Her voice left no room for protest or demurral, but her hand felt receptive to my touch. I took her arm to support her as we crossed the uneven floor of the cave, but once we came out into the entrance passage she freed herself, leading the way confidently through the familiar darkness. We stepped out through the door into the cold of the night air, where the cascades pouring down the façade of the water theatre shone like frost in the moonlight. Without pausing, Marina walked around the pool, making for the tunnel. Her silence felt inviolable and, as much as I wanted to seize this moment to make a further declaration, I sensed that it would be wrong to push her now. In any case, it was too late, because Larry, Orazio and Angelina were waiting for us in the night.
“Ah, there you are at last,” Larry said. “You must both be exhausted. Martin, old soul, you’ll be glad to hear that Angelina has some food for you. Then Orazio will show you to your bed.” He turned to Marina. “As for you, my dear – Adam has filled me in a little about what you’ve been through. I think it’s time that you too got some rest.”
Many hours later I woke up to the sound of singing in the garden outside– a duet of female voices, softly accompanied by a lute. I remembered holding Marina the previous night, holding her just long enough to feel the truth of her response. I remembered eating something and then being shown to a bed, where I lay down convinced I would stay awake all night, only to plunge at once into unbroken sleep.
By the time the singing woke me, bright bars of daylight streamed through cracks in the shutters. I guessed that more than twelve hours must have passed. I crossed to the window, opened the shutter and looked down to where Allegra and Meredith were sitting on a marble bench, singing an Italian folk song in the green shade of a mimosa tree. Fra Pietro sat across from them, smiling with closed eyes as he fingered his lute. A blue haze of afternoon sunlight hung about them.
Though they must have heard the noise of the shutter opening, not one of them looked up. So I stood at the window unobserved, breathing the scented air, listening to the music, utterly present in the moment, and filled with the exhilarating conviction that, after long years of exile in the shadows, I had at last been returned to life.
24
Heartsease
When I came down from my room, the trio had vanished. No one else was about in the courtyard. I looked through the arch into the water theatre and saw that the cascade was not operating, so I passed on down the stairwell to the lower garden and the swimming pool, and found that area deserted too. I had no idea how many people were staying at the Villa. Maybe most of them had left? Or perhaps they were all assembled somewhere or had withdrawn for a siesta? In any case, I was impatient to see only one of them, and I was glad of this chance to come quietly awake before re-entering the world.
I dived into the pool and swam several lengths, delighting in the touch of water and the shimmer of light it cast among dark cypresses. When I hauled myself out, I saw Gabriella approaching from the direction of the stairs.
“So you are returned to us at last,” she said.
“I must have been asleep for hours.”
“Many, many hours. I think more than thirty.”
I looked out in amazement as I dried my hair with a towel.
“It’s true. I think also you must be very hungry.”
“I’m famished.”
“I will ask Angelina to prepare something for you. Later we shall all eat dinner together. You are welcome to be among us, if you wish.”
“So everyone is still here then? All the people I saw?”
“Not all. Some have left. Some had left even before we came to greet you. And this will be the last night together for the others.”
I recalled the feeling of emerging out of darkness into a bright otherworld, and the throng of people who applauded me in the cave. “This has all begun to feel a bit unreal,” I said. “Like a dream or something.”
“But are not dreams also real? Are they not sometimes more real than things we wrongly believe to be true?”
“Yes,” I said, answering her smile, “I believe that sometimes they might be.”
“Good! This is an improvement.”
“If so,” I said, “it may have something to do with the surprise you all jumped on me.”
“Not jumped,” she smiled, wagging a corrective finger at me, “springed.”
“Not springed,” I said, “sprang.”
Gabriella flapped her hands in exasperation.
More seriously I said, “Marina and Adam must have passed on what I told them.”
“Of course. And it seems that you are not so much a meschino as I thought. A little foolish sometimes perhaps, but not a wretch. This too is an improvement.”
“I’m glad you think so. Is this why I’m now invited to meet your other friends?”
“Also because, as I have said, certain among them are already gone.”
“The ones I might have recognized?”
“Perhaps.”
“So are you going to tell me more about the mysterious Heartsease Foundation?”
“Dine with us tonight,” she answered, “and find out for yourself. Also there is someone important that you must certainly meet.”
I said I looked forward to it, and then finally got to put the question that had been on my mind throughout the conversation. “Have you seen Marina today?”
“Of course.”
“How is she?”
“I think perhaps,” Gabriella said, “I must leave her to answer for herself.”
Angelina brought me a tray of food down to the pool. As she arranged a dish of gnocchi and some bread on the marble table, her Italian prattle felt as amiable as it was incomprehensible. I was relishing every mouthful of the food when Adam came to sit with me beside the pool.
