Water Theatre (11 page)

“It sounds amazing” Marina said in the darkness. “What a great place to grow up in!”

But she spoke only from boredom with her own privileged home, he thought. Nor had he yet disclosed any of the circumstances that had come to blight his life. Having begun, however, there was no stopping now, so he told her how, at the back of the vestibule, a door gave onto a gloomy staircase that led down into the cellars. This was where the Crowthers had their kitchen-living room. Its scant daylight came from two frosted-glass sash windows that reached only to pavement level on the street outside. All that could be seen through the foggy panes were the shadows of passing feet. If the windows were opened, dirt and petrol fumes blew in.

His mother had done what she could to make the place attractive with wallpaper and linoleum, but there was no disguising the bloated lead pipework under the sink, and no defeating the musty odour of damp that seeped in from the other basement rooms beyond. One of them was a larder with arched stonework, where spiders, silverfish and cockroaches thrived; another the coal hole that was filled by the lorry load from a chute in the yard. Neither had windows. In an otherwise bare room with whitewashed stone walls and a flagged floor stood a copper for boiling clothes and an old stained bathtub.
The lavatory lay beyond, outside, its door at the foot of some railed stone steps which climbed up to the yard. In winter it was a cold place to have a shit.

None of this had bothered Martin at first. It was how things were, the received order of things, his life. Then he had passed the examination that took him to the grammar school, and it wasn't long before he realized how different were his own circumstances from those of classmates who lived out in the new housing estates or among the tree-lined avenues of Heathcote Green. Once he had become aware of the difference, only one or two trusted friends were ever invited back to his cellar dwelling in Cripplegate. Even to them it was hard to explain that he had no room of his own, for when the Crowthers moved into the Chambers, they were given only a single bedroom to share on the top floor. Not until the lad was twelve, and increasingly taciturn, could his mother persuade Clarence Hallowes, the feudal ruler of the Chambers, to have a small attic cleared of half a century's junk so that parents and son might pass their nights apart.

Once he had his own room, Martin would spend hours alone up there, reading, listening to his Bakelite radio, or staring at the busy street below like one of God's spies. For hours at a time he watched people going about their lives utterly unaware of how closely they were observed: the shoppers and strollers, the queues forming for the Palace of Varieties across the way, pedestrians hurrying homeward in the rain, the lovers meeting at bus stops, their kisses sometimes, and their public quarrels. It was only when he started to take an interest in girls himself that things began to darken for him.

By the time he was fifteen, he was attracting the attention of high-school girls, all of whom came from respectable middle-class homes and had little notion of how anyone else might live. Mostly he met them in the coffee bars after school, or walked with them in the parks, but sooner or later their parents would expect to meet him. Having invited him out to
her semi-detached home in Manor Drive two or three times, one of his girlfriends insisted that it was time he took her to meet his parents, and at last he ran out of excuses. She had looked around in some amazement as they entered the vestibule of Cripplegate Chambers. At the head of the cellar stairs, she hesitated when he led the way down. He looked back and reached for her hand but, presumably imagining that he was taking her down into a dark place with illicit designs, she turned on her heel, ran out of the building and would not come back. After that he kept quiet about where he lived.

This, he admitted in some wonder to Marina now, was the first time he had talked about it since. He lay, rigid, waiting for her to speak.

“So you live in a cellar,” she said eventually. “So what? Do you think it makes you some kind of troglodyte?”

Lying in the darkness, hot and furious, he felt himself grow into the fit of the word. A troglodyte, yes. Low-visaged, clumsy-footed, grim and sullen, a beast stumbling up out of the bowels of the earth, half-formed by contrast with her dancing-princess hauteur. “Why not?” he snapped. “What do you think?”

“I think you might be a bit of a snob.”

“I should have known better than to tell you.”

“It must be such a luxury,” she said after a long moment, “to be able to feel sorry for yourself like this all the time.”

He rounded on her then. “You should talk! Who's been lying on her own all night trying to make everybody else feel guilty? You've no idea how lucky you are – living in a place like this, with parents who can give you everything you like.
You
want to try being holed up underground like a bloody badger!”

