Water Theatre (55 page)

“As you did mine, in a different way. You Brigshaws turned me over in every way imaginable. You did it between you back
then, and you seem to have done it again here. I certainly can't go back to the way things were. Not now.”

“What about your job?”

“I think that's over,” I said. “My career began in Equatoria, and that's where it should end. I've done what I can. I know that in the great scheme of things it doesn't amount to much. And I'm getting too old for it. There are other, younger people already doing it far better than me – some strong women among them.”

“Perhaps you shouldn't be too hasty about that,” Adam cautioned me. “You may feel differently once you're outside this enchanted place.”

“I don't think so. I've no wish to crawl back inside my cage.” When I looked back at him I saw him shaking his head. “What is it?” I asked.

“I wonder if we're about to make another switch,” he said. “You and me, I mean. I've been thinking for a while that it's time I got out into the world again. I'm wondering whether it's time I went back to Africa.”

“To Equatoria?”

He nodded uncertainly. “I think there may be things I have to offer there. Finding out what's needed first, then looking for appropriate ways in which the Foundation's resources might be able to help.”

“Does this have anything to do with Efwa being there?”

“Not in the way you think. But what you told me about her has sharpened my thinking. I know that I let her down, Martin. I let her down in all sorts of ways. If there's anything I can do to help her now… Well, I believe I should do it. Don't you agree?”

I could see excitement in his eyes. I could feel it in his voice. But I was still unclear about his role in the Foundation, and I was puzzling over the strange rituals I'd seen in this place, that bizarre procession of fancy dress and masks a few evenings earlier. What could such elaborate fantasies have to do with
the pressing needs of a country that was suffering as Equatoria suffered? When I challenged him about it, Adam merely smiled. “What you saw,” he said, “was part of our celebrations before some of our key speakers had to leave.”

“You mean it was just a party, a social occasion?”

“Not just that. But what's so wrong with having a good time?”

“I still don't get it,” I said. “You're going to have to say more.”

Perhaps wary of my scepticism, Adam took some time to think before speaking. “As I told you the other night, we're about change,” he said eventually. “The Foundation is concerned with the dynamics of change in general – social, political and cultural change, yes, but change in individuals too – which means it comes from the ground up, not top down. Above all we're about using the transforming power of the imagination.”

I recalled the five-point mission statement on the first page of the folder in which Adam had filed his account of the meeting with Gabriella at the Springs of Clitumnus. I'd taken it for mere rhetoric at the time; now Adam seemed to be offering it as a serious and considered manifesto.

“That's still a bit on the vague side,” I said. “I have a lot of questions.”

“Then talk to some of the people here – particularly the students. They're the future. They're what Heartsease is about.”

“And what about Larry's part in all of this?” I pressed. “All his stuff about the Mysteries of Isis and the Revenant of Fontanalba?”

“Ah,” Adam glanced at his watch, “I can't explain that for you. If you really want to understand, you'll just have to experience it for yourself.” He got to his feet. “Look, I have a meeting in a few minutes. Let's talk again later – at dinner perhaps.”

As he turned to leave, I said, “Do you know where Marina is?”

“I haven't seen her all day,” he said. “Try her studio. It's near the water theatre: turn left at the arch, it's at the end of the courtyard, looking out towards the orchard.”

When I went back through into the courtyard I saw Allegra supervising two young men who were carrying clothes hampers through to the front of the house. “We have to return this lot to the costumiers today,” she explained cheerfully. “How are you this morning?”

“I'm feeling fine. Surprisingly fine. I was just looking for your mother. I gather she has a studio somewhere here.”

“It's over there.” Allegra pointed to the end door of the building across the courtyard from the house. Then she raised her eyebrows at me and said, “Good luck!”

“You think I'll need it?”

“Don't we all?” she said, and turned back to her work.

