Bethany

by Anita Mason

  I stared numbly at the ground. A few feet away the paving petered out in a little wilderness of weeds and bare cement. Was that why she never finished anything?

  ‘What does she do to people?’ exclaimed Simon. ‘It’s terrible.’

  I tried to say something but could not find my voice. What was the point of trying to hold back this tidal wave of awful truth, which my instinct had known for years?

  ‘Look what she’s done to Charles,’ said Simon in a voice so low I could barely catch it. ‘That really is terrible, Kay.’

  Charles? What did Charles matter among so many? They surged into my mind, all the forgotten people who had loved Alex. Writers, painters, lawyers, thieves, professional men and con-men, economists and forgers … She had had affairs with all of them, asexual affairs, affairs of the mind, affairs which never lose their power to obsess because the obsession is never gratified. Some of them still struggled to maintain their side of the friendship in spite of the wrath of their wives, for behind nearly every man who loved Alex there stood a woman half out of her mind with jealousy over a relationship she could neither compete with nor understand.

  Then there were the waifs who had drifted into her net, the drug-addicts and the sexual misfits and the simple-minded. She had been kind to them and then, tiring of them, thrown them back into the sea where they no longer had the will to swim. Maurice was one of these. Alex had discovered him, feted him, dazzled him, and abandoned him, leaving me to stitch up the wound by writing his book. He could not understand how he had offended.

  Help? Had she ever ‘helped’ anyone who had not ended up devoted to her? Even Tessa, I now remembered. There had been a time when Tessa pursued Alex with a persistence that became socially embarrassing. She had only set her cap at Alex’s brother when it had been made clear to her that she could not have Alex.

  ‘It isn’t even just people,’ said Simon. ‘Look what she does to animals. Look what she did to Esther. That was the most horrible thing I have ever seen.’

  Esther in Alex’s arms, a centre of elaborate attention, when it was too late. Esther in the vet’s surgery waiting for the knife, waiting for Alex, who had gone to London.

  I felt sick. I had opened a door, and through it was blowing a wind, a gale, a hurricane.

  We had spent just under £19, and there was £43 in the kitty. I switched on the calculator to check that I had divided the expenditure correctly.

  Simon said, ‘Are you dividing it by three or four?’

  ‘Three,’ I said. ‘Alex isn’t here and she won’t have any money anyway.’

  ‘In nine weeks,’ said Simon, ‘Alex has paid her share three times.’

  I switched off the calculator.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But if she doesn’t have any money she doesn’t have any money. I can divide it by four if you like, but all that will happen is that I shall end up paying half the total instead of a third. Which presumably isn’t what you have in mind.’

  ‘We don’t want you to pay for Alex,’ said Simon. ‘We want Alex to pay for herself. For once.’

  At the beginning, when it was agreed to split the expenditure four ways, I had felt the arrangement was unfair. I was still not entirely happy about it, but this was not the point. Alex had undertaken to pay a quarter of the expenses whenever she could. That had turned out to be hardly ever.

  ‘How can she pay?’ I said.

  ‘She could sell some furniture,’ said Simon. ‘Some of the furniture in this house would fetch a lot of money.’ He indicated the carved oak sideboard behind him. ‘I saw a sideboard like that priced at four hundred pounds.’

  I wrestled with a moment of anger. That the sideboard was not worth anything like that sum, that it had been in Alex’s family for many years, and that it was exactly right for the wide alcove in which it stood, were all alike irrelevant. Furniture did not matter.

  ‘I’d be surprised if it was worth that much,’ I said. ‘And in any case, Simon, antique furniture takes time to sell. You can’t just pop into town with it when you want some money.’

  ‘She could advertise it nevertheless.’

  His eyes travelled over the room. To most people it would have appeared very sparsely furnished.

  ‘There are lots of small things that could be sold. Pictures. That mirror.’

  A rather pretty oval Victorian mirror which we had bought for a pound at an auction.

  ‘Oh, the mirror’s nice, Simon,’ said Coral. ‘And it’s useful.’

  ‘Okay, not the mirror, since someone likes it. Pictures. There must be dozens of pictures in this house.’

  Indeed there were. Most of them were in my study stacked against a wall, affording a haven to spiders. They were a residue of Alex’s foray into picture-dealing.

  ‘They aren’t worth anything,’ I said. ‘Except for one or two which might fetch a bit if she restored them.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she restore them?’

  His eyes continued their journey, and came back to the sideboard. On it were a few modest ornaments, none of which would have attracted a second glance in a junk shop.

  ‘Well, it’s clear there are a number of things which could be sold to raise money,’ he said. ‘There is no reason why Alex should not pay her share. However, for this week I suppose we could make an exception. If Pete agrees.’

  Pete, who had appeared sunk in thought since the start of the meeting, roused himself, smiled, and said ‘Yes.’

  I divided the expenditure by three.

  When we had disposed of the financial business, Simon said, ‘When are the oats going to be harvested?’

  Alex had arranged for Mr. Pascoe to bring his combine harvester down to our field as soon as he had finished getting in his own crop.

  ‘Probably on Saturday,’ I said.

  ‘And when will Alex be back?’

