Water Theatre (12 page)

With the dogs bounding far ahead, plunging into drifts and clambering out again, pink-tongued, to shake their coats, they walked out under a sky that had cleared to a crisp, unblemished blue. Mostly they were silent, each absorbed in his own thoughts, but as they stood on a ridge of outcrop rock capped with frozen snow, Martin asked Adam about his time in Africa. Adam spoke at length about his childhood, how he and Marina had grown up there with their nanny, Wilhelmina Song, and their friends on the school compound, who taught them the traditional lore of animals and birds, of reptiles and insects, of witches, ghosts and spirits. Caught up in his memories, Adam went on to tell of a trip he had taken by steamer up the River Kra with Emmanuel and Hal. They were on their way to the forest city where the Olun of Bamutu, the most powerful of the colony's paramount chiefs, kept court. He remembered watching crocodiles glide away through the brown water, and the lean men who stood on their reflections, spear-fishing from pirogues. He remembered the sound of monkeys chattering in the trees as the forest drifted by in a haze of sunlight, and how villagers had gathered in crowds to stare in wonder at this white child each time he stepped ashore. By the time the steamer docked at Bamutu, the Olun's ceremonial durbar was already in full swing. Adam saw the chieftains carried high on their palanquins under flouncing parasols. He saw platoons of warriors gesturing with spears and muskets as they shouted and danced to the beat of drums and gongs. What he did not share with Martin, though it came vividly to his mind, was his memory of fainting that day. He had been carried through the excited crowd on his father's shoulders, and they were approaching the space kept clear before the Olun's pavilion when he saw the palpitating belly of a goat
tethered on the ground. He could feel the sweat from his father's brow beneath his hands, his own shirt sticky at his back. Unable to blink, he had watched a fetish priest draw a knife across the goat's white throat. In the same instant, the fringes of the sun, which only moments before had been a glaring yellow, seemed to careen into a livid green. Then the sky had turned inside out, revealing the darkness hidden there.

Listening to Adam's stories in the frosty air of that Pennine moor, Martin contemplated the banality of his own life. But when he remarked on it, Adam merely said, “Count yourself lucky. At least you were spared the bloody awful misery of the boarding school they sent me back to when I was a bit older. Hal said it was a good place to learn to know my enemy, and he was right about that. But I'd rather have stayed in Africa among my friends.”

“Was your school really bad?” Martin asked.

“As you see,” Adam answered, “I survived.”

Later in their friendship Martin learnt more of what lay behind that dry response. After the heat of equatorial Africa, Adam had shivered in the winds that thrashed around the unheated rooms of Mowbray College. The dismal morning ritual of queuing naked on duckboards over wet floors before plunging into a cold bath left him with chilblains and chapped lips and a permanent, snivelling cold. But it was only when he was made to fag for a prefect called Hedley Bingham that he had begun to grasp what his father had meant.

Bingo was a notorious bully who saw in Adam's shy independence of spirit a thing to be broken, and in himself just the man for the job. Having informed the frightened boy that he was no better than a savage out of Africa who would one day thank his tormentor for teaching him civilized ways, he turned Adam's time at school into an ordeal of misery and humiliation. Adam suffered in silence for as long as he could, but Bingham was too randomly cruel, and he himself too proud. Eventually he mutinied. When he refused to boil a pile of dirty jockstraps
that the prefects dropped at his feet one afternoon after rugby, Bingo took out his cane. Three mighty swipes across his naked buttocks later, Adam was still refusing to obey. Three more strokes were administered. The skin broke and began to bleed, but still he would not pick up the jockstraps. Cursing, Bingo lifted his cane, but was stopped by the house captain, Tom Hardesty. “Put him in the Hole,” Hardesty said with a bored sigh.

