Water Theatre (29 page)

“Marina is my friend. I care for her very much. We are speaking also of her mother, yes?”

“I see. Did Marina tell you about the coin?”

Ignoring the question, Gabriella looked out across the shimmering span of the pool, then back to where I sat at the water's edge. “Come. You had this coin from the dead. Is it not time that you gave it back to the dead? It will make a suitable oblation.”

“I can't. I feel that as long as I have it…”

“Yes? What then? What is the magic of this coin? Do you think you have your mother in your pocket?”

“It was precious to her as well.”

“Then return it to her.”

I got to my feet, but stood unmoving, remembering that snow-bound Christmas long ago at High Sugden, how Grace had given me the ancient silver coin, knowing how long I'd coveted it. I remembered how I had vowed to treasure it always, and had done so for a time, then put it away and forgotten it until the time of her death. Since then I had carried it with me everywhere.

“Come, let me see this coin,” Gabriella said. When I still made no move, she glanced at me almost in disdain. “Don't worry, you shall have it back. I cannot make the sacrifice on your behalf.” So I took the battered leather purse from my trousers' pocket and fished out the coin. Gabriella held
it up to the sunlight to inspect its eroded inscription. “Ah! L'imperatore Adriano,” she exclaimed, turning the coin over in her hand. “And here, on the other side, his lover, for whom he grieved so much that all the world was made to honour him as a god. Antinous. Was that not his name?” She glanced back up at me. “But do you think even an emperor can keep a loved one from death by locking memory inside a piece of metal? Even if it endures two thousand years?” When I failed to answer, she closed the silver coin in her fist and held it to her breast. “About Antinous,” she said abruptly, “tell me: do you know how he died?”

Still I said nothing.

“I think you must know that he drowned in the Nile,” she said, “while all around him the Egyptians were mourning the day of the death of Osiris. I think you must also know that Antinous was a fine swimmer. That it would have been hard for him to drown in the mud of the Nile, unless…” She removed her sunglasses again. “His clothes were found folded on the bank. Earlier he had made a sacrifice in the temple of Osiris. It seems he had already decided to make a sacrifice of himself.” She opened her fist, stared down at the coin, and then tossed it across to me. I snatched out a hand to catch and grip it. “Release her,” she said in strict tones that shocked me with their coldness. “Free yourself. Give this silver back to the underworld.” Almost as if my hands had been pressed against my ears to shut out every word she said, I could feel the pressure building inside my head. “Do it,” she said quietly. “Be done with her now.”

“My God!” I gasped. “Do you have no feelings at all?”

“Yes, I have feelings.”

“Well, right now I'm finding it hard to believe. You seem to have made up your mind to take away every last thing that matters to me. I don't understand any of this. What do you want from me?”

“Everything that can be taken from you.”

I stared at her in silence, beginning to understand just how absolute her claims were. I turned away to stare down
into the pool. The coin was gripped in my hand. I turned it over and over, feeling its substance, its worn surfaces and edges, its obstinate ability to survive. I remembered how often, at moments of uncertainty or stress, I had tapped it for solace without conscious thought. It was the single holy thing in my unholy life. I could not conceive of parting with it.

At my feet the surface of the water rippled and shone.

“Make the oblation,” Gabriella said quietly at my back.

“You don't know what you're asking.”

“Do you wish her to haunt your life for ever? Let it go.”

“I can't imagine what I'd become if I did.”

“That's exactly right,” Gabriella answered. “You will become that which you cannot yet imagine.”

Her presence was no more than a chilling whisper inside my head, a voice that might have been that of the water of Clitumnus, rising fresh and clear in each utterance of bubbles after its long journey through the underworld.

I must have held out and opened my fist, but it felt as though the coin my mother had given me delivered itself of its own desire to that clear spring. I saw it turn and sway and shine. I saw it drowning as it fell. Then it vanished in a blur of mud and light.

