Bethany Read online

  My eyes moved to Dao, sitting comfortably in the lotus position with her children arranged around her skirts. I thought I had never in my life seen a face so beautiful: so eloquent and yet so contained, so serious and yet so full of laughter. She was so beautiful, so serene, this tiny Oriental creature, that at first I had found myself almost tongue-tied in her presence and had been as conscious of the size of my feet and the loudness of my voice as an adolescent. After a week of daily contact I was still shy of her, and she knew it, and across the supper table her laughing eyes would seek out mine and silently accuse me of running away. I couldn’t help it: simplicity always frightened me, and here were wisdom, simplicity and beauty together. It was too much. She made me feel worthless. She made me feel like a child. She made me feel what I was – a devious, superficial, ungenerous and utterly imperceptive Westerner.

  Simon had met her in Thailand, when he was working there for the British Council and she was teaching English at Bangkok University. He had played the flute for her in her village, and they had fallen in love. She came back with him to England. Simon was already married, although estranged from his wife, but the problem of a passport for Dao was simply if imaginatively solved – she married a college friend of Simon’s who was also working in Thailand and who handed her over to Simon immediately after the ceremony. I blinked when I heard this part of the story: it seemed less than perfect. I then rebuked myself for my prudishness: what business was it of mine, and what difference did it make? Did I want Simon to be a saint? I also made due allowance for the source of the information. It came from Manuela, who retailed gossip with such style that one was hardly conscious that that was what it was.

  Simon, Coral, Pete, Dao. And Alex. I looked at Alex. She was sitting cross-legged against the pine chest in which we kept Wellington boots, of which there were always an inexplicable number. She sat, small, neat and upright, smiling at her folded hands. It was obvious that in a period of heightened emotion I had greatly overestimated her problems: there could be nothing seriously wrong if that look of peace was on her face.

  Simon, Dao, Pete, Coral, Alex and me. Quietly, by doing almost nothing, we were going to change the world.

  The world was crooked. The world was corrupt. The world was cruel. These things we took as axiomatic. However, unlike most groups which have taken it upon themselves to judge the moral standards of their contemporaries, we did not assume that the evil could only be eradicated by divine intervention. We believed, as do Buddhists, that evil is suffering and can be avoided, and that the natural inclination of man is towards good, which is happiness. We would withdraw initially from the world, not because we feared defilement, but in order to resolve our own problems, the better to help the world.

  ‘It’s like dropping a pebble into a pond,’ said Simon on the first evening. ‘The ripples spread out. Every action sends out ripples. Thought sends out ripples. When I drop a pebble, I have no idea where those ripples will go. Bad thought, bad action, where the ripples start, and ten thousand miles away the ripples end with human beings setting fire to other human beings’ children.’

  If the people who rule the world could listen to this man, I thought, there could not be a Vietnam.

  ‘So my thought, my action, must be pure,’ continued Simon. ‘If I do the right thing, the straight thing, there are no harmful ripples. In a sense I have not “done” anything: I have simply made an appropriate response. Now, a group of people consistently behaving in that way would create, in this chaotic and crooked world, a little pocket of stillness and sanity, an area where, in the best sense, nothing happened. And perhaps the ripples of that stillness would spread. And in time, perhaps, the world itself would be changed.’

  I stared at my feet, too moved, too dazzled by his vision to meet another person’s eyes. There was silence in the room for a long time.

  ‘Doing nothing’ turned out, in the tradition of all the best paradoxes, to be very hard work. This was only to be expected, since it entailed breaking the habit of a lifetime. It involved, for a start, a transparent honesty in one’s dealings with other people. Honesty not merely in telling the truth, but in refraining from the minor manipulations, evasions and insincerities that constitute probably nine-tenths of ordinary social intercourse. I found it at first a constant struggle to anticipate and repress these verbal manoeuvres which had become so natural to me that often I was not conscious of the deviousness of what I was saying until some time after I had said it. But gradually it became easier, and the direct replaced the indirect response as a habit. My self-awareness sharpened until I could spot, not just the false response before it was uttered, but the impulse to the response, and beyond that the tawdry chain of mental cause and effect that gave rise to it.

