Bethany (3 page)

I had lived for seven years in Alex's shadow. I was content with this: I had no liking for limelight. She was the talker, she was the doer, even if what she did was not always easy to determine. Quick of brain, lively of interest, warm of heart, with a smattering of information about almost everything and a complete originality of thought (resulting largely from a complete lack of education), she shone like a star in the obscurity of the local pub. There the men, mostly labourers or unemployed, who had gone there most of their lives to get away from their womenfolk and discuss the best way of growing beans or building a hedge or picking a runner in the three-thirty, looked first with resentment, then with admiration, and finally with a fierce
protective love at this slip of a woman, five foot four, who smoked cigars and bought her round, and drove a Thames truck as well as any of them, and had about her a gentleness which they had never seen in their wives. Their wives, of course, hated her.

I was sufficiently sure of my own worth not to resent being eclipsed by Alex's personality. In any case, I did not share Alex's conviction of the innate superiority of the working class, and I thought she was welcome to the spoils. With our London friends I did sometimes feel I had been edged into a subservient position, and I reacted either by competing or by silence, depending on my mood. But I knew that it was as much my fault as hers. She removed from me the odious responsibility of being sociable.

Inequalities of personality were aggravated by the fact that when we began to live together she had a house and a private income and I, having given up a job to leave London, had nothing at all. The psychological structure thus established persisted long after her income stopped and we were both living on my earnings. But in a sense these considerations were all superficial. Alex dominated, and I did not challenge her dominance however disastrous the results might be, because she had a rare and precious quality. I could not name it, but when I met her I knew that, having found it, I must never let it go.

It was like a candle-flame that, however near to guttering, never quite goes out. It was at once an innocence, a wisdom and a strength. I had seen her draw on it to cope with situations in which I was utterly at a loss: Jacques nihilistic and blaspheming, with Manuela weeping in terror and the children white-faced against the wall; Manuela's brother, black eyes burning, covering sheet after sheet of paper with pencil drawings of landscapes made out of faces, never looking up, never lifting the pencil, for six hours; gentle William, devastating in his lobotomised simplicity, asking after five minutes' acquaintance if he could sleep with her; crazy Caroline, squatting on the unswept floor in her Highbury flat, working out numbers,
working out the number of the house added to the numerical value of the street name plus the postal district, divided by the numerical value of her own name reduced to a single figure, because if the answer came out exactly she would survive the night in that house.

Alcoholics, drug-addicts, schizophrenics, the lost and the damned – to all these people, from whom I drew back in fear because I could not begin to understand the darkness into which they had fallen, Alex found something to say. Across that terrible gulf she would lean and hold their hands, and they would look up for a moment and hope.

It was a kind of grace. It came, obviously, from God, whatever that meant. Thus I acknowledged that Alex, however irrational, inconsiderate, wilful and self-opinionated, was better than me, and better in a way that transcended my scale of values. She had the true gold, the spark, the spirit. I bowed to it.

And now I saw that I had been mistaken. Oh, it was there. But what a small, threatened thing it was, and how unsure of its way. How weak she was, this woman I had thought so strong. How puerile was the wisdom that held them spellbound in the pub. I knew; and, looking at me as I sat by her on the steps that night, she knew that I knew, and buried her face in my shoulder.

All next day, and the day after that, we talked. I realised with growing dismay that she was in grave spiritual danger. I could see the light and the darkness struggle within her as she half-answered, parried or evaded my questions, or tried to translate what I was saying into something more congenial. She did not want to see Simon: she was afraid, as I had been. Or, rather, the darkness was afraid. I told her there was nothing to fear, but the dark thing writhed and lashed its tail and glared at me, and I knew that it was beyond my powers to remove it. The best I could do would be to hold her hand while one wiser than I brought her out of the shadows.

I came home from work on the Monday and saw the
Humber parked under the laurel tree. They were all there: Simon, Dao, and their three little girls, and Pete, Coral and the baby.

