by Alex Preston
‘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 yel
low 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.’
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 c
ertain 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.