The Revelations (12 page)

Mouse kept her clasped closely to him as they sat in a dimly lit corner. At first, they were quiet, and he felt her breaths rise and fall under thin ribs, let her pale, drawn face rest on his shoulder as they watched people go to the bar and play fruit machines and walk out to smoke cigarettes. Lee sighed.

‘You know that image from Bede?’ she said.

‘Hmm?’ He had been enjoying the silence and now brought her into focus with difficulty.

‘The one that says our lives are like the flight of a sparrow through the night into a bright mead hall? We fly from darkness into light and laughter and then out again into darkness. Sometimes I feel like I’ve already come out the other side. That my teenage years were my real life, when I lived everything so intensely, when I was completely carefree and wild. And these days I’m just in darkness, flying along without any idea of where I’m going.’

Mouse took a sip of her drink and lifted his arm from around her shoulders. He turned to face her, frowning.

‘Honestly, cheer up, will you? The Retreat’s almost here.
Things
can’t be as bad as all that now, surely?’

‘I’m afraid they are.’ Her voice was very low.

‘Jesus, Lee, will you get a grip? This self-pity, this constant misery, it’s just exhausting. I could strangle you sometimes.’ His voice rose in pitch and Lee winced. ‘You’re young, you’re very beautiful, you’re scarily clever. A lot of girls would die to have what you have. You need to pull yourself together. This can’t go on.’

‘Please don’t do this. I’m really tightroping at the moment. I need you to keep me steady.’ Lee was knitting her hands in her lap.

Mouse could see that Philip and Maki, who were standing at the bar, had stopped talking and were watching them. He lowered his voice.

‘Your problem, you know, is that you have forged this identity for yourself around religion. Lee the sexy little party girl has been replaced by Lee the pious saint. But it’s not a good religion, not a real one. It’s based upon those hysterical women you are such an expert on.’

‘I’m going to go . . . I’m leaving now.’

Mouse gripped her wrist and spoke in a violent whisper.

‘No you’re not, you’re going to sit here and listen to me. What you believe is a heavily mediated, crackpot version of religion. Two hours, two short hours is all we have of Jesus, if you read out everything that he actually says in the Bible. Our entire religion is founded on those two hours. Your problem is that you concentrate too little on Christ’s words and too much on the hysterical writings of a bunch of madwomen.’

‘Some of their stuff is amazing. You’ve said so yourself.’ His hand still gripped her wrist painfully.

‘Some of it is beautiful poetry. I can see how it’s helpful alongside the real thing. But not as a replacement. I’ve met some girls in the Course over the years who seem to have based their belief on St Francis, St Augustine. Both heavily mediated versions of real faith. But at least those saints were adepts, at least they were fully schooled in the doctrine, and could serve as reasonable proxies for Christ. Your women are just early incarnations of Christina Rossetti, wringing their hands and moaning and pretending it’s a religious experience rather than just frustrated sexuality and thwarted ambition. Hildegard, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe – hysteria and weeping were to them what sex was to the Wife of Bath. They won’t help you.’

‘But they do help me. They make a huge difference to me. And you didn’t mention Julian of Norwich. She’s no hysteric.’

‘Julian spent all her days locked in a cell meditating on Christ’s suffering on the cross, fixated on his wounds. This is exactly why you’re such a mess. You’ve put suffering and guilt at the very centre of your conception of faith. These women were writing about their religious feelings, but they were also conveying the very painful truth of what it was like to be a woman in fifteenth-century England. Don’t confuse the two. They’re leading you in completely the wrong direction. Faith should be a comfort, not an ordeal.’

‘They’re my role models, and I won’t have you talk about them like this. It’s fucking hard to say how I feel. When I’m right down in my slumps, I can’t find my own words to express it. And not only do the women mystics help me say how I feel, they rephrase my unhappiness as something positive. They make me feel that there might be something good the other side of all this pain.’ Her eyes were bright with angry tears.

Mouse let go of her wrist, a little ashamed.

