[Excerpt: short fiction]

Pauline Holdstock: “Perfect Obedience”

“For any grizzled, deeply middle-aged, commuting, news-reading, mortgage-holding reader (such as myself), the novel’s wonderment and delight in the possibilities of life is an effervescent tonic”: that was me writing, back in 2019.

The book under review was Here I Am!, about a boy’s stowaway adventures that had, for a moment, lifted my spirits and elicited bouts of snorts, chortles, and guffaws. Victoria-based Pauline Holdstock, who came to Canada from the UK in 1974, was the author, and until then I’d never heard of her. 

When I reviewed her next novel, Confessions With Keith, I pegged Holdstock as a novelist—an eclectic one, true, with an abiding interest in offbeat subject matter and narrating techniques—but, at heart, a true believer in long-form fiction (the novel, in other words).

Turns out, I wasn’t entirely correct.

Though Holdstock has published several novels, beginning with The Blackbird’s Song in 1989 and continuing with Beyond Measure, Into the Heart of the Country, and The Hunter and the Wild Girl, she has also published essays (Mortal Distractions). And currently, in What Endures, short stories. 

(She’s also a repurposed poet, the author confided to Samantha Ainsworth: “I’ve published a very small amount in literary journals. I’m a poet at heart, but I’ve never quite recovered from showing my first poem to a high school teacher in England and being told that it didn’t scan. Whatever poetry I possess is channelled into my fiction.”)

As for short fiction, Holdstock revealed her passion for the form to Yvonne Blomer:

“Short stories were my first love and I still get great satisfaction from writing them. I love the constraint of the form. They can represent a single moment in time or a whole life but they must always have the aha moment, either for the reader or for one of the characters, the moment that represents a blooming, a blossoming, even an explosion of meaning. It’s the moment of illumination and the reader understands it a very deep level: “Ah, that! That’s what matters in this life!”

With a heaped banquet of tales—of a de-aging woman; a family drama centred on a mother, her surly adolescent son, and a nest of baby rats; one man’s hopeful (if naive) “crepe-soled exit” from adult responsibility; and “Vita Has Brain Surgery”—Holdstock delves into the aha moments and the “Ah, that!” eurekas that, for her, make short fiction so worthwhile.

Plus, there’s “Perfect Obedience,” a tale as old as time—a woman, a dog, and all the good intentions in the world…

The British Columbia Review would like to thank Pauline Holdstock and publisher Biblioasis for permission to reprint the following excerpt. —BJG



[Editor’s note: Along with Richard Kelly Kemick (Decadence), Pauline Holdstock launches her book in Vancouver on August 6, starting at 6:30pm.]

. . .



“Perfect Obedience”

It wasn’t a bad dog. You could, in fact, say it was good. The way Vita saw it, there were no grounds, none at all, to give a person pause, so to speak — unless you counted certain aspects of its behaviour. To blame the dog itself, as Nick did, for any pain a person might feel as a consequence of its actions seemed to Vita like injustice on a cosmic scale. There was after all such a thing as innocence. Such a thing as good. Innocence was by definition beyond blame.

Nick, dear Nick, had not wanted a dog in the first place. Nick loved order, cleanliness. He loved his house. He painted it computer grey throughout, furnished it with minimalist chrome furniture, and paid for someone to come each week to clean, smoothing out the wrinkles that Vita made in his, in their, existence. He liked to punctuate the smooth tracts of order he created with ironic, self-reflexive statements: a retro lava lamp, a telephone shaped like Michelangelo’s hand of God pointing. Vita often wondered if she was one of his statements. Nick referred to her, when speaking to his friends, as his “new relationship.” Like a new colour scheme.

A great-horned African snail was his one whimsical concession to petdom.

Vita told him it didn’t fit the bill. “We need something more,” she said. “We shall become a selfish old gnarled old couple without a proper pet.” 

She lowered her voice a whole octave. 

“Nick,” she husked. “I want a dog.” Ten minutes later, with Diana Krall on the stereo and Nick’s tongue in her ear, she said, “I’ve seen this ad.” 

“Ad . . . Ad . . . Ad . . . ,” said Nick. 

Afterwards, while the automatic espresso machine made two chai tea soy lattes, Nick said, “But it has to be house-trained.”

. . .

“No,” said the couple who had placed the ad. “We don’t want to take your money. Just glad she’s going to a good home. Real glad.”

You could see they meant it. They had their arms round one another — closing ranks against a change of heart. Like newly released hostages. They couldn’t wait for the camera crews to be gone.

“No, get along. Take her. Here, don’t forget the rat trap.”

They had used the rat trap, they said, to dissuade her from jumping up on the furniture. A two-by-four hadn’t done the trick.

Vita turned to put the dog — Abigail it was inexplicably called — into the car but found that it was in already, sitting in the driver’s seat and licking the steering wheel.

The couple smiled indulgently. “Likes salt,” they said, “and sweat. There’s a lot of that on steering wheels. Likes doorknobs too.”

Vita wasn’t listening. She was looking at a long scar on the dog’s throat. The hair was still growing back.

“Oh that,” said the man. “Lucky she was. Fourteen stitches. Jumped clean through the window. She likes seagulls too.” Vita listened to the story as she tried to push the dog off the seat. It sounded unlikely. Something about the dog trying to get at a bird. She pushed harder. Abigail sat tight, a flicker like a smile about the corner of her black mouth.

“I’ll get her,” said the man, and opened the passenger door. The dog jumped past him out of the car and raced round to jump back in the other side. They laughed. When it repeated the trick, Vita laughed again. And the next time. The couple, she noticed, had stopped, as if their batteries had suddenly died. The dog was still running. Vita then began to feel tired and shopworn herself, like a Boxing Day toy. There was a nasty V-shaped tear in the passenger seat.

