‘Are you, like, a real lawyer? Murderers and all that?’
‘No. No, that isn’t what I do at all.’
There was a pause.
‘I secretly do quite want to be a housewife,’ Rebecca whispered, leaning over towards him conspiratorially. ‘It would drive my father wild, after everything he’s spent on education, but I’d like to live in a big house in Henley and have lots of children and dogs. I’d bake on Tuesdays and supervise the gardener on Mondays and Thursdays.’
Marcus laughed. He was slowly getting used to seeing Rebecca as herself, rather than as a reflection of Lee. She leaned towards him again.
‘So what else do you do? What’s your thing?’
Marcus sighed. ‘Do you know the Course?’
‘The cult thing? Yes, of course I do. You’re not involved in that, are you?’
He nodded. ‘I’m a Course leader, no less.’
Rebecca whistled. ‘Jesus. . I mean, fuck. I had a couple of friends at school who went for a while. I always thought it was just a phase. Like anorexia or smoking pot. I didn’t think someone as old as you would still be doing it.’
Marcus winced and lit another cigarette.
‘Am I old?’
‘No, but I mean, you’re not really young, are you? The Course always seemed to me like a crutch that people leant on until they worked out who they were. Something to get you through those in-between years.’
‘I think maybe it was like that for me. But then it became my life. It’s not a bad way to deal with the world, even for someone as old as me.’
‘I’m not saying it is. Just that it seems a little bit easy.’
He could feel her edging away from him. Where before she had been charming and conspiratorial, he now felt her looking at him from a distance, with a kind of anthropological interest.
‘To tell you the truth, Rebecca, I’ve been thinking about leaving the Course. Life just goes by, sometimes, and before you know it you’re thirty and the best things are behind you. I think I did need the Course when I first came to London. I’m not sure I do any more.’
She leaned towards him again.
‘I say my prayers quite often. When I’ve been really bad.’
Marcus looked at her, frowning.
‘That’s one of the things that bothers me about the Course, though. You have so many people who think that they can act without consequence. As long as God forgives them — which of course he always does — they’re in the clear. They can do almost anything — no matter how cruel.’
‘I suppose that’s what makes you Christians seem so otherworldly. You are cut off from the rest of us by your ability to be forgiven. Whereas, even though I try to pray, I never feel all that confident about it.’
Marcus sipped from the bottle and passed it to her. She took a long gulp and choked a little.
‘You look a lot like a friend of mine. A friend I don’t see any more.’
‘I get that quite a lot. I always take it as an insult. That my face is just this tabula rasa that people project their images onto. I want to be an actress, so I don’t suppose it’s the worst thing.’
‘No, but you look exactly like her. It’s bizarre.’
Marcus looked back towards the house, trying to make out Mouse through the kitchen doors. There was a thick pack of bodies in the room. Everyone was dancing and Marcus found it hard to distinguish between the dancers.
‘Shall we go inside?’ said Rebecca, rising to her knees.
‘Sure,’ said Marcus.
Rebecca took him by the hand again and led him into the surging mass of people. She still carried the bottle of vodka and passed it to him as they began to dance. She fixed her eyes upon his as they moved together, leading him through the sweating, gurning partygoers, spinning him in the darkness. A slower song came on, something deep and trippy, and Marcus felt Rebecca press herself against him. She snaked her thigh between his legs and looked up at him.
‘Here, have one of these,’ she said.
Rebecca emptied a small paper package into her palm. Two white pills. She picked one of them up between small finger and thumb and forced it gently between Marcus’s lips. The pill was bitter and caught in his gullet for a moment. He watched Rebecca take her own pill and then she leaned towards him and kissed him, pushing her tongue where moments before she had pushed her fingers. They continued to kiss as they danced, and he realised that she was smaller than Lee, her hands were like paws on his body, clawing away at him, burrowing under his shirt to twist the hair of his chest. He allowed himself to imagine her as Lee, though, and half-opened his eyes to see the pale skin marked by freckles along her cheekbones.
After fifteen minutes, Marcus began to feel the pill working on him. He seemed to hear the music more clearly, to sense the surge and life of the surrounding dancers. His skin tingled whenever Rebecca touched him and when he kissed her the world seemed concentrated in their mouths; then the music changed again, and he was spinning very quickly, and Rebecca took him by the arm and led him upstairs.
Carrington’s studio was empty when they walked inside. The bright lamp was still on in the corner, casting extraordinary shadows across the room, picking up small sculptures and exploding them against the wall as a violent Guernica of strange, dark images. Marcus took Rebecca in his arms and they began to kiss again. They danced in dreamlike patterns, feeling as much as hearing the music from the party below. Marcus thought suddenly that he could see the mist that had moved in the air that night with Lee. He lifted Rebecca’s jumper off and helped her to undo her shirt. Marcus’s heart banged hard in his chest.
It began to drizzle on the skylight above them. Rebecca, wearing only her underwear, dragged a beanbag to the centre of the room.
‘I love to look up at the sky,’ she said.
‘Lee. .’ Marcus moaned, and then reached down to slip off her pants.
She looked very young. Marcus remembered kissing Lee in her room at university, and tried to imagine what would have happened if Abby had not come in that night. He realised he was still fully clothed. He knelt down on the wooden floor, took one of Rebecca’s ankles in his hand, and began to lick slowly up her leg. His tongue went dry very quickly. He suddenly thought of Darwin, and hoped that the dog wouldn’t be lonely without him there. He reached the top of Rebecca’s leg and slipped his tongue inside her. She moaned quietly, placing her hands in his hair. Marcus began to cry. At first silently, wetting the inside of her thighs with his tears, then in great gulping sobs as he licked hopelessly at her.
‘Oh, you poor darling. Come here, Marcus.’
Rebecca was very good about the whole thing. She held Marcus’s head in her lap until his sobbing receded, and then he told her the whole story. She listened in silence to the tale of Lee Elek, nodding sympathetically whenever Marcus looked up at her. The drizzle had turned into driving rain. Marcus lay down beside Rebecca on the beanbag and they looked up at the sky. She shivered and Marcus found a sheet and draped it over her. The effect of the pill was beginning to wear off and Marcus felt suddenly very tired.
‘I’m sorry. I’m such a mess at the moment. I’m so embarrassed.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s better than my usual experiences up here. I like you, really I do. I would suggest we see each other again. If you weren’t married, that is. And a religious nut.’
Marcus spluttered.
‘I’m joking, I’m joking. But seriously, you need to get out of the Course. Those aren’t good people you have been telling me about. You’re better than that.’
As it began to grow light above them, Marcus said goodbye to Rebecca and crept downstairs. People were sleeping everywhere. The last revellers sat smoking in the rain by the dead fire, umbrellas capturing the smoke as they exhaled it, forming foggy huts around them. Marcus couldn’t find Mouse. He walked out into the dreary morning and trudged up Hackney Road looking for a cab.