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  From upstairs there came the sound of a door opening and an exchange of conversation as someone left the solicitor’s chambers. Seeing that Marina would not be gainsaid, he glowered at her. “You’d better come down then. I think my mother’s in. She’ll be a bit flustered. She’s not expecting you.”

  Marina watched him lift the latch on a door at the far end of the hall and followed him down the dark stone steps into the basement. He bit his lip at the vague smell of damp as they came out into a lime-washed passage that led one way to the bathroom, the other to the coal hole. It was lit by a single bulb.

  Her eyes were caught by the varnished case of numbered bells high on the vaulted wall. “I suppose that’s how they summoned the servants,” she said.

  “It’s disconnected now.”

  “Good thing too.”

  He shrugged and opened the door onto the basement living room, where his mother stood at the old butler sink filling the kettle. Without turning she said, “I was just making some tea. Do you want a cup?”

  “We’ve got company,” he answered, putting his books down on the table. “This is Marina.”

  Bella Crowther made a small, regretful noise in her throat as she put a hand to the dark frizz of her hair. Above the sheen of the linoleum the furniture in the room stood very still.

  “Oh, Martin, you should have said. I’d have got in something special!”

  “I didn’t know she was coming.”

  “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this,” Marina smiled, “but I was just going past the door and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time.”

  Bella put the kettle down on the gas stove and wiped her hands on the towel hanging there. “Well, you’d better come in then. Sit yourself down, love. You look wet through. Frame yourself, Martin – take her coat before she catches her death. Just let me get this kettle on and I’ll put a match to the fire.”

  “There’s no need. I’m not cold,” said Marina, unbuttoning her coat. Martin watched her glance take in the table with its hand-embroidered cloth, the sideboard and mantelpiece where two china figurines – a Regency dandy and his crinolined belle – stood at either side of the electric clock. “It’s really cosy here.” she said. “I don’t want you going to any trouble.”

  “No trouble.” Bella Crowther’s eyes were assessing the young woman across from her as she added, “It’s not every day our Martin brings a girlfriend home.”

  “She’s not a girlfriend.” Only in that moment did Martin fully realize how much he had come to loathe the garishly patterned wallpaper of the room. “She’s just Adam’s sister.”

  “Well, you know what I mean.” The gas jet popped to the struck match. “Lucky I did a bit of baking yesterday. Do you like scones and jam, Marina?”

  “Very much,” Marina nodded. “Is there anything I can do? If you’ll show me where the knives and plates are, I’ll put them out.”

  Over tea there was talk of baking and shopping, of which stalls on the market were good and which were not, and other chatter about small matters of domestic life. Martin took no interest in it except that of watching an older woman and a younger woman discover more about each other through their trivial conversation. As they carried the crocks back to the sink, his mother mentioned how many pint glasses she could hold in her hands at once in the days when she worked as a barmaid. Marina listened wide-eyed as the older woman went on to tell her more about the pubs in those days before television, and how they were so busy most nights that ale swilled from the pumps across the floor of the bar.

  “By the time the bell went for last orders,” Bella said, “the soft shoes I wore were ruined. We had to get a fresh pair every night. They were cheap enough. And you should have seen the hem of my satin skirt. It hung round my ankles stiff as cardboard.”

  “I bet the men all fancied you like mad,” Marina said.

  “Funny you should say that,” Bella smiled, pleased with herself. “Jack used to get right worked up about it. Still does sometimes, I’m glad to say.”

  When Jack Crowther came home from work, the two of them were laughing together as they peeled carrots and potatoes at the kitchen sink. Unprepared for company, Jack unbelted his raincoat to reveal his blue boiler suit beneath, though the hand he held out to shake Marina’s was well washed. He appraised the smile on her fresh, slightly freckled face. “So you’ll be Harold Brigshaw’s lass,” he said. “I were thinking it’s time our Martin brought you home for us to see. Come and tell us summat about yourself.”

  Again Martin looked on, slightly askance, while Marina began to chat with his father as if she’d known him all her life. In those days Jack Crowther was still worrying about losing his job, but Marina’s presence seemed to lift his spirit. Soon he was teasing her. She cottoned on at once and gave as good as she got. Within minutes, across the gap of a generation, they were flirting easily.

  Martin said almost nothing. The whole room felt odd about his head, as if a new order of things had been announced while his back was turned. Even the quality of the light felt different, more buoyant, refreshed by company. And how strange to have Marina there, taming his father without a hint of falsity or condescension!

  Most astonishing of all was the revelation that she knew enough about horse racing to convince his father that she shared his passion for the sport. Their talk was of horses and courses and jockeys, of classic flat races and steeplechases, of favourites and outsiders. Delighted by her enthusiasm, Jack taught her about the more complex aspects of betting in doubles, trebles and accumulators, and then he turned, grinning, to his son. “Well, you’ve found a lass with a bit of sense about her,” he said. “If you’ve any sense you’ll hang on to her.”

  Had Jack got his way, Marina would have stayed to eat her evening meal at his side but, explaining that she was expected at home, she got up to leave.

  “You’ll come and see us again, won’t you?” Bella pressed. “It’s been lovely having you!”

