Bethany (20 page)

And she was always going out. She had always liked going out in the car on her own, and had made numerous trips to buy odds and ends for the building and to collect watercress and wild herbs, but now she was going out every day on errands which seemed less and less necessary. It was as if she wanted to get away from the house. The implications were very disturbing, and I knew that Simon was unhappy about it. ‘Why does she want to go out?' he said to me. ‘There is everything here one could want. I walk down to the road with the children and I have no wish to go any further. I would never go out at all if I didn't have to.'

I remarked to Alex that her absences were becoming pronounced, but she reacted impatiently. She pointed out that Simon went to the city regularly once a week and Pete sometimes went twice, once with Simon in order (we assumed) to draw their Social Security, and once with Coral to the flat to do the washing in the washing machine. ‘Which is quite unnecessary,' added Alex. ‘And you go to work three or four days a week, which gets you out of the house. So why should I be expected to stay here?'

‘But why don't you
want
to stay here?' I persisted.

‘I like to be on my own sometimes,' said Alex. ‘I like to get away and think.'

Think. About what? Her tone forbade me to ask her, but it was of the utmost importance. ‘We shall have no secrets,' Simon had announced at the start of the group; and, barring those things which were properly private, we had none. We were transparent to each other. Alex now had ceased to be transparent. She had deliberately withdrawn communication, in order to concentrate on thoughts which she would not share. The thoughts themselves might be harmless enough, but the exclusiveness with which she invested them was dangerous. In any case, why wouldn't she share them? I suspected that she was indulging in an introspection that was not only pointless but unhealthy, because it was food for the ego. I hoped she would take the sensible course and talk to Simon about whatever was on her mind, but far from wanting to talk to him she seemed actually to be avoiding him; and he, since there were no longer any Sessions, lacked the framework in which the problem would formerly have been tackled, and had to wait for her to broach it.

When one's eyes are turned inward, one cannot see other people. Alex did not see the puzzlement on the faces of the group as she talked to them about her property problems one sunny morning on the patio. The conversation had been set off by the arrival of another letter from the bank manager. The overdraft had reached £19,000, and a man whom Alex had believed to be seriously interested in buying her roofless building for a luncheon club had turned out to be interested only if he could buy it at site value, which was a quarter of the sum Alex needed. Alex's thinking about the problem had now become quite tortuous: she wanted to form a syndicate with various friends and acquaintances, who between them would put up the money to pay off the debt and convert the building into a series of rented
pieds-à-terre
for businessmen. Alex's contribution to the syndicate would be the building itself, since
she had no capital; but the difficulty was that most of the friends whom Alex hoped to interest in the venture had no money either, and Alex was now engaged in working out ways in which they could raise their part of the investment, and calculating the return they might expect. I wondered why Alex's solutions always tended to be more complicated than the problem. Simon voiced the same thought, but with a sharper insight: it was that sort of thinking that had created the situation in the first place, he said.

If she had examined his statement she would have found it was a lifeline. She glanced at it and discarded it as irrelevant. Soon afterwards she went out again, this time to see a solicitor in town. The purpose of the visit was not clear: it was just Alex going out again.

One afternoon when we had hardly communicated for days she came up to me in the vegetable garden and said she wanted to talk to me. I stopped what I was doing and waited, but she would only talk in a place away from the house, so we went and sat under the chestnut tree.

She started to talk about our relationship. She talked urgently for half an hour, and made no sense. I kept trying to tell her that our relationship was not important, that what was important was the dislocation of her relationship with the group and whatever lay behind it, and that that was what she should look at. Focusing on our relationship was an evasion, I said, and she was in danger of taking herself in. I was by now very worried. Even her insistence on talking away from the house seemed sinister, as if she was set on placing as many barriers between herself and the group as possible. I asked her what she was protecting, but she wouldn't listen. She said, over and over again, that we had to let each other be free.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘I know that. If there is no freedom there is no relationship. But to have a clear relationship you must be clear in yourself: and
you
are evading something.'

In the end we both gave up. I was left confused, but with a strong feeling that she had wanted to confuse me. There was
something I must not be allowed to see. I knew that whatever it was she only dimly sensed it herself. I also knew that she was desperate.

That evening as I was cleaning out the car, preparatory to its being ‘done up', I heard the dogs bark and saw that we had visitors. Walking up the drive were a couple we knew in the town; they had probably come to find the reason for our prolonged absence from the pub. No sooner had I registered this than there was a flurry of feet and Alex thrust me aside and jumped into the car. I was in the middle of washing the windows.

‘Where are you going?' I said, stupid with surprise.

‘To get some watercress,' said Alex, as if it was obvious.

‘But – I'm in the middle of cleaning the car,' I said.

‘Well, that's your look-out,' said Alex. ‘You know I go out in the evenings to get watercress.'

She released the handbrake, spun the wheel, and roared down the drive past the astonished faces of our visitors.

I looked at Simon, who was sitting on the patio and had witnessed this scene. He looked at me gravely. It was either the behaviour of someone who did not know what she was doing, or a declaration of war.

I had a busy morning at the office next day, and by half-past twelve I was hungry. Usually I brought sandwiches, but this morning there had not been enough bread. The idea of a roll from the shop, lifeless white bread stuffed with rubbery cheese and a limp lettuce leaf, did not appeal. An old desire began to gnaw at me. I struggled with it, but in a few minutes it had won. After all, what did it matter? I slipped across the road and bought myself a Scotch egg from the bakery.

I bit into the spicy, fragrant sausage-meat and was suffused with ecstasy and guilt. It was freshly-made and delicious. The egg-yolk was golden and creamy. I wolfed it. I was about to take the last mouthful when Alex walked through the door.

She took one look at the morsel in my hand and burst out
laughing. I felt myself blush crimson. Then I started to laugh too.

