“I’m not as cold as you make me sound.”
“No, you don’t feel cold to me. But it does seem a bit lonely. As if somewhere along the line you missed your own real life and ended up filling it with other people’s disasters.”
“Don’t you think that’s a rather large assumption?” I answered with studied lightness. “But I can see you’re blessed with a romantic imagination, so I forgive you. In any case, there’s a simpler explanation for why I’m still here – one you don’t seem to have considered even though you suffer from it yourself.”
“What’s that?”
“Curiosity. I haven’t seen either Adam or Marina for years, and neither of them seems to be the person I once knew. Marina’s work has changed out of all recognition – the paintings she did before she lost her sight, I mean. It’s as if they were painted by a different person. And Fra Pietro had some rather strange things to say about Adam. So it’s not surprising I’m intrigued. I’d like to know what’s been happening to them and what they’re both doing these days. This gathering you mentioned earlier, for instance – the one that’s got Lorenzo in such a state – I’m wondering what that’s all about.”
“That would be hard to explain,” she said, “even if I was free to do so.”
“Who’s stopping you? Larry? Gabriella? Your mother?”
“All of them – and none of them. They would tell you the same thing.”
“That all sounds very mysterious.”
“Yes,” she answered, “that’s the right word.”
I was about to press her further when we heard Larry’s voice complaining in the hall outside. “But Gabriella, darling, you can’t insist on putting me out like a cat at this ungodly hour. Especially at a moment like this. After the amount I’ve had to drink I shall certainly drive into a tree, and then how would you feel?”
Glancing across to where Allegra and I stood together, Gabriella, who was holding a green ring binder, said, “Fra Pietro will lead the way on his Vespa.”
“I’ll drive you back, Larry,” I volunteered.
“No,” Gabriella shook her head, “you and I must have words, Mr Crowther.”
Allegra said, “I’ve already told him you wouldn’t mind if he stayed the night.”
“That will be convenient,” Gabriella nodded, and I was left with no more room for argument than Larry, who was ushered out to where Angelina and Orazio chatted with Fra Pietro. A few minutes later he drove off, muttering as he followed the Vespa’s tail light into the night.
When we came back into the house, Gabriella suggested that Allegra must be tired after her journey from Rome that day – perhaps it was time she went to bed? Allegra was about to demur when she saw from the glint in Gabriella’s eye that she wanted her out of the room. Moments later Gabriella and I were alone together.
Arching her brow, she said, “I see that you have quite charmed Allegra.”
“On the contrary, it’s she who has charmed me.”
“Well, perhaps it is so. And perhaps your luck is changing after all. It seems that Adam is eager to meet with you again.”
“He knows I’m here then? How is he?”
“He is weary and a little dazed, but yes, he knows you are here.”
“Does he know why?”
“He knows that his father has asked you to come, yes.”
“And what did he say? Will he go back to see Hal?”
“That is not yet decided. But I think that Adam may be well disposed to you.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. Marina was very edgy with me still.”
“Perhaps she has good cause?”
“I think you know that she does.”
Gabriella smiled at me. “That is commendably honest, Mr Crowther. I wonder if Lorenzo is wrong to be so mistrustful of you. But then he tells me that he liked you much better in the time before you became a journalist.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you still wary with me?”
She gave a little shrug, wry but not unfriendly. “My feelings are not so important. But let us say that you interest me. I shall like very much to see how you will respond to what Adam has asked me to show to you. Then I will know better what kind of man you are.” She tapped the binder she held at her chest. “He wishes you to read what he has written in these papers.”
“What are they? Do they explain what he’s doing here?”
“Some things, but not all. He hopes that they will interest you.” Gabriella handed me the file. “Maybe this will help you to understand us all a little better.”
I opened the file on what seemed to be some kind of mission statement:
HEARTSEASE
1. Our lives are as we imagine them to be.
2. Imagination is the agency of change.
3. Change in the collective begins with change in the individual.
4. Compassion is an act of the imagination.
5. Let us re-imagine our world.
Turning to the next of many pages, I came upon a single word:
CLITUMNUS
“Read this and sleep on it,” Gabriella said. “Tomorrow we shall see.”
10
Dance
That September, Martin was preparing to leave home for his first year at university when, unusually, his father came home from work one evening in the Bamforth Brothers’ lorry. The driver unbolted the back and helped Jack carry into the house an old steamer trunk that he had bought from the manager of the mill. They put it down on the floor at Martin’s feet in the small sitting room.
The trunk might have been half a century old or more and had seen better days, but it was strongly bound with studded woodwork, its corners were reinforced by leather and steel, and it was still in sound condition. Across the curve of its lid were glued the remains of ancient labels telling of voyages around the world – by Union Castle to South Africa, P&O to Malaya, and on the Cunard line, across the Atlantic, to America. The name of the previous owner had been painted out, and Martin’s own name and address stencilled in white across the black patch.
Looking down at his purchase with suppressed pleasure, Jack Crowther said gruffly, “I thought you’d be needing summat like this for carting all your books and stuff.”
When Martin did not immediately answer, his mother said, “It looks like a good’n, Jack.”
