3

‘Is there any chance of your going back to Kleinwort’s?’ sighed Mrs Thorpe.

‘I don’t know,’ said Peter, to whom it seemed rather less likely than an invasion from Sirius. Kleinwort’s was utterly remote to him at the moment. Over the last few days the rest of the world had receded like clouds melting in the heat of an atomic blast. He didn’t dare tell his mother that he’d forgotten her telephone number.

‘You must be running out of money,’ she said hopefully.

‘Not yet.’

‘You can’t just say you don’t know,’ said Mrs Thorpe.

‘Even if it’s the truth?’

‘But I don’t think it is true, not deep down.’

‘You mean the deepest thing about me is my potential re-employment by a merchant bank?’

‘You sound so different,’ said his mother. ‘You used to plan for the future.’

‘Well, just now I’m trying to live in the present.’

‘That’s what animals do, darling, we’ve got minds.’

‘And what are they for? Buying life insurance?’

‘I can’t make out whether they’ve turned you into a socialist or a Moonie,’ said Mrs Thorpe.

Peter looked out of the telephone booth. The Pacific, sparkling among the dark branches of a cedar tree, made him pause long enough to disarm.

‘You’re probably right in a way. I don’t really know what I’m up to,’ he said. ‘We’re all so fragmented, perhaps we can never know ourselves as a whole.’

‘Are you all right?’ said Mrs Thorpe, her opposition replaced for a moment by maternal concern. ‘You’re not cracking up, are you?’

‘No, I mean, I had this strange feeling the other day. Maybe I felt whole then, or maybe it was just a new bit of me emerging.’

‘You are cracking up,’ said Mrs Thorpe, no longer in any doubt.

They fell silent for a moment and then Mrs Thorpe bravely resumed.

‘Fiona rang. I had to admit that I had no idea how to get hold of you. I don’t think she believed me, which is absolutely maddening because as you know I think she’s perfect for you. She blames that Findhorn Foundation. What I can’t understand is why you went there in the first place.’

‘To get away from Fiona for one thing,’ said Peter.

‘Well, you didn’t have to go to a Moonie place, you could have gone on one of my Serenissima Tours. They’re such fun. We’re going to look at castles on the banks of the Danube next month.’

‘If you really want to know, I was also pursuing another woman.’

‘Cherchez la femme!’ said Mrs Thorpe.

‘That’s exactly what I was trying to do. We only spent three days together but I’ve never been so happy in my life. Then she just disappeared saying nobody owned anybody else.’ Peter watched Brad lolloping past the phone booth in a faded pink T-shirt.

‘Hey, Peter,’ said Brad.

Peter waved at Brad. ‘I had no desire to own her,’ he went on explaining to his mother. ‘I just wanted to hang with her.’

‘Hang?’ said Mrs Thorpe, vaguely remembering a disgusting article about American adolescents who hanged themselves in the shower for sexual titillation.

‘Oh, it’s just an expression they use here, an abbreviation for hanging out – you know, spending time with someone.’

‘Well, it should be abolished,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘How long do you propose to go sleuthing after this inveigling woman? Sex isn’t everything, you know. I learned that from your father. If you went back to Kleinwort’s you could get a private detective to find her. When he succeeds you’ll be able to pop out and join her. Frankly, she doesn’t sound that keen anyway.’

‘She was very keen at the time, that’s the puzzle. Anyhow I haven’t got a photograph of her and I don’t know her last name, so the detective would have to be a psychic.’

‘I’m sure there’s no shortage of those in the circles you move in these days,’ said Mrs Thorpe, pronouncing the word ‘circles’ with cool irony. ‘Do you make a habit of going to bed with women whose last names you don’t know? As you know I’m not easily shocked…’

‘But you’re easily shocked…’

‘No, no, I realize that standards change, I just wish they sometimes changed for the better.’

‘Listen, I’m running out of money,’ said Peter, ignoring the heaps of change scattered on the wooden ledge under the phone.

‘Are you going to tell me where you are?’

