Water Theatre (45 page)

Hal and Grace came to the funeral too. Touchingly kind with my mother, they brought condolences and flowers from Adam and Efwa, who were unable to come because they were committed to an important event of community theatre that day. Sadly, Marina was out of contact, travelling abroad with friends. “But I'm sure she would have come if she'd known,” Grace said to my mother, while Hal looked on. “She was very fond of both you and Jack.”

For a man who thought he'd learnt to deal with death across the war-torn regions of the world, I did not cope well with my father's passing. Outwardly I remained more or less impassive. I told myself I was holding my grief at bay for my mother's sake, and perhaps in part I was. But a time came, just a few days after the funeral, when I had no choice but to leave her alone in that little house in Calderbridge. Even then, long after I was out of earshot, my feelings remained ice-packed in cold storage. No tears were shed. I turned instead to dope and drink, and found a shell-shocked sort of refuge there.

Then one evening, several weeks later, my phone rang, and Marina's voice came down the line. “I've only just heard about your dad. I am so sorry, so very sad. I can't bear that I missed the funeral. I was wondering… Perhaps we could get together? For a drink… or a meal even? If you'd like that, I mean.”

I said, “I don't know what there is to say.”

After a moment she said, “I really liked him, you know. I liked him a lot. I want to talk about him. I want to listen to you talking about him too.”

We met in a pub by the river. Wary as I was, I found her as approachable and responsive as she had been cold and aloof the last time we'd met. We moved on to a quiet Chinese place she knew, where it was easier to talk.

When I told her how dismayed I'd been by our previous meeting, she said, “I'm sorry. It had nothing to do with you. There were difficult things going on at the time.”

“Jeremy?” I hazarded.

She sat back in surprise “How do you know about him?”

“Hal wrote to me after your visit to High Sugden.”

“I see.” She studied me with ironical, suspicious eyes.

“He only mentioned it because he cares about you.”

“You're pretty close, you two, aren't you?”

“I owe him a lot. He's always been kind to me.”

Marina sat in silence for a time. “Anyway,” she finally said, “I know he couldn't stand the sight of him. Didn't surprise me. I rather think that's why I took Jeremy to meet him. They're too alike, you see.”

“In what way? Hal doesn't seem to think so.”

“He wouldn't, would he? I mean, when would Hal ever admit that he's an autocrat and a bit of a bully and exploitative of women?”

“And Jeremy is all those things?”

“And more. And worse.”

I waited for her to go on, but she was not ready for that. Instead she changed the subject. “Well, at least Adam's happy enough. And Efwa seems to be enjoying life over here. I have to admit I was worried when they first got married, but it looks as if it's working out a lot better than I expected.”

“I hope so,” I said less confidently, “but it can't be easy.”

“I don't suppose marriage ever is. Not if my parents are anything to go by.”

“Have you been in touch with Grace lately?”

“Not since we were at High Sugden. Why do you ask?”

“Because of something she said the last time I talked to her.”

“Oh yes? What was that?”

“That she felt you were very judgemental of her.”

Using the tip of a chopstick to make a lacy pattern with the remaining grains of rice on her plate, Marina said, “It's
just that I can't stand the way she lets Hal walk all over her. I thought that when she came back from Equatoria she'd finally found the guts to make a clean break. But as soon as he turns up again, there she is, licking his wounds, doing his washing, cooking his food – and there's Hal, lording it over the place again as though nothing bad had ever happened.”

“You didn't find that he'd changed?”

“He was making more of an effort, but…” She faltered there. “Look, you and Hal are friends. I'd rather not talk about him. Anyway, what about you? You haven't said much about yourself, about your feelings.”

So she pushed me into talking, and once I had begun I talked for a long time, opening up to her again as once long before at High Sugden. I talked about my anxieties for my widowed mother. I talked less comfortably about my father, and how my feelings of grief at his funeral were less strong than my awareness that, unlike him, I belonged to no community, was no longer rooted in a world of shared values and unquestioned loyalties. I talked about how far I had been distanced from both my parents, at first by my education and then by my experiences as a foreign correspondent. Only when Marina pressed me did I talk about the state in which I returned from the world's war zones – the prolonged hangover of nervous tension, the avidity for renewed excitement that propelled me into frequent, meaningless encounters with women. Yet, even as I spoke, a part of my mind remained aware that it was precisely through such calculated acts of confession that I accomplished those seductions, and I saw that Marina understood this well enough.

“It feels to me,” she said, “as though we've both got lost from ourselves. Perhaps we should try to help each other find a way back?”

We went together to the flat in Bloomsbury, and because I was still young then – younger in many ways than Marina, though there was only a year between us – and because I'd longed for
her across so many years, and because I hardly knew myself at all, I thought it would be easy for us to make love. Since my return from Vietnam I'd grown used to approaching sex with cool, observational detachment, savouring its excitements while feeling little more than a mild erotic affection for the women who shared my bed. This night, I knew, would be very different, but my whole body began to tremble with emotion as we moved together. And then, thrown by the images assaulting my mind, it juddered and stalled.

Shaken, eyes screwed tight shut, groaning with misery, I pulled away in failure and recoil. Then Marina was over me, soft with concern, gathering my head to the fern frond of the lightning sign at her chest. I lay shaking in her arms, as a long overdue release of jammed feelings turned at last to tears.

“It's all right, don't try to stop it,” she urged. “Let it all go.”

Only then did I discover how congested with grief my heart had become, how much anguish and woe had been packed in there as the wretchedness of the world compounded my own, blurring with it, congealing there, freeze-framing each occasion of shock and fatigue till I'd scarcely dared to feel anything at all. Now, with all the fuses softly blown, the mess of thaw was pouring everywhere.

