Bethany (23 page)

Yet, I remembered, Alex was always strong when I was weak, and only weak when I was strong. I needed to talk to her. On my way home from the office I telephoned Harry's number in London. She was out. I was on my own.

I did not go in to supper. I milked Myrtle again: she made an initial demonstration, but soon quietened. I took her some sycamore branches and stood stroking her as she ate, and she pressed against me affectionately.

I busied myself in the barns, avoiding Simon. Later I brought the other two goats in and milked them. I took the same amount of milk as usual. I left it in the kitchen without bottling it. Dao could decide what she wanted to do with it.

Simon was sitting in a chair on the patio as I went out.

‘Hello, Kay,' he said.

‘Hello, Simon,' I said.

His humorous half-smile swept through my defences as if they had not been there.

‘Is there something you would like to talk to me about?' he said.

I brought out another chair and sat down.

I hoped he would begin, but of course he did not. I waited for the disquiet in my mind to crystallise.

I said, ‘I have been avoiding you.'

‘Why have you been avoiding me?'

I said carefully, ‘I see two people in you. One is kind, humorous, and motivated by love. The other is harsh, and motivated by something which I don't understand. Sometimes I think you're cruel.'

He seemed surprised. I thought he was surprised, not that this should be said to him, but that I should say it.

‘Cruel?' he repeated.

‘Not unwilling to hurt people.'

‘Do you think I like hurting people?'

‘No. But you're ready to do it.'

He said, ‘I don't hurt people. I try to help them.'

‘Kindness might do as well,' I said.

He did not reply. His eyes scanned the valley and focused on something far beyond it. The silence deepened and became more than silence. My heart began to labour painfully, filling the silence that went on and on.

‘Why can't you love anyone?' he said.

There are things that can only be said to a person once in a lifetime, because after they have been said the person is not the same. In the moment when the words are spoken, something happens which is a kind of death. Simon's question struck the flesh from my bones.

I found myself in a strange country. It was wasteland as far as the eye could see. Nothing grew there. I wandered in it. It was my life. Bare rocks, dusty plains, paths that led back on
themselves. I seemed to recognise a few landmarks, but as I approached them they dissolved: mirages. I read a milestone. It was a gravestone.

I wandered there a long time. I felt no emotion. I had no emotions. I was a ghost. This was my country.

At some time I came back to where I sat, in a chair, overlooking a green valley. I remembered that I had been asked a question, and that I had a voice.

With my voice I said, ‘I am afraid of love.'

I heard him speaking, and knew there was nothing he could tell me that I had not seen. In the wasteland there were no excuses, and even fear was an excuse. There were no causes: what did it matter why I had been afraid? There was no past, there was no future, there was no cover for nakedness. The wasteland was all there was.

He began to lead me out of it. At first I resisted, preferring despair to such gigantic effort.

‘In the Middle Ages there was a word for the state of mind you are experiencing,' he said, and I remembered it. The old theological term for the deadly torpor of the soul.

‘Accidie,' I said.

‘It was recognised as one of the gravest sins.'

How well he knew me. I smiled, and followed him.

‘There is always something that can be done,' he said. ‘Usually it is very clear. It is simply the next thing. If for instance you have taken something from someone, the next thing is to give it back. After that, the next step will in turn become clear. But it all rests on seeing in the first place what it is you've done. That is the most difficult part, because the mind obscures from itself the knowledge that it has done something bad.'

He was talking quietly. It was the Simon I knew. I rested, and let him take me home.

‘Truth is straight,' he said. ‘If you put something straight beside something crooked, you see the crookedness. When a crooked person perceives his crookedness, there is pain. When he feels that pain, he is starting to get better.'

He paused.

‘If you put a straight thing beside another straight thing, nothing happens. If you tell the truth to a straight person, there is no pain. If there is pain, it is because the person is crooked. If he is crooked, it is not kindness to tell him he is straight. Thereby one takes from him a great opportunity. It may be the only opportunity he ever has.'

I nodded. I knew.

