He opened his mouth to reply, but then turned wretchedly away. “Nothing,” he acknowledged. “I failed her. I failed her years ago. I never saw her clearly. Not from the start in Equatoria, let alone in London.” But now he was speaking more to himself than to me. “She badly wanted to have children,” he said, “and I wasn’t ready for that. I was too young. Or perhaps I was just too scared.” He pushed a hand through his thinning hair. Then, like a man dazed by his own admission, he added, “The truth of the matter is that Hal probably understood Efwa better than I did.”
“Who knows?” I said. “But sooner or later we have to forgive our fathers, don’t we?”
Apart from the sound of the water falling into the pool, there was, for a time, only silence in the cave. All three of us were locked inside our own thoughts. Faced with Adam’s anguish and Marina’s continuing silence, I became convinced that I had made a terrible error of judgement in revealing the truth. Might it not have been wiser to get away from Fontanalba days ago after I’d done what I came to do? It would have been their choice whether or not they wanted to see their father again, and at least I would have left them with their illusions intact. And though such a course of action might have meant all kinds of loss to me, I had been living with loss for thirty years and was almost inured to it. But the truth was out now, and there was no going back. All three of us would have to live with the consequences, and for Adam, who was in so many ways the most vulnerable, they might prove disastrous.
But I had underestimated my friend and the degree to which the years had transformed and strengthened him. I heard him utter a small, dismissive laugh. Looking up, I saw him shaking his head at me with a perplexed and rueful smile. “What is it between you and me?” he said. “Ever since we first met, we’ve been confusing each other about who we are. When I came in here tonight I thought that you were the one who would be looking for forgiveness from me, and that it was my role to be magnanimous. But that’s been turned upside down, hasn’t it?”
“There’s nothing I have to forgive you for,” I said.
“Only half a lifetime of misjudgement!”
“Which only happened because I withheld the truth.”
“And now I understand why,” he said, “even though I think you were wrong to do it. Wrong for yourself certainly. Wrong for you and Marina too. And probably wrong for me as well. Haven’t we all been living out a lie for all these years because of it? But it was a lie that came from care, and I can’t blame you for it. In fact, I guess I should thank you for it.”
“But then,” I said, “I have to thank you too.”
“You do? What for?”
“For my trip to the underworld, and for what happened down there.”
Adam studied me with searching eyes. “We should talk more about that. But it sounds as though you kept your side of the deal.”
Encouraged by his wry manner, I said, “So what about yours?”
He drew in his breath before answering, “I suppose I’ll have to honour it. I can’t see how else to put an end to all this – though it’s going to take me some time to find the strength.” He glanced down at his sister and stroked her hair with an affectionate hand. “But you and Marina need to talk to one another now. Alone, I mean, without me.” His brow wrinkled in a frown as he looked back at me. “I don’t know what else to say right now, except that I’m utterly saddened by everything that’s come between us.”
“Me too,” I responded, and a moment later, to our mutual amazement, we found ourselves moving into an awkward embrace. Briefly it felt as though the long, conflicted scissors movement of our lives was resolving itself into a completed circle. Then he picked up a candle, walked away across the floor of the cave and disappeared into the darkness of the arch, leaving me alone with Marina.
Impassive as a statue of herself, Marina sat among candles beneath the figure in the rock. She had gathered the white folds of her cape about her, holding it closed just below her throat as if to protect herself against the cold. Yet it was not cold in the cave, and there were no winds to ruffle her hair or scatter the sleek fall of water into the pool. Her knuckles shone in the candlelight, her face was half turned away.
If Marina had been at all moved by what she had heard, her feelings did not show. I had told her everything, and she was giving nothing in return. Clearly my unpalatable truth was not what she had expected – how could it have been? – but her composure alarmed me. I was left doubting whether it would be possible to retrieve half a lifetime of loss and grief and guilt with a single conversation, but at least we had to begin.
“What about you, Marina?” I said. “I’ve no idea what you’re feeling now.”
She turned her sightless eyes my way. I wanted to meet them, but couldn’t. “What do you want me to feel?” she sighed. “Gratitude that you’ve been honest with us at last? Regret that I didn’t give you the chance to explain yourself all those years ago? Perhaps you want an apology for the way I misjudged you as badly as I did? I don’t know what you can possibly want of me any more.”
“I don’t want any of that,” I said. “What I want is to feel you here, present, feeling something – anything – I don’t care what, so long as it’s real. Anything but this cold distance. I can’t believe in that. I was prepared for you to be furious at what had happened. Furious at me, furious at Hal. Furious at life and what it’s done to us. I expected you to be outraged by the truth.”
