A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

ideas off. What would I be without him? This afternoon we go to the pet shop with Bonnie for new dog beds and the expedition is fun. We eat sausages, read and doze by the fire.

      20 January: … so good to be home again with Bonnie. She represents home now.

      2 February: … coming back home to be welcomed by an ecstatic, wriggling little dog.

      Bonnie always cheered me, always inspired closeness and took both of us away from work.

      The day before our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary was a normal Saturday, and so I listened to my husband on the radio, took the three dogs up through our wood for a walk and felt a great surge of happiness in the still, cold air. It was strange, I thought, to be happy when the news was full of the looming war in Iraq, but the sunlight glittered on a hard frost and I took my little dog to be groomed, and picked her up later, a fresh-smelling shorn lamb. How can one suppress natural joy? It was there every day in Bonnie’s behaviour: the irrepressible nowness of each second, the perpetual readiness for action and adventure, even if that was only chasing a leaf. Each parting would be marked by the reproachful eyes and the drooping tail, even though she had two big dogs to stay with. I would return from shopping, one hour later, to be met with such an effusion of joy, such a frolicsome licking, that there was nothing to do but laugh.

      On our anniversary, 23 February, J returned from presenting his usual Sunday television programme and presented me with his gift: a fine, chunky necklace of antique coral, since the thirty-fifth is the coral anniversary. In an imaginative touch he had also entered the bookmakers Joe Coral (for the first ever time) and placed a bet that Liverpool (my home team) would win their next away football match. He handed me the betting slip – and we laughed. That night we went to our favourite restaurant (not the grandest in Bath, but we ate out rarely, preferring to be in our blue and yellow kitchen) and my diary records: ‘We ate well and drank better and talked best of all. Perfection. As I say so often, I am so lucky.’

      There it is.

      Liverpool did not win.

      As I explained in the Introduction, writing a memoir is to offer just a slice of a life, a section of truth – like a sample taken by an archaeologist, full of priceless shards which remain, nevertheless, mere parts, fragments shored against ruin. Sometimes when my dog is snoozing on my knee I trace her ribs with my fingertips, each one in turn, imagining the fragility of her skeleton laid in earth. Yet nowadays the computer can reassemble a whole head from fragments of bone, an image of what once was (a centuries-dead face reconstructed) turning and turning in cyberspace to awe us. So my dog’s DNA will lie for ever in earth and so will mine and therefore the essence of what is true is unassailable.

      That is how I feel about that last anniversary.

      Whatever went before, and no matter what was to come after, what happened that day and is condensed into those few words, remains The Truth.

      Yet in the end only he and I know that truth; therefore what is presented to the world remains as shards.

      J was the Chairman of the Bath International Music Festival and worked tirelessly to promote it. It was he who had taken me to my first big classical concert at the Festival Hall in 1968, although in my late teens I did begin a small collection of budget classical LPs. When we met he was rather entertained that I could be so admiring of his piano playing, since I knew so little about technique. When I was 30 a friend took me for the first time to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and my tears at the end of La Bohème began a craze for opera which took me to some of the great opera houses of the world and led me to study the famous Kobbé guide so that I knew all the stories. Yet by 2003 I had grown tired of the form, and returned to jazz and blues as my cooking music of choice, as well as classic pop tracks (‘Leader of the Pack’ etc.), cajun, country, not to mention urban grooves like Fishbelly Black. Our musical tastes had slightly diverged, although we shared a love of chamber music.

      I remain unsure of exactly how it came about but this is what I know. Just after our anniversary J had been asked to interview Susan Chilcott where she lived, in a village called Blagdon, not far from Bath and Bristol. The article was to appear in the local evening paper, its purpose to promote the long-established Mid-Somerset Festival, invaluable for its encouragement of young performers each March. Later it was to amaze people that somebody as well known as J should agree to write for a local paper; at the time I hardly knew this was happening because I was planning a trip to Milwaukee as well as starting work on a public lecture at Bath University on the subject of pornography. Still, had it registered on my radar I would have attributed it to his good will. And I do know for certain that there was nothing suspicious about the meeting – on one level. Yet they had liked each other enormously at that dinner party four months before, and she told a mutual friend (I heard later) that she was excited to see him again.

      In her case, I should probably have felt the same. Over the years she must have sat next to any number of self-centred men at dinner – you know the ones – who never ask a question yet, puffed up with needy masculine ego, assume you will uncover every achievement and interest in their lives. Sitting next to J she would have dazzled but been enchanted too, since he, the consummate interviewer, would always be sure to find out what made the most humble person tick, let alone a beautiful soprano.

      He went to Blagdon that day.

      They fell in love.

      How can I know what happened? The novelist in me could write the scene and invest it with heady tension. But I never asked how it all came about, and speculation is irrelevant. What’s more, in the days following I noticed no change. Our life was hurtling on in its normal way, and I had no inkling of any undercurrent tugging my husband into deeper water. But just as one reads a novel, listens to music or looks at a great painting differently once you know the circumstances of its composition or future, so it is impossible to look back without seeing clouds mass over our farm, our life.

      So now I see everything we did after 23 February in the light of what was to come. Evenings with friends in London during which we argued about Iraq; me interviewing Ben Okri at the Bath Literature Festival; our children visiting for weekends to tell us how their jobs were progressing; one special evening when J and I ate caviar (a gift from a friend), blinis and sour cream helped down by shots of bison grass vodka, followed by pot-roasted pheasant and mashed potato with good red wine and then home-made rhubarb crumble and my own ice cream – all by candlelight in front of a crackling dining-room fire. Good times, all – yet now overshadowed.

      My own days were made gloomy by work on my lecture for Bath University. Despite the laisse-faire attitude of so many of my peers, my attitude to pornography and the insidious ‘pornogrification’ of society – a subject I’d visited often in journalism – has remained constant over the years: I detested it for reasons that went beyond feminism and perhaps might be called humanist. And now the cruel hydra of internet porn is indestructible. I investigated, read – and became depressed. The dark world I uncovered revolted me even more than I expected. With hindsight it was a mistake to take it on; the task made me withdrawn, and perhaps less observant of what was going on in J’s life than I might otherwise have been. A diary entry is very telling:

      20 March: The farm is bathed in sunlight but I proceeded to make myself miserable by doing a trawl of porn sites to see what can be accessed freely and easily. It was far, far worse than expected and as I went on I became so overwhelmed by the scale of the horror that my mouth was dry – and at one point I had to walk out into the garden for air. The birds were singing, the crocuses pale gold in sunlight, and sweet little Bonnie rushed about at my feet – all white, all innocence. Yet not even she could make me feel better. That other world was ‘in’ my computer, ‘in’ the very air that I had breathed in my study. I felt polluted. Everything spoiled by it. The violence, the hatred against women defies description. This wretched lecture is a terrible black burden pressing down on me.

      Meanwhile J was spending much time in London making extra programmes about the war in Iraq and besides writing the lecture I was planning a trip to Kenya for the charity Plan International, to visit my sponsored child and write about the trip for the London Evening Standard. I was also unwell; not in pain but afflicted by inconvenient female