‘At Esalen.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A personal growth centre. I know…’

‘It sounds like something a doctor should have a look at,’ giggled Mrs Thorpe.

‘Ah, there goes my last coin,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll call you soon.’

He was not surprised that his mother found it hard to understand the changes he’d been through in the last four months; he found it even harder, despite the advantage of having lived through them himself. She at least rested in the certainty of her disapproval, whereas he was at once disapproving and overwhelmingly grateful, flooded with a new sincerity and convinced, sometimes by the same sincerity, that he must be deceived.

His life had been a forced march through the Cotswolds of English respectability, interspersed with periods of equally brutal idleness among the same irreproachable hills. Now everything was in doubt. His pursuit of Sabine seemed to have translated him to a Himalayan landscape where the sublime and the ridiculous alternated with horrifying suddenness. His feet could freeze while his face burnt. He sometimes found himself gasping beyond the tree line of everything reassuring and familiar, but the view from those rocky slopes made him reluctant to accept the bribes of homecoming, those dripping oaks and bleating sheep, the gusts of warm stale air in the underground on his way to work, the reiterated sense of belonging. Without knowing what it would mean to look on the world nakedly, he knew that he had never done so. The cataracts of habit and conditioning clouded his eyes; the world he looked on seemed to have been wrapped by a demented florist in swirl after swirl of noisy and distorting cellophane.

He had always been too busy to daydream, except about unexpected sex and unexpected promotion. Everyone had time for that. Peter heaved himself up, stepped out of the phone booth and ambled down to the Pacific with his hands in his trouser pockets.

When he’d met Sabine on a banking trip to Germany, and actually had some unexpected sex, he’d made the mistake of telling Gavin about it, in Gavin’s terminology.

‘Met a really stunning German girl, physically, apart from anything else, really stunning.’

‘Jammy bastard,’ said Gavin.

Gavin was an acquaintance of his from school who had been so struck by twice belonging to the same institution as Peter that he’d prophesied they would become ‘bloody good mates’ at the bank. Although Gavin’s dinner parties in Parson’s Green, with their smoked-trout mousses, and the weekends playing Monopoly for real money left Peter cold, he had fallen in for a while with Gavin’s fantasy of friendship, through the same combination of resignation and vague reluctance to cause offence which had determined most of his social life.

‘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.

The circle was the sun, Ulrike explained, and each person was a sunbeam. ‘We will dance the sun meditation and maybe the sun will come out,’ she smiled.

Fat chance, thought Peter.

Ulrike asked everyone to look at each other while they danced.

The music from the St Matthew Passion swelled from a ghetto-blaster in the corner. They started to move in a simple step, looking by turns into each other’s eyes, trying to move harmoniously round the room.

Peter looked at Lolita and she seemed to be serious and kind. Krishna, too, had a serious expression in his eyes. He looked around the room and saw candour, yearning and woundedness. Only Jill looked resolutely at her feet. She was young, excruciated, lost. Her skin was bad and her clothes defiantly ugly, but instead of dismissing her as he would have in the predatory streets of London, Peter found himself longing to reassure her and put her at her ease. They moved around, ceremonious and slow. If only she would look up, he would rain kindness into her eyes.

There were further dances, including a vegetarian allegory in which a hunter, startled by the beauty of his prey, spared its life. Peter continued to note the ideological pressure he was under, but it no longer bothered him as much. He was more intrigued by the strange sense of goodwill that was welling up in him. Why not approach people with trust instead of suspicion? Why not be helpful instead of opportunistic? Why not be heartfelt instead of calculating?

The clouds had thinned, melted and fragmented, and the sun poured down on to the lawn and through the tall windows onto the blond floorboards of the ballroom. What was going on?

‘You see, we’ve brought out the sun!’ Ulrike laughed.

