Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  Over dinner we chatted about Adam for a time. On the few occasions she and I had been together that year, Adam had also been present, so this was our first chance to talk about him freely. What did I really think, she wanted to know, about his commitment to Efwa Nkansa, and how serious was her attachment to him?

  I told her I wasn’t sure on either count and that, for all I knew, it might be no more than a mutual infatuation that would burn out as quickly as it had flared up.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said. “I don’t understand why mum and dad didn’t let Adam stay on in Africa. It would have given them time to find out whether it was going to work.”

  Later, as we leant on the parapet of the bridge looking down at the punters waiting for the firework display to begin, I risked asking her about her lover in London. “How does he feel about you being here with me tonight?”

  “That’s over,” she said.

  “By your choice or his?”

  “His actions, my choice.”

  I nodded. “Can’t say I liked him much. Wasn’t he a bit old for you anyway?”

  “That wasn’t the problem – though he did turn out to be too like my father.”

  “In what way?” I asked, surprised.

  “Full of big ideals about how the world should be run. Also a complete rat in his private life. Don’t look so surprised – you must know about Hal’s affairs!”

  “Not really,” I mumbled.

  “Oh come on, Martin, you can’t be that naive.”

  “Well, I’d wondered of course. I mean, he’s very attractive to women, but…” I slid away from half-truths. “Anyway, what about your man? Is he married then?”

  “He was. His wife had the sense to leave him. But he still screws around.”

  “And you were hoping for something else?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly, “fool that I am.”

  “I don’t think you’re a fool.”

  Marina turned to look at me, shaking her head. “You’ve never seen any of us very clearly, have you? Not me, not Adam, not Hal. Not even poor old mum, I bet, and she’s the simplest of us all. You always think the best of us, don’t you? But we’re not like you, us Brigshaws. We’re not straightforward, not any of us.”

  “Is that how you think of me?”

  “Course I do. You’re just about the most honest person I know.”

  Swallowing, I said, “Do you think it was honest of me to ask you here tonight as if we were just friends? As if I didn’t still want you more than anyone I know?”

  “Why do you think I came?” she asked. “Do you really want to watch these fireworks? Haven’t you got a room in college?”

  Marina and I in bed together again then, albeit my narrow single bed, and with a rowdy, drunken noise rising from the room below us on the staircase. I was trembling as I helped her out of the dress, but she smiled and said, “You’ve done this before.”

  She was right, of course. During my second year in college my confidence had grown, and a few of the girls who cycled in from Newnham or Homerton had proved responsive to my northern accent and a spurious air of knowing what I was about – an air that soon became more self-possessed. But that night with Marina was different. Our mouths opened softly as they met. My heart swayed as we slipped out of our clothes. Then we lay together on the bed and filled that intimate dark space with kisses and whispers, ignoring the noise from the floor below. Tenderly I gave myself over to love for her, and though it might have been nervous and unseasoned, love it surely was; so I dared to call it by its name.

  “But are you sure it’s me you love?” she said quietly.

  “Of course I’m sure,” I answered at once. “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “You might just be in love with love itself.”

  “I don’t see how there can be a difference. I love being in love, yes. It makes me feel more real, more completely me. But it’s you who makes it happen,” I insisted. “It’s only you I love. It only ever has been you.”

  So we kissed and held each other more closely still, but when I lay over her, lifting my hand gently to her face, I felt the dampness of tears on her skin.

  “What is it?” I pushed myself up to gaze down at her. “Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered, turning her face away. “I was just thinking,”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.”

  “If you’re crying,” I said, “it matters. Tell me. What is it?” In the half-light of the room she turned to look up at me again. Her eyes searched mine, her gaze more vulnerable than I’d ever seen it before.

  “Tell me,” I said again.

  “I was thinking about the abortion.”

  Softly as that whisper came across the narrow space between us, it pierced right through me.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped, “I shouldn’t have said anything… It’s not fair…”

  “Yes, you should. It’s part of who you are. It’s part of what I love.”

  “You can’t really mean that.”

  “I do. I do mean it – even though that must have been a terrible time for you.”

  I shifted my weight to lie beside her again, stroking her cheek with my fingertips, and felt the breath shaking through her.

  “The worst thing,” she began. “The worst thing was when I knew that…” But again she faltered there.

  “What?” I asked, afraid to hear yet feeling her need to speak. “Go on.”

  “It was as if a presence I had felt inside me vanished. As if a spirit had been there for a while, for a purpose, then left.”

  Gently I tightened the fold of my arm across her. We lay together in silence, filled with mutual sadness, mourning her loss. Some time later, in the half-light of my room, to the accompaniment of the revellers singing a rugby song on the floor below, I found the courage to say, “Marry me.”

  “No,” she answered at once, “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be right… Because we don’t know who we are yet.”

  “I know that I love you. I know that I want to be with you.”

  “Oh God, it’s so loving of you,” she said ruefully, her eyes closed, “but think about it, Martin. We’re still at the start of everything. I’ve already made big mistakes. If we give away our freedom now, before we’ve even begun to understand what it means for us, we might end up hating each other.”

