Bethany by Anita Mason Page B

anything.
    Simon said, ‘Why do you involve yourself?’
    I was shocked. He could not have read my mind so literally. I stared at him.
    He said, ‘If it is nothing to do with you, why do you involve yourself?’
    My mind wheeled in an arc like a buzzard and homed finally on his meaning, which, as I circled into it, became so beautifully obvious that I burst out laughing. He had presented me with the flipside of the mental process I had just been through. He laughed with me, not knowing what I was laughing at but delighted that it had made me happy.
    I sobered up. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I involve myself. I feel responsible. Particularly with Alex. Or rather, I
don’t
in fact feel responsible, but I feel that I ought to, and so I involve myself even more anxiously.’
    â€˜But if it is Alex’s business, why do you have to involve yourself?’
    â€˜I feel protective towards her,’ I said.
    â€˜One protects children,’ he said.
    I could not answer him. The dogs gruffed and whined in the kitchen, wanting to be let out. Dao opened the door and they bounded out and streaked across the field, one blue-grey mongrel, one small terrier, barking exultantly, oblivious of the death of a companion the day before. Two dogs, free, simple.
    â€˜Why do you feel that you ought to feel responsible?’ he asked.
    I scanned for the reason and knew that I would not find itthat evening. It went deep. It was a chance in a thousand that I had brushed past the tip of it in my attempt to answer another question.
    â€˜I’m tired,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can come back to it.’
    He smiled, an approving smile, knowing that this was not an evasion but a decision to treat the matter with the seriousness it deserved.
    â€˜If you like,’ he said.
    Two days later the Sessions began.
    â€˜Locate an incident which might have caused this tendency to make you feel responsible when you are not,’ said Simon.
    His voice was quiet and held the power to command. We were sitting in the sun-dappled parlour. I closed my eyes, partly to concentrate, partly because of the brightness. My mind ranged back, selecting and rejecting, hesitant. Then it found. It was like a hawk stooping: there was no doubt.
    â€˜I have the incident,’ I said.
    â€˜Go back to the beginning of the incident,’ said Simon. ‘Tell me when you’re there.’
    I was there. Standing in the doorway of Alex’s workshop on a long-forgotten spring afternoon. Listening, puzzled and unhappy, as Alex railed at me. Watching the cold sunlight, broken up by the moving branches of the laurel tree outside, make patterns on the dusty machinery.
    â€˜It is seven years ago,’ I said. ‘I’m standing in the doorway of Alex’s workshop, which is now part of the kitchen. Alex is angry with me because she says I’m not helping her. She says I am leaving her with the sole responsibility for the house. She says I’m not pulling my weight.
    â€˜The trouble is,’ I continued, ‘that it’s true enough to make me feel guilty, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t got a job, but then neither has Alex. She’s supporting me, but it isn’t costing her anything in terms of effort. In any case she says she isn’t asking me to get a job. She wants me to take responsibility, she says. But responsibility for what? She doesn’t expect me tomend the roof. What does she expect me to do? I thought it was all right for me to live here and clear the brambles and work in the garden and do a bit of freelance work and enjoy myself, but apparently it isn’t. Something more is being required of me. I don’t know what it is.’
    The workshop faded from my mind and I was standing in a field: one of the lower fields that led to the river. I was gazing at the hedge. It was an old Cornish stone hedge, overgrown with grass and weeds and crowned at intervals