Water Theatre (54 page)

“Isn't that better than doing the wrong thing for the right reason? Or what I thought was the right reason? I've already wasted half my life that way. Don't ask me to throw away any more of it.”

“I'm not asking you for anything.”

“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why are you withholding yourself this way?”

“Why did you withhold the truth from me?” she countered.

“I've told you already.”

“And that kind of moral evasion is consistent with your idea of love? Do you really believe that anyone has the right to keep another person ignorant of something as vital to the whole fabric of their life as that?”

“No, not if they have something to gain from withholding the knowledge. But I didn't, Marina. I only had something to lose.”

I watched her withdraw again into silence, putting a hand to the rock formation as if for support. But I had not made that journey through the dark only to lose her again as I had lost her all those years ago,

“I came because I want you back,” I said.

Her chin tilted as she took in my words. Then she shrugged with a weary air of resignation. “It's too late. Everything's different now. That time's gone. We live in different worlds, you and me. You don't know who I am any more.”

“I know who you are for me.”

“You knew the woman I was thirty years ago. Everything in my life has changed since then. You know almost nothing about me now. You have no idea about my life, about what I do here, about what matters to me.”

“You don't think that, after what I've just been through, I'm beginning to get some sense of it?” Some of the rapture of release I'd felt on first emerging from the tunnel had returned to my voice. “I don't pretend to understand everything that happened down there, but it feels as if it's altered everything. It feels as though something new can happen now. That's what I want. That's what I want with you. Everything is still possible. All you need to understand is that my feelings for you are as true now as they were that night in London. I loved you then, Marina, and I love you still.”

“Why aren't you listening to me?” She tossed her head impatiently. “We're not the same people we were then. It must be obvious I'm not the person you once knew.” Before I could argue she pressed on. “You don't have to take my word for it. You've seen the paintings I've done while I've been here. Do you think the woman you used to know could have painted them? Did you even recognize them as mine?”

With growing confidence I told her that I had indeed recognized her clearly in the huge mural on the walls of the painted room, that I'd seen her kneeling there, surrounded by all the dreadful things that life can do to us. I told her that her presence among those images had shown me just how much we must have in common still, because if I were able to paint my own self-portrait it would look a lot like that – a man on his knees in the middle of some heart-breaking atrocity or other.

Her lips had opened slightly. She uttered a half-suppressed gasp of astonishment.

“What is it? I asked.

“It's nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“It's just that for much of the time I was working on that painting I was thinking of you. Of your work. Of what you do.”

“You see?” I said. “We do know each other after all.”

“There's a difference,” she insisted. “For you, the horror seems to be out there in the world. For me, it's in here.” She put a hand to her chest. “Every detail of that painting is me, my self-portrait – not just the figure you focused on. I can still see it all. I only have to look inside.”

“And you don't think that's true for me too?”

“I'm not just talking about remembering it,” she said. “I'm talking about owning it, about admitting it as an undeniable part of who we are. Yes, I know that you've been enduring the most terrible things for years, observing them, reporting on them, capturing them on film. You must know far more about the atrocities out there than I ever will, but I'm not sure that you have anything other than a literal understanding of it all.”

I shook my head at that, wondering what could be more literal and real than the devastations of war. But this wasn't what I wanted to talk about. “Does it matter?” I protested. “I think we both got lost in the sheer awfulness of things because of what happened all those years ago. But we can't answer for all of the misery in the world. And we don't have to let it blight our lives for ever. Not now. Not any more.”

Candle flames swayed and flickered around us. She put the palms of her hands together and brought them to her lips as she rocked her body slowly back and forth. In little more than a whisper she said, “I don't even know what you look like now.”

Moving closer, I reached over and took hold of her hands. She started a little as I lifted them to my face. Tentatively her fingers began to explore my temples under the receding hairline before moving with more confidence round the orbital bones of my eyes to the ridge and contours of my nose. They followed the creases etched from the curve of the nostrils to the taut line of my mouth and on into the groove above the lips. Stubble
rasped as her palms closed over my chin and jaw. Her fingers made their way towards my ears and back to the temples. My skin trembled at a touch which felt as intimate and revelatory as a prolonged meeting of the eyes.

“You're older, craggier,” she said at last. “But it's still you.”

“Yes,” I whispered, “it's still me.”

Sensing that I was about to gather her in my embrace, she lifted her hands from my face and pulled away.

“Think about it, Martin – even if everything else made sense, the last thing you need is a blind woman in your life.”

“Is that what's bothering you?”

When she didn't answer I said, “Listen to me, Marina. I've spent years since that time in London trying to forget you. I've tried and I've failed. It's the most dismal failure of my entire life. Why else do you think I haven't been able to hold another relationship together since then? Why do you think I got hooked on chasing catastrophes around the world? And yes, it agonizes me that you've lost your sight. But it doesn't change my feelings for you. It doesn't change anything. Not for me.”

For a moment I felt I had won through. I sensed her teetering on the very brink of assent. Then she drew in her breath sharply and edged further away. “Let's not talk about this now,” she said. “We're bound to get things wrong like this. I need time to think about everything that's happened tonight. And so do you. You need to come down. You need to rest. You need to get back inside your skin again.” Supporting herself against the rock, she rose to her feet. Her free hand reached for me. “Give me some help to get out of here now,” she said. “We'll talk again tomorrow.”

