Water Theatre Read online

  The chimney corner of the frescoed living room had become a small study alcove. Beside it, an upright piano stood against one wall, its panels inlaid with fretwork patterns of foliage and masks. The trellised backs of two chairs were painted in peeling gold. A blue throw covered an old couch. On the desk in the alcove stood a paraffin lamp, a portable typewriter, a pencil case with a brass hasp and three books. A New Pronouncing Dictionary of the English & Italian Languages had been published in 1908 when, according to the table on page iii, a twenty-lira piece had been a gold coin worth fifteen shillings and ten pence farthing. Next to it leant a Rough Guide to Italy. It occurred to me that an entire civilization had vanished down the gap between those two volumes. Beside them lay the only other reading matter in the room – a skimpily bound book with the title Umbrian Excursions stamped on its spine.

  The alcove would have been the obvious spot for a telephone if Marina had not refused to have one installed. Thinking of this, I took out my mobile phone and was about to dial Gail. But I was tired and fractious, the conversation would too easily go wrong, so I put the phone away again, knowing the call might now prove all the harder when I came to make it.

  In the small kitchen at the back of the house I found the wine rack and enough bits and pieces for a scratch meal. I sat puzzling over those anachronistic frescoes as I ate. Surely monks and angels had no role in Marina’s universe? If she had rejected everything else about her father, his atheism had gone unquestioned. Like oxygen or sex, it was a fact of life with which it made no sense to quarrel. So what were these paintings doing here along with an image of St Francis? They reminded me of the illustrations to the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that my mother had bought for me when I was small. In the stillness of the room I recalled the smell of that book and the way its pictures were like windows on a world utterly different from the grimy industrial landscape in which I grew up.

  Then I remembered how I’d lain in bed with Marina once, chaste as a fabled knight, telling her one of those stories to still the rage of her grief. That state of almost innocence possessed me again in all its adolescent sensuality as, with a catch of the heart, I recalled the gift she’d given me later – a painting she’d made of a boy riding on a fox’s back. These frescoes were more expertly done, but the same enchanted imagination was active here.

  In the drawer of a bedside table upstairs I found an English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Propped against a fat pillow, I opened the pages, and an old sky-blue envelope fell out onto the bed. To my astonishment, I saw that it was addressed to Adam in my own handwriting. Its postmark dated from the late ’50s, at a time when we were both second-year undergraduates. During the bitter January of that year, Adam had suffered a brief episode of nervous breakdown. He’d been kept under supervision in a local mental hospital for a few days before being sent home to recuperate. I’d written this letter to him there, telling him how much he was missed by all his friends and trying to lift his spirits with a satirical account of our doings. Its tone was light but caring, even studiedly so in its preservation of a certain northern reticence. Adam had let me know how much it meant to him at the time, but I was both touched and amazed to discover that he had valued the letter enough to preserve it across all the years between.

  My first thought after reading it through was that this mission to Italy might not be quite as hopeless as I’d feared. Then came a second, less optimistic thought. Hailing as it did from a time when things were still good between us, this letter might simply have been tucked between the pages of a book he’d been reading more than forty years ago and then forgotten. Thinking about it further, I could imagine no other reason why it would have escaped destruction.

  I was about to switch out the lamp when a sweep of headlights brightened the bedroom window and a car approached across the valley, pulling to a halt somewhere close by. Unless the night had bounced the sound from elsewhere there must be another house, just below this one, on the side of the hill. A man and a woman got out of the car, laughing together. I caught a shushing sound, and then something muttered in a whispered exchange that ended in a brief contralto giggle. Perhaps they’d been surprised by the light in Marina’s cottage? A key turned. There was more suppressed laughter before the door closed again and the lock clicked shut. Not long afterwards came the sounds of exuberant sex.

  There are few more isolating experiences than that of lying alone in earshot of loudly rutting strangers. My mind illustrated the event, mingling fantasy and memory, and when at last all three of us were done, I lay in the silence thinking about the previous night in the Camden flat with Gail – how after the row over my decision to go to Italy we had struck an unsatisfactory truce and adjusted our plans to allow for time alone together. But that assignment in Africa had sickened my desire. Our lovemaking had been incomplete. It felt wistful as a fall of snow.

