Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  Among his listeners was the writer Miriam Stallard, whose controversial first novel, The Mirror Room, had attracted much attention that year. Her name was only one among a list of radical celebrities with which Adam later taunted his sister, but at its mention Marina could no longer conceal her regret for everything she had missed. “What was she like?” she asked Martin.

  “She was brilliant,” Adam chipped in, to Martin’s astonishment. “I can’t remember when I last met such a fascinating person. More fool you, Marina, for not having come! But as you don’t have much time for us pathetic lefties any more, I suppose it hardly matters.”

  A few days later, Marina came back to High Sugden in a filthy mood to announce that she and Graham Holroyd would not be seeing each other again. About the reasons for the breakdown of the relationship, and the events surrounding it, she would say nothing. She withdrew inside herself, demanded the use of the haunted bedroom as a studio, and began to splash out her emotions on sheets of hardboard in collisions of carmine, purple, orange and black. If she had been volatile before, her moods were turbid and sulky now.

  Martin arrived at High Sugden one Saturday to learn that she had been shut away inside the haunted room for three days. “She won’t talk to any of us,” Hal frowned. Having returned from London the day before, already tired from a difficult and ultimately unproductive bout of negotiations between representatives of Emmanuel’s People’s Liberation Party and delegates from Ambrose Fouda’s conservative opposition, he had been further exasperated by Marina’s refusal to respond to his approaches. “I’m just about at my wit’s end with her. This has been going on long enough. I think it’s time we called the doctor in.”

  “Shall I try to talk to her?” Martin offered.

  Hal shrugged, and Martin went uncertainly upstairs. He stood on the landing for a time before tapping at her door. At his third knock she said, “Oh for God’s sake go away.” He cleared his throat and was about to say, “It’s Martin,” but saw that his name would alter nothing. Then, out of nowhere he heard himself saying, “It’s Jonas Cragg! That’s my room you’re in.”

  Martin strained his ears at the silence for the best part of a minute before he heard the bolt drawn on the other side of the door. He pushed it open, prepared for a ruinous mess of paint and bed sheets, but the panelled room was tidy enough, its air only slightly tainted with the smell of turpentine and linseed oil. Marina stood with her back to him by the window, barefoot in her blue dressing gown, staring out across the valley. She neither turned nor spoke as he entered.

  “Haven’t we been here before?” he tried, and when she didn’t answer, “Or somewhere very like it?” But the words elicited no response. He gazed at the loose fall of her hair above the belt of her gown, feeling his heart reach out at every accidental detail of her appearance. However stubborn this sullen mood might be, it was the simple, marvellous actuality of her being in the world that stirred his heart whenever they were alone together. Surely she must feel the longing in him? Surely she would respond?

  “You wouldn’t have let me in if you didn’t want to talk,” he said.

  Still she was silent. He cast about, looking for ways to provoke a response. “It’s Holroyd, isn’t it?” he asked. “Has that selfish sod done something to hurt you?” He wanted her to look at him, to see that he was her gruff knight, the angel of retribution, standing ready at her command, her worried and unhappy friend.

  “No,” she said, without turning, “it’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what is it like? Talk to me, Marina. How long are you going to let that crowd mess up your life like this?” He saw the blue cloth at her back begin to shudder then. Thinking she was about to cry, he wondered whether to move at once and take hold of her, but she dipped her head and crossed her arms over her breast so tightly that he could see her fingernails whiten at the curve of each shoulder. “I just wanted to be normal!”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, bewildered. “You are normal. At least most of the time.”

  “Ordinary, I mean,” she snapped back. “Satisfied to be ordinary. Like them.”

  “I see,” he retorted. “Well, there’s not much chance of that, is there? You’re not ordinary. There’s nothing ordinary about you. It’s not your fate to be ordinary. You’re special. You’ve always been special. You always will be. In fact, you’re probably the most special person I know.”

  When she snorted at that, he let his outrage show. “What do you want to be like that lot for? That’s not living, that’s just squandering and foolishness. It’s pretending that nothing really matters because, as far as they’re concerned, nothing does count for much, except money and having a good time. If you ask me, you’ve been throwing yourself away on them. You’re worth more than that. There’s such life in you, such special, extraordinary life…”

  “I wasn’t asking you,” she whispered.

  “But I’m telling you anyway. I’m telling you what I know.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I think I do,” he came back at once. “At least, I once knew somebody who lived here, and she wouldn’t turn her back on life like this. She might lick her wounds for a bit, but then she’d come out fighting.”

  Not a muscle of Marina’s body moved.

  “So what about it then?” His voice was hoarser now. “Are you going to stay walled up here? There are people downstairs worried sick about you, you know.”

  “Just leave me alone,” she said.

  “You’ve been on your own long enough. I think you should put some clothes on now. I think you should come out on the tops with me and Adam and the dogs. It’s where you belong, out there. Not cooped up like this.”

  After a time, ignoring the continuing strength of her resistance, he heard himself say, “I’ll see you downstairs then,” and left the room.

