12

Some people said, ‘Be here now,’ but what Brooke said was, ‘You’re always missing something.’

Here she was in an absolutely fascinating Rumi class, but she could be doing something else absolutely fascinating instead. She knew that Crystal Bukowski was at Esalen doing an exciting-sounding meditation workshop. Brooke was no stranger to meditation, she had built the most beautiful, completely authentic zendo in the garden of her summer place in Rhode Island. She even sent the architect to Kyoto to study the whole thing and get every detail right.

What finally convinced her that she was in the right place, that most elusive category of all, that spot you could never find at a party, was the secret thought that she was in a room with two men who, God forbid they should think she thought so, were on her staff.

Adam was a star, an absolute star, on her staff. And Kenneth was a complete failure, on her staff. The sinister thing (where was Dr Bukowski when you really needed him?) was that she had grown much fonder of Kenneth since his compromising admission of failure. Pathetic, downtrodden, powerless, he was only a step away from being completely perfect.

The wonderful thing about Adam was that he made Rumi so relevant. She had thought to begin with that he might be a little too homocentric, if that was a word, but she had soon substituted the permissive thrill of imagining she liked his introductory refrain, ‘Through the grace of the Divine Mother and the love of my husband…’

Her initial recoil from the suggestion that she see sperm as holy water was swept away by the thought that the comparison would have annoyed her own far from Divine mother. It also would have failed to make her mother think of sperm as any more sacred – for that, Adam would have had to compare it to a mint julep.

Both Adam and Rumi were fond of culinary comparisons. Rumi had said, ‘My poetry is like Egyptian bread.’ Brooke, who had been to Egypt, couldn’t help regretting this news. Apparently what Rumi had meant was that you had to eat it straight away, whereas Brooke felt that you shouldn’t touch it at all. Luckily the Johnsons, who were the most thoughtful hosts you could possibly imagine, had croissants flown in from Paris every day. They appeared miraculously at breakfast as their boat throbbed down the Nile, past the fundamentalist children gesticulating on the ragged banks. Poor Rumi probably never tasted a croissant. Anyhow, the point about the Egyptian bread was the same as what Blake meant when he said you had to kiss joy ‘as it flies’ in order to live in ‘Eternity’s sunrise’. She was learning so much.

Then Adam had said you had to seal the vessel of love with fidelity, that it was like making a good soup. Although there were no dogmas, you had to be faithful to one person for the rest of your life, and stay on your knees adoring God through that person. Once you were doing that, there was no room for any more dogmas.

Kenneth took notes discreetly in the back of Adam’s class. ‘Stop complaining and start contemplating; stop rebelling and start co-creating,’ he wrote.

Life was complicated; sometimes hypocrites and even idiots said things that were true. He was a hypocrite himself, so he ought to know. His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death. Adam’s case brought out all his new agonies of self-reproach. If only Brooke had been nasty to him, he could have hidden his failure in retaliation and escape.

Instead, here he was, Kenneth Shine – even his name was false – the former ‘ambience director’ of the Blind Parrots, a group whose ambience was more celebrated than anything else about them, sitting beside his patroness to whom he had sold himself as a New Age Prometheus, proposing to steal the forbidden fire of every spiritual fad anybody had ever thought of and stoke it into a single inferno of wisdom, but failing in fact to produce a single word. And here was Adam Frazer, whom he had always billed as a total fraud, turning out to be an unreliable soprano, occasionally hitting an unmistakably high note amid the shuddering props, gushing orchestration and weird melodrama of his performance.

What made the horn of Kenneth’s paranoia overflow completely were the attacks on fake gurus and New Age thinking which sometimes erupted from Adam’s tutorials on the incomprehensible splendour of Divine love.

‘It’s time for all of us to grow up,’ Adam was saying, pausing like a nanny who wishes to show that her own tantrums are more terrifying than anything her little charges could manage. Kenneth prickled with unease.

‘You don’t need complicated mantras, all that’s bullshit too. The Divine is always listening to the soft whisper of your heart…’

Or, in my case, thought Kenneth, the loud scream.