Her voice left no room for protest or demurral, but her hand felt receptive to my touch. I took her arm to support her as we crossed the uneven floor of the cave, but once we came out into the entrance passage she freed herself, leading the way confidently through the familiar darkness. We stepped out through the door into the cold of the night air, where
the cascades pouring down the façade of the water theatre shone like frost in the moonlight. Without pausing, Marina walked around the pool, making for the tunnel. Her silence felt inviolable and, as much as I wanted to seize this moment to make a further declaration, I sensed that it would be wrong to push her now. In any case, it was too late, because Larry, Orazio and Angelina were waiting for us in the night.

“Ah, there you are at last,” Larry said. “You must both be exhausted. Martin, old soul, you'll be glad to hear that Angelina has some food for you. Then Orazio will show you to your bed.” He turned to Marina. “As for you, my dear – Adam has filled me in a little about what you've been through. I think it's time that you too got some rest.”

Many hours later I woke up to the sound of singing in the garden outside– a duet of female voices, softly accompanied by a lute. I remembered holding Marina the previous night, holding her just long enough to feel the truth of her response. I remembered eating something and then being shown to a bed, where I lay down convinced I would stay awake all night, only to plunge at once into unbroken sleep.

By the time the singing woke me, bright bars of daylight streamed through cracks in the shutters. I guessed that more than twelve hours must have passed. I crossed to the window, opened the shutter and looked down to where Allegra and Meredith were sitting on a marble bench, singing an Italian folk song in the green shade of a mimosa tree. Fra Pietro sat across from them, smiling with closed eyes as he fingered his lute. A blue haze of afternoon sunlight hung about them.

Though they must have heard the noise of the shutter opening, not one of them looked up. So I stood at the window unobserved, breathing the scented air, listening to the music, utterly present in the moment, and filled with the exhilarating conviction that, after long years of exile in the shadows, I had at last been returned to life.

When I came down from my room, the trio had vanished. No one else was about in the courtyard. I looked through the arch into the water theatre and saw that the cascade was not operating, so I passed on down the stairwell to the lower garden and the swimming pool, and found that area deserted too. I had no idea how many people were staying at the Villa. Maybe most of them had left? Or perhaps they were all assembled somewhere or had withdrawn for a siesta? In any case, I was impatient to see only one of them, and I was glad of this chance to come quietly awake before re-entering the world.

I dived into the pool and swam several lengths, delighting in the touch of water and the shimmer of light it cast among dark cypresses. When I hauled myself out, I saw Gabriella approaching from the direction of the stairs.

“So you are returned to us at last,” she said.

“I must have been asleep for hours.”

“Many, many hours. I think more than thirty.”

I looked out in amazement as I dried my hair with a towel.

“It's true. I think also you must be very hungry.”

“I'm famished.”

“I will ask Angelina to prepare something for you. Later we shall all eat dinner together. You are welcome to be among us, if you wish.”

“So everyone is still here then? All the people I saw?”

“Not all. Some have left. Some had left even before we came to greet you. And this will be the last night together for the others.”

I recalled the feeling of emerging out of darkness into a bright otherworld, and the throng of people who applauded me in the cave. “This has all begun to feel a bit unreal,” I said. “Like a dream or something.”

“But are not dreams also real? Are they not sometimes more real than things we wrongly believe to be true?”

“Yes,” I said, answering her smile, “I believe that sometimes they might be.”

“Good! This is an improvement.”

“If so,” I said, “it may have something to do with the surprise you all jumped on me.”

“Not
jumped
,” she smiled, wagging a corrective finger at me, “
springed
.”

“Not
springed
,” I said, “
sprang
.”

Gabriella flapped her hands in exasperation.

More seriously I said, “Marina and Adam must have passed on what I told them.”

“Of course. And it seems that you are not so much a
meschino
as I thought. A little foolish sometimes perhaps, but not a wretch. This too is an improvement.”

“I'm glad you think so. Is this why I'm now invited to meet your other friends?”

“Also because, as I have said, certain among them are already gone.”

“The ones I might have recognized?”

“Perhaps.”

“So are you going to tell me more about the mysterious Heartsease Foundation?”

“Dine with us tonight,” she answered, “and find out for yourself. Also there is someone important that you must certainly meet.”

I said I looked forward to it, and then finally got to put the question that had been on my mind throughout the conversation. “Have you seen Marina today?”

“Of course.”

“How is she?”

“I think perhaps,” Gabriella said, “I must leave her to answer for herself.”

Angelina brought me a tray of food down to the pool. As she arranged a dish of gnocchi and some bread on the marble table, her Italian prattle felt as amiable as it was incomprehensible. I was relishing every mouthful of the food when Adam came to sit with me beside the pool.

He told me that he had been waiting for me to wake so that he could talk to me again. He had been thinking things over since leaving the cave. He wanted me to know that if I had told him the truth about Hal all those years ago, he might have been destroyed by it. Even as things were, he admitted, it had taken him years to pull himself together again after that disastrous time.

“But I want you to know that I understand just how much your silence cost you,” he said, “and though there's nothing I can do to make up for that, at least I can keep my side of the deal and go back to see Hal.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” I said, trying to lighten things a little. “After all, a deal is a deal.”

“Even though neither of us knew quite what we were letting ourselves in for.”

We sat in silence for a while, each preoccupied with his own thoughts, until I glanced across at him and said, “Do you remember Jonas Cragg?”

“Of course,” Adam laughed, “how could I forget old Jonas?”

“I think I believed in him rather more than you did.”

“I was an incorrigible sceptic in those days,” Adam said. “And the son of one too. It took an original like you to reopen my imagination.”