Water Theatre (44 page)

I suggested that tribalism didn't offer much hope for the future, but when he countered with a reminder of the wretched condition in which Hal's policies had left the country, Efwa began to air her personal anxieties.

“I am worrying too much about my family in Adouada,” she said. “Now even the price of yam and cassava is too dear. Also is hard for them to get kerosene and petrol. As for Adam and me, we don't get money to send for them. Sometimes I am feeling too too bad about it all.”

The mood around the table had changed. Adam and I averted a political dispute which had nowhere to go, but now tensions between him and Efwa surfaced as she went on to complain about how hard-up they were.

“Soon I would like to have baby,” she finally admitted, “but Adam says we don't get enough money yet.”

“We just have to be patient, love,” he reassured her. “It won't always be like this. When the grant proposal gets accepted, the project will take off. Then anything can happen, you'll see. Once we're better off, you can have seven babies if you like – one for each day of the week.”

Efwa grunted dubiously, and he pulled a face at her. She put out her tongue at him, then burst into loud contagious laughter. I ordered more wine.

At least Adam had agreed to go to High Sugden. I felt sure I could use that as leverage on Marina, but our meeting was baffled on my part and distanced on hers. I scarcely recognized the stark, monochrome figure who came into the Brewer Street bar she'd suggested. Her hair was cropped short and dyed black. She wore a black leather jacket with black trousers, and was now wearing glasses with severe black frames. In the old days I might have teased her about such drastic changes, but her manner discouraged me. Even so, I tried to reach out to her, but our exchanges seemed fenced with razor wire. She asked about my work only to dismiss television as “a toxin for the public imagination”. For the first time in my life I began to feel hostile towards her, and decided to get quickly to the point before we teetered into some stupid argument that might wreck any chance of persuading her to visit High Sugden.

She listened to what I had to say about Hal with a sceptical twist to her lips before saying, “There's no point. It will only go wrong again.”

“Hal doesn't want that to happen,” I countered. “Why should you?”

“I don't. That's why I'd rather not go. I don't need that kind of grief.”

“What is it between you and Hal?” I asked.

She merely shrugged, stubbed out her cigarette and stared through a grimy bottle-glass window into the crowded Soho street.

I said, “Your mother thinks you only fight with him the way you do because you love him.”

“I've never been impressed by my mother's grasp of psychology,” she retorted at once. “In any case, how can you love someone if they won't accept you for what you are?”

“People can change.”

“You certainly have.”

“You too, Marina,” I replied with equally critical force. “And so has Hal. Say what you like, but I don't think he's in any mood to pass judgement on you right now. He just misses you. He misses you very much.”

But the best I could extract was a promise that she would talk to Adam about it.

“If I go at all,” she said, “it will only be to help him out.”

Looking – too late – for a way to breathe some warmth into our meeting before she left, I asked about the progress of her work. She told me that there was currently an exhibition of her paintings in a small East End gallery. “If you're interested,” she said without enthusiasm, “go and look.” I said that I might just do that, and we parted a few minutes later.

Though I concealed my dismay at her unresponsive manner, watching her walk away felt like surgery, part of me detaching itself and migrating to some other life. But if Marina had been chilly and distant in person, the impact of her work was fiery and immediate. Large abstract canvases blazed across the gallery in lightning strikes of crimson, smoky whites and magnesium yellows. Was this what had become of her passion then? Had it all been consumed by the power of an inward vision to erupt across these canvases in hot conflagrations of paint?

I wanted to buy one of the bigger pictures, but their scale was far too large for the walls of my flat. The smaller studies were less dramatic, but one of them burned with an intense smoky glow, like the opening of a furnace door. I wrote a cheque and took it away with me, a keepsake of the Marina I would always love.

Having observed the scope for disaster in Hal's reunion with both his daughter and his son, I had no regrets about missing the party at High Sugden. I was surprised, therefore, by Hal's description of it in a letter he sent afterwards.

