Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(26)
“I hope you’ll find what you’re seeking here, Arthur. You won’t find it unless you turn off your head. It’s easy. Just do it, Arthur.” Henrietta Wilks, before she fell under the sway, had been a reasonably normal person, a buyer of Blunder Bay’s eggs and goat cheese, but she’d had a crackup after a relationship went sour.
“Ah, yes, thank you, Henrietta. Thank you, indeed.” He leaned away from her — it could be catching; he could end up spending the rest of his days collecting emu eggs and planting kumquats at Starkers Cove. Doing so happily. Loving all things.
Felicity was by the van, and she directed her mother to back up to the lodge’s wide, timbered door. Already parked near the door was the orange Hummer of Kurt Zoller, who was in uniform, talking with Silverson and Morg. Obviously Zoller had sped here from the pub to gather evidence of lewd sex practices, and Silverson had arrived to find him snooping.
“Maybe, Arthur, you can help him with advice,” Silverson said, “about how to find his way out of here.” And abruptly he joined Morg in unloading supplies from the van and the truck.
Despite feeling co-opted into donating legal services, Arthur drew Zoller aside. “This is not a good time, Kurt. Nor the right tactic. Jason thinks you’re being unfriendly.”
“I only asked if I could check around and see everything’s according to code, and he and Morg took up umbrage.”
“You don’t have a search warrant and you don’t have probable cause. Therefore you’re trespassing.”
Flustered by a show of incompetence now obvious even to him, Zoller altered tack. “That plastic sheeting is so transparent you can see everything they’re doing. I seen a lady taking off a brassiere. Are you going to say indecent exposure isn’t a crime neither? And group sex?”
“Kurt, no one here is filing any criminal complaints.”
Arthur had difficulty seeing these cultists as Dionysian revellers — certainly not the locals, like Henrietta and the school janitor. Nor most of the American recruits, old and new, who seemed too bourgeois beneath the fa?ade of hippiness to have had much experience with scandalous behaviour. Most of Silverson’s original group, the thirty he’d brought across the border, seemed well into middle age: long-haired, paunchy men; women in ragged cutoffs or peasant dresses; long strands of beads; peace symbols; a pretence of youth; a blatant evocation of a decade Arthur had somehow missed.
Absent from this assemblage were children of any age. Presumably persons under the age of consent were either not encouraged or not allowed.
Silverson squeezed Arthur’s shoulder, conspiratorially. “Is the problem resolved, then? I’m delighted to have met you, Constable.” He thrust out a hand; Zoller took it numbly. “Thank you for caring.”
Zoller mumbled some words of parting and retreated to his Hummer.
“What a bring-down,” Morg said softly, but Zoller heard and turned quickly to glare at him.
§
Fifteen minutes into Silverson’s guided tour, Arthur had seen nothing to confirm rumours of love-drug labs and open-air orgies. But he did see an epic display of rural naiveté. The planting of vegetable seeds late in the growing season. The fence-free gardens overrun with fowl and bunny rabbits. An emu had broken into the seed packets, and no one seemed disturbed that a cow was trampling over a newly seeded lawn.
One could hardly go back to the land if one had never been there, and clearly most of these Americans had never been closer to a farm than the local flower shop. Arthur felt sorry for them, for their ineptitude — yet, amazingly, they were the happy ones, while he was still wired into the world’s hubbub and racket, its bother and pain. Arthur had never transcended the competitive life of the courts, the cold, hard logic of the law; therefore he was impregnable — or so he thought before last weekend’s onset of calm, pleasant peace. It was worrying that the skeptic within had so easily been lulled.
The grounds could have been a set for a costume musical — might these joyous workers suddenly burst into song? He wondered if they’d truly found inner peace, or were victims of some kind of hypnotic delusion. He wondered if they were drugged. A ludicrous image came of Silverson performing frontal lobotomies in the spa.
Or maybe it was all a cover for something patently salacious. Happening right now behind the lodge, in the heated pool and hot tub where Silverson was leading him. The group-groping bacchanal that Kurt Zoller was so hungry to witness.
The several women in the water wore bathing suits. They smiled and waved. Arthur smiled and waved. He was rewarded with views of nothing more risqué than dripping armpit fluff. “It’s the women’s time,” Silverson said. “They have the pool until dinner.”
So far, Silverson hadn’t treated Arthur like a senile senior or tried to evangelize him. But he was full of mundane bonhomie, bouncing about from one unspiritual topic to another: films, politics, sports. He’d once had a drinking problem. He’d suffered a cruel divorce. He knew Arthur’s pain. They were one.
Silverson invited him to share a bench overlooking the cove, his “favourite retreat for morning meditation.” Arthur joined him, perching a few feet away, out of range of his minty breath.
Silverson looked pensively at the lapping waves. “There’s a sadness to every sunset, however lovely, but the dawn renews hope, renews our faith to be who we are.” He mused. “Who we are is who we are. That is essential to our philosophy, the philosophy of Baba Sri Rameesh. We cannot lose who we are, no matter what we experience. A simple truth.” He seemed for a moment to be lost in his own easy-listening formulations, then snapped out of it. “I’m boring you. I can’t blame you for seeming . . . maybe doubtful is the word, Arthur? Cynical? Or maybe just distracted by concerns. You have more on your mind than the sun’s rising and setting.”