Bethany (15 page)

The meeting broke up in an impasse. People went back to their work. I walked out aimlessly into the fields.

Several hours went by. The bell rang for lunch but I didn't go in. I couldn't face them. Literally, I didn't know how to face them: I did not know what face to present to them, because I didn't know who I was. My centre of identity had been broken by Simon's question.

I found myself by the ruined cottage. It was a spot I particularly liked, at the top of a sheltered slope and overlooking the wooded part of the valley. People didn't usually go there. The field was uncultivated and given over to dock, bracken and a spreading colony of raspberry canes. I leant against an ash tree and let my gaze wander over it. I saw that it was beautiful, and that I had no part in it. It was sealed off from me.

Alex walked past. I said something to her: she stopped, grudgingly. I said, ‘I'd like to talk to you about what's going on.'

She was preoccupied and unsmiling. ‘I'm sorry, but I don't think there's any point,' she said. ‘In any case, I have my own thoughts to think about.' She walked off abruptly towards the woods.

Only the tension in my stomach and the constriction across my forehead told me it was really happening. My mind had stopped working. Every time I started it up it whirred furiously for a few minutes, scattering thoughts instead of relating them, and then cut out again.

I forced it into life once more. What was I going to do?

I had been rejected by the group. They had, as it were, withdrawn
my membership. I had a choice to make: I must go or stay. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it was to do either. If I were to stay, I must immediately heal the breach between us: it would have to be done by me, since they would not, however long the situation continued, move from their position of monolithic rightness. But I could not heal the breach without confessing myself guilty of whatever it was I was supposed to have done, and I still did not know what it was. I did not feel guilty, just hurt and bewildered. My mind formed the words ‘hurt and bewildered', and I caught a glimpse of myself as a pathetic victim, and then of myself watching this creature with pity and approval, and recoiled in disgust. If I was still writing dramas for my ego, perhaps everything Simon had said about me was true. I tried to concentrate on what he had said about me, but it had gone, leaked out through the holes in my head.

I returned to my dilemma. Should I leave? At once, with a cold claw at my stomach, the question became, could I leave? This was my home. It was more than that, it was my world. If I left it I would die, deprived of vital nourishment. In any case, where would I go? To obliterate the pain of this leaving I would have to go far away; but I had no money for travel or lodging, and my job was here. Should I then just move out of Bethany and find somewhere to live nearby? The idea was grotesque, and more painful than the idea of going away altogether. I forced myself to think about it; about the mechanics of finding somewhere to live, probably in the town where I worked because I would have no car; about coming home to an empty room, and making tea for one. I told myself it did not have to be as bleak as that: I could make new friends, go to the pub in the evenings, do all the things I was not free to do now – stay in bed late, read, listen to the radio, eat eggs for breakfast. The small stirring of excitement produced by these ideas was immediately quenched by a recognition of their paltriness. Certainly I would be free. Free, in a desert, to choose whether I died of thirst, despair or loneliness. I knew the world
outside the group: it was a grey, disjointed, senseless world, a world of cardboard through which its inhabitants moved like puzzled ghosts. How could I imagine that I could go back and live in that featureless, sunless place?

Yet the group, outside which I could see no possibility of life for myself, had rejected me, like an organism rejecting an unhealthy cell. The organism would not re-admit me until I was again in harmony with it, and that meant accepting a guilt I did not feel. I wondered briefly whether they would let me live somewhere on the land, in a caravan perhaps, as a sort of friend of the group but not part of it. I saw that the idea was ridiculous. ‘He who is not with me is against me.' Either I was part of the group, or I wasn't.

Up by the house I heard Pete calling something cheerily to Coral, and my heart ached in its isolation. From inside, the group appeared to be a centre of radiation, pulsing outwards its warmth and light; but from outside, this magic circle presented the appearance of an unbroken wall.

Why had they done this to me?

I brooded again on what had happened, and, finding no answer, concluded again that what had really happened could not be what I thought had happened. Yet what else could have happened? I examined it again, over and over, and still I found no clue to what had taken place in that fractured moment after I said, ‘We're working too hard'. The answer must lie in what I'd said, but although by now I could see many things wrong with the statement – a cocksureness and insensitivity, perhaps even an echo of the old desire to gain Simon's attention – I could not see anything sinister enough to merit his devastating response. It was an injustice, it must be: and yet if so, it was a terrible one. I did not want to think Simon unjust even in a very small way – I simply could not tolerate the idea of his being guilty of an injustice as great as this. But there was no third possibility. Either he was guilty of a terrible wrong, or I was. I had to admit that, on the past records of both of us, the likelihood of my being wrong was considerably greater.

I would not have minded discovering that I was in the wrong; indeed I would have welcomed it. But I could not honestly come to a conclusion for which neither my reason nor my intuition showed me any evidence. It was a deadlock on all levels, and somehow I had not only to resolve it, but resolve it at once. It would not loosen with my inaction but become more rigid, and it would extend its sphere of paralysis until I could not act at all.

There was only one thing I could do. Simon had refused to tell me what had happened, but I must make him tell me. Otherwise, for the rest of my life I would never be able to move beyond this point.

I went to find him.

He was on the landing, about to go up the second small flight of stairs to his bedroom.

‘Simon,' I said timidly.

He looked down at me and smiled.

‘Yes, Kay.'

‘May I talk to you?'

We sat on the floor of the landing, he with his back against the bathroom door, I with my back against the opposite bedroom door.

He said, ‘What do you want to talk about?'

I said, ‘I've come to ask you if you will please explain to me what has happened, because I've thought about it for hours and I still don't know.'

His blue eyes rested on me with just a trace of humour. He said, ‘Why have you thought about it?'

