Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  The latch jolted and the door opened. Marina stood there with a dim battery torch in one hand, holding her blue woollen dressing gown closed at her throat with the other. “I thought you were awake,” she whispered. “I was going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “You shouted something.” She swung the torch towards his face. “You look terrible in this light.”

  “For a minute there,” – he smiled weakly – “I thought you were Jonas Cragg.”

  “I feel about as cheerful.”

  At that bleary hour he had spoken without thought, and was amazed she’d let slip a chance for mockery. Then a phrase from Shakespeare, that had recently meant much to him too, flashed across his mind: the pangs of disprized love. He said, “You should have talked to someone.”

  “Do you, when you’re miserable?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  She stood at the threshold, assessing his uncalculated honesty. The night was cold at her cheeks and ankles. “All that stuff about Jonas – Adam and I made it up to scare each other when we were kids.”

  “I guessed. I bet you haven’t got an Uncle George either.”

  “But it could be true,” she said. “All kinds of spirits haunt these moors. I know you think so too, because Adam told me.” She crossed to the casement, drew one curtain slightly and shone her torch out across the snow. “The little lamp burns straight,” she whispered in a hollower voice, “its rays shoot strong and far. I trim it well to be the wanderer’s guiding star.” But only when the rhyme came did he recognize the poem she was reciting.

  “You love her too,” he said.

  “Of course. How could one not? Emily was a rebel and a visionary. I bet her dad found her even more impossible than mine does me.” Marina had not turned from the window, nor did she now as she quietly declaimed:

  “Frown, my haughty sire! Chide, my angry dame!

  Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame!

  But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know

  What angel nightly trails that frozen waste of snow.”

  though as the stanza reached its climax, she held the torch under her chin and confronted him with features that would have formed a still more spectral mask had not the battery begun to fail.

  “This is hopeless,” she said, scowling at the frail beam, “I won’t be able to see what I’m doing.” She turned towards the door, then hesitated and looked back again. “I’ll talk to you if you like.”

  “You’ll catch your death standing there.”

  “That bed’s fairly big.” Before he could respond she was crossing the room, saying, “Edge over a bit.” He hesitated, conscious of his body, of hers, of her parents asleep along the landing. “Do you want me to freeze?” she said.

  With his breath tight in his throat, he withdrew as far as he could to the far side of the bed as Marina climbed in.

  After a time, he said the first awkwardly consoling thing that came. “He can’t be the only man who fancies you.”

  “But I thought I was in love with him.” She lay with her knees drawn up, tenting the blankets, her fist holding the dressing gown closed at her throat. “I probably was.” He could smell the clean warmth of her body; otherwise she was no more than a vague blur in the darkness. Then, as she swallowed, he sensed the shudder of her tears.

  “I know,” he offered quietly. “It hurts.”

  Marina turned her face towards him, surprised by the quality of his sympathy again as she had been a few hours earlier on the stairs. “Yes,” she whispered, regaining control of her breath. Then Martin lay there, listening to her express a tumult of thwarted feelings for another man.

  Much of what she had to say was of no interest to him. There was, in any case, little space left for response. So he became preoccupied with the sound of her voice in the darkness, and with the untouchable closeness of her warm figure. He felt like a specimen sealed in a jar, motionless, in cloudy suspension.

  “You’re a strange one,” she said at last.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Listening to all this, saying nothing one way or the other, as if your views don’t count. Or as if you’re too high and mighty to share them with me.”

  “It’s not that,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know the man,” he glowered at last. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”

  “So why not tell me to shut up and go back to bed?”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It doesn’t help to talk about him. It just makes me angry when I think of him falling for that scheming little cow.” Impatiently she began to flick the torch on and off as though signalling across space. By the light of a longer flash he saw, where her dressing gown had fallen open, a coral-coloured birthmark near the top of her breast. Making no effort to conceal it, she said, “I won’t be able to sleep. I don’t know what I want.”

  He felt the heat and fury of her grief, and that in some obscure and unjust way he was now being held in part responsible for it. But she made no move to leave his bed. Unsure himself whether it was intended as a taunt or a sop to her childishness, he said, “Shall I tell you a story?”

  “What kind of story?”

  “I don’t know. An old story.”

  After a pause, she said, “Go on.”

  “Switch the torch off first and put it down.”

  When she’d done so, he thought for a moment or two, then he told her the story of ‘The Golden Bird’ out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He had always loved the ambiguous relationship between the youngest son and the magic fox who was his guide, and the way the animal’s seemingly callous advice steered the soft-hearted youth away from temptations that would have wrecked his quest to gain the Golden Princess. Marina listened in rapt silence as he spoke, uttering a small moan of dissent only when, as a reward for its faithful service, the fox finally asked his friend to cut off its head. Moments later, Martin smiled at her sigh of pleasure when the fox was transformed by the bloody act into a prince.

  “Ruth Asibu would like that story,” she said. “She’s my friend. My best friend. She lives in Equatoria.”

  “I remember,” he said. “The cook’s daughter who wants to be a lawyer.”

