Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  “On what?”

  Marina merely shrugged, smiling, and pushed back a strand of hair behind her ear. “But in the meantime,” she said, “you’re not to go chopping off any foxes’ heads!”

  Grace went to bed early that night, complaining of a headache. Hal relaxed from the wider anxieties pressing on his mind by provoking Martin into debate. It began with literature, shifted to ethical issues, and was soon, as Hal had always intended, centred on politics. Emmanuel and Adam sat back, exchanging discreet smiles as Martin abandoned position after position under a dialectical assault conducted with such skill that he felt enlarged rather than quashed by each defeat. At one point, however, he looked up and caught a quick, swiping glance of disdain on Marina’s face. More might be at stake, he realized, than he had so far seen.

  “You don’t question his premises?” she challenged.

  “What’s wrong with my premises?” Hal smiled.

  Marina turned a cold stare on her father. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with them.” She swept her eyes back across Martin again. “But if he’s got a mind of his own, he needn’t just accept them as if they were written down on tablets of stone.”

  Hal smiled across at Martin. “So do you think I’m playing God?”

  “You don’t believe in God, so why would you?”

  “Words!” Marina snorted with contempt. “It’s all just words, and I’m getting a bit sick of them. Suppose man isn’t the perfectible animal you take him for, Hal – what then? Suppose all your theories are based on too high a view of him altogether? Suppose we just need to be bad sometimes, to be wicked even, to refuse to grovel under your high-minded moral imperatives. What if there’s a dark part of us that would rather risk passion and tragedy than settle for a boring state of economic equity and social justice?” She was warming to her own eloquence. “Perhaps it has a bloody-minded preference for drama and turmoil and suffering? And suppose there’s a good evolutionary reason why wickedness should flourish like the green bay tree? What if the real revolutionaries aren’t utopian lefties after all, but diabolical angels who come whistling out of the dark with whips and tongs and temptations to shock the world out of complacency?”

  Taken aback by this onslaught, Hal was about to answer when she added, “And don’t patronize me by telling me I’m just being perverse.”

  “On the contrary,” Hal coolly lied, “I was going to say that it’s an interesting line to take.”

  “Suppose it’s not just a bloody line,” Marina shouted, exasperated by his mandarin composure. “Suppose I’m speaking for myself. Suppose I actually like chaos. Suppose I prefer sinfulness for its own perverse sake. How about that then? Suppose I tell you to take all your theories and schemes and good intentions, all your carefully worked-out positions on this, that and everything, and most of all your intellectual condescension, and…”

  “Marina,” Hal raised his voice over hers, “that’s enough. This is Emmanuel’s last night here. If you’re not interested in taking part in a civil conversation, you’d better go to your room.”

  Marina got to her feet, staring at her father in silence. Then she scorched Adam and Martin with the same gaze and walked out.

  “What was all that about?” Hal asked in helpless dismay as the door banged shut behind her.

  “I think perhaps we are all tired,” Emmanuel offered.

  “She can be insufferable sometimes,” Hal said.

  Adam took a split log from the wicker basket and threw it onto the fire. “It’s the lightning in her,” he said. “One of her more spectacular displays, I thought.”

  “It wasn’t coming at you,” Hal complained, aggrieved and angry still. “I can’t say I understand why I got hit this time.”

  “When was lightning ever rational?” Adam answered, stirring the fire to a blaze with the brass-handled poker.

  “Does she have the mark still?” Emmanuel asked.

  “I imagine so,” said Hal. “I think it’s there for life.”

  “People born in a storm can be touched with prophetic fire,” Emmanuel reflected. “One must be patient with such a destiny. Sometimes it will shock and burn us, of course, but one day it may lighten our darkness.”

  “It’s just as likely to bring the roof down round our heads,” Hal muttered with a muffled fury that might have been directed as much against his friend’s optimism as against his own difficult daughter.

