Water Theatre (6 page)

“He works at Bamforth Brothers.”

“Does he now? I know Eric Bamforth. Not a bad sort, though some of his opinions are outrageous. Have you met him?”

“He came along to a works' cricket match once.”

“Your dad's a cricketer, eh?” Hal beamed his approval. “Batsman or bowler?”

“Both really. He loves all sports.”

“But you don't?”

Martin frowned at his plate, confused to find himself so transparent. “Not really my thing.”

“Because he wishes it were?”

Unused to such close pursuit, Martin mumbled a dull confession that he'd never thought of it that way.

“At least you were supporting your dad,” Hal said. “At the match I mean.”

“I was scorer.”

“I see,” Hal pressed. “So what's your dad's job at the mill?”

“He's the boiler-firer.”

“What's that?” Marina asked.

“The stoker,” Adam answered her.

“Shovelling coal you mean?” She was looking only for clarity, intending no judgement or affront, but her frank gaze pushed Martin into deeper retreat.

“Then he is the powerhouse of the place,” Emmanuel said. “Everything there depends on him. Isn't that so, Hal?”

“Absolutely right – except it won't be long before they're forced to electrify.” Hal frowned his concern across at Martin. “I suppose your father knows that?”

“He hasn't said anything.”

“Well, it's going to happen. And soon. It has to. While we can all still breathe.”

“You mean they'll just sack him?” Marina put in.

“It depends,” Hal said. “If he's a good cricketer, Eric Bamforth'll find some way to keep him on if he can.”

“Let's hope so,” said Grace, who was seated on Martin's right and sensed his discomfort. She tried to move things through onto safer ground. “So where do you live, Martin?”

“In town.”

“Yes, I've gathered that,” she smiled, “but whereabouts exactly?”

“Cripplegate.”

“Really? I thought they were all commercial properties. I hadn't realized that anyone actually lived there.” After a
moment in which Martin failed to respond, she added: “It must be very convenient for the town centre.”

Something in the young man's flushed silence had reached Emmanuel, who smiled across at Martin now. “I myself was born in what you would call a mud hut, my friend,” he said, “and my father could not read or write at all.”

Hal gave a little, chuckling laugh. “And now look at him – about to lead a whole new nation through to a time when none of them need say the same.”

“God willing,” the African murmured.

“It's in
your
hands now,” Hal declared, then shifted his gaze back to Martin. “Believe it or not, lad,
my
old man shovelled some coal in his time as well. He worked as a fireman on the railways.
And
the old bugger voted Tory all his life!” Martin had sustained Hal's appraising gaze with some difficulty; now he saw it melt into an amiable grin as the man said: “So as for your own stoker dad – be angry with him if you like. Fight him tooth and nail if you have to. But never be ashamed of him. It only weakens your own spirit.”

“Don't lecture the boy, Hal,” said Grace.

“I was just letting the lad know there's no call to be embarrassed on our account. Quite the reverse, in fact. You understand that, don't you, Martin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hal, lad. The name's Hal.”

“Harold actually,” put in Marina, “as in Anglo-Saxon. It means ‘army rule', though he doesn't like to be reminded of it.”

Briefly, father and daughter stuck their tongues out at one another in affectionate scorn, before Hal grinned at Martin again: “Hal to my friends, all right?” There was an eager, masculine warmth in Hal's gesture, a desire to be liked, to be approved, that took Martin by surprise. “My daughter likes to pretend I'm a tyrant,” he said.

“Your daughter
knows
you're a tyrant,” said Marina, “even if you have convinced everybody else you're a champion of liberty.”

Martin swallowed and said, “Adam tells me that you and Emmanuel are planning to overthrow the British Empire.”

After a quick glance between father and son, Hal grinned. “That moth-eaten old lion's already weak at the knees. What interests us is what comes after it.”

“The difference between freedom
from
and freedom
for
,” said Emmanuel.