Eventually my eyes cleared and my breathing slowed. I stared at the water into which I had poured my life. In the stillness between my face and the reflection of my face I became a moment of pure vacancy. Time slipped by. And then, to a sound that might have been the throbbing of the universe, there came the inrush of the god.

I came awake to a soft knock and the sound of the bedroom door swinging on its hinges. A crack of daylight split the room. My eyes opened on the green binder of Adam's manuscript lying beside me. The bedside lamp was still lit.

Lifting my head, I saw Angelina carrying a breakfast tray towards the bed. Her chirpy “
Buongiorno, signore
,” was followed by a mutter of disapproval at the sight of me sprawled across the brocaded counterpane, still wearing my clothes from the night before. With a shake of her head, she put the tray down on the bedside table before swaying across the tiled floor to throw open the shutters onto the loggia. The morning light wafted into the room on a wave of heat.

I drank a strong espresso, took a shower and lay back on the half-tester bed in a borrowed bathrobe. Then I reached for the folder and glanced quickly through its pages, trying to decide once again why Adam had decided to inflict them on me.

I had read the document the previous night with growing unease. At first I was amused by Adam's satirical description of the gathering at the villa and his account of the visit to the barber. But amusement soon gave way to disbelief – not so much at Gabriella's behaviour at the
tempietto
, which seemed quite consistent with her tales of oracles and omens and the scaly-legged sibyl in her underground boudoir, but at the outrageous demands she made once she and Adam had arrived at the springs. The guarded young man I'd first met at High Sugden would have run a mile sooner than submit to such an ordeal of self-revelation. Yet Adam had gone along with it.

Knowing that I must be implicated in any disclosures he made, I had prepared myself for more, and for worse than his account obliged me to feel. He hadn't even mentioned me by name in what was, admittedly, no more than a brief summary of the most painful crisis of his life. I featured only in passing as the friend – the
closest
friend – who had betrayed him. Who had betrayed him
unforgivably
. But brief as the reference was, that last word had pierced me. It did so again as I reread it now. Was this Adam's way of telling me that if I had come to Umbria looking for reconciliation I was on a fool's errand? But what else did I expect? Hadn't I said as much to Hal back in High Sugden?

Or had Adam's intention been more challenging? Evangelical even?
You may have made me suffer abominably
, he seemed to be saying,
but I have transcended all that. I have re-imagined my life. Dare you do the same?

I looked again at the first page with its questionable five-point manifesto. Well, if this flaky talk of gods and oracles and sacrificial rituals was Adam's way of re-imagining his life, of putting his fugitive heart at ease, then he was welcome to it. I wanted no part in it. Again I wondered why I hadn't trusted my own judgement enough to refuse to come looking for him here in Umbria. I would certainly have preferred to live without the knowledge that he had so foolishly relinquished the rational powers of a mind I'd once admired. Or that his will had been so far corroded by despair that he was incapable of resisting a woman who was – he acknowledged it himself – as crazy as a hare.

And what about Marina? I'd lain awake half the night, yearning for all that had been lost between us. But it was clear from everything I'd seen and heard and read in this place that the people I'd known and loved no longer existed. They had changed so much it felt as though we no longer lived in the same universe. So why was I wasting my time here when my own real life was elsewhere?

Throwing the pages aside, I fished for my mobile phone in my jacket pocket. I'd switched it off during the previous evening's dinner party, and had been so eager to read what Adam had written that I'd forgotten to check it afterwards. Waiting for me was a voice message from Gail, a message filled with reproachful hesitations.