‘Kay!' said Coral and hugged me. Dao, luminous with smiles, placed her hands palm-to-palm and inclined her head above them in the Eastern greeting. I responded, less gracefully, but from a full heart. Simon and Alex were talking in the garden. It was going to be all right, I thought, as I made the tea.

We sat in the sun listening to the bees among the roses, and smiled at each other. Simon said it had been agreed that they should move in at the end of the week. He thought there should be a trial period, and asked for suggestions as to its length. No one volunteered a suggestion, so Simon said five months. We agreed.

As Simon talked, I realised that what he had in mind was far more than a friendly house-sharing, far more even than a conventional commune. He wished to find out whether there was a new way for people to live together. A way that did not involve private will; a way that broke down the barriers between people until the will of the individual and the will of the group were one. A way in which communication flowed freely between people, unimpeded by motives arising from the self, so that a thing was no sooner thought than it was said, no sooner said than it was done, no sooner done than it was dismissed from the mind so that the next thing could be dealt with. A way in which there were no lies, no evasions and no secrets. A way in which there was no dwelling on the past and no dreaming of the future, but only total awareness of the timeless present. It was an amazing conception. Dimly I glimpsed the sort of power such a group would have.

So that was why he wanted so long a trial period. With such an aim in view, there would be many problems to be overcome.

But what was he saying now?

‘One sees that in this beautiful place there is something wrong. There is something not straight. It is like a broken limb.
When a limb is broken you put a splint on it to keep it straight. Something strong and straight is tied to something weak and crooked, until the weak thing grows strong. That is what we are going to do here.'

I had some difficulty in believing that he meant what he obviously had to mean. I glanced at Alex, who was smiling serenely. She doesn't understand, I thought. I felt protective, and for a moment indignant.

‘A five-month splint. The Bethany splint.'

Well, it was what I wanted, wasn't it?

Simon, sipping his peppermint tea by the kitchen window, said, ‘The group has been in existence for a week. Are there any suggestions?'

‘Yes. Another week,' said Coral with a broad smile.

She looked blissfully happy, sitting on the floor feeding her baby. We had all taken to sitting on the floor. It was the only comfortable way six adults and three children could fit into the long, narrow kitchen at Bethany, and in any case there were never enough chairs in the house for visitors because of Alex's deep-rooted hostility to furniture.

Alex and I had never encouraged sitting on the floor because, trodden constantly by three dogs, the floor had never been very clean; but now it shone with a lustre we dimly remembered from years ago when the lino had just been laid. Unlike Alex and me, Coral and Dao did not regard the fact that a thing would immediately get dirty again as a good reason for not washing it. The whole house sparkled.

‘It's very nice here,' said Coral in her American drawl, and
then smiled again at the inadequacy of the statement. I studied the slim figure, in white shirt and faded jeans, resting easily against the wooden cupboard. The lazy brown eyes and sensuous mouth were full of gentleness as she looked down at the baby and cupped her breast to help him. It was difficult to imagine hardness in that face, but Coral had hinted that there were many things in her past that did not bear examination. She was, I thought, to a greater extent than any of us, a refugee. She had stopped running, now.

I glanced at the others. Pete. Immediately I experienced the slight withdrawal I was never quick enough to stop. I had tried to like Pete, I had catalogued to myself his virtues and tried to return his open smile with an equally open one of my own, but it was no use. Confronted by Pete, my heart did not open up to welcome him, it closed like a clam.

What was it? His appearance? The black beard, hairy chest, powerful arms? Yes, he repelled me, even slightly alarmed me, as did all very masculine men, but I knew that I could have forgiven Pete his abundance of hormones were it not for the two other qualities he combined with them: a level of intellect which I despised and an intuition I had to respect.

