Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  5

  Proxy

  When Martin came down to the smell of bacon late the next morning, he found everyone except Marina up before him. Only the two setters greeted him with unmixed pleasure, beseeching attention at his knees. Grace Brigshaw seemed less patient of the young man’s presence in the kitchen than at any time since his arrival, and when he carried his plate through into the breakfast room Martin found Hal and Emmanuel worrying over the African’s delayed return to London while Adam applied himself to buttering his toast with gloomy concentration.

  A few silent minutes later, Grace brought in a second pot of coffee, sighing, “Do you think Marina intends to lie in bed all day?”

  “If she’s going to sulk, it’s probably the best place for her,” Hal grumbled. “I can’t be doing with her emotional tantrums right now.” He stared across the table at his son. “Why don’t you make an effort to cheer her up?”

  “Actually,” Adam answered, gazing out at the drifted snow, “I don’t have much time for her right now. If she throws herself away on idiots like Graham Holroyd, then she deserves all the grief she gets.”

  “Well, that’s not very helpful of you,” Grace declared. “The trouble is, she won’t take any notice of a word I say, and the two of you haven’t the faintest notion of how she feels.”

  “In my country,” Emmanuel said, winking at Martin, whose heart had jumped at the first mention of Marina’s name, “they say that women should be kept laden, pregnant and six yards behind. I wonder if everyone isn’t much happier that way.”

  “I’m quite sure the men are,” Grace replied with an air of exasperation. “However I wonder if it’s ever crossed either of your minds that it’s not only African men who are in need of liberation?”

  “Now hang on a minute,” Hal put in tetchily, “you know damn well we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get as many of the market women involved in the movement as we can.”

  “If you think that’s what I’m talking about,” said Grace, “I give up.” And she returned to the kitchen.

  Martin stared at his plate, uncomfortably aware that he knew more than anyone else about Marina’s condition, though he had no idea how her mood might have shifted since their night encounter. But when she came into the room a few minutes later, wearing a roll-neck sweater and jeans, Marina exclaimed with cheerful nonchalance at the smell of fresh coffee.

  “I’m glad you’re in a good mood,” her father scowled, “having managed to upset everybody else.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Marina said, with no trace of sorrow in her voice, “but it was a bit of a blow at the time – you must see that?”

  “Well, you seem to have got over it remarkably quickly,” said Hal. “I wish my problems could be solved half as fast!”

  “I think you must have passed a better night than I did,” Emmanuel smiled at Marina. “I was disturbed by so many noises that I thought the ghost you were talking about must have come in from the spirit world.”

  In the instant before he averted his own gaze, Martin saw Marina’s eyes avoid the tilt of the African’s smile. He thought: Emmanuel heard us; he must have said something to Hal.

  Cool and unruffled, Marina said, “Old Jonas, you mean? Perhaps he did. I seem to remember hearing one or two odd things in the night myself.”

  Martin could not look at her. Instead he glanced across at Adam, who was frowning at his sister. Then Marina turned her smile on Martin. “You look a bit washed out. It wasn’t you wandering about in the night, was it?”

  “Me? No. It wasn’t me.”

  “I’ve been on the phone to Jim Lumb down at Sugden Foot,” Hal said. “He reckons that if it stays like this, his tractor should make it up here tomorrow morning. So we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed.” He looked at Marina. “I think your mother could do with a hand today. Mrs Tordoff won’t be coming in till after the New Year.” Then at Adam: “And we need more wood brought in.” He turned to Emmanuel, shaking his head: “I should have had more sense than to bring you up here.”

  “Not at all,” the African grinned. “Being confined like this is good practice for when I shall be locked up inside Makombe Castle.”

  “You expect them to put you in prison?” Martin said, taken aback, but glad to keep attention elsewhere.

  “I intend that they should.” The African widened his eyes in a smile. “Actually, Governor Dawnay would prefer not to arrest me, but I shall make it impossible for him not to do so. Then everyone from Fontonfarom to Port Rokesby will be on the streets demanding my freedom.”

