Bethany (19 page)

‘Houses belong to the people who live in them,' she said.

She added that banks however did not understand this, and she would have to find out exactly what her position was as regards giving Bethany to the partnership.

Simon, who had been listening attentively, wrote ‘House, £22,000' in the notebook. We agreed that the partnership would start the next morning, and that in my lunch-hour Simon and I would go to see the manager of the local Barclays Bank and open a partnership account. We would show him the list of assets.

‘Perhaps he'll give us a loan,' said Coral innocently and missed, in the ensuing laughter, its depth of irony.

Simon asked everyone to sign the book. I wondered privately what the bank manager would make of us. We had chosen Barclays because neither Alex nor I had ever had dealings with that bank.

Coral went in to make us all a drink. We sat quietly on the grass listening to the humming of the bees. It seemed to have been a very successful meeting. Yet there had been something wrong. There was a shadow in Simon's eyes.

Normally we helped ourselves to breakfast when we were ready for it. But next morning Simon seated himself at the head of the table and asked us all to come into the room.

‘I would like everyone to be here,' he said. ‘I have something to say.'

There was a solemnity in his manner that disquieted me.

He waited while we assembled. Then he said, ‘I find that I do not want to be a member of a partnership. I do not want to be part-owner of a house. And I do not want to go on being Organiser of this group.'

It was as if, just before the assault on the summit, the leader had abandoned the expedition.

I did not understand what had happened. We sat at the table, shocked and silent. Finally Pete spoke.

‘I don't understand,' he said.

‘I do not want to tell people what to do,' said Simon. ‘I don't think this group needs an Organiser. You may not agree, in which case perhaps someone else would like to be Organiser.'

The idea was so preposterous that no one attempted to reply.

After a while Simon said, ‘The fact that I have stopped being Organiser doesn't mean of course that you have to stop doing your jobs. You may decide to stop doing them, or to carry on. You must make up your own minds.'

He smiled equably, picked up his spoon and began eating his muesli. I struggled to eat mine. Pete and Alex were thoughtfully chewing theirs. Coral fed the baby, Dao attended to her children. We sheltered from the silence.

I realised that we were being required, as individuals, to
take an important decision. No one else seemed aware of this responsibility, or that it could not be deferred. I cleared my throat and said, ‘It seems to me that we need someone to look after the money, so I shall continue as Bursar unless someone else would like to be Bursar. Or unless people feel that we don't need a Bursar.'

No one said anything, but they all smiled encouragingly, which I took to mean that I should carry on. I waited for other people to speak on their own behalf, but they all finished their breakfast in silence and one by one went out to the kitchen, leaving me alone with Simon. He was peeling an apple.

By this time I had achieved an interpretation of his behaviour. As I got up from the table I said, ‘I'm glad you're off the hook.'

I meant that as Organiser he had presumably found himself, in the interests of the group, assuming a position of authority which conflicted with his principles, and that I was happy for him that he had resolved the dilemma.

He looked at me strangely, without warmth.

‘I wasn't on a hook,' he said.

It was an unmistakable rebuke. I went outside and saw to the goats. As I was about to leave for work Simon came into the kitchen with a pile of the exercise books he had used for taking our Session notes.

‘I'm returning these to you, as they're your property,' he said to us. ‘It's up to you what you do with them. You may well decide that the bonfire is the most suitable place.'

He could not have expressed his contempt more clearly. I was shocked. I had regarded the Sessions as one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I wondered at that moment if I knew anything about Simon at all. I remembered several occasions in the past when I had not understood his behaviour. I had felt on those occasions as if I had suddenly seen that I stood on the edge of a precipice.

I went to work, telling myself that things would be clearer when I came home.

I sought out Alex immediately on my return and asked her what had happened during the day.

‘Nothing,' she said.

‘But surely you discussed it. Decided whether you were all going to carry on.'

‘No,' said Alex, ‘nobody said anything.'

‘But that's extraordinary,' I said.

‘Yes,' said Alex, ‘I know.'

