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head where she hit a stone as she fell. Honestly,’ he said, ‘she looked like she was dead. Pilot had taken off into the woods by this point and the woman was so worried about Betsy that she forgot about shooting the dog and helped me carry her to the car and came with us all the way to the hospital. Betsy was fine, of course.’
    He laughed grimly and shook his head.
    I asked him what happened to the dog.
    â€˜Oh, he came back that night,’ he said. ‘I heard him at the door and when I opened it he didn’t come in but just stood there outside looking at me. He was absolutely filthy and covered in blood and he knew what was coming to him. He expected it. I hated beating him though,’ he said sadly. ‘I only had to do it two or three times in his life. We both knew he couldn’t have been what he was without it. But Betsy refused to accept what he had done. She wouldn’t touch him or speak to him for weeks. She wouldn’t speak to me either. She just didn’t get it at all. I said to her, you know, you don’t train a dog by sulking and being in a mood with him. You’ll just make himsly and dishonest. You know, I said to her, the reason you feel safe when I’m not here is because you know that if anyone tried to hurt any of you, Pilot would do to them what he did to that deer. He might sit on the sofa with you and bring you things and lie next to you on the bed when you’re ill, but when someone he doesn’t know knocks at the door he’s ready to kill them if need be. He’s an animal, I said, and he needs to be disciplined, but when you impose your sensitivities on him you interfere with his nature.’
    He was silent for a while, his chin lifted, staring down the grey aisle where the air hostess was pushing her trolley through the sea of people. She turned to left and right, bending from the waist across the rows, the lifted corners of her eyes and mouth so sharply delineated that they almost seemed to have been intricately carved out of the smooth oval of her head. Her automatic movements were hypnotising and the man appeared to go into a kind of daze watching her. After a while his head began to nod forward until it fell with such a jolt that he sat up again.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he said.
    He rubbed his face energetically, and after staring past me out of the window for a while and breathing deeply through his nose, he asked me whether I had ever been to this part of Europe before.
    I told him I had gone there only once, years ago,with my son. He was finding life difficult at the time, I said, and I had thought a trip away would be good for him. But then at the last minute I had decided to take another boy along too, the son of a friend of mine. My friend was ill and needed to go to hospital and so I thought it would help her. The two boys didn’t get on very well, I said, and my friend’s son needed a lot of attention, so while my own son might have expected to be my focus for a few days, in the end it didn’t work out like that. There was an exhibition I very much wanted to see and so one morning I persuaded the two of them to come with me to the gallery. I had thought we could walk there but I had judged the distances wrongly and we ended up walking for miles along a sort of motorway in the pouring rain. It turned out my friend’s son never went to galleries and wasn’t interested in art, and he began to misbehave, so that the attendants had to reprimand him and eventually asked him to leave. In the end I had to sit with him in the café in our wet clothes while my son went to the exhibition on his own. He was gone for about an hour, I said, and when he came back he described everything he’d seen for me. I didn’t know, I said, whether it was ever possible to ascribe a final value to the experience of parenthood, to ever see it in its totality, but that time we spent in the café while he talked was one of its