Bethany (6 page)

‘That is not the correct way to look at it,' said Simon. ‘It is a question of whether people are able to contribute.'

‘But Alex hasn't got any money,' I said. ‘The only money she earns pays the mortgage, and that's a contribution in itself.'

‘Yes, but we pay the rent for the flat,' said Pete. ‘If the mortgage is going to be counted, that ought to be counted as well.'

They had decided to keep the flat on and not sub-let it. It seemed extraordinary to me that Pete should place the flat, which they weren't living in and which was therefore an unnecessary expense, on the same level as the house, which they were living in and which was a necessary expense; but on the other hand if they relinquished the flat and the group experiment did not turn out well … I found myself in an unpleasant quicksand and withdrew, a little confused.

Alex put an end to the debate by saying that she was not able to make regular contributions, but she did sometimes have some money and would contribute when she could. That seemed to satisfy everyone.

Since the group was in every sense a new beginning, it was obvious that the house in which we lived should also be, as it
were, made new. Obvious as it was, its necessity escaped me at first, and I watched with astonishment and some pain as, one by one, each room of my home was utterly transformed. Furniture was moved, or pressed into unfamiliar use; walls changed colour, floors changed carpets, ancient and venerable armchairs acquired bright and perky cushions. It seemed to be change for the sake of change – and so of course it was. A new way of life could not take root in old soil.

After the first shock had subsided I realised that my hankering for the familiar was a hankering for a dead past. I joined exuberantly in what had become a kind of festival. It was exhilarating to be in a house that hummed with activity and sparkled with cleanliness, where the windows, the brass door-handles and the slate flagstones all shone as they had not done for years. It was a joy to be in a house that resounded with laughter, and was now being cared for as Alex and I had never been able to care for it.

We threw away everything for which there was no use – clothes that were never worn, books that were never read, implements that were never used, broken electrical appliances that only required a minor repair but had never been repaired because there was no need for them … all the accumulated junk of seven years. Alex and I flung ourselves into the task with a relish that at times bordered on hysteria, and laughed helplessly at the expressions that greeted some of our more extraordinary treasures. How could we explain to these rational people why the garage, instead of housing a car, housed a broken harmonium, part of a marble fireplace, three hundred Victorian glass bottles without stoppers, a box of old wood-working planes, twenty feet of cast iron railings, a forty-year-old motor mower, a 1914 jeweller's catalogue and six incomplete Cornish ranges?

I made it clear that the throwing-away would not extend beyond the big double doors to the contents of my study, since there was nothing in there that would not, sooner or later, be necessary to my work. Even so, looking around the room, I was
able to pick out half a dozen books I had never liked, and dump them on the rubbish pile.

As room after room emerged in fresh guise it sometimes became appropriate to re-name them. The first one to be christened was the large front room in which we held our meetings and often sat and talked in the evening. It was a splendid, spacious room with a lovely curved wall in which was set a french window looking over the valley. Alex and I had always called it simply ‘the front room'. Simon asked for suggestions for a new name.

‘I suppose we could call it anything,' I said. ‘Well, almost anything. I don't think we could call it the parlour.'

Simon thought for a moment. He said, ‘I propose that we call it the parlour.'

I looked quickly at him. No, it was not a rebuke.

‘The word means a place where people talk,' he explained to the others.

‘It has connotations of lace curtains, and parrots, and antimacassars, and long Sunday afternoons when nobody talks to anybody,' I objected.

‘Then,' said Simon, ‘we shall change the connotations of the word “parlour”.'

After a few days it seemed remarkable that we had ever called it anything else.

The house was physically renewed, the people in it had been spiritually renewed. There burned in all of us a desire to renew the world. Perhaps subconsciously we felt there was an element missing. It was supplied by Alex.

