Water Theatre

by Lindsay Clarke

  She listened to what I had to say about Hal with a sceptical twist to her lips before saying, “There’s no point. It will only go wrong again.”

  “Hal doesn’t want that to happen,” I countered. “Why should you?”

  “I don’t. That’s why I’d rather not go. I don’t need that kind of grief.”

  “What is it between you and Hal?” I asked.

  She merely shrugged, stubbed out her cigarette and stared through a grimy bottle-glass window into the crowded Soho street.

  I said, “Your mother thinks you only fight with him the way you do because you love him.”

  “I’ve never been impressed by my mother’s grasp of psychology,” she retorted at once. “In any case, how can you love someone if they won’t accept you for what you are?”

  “People can change.”

  “You certainly have.”

  “You too, Marina,” I replied with equally critical force. “And so has Hal. Say what you like, but I don’t think he’s in any mood to pass judgement on you right now. He just misses you. He misses you very much.”

  But the best I could extract was a promise that she would talk to Adam about it.

  “If I go at all,” she said, “it will only be to help him out.”

  Looking – too late – for a way to breathe some warmth into our meeting before she left, I asked about the progress of her work. She told me that there was currently an exhibition of her paintings in a small East End gallery. “If you’re interested,” she said without enthusiasm, “go and look.” I said that I might just do that, and we parted a few minutes later.

  Though I concealed my dismay at her unresponsive manner, watching her walk away felt like surgery, part of me detaching itself and migrating to some other life. But if Marina had been chilly and distant in person, the impact of her work was fiery and immediate. Large abstract canvases blazed across the gallery in lightning strikes of crimson, smoky whites and magnesium yellows. Was this what had become of her passion then? Had it all been consumed by the power of an inward vision to erupt across these canvases in hot conflagrations of paint?

  I wanted to buy one of the bigger pictures, but their scale was far too large for the walls of my flat. The smaller studies were less dramatic, but one of them burned with an intense smoky glow, like the opening of a furnace door. I wrote a cheque and took it away with me, a keepsake of the Marina I would always love.

  Having observed the scope for disaster in Hal’s reunion with both his daughter and his son, I had no regrets about missing the party at High Sugden. I was surprised, therefore, by Hal’s description of it in a letter he sent afterwards.

  “All things considered,” he wrote, “the do went rather well – largely I have to say because of the way Efwa’s bubbly spirit took the edge off things. I never really got to know the girl back in Port Rokesby, but I see now what attracted Adam to her. She’s full of warmth and jollity – she has a great sense of fun – reminded me of everything in that marvellous continent that warms my heart. Things were much stickier with Marina, of course, but I was on my best behaviour (Grace’s orders) and my tempestuous daughter managed to get by without starting a row. I can’t say I thought much of the bloke she brought with her though – an opinionated lizard called Jeremy, who charitably gave us the benefit of his Olympian views on Art in words of such mind-numbing abstraction that Efwa almost collapsed in squeals of mirth. Too much brain, I thought, too little human feeling, and at least a decade too old. But if he makes Marina happy, who am I to carp? Not that I can quite believe he does – she looked withdrawn and peaky to me, and I don’t think that was all my fault. Something not right there. But I suppose we ageing parents understand our adult children no better than they understand us! Anyway, I want to thank you for your part in making it all happen. I shan’t forget it. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just say the word.”

  That letter, together with Marina’s painting, was all I saw of the Brigshaws for some time after that. I was immersed in the demands of my work and caught up in casual affairs that had nowhere to go. I was beginning to wonder whether my efforts to help heal the rifts in that complicated family had spelt the end of my connection with them when Hal rang me one evening out of the blue. He told me he would be coming down to London more often, that he would be working with Emmanuel’s son Keshie and his group of exiled Equatorians, and that he still had influential contacts on the world scene who wanted to keep in touch with him.

  “Some interesting straws in the wind,” he said. “We’re not finished yet, old son. Not by any means. The thing is, because Marina has colonized the family flat, I’ve got nowhere to stay. Any chance you might put me up every now and then?”

  I was still sufficiently in awe of Hal to be gratified that he should call on me for help, and still sufficiently driven by secret guilt to feel I could refuse him anything. In any case, I owed my entire career to him, and that career took me out of the country for so much of the time that I had only occasional uses for the flat. So I was happy to give him a key on the clear understanding that he wouldn’t hang about there when I got back.

  The first time he came down to London we spent the evening together, and I was immediately impressed by how much better he looked. His stomach troubles had gone, he had regained his weight, and long hikes across the Pennine hills had built back his strength. His skin shone healthy and clear, the Viking glint was back in his eyes, and though his hair was wintering towards white, he might have been a decade younger than his fifty-seven years. Also, along with his vigorous good looks, his appetite for life had returned, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when, at the end of his third brief visit, he said, “I was wondering how you would feel about my bringing a friend here every now and then?” He gave me his most raffish smile. “Shouldn’t think it would bother you too much, would it?”

