Water Theatre (10 page)

This was Martin's birthright father, a man who had come back from the war as a stranger to terrify his infancy, and whose quick rage could still shake and silence him. Yet gradually the man's power over his son had diminished as his bewildered
pride in the boy's accomplishments had grown. No longer afraid of him, Martin tended to think of his father now with a rancorous kind of grief. Yet he suspected that, as long as they kept off politics, his father and Hal might get on well enough together. They shared both a bluff air of conviviality and that canny north-country manliness that prided itself on being nobody's fool. Both men seemed built on a bigger scale than either Adam or himself – as though, in their different ways, they were relics of a mighty culture that had spent itself in warfare and would never know such days again unless new springs of energy could be found. But Hal Brigshaw recognized this as Jack Crowther did not, and in that vision lay the evolutionary difference between them. Martin's father was stranded in the unsatisfactory past. Adam's was designing the future.

Torn between newly excited ambitions and the familial ties he resented, Martin lay awake, ruing his predicament until it occurred to him how much more bewildering must have been the life of the African who slept along the landing with the destiny of a whole nation in his dreams. He remembered Emmanuel talking about a huge crocodile he had seen dragged alive out of the Kra's brown water when he was a child, and how his mother had hidden him away one night lest he be carried off to accompany a newly dead king into the spirit world. Wondering at the distances the African had travelled, and whether his own life might one day be catapulted into strange orbits by Hal Brigshaw, Martin eventually fell asleep.

In the dream that came he was approaching his father, who sat, robed in ermine, on a royal throne. When Martin stood at his feet, this kingly figure reached out, roaring, with his mouth gaping open, to seize his son and cram him head first down his throat. Uncertain whether he had actually shouted out loud, Martin woke and lay trembling. Except for a slant of moonlight through the curtained casement, the panelled room was all thick darkness round him. Wide-awake now, he lay in the rigid silence of the house. The luminous hands on his wristwatch
leant at ten past two. He was afraid, though it made no sense to be afraid. Shut inside a dark world, he knew what time it was and nothing else. Then he heard the sound of someone walking on the old boards of the landing beyond his door. Gripped in silence, he turned his head and made out a faint radiance there. The footsteps passed, stopped, turned again. With absolute certainty he sensed someone standing at his door. Martin was reaching for the bedside lamp when he remembered that the power lines were dead. Because the silence was intolerable now, he said, “Who's there?”

The latch jolted and the door opened. Marina stood there with a dim battery torch in one hand, holding her blue woollen dressing gown closed at her throat with the other. “I thought you were awake,” she whispered. “I was going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

“You shouted something.” She swung the torch towards his face. “You look terrible in this light.”

“For a minute there,” – he smiled weakly – “I thought you were Jonas Cragg.”

“I feel about as cheerful.”

At that bleary hour he had spoken without thought, and was amazed she'd let slip a chance for mockery. Then a phrase from Shakespeare, that had recently meant much to him too, flashed across his mind:
the pangs of disprized love
. He said, “You should have talked to someone.”

“Do
you
, when you're miserable?”

“No, I suppose not.”

She stood at the threshold, assessing his uncalculated honesty. The night was cold at her cheeks and ankles. “All that stuff about Jonas – Adam and I made it up to scare each other when we were kids.”

“I guessed. I bet you haven't got an Uncle George either.”

“But it could be true,” she said. “All kinds of spirits haunt these moors. I know you think so too, because Adam told me.”
She crossed to the casement, drew one curtain slightly and shone her torch out across the snow. “
The little lamp burns straight
,” she whispered in a hollower voice, “
its rays shoot strong and far. I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding star
.” But only when the rhyme came did he recognize the poem she was reciting.

“You love her too,” he said.

“Of course. How could one not? Emily was a rebel and a visionary. I bet her dad found her even more impossible than mine does me.” Marina had not turned from the window, nor did she now as she quietly declaimed:

though as the stanza reached its climax, she held the torch under her chin and confronted him with features that would have formed a still more spectral mask had not the battery begun to fail.