‘I used to go and visit an old Sufi,’ said Adam, ‘who lived in a small room with lots of books, and always had a bowl of fresh roses in the corner, and one day he said to me, “You know of course that Rumi and Shams were lovers?” And I said, “Of course they were lovers, they met at the highest point of the soul where hearts fuse, and their souls became one…” And he said, “Yes, but you know that they were lovers.” And I said, “Yes, at that level there’s no body any more…” And he said, “My dear Adam, go over to that bowl and take the rose out of the bowl” – I was completely confused by this point – and so I took the rose, this great big open red rose, and he said, “Smell the rose and tell me if it’s physical or spiritual.” I just took the rose and something very strong happened which I can’t put into words, and the full impact of that rose exploded all over my body and my soul and I realized the shattering stupidity of separating soul and body.

‘This is the secret that is being given to the whole human race now, which we’re at last adult enough to receive. Not the pasteurized, patriarchal version which splits off the spirit and the body, but the full secret of the full human Divine experience.

‘If you want to see the light that is streaming from everything,’ Adam incanted, ‘if you want to see the light streaming from your lover’s body, then you must be in a naked state of adoration and gratitude. If you want a rose to speak its secret name when you gaze at it; and if you want to be fed in dreams and visions; and if you want to feel with every second you spend on this earth that you are a Divine being; if you want that experience and it’s the only experience you want, because all the rest is pointless bullshit and vanity and stupidity and ego; if you want that experience, the Beloved asks only one thing – it doesn’t ask that you be brilliant, it doesn’t ask that you write three hundred and fifty books…’

Just as well, thought Kenneth.

‘… it doesn’t ask that you live on a glass of orange juice,’ said Adam, ‘and stand on one leg and mortify and torture yourself in the Himalayas. All those things are too easy. Anybody can adopt a few forms, anybody can have a discipline that makes them feel good about themselves. All that is bullshit!’ he screamed. ‘The Beloved, who created all of this, is asking only one thing of us: that we become one love.

‘Don’t think it’s easy, because it’s not easy. It’s simple but it’s not easy. It demands one very important thing of us, it demands humility, always being on your knees…’

Funny how ‘our’ turned into ‘your’ with the mention of knees, thought Kenneth. Standing on one leg is bullshit but being on your knees is crucial. Posture remains an important issue.

Kenneth was pleased with the sharpness of his observation, and with the joke of hearing Adam promote humility, and yet at the same time he was uneasily impressed by Adam’s passion. How could he split himself off so consummately from what he was saying? In the end there was no substitute for self-deception, Kenneth reflected enviously; it left insincerity standing, or kneeling, on the starting line.

‘The Sufis say that there’s a gate for each one of us,’ Adam continued, ‘through which each one of us can enter into the garden of Eden, but the shape of that gate is the shape you make when you’re on your knees. You can’t get through it standing up and you can’t get through it jogging; no guru can take you through it, you have to go through it yourself, on your knees.

‘All these philosophies which have been patriarchal and destructive have said that the point is to get out of here. What an absurd idea to be told that you’re just a pathetic little worm trapped in a million lives of bad karma, brought to this appalling Earth which is nothing but illusion, darkness, suffering and disaster, and the only thing you can do is scourge yourself and batter yourself and purify – never forget that word purify!

‘This is not an illusion,’ wailed Adam, pointing to the pretty view out of the window. ‘This is a masterpiece of the Divine. The Beloved is looking at the Beloved through your eyes. Ramakrishna says that knowledge will get you into the courtyard, but only adoration will get you into the bedroom. Poetry is the sign saying “This way to the bedroom”.’

The bedroom, thought Brooke, that was another place where she might be having a wonderful time.

‘Adoration is the opposite of capitalism,’ said Adam. ‘In capitalism, the more money you spend, the more money you lose. In adoration, the more love you give, the more you feel. The soul’s extravagance is endlessly returned…’

Now that was the kind of investment adviser she really needed! God was great, there was nothing he didn’t do better than everyone else. And yet it was Kenneth, sweating with guilt and probably plagiarizing Adam’s pronouncements, who was in danger of securing her adoration.

‘The Divine wants you to have the whole thing,’ said Adam. ‘Not just a banana…’

A banana? thought Brooke. That certainly wouldn’t be a good return on your adoration investment.

A banana? thought Kenneth. Why not at least say ‘the Presidency’? What catastrophic prompting of the unconscious had led Adam to say ‘banana’? The guy was losing it, thought Kenneth gleefully.

Kenneth and Brooke looked at each other and frowned.

‘The elite, the hierarchies, have not worked,’ said Adam. ‘We’re twenty years away from extinguishing life on this planet. There are people who know all the facts about the forests, there are corporations that know exactly what they’re doing, and still sit swilling Château Lafite, on their electrical chairs, in their Armani suits, discussing how to kill the peasants so they can get their land…’

They didn’t sound that elite, thought Brooke, in their Armani suits. And Adam sounded as if he’d be happy to see them in another sort of electrical chair, being turned into little wisps of smoke.

