Bethany

  ANITA MASON

  BETHANY

  Contents

  1 The Bean-Patch

  2 The Ark

  3 Esther

  4 Sources

  5 The Fulcrum

  6 The Rose-Garden

  7 Trouble

  8 Alex

  9 Truth

  A Note on the Author

  1

  The Bean-Patch

  I am right.

  There was a time when I believed that rights and wrongs were relative, that there was no ethic based on a truth beyond challenge. Pressed, I would attempt a definition of right in terms of some temporal good, the good of the many. Pressed further, I would admit that this was Utilitarianism and had been seriously discredited by G. E. Moore, but I would ask, with what I thought was disarming honesty, what credible alternative there was. I was taking a course in philosophy at the time. I gave it up soon after I met Simon.

  How pointless it all was, how shallow. And yet how hard it was to step out of that shallow pool where the children play, into the sea. How frightened we are that in that thundering immensity we will drown. Why has no one ever told us we are built to swim?

  All we have to do is let go.

  See, and understand. There is nothing hidden. There never was. All systems of knowledge are irrelevant. All systems of secret knowledge are not merely irrelevant but a fraud. The book of the universe is open. Every creature can read it, because every creature has written it.

  An emerald-green insect lands on my knee and anchors itself with long fine legs to an airfield of blue denim. I curve my hand to shelter it from the breeze. It winks its strange eyes at me. Myself looking at myself.

  I must not be complacent. Constant vigilance is essential. On either side of the true perception lies the old way of thinking, waiting like a bog to suck one down. One lie, one lie not pursued and purged can blind the eyes for ever. One evasion …

  She looked at me almost pleadingly as I went into the kitchen. For a moment I felt a twinge at my heart, but I maintained my detachment and gave her a friendly smile.

  It is difficult. But it is not too difficult. I have found that I have great strength, now that my mind is clear. After all, there is nearly forty years’ evil to be undone. And however difficult it is, it must be done, because now I have started we shall both be destroyed if I do not finish the task.

  God help me keep my clarity, and my love.

  Love must be the motive, the only motive. All other motives are impure. Impure motive contaminates the deed, perverts its outcome, and damages the doer. Eyes narrow with self-interest cannot see the truth.

  This is obvious and very hard to accept.

  We chain ourselves with motives. We wriggle and creep to evade the true, the straight response, because that response will not gain us our ends. The words that do something are always preferred to the words that do nothing, the transparent words that purvey truth. The trick of lying becomes a habit, becomes a dreadful necessity, until the mind is stupid with the poisonous junk it cannot stop manufacturing.

  But all you have to do is let go.

  Then the peace. The bliss. The ease. One is almost weightless: one flies. One is almost immaterial: problems dissolve and one slips through them. Carrying no luggage, one can roam the universe. Defenceless, one is invincible.

  These things I discovered as I raked the bean-patch one warm May evening. It was the same patch I had been working on two days earlier, when they came and I refused to talk to them. I was afraid: I knew that if they came to live with us my life would be changed utterly. I thought I would lose everything. I was quite right, of course; what I didn’t realise was how glad I would be to see it go.

  So when they arrived, Alex being out, I made tea and polite conversation, and avoided Simon’s questioning eyes. As soon as Alex returned – after all, it was she who’d invited them – I went off to the field again, and dug until my back and arms ached and my throat was like a sandpit. When I finally went back to the house they’d gone.

  I was angry. Angry with them for coming, when they must know that I didn’t want them there and should have known that Alex, having invited them, would change her mind, as she changed it about everything. Angry with them for their simplicity and their grave happiness. Angry with Simon, because I had hurt him.

  Angry with Alex, who for the seventh summer in seven years was about to fill the house with people who would not understand about gates and animals and the Rayburn, and whose children would chase the poultry and shatter the quiet of the woodlands with their noise. Certainly it was Alex’s house; but after seven years had I no rights in it at all?

  And, obscurely, I was angry with myself.

  Alex was quiet after their visit, but bright-eyed. It was obvious that having regretted inviting them that day – to the point of convincing herself that the invitation had not been accepted and she was free to go out – she had now returned to her original position. It was a familiar manoeuvre but one which for some reason I never foresaw. She had given up smoking, which I took as an ominous sign, and, even more ominously, was not bad-tempered. She was all sweet reason as I rolled a cigarette at coffee-time and fouled the kitchen with smoke. ‘You don’t have to give it up if you don’t want to,’ she said. She meant, ‘You don’t have to save your soul if you don’t want to.’

  I didn’t. I was quite happy, thank you. Dabbling in farming, dabbling in writing, working for the local newspaper a few days every week since neither of the other two activities made anything but a loss; I was involved in the world and I liked it. I liked the company of sinners. I was at ease in that worldliest of places, a pub.

  I was not at ease with Simon.