  ‘She said she’d be back today, but that doesn’t mean she will,’ I said. ‘She often doesn’t come back the day she says she will.’

  ‘I see,’ said Simon. He thought for a while. Then he said, ‘Until the problem that is facing the group is solved, there is no point in trying to deal with anything else. In the circumstances I don’t think we can possibly have the oats harvested.’

  I sat back in the chair and cleared my mind. There was no room for emotions. This was going to be a long evening.

  Simon said, ‘Is there anyone here who doesn’t know what the problem is?’

  No one spoke.

  Simon said, ‘There is a member of the group who does not want the group to work.’

  He began to talk about Alex’s behaviour. After a few sentences Dao interrupted.

  ‘It seems to me it is not right,’ she said, ‘to criticise one who is not present.’

  ‘This is not criticism,’ said Simon. ‘The intention is to help Alex. If the intent is right, no harm is done.’

  The discussion continued. Alex was a farmer who did not farm, a builder who would not build, a businesswoman who could not be businesslike. She played at everything she did. She could not even handle the responsibility of having tenants. Everything she undertook ended in chaos; every job she started had to be finished by someone else, who would probably be told they had done it wrong. She was lazy: she got people to do things for her. She was mean: she liked to get things done on the cheap or if possible for nothing. She was good at this, because she charmed people. However, her relationship with the people who did things for her always broke down because she continually changed her mind about what she wanted. She would then shift the blame for the failure on to them. She was never grateful for help. She behaved like a grande dame: when she had tired of charming people, she treated them like serfs.

  She confused everyone with whom she had dealings because she changed her mind, went back on her word and broke promises. She could not be relied on to do anything she said she would do, or even to remember tomorrow what she had said today. She would change her version of the past to suit her present requirements. She di
d not pay her debts. She caused immeasurable trouble to countless people and appeared to think that none of it mattered in the slightest. She had managed to live in this way for thirty-eight years and would doubtless continue to do so for the rest of her days as long as the people around her made allowance for her eccentricities and went on carrying her as a passenger.

  ‘We cannot have passengers in this group,’ said Simon. ‘There is too much to be done, and not much time. There is a world out there hungry for a new way of life, and we are waiting for Alex.’

  He paused. ‘If I am wrong,’ he said, ‘someone will correct me.’

  Pete, Dao and Coral glanced at me. I said nothing. What could I say? He had presented me with a picture of Alex more coherent than any I had possessed. It was exact in detail, and contained intuitions which my own knowledge confirmed. The most striking was his phrase ‘grande dame’: he did not know that Alex, brought up in the woods, kept a picture postcard of her ancestral home in an upstairs pigeon-hole.

  I had listened with all my mind for a small mistake in the damning litany: there was none. There was not the slightest chink into which I could insert a denial and try to prise apart this monstrous edifice. I gazed at the dark Alex who was taking shape before my eyes, and knew that for seven years I had been the victim of a conjuring trick. The lights shone on an empty stage: what I had taken for a shadow was the only flesh.

  I woke up feeling wretched. I had pledged myself not to stand between Alex and the truth. Where then did I stand? ‘You must hate the offence but love the offender,’ Simon was apt to say. I wondered if I was yet capable of such a mature discrimination.

  The rest of the group seemed happy and treated me with more than usual gentleness. There was an air of waiting for something. Alex had telephoned late the previous evening to say she would be back on Saturday night. I could not remember what I had said to her.

  I was ill at ease, and went into town to do some shopping. I bought groceries, a pair of scissors for Coral, and some small brass screws with which to fit clothes-hooks on to the bedroom doors. There were no wardrobes at Bethany because Alex always threw them away.

  On the way back I drove up the hill towards the lane that led to Mr. Pascoe’s farm, and found myself driving past it and on towards the lay-by at the top in which there was a telephone kiosk. I stopped there and sat behind the steering-wheel, considering. It was as sensible to telephone as go there. All I had to do was deliver a simple message, which could be entrusted to anyone in the house: we did not want the oats combined tomorrow. I would have to give a reason, of course.

  I said to Mrs. Pascoe, ‘Could you tell your husband that we’re not quite ready to get the oats in, and if he could put it off for a few days it would be a help. I’ll ring again.’

  She said yes, that was all right, their own oats weren’t quite ready anyway. I put the phone down with relief, and went home.

  As the day wore on I forgot my unease. I had no time to think about it in any case: I had to finish clearing out the red barn to make room for the oats. The straw alone would take up a third of the space.

  I finished just as Coral made the afternoon drink. I had been working hard, and I lingered over my peppermint tea.

  ‘Did you tell Mr. Pascoe about the oats?’ asked Pete as he stood up.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Pete nodded and walked away.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Simon casually.

  As casually, I answered, ‘I said we weren’t quite ready and could he leave it a few days.’

  There was a pause before Simon said, ‘That is not the message you were given.’

  I had been asked to tell Mr. Pascoe simply that we did not want him to combine the oats on Saturday.

  ‘Why didn’t you pass on the message you were given?’ asked Simon.

