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him,’ he said, ‘to stand in for me when I wasn’t there. I don’t think anyone could have understood what I felt about him, not even them. And the idea of them being there and of their feelings having to take priority over mine was pretty unbearable,which I think,’ he said, ‘was more or less what she meant.
    â€˜Anyway,’ he went on, ‘Pilot had this big bed in the kitchen where he used to sleep and he was lying there stretched out on his side and so I went and got some cushions and I made him as comfortable as I could and I sat down next to him on the floor. He was panting very fast and he was looking at me with these huge, sad eyes and for a long time we just stayed there, looking at each other. I stroked his head and talked to him and he lay there panting and at around midnight I started to wonder how long this was going to go on for. I didn’t really know anything about the dying process – I’ve never been with someone when they died – and I realised I was beginning to feel impatient. It wasn’t even that I wanted him to get it over with for his own sake. I just wanted something to happen. For pretty much my whole adult life,’ he said, ‘I’ve been on my way somewhere or on my way back. I’ve never been in any situation without the prospect of it ending or of having to leave at a set time and even though that way of living was sometimes unpleasant, in a sense I’d become addicted to it. At the same time I was thinking about how people say you should put animals out of their misery, and I wondered whether what I ought to be doing was knocking him out or putting a pillow over his face and whether I was justtoo weak or scared. And it felt weirdly like Pilot would have known the answer to that question. In the end at about two in the morning I cracked and called the vet and he said that if I wanted him to, he would come straight over and give him an injection. So I asked him what would happen if we just left it as it was and he said he didn’t know – it could be hours or it could be days or even weeks. It’s up to you, he said. So I said to him, look, is the dog dying or not? And he said yes, of course he’s dying, but it’s a mysterious process and you can either wait it out or you can choose to bring it to an end. And then I started to think about Betsy playing in her concert the next day and about how tired I’d be and all the things I had to do and so I told him to come over. And he was there fifteen minutes later.’
    I asked him what happened in those fifteen minutes.
    â€˜Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. I was still sitting there and Pilot was still panting and gazing at me with these big eyes and I didn’t feel anything particularly, just that I was waiting for someone to come and get me out of this situation. It felt like it had become false, yet now,’ he said, ‘I would give literally anything to be back in it, to be back in that room in that precise moment of time.
    â€˜Eventually the vet came and it was very quick and he closed Pilot’s eyes and gave me a number to call in the morning for someone to come and take the bodyaway, and then he left. So there I was in the same room with the same dog, only now the dog was dead. I started to think about what my wife and kids would say if they knew, if they could see me sitting there, and I realised then that I had done something awful, something they would never have done, something so cowardly and unnatural and now so completely irreversible that it felt like I would never, ever get over it and that things would never be the same again. And in a way it was just to hide the evidence of what I’d done that I decided to bury him then and there. I went out to the shed in the dark and got a spade and then I chose a place in the garden and I started to dig. And all the time I was digging I couldn’t tell whether what I was doing