Bethany Read online

  I stared at the red-necked figure in trousers and vest washing the grime of the day’s work from its hands.

  ‘It’s very odd,’ I said, ‘but I don’t feel at all guilty about stealing this lighthouse. I feel it’s quite unimportant. What I feel most strongly at the moment is anger. That they’re interfering again.’

  I came back to the present, puzzled at my reactions.

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

  ‘My father doesn’t like me,’ I said after a moment. ‘And I don’t like him.’ I paused. ‘I’m jealous of him, that’s why. And he seems to despise my intelligence, which I can’t understand because I know he isn’t particularly clever. So part of the reason why I’m angry is that I don’t want to be in his debt.’

  I finished speaking rather abruptly, with a feeling that it would be a mistake to spend any more time on this incident. As I turned away from it, something came into my mind so forcibly that I spoke without meaning to.

  ‘I wanted to be bad,’ I said. ‘That’s the point.’

  Alex’s brother Philip called to see us and brought his latest fiancée. He was thirty-nine and she was twenty-four, but Philip, suntanned, muscular and unimaginative, both looked and thought like a much younger man. The girl was ordinary and adoring. They might suit each other very well, I thought, if Philip was sensible this time. Something always went wrong with Philip’s plans for marriage, and he exhibited an inability to learn from experience which amazed me.

  Alex did not like her brother. Beyond a certain facial resemblance they had nothing in common. I could not make up my mind how he regarded her. At times he seemed solicitous and anxious to help, doing odd jobs for her which required little time but a lot of strength. At other times he was inconsiderate and gratuitously rude. Alex said that whenever he did things for her there was an ulterior motive, and this appeared to be true. He had, for instance, spent several days painting the front of the house after it was stripped of its rendering; it happened to be the summer that Jacques and Manuela stayed with us, and Philip had taken a very strong fancy – unreciprocated – to Manuela.

  Relations between Alex and Philip had sunk to an unprecedented level of hostility within recent memory, but since the start of the group Alex had resolved to be friendly, and in response to a cautious overture Philip had paid this visit. I could see that Alex, although civil, wished he hadn’t come. If he was aware of her coolness he didn’t show it; he seemed much at his ease, chatting to Pete and Coral, and glancing from time to time, half-puzzled, half-entranced, at Dao. At ease, that is, until Simon entered the kitchen. At the sight of him something seemed to happen to Philip: he quivered, like an animal sensing the presence of a natural enemy. They had never met before: it could only be fear. Simon’s eyes struck fear into many people.

  Alex introduced them and there was an exchange of courtesies in which I had a vivid impression of Philip in headlong flight with no pursuer. Dao must have perceived the same thing, because a few days later she asked Alex whether she had said anything to Philip to prejudice him against Simon. Alex was justifiably surprised.

  I drifted off to the fields. I did not feel inclined to talk to anyone that afternoon. I had a lot on my mind.

  ‘I can’t remember writing it,’ I said. ‘And yet now it’s been discovered I recognise it with a sort of surprise, as if it was something I thought I’d only dreamed about, and it’s turned out to be real.’

  ‘It’ was a small black notebook. It contained a record of the most appalling crimes and atrocities the imagination of an eight-year-old could invent. I had committed them.

  ‘I’m not surprised by my mother’s reaction,’ I said, ‘but I feel that it’s none of her business. It was a game and she’s taking it seriously.’

  Simon directed me to go through it again.

  ‘My parents don’t know who I am,’ I said. ‘I’ve always felt that. I feel I know things they don’t know. And I feel that I’m important in a way that wouldn’t mean anything to them.’

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

  I was finding it hard to breathe.

  ‘I feel exposed,’ I said, and paused to gulp in air. ‘I feel something is terribly unfair. And of course I feel humiliated. Because I’d like to play king, and I’m just a child.’

  My forehead was clammy. I had nearly got to the core of this awful experience, the thing that had never been understood.

  ‘Go back to the beginning,’ said Simon.

