Bethany

by Anita Mason

  I said, ‘I have been avoiding you.’

  ‘Why have you been avoiding me?’

  I said carefully, ‘I see two people in you. One is kind, humorous, and motivated by love. The other is harsh, and motivated by something which I don’t understand. Sometimes I think you’re cruel.’

  He seemed surprised. I thought he was surprised, not that this should be said to him, but that I should say it.

  ‘Cruel?’ he repeated.

  ‘Not unwilling to hurt people.’

  ‘Do you think I like hurting people?’

  ‘No. But you’re ready to do it.’

  He said, ‘I don’t hurt people. I try to help them.’

  ‘Kindness might do as well,’ I said.

  He did not reply. His eyes scanned the valley and focused on something far beyond it. The silence deepened and became more than silence. My heart began to labour painfully, filling the silence that went on and on.

  ‘Why can’t you love anyone?’ he said.

  There are things that can only be said to a person once in a lifetime, because after they have been said the person is not the same. In the moment when the words are spoken, something happens which is a kind of death. Simon’s question struck the flesh from my bones.

  I found myself in a strange country. It was wasteland as far as the eye could see. Nothing grew there. I wandered in it. It was my life. Bare rocks, dusty plains, paths that led back on themselves. I seemed to recognise a few landmarks, but as I approached them they dissolved: mirages. I read a milestone. It was a gravestone.

  I wandered there a long time. I felt no emotion. I had no emotions. I was a ghost. This was my country.

  At some time I came back to where I sat, in a chair, overlooking a green valley. I remembered that I had been asked a question, and that I had a voice.

  With my voice I said, ‘I am afraid of love.’

  I heard him speaking, and knew there was nothing he could tell me that I had not seen. In the wasteland there were no excuses, and even fear was an excuse. There were no causes: what did it matter why I had been afraid? There was no past, there was no future, there was no cover for nakedness. The wasteland was all there was.

  He began to lead me out of it. At first I resisted, preferring despair to such gigantic effort.

  ‘In the Middle Ages there was a word for the state of mind you are experiencing,’ he said, and I remembered it. The old theological term for the deadly torpor of the soul.

  ‘Accidie,’ I said.

  ‘It was recognised as one of the gravest sins.’

  How well he knew me. I smiled, and followed him.

  ‘There is always something that can be done,’ he said. ‘Usually it is very clear. It is simply the next thing. If for instance you have taken something from someone, the next thing is to give it back. After that, the next step will in turn become clear. But it all rests on seeing in the first place what it is you’ve done. That is the most difficult part, because the mind obscures from itself the knowledge that it has done something bad.’

  He was talking quietly. It was the Simon I knew. I rested, and let him take me home.

  ‘Truth is straight,’ he said. ‘If you put something straight beside something crooked, you see the crookedness. When a crooked person perceives his crookedness, there is pain. When he feels that pain, he is starting to get better.’

  He paused.

  ‘If you put a straight thing beside another straight thing, nothing happens. If you tell the truth to a straight person, there is no pain. If there is pain, it is because the person is crooked. If he is crooked, it is not kindness to tell him he is straight. Thereby one takes from him a great opportunity. It may be the only opportunity he ever has.’

  I nodded. I knew.

  ‘Do you still think I’m cruel?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I fell into thought. Every painful word of truth he had told me had given me life. For his truthfulness I owed him a debt that could not be measured. Yet, suppose he had told me these things and I had not understood? Suppose I had seen only the knife, not the cancer at which it was directed? Would that experience not have maimed me for ever? Were there not some people who could not survive this terrible surgery?

  ‘What is troubling you?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Perhaps some people can’t survive the truth,’ I said.

  ‘Why should they not be able to?’

  ‘Some people are mentally more vulnerable than others.’

  ‘Vulnerable?’

  ‘No. Unstable.’

  ‘Who are you thinking of?’

  ‘Alex,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you defend her?’

  It always came back to that question. We had touched on it many times. We had never got to the root of it.

  ‘I suppose I feel that she needs defending,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I know her. And although you see things which I don’t, I know things about Alex which you don’t know. I know where she’s most fragile.’

  ‘So why do you defend her?’

  ‘I don’t want you to hit her on that spot.’

  ‘But why do you defend her?’ he said.

  I started impatiently to reply, then stopped. His meaning gripped me and swung me round to face, once again, myself.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘What will happen if you do.’

  ‘And what do you think will happen?’

  I did not want to say it, but there was no way back.

  I said, ‘I think she might break up.’

  It was said, and I could think about it. Alex’s mother had, during Alex’s childhood, been subjects to fits of insanity. I had sometimes seen Alex in states of paranoia that were only a hair’s-breadth from madness. Throughout our relationship I had shielded her from truths that might arouse that slumbering demon.

  ‘There is something in Alex which I don’t understand and it frightens me,’ I said. ‘It’s a kind of darkness. If it is released …’

  ‘Yes?’

  The fear caught me, so strongly that I could no longer deceive myself about whom I was protecting.

