Water Theatre (15 page)

Martin glanced away. “I've heard 'em often enough.”

Even at that moment, when the year was turning and the world changing with it, and both father and son might have yearned to reach out to each other from their separate worlds, there was this baffled shock of hostility between them. But then Auntie Vi came into the hall, where in a couple of minutes she would open the front door of her house at the midnight knock. With a stick in one hand and a welcoming glass in the other, she was already singing in her thin contralto warble:

And the moment had passed before Jack Crowther could find a way to say what was plain in his gaze: that he knew his son stood on other thresholds now, and this might well be the last New Year that the two of them would welcome in together. Instead he put a stubby-fingered hand on his son's shoulder and said, “All right, let's have you out there.”

Then Martin was out in the night, stamping his feet against the cold. In one of the houses he could see the monochrome flicker of a television screen. When he looked up, the stars shivered over Gledhill Beacon. He tried to see them for what
they were in Hal and Adam's uncompromising view of things – titanic accidents of stone and gas explainable by physics and chemistry and mathematical calculations, otherwise random and meaningless. The night smelt of alcohol and old snow.

He ran the words of the family's ritual greeting through his mind.
Here's a piece of bread for the staff of life, a piece of coal for the warmth of life, and a piece of silver for the wealth of life. And here's a kiss for the love of life
.

He was the stranger at the door. It was his role to usher in the New Year that was bearing down out of the dark on all of them, and who knew what promises or menace it carried on its wings?

Well, he had ventured beyond the mills and pubs and churches of this grimy town, beyond the humdrum activity of spinners, carders and slubbing dyers, of fat solicitors and sarcastic teachers. He had glimpsed intellectual horizons that reached across the Pennine summits, round the curving earth, out into the brown river mouths and steaming green rainforests of West Africa and beyond. History was on the move. The whole world was changing. And he too could change. For even though Hal had seemed to admit him to the order of manhood, those days at High Sugden had shown Martin how little he had so far grasped of life and its possibilities. It was a time for resolutions now. As the midnight strike of the Town Hall clock was answered by a peal of bells across the freezing air, he vowed that this year he would seize life with both hands.

Invited out to High Sugden again, he went in renewed pursuit of Marina. She proved friendly enough but elusive in the little he saw of her. Adam, however, seemed glad to welcome him back. Both he and Hal were eager to share news of Emmanuel's return to Africa, where he was now under arrest. Left restless by his own distance from events, Hal turned the visit into an informal seminar, and under his Socratic tutelage Martin was encouraged to observe both local affairs and international
diplomacy with critical attention, to analyse motivations, to reason things out, and at every significant turn to demand to know, “Who gains from this?” Meanwhile he began to understand the kind of courage it took to act with radical purpose in the world – as, by early February, Emmanuel was daring to act from his cell in Makombe Castle; as the crowds of students, trade unionists and market women dared to riot for his release on the streets of Port Rokesby; as Hal's ambitious plans for a free Equatoria dared to offer a template by which things might be made new.

As also, more perversely, Marina's rebellious spirit had begun to break out from under the weight of her father's ideological authority. Quite early in the year Martin was dismayed to learn from Adam that she was infatuated with Graham Holroyd once more. Most weekends they went out together, driving across the county in his scarlet sports car, drinking too much at extravagant parties with a boisterous crowd who all seemed to be the sons and daughters of mill owners, property developers and consultant surgeons.

For a time Adam affected to despise the sister he adored. Hal was out of all patience with her, while Grace could only worry over her daughter's hectic veering between explosions of bad temper and a blithe disregard for anything that might interfere with her pleasure. Compromised by loyalty to Holroyd's circle of friends, Marina declared that she now shared their disdain for the increasingly vocal campaign against nuclear weapons, of which Hal was a prominent spokesman. As Easter approached, her resistance to joining her family on the march to Aldermaston became intractable.

