Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

Adam arrived at Brooke’s San Francisco mansion wearing the flame-coloured Nehru jacket Yves had brought back for him from Paris. Most people couldn’t get away with a Nehru jacket, but Adam, in whose veins the lava of India and the phlegm of England combined with an intoxicating hiss, wore his new clothes with indiscreet self-assurance. Adam was on fire with the truth about the future of the human race and it was not a fire he intended to keep to himself.

‘I’m wearing my heart on your sleeve,’ he whispered to Yves in the taxi.

‘And your soul?’ said Yves.

‘Always and everywhere,’ replied Adam. ‘You know I won’t settle for less.’ His eyes clouded with tears. ‘My Shams,’ he murmured.

‘My Rumi,’ answered Yves vaguely.

Adam liked people to have ‘a point’. Either they must be brilliant and spiritually evolved like himself, or embarrassingly rich like Brooke. Simple goodness touched him also, at a distance.

Brooke was in fact so rich that no amount of personal gratification could do more than bail out her sinking ship. The inrush of money was so uncompromising that a few days in bed with a cold would leave her up to her neck in unspent income. The only pump that could save her from drowning was charity, and every morning her secretary brought her a bucket of cheques to sign in the unending effort to keep her afloat.

Brooke treated everyone like a servant, which, given that she had thirty of them already, showed a lack of imagination. Her servants, on the other hand, she treated like family, her own family having thrust her among servants throughout her childhood. Brought up in the reputedly gracious South, her parents were given over entirely to alcohol, horses and other rich people who shared their interests. They had not allowed Brooke’s childish cries or lisping enquiries into the meaning of life to mar the elegance of their home. Instead she had been housed with one of the innumerable black families whose unadorned shacks cowered under the fatwood trees, their woodsmoke hanging in the humid air almost as substantially as the membranes of Spanish moss that dangled down to meet it. Brooke had often reflected that she had probably been better off living with Mammy. The riding parties that roamed the plantation in search of the perfect place to have some ‘special iced tea’, as they jokingly called the gallon of cold bourbon to which a tiny splash of tea, one mint leaf and a slice of lemon were apprehensively added by the cook, never trotted down that particular track which led to Mammy’s, its astonishing orange earth making it look more like a river than a road.

When her father died falling off one of his favourite horses, Brooke had the thrilling experience of being taken to the big house for the funeral party. ‘It’s how he would have wanted to go,’ his friends said, one after another, with a sense of their own gift for the apt phrase, mixed with a certain envy at the spectacle of such a gentlemanly demise. She asked her mother if she could stay in the big house for the night after the funeral.

‘I’m surprised at your asking, Brooke,’ said her mother with genuine outrage. ‘Can you not see that the house is full of your father’s relations?’

Returning to Mammy’s in the car, Brooke had developed, through a clinging ground mist of misery and incomprehension, a revolutionary fury, a suspicion of rich white people that could have borne cross-examination by Malcolm X, and a determination to find meaning beyond the familial horizon ringed by stallions and empty bottles, without heading too far in the direction offered by Mammy’s passion for overeating and fainting in church.

After a psychoanalytic limbo in Manhattan, facing the grey mirror of Dr Bukowski’s silence (‘At least I’m not a Kleinian,’ he had chuckled at their first meeting, but had never lapsed into liveliness again), she headed for the West Coast and its more colourful promises of liberation.

Cured of paying wise men to listen to her, she paid to listen to them instead.

It was then that she met Kenneth Shine, the spiritual teacher, and realized that here at last was the beginning of her real journey.

‘You’ve changed my life,’ she told him that first evening.

‘What hasn’t?’ he asked with a kindly gaze, and the question, which she hardly would have noticed under other circumstances, broke her mind open and in that moment she seemed to see the whole impermanence thing, and how we were all changing and the self was an illusion, and everything — he put it so much better than she could, but the sense of it had stayed with her and kept her going over the last five years, working for the good of the world at the level that really mattered, changing people’s consciousness.

The ‘Human Potential Movement’ was rather a grand phrase, perhaps a little pompous, not to be dropped casually into every sentence, but to her ears it had a noble ring.

‘You’re the Guidobaldo of the Millennium,’ Adam had recently declared. She hadn’t known what to make of that. Adam could be so bitchy sometimes. Only because he was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, of course, and he saw human potential so clearly that he got impatient with complacency. At the same time he was complacent about his own impatience, and even his nervous breakdowns and his hysterical tears had something arrogant about them, as if they’d been written by Shakespeare and deserved the closest study.

Anyhow, neither Mammy nor Brooke’s teachers at Foxcroft had been too hot on the Renaissance, but Guidobaldo, it turned out, was practically responsible for the whole thing at a financial level. She knew her uses and she was pleased to be useful. ‘Everyone has their place and everyone has their pace,’ as Kenneth liked to say in his usual memorable way. Adam called him the Bumper Sticker. There was definitely a rivalry between the two men, but she loved them both.

Kenneth was working on a synthesis of all world religions and philosophies, which he was going to condense into a form that everybody could understand. ‘Think global, act local,’ was one of his mottoes. He already had a name for his philosophy; the rest would follow. It was called Streamism because of something Heraclitus had said about how you couldn’t step into the same stream twice. It was a new stream each time. At this point Brooke got a bit confused. Were you supposed to go with the flow — Kenneth had a whole Tao thing about going with the flow which tied in beautifully with self-acceptance and all those key psychological concepts — or were you supposed to be the rock in the stream, unimpressed by the fleeting manifestations of Time? He was very good on that too. It was part Buddhism, part Marcus Aurelius, he’d told her. She was learning so much, but for a while she remained puzzled, half the time picturing herself as a rock, the other half blithely shooting the little rapids of the stream.

‘Of course,’ said Kenneth when she had shared her concern. ‘You’ve cut through to the central paradox of Streamism.’

She’d felt quite proud.

‘What is God?’ he’d suddenly asked with that kindly gaze.

She had blinked nervously.

‘The unmoved mover,’ Kenneth whispered. ‘What must we become?’ he thundered.

‘God,’ she guessed wildly.

‘Right!’ He gave her a radiant smile, the sort of smile that her father had never given her, and she felt as if she had been airlifted to the mountaintop.

‘We go with the flow, but we stay still within ourselves, and by doing that we become gods,’ Kenneth claimed, while her head swam with altitude sickness.

‘I’m only telling you part of it, of course, you’ll have to wait for the book.’