Black Dogs by Ian McEwan Page B

agreed on everything. A fine union of bodies and minds! We’d founded a private utopia, and it was only a matter of time before the nations of the world followed our example. These were the months that shaped us. Behind all our frustration over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days. Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other. Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible – and soon there was only interruption. And in the end time did run out, but the memories are still there, accusing us, and we still can’t let each other alone.
    ‘One thing I learned that morning after the dolmen was that I had courage, physical courage, and that I could stand alone. That’s a significant discovery for a woman, or it was in my day. Perhaps it was a fateful discovery too, a disastrous one. I’m not so sure now I should have stood alone. The rest is harder to tell, especially to a sceptic like yourself.’
    I was about to protest, but she waved me down.
    ‘I’m going to say it again anyway. I’m getting tired. You’ll have to go soon. And I want to go over the dream again too. I want to be sure you’ve got that right.’
    She hesitated, gathering strength for the one last talking bout of the afternoon.
    ‘I know that everyone thinks I’ve made too much of it – a young girl frightened by a couple of dogs on a country path. But you wait until you come to make sense of your life. You’ll either find you’re too old and lazy to make the attempt, or you’ll do what I’ve done, single out a certain event, find in something ordinary and explicable a means of expressing what might otherwise be lost to you – a conflict, a change of heart, a new understanding. I’m not saying these animals were anything other than what they appeared to be. Despite what Bernard says, I don’t actually believe they were Satan’s familiars, Hell Hounds or omens from God, or whatever he tells people I believe. But there is a side of the story he doesn’t care to emphasise. Next time you see him, get him to tell you what the Maire of St Maurice told us about those dogs. He’ll remember. It was a long afternoon on the terrace of the Hôtel des Tilleuls. I haven’t mythologised these animals. I’ve made use of them. They set me free. I discovered something.’
    She pushed her hand out across the sheet towards me. I could not quite bring myself to stretch out my own hand and take hers. Some journalistic impulse, some queer notion of neutrality prevented me. As she talked on, and I continued to transcribe in the dashing arabesques of my shorthand, I felt myself to be weightless, empty-headed, suspended in my uncertainty between two points, the banal and the profound; I did not know which I was hearing. Embarrassed, I hunched over my writing so that I did not have to meet her eye.
    ‘I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it’s nothing new, and it’s not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different language to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power. That’s how religions are. In the end though it hardly matters how you describe it once the essential truth has been grasped – that we have within us an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness ...’
    I had heard this before, in one form or another, from a spiritually inclined headmaster, a dissident vicar, an old girlfriend returning from India, from Californian professionals, and dazed hippies. She saw me shifting in my seat, but she pressed on.
    ‘Call it God, or the spirit of love, or the Atman or the Christ or the laws of nature. What I saw that day, and on many days since, was a halo of coloured