Kenneth yawned. The trouble with the end of the world was that it was taking so long, it was difficult to hold anyone’s attention. He definitely wasn’t going to mention it in his book.

‘Clearly what is needed at this time is a massive infusion of love into the heart of the world, a vast awakening in everybody of a deep, deep ecstatic connection with the body, and with Nature and with each other, because if we don’t have that connection with bodies and nature and each other, we won’t do everything we can to save the planet. We’ll be sitting on our futons when the last tree is burnt down, saying all this is an illusion, and actually choking to death. It’ll be that stupid.’

‘Adam,’ said a woman with a French accent.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t feel comfortable with you saying … well, you can say what you want…’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t quite agree with “Everything else is bullshit”. Because you’ve been through it and so now you can see that it’s bullshit, but for those who want to go through it, that’s OK.’

‘Oh, I agree, I’m just trying to point out that it may be a waste of time,’ laughed Adam. ‘I’m just trying to transmit something.’ He paused.

Thinks that ‘transmit’ makes him sound too much like a guru, thought Kenneth. He’s cornering himself.

‘I think you have to be very aware,’ Adam resumed, ‘of how the ego can entrap you in another game. I think you have to be very aware of how the ego can appropriate the image of the seeker as one of its theatrical roles. I think you have to be extremely aware that you can fabricate experiences for yourself, experiences that you think of as Divine visions. I think you have to be very aware that there’s something hilarious in the whole enterprise of seeking something which you already are.’

Kenneth watched Adam leap from his guru corner on the spring of rhetoric, saw him stiffen with confidence as he regained his audience of seekers by recalling them to these sensible precautions.

‘Unless your seeking has that continual subversive humour, unless it has that continual self-awareness, unless it has that humility about its potential vanity, arrogance and silliness,’ roared Adam, ‘then you’re going to be trapped by seeking and you’re going to be trapped by every other activity.’

‘And being a lover too,’ said the Frenchwoman.

What an annoying woman, thought Brooke. Why doesn’t she just let Adam fly? He’s such a star, and he’s on my staff.

‘Exactly,’ said Adam. ‘I wrote a book claiming that this woman who is half crazy is the Divine Mother, simply because I was having real experiences which I was projecting on to her. It’s very hard to grow up, and most of us avoid it as long as possible, because then you have total responsibility, and you have to look at all the things in yourself which don’t want the real truth but want magical solutions.’

‘What made you realize that your guru was half mad?’ asked the Frenchwoman.

‘Well, simply when she sat down and said you’ve got to get rid of Yves, and become a heterosexual, and write a book about how the force of the Divine Mother has transformed you into a heterosexual, because homosexuals play no part in the future of the Divine Mother. It doesn’t reek of the holiest of wisdom, and I realized that she was mad and that she was vicious and controlling and very frightened of Yves because he’s very truthful and could see everything.’

‘Why do you think it took you so long to see that?’

‘Because I’m a fool, darling, and you are, and we all are,’ snapped Adam. ‘I think a lot of the relationship with the Master is a rewriting of the family romance,’ he continued more sweetly. ‘I had a disastrous relationship with my own mother which took me years to uncover. I thought I was choosing the exact opposite to her, but in fact I was choosing the same person.’

He’s so compellingly honest, thought Kenneth, so impressively passionate, but honest and passionate about what? It might just be the latest confusion, the latest defence against the delusion before last.

‘I think that what I went through is what the whole of the New Age is going through,’ said Adam. ‘I now believe that the guru system is over. The dribble of scandals about gurus is going to turn into a monsoon. We wanted transformation on the cheap – naughty us. I had a partial awakening through the power of adoration, but I was very lucky because at a moment when I was about to go round the world announcing my guru, the Divine Mother revealed to me that she was not real. If I’d gone forward I would have been locked into a system of my own creation. So the whole thing was broken by the real Mother at a very important point, to help me to get free and also to help me discover the direct path.

‘The New Age has been in some ways a good thing,’ Adam went on. ‘It’s opened people up to this whole new area, but it’s usually been done in the context of the old Western ego that wants to appropriate and wants to possess. Now that God is fashionable, everybody is talking about God, but as soon as God stops being fashionable in five or ten years, and Stalin becomes fashionable, everybody will be wearing Stalin jackets.’

