On the Edge A Novel (6 page)

‘She said the oddest thing,’ Peter had told Gavin, quoting Sabine in a funny German accent. ‘“We meet, we come together. Don’t grasp me. If we meet again we let the universe decide.”’

‘Sounds like Loony Tunes to me,’ said Gavin. ‘All I can say is I hope the universe, whoever he is when he’s at home, has a bloody good address book. What on earth did you say?’

‘I said the universe was very wise, not without a pinch of sodium chloride,’ Peter added, hoping to fall in with Gavin’s oppressively fluent facetiousness.

‘More like a bloody shovelful I should think,’ said Gavin. ‘Trouble with these stunning women, they completely blow your gasket in that department.’ He pointed to his trousers with an expression of alarmed bliss. ‘Plus of course the mysterious depths of the female psyche,’ he conceded, ‘and then you find out they’re completely and utterly barking. One day you’re having a nice weekend of off-piste skiing, if you know what I mean, and the next you’re on the blower to Directory Enquiries, “Excuse me, do you have the number for the Priory?” By the way, old boy, you may find that three weeks in the bin for some loony Kraut isn’t included in your medical insurance,’ Gavin guffawed.

After this speech Peter had stopped confiding in Gavin, or anybody else. The truth was that Peter had always been more sensitive and intelligent than he’d let on, and now the extremity of his obsession with Sabine had no place in the world in which he moved.

He ached for her limbs and her lips. He thought he saw her disappearing round corners, or rumbling past in buses, broke into an incredulous run, and then realized he was going mad. She was the only star in the utter darkness of other people. He thought about her so much that she became more intimate to him than he was to himself.

The memory of her physical presence would shimmer towards him, like a swimmer breaking the surface of a pool. He would stop everything, in case he missed her warm breath against his cheek. Sometimes he howled out loud, thinking of her perfect body, white as the moon, buckled on the corner of the bed, and the way she had said, ‘Does it please you?’ with a worried frown.

At first he’d returned to Frankfurt, to the cafe where he’d met Sabine, and the streets he could remember walking with her. He felt increasingly distraught, remaining silent while lover’s speeches raged in his head. The obsession grew stronger with time, and his secrecy created an increasingly eerie gap between him and the rest of the world. He loathed himself for telling Gavin about her and crushed speculation when it occurred.

‘This German sex machine hardly sounds like wife material,’ Gavin hazarded one day, sensing that he was being deprived of news.

‘Oh, that’s all over,’ said Peter, furiously preoccupied with his computer screen.

‘Can’t marry a girl just because she blows your socks off,’ said Gavin.

When Peter managed, with great difficulty, to get three months off work, Gavin was incredulous.

‘Jammy bastard, going walkabout, eh? Wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain Fräulein Leg-Over?’

Despairing of Germany, Peter had decided to visit the places he could remember Sabine mentioning: the Findhorn Foundation; a bookshop in Los Angeles called the Bhodi Tree; and the Esalen Institute, where he now stood on the brilliant lawn, looking at the sea.

He had arrived a couple of days earlier, and taken room and board until Sunday when he was going to attend the ‘Moving on and Letting go’ workshop which he had chosen rather haphazardly from the catalogue. Not entirely haphazardly of course, since he really did have to return to England the following weekend if he was going to go on working at the bank. Maybe he had to move on and let go of Sabine, or maybe he had to let go of the bank. That was the trouble: he wasn’t sure what to let go of even if he found out how to do it.

In a way Fiona was right, the Findhorn Foundation had started him on what she would no doubt have called ‘the slippery slope’. He had been nervous enough himself when the taxi driver from Inverness airport, at first sycophantically mistaking him for some kind of sportsman, spat him out disgustedly at the doors of the rambling former hotel which housed the educational aspect of the Foundation. On the way in, he briefly overheard the conversation of two men with grey ponytails.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Inner Child.’

‘That’s with me!’

‘Oh, I didn’t realize it was with you!’

They rubbed each other’s backs appreciatively.

