Bethany by Anita Mason

Even so, looking around the room, I wasable to pick out half a dozen books I had never liked, and dump them on the rubbish pile.
    As room after room emerged in fresh guise it sometimes became appropriate to re-name them. The first one to be christened was the large front room in which we held our meetings and often sat and talked in the evening. It was a splendid, spacious room with a lovely curved wall in which was set a french window looking over the valley. Alex and I had always called it simply ‘the front room’. Simon asked for suggestions for a new name.
    â€˜I suppose we could call it anything,’ I said. ‘Well, almost anything. I don’t think we could call it the parlour.’
    Simon thought for a moment. He said, ‘I propose that we call it the parlour.’
    I looked quickly at him. No, it was not a rebuke.
    â€˜The word means a place where people talk,’ he explained to the others.
    â€˜It has connotations of lace curtains, and parrots, and antimacassars, and long Sunday afternoons when nobody talks to anybody,’ I objected.
    â€˜Then,’ said Simon, ‘we shall change the connotations of the word “parlour”.’
    After a few days it seemed remarkable that we had ever called it anything else.
    The house was physically renewed, the people in it had been spiritually renewed. There burned in all of us a desire to renew the world. Perhaps subconsciously we felt there was an element missing. It was supplied by Alex.
    One evening after supper Alex made reference to some recent prophecy that the industrialised world was heading for imminent disaster. 1975 would be remembered as the last summer of peace, she said. Alex was fond of quoting such prophecies, which ranged from economic collapse to global extinction, and as the years passed and the dates fixed for these catastrophes elapsed without incident her faith in them was by no means diminished. I connected this faith with her refusal toaccept the Darwinian theory of evolution and her obstinate belief that the ancient history of the world had been concocted by a conspiracy of academics on the basis of a few mis-dated fossils. I dismissed the whole ragbag as the errancy of an undisciplined mind which had never troubled to read a serious history book, and from time to time we would quarrel bitterly over some obscure matter of archaeology far beyond the competence of either of us to determine, while I raged at her denial of reason, and she raged at my contempt.
    In the past few weeks I had come to accept that I had been wrong in many things, and I had certainly never listened to Alex’s wilder ideas with as much courtesy and open-mindedness as I did now. Nonetheless I was surprised by the alacrity with which Simon took up the point – almost as if he had been waiting for it.
    â€˜The industrialised world is coming to an end,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes, of course. One sees it everywhere. There is a kind of madness. But it is not only the developed countries, is it?’
    He looked at Dao, and their eyes communicated a shared vision: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. The fleeing peasants, the mutilated children, the chaos, the cruelty, the pervasive evil that was the same, whatever its guise, in every country. The evil that lived like a tapeworm in the mind of man.
    â€˜It is the whole world,’ said Simon. ‘The whole world is coming to an end.’
    And we were the Ark.

3

Esther
    Esther was dying.
    She was eight, no more than middle age for an Airedale. It was cancer.
    From time to time there seemed to be a slight improvement, and we allowed ourselves to hope: to hope that the second lump that had appeared on the lower part of her belly was not malignant, that the herbs Alex gathered for her daily in the hedgerows were working. Often, day by day, she seemed to be making progress. But looking back over the weeks we knew she was not.
    Esther was irreplaceable. She was more than a dog: she