Bethany Read online

  About a month after that conversation, and a fortnight after the start of the group, there was a telephone call for me at Bethany when, in common with nearly everyone else, I was outside in the fields. It was evening and the call was answered by Coral, who had not been feeling well and was resting upstairs. Simon, Pete and I came into the kitchen together to be greeted by a white-faced Coral with the words, There’s been a horrible man on the phone.’

  She turned to me, almost with entreaty. ‘He said his name was Maurice and he was a friend of Kay’s. Kay, who is he?’

  I saw the whole ghastly situation in a flash and saw that there was no way of explaining it. Maurice was, indeed, a rather unpleasant character, particularly when he had been drinking, but on the basis of six years’ acquaintance he was undoubtedly entitled to call himself a friend of mine. He was a strange man who had led a roving life, mostly as a diamond prospector in various parts of Africa, and he had now, at the age of sixty, settled in Cornwall to prospect for copper and change his sex. It was such an extraordinary combination that Alex had persuaded me to ghost-write his autobiography, which I did with increasing unwillingness as he became increasingly awkward, cantankerous and obsessed with himself. The confusion over his gender had naturally set up confusions over his sexual orientation, and he attempted to release the resultant tensions in a never-ending stream of sexual innuendo, suggestive laughter, and undisguised aggression. Yes, Maurice was tiresome. However, I thought a woman with any worldly experience at all should have had no trouble in dealing with him on the telephone. Coral was obviously more vulnerable than I had thought.

  What concerned me most, I realised with shame afterwards, was my own image. Whatever Maurice had said to Coral had evidently given her the not unreasonable impression that he was a dirty old man, and why was such a person claiming friendship with a member of this very clean group? I knew I could never explain to them the split between my professional identity as a ghost-writer and my real identity as a member of the group. They would not believe such a split could exist, and perhaps they were right. Yet I must make some attempt, or to my known homosexuality, which I had always assumed they regarded as unimportant, they would add a presumed complicity with whatever this frustrated old man represented, and would arrive at the conclusion that I was sexually decadent.

  I launched into an anxious speech but Simon cut me short. He asked Coral to tell us exactly what had happened, but Coral was almost incoherent. Pete tried ineffectually to comfort her.

  Simon said, ‘Shall we try an experiment?’

  He made us sit down: we had been standing in a tense huddle by the door. Coral knelt on the floor, sitting back on her heels.

  Simon said to her, ‘Close your eyes. Now, go back to the beginning of the incident.’

  Coral shut her eyes and concentrated.

  Simon said, ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coral.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Simon.

  ‘I’m … lying on my bed,’ said Coral. ‘I’ve just woken up. I’ve been woken up by the phone ringing.’

  ‘Go through the incident until you come to the end,’ said Simon.

  Hesitantly at first, she did. At one point, when she had completely misinterpreted the meaning of something Maurice had said, I opened my mouth to interrupt, but Simon instantly silenced me with a movement of his hand.

  None of us spoke or moved as Coral finished recounting the incident. She looked strained and distressed. Simon told her to go back to the beginning and go through it again. The second version was different: she remembered much more. She remembered, for a start, that she had been anxious about something – the baby – even before she’d answered the phone. In the third telling her tension rose to a peak and she covered her face with her hands and shuddered violently. The fourth time the tension had gone out of it: she seemed rather bored by the whole thing, and as she got to the end she laughed.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ she said, and spread her hands in humorous apology for making such a fuss. She was clear-eyed.

  Simon observed her. ‘Good,’ he said calmly.

  After Pete and Coral had gone to bed, Simon said to me, ‘I’m sorry I had to stop you when Coral was talking, but I had no choice. You must never try to change someone else’s data. Never. It is very dangerous. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, rather blankly but at any rate glad that I had not incurred his displeasure. It wasn’t true, though. I did not understand. I never did understand why one must not try to change another person’s data, if the data are wrong.

