The Revelations

by Alex Preston

  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.’

  Marcus smiled ruefully.

  ‘I can see that. You’d have cats.’ He could make out David and Abby ahead through a hatch of branches. Philip and Neil were striding behind them. It looked as if they were arguing. Marcus tried to make Lee walk faster, keen to catch up with the others. Her hand was damp in his.

  ‘Margery Kempe went to visit Julian of Norwich for guidance, did you know that?’ she asked, turning to look at him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s an astonishing thought, that Margery, the great visionary, spent time in the cell of Julian, the first woman to write a book in English, the wisest of all the anchoresses.’

  Marcus thought what a good teacher Lee would make. Whenever she talked about her schoolwork her voice came alive, her eyes lit up and she seemed to come out of herself. He thought that this was a possible future for her: if she could make it through to the end of university, get a job at a girls’ school somewhere, teach and think and make music. Just as when he saw her on her bike, he sometimes imagined a child seat on the rear mudguard, a nodding blond head, creating for Lee a happy future as a balance against her present sadness. She dropped Marcus’s hand and walked a little way in front of him, gesturing as she spoke.

  ‘Margery was amazing. She would have been one of those ball-breaking City traders if she was alive now. Or a television entrepreneur. She set up a brewery in King’s Lynn – it was one of the few jobs that women were allowed to do – she had fourteen children, then, at the age of forty or so, decided she wanted to give herself over to religious life. She struggled to get her husband to take a vow of chastity, describes all his objections in great detail in her book, but finally she succeeded and then set off on pilgrimages all across Europe, having increasingly violent visions at each new shrine.’

  Lee continued in a distant, dreamy voice.

  ‘She wrote down her visions, or probably dictated them to someone. Some of them are really trivial, she talks about this great miracle when a vision helped her to find a ring she’d lost, but parts of her text are very moving, particularly her visit to Julian, who must have been at least eighty when Margery came to see her.’

  They were moving downhill. Lee took Marcus’s hand again. Through the trees, Marcus could see thunderclouds raising their dark hoods on the horizon.

  ‘I like to think that one day I could be like Julian. That people struggling with their faith might come and see me, and I could use all of this bad stuff I’ve gone through to help them.’

  ‘You will, I’m sure of it. I know what you mean about this being an in-between time, too. I’m sure our parents were grown up by this age. Mine had two kids by the time they were in their mid-twenties. And they were so incredibly happy together, happy in a settled, grown-up way. I still feel like a teenager.’

  ‘It’s because we had it so easy,’ Lee said, swinging the arm that held Marcus’s hand. ‘I think one of the reasons my father has these terrible fits of depression is that he can never live up to the memory of his parents. They made it through the war, helped to hide Jews in the lofts of churches in Budapest, then they were these great heroic figures in the resistance against the Soviet occupation. They gave up their lives for an ideal. My father just writes music about it. He gets so frustrated because he wants his music to achieve something impossible: he wants it to match up to the physical heroism of his parents.’

  Marcus could hear Mouse’s voice somewhere through the trees ahead. Lee continued.

  ‘I don’t even have enough of a connection to that history to be able to make music about it. Our generation is so divorced from that time of action, that time of strong idealistic belief. I think it’s one of the reasons that the Course has been so successful. It allows us to feel noble, to imagine that we’re aspiring to a higher ideal.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s right,’ Marcus said. ‘Humans aren’t used to being so comfortable: it goes against our nature. It’s maybe why I still feel like an adolescent. Because nothing has happened to make me a man yet.’

  Lee smiled shyly at Marcus.

  ‘I’ve never shown you this.’

  She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out her wallet. Opening a flap, she drew out a small photograph. They stopped in a small clearing and looked at the picture. It was a photo of Lee as a child, six or seven, standing on a beach in a red polka-dot swimming costume. Her father stood at her side, the sand sloping steeply away behind them to the sea. One of his hands gripped the young girl’s shoulder. Lee was smiling in the photograph, a missing tooth blacking her smile, her nose wrinkling.

  ‘I look at this picture all the time. I just can’t believe that I was ever this child, that there is any link between the person I am now and that happy, smiling kid. My problem is that I can’t recapture what it felt like to be young like that, I can’t draw a thread between now and then. A lot of the time, I’m trying to thrust myself back into the person I was then, or as a teenager. Trying to be anyone else but the me I am now.’

  Marcus squeezed her hand and they walked on in silence. The others were waiting for them at the edge of the wood. Abby and the Earl were perched on a tree stump sipping from their thermoses; David and Sally were looking through a book, attempting to identify a toadstool that was growing at the foot of a gnarled elm. Mouse stood further off with Maki. Black clouds blotted the sky behind them.