  Later, her eyes grave among the mass of her dishevelled hair, Gail had asked me again not to go.

  “I’ve made promises,” I said.

  “You made promises to me.”

  “I will keep them.”

  “They’re broken already.”

  “But mendable. I’ll make them good.”

  “It’s the way you talk about them,” she said after a time. “The people there, I mean. As if you were still in thrall to them somehow. Particularly Marina.”

  “It’s more years than I can remember since I even saw her!”

  “But you were in love with her once? She was the first, wasn’t she?”

  I said, “Marina left my life a long time ago. You have to understand: these are old loyalties. I’m doing it for Hal.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”

  “If you had any idea how much I’m dreading this trip…”

  “Then don’t go.”

  “I have to, Gail. For Hal.”

  She shook her disbelieving head again. “No, Martin. Like always you’re doing this for you.”

  And as if in ironic fulfilment of her declaration, here I was, alone in Marina’s house under the Umbrian night, regretting that I’d come, knowing there were many reasons why I’d allowed myself no choice, and aching with memories of Hal Brigshaw’s children who, together or apart, had long been capable of opening up a war zone in my heart.

  I remembered the pain of my last encounter with Marina. I remembered the bleak hour in which Adam’s friendship had turned to hostility. I thought about Hal stricken in his wheelchair and about the piled bodies of the dead in Equatoria. Again I shrank beneath the burden of my father’s corpse, a limp, decaying load that I could not put down.

  Knowing these things must keep me from sleep, I reached for the copy of Virgil. It fell open at the page where the letter had lain, and I saw at once that someone – Adam presumably; the book was his – had underscored three lines:

  Your ghost, Father,

  Your sad ghost, often present in my mind,

  Has brought me to the threshold of this place.

  The night swung like lock gates around me, letting more darkness in.

  I woke in a rose-madder room already steeped in warm mid-morning light. Pushing back the curtains, I saw a plump hill of olive groves topped by a cluster of houses, impasto pink and white, with terracotta roofing tiles. Sunlight flashed from a chimney cowl. In the hazier distance two thickly wooded hills saddled the horizon. Nothing moved. Even the swallows were silent on the wires, though somewhereasolitary cowbell clanked every now and then, jolting dry air that smelt of rosemary and thyme. Beyond the bamboo awning, a closer olive grove sloped steeply away down the hillside. The shadows of stone terraces tumbled in soft cataracts between the rows.

  I was showering when I heard a sound beyond the clatter of water at my feet. When I called out to see if someone was there, a woman’s voice lifted from the foot of the stairs. “I think may be I have come at a bad time. Forgive me.” I knew at once that it was not Marina. So whose was it then, this cloudy foreign voice that added, “I shall return ag
ain when you are dressed?”

  I reached for a towel, calling, “Hang on, I’ll be with you in just a minute. Don’t go away.” But the sitting room and kitchen were empty when I went down, though a newly filled bowl of fruit stood on the table in the dining area. Towelling my hair, I stepped outside and saw the woman sitting in the shade at the circular blue table. Sunglasses masked her eyes. A wide-brimmed straw hat with a silk ribbon hid most of her dark curls.

  “Good morning,” she said, “I had not meant to discompose you,” and rose, offering a firm hand. Slim, in her late forties, she wore a shirt of lavender-grey silk hanging loose over ivory-coloured linen trousers. “I heard only this morning that you are arrived. If I knew last night…” Her ringed hands made a deprecating flourish. “There was no food in the house, I know. I have put milk and butter in the refrigerator and there is now bread in the box.” With a hint of reproach she added, “We were not expecting you.”

  I took note of that familiar “we”.

  “There’s no phone here,” I explained. “I had to come at short notice and couldn’t let Adam and Marina know. I thought I’d find at least one of them here.”

  “I see. You wished to jump a surprise on them!”

  “Spring.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Spring, not jump.”

  “Ah yes. Forgive me… my English… I am Gabriella. And you?”

  I told her my name, there was a brief beat of hesitation before she opened her mouth and said simply, “Ah!”