Inside, after ignoring some notices from the Housekeeping Department, signed with hearts, he found himself in the hall with three groups of people. In front of him stood a couple in a long, charged hug. Over on the stairs an earth mother massaged the shoulders of a ragged-haired girl with a nose-ring. And in the corner an earnest trio consoled a crying woman.

He soon realized that the notices he’d ignored had been about removing muddy shoes before entering the house. During the months he subsequently spent in the winding souk of spiritual growth, nothing turned out to be so certain as the obligation to remove and replace his shoes dozens of times a day. Laces were as helpful as handcuffs to a juggler.

Sweaters, on the other hand, played a part analagous to armour in the lives of those medieval French knights who drowned in the mud of Agincourt, so weighed down by the armigerous language of swans and shields and falcons that they could no longer move without crane or horse. Peter felt bald in his dark-blue knitwear, when the sweaters of the initiated were bristling with rainbows, twinkling with stars, threaded with silver and gold, pulsing with hearts, populated with endangered species, embossed with purple burial mounds, and swirling with nameless mandalas. Homemade, these sweaters were also expressive of a love of creativity that scorned the judgement of the world. Everywhere, he found an art measured by its sincerity, not its results. Art itself seemed to take on a blurred but pretentious existence on the borders of therapy and craft, where it was deliriously liberated from difficulty as well as talent.

For his first few days, Peter endured the fulfilment of his prejudices in the hope of getting an address for Sabine. The New Age seemed to be a bomb shelter for people burdened with unusual names. Even those with ordinary names made subtle changes, putting a K in Eric or dropping an N from Anne. If all else failed, they simply changed their names to Shiva or Krishna, defying their birth certificates for the higher truth of their longing for deification.

He also encountered the first hints of a new vocabulary in which rules were called ‘suggestions’. This was one of the promises of the Aquarian Age, a coercion not exercised from above, but enforced from every side by the asphyxiating pressure of collective beliefs. The net would replace the pyramid as the model of human relations, but consensus could be as oppressive as authority, and the cult of group activities, while it seemed to point forward to a democratic future, also led backwards to the mentality of the schoolyard, where popularity and the ability to exploit a special slang were the currency of power. The shadow of the pyramid in any case prevailed, crumbling, compromised, questioned, but still present. He found at Findhorn, and again elsewhere, a slave population of long-term students who paid reduced rates to work for nothing, a priesthood of teachers who passed on the open secrets of the New Age, an aristocracy of administrators, and a merchant class of consumers like himself, paying for the teachings of the priests.

Peter was at first annoyed by the ‘focalizers’ – a clumsy term used to sidestep the hierarchical implications that ‘leaders’ or ‘teachers’ would have conveyed. Everyone in his group would learn from everyone else, but they ‘held the focus’ by the simple device of deciding what everyone would do for the ‘Experience Week’. Krishna and Lolita suggested that Peter move out of the local hotel he had mistakenly thought he was allowed to stay in, but Peter, who had come to pursue an amorous obsession, not to return to the primitive conditions of a hostel dormitory, suggested that he would rather leave the group than the hotel. Krishna and Lolita climbed down, but only after Peter had assured them that his separate accommodation would not prevent him from ‘fully participating’ in the Experience Week.

He had hardly tasted the thrill of out-suggesting the focalizers than he found himself in a strange crisis, wondering if he was addicted to telephones and hotel rooms, and feeling guilty about the conflict between his promise of full participation and his undisclosed reasons for coming to the Foundation. Somehow, the atmosphere of self-enquiry had already encroached on his private schemes.

On the first evening there was an ‘attunement’, a preliminary to all activities in which the help of ‘unseen presences’ and the ‘Angel of Findhorn’ was invoked, and the members of the group, sitting in a circle around a candle and some scattered leaves, ‘shared’ their feelings.

‘Oh, we are nine!’ exclaimed Oriane, a nervous and melancholy French woman whose face seemed to have been polished by too many tears. ‘It’s a sacred number.’

