One Intimate Night

‘The local paper has got wind of your dog visits to the old people’s home and they want to run an article about it. Philip’s keen for you to let them interview you and take some photographs of the owners with their dogs, kind of thing. It would be good publicity for us as well as a good public relations exercise. I’ll leave it to you to nominate and contact the owners, and the reporter from the Community News will be in touch with you direct.’

Things were beginning to look up a bit, Georgia decided a little later as she walked back to her temporary new home, even more so since she hadn’t seen Piers since that embarrassing incident in the kitchen. He had telephoned her from the city to say that he wasn’t going to be able to return for a further couple of days, and Georgia had sturdily assured herself that the feeling she had had of a sharp sense of disappointment was nothing of the sort, that the problem owed its existence to the fact that she had gone without lunch—again!

She had quickly made use of the opportunity he had given her by concentrating Ben’s training sessions in and around the house—much easier to do without Piers’s critical presence and even more critical eye on what she was doing. Ben was an intelligent dog—certainly intelligent enough to sneak himself upstairs the first night she had been in the house alone and to hide himself under his mistress’s bed whilst Georgia searched the house and then the garden for him!

The only reason she had finally realised what he had done had been that the sound of something falling to the floor upstairs with a muffled soft thud had caused her to go and investigate its cause, only to find Ben contentedly spread out on Emily Latham’s bed, the noise she had heard caused by him accidentally dislodging a bedside lamp as he had jumped up. Fortunately the lamp hadn’t been damaged, but Ben hadn’t been too pleased about being removed from his self-chosen comfortable bed and returned to his legitimate quarters in his basket in the kitchen.

When she finished work today she intended to take Ben for a good long walk along the river before returning to the house for an intensive training session with him.

They were having a busy week at the practice, with a rush of new patients, kittens and puppies in the main, needing their protective injections.

To Georgia’s distress, though, one elderly dog they had been treating for cancer was found to have developed another tumour, and his owner had to be gently informed that for the animal’s own sake it would be kinder to have him put to sleep.

The owner, a widower, who had only taken the dog in at the insistence of his late wife, had, as he confided to Georgia, become far more attached to the dog than he had ever expected.

‘We didn’t have any children,’ he told Georgia sadly, ‘and Rex here is really my last living contact with my late wife. We were teenage sweethearts and married for fifty-four years. It’s been two years now since I lost her, but I still miss her...’

Georgia’s tender heart ached for him, but she had seen the dog Rex’s X-rays and knew that there was no way the dog could survive.

It was always hard telling an owner that they were going to lose a much loved pet, all the more so because they always tried to take it so bravely, insisting that their pet’s needs must come before their own desire to prolong its life.

Sometimes, though, they did see the other side of pet ownership—people who abused or neglected their animals. People like Ben’s original owner, who acquired a puppy or a kitten and then blithely announced that it wasn’t what they wanted after all and it would have to go.

Ben had been lucky in finding a second home, a second owner like Mrs Latham, but had she been similarly fortunate in acquiring Ben? Georgia doubted that her godson would have said so.

Piers. There she was thinking about him again. In fact, she was spending far too much time thinking about him altogether, and not just thinking about him in terms of the threat he represented to Ben’s future. Georgia had to admit that she wouldn’t have liked to have been keeping a list of just how many times her thoughts had drifted to those disconcerting moments she had spent in Piers’s arms.

She was thinking about it—and Piers—two hours later as she made her way back to Mrs Latham’s. Piers was due to return this evening. Would he be there when she got back from work or would he return later?

One thing she did know was that when he did come back he would be watching both her and Ben to see how much progress Ben had made.

When he arrived home would Piers go straight upstairs to his own room, or would he linger in the kitchen, perhaps even telling her something about his work? Although she was loath to admit it, Georgia had actually missed him in his absence. On more occasions than were reasonable she had caught herself looking upwards to the top-storey windows when she was out in the garden working with Ben, as though she was hoping she might catch a glimpse of Piers standing there.