by Anita Mason
For the first time I allowed myself to consider the question of whether I too was falling in love with Simon, and was dismayed to feel my heart quicken at the thought. I had never been in love with a man: I had thought myself not capable of it. I liked male company, I approved of the balanced detachment and range which I considered typical of the male intellect at its best, and I admired many personal qualities in the men I knew; yet there was a way in which men were not quite real to me, not entirely dimensional, and I could not believe that they had emotions as profound as a woman’s. I could not take them completely seriously, and the more physical my commerce with them became, the more I despised them.
Simon, in this sense, was not a man to me; he transcended the category. Not merely did he demand to be taken seriously: he was my touchstone of seriousness. I was saturated with his ideas and his presence. He had broken every defence I had. Of course I loved him – in the sense he demanded. Was it possible that the steady warmth of this affection had aroused from its slumber a sexual love which he did not ask for and would not want?
I knew it was a mistake to think about it, and I continued to think about it. It had the heady sweetness of all forbidden thoughts, with a strong spice of fear. After a while I was unable to stop thinking about it, and I was beginning to feel the first stirrings of jealousy towards Dao. With the jealousy came guilt.
I told myself that the psychological self-exposure involved in the Sessions was bound to set up an emotional tension between me and Simon: I could hardly be blamed for it, and it was something he ought to be prepared for. But I realised that it was at least as likely that my self-exposure was sexually motivated, that I was using the Sessions to achieve a precarious intimacy with him. I was carrying on a flirtation with him through my past. It was in very bad taste, quite apart from being dangerous, and I knew I should stop it. I couldn’t: it was too piquant. Besides, the discoveries I had made in Sessions were real and important. I had to go on until I found the thing that had started it all.
‘Nearly all of it is now very clear,’ I said. ‘I tried to cheat in all sorts of ways – by escaping into fantasy, by trying to steal the thing I wanted, by simply pretending that I had it – but it didn’t work. What isn’t clear is the original event. At some point I discovered that I wasn’t like a boy, and that must have been traumatic.’
I was very calm. The previous evening, after the end of a Session, I had realised something so luminously simple that I marvelled I could have missed it for so many years.
‘In my Session yesterday I said I’d started bedwetting when I was about three and a half,’ I said. ‘It went on for well over a year, and it wasn’t only at night. My mother used to get very upset. I’ve never known why I suddenly regressed like this, because there wasn’t, as far as I know, any disturbance at home which would account for it. Then last night I recaptured how I felt on those occasions, when I knew it was going to happen; and the feeling was an absolute panic-stricken refusal to go to the lavatory.’
No doubt about it, it was a striking insight. And it brought me to a point from which I could, I was sure, reach the final enigma of my childhood in a single step. I thought I knew the direction in which it lay.
‘I had a little boy-friend,’ I said, ‘Johnny. He was almost the same age as me. Our mothers were friends. I remember an occasion when I was at his house, and we were playing in the sandpit …’
Simon broke in and made me run the incident properly.
‘I’m playing in the sandpit,’ I said, ‘and his mother comes up and asks me if I want to go to the toilet. I do, but I say no. It gets worse, but I still refuse to go, and finally the inevitable happens. Then we go in for tea, and his mother notices. She can’t understand why I didn’t tell her. And I don’t know either. I just felt compelled to say no.’
‘Go back to the beginning,’ said Simon.
This time I recaptured the fear – the fear that the wet patch I was sitting on would be discovered. Then I got a vivid picture of the green bathroom door and the green and white squared lino, and was gripped by a colder fear. Whatever happened, I could not go in there. Someone was saying something to me. I concentrated.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘His mother’s saying something. She says, “Are you sure you don’t want to go, Kay? Because Johnny’s going.”’
I stopped. ‘Good God,’ I said, in amazement at the literalness of the subconscious. I didn’t want to go because Johnny was going. There it was.
But why?
‘Is there an earlier incident?’ asked Simon.
Of course there was: the incident. I could feel it, but I could see nothing. I knew it was to do with Johnny, but it was an incident that had never been consciously held in the memory. I waited. It struggled towards me, appearing slowly like an animal emerging for the first time from the mud in which it has always lived. It became bright and sharp. I was in Johnny’s garden again. I must have been very small because the grass came up to my shoulders. Johnny and I were there alone. It was early evening.
‘We’ve been playing,’ I said. ‘I say I’m going in, to go to the lavatory, and he says, “Why don’t you go here?”’
I couldn’t see what happened next: it was as if the reel had stuck.
‘Go back to the beginning,’ said Simon.
It was very confused: a series of impressions. Hesitantly I said, ‘I take my knickers down and he looks at me in amazement and says, “You don’t do it like that!” – and demonstrates. I am very hurt at the contempt in his voice. And very envious.’
A tremendous sigh escaped me.
‘Go back to the beginning,’ said Simon again.
But this time it was quite different.
‘He’s challenged me,’ I said. ‘Who can pee the furthest, or something like that. Obviously he doesn’t know that girls can’t. I am wondering how I can evade the challenge without being humiliated.’
