by Alex Preston
He lifted his hand from her lap and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger.
‘You are such a beautiful, intelligent girl, Lee. You don’t need to be doing this, to be giving yourself away so easily. You will make somebody a wonderful wife one day. In the meantime you must just try to control yourself. You know that I think wine is a wonderful thing, one of God’s great gifts. But all of you drink too much, and it’s much harder to keep your passions in check when you’re drunk.’
He drew his hand up, across her cheek, brushing the strands of hair away from her mouth and tucking them behind her ear.
‘I will try, David, I really will. I want you to be proud of me. Sometimes, though, it feels like it takes everything I have just to get through the day. Like I’m leaning against a door, trying to keep it shut, trying to stop something terribly frightening from coming out. It’s why I’m always so tired.’
‘And what’s behind this door?’
‘I don’t know. I just know that it’s dark and horrible and scares me. I start to panic just thinking about it.’
‘You must fight against it. The Course will be there for you when you come out the other side of this phase you’re going through. But if you backslide too far, if you let the Devil come too close to you, it may be that you are too distant for even the Course to reach you. If you become known as a slut, Lee, I might have to ask you to leave. For the good of the Course.’ These last words were like glass pressed into her skin, each word pearled blood on her pale skin. Tears began to run down her cheeks and David’s voice became softer.
‘I understand what you’ve been going through. And I don’t want to turn away from you – you’re a key member of our community. I’m just trying to warn you. You know I see myself as a father to you lot. The four of you need to stick together. There’s something about you guys that is quite astonishing. On stage, obviously, but also when you move around the church, when you speak to Course members. I don’t want to lose that. It’s why I wanted to speak to you now, before things get any worse. Have a think about what I’ve said. Come and see me any time if you’d like to chat.’
He rose and placed his hand on her hair. Lee bowed her head, feeling the joyful shiver of forgiveness. When the echoes of his footsteps had disappeared from the church above, she made her way upstairs, put on her coat, pulled her hat down so that it nearly covered her eyes, and walked out into the damp night.
Mouse had saved her a seat next to him in the pub. Philip was watching from the corner as Lee moved her chair closer towards Mouse, linked her arm through his, and whispered in his ear that she loved him. He blushed and smiled. When they had finished their drinks, they made their way out into the damp night. Philip grabbed her shoulder as Mouse scampered ahead to hail a taxi.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said. I had a really good time with you the other night. But I got the feeling you were ignoring me this evening. Please tell me you aren’t upset with me.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Lee looked genuinely distraught. ‘I can be a bitch sometimes, I know I can. I really didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘You didn’t hurt me, or rather you haven’t yet.’ Philip tried to laugh, his lips peeling back from his teeth. ‘Listen, could I get your number? I’d really like to see you again, just the two of us.’
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. Her hat sat on the line of her brow and the rain collected in droplets on the cotton. Her lips were bloodless lines, unkissable.
‘No, Philip. I’m so sorry. You understand, don’t you? It’s just a really difficult time for me. I have to go. It’s wet and Mouse is waiting for me. I’m sorry, I really am.’
She ran, leaping over puddles, to where Mouse was standing, holding the door of a taxi. Looking out of the fogged back window, she saw Philip watching the cab move out of sight, the rain swirling around his tall frame. She took hold of Mouse’s hot, plump hand and squeezed it tightly.
Six
It rained every day for a week as the heat of September gave way to a bleak and wintry October. It was cold rain, the kind of rain that slants under umbrellas, soaks through the soles of shoes and explodes off paving stones. Marcus and Abby turned in on themselves, giving way to stillness and reflection. Two of the boys in their discussion group had left after the first week, though their girlfriends remained. Marcus had phoned the boys, emailed them, talked to their girlfriends, but to no avail. In the shadow of these departures, their second session had been a downbeat affair. Neil had spoken about his daughter, tears streaming down his face.