‘Do you still think I'm cruel?'

‘No,' I said.

I fell into thought. Every painful word of truth he had told me had given me life. For his truthfulness I owed him a debt that could not be measured. Yet, suppose he had told me these things and I had not understood? Suppose I had seen only the knife, not the cancer at which it was directed? Would that experience not have maimed me for ever? Were there not some people who could not survive this terrible surgery?

‘What is troubling you?' asked Simon.

‘Perhaps some people can't survive the truth,' I said.

‘Why should they not be able to?'

‘Some people are mentally more vulnerable than others.'

‘Vulnerable?'

‘No. Unstable.'

‘Who are you thinking of?'

‘Alex,' I said.

‘Why do you defend her?'

It always came back to that question. We had touched on it many times. We had never got to the root of it.

‘I suppose I feel that she needs defending,' I said.

‘Why?'

‘I know her. And although you see things which I don't, I know things about Alex which you don't know. I know where she's most fragile.'

‘So why do you defend her?'

‘I don't want you to hit her on that spot.'

‘But why do
you
defend her?' he said.

I started impatiently to reply, then stopped. His meaning gripped me and swung me round to face, once again, myself.

‘I'm afraid,' I said.

‘Of what?'

‘What will happen if you do.'

‘And what do you think will happen?'

I did not want to say it, but there was no way back.

I said, ‘I think she might break up.'

It was said, and I could think about it. Alex's mother had, during Alex's childhood, been subjects to fits of insanity. I had sometimes seen Alex in states of paranoia that were only a hair's-breadth from madness. Throughout our relationship I had shielded her from truths that might arouse that slumbering demon.

‘There is something in Alex which I don't understand and it frightens me,' I said. ‘It's a kind of darkness. If it is released …'

‘Yes?'

The fear caught me, so strongly that I could no longer deceive myself about whom I was protecting.

‘It threatens me,' I said.

There was a pause. He smiled, as if fitting together an unusual puzzle.

‘So, you want to defend Alex against me because something in her threatens you.'

It wasn't nice, but it was neat. ‘Yes,' I said.

‘So,
why do you defend her
?'

It was too much. Was no answer, no soul-baring, sufficient for the man?

‘Because I love her,' I said angrily. It was the first thing that came into my head.

‘You love her?' It was an unbelieving, lethal whisper. I sat motionless while he annihilated me.

‘All your life you have loved no one. You have just admitted it. You have taken from people and given nothing.'

‘I have tried to help people,' I said weakly. There were a few.

‘You have never helped anyone. You hinder people. You kill them.'

‘I
kill
them?'

‘You help them to kill themselves. It is the same thing. There they are, trapped in their prisons, and you come along and say, “Here's another brick. I'll even help you cement it in.” That isn't help. That's murder.'

I thought of the caravan girl. ‘No,' I said.

‘Yes,' said Simon. ‘You will keep Alex in her prison because you're afraid of what will happen to
you
if she gets out.'

A long time passed. I was conscious of very little, except the dreadful emptiness in my brain.

‘Isn't it true?' said Simon.

‘Yes.'

‘So,' he said. He crossed his legs and tucked them up under him. He was smiling.

‘In this case, what is the next thing to do?'

It was alarmingly clear. It was the clearest thing I had ever seen.

‘I'd better help Alex pull her prison down,' I said.

‘And how will you do that?'

I said, ‘I guess I start by not defending her.'

My decision not to defend Alex had opened a door which could not be closed.

Perhaps to test my resolution, Simon took an early opportunity of talking to me about her. He wanted to know what had been behind her precipitate departure to London. I could not help him: I knew less than he did, because I did not know what had passed between them the night they talked in the parlour. I tried to analyse my own perceptions of that evening, but could not get beyond the feeling of a threat, of something frightening in the house. I said that somehow it had been similar to the night the ponies got into the top field, when I
had felt, to a lesser degree, the same unnameable disturbance. I asked him what had really happened that night.

‘She left the gate open,' he said simply.