  “I could never hate you,” I protested.

  “If we don’t know who we are,” she said, “we don’t know what we might do.”

  “I’m prepared to take that risk.”

  “I’m not, Martin. Not for myself, and not for you either.”

  I would have pressed her further, but her voice was too firm. Also, even as I braced myself against it, a part of me, my inward observer, felt secretly relieved by her refusal. Then, for a time, we were overtaken by a further sense of loss – both of us, I think, though each in different ways. So we lay cradled in each other’s arms for a long time, each with our own thoughts, uttering no more than a few hesitant sentences of mutual tenderness and consolation, until Marina said that she thought it best if I took her back to the hotel.

  Nevertheless, I woke the next morning hoping that something permanent had begun between us, however long it might take to mature; but I was wrong. I didn’t even see Marina again until some months later, and by then it had become clear that she was avoiding me. I suspected it already by Graduation Day. Hal and Grace had flown home from Africa for the occasion, but for reasons that were not at all convincing Marina decided not to come to Cambridge with them. Yet I was more relieved than disappointed by the decision, for with her mother and mine chatting together outside the Senate House, I could only look on, flustered and ridiculous in my hood and gown, seriously thankful that Marina was not there to complicate an already fraught situation.

  Meanwhile, as my father gazed in wonder down
sunlit King’s Parade, he was telling Hal that he’d had no idea how cushy a life his son had been living for the past three years. And then, throughout lunch, undeterred by the fact that his experience was largely limited to seafront bars and bazaars, he regaled Hal with his wartime knowledge of Africa “from Cairo to the Cape”.

  Hal listened patiently enough, and deepened my affection for him by saying in his West Riding accent, “Well, unless I’m much mistaken, Jack, it won’t be long before your Martin has seen more of the world than you and me put together.” But then he glanced briefly across at Adam, who was furious with his parents for not bringing Efwa out of Africa with them, and added as he looked away again, “As for that lad of mine, I’ve no idea when he’s going to shape up and frame himself.”

  Adam and I had booked a punt to take our parents along the Backs that afternoon. On the way to Mill Lane we met Larry Stromberg coming out of Fitzbillies, accompanied by a tall person of indeterminate gender wearing a velvet jacket and a pair of purple trousers. Larry paused to nod amiably at my parents. My father stared in amazement at the other person’s tangled red hair and blue eye shadow as Larry congratulated Hal on the medium-term success of his efforts to bring the empire of the Philistines down about their ears. Then the pair sauntered off down Trumpington Street with Larry’s arm draped round his friend.

  When we arrived at the millpond, Adam grabbed the pole and stepped onto the counter of the punt, leaving me holding on to the painter. Hal handed my mother down to sit beside Grace, then he and my father settled themselves on the cushions at Adam’s feet. Perched in the bow, I pushed off, scowling at the remote figure of Adam, who poled the punt downstream, safely above it all.

  Having expressed her admiration for the woodwork of Queen’s Bridge and the view of King’s, my mother turned to Grace, remarking what a pity it was that Marina hadn’t joined us. If truth were told, she admitted, she and Jack had hoped that something was quietly going on between the Brigshaws’ daughter and me.

  “Oh I believe there once was,” Grace said, smiling. “But you know how these things are. I think they’re just good friends these days. Isn’t that right, Martin?”’ She rested her hand on my mother’s arm. “But I’m sure he’ll have no difficulty finding a more reliable girlfriend than Marina. It’s really her loss. Believe me, if I was twenty years younger I could quite fancy him myself!”

  And the two women laughed together at the idea.

  Was that the last time I heard Grace laugh, I wonder? I don’t suppose it was, but when I look back across my later memories of her, it’s a forlorn figure that comes to mind, bitter and pitiful, as though life had reneged on all the early promises it made, disappointing her at every turn.

  Hal and Grace did not stay in England for long after that day, but it was long enough for Hal to antagonize both his children once again. I was briefly back home in Calderbridge for my cousin Kathy’s wedding at the time, so I didn’t hear about their big row until Adam told me about it afterwards. He was still fuming after Hal’s renewed attack on his plan to bring Efwa to England and marry her. Marina had sprung to her brother’s defence, and succeeded only in calling Hal’s frustrated rage down on her own head. When he accused her of degenerating into some sort of artsy trollop with no morals to speak of, she retorted that it was he who had convinced her of the hypocrisy of bourgeois values – not through any of his high-minded rhetoric, but by his furtive escapades outside marriage.

  Then it was open warfare between them. Even Adam had been shocked by Marina’s vehemence, particularly when she dismissed Hal’s involvement in African affairs as no more than a further twist in the history of white colonialism. Hal might have set himself up as an autocrat playing at politics in Equatoria, she declared, but he shouldn’t delude himself into thinking that anyone took him seriously in the UK – least of all his own children.

  Astonishingly the row ended with Marina standing her ground unshaken, while Hal stormed out of the flat into the London night, leaving Grace to repair the damage as best she could before making her way back to their hotel by taxi.

