by Jason Hewitt

Mr Morton did not believe in chance. Chance was the religion of irrational men and in these times the one thing one could not afford to be was irrational. Everything happened for a reason. The universe had a structure to it, a pattern of atoms making everything from chairs and ears and elephants to carrots and socks and string, and performing like cogs that turned a wheel, around which life and all its absurdities merrily clunked and whirred.  He had read this somewhere in a magazine that his cousin Ernest had sent him all the way from New York. Even that which was most unexpected was the result of simple cause and effect. Take the tyre of fat around his waist, for example, caused by his gammy legs and his consequential avoidance of walking much further than his gate. The war was another example; the direct result, he had decided, of some brute’s complete disregard of other people’s garden boundaries. And his long and tempestuous affection for the late Mrs Morton, even during her last few months when she had been quite intolerable, was due to, well… He put down his pencil and thought. There was perhaps, he conceded, still some irrationality in life that even he had trouble grasping. Love, for example. And yet there it was, all the same. Everything happened for a reason.

That was why he believed in the messages. Since the war had started everyone spoke in code. The late Mrs Morton had talked in riddles for years so, God knows, he was used to it. Now, everyone was at it though, speaking in double-tongues and no one and nothing ever quite being what you thought they were. Two sticks on a path with their ends crossing might just as easily be an arrow. A pile of stones outside a door might be a welcome to German sympathisers. Even a woman’s missing earring might signal that she was a spy.

Thankfully Mr Morton had forty years’ accountancy work under his belt. He was well trained in picking out the detail and quickly spotting when things weren’t quite what they ought to be.

So it was that he hunched over the crossword at his kitchen table and, now that it was completed, he studied each answer and its placing on the grid. It was a ritual that, like many others, had started with his wife’s death.  For over a month after she had passed he had quite expected her to come back to him, and then, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to, he expected her, at the very least, to send him a message, it not being in her nature to desert him entirely. Then, several weeks after the funeral, she did indeed begin to leave him signs, tell-tale clues that she was still secretly with him: in the stir of the trees he would hear her whispering or her face would appear for a moment in a rain-spattered puddle. Finally, one night, in the crossword of that evening’s Suffolk and Essex Free Press, he had spotted three answers directly below each other:

No, Mr Morton thought, snapping himself out of it – what would the late Mrs M. say, letting a dog in the house when he knew only too well that she much preferred cats?

‘No, go on,’ he said. ‘Scram. And don’t you go giving me that look. I said, scram. Go on, shoo!’

He shut the door firmly.  He’d make himself a cup of Bovril. He had plenty of better things to be doing than worrying about someone else’s dog. Why don’t people keep these things properly contained in their own back yard? He moved into the sitting room, well away from it, and sat by the fire picking up the book he was reading but his thoughts kept drifting from the page. In time, the first spots of rain hit the window and drummed like the keys of a typewriter, or perhaps the hopeful thud of a tail. No, he would not think about the pup. The pup was not his problem.

*

When he opened the door later that night though – just to check, mind – the little mite was still there, looking up at him. It slathered its lips at Mr Morton and made a sound like a murmur.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, all right.’

It sat there for a moment, hesitant, and then, fast as anything, scampered in and for a few minutes eagerly bustled itself around the kitchen, sniffing at the corners and trying to lick something that Mr Morton couldn’t even see on the floor. Then it plumped itself down and stared up at him with its dark glinting eyes, waiting for something. It whined at him. Its tail thudded.

Mr Morton scratched at his stomach.

What did one do with a dog?

*

He cooked them both sausages along with potato mash that the pup wasn’t so fussed with, serving it up in one of his wife’s breakfast bowls. The dog slopped its water all over the floor. As the evening drew on, Mr Morton retired to the sitting room to smoke a couple of woodbines and read for an hour. After a month of waiting, he had finally managed to borrow the last Peter Wimsey mystery from the library at Woodbridge and he felt quite certain that he was only pages away from a murder. The dog snuffled around him for a while, wanting him to scratch its head or find something for them to have a game of tug of war with.

