Bethany (16 page)

I was feeling freer every day. It was the Sessions. Every day I made new discoveries, and each discovery brought a liberation, peeling off a crust of habit, lifting an unnoticed weight. One by one the tensions of the present dissolved as I tracked down the old fears and resentments that lay behind them. It didn't seem to matter where I started: every path, however unpromising, held its little crock of gold at the end.

For instance, I had discovered something quite important about my liking for tea. Tea was one of the drugs on Simon's list, and as we came to it I realised that it played a more important role in my life than alcohol or cigarettes had ever done. Them I could give up: my tea I could not.

I isolated an incident, a year previously, when a cup of tea had been particularly important. I had been feeling depressed and ill and was unwilling to get up. Alex dragged me out of bed and insisted that we talk about something I did not want to talk about – it threatened my peace of mind and indirectly our relationship. I refused to confront the issue and we started to argue, and the argument became a major row about our whole way of life. Alex was shouting at me, it felt as though she was hitting me. I started to cry. As I cried I began to see that what she was trying so violently to tell me was true. I
stopped crying and we talked. Alex became gentle. She made a pot of tea. It was the best tea I had ever tasted.

Looking at the scene, I could see that the importance of that tea lay not in the fact that Alex had made it, nor in the fact that it was a token of communication. The importance lay in the fact that it was tea. I had never liked tea until I met Alex, and then, because she was always making tea, I had started to drink it. Tea-drinking had become a central ritual of our relationship. And now, at the end of a quarrel which had apparently blown that relationship wide open and obliterated all the familiar landmarks, we were still sitting in the kitchen drinking tea.

Tea was a statement that nothing had changed; and indeed on that occasion nothing had changed. Our relationship had continued as before – slightly dishonest, slightly cynical, slightly cruel, just like everybody else's relationships. For a moment we had had the opportunity to re-make it, and lacked the courage. And tea for me was still a statement that nothing had changed. While all around me were drinking herbal teas or sarsaparilla, I drank Assam with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. It was a last-ditch attempt to preserve my old identity.

Once I had seen it I was free of it. I realised that tea was in fact a rather drab drink. I abandoned it forthwith for peppermint, with a slice of lemon and sweetened with honey.

It was one of many little things that were steadily increasing my understanding. With understanding came clarity. It was the clarity I had experienced several times before, notably on the evening when I went to the city to see Simon. Then, because it was based on an intense experience and not on an inner discipline, it had only lasted a few days before being eroded by mundane exasperations and failures. Now, at last, it seemed to have come to stay.

It was as if my mind for nearly all my life had been functioning at half-throttle. Now I found I had at my disposal a truly efficient mechanism which could think with a speed and sureness I would once have considered astounding, drawing on
sources of information I often did not know I possessed, and making connections that in earlier days I would have regarded as brilliant. Very often, however, it was not necessary to think at all. One simply looked. The mental energy seemed to translate itself into terms of sight, so that one saw and understood in a single act.

One saw what people were thinking: it was nearly always some kind of fear. One saw the wounds in their hearts as plainly as if they had been scars on the face. I was filled with pity for the people I met, pity which I could not communicate. They seemed to recede from me as I looked at them. They seemed physically smaller than me: I had the impression that I was looking down on them from a height of several feet. They seemed unreal, and I understood that indeed they were. By the manner of their lives they had abandoned the reality for the illusion, and the illusion was what they had become.

I knew that spiritual insight must in the end confer psychic power, but until a certain incident occurred at Bethany I did not realise that I already had it.

Two visitors arrived one evening. One was a girl whom Alex and I had known for several years and on whom Alex had once expended a lot of time, trying to persuade her into the paths of vegetarianism and right living. The attempt had been dropped when Alex realised that Tessa's wide-open eyes concealed a complete lack of scruple and that she was less interested in Alex's ideas than in her brother. Philip at the time was a not infrequent visitor at Bethany. The friendship, such as it was, had not completely died, however, and Tessa still sometimes came to see us. On this particular evening she had brought with her a young man I had not seen before. I looked at him and felt as though I were falling into a deep, dark pit.