  Marcus didn’t see the cows in the next field until they were almost upon them. The ground undulated deceptively, with hillocks hidden by clumps of hawthorn, declivities concealed by brambles. Marcus was walking at the head of the group, Lee and Abby following slightly behind him. The cows seemed to rise out of a dip in the ground and then there they were, almost surrounding Marcus, their large heads turning very slowly to regard the Course members. There was a barbed-wire fence running along one side of the field. A narrow passage led between the fence and the cows. There were perhaps twelve of the beasts. Marcus didn’t know what sort of cows they were, but they were enormous: huge, swinging heads on thick necks, massive haunches. There was something prehistoric about them.

  ‘Oh, look at the cows,’ he heard Abby say behind him. ‘I never know if they’re black with white patches or the other way around. What d’you think, Marcus?’

  He stared into the cows’ bloodshot eyes. He edged towards the channel between the cows and the fence and then gestured for Abby and Mouse to pass behind him. The gate leading out of the field was fifty feet away over rough ground. Abby didn’t move. He gestured again and hissed.

  ‘Get moving. Quickly.’

  ‘What? Oh, Marcus, are you scared of the cows?’

  Mouse scampered past, cheering, and then stood on the other side of the herd, dancing on the spot. The cows swung their heads from one side to the other, as if weighing their options. Two cows began, with great deliberation, to trot towards Mouse. He backed away, still calling out to the others. The cows increased their pace. It didn’t look as if they were moving any faster than a slow trot, but Marcus could see that they were gaining on Mouse. One of the cows nearer Marcus edged towards the fence, looking to close off the passage through which Mouse had passed. Marcus watched as Mouse realised that they were going to catch him. Head down, arms pumping furiously, Mouse plunged towards the gate at the edge of the field. The cows’ hoofs pounded the earth, sending up damp clods of turf. Diving, tumbling, Mouse rolled under the bottom of the gate and lay on the ground, panting. Marcus watched the cows come to a disappointed halt and then turn and trot back towards the herd.

  David came to stand beside Marcus.

  ‘Bloody stupid animals, aren’t they?’ The priest was carrying a walking stick with a duck’s head carved into the handle. ‘Let’s clear a way through.’

  David stepped towards the nearest cow, raised his stick above his head and brought it down hard on the animal’s neck. The cow didn’t move, hardly seemed aware of the blow. The priest hit the cow again and began to shout, providing a commentary to the Course members
between yells.

  ‘Get on! You need to make it very clear who’s boss. Get on with you, I say! Show no fear, don’t allow yourself to be intimidated. Yah! Get on now! They’re more scared of you than you are of them.’

  Marcus doubted this last point. The priest was bringing his stick down with regular, vicious strokes on the forehead of the nearest cow. The animal backed away slowly, drawing into the heart of the herd. Marcus took the opportunity to pass closely along the fence and then, walking very swiftly, he moved towards the gate where Mouse was sucking on a straw. Marcus pulled himself up alongside his friend and called out to the others.

  ‘Just follow me. It’s fine. Don’t run or panic and you’ll be OK.’

  He saw Maki and Philip come next, then a group of nervous-looking girls, then Sally and Neil. Lee and Abby hung back with the Earl and David. The cows continued to stare at the priest. He had adopted an aggressive stance, one arm holding the stick poised ready to strike in the air, the other raised in a kind of salute, a universal gesture of thou shalt not pass. It was the success of this macho pose that undid them. For as soon as the Earl and the girls had passed, David dropped his arms and turned to follow the others. The cows, as if released from a spell, charged.

  ‘Look out,’ yelled Marcus, standing up on the fence.

  Abby was at the head of the group, her long legs eating up the ground, bounding over tussocks of grass, leaping blackberry bushes. Next came Lee. Her face was set in frightened concentration. She had gathered up her skirt in her fist and ran with her legs splayed, the pink boots swinging out sideways as she charged forward. The Earl moved very swiftly, his head lowered bullishly. David brought up the rear. Perhaps to save face, he was trying to drive the cows back as he retreated, turning every so often and lashing out with his stick, yelling furiously at these beasts of the field who were conspiring to challenge his authority. Marcus could tell that Sally, who was perched on the gate beside him, was holding her breath.

  Abby reached the gate first. Marcus held out an arm and helped her over, taking care that she didn’t tear her jeans on the nails sticking out of the wooden gate. When he looked up, David had fallen. Lee and the Earl reached the gate and turned. Lee held her hand to her mouth. Sally let out her breath in a yelp. The cows charged towards the priest, who was struggling to get to his feet.