‘You’re not staying. So, you know, there’s no point you getting all friendly,’ Mr Morton told it.

The pup sat on the rug watching him and Mr Morton tried to bring his attention back to Lord Wimsey, but still the dog stared until eventually it settled down and shut its eyes. Over the top of his book Mr Morton watched it suspiciously, its black square moustache of a nose snuffling its snot into his rug.

*

The next morning, he tried to put the dog in the garden but the dog would not go, even when he tried sweeping it out with the broom. It sat resolutely in the middle of the kitchen floor as Mr Morton stared at it from the table and wondered what to do. It must belong to someone, yet pets were being let loose all over the place these days, their owners thinking it better to set them free now than run the risk of a sudden invasion and them being captured and their pets starving. No one in his or her right mind would have a dog that looked like this though. He wondered if the kindest thing would be to drown it. Or hang it from the apple tree around the side and out of sight. In the middle of the night he had been struck by the most ridiculous idea that a certain German Chancellor might be secretly dead and had come back to life in the form of the dog; and now, with horror, Mr Morton had taken him in. He had, with hope, read articles on reincarnation after Mrs Morton had died, God love her; and the similarity here with said German Chancellor was, he conceded, quite uncanny.

These days, he decided, with a war on and whatnot, one could not take risks, and so, with the dog following him out into the garden and watching from the lawn, he rummaged about in his shed trying to find a suitable length of rope. By the time he had everything prepared though he had talked himself out of it. After all, the pup was nothing more than a runt. It sat in the grass glancing up at him.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but you can’t stay.’

*

When Mrs Sturgeon called the next morning the dog was still there though and he had to bar her from coming in, even though she was quite insistent.

‘What do you mean? Are you sick?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you don’t look at all well. Arnie, you’re shaking. Are you sure you’re not ill?’

It was at that point that there had been the crash of something in the sitting room.

‘Good Lord!’ she said. ‘What was that?’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Mr Morton. ‘It’s nothing. But I really ought to go.’

‘Heavens, Arnie, have you guests?’ She seemed unnecessarily surprised and shuffled from foot to foot, straining to see past him down the hall. ‘I’m not interrupting something, am I?’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I mean yes. It’s just my cousin. Ernest.’

‘Not the one from New York? Oh!’

Oh, God, he thought. Why had he said that? But she had already started, wanting to know how long he was here for and why hadn’t Arnold said at the start, or even days ago that his cousin – the one from New York – was coming; and she’d be annoyed with him indeed if he didn’t take Cousin Ernest to The Cricketers, because everyone would love to meet him, a real-life American, here in Willemsley – my God! Could he imagine the excitement?

Mr Morton could.

She made an attempt to slip past him but he managed to cut her off.

‘He’s not really American…’

‘Does he sound like Clark Gable?’

Mr Morton didn’t know – having not seen his cousin since they were boys – and said, for the second time, he really ought to go. Cousin Ernest couldn’t be left on his own, he said.  Then he shut the door with some force and was ashamed when it slammed.

He found the dog sat in a tangle of cables. He had somehow pulled the lamp off the sideboard and now it was cracked and broken, Mr Morton’s favourite lamp.

The pup looked up at him as if he hadn’t done a thing.

*

When Lydia called that afternoon, it felt even worse lying to an eleven-year-old child. She stood on the doorstep in her sandals, one sock up as usual and one sock down.

‘What do you mean, I can’t come in?’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Busy?’

Mr Morton was never busy.

She screwed her face up into a frown.

‘Well, can I get you anything from the shop?’ She was good like that.

‘No, we’re quite all right, thank you.’ And then he paused and thought. ‘Actually, perhaps some dog biscuits. If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Dog biscuits?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘For dogs?’ Lydia stared.

He hurriedly tried to think of a reason that didn’t under any circumstances involve an actual dog but couldn’t. So, in the end, he mumbled something about wanting to try new things, and never-say-never, and that someone had said they might help with his protein deficiency, dog biscuits.

‘Oh,’ said Lydia, although she didn’t seem at all sure.

