Bethany (13 page)

‘Hatred.'

‘No.'

He named in addition, fear, envy, cruelty, misery and apathy. I said no to each, and laughed wryly at the last. He asked me to name any other emotion I felt. I postponed it as long as I could, until it could be postponed no longer.

‘Love,' I said.

After a moment he said, ‘The emotions I have just named are known as mis-emotions: they are unreal and negative. The one you have named is not a mis-emotion.'

‘Oh,' I said.

‘Is the emotion you are experiencing connected with someone present or not present in the group?' he asked.

‘Present,' I said. ‘You're present all the time. That's what makes it so difficult.'

We were sitting in the field, usually noisy with insects, but I could hear no sound.

Simon said, ‘We can pursue this subject as a Session, in which
case I can only ask you questions; or we can conclude the Session and discuss the subject. Which do you want to do?'

‘Discuss it,' I said.

He wrote something in the notebook, drew a line and put the book away. He began to talk. He told me that the root of my trouble was that I had never denied myself anything and therefore my ego was uncontrollable, and that this was the result of being brought up by parents who alternately over-indulged and frustrated me (he had obviously gathered a completely different set of data during my Sessions from those I thought I was presenting him with). He told me that I cared nothing for the group and was quite prepared to break it up. He told me, lastly, that my fault was the most serious fault of all – the perverse refusal of help offered, the knowing choice of wrong. It was in all likelihood this fault which was referred to in the Bible as the sin against the Holy Ghost, he said: the sin that could not be forgiven because it denied the possibility of forgiveness. He said this in a quiet, speculative tone, offering it as something that would appeal to my intellect as well as being morally improving.

I heard all this as if from a great distance. As I thanked him, Dao rang the bell for supper.

I do not like to think of my behaviour during the next two days. I behaved like a rejected adolescent, alternately sulking and trying to attract Simon's attention. I succeeded in attracting it, but it profited me nothing. In an access of self-pity I retired to my study and listened to Wagner: Simon, hearing the turbulent music, strode into the room and, without forfeiting a scrap of his good humour, had me out working in the garden within two minutes.

Plunging then to the opposite extreme in an attempt to please him, and out of a need to punish myself, I worked ridiculously hard the day we brought the hay in, driving myself to lift, carry and throw the bales until my shoulders and arms felt like water, and my fingers were numb from the twine, and my eyes were
red with dust. Simon said nothing except, towards the end of the day as I sat exhausted on a bale, ‘Some people work too hard, for reasons they are aware of.'

He behaved towards me as if the incident had not happened. As the days went by I began to forget that it had. He proposed a new subject to be covered by everyone in Sessions: drug experiences. Mine were modest by contemporary standards: the only drugs that had ever caused me trouble were tobacco and alcohol. We covered them in the first two Sessions and I made surprising and delightful discoveries about each.

It was a good time. A threatening shoal had been avoided, and we were in untroubled waters. Then early one morning there was a telephone call for Alex. Her father had died of a heart attack. She left at once for Jersey.

Alex's relationship with her parents, when I met her, was polarised into love bordering on hero-worship for her father, and a sustained low-key anger bordering on hatred for her mother. Over the years her feelings mellowed but did not change their nature, and making due allowance for the emotional pitch of the relationship, I thought there was a great deal of sense in them.

Her mother was the most frightening woman I had ever met. Her forthrightness was attractive until you glimpsed the mountain of arrogance that lay behind it. She was capable of great generosity, and of an equal ruthlessness. She had never been anything but kind and courteous to me, but I had seen beneath this surface a depth of suppressed violence and a controlled irrationality which paralysed my response to her. The irrationality had not always been controlled: Alex's childhood had been haunted by the fear that one day her mother's fits of black despair would become permanent madness.

