Bethany (7 page)

Those early summer evenings we sat and talked about all manner of things. Having a taste for the abstract I was naturally more pleased when the conversation turned to metaphysics than when it revolved around the morality of daily life; but Simon, whose deft handling of abstruse concepts was beautiful to witness, regarded such speculation as unimportant and considered my interest in it slightly reprehensible. Indeed he once expressed himself very strongly on the subject, saying that I had the Faustus complex and was very fortunate in not being as clever as I would like to be, because that intellect allied to my lack of innocence would destroy me.

I was hurt by this aspersion on my intelligence, and was thereby forced to acknowledge the truth of what he said.

He also implied that my approach was not serious.

‘You are quite happy to discuss any subject under the sun,' he said mildly to me. ‘You will sit here in the evening and examine it from all aspects and pursue all its implications, and
in the morning you will go off to work as if nothing had happened.'

It was damning. I struggled with it, and abandoned the struggle. I could not give up my job: not yet. The time would come.

The evening talks gradually became less frequent, until often a week would go by in which the only time we had all met in the parlour had been for the finance meeting. Part of the reason was that we began to find we had a lot to do in the evenings. Part was that Simon felt he should talk to us individually.

It began at the end of the first week. Simon suggested that as he had recently spent a great deal of time with Pete and Coral it might be a good idea if Alex and I, who had seen less of him, spent a couple of hours a week in personal discussion with him. My pleasure at the prospect of an hour's uninterrupted conversation with Simon was alloyed by the nervous suspicion that I would have to choose what to talk about.

The first conversation was revealing. I decided he wanted me to talk about a problem, and cast desperately about for one, finally coming up with my ambivalent attitude towards the room we were sitting in – my study. I thought it might prove an interesting line of enquiry, encompassing my difficulties in reconciling my academic leanings, which the bookshelves around the walls represented, with the way of life represented by Simon.

The opening did not lead where I expected it to. With Simon nothing ever did. He remarked casually that one never is happy in a room in which one has done bad things. This gave me a severe jolt. I had indeed done bad things in that room. I had killed bluebottles when they blundered infuriatingly round me as I was trying to write. The room was full of my anger and guilt. Too disconcerted to launch into the self-analysis I had envisaged, I found myself surprised into following quite a different tack, which led me, through half an hour's reluctant introspection, to a most unwelcome conclusion.

This was that for years I had been as unjust in my relations with Alex as I had always believed her to be with me. I undervalued what she had done for me: I saw the imperfection of the deed and not the generosity that inspired it. My study summed it up. When I first came to live with Alex, she had panelled and painted the walls of this room for me, and had brought down from London a second-hand filing cabinet which she had had re-sprayed for my use. But, being Alex, she had not quite finished the panelling on the walls – there was a small gap in the corner which required a board to be split, and she had never got round to it – and in the course of transporting the filing cabinet she had lost the handle and part of the sliding gear for one of the drawers so that it hung lopsided and could not be used. For years these things, neither of which I could rectify, had irritated me, and in the end had caused me more irritation than the gift had given me pleasure; and the more projects Alex undertook and left unfinished, each bequeathing its toll of junk in the garage and unpaid bills in the kitchen, the more the gap in the panelling and the lopsided drawer of the filing cabinet became a focus for my discontent. Thus her gift, springing from love, had turned sour because my own love was lacking. No wonder I was ambivalent about the room: it condemned me.

I thanked Simon and went to find Alex, who was working in the vegetable garden. I told her I had been unjust to her, and was sorry. She gave me a delighted smile. We had a long talk as we hoed the onions, and went into lunch holding hands like new lovers.

After Alex and I had had two or three talks apiece with Simon, Pete and Coral asked if they could have talks with Simon too. Simon smiled wryly, and arranged a timetable, which he wrote in the desk diary we kept in the parlour. We found the talks so beneficial that they became a daily feature. This took a considerable bite out of Simon's time, but he did not place any value on his own time. He only wished it to be well spent.