“Look, I'm sorry I was short with you earlier,” she began, “but I was feeling… well, you know what I was feeling. I think we've reached the end of the road… Anyway, I can't sit around here waiting for you to come back and hurt me again. So I'm taking that flight after all… I don't expect you to come after me. In fact, I don't
want
you to come after me. I really don't… And I won't be back, not this time… Let's face it, Martin, we're through. We've been through for quite a while now. We just didn't want to admit it, did we?” After a longer silence she sighed, “Oh what the hell!… Believe me, Martin, not all the memories are bad…”

After a time I went out onto the loggia. A fine haze hovered across the wooded hillsides and the plain, veiling the scene with a filmy, insubstantial air. I stood, suspended in beauty, wretched and bereft, staring down at the ornate fountain and the clipped hedges of the parterre. Then I began to boil with rage.

All this should never have happened. I should have been hiking the trails of the Cascades with Gail right now. We might have reconnected with each other again under that clear sky. Instead I'd let the Brigshaw family wreck my life once more.

I was bracing myself to go downstairs when a door opened at the far end of the loggia, and Allegra stepped barefoot onto the tiles. She was wearing a white, calf-length cotton nightdress. Her hair was loose and tousled about her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and then blinked across at me, saying, “I hope you slept better than I did.”

“I doubt it,” I answered. “I lay awake most of the night.”

“Something on your mind?”

“Lots. Too much. Mostly what a big mistake I made in coming here.”

Surprised by my tone, she said, “That seems a pity. Are we a disappointment to you then?”

“Not you.”

“Then who? My mother? It can't be Adam – you haven't spoken to him yet.”

“Marina's response to me was pretty much what I expected.”

“So Gabriella then?” Her eyes subjected me to sharper scrutiny. “Did you quarrel with her last night?”

“Why would you think that?”

Allegra shrugged and gazed back at the view. “I don't know. I just thought I picked up some sort of tension between you.”

“Perhaps because I don't accept her at as the fount of all wisdom.”

“That sounds rather bitter! Did she get under your skin?”

“Not bitter,” I said, “merely sceptical. As I am about most aristocrats. I don't care for the casual way she confronts people.”

After a moment she said, “But then you don't know her very well.”

“Well enough, I think.”

“Then you should know there's nothing at all casual about Gabriella.”

“Irresponsible then. Altogether too convinced of her own righteousness.”

“I rather think she has rattled you a bit,” Allegra smiled. “Her manner can have that effect at first. I've seen it happen before.”

Now it was my turn to look away. “Well, I'm sorry to disabuse you, but I can't say it bothered me very much.”

“You've changed,” she said quietly. “Since last night I mean. You feel different to me. Something not good must have happened.”

“You might say that.”

“Are you going to tell me about it?”

“It's nothing that concerns you. Nothing to do with anyone here.”

She stood, leaning on the balustrade, waiting for me to say more without demanding it.

Eventually I said, “I just picked up a message on my phone. My partner has left for the States. She made it clear she wasn't coming back this time. It seems I'm a single man again.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” she said.

“We've been through a lot together. I wasn't ready to let her go.”

“But it wasn't just your choice, was it?” She held my cold stare for an instant, then gave me a wry smile. “Or perhaps it was?”

“I see you like to speak your mind. You're like your mother in that.”

“I would hope so,” she said, then added, without looking at me, “Did she really break your heart? What happened between you and Marina?”

“I'd rather not talk about it. Anyway she'd only tell you I was lying.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because that's what she believes. Because life is sometimes so unjust it's more than possible for two well-intentioned people to do each other harm without either of them being wholly in the wrong.”

“You're speaking of some sort of misunderstanding?”

“Worse than that. I'm suggesting that there may be something perverse at the very heart of the way life operates.”

“I don't believe that,” she said firmly, and glanced away as if losing interest. “So what now? Will you be leaving today?”

“I don't see any point in hanging around.”

“Even though Adam wants to see you?”

“I doubt that he and I have anything much to say to one another these days.”

“Are you quite sure about that?”

“Sure enough.”

“He'll be disappointed,” Allegra said. “And I would have thought a good journalist would take more care to establish the facts of a situation before rushing to judgement. But it's up to you.” Then she turned away with a nonchalant shrug and went back into her room.