“All things considered,” he wrote, “the do went rather well – largely I have to say because of the way Efwa's bubbly spirit took the edge off things. I never really got to know the girl back in Port Rokesby, but I see now what attracted Adam to her. She's full of warmth and jollity – she has a great sense of fun – reminded me of everything in that marvellous continent that warms my heart. Things were much stickier with Marina, of course, but I was on my best behaviour (Grace's orders) and my tempestuous daughter managed to get by without starting a row. I can't say I thought much of the bloke she brought with her though – an opinionated lizard called Jeremy, who charitably gave us the benefit of his Olympian views on Art in words of such mind-numbing abstraction that Efwa almost collapsed in squeals of mirth. Too much brain, I thought, too little human feeling, and at least a decade too old. But if he makes Marina happy, who am I to carp? Not that I can quite believe he does – she looked withdrawn and peaky to me, and I don't think that was all my fault. Something not right there. But I suppose we ageing parents understand our adult children no better than they understand us! Anyway, I want to thank you for your part in making it all happen. I shan't forget it. If there's anything I can ever do for you, just say the word.”

That letter, together with Marina's painting, was all I saw of the Brigshaws for some time after that. I was immersed in the demands of my work and caught up in casual affairs that had nowhere to go. I was beginning to wonder whether my efforts to help heal the rifts in that complicated family had spelt the end of my connection with them when Hal rang me one evening out of the blue. He told me he would be coming down to London more often, that he would be working with Emmanuel's son Keshie and his group of exiled Equatorians, and that he still had influential contacts on the world scene who wanted to keep in touch with him.

“Some interesting straws in the wind,” he said. “We're not finished yet, old son. Not by any means. The thing is, because
Marina has colonized the family flat, I've got nowhere to stay. Any chance you might put me up every now and then?”

I was still sufficiently in awe of Hal to be gratified that he should call on me for help, and still sufficiently driven by secret guilt to feel I could refuse him anything. In any case, I owed my entire career to him, and that career took me out of the country for so much of the time that I had only occasional uses for the flat. So I was happy to give him a key on the clear understanding that he wouldn't hang about there when I got back.

The first time he came down to London we spent the evening together, and I was immediately impressed by how much better he looked. His stomach troubles had gone, he had regained his weight, and long hikes across the Pennine hills had built back his strength. His skin shone healthy and clear, the Viking glint was back in his eyes, and though his hair was wintering towards white, he might have been a decade younger than his fifty-seven years. Also, along with his vigorous good looks, his appetite for life had returned, so I wasn't entirely surprised when, at the end of his third brief visit, he said, “I was wondering how you would feel about my bringing a friend here every now and then?” He gave me his most raffish smile. “Shouldn't think it would bother you too much, would it?”

“A friend?”

“Just hypothetical. Probably never happen. But if the chance turned up?”

Predatory and amused, his eyes drew me into complicity. We were men together, weren't we? We understood one another.

“Of course there's no reason why Grace should know about it,” he added. “Only upset her after all.” And when I didn't reply: “Not that I'd want to upset you either. Don't mind my asking, I hope?”

“I was just thinking about the practicalities.”

“Yes, of course.” He angled his brow at me. “Well… what do you think?”

What
did
I think? I remembered every kind thing that Hal had done for me. I remembered what had happened behind his back some years ago. I thought that whatever Hal wanted of me, Hal must have. It was the price.

“It's up to you,” I said. “But I'd rather not know too much about it.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “It would only happen while you're away, if at all. I wouldn't want to compromise you in any way.”

We didn't discuss the matter again. For all I knew, he could have been sharing my flat with the city's most expensive hookers while I was out of the country, but he took care not to interfere with my privacy. When I was in London the flat was exclusively my own. I drank too much wine in those days, and smoked too much dope. Yet somehow I held my life together. Just.

I first learnt of my father's failing health through a routine phone call I made to tell my mother I'd got back home safely from the latest assignment. Almost as a dubious afterthought she mentioned that he'd been complaining about a nagging pain in his stomach.

