Water Theatre (9 page)

That night at High Sugden the electricity and telephone cables went down, leaving them with only candles and oil lamps for lighting. On Sunday morning the sun rose late over the white silence of snow. With the television set and radio out of action, no news came in from the outside world. For a time they were even shut inside the house by a drift that leant its soft barricade against the door, and the lane down to Sugden Foot proved impassable. Yet, far from imprisonment, that exile from the world spelt release for Martin Crowther. And the key to his release was conversation – exchanges rambling far into the night with a depth of intellectual passion so far beyond his previous experience that he was left staggering about for arguments.

On the Sunday morning he and Adam dug a path out of the house where snow had drifted into brilliant dunes across the yard. The digging ended in a brief snowball fight with Marina while the dogs bounded around them, barking. Then, after lunch, the three of them went sledging in the frozen afternoon.

Later, as a bloodshot gloom gathered over Calderbridge, Hal, Grace and Emmanuel strode out to watch them. Careering feet first and upright, Marina whooped and screamed as she slid out of control and poured herself smoothly into a drift. The sledge skewed on down without her, but she was quick to her feet, brushing snow from her coat, disdainful of Adam's jeers. By the time Martin had retrieved the sledge and drawn it to the top, Hal had decided that he and Emmanuel would ride it together. The African crouched at the prow, wide-eyed with laughter, gripping the sides as Hal pushed off from the rear,
leapt aboard behind him, and the two friends skidded away in a swerving dash that tipped them both, giggling like drunks, into the snow.

“Bugger it,” Hal shouted back up the hill, “one of the runners has come adrift.”

“In Hal's schemes,” Grace muttered to the wind, “there's usually a screw loose somewhere.” Beside her, Martin stared in amazement at the two men, his breath condensing to laughter on the winter air.

Walking back home across the hill, Emmanuel clutched his coat collar at his cheeks as he told Martin that one day he must come to Equatoria and learn how life should truly be lived. He spoke of the fragrant rainforest heat that dampened the air of Fontonfarom, the town on the upper reaches of the River Kra where he had lived as a child. He told Martin how he had been born on a Monday sometime in the second decade of the century, the youngest of six children fathered by a peasant farmer who had served for many years on the council of elders. Their people, the Mdemba, were the smallest of the tribes whose traditional lands had been colonized as British Equatorial West Africa. “It was our good fortune also,” Emmanuel smiled, “to live far from Government House in Port Rokesby. So now you are thinking, ‘How does this black man come to be shivering here in the snow?' I will tell you.”

Not long after his arrival among the Mdemba, a Methodist preacher called Goronwy Rhys had recognized the precocious intelligence of the eight-year-old Keshie Ofarim Adjouna. The boy already sat at the feet of the Paramount Chief on ceremonial occasions, his face painted white to signify his office as ritual soul carrier. Baptized now as Emmanuel, he was also the devout young Christian who sang soprano in the Mission Chapel choir. Over the years, the Welshman had supervised his protégé's progress through elementary, middle and secondary education, and on Emmanuel's return from military service in the Second World War he had arranged for him to go to the
newly established Teacher Training College at Port Rokesby. It was there that this eloquent and ambitious young man had first encountered the charismatic energy of H.A.L. Brigshaw. “And the rest,” he grinned, “will soon be history.”

Just then, as they approached the house, they heard a ringing in the dusk.

“They must have fixed the phone line,” Marina shouted, and ran on ahead.

She was standing in the hall with a resentful face as the others came in. “It's for you,” she said to Martin, and went up to her room.

“You might have put the kettle on,” Grace called after her, but there was no reply.

When he went through into the downstairs study, Martin was astonished to hear his mother's voice down the line. “This is the third time I've tried,” she said, slotting more coins into the box. He knew how much effort it must have cost her to risk this call to people she had never met. Was something wrong?

“The line's been down,” he said. “We were out sledging on the tops.”

“You're having a nice time then?”

“Yes, it's great.”

“Your dad got your message at the pub, so we knew you were all right. But you've not got a stitch with you. To put on clean, I mean.”

“It's all right. Adam's lent me some stuff.”