  Stripping away in this manner all superfluous utterance, we often found ourselves with little to say to each other, and would sit for long periods in a contented silence that communed far more deeply than words. ‘Silence is good,’ remarked Simon one day. ‘Whatever breaks that silence should be better than the silence it has come out of.’ Visitors to the house of course did not understand why, if there was nothing to be said, we said nothing. They would endure our smiling silence in growing discomfort and embarrassment until they eventually left in a state of mind close to fear. I felt sorry for them, but knew that by not compromising we had provided them with a rare opportunity. If they were too frightened to take it, that was their karma.

  ‘Doing nothing’ meant not interfering with other creatures, except when absolutely necessary in their own interests. Thus one would rescue a drowning wasp but one would never shoo a bluebottle from the room. One would try to do as little damage as possible to the world one lived in. A certain minimum of damage was unavoidable: one could not walk without trampling on millions of invisible organisms, or drive without smashing insects on the windscreen. Nevertheless one walked with care, mindful of the ground before one’s feet, and one went out in the car only when it was essential. Above all, one was very careful what one ate.

  We were all, of course, vegetarian, although Alex and I had renounced meat only within the last couple of years since meeting Simon. I had done so grudgingly at first. It was all very well for Alex, I thought: she had been brought up on a vegetarian diet. I hadn’t, and I liked meat. Why should I give it up? But I did give it up, mainly because it seemed ridiculous for two people living together, sharing everything else, not to share the same food.

  Having given up meat, I found myself developing a revulsion for it. I perceived each cutlet, joint and kidney to be part of a corpse, and was sickened by the cruel machine which bred and killed, bred and killed, year after year, uncomplaining thousands of sad-eyed animals for a populace too rich and fat and greedy to know or care what it ate. I saw with loathing the red pulpiness of the butcher’s hands, the veined face and dead eyes of the farmer, the pallid grossness of people who day after day crammed their mouths and bellies with other creatures’ death. I heard with incredulity the lamentations over the rise in beef prices, as if the price paid by the housewife were more important than the price paid by the bullock. Editing, as part of my job, the cattle market reports for the local paper, I gripped my pen in fingers trembling with anger and disgust.

  And every now and then, unable to resist the lure of depravity, I would buy myself a Cornish pasty for lunch.

  It was usually a gesture of defiance against Alex, after some trivial domestic dispute in the course of which I had been manoeuvred into acquiescence. There is not much meat in a Cornish pasty, but there is enough to make a V-sign. Even as I did it I knew it was unfair, that Alex had never tried to make me give up meat and that I was blaming her for a choice I had freely made. Even as the rank flavour flooded my mouth I knew that I did not like meat and that I was defiling my mind and body for no purpose at all. It was a gesture of independence remarkable only for its perfect stupidity. I always returned to the fold greatly irritated with myself after such an indulgence.

  The other members
of the group had progressed far beyond this stage, if indeed – which I doubted – they had ever been subject to dietary lapses. Abstinence from meat they pushed to its logical extension of abstinence from eggs and all things made with eggs. Now it happened that a new-laid free-range egg, boiled for four minutes until the yolk was just firm and eaten with sea salt and freshly milled black pepper, was one of my greatest pleasures. Indeed I was apt to reflect sourly, in the times of simultaneous abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, meat and sexual activity which life with Alex occasionally imposed, that it was just about my only pleasure. Moreover, we had our own chickens, and they had just come into full lay. Every day I would go out to the orchard, open the flap of the laying box, and fill a bowl with warm brown speckled eggs. They were not fertile, because there was no cockerel. There had once been a cockerel, but he had strayed too near the woods at dusk and met a fox, and left only a draggle of feathers to tell the tale. Observing that the hens seemed if anything rather relieved by his departure, we had not replaced him. The eggs, then, were innocent of life: they contained no baby chickens. Eating them was not an act of murder.