  I gazed stupidly at the ground.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  He was smiling. For a moment I thought he would let it go: he often did, if it was a small point and he had drawn one’s attention to it. But something had alerted him. The smile vanished.

  ‘You did not deliver the group’s message,’ said Simon. ‘You substituted one of your own. Why?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘To anyone outside,’ said Simon, ‘it would not appear to matter. People do this all the time. They are entrusted with a communication and they change it. The world as a consequence is full of untrue statements. People accept these statements and act on them and the result is chaos. It seems to me to matter a great deal.

  ‘It is so simple,’ he said. ‘One is given a message and one delivers that message. Why should one wish to change it?’

  He looked hard at me. ‘The motive for altering information is that one wishes to influence people or to control events. But it doesn’t work. The opposite happens. When one delivers a message exactly as one has received it, one discharges one’s responsibility totally and nothing is left behind. One is free of that situation. If one changes the message, one is left with something: a responsibility which one cannot be free of. One has chained oneself to the series of events which will result from that false message. And instead of influencing those events, one will be influenced by them.’

  It was a nice paradox. I regarded it without much pleasure.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So why did you change the group’s message?’

  ‘I … well, I thought he wouldn’t understand if I just said we didn’t want the oats combined. He would expect some sort of reason. So I gave him one.’

  ‘But the group did not authorise you to give him one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You decided to act on your own initiative.’

  Simon gazed piercingly in front of him, brows puckered.

  ‘It’s very serious,’ he said.

  I knew it was: it was even more serious than he had realised. I prayed that he would follow the track he was on and not scent that there was another.

  He followed it.

  ‘If you act apart from the group, you act against the group. After all these weeks, you are still acting against the group.’

  He talked for a long time, about the desire to assert one’s individuality, and the misunderstanding on which it rested, and the unhappiness that was caused by it. After a while, seeing my dejection and that I was not resisting him, he softened and said it was not easy to break the habit of a lifetime and a conditioning which valued the illusory and destructive thing called personality, but one must try.

  ‘One must be constantly on one’s guard,’ he said, ‘so that one sees when it starts to happen. See it, and you can stop it. In fact when you see it, it stops itself.’

  He smiled at me, got up and went into the kitchen. I sat for about five minutes, watching the slow purposeful movement of the cows in the field beyond the stream. Whether he had known or not, he had left me to contemplate, in the light of his words, the true depth of my betrayal of the group.

  I had changed the group’s message to one that would be acceptable to Mr. Pascoe because if the group broke up I would still have Mr. Pascoe as a neighbour. For the same reason, I still had not given up my job. It did not require Simon to tell me that by insuring myself against the group’s failure I was even now contributing to it.

  That evening we did a communication exercise. Simon gave us all a piece of paper and a pencil.

  ‘Draw a vertical straight line in the centre of the paper, extending from one-third of the way down the paper to the bottom of the paper,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t draw straight lines,’ I protested. I couldn’t draw anything.

  ‘Draw a straight line,’ said Simon patiently, and repeated his instruction.

  I drew one.

  ‘At right-angles to that line, and starting at the top of it, draw a straight line from left to right extending to the edge of the paper.’

  I drew one. The instructions continued, until the diagram was quite complex. I sneaked a look at Pete’s, and was glad to see that his looked
more or less like mine.

  ‘Don’t concern yourself with anyone else’s drawing,’ Simon reproved.

  I grinned. It was like a maths lesson where for once you understood what you were supposed to be doing. It was fun. It was rather an odd occupation for five adults, but it was fun.

  Simon finished and said, ‘Now, everyone should have a drawing that looks something like this.’

  He showed his own. We showed ours. They were all the same. We smiled at each other.

  ‘Communication is a matter of seeing the same thing,’ said Simon.

  Before going to bed we talked again about Alex. Dao, who had had a great affection for her, was sad. She had believed Alex to be a rare person, with a generous heart and what she called ‘a man’s spirit in a woman’s body’, but she had been mistaken. These qualities were not there, she said.

  Simon nodded.

  Each member of the group had been struck by a different aspect of Alex’s behaviour. To Dao the most upsetting thing was that she broke promises. For weeks she had been promising to label the herb jars: she still had not done it, and Dao had a kitchen full of anonymous herbs, none of which she dared use in case she poisoned us all.

  Coral complained of her laziness and untidiness. The bathroom was never really clean, she said; there was dust under the bath and behind the washstand, and the floor was hardly ever washed. I pointed out that the bathroom floor, consisting of bare floorboards which did not quite meet, was difficult to clean properly, but Simon said, ‘The hall also consists of bare floorboards, but you manage to wash it regularly,’ to which I could find no reply. There was no reply either to Coral’s complaint that no sooner had she tidied the kitchen than Alex would come in with an armful of something, dump it in a corner, and leave it there all day.

  Small things. Inconsiderate, selfish things. Symptoms.

  Pete was concerned with something deeper: the bullying ego he had glimpsed on several occasions when Alex had felt threatened or had been indulging her wit at my expense.

  ‘It’s surprising,’ he said simply. ‘For a long time you don’t realise it’s there, then suddenly it comes up.’ He made a movement with his hands to suggest something breaking surface. ‘And when you see it, it’s so big.’