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  “The difference between freedom from and freedom for,” said Emmanuel.

  “That’s right. We’re talking about people being free to make their own future through choice and action. We’re talking about how the world gets changed.”

  Adam pushed his plate away and leant back on his chair. “If you’re trying to get him excited about politics,” he said dryly, “you’ve got an uphill struggle. Martin is a bit of a mystic.”

  “Is he now?” Hal cocked a wry eyebrow, more amused than surprised. “Not many of those in Calderbridge.”

  Amazed that his friend should expose him like this, Martin sat excruciated, until Adam prompted him with an inciting smile. “What was it you said about the clouds talking to you? Or was it that they’re waiting for a word from you?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what?”

  Martin glowered at the tablecloth. To hear his thoughts distorted this way left him mortified. He could hear the blood in his ears. He thought about the many times he had come out onto the tops alone, relishing the sharp stink of a fox’s den in some abandoned quarry, listening for the curlew’s cry above the cotton grass. Yearning for that kind of freedom now, he looked up with a hot glare in his eyes. “I was talking about the landscape round here and the way it makes me feel.” They were looking at him, waiting for more, and he saw he could not leave it at that. “I mean, politics isn’t the only important thing. Our life goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? Politics always seems to be about what divides us. It sets us against one another. But at root we’re all the same. That’s how I see it, anyway – we’re all part of the natural world, and it’s part of us… maybe the most important, the sanest part.”

  “If only it was that easy,” Adam said without any edge of sarcasm now, “but either it’s too obvious to be worth saying or you really are a mystic, you know. Not so much a Godbotherer by the sound of it, but a sort of nature mystic, right?”

  Watching Martin suffer in his chair, Grace Brigshaw was moved by an intuition. “My guess is that Martin might be a poet,” she said, beginning to collect the plates, “which is a noble and difficult thing to be.”

  “Indeed it is,” Emmanuel smiled, reaching to help her, “and a true poet is even as much the enemy of oppression as some of us poor politicians are.”

  “Do you write?” Marina asked with new interest.

  “I’ve done a few things,” Martin admitted.

  “Good for you,” said Hal. “Grace is usually right about people. And there’s nothing wrong with nature for a theme – so long as you hold on to what Emmanuel said. All the Romantic poets knew that. What was that thing Wordsworth wrote for Toussaint? ‘Thou hast left behind powers that will work for thee…’ He faltered there, frowning after memory. “‘Powers that will work for thee…’ How’s it go?”

  When he saw no one else about to help, Martin quietly picked up the verse:

  “‘…air, earth and skies;

  There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

  And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’”

  Hal remembered the last two lines, and they declaimed them together, ending in a sudden alliance of laughter as Emmanuel and Grace applauded. Then, “Look,” said Emmanuel, wide-eyed in wonder, pointing to the window as he got up to help clear the plates, “look at the snow.”

  While they had been eating and talking, a blizzard had set in. Swift gusts of snow were blowing and twisting beyond the window.

  “It’s been doing it for ages,” stated Marina, pointedly.

  “I’d better go,” Martin offered, “while I still can.”

  “I can’t possibly let you go cycling out there,” Grace protested. “Not in this weather.”

  “Then you’re stuck here for the night.” Marina shrugged her narrow shoulders at Martin. “Like the rest of us.”

  Nobody had quite been prepared for this, least of all the young man who stood awkwardly by the table, gazing out at the thickening snowfall.

  “I think you’d better ring your parents and tell them what’s happening,” said Mrs Brigshaw.

  “We don’t have a phone.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, is there someone who could get a message to them?”

  “My dad might call in at The Golden Lion. I could leave word there. But, look,” – Martin glance dat Adam – “I think I might just make it back before…”

  “You’d better stay,” Adam said decisively.

  “Of course you must,” Hal insisted.

  “After all,” said Marina, “he can always sleep in the haunted bedroom.”

  Grace sighed at her daughter in exasperation. “Oh don’t be silly, darling!” Then she turned back to Martin: “But you must try to get a message through,” she said. “We can’t have your mother worrying.”

  “The phone’s in here.” Marina smiled at Martin with a kind of rueful sympathy as she opened the door onto a spacious sitting room.

  Only rarely had Martin used a telephone before, and he was amazed to have the privacy of a whole room for the purpose. He saw more crowded bookshelves – so many books in this house, there had been stacks of them along the landing and elsewhere. Now here were hundreds more, along with piles of pamphlets, newspapers and magazines. An African mask studded with cowrie shells glowered down at him with steady malevolence from over the stone arch of the fireplace. Its eye sockets were slotted like a goat’s.

  A pile of three new books lay near the telephone. On top was a translation of a work by Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution. Opening it at random, Martin read how Communist Man would improve on nature’s work, removing mountains and redirecting the course of rivers until he had rebuilt the earth. Man would become “immeasurably stronger, subtler”, he claimed. The average human type would rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx, and “above this ridge new peaks will rise”.

