Water Theatre Read online

  The Water Theatre

  THE WATER THEATRE

  LINDSAY CLARKE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Remembering

  V.M.C. 1914–72

  C.C. 1916–2005

  The author wishes to thank

  The Royal Literary Fund

  and

  The Extension Trust

  for their generous assistance

  during the writing of this novel

  CONTENTS

  1. Fontanalba

  2. High Sugden

  3. Sibilla

  4. Troglodyte

  5. Proxy

  6. Lightning

  7. Lorenzo

  8. Allegra

  9. Music

  10. Dance

  11. Clitumnus

  12. Decision

  13. In Equatoria

  14. Deal

  15. Hal

  16. Convento

  17. Emmanuel

  18. The Jaws of Orcus

  19. Trust Game

  20. Descent

  21. Loyalties

  22. Coup

  23. Revenant

  24. Heartsease

  Author’s Note

  The Water Theatre

  1

  Fontanalba

  A late-September afternoon, some time before the turn of the century, and all the hills of Umbria were under cloud that day.

  I had flown to Italy at short notice on a mission for a friend and was driving a hire car southwards at speed along the shore of Lake Trasimene, when a violent release of lightning flapped out of the sky like a thrown sheet before crashing shut again in a close collapse of thunder. The squall gusted towards me across the lake, erasing the island first, and then the pleasure steamer making for the quay at Passignano. Moments later the reed beds nearer inshore had gone and the tiny Fiat shuddered under the impact of the rain.

  I braked to a crawl. Lightning seared the clouds again, its glare prickling across my skin. With the windscreen awash, I could make out only the tail lights of the vehicle ahead, so at the first exit I swung off the autostrada to park by the flooded edge of a road overlooking the lake. Rain pummelled the car’s thin roof. It sprang in florets from the drenched asphalt. Through a streaming side window I watched a horse prance nervously across its field.

  When I checked the map, counting the kilometres past Perugia and Foligno, up a steeply winding road into the hills, I reckoned on at least another hour’s drive to Fontanalba. My plan had been to get to Marina’s house quickly, say what I’d come to say, and then hurry back to London before my life unravelled. The whole trip was supposed to take two days if I was lucky, three at the most. Either way it was going to be an emotionally expensive time. Meanwhile this storm showed no sign of abating. So I sat there in the heat, watching the lightning pitch and strike its lurid canopy across the lake.

  I remembered how Marina had once told me that lightning bolts, like kisses, are mutual affairs. They strike only when the descending charge is met by a stream of energy rising upwards from an object on the ground – a tree perhaps, or a person, one who might be utterly unconscious of the way his metabolism has been flirting with the idea of an electrical embrace. Yet the flash, when it comes, always happens by assignation.

  So I was thinking about thunderstorms. I was thinking how Marina had understood such acts of dalliance instinctively. She had been born in a tempest as a liner rounded the western bulge of Africa in the month before the Second World War began. Lightning heralded her arrival. It imprinted its tiny fern-like sign, the colour of coral, in the cleft of her infant chest. And as long as I had known her, she had always loved thunderstorms. So if this storm reached as far as Fontanalba, and the years had not sobered her beyond recognition, Marina would be out there, watching the thunder roll around the hills, inciting the universe; whereas I…

  I knew that lightning strikes about ten million times each day. I knew that at any given moment more than two thousand thunderstorms are crackling across the planet. We can watch them from our satellites and calculate their number. We can estimate the voltage carried by each of the hundred, inch-thick lightning bolts that leap for many miles through the atmosphere every second. I knew that they singe the air, briefly, at temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. But what I mostly knew was that in a thunderstorm the inside of a metal vehicle is a safe enough place to be. I’d once been told as much by a US Army medic as we rode out a storm of stupefying violence in a helicopter over Vietnam. That had been a long time ago, yet the memory retained the precise, epileptic clarity that warfare sometimes brings. Picked out of a firefight near the Perfume River only to be tossed about in a helicopter that felt ready to burst its bolts, I had been shaking with fear. But if the chopper got hit by lightning, the medic assured me with a grin, its metal shell would harmlessly soak up all the discharged energy like a Faraday Cage.

  Now, I’d never heard of a Faraday Cage before, and I suspected that the medic might be lying to me as he had certainly lied to the black soldier with a throat wound over whose bloody field dressings he held a saline drip, but the theory met the moment’s need, and I chose to believe it. Later I exalted it to a kind of principle, a law even – Crowther’s Law – which had only a single clause: before entering a tricky situation check out the nearest Faraday Cage. In my work it was stupid to do otherwise. You calculated the risks and then took all precautions that didn’t make the job impossible. It was how you survived. It was how you made the risks make sense. Though Marina, I guessed, would scorn such calculation.

  As for her brother Adam, who was now living with her here in Italy and had once been my closest friend, I had no idea who he might be these days.

