Bethany

by Anita Mason

  She took one look at the morsel in my hand and burst out laughing. I felt myself blush crimson. Then I started to laugh too.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Alex. ‘So this is what you get up to.’

  ‘I don’t!’ I protested. ‘This is the first time –’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you eat. It’s your problem.’

  We went out and had a cup of coffee together. There was a barely-concealed grin on her face. I couldn’t blame her: I must have looked ridiculous sitting there with a piece of sausage-meat frozen halfway to my lips. I tried to recover my poise, but without much success. I told myself it was unimportant, but somehow it was not. A few months earlier it would have drawn us together in a shared joke; instead, it had added another layer to the thickening wall of glass that stood between us.

  By evening I had almost forgotten it. After supper we gathered in the parlour and talked. It was like the early days of the group. With no Sessions there seemed to be much more time. We talked in a relaxed way about how the work was proceeding. The repair of the red barn had distracted us temporarily from the west wing, and there had been several days of intermittent rain which made slating impossible. We discussed what work could be done inside, and in particular what we were going to do about the floor.

  The upper storey of the west wing had originally consisted of two rooms separated by a raised landing to which a couple of steps descended from the main part of the house. It was an odd arrangement and looked even odder when the walls of the rooms were knocked down to create what Alex had intended as a single large studio, for in the middle of this area there now stood a little island about six feet wide raised a foot above the rest. Part of the floor was rotten and had been taken out, but the island, being sound, had been left intact. The question now was what to do about it.

  It had never occurred to me to doubt that a floor should if possible be level. Simon however looked at it with different eyes.

  ‘Why should a floor be all on the same level?’ he asked. ‘It might be nice to have a small platform in the middle of the floor. People might like to sit on it to eat their muesli.’

  Everyone smiled. I pursed my lips. In the East people sat on the floor to eat; in the West they did not. I found the idea of an eating-platform in a Cornish farmhouse ridiculous and rather repugnant.

  ‘Kay does not want to sit on the floor to eat her muesli,’ said Simon.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I regard sitting on the floor to eat as being probably unhygienic and certainly bad for the digestion.’

  Dao’s eyes were dancing with laughter. ‘In my village …’ she began.

  Alex cut in. ‘You’re so middle-class, Kay,’ she said.

  It was openly contemptuous. There was a moment’s stillness in the room. Simon attempted to repair the damage.

  ‘You could try looking at it another way,’ he said to me. ‘People are sitting on one piece of wood rather than another, that’s all.’

  As usual, I found his mixture of humour and analysis irresistible, and laughed. It was a cultural block, I said, and I would try to eliminate it. Simon would have let it go at that, but Alex couldn’t.

  ‘When are you going to start?’ she said.

  I caught mockery in her eyes. It was obvious that she was thinking of the Scotch egg and implying that if I couldn’t wean myself away from meat and eggs there wasn’t much chance that I could wean myself away from a cultural prejudice against sitting on the floor. Then I glanced at Simon, who was regarding me with gentle amusement, and felt certain that she had told him. Embarrassed and humiliated, I had little spirit to parry the ensuing thrusts which Alex playfully delivered during the remainder of the evening.

  In the bedroom I reproached her for mocking me in public, but she denied it hotly. She seemed astonished that I should think her capable of mentioning the Scotch egg to Simon. She intimated that my imagination was getting the better of me. I went to sleep feeling wretched and confused.

  Next day things seemed to have returned to normal, but again Alex surprised me.

  ‘What’s the programme today?’ enquired Pete as we washed up our bowls after breakfast.

  Simon smiled, and said, in joking reference to the discussion of the evening before, ‘I think we should demolish the west wing.’ It had been decided not to leave the raised platform after all, but to take out the entire floor.

  Pete went off to get his tools, and I was vaguely aware of Alex slipping out of the door behind him. I did not see her again before I left for work.

  She was not in evidence when I came home in the evening. There was an air of disquiet in the kitchen. Almost the first thing Dao said to me was, ‘Kay, please, what is the meaning of “demolition”?’ Dao frequently asked me the meaning of words. She was a keen student of language, and liked to compare my definitions with Simon’s. Fortunately they usually agreed.

  ‘Demolition?’ I said. ‘Destruction. Breaking something up.’

  ‘To demolish means to break up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She nodded with satisfaction, and returned to her cooking pots.

  Simon and Pete came in a few minutes later.

  ‘Have you seen Alex?’ I asked.

  They looked serious. Alex had hardly been seen all day. She had announced abruptly that she was going to see Mr Pascoe, one of the neighbouring farmers, about harvesting the oats, and disappeared. When asked whether she was going to help with the west wing she had replied that if they wanted to pull the house down they would have to go ahead without her.

  Light dawned. ‘God!’ I said in exasperation. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘We were hoping,’ said Simon, ‘that you could tell us.’

  I understood with relief that I was not struggling alone to make sense of Alex’s behaviour.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it seemed to me that there was something odd going on last night in the parlour. As a matter of fact I thought she was mocking me, although afterwards she said she wasn’t.’

