‘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.