“That's right. We're talking about people being free to make their own future through choice and action. We're talking about how the world gets changed.”

Adam pushed his plate away and leant back on his chair. “If you're trying to get him excited about politics,” he said dryly, “you've got an uphill struggle. Martin is a bit of a mystic.”

“Is he now?” Hal cocked a wry eyebrow, more amused than surprised. “Not many of those in Calderbridge.”

Amazed that his friend should expose him like this, Martin sat excruciated, until Adam prompted him with an inciting smile. “What was it you said about the clouds talking to you? Or was it that they're waiting for a word from you?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Then what?”

Martin glowered at the tablecloth. To hear his thoughts distorted this way left him mortified. He could hear the blood in his ears. He thought about the many times he had come out onto the tops alone, relishing the sharp stink of a fox's den in some abandoned quarry, listening for the curlew's cry above the cotton grass. Yearning for that kind of freedom now, he looked up with a hot glare in his eyes. “I was talking about the landscape round here and the way it makes me feel.” They were looking at him, waiting for more, and he saw he could not leave it at that. “I mean, politics isn't the only important thing. Our life goes deeper than that, doesn't it? Politics always seems to be about what divides us. It sets us against one another. But at root we're all the same. That's how I see it, anyway – we're all part of the natural world, and it's part of us… maybe the most important, the sanest part.”

“If only it was that easy,” Adam said without any edge of sarcasm now, “but either it's too obvious to be worth saying or you really are a mystic, you know. Not so much a Godbotherer by the sound of it, but a sort of nature mystic, right?”

Watching Martin suffer in his chair, Grace Brigshaw was moved by an intuition. “My guess is that Martin might be a poet,” she said, beginning to collect the plates, “which is a noble and difficult thing to be.”

“Indeed it is,” Emmanuel smiled, reaching to help her, “and a true poet is even as much the enemy of oppression as some of us poor politicians are.”

“
Do
you write?” Marina asked with new interest.

“I've done a few things,” Martin admitted.

“Good for you,” said Hal. “Grace is usually right about people. And there's nothing wrong with nature for a theme – so long as you hold on to what Emmanuel said. All the Romantic poets knew that. What was that thing Wordsworth wrote for Toussaint? ‘Thou hast left behind powers that will work for thee…' He faltered there, frowning after memory. “‘Powers that will work for thee…' How's it go?”

When he saw no one else about to help, Martin quietly picked up the verse:

Hal remembered the last two lines, and they declaimed them together, ending in a sudden alliance of laughter as Emmanuel and Grace applauded. Then, “Look,” said Emmanuel, wide-eyed in wonder, pointing to the window as he got up to help clear the plates, “look at the snow.”

While they had been eating and talking, a blizzard had set in. Swift gusts of snow were blowing and twisting beyond the window.

“It's been doing it for ages,” stated Marina, pointedly.

“I'd better go,” Martin offered, “while I still can.”

“I can't possibly let you go cycling out there,” Grace protested. “Not in this weather.”

“Then you're stuck here for the night.” Marina shrugged her narrow shoulders at Martin. “Like the rest of us.”

Nobody had quite been prepared for this, least of all the young man who stood awkwardly by the table, gazing out at the thickening snowfall.

“I think you'd better ring your parents and tell them what's happening,” said Mrs Brigshaw.

“We don't have a phone.”

“Ah, I see. Well, is there someone who could get a message to them?”

“My dad might call in at The Golden Lion. I could leave word there. But, look,” – Martin glance dat Adam – “I think I might just make it back before…”

“You'd better stay,” Adam said decisively.

“Of course you must,” Hal insisted.

“After all,” said Marina, “he can always sleep in the haunted bedroom.”

Grace sighed at her daughter in exasperation. “Oh don't be silly, darling!” Then she turned back to Martin: “But you must try to get a message through,” she said. “We can't have your mother worrying.”