  A week earlier I had returned from covering the civil war in Equatoria. The memories that came back with me were fixed in my head like the cutlass blade I’d seen in the skull of a bewildered tribesman who was walking away from his town along a dirt road. The death stench of that town was with me still – so many deaths, the rotting harvest of a labour of killing so immense it must finally have proved tedious. And when, two days after I’d got back to London, a call summoned me urgently to Yorkshire, to visit Hal Brigshaw, I was sure I knew what it was about. Hal must have been following the news from Equatoria, and would be anxious to hear more about the fate of his friends and allies, the men and women with whom he’d helped build that nation more than thirty years earlier.

  Knowing that almost everywhere he looked these days Hal was confronted by the failure of his hopes and ambitions, I’d driven north in dread of telling what I had to tell. This wasn’t the first time I’d made that journey filled with trepidation, but nothing had prepared me for what was waiting at High Sugden.

  Hal sat blanketed in a wheelchair with his housekeeper, Marjorie Cockroft, fussing over the lopsided sag of his body. “Another stroke,” she said, “only worse. It happened not long after you’d left last time. I did try to phone, but they said you’d gone abroad again. Anyway, he’s mostly being very good.” Dabbing a tissue at the corner of Hal’s mouth, she spoke about him dotingly, as though he were deaf. “You’re not to think we’re not coping.”

  Hal sat desperate-eyed at the indignity of his condition. His right hand lay palm upward across his narrow thigh, while his head tilted to the left in a slack loll, so it looked as if he was straining to examine something filmy and delicate between the thumb and the forefinger of his defunct hand. Meanwhile, the air of what had once been the dining room of the grange hung motionless around him. At his back, by the mullioned window with its view across the Pennine slopes, a single bed stood on castors. It felt distressingly provisional.

  I brushed a kiss across the old man’s brow and tried to rally his spirits with a bluff joke, but I
was appalled by the wreck of the once burly figure. Then still more so by the slovenly garble of Hal’s speech.

  Mrs Cockroft took it on herself to act as interpreter. “It’s that war in Africa. We always watch the news together, though I’m not sure how much he understands these days.”

  Hal’s eyes made it clear that he understood every intolerable word. Yet that wasn’t why he’d summoned me. With scowling jerks of his good hand he dismissed the woman from the room. He wanted us to be left alone. The housekeeper sighed – she was only trying to be helpful. But her parting glance demanded that I appreciate the claims made on her patience.

  Once she was gone, Hal tried to speak again. Marina’s name emerged, buckled almost beyond recognition by the struggle of his tongue, and then Adam’s followed. I should have caught on sooner to what he wanted, but Hal had spoken about neither of them for years. Only when I deciphered the word “Italy” did I grasp that he was asking me to go there and try to bring back his son and daughter.

  I said: “It wouldn’t work, Hal. They wouldn’t come.”

  “For you,” I heard him mumble. “They’ll come for you.”

  “I’m the last person…” I began, but his damaged voice spoke over me.

  “Been thinking… You’ve done it before… Got them to come home for me.”

  “More than thirty years ago,” I protested. “And that was before…”

  Again, even before that moment of hesitation, he raised the hand of his good arm and shook it as though to erase my protests.

  “They’ll come,” he repeated stubbornly. “For you they’ll come.”

  I did not share his confidence. And there were many reasons why I could have refused and perhaps should have done so. Circumstantial reasons, emotional reasons, reasons clamouring out of the present and even more strongly out of the disastrous past. Nor was there any need to scavenge for excuses. I had promised Gail, my American lover, that we would spend time alone together in the Cascades after the African assignment was complete. That time was now. The flight was already booked. I badly needed that respite. But in these desolate circumstances how to dash the last hopes of a man to whom I owed almost everything that mattered in my life? A man who had always put his trust in me, and who had once been far closer to me than my father had ever been? So I glanced away, casting about, wishing there were some other means to repay that debt of gratitude. But there was no way to say no to what Hal was asking.

  And so it is, I was thinking now, as time and space shifted round me and lightning flared again above the lake, that, less in ignorance of our desires than out of fearful knowledge of how they might consume us, we send our streamers up into the storm. I sat in the hot car with thunder rolling round me. My thoughts drifted. I must have dozed. And thinking of thunderstorms, I fell into a dream.

  I dreamt I was back in the old north on a day of bright June sunlight, certain from the idle air and the warm smells drifting from the terraced houses that it was Sunday morning, a little before noon, when all the mills and factories were still. There was no sound of traffic in the valley, no clank and rattle from the shunting yard, though distantly I could hear a peal of bells. Sunday then, and I was with my father and we were stepping out in the quiet morning to try the beer of a few pubs together. Over the next hour or two we would down three or four pints before making our boozy way back to where my mother would be waiting to lift the roast onto the table. And it was a good, warm feeling to be out with him like this, to feel the pleasure he took in showing off his son to his mates from the mill where he worked, for things had not always been so. Even in the dream, part of my mind stood aside, marvelling that things should be this easy between me and the father who, for too much of my early life, had been my most intimate enemy. But here, for once, we were at peace. I’d get in my rounds at The Royal Oak and The Golden Lion and enjoy the easy ritual of bar-room conversation. I’d listen and laugh, trade jokes and opinions about sport, about women, about the always unsatisfactory state of the world. Or that was how it should have been, for that was the feel of the dream at first, but then I saw that my father had fallen silent and was suddenly very weak. His limbs were so flaccid that he was unable to carry his own lax weight and I had to support him now, I had to get him home.

