Bethany Read online

  My thoughts chased each other fruitlessly. I felt very lonely. I glanced once or twice in Alex’s direction, but she was preoccupied with Ben and returned my look distantly. It was all I could expect. I felt alienated from the others, and although I longed for a kind word from Simon I was afraid to approach him.

  In the end I went and joined him where he sat cross-legged at the edge of the field, gazing over the valley. The heat of the day had evaporated and it was a cool, slightly misty evening.

  ‘It might rain,’ I said. It had not rained for three weeks.

  ‘Yes, it might,’ he said with a smile. The smile said that anything might happen.

  We sat and listened to the earth settling down. A few home-going rooks cawed. From the kitchen came a domestic murmur of Dao and her daughters. The chickens in the orchard were making the gentle throaty sounds that I loved, and there was a series of little flutters and bumps as they flew up into their henhouse for the night. I drank in the stillness, and marvelled that in this lovely place I could a moment ago have thought myself unhappy.

  Shouting over her shoulder at the yapping dogs, Alex emerged from the garden, carrying the tent and an armful of treasures Ben had found in the woods. She was followed by Ben himself, half-enveloped in the sleeping bag which he was trying to fold up as he walked. The dogs played noisily around his feet. They all tumbled into the Mini, from which the dogs were then ejected. Alex took them back to the kitchen, shut them in, got back in the car, and with a wave in our direction started off down the drive in a cloud of dust and to the accompaniment of excited shouting from the back seat.

  In silence Simon and I watched the little red car disappear round the corner.

  ‘Why does she do it?’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t see,’ said Simon.

  ‘I thought perhaps it was me,’ I said. ‘I thought perhaps I’d got it all wrong and there was nothing the matter.’

  ‘Nothing the matter?’ repeated Simon with a ghost of a laugh. He might have been a general surveying corpses on a battlefield.

  ‘For the past two days,’ he said, ‘it has been impossible to hear the silence for the trumpeting of human egos.’

  I examined my soul. I could not at first find evidence of egotism in my behaviour. Then I saw that my wish not to bring Ben home had been a form of egotism. I had not wanted my grief for Esther intruded upon. That grief had itself been egotism, not real grief at all. It was my own shortcomings I had been grieving over. It was always myself: I could not keep myself out of anything.

  Simon said, ‘Why do you involve yourself?’

  I was shocked. He could not have read my mind so literally. I stared at him.

  He said, ‘If it is nothing to do with you, why do you involve yourself?’

  My mind wheeled in an arc like a buzzard and homed finally on his meaning, which, as I circled into it, became so beautifully obvious that I burst out laughing. He had presented me with the flipside of the mental process I had just been through. He laughed with me, not knowing what I was laughing at but delighted that it had made me happy.

  I sobered up. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I involve myself. I feel responsible. Particularly with Alex. Or rather, I don’t in fact feel responsible, but I feel that I ought to, and so I involve myself even more anxiously.’

  ‘But if it is Alex’s business, why do you have to involve yourself?’

  ‘I feel protective towards her,’ I said.

  ‘One protects children,’ he said.

  I could not answer him. The dogs gruffed and whined in the kitchen, wanting to be let out. Dao opened the door and they bounded out and streaked across the field, one blue-grey mongrel, one small terrier, barking exultantly, oblivious of the death of a companion the day before. Two dogs, free, simple.

  ‘Why do you feel that you ought to feel responsible?’ he asked.

  I scanned for the reason and knew that I would not find it that evening. It went deep. It was a chance in a thousand that I had brushed past the tip of it in my attempt to answer another question.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can come back to it.’

  He smiled, an approving smile, knowing that this was not an evasion but a decision to treat the matter with the seriousness it deserved.

  ‘If you like,’ he said.

  Two days later the Sessions began.

  ‘Locate an incident which might have caused this tendency to make you feel responsible when you are not,’ said Simon.

  His voice was quiet and held the power to command. We were sitting in the sun-dappled parlour. I closed my eyes, partly to concentrate, partly because of the brightness. My mind ranged back, selecting and rejecting, hesitant. Then it found. It was like a hawk stooping: there was no doubt.

  ‘I have the incident,’ I said.

  ‘Go back to the beginning of the incident,’ said Simon. ‘Tell me when you’re there.’

  I was there. Standing in the doorway of Alex’s workshop on a long-forgotten spring afternoon. Listening, puzzled and unhappy, as Alex railed at me. Watching the cold sunlight, broken up by the moving branches of the laurel tree outside, make patterns on the dusty machinery.

