Water Theatre (2 page)

With one hand round his waist and the other holding his wrist at my shoulder, I was half carrying, half dragging him round the steep rim of the quarry on the hill above the town. We were making for the recreation ground on the brow. I could hear the
swings squeaking in their iron chains. Not far now, but I was panting from the effort of it; and when, pausing for breath, I looked down at his face, I saw that the eyes were sightless and opaque, that he had been dead for some time, that his body was still as wasted and naked as I had seen it on the narrow death bed when I'd laid him out. I could feel the bed sores on his back. And the ringing I heard was the inane carillon of the ice-cream van which, on the hot day of my father's dying, had been the only passing bell.

When I woke in Italy to the thunder stroke, I was still carrying my father's dead body from pub to pub round the silent streets of the town, and there was no one near to help or carry him away.

Dusk was falling when I reached Fontanalba. The hillsides teemed with cloud. When I stopped at a crossroads to look for a sign, my headlights picked out a wayside shrine to the Madonna, dressed in her peeling blue robe. Some distance away, a street lamp glimmered through the mist. Having no idea where Marina's house might be, I turned the car in that direction and parked outside a tall stone house.

A small dog ran barking from a barn beside the house to yap at my shoes. Two small boys appeared. They stood on thin legs, their glossy hair cropped short over faces which stared aghast as I cobbled together a question in Italian; then they fled into the house. Somewhere above me clanged a single bell. Wooded mountains came and went among clouds the colour of burnt tallow.

I was about to turn away when a woman in a black frock came out of the house, wiping her hands on an apron. She called off the dog, then asked something – presumably what business I had frightening her children in the dusk. I tried again. She tipped an ear and lifted a thin, worried hand to her cheek. “
Ah, la signora inglese
,” she exclaimed at last. “
Marina! Sì, sì
.”

“
Sua casa?
” I pressed. “
Dove?
”

Her wrists twisted. Her tongue sped. As best I could I picked my way through the torrent of help and, when I thought I'd got things clear, she added more. Only later, as I braked in the narrow yard outside what I hoped was Marina's cottage, did I realize she'd been trying to warn me that no one was there.

By now the bell had stopped ringing. A wind had got up and was blowing holes in the mist. A single lamp revealed how perilous was the track along which I'd just rattled my car. It was so narrow that the wheels must have passed within an inch of where the edge sheered away in a six-foot drop to an olive grove. Looking up again, I met the dark, refusing silence of the house. The shutters were closed. I tried the handle on the double door, which barely moved. Under a bamboo awning built into a recess at the side of the house four chairs stood at a circular table. The dusk smelt of rain and draughty space.

There was no room to turn the car, and I was considering how best to back out of that dead end when the elder of the two boys appeared through the tatters of mist. He walked past me without a word, making for the low wall under the awning, where he tipped a plant pot and turned, pointing at me with a straight arm stiff as a duellist's. His small hand clutched an old pistol key.

A smell of dust and dried thyme. Then the frescoes emerging from white plaster in panels no larger than foolscap sheets. They showed turbaned merchants, sailors and cowled monks; a single-masted ship with two tiers of shining oars; an angel standing guard before a sepulchre; a woman praying in the desert, her nakedness covered by silver-white hair hanging like a shawl to her knees; a lion vigilant on a rock in blazing wilderness. It was as though the walls were trying to remember a dream and could recapture no more than these haunting fragments.

I took the paintings for medieval work at first, but a closer look showed them to be more recent, handled in an archaic
style that somehow finessed pastiche and found simplicity. The Marina I'd known would have lacked patience with such obvious narrative intent. Yet if she hadn't painted these pictures, who had?

The boy smiled up at me and crossed the room towards the fireplace, where he pointed out a picture unrelated to the rest. A cheap, unframed reproduction, printed on board, it was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a jug-eared monk with hooded eyes and an unsatisfactory beard.

