Bethany (11 page)

I put my head back and laughed.

Sophie came for two days. Sophie was the four-year-old daughter of Harriet, who was Simon's ex-wife. This did not mean that Sophie was Simon's daughter: she was assumed by Manuela, Alex and me to be Pete's, since Pete had for a time lived with Harriet before he met Coral. The reason for Sophie's visit was that Harriet was going into hospital to have another baby. Gordon, the friend of Simon's who had married Dao for him, telephoned to ask if we could look after Sophie until Harriet was home again. I wondered who was the father of the baby, and rather hoped it was someone I hadn't heard of.

‘Bottled up, caged in, in a rage,' said Simon. ‘Is there an earlier incident when you felt that?'

It would have to be much earlier to be any use. I had discovered a great deal, but the source lay much further back, in my first years, before I went to school. I pushed my mind back beyond the point at which it could remember.

I was sitting on the kitchen floor cutting holes in my father's socks. I had a green sock in one hand and the scissors in the other. I was consumed with rage about something. There was another feeling which I could not identify. Having cut the heels out of several socks I folded them up and put them back on the dresser.

I went through the incident several times but could get no more out of it.

‘Is there an earlier incident?' asked Simon.

When else had I felt this baffled rage?

From the fringe of memory a dim picture came: a child, three and a half years old, looking at a Christmas tree on which were hung toys more suitable for a baby. The picture sharpened. One of the toys was a rattle in the form of a pink plastic telephone. I saw my mother, her face strained, sitting in an armchair. My father was not in the picture.

‘I feel these toys are an insult,' I said. ‘I must have expressed my dissatisfaction because my mother says, “If you behave like a baby you'll have baby's toys.” I have some inkling what she
means. I think I have been behaving badly recently. I've started wetting the bed again. But I have a strong feeling that it isn't fair.'

I paused. ‘They're not being honest,' I said. ‘I feel I've been tricked.'

I could not account for this last perception. I waited for the emotions to clarify.

‘I feel terrible,' I said, ‘belittled. Angry. But the strongest feature is that these toys are simply nothing to do with me. They're for someone else. My parents do not know who I am.'

I left the incident with a feeling of irritation. It seemed both enigmatic and trivial. I returned to the incident of the socks, which now seemed to hold a new element.

‘It's very confused,' I said. ‘It seems the right thing to do. I know it's destructive, and I know that something terrible will happen if I do it. And at the same time, as I cut into the fabric I have the extraordinary feeling that I'm doing something helpful.'

Yet the motive was spite. I was intensely angry, and the cutting of the socks brought an emotional release I could still feel. The anger was the same in all the incidents I had been through: it was the anger of impotence. It was caused by an initial frustration, compounded by many repetitions, and rendered almost intolerable by the frustration of the need to communicate. Through all the incidents ran the theme that I could not communicate my real nature. With surprise I realised that I had last felt this anger very recently.

‘It's the rage I still feel when someone won't listen to me,' I said. ‘When their refusal to listen amounts to an attempt to change my identity. It happens often with Alex. I become incoherent with anger, because she is trying to tell me about something that is happening inside my own head.'

I paused. ‘I suppose that's what is meant by trying to change someone's data,' I said.

There was a phone call to say that Harriet had had a baby boy.

It was her fourth child, the others being Sophie and two sons of Simon's, aged respectively twelve and nine. The boys were physically graceless, as was their mother, but highly intelligent. I had once seen Simon, Harriet and the older boy, Martin, together, and been struck by the child's originality of mind and by Simon's lack of warmth towards him. Simon had said afterwards that Martin had serious problems of ego. I had noticed that he required a very high standard of behaviour from his children. I reflected that it must be difficult having an apparently perfect being for a father.

I did not like Harriet, although we had a lot in common. She, Simon and I had all read the same subject at the same university, although they had been there six years before me. Harriet and I shared the same combination of an orderly mind and a lifestyle which hovered perpetually on the brink of chaos. I could not decide why I didn't like her: every time I thought about it there seemed to be a different reason. When I caught myself mentally accusing her of both puritanism and promiscuity I realised that my dislike was not rational and I had better look elsewhere for its cause. In the event I never bothered.

