Free A Dog's Life by Paul Bailey

smallest of small parts, carrying spears and understudying robustly healthy actors. In
Richard III
, in which I appeared as Lovel, Eric Porter played Buckingham with guileful authority. Each night in the wings, shortly before his first entrance, he would hitch up his robe and say something outrageous to make us all laugh. A favourite, much-repeated
cri de coeur
that Eric loved to deliver was the one expressed by a distraught brothel keeper alerting her maid-of-all-work to the prospect of custom: ‘Not a pisspot emptied, not an armpit washed, and the street full of Spanish sailors. Edie!’ Eric would lower his robe and march on to the stage with a retinue of nobles behind him struggling desperately to keep their faces straight.
    So the overwoked ‘Edie’, emptying the pots and supervising the scrubbing of armpits, gave her oft-shrieked name to the dummy. The inanimate Edie was photographed beside me in the autumn of 1986 for a magazine article to coincide with the publication of my novel
Gabriel’s Lament
. The young photographer, Chris, was amused by her presence in an otherwise conventionally furnished room. The photograph was shown in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery after Chris’s death on the
Marchioness
, the pleasure boat that sank in the Thames on 20 August 1989.
    Edie was the last of David’s possessions to go. Friends were grateful to receive his sewing machine, the corsets and bodices and an array of leftover fabrics. These were a pleasure to dispense. Only his clothes remained in the wardrobe. For a while I was unable even to touch them.
    Then, one morning, I returned from the park with the dog, and in an automatic daze I filled bags with shirts, jackets, sweaters, trousers, shoes. I carried them to the nearest charity shop, and on reaching home I tore up all the remaining pictures of him. I was staggered at the ease with which I performed what seemed like an act of ruthlessness. I wanted some part of our past to be obliterated.
    Edie is now resident in Bloomsbury, where her chest and waist are still giving service. What I have of David, apart from his undying presence, is an exquisite gold neck chain and the Swiss watch he bought for me when he was flush. Daily reminders; lasting gifts.

The Woman in Whites and the Man with a Mission
    I first noticed the would-be tennis player more than twenty years ago, when the last bloom of youth was beginning to fade from both our faces. She was always immaculately turned out in pristine, pleated, white shorts and a crisply ironed white blouse. Her white socks and running shoes were equally clean, with no traces of turf on them. She carried a racquet, a string bag containing tennis balls, and an elegant leather handbag. She sometimes wore a pink bow in her neat blonde hair.
    She had much to say to herself, of an earnest nature, to judge by the sharpness of her tone and the furrows on her forehead. I often wondered if she had two voices at her command – her own, and that of an unseen partner or contestant. Was this person on the other side of the net, perhaps, or playing alongside her in doubles? Here was a game that seemed to be in perpetual progress, with no foreseeable ending. Or so I fancied, imagining that a real match on a real court had been halted, and could only be resumed, again and again, in her mind. Her outfit might be the equivalent of Miss Havisham’s wedding dress, and her tennis match that famously cancelled marriage ceremony, with its uneaten cake, its absent groom.
    It was with the arrival of Circe that I came to realize that the woman, when kitted out for tennis, saw nothing beyond her immediate vision of the interrupted game. She was oblivious to the dog’s bark of welcome, and strode on, racquet at the ready, muttering darkly in one of her voices. Circe never failed to acknowledge her, and the woman never stopped to stroke, or talk to, the animal whose approval she had gained. How had she gained it? That was another mystery, and not