Bethany (18 page)

However, at the finance meeting when I had to get up from
my chair to collect the money, I could conceal my disability no longer.

‘Why are you walking hunched up?' asked Simon sharply.

I explained that I had hurt my back.

‘Touch your toes,' said Simon.

My forehead went clammy. ‘I can't,' I said.

‘Try,' said Simon. ‘See how far you can get.' The pain took my breath away, but I found I could bend quite a lot more than I had thought. I also found, under his unremitting direction, that I could shrug my shoulders, move my hips and do a number of other things which I had assumed would break me in two. After an hour of concentrated anguish and embarrassment – I was performing these antics as a solo in front of the assembled group – I was, to my surprise, fairly supple and in much less pain.

I kept up the exercise during the following days, and by the time I went to the osteopath I was wondering if in fact there was anything wrong with my back. The osteopath was in no doubt. ‘Sacroiliac,' he muttered, and banged and kneaded my shivering skeleton into what I belatedly recognised as the right place. I was relieved at the vindication, but at home no one seemed much interested.

By that time I had realised why I'd done it. It was a classic case of an injury with a psychological cause. Two years previously I had hurt my back while digging the garden. Alex had been out at the time, drinking in town with someone with whom I knew she was contemplating an affair. It was her one infidelity. I had done it to claim her attention then, and I had done it again now.

This realisation came to me in a Session, but I kept most of it to myself, considering it to be too personal for Simon's ears. He knew that something was missing, and the Session ended on an unsatisfactory note. It was the first time I had not fully expressed my insight, and I was disconcerted to find myself on the brink of manufacturing an insight for his benefit. I wondered if I had begun to invent discoveries when there were none
to be made. However, what concerned me even more was that he should not interpret my slight awkwardness at the end of the Session as a communication break.

Since the very life of the group depended on communication, a communication break, even a minor one, was potentially a very serious matter. Simon was therefore quite right to pursue them as vigorously as he did, but I thought that sometimes he detected them where they did not exist, and in doing so created them. I could recall at least one such occasion, and on that occasion, when Simon had insisted for ten minutes that he felt a communication break within the group and every member of the group denied having had one, I offered myself as a sacrifice and said that it was mine.

I said I had been out of communication with him earlier in the day when we were moving the rabbit-hutch out of the barn. This was true, but it had been a split-second's resentment, immediately repented, when I thought he was making fun of me. It had not been a real communication break, which entailed the blocking of one's responses towards another. I knew that every other member of the group, if questioned, would have to admit to half a dozen identical falls from grace, committed and remedied, in the course of the day. But I saw that Simon's insistence was creating a tension far more dangerous than the will-o'-the-wisp he was pursuing, and since it did not seem to matter much what had started the pursuit, I volunteered to be the person through whom the tension was discharged.

The partnership meeting should have been a joyful occasion, a culmination. Work was proceeding well and harmoniously. Four rows of roofing slates had been put up, the herb rack in the kitchen extended, and more vegetables sown. The patio fence had been boarded to make it doubly animal-proof, and in their new security sunflowers smiled by the steps from earthenware pots.

To conserve water – there had still been no substantial rainfall
– all waste water was now collected in large metal barrels which Alex had obtained for next to nothing from a local factory. Pete had made a notice board and fixed it to the kitchen wall; it bore Session times, telephone messages, requests for shopping, and a list prepared by Alex for Dao's benefit of the mineral and vitamin constituents of various foods. Alex had appointed herself the group medical officer.

‘The place looks nicer and nicer every day,' Dao wrote in the diary. We gathered in the rose-garden at three o'clock on the afternoon of June 29th to discuss how to give the group a legal form.