  “She will be one day. There’ll be no stopping her.”

  “Like you,” he replied. “I can’t see anyone stopping you either. Not for long.” But Marina didn’t answer, and they lay together in silence for so long that he wondered if she had fallen asleep and, if so, whether he should wake her, because he would never be able to sleep himself with her lying there.

  In the darkness, she said at last, “You were looking at my birthmark, weren’t you? Earlier I mean, when I was playing about with the torch.”

  “Not really,” he said, embarrassed.

  “You were. I saw you. It doesn’t bother me. They say it came just after I was born. We were on a ship out of Africa, coming home. There was a storm, lots of violent lightning. They say the mark appeared during one of the flashes, as if the lightning had stamped it there.”

  “Extraordinary!”

  She made a small affirmative noise, unsurprised, having already heard that response many times. Then she said, “Tell me about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Where you live, for instance. Why are you so cagey about that?” She felt him turn his head away. “And about your parents. Your mother sounded really nice when I spoke to her on the phone.” Still he did not speak. Marina shifted to confront him, propping her elbow on the pillow, and cupping her cheek in her hand. “I don’t know why you have to be so secretive about everything. Come on, it’s dark,” she said. “I can hardly see your face. Tell me.”

  Still he did not respond. She reached a hand to touch the skin of his cheek. “I trusted you,” she said.

  After a time he began to talk.

>   Martin Crowther had not always been ashamed of his home, for at first sight Cripplegate Chambers was an impressive Edwardian office block on a prime commercial site overlooking the busy centre of town. Slate-roofed, the grime-blackened sandstone of its staid façade exuded an air of respectable probity. The name of the building was announced on a glass light above the porched front door. Beside each of its pilasters a number of brass plaques advertised the various businesses it housed: CHAMBERLAIN & HALLOWES, Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths; THEODORE NASH, Dental Surgeon; GREVILLE EAGLAND ARIBA, Architect; CLAUDE HORSFALL, Estate Agent; NETTLESHIP, LUKINS & MIDGELY, Chartered Accountants.

  Each morning, at all seasons of the year, Martin’s mother, Bella Crowther, could be seen polishing those plaques. By that time, in the cold months, she would already have laid and lit the fires in each of the offices. All of the chambers would have been hoovered or mopped the previous evening, the ashtrays cleaned, the wastebaskets emptied, the desks dusted. But though her family lived in the building, their name went unmentioned on the door.

  They had come there when Martin was nine years old. At that life-altering moment, his strongest emotion had been wonder at the worlds revealed inside the building. A spiralling staircase with a mahogany handrail ascended through all three storeys from the chequerboard tiles of the hall. The child had never previously seen stairs on that scale, and their curving flight struck him as an airy miracle of suspension. Following his mother on her rounds at the end of the working day, he quickly discovered that each office had a distinctive smell, and that each had its particular mysteries to disclose.

  The outer rooms of the solicitors’ chambers were a cubicled warren of roll-topped desks and safes, typewriters, telephones and tall tin filing cabinets, but the inner sanctum had a clubbish air, redolent of cigar smoke and old leather. Between the ornately tiled fireplace and the window stood an imposing desk from which Clarence Hallowes proffered his expensive advice to clients seated across from himon a buttoned brown Chesterfield. Against panelled walls, glazed bookcases housed the blue ranks of Halisbury’s Statutes.

  By contrast, an astringent, antiseptic smell sharpened the air of the dental surgery, where metal drills hovered above its chair of torments, attended by a battery of lamps and an eerie carmine spittoon. Best of all, the architect’s office was a bright studio smelling of cigarette ash and Indian ink. Among its sloped drawing boards, high stools and plan chests, Martin found a trove of graphite pencils and stiff tracing paper, of protractors and shining compasses in suave leather cases, of T-squares and elegant French curves.

  Outside, in the yard at the rear of The Chambers, stood an old coach house and stable block which was now a plumber’s workshop, crammed with cisterns and lavatory bowls, boilers, pipework, sinks and taps. Soon after he arrived, Martin discovered that by climbing the outside steps that led to the old hayloft, sliding down the slate roof of the building below, and clambering round the corner of the building beyond, he could look down into the yard behind the Majestic Cinema. The door of the projection room often stood open onto the fire escape, so he could hear the blurred boom of the soundtrack above the whirring reels. Sometimes he could smell the hot, electric glare in there.

  “It sounds amazing” Marina said in the darkness. “What a great place to grow up in!”

  But she spoke only from boredom with her own privileged home, he thought. Nor had he yet disclosed any of the circumstances that had come to blight his life. Having begun, however, there was no stopping now, so he told her how, at the back of the vestibule, a door gave onto a gloomy staircase that led down into the cellars. This was where the Crowthers had their kitchen-living room. Its scant daylight came from two frosted-glass sash windows that reached only to pavement level on the street outside. All that could be seen through the foggy panes were the shadows of passing feet. If the windows were opened, dirt and petrol fumes blew in.