  ‘She was,’ said Simon and Pete together, with a certainty that drove all doubt from my mind.

  ‘It was very strong,’ said Pete. ‘It really wasn’t nice at all.’

  ‘Well, she did have a reason,’ I started to say, but Simon interrupted.

  ‘There was no reason for what I saw last night,’ he said. ‘It was cruel. And you are making excuses for her.’

  I stopped in my tracks. Cruel. Alex had mocked me for years, for being unadventurous, resistant to new ideas, careful with money, respectful of the written word … all the things suggested by the epithet she had flung at me last night – ‘middle-class’. She had mocked me for being everything she was not for so long that I took it as an inevitable part of life. It was time I looked again at this habit and called it by its proper name. Mockery hurt: it was intended to hurt. There was a word for that.

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly, ‘I suppose it is cruel.’

  I looked up and was enfolded in the kindly warmth of their smiles.

  At first I was not sure whether Alex had changed or whether my view of her had changed. Then I realised that something simpler and more dramatic than either was happening: Alex, under pressure, was revealing herself.

  The ponies got out again, as they were bound to. Once they had got out they went on getting out until they were bored with it. This time they had broken through the hedge bordering the stream and gone on to Mr Webb’s land. It would be difficult to get them back. Alex got up early, fetched two bridles from the barn and asked me to come with her.

  It was a superb morning, and I just had breath as we climbed the steep hill on the far side of the stream to admire it. There was a heavy dew. A few white puffs of cumulus floated in a blue sky. Alex was silent and self-absorbed.

  Suddenly she said, ‘I hope I can count on your support.’

  I stared at her, appalled.

  ‘Support in what?’ I said.

  She walked on in silence. The
unhappiness surrounding her was almost tangible.

  ‘Support in what?’ I repeated. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything,’ she said.

  ‘Then what are you talking about?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said roughly, ‘Oh, forget it.’

  I tried to get out of her what she meant, but she refused to say any more. Without speaking we went on and collected the ponies, and brought them home.

  I went to work with a dull feeling of dread in my stomach. Alex was going to do something terrible. She was going to break up the group.

  That day or the next she came to the office again in my lunch-hour and asked for the keys of the car. She was very tense. I went out to the car park with her so that we could talk. I asked where she was going. When the answer came I could hardly believe my ears.

  ‘I’m going away for a few days,’ she said.

  It was some moments before I could find words.

  ‘But … what for?’ I finally managed.

  ‘Because I have to,’ she snapped.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ I snapped back. ‘You’re going because you want to. Why do you want to?’

  ‘To think things over.’

  ‘What things, for God’s sake? What can you think about there that you can’t think about here?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘It is my business. It’s the group’s business. You think you can come and go as you like and never mind what effect it has on other people.’

  ‘Don’t I have a right to come and go in my own house?’

  ‘It isn’t like that, Alex, you know it isn’t. We’re a unit. You’re destroying the unit.’

  We were shouting at each other, both desperate. Alex got into the car, slammed the door, and began to reverse out of the car park. I followed her, banging my hand on the bonnet and still shouting, conscious of nothing but the need to prevent this disaster.

  She drove into the street and stopped. I put my hand on the door and said furiously, ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ and the scene started all over again. Then suddenly it stopped, and we stared at each other, badly shaken.

  ‘All right,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll put the car away and we’ll talk about it.’

  We went to the lounge bar of a hotel we used to drink in. It was spacious and private. Alex had a glass of water. I had a half-pint of lager. It tasted synthetic and bitter.

  We talked. Both of us were trying hard, but we did not manage to communicate. I knew that if Alex went away there would be no hope for her. She would have surrendered her chances of spiritual life to the Alex who went away whenever things got difficult, and she would have surrendered them finally. I pointed out that she was running away, and that it was vital she should find out what she was running away from.

  ‘The answer is here’ I said. ‘It’s inside your head.’

  What Alex was trying to tell me I was not at all sure, but it appeared to be a paranoid fantasy about Simon. He had, she insisted, been deliberately spiteful about the house; he had spoken of ‘demolishing’ the west wing.

  ‘Oh don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘He was referring to taking the floor out.’

  ‘He said, “Let’s demolish the west wing”.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, you don’t imagine he wanted to raze it to the ground, do you?’

  ‘No. He wanted to hurt me.’

  ‘Alex.’ I held my head in despair. ‘Simon doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He isn’t capable of spite. You know that. You’ve known him for five years and in that time he’s never said a spiteful word. Why are you telling yourself that he wants to hurt you?’

  ‘I don’t know why he does, but he does. I think he thinks that I wanted to take over his position as leader of the group. Simon is a bit paranoid, you know.’

  My head spun. It was as much as I could do to keep pace with Alex when she deviated this far from rationality, but I clung to my perception that behind the mental contortions was a need to evade a truth, probably a simple truth.

  ‘Why are you twisting everything?’ I said. ‘You must find out why.’