I could not understand it. The ground had been taken from under our feet, and everyone was continuing as if nothing had happened. The only reference to the event was made by Dao, who said something wry about lost sheep. She continued to cook, Coral to housekeep, Pete to fix and mend and Alex to inspect the crops, just as if the centre of the structure had not dissolved away. But the fact that it had was made painfully apparent whenever a question came up that required arbitration or a decision. Instinctively we would wait for Simon to pull the threads together; and he would smile, and say nothing.

I was dreading the Thursday finance meeting and was committed to it. It was as bad as I expected. I had never chaired a meeting in my life, and the contrast between my amateurishness and Simon's mastery was so painful that I rushed through the essentials in five minutes and sat back in my chair, hot with embarrassment.

‘That concludes the financial business,' I said. If anyone else would like to say anything, please go ahead.'

After a pause, Simon stood up. ‘Thank you,' he said, with a polite nod in my direction, and strode from the room.

As the days passed we settled down again. Outwardly, except that there were no Sessions, very little had changed. Yet I felt that something of fundamental importance had happened and had not been confronted.

Simon's abdication was recorded in the diary by Dao with the words: ‘The Organiser has left. A friend comes.'

But on the page for the previous day, below ‘Partnership
meeting in rose-garden', Simon had pencilled the cryptic entry, ‘Comm. B'.

Communication break. Whose, and with whom?

The potato patch had not been watered for six blistering weeks. The trough that fed the top field only held enough water to keep the smaller and more vulnerable plants alive, and transporting water in buckets from the house to supply ten fifty-foot rows of potatoes was not a viable proposition.

One evening I saw Pete and Simon deep in conversation over an old copper boiler they had found in the nettles by the cottage. Half an hour later as I was thinning the turnips I heard an engine labouring at full throttle, and turned in time to see the truck, with Pete clutching the copper boiler clinging on the back, and Simon grinning at the wheel with a cabfull of excited children, rounding the steep corner into the field.

They had filled the boiler with twenty gallons of water, quite a lot of which was still inside it when they lurched to a halt and started looking for the end of the hosepipe. The hosepipe was a hundred feet long and slightly too wide for the outlet of the boiler, so that Pete had to crouch on the truck holding the boiler at a steady angle while Simon held the end of the hose in place and all the rest of us manipulated its almost interminable length along the potato rows.

Everyone helped, even Coral, who did not normally venture among the vegetables, and after about ten minutes nearly everyone was helpless with laughter. As the water level in the boiler fell the flow along the pipe diminished, until Pete was wrestling with the boiler at shoulder-level to increase the gravity-feed while Simon struggled to keep the hose falling off, and in grudging recognition of these efforts a trickle of lukewarm water sauntered out and vanished instantly into the ground. At the end of it Simon was soaked, Pete was soaked, the children were soaked, and the potatoes remained surprisingly dry. Two days later it rained in torrents.

The day before the storm we had repaired the roof of the
barn. It had gaped reproachfully for months. When Simon said after breakfast, ‘I suggest that today we repair the red barn,' I was delighted. Yet that was the day when I first felt it: the trouble. There was something different about Alex. Or rather, there was something ominously familiar.

We were up on the roof of the barn, she sitting astride the ridge, I perched on a ladder, clearing away the ivy. I was still not entirely happy at the top of a ladder, particularly when leaning far out to the side to wield a heavy sickle, and the heat from the metal roof struck up at my face and made me feel faint. I was making a poor job of it and Alex was chaffing me, as she used to do in the old days when humour was as often as not a mask for contempt. Conscious of my clumsiness, I retaliated petulantly. It was a relief to climb down and let Simon and Pete come in to shift the rafter.

The thunderstorm broke at about ten o'clock at night. The lightning lit up the whole valley; the thunder seemed to tear the sky apart. Coral appeared, white-faced, at the top of the stairs, beseeching Pete to come to bed. We all went to bed, although there was no point in trying to sleep. Alex and I lay awake for hours, united again in our joy of the rain and our dread of what it would do to our leaky, long-suffering house. In the event not too much came through, except in the parlour where the French windows had never fitted properly and there was a small flood on the floor. In the morning the world was intensely green. I stood outside and listened to the deep breathing of the grass.

It was the next night that the ponies got out.

