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.
4
Peter watched his tumbling laundry, daydreaming to the faint clicking of his shirt buttons against the metal drum. What would he do if Sabine walked in right now? He still thought about her continually, but he thought about her more as a preoccupation than a person. He could no longer browse through the much-thumbed anthology of their three days together and expect to find any detail he didn’t know off by heart. What fascinated him now was the perseverance and the recklessness of his fascination. His latest and most exotic frustration had taken place only a few days before he arrived at Esalen, when he was looking for Sabine in Los Angeles.
One day the whole world was going to look like Los Angeles, he decided, not a city, nor the absence of a city, just ruined countryside, with houses squeezed between highways which never tired of whispering the lie that it was more interesting to go somewhere than to be here. The entire westward drive of American history seemed to have piled up on the beach, and the descendants of wagon-crazed pioneers, refusing to accept completely the restraint of the world’s widest ocean, frantically patrolled the edge of the West, like lemmings in therapy.
The breathless obesity of the city was mirrored by the way in which work and play spilled into each other and formed a perpetual suburb of hedonistic commerce. Every deal had to be closed with a game of golf, every party was the occasion to flex the muscles of a feeble career instead of going to the trouble of making conversation. These confusions spread to all the details of life. Menus couldn’t decide whether to advertise dieting or eating. Often the contents of salads and sandwiches hung around shyly among the real stars: the ingredients that had been left out, and the pointless variety of methods by which the sodium-free, unbleached, sugarless, decaffeinated, coffee-free coffee could be vaporized, sun-dried, skimmed, scorched, and served in sixteen different sizes of cup.
Already running low on money, Peter had slept on the sofa of an ex-girlfriend who had the good fortune to play the English wife of the maverick Lootenant McMurphy in the evergreen television series Cop Story. She really wanted to play something serious, Caroline never tired of explaining, but Cop Story paid the rent.
The night before Caroline threw him out because she said that his passionate search for Sabine was undermining her sexual self-esteem, she had taken him to a party given in the offices of a lawyer specializing in the entertainment industry. She abandoned him at the door in order to network with a producer, and Peter fell prey to Jerome, a man with electric blue eyes and chaotic grey-brown hair who plunged into speech without any introduction.
‘I feel everything is coming together tonight,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’m getting a lot of vibrational energy from the Moon.’
‘Is that nice?’ said Peter.
‘It’s great.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘I’ve written a sequel to Easy Rider, and I’ve just met a man with a direct line,’ Jerome karate-ed his hand emphatically, ‘to Jack Nicholson.’
‘But don’t all the principal characters get killed in the original movie?’ asked Peter.
‘We’ve got round that.’
‘Aha.’
‘I’m only doing the film project to make money. My real passion is for the spiritual autobiography I’m writing. It’s called “You invented the Ego because you forgot you were God”.’