Over the next few days, he kept rediscovering this sense of goodwill, even when the experiences it accompanied seemed to take place on moonless nights of rhetoric and credulity. His concern for the rest of the group gradually rose to a pitch at which his happiness seemed inseparable from the happiness of the others. Everyone developed a sense of each other’s vulnerability by telling their ‘stories’. Instead of having to lower the portcullis of a false self in order to avoid being hurt, they pre-empted the pain by showing that they were all hurt already. There was a great liberation in feeling that the worst had already happened. This mutual concern was how family life should be, but of course never was, and that was its seductiveness.

There was a hint of a primordial scene as everybody told their stories, if not around a campfire, at least around the fat candle that always burnt at the centre of the circle.

Peter had not devoted much time to what Gavin called ‘navel-gazing’, although Gavin himself once admitted to a ‘bout of the blow-your-brains-out’ on an otherwise meticulously rowdy skiing holiday in Klosters. Peter had no very clear idea of what he felt about the big issues, except a general sense that God was bad taste in some forms, boring in others and mad in the rest. Nevertheless, he started to reflect that even if we were just dying animals, burdened with self-consciousness and the certainty of death, telling ourselves stories about the world in order to pass the time and relieve our troubled minds, then they might as well be good stories and they might as well be true. And so he told the group his real reasons for being there and about Sabine and how he’d been happy for the three days they’d spent together, happier than he’d ever been.

Everyone was touched by what he’d said and nobody seemed to worry that he’d not said it before.

‘Oh, it’s so romantic,’ said Oriane, ‘it make me want to cry.’ And cry she did.

‘I want you to think of room ten as your room, Peter,’ said Evan, a buck-toothed and awkward Australian, aching to do good for the world in ways it was hard for him to put his finger on. Room ten had been assigned to Peter before it became known that he was staying in a hotel.

‘It’s actually rather a special room, because it was Eileen and Peter Caddy’s family room,’ Evan went on, unaware that this would not represent an additional temptation to Peter, who found the mythology of Findhorn and the lives of its founders, often recounted with the portentous detail of a biblical parable, one of the most tiresome aspects of his Experience Week.

‘When you were telling your story, I was thinking what a pain in the ass God is,’ guffawed Xana, an American woman who became friends with Peter, despite her initially disconcerting habit of bringing God into every sentence. She helped to persuade someone in the office to look for traces of Sabine, and miraculously, as they all agreed, one of the names that emerged was indeed ‘Peter’s Sabine’, as he could tell from the address in Frankfurt she had unfortunately been leaving at the time he met her. At least he was now fortified with her second name, Wald.

A morning’s work was part of the Experience Week and both Peter and Xana ended up working in the kitchen.

‘I’m Gawain, I’ll be focalizing the soups today,’ said the friendly man who greeted them in the kitchen. ‘And this is Bettina, who’ll be focalizing the salads.’

‘Hi,’ said Bettina.

There was an attunement and everyone shared what was ‘going on’ for them that morning. The sharing went around in what Peter was coming to think of as the usual way, until it reached Lisa, a young Argentinian woman who was part of the established kitchen team. Lisa’s English was immediately exhausted by the enormity of her mood.

‘I feel,’ she began, and then broke into gesture, wriggling her palms towards each other on different planes, like tadpoles hurrying towards a doomed rendezvous. ‘I have to be careful, because I may not really be here…’

You what? thought Peter.

‘When I was a healer in Brazil,’ continued Lisa, ‘I couldn’t work at night, because I would leave my body and go off on the astral plane. Sometimes it was very hard to come back and I think maybe last night,’ her right hand shot up into the air, ‘I spoke to my angel, and I have to share one thing: my angel tell me no work this morning.’

This was what Gavin would have called ‘skiving off work without a chit from Matron’. You didn’t need a chit from Matron here, just a chat with an angel.

Gawain, whose name sounded so like Gavin’s but whose tone was so different, asked the Angel of Findhorn to help them work as a team, to open their hearts and to clear their minds. He invited everyone to be conscious of the noises in the kitchen and of the spirit helpers, as if this enjambement of whirring blenders and fluttering wings were the most natural thing in the world.