  Emmanuel smiled, undeterred. “That might be the way of it. But back home we say that a wise man does not trade blows with the lightning; first he waits for the fire to burn out, then he tills the ashes.”

  Grunting, Hal poured more whiskey. “Emmanuel has a proverb for every occasion!”

  “In any case, my friend” – Emmanuel was laughing now, a low, mirthful, African laugh that was still laced with a peasant farmer’s sense of irony – “you should be thankful that you are only her father and not her husband!”

  “Heaven help him, whoever he may be,” Hal sighed, coming around a little in response to his friend’s good humour.

  Shortly afterwards the two men drank the last of their whiskey and retired to bed, leaving Adam and Martin sprawled before the fire. One setter snoozed beside Martin, the other propped its head against Adam’s thigh. A wind had risen, and the fire flapped and hissed in its iron basket. The night felt volatile still. Martin lay with his head on a purple cushion looking up at the mask over the fireplace. Balefully it glowered back through the empty slots of its eyes, leaving him uneasy under its black stare. When he glanced across the room, Adam’s lean features were so disfigured by shadow that his face felt almost as impenetrable as the mask. It was like being abandoned in the company of a sinister stranger.

  He considered things from a cold distance now. What a fool he’d made of himself here at High Sugden! He was hopelessly vulnerable to Marina’s moods. Adam was obviously bored by him. And could he really have been manipulated so easily by Hal? A log shifted in the grate, quickening a constellation of sparks in the dark chimney. The dog at Adam’s side kicked and panted in its sleep. The wind picked up the wildness in Marina’s words and blew them about until the pageant of freedom fighters that Hal’s zeal had earlier conjured in Martin’s imagination collapsed into a bloody carnage of riots, executions and atrocities. He saw torture, bomb blasts, massacre and counter-massacre. Perhaps Marina had put her finger on the dark pulse of things. Perhaps his own father had not been so wrong after all: politics was a dirty business, and if there were rare occasions when the tumult of human conflict was exalted by high-minded idealism, more often it proved to be a murderous Jacobean drama of betrayal and revenge.

  Then he heard Adam saying, “Is there something going on between you and my sister?”

  “What do you mean? Why do you ask?”

  “It just feels a bit odd to me, that’s all.”

  “What does? What feels odd?”

  “The way you’re both behaving. As if there’s some sort of love-hate thing going on, and the rest of us keep getting snarled up in it.”

  “I hardly know her. I think it’s your imagination.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “It’s just that I’d rather know,” Adam said, “so that I can make allowances.”

  “Know what?”

  “If something’s going on.”

  “Well, there isn’t.” Martin recoiled from the partial lie into greater heat. “I don’t want you making allowances for me.”

  “You’re very defensive all of a sudden!”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? I mean, from the moment I turned up here you’ve all been having a go at me one way or another. Everyone except Emmanuel.”

  “Perhaps you’ve invited it?”

  “Sure, that’s why I came – to have my head messed up!”

  Stroking the ear of the sleeping dog, Adam studied his friend with a mild air of disappointment. “I’m sorry you see it that way,” he said.

  “Ho
w else should I see it? I don’t think you realize just how high and mighty you lot come across. You go on and on about changing the world, but I think there’s a few things that could do with straightening out here first!”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Adam said quietly.

  Accelerating on his own steam now, Martin heard only sarcasm in his agreement. “There you go – polishing your bloody ironies again! Can’t you just try saying what you mean for once? Or are you just too clever and superior for that? Do you have to be proving something all the time?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said. “Do you?”

  Confused by the swift return of his own arrow and by Adam’s suddenly wounded manner, Martin faltered in his stride. The African mask stared down at him. Glumly he said, “I came out here thinking we might be friends.”

  “That’s what I wanted,” Adam answered, frowning. “Why else do you think I invited you?”

  “Then why can’t you show it? Why does everything have to be so complicated? I mean, for God’s sake, things can be a lot simpler than you make them out.”

