Bethany

by Anita Mason

  He looked at me strangely, without warmth.

  ‘I wasn’t on a hook,’ he said.

  It was an unmistakable rebuke. I went outside and saw to the goats. As I was about to leave for work Simon came into the kitchen with a pile of the exercise books he had used for taking our Session notes.

  ‘I’m returning these to you, as they’re your property,’ he said to us. ‘It’s up to you what you do with them. You may well decide that the bonfire is the most suitable place.’

  He could not have expressed his contempt more clearly. I was shocked. I had regarded the Sessions as one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I wondered at that moment if I knew anything about Simon at all. I remembered several occasions in the past when I had not understood his behaviour. I had felt on those occasions as if I had suddenly seen that I stood on the edge of a precipice.

  I went to work, telling myself that things would be clearer when I came home.

  I sought out Alex immediately on my return and asked her what had happened during the day.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘But surely you discussed it. Decided whether you were all going to carry on.’

  ‘No,’ said Alex, ‘nobody said anything.’

  ‘But that’s extraordinary,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, ‘I know.’

  I could not understand it. The ground had been taken from under our feet, and everyone was continuing as if nothing had happened. The only reference to the event was made by Dao, who said something wry about lost sheep. She continued to cook, Coral to housekeep, Pete to fix and mend and Alex to inspect the crops, just as if the centre of the structure had not dissolved away. But the fact that it had was made painfully apparent whenever a question came up that required arbitration or a decision. Instinctively we would wait for Simon to pull the threads together; and he would smile, and say nothing.

  I was dreading the Thursday finance meeting and was committed to it. It was as bad as I expected. I had never chaired a meeting in my life, and the contrast between my amateurishness and Simon’s mastery was so painful that I rushed through the essentials in five minutes and sat back in my chair, hot with embarrassment.

  ‘That concludes the financial business,’ I said. If anyone else would like to say anything, please go ahead.’

  After a pause, Simon stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with a polite nod in my direction, and strode from the room.

  As the days passed we settled down again. Outwardly, except that there were no Sessions, very little had changed. Yet I felt that something of fundamental importance had happened and had not been confronted.

  Simon’s abdication was recorded in the diary by Dao with the words: ‘The Organiser has left. A friend comes.’

  But on the page for the previous day, below ‘Partnership meeting in rose-garden’, Simon had pencilled the cryptic entry, ‘Comm. B’.

  Communication break. Whose, and with whom?

  The potato patch had not been watered for six blistering weeks. The trough that fed the top field only held enough water to keep the smaller and more vulnerable plants alive, and transporting water in buckets from the house to supply ten fifty-foot rows of potatoes was not a viable proposition.

  One evening I saw Pete and Simon deep in conversation over an old copper boiler they had found in the nettles by the cottage. Half an hour later as I was thinning the turnips I heard an engine labouring at full throttle, and turned in time to see the truck, with Pete clutching the copper boiler clinging on the back, and Simon grinning at the wheel with a cabfull of excited children, rounding the steep corner into the field.

  They had filled the boiler with twenty gallons of water, quite a lot of which was still inside it when they lurched to a halt and started looking for the end of the hosepipe. The hosepipe was a hundred feet long and slightly too wide for the outlet of the boiler, so that Pete had to crouch on the truck holding the boiler at a steady angle while Simon held the end of the hose in place and all the rest of us manipulated its almost interminable length along the potato rows.

  Everyone helped, even Coral, who did not normally venture among the vegetables, and after about ten minutes nearly everyone was helpless with laughter. As the water level in the boiler fell the flow along the pipe diminished, until Pete was wrestling with the boiler at shoulder-level to increase the gravity-feed while Simon struggled to keep the hose falling off, and in grudging recognition of these efforts a trickle of lukewarm water sauntered out and vanished instantly into the ground. At the end of it Simon was soaked, Pete was soaked, the children were soaked, and the potatoes remained surprisingly dry. Two days later it rained in torrents.

  The day before the storm we had repaired the roof of the barn. It had gaped reproachfully for months. When Simon said after breakfast, ‘I suggest that today we repair the red barn,’ I was delighted. Yet that was the day when I first felt it: the trouble. There was something different about Alex. Or rather, there was something ominously familiar.

  We were up on the roof of the barn, she sitting astride the ridge, I perched on a ladder, clearing away the ivy. I was still not entirely happy at the top of a ladder, particularly when leaning far out to the side to wield a heavy sickle, and the heat from the metal roof struck up at my face and made me feel faint. I was making a poor job of it and Alex was chaffing me, as she used to do in the old days when humour was as often as not a mask for contempt. Conscious of my clumsiness, I retaliated petulantly. It was a relief to climb down and let Simon and Pete come in to shift the rafter.

  The thunderstorm broke at about ten o’clock at night. The lightning lit up the whole valley; the thunder seemed to tear the sky apart. Coral appeared, white-faced, at the top of the stairs, beseeching Pete to come to bed. We all went to bed, although there was no point in trying to sleep. Alex and I lay awake for hours, united again in our joy of the rain and our dread of what it would do to our leaky, long-suffering house. In the event not too much came through, except in the parlour where the French windows had never fitted properly and there was a small flood on the floor. In the morning the world was intensely green. I stood outside and listened to the deep breathing of the grass.