‘Do you remember when those boys slapped me?’ Lee said, looking at him sharply.

Mouse did remember. They had been walking down the King’s Road on the way to the Course the previous summer when two gym-inflated bankers stumbled out of a pub and stood blocking the pavement ahead of them. The bankers had taken their suit jackets off and their ties hung loosely around thick necks. They were sweating and Mouse could see their muscular chests pressing wetly against shirt fabric. As Mouse and Lee passed, he heard one whisper to the other and then, so quickly that he could hardly register it, the banker had turned and slapped Lee hard on the arse. The two men stood, laughing, as Mouse and Lee continued up the road.

‘Just keep walking,’ Mouse had said, clutching Lee’s arm. ‘It’s not worth it.’ Shame and fear sent blood to his round cheeks and goggled his eyes. Lee’s mouth hung open and he could see her mind whirring. The bankers’ laughter still reached them through the warm summer air. Suddenly, her mouth set in a hard line, Lee had ripped her arm from Mouse’s grip, turned, and started running back down the road towards the bankers, rummaging through her handbag as she went. The one who had slapped her, his thinning hair gleaming in the early evening sunshine, looked bemused at the sight of the madly rushing girl, her blonde hair flying out behind her like smoke from the fire of her rage.

As she reached the banker, her pace unchecked, he half-raised his arms to fend her off, an uncertain smile on his lips. At the last minute before impact, Lee leapt into the air, at the same time drawing something out of her handbag with her right hand and plunging it into the banker’s neck. Mouse started running towards them, his heart thumping. The banker sat down heavily as Lee rolled away from him, picked herself up, and turned to look at Mouse, a triumphant grin stretched across her face. The second banker was bent over his friend, slowly drawing what Mouse could now see was a black and yellow Staedtler pencil out of the knot of muscle that ran between the banker’s neck and his shoulder. A thin plume of blood darkened his white collar. The two men, one crouching, twirling the pencil in his fingers, the other leaning back and breathing heavily, looked at Lee as she walked away from them, awe in their eyes.

‘Of course I remember,’ Mouse said, taking his signet ring off and spinning it on the table. ‘How could I forget?’

‘Well, when I was running towards them, all I could think of was Judith slaying Holofernes. How none of the men around her would protect her, and so she had to become a hero herself.’ She looked at him pointedly, and he felt again the shame of that evening when she had expected him to protect her and he had only felt how plump and childlike his body was next to those brawny bankers. ‘And while not all of the women I study are as physically heroic as Judith, they do show you how to act in the world. That enduring can be a heroic act in itself.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mouse said. Lee hugged him towards her, her voice softer now.

‘I’ve got my demons at the moment. I need you to help me fight them. If the Retreat goes well, I’m sure it’ll pull me out of this slump. It has to. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

They finished their drinks, waved to Philip and Maki who were still talking at the bar, and walked out into the cold night. Mouse escorted her to her bicycle and then strolled home, up through Holland Park and past the tree-hushed squares of Notting Hill.

The boat rocked him slowly to sleep that night as he lay with the Retreat bright in his mind. He pictured Lee running laughing ahead of him, saw David standing above him and looking down with pride. There was a sudden stab of guilt as he recalled the massage earlier, but then he remembered standing in the church at the last Retreat and hearing the heavenly chanting of the Course members, the tongues and the tears and the happy loss of control. Mouse slept as the moon passed through the sky, its reflection crossing the water of the canal. The boat sighed as a breeze whipped up early in the morning and then dropped again, leaving the water very clear and still in the first brightness of dawn.

Marcus parked on the crest of the bridge and looked down the canal. To the right the horse chestnuts of Kensal Green Cemetery trembled in the breeze. The graveyard’s wall was crumbling and Marcus could see through a gap to the rising ground which stretched up from the shrunken tombstones of the children’s garden to the vast mausoleums of colonial grandees. Marcus occasionally came up to visit Mouse on Sundays in summer, when they would sit and drink cans of cider on the roof of the boat and then wander through the cemetery inventing stories for the dead. Foxes would leap surprised from undergrowth as they passed, woodpeckers sweeping in bouncing flight over their heads. Now Marcus could see Mouse making his way up the towpath pulling his old suitcase with one hand, holding his snare drum and high-hat over his shoulder with the other.