“It didn’t even surprise me very much.” She frowned and shook her head a little. “I always knew that Hal was lost to himself, forever confusing what he wanted with what was the right thing to do, always meaning well, and yet succeeding only in wrecking people’s lives.” She turned away again. “And why on earth should I be furious with you? You made your choice and took the consequences. But I’m not thinking about that now. I’m thinking about Grace.” I caught my breath at that, but it was herself she was questioning. “I’m thinking about how I never really understood her – drinking the way she did, withdrawing inside herself rather than fighting him. I didn’t allow myself to see that she was struggling simply to survive. And in the end, of course, she couldn’t. He was too much for her. For all of us really.” Marina was rocking a little as she spoke. “I’ve thought about her every day since then, and even after all these years part of me is still angry with her for doing what she did, for the harm it did, especially to Adam. Yet at the same time I can’t forget the countless ways I hurt her and belittled her without even thinking about what I was doing or why I was doing it. Adam feels the same, I know. So it wasn’t just Hal, was it? None of us were innocent in Grace’s death – not even you, Martin.”
I told her I knew this was true. I said that one of the hardest things for me was knowing that I was never worthy of Grace. Not on that fraught afternoon we spent together, when she was so miserable she hardly cared what she was doing, and not afterwards either. Certainly not towards the end. “She took the distance I kept from her as a judgement,” I said, “though it was never meant that way. It was just the awkwardness with feelings of a young man out of his depth.”
“And you don’t think Grace understood that?”
“Perhaps she did. The truth is that I’ve always found it hard to think about Grace at all.
“But we have to, don’t we?” Marina insisted. “Wasn’t that what Adam was saying just now? That we have to face things – especially the things that trouble us most. So we try to convince ourselves that we don’t know them at all – until sooner or later something happens that we can’t argue with. For me that was Grace’s death. And it happened just at the point when I’d truly begun to understand something of her pain… to know how it feels,” she added with an uncertain tremor in her voice, “to be betrayed by someone you love very much.”
After an uneasy moment, I said, “I didn’t betray you, Marina.”
“You didn’t trust me with the truth,” she answered, “so it felt like betrayal.”
“But you didn’t trust
me either.”
“That’s true. I couldn’t trust you, because I asked you for the truth and you refused to answer me. What was I supposed to make of that? After that, everything was impossible.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said, “because I loved you.”
“Even though that meant wrecking both our lives?” I could feel both anger and sorrow behind the accusation. Something of the old, volatile heat had returned to her voice. “It didn’t spare Adam much in the way of pain, and it certainly didn’t save Grace. So tell me, Martin, would good did it do?”
I sat in silence, remembering and ruing the fateful trust game that Marina had asked us to play and how we had both been losers in the end.
“If I had told you back then,” I said, “what do you imagine that would have done?”
“Who knows? If I’d known the truth, I might have confronted Hal before Adam did. I might have been able to strengthen Adam against him. I might even have found a way to help Grace. How can I know what might have happened? Probably it would all still have proved disastrous, but at least it would have been real.”
Her blind gaze could not take in the anguish in my face. In that moment what I wanted more than anything else was to cross the space between us, to take hold of her – and somehow, through the immediacy of touch, scroll back the years and return to the night in London when she and I rediscovered one another and all things began to feel possible again. But time grants no such mercies, and the distance separating us stretched wider and was far less easily traversable than the one that Adam and I had crossed. Marina had turned her face away from me again. I could see only the sheen of her hair in the candlelight.
“So are you telling me that this is unredeemable after all?” I said.
“No,” she answered dully, “not entirely. I dare say Adam and I will go back and try to do for Hal what we couldn’t do for Grace – make it a little easier for him to face his death, I mean. Somehow we might even manage to forgive him. Like you said the other night, isn’t forgiveness about as close as we can get to love, these days?”
“And what about us, Marina?”
“Us?”
“Yes, us. You and me.”
“We both got things wrong,” she said. “So of course we must forgive one another. It goes without question.”
“But that’s not enough. Not for me anyway.”
When she averted her face, I said, “You know why I came to Italy.”
“You came because Hal asked you to come. You were doing it for him – just as you withheld the truth for his sake all those years ago.”
“Not true,” I said. “Not true on either count. I think you know that. I think you know that I came here looking for you.”
The sound of water falling into the pool, that susurration of white noise, filled the silence between us.
“I can’t see your face,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
When she turned my way again, I saw only sadness without any sign of hope or expectation in her features. This is how things stand, they seemed to say. We made them so. This is the price and consequence of who we are. We have no grounds for complaint.
But I wasn’t about to submit to her silence. “It’s true that Hal’s asked me to come,” I conceded. “It’s true that I was doing what I could to help him by coming here. But the real reason I came was for my own sake. I came here looking for you.”
“Then perhaps you were doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”
“Isn’t that better than doing the wrong thing for the right reason? Or what I thought was the right reason? I’ve already wasted half my life that way. Don’t ask me to throw away any more of it.”
“I’m not asking you for anything.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why are you withholding yourself this way?”
“Why did you withhold the truth from me?” she countered.
“I’ve told you already.”
“And that kind of moral evasion is consistent with your idea of love? Do you really believe that anyone has the right to keep another person ignorant of something as vital to the whole fabric of their life as that?”