  It was the next night that the ponies got out.

  I had just fallen asleep, and it was some time before I could make sense of the sounds that assailed me. There were feet on the stairs, a loud opening and shutting of windows, and Simon’s voice, uncharacteristically agitated, asking for either Alex or me to get up. ‘You needn’t both get up,’ he was saying, ‘but can one of you come quickly.’

  I pulled myself back to consciousness. No need to ask which of us was going to get up: Alex had a remarkable capacity for sleeping through disturbances. I struggled out of bed and into my clothes and followed Simon’s voice.

  ‘The horses are in the top field,’ he said. ‘Someone must have left the gate open.’

  The vegetables were in the top field and the ponies could not be allowed to stay there. It was a nuisance, but I didn’t really mind – it was such a beautiful night. But Simon was upset: it showed in the odd jerkiness of his speech. I was puzzled, but I dismissed it from my mind. The important thing was how to get the ponies out. Trying to catch them was out of the question – I would simply end up chasing them, and chasing them would either result in wholesale destruction of the vegetables or in the ponies’ breaking through the fence into the woods, after which they might wander for miles. I would have to call them, and they might or might not come. I hoped Simon would leave it to me: if he was with me they would certainly not come.

  He followed me in the direction of the field. I turned to ask him to stay behind and in the moonlight saw to my horror that he had picked up the big rake.

  ‘What have you got that for?’ I asked.

  He stared at me. ‘To drive them out,’ he said.

  ‘I should put it down,’ I said. ‘These ponies can be led but they can’t be driven.’

  I had never spoken to him like that. The te
rse words echoed in my mind as I walked up the field and started calling.

  They didn’t come. I could see them, two pale shapes against the shadowy hedge. I called again. They shifted a little, and watched me.

  Oats. They would come for oats if I rattled a bucket. I went back to the barn to get some. I saw Simon standing on the patio, watching me. I went back up the field with the bucket of oats and shook it, and called again.

  There was a stir of interest, but they didn’t come.

  Then I heard Alex’s voice. They heard it too, and moved a few paces forward. Bishop whinnied.

  Alex took the bucket from my hand and walked on into the field, giving the musical call that I could never quite imitate. There was a drumming on the ground and the grey shapes swept towards her, then pulled up abruptly and nuzzled and jostled to get into the bucket. Slowly Alex began to walk back down the field, and they followed her. We went through the gate, and shut it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Simon had gone.

  In an attempt to dispel the disturbing quality of the incident, I apologised to Simon the next morning for speaking to him so sharply.

  All Simon replied was, ‘Someone left the gate open.’

  My feeling that something odd had happened was confirmed by a look at the diary page for that day. Almost at the bottom of the page Dao had written, ‘It’s been a peaceful day,’ and directly underneath it, in Simon’s hand, was written ‘Thunder and lightning’. It was so pointed as to be unkind. It was also unfair: the thunderstorm had raged the previous night, and had been all over by the start of the day. I wondered what was troubling Simon, that he should find a symbol in the storm and express his disquiet in so uncharacteristic a way.

  It was the last thing Simon wrote in the diary, except, three days later, the solitary word, ‘Trouble’.

  I did not know what had caused it. All I knew was that suddenly Alex was behaving in the most extraordinary way.

  It had started with what I could only describe as an insensitivity to the feelings of the group. Somehow she had lost the wavelength, and everything she said and did was slightly discordant.

  She complained to me about the way Pete and Simon were slating the roof. They were doing it all wrong and breaking a lot of slates, she said. I heard this with a shiver of disbelief. Alex had never been satisfied with any building job done for her. As each new builder appeared on the premises with his barrow and plastering board she had enthused to me about his skill and honesty, then in a few days had begun to find fault, and by the end of a week would be raging at his incompetence. It made no difference whether he was a master craftsman or a weekend plasterer from the Gas Board: Alex would declare he had botched the job and cheated her. I did not know enough about building to be able to judge, but it seemed to me that in this endless procession of workmen there must have been some who had been dismissed without cause. I did not understand why Alex was incapable of having a satisfactory relationship with someone working for her, but I came to foresee and dread the bitterness in which these relationships always ended. However, it had never occurred to me that the same poison could begin to work in her relations with Pete and Simon, who were our friends, and were going to live here, and were doing it for nothing.

  And she was always going out. She had always liked going out in the car on her own, and had made numerous trips to buy odds and ends for the building and to collect watercress and wild herbs, but now she was going out every day on errands which seemed less and less necessary. It was as if she wanted to get away from the house. The implications were very disturbing, and I knew that Simon was unhappy about it. ‘Why does she want to go out?’ he said to me. ‘There is everything here one could want. I walk down to the road with the children and I have no wish to go any further. I would never go out at all if I didn’t have to.’

