On the Edge A Novel (8 page)

Peter realized with some bewilderment that he felt protective towards the fragile revelations he’d had over the last few days, and that the great anxiety about whether to stay, which seemed to be the principal preoccupation of the entire population of Findhorn, might not just be born of a reluctance to leave a warm bath of licensed self-obsession, removed from the economic pressures of ‘the wider community’, but also spring from the loyalty he could feel stirring quietly inside himself, if only in opposition to Warren’s malign influence.

Perhaps Warren had performed a valuable service after all. No, no, he couldn’t start thinking like that; that’s how they thought.

On the free afternoon that came just before the end of his Experience Week, Peter went to see David Campbell, a local laird who had been a friend of his father’s. He had planned this escape while he was still in London, thinking it would offer a harbour of sanity in a lunatic week. Shivering his way among the silver dunes, with the North Sea licking icily at the beach and a few purplish clouds shrinking towards the horizon, he wished he’d stayed at the Foundation, and talked about his feelings with someone in his group.

Campbell lived in one of those high-rise cottages which are called castles in Scotland. Except for the inevitable rumour that Bonny Prince Charlie had passed through, dressed as a baker’s wife, nothing had happened on this unprofitable stretch of frigid coastline until it became the landing site for a New Age settlement.

Campbell sat in the corner with yellow-white hair, coughing and smoking in a paisley dressing gown covered in ash and coffee stains.

‘I call them the Gestapo,’ he said. ‘The women tend to wear long dresses and flowing robes and carry their babies on their backs instead of having prams and pushcarts like everyone else.’

How different history might have been, thought Peter, had the Gestapo worn long flowing robes and carried babies on their backs.

‘Item number one,’ said Campbell, ‘they’re selfish. They’re not interested in the people around them. They pretend to be but they’re not, because they think they’re more important. Mrs Brown, who looks after me, was collecting for the local oldies, and I told her to jolly well go and rattle her box at the Foundation. She didn’t want to go because it’s another world to her.’ Campbell paused, taking the opportunity to clasp a glass of warm vodka with his arthritic hands. ‘Not a penny,’ he said, sucking from his smudged tumbler. ‘They said they hadn’t got any money, although according to her they were all tucking into huge plates of delicious-looking food.’

‘It’s easy not to have any money because you don’t have to pay for anything,’ said Peter.

‘Item number two,’ said Campbell, ‘a lot of them drop out of the Foundation and buy houses nearby, but they don’t make themselves very popular because they keep themselves to themselves. We’re at the end of the road here, there’s nothing between us and Greenland.’ He waved his cigarette towards the draughty and peeling window.

Realizing that Peter wasn’t going to participate in satirizing the Gestapo, item number three turned out to be that ‘they do no real harm’. As Peter left, his host went further and said, ‘I suppose some of the things they say about trees and so forth make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s not my sort of cup of tea.’

By the last evening, Peter was in a fever of reciprocated and complex concern about the other members of his group. He not only knew what Evan thought of Xana and what Xana thought of Evan, but what Xana thought about what Evan thought of her. The web of connections was so intense that it promised to be permanent, as if the solution created by dissolving all these individuals together had formed a crystalline structure of its own during the course of the week.

As they shared for the last time, a young German woman called Lara told about the death of her three-week-old child. Hardly able to speak, let alone in a foreign language, she made exasperated gestures, as if she were tearing up vast sheets of paper, then she joined her knuckles together and pressed them hard, rocking her upper body.

‘That morning I was so happy, yes? When I looked at my child … her face was so peace, yes? Umm, I am very happy. Then I see she is not breathing, and I think, no, this is not possible. How can this happen when I love her so much? How can she stop breathing?’

Oriane burst out of the deadly silence that followed.

‘It make me so angry. How can you believe in God when this happen?’

Later, Oriane was upset by her outburst and Peter was upset that she was upset, and they were both upset that Lara was so unhappy, and Xana was upset by it all too. After having a long speechless hug with Lara, Peter took a cup of tea to Oriane’s room, and then he brought Lara to Oriane’s room, and Lara said it was all right because anything anyone said was hopeless but she knew that Oriane felt the sadness in her heart, and Oriane burst into tears and so did Lara, and then Peter and Xana couldn’t help bursting into tears as well.

