Water Theatre Read online

  I hadn’t seen Laurence Stromberg for years, and he had put on a lot of weight. His familiar features were dewlapped now, and his eyes thickly pouched. His lips seemed wearier in their sensuality, but the voice, measured and mannered as ever, was unmistakable.

  “Hello, Larry,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  Shamelessly he closed the drawer and proffered me a glass of wine. “Waiting for you, old soul. I feel sure Adam would want us to celebrate, don’t you?” He swirled the wine in his glass and savoured its bouquet before taking a sip and chasing the wine around his palate. “Ah yes! Well met again! And in Fontanalba of all places.” His eyes frisked me from head to foot in sceptical appraisal. “But I see you’re still looking formidably grim behind the rumpled charm.”

  Contriving a smile, I said, “Does Adam know you’re going through his things?”

  Stromberg widened his eyes. “Does he know you are, old soul? After all, I can’t imagine he invited you here. Not unless something quite marvellous has transpired. Has it?”

  “Just the opposite, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh dear, not more dismal news from your lips!” Stromberg sighed his way out of a feigned chagrin. “I’ve been trying to recall exactly when and where you last left me distraught. It was on King’s Parade, if I’m not mistaken. You affected black in those days – a black shirt, black jeans, rather displeasing black shoes. On a smarter man it might have been quite sinister.”

  “You’ve forgotten the crush bar at the theatre where Adam gave his last performances. You were still fishing for compliments on your Tempest as I recall.”

  “What a slanderer you are! Though I must admit there was a touch of flair in the way I released the actor in Adam. What a magnetic Ariel he made!”

  “I don’t recall you being thrilled with my Stephano however!”

  “Well, we do what we can with what we have. And you’ve made rather a good living out of the voice I taught you – even if you’ve barely spared me a thought since then. Come, don’t deny it. I can tell.”

  “We weren’t exactly best mates, Larry.”

  “I’d much rather you called me Lorenzo, if it doesn’t come too hard. That’s how they know me here.”

  From a house somewhere up the hill came the sound of a woman beating a carpet over a clothesline. She called irritably to a child every now and then: Tomassino, Tomassino.

  “But just look at you, dear man!” Stromberg smiled as I sat down across from him. “How much kinder the years have been to you than to me, for all your exploits in the gloomy places of the earth.” He slipped me an arch glance. “Oh yes, I’ve kept track. But then how could one not with your face on the screen so often, persistently ventilating the planet’s woes? Terribly intimidating, old soul! What do you think you’re about? Reminding comfortable folk like me that there’s a shit storm blowing out there, I suppose?” I caught the sly edge of his smile, and remembered that he had grown up in white South Africa under a regime with which he had so little sympathy that he exiled himself at the first opportunity. “The difficulty is,” he said, “that your forthright way of spreading dreadful news across our TV dinners forces us to look at the horrors of the world without assisting us to see through them.”

  “I can’t imagine you’ve ever eaten a TV dinner in your life,” I smiled. “Anyway, would you rather have evil go about its business unobserved?”

  “Now I suspect you’re wilfully misunderstanding me. But you shall have the benefit of the doubt. After all, you were ever the noble ape. How else could you have endured those dreary hours of schismatic wrangling among the lefties? Yet the passion you brought to it all! Adam admired it in you. I rather worried over it myself. I felt it could only bring you to grief. Didn’t I tell you as much once? Was I right or was I right?”

  I remembered the occasion well enough – a late-night altercation in Adam’s rooms, fuelled by a bottle of brandy. Adam had tired of our point-scoring and gone off to bed, leaving me to pit my political zeal against Stromberg’s metaphysical despair. But it was as though Adam’s assent had been the real trophy of our wrangle, and once he had gone we were left only with a sense of its futility.

  I said, “For a few minutes you almost had me convinced that the whole political world is a mere illusion – “an evil dream of night” I think you called it.”

