On the Edge A Novel Read Online Free

room with subdued indignation.
    Adam sat down and smiled modestly, but soon resumed the luxury of his new torment.
    ‘The whales,’ he said to Kathleen O’Hara, like a child whose adored puppy has just been run over and is offering his inconsolable torment to his mother.
    ‘There,’ said Kathleen, instinctively maternal. What a lovely sensitive man, she thought, so in touch with his feminine side.
    ‘It’s terrible what we’re doing to the oceans,’ she said. ‘They’re our natural filter systems, the kidneys of the planet.’
    Everyone was embarrassed by Adam’s speech. The idea of being the most important gathering in the world, and the excessive responsibility it brought with it, made them anxious to return home. Crystal’s arrival could only act as a small counter-current to the tide of departures. When Moses showed her into the dining room, Adam was talking excitedly to Yves, Brooke and Kathleen about the vividness of his spiritual life. He was feeling charming, as he often did once he had discharged the anguish and hysteria which haunted his nature.
    ‘Crystal, darling, we missed you over dinner,’ said Brooke.
    ‘And you missed a wonderful dinner,’ said Adam, getting up.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Crystal to Brooke. ‘By the time I knew the plane was delayed, your number was in the hold with my baggage.’
    Brooke introduced her to the other guests.
    ‘You must have been the empty space on my right,’ said Adam.
    ‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form,’ said Crystal in her Indian guru voice. Adam Frazer was a minor celebrity on the alternative scene and she wanted him to think she was interesting. There she was again, she reproached herself, still looking for approval from a powerful man. ‘The two are really one,’ she warbled.
    Adam laughed. ‘Not being completely enlightened, I prefer this delightful illusion to the more austere one I had over dinner.’
    ‘You are tossed on the restless sea of samsara,’ said Crystal, shaking her head sadly. ‘Just turn your mind back to the source,’ she urged him, quoting the great Poonjaji.
    ‘Adam,’ said Yves, who thought that Adam might be having fun with somebody else, ‘it’s getting late.’
    ‘Oh, my love, are you tired?’ asked Adam. ‘We’ll go home this instant.’
    ‘Brooke, it’s been a wonderful evening,’ said Kathleen.
    ‘Here’s that thing we talked about,’ said Brooke, half-discreetly, giving Kathleen an envelope. ‘For the Foundation.’
    ‘For the lungs of the planet,’ said Kathleen compulsively.
    When the others had left, Brooke took Crystal up to a guest room. It was so much cosier than sending her up with Moses. She sat on the small sofa at the foot of the bed and told her how welcome she was and to treat the house as her home while she was in San Francisco.
    Crystal was touched and a little saddened at the same time, because the places where she had lived had been her homes for such fleeting periods, often under the precarious conditions of hospitality. Of course she had long inhabited the paradox of feeling at home with no home, and she tried to think of the glutinous satisfactions of property as a bribe it was noble to refuse. Instead of a memory oppressed by the tropical air of nostalgia, her memory had a swifter quality, as fugitive as the shadows of starlings flitting across the ground, but capable of delivering high notes; whole cities, whole atmospheres, whole passages of thought and feeling, as vast and suddenly present as the smell of the sea.
    Brooke’s own wounded sense of home made her almost excessive in her hospitality, but the two women ended up both feeling moved by the rituals of welcome.
    ‘As you know, I’m going to Esalen on Sunday,’ said Crystal. ‘So I’m only really here tomorrow.’
    ‘Oh, I should have told Adam,’ said Brooke. ‘He’s teaching Rumi there next week. He’s teaching Rumi everywhere every week,’ she laughed. ‘Make sure you contact him now that you’ve