  ‘I have cut myself off from the human race,’ I said. ‘My mother’s reaction is that I’m a monster. But that’s what I wanted. That’s what this notebook was all about. It was completely mad. It was about power and cruelty.’

  Then at last I remembered writing it, and was overwhelmed by an emotion so painful, so disturbing, that I had to fight for breath. It was an emotion grotesquely out of place in childhood. It was an emotion I knew, and could not identify.

  ‘When I put down my pencil,’ I said, ‘it was like waking from a beautiful dream. There was a moment of intense sadness.’

  I felt again the deep, uncomprehended anguish that followed the exhilaration of writing in the notebook.

  ‘It was like a drug,’ I said. ‘These exploits of mine had to get worse and worse. I went from excess to excess. I killed thousands of people, in the most unpleasant ways I could devise. I crucified them, I burnt them alive. For some reason they were usually women. And babies. God, how I hated babies.’

  With the eyes of an adult I surveyed the torment of a child, and still could not understand. The horror and the beauty, how could they be the same? I shut my eyes and tried not to think.

  ‘It was like flying,’ I said suddenly. ‘I used to dream a lot about flying. It was the same feeling.’ A startled moment later I added, ‘There’s a very strong sexual element in it.’

  I opened my eyes and sat back in my chair. I had found it. I felt exhausted, but physically lighter. I breathed deeply for a while. Simon waited.

  ‘I don’t know what it means,’ I said at last. ‘I know it’s right, but I’m no wiser. There’s something impenetrable there.’

  The bell rang for supper. I heard the click as Simon put away his pen. We smiled at each other and walked towards the house.

  Alex had decided to go to London. She had received a terse letter from her bank manager requesting specific proposals for the reduction of the interest on £18,600. She would go to see him, and would also see various other people who might be of assistance in selling a roofless property which nobody wanted to buy. She departed turbulently, after losing, bewailing and finding again the ten-pound note with which I provided her for the journey, at half-past six in the morning.

  I was not sorry that she would be away for a few days. I had no room in my mind for the demands of a personal relationship. I was in a dream, sleepwalking through the days towards the hour in the evening when I would sit down with Simon and resume my journey through the dark cavern that held the secret of my childhood.

  Then as I walked pensively through the fields waiting for that hour, I realised that I already knew it, and stood amazed at its simplicity and my obtuseness.

  ‘I spent a large part of my early childhood in a state of bitter anger,’ I said. ‘I felt I had been cheated. The reason was that I wanted to be a boy.’

  The tension in my stomach had gone, and I spoke confidently. I had made a vital connection, and it illuminated everything around it.

  ‘It wasn’t envy,’ I said. ‘It was a passionate yearning. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a boy. When I was very little I believed God would one day turn me into a boy if I was good, but eventually I realised it would never happen. I felt it was a terrible injustice. I looked at the little boys I knew and it seemed to me that most of them didn’t deserve it.’

  I was conscious of smiling wryly. I had never quite lost the feeling that the male in general was not worthy of its biological privileges.

  ‘So
,’ I said, ‘I tried to be as much like a boy as possible, but it didn’t work. I wanted to wear jeans – or whatever they were called in those days – but my mother didn’t approve of trousers for little girls. And I wanted a toy revolver.’ I stopped, momentarily assailed again by that desperate childhood lust.

  ‘No one would give me one,’ I said. ‘It became an obsession. In the end, I took some money from the hallstand and went to the toyshop and bought a black toy revolver in a holster. I couldn’t wear it openly, of course, I had to wear it under my raincoat. It was discovered and I had to send it as a Christmas present to my cousin. He probably had a dozen of them.

  ‘By the time I wrote the notebook,’ I said, ‘I’d more or less given up trying to acquire a gun. I’d always thought the notebook was an expression of alienation and something to do with my relationship with my parents, but I’ve realised that it wasn’t. It was a sadistic fantasy based on the childish equation: male equals big and strong equals cruel. My dislike of babies was simply a rejection of the maternal role, of course. I still don’t like children much.’

  Simon wrote busily. He took notes during all the Sessions now. He spent most of each day writing at speed. I thought it must be very tiring.