I could see no more, but I knew that I had not managed to evade it. The humiliation, the exposure of my inferiority, had taken place then in that garden.
‘I’ve been tricked, betrayed, conned,’ I burst out. ‘I am at a terrible disadvantage and nobody has prepared me for it. The worst thing is the feeling of betrayal. My parents made me believe I was someone special, and all the time I was inferior. They don’t even understand how terrible it is. I can never trust them again.’
I came back to the present with a faint dissatisfaction. I had expected to find, at the end of my quest, some event of haunting lucidity, alight with the strange logic of the subconscious. What I had found was the logic of suburbia. It was so predictable that I could have made it up. An uncomfortable feeling grew in me that perhaps I had made it up. And if I had, what else had I made up? Surely only a colourful detail here and there, to make a better story of it. The progression from incident to incident was real. Yet I wondered if it was inevitable. Would other incidents have done?
Well, I would have to rest content with what insights I had gained. The series was finished. I had said so: and in any case, Alex was due back.
The diary was kept in the top right-hand drawer of the carved oak sideboard in the parlour. Simon had bought it, so that, he said, everyone could write in it what they felt. Since, if we had something to say, we usually said it openly, most of the entries were records of things done, decisions made, or major items of expenditure. However, interspersed among these sober entries, which were usually in Simon’s hand or mine, appeared others of a more poetic nature by Dao, Coral, and sometimes (rather shyly) Alex.
Sometimes there was nothing on the page except, in the top right-hand corner, a note of the weather by Simon. However, the page for the second Thursday in June was almost filled.
First, in Dao’s surprisingly bold writing, whose only hint of un-Englishness was the little spiral, like the start of the treble clef, with which she prefixed her capital I’s: ‘5.30 a.m. saw the red car. Very nice indeed. It means Alex has come back.’
From these two lines could be deduced s
everal things: that Dao got up early, that she was fond of Alex, and that Alex had returned after Dao had gone to bed. In fact Dao habitually went to bed shortly after eight o’clock in the evening, at the same time as the children, and she was always up before anyone else. She liked to get up before six and meditate for half an hour on the grassy slope in front of the house. Then she brought us tea, or whatever we liked. Most people liked a herb tea, but I was reluctant to wake up to anything but Assam. Dao herself rarely drank anything but boiled water which had been allowed to cool until tepid: occasionally she would squeeze a drop of lemon juice into it.
Underneath Dao’s entry Simon had written in his neat hand: ‘Simon, Pete, Dao, Coral and the children went to see Harriet and baby at the hospital.’ On the next line Coral had written: ‘Afterwards, went to Manuela’s.’ And then after a space, ‘The atmosphere in the city is poisonous and the people are suffering.’
The lower half of the page was taken up with Simon’s notes on the weekly finance meeting. These meetings always followed the same form. I would open the proceedings by stating how much had been spent in the past week. Shopping for the group was done by whoever happened to be going into town (in fact I usually did it in my lunch-hour), and the expenditure was written in the cash book. Every Thursday I added up the total expenditure and divided it by three or four (depending on whether Alex was paying a share that week), and people who had done shopping were reimbursed or asked for the balance according to whether the amount they had spent was more or less than their share. I also collected money for the running costs of the house. This money, the kitty, was kept in a tin box and from it the bills were paid.
The arithmetic involved was not complex but it was enough to oppress me, and after the first week I bought a battery for Alex’s pocket calculator. I put the battery down as group expenditure, on the principle that it was in nobody’s interests if the Bursar got her sums wrong.
Having given a statement of expenditure and collected the money for the kitty, I would raise any other matters relating to the finances. When the financial business was completed Simon would take over the meeting and ask if anyone else had anything to say. When everyone had finished, Simon himself would speak.
His chairmanship was superb. By turns patient, humorous and incisive, he guided us through an agenda which, item by item, he reduced to its essentials. Every view was equally weighed and no suggested course of action was dismissed simply because it was inconvenient. He made sure that a decision of some kind was always taken, and was taken with the full, considered assent of all members of the group. There were no majority decisions: if anyone disagreed, the matter was examined until a course was found that satisfied everyone. It was no small achievement. In any normal committee it would be impossible: it was made possible because we had no personal ends to pursue.
Simon’s notes for the second Thursday evening in June ran as follows: ‘Finance meeting,’ followed by the sum we had spent that week. It was rather higher than usual because Alex had bought food in London which we could not obtain locally. Under this Simon had written ‘Agreed’: and three items. The first two were ‘Hay and hay barns’ and ‘Roof’.
The hay was a yearly ordeal for Alex and me. Would we be able to get a contractor to harvest our modest six acres of hay when all around us were farmers struggling to get a hundred acres cut, turned, baled and under cover before it rained? Somehow it was always managed, and each time it seemed a miracle.
This year matters were in the hands of the group. Pete opened the discussion by asking, ‘Why do people cut hay?’