He told me that he had been waiting for me to wake so that he could talk to me again. He had been thinking things over since leaving the cave. He wanted me to know that if I had told him the truth about Hal all those years ago, he might have been destroyed by it. Even as things were, he admitted, it had taken him years to pull himself together again after that disastrous time.
“But I want you to know that I understand just how much your silence cost you,” he said, “and though there’s nothing I can do to make up for that, at least I can keep my side of the deal and go back to see Hal.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, trying to lighten things a little. “After all, a deal is a deal.”
“Even though neither of us knew quite what we were letting ourselves in for.”
We sat in silence for a while, each preoccupied with his own thoughts, until I glanced across at him and said, “Do you remember Jonas Cragg?”
“Of course,” Adam laughed, “how could I forget old Jonas?”
“I think I believed in him rather more than you did.”
“I was an incorrigible sceptic in those days,” Adam said. “And the son of one too. It took an original like you to reopen my imagination.”
“As you did mine, in a different way. You Brigshaws turned me over in every way imaginable. You did it between you back then, and you seem to have done it again here. I certainly can’t go back to the way things were. Not now.”
“What about your job?”
“I think that’s over,” I said. “My career began in Equatoria, and that’s where it should end. I’ve done what I can. I know that in the great scheme of things it doesn’t amount to much. And I’m getting too old for it. There are other, younger people already doing it far better than me – some strong women among them.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t be too hasty about that,” Adam cautioned me. “You may feel differently once you’re outside this enchanted place.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve no wish to crawl back inside my cage.” When I looked back at him I saw him shaking his head. “What is it?” I asked.
“I wonder if we’re about to make another switch,” he said. “You and me, I mean. I’ve been thinking for a while
that it’s time I got out into the world again. I’m wondering whether it’s time I went back to Africa.”
“To Equatoria?”
He nodded uncertainly. “I think there may be things I have to offer there. Finding out what’s needed first, then looking for appropriate ways in which the Foundation’s resources might be able to help.”
“Does this have anything to do with Efwa being there?”
“Not in the way you think. But what you told me about her has sharpened my thinking. I know that I let her down, Martin. I let her down in all sorts of ways. If there’s anything I can do to help her now… Well, I believe I should do it. Don’t you agree?”
I could see excitement in his eyes. I could feel it in his voice. But I was still unclear about his role in the Foundation, and I was puzzling over the strange rituals I’d seen in this place, that bizarre procession of fancy dress and masks a few evenings earlier. What could such elaborate fantasies have to do with the pressing needs of a country that was suffering as Equatoria suffered? When I challenged him about it, Adam merely smiled. “What you saw,” he said, “was part of our celebrations before some of our key speakers had to leave.”
“You mean it was just a party, a social occasion?”
“Not just that. But what’s so wrong with having a good time?”
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “You’re going to have to say more.”
Perhaps wary of my scepticism, Adam took some time to think before speaking. “As I told you the other night, we’re about change,” he said eventually. “The Foundation is concerned with the dynamics of change in general – social, political and cultural change, yes, but change in individuals too – which means it comes from the ground up, not top down. Above all we’re about using the transforming power of the imagination.”
I recalled the five-point mission statement on the first page of the folder in which Adam had filed his account of the meeting with Gabriella at the Springs of Clitumnus. I’d taken it for mere rhetoric at the time; now Adam seemed to be offering it as a serious and considered manifesto.
“That’s still a bit on the vague side,” I said. “I have a lot of questions.”
“Then talk to some of the people here – particularly the students. They’re the future. They’re what Heartsease is about.”
“And what about Larry’s part in all of this?” I pressed. “All his stuff about the Mysteries of Isis and the Revenant of Fontanalba?”
“Ah,” Adam glanced at his watch, “I can’t explain that for you. If you really want to understand, you’ll just have to experience it for yourself.” He got to his feet. “Look, I have a meeting in a few minutes. Let’s talk again later – at dinner perhaps.”
As he turned to leave, I said, “Do you know where Marina is?”
“I haven’t seen her all day,” he said. “Try her studio. It’s near the water theatre: turn left at the arch, it’s at the end of the courtyard, looking out towards the orchard.”
When I went back through into the courtyard I saw Allegra supervising two young men who were carrying clothes hampers through to the front of the house. “We have to return this lot to the costumiers today,” she explained cheerfully. “How are you this morning?”
“I’m feeling fine. Surprisingly fine. I was just looking for your mother. I gather she has a studio somewhere here.”
“It’s over there.” Allegra pointed to the end door of the building across the courtyard from the house. Then she raised her eyebrows at me and said, “Good luck!”
“You think I’ll need it?”
“Don’t we all?” she said, and turned back to her work.