One evening after supper Alex made reference to some recent prophecy that the industrialised world was heading for imminent disaster. 1975 would be remembered as the last summer of peace, she said. Alex was fond of quoting such prophecies, which ranged from economic collapse to global extinction, and as the years passed and the dates fixed for these catastrophes elapsed without incident her faith in them was by no means diminished. I connected this faith with her refusal to
accept the Darwinian theory of evolution and her obstinate belief that the ancient history of the world had been concocted by a conspiracy of academics on the basis of a few mis-dated fossils. I dismissed the whole ragbag as the errancy of an undisciplined mind which had never troubled to read a serious history book, and from time to time we would quarrel bitterly over some obscure matter of archaeology far beyond the competence of either of us to determine, while I raged at her denial of reason, and she raged at my contempt.

In the past few weeks I had come to accept that I had been wrong in many things, and I had certainly never listened to Alex's wilder ideas with as much courtesy and open-mindedness as I did now. Nonetheless I was surprised by the alacrity with which Simon took up the point – almost as if he had been waiting for it.

‘The industrialised world is coming to an end,' he said slowly. ‘Yes, of course. One sees it everywhere. There is a kind of madness. But it is not only the developed countries, is it?'

He looked at Dao, and their eyes communicated a shared vision: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. The fleeing peasants, the mutilated children, the chaos, the cruelty, the pervasive evil that was the same, whatever its guise, in every country. The evil that lived like a tapeworm in the mind of man.

‘It is the whole world,' said Simon. ‘The whole world is coming to an end.'

And we were the Ark.

Esther was dying.

She was eight, no more than middle age for an Airedale. It was cancer.

From time to time there seemed to be a slight improvement, and we allowed ourselves to hope: to hope that the second lump that had appeared on the lower part of her belly was not malignant, that the herbs Alex gathered for her daily in the hedgerows were working. Often, day by day, she seemed to be making progress. But looking back over the weeks we knew she was not.

Esther was irreplaceable. She was more than a dog: she was a gentle, humorous spirit sent to be a companion to human beings who did not deserve such straightforward affection. Generous, forgiving, she seemed to me to embody the spirit of Bethany, and I felt that when she died something of the place would die too: a special, lowly innocence.

Even Simon, who, while insisting that animals be respected, made it clear that they were not to be regarded as equals,
recognised Esther's quality. He described her as a ‘mature dog', meaning that she had developed to the limits of her nature. He inclined to the view that in her previous incarnation she had been human. The other members of the group also seemed to believe this – certainly Alex did. I did not. For one thing, try as I might I had never been easy with the doctrine of reincarnation: I found it intellectually repugnant. For another, if Esther had been a human being and was now a dog, presumably she had committed some very bad sins in her previous existence to merit this demotion, and I was sure that Esther's soul was unspotted. I also failed to see why one should assume that a bad human being would make a good dog. Surely a soul that made a bad job of being human would be likely to make a bad job of anything?

Esther bore her pain with dignity. Alex and I had decided, as soon as the first lump manifested itself, that having her ‘put down' was out of the question. We had taken that decision in principle years earlier when two of our kid goats, clumsily dehorned by the vet, had suffered brain damage resulting in a gradual twisting-round of the neck. The spectacle was grotesque and evoked extreme reactions in visitors, who could not understand why we had not had the animals killed as soon as it began to happen. It was clear to Alex and me that the visitors were far more concerned with their own emotions than they were with the kids, about whom they had made the unexamined assumption that they were suffering so much they would rather be dead. Alex and I were not at all sure the kids were suffering, and even if they were, was death necessarily better than pain? How much did pain matter? How much did life matter? It seemed to us that no human could answer these questions, and that the average human, confronted by these deformed goats, would kill them because he could not bear the sight of them, and would call it pity.

We refused to do it. We helped the kids to feed, and waited until the day when they could no longer do anything at all to feed themselves. On that day, since they had ceased to be viable
organisms, we called in the vet with a humane killer. For some time afterwards we suffered strange looks from people we knew.

