Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  Martin shifted the mug to his left hand and took the slender hand that was held out to him. The grip was strong. Adam turned to Martin. “This is Emmanuel Adjouna. You can talk at lunch. He’s working with my father right now.”

  The African’s smile widened. “You have fallen among good friends, Martin. In this place only the rooms are cold. Adam my dear, I think I would have died by now if not for these excellent trousers and sweaters you lent me.” And he burst into a hoarse laugh. Martin found it impossible to say how old this man was. He wanted to laugh with him. Aware of the mug steaming in his hand, he said, “This tea might warm you up. I don’t really want it.”

  “Thank you, but I have this.” Grinning, the African took a flask from his back pocket. “From Russia, where they know how to banish cold. You like to try some vodka?”

  At that moment a door further along the landing opened. A bluff voice called, “What’s going on out here?” and a burly man with a strong, romanesque head and a broken nose stared out at the gathering on the gallery. “That for me?” he asked, and took the mug of tea. “Good, I’m gasping.” He sipped at the mug, held it away from his pugilist’s jaw, studied Martin for a moment, and said, “I’m Hal. This is my house. You’re very welcome.” Before the visitor could respond, the big man – he was taller than Adam, more vigorously built – turned to the African, muttering, “We’d better push on, old son, or we’ll never have you in Government house.” Then he went back into his study.

  With a wry grimace Emmanuel Adjouna winked at the two young men and followed his friend. As the door closed behind him, the telephone in the study rang once and was again immediately answered.

  Adam’s was an attic room, up a further winding stair. Under the eaves by the dormer window, he bent to plug in a two-barred electric heater, pointed Martin towards a steamer chair that had seen better days and threw himself onto the plump eiderdown of the single bed. Above his head was pinned a Cubist poster from Le Musée d’Art Moderne. Martin took in the shelves stacked with books, the many Penguins in their orange livery with the white stripe; the leaning rank of records, many LPs among them; the slimline desk with its swivel chair; the air of inviolable privacy. He tried to clear his mind of envy.

  “What are they doing?” he asked. “Your dad and his friend, I mean.”

  “Overthrowing the British Empire.”

  When Martin snorted and glanced away, Adam said, “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure!” Martin got up and crossed to the dormer window, where he gazed out at the swollen sky over Sugden Clough.

  “You haven’t heard of my father?” Adam said.

  “Should I have?” Martin turned and saw him balancing something on the thumbnail of his right hand. Light glinted briefly off an old silver coin as Adam flicked his thumb, sent the coin spinning into the air, and caught it in the same hand when it fell.

  “He’d like to think so. H.A.L. Brigshaw? Author of Inglorious Empire and The Practice of Freedom?”

  “Doesn’t sound like the sort of stuff I read.”

  “But you read the papers, don’t you? The Express thinks he should be thrown in the Tower pending execution at Traitor’s Gate. Mind you, he’d be pissed off if it didn’t.”

  “Politics isn’t my thing.”

  Adam laughed, aghast. “Better not let Hal hear you say that – not unless you fancy being beaten into submission. We’re all passionate about politics here, except Marina of course, though even she gets worked up about Africa. We lived there for years till Hal got the sack. Emmanuel’s going back next week.” Adam tossed the coin again. “Keep an eye on the news.”

  “Why, what’s going to happen?”

  “His people have already got the students organized, and the Trades Unions in Port Rokesby are with him. He’s working with Hal on a strategy to get the miners on board, and once that happens the colony will be ungovernable.” Again the coin span on the air between them.

  “Which colony is that?” Martin asked, flustered by his own ignorance. But Adam seemed untroubled by it. “British Equatorial West Africa,” he answered. “The Tories know they’ll have to get out of course, and there’s a puppet of their own they’d prefer to leave in charge, but Emmanuel’s the only man who can keep the tribal factions together. He should be Prime Minister within the year, and then it’ll be a clear run to independence.” Adam shrugged airily at Martin, who stared at him as though listening to a signal from a distant star. “But then you’re not interested in politics. I suppose you’ve got more important things on your mind.” With studied casualness, he tossed the coin over and over again.