The daily talks had been continuing for about a week when their nature changed. This happened as the result of an experiment initiated by Simon, which was itself the outcome of a conversation we had before the group was formed.

We were sitting in Pete and Coral's flat. We had been talking for several hours when reference was made to a quasi-religious organisation which had a centre in the city, members of which were periodically to be seen touting on street corners for people to come and take one of their free ‘personality tests'. I had once done so as a reporting assignment for the newspaper, without of course revealing my identity. The experience had been exactly what I expected: a questionnaire which asked ill-disguised leading questions; a bookshop in which one was pressed to buy as one waited for the results of the ‘test'; a ‘diagnosis' from the questionnaire which indicated that one should take a course at the centre in order to improve the quality of one's life. I went home and wrote a smug article on this money-oriented, fake-psychology-peddling cult. It was the same article the British press had been serving up for years. In a corner of my mind I was a little ashamed. It was too easy. There must be more to them than that.

And yet when the organisation was mentioned that evening two years later I dropped instantly into the same position of ridicule and dismissed them as charlatans. Simon looked at me with faint surprise.

‘I've been to their centre and talked to them,' he said. ‘They struck me as very energetic young people who would like to make the world a better place. Their eyes are bright, as if they have come through a difficult experience.'

I looked at the floor and blushed. It was true, but I had chosen not to see it. Their eyes had been bright. Not as bright as Simon's, but bright enough. Whether it was the glitter of delusion or the light of truth how could I tell, when I had not troubled to find out the first thing about them?

Simon then proceeded to talk about them, or rather about the idea on which their theory of psychology was based. Their
founder had discovered, he said, that in all human beings there existed a time-track on which was recorded everything that had ever happened to that person. It was analogous to the databanks of a computer. All past experience was stored on the track, and all of it was accessible to consciousness, though sometimes only with difficulty. To regain an incident from the past all one had to do was command the mind to ‘go back' to the incident and let it replay itself, which it would do with absolute fidelity. It was a process quite different from remembering; it was something everybody could do, and few knew about.

On most people's time-track there were gaps, said Simon. These occurred where the person had been unconscious, or when the incident was so painful, mentally or physically, that the mind had apparently obliterated it. Nevertheless these incidents were recorded, but they were stored in a hidden area of the mind from which they emerged at intervals when circumstances resembling the original incident occurred. At such moments the individual would find himself acting in an irrational way under a compulsion he did not understand. Some people's behaviour was almost entirely controlled by such compulsions. There was a way of ending the mechanism: one followed up the clues until one found what appeared to be the gap, and then one made the person go through the experience over and over again, until it was fully recalled and had lost its content of pain and its power to compel. This processing was the main technique employed by the organisation, and was carried out according to a strict formula by people trained for the purpose.

I was fascinated and repelled by this exposition. As a onetime devotee of science-fiction I was much taken with the idea of a sort of personal tape-recording, but the therapeutic application of it had a mechanistic ring I disliked, and the whole concept seemed to lean heavily on Freud while decrying psychoanalysis. I knew that Simon had no prejudices and was willing to take ideas from any source if he thought he could use them,
but I was surprised that he should find this worthy of his attention. The jargon in which the technique appeared to be wrapped added further to my hostility. I gave the matter no further thought.

About a month after that conversation, and a fortnight after the start of the group, there was a telephone call for me at Bethany when, in common with nearly everyone else, I was outside in the fields. It was evening and the call was answered by Coral, who had not been feeling well and was resting upstairs. Simon, Pete and I came into the kitchen together to be greeted by a white-faced Coral with the words, There's been a horrible man on the phone.'

She turned to me, almost with entreaty. ‘He said his name was Maurice and he was a friend of Kay's. Kay, who is he?'