  He asked me what physical feeling I associated with the experiences I had just described.

  ‘Being bottled up, caged in,’ I said. ‘A feeling of rage.’

  He told me to locate a particular incident when I had felt that. I hesitated. There were so many. I selected the one that seemed to have the strongest emotional charge.

  ‘I’m six years old,’ I said. ‘I’m standing looking in a toyshop window at something I want which will change my life. I know I can’t have it. There is no good reason why I can’t have it. Nobody understands why I want it. I hate them.’

  I stopped abruptly. I was looking at an expensive toy revolver with an imitation ivory handle. It was the biggest and best in the Lone Star range and I looked at it every day on my way home from school. Every fibre of my being yearned towards it. I felt that it was already mine. Yet as I thought that, that it was mine, I felt a strange dissatisfaction.

  I, as adult, examined this dissatisfaction and saw that it was not the normal boredom that ensues on getting what one wants, nor was it a consciousness that the thing was a toy and not a real gun. It was the tip of an insatiability. As I saw it, I experienced an avalanche of comprehension. For I was prepared to do anything to obtain this revolver – lie, cheat, steal. And as the years went by I did precisely that: I lied, cheated and stole. I had never made the connection, because I had never stolen anything I really wanted. Instead, I had …

  I slammed my hand down on the arm of the chair with the force of the insight. ‘That’s where it started!’ I exclaimed.

  Mindlessly I had accepted the dictum that the kleptomaniac is looking for love, and blamed my compulsive childhood thieving on loneliness. I had been looking for nothing of the sort. With newly-opened eyes I scanned the wretched catalogue of things I had stolen from relatives, school-mates and shopkeepers – the little lighthouse, dozens of pens, pencils and crayons … I remembered stealing money from my mother’s purse to buy a cheap fountain pen I didn’t want; I remembered the strange episode in which I had stolen a pound note from my grandmother and obliterated the memory of the theft, so that my first consciousness of it, and all I could subsequently recapture of it, was the moment when my fingers contacted in my raincoat pocket a stiff papery cylinder which my mind desperately interpreted as a toothbrush. I had coveted and by devious means obtained another child’s plastic retractable dagger, and the last thing I had ever attempted to steal was a model soldier with a rifle. All this, and a six-shooter too. A parade of phallic symbolism almost embarrassing in its orthodoxy. Seldom could Freud have been so simply and triumphantly vindicated.

  I put my head back and laughed.

  Sophie came for two days. Sophie was the four-year-old daughter of Harriet, who was Simon’s ex-wife. This did not mean that Sophie was Simon’s daughter: she was assumed by Manuela, Alex and me to be Pete’s, since Pete had for a time lived with Harriet before he met Coral. The reason for Sophie’s visit was that Harriet was going into hospital to have another baby. Gordon, the friend of Simon’s who had married Dao for him, telephoned to ask if we could look after Sophie until Harriet was home again. I wondered who was the father of the baby, and rather hoped it was someone I hadn’t heard of.

  ‘Bottled up, caged in, in a rage,’ said Simon. ‘Is there an earlier incident when you felt that?’

  It would have to be much earlier to be any use. I had discovered a great deal, but the source lay much further back, in my first years, before I went to school. I pushed my mind back beyond the point at which it could remember.

  I was sitting on the kitchen floor cutting holes in my father’s socks. I had a green sock in one hand and the scissors in the other. I was consumed with rage about something. There was another feeling which I could not identify. Having cut the heels out of several socks I folded them up and put them back on the dresser.

  I went through the incident several times but could get no more out of it.

  ‘Is there an earlier incident?’ asked Simon.

  When else had I felt this baffled rage?

  From the fringe of memory a dim picture came: a child, three and a half years old, looking at a Christmas tree on which were hung toys more suitable for a baby. The picture sharpened. One of the toys was a rattle in the form of a pink plastic telephone. I saw my mother, her face strained, sitting in an armchair. My father was not in the picture.