Not everybody, thought Brooke proudly.

Not a bad idea, thought Kenneth. It just might work.

‘This is not a fashion,’ said Adam; ‘this is the final call to wake up. We have to travel through the narcissistic phase of the New Age, the absorption with beautiful bodies and living a long time, and having your perfect aura, and seeing visions and all the rest of it, very fast, because all that’s child’s stuff, and we have to get to being spiritual adults, real Divine children, who are seeing quite clearly, without any consolation, the desperation of a world hurtling towards catastrophe, the horror that we could be about to enter, the horror of injustice and the holocaust of nature, and seeing it without panic and without fear, because you’re rooting yourself, as Rumi suggests, in Divine Love.

‘I think it’s very important to look at how some people have acted in final situations, in Auschwitz for example. Unless we’re all armed with vitality and courage and heaven-may-care heartfulness, we’re going to be reduced to screaming animals.’

Adam shuddered to a pause and began to cry.

‘The whales have got AIDS, the whales.’ Tears flowed down his cheeks.

He was rehearsing this at my dinner party, thought Brooke. You get so much more than just Rumi in an Adam Rumi class.

‘If you’ve ever seen a whale up close, you know that you’re in the presence of God, you know that it is the representation on earth of the Divine Mother. They’re so incredibly beautiful and intelligent. To think that the whales are dying because we’re so selfish and so cruel and so stupid is so unbearable. And it should be unbearable, it’s properly unbearable.’

Adam paused, and resumed in a steadier voice. ‘We must let it become unbearable. Not because we’re pain queens, and hysterical, but because we’re slowly learning to become responsible.

‘We could say, like some of these fashionable gurus, that it’s all an illusion and so don’t let it get to you, but the whole point of the mystical path is to let it get to you,’ he roared angrily.

‘This is what it means,’ he said, his voice changing to pleading, ‘to arrive here, to let your heart break. There is no otherwhere that we’re going to; this is the Divine world, and we are the children of the Divine, and it’s because we haven’t recognized that, and because we’ve invented elsewheres and otherwheres, that we haven’t had the supreme beautiful experience that Rumi is talking about.

‘Rumi says there comes a point in the search when you’re not seeking, you’re being hunted. That’s the most wonderful moment of all, when you wake up to the fact that you think you’ve been seeking, but in fact the Divine has been appearing in your coma, shaking you, dancing around you, making funny noises, giving you the odd illness and heartbreak, hoping that you’ll wake up to its presence.’

What funny noises? thought Brooke.

Funny noises? thought Kenneth.

‘There’s a lovely story about a priest who went to see Ramakrishna,’ said Adam. ‘And he found a very peculiar-looking man leaping up in a field like a rabbit, surrounded by rabbits. And he thought, this is probably the village idiot, but he might be able to direct me, and he asked, “Where is the great swami, the illumined one, the child of the Divine Mother, Ramakrishna?”

‘And of course it was Ramakrishna, and he was actually lying in the grass, and he was talking in rabbit language to the baby rabbits, and what he was saying was, “You’re very silly baby rabbits,”’ Adam lisped, ‘“because over there are baby snakes and you think they’re rabbits, but they’re not rabbits they’re snakes. Don’t go and play with the snakes because they’re going to kill you. Do you understand?” And the rabbits said, “Yes.”

‘And then he lay down with the baby snakes and said, “I love you and you’re right to be snakes, Mother made you snakes, but you’re not to kill those baby rabbits. You’re cleverer than they are and you know they think you’re rabbits and it’s very naughty and you must stop it.”’

This guy’s got more voices than a jukebox, thought Kenneth.

‘There he was,’ Adam resumed in a voice which had discarded its copy of Peter Rabbit: ‘he wasn’t in the lotus position, he wasn’t emanating peace, he wasn’t collecting cheques for being enlightened. He was in the space of total love, and he was protecting the baby rabbits from the snakes, so he was honouring both of them.’

What were the snakes supposed to do, thought Kenneth, in a fit of compassion, become vegetarians? Or were the mice they ate not made by Mother?

‘When you hear stories like that you realize you’re having such a limited experience. Here we are trapped in our identities, in our clothes, in our vanities, in our plans, in our projects, in our disciplines, in our dogmas. But the Divine itself is extremely humble, that’s the point we always miss – the Divine is so humble that it appears in a ladybird. We’re so busy thinking about the sixteen types of emptiness that we don’t notice that this thing we’re brushing off our sleeve is God.’