Her father, by contrast, was a quiet, mild and reasonable
man, an English gentleman, who had spent a blameless life in insurance and acquired a useful instinct for stocks and shares, but whose real interests lay in organic husbandry, fringe medicine and the innocuous foothills of the occult. He was a great reader of the works of Immanuel Velikovsky, and I held him largely accountable for Alex's regrettable conviction that all written history was a pack of lies. He was a religious man, in a diffident way. Through him Alex had inherited a distant strain of Jewish blood of which she was apt to boast, and a family crest about which she was reticent although her brother Philip wore it on a signet ring. There was an estate which had once belonged to the family in Norfolk; it had ceased to belong owing to the misplaced gallantry of an ancestor who had fought too well for Cromwell in the Civil War and been dispossessed at the Restoration. Alex had once shown me a picture postcard of the house – a pleasant place suffused with the ripe glow of ancient brickwork, surrounded by oak trees.

It was an unusual family. Both parents had a striking independence of mind, which they had imparted to all three children in quite different ways. It manifested itself partly in an inability to settle down. Alex's restlessness took the form of constant changes of direction and a very low boredom threshold, which ensured that she tired of tasks almost as soon as she had started them. Her sister, Celia, was forever embarking on new business enterprises, none of which ever fulfilled its promise. Philip, at an age when most men are frowning over their adolescent sons, was still looking for a suitable marriage partner.

Alex connected the dislike she felt for Philip with the fact that he was, as she maintained, ‘just like my mother'. I could not see the resemblance, but then, apart from the occasional rudeness which I took to be normal between brother and sister, I had never seen Philip when he was behaving in the way of which Alex so bitterly complained. From direct observation I would almost have judged him to be an amiable, handsome fool, a man in whom puritanism replaced real moral sense and
who was out of his depth in all the serious matters of life including relationships with women. Almost, but not quite, because every now and then I glimpsed something else, a spitefulness, a slyness, which lent credibility to Alex's furious denunciations of him. She said he was a betrayer, a snake in the grass. She had never forgiven him for a crucial breach of confidence many years ago which could only have been committed out of malice, and had resulted in her parents' realisation that she was homosexual. Not, said Alex, that she minded them knowing, but she certainly minded them finding out in that way.

There had been many other, smaller incidents when Philip had contrived to stick a knife in her back, but the major recent offence was the roof. Philip, a fine carpenter and fresh from building his own house, had undertaken to do the dormer conversion of the west wing at Bethany. At the last minute he had decided not to do it, and had telephoned to say so only the day before he was due to start. The timing made it impossible for Alex to find other builders in time to qualify for a local authority grant, and the event had cast a blight over the whole west wing enterprise from which it had never recovered.

Alex, still bitter more than a year later, blamed Philip solely for the dilapidation of the west wing, and in moments of passion was apt to blame him for the dilapidated state of the whole house and even for her financial problems over the property in London. Listening to one such outpouring I was at a loss to understand how she could involve him in the London fiasco, until she reminded me that at one point he had been going to do that job as well. As I pondered this she added thoughtfully, ‘I suppose I did let him down over that. I was going to take him into partnership, and I changed my mind.' She paused, then said: ‘Thank God I did.'

My uneasy feeling that in Alex's relationship with Philip lay more than met the eye was crystallised by this remark. I had known, and forgotten, the quickly-dropped scheme that would have made Alex and Philip equal partners in the London property, she to put up the money, he to do the work. I had known
and forgotten that Alex had put this scheme to Philip as one that was sure to make an excellent profit and might lead to even more profitable co-operation in the future. When nothing came of it I assumed that it had been dropped by mutual consent. Now it appeared that Alex had simply changed her mind. Alex was always apt to change her mind on any issue, no matter how firmly it seemed to have been decided and no matter what was involved for other people in a change of plan. She did not seem to understand that the right to change one's mind is limited by other people's right to know what is going on. So, Alex had changed her mind about the house in London, and six months later Philip, bearing no outward sign of a grudge, had changed his about the west wing. There was no doubt that Alex was perfectly aware of the connection.

