Excusing myself, I followed her through onto the terrace, watching the white sway of hair at her back. The breath felt constricted in my chest, and I was glad of the night air when Marina stopped at the balustrade and stood with her back to me, tapping the stone with her fingertips. I felt a sudden access of affection for the familiar line of her spine in the backless dress, though every instinct advised me against speaking first.
We stood in silence. “Marina,” I finally said, “you have to understand why I came.”
“I know about Hal,” she answered, without turning. “I’m thinking about it.”
“I just didn’t want you to think…”
But she rounded on me then. “Don’t.” And before I could speak again, “Why should I be surprised that you’re still as devious as you ever were?”
“I may have my failings,” I said with a nonchalance I didn’t feel, “but there must be better uses for this conversation than insulting one another.”
“I want you to leave Allegra alone. I won’t have you using her against me.”
“I didn’t know that I was.”
“Oh yes you did, you bastard.”
I released a tense breath. “Look, we can stand here trading accusations all night if you like, but what will it change, what good will it do?”
Marina tossed her head as if about to retort, then changed her mind. “All right. Let’s walk,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Not yet. I want to take a few minutes to clear my head.”
I followed a few paces behind as she walked along the gravelled path towards the hidden door leading down to the garden. The stair was narrow and dark; she felt her way down through the damp smell, which seemed ranker by night, and the garden itself was a warren of shadows through which water threaded its sound.
Marina sat down on the marble steps of the temple, holding the fingers of one hand in the runnelled cascade. No light reached us from the house, but the darkness was drenched in moonlight. We waited, as bereft of speech as two nocturnal animals of different species, as wary of each other, until at last she said, “This feels a long way from High Sugden.”
“Yes.”
“The weird thing is I was dreaming about the house last night. I was trying to fit together the words above the door. They wouldn’t sit right. They seemed to be saying This place hates peace, observes crimes, loves wickedness, punishes the virtuous.”
“You left out honours laws.”
“The dream left it out.”
“Because those aren’t the laws it honours? It’s a lonely place now, Marina.”
“It always was.”
“But not like this. Things are desperate there.” Her retort was immediate, “Do you think Grace wasn’t desperate?”
Only the water spoke in the long ensuing silence.
Before I could think how to answer, Marina turned away, breaking the tension, though some unrequited appetite inside her was still hankering for the worst. “You’ve just come back from Equatoria,” she said.
“This time last week, yes.”
“How far upcountry did you get?”
“I got through to Fontonfarom just after the massacre. It was bad everywhere.”
“Are any of Emmanuel’s family left?”
“I don’t think so. I couldn’t trace them.”
“They should never have gone back.”
“Young Keshie felt that something of his father’s vision might be retrieved.” I heard a sound that might have been a sigh or a snort, a grief suppressed in the darkness. “I know,” I said. “And with the army divided and Mouhatta’s Action Brigades against him, and the UN wringing its hands at a standstill because no one would commit their troops… he never stood a chance.”
“No, I don’t suppose he did.” Marina released a long, shuddering breath. “I haven’t heard from Ruth Asibu in a long time. Is she dead?”
I might have lied, but Marina knew that her friend had been lucky to survive for as long as she did. As a radical lawyer, famed for her courage in taking on the corrupt and despotic regimes that followed the overthrow of the First Republic, Ruth’s name had figured high on the death-wish list when General Obanji Mouhatta unleashed his bands of irregulars. I could imagine the volatile young men I’d seen careering the streets in a Datsun pickup truck breaking into her house, stoned out of their minds, carrying cutlasses and Kalashnikovs, one of them sporting a strawberry-blond wig. She too would have stood no chance.
“Wilhelmina Song?” Marina asked after a moment. “Old Joshua? The Diallo twins?” At each pause I shook my head before saying, “I tried to find them but… there were a lot of mass graves.”
About one significant name, I noted, she made no enquiry, and it was not a name that I felt ready to raise. Out of the bleak distance I said, “I’ve brought a videotape with me in case… but I can’t imagine that you’d want to see it.”
Her voice was compressed with pain as she said, “I dreamt about it. Night after night, at the time it was happening. No faces, just nameless figures, killing and falling. At first I thought it was just me, my nightmare, but…” She looked up and must have remembered who she was talking to. “I have no use for your film.” I flinched at the derision in her tone. “And what about you?” she demanded. “What does looking at that kind of thing do to you?”
“Nothing good,” I admitted. “I used to think that bearing witness had to make a difference. That if we looked the horror in the eyes and showed people things they’d rather turn away from, things would change, that we’d learn something, that we might use the evidence against ourselves to some advantage. But the fact is we’re far too comfortable with the way things are to be serious about change. Sometimes I think all we’ve done is turn the sitting room into a private amphitheatre – a cosy little peep show where we can get off on the visuals while indulging our compassion. Or we can just reach for the remote and change the channel. Either way we delegate the suffering.”