By now it was late afternoon and the light was fading towards sunset. When I knocked at the door of Marina's studio it was opened, to my surprise, by Larry's friend, Giovanni, who was dressed in grubby overalls and wiping his hands with a towel. I told him I was looking for Marina. He nodded, turned and called her name.

“Who is it?” she answered.

“It's me,” I said. “I've come calling on you. May I come in?”

A moment later I heard Marina say something in Italian, and Giovanni stepped to one side. The studio was lit by a large semicircular window above a workbench on the wall of the gable end. Wearing a blue smock and jeans, Marina sat perched on a stool there, doing something I couldn't see with her hands. The light from the window gleamed off her hair. She did not turn her head my way.

After a further brief exchange in Italian, Giovanni nodded to me again and went out, closing the door behind him. I took
in the contents of the room: a sink with large brass taps, a number of buckets, a row of jars and bottles filled with coloured powders, a stack of plastic sacks piled beneath a banistered staircase, and in one corner an electric kiln with its door open and three shelves perched on stilts inside.

“You're a potter,” I exclaimed.

“No,” she answered. “Giovanni's a potter. He has his own studio in the village. He comes out here every now and then to help with the things I can't do.”

Moving closer, I saw that she was turning a lump of clay in the palm of one hand, opening it, like the corolla of a flower, with the other. “I just like the feel of clay.”

I cleared my throat. “The other night,” I ventured, “you said we'd talk again.”

Carefully she set down the unfinished pot on the workbench, got up from the stool and crossed to the sink, where she washed her hands clean of clay and dried them. I saw from the confidence of her movements that she knew the exact location of everything in the studio.

“Shall we stay in here,” she said, “or would you rather be outside?”

“I like it here.”

She returned to the stool and sat down again, facing me this time across the room. From outside the studio came a clatter of wings as a flight of doves rose and circled and shone against the evening sky. After a long pause I looked back at Marina and said, “So, where do we go from here?”

She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair. “Nowhere,” she said. “We go nowhere. This whole thing's impossible.”

“It's not impossible,” I answered immediately. “Why should it be impossible?”

“Look at me.” She lifted her defiant face as if to outstare me. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Just think about the kind of life you live. How could the two things possibly go together?”

“They don't have to. I've already told Adam – I'm giving up that life.” She shook her head in dubious reproof. “And no, not because of you,” I said. “Whatever happens between you and me, I'm giving it up because I'm through with it now. I want to be human again.”

I heard the catch in her breath, saw her pass her hands through her hair again, and then bring them to rest at her cheeks, cupping her face.

“But I don't want to do it alone,” I whispered, moving closer to her, “not now. I want to do what we should have done all those years ago. I want to make a life with you.”

She lowered her hands, clasped them tightly together and then raised her head to face me. Even in that diminishing light, I could not believe I was invisible to her.

“Are you sure that's what you want?” she asked. “Are you really sure?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I'm absolutely sure.”

I saw the light of assent brighten her face. She lifted her hands, reaching for me through the dark. For the first time in too many years, we moved into a deep embrace. And then, for a time, we were both in tears. Perhaps both of us were thinking of that long-ago morning in Bloomsbury, when we agreed that the time and place of our next meeting would happen as a gift of chance. And because of that act of trust in life, and because of the failures of trust on both our parts which followed it, we had lost so much. Yet even so an assignation of love had been made that day, and it was time to keep it now.

“I love you, Marina,” I whispered. Softly she answered me. Our embrace reached deeper still. Then she broke away from our kisses and led me across the studio to the stairs, and up into a simply furnished room, where our bodies eagerly found and recognized the lovers they had lost. As the dusk gathered around us, our acts of tenderness and passion redeemed the years of loss, fulfilling all the promises once made by a love that had got deferred through error, chance and circumstance, and
yet remained strong enough to bless our life for years to come. We felt it now. We knew.

That evening, Marina and I were the last to enter the long chamber in the building opposite the water theatre which had been put into service as a dining hall. Allegra and Gabriella immediately approached us with a glint of purpose in their eyes.