  I remarked to Alex that her absences were becoming pronounced, but she reacted impatiently. She pointed out that Simon went to the city regularly once a week and Pete sometimes went twice, once with Simon in order (we assumed) to draw their Social Security, and once with Coral to the flat to do the washing in the washing machine. ‘Which is quite unnecessary,’ added Alex. ‘And you go to work three or four days a week, which gets you out of the house. So why should I be expected to stay here?’

  ‘But why don’t you want to stay here?’ I persisted.

  ‘I like to be on my own sometimes,’ said Alex. ‘I like to get away and think.’

  Think. About what? Her tone forbade me to ask her, but it was of the utmost importance. ‘We shall have no secrets,’ Simon had announced at the start of the group; and, barring those things which were properly private, we had none. We were transparent to each other. Alex now had ceased to be transparent. She had deliberately withdrawn communication, in order to concentrate on thoughts which she would not share. The thoughts themselves might be harmless enough, but the exclusiveness with which she invested them was dangerous. In any case, why wouldn’t she share them? I suspected that she was indulging in an introspection that was not only pointless but unhealthy, because it was food for the ego. I hoped she would take the sensible course and talk to Simon about whatever was on her mind, but far from wanting to talk to him she seemed actually to be avoiding him; and he, since there were no longer any Sessions, lacked the framework in which the problem would formerly have been tackled, and had to wait for her to broach it.

  When one’s eyes are turned inward, one cannot see other people. Alex did not see the puzzlement on the faces of the group as she talked to them about her property problems one sunny morning on the patio. The conversation had been set off by the arrival of another letter from the bank manager. The overdraft had reached £19,000, and a man whom Alex had believed to be seriously interested in buying her roofless building for a luncheon club had turned out to be interested only if he could buy it at site value, which was a quarter of the sum Alex needed. Alex’s thinking about the problem had now become quite tortuous: she wanted to form a syndicate with various friends and acquaintances, who between them would put up the money to pay off the debt and convert the building into a series of rented pieds-à-terre for businessmen. Alex’s contribution to the syndicate would be the building itself, since she had no capital; but the difficulty was that most of the friends whom Alex hoped to interest in the venture had no money either, and Alex was now engaged in working out ways in which they could raise their part of the investment, and calculating the return they might expect. I wondered why Alex’s solutions always tended to be more complicated than the problem. Simon voiced the same thought, but with a sharper insight: it was that sort of thinking that had created the situation in the first place, he said.

  If she had examined his statement she would have found it was a lifeline. She glanced at it and discarded it as irrelevant. Soon afterwards she went out again, this time to see a solicitor in town. The purpose of the visit was not clear: it was just Alex going out again.

  One afternoon when we had hardly communicated for days she came up to me in the vegetable garden and said she wanted to talk to me. I stopped what I was doing and waited, but she would only talk in a place away from the house, so we went and sat under the chestnut tree.

  She started to talk about our relationship. She talked urgently for half an hour, and made no sense. I kept trying to tell her that our relationship was not important, that what was important was the dislocation of her relationship with the group and whatever lay behind it, and that that was what she should look at. Focusing on our relationship was an evasion, I said, and she was in danger of taking herself in. I was by now very worried. Even her insistence on talking away from the house seemed sinister, as if she was set on placing as many barriers between herself and the group as possible. I asked her what she was protecting, but she wouldn’t listen. She said, over and over again, that we had to let each other be free.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I know that. If there is no freedom there is no relationship. But to have a clear relationship
you must be clear in yourself: and you are evading something.’

  In the end we both gave up. I was left confused, but with a strong feeling that she had wanted to confuse me. There was something I must not be allowed to see. I knew that whatever it was she only dimly sensed it herself. I also knew that she was desperate.

  That evening as I was cleaning out the car, preparatory to its being ‘done up’, I heard the dogs bark and saw that we had visitors. Walking up the drive were a couple we knew in the town; they had probably come to find the reason for our prolonged absence from the pub. No sooner had I registered this than there was a flurry of feet and Alex thrust me aside and jumped into the car. I was in the middle of washing the windows.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said, stupid with surprise.

  ‘To get some watercress,’ said Alex, as if it was obvious.

  ‘But – I’m in the middle of cleaning the car,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s your look-out,’ said Alex. ‘You know I go out in the evenings to get watercress.’

  She released the handbrake, spun the wheel, and roared down the drive past the astonished faces of our visitors.

  I looked at Simon, who was sitting on the patio and had witnessed this scene. He looked at me gravely. It was either the behaviour of someone who did not know what she was doing, or a declaration of war.

  I had a busy morning at the office next day, and by half-past twelve I was hungry. Usually I brought sandwiches, but this morning there had not been enough bread. The idea of a roll from the shop, lifeless white bread stuffed with rubbery cheese and a limp lettuce leaf, did not appeal. An old desire began to gnaw at me. I struggled with it, but in a few minutes it had won. After all, what did it matter? I slipped across the road and bought myself a Scotch egg from the bakery.

  I bit into the spicy, fragrant sausage-meat and was suffused with ecstasy and guilt. It was freshly-made and delicious. The egg-yolk was golden and creamy. I wolfed it. I was about to take the last mouthful when Alex walked through the door.