“This is hopeless,” she said, scowling at the frail beam, “I won't be able to see what I'm doing.” She turned towards the door, then hesitated and looked back again. “I'll talk to
you
if you like.”

“You'll catch your death standing there.”

“That bed's fairly big.” Before he could respond she was crossing the room, saying, “Edge over a bit.” He hesitated, conscious of his body, of hers, of her parents asleep along the landing. “Do you want me to freeze?” she said.

With his breath tight in his throat, he withdrew as far as he could to the far side of the bed as Marina climbed in.

After a time, he said the first awkwardly consoling thing that came. “He can't be the only man who fancies you.”

“But I thought I was in love with him.” She lay with her knees drawn up, tenting the blankets, her fist holding the dressing
gown closed at her throat. “I probably was.” He could smell the clean warmth of her body; otherwise she was no more than a vague blur in the darkness. Then, as she swallowed, he sensed the shudder of her tears.

“I know,” he offered quietly. “It hurts.”

Marina turned her face towards him, surprised by the quality of his sympathy again as she had been a few hours earlier on the stairs. “Yes,” she whispered, regaining control of her breath. Then Martin lay there, listening to her express a tumult of thwarted feelings for another man.

Much of what she had to say was of no interest to him. There was, in any case, little space left for response. So he became preoccupied with the sound of her voice in the darkness, and with the untouchable closeness of her warm figure. He felt like a specimen sealed in a jar, motionless, in cloudy suspension.

“You're a strange one,” she said at last.

“How do you mean?”

“Listening to all this, saying nothing one way or the other, as if your views don't count. Or as if you're too high and mighty to share them with me.”

“It's not that,” he said.

“Then what?”

“I don't know the man,” he glowered at last. “It doesn't really matter to me.”

“So why not tell me to shut up and go back to bed?”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“I don't know. I don't know what I want. It doesn't help to talk about him. It just makes me angry when I think of him falling for that scheming little cow.” Impatiently she began to flick the torch on and off as though signalling across space. By the light of a longer flash he saw, where her dressing gown had fallen open, a coral-coloured birthmark near the top of her breast. Making no effort to conceal it, she said, “I won't be able to sleep. I don't know what I want.”

He felt the heat and fury of her grief, and that in some obscure and unjust way he was now being held in part responsible for it. But she made no move to leave his bed. Unsure himself whether it was intended as a taunt or a sop to her childishness, he said, “Shall I tell you a story?”

“What kind of story?”

“I don't know. An old story.”

After a pause, she said, “Go on.”

“Switch the torch off first and put it down.”

When she'd done so, he thought for a moment or two, then he told her the story of ‘The Golden Bird' out of Grimm's
Fairy Tales
. He had always loved the ambiguous relationship between the youngest son and the magic fox who was his guide, and the way the animal's seemingly callous advice steered the soft-hearted youth away from temptations that would have wrecked his quest to gain the Golden Princess. Marina listened in rapt silence as he spoke, uttering a small moan of dissent only when, as a reward for its faithful service, the fox finally asked his friend to cut off its head. Moments later, Martin smiled at her sigh of pleasure when the fox was transformed by the bloody act into a prince.

“Ruth Asibu would like that story,” she said. “She's my friend. My best friend. She lives in Equatoria.”

“I remember,” he said. “The cook's daughter who wants to be a lawyer.”

“She will be one day. There'll be no stopping her.”

“Like you,” he replied. “I can't see anyone stopping you either. Not for long.” But Marina didn't answer, and they lay together in silence for so long that he wondered if she had fallen asleep and, if so, whether he should wake her, because he would never be able to sleep himself with her lying there.

In the darkness, she said at last, “You were looking at my birthmark, weren't you? Earlier I mean, when I was playing about with the torch.”