How these two qualities came to co-exist in the same person I could only explain by Pete's long association with Simon. Pete was a simple, straightforward man, ill-educated and not very articulate, but on this ordinary material had been superimposed something of Simon's extraordinary perception and Simon's wide-ranging knowledge. The result was a man capable of remarkable intuitions and well acquainted with Eastern thought, who was quite unable to express himself in terms that could be understood. Sometimes I listened to Pete trying to express an idea, and it was like listening to a peasant who had once, long ago, seen a wonderful thing in a dream. Yet, at other times I was not so sure. Simon, Dao and Coral seemed to understand without any trouble what he meant. I had even seen Alex engage in discussion with him when I could not make
head or tail of what he was saying. So perhaps there was something wrong with me?

The disturbance this idea caused me largely accounted for my difficulties with Pete. Objectively I acknowledged him to be a kind, helpful and considerate man: inwardly, the moment I saw him I recoiled. Physical distaste, sexual antagonism, intellectual disdain: it was a potent mixture, I thought, and none of it to my credit. I resolved to try harder to like him. If I indulged it, my stupid egotism could wreak havoc here.

My eyes moved to Dao, sitting comfortably in the lotus position with her children arranged around her skirts. I thought I had never in my life seen a face so beautiful: so eloquent and yet so contained, so serious and yet so full of laughter. She was so beautiful, so serene, this tiny Oriental creature, that at first I had found myself almost tongue-tied in her presence and had been as conscious of the size of my feet and the loudness of my voice as an adolescent. After a week of daily contact I was still shy of her, and she knew it, and across the supper table her laughing eyes would seek out mine and silently accuse me of running away. I couldn't help it: simplicity always frightened me, and here were wisdom, simplicity and beauty together. It was too much. She made me feel worthless. She made me feel like a child. She made me feel what I was – a devious, superficial, ungenerous and utterly imperceptive Westerner.

Simon had met her in Thailand, when he was working there for the British Council and she was teaching English at Bangkok University. He had played the flute for her in her village, and they had fallen in love. She came back with him to England. Simon was already married, although estranged from his wife, but the problem of a passport for Dao was simply if imaginatively solved – she married a college friend of Simon's who was also working in Thailand and who handed her over to Simon immediately after the ceremony. I blinked when I heard this part of the story: it seemed less than perfect. I then rebuked myself for my prudishness: what business was it of mine, and
what difference did it make? Did I want Simon to be a saint? I also made due allowance for the source of the information. It came from Manuela, who retailed gossip with such style that one was hardly conscious that that was what it was.

Simon, Coral, Pete, Dao. And Alex. I looked at Alex. She was sitting cross-legged against the pine chest in which we kept Wellington boots, of which there were always an inexplicable number. She sat, small, neat and upright, smiling at her folded hands. It was obvious that in a period of heightened emotion I had greatly overestimated her problems: there could be nothing seriously wrong if that look of peace was on her face.

Simon, Dao, Pete, Coral, Alex and me. Quietly, by doing almost nothing, we were going to change the world.

The world was crooked. The world was corrupt. The world was cruel. These things we took as axiomatic. However, unlike most groups which have taken it upon themselves to judge the moral standards of their contemporaries, we did not assume that the evil could only be eradicated by divine intervention. We believed, as do Buddhists, that evil is suffering and can be avoided, and that the natural inclination of man is towards good, which is happiness. We would withdraw initially from the world, not because we feared defilement, but in order to resolve our own problems, the better to help the world.

‘It's like dropping a pebble into a pond,' said Simon on the first evening. ‘The ripples spread out. Every action sends out ripples. Thought sends out ripples. When I drop a pebble, I have no idea where those ripples will go. Bad thought, bad action, where the ripples start, and ten thousand miles away the ripples end with human beings setting fire to other human beings' children.'

If the people who rule the world could listen to this man, I thought, there could not be a Vietnam.

‘So my thought, my action, must be pure,' continued Simon. ‘If I do the right thing, the straight thing, there are no harmful ripples. In a sense I have not “done” anything: I have simply
made an appropriate response. Now, a group of people consistently behaving in that way would create, in this chaotic and crooked world, a little pocket of stillness and sanity, an area where, in the best sense, nothing happened. And perhaps the ripples of that stillness would spread. And in time, perhaps, the world itself would be changed.'