Bethany

by Anita Mason

  And was it necessary? I remembered how we had agreed that the ideal was to do as little as possible, how Simon had said with a smile that he looked forward to the time when the sound of the hammer was heard no more, and I wondered how we had got into a situation where the sound of the hammer never ceased. The house, the barns, the fences, the hay, the scaffolding, the roof … we hadn’t stopped for weeks, and nearly every day new suggestions were made and Pete added a few more items to the list in his maintenance book. What had happened to those marvellous talks, those magical times when we had sat for hours after a meal, or in the parlour in the evening, or on the patio in the sun, and listened to Simon, and explored the universe with our minds?

  Thus I reflected. And, since we always said what we thought, I said it.

  Again the defence. I persist in attributing to myself the best motives, to believing that it was all a misunderstanding.

  But of course he understood. He has always understood. I have never known him wrong.

  And even if he had, in this case, slightly misunderstood, it wouldn’t matter. Because his lightness would always, in sum, exceed mine and the excess would swallow up, as it were, any small wrongness. That was why I submitted.

  We sat, then, in the parlour, I in my usual chair in the corner, the high-backed Victorian armchair which, like everything else at Bethany, struggled to maintain its dignity in spite of a broken spring. We always sat in the same places: Coral and myself on either side of the fireplace; Simon directly opposite the fireplace with Dao sitting next to him, surrounded by the children; Alex between me and Dao, and Pete between Coral and Simon.

  Coral fussed a great deal over the baby during meetings, but Simon said nothing about it, although he tolerated no interruptions from his own children. If they were disruptive – which was rare – he asked Dao to take them to bed. Since the meetings were in their nature meetings for and about the group, there was no question of the children not attending. At the start of this particular evening the group was incomplete because Alex was away. It was the only time anyone missed any part of a Thursday meeting.

  The atmosphere of those meetings was something I had never experienced before. It was a little like being in church; but the peace that filled the room had nothing to do with rituals: it was a peace that came from living truthfully. It was the peace of perfect communication. Simon never tired of stressing the crucial importance of communication. He seemed to attach a mystical value to it, which I did not quite understand at the time. I did, later. Perfect communication is Communion.

  So there we sat on that ill-starred Thursday evening, and I announced that we had spent just over £41 in the course of the week. There had been several abnormal items of expenditure: roof battens, a pitchfork, and a quantity of pinhead oatmeal. I was just dividing the sum by three and wondering if I could pay my third and also repay the £20 I had borrowed from the kitty to get Alex to Jersey, when I heard a car come up the drive. Alex was back.

  I suppose I had expected her to look upset. She looked distant, but serene. She returned our smiles calmly and took her place in the semi-circle. We went on with the meeting.

  Alex said she could pay her share of the expenditure this week as her mother had given her some money. I did my arithmetic again, and it was agreed to pay the phone bill. We were running short of flour and oats, and Alex, who had not contributed to the bulk food purchase a month earlier, said she thought the food merchant would probably barter a sack of each for a small antique sewing machine of hers which had caught his eye when he delivered the initial order.

  This offer was accepted with approval, and Simon said there must be a lot of things we could barter if we looked around. In time we might find we could do without money altogether.

  We agreed that we could not go on doing without baths altogether. The water situation was becoming critical: there had been almost no rain for six weeks and the spring that fed our tank was running low. A bath drained the tank completely, so no one had had a bath for a fortnight. In any case no one felt like having a bath because, since the Rayburn was on all the time for cooking, the hot water was so hot it came spitting out of the taps half steam. You couldn’t add cold water to it because the constant emptying of the cold water pipes had dragged the scaling of rust from their insides and the cold water was now permanently orange. It was surprising how disturbing the idea of sitting in orange bathwater was. The hot water came out comparatively clear, presumably because the sediment had had time to settle in the boiler.

