Bethany (14 page)

It seemed to me that everyone else in the group must be in the same situation, and Simon most of all. He was now doing Sessions with all of us, since Dao had asked to have them as
well. And the Sessions themselves, since an hour was frequently too short to pursue an incident thoroughly, had been extended to an hour and a half. Simon was therefore spending seven and a half hours every day guiding and taking notes while we put our souls in order, in addition to what other work he did on the house and the land. Whatever his reserves, I thought, it must be a strain on him.

And was it necessary? I remembered how we had agreed that the ideal was to do as little as possible, how Simon had said with a smile that he looked forward to the time when the sound of the hammer was heard no more, and I wondered how we had got into a situation where the sound of the hammer never ceased. The house, the barns, the fences, the hay, the scaffolding, the roof … we hadn't stopped for weeks, and nearly every day new suggestions were made and Pete added a few more items to the list in his maintenance book. What had happened to those marvellous talks, those magical times when we had sat for hours after a meal, or in the parlour in the evening, or on the patio in the sun, and listened to Simon, and explored the universe with our minds?

Thus I reflected. And, since we always said what we thought, I said it.

Again the defence. I persist in attributing to myself the best motives, to believing that it was all a misunderstanding.

But of course he understood. He has always understood. I have never known him wrong.

And even if he had, in this case, slightly misunderstood, it wouldn't matter. Because his lightness would always, in sum, exceed mine and the excess would swallow up, as it were, any small wrongness. That was why I submitted.

We sat, then, in the parlour, I in my usual chair in the corner, the high-backed Victorian armchair which, like everything else at Bethany, struggled to maintain its dignity in spite of a broken spring. We always sat in the same places: Coral and myself on
either side of the fireplace; Simon directly opposite the fireplace with Dao sitting next to him, surrounded by the children; Alex between me and Dao, and Pete between Coral and Simon.

Coral fussed a great deal over the baby during meetings, but Simon said nothing about it, although he tolerated no interruptions from his own children. If they were disruptive – which was rare – he asked Dao to take them to bed. Since the meetings were in their nature meetings for and about the group, there was no question of the children not attending. At the start of this particular evening the group was incomplete because Alex was away. It was the only time anyone missed any part of a Thursday meeting.

The atmosphere of those meetings was something I had never experienced before. It was a little like being in church; but the peace that filled the room had nothing to do with rituals: it was a peace that came from living truthfully. It was the peace of perfect communication. Simon never tired of stressing the crucial importance of communication. He seemed to attach a mystical value to it, which I did not quite understand at the time. I did, later. Perfect communication is Communion.

So there we sat on that ill-starred Thursday evening, and I announced that we had spent just over £41 in the course of the week. There had been several abnormal items of expenditure: roof battens, a pitchfork, and a quantity of pinhead oatmeal. I was just dividing the sum by three and wondering if I could pay my third and also repay the £20 I had borrowed from the kitty to get Alex to Jersey, when I heard a car come up the drive. Alex was back.

I suppose I had expected her to look upset. She looked distant, but serene. She returned our smiles calmly and took her place in the semi-circle. We went on with the meeting.

Alex said she could pay her share of the expenditure this week as her mother had given her some money. I did my arithmetic again, and it was agreed to pay the phone bill. We were running short of flour and oats, and Alex, who had not contributed to the bulk food purchase a month earlier, said she
thought the food merchant would probably barter a sack of each for a small antique sewing machine of hers which had caught his eye when he delivered the initial order.

This offer was accepted with approval, and Simon said there must be a lot of things we could barter if we looked around. In time we might find we could do without money altogether.

We agreed that we could not go on doing without baths altogether. The water situation was becoming critical: there had been almost no rain for six weeks and the spring that fed our tank was running low. A bath drained the tank completely, so no one had had a bath for a fortnight. In any case no one felt like having a bath because, since the Rayburn was on all the time for cooking, the hot water was so hot it came spitting out of the taps half steam. You couldn't add cold water to it because the constant emptying of the cold water pipes had dragged the scaling of rust from their insides and the cold water was now permanently orange. It was surprising how disturbing the idea of sitting in orange bathwater was. The hot water came out comparatively clear, presumably because the sediment had had time to settle in the boiler.

Dao, who at first had been loud in dismay at the peculiarities of the plumbing system, now accepted them with humour, but Coral was not resigned. Indeed, we would all have liked to plunge into a cool bath after a day's work in the fields. We discussed, not for the first time, installing a shower, and realised again that a shower would work directly off the existing water supply and merely provide us with the same choice of clear scalding water or orange cold water.

Simon then remembered that a portable shower for campers was manufactured: it used only a gallon of water, which could be drawn off from the hot tap and allowed to cool. It was obviously the answer, and I was requested to find out the price.

The next item was the ponies. It seemed that Bishop had decided Coral was fair game. Reading galley-proofs in my study that afternoon, I had been disturbed by a movement outside the window, and, looking out, had seen Simon running full pelt
down the drive. I wondered what could be happening to make Simon run, and then I heard a whinny and knew. Bishop and Osmond had decided to join Coral as she took the baby and the three children for their afternoon walk while Dao had her Session. Bishop had teased, Coral and the children had panicked, and Bishop had gleefully chased them all the way down to the gate. It was useless to say to Coral, ‘Never run away,' just as it was useless to say to the rest of the group, ‘These ponies are like that: I tried to tell you,' so I said nothing, and the situation was resolved by Alex's volunteering in future to escort the four o'clock walk.

The last item was the west wing. There was hardly any discussion: we were agreed that it should have top priority. Simon wrote it in the diary.

