‘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.