Bethany Read Free Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Let go.’
    â€˜I can’t.’
    â€˜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.
    I had lived for seven years in Alex’s shadow. I was content with this: I had no liking for limelight. She was the talker, she was the doer, even if what she did was not always easy to determine. Quick of brain, lively of interest, warm of heart, with a smattering of information about almost everything and a complete originality of thought (resulting largely from a complete lack of education), she shone like a star in the obscurity of the local pub. There the men, mostly labourers or unemployed, who had gone there most of their lives to get away from their womenfolk and discuss the best way of growing beans or building a hedge or