On the last day they all spoke about their week. Lara said she felt as if she were dissolving in an ocean of love. Krishna said the love was so palpable you could cut it like a slice of cake. Peter said he knew something important had happened but he didn’t yet know what.

‘I hesitate to share,’ said Oriane with a sigh. ‘I always hesitate in my life and now I hesitate to share because I don’t want to sound negative. This morning when I hoover the carpet I cry because I am so happy to be a slave, no, not a slave, a servant, but I am so happy not to make decisions. It’s incredible what this group has shown me. I have a therapist for many years but he never show me how much I hate myself. This week I have seen how much I hate myself and I am very shock.’

Xana said she wished she’d had a mother who was as heartfelt and enthusiastic as Oriane, and Oriane burst into tears.

Krishna explained that they would end with a dance, as they had begun. He taught them the steps of another simple dance and Lolita, after putting Pachelbel’s
Canon
on the sound system, ran from behind the controls to join the others.

The group started to step slowly round in a circle, holding hands, each person in his place and then each person in everyone else’s place. The sun was setting through the bay windows of the room they had met in all week. It seemed to sink under the weight of the baroque melancholy wrung from the speakers. No longer inhibited, Peter circled around effortlessly. Tears fell from Oriane’s eyes and from all the other eyes as well. There was nothing to hold them back.

Peter knew all about their failed marriages, and their sick children, and their heartless mothers and their high ambitions, and they knew that he was a romantic and demented figure under his banker’s garb. He would probably never see any of them again, but they were webbed together for ever by the emotional pressure of the week, and their connections would be preserved in some other dimension like the veins of a petrified leaf.

It was not that they had made friends, like holidaymakers bonding by a poolside, but that strangers had found a way of cutting directly through to intimacy, without the meanderings of social life or the precarious exclusivities of sex. Flowing through the room, along with the music and the tears, was the conviction that this was how people were meant to live, with nothing left to hide. The idea that all human beings could be loved had always struck Peter as either an unappetizing journey to a subbasement of species loyalty, or a rumour started by a Sunday school. Now it seemed to him to be the ground of all relations. Everything had been complicated and wrong; now it was simple and right.

Peter tried to restrain this delinquent effusion of goodwill, but it was no use. He was shining with conviction and, besides, the self which might have made sceptical judgements and qualifications was changing so fast that there was no position from which to make them. At the same time he kept meeting people who presented combinations of qualities which the outside world had lazily encouraged him to think of as mutually exclusive, people who were inarticulate and interesting, vulnerable and strong, unsuccessful and contented.

When it was time to leave, Peter threw his air ticket away and decided to return to London by night train so he could have a final drink in the pub with the group. Although after the closing ceremony there was a strangely awkward and anticlimactic quality to this meeting, Peter promised himself that this was just the sort of flexible behaviour that would characterize his life from now on.

In any case, he started to remember the excitement he felt as a child on the two occasions he had travelled by night train with his parents. He could suddenly picture how exhilarated he was by the crowded panel of light switches and air vents, by the concealed basin, and the clanging chains wrapped around the wheels for the Channel crossing, the blind that lowered on darkened countryside and sprang up again on startlingly new landscapes, with mountain torrents thin as threads of smoke, or umbrella pines that arched over a sea rippling with the reflection of an orange cliff, like blue silk set on fire.

When he booked his ticket he was told that the dining car wouldn’t be attached until Edinburgh, but there would be a trolley service available at the front of the train. Instead of feeling disillusioned, Pachelbel’s music still circled solemnly in his memory, keeping him on the cusp of an elated poignancy. He hadn’t found Sabine Wald, but he was no longer suspicious of the world she moved in, and he decided to continue his search for her, only stopping briefly in London. Fiona wouldn’t be pleased, but she would preserve that air of martyrdom which seemed to design her for disappointment.

Still feeling spontaneous, Peter decided that before he left the hotel he would call Gavin, who had played such a strangely insistent role in his thoughts during the week.