She and Simon had separated because of mutual incompatibility of temperament. (My words, not his: the only time he ever referred to it in my hearing was to pay Dao a gentle compliment, saying what bliss he found it to live with someone who left him in peace.) He had given Harriet the cottage in which they'd lived, a few miles from the city, and since then he and Dao had never had a permanent home. When I met them they were living in a cliffside chalet overlooking the Atlantic. The view was breathtaking, and so, in winter, were the winds.

The chalet belonged to Gordon, the friend who had married Dao. They moved out of it after the Buddhist equivalent of trouble with the neighbours: the man next door, after a few conversations with Simon, had become angry and hit him. Simon had not attempted to defend himself, but had decided to move since his presence obviously upset the man. This information came from Manuela, supplying, as always, the
apocrypha to Simon's canon. I could not fathom her attitude to Simon: it seemed to be a mixture of respect, impatience, affection and mockery. I had once heard her say, ‘When I think of Simon I feel so sad,' with the unmistakable and extraordinary implication that there was something wrong with him. I concluded that Manuela had never properly listened to Simon because in her mind she was still listening to Jacques – Jacques as he had been before alcohol and drugs claimed him. I concluded also that she was a little in love with him. Surely few women who met Simon could not be in love with him. Men, too. Why else did Gordon do so much for him? And there was the dog-like fidelity of Pete.

For the first time I allowed myself to consider the question of whether I too was falling in love with Simon, and was dismayed to feel my heart quicken at the thought. I had never been in love with a man: I had thought myself not capable of it. I liked male company, I approved of the balanced detachment and range which I considered typical of the male intellect at its best, and I admired many personal qualities in the men I knew; yet there was a way in which men were not quite real to me, not entirely dimensional, and I could not believe that they had emotions as profound as a woman's. I could not take them completely seriously, and the more physical my commerce with them became, the more I despised them.

Simon, in this sense, was not a man to me; he transcended the category. Not merely did he demand to be taken seriously: he was my touchstone of seriousness. I was saturated with his ideas and his presence. He had broken every defence I had. Of course I loved him – in the sense he demanded. Was it possible that the steady warmth of this affection had aroused from its slumber a sexual love which he did not ask for and would not want?

I knew it was a mistake to think about it, and I continued to think about it. It had the heady sweetness of all forbidden thoughts, with a strong spice of fear. After a while I was unable to stop thinking about it, and I was beginning to feel the first
stirrings of jealousy towards Dao. With the jealousy came guilt.

I told myself that the psychological self-exposure involved in the Sessions was bound to set up an emotional tension between me and Simon: I could hardly be blamed for it, and it was something he ought to be prepared for. But I realised that it was at least as likely that my self-exposure was sexually motivated, that I was using the Sessions to achieve a precarious intimacy with him. I was carrying on a flirtation with him through my past. It was in very bad taste, quite apart from being dangerous, and I knew I should stop it. I couldn't: it was too piquant. Besides, the discoveries I had made in Sessions were real and important. I had to go on until I found the thing that had started it all.

‘Nearly all of it is now very clear,' I said. ‘I tried to cheat in all sorts of ways – by escaping into fantasy, by trying to steal the thing I wanted, by simply pretending that I had it – but it didn't work. What isn't clear is the original event. At some point I discovered that I wasn't like a boy, and that must have been traumatic.'

I was very calm. The previous evening, after the end of a Session, I had realised something so luminously simple that I marvelled I could have missed it for so many years.

‘In my Session yesterday I said I'd started bedwetting when I was about three and a half,' I said. ‘It went on for well over a year, and it wasn't only at night. My mother used to get very upset. I've never known why I suddenly regressed like this, because there wasn't, as far as I know, any disturbance at home which would account for it. Then last night I recaptured how I felt on those occasions, when I knew it was going to happen; and the feeling was an absolute panic-stricken refusal to go to the lavatory.'