  “So a week or so from now,” Hal said to Martin, “you can think of this cool customer sweating inside a hot cell.”

  “While I shall be remembering this preposterous snow,” the African added, “and all of you shivering in Yorkshire, and it will make me very content to be where I am!”

  Meanwhile Marina was picking at a scrap of cold toast, alert to every nuance of feeling in the room, discomfited by none of it and so poised in her detachment that Martin was left wondering whether his memory of their time spent in bed together was merely a figment of some midnight fantasy. So he was glad to get out of the house and fetch logs from the woodshed. The air there smelt of frost and sawdust. Its chill smarted at his cheeks as he and Adam worked together in silence, taking turns to swing the axe and carry the filled basket through into the house until a stack of split logs stood high at either side of the open hearth.

  They came back into the kitchen in time to see Marina lift a tea towel from a bowl of risen dough. Closing her eyes, she leant over and pressed her lips to its soft dome. When she looked up, she saw Martin staring at her.

  “Do you want to kiss it?” she invited.

  He snorted, blushed, looked away, aware of Grace and Marina grinning at him.

  “Here,” said Adam, “let me.” He kissed the dough, tipped it out of the mixing bowl onto the tabletop and began to knead. As Martin watched the smooth rolling motion of his shoulders and fists, Grace bent to open the oven door. The air swirled with the smell of baking bread. She prised the loaves from their tins, testing each with the tap of a knuckle at its base before setting them to cool on racks.

  “Let Martin try,” she said to Adam. “Come on, kiss it first.”

  Self-consciously, Martin did as he was bidden. Surprised by the soft touch of the dough at his lips, he pulled back, smiling, then he leant over the dough, pushing at it with bunched fists.

  “Not so hard,” Marina said. “It’s alive. It wants to breathe. Be gentler. Try tucking your thumbs into your palms, like this.”

  After a few more awkward movements, Martin found the rhythm of the task. In the warm smell of the kitchen his body swayed to the roll of the dough. His big hands gentled at its living touch. And for those quiet moments he was untroubled by thoughts of Cripplegate or Africa, of his own father or of Adam’s, and briefly forgetful even of the puzzling young woman who stood watching him. Then Grace said, “That’s enough now.” She offered him a knife to slice the smooth dough into three parts, each of which he lifted into its own greased tin. Grace covered them with a towel. “They need to rise again before I put them in the oven.” She looked up, where sunlight glanced off the snow outside, brightening the kitchen’s white walls. “It looks lovely out there now. Why don’t you boys take the dogs for a walk?”

  With the dogs bounding far ahead, plunging into drifts and clambering out again, pink-tongued, to shake their coats, they walked out under a sky that had cleared to a crisp, unblemished blue. Mostly they were silent, each absorbed in his own thoughts, but as they stood on a ridge of outcrop rock capped with frozen snow, Martin asked Adam about his time in Africa. Adam spoke at length about his childhood, how he and Marina had grown up there with their nanny, Wilhelmina Song, and their friends on the school compound, who taught them the traditional lore of animals and birds, of reptiles and insects, of witches, ghosts and spirits. Caught up in his memories, Adam went on to tell of a trip he had taken by steamer up th
e River Kra with Emmanuel and Hal. They were on their way to the forest city where the Olun of Bamutu, the most powerful of the colony’s paramount chiefs, kept court. He remembered watching crocodiles glide away through the brown water, and the lean men who stood on their reflections, spear-fishing from pirogues. He remembered the sound of monkeys chattering in the trees as the forest drifted by in a haze of sunlight, and how villagers had gathered in crowds to stare in wonder at this white child each time he stepped ashore. By the time the steamer docked at Bamutu, the Olun’s ceremonial durbar was already in full swing. Adam saw the chieftains carried high on their palanquins under flouncing parasols. He saw platoons of warriors gesturing with spears and muskets as they shouted and danced to the beat of drums and gongs. What he did not share with Martin, though it came vividly to his mind, was his memory of fainting that day. He had been carried through the excited crowd on his father’s shoulders, and they were approaching the space kept clear before the Olun’s pavilion when he saw the palpitating belly of a goat tethered on the ground. He could feel the sweat from his father’s brow beneath his hands, his own shirt sticky at his back. Unable to blink, he had watched a fetish priest draw a knife across the goat’s white throat. In the same instant, the fringes of the sun, which only moments before had been a glaring yellow, seemed to careen into a livid green. Then the sky had turned inside out, revealing the darkness hidden there.