  “Some things only look simple,” Adam countered, “because you haven’t yet seen how complex they are.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” Martin answered. “I’m not a complete fool, you know. And I only have to listen to you lot to see how you can think yourselves into a hell of a mess. I tried to tell you what feels real to me that first morning. Nothing I’ve heard since convinces me I was wrong.”

  “So we’re back to the stones and the wind?”

  “You can stand on stones. You can breathe the wind.”

  “But we’re not wild animals,” Adam retorted. “And we’ve moved on a bit since we were bare-arsed cavemen. We don’t just inherit the world as it is. We have the ability to improve it.”

  “You mean with factories and mills? Have you checked out the state of the Calder lately? You mean with laws and politics and police forces? Like Siberia?”

  “If you change the terms a bit and say the power of human invention and the principle of justice, yes, I do mean that. And if that sounds too abstract for you, well I’m afraid we can’t all just be hermits holed up in the rocks. We live in the plural. We’re responsible to one another.” Adam was breathing quickly now, speaking with untypical agitation. “All right, you may not think much of me and my family, but what about Emmanuel? Think about what he’s doing, and why. Can you honestly tell me it would be better for millions of oppressed people if he listened to you and gave up everything that he and Hal have always stood for?”

  Frowning, Martin fell silent. He was trying to recover the ground on which he felt most securely himself. Like the snow-clad hill out there, that ground was far older than history, more deeply nourishing to the soul; but throughout the weekend he had felt its radiance fading from him, veil by veil, like a dream of innocence. It was as if he’d come out to this lonely house only to find himself confronted by the tumult of the world crying out for justice. And far from inciting Martin to defect from his family, Hal Brigshaw was demanding that he render it a more active loyalty, that he take up the challenge of the cry in his family’s name, for their sake, and for the sake of millions like them. So even now, as he strove to hold on to a vision of a universe that spoke the language not of politics but of poetry, Martin heard himself being summoned elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, Adam was also undergoing a silent crisis of belief. For yes, he did know how vilely the river in the valley below had been fouled by the power of human invention. He knew too how the principle of justice was honoured more frequently in the breach than the observance, and he had a shrewd idea how short the journey could be from democracy to demagoguery to dictatorship. Closer to home, he often worried whether a driven egotism lay behind his father’s political ambitions, and he had been more disconcerted than he had shown by his sister’s outburst. But he was pressed more closely still by the uneasy knowledge that, for all his advocacy of Hal’s ideas and Emmanuel’s dreams, he himself was not, and would never be, a man of action. When it was merely a question of debate, he could filibuster for hours at a time, but the thought of entering the public arena, of having to act on his opinions and endure the consequences of action – that thought filled his heart with dread. And a still more insidious pressure was building now, for during the course of their walk that afternoon he had begun to see that he might be resisting Martin’s mystical vision of things precisely because of the draw it exercised on his own imagination.

  “I didn’t really mean it,” he heard Martin saying now, “the stuff I just said…”

  “It’s all right. It’s been a weird time. I understand.”

  Martin glanced up from his apology. “I know that a lot of what Hal has to say is true and real and important. But what I can’t accept is that human beings are the only source of meaning in the world. Some of my most meaningful experiences have had nothing to do with people – things like staring up at the night sky, listening to water in a crag, walking through a wood and feeling the hairs prickle at my neck. You won’t convince me that such experiences aren’t real.”

  “I wouldn’t even try,” Adam said. “I’ve had the same feelings myself, many times. But I don’t know what you mean by calling them meaningful. Powerful, yes. Charged with a primitive sense of awe and wonder. But I don’t see that they carry any intelligible meaning.” He looked up at Martin, not quite with disdain, both amused by such unguarded earnestness and discomfited by it. “Or if they do, it’s regressive, the kind of animist superstition that’s kept Africa in the dark ages. Like that mask up there. Yet here you are going on about them as if they were divine. Why can’t they just be a kind of vestigial sensitivity left over from our animal nature? From a time before we had language, before we were conscious enough to find our own meanings in the world?”