As it happened, Grace fell briefly ill around that time, so only Adam and Martin travelled by coach to London, where Hal was already closeted with the other leaders. On their elated return four days later, Marina became aware that she had denied herself an important experience. She listened in glum silence as Martin and Adam reported on how a crowd
consisting of no more than a few hundred good-humoured protesters had set out through the streets of the capital, only to grow in strength day by day, until the gathering outside the Nuclear Research Establishment at Aldermaston broke on the nation's consciousness as the most powerful demonstration of popular dissent since the Jarrow march. Filled with admiration, Martin described how Hal's bluff, charismatic manner had drawn many people into vigorous debate along the route as he articulated ways in which the aims of the march were related to the wider political and economic problems of the planet.

Among his listeners was the writer Miriam Stallard, whose controversial first novel,
The Mirror Room
, had attracted much attention that year. Her name was only one among a list of radical celebrities with which Adam later taunted his sister, but at its mention Marina could no longer conceal her regret for everything she had missed. “What was she like?” she asked Martin.

“She was brilliant,” Adam chipped in, to Martin's astonishment. “I can't remember when I last met such a fascinating person. More fool you, Marina, for not having come! But as you don't have much time for us pathetic lefties any more, I suppose it hardly matters.”

A few days later, Marina came back to High Sugden in a filthy mood to announce that she and Graham Holroyd would not be seeing each other again. About the reasons for the breakdown of the relationship, and the events surrounding it, she would say nothing. She withdrew inside herself, demanded the use of the haunted bedroom as a studio, and began to splash out her emotions on sheets of hardboard in collisions of carmine, purple, orange and black. If she had been volatile before, her moods were turbid and sulky now.

Martin arrived at High Sugden one Saturday to learn that she had been shut away inside the haunted room for three days. “She won't talk to any of us,” Hal frowned. Having returned from London the day before, already tired from a difficult
and ultimately unproductive bout of negotiations between representatives of Emmanuel's People's Liberation Party and delegates from Ambrose Fouda's conservative opposition, he had been further exasperated by Marina's refusal to respond to his approaches. “I'm just about at my wit's end with her. This has been going on long enough. I think it's time we called the doctor in.”

“Shall I try to talk to her?” Martin offered.

Hal shrugged, and Martin went uncertainly upstairs. He stood on the landing for a time before tapping at her door. At his third knock she said, “Oh for God's sake go away.” He cleared his throat and was about to say, “It's Martin,” but saw that his name would alter nothing. Then, out of nowhere he heard himself saying, “It's Jonas Cragg! That's my room you're in.”

Martin strained his ears at the silence for the best part of a minute before he heard the bolt drawn on the other side of the door. He pushed it open, prepared for a ruinous mess of paint and bed sheets, but the panelled room was tidy enough, its air only slightly tainted with the smell of turpentine and linseed oil. Marina stood with her back to him by the window, barefoot in her blue dressing gown, staring out across the valley. She neither turned nor spoke as he entered.

“Haven't we been here before?” he tried, and when she didn't answer, “Or somewhere very like it?” But the words elicited no response. He gazed at the loose fall of her hair above the belt of her gown, feeling his heart reach out at every accidental detail of her appearance. However stubborn this sullen mood might be, it was the simple, marvellous actuality of her being in the world that stirred his heart whenever they were alone together. Surely she must feel the longing in him? Surely she would respond?

“You wouldn't have let me in if you didn't want to talk,” he said.

Still she was silent. He cast about, looking for ways to provoke a response. “It's Holroyd, isn't it?” he asked. “Has that
selfish sod done something to hurt you?” He wanted her to look at him, to see that he was her gruff knight, the angel of retribution, standing ready at her command, her worried and unhappy friend.

“No,” she said, without turning, “it's nothing like that.”

