During the pandemic, a lonely old man living in a ground-floor flat on my street in south London took in an orphaned fox. They watched daytime TV together on the sofa and snacked on bits of toast with Gentleman’s Relish. Then, one day, the man had to go in to hospital and never returned. At least, that was the backstory I imagined when a slightly ragged but curiously tame fox turned up at my back door.
I called him Reynard. My wife called him That Fox. As in: That Fox has pissed on my shoes again. That Fox has stolen all the eggs. That Fox is thinking about eating the baby.
I didn’t let the fox inside at first. In fact, I often shooed him away. I had recently bought some chickens for my eldest daughter. They were Malaysian Seramas, the world’s tiniest breed of chicken, and the fox seemed to love watching them as they flapped around their coop, too flustered to lay. I could never bring myself to seriously chase him off, however. He was pitiably small, with a gammy eye and a moth-eaten coat. Instead, I began feeding him.
Very soon, the fox forgot about the chickens. It helped, perhaps, that I raised up the coop on stilts, and that Reynard was now being offered easier prey: frankfurters, cubes of cheddar cheese and slices of ham. I loved to watch him eating raw eggs. He would pick one up in his mouth, gently crack it on the patio, then lap at the oozing liquid, his tongue darting in and out of the widening fissure like a bee sipping nectar.
In my many one-sided conversations with Reynard, I referred to him as my friend. But was he really? We were friendly, it was true. Intimate, even. He ate out of my hand. Sometimes, he licked my fingers. I welcomed him into my home, introduced him to my children. The four-year-old, he looked at with fear. The baby, with a different expression entirely.
It was around this time that we had a young couple from Ukraine staying on the sofa bed in our living room. They were so quiet, I barely knew they were there. Except for one night, when I was roused by the sound of crashing and raised voices. In the morning, I learned that Reynard had snuck in through an open window and curled up in bed between them. On being discovered, he had dashed into the kitchen, snatched a box of eggs from the counter, then leapt back out of the window. “I know it wasn’t a dream,” the young man told me. “The smell is still there.”
Whenever I fried meat, Reynard would be sure to appear, bringing to mind that mythic image of the first dogs – wolves – begging for scraps from ancient man’s hunt. Reynard prowled the threshold between wild and tame, pet and pest. He wanted to be fed and to snuggle. But he wouldn’t listen when I told him the kitchen was no toilet, and I never quite trusted him with the baby.
It was my wife who discovered Reynard padding upstairs towards the room where the baby was taking her nap. She shouted and chased him away. I doubt he was really thinking of tucking in. Foxes prefer mice. But after that, I stopped letting him inside, and things were never the same.
The last time I saw Reynard was out in the street. I called to him, as friends do, but he sauntered by as if I was nobody at all.