“It’ll last him the rest of his life, if he can be bothered to look after it.”
Aware of the pride and sadness in his father’s face, and of the hidden trepidation too, Martin flushed and muttered, “You never said owt about it.”
“I didn’t think there were any need.” Then Jack Crowther risked a step further than the usual wary exchanges between them. “Well, do you like it then?”
Refusing to encounter that earnest gaze, Martin bent down to examine the trunk. Already amazed by the unanticipated way this battered veteran of the imperial past had crossed the oceans of the world to fetch up at last in his own life, he swallowed and said, “Yeah, course I do.” Then for the first time he glanced directly into his father’s eyes. “It looks great.”
“You’d better open it up then,” Jack nodded, “and have a proper look.”
Martin felt his heart jump at the sound of the catches. He lifted the heavy lid and saw a shallow upper tray lined with fading pinstriped paper. When he removed it to reveal the empty chamber beneath, a dry exotic odour of camphor and sandalwood scented the air. It was like opening a box in which the past had evaporated to make room for his future, leaving only this scent of far and foreign places behind. The cabin trunk’s memory traces of distant continents and oceans filled him both with nostalgia for the world he was about to leave and with the urgent yearning to be gone.
Around that time too he felt more poignantly than ever the draw of the hills, moors and crags around Calderbridge. His love for them had in no way diminished, but during that summer they had receded from the foreground of his awareness. Now, as the time to leave approached, he would catch himself gazing u
p at cloud shadows shifting over Gledhill Beacon and feel an aching sense of the transience of things.
In such a mood he took to his bike one afternoon and cycled out towards High Sugden. Though he had received no answer when he rang the house from a telephone box before leaving, he hoped that Adam or Marina might be back by the time he arrived. Best of all he might find Marina alone there, so that he could be granted space to declare his love for her, and to do it with such incontrovertible conviction that she could no longer evade him as she had done on every occasion since that afternoon of the storm.
In any case, he wanted to be out on the tops, breathing wild air, easing his unrequited heart. Yet the harder he pushed on the pedals, the more the landscape seemed to recede around him. He stopped to rest above Sugden Foot, and watched a sudden burst of sunlight pouring through a gap in the cloud to brighten the hills across the valley. The day glinted hard and clear about him. Unaccountably heavy-hearted, he pushed his bike up to the ridge and freewheeled down the slope towards High Sugden.
When he arrived at the grange, he found Grace alone with the dogs.
She opened the door at his knock. “Martin, my dear – how lovely!” she said, and looked at him with an air of puzzlement in her pale-blue eyes, as though having trouble identifying him.
“I thought there might be nobody here,” he said. “There was no answer when I rang. I just called in on the off chance.”
She frowned, silently tapping the panelled door with her fingertips, “I must have been out with the dogs. Adam and Marina have gone shopping in Leeds – things they need for the start of term. Didn’t they say?”
“I haven’t seen them for a few days.”
“No? Well, they won’t be back for hours yet. They said they were going to take in a film. And Hal’s in London as usual. So it’s just me I’m afraid.”
He stood hesitantly in the porch. Could he ride away without seeming rude? Did she want him to leave anyway?
“I just came out for the air,” he tried. “I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
She gave a small, unexpected laugh and pushed back her hair. “Actually, I was feeling rather dull here on my own. Why don’t you come in? Would you care for tea?” She turned away before he could decline, leaving the door ajar for him to pass through. Her voice reached for levity as she added, “Or we could have something stronger, why don’t we?”
Uncertainly he stepped inside. She came to a halt at the sitting-room door and turned to look at him. Her eyes fell to his ankles, where his flannel trousers were still bunched in the grip of his cycle clips. “I was in here,” she smiled. “Come on through.”
Martin bent to pull off the clips and stuffed them in his pocket. Then the dogs came bounding out of the opened door and were all over him, their flanks shivering with delight.
“You know where to put your coat,” Grace called as he fussed them. “I’m having a gin-and-tonic. What about you?”
“The same,” he called from the coat cupboard, and cleared his throat. The smell of the house was familiar, but he had never spent time alone with Grace before, and he felt a little ill at ease.
“Are you sure? There’s everything here. Beer? Sherry? Whiskey perhaps?”
“Gin’s fine,” he said, and pressed his hand to the head of the owl on the newel post as he crossed the hall into the sitting room.
Grace must have kicked off her shoes earlier, for she stood in her stocking feet at the sideboard where the drinks tray was kept. Her long back was turned to him. A blue cashmere sweater hung over her pleated skirt. As she skewered a twist of lemon on a cocktail stick, he glanced away from the line of her hips to the couch, where a book lay splayed open on its pages.
“Tell me if this isn’t strong enough,” Grace said, proffering the glass. “And do sit down.”
By contrast with Grace’s slightly distracted air, he felt more adult than usual. Composing himself in a studded leather armchair, he lifted one leg over the other and held its shin with his free hand. The light danced in his glass.
“I can’t remember if you smoke…” said Grace.
“Not really.” He lowered his foot to the floor again.
“…but do if you must.”
“I don’t.”
