The Revelations (13 page)

Marcus had been aware of something nagging at him for a while, something dimly perceived, at the verge of his consciousness. Only when David paused in his speech to sip his tea did Marcus realise that he could hear traffic. Not the road they had come in on, but the relentless drone of a motorway: articulated lorries and caravans, car transporters and pantechnicons. Dusk had fallen outside and, looking out of the kitchen window, he could see a thin belt of yellow light above the trees fading into the night sky. David continued to talk for the next twenty minutes, reminiscing about previous Retreats. Then it was time to go out and greet the new members who had come up from London in a coach that barely squeezed its way through the gates and under the canopy of trees.

The front of the house was illuminated by the coach’s headlights as the new members stepped blinking from the vehicle’s dark interior. Neil was first, followed by Maki and the twins. Philip was the last to make his way down to join the cluster of twenty or so who stood close together in front of the large doors. Marcus could see their breath caught in the lights that blazed from the coach. He walked out and picked up the twins’ suitcases as David bounded out to welcome the new arrivals. The priest swept his pale eyes over the Course members.

‘Hi guys. This is where it begins for you. For many this weekend will be one of the most important experiences of your lives. Savour it all. Prepare yourselves for miraculous things. Approach the weekend with an open mind and you’ll find yourselves changed beyond recognition.

‘Now come on inside, make yourself at home. We’ll have a brief service of thanksgiving before dinner. The Course leaders have been getting to know the layout of this extraordinary place, so do ask if you get lost.’ The Earl stood bearlike behind him, nodding every so often.

The chapel was very cold. Candles had been lit along the aisle; otherwise the small church was dark. Marcus’s hands felt stiff and unresponsive on the frets of his guitar. Only he and Lee were performing that evening. The whole band would play together for the main ceremony on Saturday night. They had tuned up, and now they were waiting for the members to come down from the house. Lee was fidgeting notes from the piano with her right hand.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, resting his bass on the ground in front of him and going to sit next to her at the piano. She shuffled thin buttocks up the bench and he began to play along with her, watching her fingers and trying to copy the melody. He realised that she was playing
Pictures at an Exhibition
.

‘I’m OK,’ she said.

Marcus felt her swaying slightly as she played. Without missing a note, she placed her left hand on his and helped him to find the melody. Her hands were colder than his, the frosty pressure of her fingers made him shiver slightly.

‘You love this piece of music, don’t you?’

She stopped playing for a moment and looked over at him.

‘Yes. My dad taught it to me when I was very young. It makes me think of him.’

She started to play again, now extemporising a harmony over his refrain. She closed her eyes.

‘It reminds me of what my dad’s music used to be like, before he got depressed. His new composition is so bleak, so empty. The stuff he doesn’t burn, I mean. It seems to me that all of his new music aspires to silence. When I speak to him on the phone, he’s often silent for a long time. We sit and listen to each other breathe. Sometimes he’ll hang up without saying anything.’

Marcus stopped playing. He sat back and watched Lee nod her head in time to the music.

‘It’s like he has used up all of the ways of saying what he needs to say through music and language, and silence is the only voice left to him.’

‘Do you think that you inherit your slumps from your dad?’

Lee stopped playing and turned towards him, her hands folded in her lap.

‘Of course. But he’s further along than me. I’m certain that my dad will kill himself soon. It’s something that I have known for a long time. And I miss him already. Because this silence – that’s what it is. It’s a kind of suicide. He’s backing away from the world and finally he will make his move complete.’

She was chewing on the inside of her cheek. Marcus could see blood on her teeth when she opened her mouth. He took her hand, feeling horrified and helpless.

‘You talk about my slumps, but none of you know what it’s like. When I’m in one of them it’s like being in a dark cell with one other creature, and then you find out that dark creature is yourself. It’s a bond between me and my dad – that we both go there – but it doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t make you want to go on surviving.’

Marcus saw that people were beginning to come into the chapel. He stopped playing and looked down into the shadowy nave. Mouse and Abby sat in the front row, huddled together for warmth. He smiled at them and then turned back to Lee. Leaning towards her, he spoke in a low voice.

