Bethany Read online

  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 to accept 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.

  ‘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.

  ‘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 was a gentle, humorous spirit sent to be a companion to human beings who did not deserve such straightforward affection. Generous, forgiving, she seemed to me to embody the spirit of Bethany, and I felt that when she died something of the place would die too: a special, lowly innocence.

  Even Simon, who, while insisting that animals be respected, made it clear that they were not to be regarded as equals, recognised Esther’s quality. He described her as a ‘mature dog’, meaning that she had developed to the limits of her nature. He inclined to the view that in her previous incarnation she had been human. The other members of the group also seemed to believe this – certainly Alex did. I did not. For one thing, try as I might I had never been easy with the doctrine of reincarnation: I found it intellectually repugnant. For another, if Esther had been a human being and was now a dog, presumably she had committed some very bad sins in her previous existence to merit this demotion, and I was sure that Esther’s soul was unspotted. I also failed to see why one should assume that a bad human being would make a good dog. Surely a soul that made a bad job of being human would be likely to make a bad job of anything?

  Esther bore her pain with dignity. Alex and I had decided, as soon as the first lump manifested itself, that having her ‘put down’ was out of the question. We had taken that decision in principle years earlier when two of our kid goats, clumsily dehorned by the vet, had suffered brain damage resulting in a gradual twisting-round of the neck. The spectacle was grotesque and evoked extreme reactions in visitors, who could not understand why we had not had the animals killed as soon as it began to happen. It was clear to Alex and me that the visitors were far more concerned with their own emotions than they were with the kids, about whom they had made the unexamined assumption that they were suffering so much they would rather be dead. Alex and I were not at all sure the kids were suffering, and even if they were, was death necessarily better than pain? How much did pain matter? How much did life matter? It seemed to us that no human could answer these questions, and that the average human, confronted by these deformed goats, would kill them because he could not bear the sight of them, and would call it pity.

  We refused to do it. We helped the kids to feed, and waited until the day when they could no longer do anything at all to feed themselves. On that day, since they had ceased to be viable organisms, we called in the vet with a humane killer. For some time afterwards we suffered strange looks from people we knew.

  We felt we had done our best to handle correctly a situation in which we had been at fault in the first place. We should not have had the kids de-horned. Henceforth, we vowed, no vet should set foot on the premises; if any disease arose among the animals, we would treat it herbally. However, we had reckoned without Esther. When an animal shows clear signs of a malignant growth, for which there is no known natural cure, what do you do?

  We took her to a young vet whom we trusted: he had not been practising long, but was capable and compassionate. Or, rather, I took her. Alex had gone to London. I went home in my lunch-hour and took Esther to the surgery, and collected her at half-past five after the operation. Poor Esther. Barely conscious, drugged, shocked and sick, she opened her eyes as I entered the room and her tail thumped once on the floor. I carried her in a blanket into the back of the Mini and took her home. It was difficult, on my own, getting her out of the car, carrying her up the steps and into the kitchen and putting her down, all without altering the position of the hind legs, but I managed it. When Alex phoned that evening I was able to tell her that Esther had come through the operation well and was asleep in her usual corner.

  Six weeks later, when Esther had apparently made a full recovery and was running about with the other dogs, we discovered the second lump. We knew then that she would die. There was no question of further surgery – she would not survive it, and in any case it seemed obscene to go on cutting parts out of an ageing animal. We did what we could to make her last days more comfortable, without relaxing the strict diet we kept her on in the hope that nature might still effect a last-minute cure. Alex, having recently read that violets had been known to cure cancer, searched for and picked them every evening and fed them to her. Gradually she declined, until she could only walk with the greatest difficulty.

  The shift, subtle but unmistakable, into the last phase occurred about ten days after the group had been formed, and on that day Alex and I moved Esther into our bedroom. She lay on her blanket, patiently waiting. At intervals Alex would carry her outside so she did not foul her blanket. Simon watched, but said nothing.

  The house was shipshape, we turned our attention to the land. Almost overnight, it seemed to me, the monster I had loved and struggled with became tame and obedient to command. Plants were hoed and thinned, seedlings were planted out, weeds were cut before they seeded instead of a week afterwards, little things I had always meant to do were done when I got home from work, big things I had never hoped to do became a real possibility. There was order. The plants glowed with health and pleasure. I wondered how I could ever have thought a solitary battle with fourteen acres preferable to the rewards of co-operation.