  He was tall, lean, bronzed, and handsome in a particularly English way which the traces of his many years abroad – a beard with a hint of the Chinese mandarin, the suspicion of an American accent in the way he pronounced certain words – could not diminish. He wore jeans – much patched, but always clean – and sandals. He spoke softly, and when he spoke you listened. But when you met him all you saw were his eyes. They were bright blue, and they blazed. There was no avoiding them, and once you met them there was no avoiding the shock of recognition. For you had been looking for this man all your life. People look in different places: I had always looked in books. I put away my books, which had never told me anything. This man had the answer to the riddle.

  Yet I fought him. He demanded too much. He demanded total honesty. That was painful. He demanded that one be prepared to think again, from scratch, about everything. That was a threat the magnitude of which could scarcely be comprehended. He demanded a level of thought which had not been required of me by one of the most eminent universities in Europe. He demanded an unswerving morality; and if there was one thing I hated it was morality.

  Side by side, Alex and I, fascinated and fearful, we fought him. Side by side we ran out of arguments and excuses, and faced our own moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Side by side we laughed and capitulated.

  Until the next time.

  He came to see us every few months, arriving without warning, but always after we’d been thinking about him. We would be appalled to see his car come up the drive, and exhausted by the time he left. Yet every time he came it seemed he teased out into the open and exploded some problem that had lain like a dull weight at the back of the mind for years. The effect was exhilarating, intoxicating. It was like having one’s brain serviced by an expert mechanic.

  The price was whichever of your illusions he fancied extracting that day. He dealt swiftly with my pet interest, literature. I shyly showed him my study: it was lined with books. ‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘as long as you realise that they’re all the same book.’ It was a long time before I saw that room with his eyes.

  I expounded
to him my pleasure in working the land. He listened courteously and asked whether I did not think an unploughed field, with its diversity of flowers and grasses, insects and wild animals, to be more beautiful than a ploughed one. Reluctantly I agreed, and away went half my joy. People had to eat, I said. There was a banquet all around them, he said. He brought a hazelnut out of his pocket and, watching me, cracked and ate it. I remembered that the drive was strewn with them; they were so much smaller than the imported ones in the shops that we did not even bother to pick them up.

  To my image of the farmer at one with the land, Simon opposed another – the farmer at war with the land. I could neither bear the personal implications of this nor unravel its global ones. I retreated to my study and consulted William Blake, a Roland for this Oliver. I came back in triumph.

  ‘The cut worm forgives the plough,’ I said. Clearly it had to, or life must stop.

  Simon smiled at me. ‘Is that what the worm says?’ he asked.

  No, I could not cope with Simon except in small and infrequent doses. And now Alex had invited him, his family and the couple with whom they were staying, to come and spend the summer with us. They were all living in a small flat in the city twenty miles away. We had a large, almost empty house in the country. It was a fine, civilised idea. It was utterly intolerable. Hearing Alex make the suggestion, and ask them to tea in a few days to talk about it, I was seized first with incredulity and then with despair. She was a little incoherent, and for a moment the insane idea flashed into my mind that Simon had hypnotised her.

  Two days after their abortive visit I had worked myself up into a fury of indignation. Really, what did Alex think she was playing at? It threatened to be by far the worst of her indiscretions. She had always been hasty and impulsive, ready with offers of help and hospitality which as often as not she regretted when the time to honour them came round. The first summer of our living together had been blessed with visits from an old friend of hers now teaching in Holland, his Dutch wife, their three scrubbed children and a discontented au pair, and from another friend in London, his wife, three children and Alsatian. The first set of children regarded me with cold contempt, knowing well that I disliked and feared the human young; the second set brawled, swung on the gates and dug penknives into the exquisite cherry-laurel tree in front of the house. The Alsatian fought our Airedale, and terrorised callers. Alex promised not to do it again, and did it again every single year.

  In an unending stream they came: old friends, new acquaintances, ex-admirers (rarely ex-lovers – Alex had broken many hearts, but mostly by refusing), and lame ducks. The lamest were a family living on the caravan site a mile away. The man was, Alex told me, a most interesting person, and she was sure he had once known another friend of hers from Soho days. He had. Ridiculous coincidences happened to Alex daily.) The woman was Spanish, and there were the statutory three children. They were all living on Social Security in a tiny caravan. Before I could blink they had moved in.

  Jacques was, it is true, interesting, but mainly by virtue of a past he could no longer support. Alex’s hopeful eyes had detected the visionary in him and missed the alcoholic. He drank the contents of every scent and spirit bottle in the house, and beautiful Manuela shoplifted matter-of-factly for him at the off-licence. Jacques – who was not French, but vaguely Irish – lay in bed all day, covering the margins of a large hardback edition of the I Ching with small pencilled notes and periodically bellowing for Manuela. She cooked for all of us, and screamed in Spanish at the children. I hid alternately in the vegetable garden and my study. I cannot remember what Alex did, except that towards the end of their ten-week stay she accepted an invitation from a rich ex-admirer to spend a week in the south of France. While she was away Jacques got out of bed and went to London, where he renewed his acquaintance with heroin and rang Manuela up every night asking for help. I lay in bed listening to her frantic weeping. When Alex returned I issued an ultimatum, and the family left to stay with other friends elsewhere. A year later Jacques died of renal failure in a hospital in the city. Manuela survived, as she had to for her children, and casually introduced us to Simon.

