Alex Preston - The Revelations

‘I just wanted to check that you were OK,’ said Marcus. ‘We missed you at the last Course session. At church, too.’

Mouse shook his head. ‘Are you just passing by? Or can you stay for a bit? We could go up to my room.’

‘I’ve got some time. I told Abby I’d be back for dinner.’

Marcus followed Mouse out to a stairwell. They walked up three flights and the stairs ended in a door marked Staff Only . Mouse unlocked this and it gave onto a smaller stairway. They climbed up together. Marcus counted the floors as they rose through the library. Mouse panted as he climbed. On the fourteenth floor, Mouse opened the heavy brown door on the landing and they stepped out into an empty corridor with a parquet floor. Marcus recognised the howling wind from telephone conversations that he had had with his friend.

‘Not much further,’ Mouse muttered as he led them down the corridor, through a set of swing doors and then around a corner into another long passageway. They walked through more doors and then the corridor turned again, ending abruptly in a brick wall. Mouse opened the last door on the right-hand side and Marcus followed him through it into a large, echoing hall. Along one side of the hall were long windows, with stained glass in the uppermost panes. Marcus saw a date — 1936 — set into the red and green glass. There were no shelves in the hall, but Marcus nonetheless caught the sweet, dusty scent of old books. At the far end, Mouse had built a den. A wardrobe stood against one wall with a duvet and several pillows lining the bottom. Shirts hung above the little nest. A trestle table sat in front of the window with a desk lamp on it, books piled beside it and scattered across the floor around it. There was a cardboard box in which Marcus saw various bottles, a loaf of bread, some toiletries.

‘Is this where you’ve been living?’ Marcus asked, turning to his friend.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Mouse walked over and found a half-full bottle of wine. He pulled the cork out and poured it into plastic cups. ‘It was cold on the boat. The heating isn’t all that good. And I knew you’d come looking for me there.’

Marcus sipped the wine.

‘It’s amazing up here.’

Mouse walked over and opened a window. Snow was falling outside. They both stood and looked out over the roofs and down to the dome of St Paul’s. Mouse drew out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Marcus.

‘You have to lean out, otherwise the smoke alarms get you.’

Marcus held up his hand. ‘I’m not smoking.’ He paused. ‘Abby is pregnant.’

Mouse turned to him with delighted eyes. ‘You’re joking. Sport, that’s grand. I’m so happy for you both.’

Marcus was touched by his friend’s joy. ‘I shouldn’t really tell anyone yet. You might have guessed that we’ve had some trouble before. But I’ve a good feeling about this one.’

Mouse put his arm around Marcus’s shoulder and blew a jet of smoke out of the window.

‘Have you got names yet?’

‘No, that would feel like jinxing it somehow.’

The snow began to fall more heavily. Mouse finished his cigarette and closed the window. The wind had picked up and moaned balefully as Mouse opened another bottle of wine. They sat on pillows with their backs against the wood-panelled wall. The light had dropped outside and Mouse switched on the desk lamp.

‘We’re going away for a while,’ Marcus said.

Mouse looked across at him.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘David has asked Abby to stay on in New York. I’m going to go with her. Only for a year. Two at the most.’

Mouse’s face fell.

‘You’ll have the baby out there?’

Marcus nodded.

‘Oh. I was hoping. . I suppose I can come out to visit.’

‘Of course you can. You can come whenever you want. You’ll be the godfather, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Mouse smiled. ‘When are you going?’

‘Straight after Christmas.’

‘Oh. That’s very soon.’ Mouse stared down at his hands. Marcus’s voice softened.

‘I just realised that we had to grow up. When Abby came back, she seemed changed, suddenly an adult. I’m going to be a father; I’m fed up with pretending I’m still a teenager. I want my kid to have a dad he can be proud of.’

‘You’re a Course leader. You’re a successful lawyer. I don’t understand.’

‘All of us, we’re in hiding, obsessed with our narrow little world. I’m not saying that going to America will change all of that, but at least it’ll change something.’

‘But what about me? What about us?’

‘Lee’s death has altered everything. Things can’t go back to how they were. David will find a new group of Course leaders, but The Revelations are finished.’

They drank the remains of the bottle of wine.

‘Listen, I’m going to have to get going. Abby, you know. .’

‘I know. I understand.’ Mouse looked downcast for a moment, then smiled over at Marcus hopefully. ‘Will you stay for just one more drink? I have some vodka over here somewhere.’ He rose. ‘Here it is. Stay and toast the end of an era. Just while I have one last cigarette.’

Mouse filled both their glasses and walked over to the window. Darkness had fallen, but the lights that illuminated the tower blazed up into the night sky. The snow raged in the beams of light, whipped across their field of vision by the wind, swirling upwards and then exploding in all directions as it hit the building. Marcus watched flakes land at Mouse’s feet and disappear into the parquet floor. He crossed to stand behind his friend.

‘You know the story about the lights?’ Mouse was staring out into the blizzard, the cigarette held in his lips, his hands either side of the window frame.

‘During the blackout, Senate House was the only building illuminated in Bloomsbury. A beacon of light for the German bombers. They never switched these things off. But it wasn’t hit. Through the whole of the Blitz this enormous building stood here, like a middle finger raised to the Germans, and never once did they hit it. Bombs fell either side, they devastated the area up towards Euston and across Clerkenwell and Holborn, but never here.’

Mouse raised his glass.

‘Cheers, by the way. Anyway, after the war they found out that Hitler was planning to base the Third Reich in Britain in Senate House. I mean, it has the right feel about it, doesn’t it? The size of the place, the sense that it’ll be here in a thousand years when all the City skyscrapers have been burned to the ground. If Oswald Mosley had won power, he intended to move parliament here.’

Marcus finished his drink and placed the cup on the trestle table.

‘I really have to go now.’ It was almost seven o’clock.

‘Just. . I need to speak to you.’ Mouse didn’t turn around, but drained his plastic cup and sent it spinning out into the snow. Marcus stood in the middle of the room, hands hanging at his sides, looking at his friend’s squat frame silhouetted against the white world outside.

‘I want to go to the police,’ Mouse said. ‘I want to hand myself in. Tell everyone exactly what happened. I just can’t stop thinking about Lee’s dad. I’m responsible for his hope, and it isn’t fair. Every time the telephone rings, every time there’s a knock on the door, part of him — maybe an increasingly small part of him as time passes, but part of him nonetheless — will think it’s her. He’s an amazing man. I always loved speaking to him whenever I went up there. He deserves better than this. We shouldn’t be covering this up.’

Marcus’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it, stood lost in thought for a moment. Mouse continued.

‘I’ve been thinking very hard about this. I almost called D.I. Farley last night. I don’t know what’ll happen to me, but it really doesn’t matter. I’d be fine in jail. I’d cosy up to some big gangster type, offer to soap him in the shower. I’d be grand.’