  “Yes, well I was probably quoting someone.” Stromberg picked up his little book of Umbrian Excursions from the desk and leafed through it. “The question is,” he said, “how are we to waken from that dream? I rather fear that your distressing expeditions into reportage serve only to darken its depths – particularly when you flirt with the camera in that fetching flak jacket!”

  “But then,” I said, “we never agreed about anything that matters, did we, Larry?”

  “You know that’s not true,” he protested. “Didn’t we once agree that we both love Adam, for all his little faults? However, I suppose I’ve taken far better care of my loyalties than you ever did of yours.”

  “Is that why you’re here? Are you living here these days?”

  “I come and go, dear man, like the swallows.”

  Outside, in a voice coarse with frustration the woman who had been beating the carpet scolded her child. I said, “Because Adam’s here?”

  Stromberg held up his little book. “Were you to browse in cette petite folie de jeunesse,” he reproached me, “you would see that I was in love with Umbria long before the Brigshaws fled here. Umbra santa, Umbra mistica, la terra dei santi e della negromanzia. Was ever a place more richly endowed with sacred art, natural beauty and unspoilt young men such as Giovanni – who is, I trust, still sunning himself out there like a cougar? It has long been my heart’s home. Let us not dispute precedence here.”

  “Yet here you are in Marina’s house,” I pressed, “and neither she nor Adam here. I can’t help wondering what’s going on.”

  “But don’t imagine I shall say a word till I have a clearer idea of what you’re doing here yourself.”

  “There’s no secret about that. I’ve come looking for Adam and Marina. Their father’s very ill. He may not have long to live. He wants to see them again.”

  “Am I to understand you’re acting as the ogre’s envoy?”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything Adam says about Hal.”

  “Now your loyalties come clear! Of course, of course! But I don’t have to rely on Adam’s opinion of his father. I found the man insufferable when he visited Adam at school. I mean, the hypocrisy, my dear! ‘Were you to be true to your noble principles,’ I goaded him once, ‘you’d put this place to the torch sooner than suckle your son on its mouldy patrician titties.’ His riposte escapes me – though I recall some effort to patronize me from the barren and truly wuthering heights of his egocentricity.”

  “I’m sure you left him speechless.”

  “Well, I wasn’t about to let him bewilder my good sense with his preposterous ambitions. Grace, his poor wife, on the other hand, I found enchanting – though even in those days the shadow of that man’s undeveloped soul fell hard across her. I visited them once, much later, in that dour fastness in the Pennine fells, and what a cat’s cradle of fraught emotion I chanced upon in my innocence!”

  Fetching a sigh, Stromberg lifted himself out of the chair and wandered the room, wineglass in hand, peering at the frescoes. He gestured to where a lion glowered down from a promontory of rock with a devouring glitter in its gaze. “Do you recall that line from Wallace Stevens?” he said. “Something about a lion roaring at the enraging desert? Long way from High Sugden this, wouldn’t you say?”

  “They are Marina’s work then?”

  “Yes. From some time ago, of course.”

  “But not at all like the canvases in her London show.”

  “I suppose not.” He sighed and glanced my way. “So the flesh has scuppered Hal at last, and he wants to gather his children at his bedside? I wonder what Adam will make of that!”

  “Not too muc
h of a meal, I hope.”

  “But you can’t expect him simply to shake off a lifetime’s rancour and trot back home with you? I mean – really, Martin! – with you, of all people?”

  “I don’t expect it, but I live in hope.”

  “Then may you live long, for you may have to.” Stromberg looked up from his wary inspection of a fresco in which a wild woman stood draped in her hair. He shrugged when I said nothing. “Well, who would have thought you’d still be dogsbodying for Hal after all this time? I don’t recall ever meeting your old man, by the way. Is he an amiable cove?”

  “Actually you did meet him once. On Graduation Day, though you didn’t speak to him, and I guess he was more likely to remember you than you him – you and that colourful chum who was hanging on your arm that day. But no, I doubt you’d have found his company congenial. And by the way, he’s dead.”