Abby was trying to get the car’s radio to work. A long blare of static came from the speakers. Lee sat in the back pressing her temples with her fingers, taking controlled breaths. She had cut her hair very short the previous night. She told Marcus and Abby how she had been suddenly infuriated by the long blonde hair and had cut it herself in the bathroom sink. Jagged edges stuck up on top of her head; Marcus thought she looked like an adolescent boy. The shortness of her hair made her blue-green eyes and angular cheekbones seem unearthly and disturbing, shorn of the softening frame of her long hair. Lee’s neck, where she had cut the hair in a severe line at the back, was as slick and white as a scar.

Marcus was impatient to be on the road, to head westwards and shake free of the grim city. He leapt from the car when Mouse appeared on the pavement and squeezed the suitcase and drum into the boot. Mouse climbed in beside Lee, lifting Marcus’s guitar onto his lap.

‘Blimey,’ he said as he caught sight of Lee’s hair. ‘Auditioning for the Sex Pistols?’

‘I wanted a new look. Now be nice about it.’ She leaned over and placed a breathy kiss on his cheek.

Abby switched off the radio and suddenly they could hear the ducks on the canal, the birds singing in the cemetery. Then Marcus started the engine and they pulled out onto Harrow Road and were away. The skies were heavy unbroken grey above them. Marcus drove haltingly along the A40, braking for speed cameras, nosing from lane to lane, trying to cut a clear path through the traffic. Just before the widening of the road at Hillingdon, a traffic jam snaked back from the charred carcass of a burnt-out car. A lane was closed, and people edged past the scene, noses glued to their windows, looking for bodies.

‘So who’s not going to make it through the Retreat?’ Mouse asked. ‘I know you’ve all been thinking about it. There are always drop-outs at the Retreat.’

There was a silence. Marcus looked into his wing mirror and waved as the car behind let him through.

‘Of course we’ve been thinking about it.’ Marcus looked across at Abby. ‘The twins will be fine. Neil’s a good bet. I think most of our group are in for the long haul. What do you think, Mouse?’

Mouse lit a cigarette and opened the window.

‘Maki’s hard to read. She seems spiritual, to understand the need for faith, but we should keep an eye on her.’

‘What about Philip?’ Marcus asked. ‘Do you think he’ll stay?’

Mouse paused, drew on his cigarette, and spoke.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Partly because I think he’s thought more than anyone else about it. He’s laid the foundations of the revelation. But also, he’s nervous, and those nerves can be helpful, they bring you to that fine point where you just have to let yourself go.’

Marcus saw Lee take a drag on Mouse’s cigarette. Her voice was low and tired.

‘I’m not so sure. I think we might lose him,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘It seems to me that Philip wants everything that goes with being a Course member, but I don’t know that he wants God. He’s just a bit too eager. And thinking about faith doesn’t do any good without feeling it first.’

Marcus frowned in the rear-view mirror.

‘I’ll have a word with him. We have to make sure we don’t lose anyone else. David is depending on us. If you feel like anyone’s wavering you have to leap on it. It’s not just keeping them here, but making sure they’re fully converted. We need to deliver, to prove to David that we can do this.’

The clouds had begun to break up as they drove through the cut in the Chilterns and the world unravelled itself beneath them. They came off the motorway at Banbury and then they were almost at Lancing Manor, and Marcus felt a surge of pleasure in his stomach.

The Earl had been at school with David and was reported to have financed the Course’s initial sessions, supported the priest as he wrote
The Way of the Pilgrim
and took his orders. He was on the boards of a host of City corporations, had links to shady business ventures in offshore tax havens, hedge funds that had benefited from the Credit Crisis. He attended most Course sessions and played the organ at St Botolph’s on Sunday mornings. His house was said to be astonishingly grand.

