The Revelations (15 page)

The bridge was suspended a hundred feet above the motorway. It seemed very flimsy to Marcus as he led Abby along it. There was no wind from above, although the machines rushing beneath them seemed to create their own strange currents, sucking the air from around the Course members and then a sudden rush as the lorries surged past. Mouse was standing at the centre of the bridge, leaning far forward over the handrail, waving his hat to the vehicles below, a cigarette pointing downwards from his wildly grinning mouth. Marcus caught some of his friend’s exhilaration. He slipped out of Abby’s embrace, danced forward, then turned back and took his wife’s hand before leading her out to the middle of the bridge.

The noise from the traffic below made speech impossible. The roar whipped thoughts from their minds and the breath from their chests. The bridge shuddered when the largest lorries passed beneath, hummed and trembled the rest of the time. Marcus saw Philip come up behind Lee and place his strange zombie arms around her shoulders. He gripped Abby’s hand tightly in his own. He could see that Mouse was shouting, screaming down into the roar of traffic below. It felt as if they were linked by something, as if a chain of feeling hung between them like bunting out there in the high and dangerous sky, as they stared down on the man-made sublime.

A convoy of military vehicles passed beneath them: Land Rovers and tarpaulin-covered trucks followed by transporters carrying tanks and amphibious vehicles. Through the open backs of the trucks, Marcus could make out soldiers leaning against the shuddering material, some of them trying to sleep, some talking over the roar of the engines. One of them looked up and Marcus imagined that the soldier might carry the image of the young people silhouetted on a bridge away to battle, that it might rest in his mind like a talisman, a reminder of home. Looking down on the military vehicles, Marcus thought of toys he had collected as a child and arranged in careful formation to show his father when he arrived home from work, battlefronts drawn out on the kitchen floor. When the convoy had passed something in the air changed, and Marcus was aware that Abby was shivering beside him; he saw Lee slip gracefully out from under Philip’s arms. Only Mouse was still standing braced against the roar below, his chubby cheeks livid in the glare of the street lights, the hat now back on his head giving him the air of a mad general leading his troops on a final suicidal mission. Lee knelt at the entrance to the bridge and took Mouse’s photograph. Finally, Mouse joined them, his large eyes wet, his mouth hanging stupidly open.

Making their way back up the hill towards the house, there was a sense of deflation, but also of a communal recognition of this deflation, a feeling that they were together in feeling rather disappointed by the natural world, by the inconsistencies of the sloping ground when compared to the tarmac and metal perfection that they had just witnessed. Marcus drew his rabbit-skin jacket closer around his shoulders and pressed his lips down into the worn fur of the shoulder. He breathed in the greasy softness of the pelt. Abby looked dazed and had to lean on him every so often to catch her breath. They skirted the edge of the lake, whose waters were an oily reflection of the night sky. Philip came to walk beside Marcus and Abby.

‘I’m nervous about tomorrow,’ he said. Marcus looked over at him. His face was very pale in the moonlight.

‘Why’s that?’ Marcus felt Abby squeeze his hand in his pocket.

‘It feels like it’s going to be a test of everything that has gone before. That if we can’t embrace it all, we’ll somehow have failed. I’m worried I’ll be standing there in the service and I’ll feel as uninspired as I always did, back when I was a choirboy and I used to see church services as a kind of endurance event, used to long for the sermon because it meant we were entering the home straight.’

They were walking through the darkest part of the wood now, and Marcus could barely see Philip beside him. Abby stumbled on a root and then spoke, leaning across Marcus to address Philip’s shadowy outline.

‘When I spoke in tongues for the first time, all of the rest of the service suddenly made sense. We become a community when we pray, or sing together. In that comfortable, familiar space it’s amazing what you can do.’

‘I really hope so.’

‘Try to think of it as abstract art. You know the way a painting can be terribly moving, even though it is just a few splashes of paint on a canvas? The way something by Pollock can be more powerful, and beautiful, than a Constable landscape? It’s because it entirely bypasses our consciousness. The tongues, the music, the words of the service – you should think of them like that. As something beyond the scope of your rational mind.’

‘That’s helpful. I’ll see if it works in the chapel tomorrow.’

Finally, they broke free of the woods and saw Lancing Manor looming above them, a black shadow against the starlit night behind. A turret rose up like a coil of smoke from the house, a light burning in its narrow window.

