Water Theatre (49 page)

A dozen wary steps across a random fall of stone and I was looking up an angled shaft wider than a chimney some twenty feet high. Shadows thrown by the light revealed ledges offering handgrips in the rock. I guessed that others had passed this way before me. Using the same grips and toeholds that a cave dweller might have found twenty thousand years earlier, I made the climb. At one point I was forced to perch with my feet astride the shaft as I fumbled for the next grip. Then my fingers found a purchase. I swung my foot back across the gap onto a ledge wide enough for me to push upwards. A second later my head pushed through the gap and my dark-adapted eyes were so dazzled by a brilliant glare that I might have dipped my head into the sun.

Light seared across my vision, obliterating more than it revealed. Only gradually dared I allow its radiance to filter through. When I did so, I saw how it was generated by the massed ranks of burning candles, hundreds of them, each raising a silent hosanna in what felt like a convocation of flame. A figure loomed over me blocking out some of the glare. Then a hand reached down to help me through the gap in the rock. Astounded, overwhelmed with gratitude to have come through, and filled with crazy exultation, I think I gasped out loud. When I looked up, an expressionless mask stared back at me.

Half climbing, half pulled, I emerged into the rounded chancel of a candlelit cave. The bulky figure whose hand I had taken stepped back from the edge, and I saw many other people waiting for me, silent, motionless, all of them caped in white. Through air redolent with beeswax and warmed by the heat of many candles, I might have been looking at a company of exiled angels or at the assembled spirits of the dead.

“Well done, old thing,” said the figure beside me. “We were beginning to worry.”

I stood blinking in the light, my mind adrift in a vague terrain between reality and dream. But I could smell the dry air of this cavern round me, my shins smarted where they'd grazed against rock, and somewhere I could hear the sound of falling water. I had to trust the evidence of my senses.

Turning my head towards the sound of water, I saw an arch of rock that sprang like a flying buttress across a green pool, and knew that I was back inside the same chamber where Adam and I had taken to the skiff. And here was Gabriella, still in her carmine gown beneath the white cape, stepping forward from the assembled crowd to greet me.

“So, Mr Crowther” – her smile contrived to mingle concern with a mild, ironical detachment – “like our friend Guerino you have made a journey to the underworld in search of your father. But did you find him there?”

“Yes,” I heard my voice answer in the silence of the cave, “I believe I did.”

“And did you speak with him?”

I nodded my head.

“And tell me,” she pressed quietly, “did you have the good sense to say farewell to him and leave him in peace?”

“I think so. I believe that's what happened down there, yes.”

“Then you are welcome back into the land of the living,” she said at last. “I think you deserve our congratulation.” Smiling, Gabriella put her hands together and began to clap.

Immediately Larry Stromberg, who stood a couple of paces behind her, did the same, and then every one assembled in the cave joined the applause, with a benevolent air of welcome and approbation.

Bewildered, embarrassed, I began to feel like the dazed centre of attention at a surprise birthday party. Looking around at these people who had been waiting for me here in the light while I was scrabbling on my hands and knees through the dark, I recognized some faces: Allegra, Meredith Page, Dorothy Ziegler, Orazio, Angelina.

“Forgive me,” Gabriella said, as the applause came to an end, “that you were kept for so long a time alone, but you came among us in ways which were not foreseen.” She opened her hands in an extravagant gesture of self-exculpation. “If only you had done as Adam asked, things would have been arranged with more consideration.”

“Where is Adam?” I asked. “He was behind me in the cave, and then he vanished. I don't know what happened to him.”

Gabriella turned and gestured to Allegra, who took the hands of two cowled figures standing beside her and led them towards me. When they pulled back their hoods, I was looking at Adam and Marina. Neither of them spoke, but Allegra said quietly, “This should have happened a long time ago. I hope you'll be kind to one another.”

