They were the other figures from the dream that had come to me in the storm by Lake Trasimene – my mother and all the other women, invisible in their kitchens, cooking the food, lifting the roasts from the oven, waiting, while we men were still out there, doing what men do. And here was my mother now, standing by her own oven, looking across at me, shaking her head in troubled, exasperated love. “If you won’t talk to him,” she’s saying, “you might at least listen to what he has to say.” And I know she’s speaking about my father, who is lying there beside me in the dark.
So what did he have to say? What did he ever have to say that I wanted to hear? Nothing. Nothing that mattered.
Then I remembered that there was one thing at least – the true thing he’d said that day when he’d come home from work, still in his boiler suit, and found Marina in our cellar living room in Cripplegate Chambers, and they’d chatted together, happily, knowledgeably, about horse-racing, and he’d looked up at me afterwards and said the one true thing with which I could wholeheartedly agree. “Well, you’ve found a lass with a bit of sense about her. If you’ve any sense, you’ll hang on to her.”
Then I was biting my lip, biting back the grief as I remembered the time in London when I’d said to Marina, “I just want us to be together, whatever the rules.”
Lying in that underground passage, I repeated the words to myself, and even as the darkness absorbed them I was thinking, Wasn’t that the reason why I left Gail and came to Umbria? Wasn’t that why I’d agreed to Adam’s dubious deal and followed him into the underworld? Hadn’t all the accumulated energy of my life’s unrequited longing brought me to this place where I lay, ruing the worst mistake I’d ever made, ruing the way my life had been lived since then, the life of a man groping through a moral darkness which had brought me down at last into this actual subterranean darkness gathered closely around me now?
And at that thought I realized that in one cruel respect Marina and I were already together, for the darkness in which she lived was co-extensive with this darkness in which I was confined. Her darkness and mine flowed into one another in much the same way as did the water I could dimly hear falling in the distance and the water rising at Clitumnus springs. My life now felt so completely exiled from the light that no distinction could be made. Down here it was all one.
But then I realized that there was a difference too, for Marina remained steadfast and undefeated in her blindness, whereas I had given up on everything. Depleted of all energy, I lay abject and helpless, panting like an injured animal in its lair, willing myself to cultivate an animal’s acceptance of its coming death. But the body wasn’t ready to die. Either that or the soul wasn’t yet ready to desert the body. All I knew was that something restless was stirring inside my emptiness. It had a voice. It had my father’s rough and grudging voice, a voice edged with the familiar derisive impatience I remembered from my boyhood, speaking in the millstone-grit accent of the Calderbridge streets.
“Is that it then?” he growled into the dead-end silence. “You’re giving up, right? And when I didn’t answer, “Come on, speak up. Have you nowt to say for yourself? You’ve had enough, have you? You’re just going to call it a day?”
“You know nothing of what I’m feeling,” I said. “You never have.”
“That’s what you think, is it? You think I know nowt about what you’re going through. Well, let me tell you summat. I’ve been there, lad. I’ve been there and worse. I’m talking about when the old Karima went down in the Atlantic and I was in the water and I couldn’t swim, and I had to hold on to a bit of wreckage just to stay afloat. It were night and black as pitch and these big waves kept coming at me out of the dark, and I’ve never been so cold or frightened in my life. But I didn’t give up, did I? I hung in there. I hung in there for what felt like bloody hours, and I got lucky. One of the corvettes in the convoy put a boat out looking for survivors, and I got picked up. Afterwards they told me that if I’d been in that water five minutes more, I’d have been dead as a doornail. They said I’d done bloody well to hang on for as long as I did. And do you know what it was that kept me hanging on all that time? I’ll tell you. What kept me going was thinking about you and your mam. I thought to myself, I’m not going to bloody die here when I’ve got a wife waiting for me at home and a little lad I’ve hardly seen owt of yet. So I hung on and kept on shouting in the dark till some bugger heard me at last, and this lifeboat picked me up. You want to think on about that and learn summat. Or are you telling me you’re not man enough to do owt but lie there whinging like a Mary Anne?”
“I can’t turn round,” I said, “and I can’t go on. What do you expect me to do?”
“You’d never let me in, would you?” he said. I could almost see him shaking his head in the dark. “No matter how hard I tried, you’d have nowt to do with me. But it’s not about me now, is it? It’s all about thee, lad – though God knows what’d happen if I weren’t here to give you a shove. So pay some heed. I reckon it’s time you stopped thinking about yourself and started thinking about that lass. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’ve any sense, you’ll hang on to her.”
Flushed with the old frustrated rage against him, I snapped back, “Don’t you think that’s what I want? Don’t you think that’s what I’ve always wanted?”
“Then do summat about it. Let’s see what you’re made of. Frame yourself. Get on out of this bloody hole.”