The Hole was a small cupboard that had been made from a blocked-up lancet window four feet up the rough flint wall of the house's attic staircase. It took three prefects to manhandle the scrawny boy into its narrow space and lock the door on him. Trembling, Adam crouched in the dark niche, with barely room enough to bang a fist. He heard Bingo summon Laurence Stromberg – a podgy boy who had already endured a year of this grim culture – and order him to stand on the stairs throwing a tennis ball against the cupboard door at head height until the mutinous fag howled for release. Then the prefects lounged against the wall listening to the dull thud of the ball for ten minutes or so before going down to their study, demanding to be called when Adam broke.

Still the boy held out. The tennis ball pounded against the cupboard door, and the reverberations of its planks shook inside Adam's head until he began to wonder whether the next thud must drive him mad. He was given a vision of hell then – an eternity confined inside a cramped space with only the pounding of a ball to mark the passage of time. The thought occurred to him that if he held his breath for long enough he might suffocate and die, and the pounding would stop and the whole school would be so shocked by the discovery of his corpse that no one would ever be allowed to suffer such torment again. For a fewmoments there was something almost voluptuously consoling in the prospect of a martyr's death, but despite the contortions of his will, his mouth burst open and his lungs sucked at the air. He told himself that, sooner or
later, someone must come along to drag him out of that hell-hole before he had the chance to die. Meanwhile his nose was bleeding and the pounding went on.

Almost an hour later, young Laurence Stromberg finally persuaded Adam to climb down. “For God's sake, Brigshaw,” the boy said, “it can only get worse if you don't toe the line. Don't imagine you can beat those evil bastards. You'll have to cave in sooner or later. Besides which, this is pretty bloody shitty for me too, you know?” Another thud shook the door. “Better be crafty than crazy, don't you think?”

The suggestion struck Adam with the cool, refreshing force of reason. He saw that neither courage nor principle lay behind his resistance – merely the brute stupidity of a frightened dog. Now his head was clearing. He saw that there was no justice among men, and very little mercy. For the first time he understood the rage and ardour with which his father believed in the absolute need to change the way the world was run. “All right,” he said, “tell them I'm coming out.”

When he fell stiffly from the opened cupboard, he blinked up in the sudden light, and saw Hedley Bingham standing over him with the cane in one hand and a jockstrap dangling from the other. “Lick it,” Bingham smiled, “lick it clean for me, there's a good chap!”

Out of the corner of his eye Adam saw Laurence give him an encouraging nod. A moment later Adam leant forward on his hands and knees, put his tongue to the sweat-stained cloth and stared into the eyes of his enemy.

His stream of thought had never run colder or more clear.

“There were times when I hated Hal for sending me to Mowbray,” he said now, as he and Martin turned to walk back to High Sugden, “but I'll tell you something – I came away from that awful place with a much sharper understanding of just why he's so passionate about freedom and justice.”

*

In the quiet time before dinner, Martin was lying on his bed when he heard a soft tap at the door. Marina came in and stood across from him with one hand held behind her back.

“I was wondering whether to come and see you,” he said, sitting up, “but I couldn't see how.”

“Just as well you didn't. I've only just finished this. It's for you.” From behind her back she brought a small sheet of cartridge paper. “Because I'm sorry about being bitchy with you last night.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to approach. Marina remained where she was, at a deliberate distance, extending her arm so that he had to get up and cross the room to see what she was offering. He held her gaze for a moment before glancing down at what she had given him.

“You painted this for me?” he said, and when she nodded he looked back at the picture of a young man in doublet and hose riding on the back of a fox. With one hand the youth gripped the red fur of the fox's neck, while the other was lifted from a slashed sleeve to clutch at his extravagantly plumed hat. Martin saw at once that it was an illustration of the story he'd told the previous night – the fox carrying the prince over hill and dale from one magical encounter to the next. A moment later he recognized his own features in the young man's startled face.

“I made him look like you,” Marina was saying, “because if you ever find your princess, it will probably be by doing the wrong thing at the right time, like him.”

“I didn't know you were an artist,” he said.

“I'm afraid that hind leg went a bit wrong.”

“No, the whole thing's brilliant. It's just how I imagined it.”

“You're to promise not to show it to anybody.”

“Not even Adam?”