  “Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that. Mine too – God rest his disagreeable soul!” Stromberg’s wanderings had brought him to the piano. He opened the lid and flexed his fingers above the keys before trying a chord. “They keep this pretty little machine in tune, I see.”

  With conscious irony, he explored a few bars of Schumann’s Träumerei, then stopped, sat down at the stool and began again with deeper commitment. As he leant his body into the phrasing, the room filled with yearning for things irretrievable – dead parents, lost lovers, broken friendships, the hopes of youth. Remembering how such music used to drift down his staircase in college, I felt again the insidious, salad-days spell of that Cambridge high culture to which I was no natural heir and which I had both coveted and affected to despise.

  “Still, God forbid that we should be so poor in magnanimity as to lay all our troubles at mummy and daddy’s door,” he mused. “We have to forgive them their trespasses against us, don’t you think? Far better that we salvage a little wisdom from the misery they cause us – and as much love as we can, not so?”

  When he lifted his hands from the keys, the instrument resonated for several moments in the silence. “So you don’t know?” He swivelled the stool to face me. “You know nothing of Adam and Marina’s recent history?”

  “There didn’t seem to be any point trying to keep in touch. Not till now. What’s been happening? And where is Adam by the way?”

  Stromberg considered me with narrowed eyes. “But surely Gabriella must have put you in the picture?”

  “How did you know I was with her?”

  “This is a small village, my dear. The moment a cock pleasures a hen on one side of the hill, it becomes the gossip of the coops on the other. I know exactly what time you turned up last night, what time the Contessa came to check you out this morning, and how long you spent at the Villa delle meraviglie this afternoon. The only thing I didn’t know was what a fool’s errand you are on.”

  As if a different thought had crossed his mind, Stromberg looked at his watch. Raising his voice, he called to Giovanni, who came to the door and lolled against a jamb, glowering at us from the depths of his boredom. They spoke together in swift Italian from which I learnt nothing. Giovanni muttered something else and then went back outside.

  “Well, you know now,” I said. “So are you going to help me out?”

  “Not sure I follow, old thing.”

  When I told him how cagey Gabriella had been about Adam and Marina, he seemed unsurprised. “It’s not any of my business what they’re up to here,” I said, “and I don’t care very much. I just want to do what I came to do and get back. So fill me in: what’s the latest word from the chickens on their whereabouts?”

  Stromberg glanced down at his feet – they seemed tiny in their thonged sandals under the overhang of his belly – then he looked up at me again, taking the pressure of my smile. “Even supposing I could help you,” he said, “I’m not at all sure why I should.”

  “For old times’ sake?”

  “Old times indeed! Why would we want to wallow through that mire again?”

  “We had some good times together, didn’t we? You, me and Adam, I mean.”

  “Now you’re being disingenuous. Even if Adam were here – which incidentally he is not – I can’t imagine he’d want to speak to you. Besides, he’d have no time right now. As for his sister… well, you may have thought the Marina you knew formidable enough, but the figure she has become might verily shake your soul. And with good reason, I may add. No, dear man, I really don’t think you want to see them again.”

  At that moment my mobile phone rang from the pocket of the jacket I’d hung over the chair. “That’s probably Marina now,” I said, but it was Gail’s American voice that came crackling across the ether.

  “So what’s the story?” she demanded.

  “Hang on, I can hardly hear you. I’ll just take this outside.”

  Stromberg waved me casually away as he poured himself more wine. Under Giovanni’s silent gaze, I sat down at the table and turned my back on the door, beyond which, I felt quite sure, Larry had his ears pricked for gossip. “I rang this morning,” I said. “Did you get my message?”

  “Yes. So what are your plans?”

  “Still uncertain,” I prevaricated. “Apparently Adam’s not here, but there’s a chance I might get to see Marina. Gabriella’s discussing the situation with her. In fact, I thought it might have been her ringing.”

  “Who’s Gabriella?”