I lay there gasping in the silence, thinking I was going mad, remembering how many times he’d flustered and humiliated me when I was a kid trying to learn to ride a bike, trying to learn to swim, trying to do better on the cricket pitch, while he shouted at me, breathing down my neck, knocking me off balance with his irascibility and scorn. But hadn’t that boy grown into a man who had outstared terrifying acts of war and terror such as he had never known? I had watched men dying in their blood, and done my best to comfort them. I had watched cities burn. I had walked among the murdered dead of Equatoria and done everything I could to make it as difficult as possible for the world to look away. What more evidence could anyone want that I was a man among men? So how come he could goad out the child in me so easily? How come he could never admit for a moment that he was impressed by anything that I’d achieved?
“Leave me alone,” I groaned at him. “Just leave me alone.”
After a moment’s silence he said, “I’m going nowhere.”
“What the hell do you want of me?” I demanded. “Can’t you see that I’m just about done for? Do you expect me to drag you with me every sodding inch of the way?”
“Are you listening to me, lad?” he retorted. “Didn’t I just say that I wasn’t going anywhere?” I heard a sudden pathos in his voice. “Do you think I don’t know that I’ve had my time? It’s gone, long gone, and I did what I could with it, and God knows it weren’t all for the best. I can see that now. I can see how I made you and your mother suffer because I was trying so bloody hard to be a man. A man’s man, I mean. One of the lords of the earth. But it’s no good that way. Not any more. And I don’t want to see thee making the same mistakes. So get on with you,” he ordered, though an urgent, weary care now softened the rough impatience I knew so well. “Do summat different with your life. Do summat better if you can.”
I’d never heard him talk this way before. Not even on his deathbed had he uttered so frank a note of failure and defeat. Instantly it took me back to the moment when he lay panting beneath me on the dusty cotton bales in the warehouse at Bamforth Brothers’ mill. But it wasn’t the superior strength of youth that had wrestled him down this time. His defeat was self-accepted, a weary admission that his life was over, and that he was consigning the future to me as a legacy of his own failure. It felt like an act of entrustment, one which recognized that I might fail too, as every generation did, but fail in different and perhaps better ways. And in that sense it was no defeat at all. He was going nowhere, because there was no need for it. This was the House of the Dead. H
e had nowhere else to go. He was one among the dead. He belonged here now.
Then it came to me. I’d been dragging his dead body through my dreams not because he was hanging on to me, but because I was hanging on to him. Thirty years had passed since he’d died and in all that time I’d never been able to let him go. So if he’d come back and was alive again and full of menace, as he’d been in my dream, it was because I’d kept him alive inside me. But alive in the wrong way. Alive as an unloved and domineering part of myself. Alive as something that ought to have been allowed to die a long time ago but still lived on as the corpse that I dragged with me through my dreams. And that was my problem, not his. After all, what was he in truth except what all the many grieving friends who had turned up at his funeral considered him to be: a decent, fallible, ordinary man, doing his best by his lights to hold himself together and get on with things? No, he was right – this wasn’t about him at all. It was all about me.
And, when that came clear, I saw that, for all the things I’d done, all the wars I’d followed, all the passing celebrity I’d won for myself, I’d hardly begun to live my own life at all. And it wasn’t Adam’s life that I’d been living either. Despite what had happened between him and me, between me and Hal, I wasn’t Adam’s proxy after all. The truth was that for years, as far as my stultified heart was concerned, I’d been trying to live out my father’s sort of life when I believed I was living my own. That was why he was with me still. That was why he still haunted my dreams. And, yes, it was absurd that the realization should have come so late, to a man already a year older than my father had been at the time of his death. But I’d seen it at last, and I knew now what both of us needed. What we had both needed for a long time.
In a final act of complicity, knowing it was what his sad ghost most desired of me, I loosened my grip and, with an immense sadness of loss and completion, I opened my hands and let him go.
It was as if a door had been thrown open on a compression chamber. I felt a convulsive gust of release. Then came a sensation of the darkness round me swooping towards invisibly distant light, and I knew that he was gone. Inside me the feeling of emptiness returned, intensified now, as if nothing remained there that was indisputably mine. All bearings were lost inside that sudden vacuum. Like a nervous flicker of residual memory from another life, I experienced a few seconds of panic. Then the fear began to dissolve, for the emptiness felt charged with latent possibility. Boundaries which had earlier blurred into the darkness in alarming ways were now merging again, but with the curiously restful knowledge that there was no distinction between the molecules of which my body was composed and those of the rocks and the air inside this lightless crevice and of the world beyond. It was all one, and as familiar again to me now as it had been long before when I was a boy utterly immersed in the Pennine landscape of my youth.
That restored communion lasted for no more than a few tranquil seconds, before consciousness of the condition clicked in and I was outside it, observing myself and my situation once more. A sensation of weightlessness remained, like that of a seed head afloat on a freshening breeze. I could see nothing and hear nothing, but in that lenient silence a dark tide turned and feeling came rushing in.