“Not really,” he said, embarrassed.

“You were. I saw you. It doesn't bother me. They say it came just after I was born. We were on a ship out of Africa, coming home. There was a storm, lots of violent lightning. They say the mark appeared during one of the flashes, as if the lightning had stamped it there.”

“Extraordinary!”

She made a small affirmative noise, unsurprised, having already heard that response many times. Then she said, “Tell me about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Where you live, for instance. Why are you so cagey about that?” She felt him turn his head away. “And about your parents. Your mother sounded really nice when I spoke to her on the phone.” Still he did not speak. Marina shifted to confront him, propping her elbow on the pillow, and cupping her cheek in her hand. “I don't know why you have to be so secretive about everything. Come on, it's dark,” she said. “I can hardly see your face. Tell me.”

Still he did not respond. She reached a hand to touch the skin of his cheek. “I trusted
you
,” she said.

After a time he began to talk.

Martin Crowther had not always been ashamed of his home, for at first sight Cripplegate Chambers was an impressive Edwardian office block on a prime commercial site overlooking the busy centre of town. Slate-roofed, the grime-blackened sandstone of its staid façade exuded an air of respectable probity. The name of the building was announced on a glass light above the porched front door. Beside each of its pilasters a number of brass plaques advertised the various businesses it housed: CHAMBERLAIN & HALLOWES, Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths; THEODORE NASH, Dental Surgeon; GREVILLE EAGLAND ARIBA, Architect; CLAUDE HORSFALL, Estate Agent; NETTLESHIP, LUKINS & MIDGELY, Chartered Accountants.

Each morning, at all seasons of the year, Martin's mother, Bella Crowther, could be seen polishing those plaques. By that time, in the cold months, she would already have laid and lit the fires in each of the offices. All of the chambers would have been hoovered or mopped the previous evening, the ashtrays cleaned, the wastebaskets emptied, the desks dusted. But though her family lived in the building, their name went unmentioned on the door.

They had come there when Martin was nine years old. At that life-altering moment, his strongest emotion had been wonder at the worlds revealed inside the building. A spiralling staircase with a mahogany handrail ascended through all three storeys from the chequerboard tiles of the hall. The child had never previously seen stairs on that scale, and their curving flight struck him as an airy miracle of suspension. Following his mother on her rounds at the end of the working day, he quickly discovered that each office had a distinctive smell, and that each had its particular mysteries to disclose.

The outer rooms of the solicitors' chambers were a cubicled warren of roll-topped desks and safes, typewriters, telephones and tall tin filing cabinets, but the inner sanctum had a clubbish air, redolent of cigar smoke and old leather. Between the ornately tiled fireplace and the window stood an imposing desk from which Clarence Hallowes proffered his expensive advice to clients seated across from himon a buttoned brown Chesterfield. Against panelled walls, glazed bookcases housed the blue ranks of
Halisbury's Statutes
.

By contrast, an astringent, antiseptic smell sharpened the air of the dental surgery, where metal drills hovered above its chair of torments, attended by a battery of lamps and an eerie carmine spittoon. Best of all, the architect's office was a bright studio smelling of cigarette ash and Indian ink. Among its sloped drawing boards, high stools and plan chests, Martin found a trove of graphite pencils and stiff tracing paper, of protractors and shining compasses in suave leather cases, of T-squares and elegant French curves.

Outside, in the yard at the rear of The Chambers, stood an old coach house and stable block which was now a plumber's workshop, crammed with cisterns and lavatory bowls, boilers, pipework, sinks and taps. Soon after he arrived, Martin discovered that by climbing the outside steps that led to the old hayloft, sliding down the slate roof of the building below, and clambering round the corner of the building beyond, he could look down into the yard behind the Majestic Cinema. The door of the projection room often stood open onto the fire escape, so he could hear the blurred boom of the soundtrack above the whirring reels. Sometimes he could smell the hot, electric glare in there.