Dao and the children were a little late in appearing. As we waited for them I looked round appreciatively at the garden. We were working so hard that almost the only time I spent in it now was when I cut the grass. It was a charming, unkempt garden, sweet with the scent of the old-fashioned shrub roses I had planted for Alex. They were the only roses she liked, and I understood why. They sprawled in superb profusion, the crimson Gloire de Dijon, the delicate candy-striped Versicolor, the lovely peachy-pink of the thornless Zéphirine Drouhin. The last I had planted in a corner of solid rock; it had taken me two days with pick and shovel to gouge out the cavity it now grew in.

However, in spite of the name chosen for the garden by Simon (to Alex and me it had always been simply ‘the garden'), it was not the roses that dominated, but the low-curving quince tree, almost sweeping the ground with its fragile black fingers, which each year long before the other trees were awake announced the spring with an unfurling of mossy yellow buds. I had a special affection for this tree: its faith touched me, its generosity humbled me. It was old now, and needed propping up, but still its skirts broke the angularity of the garden with a graceful counterpoint and seemed to curtsey to the spiring pittosporum that fluttered small fastidious leaves just behind it.

Dao and the children arrived and settled down on the grass.

We waited for Simon to open the meeting. I had brought a notebook and pencil, in my capacity as Bursar. I now saw that Simon also had his notebook and clipboard, and felt embarrassed. I should have realised that he would take the notes. I hoped he wouldn't think I was being officious, or implying a criticism of his competence. I was so preoccupied with this ridiculous anxiety that I missed quite a lot of what was said in the first few minutes, and my sense of dislocation lasted for the rest of the meeting.

Simon said it had been agreed that we should form a partnership, and wrote down the names of the members. We agreed that the children were too young to be members. Simon then asked what we were going to call ourselves. We had already spent several hours discussing this and reached no conclusion: we simply could not find any name that seemed to convey our vision of the group.

In the end Simon, who had been thinking for some time, said, with the air of someone suggesting something entirely new, ‘I propose the name Bethany.' It was a name we had discarded right at the beginning as being too familiar. Simon, as always, was inviting us to re-examine our preconceptions. The name was perfect.

What were to be the partnership's sources of income, Simon then asked. There was a silence and we all studied the grass. I said there was my job, and Alex said yes, but surely I wanted to give that up soon. As a matter of fact I didn't, I was going through a phase of enjoying it, but it seemed an inappropriate moment to say so. Simon said we should be discussing ways in which the whole group could earn a living. We reviewed the possibilities, of which growing herbs was still the favourite. We had planted a lot, but they took time to grow.

Alex mentioned her own income from letting the workshop premises in London. It was only £8 a week and just paid the mortgage on Bethany. She wanted to give it up, she said. She thought there was probably nothing wrong in making a profit out of rents, but she didn't want to be involved in capitalism
herself. She proposed to write to her tenants asking them to take over the lease themselves.

In the startled silence that followed my mind raced. It would be an enormous relief to me if Alex disburdened herself of the business, because while the tenants were far from conscientious about paying their modest rents on time, the quarterly demand for Alex's lease payment on the whole building came in with terrible regularity, with the result that four times a year when the mortgage had been paid there was a frightening deficit in Alex's already grievously overdrawn bank account. (Alex had three bank accounts and shuffled her debts in a never-ending rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul between them. The branches she patronised had, I noticed, a remarkably fast turnover in managers.) It would also mean there would be no more querulous letters from the Borough Council about the lack of separate lavatory facilities for male and female employees. Altogether the property was a recurring headache I would be delighted to be rid of. Nevertheless £8 a week was £8 a week, and I wondered where in future it would come from.

I was faintly irritated at Alex's assumption that the decision was hers alone to make: I felt she should have phrased it as a suggestion rather than a statement of intent. I felt, too, that her approach was childish, and I wondered for the hundredth time why Alex persisted in seeing herself as a businesswoman when she was the most hopelessly unbusinesslike person I had ever met. I looked at her face, flushed with youthful enthusiasm, and then at the other members of the group. Dao and Coral were smiling, but in response to Alex's mood: they had not grasped her meaning. Simon and Pete were frowning slightly. I felt a chill I had felt before.

