Alex Preston - The Revelations

‘I think we can take this as good news. As soon as the police are finished with your car, Marcus, I’ve arranged for it to be towed back to London. I imagine Lee won’t be far behind it. I hope we will all learn something from this episode, guys. The Course is powerful, but it is also vulnerable. When something rises as swiftly as the Course has, its foundations need some time to set firm. Lee has endangered everything with her behaviour, by allowing herself to be swept up in her emotions. I warned you all about the dangers you would face. I’ve been praying hard for Lee and I know that you have too. Let’s welcome her back to us with love and forgiveness when she comes.’

Marcus took Darwin for a walk in Hyde Park when they got home. He had wanted to go for a run, but after a few hundred yards realised that the dog’s short legs couldn’t match his own stride. Darwin tried gamely to keep up, but kept falling forward, skidding along on his paws and then sliding on his back. Marcus walked down to the Serpentine and looked over at the Diana Memorial where two blond children were paddling in the fast-running water despite the chill air. Marcus heard their squeals travel across the lake to him.

When he got home, Abby was sorting through photographs. She sat at the kitchen table arranging the pictures into piles, a smile flickering across her face every so often. She turned and placed the photographs as if she were playing a game of patience, or reading Tarot cards. Marcus came and stood behind her and saw that she was looking at a picture of the two of them early in their relationship, kissing outside a pub. Daffy and a few of the other guys from college were pointing at them and laughing as they kissed, unaware of the camera aimed at them. One of Abby’s legs was lifted behind her. Marcus’s hands were clasped around her back and she was leaning into the embrace. At the edge of the photograph, Mouse stood, wearing an awful Liberty-print shirt. He was looking straight at the camera, or rather at the photographer behind the lens.

Lee had taken the picture. Even had he not remembered the kiss, Marcus would have known that it was her work. The group was perfectly composed, arranged in the same way that a painter would position them, the scene artfully constructed to reveal clearly the relationship between each of its subjects. Marcus liked to see the photographs that Lee had taken of him. With anyone else behind the camera, he found himself tensing just before the shutter closed. A pout would appear on his lips unbidden, his eyes took on a distant and weary glaze, his eyebrows lowered as if in deep thought. This meant that he never felt that the person presented in photographs was actually him , but rather a brooding impostor who had leapt into the frame at the last minute. With Lee it was different. She seemed to wait for the perfect moment, always captured him at his most natural.

Abby continued to flick through the photographs, pausing every so often to look at a picture, trying to situate it in time and place. She dwelt over a photo that Marcus had taken of her on their honeymoon in Corsica. It was at breakfast and her plate was piled high with bread, cheese, boiled eggs and figs. In the photograph she was looking down guiltily at the amount of food. Marcus remembered her words when they had developed the film: ‘ I can tell that you don’t love me by the way you take my picture. ’ Those words had initiated a long period of strenuous effort on his part. He had been consistently solicitous to his new wife for months afterwards, stung not by the venom in her voice, but rather by his suspicion that she might be right. He was relieved when she placed the photo on top of the picture of them kissing and began working through a new batch.

Closeness grew between them as the light faded outside and they sat sorting through box after box of pictures. Marcus stood and switched on a standard lamp in the corner when it grew too dim to make out the faces in the photos. Even now that most of his photographs were stored on a computer, Marcus insisted on having his favourite pictures developed. He was forever intending to paste them into albums with press cuttings and railway tickets and other mementos that he hoarded, but there was always some more pressing chore and so they accumulated and were placed out of sight. Abby would complain about the boxes stacking up in the spare room, but he saw that she treasured them. Her fingers picked carefully through the memories arranged on the dining table, tenderness evident in the way she stacked the pictures into neat piles. Marcus realised that one pile was made up entirely of photographs of Lee.

‘Let’s look at those,’ he said.

It was something in the way that Abby handled the photos. He couldn’t place exactly what, but it was subtly different from the way she fingered the pictures of other people, a scrupulous reluctance to touch the glossy face of the photograph, fastidiousness about avoiding fingerprints. There was something almost fearful in the way she addressed the pictures of Lee. Marcus realised that Abby thought Lee was dead. He sat back in his chair and exhaled.

‘You don’t think she’s coming back, do you?’

Abby looked sharply at him, and then back down at the photograph. It was a picture of Lee with her arm around the South African schoolboy she sponsored. The Course invested in a series of charitable projects across Africa, and had paid for the members of a Johannesburg orphanage to fly to England to visit the church whose congregation was financing their education. Lee had grown very close to one young boy. He was smaller than his classmates and Lee had taken him under her wing immediately. He had followed her everywhere during the two weeks that they were in England. When Lee and the other Course members had taken the children and their harried, chain-smoking teachers to Heathrow at the end of the visit, the little boy had refused to let go of Lee’s hand until, tears tumbling down his face, he had been pulled away.

‘She’s gone.’ She laid the photograph back down on the table. ‘I know that David is being terribly upbeat about the whole thing, but he knows as well as I do that she isn’t coming back. He told me some things when I went there for dinner the other night. Things he made me promise not to tell you.’

‘What things? Why didn’t he want me to know?’

‘I think he’s just very paranoid at the moment. He’s worried about the press getting hold of this. There was that awful article a few years ago about the Course. I know it left a real scar.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Sally had a key to Lee’s flat. She fed Darwin sometimes when Lee was at weddings. She went over to the flat and found all sorts of things. Diaries and books of photographs and. . It was clear that Lee was terribly unhappy.’

‘So why is David going on as if he’s sure she’ll turn up?’

‘Wishful thinking, I suppose. It’s a kind of prayer. If he keeps repeating it then maybe something will turn up. They gave the books to the police, of course. There was one passage that David let me read. It was heartbreaking. She was talking about how she was weighing up different methods of suicide, trying to work out which one would be the least sinful. Poor Lee. Poor, poor Lee.’

Abby started to cry. Fat tears fell down onto the photographs and Marcus leaned over her and buried his face in her hair. She turned up towards him and he kissed her. At first the kisses were gentle, kisses of consolation, then more passionate. He slipped his tongue into her mouth and swung his leg over her until he was sitting on her lap. He took her face in his hands and kissed her hard. She was still crying, and he realised that she was no longer crying about Lee, or no longer just about Lee. He pulled her jumper up over her head, then her blouse and bra until her breasts pressed against his stomach. He lifted her up, turned her around and laid her back across the photographs. The neat piles toppled over, some fell on the floor. The light was behind him and his shadow fell across her, darkening her pale skin. She slipped her jeans and pants off and watched him, still crying, as he undressed.