9.5 Lockdown

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Frog was in bed with a high temperature. He’d collapsed with uncontrollable shivering after a walk by the sea several days earlier and been ill ever since, not eating and hardly speaking. He was downstairs in the spare room so I was able to tiptoe in and out regularly seeing how he was but keeping my distance so as not to catch myself whatever he was suffering from. Flu, I presumed.
    On the Monday I planned to drop Ellie off at the dog-minder where she went once a week and played with a gang of other dogs, coming back exhausted. It gave me a break and kept her connected to other dogs. Actually, she didn’t play with the other dogs, she led them. The dog-minder would sigh with relief when Ellie arrived saying, ‘Ah, now at least the dogs will be under control.’ Usually Frog took her on his way to work and fetched her on his way home but whenever I fetched her I watched Ellie arrive back at the compound first, with all the other dogs trotting meekly behind her. What a monster! She was now ten years old but as fit and bossy as ever.
 

 

 At the dog-minder: Ellie and friends. (She is in the front on the left.)

I went in to see Frog before I left. He had the radio on so I presumed he was feeling a little better.
    ‘Just off to the dog-minder,’ I said.
    Frog opened his eyes.
    ‘Oh,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t think that’ll be possible. We’re in lockdown.’
    ‘Lockdown!’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
     I’d heard the word recently but because I hadn’t been listening to the news – I relied on Frog for that – I didn’t know exactly what it meant.
    Frog tried to explain.
 
In a temper I put my boots and coat on and prepared to take Ellie out for a walk round home instead. How dare they restrict us, I thought.
    As I traversed the field behind the house a text pinged on to my phone.
    ‘You must stay at home,’ it said. ‘You must not go out . . .’
    I couldn’t believe it. How did they know my number? How did they know I was going out for a walk? Who was ‘they’?
    What sort of a country did we live in? Had it turned into a police state?
    In rebellion at the text – no way was I going without my daily dose of solitude and nature - I spent several hours wandering the hill, peeing in my secret wood, and enjoying the glorious spring sunshine (it was March).
    When I got home Frog was definitely more alert, but he looked worried.
    ‘I think I’ve got some sort of infection,’ he said. ‘I can’t pee properly and it hurts.’
    ‘How did you get that?’ I asked, slightly unsympathetically.
    I’d been in a temper with him since the walk when he’d completely ignored something I’d said, even though I realised now it was because he was feeling so dreadful. What a horrible person I was.
    ‘I haven’t been drinking,’ he said.
    Oh my God. That was definitely my fault. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should have been checking up on that. I wasn’t much of a nursemaid, was I?
    He managed to produce a urine sample and I raced to the A & E department of our local hospital. They were horrified to see me and kept telling me to keep my distance but eventually I saw a lovely doctor who spent about an hour talking to me, telephoning Frog who was able just about able to talk to her, and warning me that if he stopped peeing completely it was an emergency and I should get him treatment immediately.
    I went home with a course of antibiotics for him.
 
So that was the start of our lockdown experience.
    The rest of it passed more or less like our normal life. I took the dog for walks, Frog and I worked together in the garden. I talked to my neighbours when I was out, either on the footpaths or over their garden gates, and we swapped books. I sewed and read and swam in the little pool we were lucky enough to have. I practised yoga on the lawn.
    The weather was extraordinary, with blazing sunshine day after day, the sky a deeper blue than I’d ever seen it in this country before. The silence buzzed. Instead of car exhaust when I stepped outside of a morning, I was greeted with sweetness and the sort of freshness you normally only found by the sea.
    Frog chafed a little as he loved shopping and going out so when we heard on the local news – where there’d been an ongoing debate as to whether or not you could drive to find a place to walk – that so long as your walk was longer than your drive it was OK.
    I took that to mean lengths of time (even though I realise now that they probably meant miles) so Frog and I took to venturing out occasionally to all our favourite places - the sea, the canal, the moors – as well as exploring new places because we had the time. It was idyllic as there was no one else about.
    The only downside as far as Frog was concerned was the fact that we couldn’t go to a pub or café but had to take a picnic instead. I found some vegan sausage rolls in Sainsbury’s however and tempted him with those.
    ‘Very nice,’ he pronounced them. ‘Almost as good as Ma’s.’
 
Another downside of our outings was Frog’s attacks of chest pain. These could be quite severe and necessitated him lying on the ground for half an hour or so, looking grey. But we didn’t pay too much attention to them – or at least I didn’t. He’d been spraying foam into the gap between the garage walls and its roof because he was rebuilding his Mini kit car in there and needed the place watertight. This had meant a lot of stretching up and so the pain, we thought, was probably muscular.
    Or at least, that was what Frog said. But whether it was what he believed was another matter.
    I began to have the strange sensation that he was keeping something from me. Being a Piscean, he could be a slippery customer, not always telling me whole truths, and I knew of course from the time of Sam that he could lie outright.
 
During the winter lockdown which wasn’t quite so nice, muddy walks being the only entertainment available, I would go down to his semi-underground den where he spent hours playing patience on his computer while listening to music, and he would look at me with wide open eyes, the picture of innocence.
    Not.
    ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I would plead. ‘You’re lying to me.’
    I knew that face so well and I was terrified of any untruth coming between us, of a repetition of the Sam years.
    ‘Nothing!’ he would protest. ‘I’m not.’
   But then as well as wide-eyed he would look worried, and sad, and a bit lost.

To be continued