  “The woman I told you about. It turns out she’s a contessa.”

  After a moment she said, “What’s to discuss?”

  “It’s possible that Marina won’t want to see me.”

  “But this contessa knows why you’re there?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “So why can’t she tell Marina what it’s about?”

  “She’s going to, but…”

  Now Gail’s impatience declared itself. “But what?”

  “Someone has to impress on Marina just how bad Hal’s situation is.”

  “Sure.” The syllable parched the air across the hundreds of miles between us.

  I’d been vaguely aware of the engine noise of an approaching motor scooter. As it turned off the road now, onto the track to the cottage, Giovanni got to his feet from where he was lounging on the wall and walked to meet it.

  “There’s every chance I’ll be on a plane tomorrow evening,” I said.

  “Have you booked a flight yet?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “So there’s every chance you might not. Not while you get to spend time with this contessa. Not while there’s a chance Marina might come through. We were supposed to be on our way to the Cascades right now, remember? We were supposed to be fixing up our life.”

  A young woman in a scarlet crash helmet and a white cotton dress had parked the motor scooter on the lane. She and Giovanni were exchanging hasty Italian sentences.

  “Gail,” I tried after a moment, “I thought we sorted this before I left.”

  “You sorted it,” she said, “your way.”

  “I still don’t see what’s brought this on.”

  “You, Martin. You’ve brought this on. You’re what you don’t see.”

  With a bag hanging from one shoulder, the young woman was standing just a few yards away, half-listening to what Giovanni was saying but staring at me as if trying to work out who I was.

  “The way I figure it,” Gail was saying, “I’m coming in a slow third on your priorities right now.”

  “Then you’re figuring wrong.”

  “Sure, like I figured wrong over Nancy Calloway during the Gulf War? Like I would have figured wrong over the French doctor who just got back to Paris from Equatoria an hour ago and thought she’d give you a call.”

  Now things came clear.

  “I thought we were through with all that,” she said. “It wasn’t going to happen again, right? So why am I surprised? When was it ever different?”

  “Look, this is bad timing right now,” I protested, watching the woman in the white dress lift off her crash he
lmet and shake loose her hair. “I should be back tomorrow. Can’t we?…”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Yes, I heard you.” Mildly embarrassed now by what she could not help overhearing, the young woman turned away as I added, “I’m sure we can sort this out once and for all when I get home.”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “Gail, there are people here. I can’t talk now.”

  “I’ve had it, Martin. I can’t take any more lies.”

  At that moment Stromberg appeared in the doorway of the cottage emitting a loud sigh of exasperation and glaring at Giovanni as the newcomer turned to greet him. “Hi Lorenzo, I’m back. Sam and Jago are coming the day after tomorrow. Is Adam about?”

  “Give me a break, Gail,” I was saying. “There’s no need for this.”

  “You want a break?” Gail snapped back at me. “Here’s a break. Let’s make it permanent this time.” And she shut down the phone.

  “You’re English?” the young woman had turned to look at me. There was no trace now of an Italian accent in her voice. I nodded in silence. Again came the shocking sensation of time folding back across itself, smoothly like linen.

  And if I was silent it wasn’t just because Gail had cut me off in mid-sentence. I was left briefly wordless by the dislocating experience of seeing Marina as she could not possibly be now, but as she might have looked almost thirty years earlier. I was still trying to come to terms with this trick of time when the woman smiled at me and said, “Hello, I’m Allegra. You must be here for the gathering.”

  8

  Allegra

  Though she was certainly not aware of it, Allegra and I had met once before, and that meeting had been fraught with all kinds of anguish. At that time Marina had been carrying boxes full of her things from her room to the rusty van parked in the yard outside High Sugden. It was the first time she had been there since her mother’s death, and within the hour she would be driving away for the last time, taking her infant daughter to Italy, where they would begin a new life together. Marina had already told Hal that this was the last that he would see of either of them. To me she said almost nothing at all.