  At her mother’s entreaty, Marina had turned up the next day for a brief and uneasy show of reconciliation before Hal and Grace flew back to Equatoria. After they’d gone, Marina told Adam she thought he was a fool to be contemplating marriage. Why was he mortgaging his whole life that way when it had scarcely yet begun? Had he learnt nothing from their parents’ disastrous relationship? As for herself, she was a free woman and intended to remain so for the rest of her days.

  Whether Adam noticed how upset I was by this absolute pronouncement, I don’t know, but after hearing what Marina had said I paid little attention to whatever else he tried to tell me that day. Her declaration felt like a deliberate rebuff to my own hopes. How could she imagine that what I felt for her might amount to nothing more than an imposition on her freedom? Wasn’t freedom the single most important value I’d learnt at the feet of the father she fought? In any case, if she felt that way, why hadn’t she told me so directly, face to face?

  I decided it was time I started to look after myself.

  I took up the contacts in television that Hal had given to me. The people who interviewed me for NTV were impressed by the work I’d done in Equatoria. I was signed up for the company’s trainee programme. My intuition that a whole new world of communication was opening up across the planet had proved sound, and I was in that world now, not too far from the start of it and ready to go. My ambition grew. What mattered was my career. Get that right and everything else would take care of itself.

  Not long afterwards, Adam astounded me by announcing that he had decided not to chance a career on the stage after all. He was going to return to Equatoria and begin married life with Efwa there. I could make little sense of what seemed to me a waste of his talents. When I learnt later that he was taking a post in one of the new government secondary schools, two hundred miles upcountry from Port Rokesby in Emmanuel’s hometown, Fontonfarom, I felt confirmed in that judgement. But by that time I was too busy pursuing my own career to spend much time worrying over the thought of my friend languishing in a bush town ringed by rainforest. If that was what his fugitive spirit wanted, who was I to argue? So I wished him good luck and promised to stay in touch.

  I hadn’t been at NTV long when news came through of political developments in Equatoria. On his return to the country, Hal must have decided that Fouda and his cronies did indeed represent a threat to the stability of Emmanuel’s regime. Despite the qualms of the more tender-minded cabinet members, he and Kanza Kutu, the powerful Minister of the Interior, persuaded Emmanuel of the need to introduce a Preventive Detention Bill to parliament and get it quickly onto the Statute Book. As soon as the measure was passed, Fouda and four members of his party were arrested and confined without trial in Makombe Castle.

  Predictably, the British press condemned what it saw as a shameless breach of civil liberties. Meanwhile, in Equatoria, the single newspaper not directly under the PLP’s control ridiculed the inadequate legal safeguards built into the Act. For the first time since independence, grumblings of unease were heard throughout the country. They sounded loudest among the lawyers and businessmen in Port Rokesby and in the tribal councils of the Eastern Region, where opposition to the government had remained strong under the conservative influence of the Olun of Bamutu. Then discontent turned to outrage when the Olun’s most distinguished spokesman was also detained for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy against the State. Rioting broke out in the streets of Bamutu, and more arrests were made.

  Shortly afterwards, one of the PLP’s Regional Commissioners was accused of amassing a private fortune by imposing fraudulent taxes on local farmers. In an effort to demonstrate the impartiality of the law, the man was arrested, tried and given a long prison sentence. But rather than appeasing discontent, this action encouraged complaints against corrupt practices right across the country. Too many local officials were half-educated party activists who had proved useful in ra
llying the masses during the struggle for independence, and were now reaping their rewards by abusing their positions of power. That it could prove unwise to challenge such “Party Hard Boys” became apparent when Kanza Kutu authorized further controversial arrests under the provisions of the Preventive Detention Act.

  I remember trying to defend these measures to a hard-bitten old journalist, once a foreign correspondent, who was now desk-bound at NTV. I told him that Emmanuel and Hal were my friends, that they were visionaries, and that their project was too important to let subversive factions or a few corrupt party cadres endanger its achievements.

  “It may be unthinkable to imprison anyone without trial here in the UK,” I argued, “but you can’t judge the new African nations by our standards. They’re coping with the stresses of a whole new world, a whole new way of doing things. They’re bound to get some things wrong.”

  “Nice line in loyalty, old son,” he replied. “It looks good on you. Only thing is, you’d best wear it with a dash of cynicism, or this bloody job will drive you mad!”

  I was far away, working on my first assignment in Vietnam, when I heard reports of the attempt on the life of Emmanuel Adjouna – an attempt which took place on the football field of his hometown, Fontonfarom.

  I learnt later that Adam and Efwa were seated under a palmthatched awning with the local dignitaries and representatives from the Secondary School when the President’s open-topped limousine drove into the football field flanked by an escort of motorcycle riders and followed by a convoy of party cars. A big crowd had been waiting for hours, waving banners and flags as they listened to the public-address system crackling out party anthems at ear-splitting volume. The dry season was nearing its end, and the sky lowered thunderously mauve above them. I’d been to Fontonfarom, and knew how the air always smelt of wood smoke and a hot swirl of ash from the refuse dump across the marsh outside the town. It must have felt as though the afternoon was burning on a long, slow fuse.