“The phone's in here.” Marina smiled at Martin with a kind of rueful sympathy as she opened the door onto a spacious sitting room.

Only rarely had Martin used a telephone before, and he was amazed to have the privacy of a whole room for the purpose. He saw more crowded bookshelves – so many books in this house, there had been stacks of them along the landing and
elsewhere. Now here were hundreds more, along with piles of pamphlets, newspapers and magazines. An African mask studded with cowrie shells glowered down at him with steady malevolence from over the stone arch of the fireplace. Its eye sockets were slotted like a goat's.

A pile of three new books lay near the telephone. On top was a translation of a work by Leon Trotsky,
Literature and Revolution
. Opening it at random, Martin read how Communist Man would improve on nature's work, removing mountains and redirecting the course of rivers until he had rebuilt the earth. Man would become “immeasurably stronger, subtler”, he claimed. The average human type would rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx, and “above this ridge new peaks will rise”.

In that moment Martin felt, by contrast, subterranean. He was worrying that he had come unprepared for an overnight stay – no pyjamas, no toothbrush, nothing but what he stood up in. But then he had been prepared for nothing here. In this ancient place anything might happen. There might well be ghosts – for the house did feel haunted, but as much by the future as the past, and the shades of both agitated him. And to talk with these people left him straddling a gulf between what was said and what was thought. Nor did he see how their hospitality could ever be repaid. When he tried to imagine taking Adam into his own home, his imagination shuddered and baulked.

Martin thumbed through the pages of the local directory, thinking that it was all very well for Hal to pontificate about not being ashamed – he did so from the accomplished heights of a civilized life in this Elizabethan grange; he had a good-looking upper-class wife; he sent his children to expensive schools. If he had ever known the humiliations of circumstance, they were far behind him.

Martin found the number and dialled it. He waited through many rings, imagining the crowded Saturday lunchtime bar of the Golden Lion, and Ted Ledbetter, the lame publican,
swearing as the phone called him away from the pumps. He dreaded that his father would be in the pub, that he would have to speak to him. He stared out of a narrow window where there was now nothing to be seen but driving snow. When at last the phone was answered, he stumbled into speech.

As he came back into the dining room they turned to look at him. “My dad wasn't there,” he said. “He'll probably drop in later. Someone will tell him.”

“That's all right then,” Hal said, and tapped Emmanuel on his shoulder. “We'd better think what this snow does to
our
plans.” The two men got up, but Hal stopped at the door and turned to look at Martin again. “About you and your father – things are difficult between you, right?” When Martin nodded uncertainly, Hal went on: “Well, for what it's worth, I bloodied my nose against my own dad time and again before I worked out something that proved vital for me.” He paused for a moment, perhaps for effect, perhaps deliberating, then drew in his breath. “The thing is, if a man wants to widen his horizons and make something new for life, he'll do well to make sure he has at least two fathers – the one he's born with, and the one he chooses for himself.”

For a moment Martin seemed to be standing at the centre of a huge silence in the room. It was as if he and the big man with the knocked-askew nose were alone together. But it was Adam who spoke: “Are you volunteering?”

Hal studied his son a moment, sounding out that louche, elusive smile for jealousy and rancour. “Don't think it doesn't apply to you too,” he said quietly, and winked at Martin. “In fact,” Hal added, “I might just be daring you both to start making your own big choices.”

“What about me?” Marina said as she began gathering the plates. “Or don't girls count?”

“You, my darling, don't need daring,” Hal said. “You've never done anything else. I don't suppose you ever will.” And he planted a kiss on her head. For the moment at least she seemed
acquiescent in the philosophical silence of snow that was settling across the house.

“One day,” said Emmanuel, “I think Marina will have something to teach us all about freedom.”

“God help us when that day comes,” her father laughed, shaking his head. “As for you, Emmanuel my friend, I'm afraid that history will have to wait a while longer. We'd better make some calls.”