“Well, it looks as though you two have begun to sort yourselves out,” Allegra said, smiling at her mother, while Gabriella took me by the arm saying, “Come with me. I wish you to meet a very important person.” She steered me across the room, past the table where Adam and Larry were sitting, towards a group of people who were chatting around an ornate fireplace. Among them stood a short man wearing an expensively cut woollen suit. His tanned, aquiline features wrinkled in a smile as he saw Gabriella.

“Ah there you are,
cara
,” he said. “I've just been hearing about the work that Molly here is doing in Northern Ireland. I am most impressed. It seems that your adventure of the imagination grows stronger every year.”

“With such good people how could it be otherwise?” Gabriella turned to me. “This is my husband Raffaele. His family have lived here at the villa since… oh I don't know when… Probably since Caligula came to make a bath
alle fonti del Clitunno
.”

Raffaele gave me a shrug of amused despair. “My wife has an extravagant talent for exaggeration,” he smiled. “Sometimes it confuses me also. But I think you must be Martin Crowther. Gabriella has been telling me of your work.”

“Has she indeed?” I returned his smile. “I don't think she entirely approves of it.”

“On the contrary. She expresses considerable admiration. But come, Angelina is ready for us, I think. Let us dine together with these young people” – he gestured to the three women and the black man in braided locks and a Manchester United
football shirt with whom he had been talking – “perhaps they will teach us how to improve the world.”

Gabriellamade off across the room as we sat down. Looking around, I saw Larry holding forth to Adam at their table, while Meredith and Dorothy were laughing among a group of young people. In a distant corner, Marina and Allegra sat deep in conversation, and were soon joined by Gabriella. Meanwhile a line of people had formed at a bar where Angelina was ladling soup from a large tureen. Despite the chandeliered grandeur of the room, the occasion had a relaxed and informal feel. Raffaele touched me on the arm and opened his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Forgive me, I was forgetting. In this company one must serve oneself. Shall we?”

Given the chance, I would have preferred to be sitting beside Marina, but I glanced her way every now and then and was relieved to see her smiling. The people around me spoke engagingly about themselves, and I soon began to build a clearer picture of who they were and what they were doing in the world. I learnt that the Irish woman's brother had been gunned down five years earlier on the Shankill Road. Now she was running a drama group for people from both sides of the sectarian and political divide in Ulster, encouraging them to tell their stories and to find common ground in the wounds and losses inflicted by the violence of that turbulent province. The young black man came from South Africa, where he was a law student working as an intern with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of the other women was Lebanese, a teacher from Beirut, who listened with critical interest as her friends discussed the problems they encountered in their work, and answered questions that Raffaele and I put to them.

When the meal was over, Raffaele pushed back his chair and turned to me. “I think I would like to smoke a cigar,” he said, “for which pleasure I shall go into the garden. Will you keep me company?”

“It's a remarkable thing that Gabriella's doing here,” I said, when we were outside.

“I do not always understand my wife,” Raffaele smiled across at me. “Sometimes she even alarms me a little. But I confess I admire her very much.” He eyed me with keener interest through a cloudy haze of smoke. “I understand you have been admitted to our beautiful water theatre. It is good to see it in operation again. Tell me, what did you make of that?”

“It was certainly an experience,” I said. “And yes, more than a bit alarming too.”

He seemed amused by the reply. “I think perhaps you are a braver man than I am,” he said. “For myself I prefer to keep my wife's activities at a distance. I find it safer so. Of course I raise funds for her adventures. I introduce people to her work. And truly I believe in it myself. But the troubles of this world are so big…” He opened his hands in an expansive gesture. “We understand this, you and I, do we not? So I think you will agree that what Gabriella and the others are trying to do, imaginative though it may be, is too small in scale, and perhaps a little too fanciful to make much difference?”