When I failed to utter any intelligible response, he grimaced, indicated that I should wait a moment and turned away into the first room down the corridor. Leaving the door ajar so he could keep an eye on me, he picked up a phone from the desk and dialled a number. I could hear only his side of the conversation and understood little, so I looked at the bookcases. Many finely bound volumes were ranked there along with other books that looked dumpy and probably dated from the early days of printing.
With a twitch of his finger the man summoned me to the phone.
“Forgive me” – I recognized Gabriella’s voice above the crackle – “I am delayed longer than I thought. But I have asked Orazio to take care of you.”
I said, “I think he’d rather throw me out.”
“Oh dear, he can be fierce, I know, but I have told him that the fault is mine. I will come soon. Please, make yourself at home. Enjoy the pool. There are towels and robes in the pool house.”
I hesitated a moment before saying, “You didn’t tell me you were a contessa.”
“Ah! You do not care to have surprises springed on you?”
“Sprung.”
Laughing, she said, “English has no pity.”
On impulse I asked, “Is Adam there with you?”
“Adam? Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I get the feeling you’re keeping something from me.”
“And you feel you should have everything at once?”
“You think I deserve less? Besides, I told you, I don’t have much time.”
“Today is too hot to hurry,” she decided. “Enjoy your swim.”
I would have said more, but she was gone.
Orazio indicated that I should follow him out into a courtyard, where he opened a door concealed in the wall by a screen of boxwood. Immediately I heard the sound of water somewhere below. Descending a stone stairway, we came out into a secret garden. I caught the gleam of water issuing out of a lion’s mouth to cascade down a channel cut into the steps of a small neoclassical temple which overlooked the pool. White parasols shaded two sun loungers in an arbour of bougainvillaea. A long marble table flanked by marble benches stood nearby.
Orazio beckoned me inside the temple, where a stone nymph poured water down into a basin shaped like a scallop shell. It wasn’t hard to imagine someone bathing there, naked as foam-born Venus, but the steward was impatient to show me how a modern shower had been fitted into one side chamber, while a refrigerator, well stocked with drink, hummed in another. He poured me a beer. I thanked him for his trouble. Mollified, he brought olives and pistachios to the table outside, then he left me alone.
I swam several lengths, took a shower, dressed and lay down on the lounger. The beer was strong, the heat of the day soporific. A line of cypresses beyond the pool stood motionless. I might have been lying in a world where sunlight spellbound all things to stillness except water. Pouring from the lion’s mouth, down the stairs into a shallow slipper bath and thence into the pool, it flowed out again unseen. It was as if this green and secret garden existed solely as a thoroughfare for water. Nature and art had consorted here to serve its purposes. The spirit of the place breathed in its sound, and now that sound was passing through me till I was left with only a diminishing sense of separate existence.
Gazing across the ornamental hedges at the mountains beyond, I thought – as so often on the chancy expedition of my life – What the hell am I doing here?
The pool panted in its net of lights. The sun stood still. I was recalling another arrival, in another place, as I fell backwards into sleep.
2
High Sugden
Grey goose and gander,
Waft your wings together,
Carry the good king’s daughter
Over the one-strand river.
The push of cold wind at his cheeks had brought those lines to mind. It plucked them from somewhere deep in memory as he freewheeled swiftly down the banking swerve of the hill. Then, with the bike coasting on its own momentum up the lane out of Sugden Foot, the rhyme repeated itself in his head like flight instructions, until both slope and wind turned against him. Lifting himself from the saddle, he stood on the pedals to meet the gradient. His eyes were watering now. On either side of the lane silver tussocks of cotton grass glinted in winter light. He took the wind between his teeth, yet it buffeted about his ears so loudly he could hear nothing else and was unaware of the car climbing the hill behind him.
The car – a pale-blue Austin 7 – rounded a bend in the narrow lane as he tacked towards the next brow. Perhaps the driver had no time to see him. Certainly no attempt was made to brake or swerve, so it was merely a matter of luck that the side of the vehicle hustled past not quite close enough to touch but near enough to unbalance him. Panting in the stink of exhaust, he propped himself against the capstones of the roadside wall, looked up, and saw the car crest the rise and drop out of sight.
Alone on the side of the hill, Martin Crowther, eighteen years old, sweating inside his duffel coat, pushed back a lock of dark hair and shouted a pointless insult. But when he turned his head, the view down the valley was too elating to let him feel annoyed for long. On this last Saturday of the year the distant factories stood smokeless under dense cloud. Pale shafts of sunlight slanted down over the moor towards Crimmonden, while northwards there was already a pink glare to the sky though it was still only mid-morning. He saw that snow might fall before the day was out.
Martin let go of the cold handlebars and blew into his fist. Above him on the slope, a blackened slab jutted from a stack of outcrop rock. The light tipped and shifted again. He could hear the hum of the power lines, and everywhere around the gaunt horizon he sensed the depleted, psalm-like lamentation uttered by places where, for too long, industry and wilderness had been at war. Again and again he had tried to catch that note in poetry. He had brought some of his efforts with him in the folder in his saddlebag, and was looking forward to trying them out on Adam Brigshaw’s educated ear, but that brisk, inexpressible alteration of the light robbed him of confidence. He ran some lines through his mind, thought he saw how they might be improved, then began to worry that they were no good. It might be wiser to keep them to himself.
