On her return she had discovered that Ben’s owner had left but that Ben was still there, with a rather bemused Mrs Latham, who’d announced breathlessly to her that she was now Ben’s new owner.
In vain had Georgia gently tried to dissuade her, pointing out all the problems she was likely to encounter with such a big dog in her small, pretty town house. Mrs Latham, however, had proved unexpectedly resistant to her arguments. Ben was now hers.
And so Ben had gone to live with Mrs Latham and Ginger, and a more indulged, pampered pair of pets, everyone at the surgery agreed, it would have been hard to find.
Ben, despite all Mrs Latham’s attempts to ‘train’ him, was still regularly disrupting the weekly training class the surgery organised for dog owners.
‘The problem is that Mrs Latham simply can’t bring herself to be firm with Ben and show him who’s boss,’ Jenny had complained wryly after Ben had totally disrupted her own training session.
‘He’s a lovely dog but he needs a firm hand. As a breed, setters are scatty for the first two years. They need exercise and space and an owner who knows how to handle them. Mrs Latham loves him but she’s sixty-two, and before Ben’s eruption into her life she lived for her weekly bridge sessions.’
Helen had giggled. ‘Has she told you about when she took Ben with her and apparently he was lying under the table and then got up at the wrong moment and sent it and the cards flying? He’s banned from going now...’
Georgia, whose heart was just as tender as Mrs Latham’s, had sighed.
‘It’s a shame, because he’s such a lovely dog.’
‘Try telling yourself that after you’ve taken a class with him in it,’ Helen had advised her.
‘I already have,’ Georgia had told her, ‘and I know just what you mean, but there’s no malice in him; he’s just—’
‘He’s just not the dog for a woman with Mrs Latham’s lifestyle,’ Helen had interrupted her.
It was true. Mrs Latham lived virtually in the centre of their small market town which, although quiet by modern-day standards, and surrounded by the farmland whose needs it serviced, was still no place for a dog who needed long, long country walks and a physically energetic owner.
Predictably, perhaps, Ben’s original owner had proved impossible to trace—a ‘visitor’ unknown at the surgery. They had no record of either her or Ben.
They had all tried to suggest to Mrs Latham that a new owner ought to be found for Ben, but still she’d refused to be swayed.
‘He’s already been abandoned once,’ she had told Helen firmly. ‘So traumatic for him, poor boy. Why, when he first came to me he was so frightened of being left that he insisted on sitting on my sofa right up next to me. So sweet...’
Helen had rolled her eyes at the others as she’d related this piece of canine emotional manipulation.
‘So sweet,’ she had scoffed. ‘That dog knows when he’s on to a good thing. Talk about spoiled...’
Smiling to herself now, Georgia picked up her post. A small, pretty girl with dark red curls and huge violet-blue eyes wide-spaced in a creamy-skinned, delicately small-boned face, she had wanted to be a vet ever since she could remember.
Getting this job in such a busy, prestigious practice and within a two-hour drive of her parents’ home had been ideal, and she had soon settled down in the small flat she’d bought and begun to make new friends amongst her colleagues.