‘One of the reasons I find the idea of God so attractive, one of the reasons that I hope beyond hope that it’s all true, is so that I know that Phoebe isn’t just rotting there in her grave, that she’s somewhere she’ll be looked after by someone who really understands her. I listened to David’s speech tonight about sex and I thought – I didn’t even know if Phoebe was still a virgin, if she’d been hurt in love, if that was maybe why she became ill.’
Abby had crossed the room to embrace him. They’d only briefly touched on the topic of the evening’s talk. Marcus could tell that there was little risk of the prim girls in their group giving way to their baser passions. He could hear Mouse holding forth next door and envied his friend his fluency and his conviction.
They hadn’t stayed long at the pub afterwards, and when they got home Marcus made them Horlicks which they drank in bed, chatting with the duvet pulled up to their chins. They both guessed what had happened between Lee and Philip, and wondered whether they should mention it to David. If Philip left because of Lee, it would mean that they were three members down after the first two weeks. They didn’t blame her, though. They could see how fragile she was, how lost. Marcus reached over and stroked Abby’s soft, wide cheek. Since the miscarriage, Abby had insisted they sleep in the spare room and Marcus liked the change. There were no pictures on the walls; it was like a hotel room, quiet and anonymous. During the week they telephoned each other regularly, softened their voices and murmured until Marcus had to hang up because his boss was standing over him, or Abby saw Sally struggling with a pile of hymnals and rang off.
They made a nest of the apartment during the weekend. Marcus scuttled out to buy newspapers and small luxuries: croissants and wine. They held hands at church on Sunday morning. Abby sang more quietly than usual, leaning on the pew in front of her. She stayed at the altar rail for a few seconds after taking communion and Marcus waited beside her, watching her lips move silently. When they came back to their seats, she knelt again and prayed until the final hymn was sung. They left as soon as the service was over and spent the afternoon lying on the sofa with a duvet over them, watching sentimental old films.
Abby telephoned her mother that Sunday afternoon. She didn’t tell her exactly what had happened, and Abby’s mother pretended that she had misunderstood, rather than face the embarrassment of talking to her daughter about her feelings. Abby had two older sisters. All three of them had been star performers at the local grammar school, had shone at university. But Abby knew that her mother worried that the girls had inherited her own fatal flaw: they married badly. Abby’s parents had divorced when she was eleven. At the time she only read Jilly Cooper novels and found the drama and the heartache of the divorce rather glamorous. But she missed her father, who had subsequently married a small, thin woman in a direct reproach to Abby’s increasingly vast mother. Abby’s eldest sister had already been married twice, the first time for under a year. Susie, the middle child, was in a spectacularly loveless union with a maths teacher, ghosted by a pair of silent children. Her mother always looked at Marcus through eyes hard with suspicion.
On Sunday night they forced themselves out to a pizza joint on Westbourne Grove. The restaurant was full of couples like themselves: bankers and their wives who wouldn’t see each other all week, younger hedge-fund managers with trophy girlfriends who talked too loudly and laughed too easily, one of the partners from Marcus’s law firm. But Marcus liked the pizza
, and he squeezed Abby’s knee under the table and spoke to her about his childhood; she had heard the stories a hundred times before, but Marcus knew they soothed her. He could see her fighting to stay brave, to force the dark thoughts from her mind, and it reminded him of Lee, how she would bite her lip as she struggled against her slumps.
As the day of the third session of the Course dawned, Marcus rose very quietly from the bed and changed in the hallway. He knew Abby had had a bad night. He had woken in blackness to find her clutching her pillow, twisting and grasping it and then forcing it down onto her belly. She screamed silently for a moment before sitting up very straight, her eyes open, her chest rising. Marcus had taken her in his arms and held her until she fell back asleep. He lay beside her, unable to find sleep himself, until he saw the hand of the alarm clock creep round towards six.