‘Are you sure?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said Simon.

It seemed unlikely. But as I thought about it it began to seem all too probable. Alex was careless. She often did not bother to take precautions which I would have taken as a matter of course, because she thought them unnecessary. She might well have left the gate open temporarily when the ponies were not about, intending to go back later and shut it, and then forgotten. Alex was forgetful.

‘Oh, well,' I said with resignation.

‘Oh, well?' said Simon. ‘You and I had to get up the middle of the night. The whole house was disturbed. The crops might have been destroyed.'

‘But they weren't,' I said.

‘They might have been.'

‘Yes.'

‘Because of her. And she is the farmer. In this group we have a farmer who actually leaves gates open.'

I grimaced.

‘We have a farmer who leaves the tools lying out in the fields all night. Nearly every evening Pete and I have had to bring in tools which Alex has left out.'

So had I, for seven years.

‘We have a farmer who doesn't even see to it that there is a barn to put the hay in.'

True. It was I who had pointed out the necessity of clearing the barns before the hay was cut, and had done most of the clearing. Alex had not seemed to regard it as important. I recollected that this, too, had occurred regularly for years. I cleared barns, Alex filled them up again with junk, and every year I cleared them again just in time for the hay harvest. Alex was not interested in unglamorous jobs.

‘In short,' said Simon, ‘we have a farmer who does none of the work of a farmer.'

‘She did arrange for the hay to be cut,' I said.

‘Yes,' said Simon. ‘She gets people to do things for her. And what other work has she done?'

‘I don't really know,' I said. ‘I'm at the office a lot of the time. I don't know what she does.'

‘She goes out,' said Simon.

I searched for something to say that would not be an excuse, and found nothing.

‘She chose the job,' pursued Simon. ‘She didn't have to be the farmer. I made a list of jobs, and when I came to Farmer she jumped at it like a dog at a bone. But she doesn't do it. Why doesn't she do it? All the rest of you do your jobs. You look after the money, and every Thursday you tell us how much we've got and how much we've spent. Dao cooks: every day there is food on the table. Coral does the housekeeping: the house is clean. Except that the bathroom never seems to be particularly clean.'

Alex was responsible for cleaning the bathroom.

‘And Pete does the repairs and fixes herb-racks and slates the roof. And she doesn't even seem to like the way he slates the roof.'

‘She doesn't think he's doing it the right way,' I said miserably.

‘But she doesn't do it herself. She goes out instead.'

‘I know,' I said.

Simon leant forward. ‘Why does she do it?'

‘I don't know. She's always been like that. I've got used to it,' I said.

Through the open kitchen door came the sounds of cooking: Dao was preparing supper. Intermittent hammering from the other side of the house signified that Pete, undeterred, was still slating the roof. Fifty feet away outside the french windows sat Coral, feeding the baby. Sarah and Lily sat on the kitchen step, playing with an old tennis ball and talking in Thai.

‘A lot of people could live in this place,' said Simon. ‘There are hungry people out there. There is not much time. And we cannot progress, because of Alex.'

‘She doesn't understand,' I said. ‘I used to think she understood better than I did what the group was about. But now I wonder if she's ever understood at all.'

‘She has never understood,' said Simon. ‘But she is very good at pretending to understand things which she doesn't.'

It took me a while to absorb the full impact of his words. He had provided me with a key, a very simple key, to a number of incidents which I had long found disturbing.

I turned the key.

Harry. Tessa. A mousey girl from the village in the throes of a wretched divorce. Three of the people Alex had talked to over the years, trying to help them with their different problems by telling them the things she had learned from Simon. Always, as I listened on these occasions, I had heard a false note. Once or twice, feeling she had distorted a crucial idea, I had intervened, to Alex's irritation and the benefit of nobody. The rest of the time I had listened, puzzled. Alex's voice but Simon's words. Simon's words almost exactly. She could not match his eloquence, of course, or his inspired logic, but these were Simon's words. They had been right when he spoke them, so they must be right now. So what was wrong?