He got through to Gavin’s extension, but Gavin didn’t answer.

‘I’m afraid Gavin’s not here,’ said Tony Henderson.

‘When’s he back?’ asked Peter.

‘Look, you obviously haven’t heard, so I’d better tell you straight out,’ said Tony. ‘Gavin’s topped himself.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘Apparently it was a chemical imbalance. He had too much lithium, or too little lithium, or something.’

‘Of all people.’

‘I know.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘Bloody unpleasant, actually,’ said Tony. ‘He stabbed himself in the heart. Not how I’d choose to go,’ he added discriminatingly.

‘Christ,’ said Peter.

‘The trouble was he didn’t do it very well,’ said Tony. ‘There were a couple of stubbed-out cigarettes in the pool of blood next to him. Passing the time while he waited to bleed to death. Poor old Gavin, he always said he’d rather die than give up smoking,’ added Tony, for whom this remark was already established as an office joke.

Peter could say nothing to match its levity.

‘We looked into his computer,’ Tony went on. ‘There was a bit of a scare that he might have been doing something silly with other people’s funds, but all we found was that he’d printed out page after page covered in zeros. Very symbolic, really.’

‘Yes.’

Peter sat on the edge of his hotel bed for several minutes, staring at the carpet. Was it Gavin’s suicide that had made him think about him so often during the week? Had Gavin been haunting him? It was a far-fetched but irresistible idea. Would Oriane, he wondered with a sudden spasm of bitterness, have claimed that a hundred pages of zeros made a sacred number? No, he knew Oriane now, what was he thinking? Was he angry with Gavin for reminding him of buried moments during his adolescence when he’d longed to kill himself? Why hadn’t he? Was it because it was even more difficult than not doing so? Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that was all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death. Perhaps Gavin, behind the camouflage of his ridiculous slang, had never acquired that vital habit, had never stopped being excruciated.

Realizing he must tell Fiona that he would only be passing through London briefly, Peter called her from the train. He swayed from side to side in the carpeted cubicle, watching the credit hurtle down on his phonecard.

‘Awful about Gavin committing sui,’ said Fiona.

‘Doing what?’ said Peter.

‘Committing suicide.’

‘Did you say “committing sui”?’

‘Yes, I suppose I did,’ said Fiona uneasily.

Peter was silent. Somehow the full horror of Gavin’s life being cut short was unveiled by Fiona’s cosy abbreviation.

‘He didn’t seem the type,’ Fiona soldiered on.

‘The type?’ said Peter. ‘What type? We could all do it any time.’

‘I
suppose
so,’ said Fiona with a reluctance that was at once exaggerated and frivolous, as if she had been asked to play croquet on a particularly wet lawn. ‘Isn’t it usually intellectual types who do it, or real proper loonies?’

‘The intellectuals probably buy another black polo neck instead,’ said Peter, realizing he wouldn’t have said anything so silly except to Fiona.

‘Shall I stick my head in the oven or buy another polo neck?’ she guffawed.

‘Listen, I’m not going to be spending much time in London. In fact I’m going to be flying out before the weekend.’

‘But we’re going to Daddy’s.’

‘I know. I’ll just have to cancel.’

‘It’s a bit late to chuck.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not giving me the old heave-ho, are you?’ said Fiona, with a sudden burst of vulnerability as grating as a missed gear.

‘God, no,’ said Peter, ‘I’m just…’ he searched for the right phrase, and then he remembered Gavin’s formula, ‘just going walkabout.’

‘Men!’ said Fiona, and he could hear her eyeballs rolling skywards.

That night Peter could not sleep in his airless berth. He didn’t bother to lower the blind as the train screeched its way into the crowded south. The bunk, which had been so perfect for an eight-year-old, no longer suited him, and he couldn’t abandon himself to playing with the light switches any more.

The rhythm of the train cajoled him into a mysteriously pensive insomnia. Had Gavin’s suicide been a momentary madness, or a long-postponed rebuttal of an unbearable suffering? Was suicide the most courageous and authentic thing he had ever done? Why had Peter learned about Gavin’s suicide just when he was so elated and open to life?