The Revelations (19 page)

‘There is a whole community of us looking out for her, don’t worry.’

‘I’m just not sure that everyone has her best interests at heart.’

They turned into the station car park and Marcus switched off the engine. They sat in silence for a while. Marcus watched taxi drivers smoking with gloved fingers beside their cabs, a family pulling luggage towards the station, a bus slowly disgorging its sleepy passengers onto the forecourt. He could smell something sweet and industrial in the air. Philip opened the door and set his holdall on the ground outside. He reached over and shook Marcus’s hand.

‘Thanks for driving me. I liked you best of all of them. You and Abby are good people. I’m sorry I couldn’t see it through. I would’ve liked to be friends with you.’

‘We can still be friends.’

‘No. No, we can’t. Maybe you don’t realise it, but you won’t ever really be friends with someone who isn’t in the Course. You look down on me now. Perhaps you’re right to.’

He stepped out into the night and a blast of cold air came into the car when he shut the door. Marcus watched him walk across the forecourt. Philip turned and half-raised his hand before passing out of sight. Marcus switched on the radio and listened to old soul songs, feeling guilty for having let David down, but also, at a deeper level, that he had done the right thing. The signal faded as he turned off the Banbury Road and he drove along the ridge in melancholy silence, spotting the entrance to the driveway by the plume of mist that reached out into the road.

The sound of raucous voices and loud music blared from the hall when he came back into the house. He stood at the steps leading into the long room and saw people dancing, chairs overturned, bottles and glasses everywhere. The Nightingales, Mrs Millman and the Earl had gone to bed. Neil was passed out in the chair that Marcus had sat in earlier. The wardrobe doors were open and Marcus saw that the twins were inside. One or other of them would poke a head or an arm out, calling to Abby or Lee to come and inspect the treasures they had discovered. Mouse was striding up and down the main dinner table, the Napoleon hat on his head, a white fox stole around his shoulders. He was carrying a bottle of red wine from which he swigged as he recited from
The Wind in the Willows
and
Alice in Wonderland
. Lee sat below him, laughing and clapping. She waved at Marcus, her blue-green eyes flashing wickedly. Marcus heard snatches of Mouse’s words as he passed, and he remembered the books from his childhood and felt suddenly nostalgic and full of love for his friends.

‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late . . . How doth the little crocodile . . . Poop-poop!’

Marcus walked over to Abby, who was sitting at a table on her own. She had taken a lily from the vase on the table and wore the white flower behind one ear.

‘The Earl’, she said, looking up at him with a grin, ‘was so delighted by the service that he gave me the key to his cellar. I’ve been drinking port. Port makes me feel very silly.’ Her lips and her large teeth behind them were stained purple. Marcus shook his head and sat down beside his wife.

‘Let’s have a glass then,’ he said.

Hours passed. Neil made his way groggily up to bed. The twins fell asleep in the wardrobe. Marcus looked in to see them curled up on a nest of fur coats. Only the four friends were still awake. Mouse and Abby were talking in a corner, surrounded by bottles of wine. Mouse waved his hands as he spoke, taking off his hat and brandishing it every so often to emphasise a point. Marcus was in his favourite armchair with Lee perched once again on the arm. She was very drunk, slurring as she spoke. She leaned against him, one arm around his shoulders, her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. Her earlier melancholy had entirely disappeared, replaced with a kind of manic enthusiasm.

‘We should go on a proper retreat. I’ve been reading about this one in north Wales. You go up into the mountains, stay in tents pitched around an old chapel, spend the days praying and walking and swimming in ice-cold lakes. I think that’s maybe the best way to get close to God.’

‘It sounds amazing,’ Marcus said.

‘I don’t know if David would get jealous, us going on someone else’s retreat.’

Mouse strutted over to them, carrying an armful of lilies, the pollen running orange streaks through the white fur of his stole.

‘Abby and I would be delighted if you’d join us for a trip to pay homage to our great lords of the high road, the titans of the tarmac. I want to drop flowers down on the lorries, let the blessing of nature purify their sooty hearts.’