Back inside the dining hall, Mouse initiated a half-hearted drinking game, but Marcus could tell that everyone was tired. He made sure the coats were hung back in the cupboard and drank a glass of water. He wanted to leave while there was still a feeling of community hanging between them. It was something he remembered from his first Retreat, when the Course members, who had until then seemed somehow suspicious, distant and self-satisfied, gathered around him and he felt warmth radiating from them.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, looking over at Abby. She smiled at him and they walked down the dining hall holding hands. They made their way through the heavy doors and into the main hallway, where a single lamp stood on the mantelpiece, a solitary point of light in the darkness that reared up above them. Abby shivered as they crept up the stairs and down the long corridor past the ghostly photographs. Their room was warm. Mrs Millman had lit a fire in the grate earlier when she came in to close the curtains. Their duvet was turned back and the bedside light cast a cosy glow across the white sheets.

Marcus helped Abby with her zip. She let the dress fall to the floor and stepped out of it. She wore white pants, a black bra that was fraying under the arms: Marcus could see a safety pin holding one strap together. Her thighs were milk-white as she took down her pants, bending to place them on a chair. She turned towards him, carefully unhooking her bra, and he lost himself in the wide expanse of her face. She undid his belt with a flourish and helped him take down his boxer shorts. They lay down together on the bed, which creaked and sagged reluctantly beneath them.

Abby kept laughing as they fucked; at one point he looked down at her and saw a smile flash across her face, igniting in her eyes and then exploding across her pink lips. Every time they moved, the bed groaned and Abby squealed laughter. Marcus thrust into Abby, stopping when he was entirely inside her, feeling their bodies intersecting at so many distinct points, hot skin against hot skin. They fell asleep and woke still pressed close together. Abby cradled Marcus’s head in her arms, hugged his face to her chest. He had no idea what time it was, nor for how long Abby held him. He lay and listened to her heart and the distant moan of the motorway. They slept again and when they woke it was growing light outside. Marcus could hear people moving downstairs. Milky sunlight fell into the room through the gap in the curtains.

Marcus and Abby had breakfast in the kitchen, where Mrs Millman stood over the Aga stirring a pot of porridge. David and Sally sat side by side, very close together. Marcus wondered if they had had sex the night before. He and Abby slouched opposite them feeling somehow seedy, still swimming in the pleasure of their night together. The Earl was wearing a tweed jacket and a dark blue tie. He perched low over his bowl of cornflakes, his narrow eyes surveying the Course members as they came in to eat. David smiled at Marcus.

‘Mouse and Lee have already been down. I think they’re in the chapel preparing for this evening.’

Marcus couldn’t tell if there was reprimand in his voice.

‘What’s the plan for the day?’

‘Some discussion groups this morning, lunch in the dining hall at one o’clock and a walk this afternoon if the weather holds out. Then, of course, the service.’

‘The forecast isn’t that good, I’m afraid,’ Sally said, buttering a slice of toast.

Marcus and Abby ate quickly and in silence, then hurried back upstairs. They took a bath together as they had at university, carefully adjusting their limbs in the ancient iron tub with its rusty lion’s-claw feet. Abby ran her fingers slowly down the inside of his thighs as they lay in the hot water, singing softly to herself. Marcus watched as the thousands of tiny bubbles that clung to the nest of his pubes were dislodged by her fingers and rose swiftly through the water like champagne. By the time they had dried and were down in the chapel it was ten o’clock and the Course members sat around chatting.

Marcus still couldn’t remember the names of the girls in his discussion group; one was Lizzie and another Sarah, but he didn’t know the others and the remaining boyfriends were just flushed cheeks on vague faces. He was glad to see that most of his group were surrounding David and the Earl. David was standing in front of the Stations of the Cross describing the meaning of each scene while the Earl interjected occasionally with stories about the artist he had invited to paint the images directly onto the walls of the chapel. Philip sat with Mouse and Sally in one corner. Mouse was talking very quickly, his hands dancing as he spoke. Lee sat apart from them, her legs stretched out along a pew, her arms around her shoulders. A beam of sunlight fell into her short hair and she lifted a hand to shade her eyes from the brightness. Marcus took Abby’s arm and they made their way to the front of the chapel, where Maki and Neil were inspecting engravings on the pillars in front of the altar.

‘Morning.’

‘Morning, Marcus. Hi, Abby. Have you seen these inscriptions? The lettering is exquisite.’ Neil ran his finger over the text, which Marcus recognised as a chapter from Ecclesiastes: ‘Rejoice, O young man in thy youth . . .’ The letters were like runes, difficult to read at first, but once his eyes had become accustomed to the jagged shapes, Marcus saw how perfectly they expressed the regretful wisdom of the words. Abby stood behind Neil and reached over to run her own fingers over the inscription.

Neil and Maki sat down on the steps leading up to the altar while Marcus and Abby leaned back against the front pew. Marcus began to say something, but Abby cut him off.

‘It’s about getting rid of your inhibitions, this weekend. All those things that get in the way when you’re in London. It’s why we always come out to the countryside. Silence, music, peace. This is what we need to get closer to God.’