‘I’m so worried about you.’

‘Don’t be.’ Her voice was suddenly hard. ‘Please stop worrying about me. And stop telling me that you’re worried. Sometimes if you think about something all the time, and harp on about it, it can make it real. I’m fine, really I am. I’m finding ways of coping.’

Marcus saw David come into the chapel, followed by Sally and the Earl.

‘Now let’s just play some music,’ Lee said. ‘Worry about yourself, about Abby. I can look after myself.’

Marcus lifted up his bass and began to pick out a series of notes, following Lee, who was playing a rousing tune that marked David’s passage down the aisle. The priest turned and stood in front of the low altar, his white shirt and chinos bright in candlelight. The new members looked nervous and excited. The atmosphere was constructed to be as fertile for revelation as possible; nothing should feel forced. Each of the new members had been given a candle to hold as they entered the small chapel. Marcus watched the careful way each of them held the flames, trying not to allow the wax to spill from the white cardboard collar that formed the handle.

David read a passage from St Luke – ‘He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray”.’ The cold dark room echoed with the sound of his long vowels, the stentorian manner in which he declaimed the Lord’s Prayer. Marcus laid his guitar across his knee and sat on his hands to keep them warm. While the priest talked, Marcus thought back to his first Retreat. He had travelled down with Abby to a tatty hotel near Exeter where chickens pecked in the yard outside their window. Those days in the balmy air of an Indian summer had changed Marcus. They had brought him closer to Abby, but also made him face up to the creeping realisation that someone – God, perhaps – was trying to win him over.

The coincidences had been occurring with disturbing regularity in the days leading up to that first Retreat. Phrases from the book he was reading on David’s orders – C. S. Lewis’s
The Screwtape Letters
– had been appearing on billboards, in graffiti on the sides of buildings, were spoken in meetings when he was half-listening, leaping from the surrounding drone. The number sixty-two cropped up everywhere: receipts, payslips and telephone numbers, page numbers in books that seemed full of hidden meaning, whispered significance. He would find a song repeating in his head on the way into the office; on the way home he’d sit next to a tramp singing the very same song in a voice far too beautiful for his grizzled face. But the biggest coincidence, the moment that had shocked him into belief, had occurred on the Saturday morning of that first Retreat.

Marcus and Abby had been arguing in her room. Because they were not yet married they had separate bedrooms and Abby didn’t think they should sleep together during their time at the Retreat, should obey the laws of the Course at least here. Marcus had shouted at her and stomped from the room. Outside it was warm enough for him to take off his jacket and sling it over his arm. An estuary swept across the horizon and he strode purposefully down towards the sea. He was twenty-three and he walked with the bouncing steps of an athlete. The sea was further than he thought but he pressed on, past low cottages and cows watching him with stupid curiosity. Down a narrow lane with flint walls overgrown with ivy he came upon a small church. Norman, with a leper gate and crumbling roof. The door bore a heavy padlock; looking in, with his hand cupped to the grubby window, Marcus saw that the inside was empty, the church disused. The graveyard had been overtaken by nature. Nettles grew in thick clumps above red-veined dock leaves, brambles were knotted around teetering gravestones and rabbits scuttled under apple trees as he made his way further into the cemetery.

Marcus liked to look at dates. When he went to art galleries he spent as much time calculating the ages of the artists when they died as he did looking at their paintings. Picasso filled him with hope, Toulouse-Lautrec terrified him; Dalí was a beacon, Jackson Pollock a tocsin. It was the same in cemeteries. Whenever he walked around Kensal Green with Mouse he looked hungrily for signs of extreme longevity, but was often brought up short by the graves of teenagers, people dead in their twenties and thirties. He watched particularly for family tombs where parents had outlived their children. So in the little churchyard in Devon, Marcus tore back brambles and scraped away lichen, bringing his face down close to the dappled gravestones. Most were very ancient, almost unreadable, telling of plague-deaths and children snatched by smallpox and dropsy. Then, as he was about to leave, he saw a newer stone in the corner of the graveyard, the sandy earth seemingly fresh-dug. A bunch of tulips lay upon the earth below the stone. The engraving upon it made Marcus’s throat close up in fear.