Peter found that few numbers escaped this accusation at one time or another. The number ten clung to a certain steely practicality, gleaming like a Swiss army knife among the smoky relics of numerology, although there was no doubt some ‘system’ in which it too bowed down before the tyranny of the esoteric. As a banker, his relationship with numbers was at once corrupt, since numbers were always figures, standing for a sum of money, and at the same time serene because, even in the debased form of a bottom line or a grand total, they spoke of a separate reality, infused with a meaning less slippery than language and less ephemeral than emotion. To see this Platonic realm press-ganged into the tricky service of symbolism was strangely disturbing to him. He felt a similar flicker of indignation at the thought of astrology. Why should the other planets, which spun out their lives beyond the reach of palpitating human concerns, be dragged into that unfortunate melee?

As the sharing went round, Peter became anxious about giving an account of his motives for coming to Findhorn. His heartbeat quickened and his mouth grew dry. He was far too preoccupied to notice what the others said, except that each one seemed to be ‘going through a transition’ and won appreciative nods from Krishna, Lolita and the others for using this phrase.

‘I’m going through a transition too,’ said Peter defensively. ‘It’s difficult to talk about because, well, I’m sort of right in the middle of it at the moment. I work in a bank and the thing is it suddenly seemed
completely pointless
and I had a bit of a nervous breakdown … that’s all I can say just now.’

He blushed at the thought that he might be believed as much as at the thought that he might not be. What disturbed him even more was that he started to believe what he had ‘shared’. On his way through the dark woods that led down to the village of Forres and his hotel, he began to feel that he really was having a bit of a nervous breakdown, that banking did seem completely pointless, and that he was in fact going through a period of transition.

Back in the hotel, he was told there was a function in the Sunderland Room, but that residents were of course welcome to avail themselves of the bar facilities. He drank whisky in the bar and wondered what kind of mirror the group was setting up. Why should he start to worry about the things he said in front of the group? Why did it seem to act on him like some magnified and collective conscience? Why could he not wear some adequate disguise, and when the office opened the day after next ask if they could remember a German woman called Sabine, and when he had an address for her, leave Findhorn and its silly rituals? That’s what he would do, that was definitely what he would do.

The next morning on his way to breakfast, Peter saw the man with the grey ponytail he had overheard on the first day. He was again in earnest conversation.

‘He was saying that when you bring things together with love, either pieces of yourself or people in a group, that the sum is greater than the parts, and that in that context one and one equals three…’

Here, perhaps, was the sacred arithmetic that explained the strange power of the group to impress him more than its constituent members.

The fact that the first thing he heard in the morning seemed to address the very question he had been asking himself in the bar the night before was one of those funny little coincidences of which the people around him made such a cult.

‘Here at Findhorn,’ said Krishna before that morning’s attunement, ‘we suggest you make “I” statements. Out there –’ he thrust his chin towards the uncomprehending world that lay beyond the window – ‘you often say “you” when you really mean “I”, but here we like to own our feelings.’

Jill, a crushingly shy nineteen-year-old from Glastonbury, wanted to leave the group. Lolita was with her now, Krishna explained, trying to persuade her to stick it out at least for the sacred dancing they were going to do after the attunement. Krishna asked everyone to hold hands by crossing their arms over each other as if they were weaving them into a rope.

‘Feel the energy going round the circle,’ he said. ‘Receive it, take what you need and pass it on.’

Peter felt the flow come through one hand and pass out through the other. Was his neighbour sending the flow the same way? Did it matter?

‘Let’s focus on Jill and hope that through our love we can persuade her to remain part of this circle of new friends.’

Peter, who despite himself was enjoying being roped to his neighbours, was jolted into rebellion by this promiscuous use of the word ‘friends’ to describe the bunch of nervous strangers who had met for the first time the evening before.

The sacred dance was focalized by Ulrike, a German woman who had been ‘heavily into the lesbian and biking scene in Berlin’ before she got into sacred dance; now it was her life.

They stood shoeless in the former ballroom of the hotel, no doubt the site of many functions in its day, a painting of a unicorn, as pleased as Punch beside a woodland stream, now defacing its principal wall. Outside, ribs of dark grey cloud were packed tightly overhead. Peter looked longingly at the cars parked at the back of the building. He hated dancing. They were trying to brainwash him into some collective trance in which community, communism and communion formed a noose around the beautiful neck of capitalist individualism, the sole route to cultural achievement and personal happiness. He was going to scream.