Then looking quickly round the group he asked, in his level, courteous, chairman's manner, ‘Has anyone else any suggestions to make?'

I waited for a few seconds, to give other people a chance. No one seemed to have anything to say.

Slightly nervously – it was, after all, quite a bold statement – I said, ‘Yes, I have. I think we're working too hard.'

I was surprised by the silence. I had expected some kind of recognition. There was nothing.

I continued.

‘All these projects,' I said. ‘We're all doing something all the time, we never stop. We never seem to have time to talk any more. At the start of the group there seemed to be much more time. We used to sit around and talk; it was good, we all benefited. We don't do that any more.'

My voice had risen and I had trouble keeping it steady. There was no feedback at all: not the slightest hint that they knew what I was talking about. Simon was frowning.

Alarmed, I blundered on.

‘Only the other day I heard Pete saying there never seemed to be any time.'

‘Don't speak for others,' said Pete.

I felt as if I had walked into a tank.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I know one shouldn't speak for others. I was just trying to make it clear that I wasn't speaking purely on my own behalf: I thought I was expressing a view which was probably shared by other members of the group.'

‘Don't speak for others,' said Simon.

I realised I had made a terrible mistake, but I didn't know what it was. There was silence in the room. I glanced at Alex, sitting a few feet away; she was looking straight in front of her.

I waited.

But Simon was waiting. What was he waiting for? There was nothing more I could say. After a few minutes of that silence I would have been unable to speak even if I had found something to say. The silence was iron; it was ice; it was stronger than all the souls it contained.

It lasted for ten minutes by my still-ticking watch.

Simon said, ‘Has anyone else anything to say?'

Receiving no answer, he stood up and walked from the room.

He wanted to bring me to my senses, I suppose, and knew that only the strongest measures would do it. I held out against him a long time. I felt an injustice had been done me. I hoped in the morning things would be different.

We went off to bed in silence, except for the smiling ‘Goodnight' which usually said so much, and tonight seemed to say nothing at all. I wanted support from Alex, but she was withdrawn. She said that in Jersey she had made some important discoveries which she had come back wanting to share with the group, and instead had found herself in the middle of a distressing situation which I had provoked. We slept in the same bed, not touching.

In the morning things were not different. I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. At about nine o'clock the bell in the hall was rung. Normally the bell was only rung for meals: if it
was rung at any other time it was a summons to a meeting. Dao was calling a meeting.

We sat again in the parlour. Dao said she had called the meeting because something was wrong and she thought it should be settled. Simon asked of the group what was wrong. There was a long silence.

In the end I said that Dao was obviously referring to what had happened the previous evening when I made a suggestion and it was badly received by the group.

Simon said in a cold, puzzled voice, ‘When you did what?'

I faltered. Surely that was what had happened?

‘I made a suggestion,' I said. ‘I thought we were all working unnecessarily hard and I suggested that it might be a good idea if we had a bit more time to … well, sit and talk.'

Again the complete silence, as if I had not said anything. Or as if they were waiting for me to say something in a language they could understand. On every face was the same faint smile of patience, and behind it an endless gravity.

I began to feel very afraid.

Simon waited to see if something would come out of the silence. Nothing did. After a while he picked up the thought again.

‘You know what you did,' he said to me.

‘No, I don't,' I said.

‘You don't know?' His voice was incredulous, contemptuous.

I grasped the arms of the chair to steady myself, and kept my voice quiet and level.

‘No,' I said, ‘I don't understand what has happened.'

It was true. In a few minutes I had moved from absolute certainty about what had happened to utter doubt. I knew I had said what I remembered saying, but I knew nothing else. I did not know what I had meant when I said it. I did not know what effect I had intended, or what effect my words had had. I felt I was alone in a dark place. From long habit I looked
to Simon to guide me, but remorselessly he threw me back on myself.

‘You know,' he insisted.

Surely I had tried to help. No, I could no longer cling to that idea, which now seemed ridiculously inadequate. My motives must have been selfish. Yet I could not see how. What could I gain? It occurred to me that I was looking at the wrong thing, but I did not know where else to look.

In the midst of my confusion I felt a resentment. For surely this was monstrously unfair? Simon had turned the full force of his rejection on me in punishment of an error so small it merited no more than a stern word. Indeed I still did not know what the error was, but I was sure it was superficial, no more than a misunderstanding.

And then Simon did the thing which I had sometimes seen him do before, and which is the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life.

He goes back into his mind. His body hangs limp in the chair: if you struck him he would not feel it. All the force of his being now drives the mind, which, at a speed reflected in the strange flickering of his eyes, scans … what? Information. He is reading information. Information stored somewhere I cannot reach, in a form I cannot imagine. Faster and faster the mind flickers, searching, comparing, checking, rejecting, refining ever further until the analysis is complete.

Still now, like a blue lance, the eyes pierce mine.

‘What have you done?' he says.

A banal question, a question often asked of children. The primal question, the question asked of Adam and of Cain.

Let the question sink into you, do not fight it. Let it sift down through the layers of your mind, through the thickening layers until it is lost to sight and can only be sensed, and then is lost altogether. It becomes the most terrible question in the world.

I could not answer. I sat, drained, in the corner of my high-backed chair while Simon spoke.

I don't remember what he said. It didn't register. His words
surged over me, making no sense. I knew they were addressed to me, but they seemed to have nothing to do with me. At one point he rebuked me for fidgeting, because I was moving the toe of my right shoe slowly in a small circle.

A little later he asked if the others wished to say anything. Coral said gently, ‘You see Kay, when you love people you don't want to hurt them.' I smiled at her, with not the glimmering of an idea what she was trying to say.