“It will come back,” she said. “One way or another it comes back.” She got up and turned away with an impatient sigh, shaking her head. “Gabriella thinks you’re in shock. So much in shock that you don’t even know it.”
“I see. Is that what you think?”
“I’ve no idea. I don’t know who you are any more. I suppose it’s possible. But as I reminded Gabriella, you’re English and, what’s worse, a Yorkshireman, which means you’re probably so thick-skinned you might as well be in deep permafrost as far as feelings are concerned.”
So here it was again – the old, judgemental arrogance. What did this woman know about my feelings? What had she ever known about anyone’s feelings but her own? I waited in silence, denying her the satisfaction of a response.
“So was this just another war for you?” she asked.
“There’s no such thing as just another war.” I said quietly.
“But you’ll go back to it, won’t you? When you’re finished here, I mean. You’ll go looking for the next disaster?”
“I don’t know. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at.”
For an instant I glanced back across the landscape of my life as she might have seen it: a burnt-out zone of craters and wreckage, of flak jackets and body bags, where coming out alive was rarely compatible with nobility of soul and, as often as not, courage itself was no more than a half-demented talent for enduring the intolerable. Perhaps she was right. What kind of monster would take pride in competence with such atrocity?
Frowning, I said, “I was planning to take a break. I was going to rethink my life. I should be on my way to the Cascades right now.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You know why. I came because Hal asked me to come.”
Her voice hit me from the darkness. “If your only reason for coming here was to let me know about Hal you could have left already. Gabriella has told me all I need to know. There was nothing stopping you leaving for the Cascades, wherever they may be. I don’t see why you needed to meet me again.”
<
br /> “Because I thought I should tell you myself. I thought that’s what Hal would want. I’m here for his sake. He’s…”
“Don’t talk about Hal. Talk about you.”
“He’s had a stroke, for God’s sake. He can’t speak for himself.”
“I know that. I’ve known it for several hours. What I don’t know is why you’re still here.” I saw then that she was not, as I’d first thought, shying away from the painful truth about her father. Nor for all the unyielding detachment of her demeanour was she indifferent to his condition, though she might not yet have decided how to act in response to it. No, for the moment, this was between me and her. “So you’re still his creature are you?” she snorted. “You thought you could do what he always did – argue your way into getting what Hal wants, what Hal must have and what must therefore be right for everyone else in the world? But you can’t really have imagined that anything you could say would make the slightest difference to my feelings?”
“There was a time when it could, Marina.”
“There was a time when I respected you.”
She moved away a little. I saw her white hair glittering in the moonlight.
“Do you think I wasn’t expecting this?” I countered quietly. “You don’t think it would have been a lot easier for me to leave the message and walk away?”
“Then why didn’t you? What do you want here? Why did you come?” For a few seconds longer she stood across from me; then, with a brisk sigh she turned away, saying, “Why did you have to come?” And it was no longer the same question.
I should have spoken then. I should have found the heart to say what I had come to say. But I was already far gone from the moment, gone from the midnight garden, plucked back to that desolate town in Africa where I stood across from a woman in a yellow turban who was holding her dead child out to me and my cameraman, cradling the loose dangle of its head in one hand, and crying, “What for you come to this place? Why you are here? Why?” – as though our presence there was not merely bearing witness to her suffering but feeding off it – and not innocently like the vultures scavenging in the heat haze at her back. The question was an accusation. It made me complicit with all the forces that had come together to wreck her life.
The camera was running, I was wired for sound, but the image of that woman holding the torn neck of her child and demanding to know why I was there would never travel out across the airwaves, never reach into the draught-excluded sitting rooms back home. Nor would it be erased from my memory – that human face disfigured by every atrocious thing that had happened to her world, leaving her half-crazed and speechless but for that unanswerable question.
As for me, I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t act. I didn’t know why I was there. I couldn’t remember why I had come. And was there ever, I wondered, a less negotiable question than the question why? I was no more capable of answering Marina than I’d been able to answer the woman in the yellow turban. Who? When? Where? How? Those were the questions I could deal with, answerable questions. They were how you got the facts as straight as you could. When the river was shoaled with corpses, to ask “why” might have been part of my brief: but it was nothing I could answer, nothing I understood.
When I looked up, the tilt of stars was swarming round me. My mind felt as dizzily black and empty as the spaces between their flashing points of light. Perhaps Gabriella was right after all: I wouldn’t be the first tired journo to have buckled under stress. And what was it Conrad’s Marlow had said on returning from his journey far into the heart of darkness a century ago? That it wasn’t his body that needed nursing but his imagination. And what hope for a man whose imagination was now so sickened and corrupt that he dragged his long-dead father’s body through his dreams? No hope. No hope at all.
But in the next moment a waft of music descended from the terrace above us, commanding silence, and seconds later came the sound of Allegra singing to the accompaniment of Fra Pietro’s lute.
