by Anita Mason
I would not have minded discovering that I was in the wrong; indeed I would have welcomed it. But I could not honestly come to a conclusion for which neither my reason nor my intuition showed me any evidence. It was a deadlock on all levels, and somehow I had not only to resolve it, but resolve it at once. It would not loosen with my inaction but become more rigid, and it would extend its sphere of paralysis until I could not act at all.
There was only one thing I could do. Simon had refused to tell me what had happened, but I must make him tell me. Otherwise, for the rest of my life I would never be able to move beyond this point.
I went to find him.
He was on the landing, about to go up the second small flight of stairs to his bedroom.
‘Simon,’ I said timidly.
He looked down at me and smiled.
‘Yes, Kay.’
‘May I talk to you?’
We sat on the floor of the landing, he with his back against the bathroom door, I with my back against the opposite bedroom door.
He said, ‘What do you want to talk about?’
I said, ‘I’ve come to ask you if you will please explain to me what has happened, because I’ve thought about it for hours and I still don’t know.’
His blue eyes rested on me with just a trace of humour. He said, ‘Why have you thought about it?’
I thought, and smiled. ‘I don’t know how else to approach it,’ I said.
He waited long enough for me to realise that I had just told a lie. Then he said softly, ‘What happened?’
I was back again in the mists. But this time I knew which direction I should follow. Somehow I was in the wrong, for I had lied and there would be a reason.
Lifting the lie to see what lay underneath it, I found that I had constructed a double defence: against seeing the problem, and then against seeing the only way in which it was possible to see the problem. Presumably I also had a third defence against seeing that I had done it, and so on.
Simon now was forcing me to see what had happened.
I saw the group assembled in the parlour, smiling at the satisfactory completion of an evening’s business, an evening’s communication. I saw Alex, pensive and peaceful, and Simon, looking just a little tired, about to tuck his pencil away in his pocket. I saw myself, absorbed in myself, about to impose my personal view of reality on them.
I heard my voice, self-confident and stupid, making assertions, and the amazed silence that followed it, a silence in which became dreadfully clear the distance which separated this member of the group from the others.
I saw, as the time passed, how this member, though now conscious of being out of communication with the group, refused all offers of help, rejected all clues to the nature of the situation, and took refuge from imagined hostility in a fancied incomprehension.
I saw how the member’s resistance to understanding the situation increased to the point where Coral’s statement, in which the issue was presented in its simplest possible terms, had been seen as a riddle.
And of course it really was that simple. My self-absorption had been lack of love. Lack of communication was always lack of love. I had cut myself off. In a group such as ours there could be no greater offence. It was an act against the group. I remembered that Simon had accused me of being against the group and I had protested that I didn’t understand what he meant. ‘You mean you won’t understand,’ Simon had retorted.
I recalled the recent occasions when I had felt hostility towards the group or individual members of it. I had been irritated by Coral, for her excessive preoccupation with the baby, her lack of interest in any tasks that were not directly concerned with the household, and her naivety, which seemed to me to be a pose. I had been shamed on more than one occasion by Dao’s directness and had once deliberately refused an invitation to talk to her because I was afraid of contact with a being so innocent and so discerning. I had felt flashes of dislike for Dao’s children, particularly Sarah, the beautiful unsmiling five-year-old whom I had several times caught throwing earth at the chickens and reprimanded with a gentleness I was far from feeling.
I had experienced antagonism to the group as a whole on almost every occasion when their opinion had differed from mine on the subject of the animals. I had never succeeded in ridding myself of the idea that experience with animals conferred wisdom on the matter, even though I would readily have agreed that those with the greatest experience of animals are the greatest exploiters of animals, and therefore the least able to see what an animal is.
My irritation had reached a peak with the incident that involved Coral, the children and the ponies. I had somehow managed to tell myself that it was their own fault if they were chased by the ponies and that an unnecessary amount of fuss was being made about it. The fact that three young children had been in physical danger and that the baby in the pram might even have been thrown out and killed I had dismissed as unimportant, preferring to regard the incident as a rather amusing vindication of my view that the ponies should be fenced in.
My selfishness, my cruelty, momentarily sickened me so much that I covered my face with my hands. Behind that wall of selfishness I had sat at the group meeting, and wondered why I could not see what was going on.
I uncovered my eyes. ‘I see,’ I said.
‘What do you see?’ asked Simon, and I told him. It wasn’t enough, of course: Simon always pushed one further, further than one thought one could possibly go, beyond logic, beyond experience, into a region where the investigating mind was as sharp as a blade of light and as subtle as the mothlike ideas it darted among, and where even to glimpse an idea was to milk it of its burden of truth. In this quicksilver region I lost and found myself many times in the three hours of our talk, and, when at last we came back to our starting-point, I felt as though I had been made new. My understanding seemed limitless, my love unbounded.