  With one hand round his waist and the other holding his wrist at my shoulder, I was half carrying, half dragging him round the steep rim of the quarry on the hill above the town. We were making for the recreation ground on the brow. I could hear the swings squeaking in their iron chains. Not far now, but I was panting from the effort of it; and when, pausing for breath, I looked down at his face, I saw that the eyes were sightless and opaque, that he had been dead for some time, that his body was still as wasted and naked as I had seen it on the narrow death bed when I’d laid him out. I could feel the bed sores on his back. And the ringing I heard was the inane carillon of the ice-cream van which, on the hot day of my father’s dying, had been the only passing bell.

  When I woke in Italy to the thunder stroke, I was still carrying my father’s dead body from pub to pub round the silent streets of the town, and there was no one near to help or carry him away.

  Dusk was falling when I reached Fontanalba. The hillsides teemed with cloud. When I stopped at a crossroads to look for a sign, my headlights picked out a wayside shrine to the Madonna, dressed in her peeling blue robe. Some distance away, a street lamp glimmered through the mist. Having no idea where Marina’s house might be, I turned the car in that direction and parked outside a tall stone house.

  A small dog ran barking from a barn beside the house to yap at my shoes. Two small boys appeared. They stood on thin legs, their glossy hair cropped short over faces which stared aghast as I cobbled together a question in Italian; then they fled into the house. Somewhere above me clanged a single bell. Wooded mountains came and went among clouds the colour of burnt tallow.

  I was about to turn away when a woman in a black frock came out of the house, wiping her hands on an apron. She called off the dog, then asked something – presumably what business I had frightening her children in the dusk. I tried again. She tipped an ear and lifted a thin, worried hand to her cheek. “Ah, la signora inglese,” she exclaimed at last. “Marina! Sì, sì.”

  “Sua casa?” I pressed. “Dove?”

  Her wrists twisted. Her tongue sped. As best I could I picked my way through the torrent of help and, when I thought I’d got things clear, she added more. Only later, as I braked in the narrow yard outside what I hoped was Marina’s cottage, did I realize she’d been trying to warn me that no one was there.

  By now the bell had stopped ringing. A wind had got up and was blowing holes in the mist. A single lamp revealed how perilous was the track along which I’d just rattled my car. It was so narrow that the wheels must have passed within an inch of where the edge sheered away in a six-foot drop to an olive grove. Looking up again, I met the dark, refusing silence of the house. The shutters were closed. I tried the handle on the double door, which barely moved. Under a bamboo awning built into a recess at the side of the house four chairs stood at a circular table. The dusk smelt of rain and draughty space.

  There was no room to turn the car, and I was considering how best to back out of that dead end when the elder of the two boys appeared through the tatters of mist. He walked past me without a word, making for the low wall under the awning, where he tipped a plant pot and turned, pointing at me with a straight arm stiff as a duellist’s. His small hand clutched an old pistol key.

  A smell of dust and dried thyme. Then the frescoes emerging from white plaster in panels no larger than foolscap sheets. They showed turbaned merchants, sailors and cowled monks; a single-masted ship with two tiers of shining oars; an angel standing guard before a sepulchre; a woman praying in the desert, her nakedness covered by silver-white hair hanging like a shawl to her knees; a lion vigilant on a rock in blazing wilderness. It was as though the walls were trying to remember a dream and could recapture no more than these hauntin
g fragments.

  I took the paintings for medieval work at first, but a closer look showed them to be more recent, handled in an archaic style that somehow finessed pastiche and found simplicity. The Marina I’d known would have lacked patience with such obvious narrative intent. Yet if she hadn’t painted these pictures, who had?

  The boy smiled up at me and crossed the room towards the fireplace, where he pointed out a picture unrelated to the rest. A cheap, unframed reproduction, printed on board, it was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a jug-eared monk with hooded eyes and an unsatisfactory beard.

  “San Francesco,” he announced. I took in the golden nimbus around the tonsured head. The local saint, of course, St Francis of Assisi. Now the boy was pointing at his own chest. “Franco. Franco Gamboni.”

  I nodded, tapped my own chest. “Martin. Martin Crowther.” Neither sound meant much to him, so I tried a variation – “Martino” – which elicited a nod. I opened a door onto a little kitchen. “Well, Franco Gamboni,” I said, “I can’t think there’s a restaurant in this village of yours, so let’s see if we can get some grub together.”

  Remembering forgotten instructions, the boy drew in his breath, gestured widely across the paved floor. “Attenzione, ci sono scorpioni!”

  “Ah, grazie, grazie.”

  “Prego.” He stood, smiling, with both hands clasped on top of his head, swaying from side to side. Then he turned and ran back up the track through the gloom.

  Generations of olive growers must have scratched a living here before the house fell empty and Marina purchased it for next to nothing. She had intended to use it as a holiday cottage, but once life in England became intolerable to her, she had settled here in Fontanalba, living simply and cheaply, painting outdoors, content to be alone with her child. Then, much later, when he had nowhere else to turn, her brother Adam came to join her there.