  Listening to Adam’s stories in the frosty air of that Pennine moor, Martin contemplated the banality of his own life. But when he remarked on it, Adam merely said, “Count yourself lucky. At least you were spared the bloody awful misery of the boarding school they sent me back to when I was a bit older. Hal said it was a good place to learn to know my enemy, and he was right about that. But I’d rather have stayed in Africa among my friends.”

  “Was your school really bad?” Martin asked.

  “As you see,” Adam answered, “I survived.”

  Later in their friendship Martin learnt more of what lay behind that dry response. After the heat of equatorial Africa, Adam had shivered in the winds that thrashed around the unheated rooms of Mowbray College. The dismal morning ritual of queuing naked on duckboards over wet floors before plunging into a cold bath left him with chilblains and chapped lips and a permanent, snivelling cold. But it was only when he was made to fag for a prefect called Hedley Bingham that he had begun to grasp what his father had meant.

  Bingo was a notorious bully who saw in Adam’s shy independence of spirit a thing to be broken, and in himself just the man for the job. Having informed the frightened boy that he was no better than a savage out of Africa who would one day thank his tormentor for teaching him civilized ways, he turned Adam’s time at school into an ordeal of misery and humiliation. Adam suffered in silence for as long as he could, but Bingham was too randomly cruel, and he himself too proud. Eventually he mutinied. When he refused to boil a pile of dirty jockstraps that the prefects dropped at his feet one afternoon after rugby, Bingo took out his cane. Three mighty swipes across his naked buttocks later, Adam was still refusing to obey. Three more strokes were administered. The skin broke and began to bleed, but still he would not pick up the jockstraps. Cursing, Bingo lifted his cane, but was stopped by the house captain, Tom Hardesty. “Put him in the Hole,” Hardesty said with a bored sigh.

  The Hole was a small cupboard that had been made from a blocked-up lancet window four feet up the rough flint wall of the house’s attic staircase. It took three prefects to manhandle the scrawny boy into its narrow space and lock the door on him. Trembling, Adam crouched in the dark niche, with barely room enough to bang a fist. He heard Bingo summon Laurence Stromberg – a podgy boy who had already endured a year of this grim culture – and order him to stand on the stairs throwing a tennis ball against the cupboard door at head height until the mutinous fag howled for release. Then the prefects lounged against the wall listening to the dull thud of the ball for ten minutes or so before going down to their study, demanding to be called when Adam broke.

  Still the boy held out. The tennis ball pounded against the cupboard door, and the reverberations of its planks shook inside Adam’s head until he began to wonder whether the next thud must drive him mad. He was given a vision of hell then – an eternity confined inside a cramped space with only the pounding of a ball to mark the passage of time. The thought occurred to him that if he held his breath for long enough he might suffocate and die, and the pounding would stop and the whole school would be so shocked by the discovery of his corpse that no one would ever be allowed to suffer such torment again. For a fewmoments there was something almost voluptuously consoling in the prospect of a martyr’s death, but despite the contortions of his will, his mouth burst open and his lungs sucked at the air. He told himself that, sooner or later, someone must come along to drag him out of that hell-hole before he had the chance to die. Meanwhile his nose was bleeding and the pounding went on.

  Almost an hour later, young Laurence Stromberg finally persuaded Adam to climb down. “For God’s sake, Brigshaw,” the boy said, “it can only get worse if you don’t toe the line. Don’t imagine you can beat those evil bastards. You’ll have to cave in sooner or later. Besides which, this is pretty bloody shitty for me too, you know?” Another thud shook the door. “Better be crafty than crazy, don’t you think?”

