On the Edge A Novel
Read On the Edge A Novel Online
Authors: Edward St. Aubyn
On the Edge A Novel
Edward St. Aubyn
Picador (2014)
Tags: Literary, Retail, Fiction
Literaryttt Retailttt Fictionttt
Retail
FROM THE MAN BOOKER–SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
Called “the most brilliant novelist of his generation” (Alan Hollinghurst), Edward St. Aubyn captivated and astonished readers and critics alike with his mesmerizing quintet, the Patrick Melrose novels. Its publication introduced one of the most complex and fascinating protagonists in modern fiction.
Now being published for the first time in America,
On the Edge
is an uproarious and sharply rendered satire of the New Age, which shows St. Aubyn at his finest.
Peter Thorpe is disillusioned with his conventional life as a merchant banker until he meets Sabine, the most enchanting and enigmatic woman he’s ever encountered. His desire for her reaches such a pitch that he overturns his whole life, leaving everything behind to follow her into the stronghold of the New Age movement among the stunning peaks and valleys of Big Sur, California. There he meets an eccentric cast of spiritual seekers, joining them in pursuit of that elusive something (happiness?), which he never before dared to imagine possible.
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For Eleanor
Contents
Praise for the Patrick Melrose Novels
1
Adam arrived at Brooke’s San Francisco mansion wearing the flame-coloured Nehru jacket Yves had brought back for him from Paris. Most people couldn’t get away with a Nehru jacket, but Adam, in whose veins the lava of India and the phlegm of England combined with an intoxicating hiss, wore his new clothes with indiscreet self-assurance. Adam was on fire with the truth about the future of the human race and it was not a fire he intended to keep to himself.
‘I’m wearing my heart on your sleeve,’ he whispered to Yves in the taxi.
‘And your soul?’ said Yves.
‘Always and everywhere,’ replied Adam. ‘You know I won’t settle for less.’ His eyes clouded with tears. ‘My Shams,’ he murmured.
‘My Rumi,’ answered Yves vaguely.
Adam liked people to have ‘a point’. Either they must be brilliant and spiritually evolved like himself, or embarrassingly rich like Brooke. Simple goodness touched him also, at a distance.
Brooke was in fact so rich that no amount of personal gratification could do more than bail out her sinking ship. The inrush of money was so uncompromising that a few days in bed with a cold would leave her up to her neck in unspent income. The only pump that could save her from drowning was charity, and every morning her secretary brought her a bucket of cheques to sign in the unending effort to keep her afloat.
Brooke treated everyone like a servant, which, given that she had thirty of them already, showed a lack of imagination. Her servants, on the other hand, she treated like family, her own family having thrust her among servants throughout her childhood. Brought up in the reputedly gracious South, her parents were given over entirely to alcohol, horses and other rich people who shared their interests. They had not allowed Brooke’s childish cries or lisping enquiries into the meaning of life to mar the elegance of their home. Instead she had been housed with one of the innumerable black families whose unadorned shacks cowered under the fatwood trees, their woodsmoke hanging in the humid air almost as substantially as the membranes of Spanish moss that dangled down to meet it. Brooke had often reflected that she had probably been better off living with Mammy. The riding parties that roamed the plantation in search of the perfect place to have some ‘special iced tea’, as they jokingly called the gallon of cold bourbon to which a tiny splash of tea, one mint leaf and a slice of lemon were apprehensively added by the cook, never trotted down that particular track which led to Mammy’s, its astonishing orange earth making it look more like a river than a road.
When her father died falling off one of his favourite horses, Brooke had the thrilling experience of being taken to the big house for the funeral party. ‘It’s how he would have wanted to go,’ his friends said, one after another, with a sense of their own gift for the apt phrase, mixed with a certain envy at the spectacle of such a gentlemanly demise. She asked her mother if she could stay in the big house for the night after the funeral.
‘I’m surprised at your asking, Brooke,’ said her mother with genuine outrage. ‘Can you not see that the house is full of your father’s relations?’
Returning to Mammy’s in the car, Brooke had developed, through a clinging ground mist of misery and incomprehension, a revolutionary fury, a suspicion of rich white people that could have borne cross-examination by Malcolm X, and a determination to find meaning beyond the familial horizon ringed by stallions and empty bottles, without heading too far in the direction offered by Mammy’s passion for overeating and fainting in church.
After a psychoanalytic limbo in Manhattan, facing the grey mirror of Dr Bukowski’s silence (‘At least I’m not a Kleinian,’ he had chuckled at their first meeting, but had never lapsed into liveliness again), she headed for the West Coast and its more colourful promises of liberation.
Cured of paying wise men to listen to her, she paid to listen to them instead.
It was then that she met Kenneth Shine, the spiritual teacher, and realized that here at last was the beginning of her real journey.
‘You’ve changed my life,’ she told him that first evening.
‘What hasn’t?’ he asked with a kindly gaze, and the question, which she hardly would have noticed under other circumstances, broke her mind open and in that moment she seemed to see the whole impermanence thing, and how we were all changing and the self was an illusion, and everything – he put it so much better than she could, but the sense of it had stayed with her and kept her going over the last five years, working for the good of the world at the level that really mattered, changing people’s consciousness.