  His mother had done what she could to make the place attractive with wallpaper and linoleum, but there was no disguising the bloated lead pipework under the sink, and no defeating the musty odour of damp that seeped in from the other basement rooms beyond. One of them was a larder with arched stonework, where spiders, silverfish and cockroaches thrived; another the coal hole that was filled by the lorry load from a chute in the yard. Neither had windows. In an otherwise bare room with whitewashed stone walls and a flagged floor stood a copper for boiling clothes and an old stained bathtub. The lavatory lay beyond, outside, its door at the foot of some railed stone steps which climbed up to the yard. In winter it was a cold place to have a shit.

  None of this had bothered Martin at first. It was how things were, the received order of things, his life. Then he had passed the examination that took him to the grammar school, and it wasn’t long before he realized how different were his own circumstances from those of classmates who lived out in the new housing estates or among the tree-lined avenues of Heathcote Green. Once he had become aware of the difference, only one or two trusted friends were ever invited back to his cellar dwelling in Cripplegate. Even to them it was hard to explain that he had no room of his own, for when the Crowthers moved into the Chambers, they were given only a single bedroom to share on the top floor. Not until the lad was twelve, and increasingly taciturn, could his mother persuade Clarence Hallowes, the feudal ruler of the Chambers, to have a small attic cleared of half a century’s junk so that parents and son might pass their nights apart.

  Once he had his own room, Martin would spend hours alone up there, reading, listening to his Bakelite radio, or staring at the busy street below like one of God’s spies. For hours at a time he watched people going about their lives utterly unaware of how closely they were observed: the shoppers and strollers, the queues forming for the Palace of Varieties across the way, pedestrians hurrying homeward in the rain, the lovers meeting at bus stops, their kisses sometimes, and their public quarrels. It was only when he started to take an interest in girls himself that things began to darken for him.

  By the time he was fifteen, he was attracting the attention of high-school girls, all of whom came from respectable middle-class homes and had little notion of how anyone else might live. Mostly he met them in the coffee bars after school, or walked with them in the parks, but sooner or later their parents would expect to meet him. Having invited him out to her semi-detached home in Manor Drive two or three times, one of his girlfriends insisted that it was time he took her to meet his parents, and at last he ran out of excuses. She had looked around in some amazement as they entered the vestibule of Cripplegate Chambers. At the head of the cellar stairs, she hesitated when he led the way down. He looked back and reached for her hand but, presumably imagining that he was taking her down into a dark place with illicit designs, she turned on her heel, ran out of the building and would not come back. After that he kept quiet about where he lived.

  This, he admitted in some wonder to Marina now, was the first time he had talked about it since. He lay, rigid, waiting for her to speak.

  “So you live in a cellar,” she said eventually. “So what? Do you think it makes you some kind of troglodyte?”

  Lying in the darkness, hot and furious, he felt himself grow into the fit of the word. A troglodyte, yes. Low-visaged, clumsy-footed, grim and sullen, a beast stumbling up out of the bowels of the earth, half-formed by contrast with her dancing-princess hauteur. “Why not?” he snapped. “What do you think?”

  “I think you might be a bit of a snob.”

  “I should have known better than to tell you.”

  “It must be such a luxury,” she said after a long moment, “to be able to feel sorry for yourself like this all the time.”

  He rounded on her then. “You should talk! Who’s been lying on her own all night trying to make everybody else feel guilty? You’ve no idea how lucky you are – living in a place like this, with parents who can give you everything you like. You want to try being holed up underground like a bloody badger!”

  For a moment h
e felt vindicated, one of the wretched of the earth raising his voice at last, casting his shadow over the ignorant airy world of the privileged. He was high on the anger that throbbed inside him.

  “Mind you,” she went on undeterred, “I can see one big disadvantage with living where you live. If you spend half your life squinting up at people from under their feet, and the other half gazing down on them like some superior being, then it must be hard ever to look them straight in the eye. You should be careful of that. If you don’t put it right, it could cost you friends. Friends who want to care about you for who you are, not because of where you live or what your father does, or how many exams you’ve passed.” He was about to shut her up with a blistering retort when he was silenced himself by her afterthought: “People like me I mean.”

  It left the darkness strumming between them. He wanted the night to hang still for a moment. Needing some firm hold on the shimmering thing this confusing creature was making of his world, he felt a barely governable urge to turn over, pin her down by her wrists, and demand that she say the last thing again, slowly, without irony or ambiguity. But that would only prove he was the lumpen brute she’d accused him of believing himself to be.

  So he did nothing, said nothing.

  “Actually,” she said after a pause, “it’s a pity you’re not a bit more of a troglodyte than you are.” And then, to his amazement she raised herself on one elbow and leant through the gloom to kiss him, a little awkwardly, on the brow. For an instant the soft warmth of her breast pressed against him, but before he could respond she was out of the bed, making for the door, where she stopped, turned on bare heels and said, “Thanks for letting me let off steam.”

  “Wait.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she smiled, then she whispered, before vanishing, “For everybody’s peace of mind we’ll pretend this never happened. Okay?”