  “Course I will,” Marina smiled, and kissed her warmly on the cheek.

  Martin accompanied her back up the stone stairs in silence and stood at the front door of the Chambers, chewing his bottom lip. “Well, you were a hit, “he said. “I didn’t know you were such an expert on racing form.”

  Marina tilted her chin at him. “There’s a lot about me you don’t know. And as for you, Jonas Cragg,” she said, unsmiling, “your mother’s lovely and your dad’s a poppet. So you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing except your own snobby nonsense, that is.” Then she turned on her heel and walked away down the damp pavement of Cripplegate without once looking back at him.

  Martin went out to High Sugden for the August Sunday of Marina’s birthday. After the recent developments in Equatoria, where the move towards independence was well under way, Hal had come home for the weekend. His impatience for the politic moment when a call from Emmanuel would officially install him as Special Advisor in Government House was evident enough, but he was determined to make this a happy family occasion. Having seen little of Marina in recent weeks, however, he misjudged her mood.

  When the time came for presents, he produced an elaborate boxed affair wrapped in candy-stripe paper and professionally tied with a silk ribbon. Marina, who had beensqually and restless since Hal’s return from London, tore open the wrappings and found herself looking at a midnight-blue dress which would have made her eyes glitter only a few weeks earlier. Now she barely concealed her scorn for it as she muttered her desultory thanks.

  “Well, that was a bit of a damp squib!” Hal complained. “I thought it’d be perfect for nights out on the town when you’re at art school.”

  “Not really my taste,” she answered, “not any more.”

  “I see. Well, I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered. Anyway,” he grunted, leaving the room. “I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

  “That seems a pity,” Martin frowned at Marina. “It looks as though your dad went to a lot of trouble.”
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  “Actually,” Marina said, “I don’t think he gave it too much thought.” But she was watching her mother pour a large sherry. Grace had already lifted the glass to her lips when, with a vague, self-reproachful smile, she saw that she was watched. “Would anyone else care for a drink?” she asked.

  Marina glanced across at Adam. “I need to get out of here. Let’s walk the dogs.”

  Half an hour after they had left, the sky blackened westwards across the Pennines. Already in a grumpy mood, Adam turned back towards High Sugden, striding out to beat the coming rain, with the dogs bounding ahead of him. Martin kept to Marina’s slower, pensive pace, though she hardly spoke to him as they made their way across the rough slope of the hill. She stood for a time on a high jut of whinstone, staring at the turbulent sky where dense rain clouds trawled the summits three or four miles away.

  “Come on,” Martin eventually called to her. “We’re going to get soaked.”

  “Who cares?” she answered. “Go on if you want.”

  He shrugged, sensing her impenetrability, despairing of it. “It’s up to you,” he said, and began to walk on. But when he turned to look back, he saw that she was following him. Angry with her, at a loss, he stopped to let her catch up.

  “Bloody awful birthday,” she said.

  “Was it? I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. It’s me. I’m impossible. I loathe myself.”

  “No you don’t. You love yourself. You just like giving us all a hard time.”

  “You don’t really believe that?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because you’re my friend?”

  “That’s just it.”

  “Just what?”

  He frowned down at the blowing tussocks. “If you don’t know, it doesn’t matter.” He walked on, aware that she had come to a halt behind him.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it must be obvious by now.” But he was resolved not to turn as he spoke, and the wind that was bringing the rain might easily have scattered his words before it. So they walked on in silence for a time. Then the light changed, and the rain was on them, a sudden squall, cold and drenching, almost as sharp as hail on their ears and hands. Martin looked up and saw the old stone cattle byre across the field. The grass was slippery under his shoes as he ran for the cover of its slates.

  He was in amongst its warm smell of hay and dung and moulding leather harness, shaking the rain from his hair, when Marina joined him. She stared at him from the doorway, where the slope of coarse pasture glowed luminously green at her back. Her hair gleamed against the sky’s bruised grey.

  “I don’t want this,” she said.

  “What? What don’t you want?”

  “You – mooning over me like this. You’re supposed to be my friend. It’s best that way. I don’t want you loving me.”

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

  “Then don’t.” She looked away. “I’m not even sure it’s me you want.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, astonished. “Who else could it be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” she snapped impatiently.

  Two seconds later she was standing in front of him, wet, smelling of rain. Holding his eyes in her gaze, she put her hands to his arms as if she was about to try to shake some sense into him. Then she pulled him closer and pressed her lips to his.

  He held her close, and they were both trembling now. With his cheek pressed into her damp hair, he was whispering, “You’re beautiful, you’re so very beautiful,” but she lifted her fingers to his mouth as if to forbid the next dangerous thing he might say.

  Refusing to be silenced, he pulled back to confront her more earnestly. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s not just mooning, Marina, it’s really not.”

  “I know it’s not,” she answered. “That’s why.”

  “Why what?” The eyes looking up into his were vulnerable and uncertain, but not forbidding. When his question went unanswered, he kissed her again, more gently now, and felt her move so tamely into the embrace that, for all her protestations, he knew she wanted to be there with him, like this, just as urgently, and with the same passionate trepidation, as he wanted it himself. Heartened, he pressed a hand to her breast. She lifted it away, looking round at the stalls and rusty mangers. For a moment he thought he’d lost her; then she led him to where a bale of straw had spilt across the flagstones.