  “They’ve spoken of me?”

  “Of course.” Her eyes, which had been briefly averted, returned now, bright with renewed affability.

  “Do you know where Adam and Marina are?” I asked. “Is there any way to contact them?”

  She gazed brightly up at me. “For the moment I don’t think so.”

  “It’s rather urgent. I don’t have much time.”

  Somewhere higher up the hill a bell counted eleven in tinny chimes. We stood by the blue table in the fragrant day while she considered her response. Awhite sports car gleamed beside the shrine at the junction, where she had parked it. The morning basked in dry light.

  She said, “I think you must wait for them.”

  This woman was no peasant, but the statement had a peasant’s obstinacy. It assumed that waiting was the usual condition here. Things might once have happened; one day something might happen again; in the meantime, waiting was the thing.

  But the prospect of kicking my heels in this uneventful place held no appeal. I said, “Perhaps the neighbours know where they are? I heard them last night. Down here.” Crossing to the wall beyond the table, I looked over onto the salmon-coloured pantiles of a low-pitched roof. Another cottage was stacked on the side of the hill below Marina’s, neater, in better repair.

  “Ah,” Gabriella smiled, “so Capitano Mezzanotte is back! But I doubt he can help us.” I was about to suggest that it might at least be worth a try when I heard her chuckling softly at my back. “Of course that is not his true name,” she said. “It is our joke, yes? He makes use of the place only occasionally. Adam called him by that name because he comes by night and always leaves early.”

  “They,” I corrected.

  “Yes,” she smiled.

  “Captain Midnight. I see.”

  “He is a very private man.”

  “Public enough to keep me awake.”

  She nodded, her lips pursed, but smiling still. It occurred to me that she and Adam must be on intimate terms to share such a joke. Were they perhaps lovers? If so, this woman might be just as resolute to protect him from the past as he had been to sever all ties with it. She wouldn’t want me “jumping” any surprises on him.

  I said, “You really don’t know when they’ll be back?”

  Frustration must have shown in my face, but with a wry tilt of her head she evaded my question. “Things don’t always work out as we expect. You must not be dismayed.” Abruptly she brought her ringed fingers together at her lips. “I have some small business to perform this morning. It will take me perhaps one hour or so. After then I will give you lunch at the Villa, yes? If you are agreeable, I will pick you up at, say, twelve thirty.” The smile was warm.

  Lacking options, I decided to be “agreeable”, thanked her and asked whether it would be too far for me to walk.

  She opened her hands and brought them together lightly at her chest as though catching a moth. “No, not far. But the road is steep,” she said. “It will be a hot walk.”

  “I’m used to heat. I was in Africa a week ago.”

  The smile broadened, the narrow shoulders wriggled a little beneath the silk. “I am forgetting. You are famous for your ardimento. Very well, go round the hill and take the road to the left, past the convento. You will see. Cross a bridge and in perhaps three kilometres there comes a gate with birds. Mythological birds. Grifoni?”

  “Griffins, yes.”

  “The drive will bring you. The door is open. Come through. I will expect you.” Again she offered her hand and quickly slipped it free.

  From the dappled light of the awning I watched the sports car accelerate away around that steep, heat-stunned theatre of olive groves.

  I breakfasted on coffee and fruit with the Rough Guide open on the blue table. Fontanalba was of too little consequence to feature in its pages, so I picked up the slim volume called Umbrian Excursions and was about to open it when I decided I’d better call Gail. Only the machine answered me. I left a message telling her what had happened, gave a satirical account of the conversation with Gabriella and insisted that I had no intention of hanging about in Umbria for more than another night.

  “You were right,” I conceded, “I shouldn’t have come. I’ll make it up to you.”

  Then I sat, staring at the olive groves, marooned by the silence.

  For want of anything better to do, I picked up the book again. The title was embossed on the cover, though neither the author’s name nor the publisher’s colophon appeared there. Only when I turned to the title page did I discover that it had been written and privately published by Laurence Stromberg.