  The suggestion struck Adam with the cool, refreshing force of reason. He saw that neither courage nor principle lay behind his resistance – merely the brute stupidity of a frightened dog. Now his head was clearing. He saw that there was no justice among men, and very little mercy. For the first time he understood the rage and ardour with which his father believed in the absolute need to change the way the world was run. “All right,” he said, “tell them I’m coming out.”

  When he fell stiffly from the opened cupboard, he blinked up in the sudden light, and saw Hedley Bingham standing over him with the cane in one hand and a jockstrap dangling from the other. “Lick it,” Bingham smiled, “lick it clean for me, there’s a good chap!”

  Out of the corner of his eye Adam saw Laurence give him an encouraging nod. A moment later Adam leant forward on his hands and knees, put his tongue to the sweat-stained cloth and stared into the eyes of his enemy.

  His stream of thought had never run colder or more clear.

  “There were times when I hated Hal for sending me to Mowbray,” he said now, as he and Martin turned to walk back to High Sugden, “but I’ll tell you something – I came away from that awful place with a much sharper understanding of just why he’s so passionate about freedom and justice.”

  *

  In the quiet time before dinner, Martin was lying on his bed when he heard a soft tap at the door. Marina came in and stood across from him with one hand held behind her back.

  “I was wondering whether to come and see you,” he said, sitting up, “but I couldn’t see how.”

  “Just as well you didn’t. I’ve only just finished this. It’s for you.” From behind her back she brought a small sheet of cartridge paper. “Because I’m sorry about being bitchy with you last night.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to approach. Marina remained where she was, at a deliberate distance, extending her arm so that he had to get up and cross the room to see what she was offering. He held her gaze for a moment before glancing down at what she had given him.

  “You painted this for me?” he said, and when she nodded he looked back at the picture of a young man in doublet and hose riding on the back of a fox. With one hand the youth gripped the red fur of the fox’s neck, while the other was lifted from a slashed sleeve to clutch at his extravagantly plumed hat. Martin saw at once that it was an illustration of the story he’d told the previous night – the fox carrying the prince over hill and dale from one magical encounter to the next. A moment later he recognized his own features in the young man’s startled face.

  “I made him look like you,” Marina was saying, “because if you ever find your pri
ncess, it will probably be by doing the wrong thing at the right time, like him.”

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” he said.

  “I’m afraid that hind leg went a bit wrong.”

  “No, the whole thing’s brilliant. It’s just how I imagined it.”

  “You’re to promise not to show it to anybody.”

  “Not even Adam?”

  “Not to anybody.”

  He looked up into her insistent eyes. “I think Emmanuel knows.”

  “Of course he does. But he’s relaxed about it. He won’t say anything. Africans are sensible about these things.”

  “Anyway, I shall be gone tomorrow.”

  “Lucky you!”

  “Shall I get to see you again?”

  “If you come back.”

  This was less encouragement than he’d hoped for. “I’m not sure Adam will invite me. He didn’t bargain on having me around for this long. I think I bore him.”

  “That’s just his stupid way of trying to stay superior. Actually he’s intrigued by you. And I think you might be just what he needs. He needs a good friend – one who won’t let him get away with anything.”

  Martin stood, wondering at her utter absence of doubt in her own wisdom. “What makes you think I’d be any good at that?

  “Because I think you’re honest. You say what you think and you seem to mean what you say – which is probably why you rub him up the wrong way sometimes.”

  “What about you?” he asked hoarsely.

  This time it was she who glanced away. “You’ve never been in bed with a girl before, have you?” When he did not answer, she gave a little laugh, though it was not unkind. “I don’t suppose it’ll be long before it happens again.”

  “With you?” he dared.

  Glancing about the room, she spoke not to his face but to the angled reflection of his face in the full-length mirror set into the wardrobe door. “That depends.”