It did not make Philip's behaviour any better; in fact it seemed to make it worse; but it did introduce a justification for him from Alex's own behaviour. I began to wonder how often Philip's meannesses had been, not, as I'd assumed, wanton, but the revenge of a weak man on a stronger, younger, cleverer sister who had trampled on him. Every one of the incidents I could recall was susceptible of this interpretation: every one was the sequel of an incident when Alex had wounded Philip's pride. The original incident of the breach of confidence was a prime example, for Alex had been having an affair with a woman with whom Philip fancied himself in love. Philip at the time had been an immature twenty-five: he must have hated his sister with all the fervour of his young puritanical heart.

Where did the truth lie? In Alex and Philip were expressed two conflicting views of life: hers founded on freedom, tolerance and the pursuit of intangible goals; his founded on self-discipline, hard work and a respect for conventions. He found her lazy and unpredictable: she found him stupid and mean-spirited. Whenever I tried to weigh their respective rightnesses I found the balance tipping heavily in favour of Alex, if only because her view of life was larger than his. But I realised that
the tipping of the scales resulted from the centre of balance I had adopted, and that this followed a subjective preference. What would happen if I shifted that centre, adopting a less sympathetic criterion? I could get no further with this question, because I did not know what to take as my fulcrum. After all, what I was attempting to weigh was two interpretations of the world, and over what truth could I weigh them which did not itself belong to one or the other?

I was less disturbed by the metaphysical difficulty of these thoughts than by the bright light they cast on Alex's character. In that light the shadows danced alarmingly. In time Alex's relationship with Philip came to symbolize for me everything in her which caused me disquiet.

Now her father was dead. She caught a plane to Jersey, to stand beside Philip at her father's grave.

Looking back, I am amazed at how little I understood even then. Simon did not want Alex to go to Jersey, did not think it necessary. I thought this harsh. I was a little upset because in the diary, when he might have written, ‘Alex's father died', he wrote, ‘Alex went to Jersey to see her mother'.

He did not want her to go because there was no point. There was no point in any of Alex's forays into the outside world. There was no point in going to help her mother, because her mother could not be helped. And there was no point in going to bury the dead, because the dead will bury their dead.

At the time I had temporarily lost sight of what the group meant. If I hadn't, I would never have made the mistake I made three days later, the evening Alex came home.

Alex's absence, since the question of which slates to put on which part of the roof had not been fully resolved, meant that the slating of the west wing could not be started, so instead Simon and Pete began to demolish some of the rotten timber inside. A bolt was put on the double doors so the children could not go into the danger area, and the house echoed to the
wrenching-up and throwing-down of floorboards. I worried about my study, and crept off to inspect it when work had finished, but apart from a fine deposit of plaster-dust over everything it was unharmed.

Demolition came to an abrupt halt the day after it had started when Coral found Bishop on the patio poking his velvet nose into the baby's pram. The ponies had been brought down from the upper field where they were fenced in to the lower, unfenced fields around the house, so they could roam freely and enjoy the benefits of human company. Bishop, as usual, had taken things too far. Coral was almost hysterical at the idea of ‘what could have happened'; indeed such was her distress that I wondered if she thought horses were carnivorous. When I came home from work the next day a strong wooden fence had been erected all the way round the patio and Pete was making a ten-foot gate to go across the top of the steps. Pete was also tiling the surround of the new sink he had installed, and putting up a large herb-rack in the kitchen. The herbs were to be stored in glass sweet-jars, which could be bought cheaply from sweet-shops. It was one of my jobs as Bursar to locate and purchase sweet-jars in my lunch-hour. Alex collected most of the herbs, and had promised to label them for Dao.

Pete worked very hard. I never saw him when he wasn't working. Once on the patio I heard him remark to Coral – in a tone of perfect good humour, as if mildly surprised by it – that he didn't seem to have any time at all. I sympathised. I never had any time either. Every moment of my day, from the time I got up, milked the goats and hoovered the stairs before going to work, to the time I fell into bed, was completely occupied. Not even in my lunch-hour at the office did I have time to sit over a cup of coffee and think. I wasn't tired: I had never felt more full of energy. And I certainly wasn't unhappy to work. It was simply that I had no time to think.