  Dao, who at first had been loud in dismay at the peculiarities of the plumbing system, now accepted them with humour, but Coral was not resigned. Indeed, we would all have liked to plunge into a cool bath after a day’s work in the fields. We discussed, not for the first time, installing a shower, and realised again that a shower would work directly off the existing water supply and merely provide us with the same choice of clear scalding water or orange cold water.

  Simon then remembered that a portable shower for campers was manufactured: it used only a gallon of water, which could be drawn off from the hot tap and allowed to cool. It was obviously the answer, and I was requested to find out the price.

  The next item was the ponies. It seemed that Bishop had decided Coral was fair game. Reading galley-proofs in my study that afternoon, I had been disturbed by a movement outside the window, and, looking out, had seen Simon running full pelt down the drive. I wondered what could be happening to make Simon run, and then I heard a whinny and knew. Bishop and Osmond had decided to join Coral as she took the baby and the three children for their afternoon walk while Dao had her Session. Bishop had teased, Coral and the children had panicked, and Bishop had gleefully chased them all the way down to the gate. It was useless to say to Coral, ‘Never run away,’ just as it was useless to say to the rest of the group, ‘These ponies are like that: I tried to tell you,’ so I said nothing, and the situation was resolved by Alex’s volunteering in future to escort the four o’clock walk.

  The last item was the west wing. There was hardly any discussion: we were agreed that it should have top priority. Simon wrote it in the diary.

  Then looking quickly round the group he asked, in his level, courteous, chairman’s manner, ‘Has anyone else any suggestions to make?’

  I waited for a few seconds, to give other people a chance. No one seemed to have anything to say.

  Slightly nervously – it was, after all, quite a bold statement – I said, ‘Yes, I have. I think we’re working too hard.’

  I was surprised by the silence. I had expected some kind of recognition. There was nothing.

  I continued.

  ‘All these projects,’ I said. ‘We’re all doing something all the time, we never stop. We never seem to have time to talk any more. At the start of the group there seemed to be much more time. We used to sit around and talk; it was good, we all benefited. We don’t do that any more.’

  My voice had risen and I had trouble keeping it steady. There was no feedback at all: not the slightest hint that they knew what I was talking about. Simon was frowning.

  Alarmed, I blundered on.

  ‘Only the other day I heard Pete saying there never seemed to be any time.’

  ‘Don’t speak for others,’ said Pete.

  I felt as if I had walked into a tank.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know one shouldn’t speak for others. I was just trying to make it clear that I wasn’t speaking purely on my own behalf: I thought I was expressing a view which was probably shared by other members of the group.’

  ‘Don’t speak for others,’ said Simon.

  I realised I had made a terrible mistake, but I didn’t know what it was. There was silence in the room. I glanced at Alex, sitting a few feet away; she was looking straight in front of her.

  I waited.

  But Simon was waiting. What was he waiting for? There was nothing more I could say. After a few minutes of that silence I would have been unable to speak even if I had found somethi
ng to say. The silence was iron; it was ice; it was stronger than all the souls it contained.

  It lasted for ten minutes by my still-ticking watch.

  Simon said, ‘Has anyone else anything to say?’

  Receiving no answer, he stood up and walked from the room.

  He wanted to bring me to my senses, I suppose, and knew that only the strongest measures would do it. I held out against him a long time. I felt an injustice had been done me. I hoped in the morning things would be different.

  We went off to bed in silence, except for the smiling ‘Goodnight’ which usually said so much, and tonight seemed to say nothing at all. I wanted support from Alex, but she was withdrawn. She said that in Jersey she had made some important discoveries which she had come back wanting to share with the group, and instead had found herself in the middle of a distressing situation which I had provoked. We slept in the same bed, not touching.

  In the morning things were not different. I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. At about nine o’clock the bell in the hall was rung. Normally the bell was only rung for meals: if it was rung at any other time it was a summons to a meeting. Dao was calling a meeting.

  We sat again in the parlour. Dao said she had called the meeting because something was wrong and she thought it should be settled. Simon asked of the group what was wrong. There was a long silence.