  ‘It is seven years ago,’ I said. ‘I’m standing in the doorway of Alex’s workshop, which is now part of the kitchen. Alex is angry with me because she says I’m not helping her. She says I am leaving her with the sole responsibility for the house. She says I’m not pulling my weight.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I continued, ‘that it’s true enough to make me feel guilty, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t got a job, but then neither has Alex. She’s supporting me, but it isn’t costing her anything in terms of effort. In any case she says she isn’t asking me to get a job. She wants me to take responsibility, she says. But responsibility for what? She doesn’t expect me to mend the roof. What does she expect me to do? I thought it was all right for me to live here and clear the brambles and work in the garden and do a bit of freelance work and enjoy myself, but apparently it isn’t. Something more is being required of me. I don’t know what it is.’

  The workshop faded from my mind and I was standing in a field: one of the lower fields that led to the river. I was gazing at the hedge. It was an old Cornish stone hedge, overgrown with grass and weeds and crowned at intervals along its curving length with a number of trees, ending with a fine beech. I loved the hedges at Bethany, I delighted in their ancient mingling of the man-made and the natural. Looking now at this hedge I saw that my innocent relationship with it had been destroyed. I could no longer enjoy it, because I was going to have to use it. I was going to have to trim it back and put a fence along it and turn it into an efficient hedge. And when I had done that, it would have ceased to be a hedge. It would have become what already I saw in it, a wall.

  ‘And so my attitude to the place altered,’ I said. ‘It became something I had to worry about. And because there was not very much I could do on my own, I worked very hard doing things which I knew were not particularly important. All to discharge a feeling of responsibility which I did not feel to be quite genuine.’

  I sat back in my chair, very surprised. In ten minutes I had discovered the cause of a habit which had dominated my life for seven years.

  Or had I? There was something more. Why had I been so susceptible to that accusation of Alex’s, which I could see even at the time rested on flimsy foundations?

  Simon saw it, and did not attempt to take me through the experience again. ‘Is there an earlier incident which you associate with the idea of responsibility?’ he asked.

  It came almost at once, and I fought to dismiss it. I did not want to look at it. I knew from the violence of my reaction that I must.

  I was back at school, boarding school. I was in sixth form and I hated it. I hated it for its tedium and lack of privacy, but most of all because it imposed duties on me which I did not want to fulfil. All my schooldays I had flouted authority: now, as a sixth-former, I was authority. I could not cope with it. I did not wan
t to tell the younger children to be quiet, brush their hair and behave themselves. I did not want to because I did not believe in the virtue of doing these things. And I did not want to because I was afraid they would laugh at me.

  Sitting tense in my chair in the parlour, I found myself once more, sixteen and bitterly alone, standing irresolutely in the sixth-form study when I should have been upstairs. I should have been restoring order in the dormitory, imposing silence on chattering juniors and braving their whispered sarcasms. Instead I was leaving it to my fellow sixth-former, an earnest girl universally mocked and despised. I left it to her every night. In consequence her public standing was as low as mine was high. No one saw that I, the rebel, the individualist, the free-thinker, was a hypocrite, a coward and a fake.

  I shuddered. I was very cold. I came out of it slowly, feeling drained. I knew that I would have to go through it again until the pain was discharged, but that behind it lay a dark mountain of unsearched misery that would have to be explored, mapped and understood before I was a whole human being and could call my mind my own.

  4

  Sources

  It was about this time that something strange happened.

  I came into breakfast and found a roomful of silent, still people. Simon, instead of occupying his usual chair at the head of the table, was sitting in a chair several feet away near the window in an uncharacteristic attitude: it was almost a slouch. His face was pale and withdrawn. No one was eating.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, to the room in general.

  ‘You know,’ said Simon without looking up.

  It was like a physical blow. I had no idea what he meant.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t,’ I said.

  Alex came in.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  Simon looked up, and his eyes fastened coldly on hers.

  ‘You know,’ he repeated.

  Alex drew in her breath sharply as if to say something, then looked at me. I shrugged.

  We sat down and helped ourselves to muesli, and tried to eat it. After a while the others ate too. The chink of spoons sounded deafening.

  ‘Won’t you have something to eat, Simon?’ coaxed Dao.

  ‘No thank you, Dao,’ he replied with his normal courtesy.

  Whoever had caused this, it wasn’t Dao.

  After a while Pete put down his spoon and said, ‘Are we going to repair the orchard wall today?’

  ‘It’s too late,’ said Simon.

  I felt dread settle into every crevice of the room.

  ‘Too late for what?’ said Alex.

  Simon stood up. ‘It’s too late,’ he said, and walked out.

  The only thing I was sure of was that this nightmare had nothing to do with me. Doggedly I finished my muesli, washed the bowl, and went upstairs to change. I had to go to work. To my surprise I heard the Humber start up and go down the drive while I was in the bedroom. I went downstairs to find everyone in the kitchen except Simon. He had gone to the city, said Dao. Simon, who never went out. Alex and I exchanged glances.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ I asked.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Is it something we’ve done?’ said Alex.

  Coral said, ‘Simon didn’t say what was the matter.’

  Alex and I walked out on to the patio. It was a beautiful morning. The exhaust fumes from the Humber still hung faintly in the air.