  Alex was finding the same thing. I was well used to the spectacle of Alex, begrimed and oil-stained, emerging from underneath an ailing vehicle, cursing because she had been able to diagnose the fault but did not have the tools to correct it. This would not prevent her from trying, and I kept out of the way on those occasions because her wrath over a recalcitrant nut was apt to descend on anything in the vicinity which moved. But now it was Pete who lay on his back under the truck, while she passed him tools and made tactful suggestions, and gave me,
as I passed, a grin which I perfectly understood.

  The new sink was functioning, the Flymo worked, the truck could now be used for getting in the hay crop, and there was an acre under intensive cultivation. Soon we would start on the major tasks. One of the first was repairing the roof of the red barn. A gale had ripped off three of the galvanised sheets and dislodged one of the rafters: replacing it, while perched on a ladder, was far beyond the combined strength Alex and I possessed. And beyond that loomed the most formidable job of all: rebuilding the end of the house. Perhaps they would not want to undertake it. Yet if the group were serious in its aims the house must be completed. Not only for us, but for anyone else who, seeing the approaching deluge, sought shelter.

  In the evenings we rested from our labours and talked. We would sit in the parlour, and if it was chilly there would be a log fire in the big fireplace. Simon would light some joss sticks and the air would be heady with incense. I had to overcome an initial prejudice against joss sticks, which I had always found to perfume the houses of habitual pot-smokers, and which I associated with the mental flabbiness that seems to accompany prolonged use of cannabis. In Simon’s company the association rapidly weakened and I found myself enjoying the heavy scent. If no one else was in the room I would go up and sniff the blue smoke that curled from the glowing tip of the stick. I realised as I did so how much my lungs still craved tobacco. The smoke made me lightheaded: it seemed to be able to affect my state of mind. I wondered briefly whether it might be addictive.

  Those early summer evenings we sat and talked about all manner of things. Having a taste for the abstract I was naturally more pleased when the conversation turned to metaphysics than when it revolved around the morality of daily life; but Simon, whose deft handling of abstruse concepts was beautiful to witness, regarded such speculation as unimportant and considered my interest in it slightly reprehensible. Indeed he once expressed himself very strongly on the subject, saying that I had the Faustus complex and was very fortunate in not being as clever as I would like to be, because that intellect allied to my lack of innocence would destroy me.

  I was hurt by this aspersion on my intelligence, and was thereby forced to acknowledge the truth of what he said.

  He also implied that my approach was not serious.

  ‘You are quite happy to discuss any subject under the sun,’ he said mildly to me. ‘You will sit here in the evening and examine it from all aspects and pursue all its implications, and in the morning you will go off to work as if nothing had happened.’

  It was damning. I struggled with it, and abandoned the struggle. I could not give up my job: not yet. The time would come.

  The evening talks gradually became less frequent, until often a week would go by in which the only time we had all met in the parlour had been for the finance meeting. Part of the reason was that we began to find we had a lot to do in the evenings. Part was that Simon felt he should talk to us individually.

  It began at the end of the first week. Simon suggested that as he had recently spent a great deal of time with Pete and Coral it might be a good idea if Alex and I, who had seen less of him, spent a couple of hours a week in personal discussion with him. My pleasure at the prospect of an hour’s uninterrupted conversation with Simon was alloyed by the nervous suspicion that I would have to choose what to talk about.

  The first conversation was revealing. I decided he wanted me to talk about a problem, and cast desperately about for one, finally coming up with my ambivalent attitude towards the room we were sitting in – my study. I thought it might prove an interesting line of enquiry, encompassing my difficulties in reconciling my academic leanings, which the bookshelves around the walls represented, with the way of life represented by Simon.

  The opening did not lead where I expected it to. With Simon nothing ever did. He remarked casually that one never is happy in a room in which one has done bad things. This gave me a severe jolt. I had indeed done bad things in that room. I had killed bluebottles when they blundered infuriatingly round me as I was trying to write. The room was full of my anger and guilt. Too disconcerted to launch into the self-analysis I had envisaged, I found myself surprised into following quite a different tack, which led me, through half an hour’s reluctant introspection, to a most unwelcome conclusion.

