Free Bethany by Anita Mason Page A

it. I longed for Simon to make the single lucid statement that would pull all these wild fragments into their rightful places, but Simon said nothing. He listened. After a while I realised that he was listening, not to the words, but to the voices.
    Alex, gently, patiently, was trying to weave sense out of it. She seemed to be succeeding, if the brightness of the smiles they exchanged was any guide, but I was too tired to judge. I knew that Alex often understood people’s meaning when I did not, because I was trained to analyse words and that faculty is no use when you are listening to someone who does not use words in the proper way; whereas Alex, free of my assumption that a word must mean something, was intuitively open to the thought struggling to get out behind the words. But I also knew that Alex found Pete almost as baffling as I did. If she was making anything out of his utterances this evening it must be by the inspiration of charity.
    At last she stood up, and we all said goodnight. I followed her out of the room, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Two steps behind her, I saw her fling herself with a cry on to Esther’s blanket, and was just in time to see the dog’s sad, grateful eyes close at the end of the long, long wait.
    We buried her next morning in the spot where she had liked to sit, looking over the valley. One imagines that animals do notappreciate a view, but Esther would sit for hours, apparently rapt, gazing into the distance from that spot. I wept into the grave as I dug it, remembering her patience, and the times I had been bad-tempered with her. I wept for her pain and my callousness and Alex’s sadness. For Esther had been Alex’s dog, and when Esther was dying Alex had not been there. She had been downstairs, trying to help Pete make sense of himself.
    I felt Alex’s anguish more keenly than I did my own. She must have felt the same, because she came round the corner of the house and comforted me. Together we laid Esther, now cold and stiff, in the irregular pit I had dug and hacked, declining help, out of the stony soil. Together we heaped the earth and shale over her in a low mound and walked away.
    As we went back to the house we found Simon sitting alone on the patio steps. There seemed something odd about him: his face was paler, it lacked its usual radiance. I sat down by him. He asked if he could help me. I said no. He had already asked me the same question several times and I had given him the same answer. We sat without speaking for a few minutes and I became aware that tears were trickling down my face again.
    â€˜Why are you crying?’ asked Simon.
    I started to answer, broke into a sob, and covered my face with my hands. After a while I said through my tears, ‘Esther is dead and I loved her.’
    Simon waited for me to control myself. Then he said quietly, ‘No you didn’t.’
    I registered a dull shock, more of bewilderment than pain. There was nothing I wanted to say. After about a minute I got up and went in search of Alex.
    We decided to go into the city. It was Saturday; we could do some shopping, have coffee in our usual coffee shop, and perhaps call on Manuela. It would cheer us up, and get us out of the house. We both felt a need to be away from the house, which was pervaded that morning by an unhappiness which seemed to have no connection with Esther’s death. Pete andCoral had had a disagreement and were making silent but audible statements about it, Coral from the bedroom and Pete from the toolshed; Simon was still sitting on the steps. In the kitchen one of the children was crying. We saw no point in adding our own unhappiness to the common pool. We told Dao we would be out for lunch, and went.
    The city was stifling, and the heat, combined with the heavy-headed feeling that was the aftermath of tears, soon gave me a bad headache. I had a sense of dislocation from reality, as if I had walked into the middle of a film where