Abby was already gently easing a fur out from beneath one of the sleeping twins. Lee wrapped herself in a rabbit-skin coat that hung down to the ground. She left the front open, revealing her low-cut black top. Marcus pulled a bearskin around his shoulders like a cloak. He thought it was probably supposed to be a rug: it trailed behind him as he walked out into the misty night. Mouse and Abby had already started down the path ahead of them. The mist deadened sound as they made their way down into the valley; Marcus could no longer hear the motorway. Lee stopped to light cigarettes for both of them, struggling to get the flame to catch in the damp air. Marcus helped her and took a long drag, blowing the smoke out to meet the misty air. When he looked up, Mouse and Abby had disappeared. Lee took his hand and scurried along the path, making her way fleet-footed over the red earth, skipping above half-hidden roots and tree stumps. Marcus thrust his cigarette into his mouth and struggled to keep up with her.

There was no definite point at which Marcus realised that they were lost. The mist had an extraordinary disorienting effect, and Lee’s scampering flight had been so swift that he hadn’t noticed that the path, which had seemed well-worn and familiar in the daylight, had merged into the surrounding earth. He let go of Lee’s hand and looked around. She turned back towards him, laughing, gesturing him onwards.

‘We’re not on the path any more,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she replied, ‘we just need to carry on down until we reach the motorway embankment. We can make our way along to the bridge from there. Come on, this is fun.’

Marcus stopped. He peered further into the trees around them. It had grown lighter, and when he looked closely he could see that all of the trees around them were dead. The spindly skeletons of pines stretched skywards, the wizened fingers of branches white in the moonlight, the trunks reaching up from the mist that swirled around their roots. There was no foliage on the branches, nothing but mist to impede the searing white light of the moon. Bark peeled back like diseased skin. Marcus pressed his hand against one of the trees and felt the crêpelike wood dissolve under his touch. The world was only whiteness and shadow and the skeleton fingers of the trees all seemed to point at Marcus. He made out a darker shadow in the distance.

‘What’s that through there?’

He took her hand, which was damp and hot, and led her across the uneven ground, around the rotting trunk of a fallen tree and over a small ridge into a clearing. They were beside the lake, whose surface was trapped under a thick cushion of mist. The shape that Marcus had seen was the boathouse. One of the grain drums stood next to them, its rook corpse turning slowly in the mist above.

‘How did we end up here?’ He looked up and could just make out the dark mass of the house above them. ‘I thought we were much further down. At least we know that this path leads to the motorway.’

Lee didn’t answer. She was standing on the bank of the lake, looking out into the thickly packed mist, which glowed where it was illuminated by moonlight away from the shadows of trees. Marcus came up behind her and put his arms around her, pulling the bearskin rug about them both. She was breathing very quickly, and he saw her breath on the air in front of them. She half-turned her head and leaned back against him. He could feel his own heart beating as it pressed against her back.

‘It’s like the
Morte d’Arthur
,’ she said.

‘It’s beautiful.’

She pulled away from him, walked over towards the boathouse, hesitated for a moment, and then stepped out into the mist that sat above the lake. Marcus jumped towards her, ready to pull her from the cold water. Only when he was beside the boathouse did he realise that she had stepped out into a rowing boat that was moored to the deck in front of the small wooden building.

‘Come in. Let’s row out into the lake. I want to look up at the moon through the mist.’ She moved up to the prow of the small boat and lay back, her legs folded beneath her.

Marcus stepped unsteadily onto the boat. The misty air was a cold blanket around his shoulders. He sat down upon the central bench and felt on the floor for the oars. He rowed them slowly out into the centre of the lake. The water slapped gently against the sides of the boat. After a while he let them drift and made his way towards Lee. The mist was very thick around them; it was as if it were something solid that re-formed each instant to accommodate the gentle passage of the boat through the water. The moon was a faint silver smudge above them, the surrounding trees were shadows. Marcus lay down on the floor of the boat, his head in Lee’s lap. He pulled the bearskin over them. He felt the shifting of the water beneath him, imagined the fish moving among the weeds below. Lee ran her long fingers through his hair.

‘We could be anywhere. Anywhere, at any time. Floating through an endless night.’

The boat rocked as Lee shifted and leaned over him. He looked up at the halo of her short, damp hair, then shuffled further into the warm darkness of her lap.

‘Do you ever think about that time at university?’ Her voice was a whisper. He heard her light a cigarette. After taking a drag she held it in his mouth. With one hand she continued to stroke his hair. He spoke into the coarse hair of the rug.

