Bethany (2 page)

I had forgiven Alex, but the episode had left a scar. I shied away from any suggestion of house-sharing or long-term guests as a horse shies at a corner where it was once frightened. I knew I could not go through that experience again. If anyone had asked me what the experience was, I would have described it as a kind of rape.

Over the years that I'd lived there, my sensibility had extended to penetrate every inch of the house and its surrounding acres. I felt it was the first real home I'd ever had: boarding school, university and a series of depressing bedsits in London had succeeded a childhood home so far distant that it might have belonged to someone else. But this place, this once gracious, now dilapidated house overlooking a tranquil valley, where five magnificent ornamental trees bore witness that the sloping pastures had once been parkland, where a grassy track
opposite the kitchen door led unexpectedly into woods, where a barn owl swooped nightly, whitely, along the hedge and buzzards reared their young in the same tree every year … oh this was a home not just for the body, but for the soul. Wrest it from me who dared, for my life-blood ran through it.

My passion was rendered fiercer by Alex's neglect. Alex loved Bethany, but in rather the same off-hand fashion as she loved me. She was a bit rough with both of us. She could not rest until she had remade the house. She started by taking the rendering off the front and having the stonework pointed. The appearance was much improved, but that wall, facing southwest, had been rendered for a very good reason – it took the whole brunt of the gales that swept in from the Atlantic – and no amount of pointing could henceforth keep the rain out. Then she had new windows put in the front, where the old frames, intricately patterned with small triangular panes, were rotting. If she had stopped there all might have been well, but she went on to change the pitch of the roof at its two ends to allow room for dormer windows along the east and west walls, knock down half a dozen non-structural walls inside, and eventually apply for planning consent to convert the west side of the house into a separate unit. Unfortunately she got it. Her relations with builders were stormy and in course of time she ran out of money, so that as I worked on my bean-patch that May evening the sun shone down on a black-felted, not a blue-slated roof, and the breeze played through unglazed window-frames and disturbed the sawdust on a half-boarded floor.

In between times Alex embarked on projects outside, the most striking of which was to be a paved patio area outside the kitchen door, with steps leading down to the drive. A vast quantity of concrete was hand-mixed by an unemployed lame duck from the caravan site, and Alex started to pave the thing. Something else caught her interest and she never finished it. Nettles colonised the bare patches, and dustbins and old pieces of cast iron collected on corners. Alex liked cast iron. One day
she was going to melt it all down, and make our own knives and forks.

I loved her, and despaired.

I thought I understood the cause of it. Alex and her brother and sister had been brought up in somewhat unusual conditions. They had spent the greater part of their childhood in wooden shacks in a Hampshire forest, helping to hew wood, draw water from a well they had dug themselves, and clear the woodland for what later became a nudist colony run by their parents. The wonder and the insecurity of that half-wild childhood had never quite left Alex, and having worked hard for ten years in London to buy herself a proper house, she then set about reducing it to a wooden shack, since that was home. So at least I reasoned.

And yet none of these was the worst thing. The worst thing was so bad that I did not let myself think about it. It was that Alex, having tired, presumably, of playing such small games with her house, had staked it in a property gamble. That had not been the intention, but that was the result.

She had bought very cheaply, with money borrowed from her father, the freehold of a building in London on which she held a lease. She had intended to do the place up quickly and let it. It was a shrewd idea: the property was in a run-down area which was about to become smart. But a structural flaw requiring work on the foundations was found, and a property boom sent building costs rocketing, and Alex ran short of money. She approached the bank and negotiated a £10,000 loan on very little security. She had a way with bank managers. The money somehow disappeared without very much to show for it, since Alex, in an attempt to get the work done cheaply, had hired some self-employed builders who smoked pot all day and built nothing at all. In the end, having taken the roof off to build an extra storey, Alex found herself without the money to put it back on. Matters were not helped by the fact that the building, listed as being of architectural interest, was such an
odd shape that it was unlikely that any design so far produced for the roof would be structurally sound in any case.

A number of things then happened at once. The property market collapsed, and Alex, attempting to sell the property to recoup, found that nobody wanted to buy a building without a roof. The architect resigned from the job when simultaneously his nerve broke and his wife left him. Alex found a new architect who turned out not only to be incompetent but to have an unhealthy interest in the amount of building materials the job involved, and refused to pay him. He sued. Alex counter-sued. The neighbour sued for damage to his harpsichords. A small-time gangster told Alex that he wanted the building for a pornographic bookshop and blue film club and would buy it at his price, failing which he would cut off her toes, and Alex, too incensed to feel fear, drank him under the table and consulted her young Jewish solicitor, who dialled a few numbers and got the gangster moved on by the local Mafia. Alex subsequently regretted this, since the gangster's offer was the best she ever got for the building.

The bank began to press for repayment of the loan, or at least a reduction of the interest, which was mounting alarmingly. Alex had no money, neither did I. The bank asked for Bethany to be offered as security. Alex bluffed, hedged, prevaricated, pretended not to hear, pretended not to understand … and in the end signed a piece of paper. A ghost moved in to live with us.

As I raked the bean-patch, Alex's debt to the bank stood at £18,000 give or take a hundred or two. The only way of raising this sum was by sale of the London property which nobody wanted to buy, and in any case the debt probably now exceeded the property's value. If the money was not found within about a year, the bank would start pressing Alex to sell Bethany. What could I do? The capital sum was so far beyond my reach that it might as well have been a million, while even the weekly compound interest, multiplying like a cancer, was approximately twice my weekly earnings. The only person who could
save the situation was the person who had caused it, but Alex, who could always see a perplexing number of sides to every question, was paralysed by indecision. Make an effort to get a roof on the building? Advertise it yet again as it stood? Apply for a change in planning permission? Make Bethany over to me, in hope that the bank could not take it? Or just skip the country?

