Bethany by Anita Mason Page A

‘I tell these they must eat what is in front of them, or not eat. Otherwise I will be in the kitchen all day, because they do not like this or they do not like that.’
    Her words hung, uncompromising, in the silence. Alex said nothing, smiled reassuringly at Ben, and gave him some of her own bread. No one spoke for the rest of the meal.
    I washed my bowl and went outside. I felt upset. Dao had been harsh, a thing which was in itself almost unthinkable. They had all been harsh, in that their silence had supported Dao. Yet they had been just. It was absolutely reasonable that a child visiting the house should be asked to obey the same rules as the children living there, in order that trouble might be avoided in future. But was it reasonable to expect a child to eat something which he thought would hurt him? Ben should trust us, of course. And yet, I thought, why should he, when of the whole group only Alex had troubled to be kind to him? But then it was only Alex who had invited him: he was her guest, not the group’s. But what did that matter? We were supposed to love everybody, weren’t we, and here we were discriminating against a child. Or were we, or was the discrimination purely mine, a pathological reaction to having yet another child around, yet another guest I had not myself invited?
    My thoughts chased each other fruitlessly. I felt very lonely. I glanced once or twice in Alex’s direction, but she was preoccupied with Ben and returned my look distantly. It was all I could expect. I felt alienated from the others, and although Ilonged for a kind word from Simon I was afraid to approach him.
    In the end I went and joined him where he sat cross-legged at the edge of the field, gazing over the valley. The heat of the day had evaporated and it was a cool, slightly misty evening.
    â€˜It might rain,’ I said. It had not rained for three weeks.
    â€˜Yes, it might,’ he said with a smile. The smile said that anything might happen.
    We sat and listened to the earth settling down. A few home-going rooks cawed. From the kitchen came a domestic murmur of Dao and her daughters. The chickens in the orchard were making the gentle throaty sounds that I loved, and there was a series of little flutters and bumps as they flew up into their henhouse for the night. I drank in the stillness, and marvelled that in this lovely place I could a moment ago have thought myself unhappy.
    Shouting over her shoulder at the yapping dogs, Alex emerged from the garden, carrying the tent and an armful of treasures Ben had found in the woods. She was followed by Ben himself, half-enveloped in the sleeping bag which he was trying to fold up as he walked. The dogs played noisily around his feet. They all tumbled into the Mini, from which the dogs were then ejected. Alex took them back to the kitchen, shut them in, got back in the car, and with a wave in our direction started off down the drive in a cloud of dust and to the accompaniment of excited shouting from the back seat.
    In silence Simon and I watched the little red car disappear round the corner.
    â€˜Why does she do it?’ I said.
    â€˜She doesn’t see,’ said Simon.
    â€˜I thought perhaps it was me,’ I said. ‘I thought perhaps I’d got it all wrong and there was nothing the matter.’
    â€˜Nothing the matter?’ repeated Simon with a ghost of a laugh. He might have been a general surveying corpses on a battlefield.
    â€˜For the past two days,’ he said, ‘it has been impossible to hear the silence for the trumpeting of human egos.’
    I examined my soul. I could not at first find evidence of egotism in my behaviour. Then I saw that my wish not to bring Ben home had been a form of egotism. I had not wanted my grief for Esther intruded upon. That grief had itself been egotism, not real grief at all. It was my own shortcomings I had been grieving over. It was always myself: I could not keep myself out of