“It feels to me,” she said, “as though we’ve both got lost from ourselves. Perhaps we should try to help each other find a way back?”
We went together to the flat in Bloomsbury, and because I was still young then – younger in many ways than Marina, though there was only a year between us – and because I’d longed for her across so many years, and because I hardly knew myself at all, I thought it would be easy for us to make love. Since my return from Vietnam I’d grown used to approaching sex with cool, observational detachment, savouring its excitements while feeling little more than a mild erotic affection for the women who shared my bed. This night, I knew, would be very different, but my whole body began to tremble with emotion as we moved together. And then, thrown by the images assaulting my mind, it juddered and stalled.
Shaken, eyes screwed tight shut, groaning with misery, I pulled away in failure and recoil. Then Marina was over me, soft with concern, gathering my head to the fern frond of the lightning sign at her chest. I lay shaking in her arms, as a long overdue release of jammed feelings turned at last to tears.
“It’s all right, don’t try to stop it,” she urged. “Let it all go.”
Only then did I discover how congested with grief my heart had become, how much anguish and woe had been packed in there as the wretchedness of the world compounded my own, blurring with it, congealing there, freeze-framing each occasion of shock and fatigue till I’d scarcely dared to feel anything at all. Now, with all the fuses softly blown, the mess of thaw was pouring everywhere.
Through shallow gasps of breath, I struggled to say I was sorry, but Marina shushed and rocked me in her arms, reminding me how she too had been in tears the last time we’d tried to make love: now she was here for me as I had been beside her then. Though more deeply so, more completely so, I insisted, feeling the turmoil of her hair against my skin, wondering at the clear strength of her presence, its maturity of care.
“Let’s just hold one another for a time,” she quieted me. So I stilled my breath in her embrace, and felt the exhausted store of grief give way to a powerful new love for this woman whom I had already loved for so many years.
We lay talking for a long time afterwards, as we had once done long ago in the moorland silence of the night around High Sugden. The noise and half-light of a crowded city surrounded us now, but we were exempt from its restlessness, and so deeply at peace with one another that we might simply have fallen asleep together there. But a moment came when she touched my face, saying, “I need to tell you how good it feels to be held by someone as if you are precious, as if you’re soft and human and breakable.” Perhaps only then, as we began to make love with a tenderness and passion that astonished us both, did I truly come to understand what she too had endured.
We woke early the next morning and lay, listening to London droning into gear, in awe of what had happened between us and half-afraid to believe. We were both well practised at escape by then. We each had separate, complicated worlds into which we could return. But I was determined that wouldn’t happen to us this time. We had to get together again very soon, I insisted. Why not that night? Either at her place or mine. Wherever she wanted, I’d be there. But it had to be soon.
Marina hesitated. “I think I need to get used to the idea of this. I think we need to feel our way.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We can do that.”
“It’s going to take me time.”
“We have time. Tonight. Tomorrow. The next day. Whenever. Tell me when.”
“Don’t rush me, Martin.”
“I don’t mean to. It’s just that I don’t want to let you slip away again.”
“Is that what you think I’m going to do?”
“No, not really, but…”
“But what?”
“I didn’t think so last time either… In Cambridge, I mean.”
After a further moment of hesitation, she glanced up at me almost in contrition. Then she astounded me by saying, “I was afraid then.”
“Afraid? What of?”
“It was hard for me. I was still feeling vulnerable and confused…”
“But I’d loved you and wanted you for years.”
“What I mean is that I was afraid for you. I knew I wasn’t ready for what you wanted. I don’t believe that either of us was.”
When she looked away from me, I said, “Are you still afraid?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” But her eyes remained elsewhere, looking down where she loosely creased the edge of the sheet between her fingers.
“All right,” I conceded, “you may have been right back then. Perhaps neither of us was ready. But we know we’re ready now, don’t we?”’
Lifting her eyes back to mine, she said, “I think we’re still finding each other.”
“Consider yourself found. I found you a long time ago, Marina.”
“And you?” she asked. “With all you’ve been doing out there in the world, have you found yourself yet?”
“I’ve never felt more myself than I did with you last night.”
“But it’s not just about making love, is it?”
“That’s why I’m impatient for us to do other things together. Don’t you think we’ve wasted far too much of our lives already?”
“It hasn’t been a waste,” she said. “It’s been painful and hard, and we’ve both made mistakes, but it was all necessary, all part of the finding-out.”
I studied her in silence before responding. What had happened during the course of that night was real and true and profound. I had no doubt about that. But did she share that certainty? Did she believe it too?
“Yes, but what about now?” I said. “After last night I mean… I don’t understand why you’re hesitating.”
“I’m not. Not really. But, like I said, I don’t want to rush this. I don’t want to manage and tame it with arrangements either. I want us to be freer than that. I want us to give each other the chance to find out how we really feel.”
“I already know how I feel.”
“You know how you felt last night, and you know how you feel right now. And so do I. But what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to kill this with expectations.”