“Oh, I see. Well, so long as you're being no trouble.”

He glowered at his reflection in the dark window glass. The silence of the line stretched between them. He withdrew inside the walls of that ancient house, inside the thick dusk of the high hillside moor that was already stiff with cold. What could he say that would make sense to her about the life of this extraordinary family?

She said, “We'll see you when we see you, then.”

“Tomorrow probably.”

“Right.”

“Or the next day. It depends when they clear the lane. It's isolated up here.”

“I should think so. Wouldn't care for it myself.”

“No, I don't suppose you would.”

“Well, you won't forget to say thank you to Mrs Brigshaw for me. For putting you up and looking after you, I mean.”

“Course not.”

“All right then. Take care of yourself.” Before her money had expired, she put down the phone. Martin replaced the receiver and stood in the book-lined study filled at once with relief and remorse. His hands, he realized, were throbbing from the snow. Almost immediately the phone tinkled as a receiver was lifted somewhere else in the house and another call made.

Grace and the men were in the kitchen by the Aga, waiting for the kettle to boil, so it must have been Marina on the telephone, impatiently making contact with her own world. Not until half an hour later, when her father picked up the receiver in his study and told her to clear the line, did she stop talking. Martin was coming down the stairs from the lavatory as Marina walked head down into the hall. When she looked up at him, her eyes were raw with tears.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Everything. Just every bloody thing, that's all!”

“Anything I can do?”

She glared up as though bewildered by this concern, then she shook her head and brushed past him, making for her room. Called down to dinner an hour later, she refused to come. Hal was all for fetching her to the table, but with a wan, apologetic smile at Emmanuel, Grace advised her husband to let their daughter be.

“She seemed very upset,” Martin put in.

“Trouble with the rugger-bugger, I expect,” said Adam.

“Which one is that?” asked Hal.

“The Holroyd boy,” Grace supplied. “Graham.”

Adam said, “He probably got seduced by some other tart last night while Marina's back was turned.”

Grace winced at her son. “Must you use that awful word?”

“But I think her heart will be aching,” said Emmanuel.

“She'll get over it,” Hal decided.

“Of course,” Adam added, buttering a thick slice of bread, “once she's milked it for all the drama she can!”

After the meal Grace said that she wanted an early night and left the men talking together before the open fire in the sitting room. On her way to take a bath, she knocked at Marina's door and was told to go away. Rather than provoke a fit of rage that her daughter might later regret, Grace sighed and made her way to the bathroom, where she soaked for a long time by candlelight with a gin-and-tonic beside her. Downstairs the men talked on.

The independence of India. The defeat of the French at Dien-Bien-Phu. The ignominious debacle of the Suez Crisis. The triumph of the People's Army in China. The callous exportation of conflict from the prosperous northern hemisphere to the rainforest farms and flooded rice paddies of the south, and a growing understanding of how an inexorable cabal of political, military and economic interests was disfiguring the lives of millions who lacked any notion of geopolitics. Until this snowbound weekend at High Sugden, Martin Crowther had been only dimly conscious of such issues and events, or blind to their significance. Now, as Hal and Emmanuel explained their relevance to the coming struggle in Africa, they becamematters of urgent interest to him. At the same time he saw surprising connections made. He had never realized, for instance, that the muck-and-brass, industrial enterprise of the hard-worked landscape around them had first been financed by profits from the trade in slaves between Africa and the Americas. Nor that the population of Equatoria provided one among many captive African markets for cheap cloth made just across the moor
in Manchester. Nor that the colony had first tasted freedom when its young men were conscripted to fight in England's war against Hitler. It was, said Emmanuel, a taste that could not now be taken from their mouths.

That evening Martin also learnt how Hal and Emmanuel had been expelled from the colony several years earlier when the government tried to break up their Popular Liberation Party and install a lawyer called Ambrose Fouda as a more biddable political leader. Hal's response was to write
The Practice of Freedom
, which quickly won him a reputation as a champion of revolutionary thought across the colonized world. Meanwhile, Emmanuel was working with the small band of exiled politicians living a half-starved life in the cheap lodging houses and grubby coffee bars of London and Paris. He and Hal watched from an impotent distance as their allies in the colony were sacked, beaten up or imprisoned. But Fouda's United Democratic Convention failed to win popular support, and in recent times the tide had turned in favour of the PLP.