Through shallow gasps of breath, I struggled to say I was sorry, but Marina shushed and rocked me in her arms, reminding me how she too had been in tears the last time we'd tried to make love: now she was here for me as I had been beside her then. Though more deeply so, more completely so, I insisted, feeling the turmoil of her hair against my skin, wondering at the clear strength of her presence, its maturity of care.

“Let's just hold one another for a time,” she quieted me. So I stilled my breath in her embrace, and felt the exhausted store of grief give way to a powerful new love for this woman whom I had already loved for so many years.

We lay talking for a long time afterwards, as we had once done long ago in the moorland silence of the night around High
Sugden. The noise and half-light of a crowded city surrounded us now, but we were exempt from its restlessness, and so deeply at peace with one another that we might simply have fallen asleep together there. But a moment came when she touched my face, saying, “I need to tell you how good it feels to be held by someone as if you are precious, as if you're soft and human and breakable.” Perhaps only then, as we began to make love with a tenderness and passion that astonished us both, did I truly come to understand what she too had endured.

We woke early the next morning and lay, listening to London droning into gear, in awe of what had happened between us and half-afraid to believe. We were both well practised at escape by then. We each had separate, complicated worlds into which we could return. But I was determined that wouldn't happen to us this time. We had to get together again very soon, I insisted. Why not that night? Either at her place or mine. Wherever she wanted, I'd be there. But it had to be soon.

Marina hesitated. “I think I need to get used to the idea of this. I think we need to feel our way.”

“That's all right,” I said. “We can do that.”

“It's going to take me time.”

“We have time. Tonight. Tomorrow. The next day. Whenever. Tell me when.”

“Don't rush me, Martin.”

“I don't mean to. It's just that I don't want to let you slip away again.”

“Is that what you think I'm going to do?”

“No, not really, but…”

“But what?”

“I didn't think so last time either… In Cambridge, I mean.”

After a further moment of hesitation, she glanced up at me almost in contrition. Then she astounded me by saying, “I was afraid then.”

“Afraid? What of?”

“It was hard for me. I was still feeling vulnerable and confused…”

“But I'd loved you and wanted you for years.”

“What I mean is that I was afraid for
you
. I knew I wasn't ready for what you wanted. I don't believe that either of us was.”

When she looked away from me, I said, “Are you still afraid?”

“No, I wouldn't say that.” But her eyes remained elsewhere, looking down where she loosely creased the edge of the sheet between her fingers.

“All right,” I conceded, “you may have been right back then. Perhaps neither of us was ready. But we know we're ready now, don't we?”'

Lifting her eyes back to mine, she said, “I think we're still finding each other.”

“Consider yourself found. I found you a long time ago, Marina.”

“And you?” she asked. “With all you've been doing out there in the world, have you found yourself yet?”

“I've never felt more myself than I did with you last night.”

“But it's not just about making love, is it?”

“That's why I'm impatient for us to do other things together. Don't you think we've wasted far too much of our lives already?”

“It hasn't been a waste,” she said. “It's been painful and hard, and we've both made mistakes, but it was all necessary, all part of the finding-out.”

I studied her in silence before responding. What had happened during the course of that night was real and true and profound. I had no doubt about that. But did she share that certainty? Did she believe it too?

“Yes, but what about now?” I said. “After last night I mean… I don't understand why you're hesitating.”

“I'm not. Not really. But, like I said, I don't want to rush this. I don't want to manage and tame it with arrangements either.
I want us to be freer than that. I want us to give each other the chance to find out how we really feel.”

“I already know how I feel.”

“You know how you felt last night, and you know how you feel right now. And so do I. But what I'm trying to say is that I don't want to kill this with expectations.”

“You can't think that I do?”

“No, but…”

“But what?”

She looked up at me, bright with inspiration. “Listen, I surprised you by calling you last night, didn't I? And look what happened! Neither of us expected it. We surprised each other into this, right? That's why it feels so alive, so new. It's like a gift from life, not something we managed and contrived. So why don't we do it that way again?”

I looked down at her face in wonder, delighted to discover the impetuous spirit I'd loved since she was a girl. “If that's the way you want it,” I smiled. “But I get to call you this time.”

“No,” she said at once, “that's too easy. Let's be wilder than that. Let's find some other way of surprising each other into meeting. What do you say?”

“You make it sound like a game.”

“Why not?” she answered. “But it's a game about being truly serious. About allowing ourselves to come together without trying to control things, without tying each other down. It's a trust game. A trust game with life.”

“Isn't that just a bit crazy? I mean, what if one of us tries to surprise the other and it doesn't work out?”

“If it's meant to, it will. At the right time it will.”

Again I saw in her eyes the flash of intrepid light I recognized from the old days. We might have been out at the foot of the moor beyond High Sugden again, with me shaking my uncertain head, breathless with adoration, yet thrown by her sudden wildness as she taunted me to jump into the waters of the dam.

“Are you daring me?” I asked.

“Do you need to be dared?”

I saw then that I too would have to learn to trust once more.

“I just want us to be together,” I answered, “whatever the rules.”

When I came awake again inside that painted chamber I had no idea how long I had been there or what hour of the day it was. Someone was standing over me, dark against the soft glare of the electric light, saying, “Wake up, Martin. It's time.” I made out Adam's face looking down at me, familiar but unaccountably aged. Strange to wake from sleep – a sleep that might have lasted hours or days – and see that face loom out of a past so distant it seemed almost another incarnation. A face not yet old, but decades older than I remembered.

“What time?” I muttered. “Time for what?”

“For what we agreed.”