  In the end I said that Dao was obviously referring to what had happened the previous evening when I made a suggestion and it was badly received by the group.

  Simon said in a cold, puzzled voice, ‘When you did what?’

  I faltered. Surely that was what had happened?

  ‘I made a suggestion,’ I said. ‘I thought we were all working unnecessarily hard and I suggested that it might be a good idea if we had a bit more time to … well, sit and talk.’

  Again the complete silence, as if I had not said anything. Or as if they were waiting for me to say something in a language they could understand. On every face was the same faint smile of patience, and behind it an endless gravity.

  I began to feel very afraid.

  Simon waited to see if something would come out of the silence. Nothing did. After a while he picked up the thought again.

  ‘You know what you did,’ he said to me.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know?’ His voice was incredulous, contemptuous.

  I grasped the arms of the chair to steady myself, and kept my voice quiet and level.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand what has happened.’

  It was true. In a few minutes I had moved from absolute certainty about what had happened to utter doubt. I knew I had said what I remembered saying, but I knew nothing else. I did not know what I had meant when I said it. I did not know what effect I had intended, or what effect my words had had. I felt I was alone in a dark place. From long habit I looked to Simon to guide me, but remorselessly he threw me back on myself.

  ‘You know,’ he insisted.

  Surely I had tried to help. No, I could no longer cling to that idea, which now seemed ridiculously inadequate. My motives must have been selfish. Yet I could not see how. What could I gain? It occurred to me that I was looking at the wrong thing, but I did not know where else to look.

  In the midst of my confusion I felt a resentment. For surely this was monstrously unfair? Simon had turned the full force of his rejection on me in punishment of an error so small it merited no more than a stern word. Indeed I still did not know what the error was, but I was sure it was superficial, no more than a misunderstanding.

  And then Simon did the thing which I had sometimes seen him do before, and which is the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life.

  He goes back into his mind. His body hangs limp in the chair: if you struck him he would not feel it. All the force of his being now drives the mind, which, at a speed reflected in the strange flickering of his eyes, scans … what? Information. He is reading information. Information stored somewhere I cannot reach, in a form I cannot imagine. Faster and faster the mind flickers, searching, comparing, checking, rejecting, refining ever further until the analysis is complete.

  Still now, like a blue lance, the eyes pierce mine.

  ‘What have you done?’ he says.

  A banal question, a question often asked of children. The primal question, the question asked of Adam and of Cain.

  Let the question sink into you, do not fight it. Let it sift down through the layers of your mind, through the thickening layers until it is lost to sight and can only be sensed, and then is lost altogether. It becomes the most terrible question in the world.

  I could not answer. I sat, drained, in the corner of my high-backed chair while Simon spoke.

  I don’t remember what he said. It didn’t register. His words surged over me, making no sense. I knew they were addressed to me, but they seemed to have nothing to do with me. At one point he rebuked me for fidgeting, because I was moving the toe of my right shoe slowly in a small circle.

  A little later he asked if the others wished to say anything. Coral said gently, ‘You see Kay, when you love people you don’t want to hurt them.’ I smiled at her, with not the glimmering of an idea what she was trying to say.

  The meeting broke up in an impasse. People went back to their work. I walked out aimlessly into the fields.

  Several hours went by. The bell rang for lunch but I didn’t go in. I couldn’t face them. Literally, I didn’t know how to face them: I did not know what face to present to them, because I didn’t know who I was. My centre of identity had been broken by Simon’s question.

  I found myself by the ruined cottage. It was a spot I particularly liked, at the top of a sheltered slope and overlooking the wooded part of the valley. People didn’t usually go there. The field was uncultivated and given over to dock, bracken and a spreading colony of raspberry canes. I leant against an ash tree and let my gaze wander over it. I saw that it was beautiful, and that I had no part in it. It was sealed off from me.