‘Oh, let's go to the pub': so these debates usually ended. Yet I felt that Alex could solve the problem if she really set her mind to it, and it sickened me to see it drift on, worsening a little every day, while she made plans for damming the stream to create a pool where we could grow water-chestnuts, or designed an improved geodesc dome, or went for drives round the countryside and came back with hundredweights of edible seaweed and irresistible pieces of cast iron. I would not have had her different. I just wished that once in a while she would earn some money. She was a very talented jeweller: she could have earned a lot.

I raked and smoothed, raked and smoothed. A bean-patch. Alex's idea. We would grow field beans, they required little care and would feed both us and the animals. I did not much like field beans and was fairly sure that Alex didn't either, but I supposed they would do for the dogs. I had marked out three large patches separated by grassy strips. They really were large patches – this was only the first one, and already I had spent several days on it. Alex had brought home half a hundredweight of seed beans: we had to do something with them. It was typical of Alex: get an idea about growing something, buy ten times the amount of seed required, and leave me to sow it.

As I worked, my feelings of anger and hopelessness grew. Was I never to have any peace? Struggling always in the wake of Alex's impetuosity. She never seemed to struggle. She always did exactly what she felt like, and devil take anyone else. And now, having tossed around for twenty years on assorted seas of experience, she had finally sailed straight for the hurricane. She
was going to open her house – my home – to a group of tee-total, non-smoking, love-thy-neighbour mystics who once they had moved in might never move out. After all, why should they? All places were the same to them, and the only time was the present. The concept that on such and such a date they would have to go back to the city was not likely to impress them as very meaningful.

I would have to share the solitude of the woods with them. I would have to explain about keeping the dogs in and the cats out and the goats tethered and the ponies calm, and why they must not waste water or use bleach, and why the water sometimes went orange although it was not dangerous, and why the children must not go into the ruined cottage because it was dangerous. I would have to say all these things because Alex never thought of anything, and they would look at me with the gentle incredulity that drove me mad. All this I would have to bear, and I would have to stop eating eggs. It was insufferable; it must be prevented. I slammed the rake down edgeways on a clod of earth with such force that it sprang up again violently and jarred my wrist. Suddenly I started to cry.

I don't quite know what happened. Tears are always the release of a greater sorrow than one knowingly feels, but these tears were for my whole life. They convulsed me. I laid my head on my arms on the low stone wall and disintegrated. Part of me assumed the role of cinema projectionist and exhibited me to myself. I observed my behaviour: cold, selfish and calculating. I noted my complete inability to feel love, compassion or even genuine interest in response to another human being. I saw my pitiful arrogance and the void it was founded on. I looked at my heart and saw that it was a mean and frightened thing. I saw the faces of the people I had hurt. I saw Alex, brave, lost, indomitable, haunted by a spiritual need that drove her to excess after excess, a seeker whose quest I blocked at every turn, while at every failure she grew more desperate and I more sure of my deadening power. And I said that I loved her! Cruellest of all, I had made her believe it.

Down that pit I fell, like Alice, slowly and with my eyes wide open. I could not stop the descent: something beyond me was forcing me down through every bitter level of my experience. Down, down, through the lies, betrayals and manipulations. Down through the utter aridity of a life lived only for self. Down to where, I wondered, for surely this despair could find its end only in death.

‘Let go.' It was a whisper: Simon's voice in my head.

The descent stopped, then started again with a lurch. For I knew that I would not, and that it was because I would not that I was here weeping out my heart in a Cornish field, and that I had condemned myself most justly to the punishment of those who will not give up their misery. That is, their misery.

‘Let go.'

‘I can't.'

‘Yes you can. These are all ideas. Let them go.'

A breath of hope stirred in me. Suppose I tried letting them go just a little bit, and saw what happened?

I suddenly had a vision of myself. A child standing on the seashore holding a cup of water. A child, its feet lapped by the waves, its ears filled with the roar of surf, fighting and screaming to retain sole possession of its tiny cup of water.

I raised my head and looked around me. I saw a world I had not known I could perceive. It must be the world that very young children see, before they are taught words to nail it down and kill it. But it was not seeing, because sight is of something outside oneself, and this world was not outside me. It enveloped me, it breathed through me. The dancing leaves of a tree fifty yards away brushed my skin. A bird sped into the sky and the ground fell away beneath me. The soft spears of grass tickled my feet through the soles of my boots. Life blazed and throbbed in ceaseless ferment everywhere I turned my gaze; life prodigal, inexhaustible, beyond comprehension, filling and creating the universe and perhaps other universes not to be imagined. This was my birthright. To claim it all I had to do was …

Humbly I wiped my face on my shirt and went to find Alex.

Strangely, as soon as I realised how desirable it was that Simon and his friends should come to Bethany, Alex began to exhibit signs of disquiet. She urged me to go and see Simon without delay, but her joy at my conversion was already clouding when I got into the car to drive to the city.

It was an extraordinary evening I spent there. Gently Simon talked me through my purgation; brilliantly he took up first one and then another of the things I had said, analysed them, and explored them with the relentless logic and daring intuition I had come to expect of him but which still left me breathless; finally, when I had followed him for three hours through these foothills without faltering, he took me by the hand and led me over mountain ranges of such height and splendour that at each step I thought I must fall, while at each step I climbed higher. Where I stood, at last, there was no thought, only perception which comprehended thought and all things. I knew that wherever I turned my eyes, I would understand completely. I knew that I would keep this pure perception as long, and only as long, as my heart was pure. I knew that I was nothing, and immortal.

I left late in the evening and drove home with care. Alex was sitting on the half-finished patio steps in the moonlight, waiting for me. I knew at once that something had changed, and changed for ever.