  I put this to Simon as we washed our plates one evening. He considered it carefully.

  ‘It’s a very strong argument,’ he said. ‘On rational grounds, I cannot answer it.’

  I waited.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘perhaps there is another kind of answer. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not understand.” Would you accept that?’

  It was absolutely fair. It was also a challenge. His blue eyes rested on me, to see if I would take it up. He was asking me to make an imaginative leap. No one outside the group, of course, would have accepted that answer for a moment. I examined it and saw its profundity.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, that will do.’

  The eggs, uncollected, were eaten by rats until the discouraged hens ceased laying.

  Non-interference went much further than abstention from involvement in the grosser forms of killing. Size means nothing. Therefore if it is wrong to kill a bullock for its meat, it is equally wrong to kill a caterpillar on a lettuce. Accordingly, before vegetables were picked from the kitchen garden any feeding insects were carefully removed from them first. Often it was impossible to do this without damaging the insect unless one removed part of the plant as well, and thus the lettuce leaves that appeared on the table were apt to be a very odd shape and full of holes. The process was time-consuming: sometimes Dao and Coral would spend well over an hour preparing enough lettuce-lattice for lunch. This, of course, was not important. And, as Coral pointed out, the insects had as much right to a meal as we had, and how unkind to deprive them of it when it was really quite easy to tear off a small piece of leaf. I wondered whether city-bred Coral would speak in quite the same way if she had herself dug the seed-bed, sown the seed, thinned and watered the seedlings and carefully, on a cool evening, transplanted the young lettuces. I regretted the thought immediately: it was not how one felt that mattered but what one did; and personal knowledge of a thing often made one unfit to judge it.

  A consciousness of the immense gulf between the things taken for granted by the group and the things taken for granted by the world outside sometimes made my head reel. Returning home from work one day I found Simon, Alex, Dao and Coral earnestly bending over a sack of flour with matchboxes in their hands. The flour had been given to Simon and Dao by a friendly baker whose gift had subsequently been found wanting: there were weevils in it. Simon, Alex, Dao and Coral were catching the weevils in matchboxes, and proposed to take them out into the woods with enough flour to ensure immediate survival. After that, it was up to the weevils.

  I went outside quickly before my smile was seen. For a long time I wrestled alternately with my sense of humour and my sense of logic, trying to force them to come to an agreement. They would not, I simply could not bring them to occupy the same mental space. I still had not resolved the problem a week later, when Simon found me on the point of lighting a bonfire with a pile of rotten floorboards. He looked at one of the boards carefully.

  ‘It has woodworm,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said brightly. ‘That’s why I’m going to burn it.’

  ‘But there is woodworm in it,’ he said.

  I opened my mouth, and shut it again as I understood.

  ‘Some people think it matters,’ said Simon. ‘Some people don’t.’ He walked away smiling, leaving me to reconcile the two warring halves of my brain.

  ‘Doing nothing’ meant not taking away the freedom of other creatures. Simon’s eyes dwelt on the dogs as he said this, and they wagged their tails at him hopefully. He clearly considered them to be living in a state of spiritual slavery, but he did not say so, perhaps because nothing could be done about it.

  He questioned the rules Alex and I had formulated years ago concerning dogs: no dogs to be allowed in any part of the house other than the kitchen, and dogs always to be shut in the kitchen when anyone left by car. The reason for the first rule was, I thought, obvious. The reason for the second was that my small terrier, Hoppy, was car-fixated and likely to follow any departing vehicle down the drive and on to the main road. Simon, Dao, Pete and Coral listened smiling to our explanations and appeared not to believe a word. I could hardly blame them. Where is the slave-master who cannot justify his actions in terms of the well-being of his slaves? Nevertheless I could not repress a grin when later, after the door from the kitchen into the main part of the house had been repeatedly left open, Dao found something unexpected in her bed. It was the leg of a long-dead sheep. I realised that it was a gift, but I was alone in this perception. The kitchen door was henceforth kept shut.