Having been brought to a halt, he would have to walk his bike up to the next rise, so he swung his leg across the saddle and began to push. Grey goose and gander, he found himself muttering the old nursery rhyme again, waft your wings together, carry the good king’s daughter over the one-strand river.
Over the centuries the slate roof of High Sugden Grange had buckled to a wave, so that the blackened Elizabethan house sheltered in the lea of its high stone barn with a head-down, introverted air. A lower range of outbuildings enclosed the yard where the Austin was parked beside a shooting brake. A skimpy figure wearing a red scarf reached into the back seat and took out two baskets before crossing to the porched door of the house.
Minutes later Martin’s tyres whirred through the open gate into the yard. He propped his bike against a shed wall, removed his bicycle clips and put them in the pocket of his duffel coat. Under the noise of the wind he heard the clatter of beck water pouring into a stone trough, but so chill was the air that he thought it couldn’t be long before even that sound was stilled to ice.
On the pediment over the porch, a mason had carved two free-floating cherubs in relief holding a shield on which a name – JNO. CRAGG – had been chiselled inside the angle of an open pair of compasses over the date 1596. Beneath it ran the inscription:
THIS PLACE HATES LOVES PUNISHES OBSERVES HONOURS WICKEDNESS PEACE CRIMES LAWS THE VIRTUOUS
The floor of the porch was flagged, and stone benches had been built into the recess at either side. A ribboned sprig of mistletoe hung above the door. As Martin stepped into the porch, the noise of the wind stopped, as though a switch had been thrown. Struck by the abrupt alteration, he took a single step back into the yard, and there was the wind instantly barracking at his ears. When he stepped forw
ard into the porch, the switch was tripped again. It cut the world in two. It made things feel provisional and strange.
Martin lifted his hand to the knocker, and the studded oak door moved at his touch. He heard the sound of a woman’s voice inside. “Don’t be tiresome, darling,” she was saying, “the day’s quite complicated enough as it is.”
“Then wouldn’t it be simpler if I wasn’t around?” The answering voice was also female, but younger, tetchier.
“Now you’re just being captious,” came the reproof.
“But I pulled my weight over Christmas, didn’t I? I really don’t see why I should waste half my weekend entertaining Adam’s boring friends.”
“There’s only one of them.”
Somewhere in the house a phone rang just once and was immediately answered. “Anyway it’s not just him,” the woman’s voice went on after a moment. “You know Emmanuel’s leaving tomorrow. I really think you have to be at dinner tonight. You can spend all day tomorrow with Graham.”
“That’s not the point. You know I…”
“There’s a terrible draught in here. Did you leave the front door open?”
“I don’t know, I had my hands full. I really think we should discuss this.”
“Marina, I don’t have time. The point is, Emmanuel’s hardly seen you…”
“Well that’s not my fault. I’ve been here kicking my heels, waiting for him and Daddy to show their faces.”
“They do have more important things on their minds!”
“My point exactly.”
Martin stood between the wind and the door, preventing the knocker’s fall, admiring and fearing the suave way these voices performed their disagreement. What to do, in such company, with the thudding flats and twangs of his own rough vowels? Gentrify them? Speak as little as possible?
“Anyway,” Marina pressed, “I can’t think why you want me storming about the place in a bad mood before he goes.”
“Oh do stop it, darling. What I want is for you to see if that door’s shut. It’s like the Russian front in here.”
Martin let the knocker drop. It banged in his chest.
“Oh surely that’s not him already! It’s barely twelve. Go and see, will you?”
“Why can’t Adam go? It’s his friend.”
“He’s out on the tops with the dogs. He should have been back ages ago.”
Martin heard footsteps on flagstones, and then the door was pulled open. Light from the yard fell across the girl’s face, sharpening her frown. She said, “You must be Adam’s friend.” His gaze dipped to the denim jeans rolled at ankle length over her loafers. “Well, you’d better come in,” she offered, as though leaving him outside was a preferable, and perhaps feasible, option.
Martin stepped through into the hall and took in the sombre panelling, the tinted engravings and a newel post topped by a lugubrious owl at the foot of an oak staircase that rose to a banistered gallery. A smell of roasting meat warmed the air. He said, “I’m a bit early, I think.”
“Yes. We’re in the kitchen.”
Would he have known this girl for Adam’s sister in the street? Probably not. She lacked his sidelong air of reticence that might be either diffident or vain. The glance of her slate-blue eyes was franker. She was fairer of skin and hair, the latter drawn back into a ponytail at her neck, neither blonde nor mouse but glistening somewhere between. Martin found her frosty, snobbish, spoilt.