They got lost around Chipping Norton. Abby had been reading the directions but, during the discussion about the new members, she had let the map fall to the floor. After they had negotiated the sandstone wiggle of the town for the third time, Marcus stopped the car outside a truckers’ cafe and looked at the map. Heading back on the main road towards Banbury, they came upon David’s silver Mercedes plodding slowly northwards. Marcus could see the priest leaning forward over his steering wheel as his wife stared out at the passing countryside. Marcus honked and the priest looked in his rear-view mirror and raised his hand. Marcus followed David as he took a right turn and drove along a ridge between two valleys. Marcus watched the priest’s eyes, which whipped back to the pursuing car in the mirror every so often. They made their way through a number of windswept hamlets; a wood appeared on the left. Nightingale slowed, began to indicate, and Abby let out a cheer.

Nightingale’s Mercedes turned into a shadowy driveway through black iron gates. Marcus followed down the gravel track above which trees clasped a thick canopy. The track ended in a turning circle in front of a high, dark house. Lancing Manor had two large wings that shot off from the main building, further outbuildings and laundry rooms that were linked by covered cloisters. The rickety gables and turrets seemed to be climbing the body of the house, clambering over one another, reaching up to the low clouds. Rooks perched monkish on the gabled roof, their beaks the colour of bones. The ivy that grew up the front of the house seemed to be gathering itself for some great effort, balling itself into a fist in an attempt to pull the building into the ground, sending out single vines as scouts snaking along the brown Hornton stone. The house was perched on the brow of a hill looking down over thickly planted pine trees and, halfway down the hillside, where the ground flattened out before plunging down into the misty valley, a lake that was bright with weed in the midday sunlight. A boathouse stood in the shadow of overhanging trees at one end. The Earl came out of the oak doors, rubbing his large hands.

‘Welcome to Lancing Manor. You found the place without trouble? Good, good.’

He was wearing a thick brown jumper and corduroys, his heavy body somehow more at home in front of the vast, dark house than it was in London. David embraced him and turned to help Sally with their luggage and his guitar case. Marcus and Mouse hefted their own belongings into the entrance hall. Marcus watched as Abby and Lee looked upwards, slowly realising the size of the great room they had entered, a room whose shadows were punctuated by etiolated stems of green-white light that fell down from stained-glass windows set high above. A staircase reared in front of them from the black-and-white chessboard marble of the floor. Embers dimly glowed in the fireplace, along whose mantel carved stone vines extended themselves between armless caryatids. Doors led off the hall, interrupting bookcases filled with dusty works of philosophy, Latin and German texts whose names Lee revealed with a sweep of her thumb down leather spines. A thin woman with short grey hair came through a swing door and nodded severely in their direction.

‘This is Mrs Millman,’ said the Earl. ‘She’ll show you to your rooms. I’ll walk with you, David. I thought we’d put the youngsters in the east wing. Keep all the trouble in one place.’ Mrs Millman made her way up the staircase with the delicate steps of a wading bird. The four friends followed her.

The dust increased as they climbed the staircase to the gallery that encircled the hall. The fan-vaulted ceiling was hung with giant pendants. Shards of sunlight fell into the dusty air, shimmering with the colours of the stained glass. Marcus could make out the pictures depicted in the glass of the high windows, scenes of martyrdom and religious heroism: Sebastian pierced by arrows, Moses on the Mount, Daniel among the lions. On the walls hung portraits of what Marcus assumed were the Earl’s family. He saw a young girl with a bright parrot perched on her thin hand, a dog sleeping at her feet. He thought she looked like Lee. Further along there was a stern Roundhead, a jovial Victorian slumped behind an enormous belly, a pale woman with an Elizabethan ruff dandling a baby. Then the Earl, perhaps twenty years younger, his hair – longer then – a dark flame atop his head. Behind him Lancing Manor, presented against a fantastical background of mountains and ravines, rose dark and gloomy. The artist had ignored any sense of perspective and so the painting looked primitive, wild, the Earl the master of a dismal kingdom, rooks circling above him.