  But she could not move outside the small, mad cage she had made for herself. We achieved this much, that she said she would not go away. Exhausted, I returned to my office.

  Alex did not go away, but she did the next best thing. She retired to her room.

  I went in to see her several times, to try and get her to talk or coax her downstairs. She refused, and all but dismissed me. I usually found her sitting at the bureau. She seemed to be spending most of her time writing in a big old-fashioned exercise book. I knew what that meant. In times of stress, especially when confronted with an emotional problem, Alex would attempt to sort it out on paper. It was exactly the wrong strategy to adopt, because Alex was a talker, not a writer, and as soon as her pen touched paper she lost herself in labyrinthine sentences and quagmires of abstract nouns. In spite of this she maintained that writing helped her to organise her thoughts.

  She sat now at the big oak bureau that, together with the double bed, took up nearly all the bedroom, and tried to organise her thoughts about what was happening. It was poignant, because I knew that not only was it a hopeless task but the very fact that she was attempting to deal with the situation in this way meant that she had no understanding of what was happening. If there was one thing utterly contrary to the group’s philosophy it was sitting down alone at a desk and writing about one’s state of mind; and the very reason why Alex found it necessary to do this was that she had temporarily lost touch with the group’s philosophy. To break the vicious circle all she had to do was get up, go downstairs and say ‘Hello’. I told her this. She stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese.

  I was full of pity for Alex in her isolation. I took her cups of tea or fruit juice when we had a drink; I took her some lunch. She thanked me curtly. She did not appear at supper, so afterwards I took her a bowl of soup. She had gone to bed, and said in a cold, peremptory tone, ‘put it on the chair.’ I felt her ingratitude, but told myself that she was disturbed and I should not expect anything.

  When I returned to the kitchen I found Simon’s eyes on me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked conversationally.

  ‘I took some soup up to Alex,’ I said.

  ‘Is she ill?’ asked Simon.

  I hesitated. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then why can’t she come down and get it herself?’

  There was no answer. I sat down on the one stool in the room and studied the patterns in the rough slate shelf.

  Simon said, ‘Why is she making you take food to her?’

  I was startled. ‘She isn’t,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t asked me to.’

  Simon said, ‘She is sitting up there in that room silently demanding that you take food to her.’

  I reflected. Certainly she hadn’t asked me not to. Certainly her attitude to me was more that of the hotel guest to the waiter than that of friend to friend. As I thought about it I realised that in fact it was a monstrous impertinence.

  Simon said, ‘Why do you let her get away with it?’

  ‘She has to eat,’ I said. ‘She won’t come down for it.’

  ‘If you didn’t take it to her she’d have to come down for it. She would be so hungry she would simply come down. By taking it to her you’re keeping her up there.’

  Of course I was. Why hadn’t I seen it? I realised the reason why I hadn’t seen it was that I wanted to serve her. I had wanted to preserve our relationship, make her feel I hadn’t abandoned her.

  ‘You are doing her a disservice,’ said Simon.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So,’ said Simon. He crossed his legs on the wooden chest and tucked them under him. It meant he was preparing for a serious talk.

  ‘Why do you let her get away with it?’ he said.

  ‘She’s … well, she’s ve
ry disturbed,’ I said.

  ‘Is she ill?’ repeated Simon.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s …’ I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t even know what I meant myself.

  Simon said, ‘She’s manipulating you.’

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes she is,’ said Simon. His voice was steel. ‘She goes to her room and snaps her fingers and you jump to attention. What a way for one human being to treat another. She’s pushed you around for years.’

  I felt as if I had plunged off a cliff edge.

  Simon said, ‘She has so little respect for you that she will actually drive off in the car when you’re in the middle of cleaning it. I’ve never seen anything like it. Why do you let her treat you like that?’

  I became aware that our voices had risen and were probably audible to Alex in the bedroom above. There was a gap in the floorboards which we had never got round to filling. Instinctively I raised a finger to my lips.

  He gazed at me incredulously. ‘You’re afraid of her,’ he said.

  There was nothing I could say. Behind my gesture lay years of compromise, renunciation and dishonesty, all dedicated to the cause of keeping Alex happy. I never got what I wanted because Alex always wanted the opposite. Alex always got what she wanted because there was hell to pay if she didn’t. I gave in, always. I was afraid of what would happen if I refused.

  I sat quite still and absorbed it. I would never be afraid of Alex again. I saw how utterly powerless she was to hurt me. And I saw something else: I saw why it had been so difficult for me to grasp the very simple nature of my subservience.

  ‘I’ve always thought,’ I said slowly, ‘that Alex had a special quality which I lacked. A sort of spiritual compass. I knew she was capable of behaving badly; but ultimately, where moral questions were concerned, I always trusted her judgement. I thought she knew better than me. And now, when something happens which throws doubt on that belief, it is very difficult for me to adjust.’

  Simon said, ‘I know exactly what you mean. People have felt much the same way about institutions such as the Church.’

  His words released such a burst of clarity in my mind that for a few minutes I said nothing, but sat bathed in its radiance.