Alex Preston - The Revelations

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.