For a moment I thought that he had no eyes. Then I realised that I was seeing, for the first time, either pure evil or pure madness – I did not know which. From the sockets of his eyes there radiated a dense blackness which obliterated nearly a third of his face. I tried to pull my mind back to an ordinary
perception, and glimpsed, as in a snapshot, a thin, nervous, moody young man standing on the patio. I asked him a question. He did not reply, but stared at me. The coalpits opened again.

He asked if he could go into the kitchen. It was an odd request, as we were all out on the patio, but I said yes. I had forgotten that Coral was inside. She came out very quickly.

‘Who is that man?' she whispered to Simon and me. We were sitting side by side on the bench.

‘A friend of Tessa's,' I said.

‘He's … Simon, I don't like him. I don't think he ought to be in the kitchen on his own. Can you ask him to come out, Simon? Please?'

Simon, without moving, said, ‘Kay, will you ask him to come out, please?'

I went into the kitchen and said quietly, ‘I'm sorry, but would you mind coming outside again?' I stood aside so he could come past me.

Then something so extraordinary happened that I could hardly believe it. He backed away, down the kitchen, opened the window and climbed out of it.

He had not been able to come past me. Something had made him so afraid that he had had to escape through the window.

Conscious of the unbridgeable gulf that now existed between us and the outside world, Alex and I let many friendships lapse. Invitations were declined, letters went unanswered because there was nothing to say. The world, however, did not understand that we had renounced it and continued to knock at the door. We coped with the summons with varying degrees of success.

I got home from work one day to be told that the bed in my study had been made up for an overnight visitor who was expected late in the evening. She was a friend of a London friend of ours called Nick, and was coming to inspect an old showman's caravan which Alex and I had acquired years previously;
she was thinking of buying it and taking it back to Wales.

The caravan was in an advanced state of decay and we had never told anyone it was for sale; and neither Alex nor I had ever heard of the girl, whose name apparently was Brenda. It all sounded rather odd.

‘You know what I think it's about?' Alex remarked to me. ‘This girl is having Nick's baby, and is putting pressure on him, and to keep her quiet he's going to buy her the caravan and tuck her away in Wales. You remember he was looking at it last time he came down here.'

It was a wild conjecture, but I did not dismiss it. Nick, who was loosely associated with television, had an even looser personal life. He had a charming, defeated wife. Alex, moreover, was sometimes clairvoyant.

Brenda arrived at about half-past nine, and as she walked into the house I felt the temperature drop from summer to autumn. She was about twenty-four, and she wore her unhappiness like a winding-sheet. Only Simon, Alex and I were still up. We gave her something to eat, and sat down to talk to her.

She told us about herself and the purpose of her visit. She rented a Welsh farmhouse from two young men who now wanted to move into it, which meant that she had to move out. However, they did not mind if she continued to live on the land. She wanted to stay there because she was growing herbs. She was very interested in the curative properties of herbs and intended to make a study of them. Before going to Wales she had lived with a group of friends in London and they had made gardens on the bomb-sites. It was creative.

Her fingers picked nervously at the shawl trailing over her black dress as she spoke. Why was she wearing black?

She had a cat, she said. Cats had a special kind of intelligence. In earlier times this had been understood, but we had now lost nearly all the ancient knowledge. A few people were trying to revive it.

I felt the hair on my arms prickle. Simon said nothing. He had not said anything since she arrived.

I said, ‘The caravan is in a very bad state of repair, you know. It needs a great deal of work done on it.'

‘Oh, that doesn't matter,' she said. ‘These friends of mine who are moving into the farmhouse have offered to do it up for me.'

‘You'd be better off buying a newer one,' I said.