“San Francesco,” he announced. I took in the golden nimbus around the tonsured head. The local saint, of course, St Francis of Assisi. Now the boy was pointing at his own chest. “Franco. Franco Gamboni.”

I nodded, tapped my own chest. “Martin. Martin Crowther.” Neither sound meant much to him, so I tried a variation – “Martino” – which elicited a nod. I opened a door onto a little kitchen. “Well, Franco Gamboni,” I said, “I can't think there's a restaurant in this village of yours, so let's see if we can get some grub together.”

Remembering forgotten instructions, the boy drew in his breath, gestured widely across the paved floor. “
Attenzione, ci sono scorpioni!
”

“
Ah, grazie, grazie
.”

“
Prego
.” He stood, smiling, with both hands clasped on top of his head, swaying from side to side. Then he turned and ran back up the track through the gloom.

Generations of olive growers must have scratched a living here before the house fell empty and Marina purchased it for next to nothing. She had intended to use it as a holiday cottage, but once life in England became intolerable to her, she had settled here in Fontanalba, living simply and cheaply, painting outdoors, content to be alone with her child. Then, much later, when he had nowhere else to turn, her brother Adam came to join her there.

The chimney corner of the frescoed living room had become a small study alcove. Beside it, an upright piano stood against one wall, its panels inlaid with fretwork patterns of foliage and masks. The trellised backs of two chairs were painted in peeling gold. A blue throw covered an old couch. On the desk in the alcove stood a paraffin lamp, a portable typewriter, a pencil case with a brass hasp and three books.
A New Pronouncing Dictionary of the English & Italian Languages
had been published in 1908 when, according to the table on page iii, a twenty-lira piece had been a gold coin worth fifteen shillings and ten pence farthing. Next to it leant a
Rough Guide to Italy
. It occurred to me that an entire civilization had vanished down the gap between those two volumes. Beside them lay the only other reading matter in the room – a skimpily bound book with the title
Umbrian Excursions
stamped on its spine.

The alcove would have been the obvious spot for a telephone if Marina had not refused to have one installed. Thinking of this, I took out my mobile phone and was about to dial Gail. But I was tired and fractious, the conversation would too easily go wrong, so I put the phone away again, knowing the call might now prove all the harder when I came to make it.

In the small kitchen at the back of the house I found the wine rack and enough bits and pieces for a scratch meal. I sat puzzling over those anachronistic frescoes as I ate. Surely monks and angels had no role in Marina's universe? If she had rejected everything else about her father, his atheism had gone unquestioned. Like oxygen or sex, it was a fact of life with which it made no sense to quarrel. So what were these paintings doing here along with an image of St Francis? They reminded me of the illustrations to the copy of Grimm's
Fairy Tales
that my mother had bought for me when I was small. In the stillness of the room I recalled the smell of that book and the way its pictures were like windows on a world utterly different from the grimy industrial landscape in which I grew up.

Then I remembered how I'd lain in bed with Marina once, chaste as a fabled knight, telling her one of those stories to still the rage of her grief. That state of almost innocence possessed me again in all its adolescent sensuality as, with a catch of the heart, I recalled the gift she'd given me later – a painting she'd made of a boy riding on a fox's back. These frescoes were more expertly done, but the same enchanted imagination was active here.

In the drawer of a bedside table upstairs I found an English translation of Virgil's
Aeneid
. Propped against a fat pillow, I opened the pages, and an old sky-blue envelope fell out onto the bed. To my astonishment, I saw that it was addressed to Adam in my own handwriting. Its postmark dated from the late '50s, at a time when we were both second-year undergraduates. During the bitter January of that year, Adam had suffered a brief episode of nervous breakdown. He'd been kept under supervision in a local mental hospital for a few days before being sent home to recuperate. I'd written this letter to him there, telling him how much he was missed by all his friends and trying to lift his spirits with a satirical account of our doings. Its tone was light but caring, even studiedly so in its preservation of a certain northern reticence. Adam had let me know how much it meant to him at the time, but I was both touched and amazed to discover that he had valued the letter enough to preserve it across all the years between.