  Martin frowned across at him, baffled by the shifting moods of this house. He felt he had stumbled into a culture of baseless discontent where, for all the authority and precision with which they were used, words had a slippery existence of their own. They seemed to correspond to nothing actually present in this privileged world – except perhaps for the anomalous African shivering in borrowed trousers.

  “It’s not that I’m not interested,” he said. “Or that I don’t care. It’s just that I don’t know much about it.” He bit back the complaint that he had not shared the opportunities enjoyed by Hal Brigshaw’s family. The coin sprang into the air again. With a swift movement Martin reached out, grabbed it, and turned back into the window alcove to examine his catch. Embossed with the garlanded head of a young man, the coin lay thin and mysterious in his palm.

  “Give it back,” Adam demanded.

  “Hey, this is Roman, isn’t it? Where d’you find it?”

  “I was given it for Christmas. My mother had it from an uncle when she was a girl. I’ve always wanted it. Now it’s mine. Give it here.”

  Martin was examining the coin by winter light. “I can make out an R, an I and an A…” He was reluctant to let this ancient thing go, could feel himself possessed by the desire to have it for himself.

  “It’s Hadrianic,” Adam said. “There’s a portrait of Antinous on the reverse. He was Hadrian’s lover. Some legionary probably brought it here from Alexandria or Asia Minor.” His voice stiffened: there was a peevish edge to it now. “It’s quite rare and I’d like it back please.”

  “All right, all right, keep your hair on.” Martin handed back the coin, but already Adam was ruing his failure to trust the possibilities of friendship: “I’m sorry.” He tightened his fist round the coin. “I don’t know what’s got into me. It’s being back home again – after school, I mean. Being stuck in this place.”

  Martin sat down across from his friend again. “You don’t know how lucky you are. I’d give anything to live out here.”

  Adam slipped the coin back in his pocket. “It can get pretty boring.”

  Martin shook his head. “Not for me. I feel great when I’m out here, in the wilds.” He glanced across at Adam, ready to withdraw at the first scoff, but encountered only an interested, affirming nod. “Which is weird really,” he went on, “given that I’ve lived near the centre of town all my life.”

  “Not so weird.”

  “I suppose not, but…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Every time I come out onto the tops it feels a bit like coming home. As if the country where I belong is just over the horizon, and I know it’s there, but I can only remember a few words of the language…”

  “What kind of language would that be?”

  The word “poetry” was at Martin’s lips, but it would not pass. He saw it would render him too vulnerable to this new friend. So he merely snorted in demurral and looked away. In the meantime, Adam had felt it necessary to make amends. “Go on,” he urged, “it’s interesting.”

  “It mostly has to do with the wind,” Martin offered uneasily, “and the way the sky reflects in water, and the sound of water, too. The feel of stone.” He hesitated there, amazed that he had risked this much, then saw a way through. “I’d have thought you’d have sensed it. Living so close, I mean. You must have felt it trying to get through to us?”


  Now it was Adam who frowned.

  “You talk as though it were alive,” he said. Aren’t you being a touch anthropomorphic – muddling it all up with human stuff? What interests me most about these moors and crags is precisely the fact that they’re inanimate. Not the foxes and the harebells, I know, but the rocks and becks, the things that aren’t alive, that aren’t messed up with life and living.” Adam lay in the pallid shaft of light cast through the dormer window, staring, it seemed, into a close, countervailing darkness. “Sometimes I go out there and it feels utterly indifferent to everything – whether I’m there or not, whether I live or die even. It’s just numb, unconscious of itself, as though it had been dragged into existence and was left lying there, sticking it out, enduring whatever comes because there’s nothing else to be done.” He glanced back Martin’s way. “And you know what? I’m grateful for it. It clears my head. It reminds me that I’m human and, because of that, I’m not just trapped in the way things are. I’m free to act, to alter things, to make a difference.”