  That extravagant man had been my contemporary at Cambridge, though I’d seen nothing of him since we bumped into one another in the crush bar of a West End theatre at some point in the mid-’60s. “But you’re looking so well,” he’d crooned. “Quite the figure of the rugged hack, all tanned and rangy and doubtless badged with scars!” Then, with a wicked nudge he’d added: “Or has journalistic pribble-prabble merely deformed you into a cliché of your trade?” But Larry’s style had already begun to feel anachronistic, and his own career as a theatre director was faltering. The last I’d heard of him was a rumour that he’d been initiated into a secret order practising sex magic in South Kensington. It was the sort of gossip he might have started himself, which did not necessarily make it untrue. And the pages of his book revealed a familiar quirkiness now, for its various excursions were as much through the painted chambers of the author’s mind as through the landscape of Umbria.

  I skimmed through his account of the ancient augurs of Gubbio who’d read signs in the flight of birds, and then dipped into another on the oracular springs of Clitumnus. But I soon lost patience and put the book down. After a time I set out for Gabriella’s villa.

  Because Marina’s cottage was perched halfway down the hill, some distance outside the medieval walls, I got my first real sight of the town when I looked up from the roadside shrine. Hunkered down behind its defences, Fontanalba was curled on its summit like a snail. Only a single bell tower and the crowns of two plane trees rose above the pinkish ramparts. The lane to the villa curved on round the hill, past the gate and a complex of buildings under a square tower topped by a Turk’s cap dome.

  The armorial carvings on the bastions of the town gate were hidden behind rough scaffolding, though I could see no sign of anyone at work. The dark archway opened onto a small piazza where the crown of the hill had been cobbled over. Houses sloped aw
ay along two narrow alleys, their roofs held down by top-heavy chimneys and flat stones. As far as I could see, there were no shops or bars, but midway down the wider alley an ornate niche had been built around the basin of a fountain. At the edge of the piazza, under the white glare of the Romanesque church, six plastic chairs waited for the shade.

  Unaware of my arrival, a woman berated an old man from her vine-slung balcony. He brandished a bottle, stammered something back at her, and then slumped in the shade beside the fountain. Not wanting to get caught up in a neighbourhood wrangle that might have been going on for a decade or two, I backed away, out of the gate, wondering what else people could do in such beleaguered proximity but bicker in the heat.

  I followed the lane past the convento down to where an ancient bridge spanned a river that tumbled among stones through a green glen. On the far side, a steep climb brought me to a wooded ridge, and from there I looked back down on Fontanalba. The air was heady and resinous, the noon light a somnolent blue shimmer punctuated by the shrilling of cicadas. I saw no one as I walked.

  The griffin-guarded gates stood open. The last turn of the long, winding drive through trees revealed the palatial scale of the house. At the centre of a wide court with a parterre garden, water plashed from an elaborate fountain. Beyond it, a loggia shaded a number of doors at ground level. All of them were locked, so I climbed a sweep of stairs to the terrace above. From there, with its ochre stucco peeling in the sunlight, rose the main body of the villa.

  I stood for a while beside a stone urn, taking in a view that reached beyond the statuary and pinewoods to the hazy plain far below. Turning back to the house, I saw that a door stood open in the portico beneath a second – and grander – upper loggia. I stepped through into the cool entrance hall.

  The house was as silent as a painting of itself. Along the length of the hall’s airy tunnel three chandeliers floated like tasselled marine creatures. Mellow light from a glazed door at the far end fell along walls painted with trompe l’œil prospects of trees and bowers and hills. I coughed to make my presence heard and, when nothing happened, walked along the hall to a central atrium, where a transverse corridor offered access to rooms on both sides. I was standing by a statue which had a missing hand, wondering whether to shock the place out of its trance by shouting, when a man wearing a white jacket appeared down the corridor. Startled to see me there, he advanced quickly across the tiles and listened, unconvinced, as I explained I was there at Gabriella’s invitation. His chin was unshaven, his mouth tight, his blue eyes menacing. He growled something that might have accused me of breaking off the statue’s hand and hiding it. His own hands, which were matted with black hair, gestured extravagantly. “No, no,” he decided and, in the ensuing torrent of Italian words, two were uttered with emphatic force: “La Contessa”.