“You were caught red-handed,” Mr. Swift said mildly. “Isn’t that proof of your guilt?”
“I wasn’t red-handed,” Augustus said indignantly. “And, anyway, it was green paint. M’lud,” he added solemnly.
“Oh, please,” Mrs. Swift murmured. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“How can I be givin’ you a headache?” he asked, hurt by this further accusation. “To give you a headache I’d have to have a headache in the first place. You can’t give something you don’t have. And I don’t have a headache. Ergo,” he said grandly, pulling the word from some distant corner of learning, “I cannot have given it to you.” Mrs. Swift’s headache was not improved by this barrage of reason. She flapped her hand at her son as if trying to get rid of a particularly annoying fly and returned to her darning. “Sometimes,” she murmured, “I wonder what I did to offend the gods.”
Augustus, on the other hand, felt rather pleased with himself. He was putting up a spirited defence. He was an innocent man in the dock, fighting for his rights. His sister, Phyllis, a “bluestocking,” according to their mother, was always soapboxing about “the rights of the common man.” And here I am, Augustus thought, they don’t come more common than me. “I have rights, you know,” he said stoutly. “I have been sorely used,” he added grandly. He had heard his brother Lionel (“a prig,” according to Phyllis) say this over some stupid pash he had on a girl.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” his father said. “You’re not Edmond Dantès.”
“Who?”
“You never seem to think,” his father said. “Anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen what would happen.”
“What I was thinkin’ was that I just wanted to see what was on the other side,” Augustus said.
“Ah, how many times has that sentence been uttered as a prelude to disaster, I wonder?” Mr. Swift said to no one in particular.
“And what was on the other side?” Mrs. Swift asked, unable to stifle her curiosity.
“Well,” Augustus said, moving a pear drop from one cheek to the other to give himself time to consider.
“Was it, by any chance, Mrs. Brewster’s wig?” Mr. Swift asked in his courtroom voice, the one that implied it already knew the answer.
“How was I s’posed to know she wore a wig? It could have been any ol’ wig! Just a wig lyin’ around. And how was I to know that Mrs. Brewster was bald? You wear a wig and you’re not bald.”
“In court. I wear a wig in court,” an exasperated Mr. Swift said.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea where the dog took the wig?” Mrs. Swift asked her son.
Jock, yapping with excitement and a little tainted with the aforesaid green paint, chose that moment to enter the room, and Mrs. Swift—
Oh ye gods,” Teddy groaned, dropping the book to the floor.
Izzie had stolen his life. How could she? (The paint incident really hadn’t been his fault.) She had taken his life and twisted it and turned him into a quite different boy, a stupid boy, having stupid adventures. With a stupid, stupid, stupid dog—a Westie, with a sketchy face and black bead eyes. The book had pictures, cartoony things that made everything so much worse. Augustus himself was a scuffed, badly behaved schoolboy, his cap glued permanently to the back of his head and a cowlick of hair in his eyes and a catapult hanging out of his pocket. The book had green card covers and gold lettering and on the front it said The Adventures of Augustus by Delphie Fox, which, apparently, was Izzie’s “pen-name.” Inside it was inscribed “To my nephew, Teddy. My own darling Augustus.” What rot.
More than anything it was the Westie that had upset him. It wasn’t just the wrong dog but it reminded him of his awful loss, of Trixie, who had died just before Christmas. It had never struck Teddy that she would die before him so he had suffered as much from disbelief as grief. When he came home from his first term at boarding school he found her gone, buried alongside Bosun beneath the apple trees.
“We tried to keep her going until you got here, old chap,” Hugh said, “but she just couldn’t hang on.”
Teddy thought he would never get over this bereavement, and perhaps he never did, but a few weeks after the publication of The Adventures of Augustus Izzie turned up with another gift, a tiny Westie puppy with the name “Jock” engraved on his expensive collar. Teddy tried very hard not to like him as it would be not only a betrayal of his love for Trixie but a sign of his acceptance of the whole horrible fictionalization of his life. It was an impossible task, of course, and the little dog had soon burrowed its way deep into the caverns of his heart.
Augustus, however, would plague him one way or another for the rest of his life.