  ‘Have you done anything to upset him?’ asked Alex.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  We stared down the drive.

  ‘Bit heavy,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Alex.

  Pete and Coral joined us, Coral holding the baby.

  ‘Well, I think that’s quite extraordinary,’ said Alex. ‘People don’t behave like that.’

  ‘Not without giving a reason,’ I said.

  ‘Even with a reason,’ said Alex.

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said. ‘If that’s how he feels …’

  Pete said, with a puzzled air, ‘You seem to be saying that Simon is in the wrong.’

  Alex and I turned on him in unison.

  ‘Well we aren’t,’ we said.

  Pete smiled gently, and spread his hands in a gesture which plainly signified that we should think again. He walked off, still smiling, to the toolshed.

  Dao had come out as well, the children pattering behind her. Alex and I turned to her as to our last hope.

  ‘Dao, what is going on?’ said Alex.

  She was silent for a while, and I feared she would give us the same answer as Pete. But she was thoughtful, a little subdued. The children hung about her, thumb-sucking, absorbed in another world.

  She said slowly, ‘Simon does not have the same needs as other people. He does not need things. But he must have mental nourishment.’

  I had difficulty catching the last word, which she pronounced uncertainly.

  ‘His mental nourishment comes from love. Simon has a great need of love. When he feels that is lacking, he … oh, he becomes sick.’

  She smiled dazzlingly, and made the quick, graceful gesture of apology that accompanied all her efforts to explain something difficult in a language unsuited to spiritual nuances.

  Alex and I stared at her, at each other, at the landscape before us. It could not be clearer, or more impossible to grasp.

  I thanked her, and went to work.

  In the evening as soon as I got home I went to find Simon. He was sitting in the parlour. He looked tired and unhappy. This man who had given me so much: it wrenched my heart.

  I did not know what to say to him. In the end I stumbled out a statement that if I had upset him I was sorry, that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was cause him unhappiness. Then, greatly daring, I kissed his forehead. He said nothing.

  ‘Will you come in to supper?’ I said. The bell had gone. ‘Please.’

  He gazed at me, and suddenly smiled. He stood up.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let us both go in to supper, Kay.’

  We went.

  It was all over. What had it been? Alex and I did not discuss it: we were too glad it was past. In time I did the only thing I could do with it: I dismissed it from my mind. There was plenty to think about.

  Step by step I was being drawn back into my past. It was like entering a cavern. I had no map, no idea of where I was going. I followed the path, and after a while it was no longer possible to turn back.

  What had I done? My mother, who was supposed to be brushing my hair, was almost beating my head with the hairbrush. She was crying. She was asking how she deserved such a child, such an evil child.

  My stomach knotted. Simon’s voice, emotionless, seemed to come from far away.

  We were pursuing the theme of responsibility. Asked to define the word, I had said ‘moral accountability’, and Simon had asked me to locate an incident where the idea of moral accountability was associated with pain. My mind with scarcely a moment’s pause had taken me to a scene twenty-five years ago. A frightened child on a kitchen stool; a desperate, tearful woman. A scene only half-understood.

  ‘I can’t remember what caused it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what I’d done.’

  My incomprehension was an echo of the incomprehension I had felt then. Whatever I had done could not merit the word ‘evil’. My mother simply did not understand.

  ‘Go back to the beginning of the incident,’ said Simon.

  She did not try to understand. Everything was black and white for my mother. Everything was straightforward. For me, at the age of eight, it was not straightforward. I stole things, all sorts of things, I could not stop doing it. My mother found out and cried. She took it personally. She was right to do so: it was a rejection.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, and twisted in my chair.

  ‘Go back to the beginning,’ said Simon.

  ‘I feel guilty,’ I said. ‘Terribly guilty at upsetting my mother so profoundly. And I can’t cope. She
has called me evil.’

  I paused.

  ‘She says I’m a secretive child and I tell lies. It’s quite true. I’m secretive because I have no friends. I’m not allowed to play with the other children in the street because they’re rough. And I lie … I lie because I can see no good reason for not doing so.’

  I had been through it six times, there was no more emotion to be discharged from it. I sat quietly, feeling very sad.

  ‘Is there an earlier incident which you connect with the idea of moral accountability?’ asked Simon.

  I could have picked half a dozen, but it was not the memories which came to hand that I wanted. I wanted the thing which was so important that for twenty-five years the mind had walled it up in a cell where it could do no more harm. I waited.

  It stirred in its cell, and I had it. I wished it had been something else.

  I was watching my father wash his face and hands in a bowl in the kitchen sink. He had taken his shirt off, and I looked at his thin shoulders with distaste. He had just come home from work; he was tired, but before he could rest he had to do something for me.

  ‘I’ve stolen something from school,’ I said. ‘It’s an ornament, a little lighthouse carved out of stone. It has to be returned, but my mother doesn’t want me to get into trouble. So my father is going to walk up to the school this evening and throw it over the wall into the flower-bed.’