For a moment he felt vindicated, one of the wretched of the earth raising his voice at last, casting his shadow over the ignorant airy world of the privileged. He was high on the anger that throbbed inside him.

“Mind you,” she went on undeterred, “I
can
see one big disadvantage with living where you live. If you spend half your
life squinting up at people from under their feet, and the other half gazing down on them like some superior being, then it must be hard ever to look them straight in the eye. You should be careful of that. If you don't put it right, it could cost you friends. Friends who want to care about you for who you are, not because of where you live or what your father does, or how many exams you've passed.” He was about to shut her up with a blistering retort when he was silenced himself by her afterthought: “People like me I mean.”

It left the darkness strumming between them. He wanted the night to hang still for a moment. Needing some firm hold on the shimmering thing this confusing creature was making of his world, he felt a barely governable urge to turn over, pin her down by her wrists, and demand that she say the last thing again, slowly, without irony or ambiguity. But that would only prove he was the lumpen brute she'd accused him of believing himself to be.

So he did nothing, said nothing.

“Actually,” she said after a pause, “it's a pity you're not a bit more of a troglodyte than you are.” And then, to his amazement she raised herself on one elbow and leant through the gloom to kiss him, a little awkwardly, on the brow. For an instant the soft warmth of her breast pressed against him, but before he could respond she was out of the bed, making for the door, where she stopped, turned on bare heels and said, “Thanks for letting me let off steam.”

“Wait.”

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she smiled, then she whispered, before vanishing, “For everybody's peace of mind we'll pretend this never happened. Okay?”

When Martin came down to the smell of bacon late the next morning, he found everyone except Marina up before him. Only the two setters greeted him with unmixed pleasure, beseeching attention at his knees. Grace Brigshaw seemed less patient of the young man's presence in the kitchen than at any time since his arrival, and when he carried his plate through into the breakfast room Martin found Hal and Emmanuel worrying over the African's delayed return to London while Adam applied himself to buttering his toast with gloomy concentration.

A few silent minutes later, Grace brought in a second pot of coffee, sighing, “Do you think Marina intends to lie in bed all day?”

“If she's going to sulk, it's probably the best place for her,” Hal grumbled. “I can't be doing with her emotional tantrums right now.” He stared across the table at his son. “Why don't you make an effort to cheer her up?”

“Actually,” Adam answered, gazing out at the drifted snow, “I don't have much time for her right now. If she throws herself away on idiots like Graham Holroyd, then she deserves all the grief she gets.”

“Well, that's not very helpful of you,” Grace declared. “The trouble is, she won't take any notice of a word I say, and the two of you haven't the faintest notion of how she feels.”

“In my country,” Emmanuel said, winking at Martin, whose heart had jumped at the first mention of Marina's name, “they say that women should be kept laden, pregnant and six yards behind. I wonder if everyone isn't much happier that way.”

“I'm quite sure the men are,” Grace replied with an air of exasperation. “However I wonder if it's ever crossed either of your minds that it's not only African men who are in need of liberation?”

“Now hang on a minute,” Hal put in tetchily, “you know damn well we've gone to a lot of trouble to get as many of the market women involved in the movement as we can.”

“If you think that's what I'm talking about,” said Grace, “I give up.” And she returned to the kitchen.

Martin stared at his plate, uncomfortably aware that he knew more than anyone else about Marina's condition, though he had no idea how her mood might have shifted since their night encounter. But when she came into the room a few minutes later, wearing a roll-neck sweater and jeans, Marina exclaimed with cheerful nonchalance at the smell of fresh coffee.

“I'm glad you're in a good mood,” her father scowled, “having managed to upset everybody else.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Marina said, with no trace of sorrow in her voice, “but it was a bit of a blow at the time – you must see that?”

“Well, you seem to have got over it remarkably quickly,” said Hal. “I wish my problems could be solved half as fast!”