  We sat in the parlour, Simon, Alex, Pete and I. It was late, past ten o’clock. Dao and Coral had gone to bed. We were all usually in bed before this, because we got up well before seven. We four had not gone to bed because something important was happening. Pete and Alex were talking, and Simon and I were listening to them.

  It was important because Pete and Alex did not talk to each other much, and there had been a time, a year ago, when there was something like open hostility between them. That of course had long since been resolved, but there remained a certain reserve between them which, while it could quite easily be breached, usually was not. This evening they were both trying very hard to communicate. It was difficult because of their residual resistance to each other, because of the abstract nature of the ideas they were discussing, and because Pete was so inarticulate.

  I could not understand what he was saying. Not only could I not follow his thought, but every time he said anything I was assailed afresh by doubt as to what subject they were talking about. Sometimes it appeared to be the nature of happiness, sometimes it appeared to be the nature of the mind, sometimes it appeared to be a Buddhist idea which was not familiar to me, and sometimes it appeared to be a familiar and very elementary question of moral philosophy. I was quite prepared to agree that all these things might be related, might even turn out to be the same thing, but Pete was not making any order out of them that I could recognise. He was presenting us merely with a chaotic series of mental pictures. I felt a stirring of the panic that always afflicted me when confronted with mental chaos, but controlled it. I longed for Simon to make the single lucid statement that would pull all these wild fragments into their rightful places, but Simon said nothing. He listened. After a while I realised that he was listening, not to the words, but to the voices.

  Alex, gently, patiently, was trying to weave sense out of it. She seemed to be succeeding, if the brightness of the smiles they exchanged was any guide, but I was too tired to judge. I knew that Alex often understood people’s meaning when I did not, because I was trained to analyse words and that faculty is no use when you are listening to someone who does not use words in the proper way; whereas Alex, free of my assumption that a word must mean something, was intuitively open to the thought struggling to get out behind the words. But I also knew that Alex found Pete almost as baffling as I did. If she was making anything out of his utterances this evening it must be by the inspiration of charity.

  At last she stood up, and we all said goodnight. I followed her out of the room, up the stairs and into the bedroom. Two steps behind her, I saw her fling herself with a cry on to Esther’s blanket, and was just in time to see the dog’s sad, grateful eyes close at the end of the long, long wait.

  We buried her next morning in the spot where she had liked to sit, looking over the valley. One imagines that animals do not appreciate a view, but Esther would sit for hours, apparently rapt, gazing into the distance from that spot. I wept into the grave as I dug it, remembering her patience, and the times I had been bad-tempered with her. I wept for her pain and my callousness and Alex’s sadness. For Esther had been Alex’s dog, and when Esther was dying Alex had not been there. She had been downstairs, trying to help Pete make sense of himself.

  I felt Alex’s anguish more keenly than I did my own. She must have felt the same, because she came round the corner of the house and comforted me. Together we laid Esther, now cold and stiff, in the ir
regular pit I had dug and hacked, declining help, out of the stony soil. Together we heaped the earth and shale over her in a low mound and walked away.

  As we went back to the house we found Simon sitting alone on the patio steps. There seemed something odd about him: his face was paler, it lacked its usual radiance. I sat down by him. He asked if he could help me. I said no. He had already asked me the same question several times and I had given him the same answer. We sat without speaking for a few minutes and I became aware that tears were trickling down my face again.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ asked Simon.

  I started to answer, broke into a sob, and covered my face with my hands. After a while I said through my tears, ‘Esther is dead and I loved her.’

  Simon waited for me to control myself. Then he said quietly, ‘No you didn’t.’

  I registered a dull shock, more of bewilderment than pain. There was nothing I wanted to say. After about a minute I got up and went in search of Alex.

  We decided to go into the city. It was Saturday; we could do some shopping, have coffee in our usual coffee shop, and perhaps call on Manuela. It would cheer us up, and get us out of the house. We both felt a need to be away from the house, which was pervaded that morning by an unhappiness which seemed to have no connection with Esther’s death. Pete and Coral had had a disagreement and were making silent but audible statements about it, Coral from the bedroom and Pete from the toolshed; Simon was still sitting on the steps. In the kitchen one of the children was crying. We saw no point in adding our own unhappiness to the common pool. We told Dao we would be out for lunch, and went.