Gabriella opened her hands and said, “So you have your wish to meet with Adam and Marina after all. Now something much more difficult must happen. Come, Lorenzo. Come, Allegra. Let us leave these three to talk together.”

As they walked away towards the arch that led out of the cave, Adam took Marina's hand and guided her to where, in a ring of flickering candles, a rock formation roughly shaped like a stooping figure seemed to peer down into the pool. Marina sat down on a slab of rock at its base. Still without speaking, Adam sat beside her and gestured for me to join them on a slab a few feet away.

Marina must have heard the sound of my arrival, but she gave no sign of it. I now knew that she would have been unable to meet my gaze even if she wished to do so, but I felt both rebuffed and held at bay by the resolute way she kept her head averted towards the sound of water falling into the pool. Though only a few feet away from me, she felt unreachably distant. When Adam too lowered his head as if in a meditative trance, the three of us sat in uneasy silence for a time with the rough stone figure looming above us.

Eventually Adam drew in his breath and said, “You must know that this is no easier for us than it is for you. But Marina and I feel we can't go back to see Hal until we have a fuller understanding of everything that happened all those years ago. About what happened between me and him for a start, and the part you played in it. And I know that I have to come to terms with my father just as you have with yours, but this is about more than that.” He looked up at me sharply then. “And it's not just about the three of us, though God knows we need to look at all that again – at the way you hurt us both as badly as you did. But Marina and I need to talk about our mother too. We need to understand what happened to Grace – why she did what she did, I mean. And we think you know.”

Whether he knew it or not, Adam could not have found a more unnerving way to begin what had to be accomplished
between us. I looked across the short distance and the great gap of time and duplicity that divided me from these two people I had loved so much and lost so cruelly. How to cross that gap? Did they know what they were asking? My eyes shifted away, up at the figure that seemed to lean above them in a gesture of protection. But there was no protection here. Nowhere inside this cave could a Faraday Cage be found. And I had no real desire for one. I had emerged from that dark underground passage like a creature breaking a chrysalis. All I wanted now was honest air and light.

“It all goes back such a long way,” I began uncertainly, “probably further than you think. Are you sure it's what you want? Are you sure you're ready for this?”

“Why else do you think we brought you here?” Adam answered with a firm voice.

“What about you, Marina?” I asked. “You haven't said anything yet.”

She lifted her face towards me, grave, uncompromising. “If you're asking me whether I'm ready,” she said, “I've been ready for thirty years.”

And before she could add another word, I had decided that, for me too, after three long decades of self-imposed and self-defeating silence, nothing less than a confession of the truth of what had happened after the start of our trust game back in London all those years ago would do.

For several days after the trust game began, I looked for Marina everywhere, but she was nowhere to be found. I carried her absence with me like a constant ache. Three times I went to her flat unannounced. The door was locked, the lights unlit at night. I hung about the Bloomsbury streets hoping to bump into her. I went to the gallery where her work was exhibited and saw no sign of her. Then I rushed home, scanning the crowds, driven by the thought that she had been looking for me in my part of London while I sought her out in hers. Each disappointment intensified the almost pleasurable pain of knowing that my life was incomplete without her.

But events at work were catching up with me, and my mind was made up to break the rules of the game by telephoning her when I came home one evening and found a postcard lying on the doormat. On one side was Van Gogh's
Starry Night
, on the other just five words:
Are you missing me too?

The telephone gave me only her voice on an answering machine, so I tried coaxing the tape: “I know this is against what we agreed, but yes, I'm missing you like mad and, what's worse, I have to be away for a few days.
Work
. Could be a week, though I hope it'll be less. Then we have to get together. Definite time, definite place. Okay? Let's do it or – believe me – I'll go crazy.”

After that I phoned Hal, as arranged, to let him know my place was free for a few nights if he wanted it, and waited in vain for Marina to call me back.

I did get back to London early. Earlier even than I'd hoped. Early enough to hear noises in the spare room of the flat as I opened the door.