  I had forgiven Alex, but the episode had left a scar. I shied away from any suggestion of house-sharing or long-term guests as a horse shies at a corner where it was once frightened. I knew I could not go through that experience again. If anyone had asked me what the experience was, I would have described it as a kind of rape.

  Over the years that I’d lived there, my sensibility had extended to penetrate every inch of the house and its surrounding acres. I felt it was the first real home I’d ever had: boarding school, university and a series of depressing bedsits in London had succeeded a childhood home so far distant that it might have belonged to someone else. But this place, this once gracious, now dilapidated house overlooking a tranquil valley, where five magnificent ornamental trees bore witness that the sloping pastures had once been parkland, where a grassy track opposite the kitchen door led unexpectedly into woods, where a barn owl swooped nightly, whitely, along the hedge and buzzards reared their young in the same tree every year … oh this was a home not just for the body, but for the soul. Wrest it from me who dared, for my life-blood ran through it.

  My passion was rendered fiercer by Alex’s neglect. Alex loved Bethany, but in rather the same off-hand fashion as she loved me. She was a bit rough with both of us. She could not rest until she had remade the house. She started by taking the rendering off the front and having the stonework pointed. The appearance was much improved, but that wall, facing southwest, had been rendered for a very good reason – it took the whole brunt of the gales that swept in from the Atlantic – and no amount of pointing could henceforth keep the rain out. Then she had new windows put in the front, where the old frames, intricately patterned with small triangular panes, were rotting. If she had stopped there all might have been well, but she went on to change the pitch of the roof at its two ends to allow room for dormer windows along the east and west walls, knock down half a dozen non-structural walls inside, and eventually apply for planning consent to convert the west side of the house into a separate unit. Unfortunately she got it. Her relations with builders were stormy and in course of time she ran out of money, so that as I worked on my bean-patch that May evening the sun shone down on a black-felted, not a blue-slated roof, and the breeze played through unglazed window-frames and disturbed the sawdust on a half-boarded floor.

  In between times Alex embarked on projects outside, the most striking of which was to be a paved patio area outside the kitchen door, with steps leading down to the drive. A vast quantity of concrete was hand-mixed by an unemployed lame duck from the caravan site, and Alex started to pave the thing. Something else caught her interest and she never finished it. Nettles colonised the bare patches, and dustbins and old pieces of cast iron collected on corners. Alex liked cast iron. One day she was going to melt it all down, and make our own knives and forks.

  I loved her, and despaired.

  I thought I understood the cause of it. Alex and her brother and sister had been brought up in somewhat unusual conditions. They had spent the greater part of their childhood in wooden shacks in a Hampshire forest, helping to hew wood, draw water from a well they had dug themselves, and clear the woodland for what later became a nudist colony run by their parents. The wonder and the insecurity of that half-wild childhood had never quite left Alex, and having worked hard for ten years in London to buy herself a proper house, she then set about reducing it to a wooden shack, since that was home. So at least I reasoned.

  And yet none of these was the worst thing. The worst thing was so bad that I did not let myself think about it. It was that Alex, having tired, presumably, of playing such small games with her house, had staked it in a property gamble. That had not been the intention, but that was the result.

  She had bought very cheaply, with money borrowed from her father, the freehold of a building in London on which she held a lease. She had intended to do
the place up quickly and let it. It was a shrewd idea: the property was in a run-down area which was about to become smart. But a structural flaw requiring work on the foundations was found, and a property boom sent building costs rocketing, and Alex ran short of money. She approached the bank and negotiated a £10,000 loan on very little security. She had a way with bank managers. The money somehow disappeared without very much to show for it, since Alex, in an attempt to get the work done cheaply, had hired some self-employed builders who smoked pot all day and built nothing at all. In the end, having taken the roof off to build an extra storey, Alex found herself without the money to put it back on. Matters were not helped by the fact that the building, listed as being of architectural interest, was such an odd shape that it was unlikely that any design so far produced for the roof would be structurally sound in any case.

  A number of things then happened at once. The property market collapsed, and Alex, attempting to sell the property to recoup, found that nobody wanted to buy a building without a roof. The architect resigned from the job when simultaneously his nerve broke and his wife left him. Alex found a new architect who turned out not only to be incompetent but to have an unhealthy interest in the amount of building materials the job involved, and refused to pay him. He sued. Alex counter-sued. The neighbour sued for damage to his harpsichords. A small-time gangster told Alex that he wanted the building for a pornographic bookshop and blue film club and would buy it at his price, failing which he would cut off her toes, and Alex, too incensed to feel fear, drank him under the table and consulted her young Jewish solicitor, who dialled a few numbers and got the gangster moved on by the local Mafia. Alex subsequently regretted this, since the gangster’s offer was the best she ever got for the building.

  The bank began to press for repayment of the loan, or at least a reduction of the interest, which was mounting alarmingly. Alex had no money, neither did I. The bank asked for Bethany to be offered as security. Alex bluffed, hedged, prevaricated, pretended not to hear, pretended not to understand … and in the end signed a piece of paper. A ghost moved in to live with us.