In that case the sleeve it’s being brushed off is God’s, thought Brooke with relief, a bigger God’s.

‘Here is a poem that really speaks to this condition. Rumi is really giving us the neat vodka in this poem.

‘“In that moment you are drunk on yourself, you are prey to a mosquito…”

‘Everything is too much,’ Adam explained. ‘Oh, I’m feeling too neurotic to go into town today; oh, I’m feeling too desperate to go and feed the poor. “In that moment you leap free of yourself, you go elephant hunting…”

‘I love that line. Anything is possible.

‘I remember seeing a programme about Mother Teresa in Lebanon. LE-BA-NON. Everybody killing everybody else, because they’re all in such a drunken rage. Mother Teresa arrived and said, “Well, actually, across the valley there is an orphanage of spastic children, and tomorrow I’m going to get all those children out.”

‘And all the military authorities said, “You’re nuts! Do you realize that if you even walk out of that door you will probably be shot? Leave those children be, and if they’re all going to die, that’s fine. You’re going to walk through ten miles of enemy territory, and how do you even know that they’re alive?”

‘And she answered, “I’m going to ask God for those children, and I’m going to get what I want.” And the next day there was a ceasefire and she and a few old Lebanese ladies walked those ten miles and they took those spastic children out, and every one of them was saved, because she was mad enough to say, “I don’t buy your logic.”’ Adam shook with contempt.

‘“I don’t buy it,”’ he went on, calmed by his discharge. ‘There is another rule, there is another law, and there is another power than your pathetic little games. And that power is the Divine power, and love can call upon it, and she could, because she was humble enough and awake enough.

‘If you are on the side of love you can change the world – one person.’

The room became silent.

Brooke was crying. She didn’t quite know why, but all her other thoughts had disappeared and she was suddenly overwhelmed by pity and relief. Someone had gone in and saved the children. It was so moving.

Kenneth looked at the effect Adam had created. Life was complicated. Sometimes Adam could shift the whole room by invoking the perspective of an absolute truth, but he was such an unreliable witness to that truth. His slash-and-burn, rave-and-squabble progress filled the air with the smoky perfume of burning bridges. But then, Kenneth pushed his logic forward, he, Kenneth, was such an unreliable witness of Adam’s unreliability. And who was the reliable witness of his judgement of Adam? What was the value of these judgements we all spent our time formulating so carefully? It was like one raindrop trying to estimate the position of another raindrop as they fell together through space.

‘Last year I came to a moment when everything was falling completely apart,’ Adam resumed. ‘We were being persecuted and divided and had no sex for nine months. It was a horrible, horrific story. I had told the truth about my guru and I had the demonic force of all the disciples against me. I thought we’d be murdered, and then a voice said, “Even if you die, the fact that you are trying to bear witness to the truth of life will mean that in invisible occult ways anybody who stands for truth will be fed by you, even if you’re killed, even if people believe the worst of you, it doesn’t matter, stand for life anyway. Get annihilated…”’

Get annihilated? Is this still ‘the voice’? Kenneth wondered.

‘“… that standing, even if you’re defeated, puts you in the eternal order, not in the order of the world.”’

Oh, so standing is good, thought Kenneth, who was getting hungry. It’s just standing on one leg which is bullshit. Standing and kneeling are good. He’ll be walking next; a proud moment. And what about that ‘eternal order’, sounds like an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘otherwhere’? Is this a man looking at life ‘without consolation’? Kenneth’s blood sugar plummeted.

‘Christ was, after all, in wordly terms, defeated…’

‘Christ, now he thinks he’s Christ,’ muttered Kenneth.

Brooke smiled at him enquiringly. Kenneth smiled back obediently.

‘… defeated in this dimension, but the act of standing for what he believed really transformed our vision of life.

‘There’s an astonishing new discovery,’ Adam continued excitedly, ‘that, in Aramaic, Christ is punning with the last words he spoke on the Cross. They could mean, as they’re traditionally translated, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” But the very word which means “forsaken” in Aramaic could mean, wait for it, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou glorified me?” The pun gives us the clue to the whole inner nature of the Crucifixion. The ultimate dignity comes from the total embrace of that abandonment, that’s the paradox.