The strange thing was that they did work as a team, the atmosphere was wonderfully collaborative and charming, people glided round the kitchen, anticipating their fellow workers’ needs, sliding saucepans and knives to each other, handle first, with a silent smile, moving out of the way without stopping work, preparing food for hundreds without apparent effort, and enjoying themselves as well. What had happened? Again, there seemed to be something precious hidden among the rustling tissue of ritual and rhetoric. Gawain’s prayers had been answered, and even if prayers were just the setting up of a fervent expectation, they had worked.

Elated over lunch, Peter and Xana discussed what had happened while eating the food they had helped to prepare, which tasted to them supremely good. Perhaps the attunements were not just an amiable waste of time. Peter had always assumed it was best to bully his way through his feelings. When he set off for the bank feeling sad, or hung-over, or bored, or desperate, or in some other way unfit for work, he found that these moods usually evaporated as they hit the hot plate of action. There was of course a price to pay, a vague general depression, the lost habit of reflection, sudden bursts of frustration that seemed inexplicable because the trail that led to them had been obscured by a thousand urgencies, and by the trick of calling unhappiness ‘a lousy day’, and by the agreement of everyone around him that nothing surpassed the thrill of selling expensive loans and securing cheap ones, in order to enter a nirvana of ownership and hobbies.

At that evening’s group attunement, Peter shared that he liked the group much better than he’d expected.

‘Are we supposed to be flattered?’ asked Xana, breaking the rule of respectful silence.

Stung by this mild mockery, Peter felt that sense of intense betrayal that sends children running from rooms. This raw sensitivity had of course to be ‘processed’, and led to further opportunities for bonding and trust. Xana and Peter climbed on to the roof and Peter, who had always been the one who said ‘Oh, I missed it’ when someone pointed out a shooting star, saw four that evening.

‘You know they’re no bigger than a swimming pool,’ said Xana, ‘burning up as they hit our atmosphere.’

That night Peter, who never remembered his dreams, dreamt vividly. Gawain and Gavin were engaged in an elaborate medieval jousting match. From behind the stockade where he stood among the rude serfs, Peter could see Sabine seated next to the King. Peter was crushed when he found that the jousting match was a computer game he was playing at work, and that with this shift in perspective Sabine was reduced to a few dots of light on a liquid-crystal screen. Caught playing games instead of investing, Peter was furiously berated by his boss, but he couldn’t concentrate on his chastisement because he was too preoccupied with the pair of dirty pigeon’s wings which grew out of his boss’s shoulder blades. In the next scene he was swimming with Sabine among the stars, in mildly electrified water that made them both unbearably excited. Their swimming pool suddenly tilted out of orbit, hurtled through space, and flared on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.

‘Awesome,’ said Terry, a black American woman who had given up her job in order to do past-life regression work, dream work and body work. ‘You were definitely on the astral plane.’

‘Was I?’ said Peter, looking up from his porridge.

‘Definitely.’

‘Maybe I can skive off work,’ said Peter.

‘What?’ said Terry.

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘The King’s your higher Self,’ shouted Terry, as he set off to the kitchen.

He didn’t skive off work, although he soon wished he had. Gawain, who had focalized the kitchen so beautifully the day before, had been replaced by a tall bearded American called Warren. Perhaps Gawain had lost his jousting match, thought Peter, who found himself shuttling increasingly fluently between waking and dreaming.

‘Have you been the butt of a lot of small-people jokes?’ Warren asked Xana as she came into the kitchen.

‘What?’ said Xana, amazed.

‘That’s just me,’ said Warren. ‘I like to push people’s buttons. I’ve got to be myself, right?’

Despite this warning, Peter, lulled into needless candour by the touching group attunements, mentioned his real reasons for being in Findhorn.

For the rest of the morning, Warren shouted, ‘Is this the one?’ whenever a woman passed the kitchen window. He danced with special glee when the ancient overweight postmistress came to deliver the mail.

‘Hey, Peter, this is definitely the woman of your dreams. It was her dress sense that got to you, right?’