‘I’ve been reading the Bible,’ said Neil, ‘and I keep feeling like I almost get it. As if there’s something very obvious that I’m missing. But I’m almost there. I know I am.’

‘Let today carry you in its current. Don’t try to force it, just let yourself be open to whatever happens.’ Abby was glowing; she reached out a hand and laid it on the arm of the older man, who was dressed in stiff smart-casual: chinos and a blue button-down shirt. Maki, who had been hidden in the shadow of one of the pillars, leaned forward.

‘What about the tongues? I heard David last night and I just can’t imagine a situation where I’d be able to do that.’

‘What did you think when you heard it?’ Abby tilted towards Maki, mirroring her.

‘I suppose it was beautiful. It sounded like just another part of the music. It’s the thing I like best about the Course, the music. So it was nice to hear, but I don’t know if it meant any more to me than that. I certainly didn’t understand it.’

‘I don’t think you need to understand it. And you certainly don’t need to join in. I think the way that it’s presented, people expect the Course to change everything. It doesn’t need to. It can be the start of a journey; it doesn’t always take people all the way to their goal.’

‘Hmm . . . I’m just not sure it’s for me.’

‘Why did you first come to the Course, Maki?’ Marcus asked, aware that he should be supporting Abby.

‘I suppose it was to make friends, mainly. But also to find somewhere, I don’t know, spiritual. I’ve always felt that I needed to believe in something, I just never discovered exactly what.’

‘Well, you have friends here. And the Course is an extraordinarily spiritual experience. It seems to me that you just need to allow yourself to believe. Feel good about the fact that you found exactly what you were looking for. Sometimes we can get so caught up in the search that we don’t allow ourselves to accept that we’ve reached our destination.’

They spoke for another hour; Philip came over to join them after a while. They leaned back against the stone pillars, spread themselves out across the pews, listening carefully to each other as they talked, each awaiting their turn to speak, measuring their words precisely. Sally and the Earl sat down, smiling, as Marcus told the members about C. S. Lewis’s conversion.

‘He was travelling down to Whipsnade Zoo. He set out on his trip as an agnostic and arrived a believer. You need to realise that the conscious mind is the last thing to change. The more you read and the more you think about God, the more He works behind the scenes. It’s why the kind of epiphany that Lewis describes isn’t as instantaneous and unreasoning as it first appears. If you lay the groundwork then God will do the rest. And here at the Retreat, we try to do as much as we can to create an environment that allows that change to take place.’

Only Lee still sat apart from the various groups. The beam of light had moved across the room and now she was in the shadows, dust thick in the air around her, her short hair flat on her head. Marcus could see that she was looking at the pines through the high windows, watching them dance in the gentle breeze. She turned and caught his eye for a moment and he shivered and reached out for Abby’s hand. When he looked back at Lee her head was tilted back again and she seemed miles away from any of them.

At one o’clock, Mrs Millman arrived at the door of the chapel and called them for lunch. They made their way through to the dining hall, where they continued to talk as they ate baked potatoes piled high with grated cheese and baked beans. After lunch, Marcus walked over to Lee and laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘Are you coming for a walk? Do you remember when we used to walk in the meadows at university? We’d always go on ahead. I used to love just listening to you talk.’

‘I was thinking about those walks just the other day. Doesn’t it seem like a long time ago?’

‘In a way, I suppose.’

‘It feels like a lifetime to me. We were so young back then. Everything felt ahead of us.’

The Course members were slowly filing out of the hall, disappearing upstairs to collect coats and boots ready for the walk. Marcus gave Lee’s shoulder a final squeeze and they made their way up to their rooms. The Earl and David were waiting at the front of the house when Marcus came back downstairs. Abby, wearing a blue Husky and hiking boots, was handing out thermoses of hot chocolate with Sally. The wind had picked up and the sound of the pines blocked out the noise of the road. Marcus pulled his scarf tightly around his throat. Rooks swirled in the air above him, whipped into hurtling arabesques by the wind.

They set off up the driveway, crossed the road that they had driven in on the day before, and descended into the next valley on a worn footpath. The sky’s earlier blue was now a patchwork of clouds at varying altitudes, each level represented by a different colour: dark stratus against lighter cumulus, and far above, a blanket of white cirrus. The Earl and David strode out in front with Sally and Neil following closely behind them. Lee walked a few paces ahead of Mouse, who jogged every few steps to keep up with her. Abby held Marcus tightly by the hand. Soon they climbed to the top of another hill; Chipping Norton lay to the south, the chimney of its abandoned mill standing over the town like an accusing finger. They crossed the Banbury road and made their way alongside an old stone wall and down through high-piled leaves at the feet of ancient horse chestnuts.