‘Real mystic alchemy is not a game, because you’re dealing with the fundamental powers of the universe. It’s very, very difficult, because what’s trying to be born between two people on that path isn’t Shams and Rumi, but Shrumi or Rams. That’s why Rumi often signs the poetry Shams, because he genuinely didn’t know, he’d crossed over, they’d done it, Rumi was transformed by Shams and Shams was transformed by Rumi, and Shrams wrote the poetry.’

‘Adam?’ asked a middle-aged woman in a grey tracksuit and thick white socks. ‘Is Yves your Shams?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam calmly.

Shall we call him Adamy or Yvam? Kenneth pondered. Or perhaps Jesus Shramdric? Or Mother Jesus Yvansham? Or The Gloriously Forsaken Mother Jesus Ramashramydam? Weak with hunger, Kenneth started to laugh silently but uncontrollably.

‘This is a new model,’ Adam resumed. ‘The tragedy of the guru disciple thing is that the guru isn’t implicated, whereas in this relationship both go to another stage of love and discover the non-duality which occurs when both beings are fused. And that’s what Shrumi is communicating.’

Kenneth had a coughing fit and had to leave the room.

‘The only comparable relationship is a young child,’ Adam confessed. ‘I mean, when you’re a mother and that child is in pain, all the therapists in the world can tell you to be detached but you can’t sleep: the suffering comes from this immense identification with the other person. You’re not in any kind of theatre in that love, you’re not on any kind of stage, you’re not posing, you’re deprived of all the normal games by which people control each other and control themselves.

‘Really, what goes on is that Shams says, “You fool, don’t you understand what’s at stake? Stop it.” And Rumi has a nervous breakdown which is exactly what he needs, because he has to have that breakdown to get to the next stage. And Shams then leaves because Rumi has to be broken by that leaving. This would look to a normal San Francisco therapist like madness. They have all sorts of fancy names like co-dependency and sado-masochism. They wouldn’t be anywhere near what was going on in the relationship, because what’s actually going on is atomic fusion, nuclear fusion.’

‘Do we have to have a nervous breakdown too?’ asked the woman in the grey tracksuit.

‘No, no, no. Bless you. You may be lucky enough to have a harmonious relationship, and that may be a karmic gift.’

‘Add children to this dynamic, Adam, and it’s totally different. You can’t afford to do this stuff if you have children. These two guys didn’t have to deal with children.’

‘Of course they didn’t, but they had to deal with homophobia. Try homophobia, darling.’

‘Why do you think the disciples were so vicious?’ asked the Frenchwoman.

‘I think they were freaked out that Rumi, who they were projecting on as a Master, suddenly appears as a person shattered by love, crying and unable to organize his experience. And then he was with Shams, this utter nutcase who is obviously going through something immense. They don’t want a Divine experience, they want security, and so they do absolutely everything to stop it, out of a mixture of fear, panic, anxiety, rage at other people’s happiness, incredible self-accusation at not feeling as much as other people, and hatred of beauty – don’t underestimate that: I think we all have it. And so on, and so on, we’re all in this game of comparison.’

Kenneth tiptoed back into the room, looking studiously solemn.

‘But let’s not dwell on all of that,’ sighed Adam. ‘After all, is there anything more sublime in the world than sitting with a group of friends thinking about these things, in a place as incredibly sacred and radiant as this place has been for centuries and centuries. Being here with you I feel gratitude for the Earth, immense gratitude for the Sun. I feel affection for everyone that I’m looking at, because I know that everyone is sincere and searching and Rumi is the great wine-pourer, and something wonderful is going to happen whether we like it or not. We’re in the hands of powers greater than ourselves.’

There was a murmur of appreciation from the room.

‘Let’s end with a poem. I might try to sing it for you…’

‘Uhmm,’ said several people encouragingly.

‘“Those tender words we spoke to one another,

They will be stored in the secret heart of Love,

And one day,

And one day,”’

Adam repeated the line, belting it out at top volume.

‘“They will fall like rain,

And the whole earth will be made green

With our love.”’

Cheers and applause rose from the audience.

‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ purred Adam. ‘The springtime is coming, the real springtime, and this is the agony of childbirth.

‘I love you all,’ said Adam, hurrying towards the door like a man expecting to be mobbed. ‘And I’ll see you at four o’clock.’

Brooke dashed after him. She had arranged a special lunch for herself and Adam, Kenneth and Yves.

‘Let’s not dawdle,’ said Adam, ‘or they’ll all come and ask me to read their poems. How was I?’

‘Brilliant,’ panted Brooke, trying to keep up.