“No, not if they have something to gain from withholding the knowledge. But I didn’t, Marina. I only had something to lose.”
I watched her withdraw again into silence, putting a hand to the rock formation as if for support. But I had not made that journey through the dark only to lose her again as I had lost her all those years ago,
“I came because I want you back,” I said.
Her chin tilted as she took in my words. Then she shrugged with a weary air of resignation. “It’s too late. Everything’s different now. That time’s gone. We live in different worlds, you and me. You don’t know who I am any more.”
“I know who you are for me.”
“You knew the woman I was thirty years ago. Everything in my life has changed since then. You know almost nothing about me now. You have no idea about my life, about what I do here, about what matters to me.”
“You don’t think that, after what I’ve just been through, I’m beginning to get some sense of it?” Some of the rapture of release I’d felt on first emerging from the tunnel had returned to my voice. “I don’t pretend to understand everything that happened down there, but it feels as if it’s altered everything. It feels as though something new can happen now. That’s what I want. That’s what I want with you. Everything is still possible. All you need to understand is that my feelings for you are as true now as they were that night in London. I loved you then, Marina, and I love you still.”
“Why aren’t you listening to me?” She tossed her head impatiently. “We’re not the same people we were then. It must be obvious I’m not the person you once knew.” Before I could argue she pressed on. “You don’t have to take my word for it. You’ve seen the paintings I’ve done while I’ve been here. Do you think the woman you used to know could have painted them? Did you even recognize them as mine?”
With growing confidence I told her that I had indeed recognized her clearly in the huge mural on the walls of the painted room, that I’d seen her kneeling there, surrounded by all the dreadful things that life can do to us. I told her that her presence among those images had shown me just how much we must have in common still, because if I were able to paint my own self-portrait it would look a lot like that – a man on his knees in the middle of some heart-breaking atrocity or other.
Her lips had opened slightly. She uttered a half-suppressed gasp of astonishment.
“What is it? I asked.
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just that for much of the time I was working on that painting I was thinking of you. Of your work. Of what you do.”
“You see?” I said. “We do know each other after all.”
“There’s a difference,” she insisted. “For you, the horror seems to be out there in the world. For me, it’s in here.” She put a hand to her chest. “Every detail of that painting is me, my self-portrait – not just the figure you focused on. I can still see it all. I only have to look inside.”
“And you don’t think that’s true for me too?”
“I’m not just talking about remembering it,” she said. “I’m talking about owning it, about admitting it as an undeniable part of who we are. Yes, I know that you’ve been enduring the most terrible things for years, observing them, reporting on them, capturing them on film. You must know far more about the atrocities out there than I ever will, but I’m not sure that you have anything other than a literal understanding of it all.”
I shook my head at that, wondering what could be more literal and real than the devastations of war. But this wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. “Does it matter?” I protested. “I think we both got lost in the sheer awfulness of things because of what happened all those years ago. But we can’t answer for all of the misery in the world. And we don’t have to let it blight our
lives for ever. Not now. Not any more.”
Candle flames swayed and flickered around us. She put the palms of her hands together and brought them to her lips as she rocked her body slowly back and forth. In little more than a whisper she said, “I don’t even know what you look like now.”
Moving closer, I reached over and took hold of her hands. She started a little as I lifted them to my face. Tentatively her fingers began to explore my temples under the receding hairline before moving with more confidence round the orbital bones of my eyes to the ridge and contours of my nose. They followed the creases etched from the curve of the nostrils to the taut line of my mouth and on into the groove above the lips. Stubble rasped as her palms closed over my chin and jaw. Her fingers made their way towards my ears and back to the temples. My skin trembled at a touch which felt as intimate and revelatory as a prolonged meeting of the eyes.
“You’re older, craggier,” she said at last. “But it’s still you.”
“Yes,” I whispered, “it’s still me.”
Sensing that I was about to gather her in my embrace, she lifted her hands from my face and pulled away.
“Think about it, Martin – even if everything else made sense, the last thing you need is a blind woman in your life.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?”
When she didn’t answer I said, “Listen to me, Marina. I’ve spent years since that time in London trying to forget you. I’ve tried and I’ve failed. It’s the most dismal failure of my entire life. Why else do you think I haven’t been able to hold another relationship together since then? Why do you think I got hooked on chasing catastrophes around the world? And yes, it agonizes me that you’ve lost your sight. But it doesn’t change my feelings for you. It doesn’t change anything. Not for me.”
For a moment I felt I had won through. I sensed her teetering on the very brink of assent. Then she drew in her breath sharply and edged further away. “Let’s not talk about this now,” she said. “We’re bound to get things wrong like this. I need time to think about everything that’s happened tonight. And so do you. You need to come down. You need to rest. You need to get back inside your skin again.” Supporting herself against the rock, she rose to her feet. Her free hand reached for me. “Give me some help to get out of here now,” she said. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Water Theatre Page 41