  ‘It threatens me,’ I said.

  There was a pause. He smiled, as if fitting together an unusual puzzle.

  ‘So, you want to defend Alex against me because something in her threatens you.’

  It wasn’t nice, but it was neat. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So, why do you defend her?’

  It was too much. Was no answer, no soul-baring, sufficient for the man?

  ‘Because I love her,’ I said angrily. It was the first thing that came into my head.

  ‘You love her?’ It was an unbelieving, lethal whisper. I sat motionless while he annihilated me.

  ‘All your life you have loved no one. You have just admitted it. You have taken from people and given nothing.’

  ‘I have tried to help people,’ I said weakly. There were a few.

  ‘You have never helped anyone. You hinder people. You kill them.’

  ‘I kill them?’

  ‘You help them to kill themselves. It is the same thing. There they are, trapped in their prisons, and you come along and say, “Here’s another brick. I’ll even help you cement it in.” That isn’t help. That’s murder.’

  I thought of the caravan girl. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘You will keep Alex in her prison because you’re afraid of what will happen to you if she gets out.’

  A long time passed. I was conscious of very little, except the dreadful emptiness in my brain.

  ‘Isn’t it true?’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So,’ he said. He crossed his legs and tucked them up under him. He was smiling.

  ‘In this case, what is the next thing to do?’

  It was alarmingly clear. It was the clearest thing I had ever seen.

  ‘I’d better help Alex pull her prison down,’ I said.

&n
bsp; ‘And how will you do that?’

  I said, ‘I guess I start by not defending her.’

  My decision not to defend Alex had opened a door which could not be closed.

  Perhaps to test my resolution, Simon took an early opportunity of talking to me about her. He wanted to know what had been behind her precipitate departure to London. I could not help him: I knew less than he did, because I did not know what had passed between them the night they talked in the parlour. I tried to analyse my own perceptions of that evening, but could not get beyond the feeling of a threat, of something frightening in the house. I said that somehow it had been similar to the night the ponies got into the top field, when I had felt, to a lesser degree, the same unnameable disturbance. I asked him what had really happened that night.

  ‘She left the gate open,’ he said simply.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon.

  It seemed unlikely. But as I thought about it it began to seem all too probable. Alex was careless. She often did not bother to take precautions which I would have taken as a matter of course, because she thought them unnecessary. She might well have left the gate open temporarily when the ponies were not about, intending to go back later and shut it, and then forgotten. Alex was forgetful.

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said with resignation.

  ‘Oh, well?’ said Simon. ‘You and I had to get up the middle of the night. The whole house was disturbed. The crops might have been destroyed.’

  ‘But they weren’t,’ I said.

  ‘They might have been.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because of her. And she is the farmer. In this group we have a farmer who actually leaves gates open.’

  I grimaced.

  ‘We have a farmer who leaves the tools lying out in the fields all night. Nearly every evening Pete and I have had to bring in tools which Alex has left out.’

  So had I, for seven years.

  ‘We have a farmer who doesn’t even see to it that there is a barn to put the hay in.’

  True. It was I who had pointed out the necessity of clearing the barns before the hay was cut, and had done most of the clearing. Alex had not seemed to regard it as important. I recollected that this, too, had occurred regularly for years. I cleared barns, Alex filled them up again with junk, and every year I cleared them again just in time for the hay harvest. Alex was not interested in unglamorous jobs.

  ‘In short,’ said Simon, ‘we have a farmer who does none of the work of a farmer.’

  ‘She did arrange for the hay to be cut,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘She gets people to do things for her. And what other work has she done?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I’m at the office a lot of the time. I don’t know what she does.’

  ‘She goes out,’ said Simon.

  I searched for something to say that would not be an excuse, and found nothing.

  ‘She chose the job,’ pursued Simon. ‘She didn’t have to be the farmer. I made a list of jobs, and when I came to Farmer she jumped at it like a dog at a bone. But she doesn’t do it. Why doesn’t she do it? All the rest of you do your jobs. You look after the money, and every Thursday you tell us how much we’ve got and how much we’ve spent. Dao cooks: every day there is food on the table. Coral does the housekeeping: the house is clean. Except that the bathroom never seems to be particularly clean.’

  Alex was responsible for cleaning the bathroom.

  ‘And Pete does the repairs and fixes herb-racks and slates the roof. And she doesn’t even seem to like the way he slates the roof.’

  ‘She doesn’t think he’s doing it the right way,’ I said miserably.

  ‘But she doesn’t do it herself. She goes out instead.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Simon leant forward. ‘Why does she do it?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s always been like that. I’ve got used to it,’ I said.

  Through the open kitchen door came the sounds of cooking: Dao was preparing supper. Intermittent hammering from the other side of the house signified that Pete, undeterred, was still slating the roof. Fifty feet away outside the french windows sat Coral, feeding the baby. Sarah and Lily sat on the kitchen step, playing with an old tennis ball and talking in Thai.

  ‘A lot of people could live in this place,’ said Simon. ‘There are hungry people out there. There is not much time. And we cannot progress, because of Alex.’