I thought, and smiled. ‘I don't know how else to approach it,' I said.

He waited long enough for me to realise that I had just told a lie. Then he said softly, ‘What happened?'

I was back again in the mists. But this time I knew which direction I should follow. Somehow I was in the wrong, for I had lied and there would be a reason.

Lifting the lie to see what lay underneath it, I found that I had constructed a double defence: against seeing the problem, and then against seeing the only way in which it was possible to see the problem. Presumably I also had a third defence against seeing that I had done it, and so on.

Simon now was forcing me to see what had happened.

I saw the group assembled in the parlour, smiling at the satisfactory completion of an evening's business, an evening's communication. I saw Alex, pensive and peaceful, and Simon, looking just a little tired, about to tuck his pencil away in his pocket. I saw myself, absorbed in myself, about to impose my personal view of reality on them.

I heard my voice, self-confident and stupid, making assertions, and the amazed silence that followed it, a silence in which became dreadfully clear the distance which separated this member of the group from the others.

I saw, as the time passed, how this member, though now conscious of being out of communication with the group, refused all offers of help, rejected all clues to the nature of the situation, and took refuge from imagined hostility in a fancied incomprehension.

I saw how the member's resistance to understanding the situation increased to the point where Coral's statement, in which the issue was presented in its simplest possible terms, had been seen as a riddle.

And of course it really was that simple. My self-absorption had been lack of love. Lack of communication was always lack of love. I had cut myself off. In a group such as ours there could be no greater offence. It was an act against the group. I remembered that Simon had accused me of being against the group and I had protested that I didn't understand what he meant. ‘You mean you
won't
understand,' Simon had retorted.

I recalled the recent occasions when I had felt hostility towards the group or individual members of it. I had been irritated by Coral, for her excessive preoccupation with the baby, her lack of interest in any tasks that were not directly
concerned with the household, and her naivety, which seemed to me to be a pose. I had been shamed on more than one occasion by Dao's directness and had once deliberately refused an invitation to talk to her because I was afraid of contact with a being so innocent and so discerning. I had felt flashes of dislike for Dao's children, particularly Sarah, the beautiful unsmiling five-year-old whom I had several times caught throwing earth at the chickens and reprimanded with a gentleness I was far from feeling.

I had experienced antagonism to the group as a whole on almost every occasion when their opinion had differed from mine on the subject of the animals. I had never succeeded in ridding myself of the idea that experience with animals conferred wisdom on the matter, even though I would readily have agreed that those with the greatest experience of animals are the greatest exploiters of animals, and therefore the least able to see what an animal is.

My irritation had reached a peak with the incident that involved Coral, the children and the ponies. I had somehow managed to tell myself that it was their own fault if they were chased by the ponies and that an unnecessary amount of fuss was being made about it. The fact that three young children had been in physical danger and that the baby in the pram might even have been thrown out and killed I had dismissed as unimportant, preferring to regard the incident as a rather amusing vindication of my view that the ponies should be fenced in.

My selfishness, my cruelty, momentarily sickened me so much that I covered my face with my hands. Behind that wall of selfishness I had sat at the group meeting, and wondered why I could not see what was going on.

I uncovered my eyes. ‘I see,' I said.

‘What do you see?' asked Simon, and I told him. It wasn't enough, of course: Simon always pushed one further, further than one thought one could possibly go, beyond logic, beyond experience, into a region where the investigating mind was as
sharp as a blade of light and as subtle as the mothlike ideas it darted among, and where even to glimpse an idea was to milk it of its burden of truth. In this quicksilver region I lost and found myself many times in the three hours of our talk, and, when at last we came back to our starting-point, I felt as though I had been made new. My understanding seemed limitless, my love unbounded.

There was just one small point on which I had a reservation. I thought that Simon had not been quite fair in his assessment of my behaviour at the meeting: he had ruled out any possibility of my having had an altruistic motive, and I thought there had been at least a slight element of concern for the well-being of the group. I started to say so.

‘I agree that you're almost entirely right …' I said.

He transfixed me with his gaze.

‘Entirely right,' he said, and waited.

I wavered. It was such a small point. I was sure he was right. Of course he was right: it was just that I couldn't see it. Surely, if I trusted him, I could afford to make this small leap of faith?

‘Entirely right,' I said.

Simon suggested that, since I had upset four other human beings, I should go round and apologise to them individually. It was a little difficult, particularly with Pete, but they smiled at me very warmly. Afterwards we seemed more united than we had ever been: it was as if the experience had purified not only me but the whole group.

In this confident frame of mind we started on the task that had become a symbol of the group's unanimity – the slating of the roof of the west wing.

Simon (when he was not taking Sessions) and Pete nailed the slates on, sometimes assisted by Alex, who as usual was unable to concentrate on one job for long and periodically went off to attend to another part of the roof, or inspect a chimney stack, or secure a loose window-frame. I could see that Simon and Pete were perplexed by this and unaware that Alex was making a rare effort: she was at least confining her activities to a single area. I had grown so used to her restlessness, and to persevering with my own work irrespective of it, that I had forgotten how disturbing it could be.

My job was to get the slates up to the roof. I hauled them up on a pulley to the top stage of the scaffolding in a makeshift basket that Alex had constructed out of an old window-frame. After a while, realising that I was far more likely to be decapitated by a descending slate as I stood on the ground than I was to fall off the scaffolding, I mastered my fear of heights sufficiently to climb the ladder without my knees shaking and to walk about at the top, handing up slates. I suddenly realised that I was not afraid any longer, and that probably I never had been. It had been an idea. I stood at the end of the scaffolding and gazed over the valley, exhilarated by this new freedom. In time, I thought, I shall be afraid of nothing: I shall be completely free.