Alex explained that if you didn’t either graze a grass field or cut it for hay the field would quickly revert to weeds and brambles and eventually scrubland. We considered whether there was anything wrong with scrubland and decided there was not, but that equally there was nothing wrong with hay either, and that as the hay was there it would be a waste not to cut it since the goats and ponies would be glad of it in the winter.
We discussed briefly whether it might be possible to process grass into milk without first drying it and feeding it to a goat, and then, by logical progression, whether it might be possible simply to eat the grass. I said I had tasted fresh hay and it was very palatable, but I did not think the human digestion could cope with it. The latter part of this statement was challenged, and Simon said it would simplify life considerably if we could come in to supper and find a bale of hay on the table. Having noticed how Simon’s jokes had a way of turning into realities I did not find this as amusing as the others.
The decision was therefore taken to cut the hay and Alex was asked to find someone to do it. I then raised the question of where we were going to store it. The red barn would hold ten tons, but half of it was unusable because of the huge gap in the roof and the other half was filled with timber and building materials. We would have to use the coach-house. One end of it was almost entirely occupied by a decaying pine dresser which had once been used as a rabbit-hutch, and the other end housed gardening tools and Alex’s collection of non-functioning electric motors. There was a loft over, but its floor was rotten. There was nothing for it but to find somewhere else to put the rabbit-hutch, the gardening tools and the electric motors.
The second item, ‘Roof’, was music to me in its terseness. It meant that they had decided to start work on what Alex and I dryly referred to as ‘the west wing’ (the group had adopted the phrase without a smile).
The question of what to do about the west wing, or whether to do anything at all, had rumbled on for weeks. Now a decision was being requested by Dao. She was worried about the structural condition of the bedroom in which she, Simon and the children slept: it adjoined the west wing and had an inch-wide crack down the wall. It was quite safe, because Alex had had a steel tie put through the house to hold it; but Dao, with the safety of her young at stake, was not to be reassured.
Another disadvantage of the bedroom was that the section of roof above it was only partially slated and the room tended to be damp, which was not important in mid-summer but soon would be. An unsatisfactory discussion had already been held on the subject, opened by Pete with the question of why people slated roofs. He could see no reason for not patching up the leaks with anything that came to hand, and Simon observed that there were several sheets of galvanised iron lying around.
Alex rather tartly remarked that the house was a substantial one and with luck would outlast us, and we ought to be thinking about its next occupants as well. At this point Dao said that, far from being substantial, it seemed to her to be in immediate danger of falling apart. Simon mildly remarked that houses were only a lot of stones piled on top of one another and sooner or later the stones would again assume a horizontal position, and the timing of this event should not arouse emotion. For several hours after this exchange I observed between Dao and Simon what was known in the group as a ‘communication break’.
When the group first formed Alex had suggested that we should finish the west wing for Simon and Dao to live in. Although accepted in principle, the idea had not been seriously developed. Dao now revived it, and, looking at it, we saw what an excellent idea it was. There was a lot of work to be done, but it could be done before the winter. All the external structural work had been completed: it was just a question of finishing the slating, glazing the windows, and putting in a new floor and ceiling. Part of the wing was already fit for occupation: that was my study, a nervous outpost of civilisation in a waste of sawn timber, bags of nails and sacks of petrified cement. I would of course vacate it as soon as the rest of the wing was completed, but meanwhile it was too small a room to be useful to anyone but me.
It was agreed to make a start on the roof of the west wing the following day. The first thing to do was erect scaffolding. While Simon and Pete were doing that, Alex, Coral and I would sort the slates into sizes. Hearing the plans made, I could scarcely believe that a problem which had oppressed me for so long could be so quickly solved.
The third decisi
on was expressed simply as: ‘Partnership from June 30th’.
The idea that the group should be legally constituted as a partnership had been put forward by Alex at an early stage. It fulfilled a number of purposes: it gave us a solid base on which to organise our financial affairs, including any commercial undertakings in which we wished to engage; it defined the basis on which we were living together and assured equal rights to everyone; and (with luck) it would mean that the house could be regarded as belonging to the group rather than to Alex, which would make it more difficult for the bank to force its sale.
Alex’s trip to London had not, needless to say, solved the problem of the roofless property and the £18,000 overdraft. She had managed to stall the bank manager for a little longer. She spoke briefly about the situation in reply to a question from Pete. With problems on all fronts – architects, solicitors, builders, district surveyors, quantity surveyors, planning officials and vindictive neighbours all adding their quota of obstructiveness – it was by now so unbelievably complicated that I could only with difficulty keep up with it myself, and that was with the aid of background knowledge and regular bulletins from Alex.
I could see that while Simon grasped the situation perfectly, Dao, Pete and Coral were completely out of their depth. After several more questions, to which they received answers that confused them further, they subsided into a puzzled silence. I was sorry that Alex had not managed to communicate, but secretly relieved that I was not the only person to be baffled by the labyrinths into which she got herself.
While in London Alex had spoken to her solicitor about the formation of a partnership, and he had said that all that was required was for the prospective members to agree to form one. With the consent of all parties, the partnership then came into being. However, if any member withdrew, the partnership then automatically ceased, and had to be reconstituted.