We Bought An Old Officers' House And The Dog Salutes The Stairs

The house was married quarters, sold off in the nineties. It is ordinary: pebbledash, a garage, a garden my wife has opinions about.

Our dog is a collie cross with a brain the size of a walnut and a work ethic that shames me.

Every evening at about six, she goes and sits at the bottom of the stairs, facing the fourth step, ears up, tail flat on the floor. Not wagging. Still.

She does it for perhaps two minutes, and then she gets up, shakes herself, and goes and lies down.

My wife calls it "the salute", which started as a joke and stopped being one.

There is nothing there. We have looked. We have stood on the fourth step, sat on it, taken photographs of it, and had a plumber accidentally spend an afternoon working two feet from it while we watched him like lunatics.

Nothing.

The previous owners had it for eleven years. I found them, through the estate agent, because I am the kind of man who finds people, and I wrote a very careful letter that I rewrote four times so as not to sound insane.

She wrote back. She is in her seventies. She said, and I am quoting:

"Yes. Our spaniel did it too. Six o'clock. We assumed it was the pipes and then we assumed it was nothing and then we stopped assuming and got on with our lives. The man before us was army, and he died in the house, and I was told — not by anybody official — that he came home at six every day of his life."

That is all she wrote. One paragraph. Then two pages about the boiler, which was very useful.

I do not know what my dog sees. I know she is not frightened, and I know she is not playing, and I know that whatever it is, she thinks it is worth standing up for.

At six o'clock tonight I will be in the kitchen, and she will go and sit at the bottom of the stairs, and I will say, quietly, so my wife does not hear me, "Evening, sir."

Because it costs nothing. And because I would want somebody to say it to me.