“You can’t think that I do?”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
She looked up at me, bright with inspiration. “Listen, I surprised you by calling you last night, didn’t I? And look what happened! Neither of us expected it. We surprised each other into this, right? That’s why it feels so alive, so new. It’s like a gift from life, not something we managed and contrived. So why don’t we do it that way again?”
I looked down at her face in wonder, delighted to discover the impetuous spirit I’d loved since she was a girl. “If that’s the way you want it,” I smiled. “But I get to call you this time.”
“No,” she said at once, “that’s too easy. Let’s be wilder than that. Let’s find some other way of surprising each other into meeting. What do you say?”
“You make it sound like a game.”
“Why not?” she answered. “But it’s a game about being truly serious. About allowing ourselves to come together without trying to control things, without tying each other down. It’s a trust game. A trust game with life.”
“Isn’t that just a bit crazy? I mean, what if one of us tries to surprise the other and it doesn’t work out?”
“If it’s meant to, it will. At the right time it will.”
Again I saw in her eyes the flash of intrepid light I recognized from the old days. We might have been out at the foot of the moor beyond High Sugden again, with me shaking my uncertain head, breathless with adoration, yet thrown by her sudden wildness as she taunted me to jump into the waters of the dam.
“Are you daring me?” I asked.
“Do you need to be dared?”
I saw then that I too would have to learn to trust once more.
“I just want us to be together,” I answe
red, “whatever the rules.”
20
Descent
When I came awake again inside that painted chamber I had no idea how long I had been there or what hour of the day it was. Someone was standing over me, dark against the soft glare of the electric light, saying, “Wake up, Martin. It’s time.” I made out Adam’s face looking down at me, familiar but unaccountably aged. Strange to wake from sleep – a sleep that might have lasted hours or days – and see that face loom out of a past so distant it seemed almost another incarnation. A face not yet old, but decades older than I remembered.
“What time?” I muttered. “Time for what?”
“For what we agreed.”
Adam walked back to the open door, waited for me to get up and follow him and led the way along a vaulted corridor, up a flight of stone steps and out into a moonlit night. Bats skittered about the eaves of the villa. The air smelt heady and fresh. Beyond the hypnotic whirr of the crickets I took in the sound of water flowing through the garden below.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the House of the Dead.” Adam turned towards me then. “If you’re still sure you want to go through with this, that is. You can leave, if you prefer.”
Already the night felt to be floating round me. His answer had added to the prevailing air of unreality, but I nodded my assent and followed him through the shadows of the pergola and out across the enclosed courtyard at the rear of the villa. As we made for the dark archway in the wall opposite the house, I heard a coarse peal of laughter somewhere above my head. Looking up, I saw the bulky figure of a woman standing on the little balcony above the arch. She bent forward from the waist, reached for the hem of her long black gown and lifted it high to her chest, revealing the naked white spread of her belly, thighs and groin.
The spectacle lasted only a fraction of a second before she laughed out loud again with an edge of mockery in her laughter and let the dress drop. Then she dissolved into the shadows at her back.
I said, “Was that Angelina?”
Adam offered no explanation. He pushed open the wrought-iron gates and stepped through into the dripping darkness of the arch. I hesitated, staring down the tunnel to the far end, where moonlight gleamed like frost on the surface of the pool. Adam turned to beckon me on, waited until I stood at his side, and then we entered the grotto together.
I glanced up where the larger-than-life statue of a satyr embraced a nymph on one side of the cave, and a Nereid reclined in the arms of a Triton-like figure on the other. The floor beneath my feet was no longer paved with flagstones, and we had taken only a couple of steps onto an iron grating when a grinding noise creaked out of a crevice in the rocks to our left. Adam stopped as if in surprise, putting a hand to my shoulder to halt me. Almost immediately fierce jets of cold water spurted from the carved wineskins held by the satyr and the nymph to our left, and from the conch shells in the hands of the other two figures on our right. The water splashed against our bodies where we stood. It was pouring from the roof above us and spouting from the mouths of fauns and dolphins carved into the rocks. By the time we dashed through the grotto and out onto the path around the pond, we were both drenched.
Orazio was waiting for us there, offering two large bath towels. Beside him stood Larry Stromberg holding what looked like lengths of white cloth folded over his arm. Smiling at my furious scowl as I shook water from my hair and clothes, he said, “Welcome through, old thing. Don’t be too upset by our little gioco d’acqua. It’s done you no harm, and serves a serious purpose. Now get out of those wet clothes, dry yourself down, and put on this spankingly clean tunic I have for you.”
Before I could reply, Adam touched me on the shoulder again. I turned and saw him standing beside me, his lean body already naked as he dried his hair with the towel that Orazio had handed to him. If the drenching had been intended as a humiliation, then he had suffered it too.
He said, “The same thing happens to everyone who enters the water theatre for what we’re about to do.”