‘Marcus Glass. Taken from us aged 23. Grant him rest, O Lord.’

He staggered backwards, the few wispy clouds in the blue sky above him circling wildly for a moment. He had a sudden and vivid picture of his mother and sister at his father’s funeral, their faces pinched with sadness. He found his finger returning to trace the path of his own name, his own age. He knew that it was a sign. After the series of coincidences that had marked the last few days, this was the heavy-handed proof. When he returned to the hotel he went to find David and told him everything, told him that he was ready to really believe. David embraced him and he felt a shadow lift from his mind.

Lee nudged Marcus. He jumped. Lost in memories of his early days in the Course, he had missed the end of the reading. He began to strum a succession of quiet deep notes as Lee played slow descending chords. Abby sang a solo first, then the congregation joined with her. The plainness of the song suited the dark little chapel. Marcus could see the faces of the twins as they sang, twin mouths beaming, twin cheeks shining. It was a simple refrain, a prayer repeated over the same chord sequence.

Abby swayed from side to side as she sang, her eyes closed. There was something hypnotic in the music. Just as it felt that the hymn was fading into monotony, David began to improvise in the spaces between words, singing a descant in a high, fragile voice.

‘Yalullialla. Yaweahalalla. Hanna, hanna . . .’

It was the sound of the desert, the sound of ancient civilisations, and Marcus took a deep breath, trying to inhale its extraordinary purity. David was standing with his arms held out, his face turned up to the roof, a wide smile showing his bright teeth. Almost before it had begun, it was over. David muttered a final blessing and then led them up the aisle and back up to the main house. Marcus could see the dazed expressions of the new members. There were glasses of white wine on the round table in the centre of the entrance hall. Maki came over to Marcus and handed him a drink.

‘That was amazing. Was that . . . ? I mean, is that what speaking in tongues sounds like?’

‘That was it. Or at least how David speaks. I guess everyone has their own way of doing it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

Maki just looked at him with wide dark eyes.

After the wine, they made their way down to the dining hall, where Mrs Millman was standing in the corner stirring pots of stew and vats of rice. The Course members sat down at the long tables in the candlelight. They seemed lost in the vast dining hall. The hall had mullioned windows and dark tapestries of hunting scenes. A mahogany armoire stood along one side of the room, its front inlaid with elaborate carvings of Greek myths. Wooden doors at the far end gave onto the garden. Marcus sat next to Abby and Maki and they talked and drank and he felt a sense of optimism sweep over him. Abby looked happier than she had for weeks and even Lee was smiling, laughing along with the twins and Mouse, while Sally Nightingale spoke to Neil and Philip at the other end of the table. The Earl sat down opposite Marcus and ate in silent concentration, spearing pieces of beef aggressively. When he had finished, he leaned forward towards Marcus and Abby.

‘How do you like the old place?’

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Abby. ‘I’ve never been anywhere quite like it.’

‘It’s perfect for the Retreat. Don’t know why we haven’t had it here before. David was always a little nervous about it. This was where he underwent his own epiphany, you see. He wrote
The Way of the Pilgrim
here, so Lancing Manor has always held a special place in his heart. I think it’s a huge compliment to you lot that he agreed this year.’

‘I think it’s a good bunch. The new members, I mean. And I suppose he has seen us grow up with the Course. I like to think that this group of Course leaders is quite special to him.’

Marcus put his hand on his wife’s arm.

‘I have been working a great deal on the US expansion,’ the Earl said, his heavy eyebrows lowering as he spoke. ‘Over there, of course, it’s even more important that people shouldn’t worry about their wealth. It’s a society that is shaped by money and we have to recognise that. Particularly in the areas we’re targeting: the North-East and California. Greed has temporarily replaced faith for these people, but they remain believers. You can see it in their eyes. We need to let them know they can have both.’