“Very well.” Grace crossed to the couch, lowered her back to the corner cushion and lifted both legs along its length. She raised her glass to him, said, “Here’s cheers!” and took a sip. “I’m so glad you dropped in. Don’t at all care for drinking alone, though I sometimes do of course.” She sighed, smiled and glanced away.
“I suppose Hal has to spend a lot of time in London?”
“More and yet bloody more, it seems.”
“You don’t like to go with him?”
“Occasionally I do. But the flat’s usually so crowded with Hal’s chums that it can be quite exhausting. And then… well, he doesn’t always want me there. Why would he?”
Martin smiled at what he took to be a self-deprecatory joke. “Independence Day isn’t far off,” he said. “There must be a lot happening.”
“Oh yes, the action’s certainly hotting up over there. Meanwhile,” she added, “it’s rather quiet here at High Sugden.”
“I like that quiet,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful place. Hal’s lucky to own it.”
“It was actually bought with my inheritance. Didn’t you know that? Hal’s never had two pennies to rub together, but he did have the sense to marry money. I’m a Fairclough, you see. You must have heard of Fairclough’s Fine Pennine Ale? You’ve probably drunk your share of it. And Daddy wasn’t at all thrilled when his favourite daughter fell for a hard-up radical socialist, I can tell you. Having stumped up for my education as a lawyer, he assumed I’d marry a Tory Lord Chancellor or something like that. Funny how life turns out, isn’t it? I mean, look at you – off to Cambridge. I bet your father never thought that would happen, even though you passed all your exams! Is it a good thing or not that you and Adam aren’t going up to the same college, I wonder?”
“We’ll still see a lot of one another.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Though I expect you’ll find things rather different up at Cambridge. People change, you know, once they’re away from home. Anyway, the thing is,” she said, changing the subject, “I was reading this novel before you came. The Mirror Room. It’s by Miriam Stallard. Do you know it?”
“Oh that! No, I haven’t read it. In fact, I felt a bit stupid when we met her on the Aldermaston march. Not even having heard of her, I mean. Marina seemed keen on the book. What’s it about?”
“It’s a book that asks to be taken seriously as a study in the absurdity of existence,” said Grace, “but actually it’s about sex.”
“Oh, I see…”
Grace shook the ice in her glass. “Though to be fair, you can’t really separate one from the other these days.”
“I suppose not.”
“Oh, so you know about these things? You must be a man of some experience. So have you contrived to get my daughter into bed yet?”
Floundering he said, “I didn’t mean to suggest…” and could see no way to take the sentence further.
“Of course you didn’t,” Grace smiled in reprieve. “Take no notice of me. I’m in a tiresome frame of mind this afternoon. Anyway, it’s perfectly evident that Marina is still a virgin. In fact I rather suspect she must be the most awful tease. Which is why the Holroyd boy finally gave up on her, of course – though that was a blessing if there ever was one!” Grace gazed across at Martin as if seeking his agreement, but he was staring uncomfortably at the dogs. “And what about you?” she said. “Let’s hope Marina hasn’t got your little man in too much of a pickle. Do you find it hot in here? Shall I open a window?”
“I’m fine,” he lied, but Grace was already crossing to the casement. “Then I was forgetting,” she said as she opened the window, “you’re a poet after all. Perhaps a degree of erotic frustration is necessary to your art? Hopeless love and all that? You are still wri
ting poetry, aren’t you?”
“Not for a while.”
“Oh that’s really too bad! She’s had the opposite effect, I see. I wish I could have warned you off earlier. Marina always was a difficult child, and I begin to think she’ll be an impossible woman. Not that it’s all her fault! She’s inherited Hal’s imperious spirit, of course, but I’m rather afraid she’ll also be driven to live out all my own unlived life.”
Still unwilling to look at her, Martin said, “You almost make it sound as though you don’t like her very much.”
Grace raised her brows. “Well, you know, I’m not at all sure that I do. I love her – which is quite a different matter, and beyond all choice – and probably much closer to hate at times than to mere disliking. But we’re a passionate lot, you see, we Brigshaws. Even Adam, who’s so deeply in awe of his own feelings that he thinks it’s safer to pretend he doesn’t have any!” She sighed, adjusted the hem of her skirt at her knees, and studied her guest’s troubled face. “Dear Martin! You really should be more careful of us. Particularly Hal, who will charm your ego and flatter your youthful idealism, then run you ragged at his beck and call.” Grace finished her drink. “But once again I fear I speak too late. And like Cassandra I shall certainly go unheard.” Straightening her arm, she held out the empty glass to him. “Get me another, darling. I’m suddenly depressed.”
When he came back with her drink, Grace took the glass without thanking him. “Shall I tell you why I dislike that book?” she said.
“If you like.”
“Because it has a calculating heart. Because it does dirt on life. And if that’s not reason enough, it may interest you to know that its rather pretty, twenty-eight-year-old author is fucking my husband.”
Never having heard the word used by a woman before, Martin was doubly shocked by the dry, matter-of-fact tone in which it was uttered. “I don’t think that can be right,” he mumbled in confusion. “Surely Hal’s got much more important things on his mind?”
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