“He says it's just a touch of indigestion,” she said, “but he will keep going on about it.”

I caught the trace of suppressed anxiety in her voice. When I heard that he'd been complaining about the pain for more than two weeks, I told her she should get him to see a doctor.

“You know what he's like about doctors,” she said.

But the next thing I heard was that he'd been sent for an X-ray and then quickly admitted to the men's ward at Calderbridge General Hospital for an operation.

“They say it's a blockage,” my mother said, “so it's just as well they're getting it sorted out.”

The news did not reassure me. A colleague put me in touch with a friend who was a consultant at one of the London teaching hospitals. He described my father's condition in less
euphemistic terms. I decided to go home that weekend, but by the time I arrived in Calderbridge, the operation was over. His belly had been stitched up to his satisfaction, and even though dark shadows clung around his eyes, he was looking forward to early discharge almost with an air of defiance.

Grey with worry by then, my mother had also lost weight, but she was relieved that it was all over. I left them alone together while I went to ask the matron how long it would be before my father could go home. She hesitated a moment and then said that it would be best if I had a word with the surgeon.

He too sized me up quickly before telling me that the tumour was already far advanced, and that he had found secondary growths. “We've done what we can for your father,” he said, “but I'm afraid he doesn't have much longer to live. We'll be sending him home shortly. The district nurse will come in to see him every day. But I think your mother's going to need some support.”

None of this was disclosed to my father by the hospital staff, and he was so cheered by the prospect of getting back to his life that I decided I could say nothing either. But my mother had to be told. She had to be told in time to get over the first devastating shock before he returned home. White-faced, I held her as she wept. Later I made some urgent calls. I was due some leave, and the company agreed to extend it on compassionate grounds.

Three weeks later my father died. By then he'd understood what was coming. “If anything happens to me,” he said, “you'll take care of your mother, won't you?” I promised him I would. Soon after that, he was so far gone inside his morphine dreams that he no longer suffered from the bedsores on his back. In one of his rare moments of almost complete lucidity, I asked how he was feeling. He mumbled, “I'm as happy as the flowers in May.” They were the last words he spoke.

He died on a stiflingly hot day in mid-June, three days before what would have been his fifty-eighth birthday. On her visit that
morning, the district nurse expressed her concern at my mother's depleted condition. She asked how long I would be staying with her, and nodded thoughtfully when I told her I would have to leave for London soon. Since then I've often wondered whether she pumped a merciful overdose of morphine into my father's bloodstream before she left. Whatever the case, later that morning we heard a change in the sound of his breathing, and when I went upstairs to check how he was, I found him deeply unconscious, eyes half open, mouth agape.

Throughout that hot afternoon my mother and I sat in the parlour together, hearing the sounds of the continuing world outside, hardly speaking at all. Nothing we said could cancel out the sound of my father's breathing, like a saw dragged back and forth across wet wood. She sat beside me, wringing her tense hands, a slight figure in her floral housecoat, her face drawn, the skin around her eyes dark with exhaustion and grief. Already my father was elsewhere in some narcotic zone, where I imagined him dreaming himself back at sea on a long Atlantic convoy with a steep dark crowding from the Arctic at his prow. And here were my mother and I, left alone together again, as we had been left alone in my childhood when he was gone with his friends to the war.

I was astonished by the number of mourners who came to my father's funeral at Bridestone Royd. His surviving brothers and sisters and their families were all there, of course, but so were neighbours from the street, a few office workers from Cripplegate Chambers and many of the staff and employees from Bamforth Brothers' mill. Looking around the chapel, I also saw faces that were new to me – friends from the Working Men's Club and people who had enjoyed his company for years in pubs and clubs around the town. Tightening my arm round my mother, who wept shaking beside me, and humbled by the discovery that my father was held in such regard by so many people, I found myself envying – if one
can
envy the dead – his
lifelong membership of this closely bonded world mourning his loss.