My Hundred Lovers Read Online Free Page B

the more he believed your toes and legs to be a moveable entertainment designed especially for him. Loose in his skin, a soft, downy armful, a face sweeter than a baby’s, but soon a digger of holes to China, kidnapper of socks, chewer of shoes. Named by my mother for Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind —the bookish Rhett and not the Hollywood actor, Clark Gable.
    â€˜What’s the difference?’ I asked when I was sixteen, and Rhett was on his last legs.
    â€˜In my mind Rhett Butler in the book doesn’t look a thing like Clark Gable,’ my mother said.
    â€˜Does he look like a chocolate labrador?’ I asked.
    She gave me a withering look. ‘You are a very literal-minded girl, Deborah,’ she said. ‘You have no imagination.’
    This was one of her favourite put-downs. She said it about my deflowerer, Jonathan Jamieson, he of the wounded, dark-lashed brown eyes and the caramel-coloured skin, the singer of songs, the first boy who loved me.
    The dog had a straight, powerful tail, thick at the base and slightly tapered at the end so that when wet (he loved to swim) it resembled the tail of an otter. Wet, the whole of Rhett resembled an otter or a seal, the plump meat of his dark back and stomach glisteningly revealed. There was something liquid about him in general, too, in the swift, effortless way he moved in space, in his remarkably moist chestnut-coloured eyes, full of sympathy and helpless love. He readily proffered the wet snout of friendship, and he had a knack for endless fluid patience, for standing still for hours while frilly bonnets were wrapped around his head and skirts draped across his back.
    A vocal dog, given to loud theatrical yawns, and groans of erotic pleasure when stroked. Neither before nor since have I come across a dog who so clearly signalled his joy: when I held Rhett against the length of my body, when I was still so small that the span of a warm outstretched dog from tail to snout was greater than my own, he emitted long, satisfied groans in my ear. I felt his heartbeat, lighter and faster than a human’s, as if all his life was being used up more quickly. I lay with him in my arms on the carpet or on the grass, and he gave out great, hot sighs.

    My father owned a travel agency, which meant our family got cheap international airfares. This was in the early days of jets, when flying was thrilling and strange, an exclusive privilege granted to the rich and the exotic, and we were frequent flyers before the term was invented. (Travel, too, gave my father the chance to fly in and out of our lives like a man on a magic carpet.) When we flew away, to Disneyland or Fiji or New York, Rhett moved to a kennel. It was always the same kennel, Waggin’ Tails, and somehow Rhett always knew the moment he was put in the car that he was being packed off. All the way to Waggin’ Tails he howled, a head-thrown-back, deep-throated whine of misery. We tried everything: furtively packing his water and food bowls in the car in the dead of the night before, investigating new and more labyrinthine ways of negotiating the streets to the kennel door. How did he know we weren’t going to the beach or to the national park for a picnic? How did he know he was on his way to incarceration at Waggin’ Tails and the enforced friendships of other dogs, to long, sad days of separation from everyone he loved?
    At the kennel car park we had to wrestle him out of the car. My brother Paul and I attempted to take one end and my father the other but it always ended in a wild scramble of nails, hair and teeth and my father picking up Rhett and carrying him in. When Rhett was set on the floor of Waggin’ Tails’ reception area, his last-ditch attempt was to put on the brakes, to concentrate the full force of his muscular twenty-five-kilo body into his stiff, unmoving legs. We had to drag him down the corridor, his four legs comically extended like a dog in a cartoon,