We felt we had done our best to handle correctly a situation in which we had been at fault in the first place. We should not have had the kids de-horned. Henceforth, we vowed, no vet should set foot on the premises; if any disease arose among the animals, we would treat it herbally. However, we had reckoned without Esther. When an animal shows clear signs of a malignant growth, for which there is no known natural cure, what do you do?

We took her to a young vet whom we trusted: he had not been practising long, but was capable and compassionate. Or, rather, I took her. Alex had gone to London. I went home in my lunch-hour and took Esther to the surgery, and collected her at half-past five after the operation. Poor Esther. Barely conscious, drugged, shocked and sick, she opened her eyes as I entered the room and her tail thumped once on the floor. I carried her in a blanket into the back of the Mini and took her home. It was difficult, on my own, getting her out of the car, carrying her up the steps and into the kitchen and putting her down, all without altering the position of the hind legs, but I managed it. When Alex phoned that evening I was able to tell her that Esther had come through the operation well and was asleep in her usual corner.

Six weeks later, when Esther had apparently made a full recovery and was running about with the other dogs, we discovered the second lump. We knew then that she would die. There was no question of further surgery – she would not survive it, and in any case it seemed obscene to go on cutting parts out of an ageing animal. We did what we could to make her last days more comfortable, without relaxing the strict diet we kept her on in the hope that nature might still effect a last-minute cure. Alex, having recently read that violets had been known to cure cancer, searched for and picked them every evening and fed them to her. Gradually she declined, until she could only walk with the greatest difficulty.

The shift, subtle but unmistakable, into the last phase occurred about ten days after the group had been formed, and on that day Alex and I moved Esther into our bedroom. She lay on her blanket, patiently waiting. At intervals Alex would carry her outside so she did not foul her blanket. Simon watched, but said nothing.

The house was shipshape, we turned our attention to the land. Almost overnight, it seemed to me, the monster I had loved and struggled with became tame and obedient to command. Plants were hoed and thinned, seedlings were planted out, weeds were cut before they seeded instead of a week afterwards, little things I had always meant to do were done when I got home from work, big things I had never hoped to do became a real possibility. There was order. The plants glowed with health and pleasure. I wondered how I could ever have thought a solitary battle with fourteen acres preferable to the rewards of co-operation.

Alex was finding the same thing. I was well used to the spectacle of Alex, begrimed and oil-stained, emerging from underneath an ailing vehicle, cursing because she had been able to diagnose the fault but did not have the tools to correct it. This would not prevent her from trying, and I kept out of the way on those occasions because her wrath over a recalcitrant nut was apt to descend on anything in the vicinity which moved. But now it was Pete who lay on his back under the truck, while she passed him tools and made tactful suggestions, and gave me, as I passed, a grin which I perfectly understood.

The new sink was functioning, the Flymo worked, the truck could now be used for getting in the hay crop, and there was an acre under intensive cultivation. Soon we would start on the major tasks. One of the first was repairing the roof of the red barn. A gale had ripped off three of the galvanised sheets and dislodged one of the rafters: replacing it, while perched on a ladder, was far beyond the combined strength Alex and I possessed. And beyond that loomed the most formidable job of
all: rebuilding the end of the house. Perhaps they would not want to undertake it. Yet if the group were serious in its aims the house must be completed. Not only for us, but for anyone else who, seeing the approaching deluge, sought shelter.

In the evenings we rested from our labours and talked. We would sit in the parlour, and if it was chilly there would be a log fire in the big fireplace. Simon would light some joss sticks and the air would be heady with incense. I had to overcome an initial prejudice against joss sticks, which I had always found to perfume the houses of habitual pot-smokers, and which I associated with the mental flabbiness that seems to accompany prolonged use of cannabis. In Simon's company the association rapidly weakened and I found myself enjoying the heavy scent. If no one else was in the room I would go up and sniff the blue smoke that curled from the glowing tip of the stick. I realised as I did so how much my lungs still craved tobacco. The smoke made me lightheaded: it seemed to be able to affect my state of mind. I wondered briefly whether it might be addictive.