‘Well, you see, someone else is going to pay for it. I don't want to land him with a bill for something expensive.'

Alex's eyes drifted to the girl's stomach, which to me betrayed no evidence of a secret.

‘I hope you don't mind me asking,' she said, ‘but are you pregnant?'

‘Yes,' said the girl. She was astonished. She recovered herself. ‘That's why I want to find a caravan as soon as possible, before it gets difficult to do things.'

‘But how are you going to get our caravan to Wales?' I asked. ‘It can't be towed, and it'll cost a fortune to take it on a low-loader.'

‘I've got a friend in Devon who works for a haulage firm. He can take it up for me for nothing.'

The silence settled like fine ash.

Simon said, ‘Do you mean you are going to live on someone else's land, in a caravan bought by someone else, restored by someone else, and transported by someone else on someone else's lorry?'

He did not know Nick, and therefore did not add, ‘with someone else's husband's baby.'

She went white. She said, ‘I don't look at it in that way.'

‘Is that what you intend to do?'

A pause.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.'

The silence returned.

After a while Simon said, ‘Why do you make yourself so unhappy?'

I felt her fear.

‘I don't know what you mean. I'm not unhappy at all. All my friends say I'm a very carefree person.'

‘Your friends are dishonest. You are dishonest. You have just told us as much.'

She struggled like a fly in a web.

‘My friends aren't dishonest. They just want to help me.'

‘And in return you give them what?'

‘I help them too, believe it or not. I like to help people. That's why I'm studying herbs.'

‘You think you can tell what's wrong with people, and heal it with herbs?'

‘Yes.'

‘But what is wrong with you?'

‘There's nothing wrong with me.' Her eyes were glassy, her fingers trembled as they picked at the shawl.

Alex said, ‘You have to confront your own problems first. Until you do, you can't deal with anyone else's. You'll always be planting flowers on bomb-sites.'

The struggle went on for over an hour. Inch by inch Simon and Alex pushed her back towards the abyss into which she must fall. Finally, on the edge, she used her last defence. She covered her face with her hands and blacked out her attackers. She sat silently, shivering a little.

Simon stood up.

‘Good-night,' he said, and went upstairs.

Alex picked up the girl's plate and cup and took them out to the kitchen to wash. I looked at the huddled figure before me. Slowly, without uncovering its eyes, it reached a hand into the shoulder-bag on the floor, groped until it found something, and brought out two pills, which it put into its mouth and swallowed. So much for herbal medicine.

Until that moment I had been undecided. I knew that the normal rules of hospitality must be thrown aside if any real attempt were to be made to help this girl. I knew that; but the girl didn't. Young, pregnant, and probably tired from a long
journey, she had been subjected to a shattering experience for which nothing could have prepared her and the reasons for which she would not understand. Now she was going to have to spend the night, alone, in an unfamiliar house, in a room which was not even within earshot of anyone else – it was sealed off by the great double doors. Who knew what terrors would visit her in that room? If, at her age, I had been through what she had just been through, and had had a bottle of sleeping-pills with me, I would have swallowed every one.

I stood up and touched her on the shoulder.

‘I'll show you your room,' I said. ‘It's a bit spartan, I'm afraid, but the bed is comfortable. The doors may creak a bit in the night, but don't let it worry you. It's a friendly house really. In spite of appearances.'

She stared at me, with a confusion of hatred, suspicion and gratitude. She followed me to the study, and I said good-night to her. I told Alex what I had done, and why.

I did not see her in the morning before I went to work. When I came home I was told she had left soon after me, with hardly a word to anyone. She did not want the caravan. I wondered if she would ever understand what had happened to her.

‘It's a great pity,' said Simon.

I met his eyes, and shifted mine away.

‘If you had left her alone,' said Simon, ‘if you had allowed her to experience the climax she was ready for … But you had to intervene. You had to intervene because you yourself were afraid of what might happen at that moment of emotional release. What a pity.'