Water Theatre (34 page)

“Where's this guy get off?” exclaimed the amused, throaty gravel of the voice next to me. “Reading so much into a lousy pair of glasses, which” – she glanced back at her friend – “didn't I always tell you, sweetheart? – you never ought to wear.”

“Do I gather I'm right?”

“Close enough to be worrying,” Meredith answered. “Is it that obvious?”

“Put it down to male intuition.” I smiled into the mirror and returned my eyes to the road. A minute later I took a sharp
bend round a rock face and saw the lights of Fontanalba strung along its hill.

“Guess you were right,” Dorothy Ziegler said to her friend. “At the rate I was hobbling along it would have taken us another hour or two. And I could kill for a shower right now! What d'ya think? Do we owe this guy a meal or what?”

“You don't owe me anything,” I said.

“Sure we do, Sir Knight. You just rescued us. That right, honey?”

“Why not?”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” I prevaricated. “If I'm still in town. You must both be tired out right now. There's a crossroads coming up. Which way?”

Meredith Page leant forward between the seats and pointed. “Turn right at the shrine of the Madonna. The place we're staying is just down the road.”

I saw the tall house that had loomed out of the fog on my first arrival in Fontanalba two nights before. Again the dog began to bark as I pulled off the road, but there was no sign of Franco and his brother. I got out, opened the boot, lifted out the backpack and carried it to the house. Dorothy Ziegler watched me from the open passenger door, where she was standing, while Meredith leant over to drag her own pack from the back seat.

As I walked back to the car, a woman's voice called out something inside the house, then a door was opened and the boy's mother stood in its light.

“
Ciao
, Assunta,” Meredith said. “We made it at last.”

The Italian woman greeted both her guests by name, evidently delighted and relieved to see them. While Meredith crossed the yard to exchange embraces with her, Dorothy asked me, “Do we get to see you tomorrow then?”

“Could be. You never know.”

Before she could question me further, I was reversing the car onto the road. Glancing back as I pulled away, I saw the two
women waving in the glare of light from the house, calling out their thanks.

I'd been thrown by the down-to-earth manner with which those two American women had defeated all expectations aroused by Adam's satirical description of the gathering at the villa. Yet it was with the sensation of being caught in a loop that I turned once again down the track to the cottage. No mist blurred my view this time, so I could see the drop at its edge and the crowns of the fig trees on the slope below. The cottage itself looked as bereft of life as on my first arrival. The yard was empty, the key lay under the stone, but when I opened the door and switched on the light I saw at once that things had changed.

Someone had rearranged the furniture in the living room to make space for an old-fashioned camp bed against the frescoed wall, and when I went through into the kitchen I saw that provisions for guests had been laid ready in the cupboard and the fridge.

I poured myself a glass of water and took it through into the living room. Then I noticed a postcard propped upright against the books on the desk in the little alcove: Giotto's picture of St Francis giving his sermon to the birds had not been there when I left. I turned the card over and read:

Beside the postcard lay Larry's
Umbrian Excursions
with two strips of paper protruding from it. The first marked the passage about Fontanalba I had read earlier. This time the name of the woman who had told Larry the legend of the revenant leapt out at me: Angelina Tavenari, wife to the town barber – and now, I presumed, housekeeper and cook out at Gabriella's villa. I read the page again, more carefully this time. Then I turned to the second strip, which seemed to have been torn from a sheet of writing paper, because it bore the heading:

The page it marked was from an essay on the ancient mysteries that I hadn't read before. This paragraph had been scored:

Is it not possible that the Sibyl and her ministers were fully conscious of their own manipulative part in the process while at the same time trusting the impersonal forces that worked through them? Perhaps it might help to think of their operations as a form of sacred theatre where the power of the performance depends on the willingness of the actors to be possessed by the god. When, today, we attend a performance of King Lear performed in that spirit, we know that we are only watching men and women, our contemporaries, act out that awesome pageant of suffering, and that soon the actors will change back into their everyday clothes and go home unharmed. But though the event may be illusory, its power is not. We are moved and transformed by it. We are imaginatively enlarged. For a time our sense of the world is altered. How much more potent then an event in which there is no distinction between audience and protagonist? How much more deeply might one be drawn beyond the quotidian confines of the mind into the realm where changes begin to happen? Already induced into a heightened state
of receptivity, the willing participant in such rites descends deeper into the self even as the literal journey takes him deeper into the earth. And though the journey is always inward, the outward journey – down and through and out again – is indispensable, for it is down there, in the darkness of the underworld, that the sun at midnight shines
.

I checked the back of the title page and noticed for the first time that the book had been published nearly forty years earlier, when Larry had still been in his middle twenties. A
folie de jeunesse
, as he himself had called it, characterized by the sententiousness of youth. Yet in those extravagant paragraphs some seeds had been sown that must have come to fruition many years later.

Wondering who Sam and Jago might be, I had just opened another bottle of Adam's red wine when my mobile phone rang.

“Martin?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“Where are you?” Many things might have changed about Adam across the years, but his laconic voice was not among them. “Are you still in Italy?”

“I'm in your cottage.”

“You did come back then! I rather hoped you might, but when you ignored my message …”

“Fra Pietro wasn't exactly clear,” I said. “Something about foxes and dogs. I couldn't make much sense of it.”