“I think you must have passed a better night than I did,” Emmanuel smiled at Marina. “I was disturbed by so many noises that I thought the ghost you were talking about must have come in from the spirit world.”

In the instant before he averted his own gaze, Martin saw Marina's eyes avoid the tilt of the African's smile. He thought:
Emmanuel heard us; he must have said something to Hal
.

Cool and unruffled, Marina said, “Old Jonas, you mean? Perhaps he did. I seem to remember hearing one or two odd things in the night myself.”

Martin could not look at her. Instead he glanced across at Adam, who was frowning at his sister. Then Marina turned
her smile on Martin. “You look a bit washed out. It wasn't you wandering about in the night, was it?”

“Me? No. It wasn't me.”

“I've been on the phone to Jim Lumb down at Sugden Foot,” Hal said. “He reckons that if it stays like this, his tractor should make it up here tomorrow morning. So we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed.” He looked at Marina. “I think your mother could do with a hand today. Mrs Tordoff won't be coming in till after the New Year.” Then at Adam: “And we need more wood brought in.” He turned to Emmanuel, shaking his head: “I should have had more sense than to bring you up here.”

“Not at all,” the African grinned. “Being confined like this is good practice for when I shall be locked up inside Makombe Castle.”

“You expect them to put you in prison?” Martin said, taken aback, but glad to keep attention elsewhere.

“I intend that they should.” The African widened his eyes in a smile. “Actually, Governor Dawnay would prefer not to arrest me, but I shall make it impossible for him not to do so. Then everyone from Fontonfarom to Port Rokesby will be on the streets demanding my freedom.”

“So a week or so from now,” Hal said to Martin, “you can think of this cool customer sweating inside a hot cell.”

“While I shall be remembering this preposterous snow,” the African added, “and all of you shivering in Yorkshire, and it will make me very content to be where I am!”

Meanwhile Marina was picking at a scrap of cold toast, alert to every nuance of feeling in the room, discomfited by none of it and so poised in her detachment that Martin was left wondering whether his memory of their time spent in bed together was merely a figment of some midnight fantasy. So he was glad to get out of the house and fetch logs from the woodshed. The air there smelt of frost and sawdust. Its chill smarted at his cheeks as he and Adam worked together in silence, taking turns to swing the axe and carry the filled basket
through into the house until a stack of split logs stood high at either side of the open hearth.

They came back into the kitchen in time to see Marina lift a tea towel from a bowl of risen dough. Closing her eyes, she leant over and pressed her lips to its soft dome. When she looked up, she saw Martin staring at her.

“Do you want to kiss it?” she invited.

He snorted, blushed, looked away, aware of Grace and Marina grinning at him.

“Here,” said Adam, “let me.” He kissed the dough, tipped it out of the mixing bowl onto the tabletop and began to knead. As Martin watched the smooth rolling motion of his shoulders and fists, Grace bent to open the oven door. The air swirled with the smell of baking bread. She prised the loaves from their tins, testing each with the tap of a knuckle at its base before setting them to cool on racks.

“Let Martin try,” she said to Adam. “Come on, kiss it first.”

Self-consciously, Martin did as he was bidden. Surprised by the soft touch of the dough at his lips, he pulled back, smiling, then he leant over the dough, pushing at it with bunched fists.

“Not so hard,” Marina said. “It's alive. It wants to breathe. Be gentler. Try tucking your thumbs into your palms, like this.”

After a few more awkward movements, Martin found the rhythm of the task. In the warm smell of the kitchen his body swayed to the roll of the dough. His big hands gentled at its living touch. And for those quiet moments he was untroubled by thoughts of Cripplegate or Africa, of his own father or of Adam's, and briefly forgetful even of the puzzling young woman who stood watching him. Then Grace said, “That's enough now.” She offered him a knife to slice the smooth dough into three parts, each of which he lifted into its own greased tin. Grace covered them with a towel. “They need to
rise again before I put them in the oven.” She looked up, where sunlight glanced off the snow outside, brightening the kitchen's white walls. “It looks lovely out there now. Why don't you boys take the dogs for a walk?”