  The city was stifling, and the heat, combined with the heavy-headed feeling that was the aftermath of tears, soon gave me a bad headache. I had a sense of dislocation from reality, as if I had walked into the middle of a film where there was no part for me and the other characters were not aware of my existence. The street in which Manuela lived, sunlit and dusty, was like a deserted film set. Then eight-year-old Ben came careering round a corner on his bicycle, scattering the pigeons and whooping with delight to see Alex.

  Ben was Manuela’s son by Jacques. She also had a six-year-old daughter by Jacques, Miranda. After Jacques’ death Manuela had married a beautiful, melancholy Hungarian, by whom she had a baby son. Jacques had also left in her care his son Justin by his estranged wife. Justin was now fourteen. The three eldest children, who had lived with us at Bethany that desperate summer five years before, were handsome, articulate and imbued with a contempt for conformity that would ensure them incident-rich lives. They all loved Alex, as most children did, for Alex treated them as equals.

  On this oppressive Saturday afternoon Manuela had gone to the shops with the baby, her husband had taken Justin fishing, and Miranda had gone to a friend’s house to play, leaving Ben to ride his bike at the pigeons. He was particularly unhappy because he had expected to go camping with friends that weekend, and the arrangement had been cancelled. I felt sorry for him, remembering the bitterness of such childhood disappointments, but I was not prepared to hear him say eagerly to Alex, ‘Can I come back with you? Can I come and stay the night?’ and Alex reply, ‘Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to see what Manuela says.’

  Manuela, when she came home, was entirely in favour of a proposal which took a child off her hands for twenty-four hours.

  ‘Where will he sleep?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got my tent,’ he burst in. ‘And a sleeping bag. I can sleep in your field.’

  He wanted it too badly, it was already too late, for me to protest. I felt it was a mistake. We were no longer on our own, Alex and I: we were part of a group, and it was a basic principle of the group that no decisions were taken without a full discussion. In any community, it was always a violation of that principle that led to injustice. We could not simply turn up with an extra child, an extra mouth to feed.

  Alex apparently saw no problems. ‘Don’t be silly, of course it’s all right,’ she said when I voiced my doubts. For a moment I was swayed by her certainty and decided that my reluctance to take Ben home stemmed simply from my own unease with children. In fact I approved of Ben, and if there had to be children around me I would have preferred them to be children of Ben’s sort; nonetheless I was much happier when there were no children around me at all.

  A moment later, seeing Ben let his bicycle fall with a clatter on to the path and rush off, shouting cheerful abuse at his mother, to collect his belongings, I knew my instinct was right. Ben’s arrival would disrupt the group on a day when there had been enough disruption already. Why couldn’t Alex see it? Simon and Dao’s children were quiet, pacific children: they did not fight, or shout, or drop things with a clatter, or even drop things and not pick them up. Watching Ben, I realised for the first time just how quiet they were, just how little Bethany resounded to the normal rumpus of children. Simon’s children had imbibed from their infancy a depth of peace which was not available to other children. Certainly it had not been available to Ben, his childhood dominated by a tempestuous Spanish mother. Ben would shatter the composure of Bethany. Ben was an outsider, a rule-breaker. In fact, I thought, he had a great deal in common with Alex.

  The thought caused me a chill. It brought with it a perspective I had once had about Alex, but which over the weeks had shifted and faded so imperceptibly that I had hardly noticed the change. The contrast now was violently disturbing. I saw Alex, again, as someone who did not quite understand. She did not understand the rules of the group, and did not know she did not understand. I was sure something bad was going to happen.

  We climbed into the Mini, where there was a prolonged performance over the correct siting of Ben, the tent and the sleeping bag. As we set off, Miranda came swinging down the road. Ben opened the back window.

  ‘I’m going to Bethany with Alex, and Esther’s dead,’ he crowed.

