war had ruined everything, mixed everything up. It was the mixing she had loved, at the time. In the WVS she had rolled bandages and mixed with English people. A girl called Babs — a new style of girl, fresh from England — was kind to the Eurasian volunteers. It was rumored that Babs was a Communist. Iris was able to overlook this — also the way Babs wasted time conversing with tonga drivers, also Babs’s blond mustache — because Babs took a shine to her. There were invitations to tea, the loan of a monograph on shanty dwellers.

In April Babs was offered the use, for a week, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea garden in the Nilgiris. It stood on the far side of the valley from the manager’s house; his assistants had gone to the war and left their bungalow vacant. Unfortunately, Babs had seen fit to invite two Indian sisters as well, the up-to-date kind who had opinions. Even the discovery that the Guptas were connoisseurs of detective fiction could not redeem them in Iris’s view. With their homespun saris and dog-eared Agatha Christies, they had a disturbingly ambiguous air.

All was righted by the advent of Captain Lawrence Fitch, Babs’s brother. He brought with him one of his fellow officers in the Hussars, a beanpole he addressed as Saunders; but for Iris, this second young Englishman remained purely notional. There was only Lawrence: attentive to her every whim, always at hand with a shawl or a fish-paste sandwich, his honey-brown eyes sticky with appreciation. He had a scar just below the hollow at the base of his throat. More than anything in the world Iris wished to press her mouth to it. He gave off a powerful odor of tobacco and leather mingled, mysteriously, with burning sugar.

Ponies were hired. As Lawrence helped Iris mount, his fingers grazed her thigh.

There were mornings on the spines of ridges clad with rhododendron, a picnic in spotty light by a stream. There were cards and Charades. One evening, with an extravagant sunset spreading itself between mountains, Ayushi, the younger Gupta girl, who wore a diamond nose stud, was persuaded to tell their fortunes. Smoothing Iris’s palm with a firm, flexible thumb, she offered her a journey over water. The tiny diamond winked like a code.

Iris was a good dancer. Lawrence enfolded her in his smell and hummed along to “Embraceable You” as he steered her through the French doors onto the verandah. On their last evening he wore his dress uniform of scarlet, dark blue, and gold. Iris got her wish; and much more besides.

It was clear to Iris that she was engaged to Lawrence. Only nothing was said for the moment. Discretion was her personal sacrifice to the war; she spent twenty months feeling exalted.

In that time he wrote to her twice; the second time, three scrawled lines stating what he would like to do to her when they next met.

In the last December of the war, she went into the WVS canteen and was greeted with the news that Babs’s brother was dead. In Babs’s sitting room, on an ugly blond-wood settee, Iris poured out her own sorrow.

Babs stared at her. Then said, in a thick voice, “How dare you claim a connection.”

Iris, grappling anguish and mucus, made noises.

“The idea of Larry and . . . you.” Babs ground her teeth. “With your spangles-on-net dresses.”

Word got out.

Matthew Ho, the doctor’s son who lived next door to the de Souzas, waited for Iris after mass. She had known him forever. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. Hygiene and his Sunday suit notwithstanding, he went down on one knee on the pavement. A crowd materialized at once to offer advice and encouragement.

Iris, schooled in obedience, relayed the news to her father. “Damn Ching-Chong cheek,” said Sebastian de Souza. He might have been enraged but chose to be amused instead. After a moment, Iris could see that amusement was what the situation called for. Father and daughter tittered together.

For weeks, a word was enough to set them off. Chopsticks. Pigtail.

Every four months, for three years, Matthew took Iris to lunch at the Golden Lotus and renewed his proposal. On these occasions he remained seated. It was not the kind of restaurant to tolerate a spectacle.

Then he married a distant cousin, a girl who had been in Nanking when the Japs invaded. It was rumored that unspeakable things had been done to her.

They did not seem to have caused any lasting damage, thought Iris, plucking the telltale hair from her scalp with vicious precision. Matthew Ho’s wife had already presented him with three plump yellow sons. The baby was colicky. Iris would wake at night to his screams.

In a sea-stopped street, she passed Arthur Loxley. He peered in under the umbrella Iris carried for her complexion, and lifted his hat.

Change was flexing its claws, snarling the weave of Arthur’s days. The maharani had announced that she was immigrating to Cincinnati. She was paying for the girls to retrain as shorthand typists. Arthur, feeling a brisk pattering across his stomach, had opened his eyes to find the prettiest one practicing her finger exercises while fellating him.

He would have been a pushover for Iris in any case. She was beautiful and set herself to be charming. His strength of will could be gauged from the quantities of papier-mâché knickknacks and gaudy rugs he had amassed, the result of bazaar encounters with liquid-eyed Kashmiri merchants.

Arthur rented a sweltering cell in the house of a government clerk with nine children. It had a concrete verandah overlooking a strip of baked earth, where bold canna lilies, red and fierce yellow, grew in rusty tins. In that narrow place he passed sublime afternoons, dozing with a tumbler at hand and his landlord’s mongrel bitch stretched panting beneath his Bombay fornicator. The younger children made a game of him, daring one another to drink the melted ice in his glass or deposit a spider on the hillock of his belly. Once, as he snored, the smallest girl placed a blue flower between his parted lips.

Iris, inspecting the setup, saw at once that it would not do. There was a swath of stink from the drains. The dog’s teeth worked furiously at her ticks. The children, intuiting an enemy, gathered at a distance and dug in their noses.

Thus it was settled that Arthur would join the de Souza household. If he faltered at the prospect of his father-in-law’s countenance over breakfast, he gave no outward sign of alarm. He was still flooded with gratitude that Iris had chosen to make him the gift of herself, a marvel that twenty years of marriage would not quite suffice to dim.

And the house, set on a hill, was wonderful. Like the de Souzas, it had declined over three centuries. First the grounds had shrunk, then the mansion itself had been divided and sold piecemeal and partitioned again. It had suffered concrete outgrowths and bricked-in colonnades. An elderly gentleman lived on a half landing; a balcony sheltered a family of seven. But the house wore its changes like medals, hung out strings of washing like flags. Flowering creepers fastened it to the earth. In the compound, goats and hens roamed among tall trees and lavish ferns. There was a bed of rangy, perfumed gardenias. The de Souzas’ apartment on the ground floor retained a portico, pillars, ceilings that flaked but were plastered with garlands and painted with cherubim, windows that gave onto the puckered blue sea.

Arthur Loxley enjoyed this distinction: he was the sole individual to slip past his father-in-law’s guard. The lessons of history notwithstanding, Sebastian. . .