  Alex walked past. I said something to her: she stopped, grudgingly. I said, ‘I’d like to talk to you about what’s going on.’

  She was preoccupied and unsmiling. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think there’s any point,’ she said. ‘In any case, I have my own thoughts to think about.’ She walked off abruptly towards the woods.

  Only the tension in my stomach and the constriction across my forehead told me it was really happening. My mind had stopped working. Every time I started it up it whirred furiously for a few minutes, scattering thoughts instead of relating them, and then cut out again.

  I forced it into life once more. What was I going to do?

  I had been rejected by the group. They had, as it were, withdrawn my membership. I had a choice to make: I must go or stay. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it was to do either. If I were to stay, I must immediately heal the breach between us: it would have to be done by me, since they would not, however long the situation continued, move from their position of monolithic rightness. But I could not heal the breach without confessing myself guilty of whatever it was I was supposed to have done, and I still did not know what it was. I did not feel guilty, just hurt and bewildered. My mind formed the words ‘hurt and bewildered’, and I caught a glimpse of myself as a pathetic victim, and then of myself watching this creature with pity and approval, and recoiled in disgust. If I was still writing dramas for my ego, perhaps everything Simon had said about me was true. I tried to concentrate on what he had said about me, but it had gone, leaked out through the holes in my head.

  I returned to my dilemma. Should I leave? At once, with a cold claw at my stomach, the question became, could I leave? This was my home. It was more than that, it was my world. If I left it I would die, deprived of vital nourishment. In any case, where would I go? To obliterate the pain of this leaving I would have to go far away; but I had no money for travel or lodging, and my job was here. Should I then just move out
of Bethany and find somewhere to live nearby? The idea was grotesque, and more painful than the idea of going away altogether. I forced myself to think about it; about the mechanics of finding somewhere to live, probably in the town where I worked because I would have no car; about coming home to an empty room, and making tea for one. I told myself it did not have to be as bleak as that: I could make new friends, go to the pub in the evenings, do all the things I was not free to do now – stay in bed late, read, listen to the radio, eat eggs for breakfast. The small stirring of excitement produced by these ideas was immediately quenched by a recognition of their paltriness. Certainly I would be free. Free, in a desert, to choose whether I died of thirst, despair or loneliness. I knew the world outside the group: it was a grey, disjointed, senseless world, a world of cardboard through which its inhabitants moved like puzzled ghosts. How could I imagine that I could go back and live in that featureless, sunless place?

  Yet the group, outside which I could see no possibility of life for myself, had rejected me, like an organism rejecting an unhealthy cell. The organism would not re-admit me until I was again in harmony with it, and that meant accepting a guilt I did not feel. I wondered briefly whether they would let me live somewhere on the land, in a caravan perhaps, as a sort of friend of the group but not part of it. I saw that the idea was ridiculous. ‘He who is not with me is against me.’ Either I was part of the group, or I wasn’t.

  Up by the house I heard Pete calling something cheerily to Coral, and my heart ached in its isolation. From inside, the group appeared to be a centre of radiation, pulsing outwards its warmth and light; but from outside, this magic circle presented the appearance of an unbroken wall.

  Why had they done this to me?

  I brooded again on what had happened, and, finding no answer, concluded again that what had really happened could not be what I thought had happened. Yet what else could have happened? I examined it again, over and over, and still I found no clue to what had taken place in that fractured moment after I said, ‘We’re working too hard’. The answer must lie in what I’d said, but although by now I could see many things wrong with the statement – a cocksureness and insensitivity, perhaps even an echo of the old desire to gain Simon’s attention – I could not see anything sinister enough to merit his devastating response. It was an injustice, it must be: and yet if so, it was a terrible one. I did not want to think Simon unjust even in a very small way – I simply could not tolerate the idea of his being guilty of an injustice as great as this. But there was no third possibility. Either he was guilty of a terrible wrong, or I was. I had to admit that, on the past records of both of us, the likelihood of my being wrong was considerably greater.