  ‘She doesn’t understand,’ I said. ‘I used to think she understood better than I did what the group was about. But now I wonder if she’s ever understood at all.’

  ‘She has never understood,’ said Simon. ‘But she is very good at pretending to understand things which she doesn’t.’

  It took me a while to absorb the full impact of his words. He had provided me with a key, a very simple key, to a number of incidents which I had long found disturbing.

  I turned the key.

  Harry. Tessa. A mousey girl from the village in the throes of a wretched divorce. Three of the people Alex had talked to over the years, trying to help them with their different problems by telling them the things she had learned from Simon. Always, as I listened on these occasions, I had heard a false note. Once or twice, feeling she had distorted a crucial idea, I had intervened, to Alex’s irritation and the benefit of nobody. The rest of the time I had listened, puzzled. Alex’s voice but Simon’s words. Simon’s words almost exactly. She could not match his eloquence, of course, or his inspired logic, but these were Simon’s words. They had been right when he spoke them, so they must be right now. So what was wrong?

  Alex, sensing my discomfort, had asked me why I didn’t like her ‘talking’. I had been unable to reply. She asked me if I thought she had misinterpreted Simon’s meaning. No, I didn’t quite think that. All I knew was that I felt embarrassed. I agreed and yet somehow did not agree with what she was saying. I wished she would let me do the talking instead. Ego? No, it was not. What then? I did not know.

  My ears had picked up what my brain refused to consider. Alex did not understand a word she was saying.

  How often had she not understood when I assumed that she had? I recalled our angry arguments about history, evolution and philosophy. Arguments which had left me bruised and perplexed because I could not see why subjects neither of us cared deeply about should generate so much feeling. Arguments in which I had felt like one of those mythical heroes grappling with an adversary who continually changed shape, becoming a lion or a tree or a pool of water. Arguments in which every weapon of logic I produced was shattered against an invisible wall. I had thought it to be a wall of obstinacy, and puzzled over the fact that time did not erode it, for Alex was usually susceptible to reason on issues which did not involve her emotions. But if obstinacy was only the protective covering for a huge deception in which incomprehension masqueraded as understanding, ignorance as wisdom … then no wonder my logic was rendered impotent, no wonder I was filled with an anger I could not explain. And no wonder Alex’s defences were unbreachable. They had to be: there was everything at stake.

  How had it started, I wondered. As a self-defence when she found herself among people with no greater native wit than she had but an immeasurably better education? Or much earlier, in the shadows of a childhood dominated by a terrifying mother whose fits of unreason had forced the child into a compensating wisdom too large for her years? And to what extent was it conscious? Surely one knew whether one understood a thing or not? And if one didn’t, what purpose was served by pretending that one did?

  I had almost forgotten Simon’s presence.

  ‘Well?’ he enquired.

  ‘You’ve explained a lot of things for me,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand what she can gain from it.’

  ‘Respect.’

  I pondered. No, it wasn’t quite fair.

  ‘I think there’s more to it than that,’ I said. ‘And I think she does believe she understands, when she
doesn’t.’

  ‘She’s convinced herself.’

  ‘No, listen,’ I said. ‘After Alex met you she used to talk to people, people we knew who were in trouble. She would talk about your ideas, repeat the things you said. I admit there always seemed to be something slightly wrong with it –’

  ‘She didn’t understand what she was talking about.’

  ‘Right. But the point is that she wanted to help them. And some of those people were helped.’

  ‘Were they?’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whom has Alex helped?’

  I scanned my mental list. Harry. Harry loved Alex, had done for years, with a devotion I had seen falter only once. That was the night she had ‘talked’ to him. She had tried to tell him that the trap in which he found himself, compounded of tax debts, a second mortgage, a house he needed to sell and couldn’t sell until he had finished the renovations he lacked the money to complete, and work which he despised and which took all his time – that this closing trap, from which he escaped every night into a sea of beer, was an illusion and could simply be ‘dropped’. He was so angry, this man whom I had never heard raise his voice, that at two o’clock in the morning he embarked on an investigation of a malfunctioning water heater with a noise that woke the entire house and probably half the street. Harry was still in debt and still drinking a gallon of beer a night.

  Tessa? No, Tessa had learned nothing from Alex except a few useful attitudes with which to adorn her deviousness. However, leopards don’t change their spots.

  The girl from the village? I did not need to ask. If Alex had done anything there, it was harm. Alex had filled her head with fine phrases and lofty ideas, and the girl, emotionally disturbed and probably a little retarded into the bargain, had to my intense irritation fallen headlong in love with her.

  ‘No, she didn’t help them. But she tried to,’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t want to help people. She wants them to love her,’ he said.

  Oh, that was cruel. I started to protest, and stopped. It was uncannily close to my own thoughts.

  ‘She offers them help, but she gives them nothing. She pretends to help them, just as she pretends to understand. It’s all an act, a superb act. They’re taken in by it: it even took me in. Behind it there’s nothing. Alex is a sham.’