“Look. I’ll show you something else, said the man. Might as well, long as she’s on the loose.” He got in the car and settled himself in the driver’s seat. “If she’s any trouble,” he said, keeping the door open just a crack, “if she’s any trouble jumping up —” Abigail charged for the car and jumped up as if to illustrate his point. The second before her claws raked paint, the man opened the door violently in the dog’s eager face.

“’S all you need to know.” He smiled at Vita as they exchanged places. Vita scowled.

Abigail had finished rolling down the slope beside the drive and was scrambling back up. She seemed to have a smile on her face, too, or was it a grimace? The man held the back door of the car open and when the dog leapt in quickly shut it behind her.

Vita’s tires chewed up the edge of the lawn and sprayed gravel over the flower bed as she drove away. She threw the rat-trap out the window.

. . .

Abigail sat in the back seat. Vita could see her in the mirror, sitting there as good as gold, the window beside her wet nose decorated with swags of saliva.

But what a handsome dog, thought Vita, for such a daft name. It was glossy black with the fine large head of a hunting dog, and (despite the man’s disclaimer: Only thing she hunts is muffins) the intelligent eyes to match. Its coat was as slick as sealskin. “Abigail,” Vita said. Its long hound’s ears pricked forward and settled alluringly beside its face like the ringlets of a Dickensian dame, a heroine on Masterpiece Theatre. Oh, but it was going to be a good dog. A virtuous heroine. Vita just knew it.

All the way home Vita felt the strings of attachment to the dog already growing inside her at an inexplicable rate, like molecules in a mad scientist’s laboratory. She pulled into the driveway with a sense of moment. This new creature in her life. This presence.

That the dog jumped forward when she switched off the engine, that it then jumped across her, using her groin for a springboard to launch itself through the car window did not in any way indicate badness. She knew that. It was just a lapse of manners. It was less than nothing.

She stood for a while in the yard feeling at first awed and then heartened, her spirits buoyed by the sight of this living bundle of kinetic energy hammering up and down the path and tearing through the shrubbery. It was as if, after long simmering in the car, the dog’s whole being had come to a roiling boil, finally to erupt in the volcanic joy of sheer existence.

She was still standing, her smile a rictus, her patience shredded like the vestiges of the hemp doormat strewn over the porch, when the dog threw itself down, exhausted, on the Japanese anemones. Like a lamb it followed her inside.

Vita stood in the hall breathing heavily. Preposterous this urge to cry. Her breath sounded like someone shovelling snow. She didn’t know why she was taking it to heart so. A lapse of manners was no indication of badness. The dog looked at her from behind its paws, which were hooked over the long bridge of its nose. There! It was lying underneath the hall table. It knew it had been bad and that was proof, that was certain proof (C.S. Lewis said so all those years ago, and he spent all that time at Oxford thinking about it and didn’t he get it straight from Saint Augustine?) that it was good. Otherwise how would it know?

Vita smiled and sniffed through her tears.

“Oh, all right,” she said — or was about to. But she did not take into account the fact that the dog was intelligent as well as good and that she needed only to utter that first syllable, that conciliatory “Oh,” for it to leap up, eyes shining, tail wagging, tongue at the ready, and hurl itself upon her in a frenzy of mad and happy contrition.

She often thought about it afterwards, the way the plug of the lava lamp jerked out of its socket and came up like that between the wall and the hall table as the table rose; and how the cord could just as easily have snaked free, could have actually whipped harmlessly past Nick’s terrarium as the lamp began its slide, instead of snagging it the way it did and so dragging it into that ponderous motion that ended on the hand-made Italian tiles of the floor. Stupid bloody plug. She put the dog — that seemed to have peed in fright — outside and set to clearing up the dirt and sand and gravel, the toxic-smelling orange glop and the broken glass. She never did find the great-horned African snail. It was a puzzle. To her knowledge the dog had not eaten it. She felt certain she would have known. She thought of going outside to the dog in its banishment and confronting it, could almost believe it would answer, like an impossible child, I didn’t. It wasn’t me. After an hour she went to let the dog in again, wondering if it would still be there. A small recollection of dogs that run home to their former owners entered her head and for a moment she let it flit there sunnily like a butterfly.

Abigail was still on the mat. She had not moved. Proof, indisputable proof, of her innate trustworthiness. It would be something at least to report to Nick when he got home, something in her favour. Or perhaps not.

…

The next morning Vita woke to a loud rhythmic banging like the beating of a huge wooden spoon inside a giant stainless steel bowl.

Last night had deteriorated. She had most carefully refrained from bringing up the question of lettuce and who fed the damn snail every day anyway but it was no use. It had still turned ugly. It was not Abigail. Abigail, worn out from her exertions of the day, slept like a baby throughout. Nick had been disconsolate and cold, inconsolable. He dismissed Vita’s offer of an aquarium. He said algae. She had bought wine, bought calla lilies — so sculptural — but to no avail. She had all but prostrated herself. Then, seeing she made no headway in these icy waters, she had changed tack, yes foolishly, she saw that now, and accused him of injustice. An innocent creature could not be held accountable she said. She said it was a failing in human nature to want always to impose one’s own pathetic moral values on the created world which lives in pure obedience only to its nature. She said pure obedience was pure beauty — she had that from Simone Weil no less — and furthermore beauty was goodness and she said if you had to blame anything you’d have to blame the ugly plug.

Very slowly he repeated his instructions. She was to return the dog to its former owners or to find a new home for it by the end of the next day. In the event that she did, could, or would not, he would expect to find his house to himself — and in perfect order — when he returned from the hotel the next day.

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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