Dog

Dog recurs in Edwina’s story less as a specific animal than as a measure of changing circumstances: first a subject of playful negotiation with Ollie Treadaway, then part of the soundscape surrounding his death, and finally a companion she can imagine welcoming in Cornwall. The contrast between her early fear and her later willingness to consider a dog marks a quiet change in how she pictures the life ahead.

An early difference between Edwina and Ollie

During their first Christmas alone together, Edwina and Ollie Treadaway discussed what sort of dog they might get. Their conversation unfolded over a burnt chicken and an abundance of bread sauce in the freshly painted, blood-red kitchen. They laughed at how little they knew about each other, with decades, they thought, in which to discover such things as whether they had had chicken pox and what kind of dog they wanted.

Ollie chose a lurcher at once; Edwina preferred a rabbit because she was scared of dogs. She noticed that Ollie seemed a little disappointed. The exchange makes the pet question a small but distinct difference between them, set against their certainty about having a family: Edwina was pregnant when they married in a registry office in Camberwell. A dog remained hypothetical, one of the ordinary shared decisions they imagined they would have years to make.

A dog in the scene of loss

At Easter, while Edwina and Ollie were at the beach with their infant twins and friends from art school, a dog barked among the sounds of the shore. The babies’ toes were dangled in the water; Charlie screamed, and later tried to eat sand during the picnic. Then a cricket ball flew across the sky, Ollie lay face down and did not move, and the scene changed abruptly from family outing to emergency.

The dog is not identified as belonging to anyone, and the account gives it no action beyond barking. Its brief place in the surrounding soundscape is therefore distinct from the imagined pet of Edwina and Ollie’s Christmas conversation. The contrast nevertheless connects the ordinary presence of animals in family life with the irreversibility of what follows: Ollie dies, and Edwina has to learn to drive as a widow, returning from the holiday with the twins in his rusty green Humber Hawk.

Imagining a dog in Cornwall

Much later, among paintings that make a room feel more like an abandoned museum than a family home, Edwina considers whether she might have a dog in Cornwall. She is less afraid than she used to be, and allows herself to picture a small one. Her thoughts settle on a black-and-tan dachshund, not the lurcher Ollie once wanted but an animal of her own imagining.

The choice immediately brings the house into the decision: a dachshund could not manage all the stairs without risking its little spine, so Edwina concludes that she would have to move. Dog thus becomes part of a concrete future plan, linking the prospect of Cornwall to leaving a house whose rooms feel empty and impractical. The possibility does not erase her earlier fear or the life she and Ollie expected to share; instead, it shows how that old conversation has changed shape, from a couple’s tentative plan into Edwina’s own imagined beginning.