  “A friend?”

  “Just hypothetical. Probably never happen. But if the chance turned up?”

  Predatory and amused, his eyes drew me into complicity. We were men together, weren’t we? We understood one another.

  “Of course there’s no reason why Grace should know about it,” he added. “Only upset her after all.” And when I didn’t reply: “Not that I’d want to upset you either. Don’t mind my asking, I hope?”

  “I was just thinking about the practicalities.”

  “Yes, of course.” He angled his brow at me. “Well… what do you think?”

  What did I think? I remembered every kind thing that Hal had done for me. I remembered what had happened behind his back some years ago. I thought that whatever Hal wanted of me, Hal must have. It was the price.

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “But I’d rather not know too much about it.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “It would only happen while you’re away, if at all. I wouldn’t want to compromise you in any way.”

  We didn’t discuss the matter again. For all I knew, he could have been sharing my flat with the city’s most expensive hookers while I was out of the country, but he took care not to interfere with my privacy. When I was in London the flat was exclusively my own. I drank too much wine in those days, and smoked too much dope. Yet somehow I held my life together. Just.

  I first learnt of my father’s failing health through a routine phone call I made to tell my mother I’d got back home safely from the latest assignment. Almost as a dubious afterthought she mentioned that he’d been complaining about a nagging pain in his stomach.

  “He says it’s just a touch of indigestion,” she said, “but he will keep going on about it.”

  I caught the trace of suppressed anxiety in her voice. When I heard that he’d been complaining about the pain for more than two weeks, I told her she should get him to see a doctor.

  “You know what he’s like about doctors,” she said.

  But the next thing I heard was that he’d been sent for an X-ray and then quickly admitted to the men’s ward at Calderbridge General Hospital for an operation.


  “They say it’s a blockage,” my mother said, “so it’s just as well they’re getting it sorted out.”

  The news did not reassure me. A colleague put me in touch with a friend who was a consultant at one of the London teaching hospitals. He described my father’s condition in less euphemistic terms. I decided to go home that weekend, but by the time I arrived in Calderbridge, the operation was over. His belly had been stitched up to his satisfaction, and even though dark shadows clung around his eyes, he was looking forward to early discharge almost with an air of defiance.

  Grey with worry by then, my mother had also lost weight, but she was relieved that it was all over. I left them alone together while I went to ask the matron how long it would be before my father could go home. She hesitated a moment and then said that it would be best if I had a word with the surgeon.

  He too sized me up quickly before telling me that the tumour was already far advanced, and that he had found secondary growths. “We’ve done what we can for your father,” he said, “but I’m afraid he doesn’t have much longer to live. We’ll be sending him home shortly. The district nurse will come in to see him every day. But I think your mother’s going to need some support.”

  None of this was disclosed to my father by the hospital staff, and he was so cheered by the prospect of getting back to his life that I decided I could say nothing either. But my mother had to be told. She had to be told in time to get over the first devastating shock before he returned home. White-faced, I held her as she wept. Later I made some urgent calls. I was due some leave, and the company agreed to extend it on compassionate grounds.

  Three weeks later my father died. By then he’d understood what was coming. “If anything happens to me,” he said, “you’ll take care of your mother, won’t you?” I promised him I would. Soon after that, he was so far gone inside his morphine dreams that he no longer suffered from the bedsores on his back. In one of his rare moments of almost complete lucidity, I asked how he was feeling. He mumbled, “I’m as happy as the flowers in May.” They were the last words he spoke.

  He died on a stiflingly hot day in mid-June, three days before what would have been his fifty-eighth birthday. On her visit that morning, the district nurse expressed her concern at my mother’s depleted condition. She asked how long I would be staying with her, and nodded thoughtfully when I told her I would have to leave for London soon. Since then I’ve often wondered whether she pumped a merciful overdose of morphine into my father’s bloodstream before she left. Whatever the case, later that morning we heard a change in the sound of his breathing, and when I went upstairs to check how he was, I found him deeply unconscious, eyes half open, mouth agape.

  Throughout that hot afternoon my mother and I sat in the parlour together, hearing the sounds of the continuing world outside, hardly speaking at all. Nothing we said could cancel out the sound of my father’s breathing, like a saw dragged back and forth across wet wood. She sat beside me, wringing her tense hands, a slight figure in her floral housecoat, her face drawn, the skin around her eyes dark with exhaustion and grief. Already my father was elsewhere in some narcotic zone, where I imagined him dreaming himself back at sea on a long Atlantic convoy with a steep dark crowding from the Arctic at his prow. And here were my mother and I, left alone together again, as we had been left alone in my childhood when he was gone with his friends to the war.