The ‘Human Potential Movement’ was rather a grand phrase, perhaps a little pompous, not to be dropped casually into every sentence, but to her ears it had a noble ring.
‘You’re the Guidobaldo of the Millennium,’ Adam had recently declared. She hadn’t known what to make of that. Adam could be so bitchy sometimes. Only because he was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, of course, and he saw human potential so clearly that he got impatient with complacency. At the same time he was complacent about his own impatience, and even his nervous breakdowns and his hysterical tears had something arrogant about them, as if they’d been written by Shakespeare and deserved the closest study.
Anyhow, neither Mammy nor Brooke’s teachers at Foxcroft had been too hot on the Renaissance, but Guidobaldo, it turned out, was practically responsible for the whole thing at a financial level. She knew her uses and she was pleased to be useful. ‘Everyone has their place and everyone has their pace,’ as Kenneth liked to say in his usual memorable way. Adam called him the Bumper Sticker. There was definitely a rivalry between the two men, but she loved them both.
Kenneth was working on a synthesis of all world religions and philosophies, which he was going to condense into a form that everybody could understand. ‘Think global, act local,’ was one of his mottoes. He already had a name for his philosophy; the rest would follow. It was called Streamism because of something Heraclitus had said about how you couldn’t step into the same stream twice. It was a new stream each time. At this point Brooke got a bit confused. Were you supposed to go with the flow – Kenneth had a whole Tao thing about going with the flow which tied in beautifully with self-acceptance and all those key psychological concepts – or were you supposed to be the rock in the stream, unimpressed by the fleeting manifestations of Time? He was very good on that too. It was part Buddhism, part Marcus Aurelius, he’d told her. She was learning so much, but for a while she remained puzzled, half the time picturing herself as a rock, the other half blithely shooting the little rapids of the stream.
‘Of course,’ said Kenneth when she had shared her concern. ‘You’ve cut through to the central paradox of Streamism.’
She’d felt quite proud.
‘What is God?’ he’d suddenly asked with that kindly gaze.
She had blinked nervously.
‘The unmoved mover,’ Kenneth whispered. ‘What must we become?’ he thundered.
‘God,’ she guessed wildly.
‘Right!’ He gave her a radiant smile, the sort of smile that her father had never given her, and she felt as if she had been airlifted to the mountaintop.
‘We go with the flow, but we stay still within ourselves, and by doing that we become gods,’ Kenneth claimed, while her head swam with altitude sickness.
‘I’m only telling you part of it, of course, you’ll have to wait for the book.’
And wait she did. In the meantime she was helping Kenneth out. He didn’t want to take an advance from a mainstream publisher. They might cramp his style, and after all his philosophy wasn’t called Mainstreamism, he joked.
Kenneth thought unceasingly about Streamism. It was a concept so pregnant with undivulged glamour that he refused to stoop to the pedantry of recording his reflections. If his mind started to wander while he read Lao-tzu, or studied baseball on TV, he couldn’t help concluding that a wandering mind was the most uninhibited expression of Streamism, and allowing his thoughts to run dimpling all the way.
In the face of such a comprehensive excitement, he forgave himself for taking Brooke’s money and offering her nothing concrete in exchange. (How un-Streamist that would have been, and yet, on the other hand, how Streamist.) He did, however, wince at the memory of his feigned passion for her. It would have been so convenient to find her attractive, but sexual hypocrisy was notoriously difficult for a man to sustain. All the same, he couldn’t help feeling a troubling fondness for her. The rich always thought they were being exploited, and here was Brooke challenging that fear with one cheque after another. It was really very plucky.
‘I’ll be able to pay you back,’ he explained while she wrote another cheque for five thousand dollars. ‘There’ll be the book, and the tapes and a series of pamphlets for people with busy lives, “Streamism and sexuality”, “Streamism in the office”, “Streamism and your children” …’
She was a little worried about Kenneth’s pamphlets, but then not everyone could have the privilege of knowing Kenneth personally. She just didn’t want Streamism to become vulgar.
‘It couldn’t be made any more vulgar than it already is,’ Adam had snapped.
Honestly, those boys, they were so competitive. She must do something to make them better friends. Maybe they could join a men’s group and go to a sweat lodge together. Robert Bly could recommend the best way for them to have a male bonding experience. It was madness for them to fall out, because they really wanted the same thing: to save the world from self-destruction.
Brooke also paid for Adam’s apartment in San Francisco. He made sure that this arrangement didn’t corrupt him by peppering his flattery with sharp remarks, and occasionally changing his phone number to make sure she didn’t imagine she owned him. Hadn’t Joyce had his Miss Weaver? And who would remember Miss Weaver without him? Mantegna had had his Sforzas. Their silly intrigues looked very thin now, but his paintings repaid the compliment of their patronage with the far greater compliment of his immortality. And the monks of South-East Asia who survived on the generosity, the
dana
, of the local population, properly understood, bestowed a blessing on those who supported them. No, Adam was completely at ease with the situation, but he wasn’t going to allow the fact that Brooke wanted to help him fulfil his God-given purpose to prevent him from gently teasing her now and again.
‘I hope I die before you,’ he had said that morning after she had bored him with a further list of her good works. ‘I want to see heaven before you’ve improved it.’
‘I’ll give a party for you when you arrive,’ said Brooke, for whom ‘networking’ had become an uncontrollable habit.