  “All right, maybe they are in part,” Martin conceded, “but why should that diminish them? Perhaps the animals are saner than we are.”

  Yet, sick at heart behind his ardour, embarrassed by his own naivety, he was thinking, What if he’s right, what if he’s right about this too?

  Now Adam was staring into the darkness of his closed eyes, listening to the wind in the chimney gusting out of empty spaces, coming from nowhere with nowhere to go. It echoed on a chilly atheism long since seeded in his soul.

  “I’d like to believe it” – he might have been speaking aloud to himself – “I really would.” Then he opened disconsolate eyes. “But there’s just too much evidence that the universe is entirely indifferent to us, that it’s absurd, and we remain absurd inside it – except in so far as we affirm the possibility of meaning on our own human terms.”

  Not sure that he wanted to hear the answer, Martin said, “What kind of evidence?”

  For a time there was silence between them. The world might have been turning on that silence until, without stirring, Adam said quietly, “All right. Listen to this. It’s a story my father told me. A story from the war. Something that happened to a friend of his in France.”

  This man had been a contemporary of Hal’s at university, a principled and intelligent high Tory to whom he had never been particularly close, but for whom he felt the respect that one man accords another of differing but sincerely held views. Some time after the outbreak of the Second World War, the friend had volunteered for service behind enemy lines in occupied France, where he worked under cover for three years before his network was blown. Arrested by the Gestapo, he was questioned under duress without betraying his identity. Finally he was sent to a concentration camp. Somehow he survived and came home after the war, severely emaciated, to a hero’s welcome.

  “Have you seen pictures of the camps?” Adam asked.

  “A few,” Martin replied.

  Adam crossed to a bookcase, searched along one of the shelves, took down a book and moved the oil lamp so that Martin might study the pictures more closely. The photographs were pallid and murky, as though the camera itself had winced in recoil from wh
at it was required to record, so it took a moment before the twisted, almost abstract shapes resolved into a pile of naked bodies in a pit. In other photographs the dead were stacked like wattle hurdles. There were pictures of survivors too, prostrate on rough bunks or wandering the camp with barely the strength to stand upright, and between these portraits of the living and the wasted relics of the dead lay no more than a splinter of light in famished eyes, the merest thread of breath.

  “The huts were festering with dysentery and diphtheria,” Adam said. “They say there was the smell of excrement everywhere, of helpless human filth. And over that the smell of burning, the death smell.” Martin looked up from the book into his friend’s face. Adam shrugged and added, “This was – what? – a dozen years ago. You and I were four or five at the time.”

  Martin stared back at the pictures in silence, trying to connect with the feelings they aroused: on the one hand, a self-protective sense of distance from the squalid improbability of it all; on the other, a sickly feeling of culpability, as if he were somehow responsible. He remembered hearing that Germans who lived near the camps had been forced to file past such scenes, to stare at what they had chosen to ignore, and bear shameful witness to what had been perpetrated in their name. What must have they felt then, if he felt what he was feeling now?

  “It’s enough on its own to make my point,” Adam resumed, “but there’s something else. Something that happened in Rouen while Hal’s friend was being interrogated there, something that finally broke his faith. I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.” Adam threw another log among the embers. One of the setters lifted its heavy head at the sound, then slumped back into sleep.

  “The man’s radio call sign was Dog Fox,” Adam said. “He published his war memoirs under that name, so that’s what I’ll call him.” He stared back at the fire as though watching his story played out among that sudden hot shift of ashes. “As a matter of routine, Dog Fox was searched when he was first arrested. Among his bits and pieces, they found a fifty-franc note in his wallet with a telephone number pencilled on it. Obviously a contact number for another member of the network, right? So the number was traced and its owner brought for interrogation to Gestapo headquarters. When he protested ignorance of the whole affair, that he was innocent, a quiet family man, a man who minded his own business, they began to torture him.”