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about complaints. When the weather became suddenly autumnal, I stood for hours by their house, shutting them in one by one as they went in for breakfast, until they were all inside. I kept them in for a few days until the rain, for which I had waited with the anxiety of an Ethiopian farmer, washed away the consequences of summer.
    The murders continued, reducing the number of doves to single figures again, and stopped only when the neighbours, and cat, movedaway. The next ones brought with them several noisy, energetic children, as useful an anti-cat measure as any.
    During the time of the cat depredations, of finding and removing bodies, the period of my long and futile war, I wondered if it was worth continuing to keep the doves; but I thought about what we’d all miss if we didn’t have them: our pleasure in the way they looked, their presence in the garden as they lined up to bathe, wandered across the grass on damp mornings, pottered by the pond, the fanatic, obvious delight they took in flight, their luminous, stellar beauty. Their sounds had become part of our lives, their voices echoing down the sound-chambers of the chimneys, the way the movement of their wings outside altered the colours in the rooms. I considered my relationship with them too. It was, I decided, a rather one-sided matter but while the consternation, worry and appreciation were all mine, I didn’t expect or hope for it to be otherwise. The doves accepted my presence. They required nothing from me but food. What I required of them was what they did, lighting winter’s darkest days as flashes of white and silver against a slate or dun-coloured sky, on summer evenings, creeping up from gutter to slate to the apexes of the dormer windows on the roof as the sun lowered in the sky before heading for home, their lovely wings slap-slapping against the wind and the sky.

3
Le Jour de Gloire
    N ot long after we got the first doves, Rupert, the rat we had brought from London, died. We found somewhere to obtain two more. They were females, Japanese hooded rats of lissom white and charcoal beauty. We bought them not knowing that one was already pregnant, a circumstance that ensured that, for the next thousand days or so, the girls were rarely without a rat somewhere about their person, sitting on a shoulder, moving bumpily up the inside of a sleeve. We installed the offspring in strictly segregated quarters in what in other houses would be called the utility room but in ours is still called ‘the rat room’ in tribute to those rats, remembered still for their beauty, intelligence and charm, for their classical pantheon of names, Mars, Apollo, Venus, Aphrodite.
    For her twelfth birthday not long after, Bec asked for a bird of her own, one that would live in the house. The request seemed reasonable.What kind of bird? None of us knew. I went round pet shops, peered into cages, consulted all available works on pet birds. Finches were too small, too specialised, too unresponsive for the required purpose. Macaws and African greys were too large, too daunting, too expensive. I examined the credentials of the small grey bird with apricot cheeks I had seen in pet shops, a cockatiel, Nymphicus hollandicus , in spite of his name a bird of Australian origin, member of the cacatuidae, the cockatoo branch of the parrot family. The day before the birthday, the bird was bought. He was eleven weeks old. By comparison with the doves, he was tiny. If I’d been frightened of the doves, I was even more frightened of him, of his apparent fragility, of what I didn’t know about how to look after him. I became suddenly aware of the dangers of open windows, the possible consequences of shutting in, of shutting out, of standing on, sitting on, of wrapping inadvertently among the laundry; a neurotic’s invariable catalogue of the fears and anxieties of keeping anything, children too for that matter, although children, after a certain age, will speak, express their requirements,