No doubt about it, it was a striking insight. And it brought me to a point from which I could, I was sure, reach the final enigma of my childhood in a single step. I thought I knew the direction in which it lay.

‘I had a little boy-friend,' I said, ‘Johnny. He was almost the same age as me. Our mothers were friends. I remember an occasion when I was at his house, and we were playing in the sandpit …'

Simon broke in and made me run the incident properly.

‘I'm playing in the sandpit,' I said, ‘and his mother comes up and asks me if I want to go to the toilet. I do, but I say no. It gets worse, but I still refuse to go, and finally the inevitable happens. Then we go in for tea, and his mother notices. She can't understand why I didn't tell her. And I don't know either. I just felt compelled to say no.'

‘Go back to the beginning,' said Simon.

This time I recaptured the fear – the fear that the wet patch I was sitting on would be discovered. Then I got a vivid picture of the green bathroom door and the green and white squared lino, and was gripped by a colder fear. Whatever happened, I could not go in there. Someone was saying something to me. I concentrated.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘His mother's saying something. She says, “Are you sure you don't want to go, Kay? Because Johnny's going.”'

I stopped. ‘Good God,' I said, in amazement at the literalness of the subconscious. I didn't want to go because Johnny was going. There it was.

But why?

‘Is there an earlier incident?' asked Simon.

Of course there was:
the
incident. I could feel it, but I could see nothing. I knew it was to do with Johnny, but it was an incident that had never been consciously held in the memory. I waited. It struggled towards me, appearing slowly like an animal emerging for the first time from the mud in which it has always lived. It became bright and sharp. I was in Johnny's garden again. I must have been very small because the grass came up to my shoulders. Johnny and I were there alone. It was early evening.

‘We've been playing,' I said. ‘I say I'm going in, to go to the lavatory, and he says, “Why don't you go here?”'

I couldn't see what happened next: it was as if the reel had stuck.

‘Go back to the beginning,' said Simon.

It was very confused: a series of impressions. Hesitantly I said, ‘I take my knickers down and he looks at me in amazement and says, “You don't do it like
that
!” – and demonstrates. I am very hurt at the contempt in his voice. And very envious.'

A tremendous sigh escaped me.

‘Go back to the beginning,' said Simon again.

But this time it was quite different.

‘He's challenged me,' I said. ‘Who can pee the furthest, or something like that. Obviously he doesn't know that girls can't. I am wondering how I can evade the challenge without being humiliated.'

I could see no more, but I knew that I had not managed to evade it. The humiliation, the exposure of my inferiority, had taken place then in that garden.

‘I've been tricked, betrayed, conned,' I burst out. ‘I am at a terrible disadvantage and nobody has prepared me for it. The worst thing is the feeling of betrayal. My parents made me believe I was someone special, and all the time I was inferior. They don't even understand how terrible it is. I can never trust them again.'

I came back to the present with a faint dissatisfaction. I had expected to find, at the end of my quest, some event of haunting lucidity, alight with the strange logic of the subconscious. What I had found was the logic of suburbia. It was so predictable that I could have made it up. An uncomfortable feeling grew in me that perhaps I had made it up. And if I had, what else had I made up? Surely only a colourful detail here and there, to make a better story of it. The progression from incident to incident was real. Yet I wondered if it was inevitable. Would other incidents have done?

Well, I would have to rest content with what insights I had gained. The series was finished. I had said so: and in any case, Alex was due back.

The diary was kept in the top right-hand drawer of the carved oak sideboard in the parlour. Simon had bought it, so that, he said, everyone could write in it what they felt. Since, if we had something to say, we usually said it openly, most of the entries were records of things done, decisions made, or major items of expenditure. However, interspersed among these sober entries, which were usually in Simon's hand or mine, appeared others of a more poetic nature by Dao, Coral, and sometimes (rather shyly) Alex.