Larry handed him a white tunic, which he pulled on over his head. With my clothes dripping wet, I had no practical choice other than to strip and dry myself and do the same. The linen tunic fell to calf length, hung loosely at the left shoulder and was belted at the waist with a narrow cord. By contrast with Larry’s buttoned and embroidered costume, it left me feeling like a spear carrier in an amateur production of a Jacobean play. I was about to ask Adam just what he thought we were about to do when I was silenced by a startling alteration in the light. The ornate façade rising beyond the marble pool was now brightly illuminated, and the sculptures carved into its panels and niches – wild men, armoured knights, garlanded ladies, various animals and birds – were all thrown into sharper relief. At the same time, the night air filled with a shushing sound, and water began to pour from chutes concealed within the stonework. Gathering force, it twisted and plunged in cataracts among the carved figures, which seemed animated now by the play of light on the water cascading round them.
The façade of Gabriella’s teatro d’acqua had been impressive enough the first time I saw it, motionless and silent, on the morning when I left the villa, but gazing up again at that kinetic stage set, I felt something of the same wonder with which the hermaphroditic figure at the top of the pediment seemed to meditate on the shining spectacle at his feet. In that moment I saw that this fantasia of the baroque imagination was a portrayal of the legend of Fontanalba. The statue was the transfigured revenant returned from his search for the sun at midnight to see the spring breaking from the earth at his command. And this whole improbable artifice had been set in motion, on this occasion at least, for no one’s benefit but mine.
“Our presence is required,” said Adam quietly.
A female figure was now standing by the arch at the centre of the façade. Holding a silver staff, she wore a costume of deep carmine red cut in the High Renaissance style. The muslin-veiled hat, the full sleeves, frothy with lace, fastened to the bodice by ribbons stitched with pearls, and the richly brocaded skirt might have been worn at a Venetian carnival – not least because the woman’s face was covered by a mask as pallid as the moon. For a hopeful moment I thought this was Marina, come to meet me at last, even if concealed behind a disguise; but the figure’s height was wrong. My spirit dipped again.
Guessing it must be Gabriella, I said to Adam, “Sibilla, I presume!”
Without smiling, Adam said, “It might be wiser to keep your sarcasm in check.”
“Against the voice of the nihil,” Larry put in, “nothing is safe.”
I gazed back at the glistening marvel of the water theatre, reflecting that the cascade must flow through into the garden and out to the fountain at the front of the villa. In Adam’s account of Clitumnus, Gabriella had called the tempietto “a sacred machine”, and it occurred to me that this house might have been built on the same principles, for it too seemed to be a vestibule through which water was conducted between the dark world under the hill and the world of light outside.
As we approached, Gabriella turned into the narrow arch and led the way under the vault of a short stone passage, through into a chamber with a half-domed ceiling, similar to the roof of an apse. After the baroque fantasia of the façade, the room we had entered was small, dimly lit by candlelight and almost shockingly bare. Covered only in brownish-pink plaster, the walls were featureless, apart from a small wooden door directly opposite the one by which we had entered. Even when that first door had closed behind me, I could still hear the murmur of the water plunging outside.
Gabriella led the way to the door at the far end of the chamber, took a candle from a basket on the wall and lit it from one already burning in a sconce. Adam and Larry did the same with the two remaining candles. The hinges of the door whinnied as Gabriella opened it. With the two men offering the shifting light of their candles at my back, I stepped through the arch into a narrow tunnel. The candle flames bowed to the suck of air as the door fell shu
t behind us. Under a low barrel vault of rock our shadows flitted along walls covered in rough-cast plaster. The stone floor slabs sloped downwards into the belly of the hill.
After ten yards or so, the tunnel opened into a wider natural gallery in the rock. From somewhere out of sight came the sound of falling water. We advanced up a steepish gradient before Gabriella mounted a flight of rough steps and vanished in the darkness at the top. Following her, I saw how the passage curved sharply to the right to dip through a narrow cleft in the rock face, which was shiny with damp. The candles illuminated splashes of ochre, pink, white, dun brown and amber-tinted calcite in the rock, but their light penetrated only a little way into the gloom.
Where the track inclined steeply down again, I saw Gabriella stoop to pass through a gap little more than four feet high beneath a spur of mineral-stained limestone. As I crouched to get through, my hair brushed against the underside of the rock, making me think of the massive tonnage above my head. The passage took a narrow turn. I found more headroom. The sound of water came louder on my ears. Then we were through into a wide chamber, where Gabriella used the flame from her own candle to light others fixed in sconces to the walls. Light leapt among the recesses of the cave. One wall was textured like drapery gathered into swags. Another formed a geological map of compacted layers. I made out the swirling patterns etched by some primordial whirlpool into the low roof of the chamber. I felt as though I had entered one of the organs of the earth.
Now the candle flames were reflected in the bluish-green water of a pool. A skiff floated there, tied by its painter to a stake driven into a gravel strand. An arch of rock sprang from the strand with the grace of a flying buttress, spanning the pool to meet the opposite wall of the cave. A torrent of water poured down that wall.
Despite Adam’s earlier warning, I felt a strong need to break the silence. Smiling at Gabriella I said, “Is this Sibilla’s cavern then? I don’t see any pomegranates.”
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