  I was astonished by the number of mourners who came to my father’s funeral at Bridestone Royd. His surviving brothers and sisters and their families were all there, of course, but so were neighbours from the street, a few office workers from Cripplegate Chambers and many of the staff and employees from Bamforth Brothers’ mill. Looking around the chapel, I also saw faces that were new to me – friends from the Working Men’s Club and people who had enjoyed his company for years in pubs and clubs around the town. Tightening my arm round my mother, who wept shaking beside me, and humbled by the discovery that my father was held in such regard by so many people, I found myself envying – if one can envy the dead – his lifelong membership of this closely bonded world mourning his loss.

  Hal and Grace came to the funeral too. Touchingly kind with my mother, they brought condolences and flowers from Adam and Efwa, who were unable to come because they were committed to an important event of community theatre that day. Sadly, Marina was out of contact, travelling abroad with friends. “But I’m sure she would have come if she’d known,” Grace said to my mother, while Hal looked on. “She was very fond of both you and Jack.”

  For a man who thought he’d learnt to deal with death across the war-torn regions of the world, I did not cope well with my father’s passing. Outwardly I remained more or less impassive. I told myself I was holding my grief at bay for my mother’s sake, and perhaps in part I was. But a time came, just a few days after the funeral, when I had no choice but to leave her alone in that little house in Calderbridge. Even then, long after I was out of earshot, my feelings remained ice-packed in cold storage. No tears were shed. I turned instead to dope and drink, and found a shell-shocked sort of refuge there.

  Then one evening, several weeks later, my phone rang, and Marina’s voice came down the line. “I’ve only just heard about your dad. I am so sorry, so very sad. I can’t bear that I missed the funeral. I was wondering… Perhaps we could get together? For a drink… or a meal even? If you’d like that, I mean.”

  I said, “I don’t know what there is to say.”

  After a moment she said, “I really liked him, you know. I liked him a lot. I want to talk about him. I want to listen to you talking about him too.”

  We met in a pub by the river. Wary as I was, I found her as approachable and responsive as she had been cold and aloof the last time we’d met. We moved on to a quiet Chinese place she knew, where it was easier to talk.

  When I told her how dismayed I’d been by our previous meeting, she said, “I’m sorry. It had nothing to do with you. There were difficult things going on at the time.”

  “Jeremy?” I hazarded.

  She sat back in surprise “How do you know about him?”

  “Hal wrote to me after your visit to High Sugden.”

  “I see.” She studied me with ironical, suspicious eyes.

  “He only mentioned it because he cares about you.”

  “You’re pretty close, you two, aren’t you?”

  “I owe him a lot. He’s always been kind to me.”

  Marina sat in silence for a time. “Anyway,” she finally said, “I know he couldn’t stand the sight of him. Didn’t surprise me. I rather think that’s why I took Jeremy to meet him. They’re too alike, you see.”

  “In what way? Hal doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “He wouldn’t, would he? I mean, when would Hal ever admit that he’s an autocrat and a bit of a bully and exploitative of women?”

  “And Jeremy is all those things?”

  “And more. And worse.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she was not ready for that. Instead she changed the subject. “Well, at least Adam’s happy enough. And Efwa seems to be enjoying life over here. I have to admit I was worried when they first got married, but it looks as if it’s working out a lot better than I expected.”

  “I hope so,” I said less confidently, “but it can’t be easy.”

  “I don’t suppose marriage ever is. Not if my parents are anything to go by.”

  “Have you been in touch with Grace lately?”

  “Not since we were at High Sugden. Why do you ask?”

  “Because of something she said the last time I talked to her.”

  “Oh yes? What was that?”

  “That she felt you were very judgemental of her.”

  Using the tip of a chopstick to make a lacy pattern with the remaining grains of rice on her plate, Marina said, “It’s just that I can’t stand the way she lets Hal walk all over her. I thought that when she came back from Equatoria she’d finally found the guts to make a clean break.
But as soon as he turns up again, there she is, licking his wounds, doing his washing, cooking his food – and there’s Hal, lording it over the place again as though nothing bad had ever happened.”

  “You didn’t find that he’d changed?”

  “He was making more of an effort, but…” She faltered there. “Look, you and Hal are friends. I’d rather not talk about him. Anyway, what about you? You haven’t said much about yourself, about your feelings.”

  So she pushed me into talking, and once I had begun I talked for a long time, opening up to her again as once long before at High Sugden. I talked about my anxieties for my widowed mother. I talked less comfortably about my father, and how my feelings of grief at his funeral were less strong than my awareness that, unlike him, I belonged to no community, was no longer rooted in a world of shared values and unquestioned loyalties. I talked about how far I had been distanced from both my parents, at first by my education and then by my experiences as a foreign correspondent. Only when Marina pressed me did I talk about the state in which I returned from the world’s war zones – the prolonged hangover of nervous tension, the avidity for renewed excitement that propelled me into frequent, meaningless encounters with women. Yet, even as I spoke, a part of my mind remained aware that it was precisely through such calculated acts of confession that I accomplished those seductions, and I saw that Marina understood this well enough.