The pool in the chrome and frosted-glass gym behind Moorgate was almost empty. The traders from the surrounding banks tended to work out in the evenings; their wives came in for Pilates at lunch. One older man swam a slow, dignified breaststroke, his head squeezed tightly by the swimming cap and goggles. He sank beneath the water with each stroke and then, surfacing, seemed surprised to emerge into the same, still world. Marcus stood on the side of the pool and felt the ridges of the tiles beneath his feet, the rush of blood as he drew in great lungfuls of air, the pinch of his own goggles at the bridge of his nose. Then he plunged into the water, which was always colder than he remembered, and he was all motion, his legs thundering in his wake, his arms grasping the water and pulling him through it, a breath every three strokes on alternate sides. Sometimes he let it go for longer before breathing, waiting until his lungs were screaming, his neck straining. He loved the way sound was deadened beneath the water. He could pretend that he lived in that easy liquid world, where, while he was moving, nothing could touch him, and all the dirt of existence was washed away by the rushing water.
Later that day he sat in his office and thought about Abby. He had turned his chair to face out of the window, hoping to give the impression of one lost in the intricacies of a case. He watched the rain tracing patterns down the glass, drops gathering others in their wake as they slithered downwards, dividing their transparent bodies like amoebae viewed on a microscope slide. He knew that he took Abby for granted, knew that the complexity of their history together, the fact that they had come through so much, made him think they were invincible. But she had moved from sadness into something more forlorn over the past few days, and he felt powerless. He was so used to turning to her when he was strung out, so used to her being the strong one. It disturbed his sense of the order of things for her to be laid so low. Her face, younger, smiling, came to hover in front of his half-closed eyes.
He was doing this with increasing regularity, allowing himself to drift off into nostalgia, layering one memory upon another until his present-day self almost disappeared into the shadows cast by those former Marcuses, who always seemed brighter and more alive, still enchanted by life. His dreams always centred on the others – on Lee before her sadness set in, or Mouse back at university, or Abby in the first days of their love. It was when the memories tumbled on top of each other, interlacing so that he could barely separate them, that he realised how lucky he was to have the three of them. How, perhaps, the Course was just a way of making sure that they were always together, sealing fast the bond of their friendship. He wished sometimes that their four lives could be as ordered and synchronised as when they were on stage. It was only when they were playing music now that they seemed to work well together.
He remembered Abby walking down the aisle at their wedding. A small, sparsely furnished church near her Derbyshire home. She had arrived at the church early and the blast of Mendelssohn had caught him by surprise. He felt his heart leap in his chest and Mouse, standing beside him, had put an arm around his shoulder. Marcus had turned and looked into the white arch of light coming through doors that let the spring afternoon into the church. At first he could see nothing but the glare of the light, which seemed to him somehow linked to the bellowing of the organ. Then, coming out of the light, he saw Abby walking with slow, dainty footsteps down the aisle. Her wedding dress hung cobwebby over her chest, the veil smudged her features. She clasped a posy of wild flowers tightly in her hands. Marcus could see that they were already wilting. Her father seemed to be leaning against her as they made their way down the aisle. Behind her now, almost blocking out the light, came the bridesmaids.
The oldest sister had reacted badly to foundation applied that morning by the make-up artist and her face was a wide, red beacon glowing behind Abby’s shoulder. Susie, the middle sister, who was ashamed of her size, drooped down the aisle, shyly looking out for her husband in the crowd and then turning her eyes back to the worn stones of the floor. Lee looked stunning. Bone-thin, but poised and delicate between the two hulking sisters. Marcus watched Abby’s father scuttle to stand beside his diminutive wife. He was a history teacher at Matlock College of Further Education, disappointed-looking, cowed by his wives, ex- and present. But he stared at his youngest daughter with eyes that brimmed with love.