With increasing excitement, Martin listened to these two zealous men urging him to see how his own energy could, and should, be put in service to the worldwide reach for liberation which was now the noblest struggle of mankind.

“Do you realize the scale of resources they're squandering on the arms race?” Hal demanded in response to Martin's ill-considered remark about the peacekeeping value of nuclear weaponry. “A fraction of it would banish hunger and preventable diseases from the face of the planet for ever. Children who are dying of starvation this very moment, or living out stunted lives in a wretched daily struggle with want and sickness, could be healed and housed and educated. Our governments choose not to do that. They prefer to keep the Soviet Union surrounded by an obscene arsenal of weapons powerful enough to destroy every trace of life across the planet. I wonder how long you would continue to endorse their priorities, my bright young fool, if you knew that most of the news on which your views are based is so
much propaganda?” Hal left a pointed moment, then pressed on. “For God's sake, Martin – or better still – in the name of common humanity, the world needs intelligent young men like yourself to get out there, have the courage to see for themselves, and tell the truth about what's happening. Things
can
be changed. They've got to change. And it'snot just a matter of principle. Our decent survival as a species depends on it.”

Feeling at once admonished and adjured, Martin spoke to Adam about that moment later, when they were alone.

“Of course he'll bully you if you come out with stupid remarks,” came Adam's wry response, “but it's only because he doesn't like to see a reasonably good mind abused. Hal likes you. He wouldn't bother otherwise.” Smiling, he added, “We all like you. At least, I
think
Marina likes you – though she's capable of changing her mind at a moment's notice and you may never work out why.”

A few minutes later, as Adam was showing Martin to his room, Marina popped her head round the door and said, “You've warned him about Jonas, haven't you?” Her mood, lighter, capricious, must have shifted during her time alone.

“I thought you'd already done that at lunch,” her brother answered.

“Oh yes, I forgot. Anyway he should be all right.” She glanced wryly at Martin. “There haven't been any sightings for a while. Not since the nasty shock he gave our uncle George a couple of years ago.”

Adam said, “I'm sure Martin's made of sterner stuff.”

“And it's all a sad story really,” Marina sighed. “Jonas Cragg built this place, back in the olden days you see. You must have read the inscription carved over the front door. You can tell from that he was a crazy mixed-up sort of Puritan. But he died a hideous leper's death in this room, cursing the name of God for all his suffering.” Then she added with studied nonchalance, “If you stay awake, you might just see him walking in his shining shirt.”

“I look forward to it,” Martin grinned in answer. “I'm good with ghosts. I'm sure that old Jonas and I will get on just fine.”

Marina shook her head. “Better men than you have come out of there crying for their mummies!” And, making wailing noises, she went off to her room.

But as he lay alone later in the panelled chamber, Martin wasn't thinking about ghosts. He was pondering Hal's remark about a man's need for more than one father, and found himself thinking about the one he'd been born with. If you asked Jack Crowther about politics, the only answer you were likely to get was an obstinate insistence that it didn't matter who you voted for, they were all the same, all out for Number One. Yes, there had been a time, during the war, when he'd sailed the world as a merchant seaman and must have sensed the pressures building in many of the places of which Hal had spoken. But set beside Hal Brigshaw's visionary imagination, his world felt as cramped and dark these days as the boiler house where he laboured. For him, Africa and the Orient were fading memories of coolies and traders, of skinny children demanding baksheesh, of waterfront bars and dusky whores. Bits and pieces from his travels were still kept at home – an ebony figurine that had caught his eye in Mombasa, a pair of carved elephants from Rangoon, the crocodile-skin handbag he'd bought for his wife in a Cairo bazaar. But only the sea, in which he had drifted close to death for a time when his ship was torpedoed, remained vast and restless in his mind. Otherwise his perspectives reached little further than ambition for his cricket team, the odds on the next race, or wondering whether Calderbridge Rovers would ever climb out of the Third Division of the football league.