There was just one small point on which I had a reservation. I thought that Simon had not been quite fair in his assessment of my behaviour at the meeting: he had ruled out any possibility of my having had an altruistic motive, and I thought there had been at least a slight element of concern for the well-being of the group. I started to say so.
‘I agree that you’re almost entirely right …’ I said.
He transfixed me with his gaze.
‘Entirely right,’ he said, and waited.
I wavered. It was such a small point. I was sure he was right. Of course he was right: it was just that I couldn’t see it. Surely, if I trusted him, I could afford to make this small leap of faith?
‘Entirely right,’ I said.
6
The Rose-Garden
Simon suggested that, since I had upset four other human beings, I should go round and apologise to them individually. It was a little difficult, particularly with Pete, but they smiled at me very warmly. Afterwards we seemed more united than we had ever been: it was as if the experience had purified not only me but the whole group.
In this confident frame of mind we started on the task that had become a symbol of the group’s unanimity – the slating of the roof of the west wing.
Simon (when he was not taking Sessions) and Pete nailed the slates on, sometimes assisted by Alex, who as usual was unable to concentrate on one job for long and periodically went off to attend to another part of the roof, or inspect a chimney stack, or secure a loose window-frame. I could see that Simon and Pete were perplexed by this and unaware that Alex was making a rare effort: she was at least confining her activities to a single area. I had grown so used to her restlessness, and to persevering with my own work irrespective of it, that I had forgotten how disturbing it could be.
My job was to get the slates up to the roof. I hauled them up on a pulley to the top stage of the scaffolding in a makeshift basket that Alex had constructed out of an old window-frame. After a while, realising that I was far more likely to be decapitated by a descending slate as I stood on the ground than I was to fall off the scaffolding,
I mastered my fear of heights sufficiently to climb the ladder without my knees shaking and to walk about at the top, handing up slates. I suddenly realised that I was not afraid any longer, and that probably I never had been. It had been an idea. I stood at the end of the scaffolding and gazed over the valley, exhilarated by this new freedom. In time, I thought, I shall be afraid of nothing: I shall be completely free.
I was feeling freer every day. It was the Sessions. Every day I made new discoveries, and each discovery brought a liberation, peeling off a crust of habit, lifting an unnoticed weight. One by one the tensions of the present dissolved as I tracked down the old fears and resentments that lay behind them. It didn’t seem to matter where I started: every path, however unpromising, held its little crock of gold at the end.
For instance, I had discovered something quite important about my liking for tea. Tea was one of the drugs on Simon’s list, and as we came to it I realised that it played a more important role in my life than alcohol or cigarettes had ever done. Them I could give up: my tea I could not.
I isolated an incident, a year previously, when a cup of tea had been particularly important. I had been feeling depressed and ill and was unwilling to get up. Alex dragged me out of bed and insisted that we talk about something I did not want to talk about – it threatened my peace of mind and indirectly our relationship. I refused to confront the issue and we started to argue, and the argument became a major row about our whole way of life. Alex was shouting at me, it felt as though she was hitting me. I started to cry. As I cried I began to see that what she was trying so violently to tell me was true. I stopped crying and we talked. Alex became gentle. She made a pot of tea. It was the best tea I had ever tasted.
Looking at the scene, I could see that the importance of that tea lay not in the fact that Alex had made it, nor in the fact that it was a token of communication. The importance lay in the fact that it was tea. I had never liked tea until I met Alex, and then, because she was always making tea, I had started to drink it. Tea-drinking had become a central ritual of our relationship. And now, at the end of a quarrel which had apparently blown that relationship wide open and obliterated all the familiar landmarks, we were still sitting in the kitchen drinking tea.
Tea was a statement that nothing had changed; and indeed on that occasion nothing had changed. Our relationship had continued as before – slightly dishonest, slightly cynical, slightly cruel, just like everybody else’s relationships. For a moment we had had the opportunity to re-make it, and lacked the courage. And tea for me was still a statement that nothing had changed. While all around me were drinking herbal teas or sarsaparilla, I drank Assam with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. It was a last-ditch attempt to preserve my old identity.
Once I had seen it I was free of it. I realised that tea was in fact a rather drab drink. I abandoned it forthwith for peppermint, with a slice of lemon and sweetened with honey.
It was one of many little things that were steadily increasing my understanding. With understanding came clarity. It was the clarity I had experienced several times before, notably on the evening when I went to the city to see Simon. Then, because it was based on an intense experience and not on an inner discipline, it had only lasted a few days before being eroded by mundane exasperations and failures. Now, at last, it seemed to have come to stay.
