Bethany (25 page)

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.'

Simon said, ‘The purpose of this conversation is to find a
way of helping Alex and solving the problem which confronts the group. Has anyone any suggestions?'

‘If we could just
explain
to her,' said Coral.

‘It has been explained to her,' said Pete.

‘Pete is right,' said Simon. ‘She has been given every chance. People have been very patient with Alex. She has abused their patience. She has such a distorted idea of her importance that she expects to receive special treatment, and such is the force of her personality that she does receive it. She has always been allowed to get away with things.'

He looked round the room. ‘This is a person who does not want to hear what is said to her. This is a person who twists what people say into something they have not said. This is a person who cannot do anything straight. Whatever we say to Alex, it has to be so carefully worded, so clear, that she cannot possibly interpret it in any other way.'

It was obvious that he was the only person who could find such a formulation. We saw that he had found it already.

‘There is a single element which complicates the problem,' he said. ‘Normally it would not be difficult to deal with behaviour such as Alex's. A member who disrupted the group would be asked either to change his or her behaviour, or to leave the group. What makes it difficult in this case is that Alex is not in the same position as an ordinary member of the group. Alex is the owner of the house.'

I began to listen intently.

‘This makes it impossible to deal with her in the obvious way,' said Simon. ‘One cannot say to the owner of a house, “Change your behaviour or leave.” So the situation can only be dealt with as it should be dealt with if Alex ceases to be the owner of the house.'

Something had hit me very hard between the eyes. I stared at this man whose logic flinched from nothing.

‘The situation could have been avoided if the original intention, that the house should belong to the group, had been carried through. But it was not carried through. At the partnership
meeting I saw that the owner of the house did not want to give the house to the partnership, and since I do not wish to take something from someone who does not want to give it, I withdrew. There is no point in forming a partnership when one of the members does not want it to work.'

I blinked with astonishment, convicted him of injustice, and immediately realised he was right. Alex could work near-miracles when she wanted to, but there was no evidence that she had even tried to give the house to the group.

‘I therefore propose,' continued Simon, ‘to put three alternatives to Alex when she returns. I have looked for further alternatives, but I can find only three. These are the alternatives. One, that she sells the house to someone else in the group, and remains here. I will offer to buy the house from her. Two, that she leaves. Three, that she gets what she wants.'

There was utter silence.

Pete said, ‘I don't understand the third alternative.'

Simon said, ‘We will give her exactly what she wants.'

It was too simple for us to grasp immediately. Then we saw. If she rejected the first two alternatives she was rejecting the discipline of the group and at the same time the life which that discipline offered. She would be rejecting them in favour of whatever
she
wanted. What that turned out to be did not matter.

‘If she leaves,' said Coral, ‘does she have to leave for good?'

‘No,' said Simon. ‘If after a while she wanted to come back, the group would consider her request in exactly the same way as it would consider a request from anyone else to come and live here.'

Dao said, ‘But you have not given her the choice that she changes herself.'

‘That is not a possibility,' said Simon. ‘She has refused to change and one supposes that she can't. And as long as she continues to own the house no measures can be taken to induce her to change. The choice you're asking for is included in alternative one.'

We sat and thought. To every question Simon had an answer, and every answer brought us back to one of the three alternatives. The longer we looked at them the more inevitable they became. It was the economy of genius. However, it flashed into my mind that if Simon was the most brilliant human being I had ever met he was also the blindest, because surely Alex would not accept these alternatives. I was on the point of saying something, but stopped. I must not pre-judge. Certainly I must not predict another's actions, and thereby attempt to limit their freedom. In any case, if Alex did not accept the alternatives she would have condemned herself to a region beyond reason, because the alternatives were the only alternatives there were.

It was agreed to put the alternatives to Alex when she returned. If that was late on Saturday night, we would do it on Sunday.

Simon looked round the room with a smile. ‘Good,' he said.

‘I've been reading a good book,' said Simon next morning.

I had been surprised to see him reading. I thought he had given it up. He had once said to me that people wrote books in order to understand the thing they were writing about, which was why no book ever contained the knowledge promised in its title. I could see no reason why a man who knew that should ever read another book in his life.