  This was that for years I had been as unjust in my relations with Alex as I had always believed her to be with me. I undervalued what she had done for me: I saw the imperfection of the deed and not the generosity that inspired it. My study summed it up. When I first came to live with Alex, she had panelled and painted the walls of this room for me, and had brought down from London a second-hand filing cabinet which she had had re-sprayed for my use. But, being Alex, she had not quite finished the panelling on the walls – there was a small gap in the corner which required a board to be split, and she had never got round to it – and in the course of transporting the filing cabinet she had lost the handle and part of the sliding gear for one of the drawers so that it hung lopsided and could not be used. For years these things, neither of which I could rectify, had irritated me, and in the end had caused me more irritation than the gift had given me pleasure; and the more projects Alex undertook and left unfinished, each bequeathing its toll of junk in the garage and unpaid bills in the kitchen, the more the gap in the panelling and the lopsided drawer of the filing cabinet became a focus for my discontent. Thus her gift, springing from love, had turned sour because my own love was lacking. No wonder I was ambivalent about the room: it condemned me.

  I thanked Simon and went to find Alex, who was working in the vegetable garden. I told her I had been unjust to her, and was sorry. She gave me a delighted smile. We had a long talk as we hoed the onions, and went into lunch holding hands like new lovers.

  After Alex and I had had two or three talks apiece with Simon, Pete and Coral asked if they could have talks with Simon too. Simon smiled wryly, and arranged a timetable, which he wrote in the desk diary we kept in the parlour. We found the talks so beneficial that they became a daily feature. This took a considerable bite out of Simon’s time, but he did not place any value on his own time. He only wished it to be well spent.

  The daily talks had been continuing for about a week when their nature changed. This happened as the result of an experiment initiated by Simon, which was itself the outcome of a conversation we had before the group was formed.

  We were sitting in Pete and Coral’s flat. We had been talking for several hours when reference was made to a quasi-religious organisation which had a centre in the city, members of which were periodically to be seen touting on street corners for people to come and take one of their free ‘personality tests’. I had once done so as a reporting assignment for the newspaper, without of course revealing my identity. The experience had been exactly what I expected: a questionnaire which asked ill-disguised leading questions; a bookshop in which one was pressed to buy as one waited for the results of the ‘test’; a ‘diagnosis’ from the questionnaire which indicated that one should take a course at the centre in order to improve the quality of one’s life. I went home and wrote a smug article on this money-oriented, fake-psychology-peddling cult. It was the same article the British press had been serving up for years. In a corner of my mind I was a little ashamed. It was too easy. There must be more to them than that.

  And yet when the organisation was mentioned that evening two years later I dropped instantly into the same position of ridicule and dismissed them as charlatans. Simon looked at me with faint surprise.

  ‘I’ve been to their centre and talked to them,’ he said. ‘They struck me as very energetic young people who would like to make the world a better place. Their eyes are bright, as if they have come through a difficult experience.’

  I looked at the floor and blushed. It was true, but I had chosen not to see it. Their eyes had been bright. Not as bright as Simon’s, but bright enough. Whether it was the glitter of delusion or the light of truth how could I tell, when I had no
t troubled to find out the first thing about them?

  Simon then proceeded to talk about them, or rather about the idea on which their theory of psychology was based. Their founder had discovered, he said, that in all human beings there existed a time-track on which was recorded everything that had ever happened to that person. It was analogous to the databanks of a computer. All past experience was stored on the track, and all of it was accessible to consciousness, though sometimes only with difficulty. To regain an incident from the past all one had to do was command the mind to ‘go back’ to the incident and let it replay itself, which it would do with absolute fidelity. It was a process quite different from remembering; it was something everybody could do, and few knew about.

  On most people’s time-track there were gaps, said Simon. These occurred where the person had been unconscious, or when the incident was so painful, mentally or physically, that the mind had apparently obliterated it. Nevertheless these incidents were recorded, but they were stored in a hidden area of the mind from which they emerged at intervals when circumstances resembling the original incident occurred. At such moments the individual would find himself acting in an irrational way under a compulsion he did not understand. Some people’s behaviour was almost entirely controlled by such compulsions. There was a way of ending the mechanism: one followed up the clues until one found what appeared to be the gap, and then one made the person go through the experience over and over again, until it was fully recalled and had lost its content of pain and its power to compel. This processing was the main technique employed by the organisation, and was carried out according to a strict formula by people trained for the purpose.

  I was fascinated and repelled by this exposition. As a onetime devotee of science-fiction I was much taken with the idea of a sort of personal tape-recording, but the therapeutic application of it had a mechanistic ring I disliked, and the whole concept seemed to lean heavily on Freud while decrying psychoanalysis. I knew that Simon had no prejudices and was willing to take ideas from any source if he thought he could use them, but I was surprised that he should find this worthy of his attention. The jargon in which the technique appeared to be wrapped added further to my hostility. I gave the matter no further thought.