I had just fallen asleep, and it was some time before I could make sense of the sounds that assailed me. There were feet on the stairs, a loud opening and shutting of windows, and Simon's voice, uncharacteristically agitated, asking for either Alex or me to get up. ‘You needn't both get up,' he was saying, ‘but can one of you come quickly.'

I pulled myself back to consciousness. No need to ask which of us was going to get up: Alex had a remarkable capacity for
sleeping through disturbances. I struggled out of bed and into my clothes and followed Simon's voice.

‘The horses are in the top field,' he said. ‘Someone must have left the gate open.'

The vegetables were in the top field and the ponies could not be allowed to stay there. It was a nuisance, but I didn't really mind – it was such a beautiful night. But Simon was upset: it showed in the odd jerkiness of his speech. I was puzzled, but I dismissed it from my mind. The important thing was how to get the ponies out. Trying to catch them was out of the question – I would simply end up chasing them, and chasing them would either result in wholesale destruction of the vegetables or in the ponies' breaking through the fence into the woods, after which they might wander for miles. I would have to call them, and they might or might not come. I hoped Simon would leave it to me: if he was with me they would certainly not come.

He followed me in the direction of the field. I turned to ask him to stay behind and in the moonlight saw to my horror that he had picked up the big rake.

‘What have you got that for?' I asked.

He stared at me. ‘To drive them out,' he said.

‘I should put it down,' I said. ‘These ponies can be led but they can't be driven.'

I had never spoken to him like that. The terse words echoed in my mind as I walked up the field and started calling.

They didn't come. I could see them, two pale shapes against the shadowy hedge. I called again. They shifted a little, and watched me.

Oats. They would come for oats if I rattled a bucket. I went back to the barn to get some. I saw Simon standing on the patio, watching me. I went back up the field with the bucket of oats and shook it, and called again.

There was a stir of interest, but they didn't come.

Then I heard Alex's voice. They heard it too, and moved a few paces forward. Bishop whinnied.

Alex took the bucket from my hand and walked on into the field, giving the musical call that I could never quite imitate. There was a drumming on the ground and the grey shapes swept towards her, then pulled up abruptly and nuzzled and jostled to get into the bucket. Slowly Alex began to walk back down the field, and they followed her. We went through the gate, and shut it.

‘Thanks,' I said.

Simon had gone.

In an attempt to dispel the disturbing quality of the incident, I apologised to Simon the next morning for speaking to him so sharply.

All Simon replied was, ‘Someone left the gate open.'

My feeling that something odd had happened was confirmed by a look at the diary page for that day. Almost at the bottom of the page Dao had written, ‘It's been a peaceful day,' and directly underneath it, in Simon's hand, was written ‘Thunder and lightning'. It was so pointed as to be unkind. It was also unfair: the thunderstorm had raged the previous night, and had been all over by the start of the day. I wondered what was troubling Simon, that he should find a symbol in the storm and express his disquiet in so uncharacteristic a way.

It was the last thing Simon wrote in the diary, except, three days later, the solitary word, ‘Trouble'.

I did not know what had caused it. All I knew was that suddenly Alex was behaving in the most extraordinary way.

It had started with what I could only describe as an insensitivity to the feelings of the group. Somehow she had lost the wavelength, and everything she said and did was slightly discordant.

She complained to me about the way Pete and Simon were slating the roof. They were doing it all wrong and breaking a lot of slates, she said. I heard this with a shiver of disbelief. Alex had never been satisfied with any building job done for her. As each new builder appeared on the premises with his barrow
and plastering board she had enthused to me about his skill and honesty, then in a few days had begun to find fault, and by the end of a week would be raging at his incompetence. It made no difference whether he was a master craftsman or a weekend plasterer from the Gas Board: Alex would declare he had botched the job and cheated her. I did not know enough about building to be able to judge, but it seemed to me that in this endless procession of workmen there must have been some who had been dismissed without cause. I did not understand why Alex was incapable of having a satisfactory relationship with someone working for her, but I came to foresee and dread the bitterness in which these relationships always ended. However, it had never occurred to me that the same poison could begin to work in her relations with Pete and Simon, who were our friends, and were going to live here, and were doing it for nothing.