Simon made no comment on Alex's announcement. Instead he went on to consider what assets the partnership had. There were, for a start, three vehicles – the Humber, the Thames truck and the Mini. Alex said that her friend Harry in London, to whom she had several years ago given her old Mini van when he was experiencing hard times, was now enjoying better
times and wanted to give it back to her. It would need a little money spent on it but was basically sound, and would enable us to sell the current Mini. She thought the latter would fetch about £400 if smartened up. We agreed to start immediately on smartening it up.

I thought Alex's estimate of its value was wildly optimistic: it was very little less than we had paid for it two years ago, and since then it had been knocked around, neglected, used for transporting hay, goats and cast iron, and driven daily over the mud-filled ruts of our abominable lane. The interior light had been broken by a drunken Scotsman, the passenger window-catch by a drunken Cornishman and the wing-mirror by the ponies; moss grew along the rear window-frames and there was no carpet on the floor because Alex had taken a dislike to it and thrown it away. I mentioned some of these imperfections, but Alex brushed them aside. A few days' work was all it needed, she said.

Then there were the various items of machinery, starting with the rotovator which had never been entirely satisfactory and now only worked when it felt like it, and then never for more than ten minutes at a stretch, after which you had to let it rest for half an hour. Alex thought that this rusting, temperamental creature could, ‘if we got it serviced', be valued at £180. Admittedly prices of garden equipment had risen steeply in the past few years, but the machine had only cost £120 new. She was equally sanguine about the value of the veteran motor-mower we had bought for a few pounds in a Dartmoor village years ago, brought home at great hazard in the boot of a Ford Anglia, and never persuaded to work at all. ‘It's an antique,' she said. ‘People collect them, you know.'

I was used to Alex in this mood and knew there was no point in contradicting her. When she was convinced of the value of an object no amount of evidence to the contrary would change her mind. She habitually asked too much for the odds and ends she advertised in the local paper, with the result that she never sold them and I had to pay for the advertisement.
On the other hand, when buying she would expect to get things much too cheaply. It was not that she wanted to make a lot of money on the transaction, because she abhorred profiteering and would often give quite valuable things away. It was simply that she was unrealistic about money. In some way it frightened her; whenever she had it she had to get rid of it, spending compulsively until it was all gone. If she was unable to spend it fast enough she would lose it out of her back pocket. She did not understand what money was, and held it at everything but its true value.

The list of assets grew long and impressive, and when we totalled it up it came to about £4,000. It seemed to me that the exercise was rather pointless because surely we did not intend to sell most of the things that were listed. However, Pete was thinking along different lines, because suddenly he said with a delighted smile, ‘But there's a house!'

Simon smiled. Dao and Coral laughed at their own foolishness in forgetting the biggest asset of all. I was too taken aback to say anything. Surely the house, which was virtually in hock to the bank, could not be given to the partnership just like that? The complications were immense. I also felt a momentary flush of anger. Alex might well want to give the house to the group – she had indeed said as much – but I did not think it was Pete's place to assume that it was already theirs.

Simon said, ‘How much is the house worth?'

I looked at Alex. After a slight hesitation she said, ‘As it stands it's probably worth about twenty-two thousand.'

‘But surely –' I said.

‘There are certain difficulties about making the house over to the partnership,' said Alex. ‘The bank has a charge over it, which means that I'm not free to do what I like with it.'

‘A charge?' said Dao. ‘What is that?'

Alex started to tell her, and, seeing the incomprehension only deepen in Dao's eyes, went back to the beginning and tried yet again to explain how she had come to owe eighteen and a half thousand pounds to the bank. My mind drifted
away, reluctant as always to enter the maze, and snapped back to attention again to hear Alex saying that she thought it was nonsense that individuals should own houses, charge other individuals for their use, and make money out of buying and selling them.