“Not to anybody.”

He looked up into her insistent eyes. “I think Emmanuel knows.”

“Of course he does. But he's relaxed about it. He won't say anything. Africans are sensible about these things.”

“Anyway, I shall be gone tomorrow.”

“Lucky you!”

“Shall I get to see you again?”

“If you come back.”

This was less encouragement than he'd hoped for. “I'm not sure Adam will invite me. He didn't bargain on having me around for this long. I think I bore him.”

“That's just his stupid way of trying to stay superior. Actually he's intrigued by you. And I think you might be just what he needs. He needs a good friend – one who won't let him get away with anything.”

Martin stood, wondering at her utter absence of doubt in her own wisdom. “What makes you think I'd be any good at that?

“Because I think you're honest. You say what you think and you seem to mean what you say – which is probably why you rub him up the wrong way sometimes.”

“What about you?” he asked hoarsely.

This time it was she who glanced away. “You've never been in bed with a girl before, have you?” When he did not answer, she gave a little laugh, though it was not unkind. “I don't suppose it'll be long before it happens again.”

“With you?” he dared.

Glancing about the room, she spoke not to his face but to the angled reflection of his face in the full-length mirror set into the wardrobe door. “That depends.”

“On what?”

Marina merely shrugged, smiling, and pushed back a strand of hair behind her ear. “But in the meantime,” she said, “you're not to go chopping off any foxes' heads!”

Grace went to bed early that night, complaining of a headache. Hal relaxed from the wider anxieties pressing on his mind by provoking Martin into debate. It began with literature, shifted to
ethical issues, and was soon, as Hal had always intended, centred on politics. Emmanuel and Adam sat back, exchanging discreet smiles as Martin abandoned position after position under a dialectical assault conducted with such skill that he felt enlarged rather than quashed by each defeat. At one point, however, he looked up and caught a quick, swiping glance of disdain on Marina's face. More might be at stake, he realized, than he had so far seen.

“You don't question his premises?” she challenged.

“What's wrong with my premises?” Hal smiled.

Marina turned a cold stare on her father. “I didn't say there was anything wrong with them.” She swept her eyes back across Martin again. “But if he's got a mind of his own, he needn't just accept them as if they were written down on tablets of stone.”

Hal smiled across at Martin. “So do you think I'm playing God?”

“You don't believe in God, so why would you?”

“Words!” Marina snorted with contempt. “It's all just words, and I'm getting a bit sick of them. Suppose man isn't the perfectible animal you take him for, Hal – what then? Suppose all your theories are based on too high a view of him altogether? Suppose we just need to be bad sometimes, to be wicked even, to refuse to grovel under your high-minded moral imperatives. What if there's a dark part of us that would rather risk passion and tragedy than settle for a boring state of economic equity and social justice?” She was warming to her own eloquence. “Perhaps it has a bloody-minded preference for drama and turmoil and suffering? And suppose there's a good evolutionary reason why wickedness should flourish like the green bay tree? What if the real revolutionaries aren't utopian lefties after all, but diabolical angels who come whistling out of the dark with whips and tongs and temptations to shock the world out of complacency?”

Taken aback by this onslaught, Hal was about to answer when she added, “And don't patronize me by telling me I'm just being perverse.”

“On the contrary,” Hal coolly lied, “I was going to say that it's an interesting line to take.”

“Suppose it's not just a bloody line,” Marina shouted, exasperated by his mandarin composure. “Suppose I'm speaking for myself. Suppose I actually like chaos. Suppose I prefer sinfulness for its own perverse sake. How about that then? Suppose I tell you to take all your theories and schemes and good intentions, all your carefully worked-out positions on this, that and everything, and most of all your intellectual condescension, and…”

“Marina,” Hal raised his voice over hers, “that's enough. This is Emmanuel's last night here. If you're not interested in taking part in a civil conversation, you'd better go to your room.”

Marina got to her feet, staring at her father in silence. Then she scorched Adam and Martin with the same gaze and walked out.