‘Yes. I mean, I try not to think about it. It makes me guilty. But it was only a kiss.’

‘Yes, it was only a kiss.’

They lay and felt the air thicken around them. Marcus tried to work out whether she could also feel whatever it was that was building in the mist, grabbing hold of his heart and his groin, making his breaths come in shallow gasps. One of her hands continued to caress his hair, finding new paths to trace across his scalp, exposing new trails of nerve-ends that thrilled as her nails travelled across them. His face was pressed against the softness of her belly. A night bird called somewhere in the trees over the boathouse. She stopped stroking Marcus and pushed him gently away from her, lifting the bearskin and wrapping it about herself. He moved back to sit on the central bench. Lee’s voice came at him as if from a great distance, as cold as the mist that surrounded them.

‘You fake it, don’t you, the speaking in tongues? I can tell. I can tell when I watch you because I fake it, too.’

Marcus drew in a cool, damp breath.

‘I don’t know, Lee. It’s tough. Have you ever done it, you know, properly?’

‘Maybe once, at the very beginning. I felt like I was drifting away. It was like I get sometimes when I listen to a really beautiful piece of music, or read a poem that really speaks to me. But recently, I haven’t felt anything at all. I so wanted it to be this big revelation. I’ve been waiting and waiting for it, my Damascus moment, but it has never arrived. I think tonight I might have given up.’

A gust of wind skimmed across the lake, billowing the mist. Marcus shivered.

‘It always made me feel close to you,’ Lee said, ‘that neither of us could do it. That we were both faking it. It was a secret we shared.’

Now the moon had disappeared entirely; its only relic was the silver glow that suffused the air. Everything was mist, so thick that Marcus felt that if he reached his arm out from his shoulder, he might never see it again. He could hardly make out Lee across the boat. He grabbed one of the oars and paddled listlessly at the water, moving them in slow circles. He felt Lee shifting around in the boat, caught a glimpse of movement from the prow when he strained his eyes towards her.

‘Come over here.’ Her voice a heavy whisper. As he sank to his knees, she began to appear more clearly through the gauze of mist. The first thing he noticed was her eyes. They sparkled dangerously and fixed upon him, drawing him towards them. He kneeled on the floor of the boat between her legs. Lee was lying back on the warm pile of furs, bare from the waist down. Her skirt was rolled beneath her head as a pillow. Her black blouse served only to accentuate the pale legs that stretched out from the shadowy mound between them.

‘I’ve always wanted you to go down on me.’ She leaned forward and knitted her hand into the hair at the back of his head. He eased himself down until all was blackness and the slick saltiness of her against his tongue. Goose pimples on her thighs. He closed his eyes. The boat rocked as he flicked his tongue over her; she twisted his hair between her fingers as he moved faster. She began to arch her back, pressing herself against him, grinding his head down into her lap. He tried to stretch up and cup one of her breasts. She gently batted the hand away. He buried his face further into the bulge of her
pubic
hair. He remembered when, as a child, he had built himself a den in the middle of a clump of ferns in the woods at the back of his house, tramping down a circle at the centre and then pulling the encircling green fronds over himself. It was damp and the ferns tickled his skin, but he had felt very safe there. He thought of the den as he whipped his tongue over the soft tufty dampness of her pussy. Lee let out a sighing squeal like air released from a bicycle tyre. Marcus rose back up to kneel at her feet; leaning over, he tried to place a kiss on her lips but she turned away, presenting him with a cold hard cheek. Her teeth were chattering. She pulled on her pants and unrolled her skirt, snaking her way into it on the floor of the boat.

Marcus rowed them back to the shore and tied the boat to the deck in front of the boathouse. He reached out an arm and helped her to step onto the bank. They walked in silence down the path towards the motorway. Marcus lit two cigarettes and passed one to Lee. She took it without thanks. Finally, they heard the noise of the surging traffic in the distance. She quickened her pace, walking a few feet ahead of him as the slope steepened. The mist still wove its fingers between the trees, and Marcus kept thinking he saw shapes forming in the corners of his eyes, figures watching him from behind the adumbrated trunks of the pines. He scurried to catch up with Lee.