The ground was soft beneath their feet as they walked down into the dell ahead of them. Marcus helped Abby to climb over a stile that stood in the shade of a huge old oak. He saw that Philip and Maki were walking together, deep in conversation. There was a village at the bottom of the hill. A church was lost within a protective circle of dark trees, a large gloomy house with shuttered windows blindly overlooked the village. The walls that crossed the fields here were crumbling, nettles swamped the verges of the road. Nothing moved.

The Earl led them down a narrow path between the church and a row of tumbledown cottages and then over another stile and into a small wood. They came out on top of a grassy mound looking down over rolling fields, a stream which wended along the bottom of the valley, silver birches that climbed the opposite hillside. Marcus caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a doe crossing the stream, pearls of water thrown up by its long legs. By the time he had raised his arm to point it out to Abby, it had disappeared. They marched on.

Marcus found himself walking with Lee as they headed down towards a wooden footbridge that hung haphazardly above the swirling waters of the stream. She was wearing a Barbour jacket, pink wellingtons beneath her long skirt. She took his arm.

‘You and Abby seem happy. Go on – you can tell me – is she pregnant?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Are you trying? I’d love it if you were trying.’

‘Maybe. Maybe we’re trying, yes.’

Over the bridge and into the woods they went. In the dubious light under trees that creaked in the wind, Lee gripped his hand.

‘I’m really struggling with my thesis at the moment. I was thinking I might chuck in the PhD.’

‘Really? I always thought it was perfect for you. I liked to imagine you shut up in the library reading ancient manuscripts written by crazy saints.’ The others had disappeared, and Marcus led them along what looked like the path; a circle of rooks blackened the air above the trees, cawing.

‘I look around the reading room and I see so many girls like me. It’s a way of backing away from the world, I think. To be more comfortable in the past than you are in the present. There’s a kind of competition for obscurity between these girls. How arcane a subject can you feasibly write about for eighty thousand words? How little could it possibly relate to the real world? I used to think it was a balance; that the Course and my schoolwork were a balance against the rest of life. But it feels like things have become too heavily weighted in that direction, that real life doesn’t stand a chance when measured against all that history, all that abstraction.’

‘You’ll be fine. You think too much. I can see how much you enjoy it: it’s something you’re really good at. We all need something like that. And it obviously helps with the Course.’

‘I don’t know about that. One of the things I realise when I read Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich is just how conventional the Course’s idea of God is. It seems strange that David is so heavily focused on redefining the spiritual side of faith – the way we feel and think and act – but doesn’t try to challenge that tired Sunday School image of God. The Course’s way of thinking about Him just seems so banal – there’s no sense of mystery there.’ Lee stooped to look at a clump of small white mushrooms that were growing between a delta of roots that shot out from the foot of an oak. Marcus stooped alongside her, placing his thumb into the feathery fronds that sat beneath the tight caps.

‘It does feel like we’re still being asked to buy into the idea of an old man with a beard,’ Marcus said, as the cap of the mushroom broke from its stem, sending up a puff of white smoke that drifted and dissipated on the breeze.

‘Exactly. It’s childish,’ said Lee.

‘But who do you talk to, when you pray, I mean? If you don’t picture God like that?’

They continued down the thickly wooded path.

‘I don’t think of God. I say prayers in the way we were originally intended to: as a way of emptying the mind, readying us for the presence of God. In
The Cloud of Unknowing
there’s a line that says “of God Himself no man can think”. It’s in the stillness when you empty your mind that you get closest to God.’

‘And that works for you?’

Lee looked at him through narrow, serious eyes.

‘I’m not sure. Sometimes silence makes things better; sometimes it’s where I feel most trapped. Because the most awful things can creep into that silence.’ Her words faded at the end. They walked a little further; then she continued.

‘This voice starts speaking to me. I’m not going mad, don’t worry. But this voice is very critical, totally unforgiving. It tells me not to be such a goddamn idiot, that it’s all my fault, that I need to pull myself together. And it’s not my dad’s voice, and it’s not my mother’s. But it’s there and it’s making me very unhappy.’

Marcus squeezed her hand and looked over at her. With her thin face and small nose, Lee looked very girlish. He thought that she would always look girlish and, although she wasn’t as doomed as she liked to pretend, that there would be a time when that girlishness would grow spinsterly and unbearably sad. She brightened her voice and rested her head playfully on Marcus’s shoulder for a moment.

‘I’ll be all right. Of course I’ll be all right. I just feel that I’m in this in-between space, where I’m no longer a girl, but I don’t really know how to be a woman yet. Part of me wants to skip straight to old age. I think I’d make a fantastic old lady.’