  The goats posed more of a problem. There were three of them, and they provided us with milk. If they were not to eat every vegetable in the garden and every fruit-tree in the orchard, and then go off and do the same thing to the neighbours, they had to be tethered. The alternative was to fence them in, which would be expensive, difficult, and by the group’s standards just as undesirable. The question was debated in the first few days of the group’s existence and no solution was found. From time to time we would return to it, as to an itching scab. It was no answer to sell or give the animals away, for their new owners would impose on them the same imprisonment as we did: there were no wild goats in England. What was more, their new owners would undoubtedly apply the principles of commercial goat-keeping and slaughter any billy-kids they might produce. It was an impasse. We had to compromise, and show our regret by tethering them on pasture as varied and interesting as possible.

  Having admitted a temporary defeat over the goats, we passed on to the ponies. The ponies were Alex’s province, as the goats were mine, and I was glad to leave them to her since with the dominant one, Bishop, I existed in a state of perpetual war. If he could step on my foot or knock over my milk bucket or nip the top out of a tree I had just planted he would do so, and sometimes he managed to do all three at once. I loved Osmond, the nervous, fine-featured grey, who would come to me even across the stream if I called; but I could do nothing with Osmond if Bishop had set his mind against it. But Bishop listened to Alex. They understood each other, and she rode him bareback with an indolent grace that brought my heart into my throat.

  Well, there was to be no more riding, that was clear. One did not put a piece of steel into the mouth of another being and climb on its back. Alex, who never rode for pleasure but only when there was no other way of getting Bishop home (he liked to visit Mr Webb’s stallion over the hill), raised no objection, but I could see that, like me, she was wondering how the freedom of the ponies could be reconciled with the comfort of the humans. The ponies at the moment were kept in a field they could not get out of, and for good reason. Bishop had a disconcerting habit of pushing open the kitchen door in the mornings: if you let him, he would come in to breakfast. He also liked to eat the roses in the garden, break the cold-frames on the patio and take the wing-mirrors off cars. I said all this, and wondered, no
t for the first time, why the truth always managed to sound so silly in my mouth.

  ‘Suppose,’ said Simon, ‘we remove the cold frames from the patio, make sure that the gate into the garden is kept shut, repair the latch on the kitchen door, make do without a wing-mirror, and set the ponies free.’

  I knew it wouldn’t work, and knew it had to be tried. We agreed.

  ‘Doing nothing’ meant keeping things simple. It meant doing only what was necessary. It meant, for instance, painting a window-frame to protect it from rain, but not merely to change the colour-scheme. It meant cutting the lawn if you wanted to sit on it, and not cutting it if you didn’t. It meant cultivating, fencing, repairing and building only when these things were necessary to survival or to basic comfort, or when, if neglected, they would in the long term create even more work.

  This idea of Simon’s, that the necessity for work should be constantly questioned and that there was virtue in actually avoiding it, was familiar to me from his earliest visits and I had always had the greatest difficulty in accepting it. For I worked very hard. I milked and tethered the goats and fed the chickens in the morning before I went to work, and when I came home in the evening I would work outside for as long as I could before bringing the goats in and milking them again. At weekends I dug, planted, cut and cleared, put up fences and pulled down ivy, burnt up dead wood and tried to move all Alex’s cast iron to the same place. From time to time I did some freelance work for a publisher. When Simon, Dao, Coral and Pete moved in I had just edited the manuscript of a book and was half-way through checking the galleys.

  ‘You work very hard,’ said Simon to me on numerous occasions. I smiled. After a while I began to hear the question in his voice when he said it.