My first thought after reading it through was that this mission to Italy might not be quite as hopeless as I'd feared. Then came a second, less optimistic thought. Hailing as it did from a time when things were still good between us, this letter might simply have been tucked between the pages of a book he'd been reading more than forty years ago and then forgotten. Thinking about it further, I could imagine no other reason why it would have escaped destruction.

I was about to switch out the lamp when a sweep of headlights brightened the bedroom window and a car approached across
the valley, pulling to a halt somewhere close by. Unless the night had bounced the sound from elsewhere there must be another house, just below this one, on the side of the hill. A man and a woman got out of the car, laughing together. I caught a shushing sound, and then something muttered in a whispered exchange that ended in a brief contralto giggle. Perhaps they'd been surprised by the light in Marina's cottage? A key turned. There was more suppressed laughter before the door closed again and the lock clicked shut. Not long afterwards came the sounds of exuberant sex.

There are few more isolating experiences than that of lying alone in earshot of loudly rutting strangers. My mind illustrated the event, mingling fantasy and memory, and when at last all three of us were done, I lay in the silence thinking about the previous night in the Camden flat with Gail – how after the row over my decision to go to Italy we had struck an unsatisfactory truce and adjusted our plans to allow for time alone together. But that assignment in Africa had sickened my desire. Our lovemaking had been incomplete. It felt wistful as a fall of snow.

Later, her eyes grave among the mass of her dishevelled hair, Gail had asked me again not to go.

“I've made promises,” I said.

“You made promises to me.”

“I
will
keep them.”

“They're broken already.”

“But mendable. I'll make them good.”

“It's the way you talk about them,” she said after a time. “The people there, I mean. As if you were still in thrall to them somehow. Particularly Marina.”

“It's more years than I can remember since I even saw her!”

“But you were in love with her once? She was the first, wasn't she?”

I said, “Marina left my life a long time ago. You have to understand: these are old loyalties. I'm doing it for Hal.”

“No,” she said, “I don't think so.”

“If you had any idea how much I'm dreading this trip…”

“Then don't go.”

“I have to, Gail. For Hal.”

She shook her disbelieving head again. “No, Martin. Like always you're doing this for you.”

And as if in ironic fulfilment of her declaration, here I was, alone in Marina's house under the Umbrian night, regretting that I'd come, knowing there were many reasons why I'd allowed myself no choice, and aching with memories of Hal Brigshaw's children who, together or apart, had long been capable of opening up a war zone in my heart.

I remembered the pain of my last encounter with Marina. I remembered the bleak hour in which Adam's friendship had turned to hostility. I thought about Hal stricken in his wheelchair and about the piled bodies of the dead in Equatoria. Again I shrank beneath the burden of my father's corpse, a limp, decaying load that I could not put down.

Knowing these things must keep me from sleep, I reached for the copy of Virgil. It fell open at the page where the letter had lain, and I saw at once that someone – Adam presumably; the book was his – had underscored three lines:

The night swung like lock gates around me, letting more darkness in.

I woke in a rose-madder room already steeped in warm mid-morning light. Pushing back the curtains, I saw a plump hill of olive groves topped by a cluster of houses, impasto pink and white, with terracotta roofing tiles. Sunlight flashed from a chimney cowl. In the hazier distance two thickly wooded hills
saddled the horizon. Nothing moved. Even the swallows were silent on the wires, though somewhereasolitary cowbell clanked every now and then, jolting dry air that smelt of rosemary and thyme. Beyond the bamboo awning, a closer olive grove sloped steeply away down the hillside. The shadows of stone terraces tumbled in soft cataracts between the rows.

I was showering when I heard a sound beyond the clatter of water at my feet. When I called out to see if someone was there, a woman's voice lifted from the foot of the stairs. “I think may be I have come at a bad time. Forgive me.” I knew at once that it was not Marina. So whose was it then, this cloudy foreign voice that added, “I shall return again when you are dressed?”