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moments of grace. One of the thingshe’d seen was a giant wooden crate in which the artist had reconstructed his own room in its life-sized entirety. Everything was there – furniture, clothes, typewriter, piles of paper and books lying open on the desk, dirty coffee cups – but it had been inverted so that the floor was the ceiling and the whole room was upside down. My son had been particularly struck by this upside-down room, which you entered through a small doorway in the crate, and had spent a long time inside it. Often, I said, in the years afterwards, I would remember his description of it and imagine him sitting there, in a world that contains all the same elements but is the other way round from how you expect it to be.
    The man was listening with an expression of mild puzzlement on his face.
    â€˜And did he go on to become an artist?’ he said, as though that could be the only explanation for my telling him these things.
    He would be going to university in the autumn, I said, to study art history.
    â€˜Oh, okay,’ he said, nodding his head.
    His own son, he said, was the academic type, far more so than Betsy. He wanted to be a vet. He kept all sorts of weird animals in his room: a chinchilla, a snake, a pair of rats. They had a friend who was a vet and his son spent most of his weekends there, at thesurgery. It was his son, in fact, who had noticed there was something wrong with Pilot. The dog had been very quiet and subdued for the past couple of weeks. They had put it down to his age, but then one evening his son was fondling Pilot and noticed a swelling in his side. A couple of days later, when his wife was out and the children were at school, he took Pilot to his vet friend, not really thinking anything of it. The vet examined him and said that Pilot had cancer.
    He paused and looked past me out of the window again.
    â€˜I didn’t really know dogs could have cancer,’ he said. ‘I’d never thought about how Pilot would die. I asked whether he could operate and he said there was no point – it was too far gone. So he gave him some drugs for the pain and I drove him home again. All the way home,’ he said, ‘I kept seeing Pilot as he was when he was young and strong and powerful. I thought about all the years he had been here while I was away for weeks at a time, and the fact that he was fading now that I had retired seemed significant somehow. Most of all I dreaded telling the others, because to be honest I’m not sure they wouldn’t rather have had Pilot than me. I started to feel I had upset everything by coming home. They had all seemed so happy when I wasn’t there, and now my wife and I were arguing all the time and the kids were shoutingand slamming doors and to top it all,’ he said, ‘I’d caused the dog to get ill, when he’d never shown a second of weakness his whole life. Anyway,’ he said, ‘I did tell them, though admittedly I made it sound less serious than it was. We had arranged for him to go to kennels while we were abroad but I knew he wouldn’t make it, so I told them to go on without me. They were pretty suspicious. They made me promise to phone them if he got worse so that they could come back. They even called that evening from the hotel and made me swear I wouldn’t let Pilot die while they were away. I said he was okay and that it was just a cold or something and that he’d probably be fine in the morning.’ He paused and looked at me sideways. ‘I didn’t even tell my wife.’
    I asked him why not and he paused again.
    â€˜When she was giving birth to the kids she didn’t want me to be there,’ he said. ‘I remember her saying she wouldn’t be able to handle the pain if I was in the room. She had to do it on her own. They loved Pilot,’ he said, ‘but it was me who had trained him and disciplined him and made him what he was. In a sense I created