“Hi, Hal,” I'm back,” I called, surprised to find him there in the afternoon. I was sorting out some shopping in the kitchen when he came into the hallway, where he stood in bare feet, staring at me with a queasy smile.

“Been sleeping off a hangover?” I said. “I've got news that'll wake you up.”

“Actually, Martin,” he forestalled me, “I… I wasn't expecting you back quite yet. This is…” As I had often seen him do under question, he stretched his arms above his head, clasped his fingers there and brought them slowly down to where his hair floated in silver-grey fly-away wisps. “Well, it's a bit embarrassing, you see.” Biting his lip, he tilted his head towards the door he'd closed behind him.

“Ah! You've got a… a friend in there?”

I took in his nod and the downward flicker of his eyes before their vigilant blue stare glanced up again, warding me away. I dipped my own eyes away from that gaze. and saw the pale bones of his ankles and the yellowish hammertoe on his left foot.

“Right. I see. Okay.” Crouching down to the fridge, I put away the beers I'd bought, and heard him clear his throat. I frowned up at where he stood across from me, a big man blocking the narrow hall. “Well, I guess I'd better go out again so you can… sort yourselves out. Will half an hour be long enough?

“If you really wouldn't mind.”

“No, of course not. Best thing.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Best thing.”

As the front door closed behind me, fury swept over me. How had I got myself into the ludicrous situation of being turned out of my own flat for someone else's convenience? It might have been less infuriating if he'd lightened the moment with a joke of some sort. That would have been more Hal's way – a cavalier, unembarrassed pleasure in his own foibles. But those clipped sentences, the stubborn intensity of his gaze… he'd wanted me out of there. He'd been silently willing me to leave.

It wasn't just curiosity, therefore: more an uneasy suspicion that made me duck into the coffee bar down the other side of the street, from where I could keep watch on my front door through the window.

I didn't have long to wait. The door opened. A woman came out and turned back round on the threshold before I could make out her features through the condensation. She hugged Hal's half-hidden figure at the door, not simply in affectionate farewell, but kissing him urgently, with passion, several times, before hurrying down the street in the opposite direction to the one I'd taken. By then I'd taken in the fact that she was black, which would have caused me no concern if I had not immediately recognized the cherry-red beret she wore.

I sat down at the counter hearing the blood in my ears.

When I got back to the flat, Hal was still there, waiting to apologize. With his bag already packed, he'd recovered his composure and was ready to strike the lighter note he'd failed to achieve earlier. He was surprised, therefore, by my baleful mood.

“So,” he said, “what's your news then?”

“I've been given a new assignment,” I answered without warmth. “Chief Africa correspondent.”

“But that's marvellous,” he exclaimed. “Congratulations. We must celebrate. Let me take you out to dinner.”

“I don't think so.”

“Look,” he offered with a rueful smile, “about what just happened… I'm really sorry. We'll make sure it doesn't happen again, okay?”

I heard my voice demanding, “What the hell are you doing, Hal?”

Taken aback by my tone, he blinked. “But… I thought we had an arrangement.” He looked away from my stare, then slowly back again. “Of course, if you're not happy with it… I won't do this again. Perhaps that would be best.”

The way out was open. I merely had to step through.

“Yes,” I said, “I think that would be best.”

“Right, well… yes, I understand. Of course.” He leant down to pick up his bag. “I'll be on my way then. Mustn't crowd you out of your own place.”

At the door he stopped, put on his jaunty felt hat and turned, smiling at me – a wan, suddenly much graver smile. “I really am sorry about this afternoon, Martin. Wouldn't have had it happen for worlds. Are you quite sure I can't take you out – to make amends? We could talk about the new job.”

“I'm tired, Hal,” I said. “I'd rather not. It can wait.”

“Well if you're sure…”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

Still he hesitated. “We
are
still friends, aren't we? Wouldn't like my little weaknesses to have come between us…”

I nodded, and glanced away.