  They lay down side by side, hot and nervous, holding one another, almost as if in mutual protection from some mighty force that must soon overwhelm them. He could smell the rain in her hair. His eyes opened on the birthmark between her breasts. He lowered his mouth towards the fern-like blemish, hearing the intake of her breath, though whether she sighed with pleasure or impatience at his timidity he was unsure. But when, less tenderly, he reached down to dislodge her clothes, she raised a hand to push herself free, saying, “I can’t, Martin. Not now. Not yet.”

  He wanted to protest, yet all that came to his lips was her name, uttered both as a plea and in acceptance, because he had sensed that she too was afraid. So they lay on the stone floor for a time in silence, watching the rain twist and shine in the changing light.

  He wanted to speak, he wanted to tell her that he understood, that it was all right, that so long as they loved one another they had all the time in the world; but none of the words felt adequate to the strength and complexity of his feeling. So he lay with his eyes closed, taking in the musty smells, the sound of the beck falling down the field outside and the murmur of the summer rain on slate.

  Thunder broke across the distant summits first. At its low, rumbling diminuendo Marina pulled herself up from under the weight of Martin’s arm, tilting her face to listen more intently. He shifted his head to look through the open doorway, where the whole afternoon was streaming through the greenish light. Thunder rolled again, much louder this time. “There must be lightning,” she whispered.

  “There’s no need to be scared.” He had sought to console her, but almost before the words were out Marina was on her feet, pulling her clothes together and walking to the door. Ruing the sudden loss of her warmth at his side, Martin watched her step out into the rain. She had just passed out of sight when a detonation of thunder immediately overhead brought him to his feet with ringing ears. The whole sky shuddered and rocked above the cattle byre. The clouds might have been no more than a floor of rotten wood on which a chariot rolled by with iron wheels. Then all the daylight he could see was dazzled by a fierce glare.

  When he got to the door, he saw the slight figure of Marina twirling on the bare slope with her arms stretched upwards and her head thrown back, inciting the sky. Her mouth was open, but the discharging barrages of thunder were still so loud that he couldn’t tell whether she was shouting something or swallowing the light and rain.

  Martin stood in the doorway, rain blowing in his face, staring out at Marina, expecting to see her hair catch fire at any moment, and her frail form charred to cinders while he watched. He wanted to shout out into the storm, to warn her that she should come back inside, but he sensed that her drenched figure stood far beyond recall. And so, with the storm flashing and growling above their heads, he gazed at her from the shelter of the byre, awed by her courage, afraid for her, almost afraid of her…

  Like a razor stropped against the leathern sky, lightning crackled down again. For the duration of its glare – a fleeting, incandescent fraction of a second – he glimpsed again how vast were the distances that would always stretch out between them, however long they lived. Yet he knew he had no choice now but to strive to cross those distances – and if, as seemed likely, he must fail, then one day he must simply die for love of her.

  Thunder sounded above their heads and travelled in a breaking roll across the valley. The storm was moving away. Marina stood, soaked and unscathed, rejoicing at its distant flashing in the gloomy smithies of cloud.

  When she turned to smile at him, her skin was shining in the rain.

  7
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br />   Lorenzo

  Halfway down the track to Marina’s cottage I saw the image of a black man coming towards me through the dusty light. A grizzled farmer wearing the traditional blue-and-white striped smock of the Mdemba, he was walking down a dirt road between shelled buildings, impervious to the smell of burning tyres and diesel oil and to the litter of shrapnel and unexploded ordnance. His smock was spattered with blood. Blood had dried almost black down the side of his face. Someone must have brought a cutlass down across his head with enough force to snap off the handle and leave the blade lodged like a fixture in his skull. Such force would have stunned him for a time, and when he came to his senses among the bodies of his family and friends, he would have seen that he was lying on the floor of hell. So now he was walking away from there, a survivor, with nowhere to go and no help for his condition, and the dirt road into the forest had brought him straight inside my head. He stopped in his tracks and stared at me for a time, not reproachfully, but beating the back of one hand against the palm of the other in a silent gesture of supplication.

  Trembling, I stood in the heat of the Umbrian afternoon, waiting for the flashback to fade.

  The door to the cottage stood ajar. Sure that I’d locked it and put the key back under the plant pot before I left, I looked across to the wall beneath the bamboo awning and saw a lean young man in a white singlet and blue shorts sitting at the table. He stopped picking his teeth with his fingers at my approach and turned his head towards the house, muttering something in Italian. I was about to ask who he was and what he wanted when he shook his head and pointed at the door, gesturing that I should go inside.

  My grip on reality was still shaky. After the glare of the afternoon, it was gloomy inside the cottage, where a figure sat at the desk, examining the contents of the open drawer. He turned his head as my shadow fell across the floor. “My dear old thing, how very improbable you are, turning up like this!” Then he smiled at me over the rims of his glasses. “I’ve just cracked one of Adam’s more palatable reds. Come and join me, do.”