Abby’s mother, sitting beside Marcus’s as if somehow wishing to claim for her solitary state the reflected decency of widowhood, fanned herself with the service sheet. David and Sally Nightingale sat in the aisle behind them. Only a few of the congregation were not Course members. Daffy from university; a couple of Marcus’s friends from school – now bankers – who looked terrifyingly old, their stomachs straining against their morning-suit jackets, thin-lipped wives on their arms; Abby’s frail-looking aunts and her gruff cousins who wore their suits with the resentful air of petty criminals in court. The rest of the congregation bore the healthy glow of spiritual enlightenment. The Course members always brought their children to weddings and the men took turns to pace up and down at the back of the church with the toddlers, while mothers jogged babies or retreated demurely to the side aisles to breastfeed.
When the organ stopped and the local vicar lisped his welcome, Marcus began to panic. There was a pigeon trapped in the roof of the church. It made circles of the low roof, trying to find a way out; its hysterical wingbeats kept time with Marcus’s heart. Marcus looked at Abby and, behind her, the sisters who seemed like a dreadful premonition of her future. Lee smiled wickedly at him. He saw Abby’s mother glaring with tiny black eyes at her ex-husband and his wife. Marcus’s own mother was already sobbing quietly into a handkerchief, his sister looking over at him with something like pity.
Marcus tried to slow his breathing as he stepped forward to join Abby in front of the altar, but his heart thumped violently in his chest and his palms were coated with cold, sticky sweat. He felt as if he had entirely lost control of his life, as if he had abjured any sense of agency when he joined the Course, and he was now about to marry at the age of twenty-five, to tie himself for life to a girl and a religion he felt that he had stumbled upon by accident. He stammered his way through the service, looking at Abby as if she were a stranger, feeling no sense of the holiness of the occasion, of the joy that he saw in the faces of the Course members looking up at him. When Mouse jokily patted his pockets searching for the ring, Marcus felt the panic rising into his throat. He was convinced that he would pass out, that he would have a heart attack like his father and die, there, in front of his family. The church held none of its usual comfort. He felt terrified and alone standing up in front of people who suddenly seemed very distant; he saw something cold in the clear eyes of the Course members. Then, very quickly, the service was over, and Marcus and Abby walked out into the wide, bright day through a cheering crowd.
Abby took his hand in hers as they sat in the Rolls-Royce outside the church. There was confetti in her hair and her palms were as cold and moist as his own. She looked at him with nervous, hopeful eyes, a smile twitching the corners of her mouth. He reached over and kissed her as the car pulled away and he heard cheering behind them. They sat in silence for the remainder
of the journey to the venue. Marcus couldn’t shake the butterflies in his stomach, the feeling that he didn’t have the final say in his own life any more. He cracked his knuckles and wondered when he would be able to smoke.
The venue was a four-star hotel on the outskirts of Derby, twenty minutes’ drive from the church. Marcus looked out of the window of the car as they passed rows of down-at-heel shops, council estates and abandoned factories. His mother had wanted them to get married in Surrey, where there would have been room to hold the reception in the garden. But after a series of negotiations in which he had not been involved, but which had clearly led to some chilliness between their respective mothers, it was decided that the wedding would take place near Abby’s home in Derbyshire.
The driveway that led to the hotel wove between the pristine fairways of a nine-hole golf course. The car stopped to allow four pastel-clad golfers to cross. Their silver hair shimmered in the sunlight and one of them turned to give Marcus a thumbs-up. He smiled wanly back. The hotel was an old manor house built of dark stone that seemed to absorb the day’s bright light. Attached to the main building was a low modern wing that housed the swimming pool and gym. When they had come to visit the venue with Abby’s mother, the hotel manager had insisted on showing them the sports complex, which she assured them was unrivalled in the whole of the East Midlands. The manager was now waiting, hands linked in front of her, outside the entrance to welcome them. A marquee had been attached to the hotel and French doors led out from the dining tables to the dance floor. A gentle breeze ruffled the tent’s white fabric as they stepped from the car.
Later, as the sun sank slowly over the trees that blocked the grey council high-rises of Derby, Mouse and Marcus stood on the putting green smoking. The hours had raced by, aided by gin-and-tonics and the champagne that Marcus’s mother had paid for.