  As he went back into the kitchen and the others turned to him with anxious faces, Marina’s voice came angrily down the stairs: “Come back here a minute.”

  He stood by the newel post, looking up where she stood on the landing, gleaming with fierce pride. “Just so you don’t get the wrong idea,” she declared, “I was coming down soon anyway.”

  “That’s all right then” – he too held his head high – “I’m glad.”

  “But thanks for trying.” With a quick, unrepentant smile she reclaimed the power between them. “You’re my friend, Jonas,” she insisted. “My good friend.”

  Later, the three of them set out together, following the dogs across the moor until they stood above the steep hollow of Sugden Clough, where the ruins of a burnt-out mill hung reflected in its own small dam. As they gazed down from an outcrop rock at the surface of the water shimmering in the breeze, Adam said, “Grace used to bring us swimming here. When we were kids.”

  “When she still took an interest in things,” Marina frowned in reply. “She hasn’t been up here for years.”

  “Too busy worrying about you, I should think,” Adam retorted.

  “Don’t,” Martin put in, sensing their imminent collision, “it’s too good a day.”

  “The poet’s right,” Marina declared. “Let’s swim instead.”

  But Adam and Martin only stared at one another in uncertain disbelief. High above their heads, a skylark scaled the blue air with its song.

  “Come on,” she urged, “why not?”

  “Because for one thing,” Adam answered, “it’ll be bloody freezing. And for another we haven’t got our swimming things. And you won’t catch me jumping in there stark bollock-naked.”

  For an instant, as though her brother’s resistance had left her questioning the impulse, Marina hesitated. Then she turned to scoff at Martin. “Seems you don’t know much about wild things after all.” With a contemptuous sniff she spurned both of them, jumped from the rock and ran down the slope with the dogs bounding beside her. Halfway towards the ruined mill house, she skidded to a stop and turned her head to glance back where Adam and Martin stood unmoving, han
ds in their pockets, not looking at each other, as a cloud passed briefly across the sun. Again she looked at the dam where the setters were drinking in snatches with their clumsy mouths. Through shadowy water she could make out the dim shapes where, half a century earlier, blocks of masonry and the cogged ironwork of machines had been tipped into the depths. The cloud moved on, and the surface glittered again.

  “It’s a dare,” she called, tying back her hair, “a double dare.”

  “She hasn’t even got a towel,” Adam muttered, as Marina walked towards the dam. But his sister was already stepping out of her clothes, her slender back and limbs pale against the blackened beams and stones. At the brink of the dam she looked briefly back at them, waved, and then turned again, lifted both arms high in the air till her body strained at full stretch, and plunged into the water.

  Long seconds passed before she broke the surface, shouting against the cold grip of the dam, shaking her head in a spray of light. Furious with himself for lacking the nerve to join her, Martin knew that the image was imprinted on his memory for ever.

  On each visit to High Sugden, Martin learnt more of the truth of what was happening in British Equatorial West Africa than was to be found in the pages of The Daily Express which his father brought home each day. The campaign of civil disobedience begun by Kanza Kutu and other leaders of the People’s Liberation Party after Emmanuel had been detained was now disrupting life right across the colony. Just as Hal had predicted, Governor Dawnay’s efforts to choreograph an orderly movement towards independence around the conservative lawyer, Ambrose Fouda, failed to attract popular support, and the riots and demonstrations organized by the PLP throughout early June proved so effective that the British government wearily considered sending in troops. Before they could be mobilized, the dockers came out on strike, demanding the immediate release of Emmanuel Adjouna. When the copper miners of the Central Region joined the strike two days later, it became clear that the colonial era would end on terms set by the energetic new breed of African politicians, not by the old guard in Port Rokesby and Whitehall.

  From the first hour of his imprisonment Emmanuel Adjouna had become the living symbol of a people clamouring for liberty. Belonging to neither of the great tribal factions, he was the only politician who could command loyalty among activists from both the Tenkora and the Nau. Only his PLP party was able to mount an effective majority in the newly constituted parliament, and only his release could end the current stalemate in the colony’s affairs. So, with events progressing exactly along the lines that Hal and Emmanuel had foreseen, it was now only a question of time before a new nation was freed.

  *

  Jack Crowther bought a television set that year. Even though he had once vowed that he would never allow such an unsociable thing inside his house, he was swiftly mesmerized by its passing show of images. As soon as he came home he would switch it on and, as often as not, he would still be watching when his wife declared that she was going to bed. Sometimes he would wake with a start, hours later, dragged from sleep by the whine of the box, to find himself staring at a blizzard on the screen.

  Having taken in the headline news one night, he was about to switch channels when Martin heard the newsreader’s reference to Port Rokesby in British Equatorial West Africa. “Wait,” he said, and the command was so urgent that his father’s finger withdrew from the switch. “It’s Emmanuel,” Martin cried, pointing to a figure on the small monochrome screen. “I know him.”

  Jack Crowther frowned at his son first, then at the screen. “What do you mean, you know him?”

  “It’s Emmanuel Adjouna. I met him first time I went to Adam’s. He’s a friend of Hal Brigshaw’s. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “You said nowt about it.” Jack frowned. “But then tha’ never says owt to me.”