They passed through white doors and then in single file down a long corridor whose windows looked out over a courtyard on the right-hand side that reminded Marcus of the quadrangles at university. But the courtyard was empty and the fountain that bubbled in the centre served only to highlight the stillness of everything around it. The wallpaper of the corridor was pale yellow and the walls here were hung with photographs of stiff Edwardians in formalwear. There was something ghostly in the stare of those long-dead people, their faces trapped in forced joyless smiles or stern Imperial frowns. The photographs had faded in the evening sunlight that had fallen through the windows over the decades. Some of the lost-looking women holding pudgy babies seemed almost to have disappeared into the walls behind them. Marcus tried to work out which of the mewling infants was the Earl. Finally, they came out to a landing at the top of what looked like a maid’s staircase. Three white doors opened to light-filled bedrooms. Mrs Millman turned and stood in front of one of them and smiled. Her face was transformed; pinched disapproval was replaced by something warm and welcoming. Colour rose to her grey cheeks.

‘I thought you’d like to be up here. The rest of the members will be in the servants’ quarters on the lower floors, but these rooms are so nice and light. Bit of a climb, but worth it, especially in the mornings. Now you four get settled in and then do come down to the kitchen for some tea.’ She picked her way carefully downstairs.

Marcus and Abby took the room in the centre. Mouse carried his bag into the smaller bedroom on the right, while Lee stood reading a tapestry on the wall before entering the room on the left. Marcus looked again at her short hair and saw how dark roots now made up the bulk of it; just the tips were still blonde. Her hair was returning to the colour it had been when he first knew her. He turned and walked into his room. Abby flopped onto the large bed as Marcus closed the door and crossed to the window. The light outside had begun to fade. The room looked eastwards and Marcus saw darkness gathering on the horizon. Below he could make out an ancient chapel whose dormer windows gave it the air of an enormous dovecote. Beside it he could see the roof of the dining hall which stretched out from the main house like an arm. The hall’s roof had been turfed over, a black iron railing around the perimeter and spiral stairways leading down into the garden. The ground dropped away swiftly after the hall, down to the lake that was now almost hidden in the gloom of the valley. It was five o’clock.

Lee and Mouse were already in the kitchen when Marcus and Abby came down. They sat beside one another at the long table in the centre of the room. A fire burned in one corner. Mrs Millman stood by the wide black Aga buttering toast while Mouse held forth on the frieze of mermaids he had seen carved into the wall of a room he entered by accident on the way down to the kitchen.

‘. . . and they seemed to be swimming towards you, beckoning you somehow . . .’ He waved his teacup as he spoke, the dark liquid slopping close to the rim of the cup with each frantic movement. Then the Earl and the Nightingales arrived and a sense of seriousness descended. Mrs Millman retired to a chair by the window to polish a box of silverware. David sat at the head of the table and placed his fingers around his mug, fixing each of them in turn with his pale eyes.

‘This Retreat is going to be an entirely new experience for each of you guys. Not only because you are Course leaders this time. There’s something special about this place, something holy. When I decided to leave my job as a banker, to devote myself to God on a full-time basis, I came up here for a week to think about it. You can feel the history here, a history of strongly held faith. So spend time with the new members, help them on their path to conversion, but also spend time with yourselves, take this time to push your own spiritual development a little further along.’

The priest leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice.

‘The Retreat is the decisive moment in any Course. It’s where we find out how we’ve done, whether the seeds we’ve planted will sprout or not. This is where we get our new members to commit to the Course, where we lay foundations that will last a lifetime. Any drop-outs from here on hit us very hard. If new members leave after the first few sessions, it’s unlikely they would have seen it through to the end in any case. If they come away with us here, then we should be able to complete the conversion. Don’t let up, don’t allow yourselves to relax. Make sure that you look back on your first Retreat as Course leaders as a successful one. We won’t tolerate failure. We can’t.’