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.’