It was as if my mind for nearly all my life had been functioning at half-throttle. Now I found I had at my disposal a truly efficient mechanism which could think with a speed and sureness I would once have considered astounding, drawing on sources of information I often did not know I possessed, and making connections that in earlier days I would have regarded as brilliant. Very often, however, it was not necessary to think at all. One simply looked. The mental energy seemed to translate itself into terms of sight, so that one saw and understood in a single act.
One saw what people were thinking: it was nearly always some kind of fear. One saw the wounds in their hearts as plainly as if they had been scars on the face. I was filled with pity for the people I met, pity which I could not communicate. They seemed to recede from me as I looked at them. They seemed physically smaller than me: I had the impression that I was looking down on them from a height of several feet. They seemed unreal, and I understood that indeed they were. By the manner of their lives they had abandoned the reality for the illusion, and the illusion was what they had become.
I knew that spiritual insight must in the end confer psychic power, but until a certain incident occurred at Bethany I did not realise that I already had it.
Two visitors arrived one evening. One was a girl whom Alex and I had known for several years and on whom Alex had once expended a lot of time, trying to persuade her into the paths of vegetarianism and right living. The attempt had been dropped when Alex realised that Tessa’s wide-open eyes concealed a complete lack of scruple and that she was less interested in Alex’s ideas than in her brother. Philip at the time was a not infrequent visitor at Bethany. The friendship, such as it was, had not completely died, however, and Tessa still sometimes came to see us. On this particular evening she had brought with her a young man I had not seen before. I looked at him and felt as though I were falling into a deep, dark pit.
For a moment I thought that he had no eyes. Then I realised that I was seeing, for the first time, either pure evil or pure madness – I did not know which. From the sockets of his eyes there radiated a dense blackness which obliterated nearly a third of his face. I tried to pull my mind back to an ordinary perception, and glimpsed, as in a snapshot, a thin, nervous, moody young man standing on the patio. I asked him a question. He did not reply, but stared at me. The coalpits opened again.
He asked if he could go into the kitchen. It was an odd request, as we were all out on the patio, but I said yes. I had forgotten that Coral was inside. She came out very quickly.
‘Who is that man?’ she whispered to Simon and me. We were sitting side by side on the bench.
‘A friend of Tessa’s,’ I said.
‘He’s … Simon, I don’t like him. I don’t think he ought to be in the kitchen on his own. Can you ask him to come out, Simon? Please?’
Simon, without moving, said, ‘Kay, will you ask him to come out, please?’
I went into the kitchen and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, but would you mind coming outside again?’ I stood aside so he could come past me.
Then something so extraordinary happened that I could hardly believe it. He backed away, down the kitchen, opened the window and climbed out of it.
He had not been able to come past me. Something had made him so afraid that he had had to escape through the window.
Conscious of the unbridgeable gulf that now existed between us and the outside world, Alex and I let many friendships lapse. Invitations were declined, letters went unanswered because there was nothing to say. The world, however, did not understand that we had renounced it and continued to knock at the door. We coped with the summons with varying degrees of success.
I got home from work one day to be told that the bed in my study had been made up for an overnight visitor who was expected late in the evening. She was a friend of a London friend of ours called Nick, and was coming to inspect an old showman’s caravan which Alex and I had acquired years previously; she was thinking of buying it and taking it back to Wales.
The caravan was in an advanced state of decay and we had never told anyone it was for sale; and neither Alex nor I had ever heard of the girl, whose name apparently was Brenda. It all sounded rather odd.
‘You know what I think it’s about?’ Alex remarked to me. ‘This girl is having Nick’s baby, and is putting pressure on him, and to keep her quiet he’s going to buy her the caravan and tuck her away in Wales. You remember he was looking at it last time he came down here.’
It was a wild conjecture, but I did not dismiss it. Nick, who was loosely associated with television, had an even looser personal life. He had a charming, defeated wife. Alex, moreover, was
sometimes clairvoyant.
Brenda arrived at about half-past nine, and as she walked into the house I felt the temperature drop from summer to autumn. She was about twenty-four, and she wore her unhappiness like a winding-sheet. Only Simon, Alex and I were still up. We gave her something to eat, and sat down to talk to her.
She told us about herself and the purpose of her visit. She rented a Welsh farmhouse from two young men who now wanted to move into it, which meant that she had to move out. However, they did not mind if she continued to live on the land. She wanted to stay there because she was growing herbs. She was very interested in the curative properties of herbs and intended to make a study of them. Before going to Wales she had lived with a group of friends in London and they had made gardens on the bomb-sites. It was creative.
Her fingers picked nervously at the shawl trailing over her black dress as she spoke. Why was she wearing black?
She had a cat, she said. Cats had a special kind of intelligence. In earlier times this had been understood, but we had now lost nearly all the ancient knowledge. A few people were trying to revive it.
I felt the hair on my arms prickle. Simon said nothing. He had not said anything since she arrived.