  Ben did not play much with Simon’s children: he attached himself to Alex. She helped him put up his tent in the garden and he retired there, with a torch and book, apprehensive but determined, at nine o’clock, with instructions from Alex to come indoors if he felt cold or frightened. He did not.

  His advent had already made a noticeable difference to Sarah and Lily. They were noisier and had become almost self-assertive. In the morning they came into our bedroom, a thing they had never done before, perhaps thinking Ben would be there. Sarah was trailing a pull-along toy dog on wheels, and I realised with surprise that it was the first time I had seen any of those children with a toy. I saw the change in them with dismay, and waited for someone to comment on it, but no one did.

  The atmosphere in the house did not seem to have improved since the previous day. Pete and Coral avoided each other, Simon was remote, and even Dao’s luminosity seemed dimmed. The only happy people appeared to be Ben and Alex, who were clearing nettles from the path into the woods, and even that came to an abrupt end when Ben tripped over a stone and fell headlong into a patch of nettles still awaiting the knife. He wept bitterly, and Alex cuddled him and applied dock leaves. They were in a private world, I thought. That day they formed an indivisible unit. Alex did not want to talk to me, any more than Ben wanted to play with the three adoring little girls who watched him from a distance and tried vainly to attract his attention. They shared something, an aloneless, that set them apart from everyone else.

  Seeing the gulf widening between Alex and the rest of the group, I tried once or twice to point out to her that her behaviour was unsociable, but she did not seem to understand me. She said her responsibility was to Ben, who was a guest, and that anyway the rest of the group were quite happily going about their own business and what was I worrying about? I was not at all sure. It was so intangible. I knew a visitor to the house would see nothing wrong. I, with subtler sight, saw things terribly wrong, but perhaps my sight had become so subtle it was seeing things that weren’t there?

  Ben did not want his lunch. It was salad, with a lot of raw carrots and turnips. He ate some bread and m
argarine, and went outside as soon as he had finished it. Alex washed his plate.

  In the afternoon they cut more nettles and went for a walk in the woods. Alex was going to take him home after supper.

  Supper was bean soup with a stock made from nettles. There were a few nettle leaves floating in it. Ben studied them carefully.

  ‘What is this?’ he inquired at last.

  ‘It’s nettle soup,’ said Dao, without her usual smile.

  ‘Nettles?’ repeated Ben incredulously.

  Alex and I hastened to explain to him that the nettles couldn’t sting you when they’d been cooked, but he pushed his bowl away and burst into tears. Sarah and Lily looked at him with interest, then at their own soup with doubt, and seemed on the point of doing the same, but, catching Dao’s eye, thought better of it.

  Alex comforted him, dried his tears, and said she would find him something else to eat in the kitchen.

  ‘Please do not,’ said Dao. I had never heard her voice so cold.

  ‘He must have something to eat,’ said Alex. ‘He didn’t have any lunch.’

  ‘I do not do it for these,’ said Dao. She always referred to her own children as ‘these’: normally I found it charming. ‘I tell these they must eat what is in front of them, or not eat. Otherwise I will be in the kitchen all day, because they do not like this or they do not like that.’

  Her words hung, uncompromising, in the silence. Alex said nothing, smiled reassuringly at Ben, and gave him some of her own bread. No one spoke for the rest of the meal.

  I washed my bowl and went outside. I felt upset. Dao had been harsh, a thing which was in itself almost unthinkable. They had all been harsh, in that their silence had supported Dao. Yet they had been just. It was absolutely reasonable that a child visiting the house should be asked to obey the same rules as the children living there, in order that trouble might be avoided in future. But was it reasonable to expect a child to eat something which he thought would hurt him? Ben should trust us, of course. And yet, I thought, why should he, when of the whole group only Alex had troubled to be kind to him? But then it was only Alex who had invited him: he was her guest, not the group’s. But what did that matter? We were supposed to love everybody, weren’t we, and here we were discriminating against a child. Or were we, or was the discrimination purely mine, a pathological reaction to having yet another child around, yet another guest I had not myself invited?