  Martin considered this, then said, “I know what you mean, but it’s not the whole story.” He was thinking about the days when he went out onto the moors or followed a beck down a crag, and it felt as though everything around him was breathless with a kind of expectation. “Perhaps it wants change as well?”

  “What on earth does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. But it feels as if it might.” Martin looked up to glance, cautiously askance, at Adam. “Change, I mean. As if at any given moment something new and marvellous is about to happen… if only someone said the right word.”

  Adam ran his fingers through his dark hair. He decided that Martin had taken Wordsworth too seriously, but there was something formidable in his earnestness, a feeling of weight and substance, and Adam was in no mood for that kind of argument. He got up off the bed and crossed the room to put a record on his portable gramophone. Carefully he placed the needle on the disk and, as music swung into the silence, he stood restlessly by the dormer window, fingertips tapping out the rhythm at his thigh. He had felt like playing something plangent and modern, but his father was working in earshot, so he’d settled instead for King Oliver blowing free and easy out of the Dreamland Café forty years earlier, with Jimmie Noone’s clarinet syncopating at his side and Lottie Taylor at the piano.

  Watching him, Martin thought about the ancient coin in his friend’s pocket, the centuries impressed on it, the strangeness of time. He glanced away and saw the hollow place left by the weight of Adam’s body on the bed. The music was filling him with longings so indefinable and obscure that he couldn’t tell whether they were for something long since lost and gone or for a future that would always lie just beyond his reach.

  Then Adam turned, frowning still. “Looks like you must have said the right word,” he murmured. “It’s started to snow.”

  But only a light smattering of flakes blew about the moorland sky, and none of it was sticking, so there was no sense of urgency in the air when Grace beat the gong that summoned the men down to lunch

  Hal decided that he wanted a photograph of what was, for him, an important historical moment. As he instructed Martin in the use of his German camera, the big man’s voice rang resolutely local in an accent pitched just east of the Pennine ridge. It contrasted so bluntly with the rest of the family’s polished vowels that for a moment Martin wondered whether it was exaggerated for his own comfort. But this was not, he saw, a man likely to make adjustments to those around him.

  Never having used anything more sophisticated than a Box Brownie before, Martin peered through the viewfinder of this snouted monster, fidgeting after the right focal length while Hal marshalled his family in front of the Christmas tree. Emmanuel Adjouna stood at the centre, a blue-striped tribal smock worn over two sweaters, with one arm at Hal’s shoulder, the other round Grace’s waist. Adam and Marina were at either side. The dogs lay panting at their feet. Conscious of Adam’s discomfiture, and of Marina staring back at him with a haughty glare, Martin pressed the shutter switch. The bulb flashed – history arrested there, moment frozen for ever – then it was time for lunch at the round table in the spacious dining room at High Sugden.

  Hal had been an amateur boxer once, and a swaggering contender’s air still governed even his friendliest approaches. His hand lay big on Martin’s shoulder now as he said, “Come and sit down, lad. You must be half starved after that bike ride.” The others were already laughing at a joke Emmanuel had made, and Martin listened in fascination as they began recollecting anecdotes about past times in Africa.

  From his readings in the Empire Youth annual, he knew something about that hot, forested world of Paramount Chiefs and painted mammy wagons and nomadic cattle drovers. But these people had lived in the colony, and it was more intimately home to them than England ever would be. Adam and Marina told him stories about Wilhelmina Song, who had been their nanny, and about the family’s solemn steward, Joshua. Recalling close friends, Marina teased Adam about pretty Efwa Nkansa and spoke warmly of Ruth Asibu, who dreamt of becoming a lawyer. Emmanuel brought news of these and other people, whose exploits triggered long, amusing tales from Hal, until Grace put a stop to his flow with orders to carve second helpings off the roast.

  Then she turned to the silent young man across from her. “So tell us something about yourself, Martin. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “No,” he said, “there’s only me.”

  “Singled out for a special destiny!” Adam darted a wry glance at Marina, “As I sometimes wish I’d been.”

  “So what does your dad do, lad?” asked Hal.

  “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.”r />
  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.”