I saw the whole ghastly situation in a flash and saw that there was no way of explaining it. Maurice was, indeed, a rather unpleasant character, particularly when he had been drinking, but on the basis of six years' acquaintance he was undoubtedly entitled to call himself a friend of mine. He was a strange man who had led a roving life, mostly as a diamond prospector in various parts of Africa, and he had now, at the age of sixty, settled in Cornwall to prospect for copper and change his sex. It was such an extraordinary combination that Alex had persuaded me to ghost-write his autobiography, which I did with increasing unwillingness as he became increasingly awkward, cantankerous and obsessed with himself. The confusion over his gender had naturally set up confusions over his sexual orientation, and he attempted to release the resultant tensions in a never-ending stream of sexual innuendo, suggestive laughter, and undisguised aggression. Yes, Maurice was tiresome. However, I thought a woman with any worldly experience at all should have had no trouble in dealing with him on the telephone. Coral was obviously more vulnerable than I had thought.

What concerned me most, I realised with shame afterwards, was my own image. Whatever Maurice had said to Coral had
evidently given her the not unreasonable impression that he was a dirty old man, and why was such a person claiming friendship with a member of this very clean group? I knew I could never explain to them the split between my professional identity as a ghost-writer and my real identity as a member of the group. They would not believe such a split could exist, and perhaps they were right. Yet I must make some attempt, or to my known homosexuality, which I had always assumed they regarded as unimportant, they would add a presumed complicity with whatever this frustrated old man represented, and would arrive at the conclusion that I was sexually decadent.

I launched into an anxious speech but Simon cut me short. He asked Coral to tell us exactly what had happened, but Coral was almost incoherent. Pete tried ineffectually to comfort her.

Simon said, ‘Shall we try an experiment?'

He made us sit down: we had been standing in a tense huddle by the door. Coral knelt on the floor, sitting back on her heels.

Simon said to her, ‘Close your eyes. Now, go back to the beginning of the incident.'

Coral shut her eyes and concentrated.

Simon said, ‘Are you there?'

‘Yes,' said Coral.

‘Where are you?' asked Simon.

‘I'm … lying on my bed,' said Coral. ‘I've just woken up. I've been woken up by the phone ringing.'

‘Go through the incident until you come to the end,' said Simon.

Hesitantly at first, she did. At one point, when she had completely misinterpreted the meaning of something Maurice had said, I opened my mouth to interrupt, but Simon instantly silenced me with a movement of his hand.

None of us spoke or moved as Coral finished recounting the incident. She looked strained and distressed. Simon told her to go back to the beginning and go through it again. The second version was different: she remembered much more. She remembered,
for a start, that she had been anxious about something – the baby – even before she'd answered the phone. In the third telling her tension rose to a peak and she covered her face with her hands and shuddered violently. The fourth time the tension had gone out of it: she seemed rather bored by the whole thing, and as she got to the end she laughed.

‘Well, that's it,' she said, and spread her hands in humorous apology for making such a fuss. She was clear-eyed.

Simon observed her. ‘Good,' he said calmly.

After Pete and Coral had gone to bed, Simon said to me, ‘I'm sorry I had to stop you when Coral was talking, but I had no choice. You must never try to change someone else's data. Never. It is very dangerous. Do you understand?'

‘Yes,' I said, rather blankly but at any rate glad that I had not incurred his displeasure. It wasn't true, though. I did not understand. I never did understand why one must not try to change another person's data, if the data are wrong.

We sat in the parlour, Simon, Alex, Pete and I. It was late, past ten o'clock. Dao and Coral had gone to bed. We were all usually in bed before this, because we got up well before seven. We four had not gone to bed because something important was happening. Pete and Alex were talking, and Simon and I were listening to them.

It was important because Pete and Alex did not talk to each other much, and there had been a time, a year ago, when there was something like open hostility between them. That of course had long since been resolved, but there remained a certain reserve between them which, while it could quite easily be breached, usually was not. This evening they were both trying very hard to communicate. It was difficult because of their residual resistance to each other, because of the abstract nature of the ideas they were discussing, and because Pete was so inarticulate.