“Dog Fox,” Adam pointed out. “I was talking about Dog Fox. Don't you remember? The story I told you. Years ago, when we first met. The code name of the agent who went to Auschwitz? It's part of what I wanted to talk over with you…”

“Adam, you're not making much sense either. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, I'm fine.”

“I heard you banged your head, and…”

“Nothing to worry about,” he interrupted. “My skull's still very much intact.”

“What the hell were you doing up there in the mountains all alone?”

“Thinking. Centring myself. Communing. Not so different from what you used to do when you were younger. But something came rather clear to me when I banged my head. That's partly why I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to apologize.”

For days I'd been wondering what it would be like to talk to Adam again. Anger, resentment, the bitterness of his contempt – for all of these I had prepared myself. Yet nowhere in my expectations had the possibility of apology figured. Not after all that had come between us.

“There's no need for that. I always knew there was a price for the choice I made.”

After several moments of silence, Adam said in a colder voice, “I don't think you understand. I wasn't thinking about that. It's something else I need to get clear with you. Something that happened between us right at the start, in our first big conversation, that night at High Sugden.”

“Oh yes? What was that?”

“I have the clearest memory of making you feel ridiculous because you had the courage to tell me what you really believed. I want to try to put that right. You were so open with me at that time, so lacking in all the defensive irony I'd got used to at home and at school. And what did I do? I set about turning you into the cold-blooded sort of sceptic they'd made of me, infecting you with the virus of my own disbelief. I watched it changing you then, and it got worse at Cambridge. It still bothers me to think about it.”

I was frowning as I said, “That's not how I remember it.”

“The truth is,” he continued, as though I hadn't spoken, “I believed in nothing. Not even in that existentialist bill of goods I tried to sell you. Least of all in myself. That's why all that heady stuff about anguish and absurdity, about dread and nothingness and bad faith appealed to me so much. I was a prime specimen of all of them. As for
nausea
– I was sick to
death of myself. Sick as only an adolescent narcissist can be. And there you were, holding on to the kind of dream I'd once had in Africa as a child – a dream of nature, of the sacred wholeness of things. You were trying to stay true to the claims of that vision, making poetry from what you heard. And I talked you out of it.”

“That's not at all the way I see it,” I said.

But his wry snort stalled me there. “I stopped you writing, didn't I?”

“Well, that was hardly the most grievous loss to English literature since the death of Keats!”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I killed off the poet in you, and that's a terrible thing to do. The minute you started paying attention to me, you stopped listening to the Soul of the World.”

So strange was the assertion that for a moment we were at an impasse. I had no idea what he meant. I wished he was there with me in the room so that I could see what he looked like now, what kind of light was in his eyes. And why were we talking about this when so much else remained unresolved between us?

“That's your language, not mine,” I answered. “Sorry to contradict you, Adam, but I really can't remember ever listening to the ‘Soul of the World'. I don't even pretend to know what you mean by it.”

“You knew back then. You didn't call it that, but you knew what it was all right. You were trying to speak its language until I convinced you it was a waste of time.”

For a single, vivid instant it was like being dropped vertically down a shaft through time. I was back there, in the shadowy cleft of a crag, listening to the rush of water among ferns and stones, in a state of passionate attention such as I had never quite attained again. Briefly I felt an irrepressible pang of loss for all that was as nameless as it was irretrievable, and so far gone down the years that it resonated through me with no
greater force than the muffled plop of a stone dropped down a well. Then I was back in the present, pouring wine into a glass with my free hand, wondering what on earth to make of this.

I said, “Adam, whatever else went wrong between us, you must know that I owe just about everything I've achieved to you and Hal. That's why I'm here. That's why I came – to try and get the two of you back together again.”

Out of the uncertain silence down the line Adam said, “Marina tells me he's in rather a bad way.”

“He's had a second stroke. He's lost the use of his right side, and his speech is barely comprehensible. But he very much wants to see you.”

“Is he in hospital?”

“He was, but there wasn't much they could do for him, and they needed the bed.”

“So who's looking after him?”

“Marjorie Cockroft. Do you remember her?”

“Vaguely. Big woman? Lived down in Sugden Foot?”

“That's her. And the District Nurse comes in to help. The point is, he wants to see
you
. Both of you.”

After a further pause I said, “Adam, I don't know how long he's got.”

“It's that bad?”

“Well, he's seventy-nine now… And with nothing much else left to live for. Not after everything that matters to him has gone so desperately wrong.” I picked up the glass, took a sip. “I think it's only the chance of seeing you two again that's keeping him alive.”

I heard Adam draw in his breath. “Marina's thinking of going.”

“You wouldn't let her travel alone?”

“Allegra will probably go with her.”

“That's good. But what about you? He wants to see you too.”

“I haven't made up my mind.”

“Surely you can forgive him after all these years?”

“Maybe. I don't know. But that's not it.”

“Then what?”

When Adam's answer came, its coldness chilled me. “There are other calls on me.”

“Oh, right, yes,” I said in a voice still colder than his own, “I was forgetting that you seem to have become an important player in the snake-oil trade.”

“Shall we not quarrel?” Adam said quietly after another pause. “I'd made up my mind not to lose my temper with you. I don't think either of us needs that now.”

“Yes, let's not,” I said. “I'm sorry I said that. But the fact is I'm having a hard time understanding what you're about these days. Marina's probably told you – I've just got back from Equatoria. I can't square what's happening there with the kind of life you seem to be living here.”