“Then what is it like? Talk to me, Marina. How long are you going to let that crowd mess up your life like this?” He saw the blue cloth at her back begin to shudder then. Thinking she was about to cry, he wondered whether to move at once and take hold of her, but she dipped her head and crossed her arms over her breast so tightly that he could see her fingernails whiten at the curve of each shoulder. “I just wanted to be normal!”

“What do you mean?” he asked, bewildered. “You
are
normal. At least most of the time.”

“Ordinary, I mean,” she snapped back. “Satisfied to be ordinary. Like them.”

“I see,” he retorted. “Well, there's not much chance of that, is there? You're not ordinary. There's nothing ordinary about you. It's not your fate to be ordinary. You're special. You've always been special. You always will be. In fact, you're probably the most special person I know.”

When she snorted at that, he let his outrage show. “What do you want to be like that lot for? That's not living, that's just squandering and foolishness. It's pretending that nothing really matters because, as far as they're concerned, nothing does count for much, except money and having a good time. If you ask me, you've been throwing yourself away on them. You're worth more than that. There's such life in you, such special, extraordinary life…”

“I wasn't asking you,” she whispered.

“But I'm telling you anyway. I'm telling you what I know.”

“You don't know me.”

“I think I do,” he came back at once. “At least, I once knew
somebody
who lived here, and she wouldn't turn her back on
life like this. She might lick her wounds for a bit, but then she'd come out fighting.”

Not a muscle of Marina's body moved.

“So what about it then?” His voice was hoarser now. “Are you going to stay walled up here? There are people downstairs worried sick about you, you know.”

“Just leave me alone,” she said.

“You've been on your own long enough. I think you should put some clothes on now. I think you should come out on the tops with me and Adam and the dogs. It's where you belong, out there. Not cooped up like this.”

After a time, ignoring the continuing strength of her resistance, he heard himself say, “I'll see you downstairs then,” and left the room.

As he went back into the kitchen and the others turned to him with anxious faces, Marina's voice came angrily down the stairs: “Come back here a minute.”

He stood by the newel post, looking up where she stood on the landing, gleaming with fierce pride. “Just so you don't get the wrong idea,” she declared, “I was coming down soon anyway.”

“That's all right then” – he too held his head high – “I'm glad.”

“But thanks for trying.” With a quick, unrepentant smile she reclaimed the power between them. “You're my friend, Jonas,” she insisted. “My good friend.”

Later, the three of them set out together, following the dogs across the moor until they stood above the steep hollow of Sugden Clough, where the ruins of a burnt-out mill hung reflected in its own small dam. As they gazed down from an outcrop rock at the surface of the water shimmering in the breeze, Adam said, “Grace used to bring us swimming here. When we were kids.”

“When she still took an interest in things,” Marina frowned in reply. “She hasn't been up here for years.”

“Too busy worrying about you, I should think,” Adam retorted.

“Don't,” Martin put in, sensing their imminent collision, “it's too good a day.”

“The poet's right,” Marina declared. “Let's swim instead.”

But Adam and Martin only stared at one another in uncertain disbelief. High above their heads, a skylark scaled the blue air with its song.

“Come on,” she urged, “why not?”

“Because for one thing,” Adam answered, “it'll be bloody freezing. And for another we haven't got our swimming things. And you won't catch me jumping in there stark bollock-naked.”

For an instant, as though her brother's resistance had left her questioning the impulse, Marina hesitated. Then she turned to scoff at Martin. “Seems you don't know much about wild things after all.” With a contemptuous sniff she spurned both of them, jumped from the rock and ran down the slope with the dogs bounding beside her. Halfway towards the ruined mill house, she skidded to a stop and turned her head to glance back where Adam and Martin stood unmoving, hands in their pockets, not looking at each other, as a cloud passed briefly across the sun. Again she looked at the dam where the setters were drinking in snatches with their clumsy mouths. Through shadowy water she could make out the dim shapes where, half a century earlier, blocks of masonry and the cogged ironwork of machines had been tipped into the depths. The cloud moved on, and the surface glittered again.