‘Well, well,' said Alex. ‘So this is what you get up to.'

‘I don't!' I protested. ‘This is the first time –'

‘Oh, don't tell me,' she said. ‘I don't care what you eat. It's your problem.'

We went out and had a cup of coffee together. There was a barely-concealed grin on her face. I couldn't blame her: I must have looked ridiculous sitting there with a piece of sausage-meat frozen halfway to my lips. I tried to recover my poise, but without much success. I told myself it was unimportant, but somehow it was not. A few months earlier it would have drawn us together in a shared joke; instead, it had added another layer to the thickening wall of glass that stood between us.

By evening I had almost forgotten it. After supper we gathered in the parlour and talked. It was like the early days of the group. With no Sessions there seemed to be much more time. We talked in a relaxed way about how the work was proceeding. The repair of the red barn had distracted us temporarily from the west wing, and there had been several days of intermittent rain which made slating impossible. We discussed what work could be done inside, and in particular what we were going to do about the floor.

The upper storey of the west wing had originally consisted of two rooms separated by a raised landing to which a couple of steps descended from the main part of the house. It was an odd arrangement and looked even odder when the walls of the rooms were knocked down to create what Alex had intended as a single large studio, for in the middle of this area there now stood a little island about six feet wide raised a foot above the rest. Part of the floor was rotten and had been taken out, but the island, being sound, had been left intact. The question now was what to do about it.

It had never occurred to me to doubt that a floor should if
possible be level. Simon however looked at it with different eyes.

‘Why should a floor be all on the same level?' he asked. ‘It might be nice to have a small platform in the middle of the floor. People might like to sit on it to eat their muesli.'

Everyone smiled. I pursed my lips. In the East people sat on the floor to eat; in the West they did not. I found the idea of an eating-platform in a Cornish farmhouse ridiculous and rather repugnant.

‘Kay does not want to sit on the floor to eat her muesli,' said Simon.

‘No,' I said. ‘I regard sitting on the floor to eat as being probably unhygienic and certainly bad for the digestion.'

Dao's eyes were dancing with laughter. ‘In my village …' she began.

Alex cut in. ‘You're so middle-class, Kay,' she said.

It was openly contemptuous. There was a moment's stillness in the room. Simon attempted to repair the damage.

‘You could try looking at it another way,' he said to me. ‘People are sitting on one piece of wood rather than another, that's all.'

As usual, I found his mixture of humour and analysis irresistible, and laughed. It was a cultural block, I said, and I would try to eliminate it. Simon would have let it go at that, but Alex couldn't.

‘When are you going to start?' she said.

I caught mockery in her eyes. It was obvious that she was thinking of the Scotch egg and implying that if I couldn't wean myself away from meat and eggs there wasn't much chance that I could wean myself away from a cultural prejudice against sitting on the floor. Then I glanced at Simon, who was regarding me with gentle amusement, and felt certain that she had told him. Embarrassed and humiliated, I had little spirit to parry the ensuing thrusts which Alex playfully delivered during the remainder of the evening.

In the bedroom I reproached her for mocking me in public,
but she denied it hotly. She seemed astonished that I should think her capable of mentioning the Scotch egg to Simon. She intimated that my imagination was getting the better of me. I went to sleep feeling wretched and confused.

Next day things seemed to have returned to normal, but again Alex surprised me.

‘What's the programme today?' enquired Pete as we washed up our bowls after breakfast.

Simon smiled, and said, in joking reference to the discussion of the evening before, ‘I think we should demolish the west wing.' It had been decided not to leave the raised platform after all, but to take out the entire floor.

Pete went off to get his tools, and I was vaguely aware of Alex slipping out of the door behind him. I did not see her again before I left for work.

She was not in evidence when I came home in the evening. There was an air of disquiet in the kitchen. Almost the first thing Dao said to me was, ‘Kay, please, what is the meaning of “demolition”?' Dao frequently asked me the meaning of words. She was a keen student of language, and liked to compare my definitions with Simon's. Fortunately they usually agreed.

‘Demolition?' I said. ‘Destruction. Breaking something up.'

‘To demolish means to break up?'

‘Yes,' I said.

She nodded with satisfaction, and returned to her cooking pots.

Simon and Pete came in a few minutes later.

‘Have you seen Alex?' I asked.

They looked serious. Alex had hardly been seen all day. She had announced abruptly that she was going to see Mr Pascoe, one of the neighbouring farmers, about harvesting the oats, and disappeared. When asked whether she was going to help with the west wing she had replied that if they wanted to pull the house down they would have to go ahead without her.

Light dawned. ‘God!' I said in exasperation. ‘What's the matter with her?'

‘We were hoping,' said Simon, ‘that you could tell us.'

I understood with relief that I was not struggling alone to make sense of Alex's behaviour.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘But it seemed to me that there was something odd going on last night in the parlour. As a matter of fact I thought she was mocking me, although afterwards she said she wasn't.'

‘She was,' said Simon and Pete together, with a certainty that drove all doubt from my mind.

‘It was very strong,' said Pete. ‘It really wasn't nice at all.'

‘Well, she did have a reason,' I started to say, but Simon interrupted.

‘There was no reason for what I saw last night,' he said. ‘It was cruel. And you are making excuses for her.'

I stopped in my tracks. Cruel. Alex had mocked me for years, for being unadventurous, resistant to new ideas, careful with money, respectful of the written word … all the things suggested by the epithet she had flung at me last night – ‘middle-class'. She had mocked me for being everything she was not for so long that I took it as an inevitable part of life. It was time I looked again at this habit and called it by its proper name. Mockery hurt: it was intended to hurt. There was a word for that.

‘Yes,' I said softly, ‘I suppose it is cruel.'