  In that moment Martin felt, by contrast, subterranean. He was worrying that he had come unprepared for an overnight stay – no pyjamas, no toothbrush, nothing but what he stood up in. But then he had been prepared for nothing here. In this ancient place anything might happen. There might well be ghosts – for the house did feel haunted, but as much by the future as the past, and the shades of both agitated him. And to talk with these people left him straddling a gulf between what was said and what was thought. Nor did he see how their hospitality could ever be repaid. When he tried to imagine taking Adam into his own home, his imagination shuddered and baulked.

  Martin thumbed through the pages of the local directory, thinking that it was all very well for Hal to pontificate about not being ashamed – he did so from the accomplished heights of a civilized life in this Elizabethan grange; he had a good-looking upper-class wife; he sent his children to expensive schools. If he had ever known the humiliations of circumstance, they were far behind him.

  Martin found the number and dialled it. He waited through many rings, imagining the crowded Saturday lunchtime bar of the Golden Lion, and Ted Ledbetter, the lame publican, swearing as the phone called him away from the pumps. He dreaded that his father would be in the pub, that he would have to speak to him. He stared out of a narrow window where there was now nothing to be seen but driving snow. When at last the phone was answered, he stumbled into speech.

  As he came back into the dining room they turned to look at him. “My dad wasn’t there,” he said. “He’ll probably drop in later. Someone will tell him.”

  “That’s all right then,” Hal said, and tapped Emmanuel on his shoulder. “We’d better think what this snow does to our plans.” The two men got up, but Hal stopped at the door and turned to look at Martin again. “About you and your father – things are difficult between you, right?” When Martin nodded uncertainly, Hal went on: “Well, for what it’s worth, I bloodied my nose against my own dad time and again before I worked out something that proved vital
for me.” He paused for a moment, perhaps for effect, perhaps deliberating, then drew in his breath. “The thing is, if a man wants to widen his horizons and make something new for life, he’ll do well to make sure he has at least two fathers – the one he’s born with, and the one he chooses for himself.”

  For a moment Martin seemed to be standing at the centre of a huge silence in the room. It was as if he and the big man with the knocked-askew nose were alone together. But it was Adam who spoke: “Are you volunteering?”

  Hal studied his son a moment, sounding out that louche, elusive smile for jealousy and rancour. “Don’t think it doesn’t apply to you too,” he said quietly, and winked at Martin. “In fact,” Hal added, “I might just be daring you both to start making your own big choices.”

  “What about me?” Marina said as she began gathering the plates. “Or don’t girls count?”

  “You, my darling, don’t need daring,” Hal said. “You’ve never done anything else. I don’t suppose you ever will.” And he planted a kiss on her head. For the moment at least she seemed acquiescent in the philosophical silence of snow that was settling across the house.

  “One day,” said Emmanuel, “I think Marina will have something to teach us all about freedom.”

  “God help us when that day comes,” her father laughed, shaking his head. “As for you, Emmanuel my friend, I’m afraid that history will have to wait a while longer. We’d better make some calls.”

  “It’s been a century since Sir Elgin Rokesby deprived us of our liberty,” Emmanuel smiled. “I dare say we can endure a few more hours of servitude.”

  “In the meantime,” Grace frowned out into the gusting white whirl, “it looks like we’re all in jail.”

  Once Hal was gone, Adam seemed to relax back into friendship with his guest. When they returned to the attic, he became more talkative, less barbed with sarcasm. Their conversation moved onto the safe ground of their common interests – music, films, books – and this led to the question of whether or not writers should be politically engaged, and whether their writing could ever amount to more than bourgeois self-indulgence if they were not. Which brought them back to Hal and the question at the back of Martin’s mind.

  “So is your father a communist?” he asked.

  Adam raised his brows at him. “Why do you ask?”

  “Some of the books I noticed downstairs. And didn’t Emmanuel say something about having been to Russia?”

  “He’s been to many places. Washington is as interested in him as Moscow.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Now you sound like that grubby little demagogue Joe McCarthy: Answer the question, answer the question. Is Hal, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party? Would it bother you very much if he were? I mean, if you don’t care about politics, what’s it matter either way?”

  “It’s just that I’d like to know what I’m dealing with here.”

  “In case Hal might try to brainwash you? What kind of people do you think Hal and Emmanuel are? If you want to know about their politics, you should ask them. But ask seriously. They’re serious men. The issues they care about are serious. Probably the most serious issues in the world right now”

  Until this moment the wider context of Hal’s endeavours had seemed too far removed from this house perched on the Pennine edge for serious consideration, and too distant from Martin’s own preoccupations to excite more than puzzled interest. But now, even as the snow shut them in, he sensed horizons sweeping open round him.

  “I can see that,” he said. “It’s why I want to know more.”

  “All right, then forget your prejudices, forget the propagandist labels. Hal’s thinking owes a lot to Marx, but he’s not in the Party, not any more. He’s his own man, a thinker in his own right, a political theorist. Emmanuel has the chance to put his theories into practice. It really is about changing things… and not just in Equatoria. In fact, independence for Equatoria is only the start. They’re working on a development plan that will transform the country in ten years and set an example for the whole continent. Africa has vast resources – which is why it’s been carved up and plundered by the imperial powers to no one’s advantage but their own. Imagine what it could be like as a continental union – a federation of independent countries, each running its own affairs, resisting exploitation by international capital on the one hand and the crude oppression of state control on the other. In fact, absolutely refusing to take sides in the paranoid madness of the Cold War. Its influence would be unstoppable. It would be like accelerating history.”