By now it was late afternoon and the light was fading towards sunset. When I knocked at the door of Marina’s studio it was opened, to my surprise, by Larry’s friend, Giovanni, who was dressed in grubby overalls and wiping his hands with a towel. I told him I was looking for Marina. He nodded, turned and called her name.
“Who is it?” she answered.
“It’s me,” I said. “I’ve come calling on you. May I come in?”
A moment later I heard Marina say something in Italian, and Giovanni stepped to one side. The studio was lit by a large semicircular window above a workbench on the wall of the gable end. Wearing a blue smock and jeans, Marina sat perched on a stool there, doing something I couldn’t see with her hands. The light from the window gleamed off her hair. She did not turn her head my way.
After a further brief exchange in Italian, Giovanni nodded to me again and went out, closing the door behind him. I took in the contents of the room: a sink with large brass taps, a number of buckets, a row of jars and bottles filled with coloured powders, a stack of plastic sacks piled beneath a banistered staircase, and in one corner an electric kiln with its door open and three shelves perched on stilts inside.
“You’re a potter,” I exclaimed.
“No,” she answered. “Giovanni’s a potter. He has his own studio in the village. He comes out here every now and then to help with the things I can’t do.”
Moving closer, I saw that she was turning a lump of clay in the palm of one hand, opening it, like the corolla of a flower, with the other. “I just like the feel of clay.”
I cleared my throat. “The other night,” I ventured, “you said we’d talk again.”
Carefully she set down the unfinished pot on the workbench, got up from the stool and crossed to the sink, where she washed her hands clean of clay and dried them. I saw from the confidence of her movements that she knew the exact location of everything in the studio.
“Shall we stay in here,” she said, “or would you rather be outside?”
“I like it here.”
She returned to the stool and sat down again, facing me this time across the room. From outside the studio came a clatter of wings as a flight of doves rose and circled and shone against the evening sky. After a long pause I looked back at Marina and said, “So, where do we go from here?”
She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair. “Nowhere,” she said. “We go nowhere. This whole thing’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible,” I answered immediately. “Why should it be impossible?”
“Look at me.” She lifted her defiant face as if to outstare me. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Just think about the kind of life you live. How could the two things possibly go together?”
“They don’t have to. I’ve already told Adam – I’m giving up that life.” She shook her head in dubious reproof. “And no, not because of you,” I said. “Whatever happens between you and me, I’m giving it up because I’m through with it now. I want to be human again.”
I heard the catch in her breath, saw her pass her hands through her hair again, and then bring them to rest at her cheeks, cupping her face.
“But I don’t want to do it alone,” I whispered, moving closer to her, “not now. I want to do what we should have done all those years ago. I want to make a life with you.”
She lowered her hands, clasped them tightly together and then raised her head to face me. Even in that diminishing light, I could not believe I was invisible to her.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked. “Are you really sure?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I’m absolutely sure.”
I saw the light of assent brighten her face. She lifted her hands, reaching for me through the dark. For the first time in too many years, we moved into a deep embrace. And then, for a time, we were both in tears. Perhaps both of us were thinking of that long-ago morning in Bloomsbury, when we agreed that the time and place of our next meeting would happen as a gift of chance. And because of that act of trust in life, and because of the failures of trust on both our parts which followed it, we had lost so much. Yet even so an assignation of love had been made that day, and it was time to keep it now.
“I love you, Marina,” I whispered. Softly she answered me. Our embrace reached deeper still. Then she broke away from our kisses and led m
e across the studio to the stairs, and up into a simply furnished room, where our bodies eagerly found and recognized the lovers they had lost. As the dusk gathered around us, our acts of tenderness and passion redeemed the years of loss, fulfilling all the promises once made by a love that had got deferred through error, chance and circumstance, and yet remained strong enough to bless our life for years to come. We felt it now. We knew.
That evening, Marina and I were the last to enter the long chamber in the building opposite the water theatre which had been put into service as a dining hall. Allegra and Gabriella immediately approached us with a glint of purpose in their eyes.
“Well, it looks as though you two have begun to sort yourselves out,” Allegra said, smiling at her mother, while Gabriella took me by the arm saying, “Come with me. I wish you to meet a very important person.” She steered me across the room, past the table where Adam and Larry were sitting, towards a group of people who were chatting around an ornate fireplace. Among them stood a short man wearing an expensively cut woollen suit. His tanned, aquiline features wrinkled in a smile as he saw Gabriella.
“Ah there you are, cara,” he said. “I’ve just been hearing about the work that Molly here is doing in Northern Ireland. I am most impressed. It seems that your adventure of the imagination grows stronger every year.”
“With such good people how could it be otherwise?” Gabriella turned to me. “This is my husband Raffaele. His family have lived here at the villa since… oh I don’t know when… Probably since Caligula came to make a bath alle fonti del Clitunno.”
Water Theatre Page 42