I lay for a time with tears in my eyes, ruing all the years in which, instead of mourning my father, I’d buried him alive inside me only to forget that he was still there. But now he was gone. We were free of each other, and for the first time in as long as I could remember I felt a deep-reaching pang of love for him. He was my father, we were one flesh, and I was thinking that in the last challenge he’d given me the old bastard had never spoken a truer word. “It’s about time you stopped thinking about yourself,” he’d said, “and started thinking about that lass.”
So that’s what I did. I pulled myself together and levered my body up again. My fingers fumbled for the gap I’d found the moment before I banged my head. The slot between the roof and the top of the rock felt slim but just passable. I squeezed my shoulders into the gap, dragged my legs after me and pulled myself along.
I don’t know how many more yards I crawled inside the earth, enclosed and supported by it. Exhausted, I kept muttering quietly, as if to someone or something other than myself. Meanwhile images flashed across my mind: my grandfather on my mother’s side, hewing coal with his pick, deep underground in a South Yorkshire colliery; Maximilian Kolbe in the bunker with a donkey-headed figure praying beside him; the bodies of the many dead dumped in the streets of Equatoria; and the woman in the yellow turban wailing over the body of her child. Yet, whatever other images came at me, again and again I willed myself to see Marina beckoning me on, drawing me through the dark.
Eventually, with all sense of distance and time deleted, I looked up ahead and thought I saw the faintest glimmer of rosy light. It came like a shot of adrenalin to the heart. I closed my eyes, shook my head and looked again. Faint but unmoving, the glow was still there. It might have been a candle flame burning just a dozen yards away, or the residual light of an extinguished star. There was no way to tell. But illusory or not, it gave me a goal to strive for. It gave me hope.
I groped my way along the next stretch, listening to my laboured breath. The light neither vanished nor grew brighter. I was beginning to wonder whether it was no more than a mirage after all, when the incline turned steeper and I saw that the light was shining downwards into the passage from a hole in the roof. Not itself a source of light, the radiance was cast from elsewhere, just enough to show there was headroom here to stand and stretch my grazed and aching limbs.
A dozen wary steps across a random fall of stone and I was looking up an angled shaft wider than a chimney some twenty feet high. Shadows thrown by the light revealed ledges offering handgrips in the rock. I guessed that others had passed this way before me. Using the same grips and toeholds that a cave dweller might have found twenty thousand years earlier, I made the climb. At one point I was forced to perch with my feet astride the shaft as I fumbled for the next grip. Then my fingers found a purchase. I swung my foot back across the gap onto a ledge wide enough for me to push upwards. A second later my head pushed through the gap and my dark-adapted eyes were so dazzled by a brilliant glare that I might have dipped my head into the sun.
Light seared across my vision, obliterating more than it revealed. Only gradually dared I allow its radiance to filter through. When I did so, I saw how it was generated by the massed ranks of burning candles, hundreds of them, each raising a silent hosanna in what felt like a convocation of flame. A figure loomed over me blocking out some of the glare. Then a hand reached down to help me through the gap in the rock. Astounded, overwhelmed with gratitude to have come through, and filled with crazy exultation, I think I gasped out loud. When I looked up, an expressionless mask stared back at me.
Half climbing, half pulled, I emerged into the rounded chancel of a candlelit cave. The bulky figure whose hand I had taken stepped back from the edge, and I saw many other people waiting for me, silent, motionless, all of them caped in white. Through air redolent with beeswax and warmed by the heat of many candles, I might have been looking at a company of exiled angels or at the assembled spirits of the dead.
“Well done, old thing,” said the figure beside me. “We were beginning to worry.”
I stood blinking in the light, my mind adrift in a vague terrain between reality and dream. But I could smell the dry air of this cavern round me, my shins smarted where they’d grazed against rock, and somewhere I could hear the sound of falling water. I had to trust the evidence of my senses.
Turning my head towards the sound of water, I saw an arch of rock that sprang like a flying buttress across a green pool, and knew that I was back inside the same chamber where Adam and I had taken to the skiff. And here was Gabriella, still in her carmine gown beneath the white cape, stepping forward from the assembled crowd to greet me.
“So, Mr Crowther” – her smile contrived to mingle concern with a mild, ironical detachment – “like our f
riend Guerino you have made a journey to the underworld in search of your father. But did you find him there?”
“Yes,” I heard my voice answer in the silence of the cave, “I believe I did.”
“And did you speak with him?”
I nodded my head.
“And tell me,” she pressed quietly, “did you have the good sense to say farewell to him and leave him in peace?”
“I think so. I believe that’s what happened down there, yes.”
“Then you are welcome back into the land of the living,” she said at last. “I think you deserve our congratulation.” Smiling, Gabriella put her hands together and began to clap.
Immediately Larry Stromberg, who stood a couple of paces behind her, did the same, and then every one assembled in the cave joined the applause, with a benevolent air of welcome and approbation.
Bewildered, embarrassed, I began to feel like the dazed centre of attention at a surprise birthday party. Looking around at these people who had been waiting for me here in the light while I was scrabbling on my hands and knees through the dark, I recognized some faces: Allegra, Meredith Page, Dorothy Ziegler, Orazio, Angelina.
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