Then Mr Morton gave her all the money he had in his pocket just to get rid of her, if only for a few minutes, and, once again, shut the door.

That night when he went into the sitting room to smoke his woodbine and read his book, the dog was lying in his chair and when Mr Morton tried to move him the dog surprised him with a rather aggressive growl.

In bed, he wondered what he’d done, taking in the enemy, and now – to make matters worse – feeding it biscuits and letting it sleep in his chair.  The whole sitting room was beginning to feel like the dog’s – its hairs everywhere, its smell. When the pup led on its back though, despite his own aching spine, Mr Morton had bent down to scratch its belly. What sort of a state of affairs was that? No, he decided in the end; there was only one thing for it.

*

At the War Office on Whitehall Mr Morton heaved the doors open and dragged the dog in, it sliding across the floor on its behind and flatly refusing to walk. It had been quite a struggle getting it on the train, even with the length of garden cord acting like a lead. The same neatly dressed woman greeted him at Reception and he wondered if she recognised him and that was the reason for her raised eyebrow.

‘Sorry, sir. No dogs.’

‘It’s about the dog, actually, that I’m here,’ he said.

Then he tried to explain first to her and then to a gentleman who she called down from another floor because, she said, he was better equipped for such stories.

‘I don’t know if it’s him, you know – him – inside the dog,’ he said, not even wanting to whisper the name, ‘or whether perhaps the dog has been sent as a spy.’

‘A not-particularly well disguised one, you mean?’ said the man who, despite his uniform, looked far too young for this sort of business, and prone, Mr Morton thought, for not considering the matter with the severity it deserved.

‘Look,’ said Mr Morton, ‘I rather think it needs further investigating, don’t you? Even when he barks there is a distinct similarity in the tone.’ Mr Morton was thinking in particular of the furious speeches he’d heard from the new broadcasts. ‘You’ve not heard it but I can assure you it’s there. And,’ he added with some certainty, ‘it’s ever so possessive.’

The man looked down at the puppy and the puppy looked up at the man, its black eyes glistening and its tail giving a thump.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr Morton in the end. ‘Take a look at this and then you tell me that I’m barking.’ The man’s lips quivered. ‘If you speak to it in a certain way and use, you know, that name… Well, look, see, watch this.’ He looked at the dog as it sat on the floor, its black beady eyes fixed on him. Then, with the right tone of voice, a sharp intonation on the second syllable, he called – ‘Adolf!’. Instantly the dog’s ears pricked.

Mr Morton couldn’t help but smile. ‘There,’ he said. ‘See?’

In the end the gentleman took it, dragging the pup across the hall, its feet sliding on the floor and it looking dismally over its shoulder at Mr Morton as it went.

It was for the best, Mr Morton tried to console himself as he stared out the grimy window on the slow train home. They probably had this sort of thing all the time. In the basements beneath the War Office there were probably rows and rows of cages, filled with cats and dogs with a worrying look and German-speaking budgerigars. After all, he told himself, things like that didn’t occur by chance. Everything happened for a reason and these days, more than any, one couldn’t be too cautious.

*

That night, poring over the evening’s Suffolk and Essex Free Press his wife sent him another message in the answers of the crossword.

                  5 Across:  Visitor

                  12 Down: Vegetable

                  14 Across:  Patch

He went out to look, taking his torch with him across the garden with ‘Little Brown Jug’ playing in his head. And there it was, amongst the potatoes, the turnips and carrots. A thin black rabbit with white markings around its eyes that looked distinctly like wire-frame spectacles. It sat there staring at him from amongst the half-broken stalks and shredded leaves, caught within his torchlight, its face feverishly twitching.

Mr Morton leant in a little. ‘Oh, good Lord, not you ‘n all,’ he complained, recognising the rabbit’s face instantly. Only Heinrich bloody Himmler.

* * * * *

This story was written on the publication of The Dynamite Room for the event Short Stories Aloud in Oxford.

To find out what happens to Mr Morton and, particularly, Lydia, do check out The Dynamite Room.

Photo Copyright: © Jason Hewitt