The Same Dog by Robert Aickman

 THE SAME DOG by Robert Aickman

“; when all was so obscure, and so properly so?”

For me a Proustianly self-memorable story, and surely you must remember it, too, as well as me! The story of Hilary, much the youngest of three brothers, who later oddly joined the army because, he was a sensitive soul. His trip as a young boy with his then childhood sweetheart Mary, who had grabby fingers for him, but not a ‘Lolita’ as explicitly hinted later by the story itself, a trip to what turned out later in his life to be  a house called Maryland, was part of what these two children concocted in their secret maps of reality as well as of Fairyland, and the slithery  yellow-skinned  dog and Maryland’s yellow wall (a yellow patchy wall like that of Vermeer in the famous Proust book). The implications of what happened shake me even today, decades since I first read it, even though I am now, of course, a different self reading it. I never now lurk anywhere naked, although I am bald.

“A further complexity is that the sensitive are sometimes most at their ease with the less sensitive.”

My other reviews of this author:  https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/