He followed her through into the kitchen, where a woman in her mid-forties closed the top oven of a cream Aga and smiled. She put a hand to the dark mass of her hair, in which millings of grey were threaded. Her eyes were a searching, rueful blue. “You must be Martin,” she said, and before he could answer, “Oh for goodness’ sake, Marina, do take his coat. We’re in a bit of a muddle, I’m afraid. Adam should be back any minute. I’ve no idea where he’s got to.” She paused to take in the scale of additional difficulty presented by this young man. “You look pinched with cold. It must be horrid out there.”
“It’s not so bad,” he mumbled as water drummed into the kettle that Mrs Brigshaw held to the spout of a fat brass tap.
“Not bad?” Marina echoed, incredulous. “It’s going to bloody snow that’s all. And we’ll all be stuck out here for days and drive each other mad.” She took his coat through to the hall. Almost eighteen years old, she was as tall as her mother, but lacked her comeliness and poise.
“As you can tell,” said Mrs Brigshaw, “Marina’s in a beastly mood. Earl Grey or Transport Caf? Or would you prefer something stronger?”
“Tea’s fine. Whatever.”
“So… did you have a good Christmas?”
“It was okay.”
“Only okay? I should have expected a good-looking youngman like you to have had a lively time. Do you have a girlfriend?”
Conscious of Marina listening at the doorjamb, he said, “No one serious.”
“I should think not. There’s plenty of time for ‘serious’ later. Right now you should be having fun. God knows, serious comes soon enough.” Settling the kettle to boil on the hotplate, Grace Brigshaw wished that Adam would come back and take his friend out of the kitchen, where he was ill at ease and she had complicated things to do. None of this showed on her attentive face, but Martin sensed it as he sat in a stick-back chair, glad of the Aga’s heat, wondering at this kitchen’s airy space.
“You’re from the grammar school in Calderbridge, aren’t you?” Marina demanded. “I hear they don’t rate women very highly there. On the evolutionary scale, I mean.” She picked up a carrot and crunched it between her teeth, while her intent, grey-blue eyes traversed the kitchen, looking for some advantage with the matter that pressed more closely on her mind.
And this was unjust. He felt the heat of it. “Actually I have a rather high regard for Emily Brontë,” he retorted, and thought he had established an ascendancy, until he saw the two women glance at each other. He heard his words as they must have heard them and flushed to his ears.
“She was quite exceptional,” agreed Grace Brigshaw, and bit her lip. For a moment, sensing his misery, she wanted to pull him up from where he sat with his thick, flannelled thighs spread over large, cheaply shod feet, and hug him into relaxed laughter. But the boy would probably just stiffen like a hare on a poulterer’s hook. So where to take things now? Oh dear, with Marina already cross and tiresome, and the sky crowding with snow, this could quickly veer into a difficult day.
At that moment the front door banged open and two big dogs bounded into the kitchen with lolling tongues, their haunches shivering in an ecstasy of return. “Ah,” said Mrs Brigshaw, “here’s Adam at last,” and Martin reached out with relief to the two dappled English setters that slobbered at his thighs.
“I didn’t think you’d bother to come,” Adam said, “not with snow threatening.”
The absence of warmth in his voice left Martin wondering whether this friend he had met by chance was now regretting the invitation impulsively offered after they’d talked for an hour or so amid the steam and chatter of a coffee bar just before Christmas. They were of an age, both sixth-formers, though at different schools, working as temporary postmen during the Christmas rush, and both soon to go up to university. Conversation had revealed their shared enthusiasm for modern poetry, cinema and jazz. Each had been curious about the other’s background, yet Adam’s manner now suggested that what had seemed a discovery in the Pagoda Coffee Bar might prove an embarrassment among his family.
Martin said, “It didn’t look too bad when I set out.”
Grace Brigshaw glanced at where Martin kept his face dipped towards the warm, writhing smell of the dogs. “Well, at least Hengist and Horsa haven’t forgotten how to welcome guests,” she sighed, and glowered at her son, who said, “We’d better go up to my room.”
Wondering what had possessed him to come here rather than joining Frank Jagger and the others at the Black Horse before bussing out to the rugby match at Crow Hall, Martin got to his feet.
He stood awkwardly between the approaching mug and his departing host as Marina asked, “Don’t you want this tea then?”
Leaving the room, Adam said, “Bring it if you want.”
“Lunch will be at one,” Adam’s mother called after him. “Or thereabouts.”
Holding the mug that had been thrust at him, Martin went out to where Adam waited on the stairs, frowning back at his visitor. “Marina’s been a bitch all morning,” he said. “It’s because they won’t let her spend the night with the tedious rugger-bugger she thinks she’s in love with.”
From somewhere along the gallery above, they heard the abortive clunk and gurgle of a lavatory chain pulled four times before the water flushed. As Martin reached the head of the stairs a door opened and he was astonished to see the tall but slightly built figure of a black man come out. He was dressed in heavy corduroy trousers and a thick roll-neck Guernsey over which he wore a knitted cardigan with leather arm patches. Even so the smile on his broad-browed, heart-shaped face amounted to little more than a gallant shiver as Adam said, “Emmanuel, this is Martin – the new friend I was telling you about.”
Water Theatre Page 3