As the girl’s voice scaled the soft air, I recognized the note from The Merchant of Venice that Larry Stromberg had sounded on his arrival earlier that evening. For on such a night as this had Portia come home to her palace at Belmont, and this was the kind of music that played in her moonlit garden then – a music that presages those rare moments when justice has been done, and the sad and comical misprisions of the heart have all been sorted, and true friendship is restored.
I listened. My senses brimmed with sound. The music had already jump-started the heart. Now it released my tears.
In the midnight garden the song drew to its close, and was followed by a long-drawn breath of silence reaching deeper than applause. Though my weeping had been noiseless, Marina turned my way as if sensing how deeply I’d been moved. Meanwhile, from above our heads came the quiet sounds of a world where people lived pleasurably together, making music, drinking wine, enjoying the happy fact of each other’s existence. A world in which, for the moment, Marina and I had no part.
“Hal didn’t know how to cope with your hostility,” I said. “And neither did I. You never gave me a chance, Marina.”
But her own mood must have been altered by the sound of Allegra’s singing, because her voice came more softly now, though still her eyes avoided mine. “I gave you rather more than that. But I didn’t know who I was giving it to, did I?”
“I think you did. You knew exactly. It’s just that you stopped believing in him.”
“Why should I have believed in someone incapable of the truth?”
“I never lied to you, Marina.” I protested. “Not once. But the truth…”
I hesitated there, pulling back from the hot ground I saw opening up beyond that word. Once again, after all the years that had passed since I had last confronted her, I felt stymied into silence under the force of her accusation.
“What about the truth?” she asked.
To speak or not to speak? In those moments it might have been possible to disclose everything I’d kept from her for thirty years. I was on the brink of doing so. And why not? Hadn’t I paid the price of silence long enough? But then I thought of Hal, old and lonely in that desolate room in High Sugden, and could not bring myself to wreck whatever chance might remain of fulfilling this last mission with which he’d charged me. So once again I prevaricated.
“I’ve been a journalist too long to believe that truth is ever a simple thing.”
“Then perhaps you should take up a nobler profession,” Marina answered, retreating into such dense shadow that I could barely see her. “I remember when you were a poet. Giving up on that was one of the many things you got wrong.”
“We were children in those days. Weren’t we bound to get things wrong?”
“Unfortunately, Adam and I were Hal’s children.”
“Will you go and see him?” The question met with a silence so protracted it became unbearable. But silence was not yet refusal. Reaching back through time to an occasion I was sure she must remember, I said, “Perhaps I should dare you to? Perhaps I should double-dare you?”
With no hint that she shared either the memory or my affection for it, Marina declared, “I’ve never been afraid of Hal.”
“I know,” I answered. “But I’m wondering whether you’re afraid to see him because you might find you’ve blighted more than half your life with this stubborn pretence that you hate him.”
“You’re quite wrong,” she said calmly. “I stopped hating Hal a long time ago. I stopped hating him when I realized he had no interior life to speak of, that for all his rant about freedom he was the rather pathetic prisoner of his own narrow convictions.”
“Then pity him,” I said. “I don’t share your view of him but, if pity’s the best you can manage, maybe you can pity him enough to go.”
“I wouldn’t insult him with my pity. He’d rather be dead than endure that.”
“He’d rather be dead anyway. But he wants to see you first, and he wasn’t making any conditions. He just wants yo
u to come. Both of you, if possible.”
“Adam isn’t here right now.”
“I know. I gather he’s on retreat somewhere. But he’ll be back soon, won’t he? Anyway, you can answer for yourself. You always have.”
Marina stood quite still in the night, her head tilted upwards, attentive to the stars, as if navigating her way. But when she spoke, the question was to me. “What about your own father? Don’t you remember how hostile you used to feel towards him?” She released a sigh into the darkness. “But then perhaps it’s easier to forgive the dead?”
“I don’t know. I’m not pretending any of it is easy.” Then I heard myself saying a strange thing. “But if we don’t try to get things straight with them while they’re still alive, perhaps they find it hard to forgive us? The dead, I mean.”
As soon as they came out of my mouth the words bothered and astonished me. Marina too must have been surprised, because her response came like a demand. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “It was just a thought.”
“No,” she came back, “it was more than that. Something about the way you said it. Something in your voice. It felt personal. Where did it come from?”
Uneasily I said, “It’s not important – just something that must have come out of a dream I had.”
“What dream?”
“On my way here, I had a bad dream about my father.”
“Tell me about it.”
I hesitated, uncomfortable on this dubious ground. “Other people’s dreams are boring. It’s nothing really.”
“Tell me,” she repeated.
So I told her how I had pulled up in the car to watch out the storm over Lake Trasimene and about the dream that came while I dozed. “He was dead in the dream,” I said, “but I was dragging him along with me. He wouldn’t let me go. It was almost as if there was something he still expected of me.”
“What? What did he expect?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged again. “Nothing was said.”
So what did you do?”
“That was all of it. I woke up then. Like I said, it was just a dream.”
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