Whenever he was near Peter he sang the old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with’.

Under Warren’s guidance the food gradually declined.

‘This is my grandmother’s secret receipt,’ he said, emptying a bottle of vinegar into a saucepan full of cabbage leaves. ‘She smuggled it out of the Ukraine in the lining of her overcoat.’

‘We want to go to the sanctuary to meditate,’ said Xana at noon, when there was a theoretical right to do this.

‘Tough shit,’ said Warren.

‘We’re going anyway,’ said Xana, undoing her apron.

‘Great,’ said Warren. ‘That’s called stating your needs.’

‘You know, Warren,’ said Xana with clipped patience, ‘when you asked me about the small-people jokes, I happened to be with my god.’

‘Did you get back to him?’ said Warren, suddenly leaning closer.

‘No, I wasn’t able to do that,’ said Xana. ‘I think we’ve all come to Findhorn to develop our personal concept of the Divine. It so happens I have been the butt of lots of small-people jokes, and I’m all right with it, but you didn’t know that. You just planted a bomb and walked away.’

‘I could see you were all right with that issue,’ said Warren, as if he’d been in control of the situation all along. ‘I make people confront their issues, it’s kind of a twisted gift I have,’ he said. ‘Think about it: what’s your god worth if he can’t survive a small-people joke?’

‘That’s what I’m going to the sanctuary to find out,’ said Xana, hanging up her apron.

Peter started to follow her.

‘Have you got an issue with me?’ asked Warren, fixing Peter in the eye.

‘Not really,’ said Peter, for whom the word ‘issue’ had, until recently, always been preceded by the word ‘bond’. ‘I mean, it was a lot more fun working yesterday,’ he recovered feebly.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Warren, striding back to the cauldron of sour soup he was preparing for the community. ‘I say that,’ he shouted over his shoulder, ‘but really I care profoundly.’

Outside Xana and Peter burst out laughing.

‘I wasn’t with my god when he asked about small-people jokes,’ Xana confessed.

‘Weren’t you?’ said Peter, slightly shocked.

‘I just thought I’d throw him for a change.’

‘Rather naughty of you,’ said Peter admiringly.

Instead of going to the sanctuary, they went for a walk and talked about how horrible Warren was.

Apart from anything else, Warren had managed to destroy the alternative way of working which Peter had glimpsed the day before. A more familiar pattern had taken over; everyone retreated into their private thoughts and watched the clock, workers intimidated by an unpleasant authority. When Peter stopped chopping beetroot for a moment to stretch his back, Warren, who spent most of his time bouncing around the kitchen making flippant remarks, instantly caught him out.

‘Got a backache, huh? Try working through the pain,’ he suggested. ‘You see, I’m not just good-looking, I’m psychic.’

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?

Peter was unable to answer any of these questions, but as the night wore on, his imagination tracked Gavin’s fate, crossing to that realm of bored and plaintive ghosts, to see if he could find Gavin still smoking idly beside a pool of his own blood. Gavin’s suffering gradually merged in Peter’s tired mind with Lara’s unspeakable loss, and for one astonishing moment, as the train shot through an empty station, its deserted platforms still uselessly lit, Peter suddenly lost himself in this pool of other people’s tears, re-emerging as the windows darkened again, shaken but somehow washed.

Yes, Fiona was right, Findhorn was responsible for the start of some change in him which he could never stop for long enough to assess. After leaving London he hadn’t contacted her again until he got to California, and then he’d just written an evasive letter filled with vague neutral phrases about ‘needing space’.

And now he was at Esalen, still looking for Sabine, but less sure of his pursuit. Esalen was the last of the questing stations he could remember Sabine talking about. She had been especially nostalgic about its sulphurous hot tubs where the traumas unearthed by its workshops were transformed into a voluptuous catharsis.

Peter turned away from the wooden railing where he had been standing beside the lazy diamond ripple of the Pacific, and went back to his room to collect the dirty laundry he had accumulated in Los Angeles.