  Here was a dream on a scale unfamiliar to Martin’s thinking. Caught up in Adam’s enthusiasm for Hal’s plans, he was told how the long collaboration with Emmanuel had given Hal a rare chance to realize a philosopher’s dream that was at least as old as Aristotle: to shape world events through the proper education of a man of action. To most people Equatoria might be no more than a minor page out of a stamp album, a sweltering stretch of rainforest and savannah, populated by half-naked savages. But it had an ancient tribal culture of its own – in the sixteenth century the Portuguese had been sufficiently impressed by its wealth to send ambassadors to the court of the Olun of Bamutu, the region’s most powerful king. And the country was rich in minerals – diamonds, copper, zinc, and possibly uranium. If properly administered on behalf of the people by the new radical intelligentsia, the country could quickly be transformed. A hydroelectric dam in the Kra River Gorge would power new industries. The profits would finance a national programme of education for all. Ancient tribal rivalries would be dissolved by a growing sense of a national commonwealth. As a place to make a stand for the future, Equatoria had much to commend it.

  With growing wonder Martin realized that the telephone in Hal’s study really did reach, operator by operator, and often with difficulty, from this remote Yorkshire house to secret rooms in Africa, where brave men were conspiring to end a century of imperial oppression. And once you were put through, the whole mysterious continent might have lain steaming just the other side of the Pennines. His heart beat high in his chest when he considered how he had cycled out to High Sugden and stumbled on these new horizons. He was a privileged insider, close to the start of what might be world-shaking events.

  Yet his images of Africa were coloured by Hollywood and Rider Haggard and the comic books of his childhood. Emmanuel was the first actual African he had met. In no way did that engaging man resemble the cinema’s leopard-skinned warriors and witch-doctors, but surely no one could call him typical? And what about that mask over the sitting-room fireplace? Its barbarous grimace had left him wondering whether Africa might not still be more preoccupied with superstition and magic than with politics.

  Yet Martin was too hungry for a larger sense of life to dismiss everything Adam said as fantasy. And too canny to swallow it whole. So he drew in his breath and marshalled the first arguments he could find against his friend’s overwhelming ardour. Then he applied himself to learning, fast.

  3

  Sibilla

  I came awake to the sight of a woman in a black swimming costume at the edge of the pool. She was drying her tanned thighs with a white towel. A fuzzy aureole of sunlight glittered off her limbs. From the mouth of the lion, water poured loudly into the slipper bath. The sun had shifted. When I sat up, she turned to look at me.

  “Ah, you are awake at last,” said Gabriella.

  “Have I been asleep long?”

  “You were dreaming when I arrived.” She removed the swimming cap and shook her hair free. “I hope it was a good dream.”

  “I don’t remember anything about it.”

  “Then you must try to catch it by the tail, quickly, before it vanishes.”

  Massaging the back of my neck with one hand, I said, “If it’s anything like the last one, I’d rather let it go.”

  She studied me a moment as she dried her upper arm, eyes narrowed, lips lightly pursed in disapproval. She draped th
e towel over her shoulders, closing its edges with one hand across her breasts. “Even troubling dreams mean well by us. We should hear what they have to say.”

  “Oh dear,” I said, “are you some kind of therapist?”

  “That would please you less than my being a contessa?” She laughed at my embarrassment. “Did not some clever person say that all professions are a conspiracy against society?” she said. “I agree with him.”

  “Perhaps you can afford to.” The doze, the beer, my frustration at the unanticipated delay, my reluctance to be in Umbria at all – this dislocating mix had made me needlessly rude. She knew it, and I regretted it.

  “In any case,” she replied, “is it not good to take an interest in the mysterious facts of our condition? I enjoy working with dreams as I enjoy good conversation or swimming. As I enjoy eating also. Look, Orazio has laid out lunch for us. There is salad, cheese, prosciutto and bread. If you like, he will make us omelettes with tartufi neri. It will taste of Umbria, I promise. The truffles were gathered this morning.”

  “I trust the dew is still on them?”

  After a moment, she smiled in response. “Excuse me while I find a robe.” If she was conscious of my gaze as she walked away, it did not trouble her.

  The robe was silk, its design Japanese. Under the shade of a mulberry tree, we ate at the marble table in the heat of the afternoon. The Contessa was talkative about everything except Adam and Marina, but I was enjoying her company and in no hurry to ruffle our conversation with pressing questions. Once we had agreed how delicious were the black frittate that Orazio had cooked for us, she informed me that truffles were the fruit of lightning. We talked about the previous day’s storm, which had been the first of the season, but I said nothing further about my dream. I congratulated her on the beauty of her home and, more wryly, on its grandeur.

  “Yes,” Gabriella agreed, “it is perhaps extravagant.” A gesture of her hand dismissed the thought. “Now we shall be serious. You will tell me all about your work. It interests me very much.”