  But the truth was that Martin could hardly recognize the gangling figure who emerged from the gate of Makombe Castle amid a din of gongs and drums and singing from the adoring crowd outside. Blinking in the fierce light and still wearing a prison uniform with its pattern of arrow heads stamped on the smock, Emmanuel looked more like an escaped convict than a national leader. But a moment later, in full view of the crowd, the gaunt African pulled the smock over his head and wrapped his lean body in the folds of the traditional cloth which one of his supporters handed to him. Raising both arms above his head, he shouted out a single word – Freedom – and the shout was taken up by a crowd that had seen its own destiny made visible in that simple act.

  Listening to the commentary, Martin realized how little personal knowledge the reporter must have of Emmanuel Adjouna. After only a weekend in the African’s company, he was sure he knew more about the man himself.

  “Sounds like more bloody trouble,” his father muttered.

  “You know nothing about it,” Martin answered.

  “Oh aye? You’ve been to Africa, have you?”

  “No, but…”

  “Well, I have, lad! From Cairo to bloody Cape Town, and I know a troublemaker when I see one.”

  “He’s a brilliant man.”

  “That’s what got him put away, was it?”

  Father and son were not looking at each other as they spoke. With the memory of earlier quarrels hot inside them, neither wanted a pointless debate about distant matters, so Martin bit back his answer. Jack Crowther snorted, as if registering a small triumph. “Just ’cause you passed your Advanced Levels and got into that college, it doesn’t mean tha’ knows owt about life.”

  By now the brief item out of Africa was over, and Martin’s mind was already elsewhere. The black-and-white pictures he had been watching might have been grainy and small, but they had magicked Emmanuel into his home from a country three thousand miles away. Such was the power hidden in that box of tubes and wires. Then it occurred to him that if his father had bought a television set, it surely couldn’t be long before there was one in every sitting room. The journalists and cameramen behind the screen were reaching into homes where books were rarely opened. They could widen the horizons of millions of other people as his own horizons had been widened by his visits to High Sugden. He remembered the challenge that Hal had put to him there: the people need intelligent men like you to get out into the world and tell the truth about what’s happening. Was this then how it might be done?

  Martin felt everything on the move around him. In that moment he sensed that he had been granted something more than a glimpse into the success of Hal’s plans for Africa. He had also caught sight of a career that might, with ambition and a touch of luck, take him out of this gloomy cellar into the heat of action in a rapidly changing world. Staring at a garish show on the little grey screen, he felt the future knocking at his heart.

  Only a few days later, Martin and Adam felt an oppressive shadow lifted from their own heads. Both of them had been obliged to register for National Service in the armed forces that year. Hal had advised them to apply for deferment until they had completed their time at university. “Chances are the whole nasty business will be over and done with before you take your degrees,” he said. “You won’t even have to make a stand as conscientious objectors.” And now, like a further sign of freedom in the air, their notice of deferment came through.

  So they were free that summer to make the easy passage from sixth-formers to undergraduates, taking off with Marina and the dogs across the moors and through the crags. They were times of uncomplicated pleasure, enjoying the air, the midsummer warmth, the taste of water drunk directly from the troughs and becks. They played word games as they walked, argued the respective merits of traditional and progressive jazz, talked intensely about books and politics, about films and modern art. They drove to Manchester to see a major exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings, where Martin watched Marina studying the texture of the canvases with the same rapture as he had seen her watch the distant lightning-riven clouds of a thunderstorm across the hills.

  Once they walked out on a midnight hike, listening to the pour of wate
r among the boulders in the clough, hearing a curlew call as first light broke before they made their return, exalted by dawn, over the high tops. Then they took trips by car to the coast, eastwards to Whitby, west to Morecambe Bay, and increasingly, for Martin, each occasion felt vivid with the possibility that at any moment Marina might turn and recognize that their lives were irrevocably bound to each other. Yet that moment never quite came. However much they laughed together, or gazed in wonder at the raw beauty of things, the promise he had sensed in those hours went unrequited and, because he couldn’t bring himself to speak of them, the hopes they encouraged seemed as unreachable as the landscape of a dream.

  Then, one day, he came home from the library to find Marina standing in the porch of Cripplegate Chambers, sheltering from the rain. “I had an hour to kill,” she said. “I decided it’s time you showed me where you live.”

  “You weren’t invited.”

  “I know, but I’m here.”

  She smiled at his frown.

  He said, “I wish you hadn’t done this.”

  “Adam said you’d say that. I couldn’t persuade him to come. He said it was a bit pushy.”

  “He was right.”

  But Marina merely smiled and shrugged. When he didn’t move, she walked past the polished brass plaques, pushed open the inner door with its frosted-glass panel and stepped through into the hall. She was gazing up at the elegant twist of the staircase through three floors as he came in after her. From behind a closed door to the left came the muffled whine of an electric drill. Marina feigned a wince as she read the brass shingle, which announced THEODORE NASH, Dental Surgeon. She smiled at Martin again. “Now which way do we go?”