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Mrs Higgens kept the whole thing together, cooking and
cleaning, and of course it’s a great thing to be among talented
people, but all the hurly-burly of their extravagant natures
and their sexual lives and everything appeared to quite
exhaust Mrs Higgens. Just thinking about what went on in
their minds made her want to go for a lie down. Of course
she wasn’t scared to have her say and when she lifted me
onto the table I spied immediate evidence of her tendency to
complain: her wee brown diary sitting there open and quite
proud of itself. It was Mrs Higgens who gave me sympathy
for the household gods; here she was, this experienced rinser
of garments, this Helen of failed cakes, who might have
ruined her eyes during forty years of enabling those artists
to be free. She sat down, wiped the rim of her teacup, and
lifted the book. On the inside cover it said, ‘Grace Higgens,
Charleston, Firle, Nr. Lewes’. As she flicked through the
pages she was living all that life over again, what wasn’t there
as much as what was.* The laughter coming from the dining
room seemed an adequate accompaniment to the smell of
cinnamon drifting over the kitchen.
* As a diarist, Mrs Higgens was a minimalist. Feb. 5: ‘Bought cream buns with real cream’
Mrs Higgens wasn’t the best cook in the world. She always
worked out of a box of clippings – things she’d torn out of The Times or the Daily Express, pages now discoloured, covered in powdered egg, ground spices, dust. (It was the same box she
had used to hold the gas masks during the War.) Mrs Bell was
forever rolling her eyes at the desperate chore of having to
pretend to Grace her dinners were edible. For my own part,
however, she was the best feeder of dogs I ever encountered,
and I thought of her kitchen long after I’d succumbed to the
American way of life.
A supreme effort was being made in the kitchen that
day, not for their neighbour Cyril Connolly, a frequent and
frequently complaining guest at Charleston, but for Mrs
Gurdin, the dog-loving lady from America, a noted Russian
émigré and mother of the film star Natalie Wood. I never fully processed the connection, but I think it was that nice
writer Mr Isherwood who put them all in touch, knowing from Mr Spender that the Bells’housekeepers bought and sold puppies. Mrs Gurdin, not without grandeur, liked to say that the world’s dogs were her life’s work and her great hobby.
I passed through the dining room, where Mrs Bell was
talking quietly. ‘Quentin used to say it was odd how Virginia
wanted to know what dogs were feeling. But she wanted
to know what everyone was feeling. Do you remember
Pinker?’
‘The Sackville hound?’ said Connolly. ‘I remember it only too well. It had Vita’s face. I’m sure Virginia’s little novel Flush was a joke on Lytton. All those eminent Victorians, and here was the little Browning spaniel, the most eminent of all.’
lsquo;Pinker is buried in the orchard at Rodmell,’ said Vanessa, gently touching her wrists in turn, as if dabbing perfume.
When it comes to pedigree, each dog worth his mutton
is a font of expertise. We Maltese – we bichon maltais, the
Roman Ladies’ Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion
dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to
be the aristocrats of the canine world. A great relative of
mine was famous as the boon companion to Mary, Queen of
Scots; another one gained the ravenous affections of Marie
Antoinette. We have known philosophers and tyrants,
dipped the pink of our noses in the ink of learning and the
blood of battle, and Publius, the Roman governor of Malta,
having given house to my distant relative Issa, had a portrait
painted of the little dog that is said to have been more lifelike
than life itself. That is our habit and also our creed. Once I
came to know myself, to know that my relatives in art are
no smaller than the story of my own cells, I understood at
once that I must be a scion of that contemplative muse,
the little dog in Vittore Carpaccio’s Vision of St. Augustine.
Nothing is lost on the littlest of all dogs. We served inthe
heroic narratives of the Mediterranean, in the Holy Wars,
we sat on the laps of evil-doers and saints, were passed by
marriage across the princes of Europe to lick the tragic boots
of Charles Edward Stuart, producing, in our turn, heirs out of
the houses of Eduardo Pasquini and the Contessa di Vaglio,
the Conte Anselmo Bernardo de Pescara and the Principessa
de Palestrina. After princes and pups alike were murdered by
Hanoverian agents, the surviving brother prince and brother
pups married into the house of Dalvray and later into the
house of Claude Philippe Vandenbosch de Monpertigen
and the Comtesse de Lannoy. From there, by ferry, a son
of that union, married to Germaine Elize Segers de la Tour
d’Auvergne, came to Leith with a litter of pups that included
my ancestor Muzzy. In good time Muzzy met a full Maltese
bitch against the park railings on Heriot Row, right across
from the house of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose cousin
Noona once patted them both.* It was some of their noble
grandpups who were taken from Edinburgh to the Highlands,
where the next generations grew up in a castellated mansion
at the end of an avenue of silver firs.
Excerpted from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan. Copyright © 2010 by Andrew O'Hagan. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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