‘Of course.’ Unoffended, Heather backed away, showing her lack of umbrage by a loving smile. ‘Some toast perhaps?’
‘No thanks.’ The very notion filled Janet’s mouth with bile. She thought she might be sick.
‘You could have some butter - as a special treat.’
‘No thanks, Heather.’
‘Right.’ But Heather’s finely tuned antennae had picked up a shiver of despair. She rubbed the palms of her hands together, conjuring all her therapeutic powers, then drew them slowly apart, knowing that a powerful current of restorative energy now sprang between the two. She crept up behind Janet and started moving her hands about just above the other woman’s shoulders. Janet leapt round, cup in one hand, tea bag in the other, and shouted, ‘Don’t do that!’
Heather stepped back. ‘I was only trying to help.’
‘Help what for heaven’s sake?’
‘... well ...’
‘You don’t know do you?’ A dignified and compassionate silence. ‘Has it never occurred to you Heather that you have absolutely no diagnostic gifts whatsoever?’
Heather, red-faced, mumbled, ‘I can see that you’re unhappy.’
‘So I’m unhappy. Why shouldn’t I be? Or you - or anyone else come to that. It’s a condition of life. What makes you think it can be instantly erased? Or that we’d be any better for it if it were.’
‘That’s ridiculous. No one develops a radiant holistic soul by being miserable.’
‘How on earth would you know? You’ve got about as much chance of developing a radiant holistic soul as I have of becoming Miss World.’
‘I’m really glad you shared that with me.’
‘God -’ Janet flung the tea bag back into the box. ‘Talking to you is like wrestling with a vat of marshmallow.’
‘I can see you’re pretty stressed out right now, Jan.’
‘Shall I tell you what really stresses me out, Heather? Almost more than anything else in this depressing, loveless mouldy old universe. This vale of tears. Shall I share it with you?’
‘I wish you would dear.’ Heather’s face was cheesily transformed by pleasure.
‘It’s being called bloody Jan.’
‘Right. Fine. Now we have a scenario to talk through. Just remember, whatever comes out, that at the psychic edge I’m OK and you’re OK.’
‘Well actually, Heather, you have always struck me as being very much not OK. In fact I’d go as far as to describe you as fat for your age and a pain in the bottom.’
‘You’re missing Trixie -’
‘Oh shut up. Shut up!’
Janet ran away. Through the side door, across the smashed flagstone, down the terrace steps and across the lawn. She didn’t stop running till she reached the orchard where, amidst a drift of ox-eye daisies, she flung herself down. Early little green and red striped windfalls bumped under her back. The spirit of the place, the warm air, mocked her misery. The very words ‘love, light and peace’ were like stabbing swords.
She thought, I can’t stay here. I must move on. Not to another community, I’m obviously no good at living en masse. She had tried it many times (sometimes her life seemed nothing more than one long vagrancy), and it had never worked. Some places had been better than others. All, like the Windhorse, offered ‘love’ - demanding in return merely a posture of credulous submissiveness. Mostly they seemed to see the spiritual life as just constantly pretending to be nicer than you actually are. Janet felt there must be more to it than that.
She had exposed herself to all the orthodox religions in turn, hoping to catch faith rather as one caught a tropical disease, but had proved to be immune. Occasionally though, deeply moved by a poem or some music, or when meeting someone who seemed to have got it shiningly right, everything that she had read and thought or otherwise absorbed seemed to click into an immensely satisfactory whole. Briefly, the mysterious arid muddle in her head would be resolved, taking on a brilliantly clear and finished shape. But it didn’t last. By nightfall, like Penelope with her shroud, Janet had undone her certainties of the day and gone to rest as confused and lonely as before.
She had been made aware that such vacillation was far from healthy (Heather said negativity made warts on the mind), but did not really see what she could do about it. Whoever called religion the science of anxiety had known his stuff. It was apparently impossible to negotiate with God - whoever he, she, it or that was.
She was unhappily rambling thus when she noticed the carrier. Fawn and orange today, pushed under the little wooden door. The post! Janet scrambled to her feet and hurried to pick it up.
The bag was quite full. She tipped the letters out and straightaway saw the long blue envelope. She knew, even before turning it over, that it would be addressed to Trixie. Checking the rest - nothing for her - Janet bundled the letters away and hurried back to the house. She dumped the carrier on the hall table and ran up to her room.
In the kitchen Heather, having tilted Ken’s leg up on to the unlit range so that the blood could flow, was pouring tea all round. The company had stopped gathering in the dining room, even for dinner, once the formal highlight of the day.
The Windhorse routine, which used to be of such worshipful importance, seemed to have quite disintegrated. Members got up (or didn’t) when they liked and snacked on the hoof. The news letter hadn’t been sent out, neither was the roster of tasks attended to with anything like the usual diligence. It was either glanced at and forgotten, or ignored altogether. The laundry room was full of washing that awaited pegging out, and the frequent sad tonk of Calypso’s bell indicated that even the goat was at the end of her tether. The centre had not held and there was no doubt that things were rapidly falling apart.
Heather passed round the giant jar of honey from more than one country and continued her report of Janet’s unkindness, being careful to avoid the slightest hint of criticism.
‘I could see she was upset and all I did was try to trace the cause-initiating agent - you know? So I could offer a positive seed-thought. And she just turned on me.’ Heather’s gooseberry eyes moistened as she dissolved Ken’s honey and took the mug over. Ken nodded his thanks and gave his wife’s hand a comforting squeeze. This morning his nose, though still smashy, had lost its angry, blood-engorged appearance and was now a brownish yellow. The little cuts in the skin were healing up quite nicely.
‘I expect,’ May said, ‘she’s worried about Trixie.’
‘Of course,’ said Heather. ‘I do understand that. At least I try to. Trouble is I’ve always been so boringly normal.’ She sighed as at some capricious miscarriage of genetic justice. She and Ken exchanged normal and excessively boring smiles. ‘But when she said I wasn’t a healer -’
‘Not a healer?’ The leg nearly slipped from its iron support.
‘I know.’ Heather managed a light laugh. ‘I nearly threw that withered ovary from Putney in her face.’
‘I’m sure Janet didn’t mean to be unkind,’ said Arno. ‘We’re all under a great deal of strain at the moment. I personally am extremely worried about Tim.’
A terrible change had come over the boy. Only Arno was permitted in his room, the door was locked against all others. Tim refused to have the curtains opened but enough daylight filtered through for Arno to discern, and be dreadfully shocked by, his rapid deterioration. Sleep and weeping had puffed out his normally taut, unblemished skin. His cheeks, hummocks of scarlet flesh, were crisscrossed with tear tracks and enseamed where he had pressed his face in the mattress. Crusts of yellow glued up his eyelids.
When Arno had tried to change the pillowcase, which was stiff with sweat, he had to ease Tim’s fingers from the edge one at a time, gently coaxing the fabric free. Then the fingers, so bony and strong, had gripped his arm in terror. Arno had sat patiently, speaking words of consolation and reassurance.