  ‘I feel these toys are an insult,’ I said. ‘I must have expressed my dissatisfaction because my mother says, “If you behave like a baby you’ll have baby’s toys.” I have some inkling what she means. I think I have been behaving badly recently. I’ve started wetting the bed again. But I have a strong feeling that it isn’t fair.’

  I paused. ‘They’re not being honest,’ I said. ‘I feel I’ve been tricked.’

  I could not account for this last perception. I waited for the emotions to clarify.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ I said, ‘belittled. Angry. But the strongest feature is that these toys are simply nothing to do with me. They’re for someone else. My parents do not know who I am.’

  I left the incident with a feeling of irritation. It seemed both enigmatic and trivial. I returned to the incident of the socks, which now seemed to hold a new element.

  ‘It’s very confused,’ I said. ‘It seems the right thing to do. I know it’s destructive, and I know that something terrible will happen if I do it. And at the same time, as I cut into the fabric I have the extraordinary feeling that I’m doing something helpful.’

  Yet the motive was spite. I was intensely angry, and the cutting of the socks brought an emotional release I could still feel. The anger was the same in all the incidents I had been through: it was the anger of impotence. It was caused by an initial frustration, compounded by many repetitions, and rendered almost intolerable by the frustration of the need to communicate. Through all the incidents ran the theme that I could not communicate my real nature. With surprise I realised that I had last felt this anger very recently.

  ‘It’s the rage I still feel when someone won’t listen to me,’ I said. ‘When their refusal to listen amounts to an attempt to change my identity. It happens often with Alex. I become incoherent with anger, because she is trying to tell me about something that is happening inside my own head.’

  I paused. ‘I suppose that’s what is meant by trying to change someone’s data,’ I said.

  There was a phone call to say that Harriet had had a baby boy.

  It was her fourth child, the others being Sophie and two sons of Simon’s, aged respectively twelve and nine. The boys were physically graceless, as was their mother, but highly intelligent. I had once seen Simon, Harriet and the older boy, Martin, together, and been struck by the child’s originality of mind and by Simon’s lack of warmth towards him
. Simon had said afterwards that Martin had serious problems of ego. I had noticed that he required a very high standard of behaviour from his children. I reflected that it must be difficult having an apparently perfect being for a father.

  I did not like Harriet, although we had a lot in common. She, Simon and I had all read the same subject at the same university, although they had been there six years before me. Harriet and I shared the same combination of an orderly mind and a lifestyle which hovered perpetually on the brink of chaos. I could not decide why I didn’t like her: every time I thought about it there seemed to be a different reason. When I caught myself mentally accusing her of both puritanism and promiscuity I realised that my dislike was not rational and I had better look elsewhere for its cause. In the event I never bothered.

  She and Simon had separated because of mutual incompatibility of temperament. (My words, not his: the only time he ever referred to it in my hearing was to pay Dao a gentle compliment, saying what bliss he found it to live with someone who left him in peace.) He had given Harriet the cottage in which they’d lived, a few miles from the city, and since then he and Dao had never had a permanent home. When I met them they were living in a cliffside chalet overlooking the Atlantic. The view was breathtaking, and so, in winter, were the winds.

  The chalet belonged to Gordon, the friend who had married Dao. They moved out of it after the Buddhist equivalent of trouble with the neighbours: the man next door, after a few conversations with Simon, had become angry and hit him. Simon had not attempted to defend himself, but had decided to move since his presence obviously upset the man. This information came from Manuela, supplying, as always, the apocrypha to Simon’s canon. I could not fathom her attitude to Simon: it seemed to be a mixture of respect, impatience, affection and mockery. I had once heard her say, ‘When I think of Simon I feel so sad,’ with the unmistakable and extraordinary implication that there was something wrong with him. I concluded that Manuela had never properly listened to Simon because in her mind she was still listening to Jacques – Jacques as he had been before alcohol and drugs claimed him. I concluded also that she was a little in love with him. Surely few women who met Simon could not be in love with him. Men, too. Why else did Gordon do so much for him? And there was the dog-like fidelity of Pete.